Did Google Bomb New Directories Online? Look's That Way!

A few weeks have gone by now and the results from Google’s new update are in. As we take a closer look we see a pattern emerging. It seems as though, older more established directories are being rewarded once again. Many newer directories / Resource Links seem to rank much lower. As we take a closer look at this, we start to notice some rhyme and reason behind all the chaos.

Is This Google’s Way of Getting Rid Of “I link to everything directories”?

What is meant by that is this: As more and more people practice and utilize linking strategies online to build their SE placements, the more and more things start to get out of hand. I mean, is reciprocal linking the next “Link Farm” to get wiped out from Google?

I can’t really see that happening but it’s starting to show signs of this. When you search online these days for listings, companies, resources, etc., we seem to be getting older, more popular “Yellow Directories” than anything showing up on top of specific “service based” searches. I mean let’s face it, yellow directories have been around since “Local Telephone Books” were first invented.

Is Google Implementing A Trust Factor?

I only mention this because since the boom of resource links comes the growth of doorway pages, unethical SEO practices, and especially key stuffed resource pages. There are certain resource directories out there that have stood the test of time and still continue to use sound practices and quality content for their readers.

Don’t Forget Our Loss Of Faith In “DMOZ”!

Lately people seem to be losing faith in DMOZ, the open project directory where human beings get to judge whether or not one company should get a listing above the rest. The problem with this seems to be with the “editors” discretion of not adding the competition to their section of DMOZ. Many individuals who are “editors” at DMOZ are your competitors.

Is Google Also Losing Faith In “DMOZ”?

You may get some interesting answers when you ask yourself the above question since more and more we are seeing a drop in DMOZ activity in searches within Google. It seems as though, Google might also see this negative side to DMOZ. It may not be extremely apparent just yet but I would watch for this and possible changes to the DMOZ operation and editing freedom.

Is Google Bombing Directories Online?

Due to the new shift in resource directories online and people who exchange links, search engine results continuously bring up large useless directories of websites claiming to be relevant to your search. The problem with this is some people use “spam” tactics to stuff their directories with relevant key words in order to get better rankings for their resources. In doing so, it delivers poor quality to visitors who are actually browsing through these resources online.

What Is Google Doing About This?

Like I mentioned above, it seems that Google is taking a profound interest in older, more established directories in order to weave out newer, more content rich directories built to drive more traffic. By doing this, Google can deliver better “local searches” for company listings instead of the growing directory websites popping up at a terminal near you.

How Can You Prosper From This Change?

Go back to your directory listings online. If you don’t have any, this would be a good time to implement a directory listing strategy. Take a good look at your listing and make sure that your listing not only appeals to your visitors but also has atleast your website link for search engines to crawl through and rank accordingly.

How Will This Help You?

As a norm, a good practice to follow is search for your “desired search engine searches” geared towards your business. Find any related directory that comes up in those searches and list your business. By listing your business in these directories, you will help your company get targeted visitors to your site that are actually looking for your product/service.

I hope this article helps you out!

Google Page Rank Is Dead - Or Is It? Part I

For a long time now, marketing gurus all over the world have been talking about google page ranking. Page ranking is simply Google's way of measuring your pages accordingly.

But there is a problem...

More and more we tend to see NO consistency with page ranking at all. Please don't confuse the difference between "page ranking" & "search engine ranking". The two are completely different.

With this method of measurement, we could quickly see how much or how little a person has put into promoting their website. A high rank of 6,7,8,9,10 is sometimes held as something honerable to have for your site but does it really matter?

In some aspects it does and in some it doesn't.

As I mentioned above, page ranking has nothing to do with your search engine success. It (did) have everthing to do with "importance". The only problem is (like so many marketing ventures online), this measurement method is dying off with the rest of them. People online are very intuitive about these sort of things and tend to over saturate ways to beat them and/or improve on them quickly.

People all over the world are even still wondering how to increase their page rank. Now why would they do this???

Simple, it's all about prestige. Eventhough marketing experts like myself weigh absolutely no importance on page ranking anymore, there are still literally 1000's of business people out there that consider a high rank a good thing.

So how do you benefit from increasing your rank?

- You will attract better quality websites to yours
- People will think your website has lasting power
- People will want to mimic what you do
- People will even think highly of you

Even now, many browsing people look for high ranking websites to exchange links with.

So does trying to increase your website page ranking help you? Not really. What you ultimately want to do is promote your website as much as you can in as many "RELATED _ RELATED" places that you can and let search engines do their own thing.

Playing into search engines hands won't help your company. Building a great web marketing foundation will attract exactly what you've been after..... MORE EXPOSURE!

Please take this seriously and always be on the look-out for other ways to promote your business, let Google's page rank go and look at the future beyond PR ratings.

Hope this article helps you out!

Read more of Martin's articles online here:
http://www.smartads.info/newsletter

Google Page Ranking And The Value Of Links.

In today’s incarnation of the Internet search engine optimization or SEO is more important than webpage design skills. The best designed webpage has limited usefulness if no one visits it. A website is a product and a product that people don’t know about doesn’t sell. With the many search engines that are available it is important to know which are the most useful and how they are useful. Let’s look at Google.

Google uses a particular search algorithm that assigns a value to websites called PageRank that is one part of how it ranks pages. The PageRank value is determined by several things but the most important are the values derived from the ingoing and outgoing links in your page. Let’s look at that first.

The links in your website allow Google to navigate the pages on your site and index more of the content. Keep in mind that it is your pages that are ranked and not your site. You could conceivably have one page ranked higher than all of your others put together. This is the biggest reason to make sure that all of your pages have links into and out of them and that you never have dangling links or pages that can be linked to but not out of. This is why the navigation structure of your site is vitally important.

With that covered let’s look at the main factors used for PageRank. First of all a page on your site has to be indexed by Google to even have a PageRank. At that point the page has an intrinsic PageRank value. That page has links to your other pages. When one page links to another page it increases that page’s PageRank value without deceasing its own. It is almost like one page voting for another without penalizing itself. This is why you want to avoid any dangling links because although that page would have an increase in PegeRank it could not do the same for another page. With this in mind it is prudent to direct more links to your most important pages to increase its value. Then from that page the visitors to your site can link to the other pages.

The best strategy for increasing PageRank is to link pages to each other with a single link. By doing this you avoid splitting the value between multiple pages. However you want to make sure that all of your pages are linked together so that you can navigate your entire site from a single starting point.

Remember that in SEO you must learn as many aspects of it as possible as they are ever evolving.

LinkAdage’s Take On Google's New Search Engine Patent

Has Google thrown the cyber world a curveball? Let's fill in some blanks and connect a few dots regarding the recently-filed patent application for Google's latest Search Engine algorithm - Search Engine 125. For those unfamiliar with the inner workings of search engines, each Search Engine uses its own unique formula for determining that all-important ranking for each web site. Remember, users who query a Search Engine rarely look beyond the first page, so if you want to increase visitor traffic, step one is to develop your website in a way that matches the major search engine's ranking algorithms. You need to find out what the search engines like and make sure you feed it to them.

Now, over the years, the formulae used by search engines to rank a site have grown more complex. Pre-2000, search engines didn't do much more than count keywords on a site. The more times the words 'limburger cheese' appeared on the site, the higher the site's limburger cheese search engine ranking position (SERP). Of course, the key then became to develop SEO text with limburger cheese mentioned in every header, twice in subheads and at least once in every paragraph. Hardly compelling reading, except for the most avid of limburger cheese fans.

So, the Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines moved to improve the quality of their SERPs, to provide users with helpful, expert information. Changes were made to the keyword algorithms (the weighing formulae), awarding more points for things like the quality of inbound and outbound links to and from a site. This meant that quality links from a relevant 'authority' site - a highly-prized designation, will move your site up in the SERPs.

Well, on March 31, 2005, Google applied for a patent on its latest search algorithm. For those who have no fear of their brains exploding from buzzword overload do a search on “Patent Application 0050071741” to read the entire patent. The patent application describes "a method for scoring a document comprising: identifying the document; obtaining one or more types of history (sic) data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of historical data."

Apparently (or not), Google has determined that historical data associated with each site is an essential ingredient in developing the highest quality search results for users who query. And just what kind of historical data are we talking about here? Well, things like:

* the site's inception date (more likely the date the Search Engine noticed you)
* how frequently documents are added and removed from the site
* how often sites change over time
* number of visitors over time
* number of repeat visitors
* number of times your site is bookmarked
* how often keyword density is changed
* the rate at which the site's anchor text is revised
* inbound/outbound links - how long in place and high trust (quality) links

The list goes on and on. Factors associated with your domain include: how long your site has been registered, has the domain expired (ghost sites), is the domain stable - as in not moving from one physical address to another.

Links remain a key component of Search Engine 125. Links have to be relevant to your site. Links to your site increase in "SERP Power" as they age. Link growth should be slow and steady. A sudden influx of inbound links - especially links that have no relationship to the content of your site - is a surefire way to drop in the SERPs. Google gives such sites a much lower score.

How about data on your visitor traffic? How will Search Engine 125 weigh that? Number of visitors, growth in visitor rates, spikes in visitor rates, the length of each visitor's stay, number of bookmarks to and favorite rankings of your site - all enter into Google's new Search Engine algo according to the patent application.

Another weighing factor is search results. The number of searches using a given query word or phrase, a sudden increase or decrease in click through rates, an exceedingly large number of quick click throughs (which might indicate 'stale' content), again all factors that Google believes will increase the quality of its search results.

Other factors are also listed as part of the patent application. A site with frequent ups and downs in traffic will lose points for untrustworthiness (even if your site sells only seasonal items!). Keyword volatility, focus change and other variables will also be employed in Google's never-ending quest to quantify the quality of each site its Search Engine delivers to users based on their queries.

So, okay, where's the mystery? The intrigue? The disinformation? The e-commerce community is abuzz with speculation - speculation that Google's well-publicized patent is nothing more than a plant to throw off the competition, disinformation intended to keep the competition and SEOs off balance. So why the speculation? Well, even a quick scan of the patent application reveals large areas of gray, vagaries and downright inconsistencies within Google's proposed ranking criteria. For example, sites are penalized for changing content often (untrustworthy) and rewarded for the frequent addition of new content (freshness). A paradox, you say? Or all part of Google's master plan to feint right while going left.

The object, in the end, is quality search results. That's what Google, Yahoo and the other popular search engines want - that perfect equation, the ideal formula that will provide high quality search results. And for site owners and designers who, in fact, do keep their sites fresh, who have quality links useful to visitors, who deliver the information the user is looking for - there's no reason for concern. However, the owners of links farms, keyword dense sites and cyber garbage dumps should sit up and take notice. In the end, quality search engines will inevitably improve the quality of content available on the Internet.

Can Google Really Deliver Country Specific Searching?

This is a serious matter, can Google really deliver top quality search results for other countries? The answer so far is "sort of". In this article I will use Canada as an example of the quality or lack of thereof, that is delivered by Google's search results.

Let's take a look at Canadian search results by Google.ca:

When you highlight "Canada" through Google search results and then start searching, you may be surprised at the amount of companies that aren't really Canadian. All of this also applies for the UK and other major markets as well...

In fact, many of the "paid results" come from American companies. Now some would argue that this is to be expected, coming from American companies with large budgets but I would disagree because a lot of the bulk of the "Canadian specific" results are also American companies.

It is quite evident that this is a growing concern with business owners residing in different countries.

As an owner not from the US, I would rather compete with companies that are more local than not, simply because the results would then be relevant. Irrelevant results equal to poor results and less people take the search results seriously when they keep sifting through poor quality results online.

For example; If you highlight "search in Canada" and search for "web design", the top 2 results seem not to be from Canada. This is a serious issue. What if people click on "I'm feeling lucky", they are redirected to a company outside of Canada. The average person won't know what to think about that and may disregard searching through Canadian results any further.

The more content specific the results are, the more people will search through those results. The more people will tell their friends & peers to search through those results. See, as web marketers, we do have the power to create a search term that people get familiar with. Just look at "Blogging". A couple of years ago, if you asked people to search online for "blogging" sites, you would have had a lot of confused faces staring at you. Nowadays, if you search for blogging, there are more than 900,000 results found in Google and to top that off, there is more than enough paid advertisers as well.

What do we see changing in Google?

The #1 thing we are now seeing more and more is search results listing websites with country specific domain name extensions. Here's what I mean by that....

If you were Google and you wanted to deliver better search results for Canada, how would you go about doing that?

I would look at 2 things:

1) Does the domain name end with .ca? (Ex. www.smartads.ca)
2) Does the "contact" information about the company match the country - Street, City, Province/State, Country. Are all of these factors listed within the contact page?

These are very important factors, evidenced to the fact that, I see Google weighing your "contact" page higher than anything else within your website other than your front page. So the moral is, make sure to list EXACTLY where it is that you do business within your contact page. Your website will rank higher for local searching when this technique is utilized.

Second, make sure to buy a domain name(s) that is country specific. If you live in Canada, buy a domain with the extension (.ca). If you live in the United Kingdom, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.uk). If you live in the US, make sure to buy a domain name with the extension (.us).

You may be asking, what if I don't want to concentrate on just local searching? Create a separate website to target different areas. There is nothing with .com, in fact most people automatically type in .com but, if you truly want to target locally, you have to play locally.

The future of search engines is local searching! We are seeing an increasing amount of evidence to sustain this claim. Targeting locally is a great start and will ultimately help you to target internationally later on!

I hope this article helps you out!

Black Hat SEO – What Never To Do Or Get Banned

While there are many legitimate skills in SEO there are also those that can work but if you get caught using them the results can be disastrous. When search engine optimization became an issue many techniques were employed because at that point the search engines used a much simpler algorithm. As these tricks were used to exploit the simpler algorithms they were also served to make them more advanced. Let’s look at a few tricks.

Cloaking and redirects are methods whereby you show one page to the search engine but a different one to the visitor. A redirect merely brings visitors to one page and then sends them to another page by refreshing the page with one on their site. Cloaking involves fooling a search engine’s indexer into thinking that it is something else and getting the indexer to send false information back to its boss.

Other techniques involve overloading metatags with keywords or even hiding keywords in plain site on the webpage. A variation on this technique is to shrink the keywords so that are too small to be seen by the naked eye.

Using unrelated keywords is another trick especially when combined with the above mentioned tricks. By using unrelated keywords in this manner you can drive traffic to your site from multiple sources.

Using an overly optimized landing page can also work. This is not the same thing as a legitimate landing page. In this case you use any and all methods to overly optimize a single and use that to lead people to your site. This would involve using all of the above methods for this one page.

The ultimate penalty for using the unscrupulous methods is banishment from the search engines themselves. Be careful when you employ these dark methods for fear of this punishment. Being penalized is one thing but to not even be on a search engine in the first place is your worst case scenario.

Google Patent Application - SEO Highlights

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:

“A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data.”

The patent application sheds significant light for those pursuing search engine optimization with Google. Patent applications can be difficult to understand, so following are highlights that you should consider for your SEO efforts.

Update Your Site

Updating your site is important when it comes to maximizing your rankings on Google. In addition to the manipulation of keyword density and meta tags, the patent application reveals that Google places significant value on how often your content is updated. The more often you update, the timely and relevant your site will appear to Google. In turn, this leads to higher rankings.

To appease mighty Google, consider the following plan of action:

1. Update pages frequently,

2. Add new pages to your site,

3. Interlink the new pages with others on your site, and

4. Add new pages on a weekly basis instead of all at once.

When Google returns to the site, you want to make sure that there is new content. The high rankings of blog sites are evidence of this approach.

Google’s Looking at Your Domain

In a new twist, Google claims that it analyzes the number of years of domain registration as part of the ranking process. The application suggests that domains that are registered for longer periods of time are given more value because such a commitment shows the site is not a fly-by-night jump page. It is recommended that you extend all domain registrations for as long as possible as part of your search engine optimization efforts. It is difficult to tell how much the registration process impacts the ranking process, but every little bit helps.

Google claims that it also digs deeper into domain names to evaluate the legitimacy of the site. Factors in the evaluation include the web host and the “who is” information. According to the patent application, Google maintains a database of hosts that facilitate spamming of the Google search engine. While such hosts are not detailed in the application, pray to God that you are not using one. You should evaluate your host if your optimization efforts are not producing results.

If your search engine optimization efforts for Google are failing, the patent application may provide answers. Talk about a perfect E-book!

How Google Indexes Content From Your Web Directory

In a fluke, I was able to notice something about the way Google indexes content from web directories. Excluding your template, the most important line of code is the first title you add to your main body.

Search through Google and see for yourself!

Try searching for "something" in "yourcity","province/state" and look for a web business directory that you recognize. Once you find a directory, take a good look at the description of that particular listing (not the title). It may be a good idea to write it down. Once complete, click on the "cache" of that page within Google to highlight the content and view the web directory page.

9 out of 10 times the description of your website listing within Google is partly taken from the first line of code you have within your main body of content (excluding your header, footer, & sidebar). You will notice that this only applies for a web directory. Any personal or business related website gets indexed differently. If you take a look at the Google directory, we find the same thing: Take a look here: http://www.google.com/dirhp?hl=en

Browse to any sub-category and look at the first line of text. You will find that the title within the main body of content before anything else, is within an H1 tag.

H1 tags & H2 tags are nothing new to the development community but, there may still be many directories online that can increase their search engine rankings by changing a few things.

Here's an example we see very often online; (I am also guilty of this)

You have just developed an impressive web directory and you are very proud of your creation. In the process of organizing your massive directory you were faced with a problem on how to allow people to browse your website and how to let search engines browse through your categories with ease. So with that in mind, you create the "alphabetical solution".

THE ALPHABETICAL SOLUTION IS THIS:

Search Categories By Alphabetical Order:
A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z

The problem with this alphabetical solution (I am also guilty as charged) is that we tend to add this development solution to the top of our page so that our visitors and possibly search engines can find these extra categories easily. << This is probably hurting your results in many ways.

1) Your alphabetical solution is probably necessary but instead, you should add it a little lower below some more important page specific content.

2) No matter where you add your ABC's, search engines will find them anyway.

3) You don't want 10,000 pages to be indexed with a description that goes... abcdefg...

The Solution:

If you own a directory and you are faced with this problem, let's get our development hats on and switch a couple of things around. Try adding the main "topic" description to the top of your main body of content and create this description within one of these tags: H1,H2,H3,H4, etc.

2nd: Once you have your main title description, try adding more related content to that specific page within "bold tags" BEFORE you add your alphabetical solution. At least this way, when search engines browse through your massive web directory, they do not leave thinking that you like singing the alphabets.

One Last Thing:

If you are seriously targeting specific local markets on the web, try adding the city, province/state, & country! Being in Canada, we are faced with many brick walls when it comes to promoting certain cities.

Perfect example of this is my home town of "Hamilton, Ontario, Canada". If you don't promote this city properly, you might actually be targeting people from "Hamilton, Ontario, California" ! ! ! Did you say ouch??? As you can see, this can be easily mistaken by many visitors coming to your web directory and probably won't help your conversion rate whatsoever.

Making sure that you target the right industries and the right locations could be crucial for the success of your web directory.

I hope this article helps you out!