Posts Tagged ‘seo’
September 11th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
(But a blog can do good things for your website.)
Anyone who can type can become a blogger. There are free sites (like Blogger.com) which make it possible to set up your own blog, and host it without having to buy a domain name or pay for a hosting account. In fact, homeless people even use blogs to improve their situations and communicate with the outside world. If you do have a website of your own, adding a blog has definite advantages in the eyes of the search engines, and you can leverage your blog into a traffic generator, customer service portal, and claim to fame, all at the same time.
For example, the aforementioned Blogger.com is owned by Google, and allows people to post updates onto a Blogger profile or directly onto their own sites. Every time a new post is published, Blogger will FTP (file transfer) the new posting onto your own hosting account, in a folder that is separate from the nuts and bolts of your website. You can alter the template of you blog so it has the same look and feel as the rest of your site, and only a savvy reader will know that you’re using Blogger. We use it for our own blog, it’s free, and we have seen our blog entries end up in Google within a few minutes of publication. Wordpress is also a very popular blog application, and has quite a few bells and whistles of its own.
What are the advantages to having a blog? From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint, blogs are a fast way to add fresh content to your site. Each blog entry ends up on its own page, and you don’t have to pay a webmaster (or rewrite your site code) every time you make a new post. If you have new information that may be of interest to the general public, you can post a blog entry with text and/or pictures and then send the blog link to people in your network. You can even serve up contextual ads on your blog (through channels like Google Adsense) so you have the potential to make money through blogging. As a disclaimer, blogging for money should not be considered a money making career path, but there are quite a few people who do sponsored reviews for a few dollars per post.
There are plenty of business and personal advantages to blogging, but it does take a bit of time and effort. If you’re considering the blogging route, you should be aware that there are quite a few bloggers out there, given that the only barriers to entry in the blogging world might be a library card or the ability to borrow some time on a computer. Blogs become more popular when they are updated frequently with interesting topics. A little promotional work is also in order, so you will want to start by drawing attention to your blog, either by sending a link to friends and family, or to other sources if you don’t want your friends and family to know what you’re up to. If you’re a business, you can send blog links to your vendors, add blog links to your Twitter Posts and Facebook updates, or send out emails to customers. Once you get the ball rolling, you can even ask your readers to suggest topics, or go into depth on certain issues. Blogs are definitely a great channel for people who want to bring attention to themselves and their websites, and worth the small amount of time it takes to set one up.
Posted by Patrick Hare, Web.com Search Agency
Tags: blogging, seo
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September 10th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
In the past, having an online forum was a great way to get SEO traffic to your site. Search engines would index new forum entries as their own pages, and a lively debate between contributors would generate good online content with lots of potential long-tail keyword traffic. Forums regarding common questions and problems in a particular field often created their own SEO niche, so a person seeking information on an arcane topic could see several different posts in the top 10 Google results.
Today, there are still some forums that get good placement, and a few of these are even relevant to the world of search engine optimization. A search phrase like “google 30 penalty” will bring up the WebMasterWorld forum among the search results, with some entries from October of 2006. Several other forums are also visible in the search results, from the same time period, so a person could reasonably assume that this topic is a little dated.
If you dig deep enough into just about any topic, you can usually find search engine results for forum entries that go back into the mid-1990s. Aside from seeing the democratic nature of the internet at work, you can also chart the various abuses and anachronisms that have made forums less popular today. On the abuse side, you can see a lot of people posting link spam into forums, and there are even a few offshore SEO outfits that still make money by adding your link to their footer and posting comments into forums of all kinds. Every link that gets added contributes to the forum’s lack of relevancy. On the anachronistic side, forums haven’t had much of a makeover since they were first rendered into HTML. Modern site design practices usually tend toward the “call to action” model, where people expect to see their question answered in eight seconds or less. This may be why Yahoo Answers has broken into the SERPs, since people can choose the best answer for their question after a period of time.
Part of the feasibility question involving forums has to do with moderators. Being a forum moderator can be a full time job, especially if you allow anonymous posting. Automated and semi-automatic (automated post, human CAPCHA entry) postings can destroy a forum’s credibility with off topic posts and links to bad sites. Poor moderation can lead to a loss of visitors, as well as less search engine credibility, since links to casinos don’t usually fit a DIY Home Improvement forum. Even a self-policed forum where abuse is reported by members can have its issues, because negative postings can lead to attention from attorneys. Although the Communications Decency Act protects site owners from liability for third party postings, this will not stop lawyers from trying to get the posts removed.
Should you add an internet forum to your site to get search engine traffic? The answer to this question is going to be based on the type of traffic you expect to get, and how you plan to monetize it. If you can ensure that you have a usable header on every forum page, which makes it easy to turn visitors into customers, then a forum may still be a good way of attracting sales. However, you will still need to find people who are eager to post questions and answers about various topics. Over the past few years, some of our clients have seen their forum traffic dry up. When a posted question does not get any answers after a period of time, then the interested party will go elsewhere for a response. Similarly, if your volunteer gurus get tired of answering questions, or grow weary of the debate and abuse found on many threads, they might choose to spend their time elsewhere. When it comes to forums, a critical mass of people is going to have to invest time and energy in responding to questions and policing the pages for spam, so you should definitely be cognizant of the challenge.
For most people building a new website, a forum is not part of the site design plan. At Web.com Search Agency, we haven’t given much online forum optimization advice in some time, because people just haven’t been asking for it. In many cases blogs have supplanted the need for forum content, because a blog topic can cover a lot of ground previously covered by discussions. Most blogs still allow for comments and responses, so the art of web communication is not totally lost. For people who have older sites, with forums in place, unplugging a forum with several thousand pages could represent a genuine SEO concern, since those postings may have gotten links from outside sources, and they might get some pretty good traffic. By delving into Analytics and Webmaster Tools, you can discover the overall value of the forums before taking any drastic measures.
In the final analysis, internet forums may have served their purpose and been supplanted by more social outlets. People can post a question to Twitter and get a quick response. Search engines have become better at presenting relevant information, so forums are not the first source for getting information. Site and software developers may have corrected many of the problems people were trying to solve, or the forums may have even become successful to the extent that most important questions have already been answered. There will always be search categories where forum posts take up the bulk of the SERPs, but most savvy optimizers will create a page for any search term that gets an appreciable amount of keyword traffic. Over the coming years, it will be interesting to see whether online forums enjoy a technological renaissance or fade into obscurity.
Tags: forums, seo
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September 9th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
One of the reasons that an SEO expert should know more about real estate optimization and marketing is that almost every real estate agent has a website. In the same way that realtors have business cards with their picture on them, they have an online presence for people who may want to look at several home choices and schedule a walkthrough. Like many SEO customers, Real Estate agents need a quick education on what to expect in the optimization process. Some of the top realtors in any town will also pick up on the fact that one or two commissions can pay for a fair amount of website optimization, and a well optimized site can generate plenty of leads from buyers and sellers.
As a group, realtors can also use guidance on the need for certain SEO changes to their sites, since they may have already bought a pre-packaged site. There are only a few website design companies out there who specialize in MLS (Multiple Listing Search, a dynamic feature showing all available homes in an area) functionality, so as a rule, realtor websites can all look very similar. This similarity often extends to the content on the site itself, and in some cases the only original content on a real estate website will be the realtor’s name, address, phone number, and the neighborhoods served by the agent.
Anyone who’s read Dale Carnegie will know that the fastest way to gaining shared understanding with people is to explain things in terms that they can understand. People in SEO tend to drop a lot of jargon about keyword density, H tags, anchor strength, and site trust, all of which are concepts that could take several hours of training to truly grasp. This is would be similar to an agent talking about comps, escrow, and title searches before asking customers about what they’d like in a home. Relating the world of SEO to the world of real estate can make it easier to move ahead with vital site changes, and make your client, who is in this case a realtor, a partner in your success.
How do you relate SEO concepts to realtors? If you think about it, SEO isn’t all that different from real estate. Agents in commercial and residential real estate sell the location and the structure on top of it. In this case, the location is the domain name, and the structure is the website. The further you go toward the top of the search engine results, the more valuable the real estate. Likewise, a well built site at the top of the SERPs is akin to a luxury home in Beverly Hills. Naturally, real world locations are a bit more permanent, but SEO companies have an opportunity to show agents that the best spots are worth the money.
Using real estate concepts in SEO doesn’t stop with the website. Links to the site, and their quality, can be explained in these terms as well. In the SEO world, we talk about linking to “bad neigborhoods.” Likewise, an endorsement from a gated community (like a .gov site link) is worth more than 200 from the studio apartment complex downtown (like directories that give links to anyone, including casinos and adult sites.) The importance of page title writing can be likened to summarizing a home’s best features first. It isn’t that much of a stretch to say that your page title should be crafted in the same way that you’d place a classified ad for a home. If you really want to belabor the metaphor, you could even say that things like content, internal linking, and alt tags are analogous to zoning or HOA regulations. If you’re clear on how SEO elements relate to each other, the astute agent should get the impression that (just like the sales process) an incomplete SEO job isn’t going to end up generating commissions.
Uniqueness is another site aspect that can be related to realtors, but some caution should be advised. In the same way that many homebuyers are satisfied with “vanilla” homes in developments with only 3 choices of exterior paint color, real estate agents may want to have a site with the exact same features of any other website. From an SEO standpoint, however, there should be at least one unique feature that is going to keep people coming back to the site. This may be an MLS search that doesn’t ask for a signup, a mortgage/ payment calculator, or a virtual tour of the neighborhood. Most sites talk about schools and community centered-events, but a realtor who gets more in-depth and interactive may get multiple visits from shoppers who are seeking to eventually make a buy. An interesting feature like up-to-date pricing or recent sales figures may get realtors links from media outlets, blogs, and even other agents.
The value proposition of real estate SEO cannot be underestimated, and some of today’s most successful agents already know this. Even though there are more realty websites on the internet than almost any other small business model, the vast majority of these sites contain minimal SEO value, either because of unoriginal content, poor keyword selection, no link popularity, bad design elements (like frames), or Flash elements that can’t be crawled. For this reason, there playing field for many online real estate markets is surprisingly level, and a moderate amount of search engine friendly redesign plus link building can create a definite impact.
Relating SEO to client business models can be helpful for a variety of reasons. Working in a client’s own vernacular gives you an ability to relate to the client, and you will save time if you can turn SEO concepts into relevant ideas in the customer’s mind. Obviously, you don’t want to oversimplify things too much, but there is a clear advantage for bringing search engine concepts into the mindset of your clients. Even highly competitive salespeople have a network of colleagues and competitors with whom they share information, and one comfortable SEO client in real estate can literally create dozens of leads from people in the same geographical area. Since many agents prefer to stick to certain neighborhoods or homes within driving distance of their offices, a good SEO company can work with several local agents without excessive overlapping. Some real estate brokers may even want all of their agents to follow a solid SEO strategy, since this will mean that the agency itself will have more visibility in the search engines, even though it is spread among several different sites. In all of these cases, an agent who can relate to SEO concepts is going to be more comfortable with the type of changes necessary for success, and the cost of generating quality real estate client leads.
Tags: real estate seo, seo, seo for real estate agents
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August 17th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
One of the ways to keep track of how Google is viewing your site is to use some of the more esoteric commands available to searchers. These commands make it possible to filter information in the Google index, and get a picture of how Google considers the relationship between your backlinks, metatags, and on-page content. One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is to use these universally-available commands to diagnose common problems.
Here are some commands and ways we use them to check site issues:
- Site: This command shows all the pages that Google has found for your site. It should always be followed by your website in the format of site:example.com. If you have a lot of subdomains and only want to see the main site, you might try site:www.example.com. This command can be combined with other keywords, which lets you find specific pages, so the format “site:www.example.com dry dog food” would show you all pages on example.com about dry dog food. This tool is especially useful if you are trying to discover keyword blurring (or cannibalization) issues, because you can check to see if a single site is referencing the same topic on multiple pages.
- Allinanchor: Ostensibly, the function of this command is to tell you which sites are getting specific anchor texts (which are linked keywords) from other sites and web pages. For instance, if you search on “allinanchor:running shoes” you should be seeing a Google’s preferred order of sites that are getting links for that term. In the world of Google, rankings are heavily weighted on link popularity, and in most cases your site’s result for a given keyword should appear in the vicinity of the allinanchor ranking. If you are significantly below your allinanchor, your site’s architecture or content may not be matching up with its links. If you are significantly ahead of your allinanchor score, then you may be up against competitors who don’t do a good job with SEO.
- Allintitle: This command tells you how many pages online have a particular set of words in their titles. This can be useful for seeing how other site titles are configured. Since the title of a webpage is the primary way of defining page content, you can find relevant topics more easily with allintitle. A great way to combine two functions, and sniff out keyword blurring, is to use this in conjunction with the site: command so you would type in “allintitle:dog food bowls site:example.com” so you can see how many pages on the site have titles about the same topic. Excessive title repetition can drag down search engine rankings, so this is one way to get a quick list of the pages you should modify.
- Allintext: Want to find pages which mention a topic in their body text? This command ignores other considerations like anchors and titles and goes to the on-page content. Once again, too many similar pages can water down the focus on an important page. When in doubt, focus your energies on the page that gets the best allinanchor score, or has the most topical links pointing at it.
- Allinurl: This command searches out URLs (or domain names) which contain a certain word or phrase. Search engines give some preference to domain names that contain keyword matches. You could use this command to find sites that you may want to buy. You can also see if other sites are adding descriptive phrases to their own URL structures, so you might see example.com/dog-food-bowls/red.html. Once again, this is a good way to check your own site structure for duplicates, especially if you have a site with thousands of pages.
- Cache: If you don’t know whether or not your site is cached, and you don’t have the Google toolbar, you can simply type in cache: followed by your website. You can even do this for specific pages. The advantage of this command is that Google will tell you the last time it cached your page, assuming that it has been cached. To see what Google has read on the page, click the link that says “Cached Text” and you can see what words on your site that Google has found. As always, it may take a few days for Google to apply cached text to its index, so your result in the Google index may show an older title or description.
- Related: The related command is important because it can tell you which sites Google thinks are related to your own. In some cases, you may find that your site is listed among sites that are not relevant to yours in any way. This can happen if you’ve gotten links from questionable sources. This condition is known to some as bad co-citation, which means that you are associated with low quality sites by means of their links to you. Ideally, you want your list of related sites to contain your top competitors, or sites which are similar to your own. The solution? Get quality links from relevant sites, become a better a topic leader in your field, and make sure the content on your site is more relevant. You can even link out to your competitors in a way that does not directly pass high-value anchor text for a term you want to be found on.
- Linkdomain: This command only works in Yahoo, and shows how many links that a site has. Google (through the link: command) only shows a few links, so Yahoo has a clear advantage on this front. A command like this is very useful if you want to see how many links your competitors are getting, and you can download the first 1000 links to a spreadsheet. You can also use the link: command in Yahoo, but it only shows links to a specific page. If you exclude the domain itself (by way of the format “linkdomain:example.com –example.com) then you can see links pointing at the site, but not on the site itself. There are also dropdowns in Yahoo Site Explorer that will do this for you.
Several other Google commands not mentioned here can be found at Googleguide.com. There are many commands which make it easier for searchers to find what they are looking for, including weather forecasts, movie showtimes, phone book listings, and stock prices. In the world of search engine optimization, the above commands can help you get competitive intelligence about your online rivals, see if there are weak ranking factors on your own site, and let you know how many of your pages are visible to the search engines. If you’re still in need of better rankings, a professional organization like Web.com Search Agency can assist you in improving your site, obtaining high quality links, and applying proven marketing strategies that improve visitor traffic and sales.
Tags: search engine commands, search engine optimization, seo
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August 11th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
For the first time in its history, Google is letting users try a beta test of its latest algorithm update, which is known as “Google Caffeine.” The name is meant to imply that the search results are faster, but it may also be insinuating that is moving closer to real-time search capabilities so it can more rapidly show results for news events as they happen.
To test Google’s new results, there is a link to Google’s “Sandbox” location which otherwise looks like the standard search interface. The difference for many people will be the relevance of the results that come up. In some cases over the past day, we have seen low quality sites move into positions normally occupied by trusted websites. Google actually allows people to critique these results, so evidently they are adding a human component to their algorithm. If you want to let Google know about results on a particular phrase, look near the bottom of the results page for the link that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.”
What’s different about Google Caffeine update? This is a tough question, since the update is being beta tested, so what you see on the test site may not be there when Caffeine goes live. It looks like on-page keywords are getting a bigger response, and several exact URL matches appear to have higher positions. Google may be going for more precision, but it would appear that a complete update may push aside several results currently visible in the test version.
The other side of the update may be problematic for webmasters who are doing SEO for newsworthy topics. Google appears to be giving faster placement to news stories on some topics, so the best optimized site could find itself pushed back by relevant news events in the same keyword field. In this sense, breaking news (which can create a lot of good traffic) is going to get a priority over older content. There is some thought that Google is giving more preference to “freshness” with its real-time approach, but it will take a few weeks of observation to see if this is really true.
How should you prepare for Google Caffeine? First, don’t panic. As long as you are building a good user experience for your customers, and a resource for the general public, then you are more likely to be found. If Google is going to be rewarding keyword content, then you should consider expanding your site to the point that you cover your service or product’s features without going overboard. The current best practices in SEO and link building appear to be working just fine on the test site. As always, Google is trying to stay current by providing the best possible search results for customers, so it is incumbent upon webmasters to have sites that are the best possible match. This is why search optimization agencies like Web.com Search Agency and its industry colleagues make sure that basic SEO principles are in place, allowing for flexibility and quick recovery no matter what algorithm adjustments are made by search engines.
Tags: google caffeine, google update, seo
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August 3rd, 2009 by Patrick Hare
As many people already know, search engine optimization usually doesn’t have one single factor that instantly fixes search engine rankings. Instead, there are a series of small items, both on and off-page, that contribute to the “picture” that a search engine has in its electronic brain. When it comes to pictures, search engines still aren’t good at image recognition, so they need help with classifiers known in HTML code as “alt text” or “alt tags.”
Properly written alt tags still have a place in SEO best practices. While many search engine professionals have ignored them in favor of bigger factors, they can still be the fractional difference that puts your site ahead of your competitor’s. Fractions count in the world of SEO, so here are some tips regarding how alt tags should be treated.
- Don’t stuff your alt tags. In the past, people used to hide content in image alt tags, so you could hover over a picture and get a paragraph or an extended list of keywords separated by commas. The alt text should describe the image, or simply parrot any words that are embedded in it.
- If your site was built a few years ago, or you had work done on it in the past, you should check all of your alt tags to ensure that they aren’t spammy or inaccurate.
- Alt tag content should be original. If you have multiple tags with the same content, it should be changed, or perhaps deleted from less important images.
- If your navigation uses images instead of text, there should be alt tags matching each image. Ideally, you may want to consider using text for navigation in the future.
- Not every image needs alt text, especially if you use graphical elements to build a page. You might confuse the search engine if you have tags like “rounded upper right corner” and “tracking pixel.”
- Whenever possible, don’t exclude your images directory in the robots.txt file. The alt tag describes the image, and services like Google Image Search use this information to put you in results that may be seen in various places, including the top of a general search query. There are people who make quite a bit of money by having products listed in image search.
- If the image is of a product, include the brand name and part number in the alt tag.
- Alt text does not have to be as complex as Wikipedia makes it, but it should still adequately describe the image, using a selection of relevant keywords.
- Use proper punctuation and sentence structure for longer tags. Sales messages (“Buy now and receive FREE SHIPPING”) usually are not recommended in alt text. Most people won’t see it, and search engines may downgrade your page for being spammy.
- If your image is linked, then the alt text of the image serves as a version of anchor text, which defines the link. For instance, your company logo may link back to the homepage, so your alt text should be relevant to your home page keywords. Note that if you have an alt tag that is relevant to your current page, and are linking the image somewhere else, you may be diminishing your page’s relevance. In this case the alt tag should be rewritten to match the target page’s topic.
Alternative text for images goes back to the principle of usability, since pages would often load very slowly, so the alt text would tell you what you were about to see. It is still helpful for visually impaired people who want to use the internet, and should not be omitted for any image that is important to your site. As with any content, consideration should be given to how the keywords in the tags blend with the rest of the work on the page, so you don’t end up with high keyword density or keyword blurring.
As we stated above, alt text may not be the “smoking gun” that solves your SEO dilemma, but it should not be neglected. Anything that helps a search engine spider understand your site and its content is going to be an effective part of your SEO strategy. As search engine algorithms get more complex, they may indeed be able to decipher the context of your images, and a picture that matches its description is going to have an advantage over one that does not.
Tags: alt tags, alt text, search engine optimization, seo
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July 30th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Many of our customers have been contacting us today regarding the news of Yahoo and Microsoft’s search deal. From a Search Engine Optimization standpoint, here are the main takeaways:
- The “search merger” is going to take some time, and involve some technology integration, so people should follow web design and optimization best practices in the meantime. All search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) follow the same general set of rules.
- Bing will be handling advertising and search results. Therefore, the MSN Adcenter platform will likely be the default way of buying PPC ads.
- Bing prefers fresh content and a slightly higher keyword density, so people who want to skew toward Bing results may consider these factors. Normally we try to keep keyword density in line with Google standards.
- As we mentioned in our previous post, items like Yahoo paid inclusion are still up in the air.
- The deal has to be approved (or scrutinized) by regulators, so it may be altered in one way or another.
In the meantime, we are advising all of our SEO customers to continue with their current site optimization processes, which are standard for all search algorithm types. Part of the search deal involves technology sharing, so hopefully the finished search product will have the best aspects of Yahoo and MSN/Bing’s engines.
Tags: pay per click, seo, yahoo msn deal
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July 28th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
(Special note: if your site has been filtered or penalized, we would recommend professional SEO consulting to discover all of the underlying causes.)
In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), there are 2 definitions for the sanctions that can be placed on your site by a search engine. The first is a penalty, and the second is a filter. Each one has different causes and remedies, but if you’ve dropped out of the first few pages of results then there are SEO issues that need to be addressed.
What is a penalty?
Generally speaking, a penalty is one of the worst sanctions you can get from a search engine. It can involve losing all of your page rank and essentially having your site “de-listed” from the search results. Penalties are caused by violations of search engine guidelines including cloaking, keyword stuffing, spamming, and using prohibited or “black hat” optimization methods. A penalty is more difficult to fix than simple filtering.
What is a filter?
A filter is considered any factor applied by the search engine that moves your actual ranking below the position it should occupy. For instance, if you normally had a #1 ranking but a search engine wanted to penalize you for over optimization, you could end up in the #30, #95, or #950 position on the search engine. Normally when the filtering factor is changed or removed, your search engine ranking will go back to its proper position within a few weeks.
When a site or page is filtered, you are still getting indexed and cached by the search engine.
What Causes Filters to Get Applied by Search Engines?
- Duplicate Content – Pages on your site, another site owned by you, or a competitor’s site have substantially similar or identical content. Even if your site had the original content, a search engine may consider it to be duplicated if it was found on another website first.
- Over Optimization – Obvious optimization tactics can trip up a search engine filter, sometimes even unintentionally. If you have too many keywords, too many links pointing to a page with the same anchor text, too many instances where site content elements (Title tag, Header text, and regular text) match up with anchor text, or keyword stuffed internal site linking, then you can be tripping up an over optimization filter.
- New Site – Also known as a “sandbox” filter, new sites are generally filtered by search engines. This filter has been put in place to keep people from spamming search engines with multiple new URLs containing questionable content. Essentially, your site will need to earn the trust of the search engine, and time is a factor in trust. In some cases a new site can avoid this type of filtering, but usually the factors involved are beyond even advanced optimization.
What kinds of filters can get applied to my site?
There are 3 Major Filter Types:
- Keyword filters – If you find yourself filtered for only a few key phrases, and especially the ones for which you are using heavy anchor text linking practices, then a keyword filter may be to blame.
- Site wide filters – If your whole site has been impacted, than there is a factor that is causing your whole site to lose rankings. If your site is new, it is likely filtered.
- Link filtering – Links to your site may have lost popularity. Search engines continually reevaluate all sites on the internet, and link popularity involves hundreds of factors. If a powerful site linking to yours lost its trust for any reason, the link to your site would lose its value and you would see a rankings drop. Therefore, it is always best to diversify your inbound link popularity.
What are the different levels of filtering?
Some of the observed filter types include a “minus 30” filter that moves your ranking back by 3 pages, or 30 places, and a “minus 950” filter (also called the “950 penalty) which places you back 950 spots, or on the 95th page of search results. There also appear to be “custom” filters which may be based on a variety of factors but will cause your rankings to go below where you would expect them.
Where should I expect to see my ranking if I am not filtered?
For a well optimized site, the test in Google would be to type in allinanchor: with your top search phrase. Therefore, if your phrase was “cat food” and you typed “allinanchor:cat food” into Google, you should find your site ranked based on link popularity for that term. If your normal rankings for “cat food” fall significantly below that spot, you are either filtered or your on-page optimization is not acceptable.
How do I check for a penalty?
To check for a penalty, search for your URL, or do a site: command for the site. If you can’t find your site, and it was there before, you may be getting penalized. Make sure to check for other non-penalty factors such as robots exclusions or crawl failures.
- Is the site removed completely from the index?
- Does the site rank for its own URL?
- Does Google Webmaster Tools indicate a quality issue?
How do I check for a filter?
Do an allinanchor search. Using Google, type allinanchor: followed by your preferred keyword phrase. If you are looking for multiple phrases, the search has to be repeated for each phrase. If you site shows up in a substantially higher place for allinanchor: then it may be filtered.
How to fix a penalty:
- Using Google webmaster tools, check to see if you have any notices from Google indicating spamming, bad links, hidden text passing viruses, etc.
- Remove any hidden text, hidden content, cloaking, duplicate content, viruses, or spyware from your site.
- Check the latest version of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
- File a reinclusion request. This can be done through Google Webmaster tools. Alternatively, you can wait up to a year for the penalty to be lifted.
How to Fix a Filter:
- Identify the cause of the filtering.
- Make the necessary changes using SEO best practices.
- Wait for the search engine to recache the site and any site from which a bad link was pointing to yours.
- Wait for reindexing. There is a delay between recaching (where a search engine spiders a site and reads all the content) and reindexing (where the cached data is applied to your rankings).
Some of the newer information to come out of search engine circles indicates that there may be a permanent probation for sites that get reincluded into the Google index. This would make sense, given that a site that is likely to have broken spamming or quality rules may do the same thing in the future. Depending on the severity of your site’s infractions, whether you committed them yourself or whether you got them from a website you purchased, it may make more sense to start from scratch. Whenever you are buying an existing website, checking for penalties and filters should be pa
rt of the due diligence in the purchasing process. Even though search engines may reset some of their ranking factors when sites change hands, a penalized site may have other factors that are impossible to remediate.
Tags: penalized site, search engine filter, search engine optimization, search engine penalties, search engine penalty, seo
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July 28th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
One of the top questions asked by our clients is “Why Can’t I find my site in DMOZ?” Also known as the “Open Directory,” DMOZ is one of the web’s oldest directories and a link from it conveys a good value in the eyes of search engines like Google. Unfortunately, the DMOZ directory is infrequently updated and some people have not seen a submission approved after years of waiting.
Several factors are at work in DMOZ listings. First, a person needs to submit the listing to the proper category. Each category has its own editor and there may be a more relevant category unknown to the submitter. If an editor gets a submission for what is perceived to be the wrong category, the submission will get forwarded to the “right” category. The submission, even though it is from another editor, ends up at the back of the queue.
Second, not all editors update their listing categories, and some editors may have a financial stake in not allowing new listings. For instance, you may be selling fishing rods and your competitor may secretly be the editor of the fishing accessories category. DMOZ tries to prevent this from happening, but there is no easy way of establishing for whom an editor may work. Furthermore, editors may not be diligent in reviewing all of the listings requests they get, or there may be a backlog of requests ahead of yours, all of which need to be reviewed by hand. Because questionable sites have been submitting themselves to DMOZ, much of this backlog could consist of “junk” submissions.
Finally, there is some indication that a resubmission request for a website actually cancels out the original submission. Therefore, a request that was 1 year in process will end up at the back of the line when a new submission request is made. Assuming that an editor is reviewing the category, the request is now at the back of the line.
With DMOZ, we have found that inclusion has become the exception and not the rule. Normally we recommend submitting only the most basic information about your site, without any superlatives or “sales oriented” language. When choosing the category, first look for any other relevant categories. One way to do this is to search for your competition on DMOZ, and see if they come up in a category that is similar to yours. In the absence of a DMOZ listing, Web.com Search Agency highly recommends other directory link building which is more immediate. Submission to the Yahoo directory is good for SEO, costs $299 per year, and even brings some physical visitors. While we believe that DMOZ listings can have a good positive impact on web rankings, the 2+ year wait for approval is beyond the SEO expectations of our clients.
Special note: some companies claim to have “guaranteed DMOZ placement” for a price. This would appear to violate DMOZ terms and conditions by giving priority in exchange for monetary compensation. If you decide to go with such a service, be sure your method of payment is waiting in escrow or can be charged back if you don’t get the results you are looking for.
Tags: dmoz, dmoz submission, search engine optimization, seo
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
July 27th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
The H1 tag has been a component of SEO for some time, and we are still finding it useful as a factor in on-page optimization. Search engines use this piece of code to better classify the topic of the entire page, and recent testing (or retesting, since it has been tested in the past) shows that the H1 is still worth including, even if it means paying for extra coding or programming.
For those of us who are unfamiliar with the H1 tag, it is a piece of HTML code that is used on the “header” of a web page, and it defines a phrase which ideally should describe page content. If you are looking at a page written in basic HTML with an H1 tag, the first thing you will notice is the remarkably large font size. Font size and style can be controlled with CSS on the page code or in a CSS file, so your H1 can conceivably be the same size and font as your other text.
Here are some more tips about dealing in H1 tags:
- Don’t match up the H1 tag and the title tag. Both tags are very important, but if they are identical you risk an over optimization filter. Similarly, your inbound link anchor texts should also not match the H1 tag precisely.
- Only use one H1 tag per page. There are H2, H3, H4, and other tags that can be used, but each page should only have one main topic. Too many H1s on a page will just water down the page’s search engine value.
- As the code implies, H1 goes first. Don’t put an H2 before an H1, and whenever possible your H1 should go above the other text on the page.
- The H1 tag should include the page’s keywords in a way that helps the user. Search engines are getting more and more intelligent, and user experience helps define a page’s value.
- Every page should have a unique H1 tag. Some software platforms will automatically put a company name in the H1 spot, but this does nothing to describe each page’s unique content. If you have a shopping cart system with thousands of pages, you can put the short product description in the H1, but then you should try to make sure it doesn’t precisely match the title. This may require some creative programming. Identical or substantially similar H1 tags on different pages can cause “keyword blurring” which is also not good for search engine rankings.
People with older sites may have avoided H1 tags in the past because browsers like Netscape 3 or 4 would display H1s in their classic large font style. Hopefully your site has been maintained more frequently over the past several years, but in many cases the look and feel may have gotten fixed while header tags were still omitted. As a housecleaning measure, it is usually a good idea to do a mini SEO audit to see if your site is using the proper tag structure.
Making recommendations on H1 tags may seem like old advice to seasoned SEO professionals, but we have seen several cases where the addition of an H1 tag improved search engine rankings. In some cases (like in shopping carts or sites built with content management systems) the H1 was removed or deliberately omitted because it would have matched the title tag. If you have built your site with a CMS, you may want to check with your vendor to see if a plug-in or update has fixed this problem.
Given that SEO involves making a lot of small changes to improve your website’s value in the search engines, the H1 tag can definitely have a positive impact for sites that may be lingering in the search engine rankings. By ensuring that your site has proper H1 formatting on as many pages as possible, you may notice a positive impact in a very short amount of time, especially if your other SEO initiatives are already in process.
Tags: h1 tag, search engine optimization, seo
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
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