Why being #1 in Google matters

This is part of a 2 parts article. Initially this was supposed to be a one part and to be called “Why being #1 in DOESN’T matter”. But in a very short time window things have changed.

So, moving to the subject. Google recently announced that their Sitelinks feature from the SERPs has doubled the number of items from 4 to 8. Even though this has been announced only 7th december, I’ve seen it active for over a month.

Why Sitelinks are important? Well, take it this way. If you are #1 for a query, a user has 9(NINE!) access points to your website. Nine access points that are above the fold. You really couldn’t ask for more.

If you look at what Google says about Sitelinks, you’ll see that they are pretty vague and mysterious about it and they give you no hints on how you can control them.

Here are a few hints based on my experience:

• Sitelinks appear only when a query shows your main page as #1. I haven’t seen any examples for secondary pages, but it also applies for the first page of a subdomain. Usually any query can trigger sitelinks, but I’ve seen a few examples where it doesn’t.
  • TIP: Start again optimizing your main page for high traffic keywords
• Sitelinks are available for Google.com and in very few cases for international domains.
  • TIP: plan your optimization with the .com in mind and the rest will follow
• Sitelinks appear for old domains in general. My site where I’ve observed them is 2 years old
  • TIP: if you are #1 and you don’t have sitelinks, don’t pannic. They will appear in time
• Sitelinks appear for high volume of content.
  • TIP: My site has ~3000 pages. If you have very few pages, start creating content.
• Sitelinks are in fact, pages that have the most internal links (in your site). That’s why you will usually see sitelinks that mirror a website menu (menu links are on all pages).
  • TIP: This is valuable information about how Sitelinks are created. Try to determine what are the most important 8 pages within your website (beside the homepage) and get to work. Use nofollow on site wide links that are not important and link those 8 pages from every page. For those 8 links try using the following in any combination: title attribute, strong/em tag, h1,2,3.
• Sitelinks labels. It seems that those are extracted from the text of the links and not from the title or other content on the page.
  • TIP: Pay attention on how you are linking your target pages and keep the same text all over the site. For maximum effect, try using a maximum of 2 words.
• Even though you cannot control directly what sitelinks you have, you can remove unwaanted ones.
  • TIP: In order to do that, you need to have a Google Webmaster Account and your site authenticated. If you already have Sitelinks for your site, you’ll find them there and you can block those that are innacurate. It takes ~7days for the changes to propagate in the SERPs. Note that once you remove a link, it will not be automatically replaced with another. For my website I have removed 2 links that weren’t appropriate and now I have only 6. Perhaps in time Google will add another 2.
• Google Operating System mentions another factor: traffic data. Basically this implies that Google uses data gathered trough Google Toolbar (or other analytics means like Google Analytics or Google Adsense) to determine what are your most visited pages. Looking at my Sitelinks and at my top 50 pages I cannot say that this is 100% correct. Only 2 out of 8 pages could have been turned into sitelinks through this. Even if this is true, it looks that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you receive from Google but your general traffic for a specific page:
  • TIP: In order to control the traffic for a specific page, here are a few things that you can do.
    • Design your layout in such way that your target pages receive the most traffic
    • Use social tools (digg, del.icio.us,stumble upon) to dirrect traffic to your most important 8 pages.

Well this is all. Hope you find this useful in your SEO efforts. If your lucky enough to have sitelinks, start optimizing those pages for the best conversion, and if you don’t have them right now, I hope that this guide will help you.

See you on the second part to learn why being #1 is not so important and what you can do to make it important

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

The importance of assholes in SEO

Sometimes, when you have a website that is doing well in a small niche, is inevitable that an asshole will appear and will clone it. Depending on various factors, this could be a good thing or a disaster for you.

Today, I am gonna tell you why is a good thing.

I have a small site that’s one of the best in its niche. A few weeks ago, I received a link exchange email and I checked the website requesting it. To my surprise, it was a total clone of my own website, starting from the categories, content and monetization. Unfortunatelly for the sad bastard, here are my aces:

• My site is 2 years old
• Lots of natural links
• Lots of authority links
• 8000 RSS feed subscribers
• Excellent internal links on Google

Why the appearance of the clone is a good thing? Well, in order to take my position in the niche, he is forced to throw in the heavy artillery. He is forced to try a lot of optimization methods and he is forced to gain a LOT of incoming links. Due to the fact that he is a cheap competitor, he is not buying links but he is gaining them through request and submissions. Because my site was doing great through link baits and natural link growth, I’ve never payed attention (read this as: I was too lazy) to gain more external links. Now, the competitor is doing all the hard work (research) for me and all I have to do is to use Yahoo Site Explorer to track his actions and follow his steps

To summarize: if a competitor appears don’t go nuts. If it is a spammer he’ll get kicked by search engines algorithmically. If it is a good competitor and you have some advantages on him, analyze his steps and stay one step ahead always.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »

My experience with Live Webmaster Tools

Two months ago, one of my content sites got completely flushed from the Live index. This was a clean content site, with enough content and incoming links. Due to the fact that even though I had a lot of #1 keywords on Live the traffic was insignificant I didn’t pay attention to this.

Once the Live webmaster tools were announced, I decided to give it a try. The tools that they are currently providing are not enough not raise my interest so I decided to test drive it with the banned (?)  site.

Today, I saw that the site got back, more pages indexed and with more keywords in the SERPs (the traffic still sucks though).

Now I am going to submit a few more websites to see if the pattern repeats.

Posted in Microsoft, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Free automated pinging for your pligg site

We all have learned by now that having the ability to ping is doing miracles for our sites. So having a ping feature for a pligg based website is a must. Due to the fact that this is not a built in feature, we have the following options:

Buy a custom module. For this there is Plingger which is very cheap, only 10USD. This ping by default 13 engines and more can be added.  If you are in a hurry this is for you.

If you are not willing to invest in such a module there is another option for you: Feedburner. Here are the steps that you need to make:

1. Go to Feedburner and burn a feed for each of your sections.
2. For each feed, go to the “Publicize” tab and activate the “Pingshot” service.
3. Check the  Google Blog Search Engine and Ping-O-Matic and than add 3 more search engines of your choice

If you want to deeply integrate your Pligg based website with feedburner, here is a tutorial on how to do it. This will allow you to get statistics for your RSS feeds.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Buy Blog Comments

I was writing last time about a new form of intelligent blog comment spam commenting. This new form implies that instead of mass, automated, crappy comments on low value blogs you get some medium quality comments made by humans, with links that are going to stay for a while.

Jon Waraas  has just started a business out of this. The packages that he offers are:

• 100 comments: Get 100 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $24.99.
• 500 comments: Get 500 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $123.99.
• 1000 comments: Get 1000 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $239.99

What those packages mean in fact? You get PERMANENT links at ~0.25$. Not for month, not for year. But as long as the target blog will last. That implies links that get old on pages that in time gain PR. And links not on non related pages but targeted to your niche. That’s quite a bargain.

Why is this better for blog owners and is different from common, crappy comment spamming? Well:

• The blog gets unique content
• Those comments are very likely to stimulate conversations. Remember those are human made and on subject

After all is a win/win situation, the only ones who’d might not like it being the Google engineers. But this form of comment spamming is pretty hard to catch, so they’ll have to deal with it

Posted in Blogging, SEO Tip, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Google Indexing Speed

Google got pretty fast lately. A few examples on 2 of my sites:

• A post was created indexed and ranked in 24h. Now is #2 for its target (low&local competition though). The result is still there after 1 week
• A post created 3h ago has been indexed and ranked (on the second page though and on a low competition phrase)

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »

SEO hypocrisy

Loren Baker has a nice (even though common sense) link/digg bait list about how bad nofollow tag sucks. And they conclude that sucks. And it sucks very bad. And it sucks even in blog comments (imagine the horror):

1. NoFollow = NoWorky. Using NoFollow in blog comments, the original intent of the tag, does nothing to discourage comment spammers. Using other anti-spamming tools such as question, math and plugins such as Akismet and SpamKarma for Wordpress is much more effective.

[...]

8. Commenting on a blog post is the same as adding more relevant to that blog post. A thought provoking one sentence post can lead to pages of comments. If someone takes the time to help build your site’s content via posting comments, it is professional courtesy to give them some link love.

But this is just another don’t practice what you preach article as they still have nofollow tags for thei blog comments.

Not anymore. Nice job and a good example (hopefully) for the others

P.S. I am still using it cause I am too lazy to remove them. But I will. I promise. I’ll stop procrastinating right now and install DoFollow

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

Yahoo goes spamming

From Techcrunch:

 Yahoo’s brand-centric sites, announced in November 2006 and dubbed “Brand Universe”, have started to go live. These sites each revolve around a single popular brand - like this one on the Nintendo Wii - and have almost no original content. Instead, Yahoo is taking content from Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers and other Yahoo properties, along with some slick graphics, and hoping for page views.

[...]

Yahoo doesn’t seem too concerned with monetization of these pages yet, and they aren’t working directly with the brands themselves.

Ok, someone please explain me what’s the freakin difference between what Yahoo does and search engine spamming. Those are black hat websites by the book with a Yahoo logo on them:

• no original content
• aggregated content based on RSS feeds around a central keyword
• subdomain hosted on a core authority domain
• lots of ads (soon)

When Wordpress did that a few years ago they were called spammers and blacklisted for a while from Search Engines. When regular black haters do it are called splogs and flushed from SERPs. When Yahoo does it is brilliant.

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »

Wikipedia goes nofollow

Search Engine Journal confirms something I saw accidentally this weekend. All the external links from Wikipedia have now the nofollow attribute.

Well the ideea is that this is a pointless action in the fight against spam and it will only hurt the legit websites. Why is that so:

• After the nofollow agreement between Google/Yahoo/MSN, all the blogging platforms implemented it for the comments section. Result? Total failure. Blog spamming is a bigger issue than before
• On blogs, only legit websites were hurt because most of the spam comments are either caught in spam filters or manually removed
• Wikipedia, like DMOZ, is scraped by many other sites (some legit like Answers.com and some splogs). Don’t know if the nofollow atribute will be also included in those

Posted in General, Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments »

Google and duplicated content

All the SEOs know the regular speech, Google gives when it comes to duplicated content:

• Is bad
• It sucks
• We can detect it
• We are against it
• If you do it we are going to kick your ass out of our index and the asses of your childrens and grandchildrens
• If you do it an angel looses its wings
• yada yada yada

Ok. Some care about it some just yawn when they hear it. Today I am officially among those who yawn. I was looking for a freaking press picture of Joseph Barbera and all I got was the same endless press release. Look for “were the futuristic mirror image” to see how many duplicates Google is keeping (and yes I know in time they’ll be buried and only a few will appear…yada yada yada)

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »