Everybody who works for an SEM agency, has worked for one in the past, or just visits Fortune 500 company websites from time to time, has probably had this thought at least once or twice; "If only they got it…". Well, within the next 5 years, most l
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
.EDU links have been hot for a while now, and reason for a lot of controversy - mainly from people who understood the value lies in the domain extension ".edu" as opposed to the the inherent domain strength and trust the universities have.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
A few weeks ago during SMX East, one of the subjects that came up was pagerank sculpting and use of nofollow. Most of the panelists didn’t use the practice, and Googler Matt Cutts has said it’s ok but not something he would put a high priority on if you set up your site correctly. Xoogler […] More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE) Tags: SEOSEMWeb DesignStumbleUponReddit
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
If you want to prevent any of your Wordpress blogs from getting hacked make sure you keep your software up to date, and follow other basic Wordpress protection strategies, like - securing your admin folder, removing the Wordpress version number from your theme’s header.php file, creating an index.html file in your plug-ins directory, and removing other common Wordpress oriented footprints like a “powered by Wordpress” signature in the page footer.
Not quite as bad as full hacking, but comment spam is still annoying. There are a couple good plug ins to help prevent comment spam as well, including Akismet and Spam Karma.
Other easy suggestions on this front are to require a captcha and force first time comments to be moderated before appearing on the site.
Google IP Address Targeted Hacking + Cloaked Spam
One of my blogs was recently targeted by a blog hacker that inserted links into the site that could *only be viewed by GoogleBot*. You typically would not notice such a hack unless you subscribed to a Google Alert for your site, saw yourself ranking for some of the spam terms, and/or when your Google Search Traffic started to fall.
The issue with such a hack is that it is hard to know if you wiped it out, even if you update everything. When you use Firefox’s User Agent Switcher you still will not see the links because you are not surfing from one of GoogleBot’s IP addresses.
In fact, for this particular hack you can’t even see the links on Google’s cached version of a page unless you view the text cache version of the page.
Once you click the text only cache link tons of pharmacy links appear in the page footer. This screenshot was taken from a Texas Instruments blog post on security and safety
Earlier this week one of my writers who loves blogging complained that search traffic was dropping slightly, and then after a few days of minor decay the search traffic was cut in half. Keep in mind this site gets much of it’s traffic from organic links.
Our Google traffic started to fall off slowly, and as more of the pages with spam in them got indexed the fall off became sharper. After a week or so traffic may be a small % of what it was…or if they just spam a couple pages the change in traffic may be so minor that you never notice it. The traffic decay rate depends on…
the crawl priority of your site (how frequently it gets crawled)
the number of pages you have on your site
how bad your site gets spammed (number of spammy links and pages, etc.
You can see what portion of your site got hit by searching Google for “spammy footprint” site:example.com and comparing that count to the total number of pages Google shows indexed for site:example.com.
How to Clean Up Your Wordpress Blog
Regular updates are a plus to make it easy to revert to a prior version if needed. And if you find yourself upgrading software after a hack make sure your server is clean (save old files elsewhere) and install fresh. You probably want to change your database and Wordpress passwords after upgrading, and if you are not sure where the hack was you may also want to change your theme.
There are a lot of different ways people can hack into a Wordpress blog. Some spam hunting ideas include…
Using SSH to look for recently modified files and/or weird new files that were added to your site. Some hackers may also add files to the root of your site, or above it hidden somewhere on your web server.
Some hacks may be via a Wordpress plug-in. If you have inessential plug-ins installed see if others have complained about them getting hacked, and see if you can remove them. I think some hackers that get into Wordpress go so far as adding plug-ins that position spam throughout the blog.
If your database contains spam in it then you can run the following MySQL query (from Michael VanDeMar) to find many of the most common types of Wordpress link hacks.
If you can’t find any spam in your Wordpress database, then…
look for files that have been added or modified
back up your files and database
disable plug ins
delete all files (except for maybe your config file and .htaccess file - and verify those have not been edited as well)
update your blog to the newest version of Wordpress
change your MySQL password and your Wordpress password
install a new theme
download necessary plug-ins from their original sources if you want to keep using them
make sure you performed all the steps at the top of this article to try to keep your blog safe.
If The Hacker Was Using IP Cloaking…
If the hacker was using IP cloaking you can’t be 100% certain that the spam is gone until Google tries to index new pages on your site and/or re-indexes old pages that were hacked.
If you updated your blog a few hours ago you can also do a regular site:www.example.com search on Google and set the results to 100 per page to find any pages that have been re-indexed in the last few hours. Once the search results come up you can search the search results page for hours ago.
One note of caution is to check the actual page’s cache date at the top of the page. Sometimes when a cache is really new clicking on the link will show you the new page, but sometimes it will show you a cached page from a few days back. When you see a new cached page without the spam links hopefully your spam problems are almost over and your site is on the road to recovery, with rankings improving as Google caches more pages from your site.
Remember to set up a Google Alert for your site so you can track if any spam links magically re-appear.
Your Turn
I have only had a couple blogs hacked in my many years of blogging. Did I miss any obvious tips and/or wisdom you can add to the above post?
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Canonicalization can be a confusing area for webmasters, so let’s take a look at what it is, and ways to avoid it causing problems.
What Is Canonicalization?
Canonicalization is the process by which URLs are standardized. For example, www.acme.com and www.acme.com/ are treated as the same page, even though the syntax of the URL is different.
Why Is Canonicalization An Issue For SEO?
Problems can occur when the search engine doesn’t normalize URLs properly.
For example, a search engine might see www.acme.com and acme.com as different pages. In this instance, the search engine has the host names confused.
Why Is This a Problem?
If the search engines sees a page as being published at many separate URLs, the search engine may rank your pages lower than they would otherwise, or not rank them at all.
Canonicalization issues can split link juice between pages if people link to variants of the URL. Not only does this affect rank (less PageRank = lower rank), but it can also affect crawl depth (if PageRank is spent on duplicate content it is not being spent getting other unique content indexed).
To appreciate what a dramatic effect canonicalization issues can have on search traffic look at the following example, and notice that for the given example proper canonicalization increased traffic for that keyword by 300%
Link Equity
Google Ranking Position
% of Search Traffic
Daily Traffic Volume
Traffic Increase
split 1
60%
8
3%
50
-
split 2
40%
15, filtered = 0
0%
0
-
canonical
100%
2
12%
200
300%
What Conditions Can Cause This Problem?
There are various conditions, but the following are amongst the most common:
How Can I Tell If Canonicalization Issues Are Affecting My Site?
Besides working through the checklist performing a manual check, you can also use Google’s cache date.
Previously, you would have been able to use Google’s supplemental index marker, although Google have recently done away with this feature.
The supplemental index is a secondary index, seperate from Google’s main index. It is a graveyard, of sorts, containing outdated pages, pages with low trust scores, duplicate content, and other erroneous pages. As duplicate pages often reside in the supplemental index, appearing in the supplemental index can be an indicator you may have canonicalization issues, all else being equal.
Before Google removed the supplemental index label, many SEOs noticed that supplemental pages had an old cache date and that cache date is a good proxy for trust. If your page is not indexed frequently, and you think it should be, chances are the page is residing in the supplemental index.
Michael Gray at Wolf-Howl” outlines a method to easily check for this data. In summary, you add a date and unique field to each page, wait a couple of months, then search on this term.
How Can I Avoid Canonicalization Issues?
Good Site Planning
Using good site planning and architecture, from the start, can save you a lot of problems later on. Pick a convention for linking, and stick with it.
This tool, and accompanying video, shows you how to spot a number of site architecture problems, including canonicalization issues.
Download the tool, check the www vs non-www option box, and hit the Analyze button.
If you have a large site you may not be able to surface all the canonicalization issues using the default tool settings. You may need to use the date based filter options to get a deep view of recently indexed pages…many canonicalization issues occur sitewide, so looking deeply at new pages should help you detect problems.
Another free, but far more time consuming option, is to use the date based filters on Google’s advanced search page.
Workaround For Https://
Sometimes Google will index both the http:// and the https:// versions of a site.
One way around this is to tell the bots not to index the https:// version.
Tony Spencer outlines two ways to do this in .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO. One is to cloak the robots.txt file, the other is to create a conditional php script.
If your software program links to a duplicate version of the content (like an individual post from a forum thread) consider adding rel=nofollow to those links.
Use 301s, not 302s On Internal Affiliate Redirects
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, which indicates a page has been moved permanently. 301s typically pass PageRank, and do not cause canonicalization issues.
A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. If you use 302s the wrong page may rank. Google’s Matt Cutts claims they are trying to fix the problem:
we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct)
but if you use 302s on affiliate links the affiliate page may rank in the search results, as shown in the below SnapNames search. This, in turn, would credit the affiliate with a commission anytime someone buys through that link in the search results…effectively cutting the margins of the end merchant.
Specify preferred urls in Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides an area where you can specify which version of URL i.e. www.acme or http//acme Google should use.
Note: It is important not to use the remove URL tool to try and fix these domain issues. Doing so may result in your entire domain, as opposed to one page, being removed from the index.
SEO as International Minutia Dealer - A look at trailing slashes, alternate home pages, and how google changes how they handle canonicalization over time.
SEO Quiz - Do search Engines Consider The Trailing Slash?
Website Health Check Tool - includes video on how to use the SEO Health Check Tool to spot canonical URL issues?
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Believe it or not, it only takes me 20 minutes to write a 400-500 word article. This article (which I wrote in 20 minutes) explains some of the tricks I use to accomplish this.
Blogging gives me a daily deadline, and I don’t really want to spend more than 20 minutes each day on blogging. Many […] More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE) Tags: Search Engine MarketingSocial MarketingDiggTechnoratriTechnorati
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Meta-search engine is a web-based service that aggregates data from a number of search engines. A meta search engine doesn’t have a database of indexed pages of its own. Instead it "sends a user’s query to multiple search engines and blends the top
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Video of Matt’s comments about why they don’t mention big name sites that get penalized for playing with black/grey hat tactics during SES San Jose 2008
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Is it beneficial for you to submit the products you have for sale on Google Base? What about utilizing Google Checkout? How does this fare for your product sales? This is the question posed by a seller on WebmasterWorld.
There are mixed results — some say that their sales have increased exponentially. Others said that they didn’t see their products listed anywhere.
Now the question is pointed at you. Have you used Google Base to list your products? Has it been successful?
Please let us know your thoughts in the comments or leave your feedback on WebmasterWorld.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
cNet recently covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank [PDF]. The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links (PageRank) as the backbone of a relevancy algorithm, you could look at actual usage data from hundreds of millions of users.
Since there are more web users than webmasters BrowseRank would be a more democratic system, but many users are mislead and/or easily influenced by social media, public relations, and some referral spam strategies, so BrowseRank could surface some low quality temporal information, making manipulating Digg and other “firehose of traffic” sources more valuable than they perhaps should be. Although if certain referrals were blocked (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.) and/or BrowseRank was combined with a blended search strategy (like how Google mixes Google News in their organic results) Microsoft could have a bit more confidence in waiting out some traffic spikes to see if traffic is sustained. And this potential shortfall (if managed properly) could actually lead to a major advantage over the stale effect of PageRank. If you create non-resource hyped up piece of linkbait that gets a quick rush of links and never gains any more votes then why should that page have a lot of authority to pass around your site?
BrowseRank can look at user time on site to help determine if the site was of quality, and perhaps even normalize for page length, but what happens if a page is really good at answering a common question? Even if people only ask it once in a great while quality content should not be penalized for great formatting, ease of use, and a great user experience - though as search evolves search engines will keep displaying more content in the search results, license specialized data, and answer many common questions directly in the search results.
In addition to looking at traffic that comes via links, BrowseRank also identifies direct URL visits via bookmarks or typing in URLs. These types of traffic sources
are considered “green traffic” because the pages visited in this way are safe, interesting, and/or important for users.
Such an algorithm would add value to direct navigation keyword rich URLs. Another obvious extension of such an algorithm would be identifying brand specific searches and URL searches, and bucketing those referrals into the green category as well.
To encourage such branded search queries and long user interactions it would be better to create strong communities with repeat visitors and many web based tools rather than allowing useful user interactions occur through browser extensions.
Another big issue with BrowseRank is that it highlights many social media sites. The issue with social media is that any piece of content is generally only relevant to a small number of people and most of the content is irrelevant to the population at large. Unless the search engine had a lot of personalized data promoting the general purpose social media sites would be blunderous - surfacing lots of results that are irrelevant, spam, or both.
One of the big advantages PageRank has over BrowseRank is an economic one.
People are more likely to link at informational resources, thus surfacing those pages and sites higher in the search results.
This gives Google’s organic search results an informational bias which makes searchers more likely to click on Google’s paid ads when performing a commercial search.
Google also has the ability to arbitrarily police links and/or strip PageRank scores to 0 with the intent to fearmonger and add opportunity cost to anyone who gathers enough links pointing at a (non-corporate owned) commercial domain. This layer of social engineering coerces publishers to create the type of content Google likes to rank.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: Creating PPC Campaigns: the ‘Live or Die’ Settings; Another Microsoft Offer, Another Yahoo Rejection; Now States are Investigating Yahoo-Google Deal; and more. More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE) Tags: SEOWeb DesignSocial MarketingDiggStumbleUpon
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
A source within Google has leaked this list of 22 Google laws. These confidential laws are not meant to be known by the public so make sure to spread the news before this site gets shut down. They cover 3 topics mainly: Ethics, privacy and website optimization for Google. I added some links where the […] More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE) Tags: Search Engine OptimizationRedditFurlPay Per ClickAdsense
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
Google has confirmed the Google AdSense Fonts tests as being tests at WebmasterWorld. Since then I have tried to compile some real world examples of these fonts in action. Thanks to a DigitalPoint Forums thread, I was able to find a new AdSense font. Here it is:
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
The SEOmoz Web 2.0 awards page is PR0 and no longer ranks.
"This seems to be a particularly harsh move by Google if you ask me. I mean people have ran awards and given out badges to the winners for years and it is totally white hat."
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
BB notes: Swedish ethnologist Erik Ottoson of Uppsala University studies how people browse at flea markets, wander through malls, window shop, and even dumpster-dive, to understand the psychology of “searching.” Specifically, Ottoson focuses on “serendipitous searching,” what he defines as “open browsing for anything that awakens the person’s interest.”… More SEO News…. (CLICK HERE) Tags: SEOWeb DesignSocial MarketingTechnoratriReddit
Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.
My company is very focused on the global marketplace. Thus far this year, we’ve targeted the Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and British languages in search results.
If you’re playing "One of these things is not like the other…" you probably feel the urge to inform me that "British" just doesn’t belong. On the technical merit of your argument, I would have to agree. In the world of search, however, it is an entirely different language. Pay close attention, and I’ll show how to leave your domestic competitors in the dust by leveraging your knowledge of other cultures.
First off, you may notice that the first portion of the title is "queue up" rather than "line up." Britons typically use this term, along with "queueing up," "stand in queue," and various other terms to express standing behind other people single file. Why is this important? I’ll show you:
So, we have 134,000,000 results. It’s probably going to be pretty hard to rank for this particular term. Now we’ll do a search for the term "queue up":
With just over 1,000,000 results, this term is far easier to optimise and rank for. An added benefit is that you are catering to an audience that speaks the British variant of English worldwide. What? Yeah, that’s right. You’re also hitting Australia, India, Canada, South Africa, and portions of the Middle East. Your clients will be miles ahead of the US market by adopting an International SEO approach, and gain valuable business contacts in the process. If you think I am kidding, apply this concept to a PPC campaign. You’ll pay far less money for far more leads and sales.
America is the only place where we turn our "s" into a "z" when we spell. Yet Google still thinks I might have made a mistake when I search for "optimise," even when I check with the UK variant of Google:
In case you were wondering, the results for "optimize" clocked in at 44 million. I won’t bore you with yet another Google screenshot because I think you get the point. "But," you might say, "we are only marketing our product to the US market. Why should I care if we rank for the funny spelling of the word?" One word: Expatriates.
When people leave their own country to attend university, marry, or start a new job, there is a good chance they will not leave 20 years of spelling habits behind. It is also very likely that they will continue to use their country’s portal for search, even though they have left that geographical location. As an aside, if they are searching, then they will probably do it in their primary language, so position your strategy accordingly.
Now that we’ve established a "why," I’ll give you a few suggestions to help you rank for these "odd" spellings:
Put the term in your page title with its Americanized equivalent.
e.g., If you are trying to rank for cash registers internationally, put the terms "cash registers and tills" in your title tag.
Use the term "interchangeably" and "synonymously" in your body text.
This will help you rank more highly, and you will educate your audience in the process. That way, when some poor Scotsman asks where the till is, he won’t be inadvertently pointed towards the restroom.
Anchor Text, Anchor Text, Anchor Text
If your search terms are similar, you may get some nice overlap.
e.g., You’re anchoring with "car tires" and the international spelling "car tyres". Because they share the common KW "car" you should see a synergistic boost in rankings for both terms.
Maybe you think my advice is elementary, basic, downright common. It is. You have every right to chuckle and dismiss everything I just said. I advise you to give this method a real chance. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results.
I also know that my knowledge in this area is very limited, so please leave your geotargeted, JavaScripted, User Agent redirected, AJAX boosted, keyword arbitrage solution in the comments below.
Always link to 
