There was an interesting article written by Brandt Dainow entitled How accurate is Google Adwords? The article looks at the revenue made by Google with its Adwords CPC engine, accuracy of clickthroughs and click fraud. Definately worth a read.
advertising cpc googleUnlike Steven Colbert who is well known for his truthiness, I just spotted a small Google fib. I was just playing around with Google Sitemaps and noticed a link saying “How can I improve my site’s ranking?”. I’ll bite.
On the resulting page contains the line “We don’t manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any site in our search results.” That is interesting because I would call removing a site from its search results a pretty good example of manipulating its ranking (such as what happened with webposition.com and many other documented instances).
Hopefully this site doesn’t not not get “manipulated” for its cheekiness. More on Google Sitemaps later.
google serpThis was posted the other day to Google’s webmaster blog regarding how googlebot spiders web sites and the use of robots.txt files:
If my site is down for maintenance, how can I tell Googlebot to come back later rather than to index the “down for maintenance” page?
You should configure your server to return a status of 503 (network unavailable) rather than 200 (successful). That lets Googlebot know to try the pages again later.
What should I do if Googlebot is crawling my site too much?
You can contact us — we’ll work with you to make sure we don’t overwhelm your server’s bandwidth. We’re experimenting with a feature in our webmaster tools for you to provide input on your crawl rate, and have gotten great feedback so far, so we hope to offer it to everyone soon.
Is it better to use the meta robots tag or a robots.txt file?
Googlebot obeys either, but meta tags apply to single pages only. If you have a number of pages you want to exclude from crawling, you can structure your site in such a way that you can easily use a robots.txt file to block those pages (for instance, put the pages into a single directory).
If my robots.txt file contains a directive for all bots as well as a specific directive for Googlebot, how does Googlebot interpret the line addressed to all bots?
If your robots.txt file contains a generic or weak directive plus a directive specifically for Googlebot, Googlebot obeys the lines specifically directed at it.
For instance, for this robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Googlebot will crawl everything in the site other than pages in the cgi-bin directory.
For this robots.txt file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Googlebot won’t crawl any pages of the site.
google googlebotYahoo! is in the process of updating to a new search engine index or have just finished. This means there will be some changes in ranking of where your web site shows up in Yahoo’s SERP. It will also affect what web sites are in Yahoo’s index. So start checking the ranking of your web site for desired keyphrases in Yahoo!
yahooWhen building your pages, avoid embedding CSS style and javascript in your web pages. Instead, put the CSS and Javascript in an external file.
The reason why you should do this is because search engines tend to give more weight to content at the top of the page than to text that appears further down on a page. By removing CSS or javascript content and putting it into an external file, you are effectively moving your content to more prominent placement.
SEO seo tipIf you don’t want Google or other search engines to count outbound links, use the nofollow tag in the html of your link. Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog:
From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
SEO seo tipCalgary based Cambrian House performs publicity stunt by delivering 1000 pizzas to Google’s headquarters. Read their press release or watch the video.
googleA lot of webmasters use Yahoo! Search to get page and inlink data about their site, using ’site:’, ‘link:’, ‘linkdomain:’ queries. Beginning a few days ago, Yahoo is redirecting all queries of this nature to the Site Explorer results pages, so that you can benefit from this tool’s additional features.
To reiterate, the following types of queries will be redirected:
All other queries, such as the ones below, will not be redirected:
Google SOAP Search API (beta) has serious problems with accuracy. If you compare the results returned from the API to results from manually searching on Google, they are rarely the same. The is a serious problem.
It is against the Google terms of service to scrape the search engine results to obtain keyword positions for your web site. Unfortunately, this is the only accurate method of obtaining this information. Scraping search engine results takes up precious server bandwidth and resources that from Google’s perspective they want to be used for actual surfers searching for web pages and not for your web site analysis that earns them zero advertising revenue.
Bottom line is that SEO firms and many others use web page scraping as it is the only method of getting an accurate picture of whats happening on Google. Until Google fixes their API, expect this to continue.
api googleI recently came across a web site that I remembered from way back in the day (in Internet years one year equals one month) that used to sell a html editor called Coffee Cup. Anyways, they have some free web site templates that could be a good starting point for designing a web site, especially for those aspiring or uninspired designers. You must register to dowload the templates but it was relatively painless.
web designWhen you hire an SEO company to optimize your web site and help improve your rankings, choose one that you have good communication with and that will explain to you exactly what steps they are taking to optimize your site.
There are a couple key reasons for this. First of all, it makes business sense. You should know what your hard earned dollars are being spent on. All too often, search engine optimization firms operate as a “black magic” entity charming snakes in a backroom to get your web site a higher search engine ranking. In actuality, the only optimization they have ever done is submit your site to Yahoo and the occasional web site change. Maybe the money spent doesn’t have as much value anymore when you know the specifics of what they have done.
The most critical reason is that you are ultimately responsible for any illicit practices that your SEO firm uses. If they use keyword stuffing or cloaking (more on these later) and your web site gets removed from Google, ultimately its your business that suffers. Imagine the scenario where traffic completely disapears from one of the major search engines; this has the potential to destroy your business. An example of this was with Traffic-Power.com who was de-listed from Google (and most if not all of their SEO clients).
Search engine optimization firms play an important role but you should be wary of their practices. Some operate on the up and up, some use black hat methods. Always know what your SEO firm is doing at all times and make them provide you with a synopsis of any optimization they do.
conduct SEO seo tipI no longer recommend webmasters to run link exchange programs as the benefit doesn’t outweigh the time and effort to find quality link partners, the effort required to maintain the links, and the potential negative effects of linking to web sites for the wrong reasons. The best way to get quality links to your web site is the old fashion, tried and true methods. Unfortunately, this makes them the most difficult. But like the older generations always say, hard work pays off.
- Have quality content on your web site. If there is something there worth linking, web sites will link to it.
- Give and you will receive. Link to other web sites related to your web site’s topic that you think would be beneficial to your users. Not only do quality outbound links related to your web sites topic have a positive, upwards effect on your serp, but assuming your web site meets the first qualification, webmasters may even link back.
link popularity SEM SEO
I stumbled upon an interesting article that examines how users read web pages. Basically it summarizes that “eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.”
The implications are basically what most people already know: most people read very little of your textual content and the top text is critical. The screenshot on the right is an interesting look at how the majority of people read a google search engine results page.
web designMetaTraffic is a web analytics software package written in ASP (active server pages). It installs in minutes and gives you real time statistics of visitor traffic at your web site.
They have a lite version which is free to use if you have a non-commercial web site (a 30 day trial for commercial entities) and a pro version you can buy starting at $50 for a single web site license.
softwareWhen desiging your web site, try and keep the directory structure as simply and high level as possible. Do not embed your content deep in a folder structure more than a couple nested folders. If possible and you have a simple site, try and keep all your web pages in the root directory.
This is because Google prioritizes content based on folder level. All other things being equal, a web page in the root of your web site is seen as more important as a web page nested a folder or more deep.
seo tip urlFree Monitor is a free search engine keyword analyzer from Clever Stat. The software will check keyphrases for you and tell you the position of your web site for those keywords in Google. The software requires that you register for Google API which gives you with an API key to perform up to 1000 queries per day for free.
Just like in real life with people, first impressions mean a lot to Google. If you are launching a new web site, make it count.
Try and get a few quality links to your web site from other established, content related web sites. Make sure you have a well organized, search engine friendly web site with atleast 5 pages of optimized and related content. Finally, make sure your domain name is registered for a term of atleast a few years. All of these factors combined will contribute to a decent starting page rank and could avoid the dreaded Google sandbox.
Yes, I know. Pagerank is not as an important factor as it used to be but it’s still a solid indicator from Google as to the relevance and importance of your web site. Its a lot easier to obtain a higher pagerank down the road when you start off at a 5 or better right off the bat.
In my travels, I stumbled across a neat site with a bunch of seo web tools. The site owner apparantly wrote the tools as part of his “diploma thesis”. All of the tools are free to use and at this point do not contain any advertising, popups or anything of a spammy nature. Tool include:
And a whole lot more. In fact, there are about 15 web tools in all. Definately worth checking out.
There is no reason why every single site shouldn’t be in dmoz. After all its free. Yes, it does take some patience and time to get category editors to list your web site and if your site is spammy in nature, chances are they won’t list it (and rightfully so).
The effort of listing your site can help you build quality inbound links. Not only that but one link at dmoz is worth atleast two because Google Directory also uses the content for its own dmoz based directory. So take the time and effort and make sure you are in dmoz. You can also find local directories that will provide back links to your web site such as Find Here.
One seo tip that is often overlooked is domain name registration length. Google looks to see how long a domain name is registered and will give you a higher pagerank because of it. If you are committed to your web site and Internet presence then there is no reason why you can’t justify registering your domain name for 5 or 10 years. Not only will this give you a boost in Google but it will also secure your web identity for years to come and avoid having to renew your domain year after year.
domain google seo tipThe Yahoo blog reported that they have launched the a new version of slurp, their search engine spider that crawls and indexes web sites.
We launched a new Yahoo! Search Crawler, Yahoo! Slurp earlier this week. In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.?
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