High Search Ranking Blog

Google Magic

2007-12-13T11:37:00.000-08:00

First, we would like to apologize for being away so long... things happen.

Just to get started, I am reposting an interesting article:

From: Reggie

Okay - what is the "magic" to getting listed at the top of Google? I've done a keyword search and then tear apart the sites that pop up. Most have several things in common, one of which is this in their header:
meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOARCHIVE"
Or they may have:
META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow
As a newbie to Web page design, what are these telling the robots to
do, and does it help in the rankings?

Thanks!
Reggie

~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hi Reggie,

As I told my seminar participants the other day, everyone knows that the magic secret to ranking highly in Google is to simply place all the secret ingredients into a big pot, mix them all together, wave your magic wand, say the magic words and -- POOF! -- you'll have high rankings for life! Who needs some stinkin' code when you have a good magic wand? (I'll be selling my designer magic wands at the next
seminar so be sure to be there!)

All right...lest some of you green newbies think I'm serious... of course, I'm just kidding!

But the truth is that the code you mentioned is no more the secret to success than my magic wand.

The first code you mentioned, "noarchive," could actually do you more harm than
good. That's the tag you use when you *don't* want Google to place your page in their cache. (There's a little cache link next to most pages in Google's
results, which brings you to Google's latest copy of your page.) Most site owners don't care if their pages are archived and show up in Google's cache and therefore they don't use the noarchive tag. Those that might care are ones who feel that Google is somehow infringing on their privacy or copyright by storing their pages in the Google cache.

The others who would prefer to have their pages stay out of Google's cache are generally those who are doing something sneaky that they don't want the good people at Google to find out about. Those who are using cloaking methods to show the search engines one thing and the users something else will often use the
noarchive tag to make it less obvious what they are doing. However, since
most people *don't* use that tag, those that do open their sites up to some
scrutiny. Which is why I said that it might do you more harm than good.

What happens if Google finds that 90% of the pages using that tag are cloaking? There's nothing to stop them from deciding one day that they won't index any page that uses the noarchive tag. Remember, it's Google's index and they are a private company. Now, I know that Google would prefer to have all legitimate pages in their database, and therefore, I doubt they'd go to that extreme. But if you want
your pages indexed, I would avoid using the noarchive tag at all costs.

The second piece of code you asked about also has nothing to do with a page's High Rankings® in Google (or any other search engine). Supposedly that code is there to tell the search engine robots that it's okay to index the page and to follow the
links to the inner pages. However, the default for the robots is to index all pages
unless they are told *not* to do so. In other words, you might use the robots Meta tag if you *didn't* want the search engines to add your page to their database for whatever reason. And in that case, you'd say "nofollow" and "noindex" in the tag. Under those circumstances, to be on the safe side, you should also put up a
robots.txt file on your server which excludes the robots from wherever you *don't* want them to go.

You can learn more about how to use these tags at this Google help page.

In the past, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to keep the search
engine spiders out of their site, but I have found a few reasons for this
over the years. For instance, if you have a downloadable product page that
needs to be paid for before one is allowed access, you'd want to exclude that page or directory from being spidered in your robots.txt document.

When using the robots.txt file for exclusions, be sure that you don't list actual file URLs you want excluded, and instead place the file in an excluded directory. Otherwise, you're actually giving hackers a roadmap to your juicy stuff. Anyone can visit a site and look at its robots.txt file. It's pretty fun actually, as you can find all sorts of interesting tidbits that nobody wants you to find! Try it by using your favorite site's URL with /robots.txt tacked onto the end.

Bulk Email Marketing in 2007

2007-01-16T12:45:00.000-08:00

You're probably still wondering if email marketing is still effective in todays e-business world...

So is Bulk Email Marketing still effective today?

Absolutely!!!

You just need to know what you're doing, just make sure you get a lot of knowledgeable information about it before you go nuts and start trying to make $250,000 a year with email marketing.

First of all, is it still possible to make $250,000+ a year with email marketing?

You definitely can if you just take that first couple of steps of getting a powerful email marketing software and learning more about it.

Learn about the technology that's behind the scenes, and see it in a vision on how it can help you create success. The new technology today is obviously more powerful than yesterday, therefore please take advantage of it.

The reason why some people think that back in 1999 through 2001 email marketing was the most effective, was because nobody knew much about it back then and all the email marketing campaigns back then were almost fresh.

However, today there may be a lot of competition that may seem to be slowing you down from creating success with email marketing, furthermore, I totally believe that with the increase in technology and more people accessing the Internet today then yesterday, you'll have the same chances to created success and achieve wealth through email marketing in 2005 and beyond.

What makes it even more interesting is that because of the every increasing technology and innovative methodologies of today you can actually mix your email marketing campaigns with other marketing and advertising campaigns that can easily bring you $100,000 to $200,000 a year or more.

What are the buzz words in today's Internet Business that's driving the economy of Internet sales?... Once you know what they are, you may want to find an intricate way to somehow combine it with email marketing.

The reason I say this is because email marketing can be branched up into other opportunities on the Internet and off-line business...

for example:

-capturing email addresses of your customers who are off line,

-capturing email addresses of visitors that come to your web site and then setting them up with an autoresponder,

-buying Solo Ads from Ezine publishers as a form of email marketing to capture more email address

-or getting a list of 700,000+ to 2,000,000+ Targeted Emails with a powerful email marketing software that can help you run your email marketing campaigns absolutely free!

-And you can even extract 1000s of other targeted emails from various sources and access other email marketing lists of 4,000,000+ to 10,000,000+ email addresses.

If you can do all these while you keep your cost down, I don't see why you shouldn't make at least $100,000 a year.

And chances are because of the innovative technology of today, you can actually start learning how to use it with your email marketing campaigns as soon as possible before your competition and start making over $200,000.

You have to try it for yourself before you can see what I'm talking about. You probably have over 7,000 people out there who would be interested in buying your products and services, you just have to find them.

You should never give up on it because there is so many different variables and alternatives that you can use when it comes to email marketing. You never know, the more time you spend on learning about it, you may come up with a $500,000 idea.

=============================================================

Koffi Amouzouvi is the "author" of this Amazing Marketing Package that you can start using today to Sky Rocket your sales by 300% or more... Check out this Package "right now" visit:

http://www.gemini3style.com

=============================================================
Copyright © 2007 by Koffi Amouzouvi

Tips For Effective Social Network Optimization

2007-01-15T13:16:00.000-08:00

By Tarun Gupta

Internet guru after guru, have pronounced that the big wave now upon us in the rise of social networking websites. Needless to say, this emphasis on social networking as a potent internet marketing tool has excited all the Internet marketers looking for newer ways to promote their websites.
The ways to increase exposure through social networking:

Blogs: Blogs have since evolved as a very good marketing tool and that’s why most of the suave internet marketers now own a Blog. They use them to get links pointing to their specific products and services pages. Moreover, blogs have turned out as an effective way to generate traffic for affiliate and other niche websites.

But the relative success of Blogs as an effective marketing solution would entirely

Depend on the type of SEO techniques you employ. If you believe in spamming

And other black hat techniques then you will surely land into problems.

That’s why strictly follow white hat SEO techniques and focus on making your;

Blog as informative as possible.

Use Tags: Tags meant to label blogs/ news items as relevant are extensively used by social networking websites. Major search engines also use tags to determine the relevancy of any topic and that’s why tagging can help you draw-in relevant traffic.

Pinging: Pinging if used can be a very effective way to increase the visibility of your Blog. It basically involves, sending of an automated or manual notice to the search engines and social networking websites informing them about the updated status of your website/ Blog. The important point to be taken care of pertains to whether you are use pings to inform about genuinely new content or not.

Social networking optimization like other good Internet marketing solutions wields the power to rapidly change your websites fortune. However, if you want enduring success, always go for white hat techniques and never ever rely on instant results (black hat) solution.

After all, good things in life take time!

The Author
Search Engine marketing expert, Tarun Gupta is one of the most prolific writers in the internet marketing domain with his articles being published in numerous search related websites and newsletters.

He is the founder director of web development and seo services UK company BrainPulse.co.uk

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tarun_Gupta
http://EzineArticles.com/?Tips-For-Effective-Social-Network-Optimization&id=419714

Link Popularity And PageRank

2007-01-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

By Razvan Ionut Rovinaru

Link popularity and page rank are two things that you will get to know really well. But most people tend to confuse link popularity with page rank. Though they may seem similar, in fact they are completely different. Link popularity measures how popular your website is and how many links are directed to it. Also link popularity measures the quality of the sites that are directed to your own website. Page rank is actually a Google term ranging from 1 to 10 and is used to classify a website based on description, link popularity and keywords. So in other words link popularity measures quality where page rank measures quantity.

Link popularity is one of the most important things in your online presence. If nobody knows about your website, it is as if it doesn’t exist. You could make your website popular through pop ups and campaigns on websites with a bad reputation, but that is when quality control could become a problem, and this is when link popularity is determined.

Link popularity can be earned through having the right keywords on your website, good reputation and link exchange. Link exchange can make your website a lot more popular with the search engines. This in turn means more traffic for your website witch in fact is what we want.

Also a good way of getting some extra link popularity is to have good content on your website. Do you have interesting information on your website? You should make sure you have enough interesting material for your visitors, sometimes you might get linked by viewers on other websites, or maybe a webmaster might find your website interesting and ask to use some of your content of your site’s content and all links in place, this adds to your link popularity.

If your website sells and gives information on “books” for example, when you type in books on a search engine and your webpage isn’t in the first ten then you know your link is not optimized. Look at the other websites that are in the top. Using some browsers you will be able to view the page source of such websites. Use your competitor’s website to your advantage and see how you compare to it. See how many links you have on your website and how many websites are targeted to yours. All these important factors can lead you to greater link popularity

Also keep in mind that keyword oriented articles and reviews can bring in that all important traffic to your website, and the best thing about this is that you don’t have to do much of anything. Good luck with promoting your website.

Razvan Rovinaru is the owner of the Real Home Based Business Opportunity Blog, where he gives you step by step guidance on how to start and develop a successful home based internet business.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Razvan_Ionut_Rovinaru
http://EzineArticles.com/?Link-Popularity-And-PageRank&id=417650

Google dabbles with brokering newspaper ads

2006-11-06T12:15:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Internet titan Google said it would test the money-making potential of using its search savvy to sell advertising in a bevy of US newspapers.

AOL Enhances Search with FullView Results

AOL has rolled out a slick new search interface that automatically integrates Google-powered web search results with multimedia, local or other content from AOL and its partners.

The new service, called AOL Search with FullView, is available to the entire AOL Network audience, including AOL.com, AOL Search, AIM, MapQuest and all AOL clients.

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search

2006-09-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.

The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.

Search related advertising last year was a $5 billion market, still small compared to $22 billion in magazines and $74 billion for TV advertising - but the landscape is changing. The Financial Times ran an article on Tuesday about the belief that the shortage of marketers skilled in negotiating sites like MySpace and YouTube is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of advertising online.

Even in the short term, it’s still up in the air between the big players. Google’s advertising, which is generally believed to be more effective than that of competitors, hasn’t kicked in at MySpace yet. If Google can make MySpace search more bearable when it takes over in the fourth quarter of this year, then you can expect MySpace to drive more traffic to retail sites than ever. At the same time, IE 6 doesn’t have a native search box in the chrome of the browser and IE 7 will - to search either MSN or Live.com. We’ll have to compare these numbers with Live.com in the future.

Read more at TechCrunch.

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search

2006-09-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization's Frequently Confused Concepts

2006-08-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

When I started working with the parent company of the search engine optimization company I currently manage, I spent a lot of time on the phone with prospects and clients. I was always amazed by misconceptions given to so many people about how to get a top listing in a search engine. Often times, I felt as though people were educating themselves with literature written in the early nineties.

Unfortunately, the penalty for some of these techniques is not just a bad ranking but rather permanent delisting or banning. Nobody wants to be banned! I have organized a list of concepts that people confuse or as I like to call them “Frequently Confused Concepts”.

The most frequently confused concept of search engine optimization is the value of meta tags. Way back before search engines were sophisticated enough to scan and save the content of your web site, they would simply review your meta tags. A meta tag gives the title of your site, a description of what you do, and a list of five to ten keyword and keyphrases that are relevant to your web site. The problem with relying on these tags is that many people caught on to the unfortunate truth that pornographic keywords would generate more traffic than the terms related to their web site. Now, this is not traffic you want since the person looking for his favorite centerfold does not want what you have to offer. Also, this makes the search engines quality of results very poor for the searching public.

All the major (and most minor) search engines index your entire site and use the meta tag as a minimally valuable map of what your web site has to offer. You content is the most important. If you have “dogs, girls, basketball, superbowl” in your keywords list in your meta tag and your web site pertains to “pet care” then you are spamming with your meta tags and they will not be positively received by the search engines robots. At the same time, piling a whole encyclopedia of keywords and keyphrases into your meta tag and not mentioning these words in your general wordage of your site will also not help you. Your meta tags should have descriptive, relevant, descriptions and keywords pertaining to your sites content.

This brings me to the second frequently confused concept of search engine optimization which is keyword lists. You have all of your literature and content in tacked on your web site. Then at the bottom of your web site, you put a long list of keywords such as:

Animal Care
Pet Care
Pet Medications
Pet Bathing
Cat Toys
Dog Toy
Dog Leashes

Since these words are not in anyway (other than a list) part of your wordage, the search engines will disregard this as low quality content. You do NOT want to have low quality content as it is high quality content the search engines are looking for. After all, you will be in much better shape if you are holding hands with Google and Yahoo as apposed to thumb wrestling them. So avoid long lists of keywords and use that time to include your keywords and keyphrases frequently in your wordage. For example:

“Animal care is the foremost part of our goal at XYZ Pet Company. We are here to help you with your pet care needs. Whether you are looking for pet medications or pet bathing products, we are your one stop shop. You can entertain your pets by checking out our Cat Toys (link to cat toys page) and Dog Toys (link to dog toys page) products. XYZ Pet Company currently has a sale on Dog Leashes (link to dog leashes page).”

The above paragraph will be welcomed as quality content whereas a list of unused words will simply look like garbage.

I have had the unfortunate task of waving warning flags at prospects that come to us after working with a black hat search engine optimization specialist or misguided web designer about hidden keywords. This is my next frequent confused concept. Hidden keywords are lists of keywords in the header or footer that are the same color as the background. This makes them only viewable to search engine spiders. Do not do this! This is an offense that is punishable by black listings, banning, and overall delisting of your web site. Once again, use this time to creatively mention your keywords in your wordage.

Now that you have a quality web site, you need a few relevant web sites to link to you. Not all links are created equal. A much used (and still very popular though useless) technique is submitting to free for all link pages. These are pages that accept links to everyone’s web site. The search engines hate these as they are just lists of links. Aside from that, these sites are NOT relevant to your web site so the link you wasting your time posting will not benefit you. The best way to add your link to other web sites is by searching for relevant directories and web sites then offering link exchanges. Our friends at XYZ Pet Company could add their link to pet related directories, forums, and blogs. Another valuable technique is simply writing informational articles and include your link in the footer of the article. Then submit these articles to places like ArticleCity.com who will post your article for others to use. They use your article with the understanding that your link and footer stay in their original context.

Last but not least in my list of frequently confused concepts of search engine optimization is “hocus pocus”. Yes, we still get calls from people that believe the key to optimization is by the use of magic tags and invisible mojo. The truth is, search engine optimization is based on the three pillars of Relevant Content, Fresh Content (update your information frequently), and Relevant Link Population. If all of your techniques are centered on ethically doing those three things, you will have a better ranking and sleep better knowing that the search engines will not kick your site off their index.

Jason Bland is the Vice President of Adviatech Corporation (http://www.adviatech.com) and has recently taken over their resell search engine optimization department (http://www.resellseo.com) which enables web designers to offer search engine optimization services. Adviatech also manages search engine, SpivO Search (http://www.spivo.com).

Google Releases Google Base API

2006-08-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

Source: Search Engine Watch

The Google Code blog announced that Google Base now has an API. You can access the API's details at http://code.google.com/apis/base/. The API is like other APIs in that you can now program your own applications to interact and interface with Google Base. So with this API you can create new Google Base data, edit, delete existing data, and query for data items. This can come in handy for retailers or anyone who wants data to be found within Google Base.

10 things you should be monitoring

2006-08-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

Source: ProNet Advertising

Tracking your buzz is really something that is becoming more and more important over and will continue to increase in importance as time goes on. Everything is going social right now and messages fly around the web at a million miles by hour. In order to manage your reputation you need to track the right things, so here's a list of 10 things that you absolutely need to be monitoring.

Company name - Obviously your company name is one of the most important things that you need to monitor. Anytime your company or products are mentioned, you should know. Ex. Google
Company URL - It is also important to track your company URL for those times when someone links to your company but doesn't mention it by name. This happens a lot and is just another way to make sure you are covering all your bases. Ex. http://google.com
Public facing figures - Track the names of any key employees in your company that are public facing figures. What is said about these people also reflects on your company and usually when this people are talked about your company is tied in with that. Ex. Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Larry Page.
Product names - Track any of your company's product or service names as well. What are people saying about your products and services? Ex. Gmail, Picasa, Dodgeball
Product URLs - For the same reasons that you need to specifically track your company's URL you should also be tracking your product URLs as well. Ex. http://gmail.com, http://picasa.com, http://dodgeball.com
The industry "hang outs" - This includes blogs, message boards, important players, consumer review sites, and anything else that's related to your industry. Many times the industry feedback, that you can discover from the conversations at these "hang outs" can really help you improve your product or service. It is also a way for you to interactive with your potential and existing customers. Ex. http://searchenginewatch.com, http://seroundtable.com, http://threadwatch.org
Employee activity/blogs - Things your employees do online can affect your brand image. If you have employees that blog, it is smart to at least know about their MySpace accounts, Flickr accounts and personal blogs. I am not saying that you should spy on your employees but you do need to monitor these things just in case. It is not considered spying if they already make this stuff public. It might be safe to let your employees know you watch these things. The more well known your employees are the more important this is, many times these employee bloggers turn into company ambassadors. I've heard stories before where employers know an employee is quitting before he or she tells them because they blogged about it or put it on MySpace. Ex. http://mattcutts.com/blog, http://bladam.com, http://crazybob.org
Conversations - Are you tracking the comments from blog posts that are related to your company name, url, products, or any other buzz? These are great opportunities that allow you to participate in conversations about your company. Tools for tracking comments include Commentful, coComment, and co.mments. Ex. http://blog.outer-court.com/forum/62569.html, http://www.digg.com/software/Google_Talk_Adds_Voice_Mail_File_Sharing, http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36648272/
Brand image - What is the overall image of your brand. Do people think you're evil? Or do they love what you're doing. Ex. http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=google
Competitors - Track everything from 1-9 related to your competitors including; company name, URLs, products, key employees, etc. Everything. You need to be ready to move when any opportunity comes up. Ex. http://www.ysearchblog.com, http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/, http://www.opinmind.com/search.jsp?q=yahoo

Here is a list of a few of the websites / tools that can be used to track your buzz: Technorati, Sphere, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Google Blog Search, Rollyo, TechMeme, OpinMind, Alexa, and Commentful. Any time your company is referenced in any way it is best that you know about it. Track everything.

Web Usability

2006-08-14T11:15:00.000-07:00

What is web site usability? Shari believes usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use (Jakob Nielsen). Usability is task oriented. Usability meets a balance between satisfying users and business goals. - More at TopRankBlog

Search Engine News Roundup

2006-08-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Pandia: Google enables search for visually impaired.

Yahoo releases a more efficient webcrawler.

USA Today interviews search guru Danny Sullivan.

What Drives Searchers to Buy Cars?

2006-07-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

A new study from Yahoo and comScore looked at searcher behavior in the automotive sector, analyzing activity, user preferences, and how purchases were ultimately made. The results are fascinating, and offer lessons for search marketers operating in any field. More on the study in today's SearchDay article, New Research Shows How Search Drives Auto Buyers.

From SearchEngineWatch.

Categorizing Adwords with Ease

2006-07-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

From the Inside Adwords Blog:

This week, we released category site selection for the site tool. This allows you to browse sites by category, making it easier for you to find and include sites that are relevant to your products or services. For example, if I want to advertise my soccer camp, I would first select the 'Browse Categories' button in the site tool. Then I can select 'Sports' and drilldown to the topic 'Soccer' in order to view sites that may interest me. It's a great new way to help you browse for sites that fit your needs, and we hope you'll check it out.

Three of the most common reasons why SEO campaigns fail

2006-07-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

Most SEO campaigns fall flat on their faces and totally fail to achieve the objectives they were set out to accomplish.

Sadly the list of failures is not just limited to individuals who attempt to carry out their own SEO campaigns. It includes companies and so-called experts who are paid to carry out an SEO campaign for a client and end up totally failing to achieve what they set out to do.

Here are the three most common reasons for failure. By studying and understanding them a webmaster can start their next SEO campaign with better odds because they already understand some of the things that commonly tend to go wrong.

a) Assuming That All Businesses And Industries Are The Same
There is a common belief that if somebody succeeds in the SEO of a certain business in a certain specific industry, they will automatically succeed in any industry and any business.

This has to be the most common reason for failure. Especially where the webmaster hires some affordable SEO expert that has had success in some other niche industry.

The truth is that one business is often very different from another and quite often the effort required to get a certain web site at the top of search engine rankings is very different from the effort required to get another different site to the same level. Different categories have different levels of competition. There are certain categories where the competition is so stiff and the number of competing web sites so numerous that it is virtually impossible to carry out any successful SEO campaign without adjusting the focus and niche target market of that particular enterprise.

The temptation is just too big to hand over your web site to some "SEO expert" and expect them to work some SEO magic with no input from you. You should resist that temptation because the chances of such an arrangement working are really so slim that the odds are heavily stacked against you succeeding.

b) A Failure To Decide What Particular Niche To Focus On
Many webmasters tend to forget that they are competing in the world market and that the only way they can ever hope to be successful is by carefully selecting some narrow niche that the others have ignored but which they are very well suited to covering.

There is no way that you can be all things to all people, and especially not in a fiercely competitive world market. This correct focus on a narrow niche is what will quite often make or break an SEO effort. If you opt to hire some expert, they will usually be anxious to get your business and will hardly spend any time studying your industry prior to your committing yourself to their services. And by the time you commit there is no turning back, whatever the difficulties that they encounter.

You do not expect some SEO expert to learn all the knowledge you have accumulated over many years' involvement in a certain industry in just a few days. And that is precisely where the problem starts. There is no way that a successful SEO campaign can be executed without adequate information.

A webmaster who carries out their own SEO campaign is also doomed to failure if they have not decided on what niche to focus their efforts on.

c) A Failure To Closely And Constantly Monitor Keyword Popularity
There is no way of avoiding the appropriate keyword phrases for your site in any successful SEO campaign. The big mistake many webmasters or blog owners make is to do their keyword research once and then forget all about it. Keyword phrases are changing in popularity all the time with some reducing in polarity while others increase in leaps and bounds. There is no way you can possibly stay informed without constantly and regularly monitoring keyword popularity.

Even more important you will not be able to come across the new keyword phrase opportunities that emerge all the time.

If you decide to hire some SEO expert, they will start from a position of weakness if they are not aware of what has transpired over the last few months and even years concerning popular keyword phrases. How will they be able to accurately judge on the best direction to take in their campaign?

Conclusion
You will have realized that SEO campaigns are very intimate affairs that require lots of information and research over a long period of time to be highly successful. And even if you are bringing some expert onboard to carry out your SEO campaign for you, it is absolutely important that they have enough information to start with. Both from their previous experiences that you should know about and analyze and ask questions about before you reveal anything about the subject matter of your web site. You too should be gathering as much information as possible, all the time.

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet Marketing and search engine optimisation consultant. Visit his websites SEO tools section for free search engine tools such as Anchor text checker and Pagerank search.

Pushing Bad Data - Google's Latest Black Eye

2006-07-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

Pushing Bad Data - Google's Latest Black Eye
By Eric Lester (c) 2006

Google stopped counting, or at least publicly displaying, the
number of pages it indexed in September of 05, after a
school-yard "measuring contest" with rival Yahoo. That count
topped out around 8 billion pages before it was removed from
the homepage. News broke recently through various SEO forums
that Google had suddenly, over the past few weeks, added
another few billion pages to the index. This might sound like a
reason for celebration, but this "accomplishment" would not
reflect well on the search engine that achieved it.

What had people buzzing was the nature of the fresh, new few
billion pages. They were blatant spam- containing Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) ads, scraped content, and they were, in many cases,
showing up well in the search results. They pushed out far
older, more established sites in doing so. A Google
representative responded via forums to the issue by calling it
a "bad data push," something that met with various groans
throughout the SEO community.

How did someone manage to dupe Google into indexing so many
pages of spam in such a short period of time? I'll provide a
high level overview of the process, but don't get too excited.
Like a diagram of a nuclear explosive, it isn't going to teach
you how to make the real thing, you're not going to be able to
run off and do it yourself after reading this article. Yet it
makes for an interesting tale, one that illustrates the ugly
problems cropping up with ever increasing frequency in the
world's most popular search engine.

A Dark and Stormy Night

Our story begins deep in the heart of Moldva, sandwiched
scenically between Romania and the Ukraine. In between fending
off local vampire attacks, an enterprising local had a
brilliant idea and ran with it, presumably away from the
vampires... His idea was to exploit how Google handled
subdomains, and not just a little bit, but in a big way.

The heart of the issue is that currently, Google treats
subdomains much the same way as it treats full domains- as
unique entities. This means it will add the homepage of a
subdomain to the index and return at some point later to do a
"deep crawl." Deep crawls are simply the spider following links
from the domain's homepage deeper into the site until it finds
everything or gives up and comes back later for more.

Briefly, a subdomain is a "third-level domain." You've probably
seen them before, they look something like this:
subdomain.domain.com. Wikipedia, for instance, uses them for
languages; the English version is "en.wikipedia.org", the Dutch
version is "nl.wikipedia.org." Subdomains are one way to
organize large sites, as opposed to multiple directories or
even separate domain names altogether.

So, we have a kind of page Google will index virtually "no
questions asked." It's a wonder no one exploited this situation
sooner. Some commentators believe the reason for that may be
this "quirk" was introduced after the recent "Big Daddy"
update. Our Eastern European friend got together some servers,
content scrapers, spambots, PPC accounts, and some
all-important, very inspired scripts, and mixed them all
together thusly...

Five Billion Served - And Counting...

First, our hero here crafted scripts for his servers that
would, when GoogleBot dropped by, start generating an
essentially endless number of subdomains, all with a single
page containing keyword-rich scraped content, keyworded links,
and PPC ads for those keywords. Spambots are sent out to put
GoogleBot on the scent via referral and comment spam to tens of
thousands of blogs around the world. The spambots provide the
broad setup, and it doesn't take much to get the dominos to
fall.

GoogleBot finds the spammed links and, as is its purpose in
life, follows them into the network. Once GoogleBot is sent
into the web, the scripts running the servers simply keep
generating pages- page after page, all with a unique subdomain,
all with keywords, scraped content, and PPC ads. These pages get
indexed and suddenly you've got yourself a Google index 3-5
billion pages heavier in under 3 weeks.

Reports indicate, at first, the PPC ads on these pages were
from Adsense, Google's own PPC service. The ultimate irony then
is Google benefits financially from all the impressions being
charged to Adsense users as they appear across these billions
of spam pages. The Adsense revenues from this endeavor were the
point, after all. Cram in so many pages that, by sheer force of
numbers, people would find and click on the ads in those pages,
making the spammer a nice profit in a very short amount of time.

Billions or Millions? What is Broken?

Word of this achievement spread like wildfire from the
DigitalPoint forums. It spread like wildfire in the SEO
community, to be specific. The "general public" is, as of yet,
out of the loop, and will probably remain so. A response by a
Google engineer appeared on a Threadwatch thread about the
topic, calling it a "bad data push". Basically, the company
line was they have not, in fact, added 5 billion pages. Later
claims include assurances the issue will be fixed
algorithmically. Those following the situation (by tracking the
known domains the spammer was using) see only that Google is
removing them from the index manually.

The tracking is accomplished using the "site:" command. A
command that, theoretically, displays the total number of
indexed pages from the site you specify after the colon. Google
has already admitted there are problems with this command, and
"5 billion pages", they seem to be claiming, is merely another
symptom of it. These problems extend beyond merely the site:
command, but the display of the number of results for many
queries, which some feel are highly inaccurate and in some
cases fluctuate wildly. Google admits they have indexed some of
these spammy subdomains, but so far haven't provided any
alternate numbers to dispute the 3-5 billion shown initially
via the site: command.

Over the past week the number of the spammy domains &
subdomains indexed has steadily dwindled as Google personnel
remove the listings manually. There's been no official
statement that the "loophole" is closed. This poses the obvious
problem that, since the way has been shown, there will be a
number of copycats rushing to cash in before the algorithm is
changed to deal with it.

Conclusions

There are, at minimum, two things broken here. The site:
command and the obscure, tiny bit of the algorithm that allowed
billions (or at least millions) of spam subdomains into the
index. Google's current priority should probably be to close
the loophole before they're buried in copycat spammers. The
issues surrounding the use or misuse of Adsense are just as
troubling for those who might be seeing little return on their
advertising budget this month.

Do we "keep the faith" in Google in the face of these events?
Most likely, yes. It is not so much whether they deserve that
faith, but that most people will never know this happened. Days
after the story broke there's still very little mention in the
"mainstream" press. Some tech sites have mentioned it, but this
isn't the kind of story that will end up on the evening news,
mostly because the background knowledge required to understand
it goes beyond what the average citizen is able to muster. The
story will probably end up as an interesting footnote in that
most esoteric and neoteric of worlds, "SEO History."
================================================================
Mr. Lester worked in the IT industry for 5 years, acquiring
knowledge of hosting, website design, before serving for 5 years
as the webmaster for Apollo Hosting (http://www.apollohosting.com).
Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps
hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers.
================================================================

Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.

Secure content and MSN Search

2006-06-29T10:25:00.000-07:00

As a friendly tip, if you are a site owner, please note that the HTTPS portion of your site is considered separately from a robots.txt perspective and requires its own robots.txt file. - From the MSN Search Blog

The importance of Link Structure

2006-06-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

Source: Axandra.com

You probably know that inbound links to your web site are very important if you want to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo or other major search engines.

If you want to get high rankings for a special search term then you have to optimize a web page for that search term. In addition, you have to get many links from other web sites that point to the optimized web page.

50 links can be better than 500 links

A web page with 50 inbound links can have better rankings than a web page with 500 inbound links.

In addition to the number of links, the quality of the links is also important. Links from related web sites that contain the targeted keyword are better than general links from unrelated sites. There are many other factors that influence the quality of a link.

Analyze the linking structure of your competitors

If your web page cannot be found in the top 10 results for your keyword, then you should analyze the linking structure of the top ranked web pages:

How many inbound links do the other web pages have?
Are the other pages linked from .gov and .edu domains?
Which web pages exactly link to your site and which web pages link to the top ranked pages?
Are these pages different? What do you have to change?

You should also analyze the web pages that link to the top ranked pages:

Do these pages use the keyword in the links?
Do these pages use the keyword in their file names?
Do these pages use the keyword in their document titles?
Do these pages use the keyword in their body text?
Which other keywords are used in the web pages that link to the top ranked pages?

The right linking structure is the key to your success

Getting the right links to your web site is the key to high search engine rankings. Many webmasters focus only on getting as many links as possible. That's your chance.

If you know which links you need then you can get better results with fewer links. Focus on quality instead of quantity.

15 Shades of SEO Sp@m

2006-06-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

Article printed from SEO-News: http://www.seo-news.com
HTML version available at: http://www.seo-news.com/archives.html

15 Shades of SEO Spam
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,
StepForth Placement Inc. (c) 2006

Sp@m, in almost any form, is bad for your health. The vast majority of web users would agree with that statement and nobody would even think of the finely processed luncheon meat-product made by Hormel. Even the word itself is infectious in all the worst ways, being used to describe the dark-side and often deceptive side of everything from email marketing to abusive forum behaviour. In the search engine optimization field, sp@m is used to describe techniques and tactics thought to be banned by search engines or to be unethical business practices.

While writing copy for our soon to be revised website, the team put together a short list of the most outrageous forms of sp@m we had seen in the last year and a short explanation of the technique.

Please note, we do not encourage, endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques listed here. We don't use them and our clients' sites continue to rank well at Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Also, since Google has been the dominant search engine for almost five years, most of the sp@mmy tricks evolved in order to game Google and might not apply to the other engines.

1. Cloaking
Also known as "stealth", cloaking is a technique that involves serving one set of information to known search engine spiders while displaying a different set of information on documents viewed by clients. While there are unique situations in which the use of cloaking might be considered ethical in the day-to-day practice of SEO, cloaking is never required. This is especially true after the Jagger algorithm update at Google, which uses document and link histories as important ranking factors.

2. IP Delivery
IP delivery is a simple form of cloaking in which a unique set of information is served based on the IP number the info-query originated from. IP addresses known to be search engine based are served one set of information while unrecognized IP
addresses, (assumed to be live-visitors) are served another.

3. Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar documents each designed tomeet requirements of different search engine algorithms. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. It is considered sp@m by the major search engines as they see multiple incidents of what is virtually the same document. Aside from that, the technique is no longer practical as search engines consider a far wider range of factors than the arrangement or density of keywords found in unique documents.

4. Mini-Site Networks
Designed to exploit a critical vulnerability in early versions of Google's PageRank algorithm, mini-site networks were very much like leader pages except they tended to be much bigger. The establishment of a mini-site network involved the creation of
several topic or product related sites all linking back to a central sales site. Each mini-site would have its own keyword enriched URL and be designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine. Often they could be enlarged by adding
information from leader pages. By weaving webs of links between mini-sites, an artificial link-density was created that could heavily influence Google's perception of the importance of the main site.

In the summer of 2004, Google penalized several prominent SEO and SEM firms for using this technique by banning their entire client lists.

5. Link Farms
Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. Google, in turn, quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the PR value it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection or number of links. Nevertheless, link farms persist as uninformed webmasters and unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

6. Blog and/or Forum sp@m
Blogs and forums are amazing and essential communication technologies, both of which are used heavily in the daily conduct of our business. As with other Internet based media, blogs and forum posts are easily and often proliferated. In somecases, blogs and certain forums also have established high PR values for their documents. These two factors make them targets of unethical SEOs looking for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients. Google in particular has clamped down on Blog and Forum abuse.

7. Keyword Stuffing
At one time, search engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. When Google emerged and incoming links became a factor, some even went as far as using keyword stuffing of anchor text.

The most common continuing example of keyword stuffing can be found near the bottom of far too many sites in circulation.

8. Hidden Text
It is amazing that some webmasters and SEOs continue to use hidden text as a technique but, as evidenced by the number of sites we find it on, a lot of folks still use it. They shouldn't.

There are two types of hidden text. The first is text that is coloured the same shade as the background thus rendering it invisible to human visitors but not to search spiders. The second is text that is hidden behind images or under document layers. Search engines tend to dislike both forms and have been known to devalue documents containing incidents of hidden text.

9. Useless Meta Tags
Most meta tags are absolutely useless. The unethical part is that some SEO firms actually charge for the creation and insertion of meta tags. In some cases, there seems to be a meta tag for virtually every possible factor but for the most part
are not considered by search spiders.

StepForth only uses the description and keywords meta tags (though we are dubious about the actual value of the keywords tag), along with relevant robots.txt files. All other identifying or clarifying information should be visible on a contact page or included in the footers of each page.

10. Misuse of Directories
Directories, unlike other search indexes, tend to be sorted by human hands. Search engines traditionally gave links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of sp@mming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters hunted for valuable links to improve their rankings. Search engines have since tended to devalue links from most directories. Some SEOs continue to charge directory submission fees.

11. Hidden Tags
There are a number of different sorts of tags used by search browsers or website designers to perform a variety of functions such as; comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, and http-equiv tags. For example, the "alt tag" is used by
site-readers for the blind to describe visual images. Inserting keywords into these tags was a technique used by a number SEOs in previous years. Though some continue to improperly use these tags, the practice overall appears to be receding.

12. Organic Site Submissions
One of the most unethical things a service-based business can do is to charge clients for a service they don't really need. Charging for, or even claiming submissions to the major search engines are an example. Search engine spiders are so advanced they no longer require site submission to find information. Search engine spiders find new documents by following links. Site submission services or SEO firms that charge clients a single penny for submission to Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves, are radically and unethically overcharging those clients.

13. Email Sp@m
Placing a URL inside a "call-to-action" email continues to be a widely used type of search marketing sp@m. With the advent of desktop search appliances, email sp@m has actually increased. StepForth does not use email to promote your website in any way.

14. Redirect Sp@m
There are several ways to use the redirect function to fool a search engine or even hijack traffic destined for another website! Whether the method used is a 301, a 302, a 402, a meta refresh or a java-script, the end result is search engine sp@m.

15. Misuse of Web 2.0 Formats (ie Wiki, social networking and social tagging)
An emerging form of SEO sp@m is found in the misuse of user-input media formats such as Wikipedia. Like blog comment sp@mming, the instant live-to-web nature of Web 2.0 formats provide an open range for SEO sp@m technicians. Many of these exploits might even find short-term success though it is only a matter of time before measures are taken to devalue the efforts.

Search engine optimization sp@m continues to be a problem for the SEO industry as it tries to move past the perceptions of mainstream advertisers. When under-ethical techniques are used, trust (the basis of all business) is abused and the efforts of the SEO/SEM industry are called into question. Fortunately, Google's new algorithm appears to be on the cutting edge of SEO sp@m detection and prevention. Let's hope 2006 is the year the entire SEO industry goes on a sp@m-free diet.

Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing expert based in Victoria BC. Jim writes and edits full-time for StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes the opportunity to share his experience through interviews, articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at: jimhedger@stepforth.com