Introduction
Why does a FLASH intro need SEO? Flash, the great SE killer, is basically nonspiderable, although there are reports of the opposite. In this way, the intro creates a solid, non-permeable barrier between the website and the external world. One way around is to place the intro into a frame and connect the other pages via links from the [noframes] tag. The SE will follow such links, but will not place much weight on the anchor text or any keywords within the [noframes] tag. In this way, the index page is practically lost for most SEO purposes. A tremendous waste, if you consider that, from the SEO viewpoint, the index is the most valuable page of your entire website. For example, it is significantly easier to obtain external links pointing to the index page.
Using frames is definitely a very bad option. The very best action is to talk the website owner into removing the FLASH intro at all.
Even offering a small discount is worth the expenses. But unfortunately, most business ownners are completely fascinated by the idea of their logo bouncing around the screen, changing colors and doing other rather annoying things. This is where the real SEO comes into the play.
Just to make things clear. I sort of like FLASH. I agree that it is a killer tool for webdesign - if used properly. But I do not think that an intro is a proper usage for this technology.
Planning
Traditionally, cloaking is based on simple principles.
Identify the visitor on the basis of the user agent or (better) its IP address.
Serve different content to SE and human.
Here we will use somehow different and as I believe, more gentle principles:
Find if the client accept FLASH (Google does not).
Serve the same page to both types of clients. The only difference: the FLASH accepting clients will get the real content of the page overlayed by the FLASH layer. Pressing the STOP button will remove the flash layer, revealing the actual content of the page.
Implementation
You will find a working example at our webdesign site. There you will also find the links for downloading the source code of index.php, flash intro and switch.php.
index.php
This is the page containing the FLASH intro. The FLASH object is contained within a [div] tag with a high Z index and will therefore overlay the actual text placed into the underlying [div] tag.
Flash intro itself
The only requirement is that the STOP button points to the page switch.php
switch.php
After the STOP button is pressed the script in switch.php is executed. The script will register a session variable intro ensuring that the intro will not be played again. Calling the script again through the play intro link will reverse the situation.
Problems
- The example above uses sessions for preserving the state information. Sessions are usually stored in cookies. Thus clients with disabled cookies will not be able to escape from the FLASH movie. A simple remedy is to store the state in both a session and _GET variable. You may also consider propagating the session in the url, by setting session.use_trans_sid=1 in the php.ini file. This problem will not affect the SE. They will not be served with the FLASH. Even if they are, they will see the real page content and will not press the STOP button to start the session.
- A minority of FLASH enabled clients will not admit the ability to interpret FLASH in the content of $_SERVER[”HTTP_ACCEPT”] variable and will not see the intro. Not a real tragedy. In fact you may decide to serve the FLASH uniformly, to all type of clients. The SE will see the real content immediatelly, the human users after clicking the STOP button.
Vaclav Mach is owner of the Scisoft webdesign - a website visibility and accessibility oriented company.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Tips.
Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). There are a number of tools out there that can help you find them.Wordtracker
The best tool out there, Wordtracker is one of the most essential SEO tools. To use Wordtracker:
- Go to the Wordtracker website (http://www.wordtracker.com)and pay $7 for 24 hours’ access
- Enter a keyword phrase you’re thinking about targeting
- Wordtracker will suggest hundreds of related phrases - click on the ones you like
- Once you’ve clicked on all the phrases you like, run them through the program
- Wordtracker will compile a score for each phrase, based on the number of users searching for it and the number of websites targeting it
- The higher the score, the better the keyword phrase!
Wordtracker also offers a free service which works in the same way but only uses results generated from MSN.
Overture
Also useful, Overture’s search term suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works in much the same way as Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase.
Google
Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox) tell you which keyword phrases are being targeted by other websites.
Guidebeam
Guidebeam (http://www.guidebeam.com) is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers provided for each phrase are Guidebeam’s estimation of how relevant that phrase is.
This article was written by Trenton Moss. He’s crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone. They offer fantastic accessibility & CSS support packages, which you can read all about at http://www.webcredible.co.uk/support .
Written by SEO Tipster on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Tips.
Dynamic pages and the Search Engines By Clare Lawrence 10th March 2003 Clare is the CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.Do search engines such as google penalise dynamic pages?
Dynamic pages are used to deliver content from a database to websites ? the advantage being that data can be updated and the contents of pages changed without the need to reload pages etc.
Google publishes guidance notes on its site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html and at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
These say that dynamic pages are indexed but that the Googlebot ( Google’s spider ) can overwhelm dynamic sites and therefore the amount of pages indexed are limited
Google recommends:- “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e. the URL contains a ‘?’ character) be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.
How to get dynamic pages indexed
There are ways to get dynamic pages indexed, if the site is relatively small, then create a site map, which has static links to each of the dynamic pages. This gives the search engines a “doorway” to the dynamic pages.
For larger sites there are a number of ways to change the syntax of a dynamic URL so that it appears to be static: http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary.php?lang=english&gid=28 can be re-written as http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/28.
Index pages If your index page is dynamical generated then it will be particularly difficult for search engines to index your site. If possible you should avoid dynamically generated index pages
Algorithms
The search engines and Google in particular are getting better at indexing dynamic pages.
Looking for more advice?
We have built up an article bank on our site ? many from the leading specialists in each field, please feel free to browse them. The articles cover Domain articles, Web hosting articles, Search engine articles, e-marketing and much more.
Conclusion,
Dynamic pages are very useful to deliver content particularly if you wish to use a content management system. The Search engines do have some difficulties with dynamic content, but there are ways to improve the chances of dynamic pages being indexed.
About The Author
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd ? A leading UK provider of Domain name registration. discountdomainsuk.com; clare@discountdomainsuk.com
Written by SEO Tipster on July 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
If you’re a webmaster, you’ve probably spent almost as much time going after link exchanges as actually building your website. Gaining in-bound links, especially from websites with a higher PageRank than your own, can increase your own PageRank on Google, and help your site attain a better overall ranking in Google search results. Proposing link exchanges with other sites that have similar content to your own is a good idea, but the process can be terribly time consuming. So what else can you do?Most webmasters tend to underestimate the usefulness of online directories in propagating links to their website. No, I am not talking about FFA pages or the thousands of small directories only the website owners and perhaps two other people know about. I am talking about the big directories, such as The Open Directory Project (ODP or DMOZ), Yahoo, Zeal, and even Buzzle.
Getting a listing, or multiple listings, in these directories can bring direct traffic to your website. But perhaps most importantly, these directories act as a propagation source for other sites that are looking to place relevant links on their site. For example, someone who has website about tropical plants may want to place a variety of links to other sites with the same topic. Chances are good they will go to one (or more) of these directories, pick out some links, and place them on their links page. Now, if your website has something to do with tropical plants, and your site was listed in the directory and category they took links from, you might have received a free link from this other website without ever having asked for it. You would probably be surprised just how many new sites fill their fledgling link pages with websites listed on Yahoo, ODP, and other directories.
Furthermore, various popular search engines directly use one or more of these directories to populate their search results. For instance, Google is known to use, and look favorably upon, sites listed in ODP. In fact, Google’s so-called directory is populated almost entirely with ODP categories and websites. And because ODP data can be freely placed on any website or within any search engine, literally thousands of websites and search engines use their data. Free links galore!
There really aren’t many search engines that directly use the Yahoo directory, but that doesn’t devalue a Yahoo listing. A website listed in the Yahoo directory will benefit due to direct traffic from that listing, as well as the possibility of better placement in the Yahoo search results. Yahoo is the most used search engine behind Google, so good placement within their results is important. And as mentioned previously, many websites will “borrow” links from the Yahoo directory to place on their own site. There is no doubt that getting listed in the ODP and on Yahoo will lead to more links beyond the one or two you get in the directories.
Smaller directories, like Zeal and Buzzle are also worth submitting to for the same reasons. Zeal is a particularly good deal because site submission is free (once you are a Zeal member) and the links in the directory are used throughout the Looksmart Network, which includes the sites Looksmart.com, Wisenut.com, Findarticles.com, and more. Buzzle is an informative directory that contains useful articles as well as links. Getting listed within the Buzzle directory costs $59 (nonprofit sites are free), but it may be worth it considering you are getting a link from a good site with decent exposure.
There are many other high-quality directories you may want to consider. Good places to look for directories are, ironically, in the ODP and on Yahoo under the category Directories or Search Engines. Yahoo is especially helpful in that it lists the most popular directories first.
Bradley James is the Chief Editor at GoogleAdvisor.org. He has a computer science degree (BS) from Truman state University, and is currently working on his MS degree at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He is especially interested in search algorithms used by such search engines as Google and Yahoo.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
Search engines are constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms and when that happens some pages lose their top ranking positions. One such event was the infamous Florida Update. Many pages were practically kicked-out of the top 1000 pages for competitive keywords.With recent updates, webmasters have been thinking that Google does not use PageRank because low PR pages can get very good rankings. Before that everyone was saying that PageRank was THE factor for top positions. Now, everyone is saying that keyword rich anchor text links from many different sites is the key for the top ranks.
All these recent events seem to indicate that search engine algorithms are totally unpredictable, right? Wrong!
All search engines are going in the very same direction. The scientific literature related to information retrieval and recent search engine patents reveal the not-so-distant future of search engine ranking algorithms.
Introducing Topic Specific Link Popularity
For the last few years search engines relied on General Link Popularity to assess the importance of every page. Relevancy was based on a combination of General Link Popularity (importance) and keyword matches on page and off page (anchor text of links for specificity).
General Link Popularity is measured by summing the weight of ALL incoming links to a page. With General Link Popularity ANY link improved the importance of a page. Webmasters started to buy high-PR links from totally unrelated sites. Pages were getting unrelated votes.
To combat this problem, Google implemented a Topic Specific Link Popularity algorithm. When a user specifies a query, Google determines the importance of a page by the Link Popularity it gets from RELATED to the keywords pages.
A link from a page will give you considerable Topic Specific Link Popularity when:
1) the page itself is optimized for your keywords
2) the page has a high General Link Popularity (PageRank)
3) the page is from a site owned by someone else (you can’t vote for yourself)
From a search engine’s point of view, implementing a Topic Specific Link Popularity algorithm is a very tough task when the queries need to be answered in less than a second.
All you need to know is this: the top ranked pages for competitive keywords are the ones with the highest Topic Specific Link Popularity.
You need links from pages that have high PageRank, are optimized for YOUR keywords and are owned by someone else.
How do you get these links?
1. Search for your keywords on Google and look at all pages that rank for your keywords. Seek links from these pages.
2. Reciprocal Links. Swap links with sites that can give you a link on a page optimized for your keywords. Look for pages with high PageRank that have your keywords in their title and in their incoming links. Reciprocal links work provided that they come from optimized for your keywords (related) pages.
3. Buy links from some of the top ranked for your keywords pages.
4. DMOZ and Yahoo’s directory usually have pages that are very well ranked for your keywords. You absolutely must get links from these pages. If you have a commercial site, don’t hesitate and buy a link from Yahoo immediately. It is well worth the $299.
5. Find out who links to the top ranked pages for your keywords. Many of their links will not be topic specific, but many WILL be. Try to get links from the related ones. A page is related when it has your keywords in its title, text etc.
6. Form a link exchange ring with some of your competitors. That’s a brutally effective strategy. Basically, you link to your competitors from your main optimized page (usually the home page) and they link to you from their most optimized page! Such rings can dominate the top positions and will be very difficult to outrank (it is difficult to get that amount of topic specific links). The caveat here is that the link exchange is on the main page and is not buried somewhere deep.
One more very important tip.
Increase the relevancy of the page that links to you by using your keywords in the anchor text and the description of your site! Yes, having keywords in the links pointing to your page increase your rankings not only by associating the keywords with your page but also by increasing the relevancy of the page that gives you the link! That’s the reason SEOs think anchor text is the most important factor. It is NOT. You can get a monstrous ranking boost from a link that does not use your keywords in the anchor text provided that the page has high PageRank and is optimized for your keywords (an example would be a DMOZ listing).
What about getting unrelated links?
Let’s say you buy a high PR unrelated link. The page that links to you does not have your keywords in the title and text. The only factor that makes the link relevant to your keywords is the anchor text to your site and your description. You’ll still get some benefit but that’s nothing compared to a link from an optimized for your keywords page.
Your site can’t get into Google’s top 1000 results?
If your site lacks Topic Specific Links, it may get filtered out from the results even if it has a good amount of PageRank (from non-related or affiliated sites). You need some threshold amount of Topic Specific Link Popularity to get into the top 1000 pages for very competitive keywords.
Two Final Points
1. Only one link per site can give you a Topic Specific ranking boost. Look for a link from the most optimized for your keywords page.
2. If you find a page that ranks well for your keywords, go for the link EVEN if that page has a lot of links on it.
To recap: the more optimized a page is for your keywords (measured by PageRank and keywords found on-page and off-page) the more Topic Specific Link Popularity Boost you will get from a link.
Topic Specific Link Popularity is and will be the key for top rankings. Anchor text plays a major role but it is not THE factor. PageRank is still very important especially the PageRank of the pages that link to you.
Hristo Hristov, owner of the Search Engine Optimization Guide
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
Search Engines are hard to tame, that’s for sure. But if you can get on their good side, search can be your biggest ally when it comes to generating tons of free traffic to your business web site. Not many people understand how search engines think. So, search engine “optimization” ends up either ignored or left up to highly paid experts.
You can do this yourself, or at least very affordably
Here’s a quick tip that you can put to use immediately that doesn’t require any specialized knowledge of the Internet. You can do this yourself if you know how to program HTML. Or, if you don’t, you can hire someone far more affordably than a Web Marketing guru to handle this for you. In fact, if you’re considering hiring a Web promotion expert to maximize your website’s placement in the search engines, you’re really better off doing as much of the housecleaning yourself as you can, before you call in the big guns. Otherwise, you’ll waste your money having them take care of trivial things you could handle yourself.
What Do Search Engines Think About?
Before I let you in on this simple secret, let me explain a little bit about how search engines “think”. You see, the job of a search engine, like Google, for example, is to make sure that people find a web page that’s incredibly likely to have the exact information they’re hunting for. The search engine does this by measuring and comparing two aspects of billions of pages: Popularity and Relevance.
Don’t get me wrong, just because it’s two things, doesn’t make it easy. To compute popularity and relevance requires tons and tons of processing power. In fact, Google only updates its popularity information once a month or so because it’s such a huge effort.
Is Your Page “Relevant”?
To determine whether your page comes up when someone searches, Google asks of your page: “Are you relevant to this search?” For example, a certain page might be the most popular page about socks and have the best information about socks you would ever want. But, if you’re looking for a new muffler, that page is not at all relevant, now is it?
Is this Accident Making Your Whole Site Less Relevant?
Having the world’s best information on mufflers isn’t enough to get you to the top of the heap, either… not if you make this easy mistake that seems to happen on nearly every web site at one time or another.
What is this silly mistake made on too many websites? Broken Links. You might recognize the error you see when you click on one and your browser says “404 Not Found” or “404 page not found“.
Intelligent search engines will subtract points from your search relevance if you have broken links on your web site. Not just your home page, mind you ? anywhere on your site at all. You see, the search engines view broken links as “stale” content. And as we covered earlier, the job of the search engine is to give the best possible results.
Maybe you’ve kept old links around when your web site was redesigned. Maybe you’ve linked to a buddy’s business, and now that web site is long gone. Maybe it was a simple typo… Hey! It could happen to anybody.
In the end, having broken links anywhere on your website will hurt your placement in search engine results. Before calling in an expert to help you with your search engine placement, make sure you double and triple check your web site for broken links.
Daiv Russell is a Web Marketing Strategist at Envision Software ? http://www.Envision-Web-Promotion.com - Learn the secrets behind Envision’s 4C Web Marketing System and see how we turned our web site from a dull, zero-traffic dead zone into a lead-generating powerhouse. http://www.EnvisionSoftware.com/Internet-Marketing-Secrets.asp
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Tips.
Internet Directories and their ImportanceThere are two very pertinent reason why we submit to directories, first, to get more targeted traffic to your site and secondly, to build link popularity in hopes of a better page rank. Acquiring links from other websites may obtain the same results, providing they are qualified links meaning the website you want to exchange links with pertains to your business.
One should not exchange links with a “sock” manufacturer, when your online business is “tool and die” they are called “free for all links”.
However, there are some significant differences between the two link sources, Directories have only one purpose in life and that is to provide links to other sites. Directories are an established source of authority in regard to various subject matters. Being listed in directories serves as a level of measure as to the site’s worth.
It is much easier and faster to be listed in directories than to start a reciprocal link building campaign. Since getting listed in directories is of great consequence to a website owner, it is an essential subject matter that warrants full coverage.
Submitting to Quality Directories
Submitting your website to quality Directories is perhaps one of the best ways to acquire valuable inbound links. Directories, DMOZ and Yahoo hold significant weight. Google draws its directory results from DMOZ and Yahoo draws its directory results from its own Yahoo Directory.
Keep in mind that Directories have human editors they gather all the listings in that directory, getting listed in key directories means that it is seen by many people, therefore you are more apt to get your website’s links recognized by the crawler based search engines.
There a multitude of web directories presently out there on the web. They range from general directories that include categories for almost everything, to specific directories that contain categories to match specific area/s of interest for example Search Engine Optimization. Get your web site listed in as many directories as possible as this will help not only help in getting better search engine rankings, but assist in heading up your competition and as we all know, pending on the nature of your business, only so many websites can be in the top 10.
Getting your links listed can vary from directory to directory. Some may charge a fee which guarantees you that your link will in fact be added, those who do not charge fees, it can take some time and of course there are no certain guarantees in this case.
The best and most effective way of increasing your search engine rankings is working to improve your web site’s link popularity. This can be achieved by getting as many inbound, one-way links as you can from quality sites such as directories. Other ways to get these links are having great content on your site and requesting a link to your site from other web sites.
Increasing link popularity is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process but is definitely worth the time and effort when you see a dramatic increase in traffic. Before submitting to any directory take some in preparing your submission in making sure, probably somewhere between 20 and 25 words insuring you have placed 2-3 of your keywords in describing your website, also another helpful hint is to place your keywords in your title tag.
If you are a SEO Company offering search engine optimization for other companies, you may want to write something along these lines, “Achieve higher search engine rankings and attract more targeted visitors. We can help you build a link campaign for higher search engine rankings”. Rather than using inappropriate marketing ploys, which search engines frown upon, something like “World’s greatest online SEO Company offering the lowest prices for Search Engine Optimization, we can make you number one in just weeks”.
What to look for
Here are some of the most important criteria’s to take into consideration when submitting to directories:
Are your listings going to be posted on Static pages
Are you going to gain any Page Rank benefit
Are you able to add descriptive title to your link
Are you able to specify your own keywords
Are you able to submit multiple links under one listing
Is the directory listed in DMOZ or Yahoo
Are there more than 50 links on a category page
Can you enhance your listing by purchasing category sponsorship
If you are looking for additional traffic, does the target directory’s
Alexa rank justify the submission costs
A Helpful List of Internet Directories to Get You Started
We have complied a detailed chart outlining the Internet directories with their Google Page rank, Google backlinks and finally by their Alexa rank to help you gauge the mount of visitor traffic you can expect from these directories. We are planning to maintain the list of directories and provide timely updates of the Google Page rank, Google backlinks and their Alexa rank.
Our own website is listed in many of these directories, the cost can ran range from Free to a few hundred dollars. We suggest you start from the top of this directory list and decide how much you can afford to spend. If you have a small budget you may want to skip over the Yahoo directory submission as it is nearly $300 per year. You are probably better off spending money on 10 smaller directory submissions.
Shelley Murphy brings with her over 10 years of direct,e-marketing and Search Engine Optimization strategies Internet based businesses. Holding two BA’s in English and Journalism Communications her writing skills have been a great asset for both onsite writing and monthly newsletters publication and has become an established writer for several SEO e-zines.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 29th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Tips.
Listen. Some make submitting pages to search engines sound like the fast track to search engine ranking nirvana. Not to mention you’ll see offers to submit your site to a scadzillion sites for some low nominal fee.Yeah right. It’s enough to make Pinocchio’s nose grow!
Because it’s just not true. Basically there are really only three search engines that count. Google snags more than 60% of all searches. Yahoo 23%. While MSN search has less than 10%. Which leaves a bit over 5% for the remaining scadzillions to fight over.
So don’t fall for the line those snake oil salesmen would have you believe. You know? That submitting to all known search engines will have the bots lining up like addicts at a methadone clinic to get at your site. With traffic following your high search engine rankings shortly thereafter.
Besides it’s not even necessary. Since if you have just one link from a site already in Google or Yahoo those bots will find you. Sooner or later. Making it safe to keep your wallet securely in your pants or purse.
Now I tell you all this knowing there may be one exception. But only for those who insist on submitting out of some sense of leaving no stone unturned.
If that’s you, do you know which one page might be the only possible exception to the “It Ain’t Necessary to Submit Your Site” rule?
Let me cue up the Final Jeopardy music while you ponder that.
Give up?
Okay, I’m talking about your site map. Reason being your site map points the bots to the promised land of all pages from your site. Or should.
Given that let me make this site map submission thing super quick and easy.
First to insure the bots can’t help but find yours, put a link to your site map in the footer of every page on your site. That’s right, EVERY page. This way no matter which page the bot lands on first it can’t miss your site map. And in turn follow it to all the pages of your site.
But wait. You gotta have a site map to submit a site map, right? Well then, here’s a nifty little site map generator that should be good enough to get you started.
http://www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html
It gets high marks from me because it works and it is available at no charge.
Here’s how it works.
Enter your URL. Click none of the check boxes. Then hit ENTER on your keyboard since there is no start or run key on the page. Then right before your very eyes, in seconds, one general issue site map will appear.
Next “View Source”. Cut and paste the code into your page template and away you go. One quick and dirty site map ready for submission. Or you can edit it a tad to clean it up a bit.
Oh and if you aren’t enamored with that approach here are some other suggestions. Both free and for fee.
Finally submit your site map page to Yahoo, Google and sooner or later MSN search once it’s unveiled. To help with that here’s the links:Yahoo http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Anyway, whether you use a tool to shave hours off the process or feel compelled to create your site map by hand, submitting a site map is a once and done deal. Do so and sooner or later a hapless search engine bot will be assigned to check out the page you submitted. When it does it will think it hit web pages paydirt and get busy indexing all pages in your site.
There. Now you know which page, if any, to submit where.
Copyright 2004 John Gergye
About The Author
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook “Traffic From Google in 35 Days”. Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml. Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report “Coming Out On Top”.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
I am sure the first thought provoking question that popped into your head would be: what exactly is PageRank? Well PageRank can be summed up as how vital Google considers a particular webpage. Pagerank is a value from 0-10, zero being the least significant and ten of which few obtain being the most note-worthy. PageRank is often abbreviated as PR and Google determines this PR bye evaluating how many websites link to yours, even though many of these links are missed.Who says Google gets to play the role of big brother? Google may be the leader that people praise and follow, yet why do webmasters allow themselves to be caught up in this publicity stunt? Sure it is a BASIC measurement of how much publicity a website is getting, but what is its real purpose?
As Pagerank gains ground webmasters loose sight of what they originally intended to accomplish. By writing this article I hope to give webmasters the foresight to distinguish that in the end PageRank won’t be what makes your website a success. Even though hard work and determination may help you achieve this success; skill, luck, and good timing play a bigger roll.
Many a-days I am sifting through my vast amount of spam mail and occasionally receive an email entitled “link exchange.” As I am always intrigued by possible link partners I typically read these emails.
When I come to an email that looks generic and has 100 mailers on the list I still give them a chance and then take a look at there website. Upon opening the website I am disgusted by the huge fonts and banners trying to sell me something, as a habit I look up at my toolbar and see that this website has a Pagerank of 6! What a possibility according to many website owners. The only opportunity I see in these types of links are purely PageRank building. On the other hand?
On a rare occurrence I come across an email titled “our partnership” as this email is already more intriguing I open it urgently and see a nice layout for this email that is directed towards me and my website. Anyways on with my point, I go to this website and see a terrific design plus they offer a unique service. According to habit and maybe a bit of my obsessive compulsive side I check the Pagerank. Humm, this website hasn’t even been indexed by Google yet? Should I exchange links with this website? I am sure most of you are thinking of course not, it would benefit my website in no way. On the contrary this website has the most potential to flourish and send you quality targeted unique’s!
What I am trying to prove is that because of this “higher power” aka Google PageRank people turn down websites that can provoke there own success! Why not put Google PageRank in a state of anarchy and let websites again be judged by there quality content and superior design!
Directly PageRank cannot be bought, though often I see links being sold at outrageous monthly costs on pages with a pr of 6 and up. Many times they will provide minimal traffic. Purchasing one of these links will not bring you any targeted traffic, or any traffic at all for that matter. A site wide link on a high pr website can and will boost your pr, but will it help promote and brand your website?
I am not trying to say boycott Google PageRank and start a protest, just merely use PR as a reference but not enough to influence you’re linking decisions and how much time you spend on link exchanges. I hope you walk away from reading this article with a more open mind towards linking with new websites. Understand that every website has potential there are just different degrees to this. You can’t earn a clients respect my running up to there door and desperately offering them your product, instead let them find you. Your approach to search engines shouldn’t be any different.
Concerned about the next PR update as attempting to get those last minute link partners up and running? Invest this time instead on building up quality content pages and the Google will find you!
Written by: Michael McLaughlin at http://www.webmastershed.com ? webmaster forum, for more articles by this author please visit: http://www.webmastershed.com/articles
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
Black Hat SEO: Web Spamming and Linking to Bad NeighborhoodsSo you want to exchange links with other web sites in order to get higher search engine rankings?
So you want to create hundreds of auto-generated, keyword rich pages for your site?
Before you go and link to every website that is willing to exchange links, it would be a good idea to know where not to link to. Sometimes it can mean not linking to your own sites.
Firstly, lets take a look at the Google webmaster guidelines page which states:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
I know that Google is not responsible for all search engine traffic, but it is a good guide to follow because other engines seem to be following along the same lines.
So what is a web spammer?
A web spammer is someone who creates hundreds or thousands of keyword rich pages in order to create the illusion of a themed site with related pages. These sites can be composed of sneaky redirect pages, doorway pages, gateway pages and now the latest craze seems to be auto generated directories. SEO circles call these types of pages “search engine clutter”.
The Professional Web Spammer
The aware, professional web spammer places the search engine clutter on a secondary domain and looks for link partners. If you exchange links with these webmasters, you will be at risk of getting a penalty if one of those sites gets banned.
These sites are created on disposable (secondary) domains and they all link or redirect to a main selling website which does not link back to the spam pages. Usually, all the secondary domains link to each other too.
This professional knows all about not using the standard web page templates that come with the auto directory generation software. This webmaster is clever enough to realize that common templates will be easy to detect by search engines which means that the web spam site will get banned very quickly. This webmaster will rebuild the pages from scratch which is usually a good way to avoid detection.
The Amateur Web Spammer
The amateur web spammer, hungry for high search engine rankings will purchase software which creates search engine clutter and make the mistake of not creating a disposable domain to serve these new pages and they will use the basic easily detected templates to generate the web site.
They upload these pages to their main site and link to them. The problem with this is that if a search engine perceives these auto-generated pages as spam, it will penalize, the site that links to them as well as remove the clutter from the index.
Sometimes these sites do not get detected straight away which means that they could have a decent amount of Page Rank, but is it worth taking that chance? Your biggest challenge will be to develop the ability to detect these types of pages with the naked eye.
One Linking Myth Exploded
Please understand that you will not receive a penalty if web spam or a bad neighborhood links to your site. It is the other way around. It is only if you link to web spam or a bad neighborhood that you risk getting penalized.
There is much misunderstanding regarding this issue. Look at it from a logical point of view. If this were true that you would get a penalty, all you would have to do to eliminate all your competition would be to create some web spam and link to your competitors. So it is plain to realize that you cannot get a penalty if web spam links to you. It’s the other way around.
So what is a bad neighborhood?
I do not know how exactly to define a bad neighborhood because a bad neighborhood is not a bad neighborhood until it gets defined as such by a search engine. Examples include Free For All Links pages (FFA s), Link Farms and useless directories designed to do nothing more than create the illusion of a themed web site.
A good guide to follow would be not to link to any site which does not contain useful information or relevant content. More info about bad neighborhoods here: http://www.v7n.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11376
The Obsessive Compulsive SEO practitioner
The obsessive compulsive SEO practitioner will go to any length to get top search engine rankings quickly. It is sort of like gold fever. The bug bites and it becomes difficult to let go of the insanity.
This webmaster is always looking for the easier softer way. The delusion is strong. The insanity has got a grip of the obsessive compulsive SEO. In the end, when they get sick and tired of getting banned, they swear off Internet Marketing altogether claiming that everybody in the industry is a rip off artist.
The problem is that they got exposed to rubbish before they discovered the good stuff. They have been permission marketed by someone they trusted and ended up wasting a lot of time. (and I do mean a lot of time)
Why not create a legitimate web directory?
Here is some good stuff. In the long run, it seems to me to be a lot easier to go to a script archive like hotscripts.com or scriptsearch.com and search for terms like “toplist”, “directory” “community” and “portal”. These single one word search terms will produce many results which contain scripts which will do a much better job of creating a directory than the latest auto-directory generation software sold by Internet marketers who own big mailing lists of newbies.
Many of these scripts are free and there is some really excellent ones you can buy. The point here is that you can create a useful web site with these scripts which you will be proud to link to.
Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic
About The Author
The author, Ed Zivkovic owns his own website which contains articles, tips, tricks, free downloads and more. Here is the site: http://www.ezau.com.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 28th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
« Older articles
No newer articles