SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

According to SEObook.com, Ebay made an announcement that it will abandon CJ and valueclick and instead it will start promoting its own affiliate program. This is not suprising at all as we know a company with sizes like Ebay has the ability and resources to launch its own and this is beneficial to the end users. Whenever we decrease the number of middleman in the value chain, the overall costs decreases.  Our economy sometimes is more efficient without the middleman. For example, companies sometimes bypass the bank and issue commercial paper directly to investors. In this way, the company ends up paying lower interest rate and investors get to earn better return than if they deposit money in bank.

What i am wondering now is that will merchants like Dell, tigerdirect and other big companies follow ebay? I surely hope they do. However, CJ is still necessary for small merchants that is incapable of creating their own affiliate platform.

Put it simply, Google patent is a information retrieval based on historical data. You can get a thorough review of this topic at SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/article/google-historical-data-patent. So why would you read here? Well, I am just going to talk about my own experience and my own thoughts.

There are 5 critical points in that paper:

Google’s Concept of “Document Inception”

The date of “document inception”, which can refer to either a website as a whole or a single page is used in many different areas by Google. This data can come from the registration info, the date Google first found a link to the site/page or the site/page itself. Google will be using this data to rank documents and establish credibility and relevance.

My thoughts:
That is exactly why when you have a new page, you can get it indexed by Google in 24 hours if you can get a backlink from a high PR website. If you have a new site, you don’t need to spend big bucks to get a high quality link. You can use a free service from site like squidoo or hubpage. If you start writing some topic there and link back to your site, you site should get indexed by Google in 72 hours.

How Changing Content can Affect Rankings

Changing content over time has a huge impact in Google’s measures according to this patent. They use changes to determine “freshness” or “staleness” of websites and pages and how that data impacts the value of the links on the page as well its rankings. They’ll also measure large, “real”, content changes vs. superfluous changes and rank based on that data.

Google also says that for some types of queries, particular results are more valuable - stale results may be desirable for information that doesn’t need updating, fresh content is good for results that require it, seasonal results may pop up or down in the rankings based on the time of month/year, etc.

My thoughts:
Yes, freshness! Google loves new content and that is why blogs can do better than other types of sites. Thus, you need to provide your visitor updated information. You ever wondered why sometimes e-commerce sites rank better than a content-driven site? New and fresh content would be the reason. E-commerce site always update their product listings and show new promotions while some content driven sites shows only static shopping guides. Another finding is that it seems the more product listings a page has, the better ranking. But I am not sure about this.

Spam Detection & Punishment

Google is employing many new systems of spam detection and prevention according to the patent. These include:

• Watching for sites that rise in the rankings too quickly
• Watching for registration information, IP addresses, name servers, hosts, etc that are on their “bad list”
• Growth of off-topic links
• Speed of link gain
• Percentage of similar anchor text
• Topic/Subject shifts or additions

My thoughts:
Aggressive link building strategy probably won’t work anymore. I have worked for a company that decides to spend lots of $$ for getting a keyword ranked. We bought tons of articles, did tons of directory submission and did a lot of blog posts. Guess what, 1 month later, it worked. The company’s web page get to the 1st page of Google for a very competitive keywords. However, this only lasted for 3 months, and now get pushed back to 3rd page again.

I will talk about next 2 factors in my next post.

While i was watching video on youtube, i found a video called top 10 SEO tools. Actually, in this video, it only talked about 3 tools. One tool that interests me is the one called Hit tail. This tool lets you view real time search hits and provides keyword suggestion for your website. It offers the service for free but you can get more features with the plus version. I signed up with the free version and looked at the feature myself. At some point, the results provided is better than Google Analytics. It is easy to follow but yet very meaningful.

Look at this image below, it shows what search terms drives traffic to your site and it shows exactly how many visitors found your site with each search term. For example, 223 people found your site with the keyword “seo service” and 112 people found your site by search “seo tips”. What’s more, you can filter the results by different search engines, so you can see which search engine is your site currently optimized to.

On this page, you can see the exact referral URL sorted by time.

On this page, you can see a list of keywords that Hittail suggest you to improve. If you can work on the ranking for these certain kind of keywords, you will be able to get more qualified traffic.

How much time you devote each week for link building? What actually matters is not how much time you spent on link building but the quality of the links you acquired. We often would see websites with a “link”, “resources” or “partners” page. Doesn’t matter what they call these kind of pages, they are essentially all “link” pages. Would you go ahead and trade link with them based on the instruction? The answer is no unless you have plenty of time.

If you have limited time, then you probably want to focuse on hosted content and article submission. Hosted content, which is often called pre-sell content, makes your site looks very good. What you do is that you write a professional article and hosted on some other sites. Usually, these sites related to the topcality of your site and is an authority in the field. Since you are paying for the space, you can use links back to your site. This would make your site very attractive.

Second, you would go for article submissions. Write an article with the intention to help users solving problems. At the end of the article, include a link back to your site/product, communicate to your users how exactly your product/service would help them solving the problem. Again, this is very useful and it is a great way to acquire nature links. I personally recommend ezinearticles.com. This is a very good place to submit your articles. You can take a look at my article - get indexed by google in 48 hours. At the end of the article, i linked back to this seo blog if readers want more information.

In the latest search engine report, Yahoo counts for about 22.1% of the market share and thus, it is certainly a market webmaster should not ignore. While optimizing your site for Google, if you can have your site ranked well on Yahoo as well, it will be a big boon to your bottom line. Again, you will see that the following elements are commonly mentioned when it is related to SEO does not matter what search engines we talk about. What you need to pay attention to is the details in each of the factor:

Title tag: Make your title short, probably no more than 5/6 words.  (for google, you may want it to be more descriptive)

Meta description: Use about 2 sentences and describe what your site is about. Include your key phrases at least once in your sentence, but should be no more than 3 times

Meta keywords: This may not be useful if you optimize your site for Google. However, meta keywords still matters for Yahoo.  However, do not repeat any certain words more than 3 times.  Based on my experience, 3-5 keywords is optimal for Yahoo

Keywords in URL: No more explanation needed here. Make your URL SEO friendly.

Prominence: Use heading 1 and heading 2 on your page. In your paragraph, make your keywords bold or italic so that it stands out from other parts. In this way, you are telling the search engine that these certain keywords are more important.

alt text: Use alt text for your images. On one side, it helps the visitors if they block the image. On the other side, you are optimizing your image and there is a chance that the image from your sire may get ranked if someone searches the images

Site Explorer: Create an account on Yahoo and submit a sitemap to Yahoo just like what you would do for Google, this would help Yahoo better index your site.  You can also use Yahoo ping service to notify Yahoo whenever your web page is updated.

Once you have your website ready, the first thing you want to do is to submit to search engines like Google and Yahoo and pray that your site can quickly be updated by them. However, if you submit your site using the regular google submission form, it can still takes weeks until Google visits your site. There are certainly ways you can have your site quickly indexed by Google.
1. Get a link from an existing and authoritative site

If you can obtain a backlink from an existing site (the older the domain, the better it is) and the site is an authority in Google’s eye, then you can expect your site get indexed by Google wihtin 48 hours. Well, an easy way to get such a link is to join a forum and make some posts with your signature attached. Just be careful do not spam the forum. You should reply to thread with the intention of helping other members solving problems.
2. Create an external blog

Google loves blog with updated topics. Do not create a blog under your own domain since your domain is not trusted yet. Create a blog with blogger.com and write a couple of blog posts with links back to yoru site. Again, you can expect your site get indexed by Google within 48 hours.  (I created this blog for my SEO friendly directory. It is not for quick index purpose though)

3. Get as many links as possible
If somehow you can not get a link from a site with high pagerank and you are not in favor of developing a blog, then what you can do is to focus on the quantity of the links. Get as many links from existing websites as possible. For example, you can submit your site to directories, implement reciprocal or 3-way link exchanges. But we do suggest you focus on the previous two strategies, this strategy should be the last thing to consider since Google has been devaluing these link strategies.

Blog is a great way to share your experience and insights with other Internet users. For a person, you share your viewpoints, your life experience with others. For a business, blog is a great way to introduce what is “cool” about your business. Whenever your business offers coupons, discounts and have promotions, announce it on your blog. People who subscribed to your blog via RSS feeds will get notified immediately. In terms of SEO, blog is a great way to refresh your content and if you content is great, there is a good chance that you will get some “nature links”. This is why I created the SEO blog in my directory. Here, I’d like to talk about some good blogging practices for SEO:

• Update your blog regularly and keep it fresh
• Make sure the topics of your blog are properly categorized so that your topics are grouped into meaningful phrases on the homepage such as “SEO Resources, Directory News & Reviews”
• Fully utilize other services such as Feedburner, Technorati and other popular social bookmarking services.
• Submit your blog to blog directories.
• Make sure each individual blog post has proper title and a SEO friendly URL.

The 301 and 302 codes are the HTTP status codes used for redirection. These codes indicate that another request must be made in order to fulfill the HTTP request — the content is located elsewhere. When a web page replies with either of these codes, it does not return any HTML content, but includes an additional Location: HTTP header that indicates another URL where the content is found.

301

The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to the new location specified by the Location: header that follows. It indicates that the old URL is obsolete and should replace any references to the old URL with the indicated URL.

When loading the page in a web browser, the response will be automatically redirected to the new location specified by the Location header. After the redirection, the back button in your browser won’t reference the initially requested page, as a result of the old page being permanently redirected.

The 301 status code also indicates to search engines that link equity from the previous URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, the new page will inherit the rankings of the original page. In practice, however, it may take some time for this to occur. It would be wise not to frivolously change URLs regardless, if this is a concern.

302

The 302 status code is a bit ambiguous in meaning. It indicates that a resource is “temporarily” moved. The old URL is not obsolete at all, and clients will not cache the result unless indicated explicitly by a Cache-Control or Expires header. To confuse things even further, 302 is also used for some paid advertising links, but that is not the usage discussed here. The big problem with the 302 status code is that its meaning for search engines depends on its context. In practice, it is worth dividing them into internal temporary redirects, that is, from a page on domain A to another page on domain A, and external temporary redirects, from a page on domain A to a page on domain B. Browsers always abide by the definitions for interpreting a 302 redirect — both internal and external.
However, today, most search engines only use it for an internal 302. For an internal 302 redirect, then, search engines will not cache the result of the redirect, and continue to list domain A in the SERPs. This is consistent with the definition. External 302 redirects are more of a problem. Matt Cutts of Google states that more than 99% of the time, Google will list the result with the destination result, that is, domain B, instead of domain A. This is against the standard, and Google behaves like this to mitigate a vulnerability called “302 hijacking.”

This is not strictly a penalty in and of itself, but it may be the result of one. Google stores its crawled
search data in two indexes: the primary index and the supplemental index. The supplemental index
stores pages that are less important to Google for whatever reason. Results from the supplemental
index typically appear at the end of the results for a Google query (unless the query is very specific),
and the results are marked as supplemental results.

Here is another great article about Google supplemental index you can look at.

Potential Search Engine Penalties
A penalized web site is much less likely to show up in a SERP, and in some cases it may not appear at all.
we will discusses the following areas:
- The Google “sandbox effect”
- The expired domain penalty
- Duplicate content penalty
- The Google supplemental index

The Google “Sandbox Effect”
Many search engine optimization experts hypothesize that there is a virtual “purgatory” that all newly launched sites must pass through in order to rank well in Google. In fact, many new sites seem to pass through this stage, and many find that the period is remarkably close to six months. Matt Cutts states in an interview with Barry Schwartz that there may be “things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries” (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002822.html). While Google may not explicitly have a “sandbox,” the effect itself is real. For this reason it is termed an “effect,” and not a “penalty.” It may be the collective side effect of several algorithms — not an explicit “sandbox algorithm.” Some sites seem to be exceptions to the rule, especially those that acquire links from several authority sites early on. A few links from CNN.com and other prominent web sites, for example, may exempt a web site from the sandbox effect. Some hypothesize that Yahoo! has a similar algorithmic factor, but that it is less severe and pronounced. MSN Search does not appear to have anything similar implemented.
The Expired Domain Penalty
Using a previously expired domain to launch a new web site used to evade this dreaded “sandbox
effect.” This was likely because Google was unaware that the site was new. Google put a stop to this
loophole a while ago, and now it seems to be quite the opposite situation at times. An expired domain name may now be subject to a temporary penalty. This is important, because it implies an additional delay before a site begins to rank well. In some cases Google will even refuse to index the pages at all during that period, leaving a web site vulnerable to content theft. It is also likely that Google devalues any links that are acquired before the re-registration of the domain. At the time of writing, other search engines do not appear to penalize previously expired domains.

Duplicate Content Penalty
Search engines attempt to avoid indexing multiple copies of the same content—duplicate content. Many
search engine optimization experts hypothesize that not only does a search engine not index such pages,
but it also penalizes a site for having the duplicated content. This is a subject of much debate, but in any case, having duplicate content will not improve the rankings of a site in any of the major search engines.