Search Engine Optimization Archives

A HighRankings Forum thread has discussion around a topic I can relate with. My company, RustyBrick, builds out custom web software and sites, including iPhone apps. I often get new customers coming to me with their request to build them a web site. They are clueless about SEO and honestly, don't have the time or care to learn about it.

So we build the site for them, whatever it might be (e-commerce, CMS, social networking, etc), to the best of our ability. It is incredibly search engine friendly, with all the nice link structure, proper coding, dynamic 301s, 404s, XML sitemaps, and so on. So they got themselves a nice search engine friendly web site without knowing it.

My company does not do the content development, we just build the code and the design and make a working site structure. So when it comes time for the client to build out unique, useful and superior content, in most cases, they do not. They either don't understand the value, are too lazy or too dumb.

Some get the whole SEO thing right away, but many do not. Many will come to me later and ask about ways to get traffic. I will then explain to them the whole SEO bit. If I see the client doesn't get it, I'd recommend they seek out an SEO company.

You see, for companies like mine that build sites up from scratch, it is not easy to explain the value in SEO, before the site has potential to get traffic. But for SEO companies to show value in a site that sits without traffic, it is a tad easier.

HighRanking moderator BBCoach said the same thing that I did. Do you find the same issue with new site builds and clients?

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums.

There is an interesting conversation taking place at WebmasterWorld on the topic of page one results versus page two results. Senior member, Whitey, asks the question, should webmasters begin preparing their sites to rank well on page two over page one?

Why would anyone want to do this? Well, some webmasters are suggesting that the first page results are cluttered and polluted with universal results, including videos, news, local and so on. They think that in many cases, people will begin hitting the page two button and get results from that page.

Personally, if people are clicking over to page two, I am sure Google would be aware of that and pull many of the universal results off page one. The last thing Google wants is to make their searchers click over to page two, even though that means more air time on Google's servers (which means more ads). The reason is, searchers will become frustrated and switch to a competitor, such as Bing. ;-)

I suspect Google has noticed that searchers are clicking over to page two less often now. But I can be wrong and if I am, should you start thinking about page two optimization? Or no point in that?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

SEOmoz has released their best practices guide on SEO. This time, they used actual data to back up the best practices and have changed some of their previous best practices based on the data.

The post goes over the follow SEO elements:

• Title Tag Format
• The Usefulness of H1 Tags
• The Usefulness of Nofollow
• The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
• The Use of Alt text with Images
• The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
• The Use of Parameter Driven URLs
• The Usefulness of Footer Links
• The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
• The Use of 301 Redirects
• Blocking pages from Search Engines
• Google Search Wiki's Affect on Rankings
• The Affect of Negative Links from "Bad Link Neighborhoods"
• The Importance of Traffic on Rankings

I tend to agree with most of what is laid out in the guide. But like all SEO guides, there is always room for debate.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums and Sphinn.

An interesting Google Webmaster Help thread discusses the old and new way of handling duplicate content. In the old days, you either 301 redirected page A to page B, when there was duplicate content. But if that wasn't possible, you instructed the search engine not to index the duplicate page, by adding a noindex tag to the duplicate page. Some people had this automated through their CMS.

With the addition of the new rel=canonical link attribute, things have changed. The new attribute is basically a 301 redirect, without doing a real redirect. It tells the search engine, page B is a duplicate to page A. At the same time, this is hidden from the normal user of your site.

The Google Webmaster Help thread asked, can you use both, the noindex and rel=canonical tag on the same page?

Googler, JohnMu answers the question from Google's perspective:

This is definitely an interesting question :-). Before the rel=canonical link element was announced, using noindex robots meta tags was one way that webmasters were directing us towards canonicals, so this is certainly something we know and understand. However, with the coming of the rel=canonical link element, the optimal way of specifying a canonical is (apart from using a 301 redirect to the preferred URL) is to only use the rel=canonical link element.

One reason for this is that we sometimes find a non-canonical URL first. If this URL has a noindex robots meta tag, we might decide not to index anything until we crawl and index the canonical URL. Without the noindex robots meta tag (with the rel=canonical link element) we can start by indexing that URL and show it to users in search results. As soon as we crawl the canonical URL, we can change to the canonical URL instead. It's also much safer because you don't have to worry about serving different versions of the content depending on the exact URL :-).

Bottom line, don't do it, try to either not have duplicate content, or use a 301 redirect or use the rel=canonical. You can now stay away from using the noindex tag for these purposes.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

We asked our readers a few weeks ago if they can beat Wikipedia in the Google results? The answer is yes, most SEOs believe they can beat Wikipedia's listings in the Google results.

81% of SEOs feel they can beat the Wikipedia number one listings, if they need to. 74% said they can do it with some work, while 7% said it would be easy to do so. Let me share the break down of results:

Question: Can You Beat a #1 Wikipedia Google Listing?
:: Yes, But With Work said 117 respondents or 74%
:: No, Too Hard said 23 respondents or 14%
:: Yes, Easily said 11 respondents or 7%
:: No, Not Possible said 5 respondents or 3%
:: Other answer... said 3 respondents or 2%

That is a total of 159 responses to the poll.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This story was pre-written and scheduled to go live on May 29th.

A Cre8asite Forum thread has discussion around the topic of updating a web page that does really well in the search engines. The member asked, would you dare change your best producing web page?

The reason the SEO wants to change things is to get this page off the static environment and move it over to the updated content management system they have been using. The issue with their CMS is that it appears they will have to change the URL and the way the page renders a bit. Honestly, that upsets me, the part about changing the URL. Why can't they get a CMS that allows them to define the URL directly in the CMS?

In any event, it is a scary thing to start messing around with your best performing web page. But if this is something you have to do, down the road. You should likely do it sooner then later. It obviously depends on the type of content this page is about. Is there a slow season? If so, move it then.

Google typically will move all the link weight from page A to page B when a 301 is in place. Try not to change the content for the worse and try to keep all what you did well with that page on the new page.

Would you dare change your best performing page?

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forum.

A Google Webmasters Help thread has a webmaster upset that he lost his rankings in Google. He switched web hosting companies and days later, his Google rankings plummeted. On typical server move, you should not really lose rankings, if done right. But this person lost his/her rankings.

Google's JohnMu chimed in on the thread, saying:

It looks like your site might have shown a generic server start page for a while (a "This is the default ... server page. (...)" page). When this happens over a few crawls, it can confuse Googlebot enough to cause problems with the indexing of your pages. At the moment it appears that this is no longer happening, so I imagine it'll just resolve itself automatically over time.

Good news, the rankings should come back. But I noticed an interesting tweet from @JohnMu saying:

Tip of the day: If you have a generic "your site will be hosted here soon" page, use "noindex" or 503 result code, thanks!

Clearly that is related to this post. This is a good tip for anyone who is moving or setting up a site. I would completely avoid showing a generic message on the server, if possible, but if you can't, the advice above makes sense.

If you want to see a live site with one of these starter pages, see http://commgrad.uky.edu/.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

SEOMoz created the first and second comprehensive search ranking factors document. We now have a new one, a shorter one, from HuoMah.com.

Dave lists out dozens and dozens of factors and adds commentary around them. Here are some of them, without the commentary:

• PageRank (or relative nodal link valuation)
• Link text (internal and external)
• Link relevance (global and page)
• Also see Temporal, Personalized PageRank and Phrase factors.
• Page TITLE tag
• Meta-description tag
• Document inception/age data
• Link velocity
• Link age
• Viral/Current news (QDF)
• Time of year (niche trends)
• Content update rate
• Domain history
• Inbound links (global)
• Outbound links
• Named entities (products, brand, author)
• Contact information (also important for geographic signals)
• Location of client device
• Location of webpage hosting
• Contact / location information
• Inbound/outbound link geo-factors
• Linguistic indicators (language and nuances)
• Heading (H1-5)
• Bold
• Italic
• Lists
• Font attributes (size, color)
• Related phrase ratios
• Categorization of content (clusters)
• Occurrences (probabilistic)
• Duplication dampening (filters)
• Personalization (phrase based)
• Link analysis (inbound)
• Global site relevance
• Term proximity (for multi-term queries)
• Image tagging (in content segment/related terms)
• Search History
• Web history (pages/sites we visit)
• Query revision (and analysis)
• Search intent (informational, navigational)
• Explicit data (favourites, reader,wiki)
• Interaction with advertising
• Surfing frequency/ time of day
• Personalized PageRank (yahoo and google)
• SERP and document interactions
• Duplicate issues (structural/content)
• Link devaluations (segmentation, link text, recips)
• Poor architecture/coding
• Reviewer penalties
• Redundant meta-data (such as meta-descriptions)
• Canonical / URL issues
• Server reliability (can be de-indexed)
• Phrase based detection
• Cloaking
• Boilerplate
• Domain history
• Query analysis
• Network proxy detection
• Link based (link spam and excessive recips)
• Client type (browser, mobile)
• Toolbars and browser (Google Suggest, web history)
• Application focus (email, instant messenger, RSS etc..)

Exhausting list, but it is nice to have an updated version in one place.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 15th.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks if one should host videos on their own server or host them on YouTube.

I do a lot of videos here in my Search Buzz Video Recaps, which are weekly digests of what we covered here over the course of the week, so I have some experience with this topic.

Let me start off by saying that Google and most search engines have a very tough time understanding the content within the video. Yes, they are testing out speech recognition and other factors, but right now, these search engines don't rank videos based on the words spoken in a video. They determine the relevancy of the video based on meta data, content around the video, links to the video, the video title and so on.

That being the case, duplicate content is not really much of an issue in videos then it is with standard content on the web. Why do I say this? I publish our videos both on YouTube and on my own server because I am not currently worried about duplicate content in the video search space.

YouTube videos simply rank incredibly well. I also want my videos hosted internally so that I can publish an iTunes feed and gain subscribers not only to YouTube but also to my video feed, which can be subscribed to on your favorite RSS reader or via iTunes or other video/podcast readers.

If you had to make a decision on where to host your videos, I would tell you to host them both on YouTube and on an internal server (I use Amazon S3).

Here is my process for syndicating my videos:

1. Upload video to YouTube and write descriptive title and description, plus link to my blog via YouTube
2. Upload video to S3
3. Create blog post, embed both YouTube video and a link to the raw video on S3.
4. Create video XML feed file for iTunes and other podcast readers, which includes the YouTube video in description, but also S3 download URL for readers
5. I make sure the XML file contains description, title, S3 URL, YouTube embed, link to blog post and other meta data

You can see my latest video on April 3rd, you can subscribe directly on iTunes or via your favorite RSS reader on watch it on YouTube or on my blog. Yes, I give a bunch of options and they all work well.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A very helpful WebmasterWorld thread shares insights from a long time SEO who decided to pin two sites, competing in the same industry, with each other. He took two different strategies for each site. One site was pushed using old school SEO tactics, including doorway pages, paid and reciprocal links, content development and so on. The other site was to build a site with no paid links, unique content, no doorway pages, but add videos, blogs, rss feeds, Twitter integration and so on.

Let's call the first site the "SEO'ed Site" and the second site the "Quality Site." Guess which one is earning money and getting quality Google traffic? You got it, the "SEO'ed Site."

The member said:

Site 1 (AKA "SEO'ed Site"): after just 3 months it was skyrocketing past some pretty hefty competition with traffic increasing well each month. The site was making £10,000+ a month for the last six months we had it and just sold for a rather nice figure.

Site 2 (AKA "Quality Site"): has struggled to rank anywhere, even for it's own name, and traffic has been stagnant since the outset - it made a loss for the first 8 months and made just under £3000 in it's best month which was last month.

So what is a webmaster to do? Of course, this is just one single case study. To see exactly what tactics were used on each site, see the WebmasterWorld thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google typically cuts down the display of the title tag in the search results to no more than 65 characters. A WebmasterWorld thread asks does that mean Google won't look beyond the 65th character to determine what that page is about? Or if they do look beyond that 65th character, does Google deem the value of the words after the 65th character as less valuable?

The title tag is arguably the most important on page SEO component of a single page. Most, if not all, SEOs suggest that if you want to rank for a specific keyword phrase, you must have that keyword phrase in the page's title tag.

In addition, almost all search engines display your page's title tag in the search results, as the blue, clickable link to your page. It is vital to make sure the link is "clickable," meaning that people are encouraged to click it, by making it read well and appear nice.

Finally, the title tag is also displayed in the browser's title bar, tabs, and as bookmarks or favorites. So having them formatted nicely, is key in that respect. Let alone all the different social networking sites that use the title tag of the page as the default title of your article.

When formatting your title, I take the approach of making it short enough to be attractive in the Google search results. But you also want to make sure it has your keyword phrase in it. Will Google rank you for a keyword phrase that goes beyond that cut off? Most SEOs say yes, Google will rank you for keyword phrases found after the 65th character.

Long time WebmasterWorld member, pageonresults said:

There really is no hard rule when it comes to longer titles. I've seen titles with up to 20+ words perform just fine. tedster has mentioned that he has seen pages with longer titles perform for keyword searches where the words were towards the end of the long titles.

Senior member, wheel, said:

I care more about clickability than I do rankings when it comes to title and particularly description. I want my 'advertisement' to really pop out.

An older Google Groups thread has Googler, Reid saying:

Also making sure the most difference in the title is starting on the left ensures it will show up as a distinct button when the window is minimized or the tab is at the back of the browser window. Furthermore this also helps Googlebot in determining how unique that is.

I mentioned length of the description meta tag in terms of words because this is the typical measurement. But yes, 2 lines for a total of about 160 characters or so. As for teh title, it depends on the browse but about 70 characters are safe.

In short, there are no fixed number of words/characters that are allowed for a meta description.

A Googler did say have the most important keywords to the front of the title tag.

Let's not forget that Google recently confirmed showing longer snippets for the description part of the search listings. Would this translate to longer titles and clickable links? Who knows - it would not surprise me to see this.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 10th.

A heated Sphinn thread started some controversy in the SEO industry over who is an SEO and who is not an SEO.

In short, Edward Lewis wrote a piece named HTML 4 SEO Best Practices for HTML Authoring. The article goes through many HTML attributes that can come in handy when coding your pages. The article is a very useful resource to hold on to and bookmark, if you need to look up the various elements. So where is the controversy?

Well, when the thread was submitted to Sphinn, Harith titled it "You're not an SEO if you don't know these by heart!" That is where the controversy came in.

Well known SEO, Jill Whalen, said:

Guess I'm not an SEO then because I don't see how most of those have anything to do with SEO.

Now if you're a developer, then yeah--good stuff.

Do you really need to know all these HTML elements to be considered an SEO? I know many people who consider themselves SEO, but know very limited HTML and coding. Of course, it helps a lot to be fully skilled in HTML, and other web languages, but is it necessary?

Here is a poll, do you need coding skills to be considered an SEO?

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 10th.

There is a big misconception out there that to make a site rank well in search engines, you need to make your site look ugly. SEO (search engine optimization) does not have to look ugly. Yes, having a lot of text and hyperlinking your content, where it makes sense, is important SEO factors, but it doesn't have to look ugly.

A Google Webmasters Help thread has a webmaster who said that the SEO process is "killing the look" of his site. It doesn't have to. You can use CSS, graphics and other elements to make your site look pretty and still rank well. As long as you make sure to place enough text on the page and format it properly, it still have look great.

If anyone tells you, especially your designer, that the suggested SEO changes will look ugly, so don't do it. They are wrong. The designer should be able to be creative enough to come up with a way to get the SEO requirements in the new design and still make it look professional and pretty. It is done every day and it is done successfully and professionally.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

A week ago, we polled our audience asking How Long Should It Take To Rank Well in Google?

With over two-hundred responses, I thought it would be a good time to share the results with you all.

How Long Does it Take To Rank Well in Google Results:

:: 3 - 6 Months said 83 respondents or 35%
:: 6 - 9 Months said 46 respondents or 19%
:: 2 Months said 28 respondents or 12%
:: A Year Plus said 24 respondents or 10%
:: Weeks said 22 respondents or 9%
:: A Year said 13 respondents or 5%
:: A Month said 13 respondents or 5%
:: Other answer... said 10 respondents or 4%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

This article was written earlier this week and scheduled to go live April 9th.

Reverse search engine optimization - unranking for keyword or keyword phrases you work well for. Why in the world would you want to rank less in the search engines? Well, people have their reasons. We actually covered this topic twice in the six plus years of writing about SEO topics:

• Ranking Well But Not Too Well in Search Engines
• I Rank Too High on Google! Is Something Wrong?

A recent Google Webmasters Help thread has a question from an SEO blogger named Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI. He said he ranks too well for [advertising presentation] in Google and wants to not rank as well.

Why does he want to rank lower? He feels that his page that ranks well for advertising presentation is not what people are really looking for. This leads to those readers being dissatisfied with what they see and also leads to a high bounce rate. Some believe bounce rates influence rankings of the entire site, so it might be detrimental the rest of the site to have a high bounce rate on a specific page (I don't believe that). But the main reason Gab wants to rank lower is because he only wants happy readers.

Googler, JohnMu, offered advice on how to rank lower in Google. John said:

If you rank for a phrase that you don't want to rank for, there's not much you can do other than make sure that your content does not include this phrase. Adjusting the description meta-tag and the title element to give more information about what you are really writing about can be helpful as well, although this may not affect your ranking for that phrase. Adding a "not" qualifier won't really help to change the ranking, but it might help users who are looking for something particular.

One trick you could try is to replace individual letters with alternate glyphs that look very similar. For instance, you could replace a lower case "L" with the number "1" (or use cyrillic characters that look very similar, eg "e"/"е", "r"/"г", "i"/"і", etc.). While this would make it harder for us to understand your content (say if someone wanted to use Google Translate to read it in their own language), it would likely also prevent your content from ranking for those words.

Simply, complete unoptimize that page. Or try to target the page towards a more relevant keyword phrase.

Forum discussion at Google Webmasters Help.

Throughout my many years (makes me sound old) in the search industry, I have heard about many filters and penalties, including a filter or penalty to prevent a site from ranking well for a specific keyword phrase. For example, if I want to rank well for big blue pineapple chair and I create a page about a big blue pineapple chair but Google never ranks me for that term, I may consider my site to be penalized from ranking well from that specific term.

A HighRankings Forum thread has a couple webmasters asking about such a filter. They say they rank well for everything they want, but not for a single keyword phrase that they once ranked well for. The question they asked does a search engine, such as Google, penalize a site for a specific keyword phrase?

Here is a poll, let me know what you think about this topic:

As you can see from the poll, I have two Yes answers and one No. You can select all or none. Yes algorithmically means that Google has a filter that is automated. Yes Manually means Google does filter for keyword phrases, but a human does it. No, means, no, Google does not penalized in this way.

I'll vote but I won't tell you what my thoughts are until after I post the results.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks why do some people use more than a single robots.txt file to control and instruct search spiders how to crawl and access their content. That is a good question. Typically, the spiders will only listen to the robots.txt file found in the root level. So technically, if you place a robots.txt on a subdomain, the search engine will likely ignore it. I do not believe the same applies to subdomains, where subdomains have their own root levels.

HighRankings administrator, Randy, said:

robots.txt anywhere but the Root level will be ignored by the spiders. In fact it would surprise me if it's ever even queried. robots.txt is not like .htaccess where you can control things on a per directory level.

The only way a subdirectory robots.txt might be valid is the rare case where someone has a domain name parked on a subdirectory of another domain. Or possibly if the subdirectory is really a subdomain, though that one too is questionable in my mind and isn't something I've tested to see if spiders look for a robots.txt for each subdomain.

I love what Ron Carnell added:

FWIW, I almost always back up a file before modifying it. My ex-wife always said I had trust issues? At any rate, I probably have a few copies of robots.txt laying around on more than a few sites. I don't worry about it because, as you pointed out, the only one that counts is in the root.

I believe Google often uses individual sitemaps per subdomain, to control their content.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A HighRankings Forum thread asks an interesting question. If I add links to my web page and nofollow them, does Google still read the anchor text of the link and use that in part of how they determine what my page is contextual about.

For example, if I link to Search Engine Land as follows; <a href="http://searchengineland.com/" rel="nofollow">Search News</a> would Google or any other main search engine, take the words "search news" and place that text as being relevant to what this page is about? We know Google won't pass the link value of that link to Search Engine Land, but do we know if Google ignores that text completely?

Has anyone done any tests on this yet? If not, anyone want to try?

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

There are way too many sites out there that have their "Page Not Found" web pages return a 200 header status code, instead of a 404 code or a 301. The issue with showing a 200 code to spiders or others is that it means that your page that no longer exists, technically does exist. If you return a 404, it technically means the page does not exist. If you return a 301, then you say that page has been moved.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topic of serving up a 200 status code on these not found pages. Tedster, WebmasterWorld administration, said "over time, can destroy your site's rankings. You are essentially telling Google to index the same content for an infinite number of URLs."

I'll be honest, some of our coders here set up the "Not Found" pages are 200. I then get upset and we fix it. I got really upset on Tuesday, where I made our senior developer write a script to go through all our web sites (hundreds of them) and check to see if any 404 pages returned a status code other than a 404 or 301. We found about four sites that did and we fixed all of them.

Writing a scrip that goes through your sites on a scheduled basis and checks for this type of issue might be a good idea, if you have many sites to manage. Server configurations change over time, you make changes to sites, and you add new sites. People are human and they forget to do a thing or two, here and there. So stop being human (kidding) and set up a program that checks this stuff automatically.

Why? Well, it can come back to bite you later.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sometimes we forget or forget to look after basic SEO topics. The other day, I caught one of my programmers allowing both capitalized URLs and lowercase URLs result in having the same destination page. Let's take Twitter as an example, since it was brought up in a Google Webmaster Help thread.

Twitter allows both capitalized and lowercase URLs return the same page. For example, both http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google return the same exact page, content and information. But Google considers http://twitter.com/google and http://twitter.com/Google to be different pages, in many cases.

Now, Google isn't that dumb, just do a search for http://www.google.com/search?q=http://twitter.com/Google (the capitalized version) and Google will know you really want the lowercase version:

But you don't want to make Google figure this stuff out. What you should do, is make sure there is only one version, preferably the lowercase version in my opinion. If someone does go to a capitalized version, 301 that page to the lower case URL.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

It appears Craigslist, the very popular and old school directory listing site, has added the nofollow meta tag to most of their pages. If you view the source of the listing pages, you should see <meta name="robots" content="NOARCHIVE,NOFOLLOW"> in the header of the pages.

This tag was designed to tell a search engine not to follow any of the links on the page, including all the internal links. This is part of the reason the nofollow link attribute was designed, to give webmasters more control on which links should be followed by search engines and which ones should not be followed.

I find it interesting that Craigslist decided to simply nofollow all the links on the page, using the nofollow meta tag, as opposed to slapping on the nofollow attribute on user generated links.

As Google's help document explains, "originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page." But since the creation of the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute, most sites have abandoned using the meta tag for the more controlled attribute.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Two days ago, I ran a poll asking if SEO companies implement SEO changes or just recommend changes to be implemented. Meaning, does your SEO company normally start with coding changes and upload files to the web server.

I now have the poll results, which shows the majority of SEO companies do both. They will make coding changes and/or offer recommendations, based on what their client wants them to do.

Here is the break down of 170+ responses to the question, Do You Implement SEO Recommendations or Just Make Recommendations?

:: Both, Implement When Asked & Offer Recommendations When Asked said 121 respondents or 70%
:: Offer Recommendations Only said 41 respondents or 24%
:: Implement Changes on Site Only said 10 respondents or 6%

The numbers seem logical to me. I wonder why 6% would only conduct SEO services if they can make the changes themselves on the site. I assume it gives them more control and thus makes them more secure in getting the changes they need done, so they can see results?

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

The other day we wrote about being your own SEO client isn't easy, but clearly that doesn't stop the bulk of you from working on your own solo projects. We ran a poll, asking which would you rather do? Either work with clients or do your own work? Most of you said, you prefer to do both and mix it up.

Here is the break down of the 126 responses:

:: Both Clients & My Projects said 56 respondents or 44.44%
:: For My Projects said 48 respondents or 38.1%
:: For Client Projects said 22 respondents or 17.46%

The results really do not surprise me at all. Doing both client work and self work give you the advantage of a stable income while experimenting on how you can make yourself rich overnight. ;-)

There are many quality comments in our previous article on the topic of being your own SEO client from first hand SEOs who have done it both.

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forum.

The SEO industry is a conflicted industry to work in, in many respects. Much of the public still thinks this is a form black magic, some feel the industry is packed with scam artists and some just totally don't get it. Let's not forget the conflict of the struggle between the search engine and the search engine optimizers. Oh, then black hat versus white hat. It makes for a very conflicted industry.

The last thing we need is misinterpreting SEO advice. But it happens more often in conflicted and new industries, then it would happen in other industries.

A HighRanking Forums thread reminded me of just one minor example of misinterpreting SEO advice. Let me quote you the frustration one SEO felt about his boss's recent SEO discovery:

My boss went upstate to meet with a partner and their SEO "expert" advised him that Google sets aside the 2, 3 and 6 spot in their Top 10 listings to video. Yes folks, it's a miracle. Someone has in their infinite wisdom broken the Google algorithm and found this wonderful tidbit of information. When I tried to argue the validity of this decree, my boss assured me that the "expert" proved it to him.

Now, with Google Universal Search, there were times where specific spots seemed to be set aside for video. But not for all queries and not all the time. Even nowadays, it seems like the specific spots that appeared to be set aside to video, in some queries, are no longer the same spots. A video can now show up in the 1st result or the 5th result or the 4th result or any of the top ten results.

So what happened here? I suspect the "boss" misinterpreted this "SEO experts" advice as to use videos. I personally recommend videos for SEO purposes to many people. It can do very well in the Google results and you can get your message out to a whole group of people through the video. In fact, I did a piece at Search Engine Land named Want To Rank Tops In Google? Do YouTube Videos, Stupid! The summary:

The Forrester Blog published a small but interesting study on how you can improve your chances, by 50 times, of showing up at the top of the Google search results. Their tip? Utilize Google’s Universal Search by creating videos.

But it is not that simple, you need to look beyond those numbers and use wisdom and experience to know when to use which strategies.

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums.

Yesterday, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced together a new way to handle internal duplicate content issues with a new "canonical" header tag. Vanessa Fox does an excellent job explaining what it is all about in her piece at Search Engine Land.

So for all duplicate pages, you insert this tag in the header elements of those pages, specifying the main URL. The tag looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/true-url.html" />

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have detailed explanations of how they work.

Three main things:

(1) This works only internally, not across domains.
(2) Treat this like you would a 301 redirect, so be careful
(3) Search engines consider this a "hint" and do not have to abide by it (just yet)

Outside of that, there is good recaps on this at Techmeme.

We have a ton of Q&A on this from our live coverage of the Ask the Search Engines panel from SMX West. I am sure your questions are answered in that panel or in the discussions below.

This tag can be confusing, because it is new. But after webmasters begin to understand where, if and how to use it, they are more likely to love it.

JohnMu said in a forum post:

Here are some examples where this could be used: - Web-shops (mutliple URLs depending on how you got to a page) - Sites that work with Session-IDs within the URL - Ad-tracking URLs (eg using AdWords + Analytics) - Affiliate tracking URLs - News sites with multiple URLs per article - Forums with multiple URLs per thread/page (eg "&highlight=", etc)

Plus, Yoast already posted plugins to support this for Wordpress, Magento and Drupal.

Forum discussion Google Webmaster Help, Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Sphinn.

A common but difficult question was asked at HighRanking Forums about the issue of targeting different countries.

My advice for when it comes to targeting different countries is almost always to have two different sites on TLDs (top level domains) that match that country. So if you want to target the US and the UK, have one US site on the .com and one UK site on the co.uk and make sure your content is localized for that market. It might help to also host each site in that region, plus it is always good to set the geographic target for the UK site in Google Webmaster Tools (I would leave the US version untargeted in webmaster tools).

High Rankings administrator, Randy, adds:

When you're using a .com domain name you're not really targeting the US market. You're targeting the entire world. It's one of those double-edged swords we Murcans get/have to deal with. In that .com is a Worldwide competition. Not a US one.

The good edge of the sword being that since pretty much all US based sites use .com (as opposed to the almost never used .us) you end up with decent worldwide rankings if you get good rankings you can see from your PC from a US location. The bad edge of the sword being that if you can't compete in a worldwide market, you're basically screwed. Then the only thing left to you is your very, very localized market.

Forum discussion at HighRanking Forums.

A HighRankings Forum thread has a very interesting topic just getting started. The thread creator asks, "What Has Changed In Seo In Last 2 Years?"

This is a great question. People think that SEO tactics are always changing. You need to constantly tweak your site to get the most out of your SEO success. While others believe the same SEO principles have remained the same for the past five years.

Yes, you always need quality content with solid internal site navigation, with title tags, clean HTML, good external links and so on. But in the past two years, what has changed the most?

Off the top of my head, I would say the following aspects of SEO changed the most in the past two years. I am sure I am forgetting some aspects, but I'll do my best:

• What makes for a quality link
• Duplicate content detection and filters
• Google understanding dynamic content
• Trusting a site and the content on that site
• PageRank's importance in the algorithm
• Social media's role in trust building and link acquisition
• Google's transparency
• Black hat tactics constantly change

Those are just some of the ideas that came to mind when writing this post. I am sure I can think up more ideas and flesh out the ideas I listed above, but that is not for this site. Please feel free to add your two cents in the comments below or in the forum thread. Maybe, I'll circle back on this topic and run a poll when I get a solid list of attributes and tactics.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

About a week ago, we ran a poll asking Who's To Credit For Faster Indexing? The options included Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner, due to the topic we were discussing. The results are now in and the majority said, Google Sitemaps, in this case, gets the credit for increasing the indexing speed of these sites in Google.

Here are the results of the 80+ responses:

:: Google Sitemaps speeds up indexing said 49 respondents or 60.49%
:: FeedBurner speeds up indexing said 26 respondents or 32.1%
:: The remainder responded with "Other" but did not comment said 6 respondents or 7.41%

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

David Harry has an excellent write up on the SEO implications of page segmentation. In short, the piece goes over how search engines can, and probably do, look at each web page and segment the page into components. For example, they can pull out the navigation, footer, ad blocks, and so on from the main body copy.

This concept is far from new, it goes way back and we even covered it back in mid-2004 with Block (Passage) Level Link Analysis by MSN. It just makes sense, why treat the ads on the page the same way one would treat the body content. That is the purpose behind Text Link Ads new product inLinks.

In any event, there is some good overall discussion around the topic at Sphinn. Fantomaster said:

This is developing into an extremely important aspect of state-of-the-art SEO that cannot be ignored with impunity. While it's anybody's guess (still) how much of this technology has already been implemented by the search engines, you can easily bet the farm that it'll happen rather sooner than later.

In any event, if this is a new concept to you, you may want to read up on it. If some search engines are not deploying this yet, then they likely will soon. It just makes logical sense.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

An interesting WebmasterWorld thread discusses the phenomenon of redesigning a site, with brand new URL structure, 301 redirecting the old URLs to the new, and seeing an almost immediate boost in rankings at Google.com. In fact, WebmasterWorld moderator, minnapple, has coined this phenomenon the "honeymoon period."

What he means by that is that sometimes, a well-liked site, will see an immediate boost in rankings at Google after redesigning and implementing many 301 redirects. Minnapple described the honeymoon period as lasting about 20 days, and it is possible things can go back to how they were, or possibly get worse.

Tedster said he has seen similar things:

This lines up with the results of a redesign I helped on - we saw the new urls take over seamlessly. I'd say this is a sign that you had things well handled technically, and that Google already liked the site a good bit. Please let us know if things start to wobble.

Have you experienced this Google redesign "Honeymoon Period" yourself?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks for tips on how he can get his site indexed and crawled faster by Google. The thing is, most, if not all, of these tips apply not to just Google, but any search engine, such as Yahoo, Live Search and others.

Here are some of the tips for faster indexing via the thread:

• Submit an XML Sitemap
• Have a clean navigation structure
• Get quality links
• Go hot on Digg or other social networking sites
• Make unique and helpful content
• Use social bookmarking
• Verify your sites with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Webmaster Tools
• Remove Canonical domain issues

For more tips and discussion go to WebmasterWorld.

There is a nice old school SEO thread at HighRankings Forum on the old topic of ranking well for singular cases, when you are already ranking well for the plural version.

For example, you are in the tops of tops at Google for [buy widgets], but you want to rank well for [buy widget]. The thread goes over some SEO copywriting tips on how to help achieve your goal.

Ian McAnerin has a nice tip, let me quote it:

Here is a trick I've used (I don't know if it will help you, but it might help someone):

Original Links:

Gray Widgets | Blue Widgets | Brown Widgets
...this is fine if you are optimizing for the plural, but not helpful if you are optimizing for the singular. Just removing the "s" makes it sound/look funny. But you can fix a lot of plural singular issues by changing the sentence context:

I'm looking for a: Gray Widget | Blue Widget | Brown Widget

For the on page stuff, you can control how your content is written. It is not as simple as removing an S at the end of the phrase. You need to make sure to rewrite the content on the page to make sure it still reads logically and grammatically correct after removing the S.

The only issue is, then you may drop in your ranking for the plural keyword phrase. Personally, I have seen many cases where either the plural version brings in the conversions or the singular case brings in the conversions, but it typically is one or the other. Of course, both would bring in conversions, but in many cases, one version brings in the majority of those conversions. This is something you need to test and fine tune over time, like most of your SEO efforts.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks why does the site command in Google not match up in the number of "indexed" URLs reported in Google Webmaster Tools. A very valid question, let me show you.

A simple site command in Google for site:www.seroundtable.com returns 17,500 results. So that means, Google has indexed approximately 17,500 pages from the www of this domain.

Now, if I login and check my Sitemap data for this site (yea, I finally created a Sitemap file), it shows about half of the indexed URLs. It says Google has indexed 8,813 URLs of the 9,086 I submitted.

For me, the answer is simple. I seem to only sending URLs of the individual blog posts here. So although I have about 9,000+ blog posts at this domain, I still have about twice as many pages on this site, due to the categories, date archives, tag landing pages and so on. Those pages are not included in my Sitemap file. So Google seems to only showing the indexed URLs of what I submitted. Of course, it is hard for me to validate that by just looking at the numbers.

What I found interesting is when I went to Yahoo's Site Explorer, Yahoo told me they h have indexed 16,498 of my pages, but crawled only 15,022 pages and thus know about 16,498 of my pages. I guess via linkage data, they can index more of my pages then they actually crawl?

In fact, Yahoo's numbers for a inurl:seroundtable.com command is almost on target to the numbers they report in Site Explorer, which is nice.

In regards to what is going on with Google... I am not sure if the results are accurate or not. Tedster at WebmasterWorld said:

I'm never surpised when Webmaster Tools information seems peculiar in some way - it happens a lot. Also note that site:example.com results are getting weirder and weirder, often omitting urls that definitely are in the index - sometimes with a simple site:example.com/directory/ query.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Sometimes I seriously wonder where some of these SEO theories come from. One that caught my eye this week was found in a Google Webmaster Help thread, asking if it can hurt your SEO efforts if you do not alphabetize your META tags.

The thread creator wrote:

Can anyone tell me if it hurts indexing sites that the meta tags have been alphabetized?

But my editor tends to alphabetize them.

This webmaster asked a valid question. Since his web editor went through the trouble of making the tags in alphabetical order, should he do the same manually? The answer is no, it doesn't help in any way.

ZydoSEO replied to the thread, in which a Googler confirmed, saying:

The meta tags can appear in any order as long as they are contained inside the <head> element. It is not a problem to alphabetize them from Google's perspective... Only possibly from your perspective since time could probably be better spent doing something other than alphabetizing HTML elements.

In any event, I thought it would be fun to share this with many of the readers here.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If you're about to take on a prospective SEO client and they start taking the initiative on their search engine optimization (in ways you hadn't even thought of), should you proceed with the client -- especially if you're going to disagree with them (since their initial implementation was probably a measure to cut costs and keep their spend down?)

Probably not. But before you lose the client, make sure to educate them. Show them why you are doing something. Eventually, both you and the client may have a good relationship as goals and objectives are clearly defined.

What about an SEO client whose site is not accessible for you to actually perform the SEO? The other option may be link building, but on-page SEO is still very important. If you can't do that, try creating "microsites" that you actually can SEO.

What would you do?

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion around a webmaster who noticed Google is treating his mobile site as a duplicate site to his main site. This user has his mobile site on a subdomain of m.domain.com, where his main site is on www.domain.com. The issue is that the content is exactly the same on m.domain.com as compared to www.domain.com.

So what can you do to solve the duplicate content issue?

In my opinion, the best way to provide a mobile version of your site is to use CSS. As Phil Payne said in the thread, "code each page once (in valid XHTML Strict) and use CSS to format it for the device." But as Phil explains, Google still promotes the use of "separate mobile sitemaps but also separate mobile sites." Which steers webmasters into an issue of having duplicate content. I agree with Phil, Google should really speak up on this matter.

In short, you can always do user agent detection and force mobile users to m.domain.com, while forcing others to www.domain.com, including GoogleBot (using a 301 redirect). You can also make sure GoogleBot does not index the mobile version by disallowing it in your robots.txt file. JohnMu of Google lists out many duplicate content documents to help webmasters with the issue, plus we have covered duplicate content issues over and over again.

Google's documents:

• Deftly dealing with duplicate content
• Duplicate content due to scrapers
• Demystifying the "duplicate content penalty"
• Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced
• Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I found a DigitalPoint Forums thread that was pretty funny. In short, they mentioned how www.yourdomain.com has a PageRank score of seven. It is true, the parked domain, www.yourdomain.com does have a PageRank score of seven.

It is a very valuable domain, not just for its toolbar PageRank. I mean, everyone uses it as an example of talking about where to place your domain. Can the owner better monetize it? I am not a domainer, so I don't know.

But it is funny to see domains with little on them be worth so much, possibly accidently?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A few weeks ago I ran a poll asking does the alt tag improve rankings in search engines. We have now received over a hundred responses from our readers, who I assume are mostly SEOs.

About 80% said, yes, using an alternative attribute on images does indeed help improve rankings. While about 20% said it does not.

Here is the breakdown:
:: Alt Tag improves rankings said 86 respondents or 79.63%
:: Alt Tag does NOT improve rankings said 22 respondents or 20.37%

With most these polls, sometimes people look too much into the question. I am surprised about 20% said no.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

John Honeck asked in a Google Webmaster Help thread how much more valuable is a number one ranking in Google, when compared to the likes of Yahoo.

He asked it in the form of, "Is being #1 in yahoo as good as being #50 in Google? #100, or?" But let me place a poll below and ask you it in a different format.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

I found a fun but serious SEO mistake in a Google Webmaster Help thread that I wanted to share with you all. But I felt it would be fun, if you had the time, to share at least one of your funny, but deadly, SEO mistakes - that you have seen first hand, in the comment section below.

The mistake documented in the thread was that someone was not sure why his Webmaster Tools account was showing the status of "network unreachable" for many of his URLs. JohnMu from Google looked into the issue to explain that although you and I (ordinary users) can see those URLs, for some reason, GoogleBot was being shown a 500 error page. The way John was able to reproduce that was by simply changing his browser's useragent to the same useragent GoogleBot uses, "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)". Then he surfed to the page to be presented with the 500 error.

This is a deadly but sad mistake. Normally people will go out of their way to serve up better optimized pages for GoogleBot. But to serve up error pages to GoogleBot, while serving up your beautiful content only to your users - well, that is kinda anti-SEO. This webmaster's issue had to do with a problem with ASP.net's URL rewriting system he was using and how he set it up.

Your turn, share a quick story below of a funny SEO mistake you have seen.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

If you had no regard for your website and wanted it to be penalized or not ranked well, what would you do to make that happen? A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the potential issues that may relate to penalties, and I've turned that discussion into a "what kind of tactics can get your site penalized?" (or "how do I deoptimize my website?")

You can cause problems by considering the following:

1. Have high and unnatural keyword densities
2. Overuse of meta tags
3. Repetitive use of keywords in navigation and linking
4. Removal of non-site external links from within a site (or by adding nofollow to all external links)
5. Having too many reciprocal links

But this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. What could you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

In our continued coverage of the a WebmasterWorld thread started by senior member CainIV, we learn two more things. These two items are likely obvious to most, but have been confirmed (at least to CainIV) that they are true based on his experiments.

1. Changes to navigation links can have a serious impact on a site's ranking in Google. CainIV said, "there are certainly nav and footer link thresholds that cause a website - even a website into the top 5 - to spin out and down to pages 5 and 6 in ranking."
2. Navigation links are treated differently then links within the content. CainIV said, "Google appears to handle thresholds from links within content different than those within nav or footer sections - this is to say, that content links have a fuzzier 'trust' logic about them, and I could more links to content, faster and more focused on the primary keyword pointed at the root url without the same threshold being crossed."

Like I said and like CainIV said in the thread, this is likely all assumed already but can't hurt to validate it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

For many many cases, when people are having issues with their site's doing well in the search engines - they sometimes overlook the obvious. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen or heard that webmasters are complaining their sites are not in the search indexes, but at the same time, their robots.txt command or meta tags are telling the search engine not to crawl.

For example, a Google Webmaster Help thread shows this exact issue.

Webmaster complains they are not in the index, "This seems to be such an area of voodoo for me - so frustrating!, said this webmaster. In response, a webmaster helper, John, said, "You've got:
<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />."

The webmaster's response, is all to common:

Oh my gosh! I totally forgot about that option in WordPress - thanks for finding it!

Don't overlook the obvious.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

We know Google recommends using alternative text for your images. But does that mean your rankings will improve in the search engines if you use the ALT attribute?

That is the question at WebmasterWorld. Forget about what is "best practices" or what is nice to do, but does it actually improve rankings? The thread is not sure. We do have moderator, Robert Charlton, speak up and say:

I've seen some boosts from the alt text for a linked image, probably not as much as the boost for a text link would provide, but it's been noticeable on some phrases. I've not seen any boost from alt text in unlinked images, which doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Another senior member said:

The relative value of alt text for ranking has always been very little, but the spammy use of this has also been discouraged. I always try to fit in a 1-2-word alt text descriptor for real pictures but an empty value for spacer images.

So what do you think? Does ALT attributes directly increase your search rankings? Take the poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

This is a topic we covered in the past, but I had the opportunity to remind you all, that Google prefers you use a server status code of 503, when your site is going down for maintenance.

Googler, JohnMu, reminds us in a Google Groups thread that the best way to let Google know your site is temporarily offline is to return a 503 status code. A 503 is known as a "service unavailable" and GoogleBot and other search engines, should take that to mean that your site will be back later and this is only a temporary issue.

Returning a status code of 200, which means everything is okay and showing zero content, can hurt you. So it is best to use those server response codes, when possible, to communicate to the search spiders, what is really going on with your site.

John explains:

Optimally, all such "the server is down" URLs should return result code 503 (service unavailable). Doing that also prevents search engines from crawling and indexing the error pages :-). Sometimes I'm surprised at how many large sites forget to do this...

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Cre8asite Forums thread discusses the ramifications of giving out SEO for a fee on a one-time basis rather than having a long-term consulting project. Not all individuals are equipped to handle lengthy engagements nor do they really have the time. Is it worth it, then, to give advice to people who don't know how to manage their sites to explain that their visibility is at a complete minimum?

Absolutely. EGOL explains that he's already done this for some friends. He explains that the service he provides shows that the client websites are invisible in search. He then gives them keywords to optimize for and teaches them how to write for search. They work on the copy, send him an update, and made basic optimization changes (rewrote title tags, removed frames, etc.) With these optimization changes, they got 20 times more traffic than they previously received.

iamlost goes a step further to say that there are two ways you can package this deal. One can be an economy option: you suggest changes, and they'd implement them. The second more full-fledged package would be the gamut: you offer the advice and apply the corrections.

There is a breadth of information in this forum discussion, and I barely scratched the surface with this summary. Please read and engage in the lengthy discussion at Crea8site Forums.

Senior WebmasterWorld member, CainIV, has been running an experiment for just about two months now. The experiment is to test to see how changing your navigation links from "home," to a keyword, to another keyword, can impact your rankings.

Yes, this experiment is an internal linking strategy test.

The WebmasterWorld thread is here and it started by on October 1st. It is now December 1st, and CainIV is sharing some results. He said:

I have found that if a website is launched with those footer to home keyword links, then it is almost as if Google ignores those. However, if they are added or removed as the website begins to rank, in general the rankings go south.

Be careful when adding or removing those footer links!:)

It is important to note that these link changes are all pointing to the home page.

CainIV seems like he will be sharing more of this experiment, so check out the thread.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Many SEOs use the site command to see how healthy their site is in a particular search engine. So you plug in site:www.mydomain.com in a search engine and the search engine will return the number of pages they have indexed for that domain. If you know you have a hundred pages and the search engine indexed 90% of those pages, then you are pretty well off.

But the problem is, the site command is not often all that reliable. We had recent reports that Google is dropping pages and we had recent reports that Microsoft Live Search is dropping pages as well. Most SEOs determine a drop in pages indexed by the number of results returned by the engine for a site command.

But is this a valid way of really determining how many pages a search engine indexed of your site? From what I am hearing from search engine representatives at both Google and Microsoft, the answer is no. A webmaster should not depend on the number returned by a site command as a reliable indicator of the number of pages a search engine has indexed of their site.

Googler, JohnMu, wrote in a recent Google Groups thread three reasons why SEOs and Webmasters should not depend on this number:

• The previous approximation was incorrect, the current one is closer to the actual number of URLs that we have indexed or would show to users
• The previous approximation was close and the current one is worse than before (this can happen)
• A change in our algorithms (we make a lot of changes that will impact crawling, indexing and ranking -- for some sites perhaps more than for others)

At the same time, Microsoft's Jeremiah Andrick told me that it "is problematic to use the "site:" operator to determine how many pages for a site are included in the Live Search index. The “Site:” operator generates an estimate of the pages in the index. These numbers can vary wildly depending on when you execute the query."

That being said, how can you get an accurate number of pages indexed by a search engine for your site?

I know Google's Webmaster Tools has in their Sitemaps section a place to show you the number of pages submitted in your Sitemap compared to how many URLs actually indexed. So, this might be a better indicator, but I am nervous about this number, because way too often I hear of reporting glitches in Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to track each and every keyword phrase your pages rank for. Then see by keyword, not by site command, if those pages rank. This can be time consuming, but there are ways to automate this.

Overall, using the site command might not be the best way to determine how healthy your site is in a particular search engine. I know many SEOs use this as a factor, but maybe it is time we think again about this?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread has a webmaster asking if it helps for him to rotate content on his site. He believes it might help for three reasons:

1. Revised content will encourage GoogleBot to recrawl his pages more often.
2. Revised content makes the pages look newer, which may help improve rankings.
3. It can't hurt to do, so why not.

Are any of these reasons a valid reason to rotate content on a page? Nope. You really need to think if rotating content on a page refresh will help or hurt your conversions. GoogleBot is often smart enough to tell how much of the page's true content is changing versus a snippet of weather data, testimonials or so on.

Googler, JohnMu, said "the use of random testimonials most likely won't make or break your site." John then goes on to explain how certain ways this guy's site was built can be improved. But that doesn't touch on the heart of the question.

We discussed this twice before. Most recently in May 2007 with Does Rotating Content Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings? and a while back in September 2004 with Dynamic Content on Static URLs - Rotation of Content.

The potential to confuse your end user by not showing content on a refresh can be huge. So knowing what to rotate on refresh is very important.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

What happens if you want some good link juice to your domain? You may engage in the practice of buying a site and 301ing it to your old domain. In yesterday's PubCon session, we even talked about buying sites for maximum exposure and minimum risk. But the question is really: will you get juice by doing this?

At a High Rankings Forum post, member Randy claims that Googlers say that the "trust" of the site gets reset upon a domain transfer and that you won't get the PR value. At the same time, how is Google to know that you have bought a domain for this purpose? That said, Randy says it's 50/50.

If you have experience in this area, the comments area of this post is waiting for your insights.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Scott Hendison has a dilemma: one of his clients won't take any of his advice. I'm sure many SEOs have run into the same sort of scenario in their lifetimes, where the SEO gives good strategies -- and many of them at that -- and the actual client does nothing about it month after month. How do you handle this kind of client?

Some find that it is important to set expectations before the agreement is signed. The SEO should communicate to his client that the client will need to make changes to her site.

It's up to us to create expectations up front when we create an engagement and to continue to do so quarterly. Getting sign off on a search marketing plan as you go and achieving goals gives everyone something to aspire to and helps us to provide and reach quantifiable results.

On the other hand, if expectations aren't set, it will probably be a matter of time before the client and the SEO break up -- and the client will fault it to the SEO.

Other suggestions include dropping the client (who wants that kind of client anyway?) and picking up the phone and articulating these concerns to them in person rather than over email.

How do you handle clients who aren't responsive to your advice?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Lisa Barone writes a great piece at the We Build Pages blog about how you'll become a good SEO by actually doing SEO, not by reading SEO strategy on all those blogs you subscribe to.

It's simply not good enough to know. You need to test, retest, and verify your changes. Blogging is only part of it, but it's not the whole picture.

I know way too many people who have read a book on SEO and subscribe to blogs and say they are competent SEOs. I even know someone who makes this claim as an "SEO Consultant and Expert" and the individual doesn't even have a title tag on their page. Please.

Lisa is right. It's time you look at individuals who are in the regular practice of applying SEO skills on a regular basis than to have those who simply write upon it to be the SEOs you hire. How many journalists who write a well-researched and informed article about zoology would you actually consider zoologists?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

The Online Marketing for Marketers blog has a goo blueprint that you should adhere to if you're looking for a successful search engine optimization campaign. Your blueprint should include:

* Defined goals
* Keyword and competitive research
* A content outline
* Evaluation of technical issues
* Offsite marketing

Then, you need to lay out the action plan. Who in the team is responsible for what?

Would you add or remove anything from this blueprint?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Raise your hand if you're a religious SEO. I'm sure you've faced battles and challenges that were hard to overcome, especially since your site is religious in nature and the traffic and links don't appear to be there -- for now.

Interestingly enough, a webmaster has just built his church-oriented website and is upset that he can't get the traffic for it. I'd argue (and other forum members already did) that traffic is not the goal here -- perhaps the goal is awareness of the existence of the religious establishment.

You created the website for a purpose: to serve the congregation. Promotion, therefore, should be focused within the actual congregation (and not elsewhere). In the event that the church wants to reach out to prospective new members, what options are available?

There are a number of strategies that can be employed to garner those links.

1. Churchgoers who already maintain blogs can write about the church with a link.
2. Consider thinking about other events that have some religious correlation, such as weddings and funerals. When digging into these, consider service providers (florists, photographers, caterers, etc.) Address the concerns about weddings/funerals on your site -- be sure that the site welcomes and addresses those needing to make arrangements for either occasion.
3. Make sure that the URL of the church is highly visible in program materials (and I'd say signage too outside the church's physical location). Put the URL in your answering machine messages.
4. Document church events from the perspective of your congregation. For example, a bake sale can be posted with a video on YouTube (with the URL embedded on the bottom or at the end, of course).
5. Ask charities that your church participates in to add a link to your site.
6. Get your pastor to blog.
7. Build a directory of local churches so that out-of-towners can find you.
8. If the church is affiliated with Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, create a home on the web for these guys.
9. Find niche authority sites in the church atmosphere.
10. Get links from other churches in the area.
11. Get links from location authorities, such as media and government.
12. Get links from local non-for-profits such as local entities that use your premises for events.

What would you add to this list?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A Google Groups thread has discussion from SEOs and a Googler on the topic of removing the default.asp from your web site, through a redirect method on an IIS server.

What is the typical issue with IIS servers and redirecting? As the thread creator said:

I just realized that I have a different page rank for www.mywebsite.com and for www.mywebsite.com/default.asp. I would like to combine them into only one: www.mywebsite.com

From my default.asp page (wich is my default page off course...), do you know a way to make a 301 redirect to the root / without doing an endless loop?

John Honeck has tips at his blog post named 301 Redirects in ASP on an IIS Server. Does this answer all the questions? The forum discussion makes it sound like it does not.

Googler, JohnMu, called this the "big issue with IIS". John suspects the "newest version of IIS can handle things a bit better," but he said that most hosting companies are not running that version of IIS yet. So what options do you have?

John explains that using sessions to manage this won't work for search engines, because spiders don't handle sessions well. Thus if a spider find it, they will just run into an infinite loop on your site and that can be bad for many reasons.

John recommends the following:

The best solution is to make sure that there is absolutely no mention of "/default.asp(x)" on your site, instead only mentions of "/". You can confirm this by using a crawler such as Xenu's Link Sleuth. However, take care that you do not use forms anywhere, because they will generally return their results back to the file ("/ default.asp(x)").

For more details on this issue and troubleshooting it for your site, I highly recommend you read the whole thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

I'm inventing a whatchamacallit device that will enable me to run in circles, cut a chicken, and light up a lamp... or not. But what happens if you were enlisted to help someone optimize a website that performs activities that you never heard of or never meant to combine? A Cre8asite Forums member is running into this issue. SEOigloo says that she has been contacted by a company that wants her to optimize for a product that nobody will ever think to search for. How does one accomplish this task?

This is hard to say, really. If someone isn't going to search, perhaps search engine optimization is not the ideal approach for awareness. Instead, it may be better to consider social media marketing. Perhaps better, blogger outreach in relevant areas may be most beneficial for the product.

You can still leverage search engine optimization, however. Michael Martinez says that in terms of optimization techniques, you are the one who is able to "build a new query space." He explains:

You choose what the relevant keywords will be for the space, then optimize the site for those keywords. When the site ranks for the keywords, you start a branding campaign to teach people to search for those keywords.

The bottom line is that you can still utilize basic SEO tactics -- sure, you may have to be creative in terms of what keywords and queries you'll optimize for, but it's going to work after the initial investment. Additionally, social media marketing may be fruitful as well depending on the product and buzz.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 22, 2008.

A High Rankings Forum member questions the actions of current SEOs and wonders if the real SEO "doers" are actually working behind closed doors. He says that the SEOs who consistently tell secrets are putting themselves in danger -- the more secrets revealed, the less likely it will be for them to get clients since new "SEOs" who absorb that knowledge claim themselves to be experts and snatch up those who need SEO services. There's also the possibility of SEO secrets becoming useless over time (think: Give It Up at SMX).

I'm not sure that all SEO experts are really in hiding. Sure, I've seen a ridiculous amount of quacks claiming to be SEO geniuses probably because they've read someone's SEO guide once or twice and think they know it all. But there's no secret sauce, as many people say, and SEO isn't so much about knowledge but about application, a concept that many SEOs know quite well. SEO is also a forever-changing methodology; you'll never stop learning -- there are always new ideas and thoughts that may need to be integrated into your mindset.

Most SEO experts who claim themselves to be experts are probably fooling themselves. You can never be an "expert" in this field -- or at least, it shouldn't be a self-designation. (Other people will know if you're an expert, and if you deny it, then you probably are an expert after all.)

At the end of the day, there may be some truth to the invisibility claim (for example, I may not know all of the SEOs out there who are great at what they do), but there are just as many prominent SEOs who are also experts.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 21, 2008.

Beu has done an outstanding job testing how Google truly handles Flash indexing and crawling. To take you back, Google began indexing Flash in July 2008 and then we had a follow up post on it in late August.

Let me summarize Beu's four findings:

(1) Google has an issue associating text content within a Flash document with the correct parent URL or as a single entity.

(2) Flash documents does receive PageRank "independent of their own parent URLs."

(3) Google does not index URLs "containing #anchors (fragment identifiers) in Flash per W3C Guidelines."

(4) Google does not translate Flash content into different languages.

I would recommend you see his Flash SEO Tips for 2009 as well.

Based on Beu's tests, he has asked Google a fairly sophisticated question at Google Groups. I'll quote the question:

Can anyone confirm that Googlebot "sees" text content provided via PE (progressive enhancement) since support for simple JavaScript like SWFObject was introduced? If so, what causes Flash files to be indexed in many cases and not the parent URL where content provided via PE resides? Is there anything webmasters can do to request which version (Flash or (X)HTML) is indexed in SERPs, for example like www or non-www in webmaster tools?

That would be a nice addition but personally, I don't think it will be coming any time soon.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and Google Groups.

Stoney DeGeyter has written an insightful piece on Search Engine Guide on what you should expect from your SEO consultant. Obviously, depending on your goals, this may differ, but the ideas are the same. He explains that traffic is something to look at, but that's not what the client should only seek. Conversions are obviously important, and so are rankings, but that's not how to prove the effectiveness of the campaign. At the end of the day, ROI is really the most substantial measurement of this kind of engagement.

Stoney mentions that communication is key to make sure that expectations are set and followed throughout the duration of the contract.

Indeed, this article is pretty informative and should help you review the precautions before starting your new SEO campaign.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 15th.

When faced with marketing a brand new product or idea, how do you optimize for keywords that nobody is searching for yet? Can you find other ways to present the product, such as focus on value proposition? Would social media help here?

SEO For the Unknown explores this interesting topic at Cre8asiteforums.

In August of 2006, Rohit Bhargava coined the term SMO for social media optimization. Now search engine optimization has been around a little longer than that, but where did it come from? According to Bob Heyman, in a guest post on Search Engine Land, he did.

Bob explains that it was 1995 when the name came to mind. Once upon a time, a rock band created a website with a URL that couldn't be recalled without pulling it up in the SERPs. Unfortunately for the rock band, however, the official web page for the band was on page 4 of the SERPs. Bob explains that after that call, he resolved to make search engine rankings a priority, and thus, "search engine optimization" was born.

So why, then, is Jason Gambert claiming that he coined the phrase SEO in 2007? Give it up, Jason.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

This post was pre-written and scheduled for publication on October 14th.

A WebmasterWorld thread shows how a webmaster is sad that his competitor out ranks him. This webmaster is upset because he feels his competitor is outranking him due to the number of complaints his competitor has. Since he has so many complaints, he is getting many links from people pointing to his site, complaining about him. The links are helping the site rank higher and thus get more complaints, which leads to more links.

Here is the webmaster's complaint:

One of my competitors has apparently scammed lots of people. So webmasters and forum participants post things like "Beware of X Y Z. They took my money and I never heard from them again!" Where X Y Z is a very lucrative keyword. X Y Z's site sucks really bad, and it has practically no value for that keyword, but they are still ranked #2.

In fact, by having those anchors and being ranked so high, they get to scam more people!

Clearly, there can be other factors this webmaster is missing. But there is no doubt, that honest reviews, good or bad, can lead to good quality links. Even if the review is bad, it would be hard for Google to say - hmmm, this is a bad review, I'll rank the site lower. In fact, Google tends to like negative reviews high - or at least, those are the type of sites that get a lot of attention from me.

I wish I had more time to delve into this thread but it does make for a good discussion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In another one of those "I heard it from someone else" rumors circulating throughout the Internet, a High Rankings Forum member claims that he read an article that said that using Google Analytics on his site can hurt his search result rankings. The author's example was "do you really want Google to know that your visitors have stayed on your site for only 15 seconds?"

All forum members don't believe that Google Analytics is any indicator of search result placement (and I'd love for the Google Analytics article author to actually validate his own theory rather than spit out information that drives real search optimizers batty).

Sometimes people can search for something and find it on the first page within seconds and not need to hang around. Just because someone visits a web page for less than 15 seconds doesn't mean they aren't finding what they're looking for.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

This post was prewritten and was scheduled for publication on September 30th.

On one Crea8site Forums thread, Barry Welford asks if size is a factor in SEO success. It seems from the results that bigger sites (1000+ pages, according to him) have biggest (45%) success. Smaller sites could still be improved upon, according to 27% of the respondents, and 18% actually find success with a sub-1000 page site.

In the meantime, with such few respondents (I should have mentioned that only 11 people have responded), you can't gather that much from the poll, and forum sentiment echoes that thought.

Regardless, EGOL has some interesting feedback, and I will follow that with my own experience:

I think that the measure of success is not really in how big the site is but instead with who is running the site. I have a 5000 page site that is doing great and a five page site that is doing great.

Recently, Technorati released its state of the blogosphere 2008 and Muhammad Saleem noted that high quality is still king. I'm in agreement here. My "small" (~280 pages) blog is doing darn well.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

This post was written earlier and was scheduled for September 30th.

The Google blog has officially said that they prefer that in most cases, you should not use rewrites to change your dynamic URLs to static looking URLs. In my opinion, this is a major 180° on basic SEO practices. SEO 101 is to make sure your dynamic URLs are search engine friendly. But now, that has all changed with this blog post and even well before this blog post.

Back in October 2006, we told you, Dynamic URLs? Google Is Officially 'OK' With Them. But even then, Google still recommended, "rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions" as good practice. Recently, in the past few months, we have covered many dynamic topics that all implied issues with using static URLs in place of dynamic URLs. Here are those blog posts:

• Google Webmaster Tools Warns Of Spikes in Bandwidth Fees
• Google: Duplicate Content Penalty Does Not Exist
• Google Sitemaps "Too Many Redirects" Warning

Why the change of heart from Google? For one reason, they can now better understand the purpose of the page from the URL structure. JohnMu explained:

One of the reasons for that is that we can use the information provided through the parameters to better understand what your site is doing with those parameters. For instance,the URL http://www.mysite.com/search.php?q=keyword can give us information about what is happening, it could even allow us to recognize that this is a search form and perhaps let us attempt other keywords that might lead us to content that we haven't seen for your site. On the other hand, a URL like http://www.mysite.com/search/keyword does not give us any information at all about what the "file name" is used for.

You see, Google can learn more information about the page and what it is suppose to deliver based on the URL structure.

But should you go ahead and undo all those dynamic URL rewrites? That is the question I asked but had no easy answer for at Search Engine Land. JohnMu said,

There is no "penalty" for switching URL formats, though it might take a bit of time for everything to catch up. One thing I would recommend is that you set up 301 redirects from all old URLs to the new ones (this is something that you should do in any case when changing URLs).

But, still, hundreds or thousands of URLs can take Google a long time to pick up on. Transferring that link popularity and indexing those new URLs can be a huge task for Google. And your site can suffer during that process. So what should you do?

I think it depends on the size of your site, the number of rewrites, how well those pages are ranking now and your analytics. Possibly, start slow - with the low performing URLs, see how switching those URLs may help. This can be a huge task and that is why god created SEOs and webmasters. :)

Forum discussion at Google Groups, DigitalPoint Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, posted a thread at WebmasterWorld discussing an updated Google patent named Information retrieval based on historical data. This is one of the more popular Google documents over the years, where much of the Sandbox theories came from.

In any event, Tedster pulled out several abstracts that are new in this document. I will highlight only two that I find would be very valuable to our readers.

(1) How does Google know when a site has changed enough where they should drop all the past trust and link popularity associated with that site?

...if the content of a document changes such that it differs significantly from the anchor text associated with its back links, then the domain associated with the document may have changed significantly (completely) from a previous incarnation. This may occur when a domain expires and a different party purchases the domain... All links and/or anchor text prior to that date may then be ignored or discounted.

So it is not just about changing the domain name registration information. That is why many folks who buy sites, try to keep the same style and category of content on that domain.

(2) We heard it before, "Don't get links too quickly" because it seems unnatural. Well, here it is on paper:

The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly.

A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links.

Yes, for most sites, you don't get 50,000 links overnight. But for some sites, it is possible for several reasons. So how does Google determine which sites naturally received these links so quickly? Well, if I understand this correctly, they look to see how quickly those links go away and the "dynamic-ness of the links." Here are those explanations from the document:

According to a further implementation, the analysis may depend on the date that links disappear. The disappearance of many links can mean that the document to which these links point is stale (e.g., no longer being updated or has been superseded by another document). For example, search engine 125 may monitor the date at which one or more links to a document disappear, the number of links that disappear in a given window of time, or some other time-varying decrease in the number of links (or links/updates to the documents containing such links) to a document to identify documents that may be considered stale. Once a document has been determined to be stale, the links contained in that document may be discounted or ignored by search engine 125 when determining scores for documents pointed to by the links.

According to another implementation, the analysis may depend, not only on the age of the links to a document, but also on the dynamic-ness of the links. As such, search engine 125 may weight documents that have a different featured link each day, despite having a very fresh link, differently (e.g., lower) than documents that are consistently updated and consistently link to a given target document. In one exemplary implementation, search engine 125 may generate a score for a document based on the scores of the documents with links to the document for all versions of the documents within a window of time. Another version of this may factor a discount/decay into the integration based on the major update times of the document.

Tedster goes a bit deeper into signs of the old supplemental index, which I did not go into over here.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this month, Bill Slawski wrote about how search engines use images to rank web pages. He explains that search engines often look at text, alt tags, and similar contextual elements to rank images. He also refers to a Microsoft patent that uses image scores to aid in rankings. This system considers the contents of an image (whether it has a person, is a photograph or not, etc.) with its position on a page and then its site level features (which may distinguish between navigational images versus one-time-only images).

On Cre8asite Forums, iamlost wonders if there are other elements that will impact the rankings. For example, do page layouts impact these rankings? Do CSS or HTML resizing of image dimensions impact the scores?

I suppose these could have open-ended questions at this time. However, yannis has responded with some good image optimization techniques.

• He says that you should enclose your images in divs (defined by a photo class).
• Image titles should be in h3s or larger.
• Images that you want search engines to know about should be 35-40% of the page size and should be on the top of the page.
• The image name is still important.
• Captions should be added to images.
• Never forget those ALT tags (but TITLE tags are not as important).
• You don't need LONGDESC.
• You can refer to the image from somewhere in your content to boost its relevance.
• EXIF information from images may be important in the future but it is not being used now.
• Search engines are getting smarter at figuring out what is in images (face recognition, for example).
• Use aesthetically pleasing images.

There's a pretty valuable ongoing discussion over at Cre8asite Forums with more member follow-up, so check it out.

Last year, Matt McGee wrote the 2007 version of 21 reasons why you need a break from SEO. This year, Matt shares 21 more reasons why you may need to take your SEO break. Reasons include:

* searching for social media avatar photographers (instead of wedding photographers)
* having your spouse keep track of your conference schedule (and adding SEX to the calendar!)
* communicating with your spouse via blogs
* finding marketing potential for Google's new virtual world
* syncing Matt Cutts's vacation schedule with your own personal calendar

...and more. Matt's list always gives a good laugh, so read it before you finish swallowing that coffee.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Have you created a video recently? Did it have a video transcript? The Google Video Help document actually suggests one; in fact, you should also code it appropriately like so:

HH: Hours starting at 00
MM: Minutes starting at 00
SS: Seconds starting at 00
mmm: Milliseconds starting at 000

But is it helping the user? In response to the Cre8asite Forums post by Barry Welford, iamlost says that this time coding is beneficial for Google's data-mining process but not so much for a general user. In a way, I'm compelled to agree. I'm the kind of person who would rather read a transcript, but in the format that Google suggests, it's not as user friendly as I'd prefer.

Li Evans says, however, that transcripts have really helped her -- they've produced "amazing results." There are a few open ended questions directed at her about how she applied video, so check out Cre8asite Forums for the continued discussion.

There's a big problem in the SEO industry and that's the fact that people are not using SEO terms correctly. Jill Whalen has written a great post on Search Engine Land to this effect -- she says that due to there being no industry definitions, lack of knowledge (or laziness), and "old wives tales" (where people misinterpret something happening due to something else), SEO terms are not really understood at all times. She closes her great wirteup with a powerful statement: "After all, if the very people who make up our industry can't get it right, how will others?"

Would you disagree that this is a problem? Most Sphinners think that Jill is spot on the money. Here's a great response to the article from SEOAly:

Part of this problem comes from a combination of ignorance and being cheap on the part of site owners and designers opting for SEO consultation, rather than hiring an SEO to do the work. Some aspects of SEO can't be dumbed down into a bullet point list of tasks for those who will actually be making the changes. Hence the common reference to ALT tags, headers, title META tags, etc. - they don't understand enough about the concept of SEO as a whole to know what the terms actually refer to.

Aly also makes a rational follow-up "argument" that I personally identify with -- a lot. A lot of people, she says, claim that they know SEO when they don't. Those who know SEO don't usually say "hey, I know SEO!" There are a lot of charlatans out there.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

You're an SEO. You are tweaking client pages and billing your clients at the end of the month. Is there a standard industry practice of what you should actually put on your client bills, such as work completed?

There is no "industry practice" from what many of us have heard. However, in the event of any work completed, this is something you need to judge for yourself. If it's a small invoiced amount, typically, you don't need to do a breakdown of work completed. If it's a lot larger, however, you may want to tell your client exactly what work was performed.

Torka makes a good statement regarding acceptable billing practices that work for you and the client. Your results may vary:

I think the goal should be to achieve balance so the client feels comfortable they're getting what they pay for, and you aren't overly burdened with recordkeeping and reporting requirements.

If in doubt, discuss with your client.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Elections are at the top of mind in the United States and that means campaigning. Search Marketing is now a proven and important avenue for politicians to work in, to promote their brands, name, campaign and ultimately win the election.

A HighRankings Forums thread has an SEO asking for tips on working with politicians in the search engine optimization and marketing space. Here are some of the tips found within the thread, but I do recommend checking out the discussion.

• Target politician's name
• Go after misspellings, if it makes sense
• Target your competitor(s) name and misspellings
• Target popular topics, such as climate change, human rights, gun control, Afghanistan, climate change, and so on
• Test first with AdWords
• Use press releases, Wikipedia, Blogging, Social Media, offline contacts and more

The ideas go on and on.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forums.

Let's say you have a very dynamic web site and you also generate your meta keywords dynamically. Could you be penalized (or receive a warning) if those meta keywords are very similar? In a nutshell, yes, though there's a 'debate' across two forum threads.

You may receive a warning in Google Webmaster Tools, but you will probably not receive a penalty. However, as JohnMu says in a Google Groups thread, those "warnings" are mostly nudges that you should try to diversify the meta data. You should keep in mind that the terminology should "makes sense to your users." If that means you need to work with duplicate meta data, then that's how you should proceed.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

A week ago, I asked what would you do if your site gets penalized. The options I gave were (A) Clean Up The Site & Request Reinclusion, (B) Quit the SEO Game and Play Golf or (C) Burn the Site & Start Fresh.

Most SEOs would go with the method of cleaning up their site and requesting a reconsideration request with Google. While only 9% will kill the site and start new.

Here is the break down:
:: Clean Up The Site & Request Reinclusion said 61 respondents or 78%
:: Quit the SEO Game and Play Golf said 9 respondents or 12%
:: Burn the Site & Start Fresh Idea said 7 respondents or 9%

So there you go, go with the masses. Don't crash and burn, clean and sparkle!

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A common issue for e-commerce sites is what to do when an item goes out of stock. Do you delete the page? Do you redirect the page somewhere else? Do you just tell the user the item is out of stock?

That was the question asked at a Google Groups thread and JohnMu, a Googler, replied. Before I tell you what he said, I'll tell you what I think.

From a search engine perspective, if you have a product that goes out of stock and you decide to delete the page, then the search engine will take notice that the page is gone. If you ever get that item back in stock, the search engine can take a long time to reindex and list that page in their search index. Then what do you do? Now, if you redirect the page to a different product, the search engine will also pick that up and if you ever pull that redirect, it can take a long time for the search engine to notice that you stopped the redirect. But if you leave the page there and keep all the content, but say the item is out of stock, however, we have the following related products and link to them. A search engine will keep that page in their index, also crawl the related products and it makes for a happy SEOed site.

From a user's perspective, if you have a product that goes out of stock and you decide to delete the page, then the user will have no recourse on your site. Maybe they will look around your site for related products but they probably will click the back button and try a different site. If you redirect the page to a different product page, the user who is being redirected will be confused - which is never a good thing. If you leave the page and note it is out of stock and list related products, the user will likely understand and be more willing to try the related products before clicking back.

Googler, JohnMu's advice:

Personally, I find being redirected to a different product without knowing why always a bit unsatisfactory. How is the user to know that this product does not exist any more or is just temporarily out of stock? All they see is a different, related product..

With that in mind, I would personally prefer to see a page that mentions that the product they're looking for is not available (at the moment / forever) and that these other related products might be just as relevant to the user. To help search engines, you could use a robots meta tag on that page with "noindex, follow", which tells them not to index the page like this but to still follow the links.

Alternately, using redirect is also a possibility. I wouldn't worry about multiple redirects in a row, unless it is really excessive (I think HTTP/1.0 allows for up to 5 redirects, which should be enough).

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Sometimes it's better to do SEO for a site before it's launched. Such is the case for a High Rankings Forum member who is looking to build up his site's presence before it's actually live for the masses. How do you do SEO for a site that is not yet launched, though?

It's not that hard, believe it or not, even though some other forum members suggest that you shouldn't do this until the site is completed.

For one, if you know what your site is about, you can start writing articles on a related subject matter and build links to the content. But make sure these pages have the place in the final site design, because if you do changes on a site that's under construction, it really is doubtful that it will help unless you know exactly what you're trying to accomplish.

You can definitely rank webpages that are under construction, but the value in doing so is lost on me. Even if you work hard and get ranked early on, you will only rank for the content that is on your website, so if the page is not finished and you change that content in the future your rankings will change.

That said, SEO can be done just about any time, but it's generally agreed that the best course of action is to do it after the final site is launched.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

A High Rankings Forum member who has been working on a yearlong SEO agreement is now facing new management with his client and they're requesting a refund for services (mostly because some project deliverables weren't actually delivered). Should this SEO comply and return the money?

Well, this is a questionable issue. The particular SEO had no written policy, and that needs to be amended. In the future, a written policy (if even to say "No Refunds") is desirable and will avoid these issues. At this point, though, one forum member suggests that some money should be returned. I'm not sure I would be quick to agree that any money should be returned simply because of a management shake-up -- perhaps the money shouldn't have been paid in the first place.

Now it's your turn to answer this and let us know what your thoughts are. The poll is below.

Would you issue a refund? Do you think you would give in given the circumstances of this particular forum member?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A High Rankings Forum member has run into a bit of a rut with one of his clients who was "'brainwashed" by an SEO that editing the meta tags (and repeating keywords) would result in great rankings. The original SEO wants to get his client back, but doesn't know how to best approach this. Is it even worth the hassle?

While this is posed to the High Rankings Forum for member advice, the general consensus is that "only you can make this decision." In other words, it may not be worth the hassle to keep this particular client.

Jill Whalen makes this argument as well:

Clients don't tell you what to do. You tell them what you're going to do.

Otherwise, they don't need to be a client. If they already know what they want, then let them do it. They obviously don't need you since they already know everything.

Would you stay with a client who refuses to acknowledge reason and considers spammy (short term success, if at all) tactics?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Tamar wrote a piece named Do Search Penalties Worry You? I had her add a poll asking SEOs if they are scared of search engine penalties.

The 98 responses are back and it is about split. 56% are afraid of search penalties while 44% are not afraid of search penalties. Personally, I would be afraid of a penalty, even if I was to be hit by collateral damage. I am surprised that more SEOs are not afraid.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 55 respondents or 56%
:: No said 43 respondents or 44%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has early discussion on the topic of what to do about a penalized site. Should the webmaster destroy the domain and start on a new one or should he/she clean up the site and wait for Google to reinclude the site in the index? There are pros and cons to both avenues.

It totally depends on how bad your penalty is and what you did to warrant it. It depends on how new or old the site that got penalized is. It depends on how many quality links and trust you earned on the old site. Is it a throw away domain?

In most cases, I would say that it is best to clean up the penalized site, as opposed to starting new. But what do you think? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Vanessa Fox blogged about her experience at SES San Jose last week. She attended the highly talked about White Hat, Black Hat session and explained her findings from the perspective of an individual who worked at a search engine. When it comes to white hat, she says that there are guidelines to follow and if they are violated, you may suffer penalties. When dabbling in shades of gray, she talks about the specific guidelines and gives you the opportunity to consider whether they make sense in this technological environment, whether the techniques work, and whether the techniques are commonplace. She concludes with an important point:

When people who aren’t experienced in the intricacies of SEO look for information and they see statements like “these are white hat reasons to cloak” and “all paid links aren’t bad”, they can be led astray and think that those things adhere to search engine guidelines.

Forum members consider her post "compulsory reading." One summarizes his own thoughts behind Vanessa's blog post: "To cut a long story short, if a website is optimized for humans it is sure to get high rankings."

On the other hand, should hat colors be defined by a specific set of guidelines? Halfdeck says no:

Its an interesting take, but I don't define hat colors based on Google guidelines. There are cases where a site owner doesn't violate any of Google's guidelines but still manages to publish 100,000 spammy pages for monetary gain.

This is a good point as well.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

You can clearly search and find that many people think that SEO is dying a painful death, but do you know exactly how that will happen? Well, Ian Lurie decided to speculate how the SEO bubble will pop and proposes three theories.

In his first theory, bigger agencies will start doing their SEO in-house. In his second, SEO will just not be needed because of cut costs. In the third theory, Ian says that clients are seeking tolerable (not lousy!) results and that the rip-off artists will go away.

Do you agree? At Sphinn, forum members don't feel that Ian's assessment is correct. The need for marketing is much more important now than ever, and talent will always be needed. "Shameless self-promoters," then, will need to be distinguished from real talent.

Additionally, since web sites are not going away anytime soon, most don't foresee the SEO bubble to pop.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Michael Gray writes an interesting post about that teaching advanced link building and PageRank will never die. In the article, he explains that everyone who learns about optimization techniques are at different levels; some are more advanced and may consider topics to be basic. Now what happens if you recommend link building tactics from an "authoritative" site? By whose metric? If you apply this to authority as determined by "PageRank," Michael has a problem with this. Google's toolbar PR is simply used for "entertainment" purposes, as he says quite eloquently:

Since google has admitted that they will adjust/manipulate page rank of sites they believe are selling links, and those adjustments will trickle down/out, page rank is really just for entertainment purposes.

Therefore, Michael explains that establishing authority must occur by looking at the other available metrics together.

His post is discussed on Sphinn where Michael is forced to justify that PageRank is used now because " people need the ability to explain/understand things quickly, especially those who aren't entrenched in the field." And for that, PageRank is the current metric that delivers.

But some people have a problem with Michael's suggestion that one should refer to authoritative sites. Instead, the emphasis should be on relevant sites, be them authoritative or not. However, one points out that "relevance is a red herring," especially if the links to "relevant" pages are pornographic or questionable in nature.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

There is a very large discussion at Sphinn around a Search Engine Journal post named How to Get Rid of Multiple Subpages & Not Get Penalized. The discussion is around the topics of using different techniques when removing or redirecting pages.

Which is better to do for SEO? Do you want to 301, redirect a page, or 404, return a not found status, a page?

I can tell you that my company does this fairly frequently. We take different approaches for different sites. I try, try hard, to not think only about SEO and think what would also benefit the user.

Here is my guide:

301 redirect everything you possibly can, when it makes sense. If you have a page about big blue pineapple chairs on the old site and you are moving it to the new site, 100% use a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. However, sometimes it is not that easy.

Sometimes you have a site with hundreds, if not thousands of pages, if not more. Manually redirecting each page is a huge chore. When we can, we set up logic based 301 redirects, to redirect the old URL to the new URL dynamically. That can result in thousands of redirects, but Google should handle those fine over time.

For all the pages that do not match that pattern or logic AND for sites where there is no logic (large, old, non-database driven sites), you want to manually redirect the most important pages. So make sure you have analytics installed on the previous site, way before launching the new site - this way you have the 301 redirects in place, on the most important pages, when you launch.

Then, all other pages, I typically set up a 404 page, returning a valid 404 status code, plus it is set up as a custom 404, so users who land on it, have an avenue to find the right page.

But Rae, at the Sphinn, suggests that sometimes you should think about setting up what is called a "soft" 404 page. Basically, a soft 404 page, is a page that looks like a page not found page, but returns a server status of 200, meaning, the page is valid and active and should not be deleted. The only issue I see with that, is that the URL of the page will be different but the content of the page will be very similar, if not exact, to the other soft 404 pages you set up. Of course, if you are a smart coder, you can look at the Google referrer or the old page's data and serve up contextual relevant product or content on that page, which would make the page's content more unique.

So, like I said, it totally depends on the situation.

I am sure you guys have your own thoughts.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

At WebmasterWorld, a forum member is baffled by the fact that his homepage isn't ranking for a relevant search term; instead, one of the internally-linked pages rank. According to the forum member, the homepage has the right keywords within the title tag and should be targeted appropriately, but the internal page outranks it.

It seems that this forum member is not alone. Another member encountered a similar issue recently. Other forum members suggest that it could possibly be a temporary thing, but if (after 3 weeks or so) nothing has changed, it may be helpful to optimize those pages again.

Another possibility could be over-optimization of the front page, which could result in a penalty as we've seen before. One forum member makes this case clear:

If it has taken a tumble on just a handfull of specific searches, and there is no legit reason for the inner pages to rank higher than the home page (ie they're less targeted and have a weaker link profile), then it sounds like your home page may be seen as a bit over optimized for the phrase(s).

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the topic of title tags. Now this title tag discussion is not a typical boring thread. In this thread, some webmasters and SEOs have been observing that longer title tags are returning higher rankings in Google, when compared to their counterparts.

The example given by the thread creator, is a generic one. Search for Ie: [blue used widgets] will more likely return a number one result with a title tag that looks like "blue used widget bla bla widget," while a number five result might be "blue used widget."

Of course, there are more factors, many more factors, that come into play in which page ranks better for a search term, then just a title tag. But there is some good discussion around this thread.

Senior member, CainIV, said:

I would agree. I am finding that prominence in the title, as well as a combination of semantics is playing a big role now. Longer titles with closely related themed works are working very well.

Do you think longer titles make an impact?

Forum discussion WebmasterWorld.

There is an excellent paid only WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of why would the best SEOs decide to take on client work, as opposed to building out their own ideas and cashing in on those ideas. The rational is, if they are the best, why not make a living doing your own thing then making someone else rich?

This debate really is valid in most "consulting" practices. But many SEOs get a thrill from helping other companies achieve their goals. In addition, not every SEO has the entrepreneurial spirit to run their own thing. Some do both and have client work as a way to reduce financial risk.

I personally run a web development shop named RustyBrick. Sometimes clients ask me, what is stopping you from taking our idea and doing it yourself? I respond, I am in the business of building web sites and software, not in the business of running other businesses. Of course, I have built out our own software and products but at the same time, most applications and software require a whole new business to operate them. In many cases, one doesn't have the means either financially, physically or emotionally to run a separate business.

There are many reasons why an SEO might do client work. What are some of yours?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (note, paid access required).

How does one who may sell SEO services in the future give away information without giving away too much information (and fearing that the client will run away with the proposed strategies and implement them himself/herself?)

That's a difficult situation and one I think a lot of people find themselves in. They are compelled to sell themselves by proposing a strategy but are afraid it can backfire. However, many clients who solicit the advice of SEO services are doing it because they cannot execute that detailed plan.

noel_x99 makes a great analogy that should make you feel a little bit better about providing that information:

Here's an example: We were recently at an arts festival watching an artist scultping a log with a chainsaw. Suppose that artist were to spend time with me explaining his technique and showing me how to do it - even what he was thinking when he applied his technique. Then suppose he handed me the chainsaw and told me to do it myself. I couldn't do it. Because I would lack the basic understanding of the skills of using a chainsaw. And even though he explained the technique...I couldn't do it. It's a combination art, technical ability, and experience that I don't have with a chainsaw.

That should alleviate those fears you have about giving away ideas (unless the client is well versed in this area of marketing). Most people can hear your suggestions but have no idea about how to execute. In the end, giving out more information does seem to show that you have the expertise and indicates that you're willing to help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A Cre8asite Forums forum member asks the community about their biggest pieces of advice as it relates to search engine optimization.

What are those tips?

1. When you start doing SEO, write down every thing you do and monitor results closely. If you make a change, write that down too -- and continue reviewing.
2. If you work with clients, you may want to opt in for an NDA so that they don't "reuse any specialist codes you might be using as part of [your] strategy to work that magic."
3. Content creation is a full time job and SEO "is five minutes at the start and five minutes at the end." Content creation entails keyword research, articles targeting the proper keywords, using appropriate titles, and using keyword-targeted links.
4. Create accessible sites and follow accessibility guidelines.
5. Review your analytics and see what works and what doesn't.

These are just a few of the tips offered by the experts on the Crea8site Forums thread; forum discussion continues there.

Shimon Sandler wrote a controversial post about the options available to sites who cannot actually make code changes to optimize their site. He explains that you can build links, and that's perfectly legitimate as it's called "off site optimization."

The question is: does that really help "optimize" the site at all? If the website was poorly coded, will those links really help? Probably not.

Sphinn forum member JohnHGohde notes that this is not SEO at all:

The most positive comment that I can come up with is that link building is called SEM, rather than SEO.

In other words, SEO (search engine optimization) is about optimizing the site, but SEM (search engine marketing) includes all the other factors, like link building.

Further, if you're only going to optimize based on links, you're probably Google bombing. This reminds me of when the SEO community tried to rank Stephen Colbert as the Greatest Living American Dude. That's not the way you're supposed to do it, according to forum members. Further, it can be really difficult to rank at all with a poor quality site; Jill Whalen calls it an "uphill battle."

Other people believe that you can still optimize your site with link building, but that if you do that, you're not doing the complete job. Hugo Guzman says the following:

The proof is in the pudding. It's been done countless times (link-building without site-side). That said, not optimizing site-side elements is definitely an incomplete approach to SEO.

Like I said, Shimon's post was really controversial -- but there are a lot of great comments.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

SEOAly, an up-and-comer blogger who has been writing some really great blog posts lately, has shared the reasons why "SEO consultation" is ruining the reputation of an entire industry. In the piece, she explains that SEO is not about implementation -- it's about education. The right kind of client relationship is one where the small business owner is ready to apply the advice provided by the SEO.

The consultant may be holding their hand along the way a bit, but the site owner is ultimately responsible for actually doing all of the work that will be required to make the site perform better in the search results.

But not every small business owner is ready to do the work. They expect the SEO to do the work, and that's why the entire SEO consultancy practice ends up being blamed, says Aly. The article goes on to say that SEO can help everyone, but if unrealistic expectations are being placed on the SEO, they may not benefit from SEO after all. All in all, it's a really good read for small business SEOs.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread shows the tail of a webmaster who had issues with his robots.txt file. The robots.txt file was uploaded in what is called byte-order mark (BOM) encoding, which threw off Google, when trying to retrieve and understand the webmaster's robots.txt file.

Google Groups member, Phil Payne noticed the issue right away, by using rexswain.com/httpview.html. The HTML editor this webmaster was using uploaded his robots.txt file in the BOM encoding. Google and other search engines prefer to see the robots.txt file in UTF-8 encoding.

Googler, JohnMu, confirmed the issue saying:

Phil was right on target there, it seems the BOM at the beginning of the file might be throwing us off. The easiest way to get around this issue is to have an empty line (or a comment) in the top of your robots.txt file -- that way it'll work even if you have a BOM in your file.

In short, the webmaster fixed the encoding issue by editing the file manually and reuploading.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Would linking to your landing pages be bad for your organic rankings? This is the question posed on Cre8asite Forums, where a webmaster wonders the benefits of possibly linking to a completely different type of page (in terms of layout, etc.)

The answer: probably not. EGOL mentions that "they would probably be filtered from the search results." But if they are unique pages, that may not be the case.

Moderator iamlost says something else, though: why would you want to link to your landing pages? The point of having such pages is so that you can track your incoming traffic from PPC. If you interlink them on your web page, the metrics will be off. This is a thought that is echoed by forum administrator sanity.

Make your life easier by isolating your landing pages from the rest of your site. It's a way in from your ads only, not a way out (from your site).

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A Google Groups thread has discussion around a site that was hacked and because of it, now has many broken (dead) hyper links. The question then came up, would Google penalize a site that had broken links?

The simple answer is no, you generally will not be hurt by broken links. Googler, JohnMu said, "In general those broken links will not negatively affect your site's crawling, indexing and ranking."

But it really depends on many variables. In general, if you have a small number of broken links on your site, it should make no difference in your rankings at Google or any other search engine. However, if your site navigation and linking structure is in complete disarray, then you can expect your site to have major issues ranking well for your content. Does this mean your site will be "penalized?" No, not at all. But it does mean the search engines will have a rough time crawling your site and understanding your content.

Ben covered this topic back in 2005 under the title Do Search Engine Penalize for Dead Links? Yes, it still makes for a good read.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld member is working on a site and is running into difficulty with rankings that are dropping. When checking Google Webmaster Tools, the big issue is that the pages have the same meta tags, descriptions, and titles.

What kind of options does the webmaster have to recover his falling rankings?

As Tedster reports, sometimes it may be better not to index paginated pages -- it can cause confusion. Many people agree that indexing the first page may be the best option and then disallowing the second page and subsequent pages from being ranked.

Another proposal from Tedster is to think about the user experience.

The need is to have alternate click paths, beyond offering just one set of paginated results . The key to creating that is to forget about databases autogenerating the entire website, and in fact forget all about technology for the moment. Just think like a visitor. How many ways can you help them find what they might want?

To achieve this, you can categorize the results if possible.

Other people have tried "noindex, follow" and that has worked well for them.

There are many ways to go about it. You need to find the solution that's best for you.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Everyone emphasizes that content is king. But does the amount of content make a difference? This is the issue that is currently being discussed at High Rankings Forums.

Well, contrary to what they usually say, size doesn't matter this time. The number of pages is insignificant. Content still is king, but the amount is up for discussion.

When it comes to content, quantity is not the concern. Instead quality is of utmost importance. As forum member Torka puts it, the most valuable sites to search engines (and users, of course) are those that offer useful and original content, provide a useful service, and sell products that people want or need.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forums.

I have a client with a very large database driven site. The site is extremely crawlable, which makes for a really nice amount of pages for very specific search terms. I cannot share the site I am talking about, because I do not have client approval. But I did want to share a new Google Webmaster Tools message that this client received, that, in a sense, warned the webmaster that Googlebot may "consume much more bandwidth than necessary."

The subject line of the error reads: Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site

The body of the message reads:

Googlebot encountered problems while crawling your site http://www.domain.com/.

Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site.

More information about this issue
Here's a list of sample URLs with potential problems. However, this list may not include all problematic URLs on your site.

Here is a picture of the message:

Google goes on to list 20 or so URLs that they found to be problematic. A few of those URLs are 100% already blocked by the robots.txt file on the site, so I am not sure why they show up. The others, I can see why Google might consider them to be "similar content," but technically, they are very different pieces of content.

In any event, I had two major questions:

(1) Do you think this means Google will trust this site less? I don't think so.
(2) To me, this makes me feel that Google is giving us the option of blocking these URLs or Google will simply drop them from the index. Google does this all the time already, dropping what they believe to be duplicate URLs. Why does this require a specific message? Does it mean that Google won't drop them but warns that the crawlers will crawl and your bandwidth will just spike?

I have never really seen a discussion on this specific Webmaster Tools message from Google, so let's start one. Please comment here or join the Search Engine Roundtable Forums thread.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

A WebmasterWorld member says that when he changed his meta description, his rankings plummeted on his site.

In the past, US courts found META tags immaterial but Google has recommended it. Tedster points to previous WebmasterWorld coverage that shows that there are "indirect ranking effects from the meta description, including lower clickthrough rates that can cause a decent ranking to fall away if the url doesn't perform." Barry agrees as well.

Is Google using clickthroughs as a ranking method? Forum members are not entirely sure, but one points out that Wikipedia has no meta description -- which may count for something (avoiding that lower CTR, perhaps?)

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

I've personally found a number of people who consider that because SEO seems like "optimizing title tags, doing keyword research, and adding a little extra to a website," they can be search engine optimizers too. In the past few weeks, I stumbled across two very problematic websites from so-called "SEOs" who offer nothing but spammy services.

The problem is that they think they're 100% right. And that's a discussion that High Rankings Forums members are talking about right now.

There are so many clueless individuals in this industry. But they're likely not even reading this post or so many other posts like this that are aimed to educate. In the meantime, the issue on High Rankings Forums is that a particular SEO (who doesn't code) gave a developer a specific set of guidelines to build up a website for a client. Only after the website was live did the member realize that the developer stuffed rows of hidden keywords on the bottom of the page. When the forum member approached the developer, he got flustered and said that the page would be doomed without it.

The "know it all" approach is the kind of attitude our industry could do without. Unfortunately, it's very widespread. Further, unfortunately, it's also something that many innocent clients are easily conned with (and it gives the whole term "search engine optimization" that "snake oil" distinction).

Does that mean you shouldn't ever show your ego when you work with your clients? According to forum member qwerty, you do need it -- to educate the client, especially if the client doesn't possess the common sense and can't figure it out

But is this really different from any other industry? You can step into your local electronics store and some salesperson can tell you that your decision to buy that phone is a bad one, because "this one is just so much better." These things happen. It's not specific to our industry.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Michael VanDeMar wrote an interesting post on his blog about the uselessness of the Google Keyword tool for SEO. He explains that while we reported that the tool is showing keyword numbers, it still isn't helpful. His rationale is that the numbers refer to PPC search behavior only, not overall Google.com search behavior, and then he explains how past research has given him this perception. He writes:

For instance, for [birthday poems] the tool gave a number of 27,100 (which would be an average of 903 searches per day) and bidding on that keyword for 3 days gave me 2,411 impressions (or 803 impressions per day). This is fine and dandy if I am only concerned about getting traffic from AdWords, of course. The thing is, if I rely on this data for my SEO efforts I will at best be most likely wasting my time.

Interesting analysis. Jill Whalen admits that the numbers seem rather high but it now makes sense because they use the content network in their numbers.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Google's sitelinks, which we have covered extensively are the little links you see under a search result in Google, typically between 4 and 8 sub-links. Here is a picture of our Sitelinks:

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about the importance of Sitelinks. Here are the key points:

• Sitelinks do not directly influence your search rankings
• Sitelinks can be removed but not changed via Webmaster Tools
• Sitelinks appear to be constructed based on your site architecture, as Google understands it
• Sitelinks can strongly influence your click-through rate on your search result listing
• Sitelinks, when removed, can be gone as long as a year or more

Those are some of the key points I pulled from that thread. Getting deeper into the ranking component. Although removing a Sitelink should not impact your search rankings, you need to understand that Google gives you your Sitelinks based on how they understand your site. So if you see a Sitelink that doesn't make sense, then maybe you need to think about your site navigation.

The WebmasterWorld talks in general terms, but this webmaster also posted a thread at Google Groups, which has specifics. In this case, the webmaster had "Fiber Optic Lights" as his Sitelink, but then Google changed it to "Optic Lights." The change happened around June 26th and he noticed a big drop in search traffic for "Fiber Optic Lights" but a spike in traffic for "Optic Lights." This clearly implies that Sitelinks are somewhat important, but yet - you need to understand that the Sitelink represents what Google understands about your site. Removing a Sitelink won't necessarily change the way Google sees your site.

In fact, in the Google Groups, Googler, Jonathan Simon said, "we don't take action on Sitelinks feedback for a specific site." He said that in the context of having a Sitelink changed, but it also may prove to be evidence of the above.

In summary, Sitelinks do not have a direct impact on rankings. They may increase your click-through rate on your search results. They do have a reverse affect, i.e. because Google feels you deserve a sitelink for a particular phrase, Google clearly thinks that page is relevant for that phrase, so you may rank well for that phrase - but that is the chicken before the egg scenario. :)

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion around the META description. There is no doubt that most search engines look and use the META description on some level. Google and Yahoo and Live Search may use it for your search results snippet, the text under your site's listing in the search results (illustrated here). But does that META description actually have an impact on how well your page will rank in Google for a specific keyword phrase?

Most people say no, the META description will have no direct impact on you ranking higher for a keyword phrase. I honestly do not know the actual value in the META description's power to help you rank better.

While there may not be a direct impact in ranking improvements, as g1smd said at the thread, it does "give the appearance of a ranking increase." How so? Well, one thing the meta description will do for you is help ensure you pages don't look like they are all the same page (i.e. supplemental index) when doing a site command search. More on that over here.

Google also recommends using the META description on your pages.

But does it impact your rankings directly? Hard to say.

Google has a whole section in Google Webmaster Tools, under content analysis for "Short meta descriptions." In that section, Google says the "Meta description information can give users a clear idea of your site's content and encourage users to click on your site in the search results pages." Google then links to more information at this page.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I think it is about time I revisit a post I wrote in 2006 named In SEO, What Changes Should You Track. We have a new thread over at Cre8asite Forums talking about what logs you should keep when making changes to your site, for the purposes of SEO.

Most of you know, I am a strong believer of using an automated method of documentation. By building in a required workflow, you can also build automated tracking systems to document any change made to the web site or link building activities, so that you can report back in time on those changes. Most development environments have something like CVS (Concurrent Versions System), which tracks all file changes automatically. But this is only good for file changes, it does not cover everything. So, if possible, you need to build out your own workflow for documenting what you do on a daily-basis.

Back in our original post, we said you should track the following:

• every change to robots.txt (CVS can handle this)
• every change to htaccess (or Internet Services Manager in IIS)
• site-wide template changes (especially menu changes) (CVS can handle this)
• DNS and hosting changes
• new outbound links
• ad purchases and run-times
• Server updates (especially reboots or outages)
• Config files
• Firewall block list

Based on this new thread, let's expand this list to include:

• Google AdSense changes (placement, targeting, etc.)
• Track your rankings at various engines

But the thread here really talks about what tools are used to track these changes. While some use the old fashion pencil and paper, many are using spreadsheets, versioning systems, file archiving, and some are even using custom systems - like I described above.

In my opinion, there is nothing better then building out a custom system to aid your employees in doing their job, at the same time, it builds in a certain level of quality assurance. Not only that, it gives you the data you need to theorize why certain changes impacted certain ranking fluctuations. Finally, and probably just as important, it gives your clients (if you offer SEO services) a method of seeing your deliverables.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Jill Whalen (whose birthday is today -- wish her a happy one!) wrote a very logical article at High Rankings about the problem of SEO plagiarism. She explains that numerous not-so-established SEO types are regurgitating a lot of articles online and just switching up a few words, probably so that they can look smart. It's not so much the same as copyright infringement because of the fact that it's not a word-for-word regurgitation; instead, content is made to look original by making a few edits and calling it a day.

Jill ends her post by saying that the people who will succeed at writing articles (in the SEO world, but this is really true for any discipline) are those who can think for themselves and put their own original thoughts into writing. It's not about finding news somewhere else and then saying, "Oh, I can write this too and have my friends vote upon my content on Sphinn," which she alludes to in the article. (A few people have done that in the past.)

Jill is not sure whether to fault the education system for this behavior, but High Rankings Forums member Orpheus Descending actually does feel that this has something to do with lack of education in some areas. She explains that when working with students in a college level, 30% of a class of 70 were caught plagiarizing, and it was because they didn't know better. The internet makes it easier to do but not to think. And most of these people are ignorant.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum and Sphinn.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that they recently rewrote an article about whether Google recommends SEOs. To summarize, the article says that there are benefits, but there are also things you should look out for in an SEO and in your selection of one. For example, when choosing an SEO, you might want to ask some questions:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?
• What's your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

They also added a piece of advice that WebmasterWorld administrator tedster appreciated:

If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Google Groups

The news that Adobe announced that Google and Yahoo are indexing SWF Flash files has overtaken the front page of Techmeme this morning. It is also the dominate discussion in all the major search forums.

In any event, Google and Yahoo is now able to crawl the textual elements within SWF files, including discovering links within those SWF files. The Google Webmaster Central blog discusses the details but here are the takeaways as I see it:

• They will crawl SWF files
• Only the textual components will be crawled
• FLV files are not crawlable
• If your Flash files are generated by JavaScript, you need to be careful because Google might not execute the JavaScript
• Google may index the external files your Flash file calls and won't associate them to the Flash files
• Google has issues with some languages in Flash files, specifically Hebrew language or Arabic languages

Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has a really good write up as well on the news.

Forum discussion at:

• Flash to be made visible by search engines., WebmasterWorld
• Adobe Help Ses Index Flash, HighRankings Forums
• Google Announces Improved Flash indexing, Sphinn
• Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content, Sphinn
• Google Now Crawling and Indexing Flash Content, Digg
• Google's New Flash indexing algorithm, DigitalPoint Forums
• Improved Flash Indexing for Google (and Yahoo), WebmasterWorld
• New Google Algorithm For Flash, Cre8asite Forums

Update 07/15: Google has reorted an update regarding how it handles SWFObjects.

While SEO becomes more and more important, people try to find angles that they can exploit or take advantage of so that they can achieve good rankings. In one specific instance, High Rankings forum post asks if there's a minimum number of pages that need to be targeted to achieve decent rankings.

It's important to note that in general, a site as a whole is collectively not ranked. Each page ranks individually. Therefore, you need as many pages as possible to say what you need to say in a manner that is understandable by your visitors.

Of course, this means doing keyword research and then writing content in such a way that benefits the visitors in as many pages (or as few pages) as possible. There's no set number.

But what about theming? Does Google look at similar pages and throw a site in a single category? It's an ongoing debate, where some people say that Google does this, while others say that they don't.

In general, it's agreed upon by all to perform diligent keyword research and to write from the start with keyword phrases in mind.

Forum discussion continues at .

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how much of an impact will a site see if it is moved from a Dubai host to a USA based host? The answer is not really all that known.

This webmaster's main concern is that he receives "80% of traffic from UAE and have lots of content and back links related to UAE." He wants to continue to receive higher rankings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) regions. He is concerned that by moving his site to a host in the US, it will drop his rankings for searches conducted in the United Arab Emirates region.

Senior member, wheel, said that when he moved a site from one country into the US, he said Google has yet to pick up on that change. He said, he had a "heck of a time getting Google to realize it was a US site." Wheel explained that the site still comes up for "country specific searches" in the old region.

The overall recommendation is that the webmaster continue to obtain links from the UAE region. Plus, if possible, specific in Google Webmaster Tools that the site is specific towards that UAE region. But before doing that, Tedster warns, specifying the region in Webmaster Tools may result in you "forfeiting a lot of international traffic."

I'll track this thread and write a new post based on the results seen by this specific webmaster.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

In response to Andrew Goodman's summary of SES Toronto, The Lisa wrote a really great and informative post about how white hat SEO has evolved and "advanced SEO" is really traditional SEO. She explains that traditional SEO still works, and in many cases, can be more powerful than newer technologies (like web 2.0/social stuff). As a huge social person myself, I'm inclined to agree. A "technically sound" website will probably perform better than your social media campaign.

Lisa summarizes her points succinctly here:

...the power of white hat search engine optimization has been proven over and over again, even if it is considered boring or square to promote it. White hat works. Every time. Don't discount it.

Absolutely.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

It seems like the day has come, the day that Yahoo has killed the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Now, if you visit inventory.overture.com, you are redirected to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/. In fact, it is a permanent redirect, not just a temporary redirect, as you can see by using the URI Valet tool.

We knew this was coming, we have story after story reporting outages and downtime for this tool. Here is a run down of some of the stories we wrote covering the tool:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007
• More Server Problems With Overture's Keyword Tool on December 6, 2007

So does this end the saga with the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool or as it moved elsewhere?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A High Rankings Forum member has an interesting question about a website he maintains. In the particular example, he is selling a niche item within a broader category. I'll use an example for illustrative purposes: he's basically selling "children's books." However, he notices that he's getting general traffic from "books" sites, though his specific focus is children's books. Now he realizes that he could potentially benefit from the "books" site traffic, so he's coded some different content to be served based on a particular search phrase. If you're searching for "books" in general, you'll get different content than if you're searching for "children's books," he explains.

Is this a problem?

High Rankings forum member rolf says it might be. It feels like a win-win situation -- you're serving the right content for your visitors while still benefiting from the traffic. But is it safe? It's hard to say. As rolf puts it, "you are technically breaking the rule about serving one thing to spiders and another to visitors."

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings.

An unusual question came up at WebmasterWorld, asking if you can request a site to be completely removed from a country specific Google search engine.

For example, the site owner wants to remove his site from Google Netherlands, because the site has some issues being available to Holland searchers. So the owner of the site wants to remove it from all search results within the Google Holland/Netherlands search engine.

Is that even possible? I don't think so. And WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, also said he doesn't know of a way to do that.

No way that I've ever heard of, Aji. There's no pick-and-choose by country in the current set-up, except for some cases of local country laws that Google handles automatedly. Googlebots all share one crawl-cache these days, too.

I believe in the past, you can block specific country specific crawlers in your robots.txt file. I believe that still works for Yahoo Search, but for Google, they use one generic crawler these days.

Maybe a Googler can chime in here, if it is possible?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A Cre8asite Forums member contends that optimizing for certain keywords isn't desirable any longer. The reason given is that people aren't ever searching for those keywords (even though it looks like a logical search term). He adds that there's no consistency in users' search patterns. The behavior differs from one searcher to another, which is entirely understandable.

If I had 'optimised' the page for MY keywords I may have lost all those visitors and THEIR keywords.

But another forum members suggests that you start optimizing based on the search phrases people use; you might even get better traffic. You need to think of what people are searching for and lengthen your articles so that you capture that desired traffic.

So should you not optimize for the original keyword list? You might want to still consider users who search for "the head and the long tail," as Ammon Johns puts it.

There's really good information here, so have a read at the forum discussion at Cre8asite forums

A Sphinn discussion is currently underway about Andrew Shotland's SEO for Phone Numbers blog post. In his blog post, he argues that you should optimize for phone numbers for three reasons:

(1) Displaying a phone number in your title tag might increase your click-through-rate for your search listing. That is if, the searcher is searching for your phone number.

(2) You can take traffic away from the Internet Yellow Pages that list your business's phone number.

(3) Optimize for other business's phone numbers and when they do vanity searches on their phone numbers, they will find you and maybe buy what you have to sell them.

The Sphinn thread lists other reasons why you might want to make sure you are well optimized for your phone numbers. For example, someone forgot your company name, but your phone number is listed on their caller ID. I tried to find companies this way in the past.

But if you place phone numbers in your URL, be careful not to end in a zero.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

There is an outstanding subscriber (paid access required) WebmasterWorld thread that discusses the topic of short term versus long term phrases. These are the types of threads that make me feel, hey - that $150 subscription pays for itself. Without giving up all the details, let me explain the premise of the thread.

We all know that searchers are getting smarter at searching. Searchers are now much less likely to search for [cars] when looking to lease or buy a new car. Searchers are now much more likely to search for a more specific search, such as [lexus es 350]. The same applies to electronics, instead of [digital cameras], searchers are now being more specific with [canon powershot camera] and so on. Searchers are searching less often on the short phrases, such as one or two work keywords and more often on longer phrases (long tail), such as three, four or five word keywords. The WebmasterWorld thread gives examples of this happening via Google Trends, log files and experience.

If you agree that searchers are searching less often on short tail keywords, then you might agree that SEO, today, is less about those short tail keywords and more about the longer tail keywords.

The thread discusses how many SEOs are noticing less traffic on those short term keyword phrases, then they have in the past. The debate then gets into the niche or industry of your keywords. For some industries where the searcher is less experienced, the short tail keywords still are very high. But for other industries, those short term keywords are experiencing less and less searches. Yes, this has an impact for SEOs and how they optimize sites.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld (paid access required).

There are many SEOs spilt on the topic of the value in submitting a Sitemap to Google. In my opinion, it is clear that if a site has very poor navigation and on-page SEO, submitting a Sitemap might be your only alternative. But for well optimized sites, is there a benefit in submitting a Sitemap file to Google?

That is the topic of discussion in a Google Groups thread. Googler, JohnMu, gives us greater insight into how Google uses Sitemaps and why webmasters might want to consider submitting a Sitemap to Google. Here are my takeaways from the Google Groups thread.

• Help with canonical URLs. For example, by submitting your / and not your /index.html page, Google might just figure that / is the main URL and it will help with those canonical issues for that case. Of course, a 301 redirect from /index.html to / would do the same and Google recommends that even with a sitemap file, you 301 redirect URLs like those.
• The Last modification date field in the sitemap file can aid Google in quickly locating the actual change in the page. John at Google explained that Google might not have time to crawl all the pages you said changed, so if you specify the actual change in the Sitemap file, it will be easier for Google to pick up on those changes.
• The Priority, Change frequency is a lot like the last mod date, said John. If you give Google data that "makes sense", i.e. don't list 100% of your pages as the most important page on your site, then it can be useful to Google.

Those are my takeways from John's post. But here are John's takeaways:

• Yes, please send us Sitemap files, preferably sitemap.org XML files!
• Work on good URLs & use them to double-check your site's navigation
• Optional: Date or change frequency? depends on how you work.
• Also optional: Priority

I have always been a believer that well on-page optimized sites do not require or even benefit much from Google Sitemaps. But at the same time, I also do believe that giving Google extra clues about your site does help. It is something you need to think about. On one hand, by giving Google a sitemap file with all the changes, and a list of your most important pages - you are also giving those details to your competitors. Yes, that Sitemap file is public for Google and for your competitors. It totally depends on your industry.

What do I recommend. Try it out for a few months and see if it works for you. FYI, Beu also covered this thread.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Cre8asite Forums member asks the community about the length of a meta tag (keywords, description). Is there a particular length that you should limit yourself to?

Most search engines ignore it, and a recent lawsuit said that meta tags are immaterial. Still, a few people limit their meta tags to about 60 characters, like forum member EGOL.

Ammon Johns says something interesting regarding the length. His ideal meta tag size: zero. Why? You don't get credit and people steal it.

Seriously, there's a teeny advantage to not including the tag at all (leaner page, less data transfer), and a bigger disadvantage to having the tag in there (competitors mine it - half the keyword discovery tools use the keywords meta of other sites that rank well). Google doesn't give you any credit, not even a consolatory smile, for having the tag.

Kim Krause Berg doesn't use it and Barry Welford says that Yahoo will use meta keyword information for optimizing misspellings (but otherwise completely agrees with Ammon). There's more discussion as well, so hop on over to Cre8asite Forums for more.

Marketing Pilgrim recently published a prophecy that onsite SEO is going to die. The writer says that "[a]s the search engines acquire more revenue, their pool of professionals is also drained with best brains" and that new technologies like OCR will eliminate the need to optimize for search engines.

Search Engine Journal posted its own rebuttal that onsite SEO is not going to die. In particular, the respondent says that even if there is OCR technology that can discern text within images and the like, "there’s still got to be content, regardless of development language, for the engines to read, thus, optimizing it in some way will always, always, always be needed."

The Sphinn discussion is in agreement with Search Engine Journal: on-site SEO is here to stay. Small basic changes, for example, can make or break your website in the rankings. Others say that the best SEO happens on the page, not off the page.

And others, like Jill Whalen, think that this is an issue that is beating at a dead horse. The "SEO is dead" argument is not going away.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

My good friend Adam Audette wrote a great post on the 6 principles of ethical SEO. In his article, he explains:

1. Don't do any harm and engage in aggressive techniques. You don't want to hurt their brand.
2. Focus on the community and provide valuable information for them.
3. Fix problems, even if that means to give your clients the cold, hard truth and information they don't want to hear.
4. Internet marketing requires a combination of smaller disciplines to be powerful. Social media alone won't cut it. Neither will SEO.
5. Don't only do SEO. Teach it.
6. We should build scalable solutions so that the client will continue reaping the rewards of our campaigns.

Adam's post is interesting and a great read in itself. The ensuing discussion is also a good read -- it's all about everyone's individual ethics, and Adam has a lot of great points.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A common question in the SEO space is should I use absolute or relative URLs. Absolute URLs are when you link a URL by using the domain.com portion as well, so linking to my authors page would be a link like http://www.seroundtable.com/authors.php. The relative URL for that authors page would be a link like /authors.php.

As you can imagine, there are pros and cons. JohnMu, a Googler, has an outstanding post in a Google Groups thread with sage advice. It would be a crime if I did not quote the whole post, so here it is:

There are pros and cons to both absolute and relative URLs in links:

Absolute URLs:
+ help keep the links pointing to your content if someone were to copy it (*)
+ help keep the links pointing to your domain name if you cannot select a canonical (can't do 301 redirects)
+ help make sure that you're pointing to the right URL even if you move things around (say for stylesheets or graphics)
- cannot be tested on a staging / testing server (eg locally) (unless you insert the links dynamically)
- makes it hard to move content (unless the links are inserted dynamically)

Relative URLs:
+ make it easy to move content around
+ make it easy to test locally and on a staging server
- are easy to break if linking to content that isn't moved as well (stylesheet, graphics, etc)
- an evil scraper would have less work (*)

There's a middle ground as well, using absolute links without a domain name, eg: < a href="/resources/green/mostly/page.htm" ...> Personally, I prefer to use relative URLs + some absolute (without domain name) ones to shared resources. The advantage of being able to test things out 1:1 on a staging server can't compete with the pseudo-protection against scrapers.

The only place I would use absolute URLs would be if the site is hosted somewhere where the webmaster can't do a 301 redirect and may have trouble with duplicates. I've seen this a lot with sites hosted on a free account with the ISP; often it will be hosted as http://isp.com/users/~name/site ..., then perhaps http://domain.com/site... and http://www.domain.com/site... . By using absolute URLs in that situation, any value passed to one of the wrong URLs will automatically pass value to the correct URLs as well.

If you have a really good CMS you may be able to change from one to another and use a staging server without much work. In that case, it probably doesn't matter which one is chosen.

Solid advice!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

This post was written on June 5th and schedule to go live today.

Jonathan Hochman wrote a very good checklist on Search Engine Land about 12 ways to write search engine friendly code. Some of the tips he outlines are:

• Don't repeat yourself -- use SSIs and other code snippets instead of being redundant.
• Place JavaScript in external files and reuse as needed.
• Run your code through a validator to ensure that things are being kept clean.
• Keep your site's meta description brief (1-2 sentences)

...and so on. His points are very true for any website designer and Sphinn members are quick to agree. One issue of contention, though, is how to outline the title tags of pages. Jonathan recommends "company name - page name" but another person points out that it may be better to write "page name - subcategory name - category name - company name." It all depends on what you want to accomplish, though.

Jill Whalen mentions in the discussion that it won't help rankings. That, too, may be true, but we all know to design websites for people and not for search engines anyway. :) A happily-coded website is one that gets more links which in turn translates into better rankings.

A very long and useful ongoing discussion continues at Sphinn.

Beu posted a Search Engine Watch Forums thread after noticing that Google has changed the definition they used for what a doorway page is.

On the Google Page, it now reads:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.

The cached version still has the old version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Key sentences, words and adjectives have been removed and replaced by more generic terms. Google seems to have re-written it to discuss less of the technical nature of the page and more of the desired outcome of such a page.

In any event, all SEOs should know about the change.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums and Sphinn.

A Google Groups user is afraid that his PageRank was impacted because of too many links on his homepage.

Before you wonder whether there are search engine penalties, think about those links from a usability perspective. Are they helping your visitor or making it difficult for them? PageRank is not the issue here but more about how users are going to benefit. Even if your links are categorized, if there are too many links, it's still a pain to use.

As for this user's issue with PageRank, it doesn't hold weight. Inbound links are the metrics primarily used to weigh PageRank. As Google's Bergy says, don't worry about those green pixels!

Most PageRank changes are not the result of actions of the webmaster; rather, they're typically caused by changes to the quality and number of incoming links that the webmaster has little control over. This is why many folks in the group (myself included) have encouraged other webmasters not to worry about the little green pixels.

So at the end of the day, the issue here is that the links should be beneficial for the visitor. PageRank is not part of this equation.

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker reminds us that if we're building links, the basic rules of SEO should not be overlooked or forgotten. Even if you have hundreds of thousands of links, SEO basics are critical to achieve better rankings. Some of these include adding keywords to your copy, avoiding duplicate pages, adding unnecessary code, integrating text in images (and not using alt text), and more.

Link building itself is fine. SEO is still important for search engines, and both should be practiced together.

Most Sphinn members are in agreement about the article, but one points out that some sites may rank very well even if they don't incorporate basic SEO. He believes that it's more important to focus on relevant anchor text instead of unoptimized anchor text.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Did you know that there are specific HTML markup tags for abbreviations and acronyms? Did you know that people sometimes use them?

A Google Groups thread asks if Google actually uses these tags for indexing purposes? The example given in the thread is if Google would understand the following tag:

<acronym title="Cable News Network">CNN</acronym>

Would Google understand that CNN is an acronym for Cable News Network based on this tag?

Furthermore, would Google understand the abbreviations tag?

<abbr title="et cetera">etc.</abbr>

We all know Google has a huge dictionary and a huge huge database of searchers. I am sure they understand acronyms and abbreviations as part of the search. I am also sure they have tackled the question of automatically determining acronyms and abbreviations as part of their index. But does Google support the official acronyms and abbreviations tags?

We have no confirmation from Google either way, but it appears that Google might not support them. I have a feeling a Google representative is checking out the thread and may reply soon. I will update this post when I have confirmation on if these are supported tags.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

A Google Groups thread has a very interesting discussion that is almost complete. The discussion takes you through the life cycle of a 301 redirect. Site owner moved from domain.com to domain.info, on a domain name sale, but wanted to retain his links, so set up a 301 redirect from .com to .info for a certain period of time.

Besides for the thread covering a ton of details that are critical to such a move, I wanted to highlight one point made by Googler, JohnMu. John said that you should not use "the robots.txt to block crawling while you have a 301 redirect enabled for the domain. By blocking crawling, you're effectively blocking the search engines from recognizing the redirect properly."

I wonder how many people do that because I never would have thought people do.

Besides for that, there is some discussion on how long the 301 should be in place before handing over the old domain to someone else. If you 301 the results for 3 weeks and then hand the old domain over to the new owner, if that owner drops the 301, will Google return the old links back to the old domain or keep them at the new domain? Some suggest keeping the 301 live for at least 6 months.

There are many tips in the thread for such a process including collecting as much linkage data you can from the previous domain. You can collect linkage data via Yahoo Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools, your web analytics, your own database scripts and more. This way you can go back to those sites and ask them to update your link to the new domain.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The question of domain name registration and its impact on SEO is not a new one. However, every so often, the question comes up. Would it be better to register your domain name for 5 years instead of renewing it for just another year?

In our past coverage, we reported that there are some signals sent by extended domain name registrations, including informing the search engines that your website is not spammy (you're here to stay). Google does weigh in on these signals, apparently (albeit not as much as other factors, obviously).

Domain name registration lengths may also show more about your commitment to your work. If you extend your registration for many years, it shows that you're serious about your business. I'd say that this is stronger than renewing it yearly every single year.

Others disagree that domain name registration lengths have any profound impact on SEO. Instead, the older the domain is (rather than the length of registration), the better it is.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago I asked if Do You Report Your Competitors as Spam in Google? Well, the results are in and most SEOs said they do not report their competitors to Google as spamming. Of the 159 responses, 111 respondents or 70% said no, they do not report competitors to Google. 45 respondents or 28% said they do report competitors to Google. While three of those votes were for "other" but was actually left blank.

Here is the break down:
:: No said 111 respondents or 70%
:: Yes said 45 respondents or 28%
:: Other said 3 respondents or 2%

I am actually a bit surprised by the results, I would have thought more SEOs would anonymously say that they do report competitors to Google. These results, to me, shows a fairly strong unity amongst the SEO industry.

Forum discussion continued at Sphinn.

A Google Groups thread has discussion around how this webmaster should handle redirecting its web visitor to a localized version of their site, based on the IP address information.

Since I recently wrote a comprehensive article at Search Engine Land on How Search Engine Redirect Users To Country-Specific Sites, I thought this post was particularly interesting.

Googler, JohnMu, was first to respond to the webmaster's question. He explained that as a user, he wants the option to either see a localized version or a different version. John said, "I live in the German-speaking part of Switzerland but often browse the web in English. If I go to a search engine and search with English queries for English pages, I do not want to be redirected to a translated version which the website thinks I would like to see." For John, he would think that you should "allow the user to switch [to any version] with a simple link."

On the SEO front, John explains that if you offer these localized version via a different URL (unlike how Microsoft's Live Search works, interesting), then the search engine will pick up the content and then aid the different regions to go to your localized version for you. Let me quote John:

This allows our crawlers to find those pages and - should the user accidentally search for and click on the wrong one - lets the user move to a different language version on demand as well. By allowing our crawlers to crawl the various versions, we'll be better suited to suggest those URLs to users from those regions as well.

Of course there are many advantages to using IP geo-location techniques for your web visitor. But you need to judge the pros and cons of your specific site's goals and decide what works best.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Bill Slawski has written up another interesting piece about how search engines substitute other search terms for yours depending on past user behavior. Of course, this is related to a patent he discovered that was filed by Yahoo.

Bill explains how this works:

Let’s say that a large number of people who search for the term intellectual property then go on to search for the term patent attorney with their very next search, or within the same search session.

The search engine log files would uncover that such an association exists, and the search engine might explore how common it is for searchers to search for that second phrase. If it happens frequently enough, the search engine may start suggesting patent attorney as a suggested search to searchers along with a display of search results for the term intellectual property.

Therefore, it's important to take these other substitutions into consideration when optimizing your page, according to a Cre8asite Forums post. It is helpful to look at the various suggestions and optimize accordingly.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses the inherent benefits of typing URLs with capital letters. A few thoughts come to mind:

1. It's possible that search engines actually put emphasis on capitalized letters, though this is unconfirmed.
2. It stands out for readers

But there is a big con that you must be aware of, and that's the fact that there's a concern about duplicate content on different casing. This is especially true for IIS servers which will return "200 OK" status on all different types of casing. Tedster notes that "One big downside to using mixed case in the filepath is that you can easily get multiple urls indexed that point to the same content, just because of case differences."

A few people have experimented with capitalized letters (also known as Pascal Casing) and have determined that it helps with Google AdWords through A/B testing.

It may help improve your brand, though, but sometimes you want to make it look like a URL and not a brand name.

It's an interesting discussion and one that should be read at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about how one should handle inter-linking a network of sites. You said interlinking a network of sites! In some cases, it make sense to link a property of sites to each other.

For example, IAC, which owns Ask.com, also owns TicketMaster.com. If you scroll to the bottom of the site, you can see many of the other internet properties IAC owns. That includes Expedia, Lending Tree, Hotels.com, Hotwire and many more:

Is this wrong? Often not. It depends on your intent. But as SEOs are more concern about their intent being misconstrued by the search engines. So they often might take steps to keep the links but some how show to search engines, you don't have to count these links when looking at the link popularity component. You can do this easily by slapping on a nofollow attribute. But some SEOs don't want to add nofollows for several reasons.

WebmasterWorld administrator, Tedster, says, he uses iFrames for this situation. Tedster then explains why and what he uses iFrames for:

I use iframed urls for sets of "customer service" utility links, for example. That helps to sculpt PageRank without joining the "Cult of the Nofollow" ;)

I also commonly use iframes for large chunks of boilerplate text, such as legal disclaimers. I prefer having some indexable text, rather than using an image file and iframes have served quite well.

Got to love Tedster's "Cult of the Nofollow". In any event, this is the first thread I have seen a while on using an iFrame for this purpose.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Before beginning, I know a few of you will be upset I wrote this at all. But I want to show you the history here.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks what is the story with the noarchive META tag and the likelihood that it may hurt your Google rankings or rankings in other search engines. Let me first give you my opinion for the year 2008. I do not think the noarchive tag will hurt you in any way, unless you are spamming the search engines and hiding something from them. If you are not spamming, then you have nothing to worry about and you can use the noarchive tag for good.

So why is there concern over using the tag and having your rankings drop? As the thread shows, historically, we had reports all the way back in 2001, yes seven years ago, that sites that utilized the noarchive tag saw a drop in their Google ranks. WebmasterWorld's founder and owner, Brett Tabke, said back then, and I quote:

We've tested on 12 domains. All 12 domains dropped in rankings the following update after adding noarchive.

But Brett adds that even back then, there was opposition to the theory.

What about in 2008? Like I said above, I think its a non-issue for virtually all webmasters, of course there are exceptions. The new WebmasterWorld thread discusses just that. As you can see by reading the thread, there is still some concern over using the META tag.

WebmasterWorld's administrator, Tedster, first explains that there is nothing wrong with using the tag. Google has never said it will hurt your rankings. But he does add, that if there are "borderline spammy signs" on your pages, "then a noarchive tag can be one more bad sign and possibly contribute to a ranking problem. Matt Cutts [of Google] has mentioned this several times at conferences."

WebmasterWorld moderator, Receptional Andy, adds to Tedster's warning, saying, "Only a small percentage of sites will use noarchive; so, it puts your site in a slightly different group, and one that is more likely to be closely-scrutinised." But I love how moderator, PageOnResults, follows up to that post saying, "What percentage of Internet surfers actually use the Cached link?" Meaning, just like a small percent of sites use the noarchive tag, so to, a small percent of searches use the cache link.

For those curious, that was the basis of the argument behind Does Using a NoFollow Attribute Raise a Red Flag at Google?

Take Aways:
(1) If you are spamming or it may look like you are spamming, be safe and don't use the noarchive META tag.
(2) Otherwise, go for it!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

About a week ago I ran a poll that asked Can Someone Hurt A Competitors Google Rankings With Links? I ran the poll because there is a lot of debate around this topic. So I figured, why not ask you guys and you guys said that yes, competitors can hurt your Google rankings. Here are the details of the poll.

In short, 70% of the 135 responses said that yes, a competitor can hurt my Google rankings. 19% said, no, competitors cannot and 11% said they have no idea either way.

Here is the break down:
:: Yes said 94 respondents or 70%
:: No said 26 respondents or 19%