Some Revelations by Matt Cutts Regarding Google’s Indexing Techniques

March 15th, 2010

An interview with Matt Cutts of Google was published this morning and it reveals many indexing techniques that SEO professionals may or may not be aware of. Often, an issue that comes up with sites is, are my pages being indexed? Typically, all pages and content of a site is indexed in some form, albeit at a slower pace sometimes. But, with PageRank, not all indexing is created equally. Lower page ranks on many pages for one site can reduce the amount of time or effort Google spends crawling it, and other poor SEO techniques, such as duplicate content, may contribute to this. Some points, for those of you curious, taken from the interview include:

• The crawling and indexing team at Google wants to see all content, but they won’t crawl every page of a website.
• No indexing cap exists for a site. This means that, if a site has 1000 pages, all will be indexed at some point, although rates for sites vary.
• The pages crawled by Google are proportional to the PageRank.
• The formula for duplicate content’s negative effects. If two out of three pages crawled are duplicate, the total amount of pages crawled is lowered and, thus, the PageRank is also lowered.
• Links to pages with duplicate content aren’t beneficial to increasing PageRank.
• A loss of PageRank may occur through 301 redirects.
• If a site has a large amount of low-ranked pages, Google may not crawl the entire site. This is why, often, brand new websites take longer to be indexed with SEO changes than those already established.

Although this interview doesn’t give the full picture behind Google’s indexing efforts, it does touch on a few significant points and supports many current ideas regarding Google’s indexing methods in comparison to its peers’.

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SEO’s Influence on Public Relations

March 10th, 2010

For those of you in the PR industry, have you noticed a change in the way news and releases and distributed? A recent article claims that social media is having more of a role in distributing news. But, simply logging into Facebook and publishing a link to a new release doesn’t give you the traffic you need, however. In most cases, all forms need to be utilized after a press release has been created and released. Aside from Facebook, this includes Twitter, LinkedIn, and MeetUp.com. Before this, a release needs to be added to an online PR channel for distribution.

A website like PRWeb.com is usually a reliable source for getting a press release out on the internet to several news channels and RSS feeds. In the past, this often meant mailing or faxing a paper press release or kit to various print media channels for a reporter to do a story. In the present, the latter practice is becoming less common as print media loses its influence and more are turning to the internet for their news. Being released on a news channel isn’t enough, however. The goal is essentially to get to Google news – and made into a news story.

While you can’t always control who picks up your press release and spins a story, wait a few days to see who links to the release. Often, in these cases, their news story links to your original press release. When the release and news story make it onto Google news, use either – preferably the news story – as a link on Facebook and other forms of social media.

At this point, your PR department should have been building up a base of followers and “friends” on either of these forums. Those who follow you will see the new release or story, hopefully click on it, and bring your client’s website traffic.

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Does Google Fail at its Own Algorithm?

March 8th, 2010

Quite possibly, they could be. A recent report by Google, seen here on CNet, details their SEO efforts and success. Although by whose algorithm is unclear, the results from their SEO can be seen in a full report at the bottom of the page. Their main weakness? Title tags, including format and length, with meta descriptions coming in at a distant second place.

But, this isn’t for Google’s own home page but, rather, its own product pages. Which products are lagging aren’t specified, but, if Google’s lagging behind its own algorithm, don’t you think they should be following their rules a bit better? After all, if these results are from ranks on Google and not, say, Yahoo, they’d have the tools to immediately improve SEO.

What’s most shocking about this report is the low scores for title tags and meta descriptions – the building blocks of all SEO content. Without them, a page is far less likely to have relevant keyword terms found when crawled by a search engine’s spiders. Additionally, by looking further down the report, you can see that even Google still uses H1 tags for their products. H1 tags, much like the keyword tag, have been labeled as useless, although others continue to believe its effect on the search engine. So, if Google actually uses H1 tags with its products, wouldn’t that tell you they’re still somewhat effective in Google’s algorithm?

Although, maybe not. If a search engine company such as Google can create an algorithm and not rank its own pages well (or still determines that its SEO building blocks need work), does that indicate that every employee at the company responsible for Google’s products has an effective SEO strategy? In all cases, the findings through this report show that even Google doesn’t really know its own algorithm as well as it should.

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Google Buzz and SEO

March 1st, 2010

A few weeks ago, Google Buzz debuted as a platform to combine all social media features, such as standard blogging, Facebook-like profiles, and Twitter-like feeds, under one roof. Now that this feature has been around for a bit, the question of using it in SEO has been brought up. One recent article discusses the possibilities of Google Buzz for SEO and, although the article makes a convincing argument, will SEO and SEM companies drop their Twitter-Facebook-blogging social media structure in favor of Google Buzz?

Maybe yes, but probably not immediately. While Myspace, for example, was dropped in social media marketing campaigns in favor of Facebook, the latter had to generate a significant following before anyone decided it was a far more useful tool than the spam-laden Myspace. At the moment, Google Buzz doesn’t have that type of following – the users simply aren’t there yet. In about six months? Maybe it will become a secondary target for social media marketing.

As explained in the article, Google Buzz is a partially SEO-friendly tool. Some of the features of it include a keyword research tool, quick indexing for any material posted to it, no “nofollow” tags for links, multi-platform publishing for all content, and the possibility for real-time search. The tools involved include blogging and microblogging platforms, as well as personal profiles. The downside? Duplicate content is far more likely to occur through the multi-platform publishing feature. For someone looking to get his or her content seen, this could be beneficial but, for SEO purposes, it could become a haven for unintentional spam.

At the moment, Google Buzz looks like a nifty tool for those with Gmail. If you miss the personal profiles and pages of AOL accounts of yore, Google buzz will bring the same feeling, plus blogging features. Nevertheless, until Google Buzz’s Twitter-like posts start getting incorporated into real-time search and the tool gathers more users, it’s still significantly secondary to Facebook and Twitter.

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Refining Your Linkbuilding Strategy

February 22nd, 2010

How do you do your links? Do you think about links as part of your SEO strategy? Reciprocal links are disputed, these days. Some say that reciprocal links are outdated, as spamming, much like the keyword tag, has killed its purpose. But, reciprocal links aren’t the only strategy, however, for building popularity and traffic for your or a client’s website. One-way links, particularly though social media, have been gaining ground and have more worth for popularity than reciprocal links. Search Engine Journal gives some tips and suggestions for an effective link plan, one that serves a website well and has a specific goal.

Reciprocal links aren’t fully outdated, however, but the strategy needs to be more refined than five years ago. As mentioned in the link above, ask yourself before planning a strategy, “Are these links for traffic or popularity?” Reciprocal links are typically used for popularity and, for the best popularity, you need to develop a linking strategy that involves reciprocating with similar-topic websites with high-page ranks. Don’t turn to link farms, no matter the temptation to use them. The best strategy is to have someone in house looking for links from relevant sites and sending requests manually. If you outsource this service, you may need to check every link added to your directory, which can be time consuming.

Reciprocal links aren’t the only ones needed for popularity. One-way links are ideal for building up popularity and traffic, and this is where social media comes in. This strategy often combines article marketing, Twitter, Facebook, and standard blogging to build one-way links. For all of these, your links should be on pages with high-page rank and on topic-relevant sites. Facebook and Twitter, additionally, become too easy to welcome spam, and your approach to using these social networking sites shouldn’t be just to spread your links around but to gain followers who will click on your links when you add them.

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Posted in In the news, Link Building, SEO, SEO Tools | 1 Comment »

Hackers and Spammers Utilizing SEO

February 15th, 2010

A recent article claims that black hat SEO operations are gaining more ground, but if you read the content in the article, under the link, you’ll actually find that the article goes something like this: Hackers and spammers are using white-hat SEO techniques and social media to get to the tops of the search engine. Although the article cites Websense as a source for this information, how about we review what constitutes as “white hat” and “black hat” SEO.

For the former, white hat SEO relies on natural search techniques. This includes on-site optimization through keywords, new keyword-specific content, and reciprocal links. Off-site optimization is done through social media, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and article marketing, for one-way links and to bring in traffic. If you read the article, you’ll notice that these are the techniques many of these hackers and spammers are using to spread their “poison” links.

Black hat SEO, on the other hand, doesn’t use any natural search techniques and is an artificial way to get to the top. Many search engines, particularly Google, can tell when a website is optimized with black hat techniques and will knock a website off. Some of these include excessive, spam-like keywords on a site, keywords or spam content added to the background of a website, and many links pointing to link farms and topic-irrelevant websites. In many cases, these spam tactics quickly propel a website to the top of a search engine – and quickly the website goes down.

If hackers and spammers are using white-hat techniques, often Google can’t tell. The best way to get rid of these “poison” optimized links is for Google, Yahoo, and Bing – as well as Facebook and Twitter, if social media is involved – to notice the content of the websites. Although often a warning comes up if a page is infected with a virus or a Trojan, this often can be too late for the user. The next step for Google and other search engines in refining their algorithms is to take note of every page crawled. Like spam and pages optimized with black-hate techniques, a page containing a virus should be removed from any visible ranking.

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Is Using Linkbait Effective?

February 8th, 2010

Want to bring more traffic to your website? One option is to use linkbait. As the name implies, a page designated as “linkbait” on a website gets others to link to you – and you’ll link to them, too – and to bring in traffic. But, as stated in the article above, creating a linkbait page can be difficult to do for some website owners, as you want to make everything about your products and services. These can be the bulk of your website, however, but a linkbait page needs to be relevant to all users. In fact, the subject should even be somewhat news worthy.

Think of it almost as a press release or an article marketing page, only no link to your website is included in with the content. The page sits on the website and, because of its non-promotional content, other websites see it and link to it or may even send you a link request. The topic doesn’t always need to be relevant to the latest news story, however, and any informational page not about your products and services can be added as linkbait. For example, an SEO website wanting to create linkbait may make an informational page about various types of on-page content strategies.

One word for linkbait at Keyword Performance is a content page from scratch. Although these pages, in some cases, can be promotional for the products on the site, they’re informational in most cases. While these pages, being new, may take longer to get page rank, they often bring in more links and traffic in the long term, especially if the URL for the page is keyword-specific. Additionally, these pages often have an interior link pointing to a relevant product page, although the actual topic of the content page is purely to inform the reader.

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SEO for Large Commerce Sites

February 1st, 2010

One common client many SEO companies have on their roster is an e-commerce client. After all, these are the websites that want to get to the top of Google and Yahoo to get their products and services noticed. But commerce sites come in two varieties: Those simply advertising a service, such as a site for a law office or a restaurant, and those with actual products on the site. The former often contains less than fifty pages, while the latter can be in the hundreds. In creating an optimization campaign, what do you do to get both websites optimized with content and links and to the top?

A blogger at Search Engine Land makes the suggestion for a link directory as the gist of the optimization plan and content secondary. But, the case he makes for content is to do it for nearly any page. With his amount, he recommends outsourcing to have content for all pages. Both of these are important to any site, but, instead of the suggestion for outsourcing content, it should still be done in house.

As web and, more specifically, SEO content is a relatively new field, the assumption five years ago was anyone can create SEO content for optimizing a website. Words on a page do not make writing, however, and now skilled copywriters and those with experience in print writing are needed to craft SEO and general web content, as the search engines have gotten smarter with refining algorithms to detect spam content.

So, what does this mean for optimizing your large commerce website? It means you need to pick and choose what pages get content to prevent repetition and spam. With outsourcing to India or the Philippines, you don’t know what content you’re going to get back. In fact, your in-house writers may even need to edit it to make it less spam-like. When deciding which pages should be optimized, think of the keywords first. Each page should be dedicated to one or, at most, two keywords, and base your content on this. If the title tag, description, and content don’t fall under a single keyword or phrase – and this is often the case with singular product pages – don’t optimize it. Based on this strategy, the index, category, and sub-category pages all become optimized with content. With some commerce websites, this may mean adding content to any page that is not a singular product.

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Posted in Creating SEO Content, In the news, Keyword Research, Link Building, SEO, SEO Tools, Spamming and Black Hat | No Comments »

Microsoft Adds SEO Package to Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4

January 25th, 2010

How crucial is considering SEO in planning a website? Microsoft’s ASP tools Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will be equipped with basic SEO features when released later this year. According to the linked article, the vice president of Microsoft’s development division, Scott Gutherie, thinks that using SEO is important for all websites for better rankings and more traffic. Vision Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will have a basic SEO package, however, although more features are available through Microsoft’s separate SEO Toolkit.

The features included in Microsoft’s new ASP tools will be very basic, with keyword and description tags and URL routing included. But, as any SEO professional knows, this is a paltry amount of SEO. While description and 301 redirects are both important to optimizing any website, what about title tags, page, content, and reciprocal links? Perhaps these are included in the separate SEO Toolkit, but the SEO included with the ASP development programs is minimal, especially compared to offerings like Go Daddy’s Search Engine Visibility package.

Although adding some basic SEO can only help a website – and it should be incorporated from the development stage – thinking solely of keywords and descriptions doesn’t anticipate the issue of title tags. Ideally, title tags should be geared toward one keyword – two at the most – and with more than three incorporated into a category page title tag, the page isn’t really search engine friendly. Even though such tools by Microsoft should start developers thinking about SEO, more in-depth planning needs to be done. The main issue is devoting each page to a specific keyword or two at most and making sure all pages are equipped to handle not only description and keyword fields but also title tags and page content. After all, what’s a website without a title tag?

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How Duplicate Content Can Affect Your SEO

January 18th, 2010

An article published recently on newsfeed website Brafton states what most white-hat SEO professionals already know: duplicate content is harmful to SEO. The article states, essentially, that having duplicated content between two pages can affect page rank, as both pages are then labeled as spam. In some cases, pages buried in a website, such as products, often get away with this, but duplicated content on a category page, subcategory page, or blog? In this case, be prepared for your ranks to fall.

Search engine algorithms have come a long way since the 1990s, and Google, as well as Yahoo and Bing, are constantly refining and revising their algorithms. Google, in particular, does its best to filter out spam. Generally, spam on the search engines is seen as something that duplicates or repeats. Hence why keyword-saturated content from non-writers is now considered an outdated practice and web content or SEO copywriters are needed. Better content written by better writers typically means that the information on the page will be less likely to be labeled as spam.

Between pages, however, is where the issue of duplicated content comes into play. With an SEO team, no two pages of content, and this includes page content, meta descriptions, and title tags, should be identical. This can be difficult when writing content for identical websites but, with skilled writers, they should be able to craft however many new pages on content on one topic with originality.

Essentially, when considering your website, make sure that no content is duplicated, especially on the larger pages. Whether working with an SEO team or working on your own, make every effort possible so that the content on all pages is unique and original. Even with similar websites or similar keywords, the wording for all aspects of content should be different.

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