The end of the supplemental index?
December 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment
For those of you not familiar with the Google supplemental index, I found the best ever summary of this indice (In´dice – n. 1. Index) at Tropical SEO to sum up what this is. Quote: “The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.” I find that statement hilarious and I laughed out loud.
In the past, if you’re website had pages that Google didn’t trust or had a lot of inlinks that were suspect, Google would place your pages in a huge, dark, dusty database where you would technically be “indexed” and could “possibly” show in the search results, but the chances were slim. The official Google statement on this subject was that they would search this index if and when they had to fulfill a harder or more esoteric (obscure) search query. Read more
Google Analytics: Content Analysis and Sitemap improvements
December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Google has released an update to their much loved Analytics tool that provides basic content analysis and another improved feature that details out important information about your sitemap. The new tools will give you information about meta tags, meta description tags and information about content on your site that Google has trouble indexing. Google says:
To help you improve the quality of your site, our new content analysis feature should be a helpful addition to the crawl error diagnostics already provided in Webmaster Tools.
The new sitemap tools reveal how your sitemap was processed by the Googlebot and it should be a useful addition so you don’t have to spend the time trying to figure out if Google actually indexed all of your important pages. Information includes:
- The number of the pages from your Sitemap that were indexed
- lists any errors or warnings for specific pages
Google continues:
Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Google about your site’s most important pages, especially if you have new or updated content that we may not know about. If you haven’t yet submitted a Sitemap or have questions about the process, visit our Webmaster Help Center to learn more.
Hyphenated domain names are BAD
December 12, 2007 | 5 Comments
For those not familiar with this subject, let me give you a quick background summary.
Domain names can be purchased as “yourdomainname.com” or “your-domain-name.com” and you don’t automatically get both when making the purchase. Site owners have chosen to market their site this way for several reasons.
First, the domain name without the hyphens might not be available so the site owner opts to go with the next best thing.
Second, people have chosen to go this route to clearly place their specific keywords and key phrases in their domain name and separate them with hyphens to clearly spell out the words for the search engines. It’s not a bad idea to have your keywords in your domain name but the goal here is to target a very specific, high traffic key phrase and the practice has been abused. This technique has been popular for long, targeted key phrases that are commonly used by shady, spammy and illegal sites. For example, “buy-viagra-online-cheap.com”.
Google has said in 2005 that it doesn’t matter if you have hyphens but does this still stand up in 2008?
To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while- consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas- holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.
In 2008 it’s becoming clear that the search engines might be starting to consider domain names like this to be less relevant and spammy than domain names without the hyphen. Many prominent figures in the industry have said that more than 3 hyphens in a domain name can raise a red flag.
We’ll keep an eye on this subject and we welcome your participation in the comments below. As a general practice try to choose a domain name without hyphens. It’s easier to remember and it reduces the risk that you might rate with lower relevance in the SERP’s due to your domain name style. Of course there is nothing wrong with securing your domain name with and without the hyphens to reduce confusion but I would definitely recommend using the non-hyphenated name whenever possible.
Where’s a good place to register domain names? Check out GoDaddy.com and NameBargain.com
Your content structure and organization
December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve wondered for a long time regarding the choice of some sites to build their content out within directories, sub-domains or as static pages positioned at the top of the root directory. I’ve always had it in my mind that the static page (or at least a short path to the page) is the way to go – that Google would consider that page “more relevant” because it was higher up in the directory. The answer turns out to be none of the above. To the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first. Read more
Link building (Part 1) The Basics
December 10, 2007 | 2 Comments
Well, here we go. How do we tackle the most intensive and time consuming part of any SEO job? Just like any other job, the best way is to just hunker down, roll up your sleeves and take it step by step, bit by bit until you’ve completed the job – no matter how long it takes and how much you sweat. Hopefully in the end it will all be worth it. If you know what your goals are and where you need to go, simple focus, organization and sheer power of will will always get the job completed.
Building and managing a high quality link campaign will take exactly this commitment. It’s not something that you can just dive into without a plan and a system for organization. Actually, besides the knowledge of how to build a high quality and honest link campaign, organization is the most important part. We’ll discuss this more on this site as we progress but know this up front, if you start building links without the proper knowledge and a proper system, you’ll almost always assuredly fail. Read more
The current state of meta tags
December 5, 2007 | 1 Comment
Back in the day, meta tags were all the rage. Webmasters spent a lot of time crafting the perfect tags for the headers of their page that included keywords, descriptions and all sorts of other fancy tags that ultimately accomplished very little. Today, it’s an ongoing SEO urban myth that you need keyword meta tags on your pages.The truth is that some rogue search engines still use tags like the keyword tag but overall the engines that we really care about ignore them completely. Google has confirmed this. Read more
