Entries Tagged 'SEO' ↓

I have to add my voice to the whining, pining and moaning of webmasters who woke up this past Sunday or Monday to discover that Google wasn’t sending them nearly as many visitors.

Not this site which along with several others has remained stable. Then again none of those sites ever had 20,000 – 30,000 unique visitors a day like my mine, my purely personal site.

I’ve visited various SEO and webmaster forums and weblogs to see if anybody knows anything. There are lots of guesses. Nothing more than guesses.

Some capture me for a moment. Too much internal optimization? Mine have always had interlinking navigation by category and age. Breadcrumbs too. I did that because the sites I used to visit – like the old PCMag website – had the same. It made getting around easier.

Anchor text? Sure. When I was reading about the semantic web I was told I should have that.

I’d never heard of SEO back then.

My site – almost all of my sites have been scraped. Lots of people who’ve experienced the same haven’t been hit by the Google update some are suggesting should be called Katrina.

Bad inbound links? I didn’t ask for them. But I sure have them. People will link to anything trying to fool Google. But if bad IBLs were damaging blackhat SEOs would have been doing massive crap links attacks against their competitors.

Does anybody know why hundreds of thousands of websites have been – seemingly senselessly – slapped down in the SERPS? I don’t think so. Google engineers may. But I don’t know how much they really know will happen until they plug the latest algorithm into the system and watch the results. (Much less how they evaluate the results.)

The solution?

Ignore it.

Keep writing, working on your site.

Probably the Google engineers are twiddling with their latest refinements as I type. Maybe some of the key phrases that made my site popular will be restored to me. Maybe not

There’s always the next update.

This tool is to check your backlinks and the anchor text used in those backlinks.

Free Backlink Check Tool

Works Just like Google Dance used to however you can check the datacenters via IP as the alias URL’s at Google Dance no longer work.

Google Datacenter Checker

For some reason I’d assumed that search engines would be more interested in the image’s title attribute than the alt tag. I guess because I’ve always used my alt tags to briefly summarize the image, the title tags to make a quick comment on the image.

An old discussion that seemed authoritative to me at the time instilled the habit.

On Search Engine Watch research shows the alt tag gets indexed but search engines ignore the title attributes when applied to images.

ALT Tags & SEO

Few people offer more useful advice on website promotion than Chris Beasley. He explains his technique of hub and spoke crosslinking:

So, what I recommend doing is a hub and spoke linking scheme, this type of linking is perfectly valid to do, regardless of the topics of your site, because the practice predates link popularity algorithms with search engines, and company that care nothing about search engine optimization practice this method and do not even know it. This scheme also gives you great control over which of your websites are getting the most benefit.

Read Hub & Spoke: How to Cross-Link Your Websites

Author: Sumantra Roy

Page cloaking can broadly be defined as a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. There are two primary reasons that people use page cloaking:

i) It allows them to create a separate optimized page for each search engine and another page which is aesthetically pleasing and designed for their human visitors. When a search engine spider visits a site, the page which has been optimized for that search engine is delivered to it. When a human visits a site, the page which was designed for the human visitors is shown. The primary benefit of doing this is that the human visitors don’t need to be shown the pages which have been optimized for the search engines, because the pages which are meant for the search engines may not be aesthetically pleasing, and may contain an over-repetition of keywords.

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Copyright 2005 Brad Eden

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to your site … after all, isn’t that what you want.

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Does Google have a sandbox?

Author: Ryan Jones

Unless you’re new to the SEO world, you’ve probably heard people talking about the dreaded “Google Sandbox” causing their site to get poor rankings. Some people go so far as to say “all new sites must wait 6 months before being removed from Google’s sandbox”, while others adamantly deny the existence of any type of sandbox.

So is there a Google sandbox?

Officially: Yes. But that’s only because Google employees have affectionately titled the beach volleyball court at the Googleplex “the sandbox” after the mass SEO paranoia.

There is no real Google sandbox. New sites aren’t penalized. In fact, in some cases, new sites are actually rewarded (MSN does this most notably).

Ok, so why is my new site doing so poorly in search? Well, there are a couple of factors you need to look at.

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Out of Exile: How to get un-banned from Google.

Author: Joe Balestrino

I am banned from Google…Help!

What did you do to get banned? Can you get un-banned? Yes! But first you need to know what you did to get banned. Google will not tell you. A sure sign you have been banned is that your web site is missing a page rank. By, that I mean the PR bar is Gray. That is usually the first indication. To double check that, enter site:www.yoursite.com into Google. Replace “yoursite.com” with your URL. If it there are no pages indexed, that is a good sign your site has been removed from Google (if your pages were indexed beforehand). Also try link:www.yoursite.com to see if your back links are still listed on Google. If your site is banned they will be removed as well.

Read through the following list. If any of these ring a bell, you should change them ASAP.

Spam:

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Author: Englesos on the Web

Obscured by a dense and clinging aura of marketing “hype”, the essentially simple process of search engine optimization is one of the least understood and most exploited facets of the internet. Any webmaster’s inbox is flooded daily with spam mailings offering “The secrets of being number ONE!” – All of which are pretty much the same except for the billing addresses, and most of which should be filtered unread straight to the Recycle Bin. Over time it has been painted as an increasingly complex discipline to the point where we speak of SEO “Gurus” and every mailing uses the words like “secrets” and “mysteries” to describe a basically simple process.

The Plan The first two features to mention are so obvious that far too few people consider them in the light of Search Engine Optimization. The name (URL) and then the website itself.

1. Sorry, who? Whilst “Richard Olmshaw Computer Systems” may be a good name for your shop, it is not a good URL. We want simple & memorable. If people remember you and your site then you do not have to expose them to the competition my making them perform searches for you. (I’m a viral marketing fan when it comes to URLs)

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