Search Engine Optimization Archives

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%
:: I Have No Idea said 15 respondents or 11%

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

A High Rankings Forums member wants to know if header tags (H1, H2, H3, H4...) are weighted on search engines.

The answer is probably not, but some people think that there's minimal weight from search engines. The point is that header tags are for user readability versus focusing on search engines. If you wanted to test the theory, you could remove the header tags and instead use CSS to see how it performs.

Additionally, it's important to note that if this is something spammers start using more heavily, chances are search engines will devalue it even more (if header tags are even a metric in the algorithm). That said, do your own testing and come up with some results, but the skepticism is pretty obvious from the post.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

In the middle of the week, my good friend Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney, blogged that SEO has no future. He believes that personalized data will be more important, especially from the toolbar, user history, and analytics data. Social voting is becoming more important, and he explains that his sitelinks are the most trafficked pages on his site.

Well, the SEO community did not really want to hear that, so there have been at least three individual posts on Sphinn about it.

Marketing Pilgrim writer Greg Howlett says that search engines are getting too smart and that search engines won't want to reward companies for playing SEO games.

In one rebuttal, Ian Lurie talks about how SEO really does have a future. Smart SEO makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site. It helps create a long term content strategy. It keeps good businesses out of trouble. It ensures the discoverability of content on your site. SEO isn't about looking for loopholes but for keeping search engines happy.

In another response, Michael Gray also says that SEO has a future. SEO will have to clean up the mess of visual elements, especially flash and other technologies that are not search-engine friendly. SEOs have to explain viral marketing, content creation, and more. SEO is here to stay, he says, and there's nothing that anyone can say to stop that.

In a third response, Taylor Pratt says that SEO will exist as long as search engines exist. He says that while search engines are smart, SEOs are smart too and can work alongside search engines.

On one hand, forum members think that this is a great thing to start saying because then there will be less competition as newbie SEOs don't actually participate in SEO. Others say that SEO is not going to die but become more important, especially as big companies start partnering up with SEO firms and consultants for work.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn, Sphinn, Sphinn, and Sphinn. ;)

I'm sure you've seen those URLs -- www.domain.com/4-star-hotel-in-barcelona-spain.php. The question is: is this a tactic that we consider spammy?

Not really, according to a High Rankings Forum thread. On the other hand, if it was www.domain.com/4-star-hotel-apartment-penthouse-keyword4-keyword5-keyword6-in-barcelona.php, that may raise some eyebrows. Additionally, if you think about it, unless you change the post slug of a WordPress post, thousands of these long URLs are generated every single day. (Tip: Shorter URLs are easier to remember and rock.)

At Cre8asite Forums, the question regarding dashes in a URL is discussed. Is it better than an underscore? Back on the High Rankings discussion, dashes are the default delimiter, if that gives any indication to a widespread preference, but it really doesn't matter.

But if it comes to the actual domain name, it's a lot easier (for you) to go with one that lacks the dash to make it easier for users to remember. They're less inclined to type the dash and it takes a bit of a learning curve. I found that adjustment necessary with brand new webmaster forum Webmaster Talk.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum and Cre8asite Forum.

The SEOmoz team released a two page PDF based SEO Web Developer Cheat Sheet that I personally printed out and gave to my RustyBrick developers.

I did make a couple changes to it, nothing major. For example, as a matter of style, I personally like to reverse the suggested "Recommended Title Tag" from having the web site name go last, instead of first - or even not show the web site name at all. Update, it seems like SEOmoz updated their PDF to have the title tag start with "Keyword" then go to "Category" and then show Web site name. That is exactly the change I made when I printed it out and gave it to my developers. In addition, I typically would tell my developers to add the first two lines of content from the database into the META description field.

Overall, this cheat sheet, should be on all web developers desks. It is a great guide and it looks pretty.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

If you were interviewing an SEO firm to see if they're for real, what questions would you ask them? A High Rankings Forum thread touches upon some of the must-know questions, and they're outlined below:

1. How long they have been doing SEO?
2. Can you give me three clients that you have had first-page results for?
3. What are some campaigns you have succeeded with?
4. Can you illustrate any significant traffic boosts or conversion boosts?
5. What is your general SEO process?
6. What is your criteria for choosing keyword phrases?
7. How is success measured?
8. What should you expect from us as a client?

And the list goes on and on. What would you add to this for desired results?

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

Now that Google admitted to crawling JavaScript and forms SEOs and Webmasters need to be aware of how to manage even more duplicate content issues.

In the past, a good strategy was to build out filter pages (filter by color, size, price, etc.) using JavaScript pull down menus. Google would typically stay away from such forms and you would not necessarily have to worry about Google seeing the same content filtered or sorted by color, price, size and so on.

But now with Google crawling JavaScript and forms, Webmasters need to take an extra step towards preventing Google from crawling and indexing such content. Why? Duplicate content.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion on this topic and offers tips on what to do, to help you with this problem. Some of the advice includes:

• Include the duplicate content in an external Js, assign it to variables, and do innerHTML to some divs.
• Use XmlHTTPRequest (GET) to retrieve the data in XML format and then put it into the page.
• Use an Ajax POST and retrieve the XML content with this.
• Use robots.txt to block specific files and/or page naming conventions.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

I would consider this Google Groups thread a "gem thread," since you don't always see a thread at this level - it is precious. A Googler, Wysz, discussed in detail four methods of hiding content and how Google may interpret each method.

JavaScript-Only Navigation: Wysz explains that this tactic does not fool or confuse search engines, so it likely won't hurt you in your rankings but from an "accessibility perspective," he says it is "not desirable." Wysz then goes on to answer specific questions posed by a webmaster, which you may gain some clues from.

CSS-Enhanced Navigation: Seems like Google and Wysz both love this method. Wysz said, as long as you do not have "intent to deceive search engines," then you should be fine. On the accessibility front, it is a win-win, "since it degrades gracefully as JavaScript and CSS support are removed," Wysz explains. Wysz adds, "Google should be able to follow these links and rank your pages normally."

Hidden Links via Positioning/Color, for Design/Accessibility: Wysz explains that this method can bring you "dangerously close to a grey area." The example he gives is that if you use the word "SkipToContent," which "isn't likely to be interpreted by anyone as an attempt at deception", said Wysz. He then adds, and this is important, "unless the term "SkipToContent" becomes a highly competitive keyword." Wysz does go on record saying, "If implemented in a non-deceptive manner, these aids should not cause a problem." But that leaves it up to Google to decide and intent is not always easy to judge. So, try not to use this method, if possible.

Hidden Links with No Mention of Accessibility or User Value: I think I will just quote Wysz here, cause he said it best. :)

I'm going to assume that these links are only intended for bots to see as attempt to deceive search engines. That's probably not an assumption you want a Googler to make. When making this judgement on your own, just ask yourself this question: "Is all of this text here for the user?" If you want to make Google (and your users) happy, the answer should always be "Yes."

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The SEM Insights blog discusses four reasons why big brands don't have good SEO. They are:

Requirement: ease of maintenance: Therefore, they may not be using CMSes that are SEO friendly.

Requirement: personalization and tracking: They need quantifiable results, but they don't understand that search results are going to display the most applicable page to a search query and that that every related page probably won't rank in the top 10 for a search.

Requirement: language: Big brands often serve content to different countries under a single TLD. The problem is that when people in different companies search for in-country results, they won't locate the big brand.

Corporate policy and legal issues: The last thing is that it takes forever in big brands to get things done. To put it simply, there's way too much bureaucracy in the corporate world.

At Sphinn, the discussion continues. Forum members believe that sometimes they'll take the easy sale (an ad representative with a solid presentation) and ignore SEO (especially since they have the money to afford PPC).

Another thought is that they're just so used to doing what they're doing that change is difficult. Indeed, the IT department makes things difficult. Their mantra: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Additionally, some copywriting just sucks. Some people just won't use keyword-rich text because they want to sound more professional and that prevails over search friendliness.

What big brands need is a shift in thinking. Unfortunately, they need to kick it off if they're serious about it.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A Cre8asite Forums discussion pointed me over to a UK hosting company named UKFast that has a white paper on Server Speed and SEO.

The paper makes the argument that server speed is a critical component to your SEO campaign. Here are some quotes from the white paper:

Website response speed helps search engines to assess the site’s relevance because speed is one of the criteria recognised in a successful site.

If a more powerful, faster server is used, the site loads more quickly and is rewarded by being moved higher in a the search engines’s displayed results.

Server speed is intrinsically linked to search engine optimisation.

If a server operates at a higher speed the business is more likely to be noticed by search engines. This is because Google, which is the world’s favourite search engine, offers rewards for businesses that provide excellent customer service.

Additionally, a fast server means spiders and robots find it easier to trawl a website. This means your website is indexed on a more regular basis and updated more frequently by search engines.

Technically, a really slow server can really hurt your rankings in many search engines. But can a super fast server improve your Google rankings? I don't think so. It might let Googlebot spider more of your pages quicker, but even that seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

You see, what they claim is half-true. If you have a really slow server, it can have a negative impact on your rankings. But having a super fast server, as opposed to a fast server, won't increase your rankings. I.e. A super fast site won't rank higher than a fast site, if all else is equal. At least as far as I know.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A High Rankings Forum thread is a perfect example of how people can misinterpret SEO terms. In this particular case, because a site has lost its rankings, an individual is looking to build a "link farm."

Well, sort of. A "link farm," he says, is how he builds reciprocal yet relevant links. (A real "link farm" is frowned upon by Google.)

If you ask me, that doesn't sound like a link farm. But there's a problem within this industry that can cause serious penalties (without any idea why) if you're not understanding the proper SEO terms.

My guess is that in this particular member's case, he lost rankings because his boss misinterpreted another SEO tactic yet again. It's very important to understand these terms clearly. If in doubt, ask a forum member for help.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

WebmasterWorld administrator tedster urges each and every webmaster to ensure that their 404 custom error page actually returns an appropriate 404 error code. He explains that he sees more 200 response codes than ever, lately, because custom 404 pages are often redirected using 302 to a page that then serves a 200 error.

What this means is that eventually all of these "bad" URLs pile up and you have a duplicate content issue on your hands.

The most vulnerable web servers to this type of activity is IIS/Microsoft. Ted explains that custom error messages are set up differently (versus Apache).

He explains what you should do if you use IIS:

For the IIS user, there is one other caution I should mention about 404 handling. If you are using .NET, then there are two levels of error handling: at the IIS level and at the .NET level. It is also common to find that only one of these two levels is set up correctly. So when you're checking your site, try a bad url with a .asp (.aspx) extension, and also try a bad url with a .htm extension.

And yes, Apache may not be as vulnerable, but it still is, especially if it serves JSP pages with Tomcat.

With all that said, everyone should take a moment and check their server headers of their custom 404 page as directed by Tedster.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Some great websites rank but have horrendous code. At Cre8asite Forums, a webmaster has been given the task of redesigning the website and cleaning up the messy code and adding standard SEO elements (robots.txt, sitemap, external CSS, etc.). However, since the website is ranking well (after all, it's being updated fairly frequently and the content is good), is there a risk in taking on such a project? Will a redesign kill the rankings?

Well, it all depends. One Cre8asite member says that if the site structure remains relatively the same, nothing should really change substantially.

But what else? You should take the time to educate the client. After all, the site has been around for over 10 years in this case and it will be extremely important to you (and your client) to learn some SEO basics. As EGOL says, the client knows a lot more about her topic than you, the SEO, does. Teaching her will only reap benefits:

In my opinion the best SEOs help their clients develop into better webmasters. There is more to gain by teaching than keeping secrets.

Indeed, she can gain a lot and your life will be a lot easier if you have someone who is eager and willing to take on your recommendations.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

My BFF Lisa Barone wrote a really great post about what companies should look for when hiring in-house SEO consultants. SEO folks should have some sort of technical skills and a little coding expertise too. They also should have an analytical mindset and be willing to stare at a lot of numbers. Other highly-regarded characteristics include the ability to research well, someone who can think outside the box, someone with a sense of ethics, and an individual who can grow within your organization.

Of course, there are other characteristics. You want someone with a passion for this line of work. If they're not interested, they may not be hanging on for a long time.

You'll also wan someone to be on top of their ballgame. Just like a programming language has updates and you'll have to learn new tips and tricks in order to stay ahead, SEO isn't much different. Things change. Algorithms shift. You'll need to be able to work on new strategies if you encounter something different, and the old tricks may not suffice.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld member has been applying regular search engine optimization and link building techniques and is noticing that the traffic hasn't improved as substantially in the latter months of the campaign as it did initially. Is this something normal?

Actually, in many ways, it is. The first few months are typically a lot easier than the later months. Tedster mentions that sometimes it takes links time to reach their full power and cites Google's "Historical and Age Data" patent.

There's no reason to give up, though. It's time to focus your energy on building links from high quality relevant sites. Focus your energy on building good content to attract such links.

Forum members also believe that it may not necessarily be link building that can be holding you back. It could be that your competition is ahead of its game. One suspects that it may even be the work of a human editor. What you can do, though, is take the recommendations and be aggressive in your link building efforts. Then see if you move up.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

At a Cre8asite Forums thread, a user is looking for guidance on how to compile a SEO strategic document. What would be contained in such a document?

The first step in writing a document like this is determining your audience and asking who is going to read this strategy document. Once that's set, you can think of other goals, particularly the company goals and the departmental goals.

But be careful. Don't make promises you can't deliver:

I'd also try to be easy on predicting awesome sales. It is better to underestimate and be a winner later, then overestimate now and be seen as underachiever. Even if in the latter variant, you've done exceptionally well.

What do you think? Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums -- and the final outline for the SEO strategies document is revealed.

Julie Joyce writes on the SEO Chicks blog talks about the American Express believes that SEO is a waste of money. The idea is that there are snake oil salesmen (not all SEOs do this, though), but it ends up affecting the industry as a whole. Just because someone promised "guaranteed top 10 rankings in 90 days" doesn't mean he's doing it right or ethically. The industry shouldn't take a hit for that, but unfortunately, they do.

Julie says that you shouldn't give out bad advice as it's extremely irresponsible.

Yes, there are examples of poor SEO but that’s absolutely no reason to advise all small business owners against employing the services of reputable people who happen to have the background and the knowledge to compete in the online arena.

And she ends the article with a bang: that bad advice isn't much better than bad SEO. So there, AMEX.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

One of the oldest questions in the search engine optimization practice is on the META description. The META description is this little tag you include in the header file, that provides a machine readable short summary of your page. Many search engines including Google, Yahoo, & Live Search use the META description in one way or an other. Here is a screen capture of what our META description looks like within the source code of a page:

A Cre8asite Forums thread has a recent discussion that probes into the META description and how it impacts the search engine snippet. The search engine snippet is the piece of content found directly under the blue hyperlink of the search results listings. Here is the search engine snippet in Google for a search on search engine roundtable:

Yes, in this case it matches my META description but not always. If you search for barry schwartz you get this alternative description for this site:

Google and most engines, try to match the content of your search and then apply a more contextually relevant snippet to your query. In the case of "barry schwartz," Google noticed that "barry" and "schwartz" were both not mentioned in the META description, so it proceeded to look for content on the page that matched. What it found was the word "barry" in the little links under each post, in the alt and title tag text:

Ron Carnell, Cre8asite Forums Administrator, makes an interesting observation, which seems to be true:

In every single instance in my experience, putting the search terms in a meta-description sentence resulted in THAT sentence being used in the snippet as soon as the page was crawled. Every instance.

Got that?

Anyway, the forum thread also touches on topics such as why a search engine doesn't use anchor text when developing a search snippet? It also asks how we, webmasters, would want to extend the META description. I love Cre8asite Forum Modertor, EGOL's response:

Looking forward... maybe some day search engines will be able to pass query information to websites. If a person searches for "Bluenote Widgets" perhaps the search engine could pass those words to my website and there would be an easy to install tool that make them appear in highlight on my page... or maybe the link to my page would dropdown to the occurrence of those words on my page. These links could be tiny icons beneath the snippet. Searchers would click them if they want the highlighting or the dropdown anchor.

EGOL's first answer is a lot like how the Google Co-Op works to allow webmasters to trigger certain search results for trusted searchers:

By the way, do subscribe to our Google coop subscriber links.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Some clients just need to know if their SEO investment is worthwhile. But how do you measure ROI, or rather, can you prove that there is a return on the investment?

It's a hard question to answer. On the superficial level, you can check Google Analytics and check if there has been an increase of visitors to your site, and if so, where they came from. But typically, there's really no way to prove ROI since there are so many different factors in play, including the increase in traffic, the attribution of that traffic to your actual SEO efforts, and the long-term investment of your SEO efforts.

Additional metrics include gathering prospective callers from the website (a practical solution to measure this would be to put a different phone number on the website versus on print publications) or by simply asking "How did you hear about us?" to people who dial in.

Forum discussion and (which includes a very nifty guide for metrics posted by nethy) continues on High Rankings Forum.

Andrew Shotland aka Local SEO Guide has a very cool writeup on Facebook Pages and Local Search Engine Optimization. He explains that it's possible to do local SEO from your Facebook page and illustrates the process, which includes setting up your own blog, installing a Facebook application called SimplyRSS, keeping content updated regularly, and networking on Facebook very often.

Does it work? He illustrates that an accountant from the UK is using it, and it seems to appear pretty useful. However, with 8 fans, my bet is that they're not applying Andrew's fourth tip: "networking up the wazoo." In any event, with an RSS reader, you can embed your blog posts into almost any Facebook page that you can customize, be it your profile page or a fan/product page, and it's a very valuable tool to leverage.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

What do you do when you have an SEO client but they refuse to give you access to their servers and do not act upon recommendations that you're giving nearly blindly since you have no access to their statistics?

It depends on how you approach the client when offering services. Before a contract is signed, it's ideal to tell the client that you will need full access up front.

Since there is no right answer to the question, though, you should be sure not to guarantee rankings, especially when you cannot see how well they're doing from your efforts. You might want to eventually approach the client and say "it doesn't feel right" that you're taking their money and not able to make the suggested changes.

Some clients won't give you the access. In that case, the business relationship is probably not a healthy one. You need do what's right for you.

Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.

A Sphinn discussion thread led me to a post by Bill named Slow Down Nosy SEO's and Snooping Competitors.

In short, he gives techniques to "slow down" a competitor from analyzing your SEO techniques and just copying what you have done to benefit themselves. Now, I do not personally vouch for these techniques, that is up to you - but here they are:

• Do away with Archive.org and block them from archiving your site's changes
• NOARCHIVE your pages to block the search cache
• Block competitive analysis tools like Xenu
• Use private domain registration
• Block unauthorized bots and tools
• Cloak your pages to fool with your competitors

Again, I would not suggest all of these techniques. I am personally of the opinion to worry more about improving your own site as opposed to messing with your competitors minds - but that is up to you.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

I honestly wanted to avoid this topic, but due to the amount of attention on this topic right now, it is our duty to let the non-forum activists know about the controversy.

Shari Thurow authored an article on Search Engine Land named You'd Be Wise To "NoFollow" This Dubious SEO Advice. In short, Shari said worry more about your site architecture then using the nofollow attribute to funnel your PageRank, sculpt your PageRank, or silo your site for search engines. Shari is of the opinion that a quality site does not have to worry about it, while others, including Stephan Spencer's Search Engine Land article named Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact says it works.

Honestly, there is no doubt in my mind that using the nofollow attribute or even JavaScript or a robots.txt file to manage your PageRank and link popularity flow works. It is nothing new and has been done for ages, just not with the nofollow, since the nofollow is relatively new. Do I do it? No. Why? Cause I focus more on other things, which I think is Shari's point. Would I benefit from doing it? Probably.

Michael Gray's Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sculpting Your Pagerank takes issue with picking on those who do sculpt PageRank. He says there is nothing wrong with it at a macro level. It all depends in my opinion.

At SMX West a buddy showed me his site and asked me what more he can do. This site was absolutely optimized to the T. Pages that didn't have much content were nofollowed via the link and noindexed on the page level. The detail he put into his site was truly amazing. It all depends on priorities and resources. I say, if you got the time, why not sculpt. Google is not handing out penalties to those who use the nofollow and in the Linking Q&A panel, Matt Cutts was asked:

Q: PageRank sculpting/siloing: should we do that? Matt: In general, worry more about the high quality of your site. After you've taken care of it, then think about sculpting. Put your best pages on top - your best selling products should be linked from your homepage. The nofollow and metatags essentially do the same kind of thing. Google is against abusive manipulation.

So why not, if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site.

In any event, the discussion is incredibly heated at Sphinn, so enjoy.

In a post entitled Does Your Business Qualify for Local SEO?, Cre8asite forum member SEOigloo poses the question about whether your business website can take advantage of local SEO. Here's what's necessary:

If the business serves only within a fixed geographic region, Local SEO is a no-brainer for you. You need to optimize the tags, footer, on-page copy for that magic combination of product/service + location, and you need to register your business with the various local business centers and IYPs.

What are the pluses? Beyond regular optimization, she says that "Local SEO can be used as a form of keyword expansion that will get you ranking for additional terms that do relate to your business."

It's also helpful to take advantage of getting your business listed in Google Maps. Sometimes this isn't entirely possible, like when your business doesn't have a physical address, but it should also give you a traffic boost if you do.

Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

Moving document and file locations on the web is fairly common. So what do you do when you have to communicate the move to your users and the search engines? You set up a redirect.

There is no question that search engines prefer to see a 301 redirect. But just to make it clear, I wanted to quote a fresh friend where John Mueller, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, says once more that a 301 redirect is preferred. In fact, a Google Groups thread goes as far as saying that a meta refresh redirect may be used by some search engines as a spam red flag prompt. I am not sure if that is the case with Google, but John does comment on it.

I touched on meta refresh type redirects back in my posting on meta tags at WBC Blog. In general, we go not recommend using this kind of redirect. If you need to redirect users to a page, it is preferred to use a clean server side redirect.

John then adds his personal thoughts:

As Silverstall mentioned, some search engines (AltaVista is mentioned in that article) have seen meta refresh type redirects with a short time to redirect as a spam-signal. Personally, I find the longer time periods problematic as well, at least for the user. Who expects to be redirected to a different page after 30 seconds? It's just confusing :-).

Why would someone think a search engine would use a meta redirect as a spam technique? It could be used for showing one piece of content to a search engine and a different piece of content to the end user, a form of cloaking can be applied to it.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Taking you back to the -60 thread I blogged about earlier. The thread is at Google Groups and it shows us a little of something that may be obvious but should be spoken about.

Once you are penalized in Google or probably any other search engine for that matter, it is extremely hard to get back in. While you may be able to get away with bad links linking to your site before getting penalized, but once your site is penalized those bad links can keep you out of the index. So yes, bad links can hurt your site - even if there are just a few.

John Web aka JLH Design has an interesting post in that thread that expresses this concern. Let me quote you the part of his post that talks about this and you can read in its entirety over here.

I'm hoping that this doesn't cause a storm of people now worried about some shady seo linking to them in a spammy way to hurt their rankings. From what I gather from this thread is that once a site has been flagged and penalized that all of the details including on site and off site factors get looked at very closely, much closer than before. Remember that Google has a copy of every page on the web that they've crawled and can quickly pull up any relationships between them. So if on 10/16/07 thirty seven links start appearing with the anchor text "Dining Room Furniture" to a product page on sites that don't monitor their commenter's links, they'll be able to notice it. On it's own this may be ignored as it is generally accepted that external sites cannot hurt your ranking (though that has been removed from Googles documentation) but when coupled with other signals it may add up to something. I would imagine that it also has to be weighed as fraction of the whole of the links. In other words, if a site has 36,000 links to it and 34,000 links are from theme sponsorships, 1,000 are from keyword rich blog comments, 500 are from web directories, and only 10 are from actual sites giving out an editorial link that would be a pretty good sign that someone was trying to improve their ranking by external methods. If 99% of the links are questionable, then it may give them cause to not only devalue them but devalue the site as a whole as well. It's like the interlinking of commonly owned sites problem, or domain farming as its often called. For legitimate sites like Google, youtube, and blogger, some interlinking is possible, but only because if you look at the millions of links they have, only a very small percentage are from their own properites. Where it gets a site into trouble is when the majority of its links are from a common individual that a ranking penalty would make sense. I'm only guessing here and have absolutely no inside knowledge, just trying to talk it out.

All this is derived from Google reps continually insisting that this one site that is penalized remove all the bad links pointing to his site. Once you have bad links and your site is penalized, will Google use those links against you until they are all cleaned up or can you get back in?

What happened to the feeling that bad links can't hurt you too bad? Is this fair? Can this be used to hurt your competitors?

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Is changing content often good from a search perspective? This question is discussed at WebmasterWorld and a lot of good information is dispensed.

First of all, "changing" content should be considered carefully. It could potentially hurt your rankings, according to Tedster:

If a url depends significantly on on-page factors for its ranking on a given search, then changing that content can even undermine those rankings.

It's important to acknowledge that changing content is not a good thing, necessarily. Instead, you should *add* content.

Don't change your page too much. Instead, focus on building other pages.

If you change your page from just "trophy" to grab things like "trophies" and "trofies" (for people who can't spell) you divide all the focus of the page between those different iterations. You are dividing up the amount of emphasis you put on any one of the word sets. Themeing really comes into play. If you are worried about ranking for different variations of a phrase, create additional pages of content / links for those different variations. Sure it's a pain, but it's a solid tactic.

That's some really good advice. The more content, the more loved you are. That's how it typically works.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A WebmasterWorld thread has a Webmaster saying that a site of his recently was removed from the ODP. He said, soon after he noticed his rankings drop in Google. He wants to know if it can be related to the DMOZ listing removal or something else.

So can a ODP removal hurt your search engine rankings?

Most folks in the WebmasterWorld thread say probably not, but some aren't so convinced. WebmasterWorld moderator, pageonresults adds:

Google and others use the dmoz data. When your listing goes AWOL from dmoz, it will have an impact somewhere down the line. But, it shouldn't have that much of an impact to drag you down too far in the SERPs. Maybe one or two spots but nothing dramatic. I'm going to say there are exceptions to the rule too. If you had multiple dmoz listings and they were removed, that might have a negative impact.

Overall, I doubt it should have a major impact, like pageonresults said.

Some SEOs are a bit obsessed with getting in the DMOZ directory. But you should know the Pros and Cons of DMOZ and understand it can take a really long time to be listed in DMOZ. Also note that some of those cons no longer apply since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all support the NOODP tag, a tag you can use to tell the search engine not to display your ODP title in the search results.

Let's poll our audience: Do you think the removal of a DMOZ listing could have a "major" impact on a site's rankings in Google?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Bill Slawski's Google Omits Needless Words (On Your Pages?) at SEO By The Sea has Google texts, patents and patent applications that discuss how Google may handle boilerplate content.

Boilerplate content on a web page might be content that is found repeated on every page of the site. It may include legal texts, copyright notices, terms and conditions, and so on. Bill runs through some scientific documents by Google and comes up with some observations on the possibilities of how Google may treat boilerplate content. They include:

• Most important, search engines might ignore boilerplate content
• If the above is true, the location and number of times that text is used on your site may be a critical detail
• Google may still look at the anchor text within your boilerplate content
• We do not exactly know how Google treats boilerplate content now and if that may change in the future

Bill's post, like most of his posts, makes it into the forums for discussion. We have threads at Sphinn and Cre8asite Forum.

IAMLost in the Cre8asite Forum thread expands Bill's thoughts a bit by adding some more context from the patent Bill explored:

identification and classification of repeat non-content across pages (boilerplate):
* certain words especially if attached to links, i.e. home, about us.
* certain spacial areas, especially if including links, i.e. blogroll, nav links, but even if few/no links, i.e. header, footer.
* certain markup, i.e. javascript, but possibly also CSS id/class names such as header, footer, nav.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and Cre8asite Forum.

A WebmasterWorld thread asks how long should he or she wait for after making a chan