Entries Tagged 'Search Engines' ↓

What a strange title for this long due SEO post, let me explain.

During my late night surfing, I came across a Blogging Blog (??) with an article about keywords and more specifically how keyword tools seems to be showing over 1000 hits for the term ‘keywords MP3′. I thought it was interesting anyways so as we do at Xenyo, we’re gonna join their experiment and see how far we get with this post.

A quick check on http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com confirms their data but I have my doubts regarding the actual amount of hits reported. Basically with keyword research, I find its 30% keyword tools and 70% hunch … but hey even at 30% thats around 600 searches a day!!!

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Disturbing news indeed as webmasters over at DigitalPoint gets a bit concerned in this thread.

All the PR checker tools are reporting N/A for their sites, enough to give any webmaster cause for concern. Personally, I think its just a temporary thing though and for those that are worried about their site, our trusty old PageRank Verification Tool is still working. So go over and get your dose of Google’s green juice if you need.

If Google is thinking of killing showing of External PageRank though, what would that mean?

Hundreds, no Thousands …. millions? .. or directory owners will turn grey overnight. SEOs will be drowned in calls from their clients.Text Link Ads wont know what to base their prices on anymore… and most devastating of all … our trusty PR verification tool would be useless!!!!!

Thats bad …

Don’t be EVIL

It’s a pretty impressive mission statement from the Big G.

Recently, the internet marketing community has picked up on SERP adjustments on a couple of high profile sites.

A few weeks ago, TextLinkAds having dominated the SERPs for ‘Text Link Ads’ can now only be found on the first page because of their Adwords campaign.

John Chow who was recently hit by Google for the phrase ‘Making money online’ was slapped again and now cannot even be found for his own name.

Are these two sites considered EVIL by Google? Are they in violation of moral principles? Improper conduct?

If so then what do they have in common for these recent punishments from the Almighty? It seems that they both have committed the sin of PAID LINKS.

John Chow is infamous for his ‘sell a blog review campaign’ on his blog and TextLinkAds … well they are the leading buy and sell text links marketplace. So Google’s finally made their move on anti paid links crusade you ask?

Well, I don’t think so … I think they have just made a move on their ‘Don’t be Evil’ crusade. Both TextLinkAds and John aren’t actually famous for buying links to artificially affect their SERPs and the severity of the punishment indicates this isn’t an algorithm change.

These 2 have been picked out and punished as an example to us mortals. John for so publicly ignoring the Big G’s commandments on selling links and TLAs …

for taking 50% of their clients income

…. Err… I mean facilitating the sin of paid links.

It will be interesting if these guys get their rankings back especially if they change their business models. I think John will probably revise his blog review service … publicly. After all, God tells us to be forgiving right?

Things again being pretty hectic here but I have finally go some time to post in between the emails and lunch .. hmm, skipped breakfast again…

I wanted to talk a bit on how you direct the juice from inbound links within your website. Let’s ignore the paid links thing for the now because I am bored to bits discussing this topic recently but basically you cannot control where links arrive to your site. It maybe your homepage, your category pages or a content page somewhere deep within your site (Actually this is usually the case).

You can control however, how to direct that juice (I will use PR after this point) within your site, whether it is from home to deep or deep to home and how spread out the PR gets.

Forums for example are notorious for splitting the PR into tiny pieces such as member pages, calendars, reply, new thread pages, etc. When working on your SEO, you need to consider this and the below points.

1. PR is not an average, its a sum of the PR value of all the incoming links - Internal and External.

2. In general if you dont think that having a link to a page would help your users at that location - Chances are you should lose it. Less links means more PR will be passed to pages that are important.

3. Linking structure needs to be well thought out to take advantage of passing PR to the pages you want more power to.

That’s all for now.

Google is launching a major change to their search and its called Universal Search.

Basically, you know those tabs you see when doing a search on Google like maps, images, books, etc. Now they are going to implement results from those search components directly into the SERPs you do when searching on Google.com.

A few examples are:

Try berbatov where you will see the a Youtube video entry around rank 3.

For images, they have decided that it obstructs too much with the search results to implement them into the SERPs so they remain at the top and bottom of the results like a search for Darth Vader

What this means for SEO is that with the increase of exposure to the other elements of search, SEOs will have more options to get to the Google first page. Additionally, whereas before a first page rank 9 ranking maybe be good enough, you are now on the second page.

Expect to see some activity with regards to SEO for images and videos to take advantage of this Google upgrade and also more work to get a higher ranking for web search to make sure your site stays on the first page.

Personally, I feel this is a great change for Google if it works out. Search has been calling out for an upgrade and this is a good start. Google has said that they are still in the process of rolling out the upgrade and changes are to be expected so with one swift silent move, Google puts the excitement back into the search engine optimization industry.

Now, where did I put that camcorder…..

According to his comment on Matt’s blog, he finally confirms the Page Rank update that we had recently.

Matt Cutts Said,

May 8, 2007 @ 7:44 am

Harith:
- Yup, there was a toolbar pagerank update a week or two ago.
- I think Adam said that he was willing to investigate reports of problems. I’ve passed on 1-2 sites to the toolbar folks to check into, but for the most part it was a relatively normal toolbar pagerank update.
- I haven’t given up hope that I’ll still add to my “how to report paid links” post with some examples of the sorts of reports that are helpful, but let’s keep that conversation over on that post.

However, he does mention as we pointed out that the update seemed to have a few problems. Whether or not these problems will be fixed is unknown but knowing Google, I’d doubt it.

They’ll probably just make the next TBPR update a bit earlier.

As a follow up to my previous post on SEO and Human nature, we look at an example of the beginning of a SEO myth.

It all starts in an Internet Marketing Forum ……

Strong Minded SEO:
Google prefer’s green sites!!!! I recently changed my site design and my SERPs dropped drastically. The only thing I changed was the background colour from green to black. Whats more… after seeing the drop I changed it back to Green and boom .. I am back on the first page.

Member A:
Could it be something else that affected your SERPs?

Member B:
Actually, the same happened on my site when I changed the background to light green.

Member C(This one has 5 posts):
Yes, Google prefers light green however a darker shade is ok. You run the risk of getting thrown in the sandbox if you go for the exact optimal of green.

Experienced Poster:
Background colour has nothing to do with SERPs.

Strong Minded SEO:
It does, it a proven fact

Member C:
Wow thx .. cool, I didnt know that. Can I ask if you can give me the exact shade of green?

Experienced Poster:
Background colour has nothing to do with SERPs.

Member D:
Look experienced poster, its been proven if you dont have anything to contribute then shut up.

At this point the experienced poster gives up whilst the findings of this thread appears in other forums and even makes its way to some SEO blogs.

A quick post referencing a few comments from Adam lasnik of Google on Webmasterworld.

Our site evaluations rarely depend upon just one black/white signal… but rather groups of many, many signals.

A page with a zillion links is probably more likely, on average, to be the sort of page which isn’t very user-friendly. Other signals of such a page might make it look even more spammy, or perhaps less spammy.

On the whole, though, I’d definitely shy away from having an excessive number of links on a page.

As what Google has been saying all along, its usually not just one factor that messes things up for you. Stay away from the dark side and you will feel the love is the general message.

Another post from him to highlight this

I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about “PR leakage.” It’s more important to make sure that you aren’t engaging in link schemes designed to manipulate your site’s ranking.

Many top-quality sites feature quite a few (quality) outgoing links, and are appreciated for that by visitors.

personally, I feel that its only natural that Google doesnt look to a single factor due to the wide range of sites on the internet. This also explains the mixed messages that we get regarding SEO.

However, you should definetaly try not to stray too far with one of the no-nos … i.e. - Dont pass the ‘maybe buffer’ into the ‘Sure looks dodgy’ territory.

The hot hot topic around the webmaster forums these few days is undoubtedly regarding the Google Page Rank update. For the newcomers to the GOI(Google Optimisation Industry), A Page Rank Update is what we term an export of a page’s Page Rank to the Google Toolbar - This happens once every 3 months or there abouts.

There is a thread on Digitalpoint that I found funny in a twisted sense of humor kinda way. As is the norm with PR updates, a respected DP member posted that they have found pages that seem to have been updated. This was followed by some further evidence submitted by other members on newly found updated pages.

What I found funny was the number of members that downright refused to believe that an update had started because they did not see it on their sites. To be honest, the responses this time was a bit more civilised to previous updates.

Anyways, the point of this post is not to moan about PR updates or even to calrify whether a PR update has started or not, but rather my observation on some webmasters refusal to accept good solid advice because they have not experienced the same. Whilst I appreciate that alot of advice from webmaster forums are from people that could do with advice themselves but when a respected member of the community gives you advice, its wise to take note.

This is the reason I feel of why there are so many SEO myths around our industry. There are so many voices of self acclaimed experts that sometimes, its hard to pick out the facts from the opinions. If someone asked me to give them the best SEO tip, I would tell them to read certain SEO blogs and maybe the replies of certain community saints like tedster on Webmaster World.

You can only give opinions based on your knowledge and experience so its inevitable that the competitive SEO industry will be filled with so much smoke. As they say, if you cant stop them .. err .. just ignore them.

Interesting post by Matt which I missed a few days ago about Hidden Links. It goes on a bit discussing what a hidden link is which is pretty obvious but doesnt really mention anything on how and if Google penalises it. Although information can be gathered on how Google determines what a hidden link is if they do penalise them.

As for Paid links, this little extract is interesting

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Basically Google expects you to make paid links non spiderable … hmm .. I don’t think that this will go down well with the webmaster community at all. In fact most of the webmasters consider the latest flurry of No Paid Links messages from Google as scare tactics. Personally, I think that Google will do something soon to make sure that the message is heard, how drastic the move will be is the question.