SEO Blog - SEO for Php Link Directory and Webmasters

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.

I don’t think anyone would do an excellent job on SEO without properly using SEO tools (they are free!). Here is a collection of SEO Tools you should be aware of and over time, you should be getting famiar with it and fully utilize it for your site’s optimization.

Code Validation: http://validator.w3.org/
This involves the validation of various HTML or XML standards, which are mainly governed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).

Backlink Tool: http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ | http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/site-analysis.html
Backlinks are inbound links that point to a certain website. They are required in order to get good rankings in the search engine results.

Google Sitemap: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Google Sitemap uses a xml format and it is a powerful tool for tracking how’s your site doing in Google

Robots.txt Tool: http://www.123promotion.co.uk/tools/robotstxtgenerator.php | http://www.sxw.org.uk/computing/robots/check.html
Robots.txt is more important than you think. Make sure your site has it and it is in the right format. The first tool helps you generate a robots file while the 2nd checks if your existing one is valid.

Keywords Tools: Keywords Suggestion Tool | Google Keywords Suggestion | Meta Keywords
There are tools that will show you exactly what keywords are popular and give you suggestions based on a core keyword. It also gives you an idea as to what you can rank for and what you can’t. Some keywords are just too popular and therefore too difficult to get a good ranking for.

Keyword Density Analyzer: http://www.seobench.com/keyword-density-analyzer/
Keyword density is important since search engines use this information to determine the theme of your website, the perfect keyword density will help archive higher search engine positions.

Search Engine Ranking Check: Google Ranking | Yahoo Ranking | MSN Ranking
Look how your site rank for certain key phrases across various major search engines.

Website Optimization:
Meta Tag Generator | Spider Simulator | Similar Page Checker | Watchfire WebXACT
These tools in general can help optimize your site. Make sure that everything is up to par for the search engines can take a long time and often requires a lot of experience.

Google, Google, Google. To most of us, Google=Search Engine. It is right, if you have a website, what’s your mission? Maybe you want to make some money, or you want thousands of unique visitors every day? What it all comes down to is to be #1 on Google (right, I personally don’t really care about Yahoo and Live). If you go to a SEO forum, there are tons of threads and suggestions for ranking well on Google. Well, here is a list of things that I personally feel are on the top list of Google’s ranking algorithm.

1.  Title
No surprise here, page title, I just can not stress how important your page title is! Make your title descriptive and to the point.  Make sure it contains the exact key terms you are targeting. The position of your title tag could be important to, so make sure in your code, it is RIGHT under <head>.

2. Content
Content is  king  in Google’s eye.  Does your page have unique content that is useful to your readers? Think about the love that Wiki got from Google.  Well, I am not sure about you, I am jealous. Why can’t Google just love me the way it loved Wiki? So make sure each of your page has at least 200 words description. You don’t need to intentionally stuff keywords in there. If that is what your page is about, keywords will be used very naturally. A little bit of trick can be played here though. You can use proper headings and create  prominence (bold and underline your keywords)  in your on page description.  Keep your content updated regularly and keep it fresh. Google will love it.

3: Quality of backlink
When talk about links, I am not opposed of link exchanges as long as the site that links to you is trustworthy and the content is highly related to your site.  When acquire links, evaluate the site and ask these important questions:
1: Does the site linking to me has a lot of quality content?
2: Does the site linking to me provides extra “value” to my visitors?
3: Does the site linking to me is authoritative in Google’s eye? Further evaluate based on 3 criteria:
a- Look at how many pages are indexed by Google
b- Look at how many backlinks are counted by Google
c-  Look at the PR (some people’s favorite)
d- Look at the age of the domain

4. Internal Linking Structure
Some people actually ignored this factor. They seem only to know links from other sites are useful since one way link is so hard to obtain and we can do whatever we want with our internal linking structure. (Something that is hard to obtain is always better than something easy we can get).  Well, don’t ever overlook the importance of your internal links. In your content, link to your own page with the proper anchor text wherever is appropriate.  Say if you have a page ranked well for the term “computer motherboard”, in the content on that page, if you link to your page A using “Asus motherboard”, then the chance of your page A get ranked for “Asus motherboard” will be much greater than if otherwise.

5.  Time
Get top ranks on Google takes time! (unless you start with a blog and start to target a long tail niche keywords). Don’t ever expect your hard work would pay off any time soon. Patience is the key. Keep writing quality content, acquiring quality links instead of staring at your PR every day. At last pray!!

I watched a cool video clip a couple of days ago talking about how to use Wiki kill your competitors. I think it is interesting so I am here to share with you guys.

Now let’s say you target a keyword  “loft bed” on your site. But after months (or even years?) of hard work, you had no luck. Other people somehow just do better than you and you will never find out exactly why they rank better than you. What do you do? This is where Wiki should kick in.

Find a wiki page with the term “loft bed”. If no such page exists, you will have to create one and this may take a bit longer for the “new wiki page” to beat your competitors. If the page already exists, then congratulations! Now add some good content to that page and properly use internal links link to other wiki pages.

You know what, Google just “love” Wiki page. They are non-commercial and is so informative. To Google,Wiki is the representative of “authority”. So once the wiki page get ranked the 1st and 2nd place, the guy, your enemy would lose a lot of visitors. If you ever try it out, never mention that you read it here please…

I know there are a lot of tools there for site optimization, but here are the list of the tools I use and I would highly recommend it if you haven’t tried before

1. Google Analytics
I can not stress how important this tool is and what makes it the best tool? You got it, it is a free tool. With this tool, you can monitoring how many unique visitors you have per day, per month. What keywords drives traffic to your site. Which site refer the most visitors to you and the most important thing is you can identify areas you need to improve the most for improving your conversion rate.
http://bizsolutions.google.com/services/

2. Google Webmasters Tool
This is where you would submit a .xml sitemap to Google. You can also find other information such as detected dead link. In this tool, Google also lists the words that is associated with your site so you can check if your site’s content is relevant to the keywords you are targeting.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

3. SEOMoz Page Strength
This tool analyze your sits and return a final score based on the number of your pages indexed by Yahoo and Google, the number of links you have from .edu and del.icio.us, the age of domain, your alexa rank…etc. Other similar servic: sitening.com
http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

4. FeedBurner
if you publish a blog, FeedBurner’s service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog’s feed and you can give your readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at FeedBurner. Opps, I have yet had one, I should go and get one now.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home

What comes to your mind when I tell you to optmize your site? You will definitely say something like titles, friendly urls, quantity and quanlity of backlinks… etc. But do not ignore the trivial things when it comes to SEO since it still can impact the site to some extent and sometimes to a large extent.

95% of webmasters (or even more) know robots.txt tell search engines to exclude certain areas of your website such as /images and /temp. However, almost less than 35% of websites had a robots file and a lot of sites simply copying a robotx.txt file from another site. Spidering is a costly effort that search engines try to optimize. Therefore, it makes sense that websites that demonstrates optimal command will get rewarded.

At SES NewYork Summit, all search engines announced that they will identify site map via robots.txt file. So now, you got one more use with robots.txt by adding a line like this:
sitemap: <your sitemap URL>. A lot of people have been asking whether they can submit a sitemap to MSN. Well, here is your chance to tell MSN that you have a sitemap and hopefully that will get your site quickly indexed.

We know Google has alwasy been trying to return the best search results. Thus, Google wants to eliminate any pages that does not add any value. Google Webmasters Gudielines clearly tells that it wants webmasters to use robots.txt to to prevent crawling pages that does not add any value to users. So what are you waiting for, it is what Google want, if we want good ranking results on Google, then at least comply with their guidelines.

For more instructions, you can visit robotstxt.org

Although page URL is not as important as other factors such as backlinks and page title. It is a must for any web sites who want to get high rankings. Among the 3 search market leaders, Google, Yahoo and Live (MSN), Live still put a lot of weight to keyword-rich page URL. If you are targeting for a keyword such as “SEO tips”. Do you want the page looks like “yourdomain/index.php?=3″? We want the URL to be self-explanatory as well. So a URL like “yourdomain/SEO-tips” would be great if that’s the exact phrase you are using. Some some search engines still have difficulties indexing long URLs containing stuff like session IDs.

I am not here to brag about it, but you can take a look at my URL for example. For this wordpress blog, I installed plugins to make the SEO friendly URL. If you click on the title of this post, you will see the URL http://www.directoryseo.org/seo-blog/seo-friendly-url

I think this is the URL that can be self-explanatory and it contains the relevant terms/keywords. There is a chance that if someone search for “how to make seo friendly URL”, my page will show up. (at least the URL increase the chances).

It is sad that php link directory comes with “SEO unfriendly URLs”. Mods need to be applied to make your URL SEO friendly. If you already did that, ignore it and go play some computer games. If you haven’t done it yet, read “Make your URL SEO friendly in php link directory”

Meta tags, we probably all know what it is and how it is used by search engines. Let’s assume that we are all the beginners here first. Meta tags present some information about the website to search engines, it can show your website’s keywords, description, author, content type and more to search engines. Among these information, meta keywords and meta description are considered to be two of most important factors affecting your SERPs. To view a web page’s meta description and keywords, open a web page and view the source, you should be able to see something like:

<Meta name=”description” content=”Some meta description here”>
<Meta name=”keywords” content=”meta keywords here”>

In the old days, people almost rely on meta tags to get high rankings. However, people start to abuse it and then search engines soon find out all the tricks. It has been argued that nowadays, meta description and meta keywords has no impact on your ranking and thus we are seeing missing meta tags. It makes sense since it does not affect the rankings. However, in my opinion, we still 100% need meta description and keywords.

If you do a simple search on Google, you will see that all the sites will be showing with a title and description. Then the word or phrase that is in your search term will be highlighted. The description could be either from your meta description or from the content on your page. If you are missing meta description, then the relevant content on your page will be taken. The problem is that do you always have relevant content on your page? Some pages like contact us, support or any other pages that mainly shows images will not have enough content for search engines to determine what your page is about. What happens is that Google may see all of your pages are so similar that it will group your pages into “duplicated results”. Even say you got content on every single page, will you be 100% sure that your site is well structured and coded so that the content will appear as front as possible? Search engines may have difficulties if your do not follow good practice when designing your site.

Other than that, some search engines still make use of meta description and meta keywords when deciding the rank of your page because they are not as sophisticated as Google.

If you are using CMS or any other software building your site, make sure you are given the chance to write unique meta description and keywords for your page. Most often, plugins or extensions are needed. If you are using Php link directory 3.1, (or any other version, but I am not sure about older versions), you will be able to do that without any mods. If you are not familiar for adding meta tags in phpld, read it here : How to add unique meta tags in php link directory

As many of you have seen, Google did a PR update in July and a lot sites and pages therefore have experienced ups and downs of PR. Sadly, the PR of this blog dropped and I think the reason is because i am hosting this blog on blogger.com. A lot of discussions have been around talking about all the advantages and disadvantages of having blog on your own domain, i will not get into that topic here. What I care about is the PR of bestplatformbeds.com which has been boosted to 4, which is a pretty good PR for a site that has only been online for about 4 months. Other than the PR update, Google also updated the backlinks. If you do a link: www.domain.com you should see something different. I have seen updated backlinks to my site: Platform Beds Shopping Guide counted by Google.

A lot of people complained about the fact Google does not show as many as backlinks as it is shown on Yahoo and MSN. Google does put more weight on the quality of your backlinks and the age of your backlinks. You also need to know that Google does not show all the backlinks they know of. So keep up your hard work and hopefully you will see increased PR and traffic to your site.