The index for 2010 is going to be lean and bald like Matt Cutts, other Google employees will lose their hair to look more android, resistance is futile.

Key points from a SEO perspective:

Comprehensive – When you do a search for your “keywords” expect extreme variation and inclusiveness.

Relevance – This is the holy grail of search, if you are there…you are home.

Freshness – Expect to see more news, blogs, Google stores, images, video and other media injected into organic search.

Speed – You will need to optimize your server and content for mobile AND Google!

Link:
Webmaster Help Channel videos on Youtube. Search the video page by “date added” to keep an eye on the latest hints from Webmaster Help.

To do:
If you use Wordpress as a CMS I highly suggest that you install WP-super cache. Matt talks about speed and efficiency a lot these days, in 2010 you do not want to be on a slow server or have a sluggish website (wordpress). Super cache serves things up a bit faster, don’t forget to tic the “gzip” box.

Google tutorials:
Let’s make the web faster – New articles show you how to optimize your website for speed.

Why not make sure that your website, blog or other cms validates while you are at it? Optimize, optimize, optimize…

Hello SEO people, long time! -Aaron

Absolute URLs:
+ help keep the links pointing to your content if someone were to copy
it (*)
+ help keep the links pointing to your domain name if you cannot
select a canonical (can’t do 301 redirects)
+ help make sure that you’re pointing to the right URL even if you
move things around (say for stylesheets or graphics)

- cannot be tested on a staging / testing server (eg locally) (unless
you insert the links dynamically)
- makes it hard to move content (unless the links are inserted
dynamically)

Relative URLs:
+ make it easy to move content around
+ make it easy to test locally and on a staging server

- are easy to break if linking to content that isn’t moved as well
(stylesheet, graphics, etc)
- an evil scraper would have less work (*)

+ More

Matt Cutts sums it up with good humor:

By the way, I’d argue that some expired domains are closer to a bank at one location that goes out of business and becomes a coffee shop. That coffee shop can build up its reputation on its own, but shouldn’t automatically get the customers that were showing up hoping to do their banking.

And yes, I do know a Starbucks that used to be a bank. It still has the vault!

The same applies to buying used domains in an attempt to use their link equity. If you change the theme or combine sites you run the risk of Google sniffing you out. This almost always results in a reboot of link equity.

If you launched a new site recently you might have felt the excitement of being found right away for some keywords and phrases in Google. This almost always (in competitive areas) leads to frustration (out of lack of understanding) when you suddenly are no longer found. The good news is that you get a few days out there in organic search to allow Google (and now msn and yahoo?) to measure your success.

The same applies to those who lost many of their pages to Google’s supplemental trash bin. As you might know, pages put in the stealthy supplemental index are rarely seen (for competitive phrases) in Google’s main index so how do you get the hell out of there? Google has a wonderful gift for you as well; your new content will also rank for a few hours/days or even months to allow the algorithms to gauge if you have improved your relationship with humans (traffic) and other websites (links from).

Thy new content shall go forth and prosper!

Think about it, you have a new blog; Google is interested in fresh content but doesn’t want people spamming their index. Anyone can make a new blog, add content and ping Google so how do they measure quality and separate real content from spam? Again, they allow the fresh content to rank for a few hours/days to meter the buzz it gets. If you didn’t attract any attention simply try again, you will eventually do something that does and search engines will be right there watching you!

Hang in there ye frustrated webmasta, tis good news, Arrrg! ;)

Related post:
When Google loses interest in your content

For the longest time the image was #1 for the phrase halloween background. Lots of people used it on their websites which was fine but the image can no longer be found when searching Google Image Search. Today other people who copied the image are showing up for the phrase “halloween background”, most of them hotlinked to our image so wouldn’t Google Image Search come to the conclusion that we are the originators of this media?

I do not really care because the site has gone supplemental, there is very little Google seems to like about it (it lacks pagerank), sigh!

Image search can be a websites last hope, for Google to take that also is like yanking a crutch away from someone who needs it to walk.

“I was checking my webmaster tools yesterday and saw that my domain www.colebrothers.com had been removed from the google index for violations concerning hidden keywords in some pages. The keywords were on some pages that I had created about 15 years ago before I knew better. I have forgotten all about it until yesterday. I have gone through and removed everything that I can find to make sure my sites are not in violation and I have submitted a reconsideration request. Does anyone know how long it will take for the site to be reviewed and reinstated? I support my family with this website and I really need to have it in the google index. Any help would be appreciated. -Steve”

Using the WayBackMachine you see that in 2002 the keyword stuffing was visible at the bottom of the page in white text. Then all the way up until 2007 this guy was living large off hidden text. You can learn a lot from others mistakes. ;)

He filed for reinclusion in Google BUT does anyone know how long it takes to be reconsidered? I am interested in learning the answer to gauge how forgiving Google is for keyword stuffing and hidden text, thanks.

Update:

“I corrected the problems, submitted a reconsideration request and my pages are back up. I have learned that is is better to just follow all the rules than to take short cuts and have to pay for them later. Even if its 15 years later they sometimes still catch up to you. I have gone through the webmaster guidelines and am applying the recommendations to my sites and checking to make sure there are no other problems that may affect me in the future. Hope this helps someone else in the future. Thanks, Steve”

Wow, that was fast! :)

I know I may cause my SEO friends to gasp in horror when I say this, but if you have to balance priorities, youre probably right to relegate SEO to phase two of your product development plan. However, if you do that, theres definitely one thing you need to factor in to phase one, and thats the ability to implement SEO later. [more...]

Vanessa refers to Danny Sullivan (I had a quick chat with him not long ago) as an example, his Sphinn uses Ajax for comments so search engines can not get at all the user generated content.

Except that the comments on Sphinn are in Ajax, and with Javascript turned off, theyre invisible. Which means all of that great user-generated content is also invisible to search engines. -Vanessa Fox

Who knows, maybe Danny believes “comments” are much too noisy?

Did you know that this blog gets most of it’s traffic from Google for phrases about “SEO” made in the comment area? In other words, if people are offering their input, that conversation in algorithms is often of more value than the original post, hint hint! ;)

Important points:

1. Relegate SEO to phase two but make sure you have your template (CMS, static site, forum, whatever…) in order.
2. Do not overlook the value of comments, Google indexes your comments (increasing your traffic and value).

Before we understand how to get out of supplementals let us get our facts straight.

1. Pagerank is finite – That is right, websites with low pagerank (few links) can keep a limited number of pages out of Google’s second index.
2. Pagerank comes from earned organic links – As you know, pagerank comes from people linking to your content, it transfers Google juice.
3. It is all about the pagerank – Yes it is, do not be fooled into believing otherwise, if you do not have fuel your website will not drive.

So, if pagerank is limited and relative to how much juice you gain from domains linking to your content, you can get yourself into real trouble if you make too many pages. My advice is to slow down and really think about what you are doing. Every single page you create must be near perfect in quality (unless it is a silly SEO blog like this and you make no money from it) but even more importantly, provide something that other humans find useful. Useful content draws in the much needed fuel to keep it out of the supplemental trash bin.

Yes, it is both depressing and uplifting because I notice Google doing something a little extra for those thrown into supplimentals (lack of pagerank), they have been given a chance to get out of purgatory. Google allows new pages to rank so they have a chance to gain attention (links) even if 90% of the previous content is on hold waiting for the day you gain enough PR. You can thank supplementals for this one positive fact. Work hard to gain attention in the form of links to boost you pagerank level and those pages just might start coming out for organic searchers to find.

I do not think I could offer any current advice that is more straight than this, enjoy and do not forget about the human element, you are building websites for people, serve them well and you will bring in a few links needed to allow you to have more pages rank in Google. If you don’t you better stick with building 20 page sites because Google is conserving fuel. If you are in it for the short term do all you can to remain relevant I believe you guys work way to hard. Sites that stick and remain in the main index are real estate!

My favorite quote:
Google Guy says – Posted: August 27, 2003 1:16 AM (notice the date? pay attention!)

Hey, the supplemental results are a new experimental feature to augment the results for obscure queries. This is a new technology that can return more results for queries that for example have a small number of results. So it might not affect the results for a popular search, but for a researcher doing a more specific query, it can improve the recall of the results. The supplemental collection of pages has been collected from the web just like the 3.3 billion pages in Google’s main index.

Hope that helps,
GoogleGuy

1. Making your blog discoverable
2. Ensuring your blog is crawlable
3. Making your blog content relevant

Looks like Google still relies on anchor text, Vanessa even suggests asking those who have linked to you to change it (if it is not relevant) but isn’t that kind of going into the area of “link exchange” or the influencing of search engines? Hmm? HAHA!!! I really wanted to ask her that but decided not to stir things up.

I have been using Wordpress blog software (way before SEOs starting getting interested in it) and believe me, it was a shaky somewhat unstable ride. Following the basic tips Vanessa offers is a good start.

If Google judges content not worthy, is it trash or is it simply not getting enough pagerank to remain in the main index? Well, that question has already been answered, but what about this?

If we remove ALL pages that have gone supplemental will the small amount of pagerank (we currently have) work better for us?

On second thought, is that exactly what supplemental pages do? In other words, supplemental results allow current content to rank in hopes it brings in some measurable human interest in the form of links/pagerank? Brilliant!

It appears that pagerank is finite because if you had enough ALL pages would stay out of the trash bin.

In other news as seen below, “universal search” is really paying off for Matt Cutts, what a spammer! ;)

In my case (descibed below) you can write good content in an area that is not friendly to natural linking with a sad result, you go supplemental and are put in Google’s trash bin. Just like the trash bin in Windows, junk is put there reachable but out of the public eye to later be removed if you fail to get any attention or break Google’s ever changing guidelines.

Content and Links – Links to Content

Content – Well written content describes what you are trying to say flawlessly using terms that fit. If you are writing a copy about “push lawn mowers” you do not want to go into a long rant about the flaws of self propelled mowers too heavy. If you do find yourself changing subject write a copy on the “flaws of self propelled mowers” and link to it from your “push lawn mower” review. At the same time do not be afraid to interject your personality into your writing. Use humor, philosophy, metaphor and spirit to paint a picture in your own unique words. You might also find that your personality alone can inspire others to link to you and pass the pagerank torch to your content (which keeps it’s flame from burning out).

Links – Well written content brings in earned organic links from website and blog owners you trigger an interest in, they link to your content and search engines notice you creating a buzz. Not all content influences incoming links so do not get too obsessed paying much attention to them in the beginning. Well, unless you have a website on a subject that does not bring in natural links (more on this below). A website needs few links but if you have none, forget about it, you are all alone on a deserted island. Search engine bots need linkage to follow to find your content so if you are not holding up a few flags via links/references on other people’s websites you get poor results, period.

I have a website that does not bring in natural links. It is called Lawn Maintenance Tips. Go check it out, read a page or two and tell me what you think, well written content right? So why are several of the pages in Google’s dreaded supplemental results then?

On first observation you might notice (as others did), that my site has few pages but a good toolbar Pagerank of 5 so why are those pages being thrown into the Google trash bin? The reality is that it is linked from my PR7 site. I will not go into it now but the PR8 (that gives my other site the PR7) is being devalued because it exists in a “paid” area on some else’s site (ignore this sentence if it confuses you).

Anyhoo, my lawn care site where I practice writing a better sales copy is more likely a PR3 with no relevant incoming links. My pages rank well for a few weeks/months then as I add more the older ones are put in Google’s trash bin because their is not enough fuel to float the ship. In other words, Google is throwing away perfectly good pages because they lack any measurable human interest in the form of links/pagerank. If I was to take these same writings and put them on a lawn care site that has trust in Google guess what? They would rank up there with the best and stick!

You will not find me crying though, my site will require some buzz marketing, I will have to do something extra special to acquire natural links because even though I love to review cool lawn care products and books, there are very few with websites (other than corporate sloth’s) that will link to my content. It is just a sad fact, the major “lawn” companies have handfuls of blogs owning Google, do you think they will link to someone like me without payment? Not!

This is a fact, jack:

Acquire a few links as you build content or end up in Google’s dreaded supplemental trash bin. I am not bitter and new pages still do well, it is just a shame to watch them eventually go into the bin simply because I exist in an area that is not friendly to linking to me.

Do pages that go supplemental come out of the Google trash bin when a site starts to generate human interest or do Google algorithms pretty much throw out your content? I kind of know the answer to this and have an example but am interested in others experiences in trash bin hell.

How’s that for honesty?

Kind of related:
GWHG Highlight: MFA (adsense) vs. MFA (affiliates)

Other:
Gone supplemental

You know, where all it takes it 1, 2 and 3 to get a website ranked in search engines using only basic optimization in the form of crawlibility and buzz marketing?

Or will there always be weaknesses in algorithms giving the unfair advantage to those who are good at gaming the system?

If Google is successful in algorithmically determining “paid links” the only thing that might be left for “clients” will be clean code and traditional marketing.

When I had a quick chat with Danny Sullivan awhile back I asked if SEO will be replaced by internet marketing. Danny did not really follow what I was implying so let me try again by saying:

SEO isn’t dead but it is dying.

Writing – Writing is the most valuable skill for any website owner. If you are interested in selling a product or service online it is the written word that will make the final sale every time. If you don’t write I suggest you start today, get a blog or notebook and just do it! Transfer this skill as it develops into a small handful of websites that match your hobbies, interests and dreams and you could even make enough to do this stuff full time. This stay home dad pays for his childs daycare with Google Adsense via product reviews, it really isn’t hard. Heck, you don’t even have to write well, if you write to an audience that has the same passions as yours you can only succeed.

Webmastering – I think I can safely say that in most cases when someone claims that Google is throwing their website in the trash (white hat sites) it comes down to two things.

1. Error in code – Yes this is your fault as a webmaster, you just had use flash, frames and javascript didn’t you?
2. Error and updates to search engines – That’s right, Google can get it wrong also and has had to reboot webmaster tools for this site two times already. Thank you Vanessa! If you are like myself and watch stuff like a hawk you will freak completely out during updates (as I did yesterday). You might want to also go to the gym three times a week to be reminded you have a body that others have to look at.

SEO – Suprised that SEO is last on my list? SEO is starting to be more about crawlibilty and good honest intent than it is about LINKS LINKS LINKS. In fact, want your site to be put in purgatory today? Do some link building without regard to understanding what is relevant and what isn’t. Earned organic links come naturally to those who build cool stuff and even though they come at a slower rate, (unless you are the king of Digg and I am sure their is a algorithm for you) they are of more value.

If you concentrate on your audience, writing and crawlibility you can surpass those who got there using old school, brute force SEO, you might even be rewarded the high honor of stickiness if you get it right.

Care to agree, challenge or add to the list of skills needed for website success and mastery?

And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it, that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion, those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.

If you also shy away from social media optimization how do you get the links to float your battleship?

Simple, build sites and wait for people to find you via content that ranks organically in search engines and guess what? It works, people naturally link to well written, useful content – what a concept eh?

Let’s use this blog as an example, even though I did do some SMO in the form of SEO interviews and tested out link baiting, I have done no link building. That’s right, no submissions to directories, no paid links, no social media spamming and no reciprocal link building.

Do not feel like you are missing anything, organic search is being designed for those who write the best copy and have good honest intent. You will often work in silence BUT you will find yourself ranking better than those who got to where they are artificially in the future.

Anyone believe in this more natural link building concept?

Janeth says:

So you buy the website Mom’s Jewelery and Diamonds and let your expert start blogging once a day about how they work with diamonds and what to look for when buying diamonds and answering questions online.

I do not see it as spam, Matt Cutts has a blog he post in and writes stuff about Google.

Is that spam?

Is Matt Cutts a spammer?

My response:

That is where you are wrong Janeth, what you would be doing there is trying to influence search engines via multi-domain cross linking. Why not just put the blog on a subdomain of the main website and make a “news” area that can be displayed via RSS feed or not at all?

BUT now I am not so sure, what do you think about using multiple sites to promote your stuff?

What about Matt Cutts, isn’t that in a exactly what he is doing? Help me out here!

Matt Cutts admits that he stinks at gaming so why would he make a post about speed runs? That’s right, I believe that Matt lays out an occasional thread as an example of useful SEO. If not, I find his post to be of value for offering my ideas about weathering the personalization storm that is surely coming .

What are some ways to remain relevant in a more personalized internet?

In a future personalized search you will be ranked more favorably because you are acting personal AND charitable.

I found some speed runs over at archive.org to add to Matt’s outstanding example. Think about hobbies and knowledge that you can offer others and blog about it, you will notice increased traffic from organic search.

Click the image in the following post to see another example of useful, personalization proof SEO and my sharing of spooky hobbies. Do not think that client sites can not be fun and interesting either, it’s all about creativity and adaptability.

Keep it real, adapt and get to know Personalization Proof SEO.

What are some examples of good SEO advice?

Smarter Linking – SEOs are obsessed with links but many have got it wrong, seek only earned organic links from the start and you will see your website do well in future search results.

Avoid Canonicals – Learn what a canonical URL is and choose your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

Learn about PageRank – Learn about incorrect pagerank distribution and how it can cause supplemental results in Google.

What are some examples of bad SEO advice?

Weak SEO – Do not take part in weak SEO tactics that do not focus on long term results. Engaging in defensible traffic in reality is poor advice for business.

Paying your way into search – Avoid paid posts that also will violate future search engine guidelines.

Preserve your pagerank – Become aware that you can lose your ability to pass pagerank if you take part in most of the above.

There are just a few bits of advice I offer from this blog, also notice that the advice has more to do with webmastering than SEO, why? It is a fact that sometimes good SEO is no SEO so keep it real, don’t follow those who offer weak SEO advice for long term results if you care about showing up in search engines like Google.

Did you know that robots only do what you tell them?

Search engine robots, including our very own Googlebot, are incredibly polite.

Google offers several ways to remove indexed content including a URL removal tool which is tedious and extremely misunderstood. As a novice webmaster I once used it to remove pages when I should have added a 301 redirect to .htaccess. If you also spend time in Google Groups you will find people who are fearful of using the removal tool just as expected.

You can remove the following from Google’s index via robots.txt exclusion

Remove your entire website
Remove part of your website
Remove snippets
Remove cached pages
Remove an outdated link
Remove an image from Google Image Search
Remove a blog from Blog Search
Remove a RSS or Atom feed (i.e., block Feedfetcher)
Remove transcoded pages

Read: How can I remove content from Google’s index?

I am looking for a way to remove all content back to a specific date, it does not appear that Google offers this type of exclusion yet so there is a limit to what you can do via robots.txt.

Vanessa Fox:

The site: command enables you to search through a particular site. For instance, a searcher could look for references to [Buffy] in this blog by doing the following search:

site:googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com buffy

Webmasters sometimes use this command to see a list of indexed pages for a site, like this:

site:www.google.com

So what happens when SEOs do a site:command that doesn’t show a full list of results? They go nuts!

Google’s response:

In some cases, a site: search doesn’t show a full list of results even when the pages are different, and we are resolving that issue as well. Note that this is a display issue only and doesn’t in any way affect search rankings. If you see this behavior, simply click the “repeat the search with omitted results included” link to see the full list.

Because this change to show all results for site: queries doesn’t affect search rankings at all, it will probably happen in the normal course of events as we merge this change into the next time that we push a new executable for handling the site: command.

I have to admit that I find these moments to be extremely amusing because normal people who use the site:command to search websites for stuff like my wife (a librarian) have no clue about “indexing” if you know what I mean.

I used the site command just last night to find links on this site that go against Google’s guidelines. I found that SEO buzz box was linking out to a site in an interview that “went graybar” and is considered a “bad link neighborhood”, so I broke that association by removing the link.

Last night I pruned a few posts and even an entire interview from this blog and plan to remove more. In fact, I have changed more in that last couple of months (now that all the data is in) that I could delete everything prior and not feel a thing.

I want to make no future reference to:

1.) Paid Posts – As in Aaron Wall’s and Andy Hagan’s Reviewme.com that I believe will do more damage to unsuspecting bloggers blogs in the near future than anything. Preying on bloggers, authors and copywriters dreams of earning money online to rob them of pagerank is evil and even more so when it can result in the loss of the ability to pass pagerank.
2.) Paid Links – I bought a link once, turned out it didn’t do a thing for my rankings, if you can find some that do.. great but you will not find any future reference to it here.
3.) SEO Contests – I believe there is nothing more damaging to the reputation of an industry than SEO contests. The phrase “wacking off” keeps coming to mind and I am really surprised at some people who I once respected for getting involved, including myself. ;-(

I do not want to promote anything that would ruin someones chances of ranking organically in Google. People will give examples of the above spammy ways of doing business as key, but I consider it similar to the addiction to crack, it is extremely weak SEO. They will also accuse you of “whining” when you get in the way of their snake oil advice so don’t even bother.

If those around you are no longer supporting your beliefs is there any reason to reward them by linking to them?

Would it be smart to play the same game and circular link to only those who believe in long term SEO and ignore those who go the route of the quick fix?

Should I just delete this entire blog or are their others who believe as I do?

I am interested in your views on anything I say above, I have spent much time studying and thinking about this. Thank you!

Here is a previous post to help you set your preferred domain in Google.

If you have a Wordpress blog read my new post on webmaster404.com titled (with extreme ego): Two plugins for preferred domain mastery

Here is an old link that helped me set a 301 to my preferred domain on a regular website years ago. If you do not have a Wordpress blog add (cut and paste) the code below to a file named .htaccess.

For a domain that starts with “www”:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

For a domain that starts without “www”:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Visit the above three links to help you resolve the canonical URL once and for all.

Looks like Nathania fixed it with a little help from her new friends:

Ok, was able to fix the nofollow links for both the SEM Zone and my little blog about classic films. They both use Blogspot templates. However, they use different templates.

For the SEM Zone, I followed the advice given above by JLH.

1. I saved a copy of the template HTML code in case all you-know-what broke loose.

2. I went to the SEM Zone home page and pulled the source code.

3. I copied the Meta tags stuff – ending with the line that had the noindex and nofollow tags.

4. I went back to the template and erased this:

5. I replaced it with the meta tags i copied from the source code EXCEPT without the noindex nofollow tags.

Tada!

NOW – some of you may have this problem, but you’ll have to do something else altogether b/c you’re looking at a different template.

1. Look at the HTML code for your template inside blogger.

2. Make sure you click the box for “Expand Widget Templates” at the top right hand corner above the box containing the code.

3. Either copy and paste the code into a word processing or text program to search for nofollow (and then delete and paste the remaining code back into blogger) OR just look carefully for the nofollow tag and delete it.

BTW – no matter which method you have to use – make sure you SAVE your changes. And republish your blog.

Today by default we link to SEOBOOK.com and other places without much thought from our blogrolls. What about the rest of us unknowns? Would it be fair to allow the massive power of the blogroll to go unchecked as it promotes only a few popular bloggers? The answer is no and it comes down to a pretty basic equation (and I have no idea what the math is).

Links that exist in a blogroll do not change so they do not bleed pagerank. Linking that does not change is also easy to detect and flag as blogroll links just like links in the footer. In fact I would go as far as to say that all external links that go offsite in footers, headers, sidebars AND blogrolls do not carry as much weight as in content linkage accompanied by surrounding text. So do you agree that blogrolls do not bleed pagerank? I have proof BTW but do not want to keep linking the poor folks who work @ Google. ;)

In the following image you see (in pink) a nofollow tagged link to Webmaster Central Blog that I made in a post titled “When was the last time you checked your links?”

If you go to the post I linked to on Webmaster Central and look at the bottom of that page they show “Links to this post:” correct? If Googlebot followed the nofollow “When was the last time you checked your links?” should appear in that area but it doesn’t. That’s right, Google did not follow the link just as Adam Lasnik from Google clearly states here.

So there you have it, proof and words directly from someone who works for Google, who do you trust? :)

Is pagerank diluted as you add more content to your website?

Is pagerank diluted as Google adds more filetypes to the index?

Can issues with numerical accuracy result in “chaotic” pagerank
fluctuations?

The more questions one asks the more questions one has, all ideas are welcome.

In 2003 I asked the following (notice how nobody answered, there was no Matt Cutts back then and Google had terrible support)

Hello folks,

Google dropped my longer URL (www.ne-design.net) for the short (ne-design.net – without the www) URL with a troubling result, loss of top 10 page position for the search terms “rain barrel” and “rain
barrels”. The strange thing is that it picked the URL (ne-design.net) over (www.ne-design.net) with higher page rank and many more back links. Shouldn’t a page with more links pointing to it and higher
page rank be indexed? Why did it do this to me?

I repeat:

Why did the googlebot choose short URL for a already ranked and positioned longer URL? Shouldn’t it have chosen the one with all the backlinks pointing to it and higher page rank?

*WARNING* I was hosted on Godaddy.com right around the time google started dropping folks entire sites from the index. I moved quick to another host and this might be part of it BUT I can not get an answer on this either.

Thanks in advance,

-Aaron

The amazing part about this is that people still hit Google Groups and SEO forums every day complaining of similar issues. Setting your preferred domain is as simple as choosing which one you want in Google Webmaster Tools. Newbies are in luck and do not have to suffer what is known as canonicalization as much these days.

Things to remember:

• It’s good to set your preferred domain early in website development.
• www.yoursite.com is much more likely to be linked to than yoursite.com without the “www” so you might want to pick the URL with the “www”.
• Sites with low PR are more likely to “bounce” around in Google without a preferred domain set just as mine once did until I settled the score with what webmasters call a “301 redirect”.

Go: set the preferred domain now if you haven’t already.

Report a problem

• Spammy sites violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
• Malicious software that displays weird toolbars, popups, or redirects to strange sites
• Inappropriate or irrelevant search results
• Problems personalizing your Google homepage
• General problems using Google Web Search

Report a legal matter

• Remove information from Google’s search results / Privacy questions
• I have a question about privacy
• I’d like to remove information from Google’s search results

Learn how to

• Personalize my homepage
• Search for something specific
• Delete my search history

Other

• For all other issues

Got a question that can not be answered in Google Groups? Ask it using the Web Search Help Center. Good luck!

An RSS feed can appear days before the actual page shows up in Google’s index. This is nothing to worry about because the googlebot grabbed for something to ID as quick as it could to determine the originator of content. If you watch closely, (and have enough pagerank/trust) after 3 (or sometimes more) days your RSS information disappears and is replaced by the actual page or post.

If you also look at this Boing Boing example (below) you see an archive AND feedburner URL. Wouldn’t it be nice to hold to top three positions for a few days even if it was for a homepage, archive and feed, in that order? This is good reason to monetize your feed and archive. :)

I link my feed in my footer and it currently has a pagerank of 5, it works well in getting my content crawled, indexed AND stamped with ownership if you know what I mean.

Noindexing a feed might also be dangerous, feeds have a purpose, let Google sort it out, well, it looks like they already have but I am open to further information on this if you got it, thanks.

I also have very few internal pages/categories linked from other sites so there will not be much increase in PR gained from other sites directly linking to them but logically someone could link to a page/category with a high PR and boost its value.

The way to correctly determine if my speculation above is true is to study a blog that has always linked categories from its sidebar. Let’s checkout Matt Cutts blog, look to the right and click each category to see if PR is distributed evenly. What you will find is that Matts index is a PR7 and all categories are PR6 proving that even pagerank distribution comes down to linking.

This also says that you could remove categories that you DO NOT want to pass more pagerank to.

New website owners often are confused as to why their homepage has less pagerank than their internal pages, in this case it often comes down to few links pointing to the index and more pointing to specific pages.

You control pagerank distribution not Google.

Important Message from Google’s Matt Cutts:

Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).

It is true that the best links are earned organic links so stay clear of heavy link building and instead try to impress people with your quality content to gain natural incoming links.

To see which of your pages are in the supplemental index do a search in Google using site:www.yoursite.com (click link for example). You will often notice a bunch of stuff that is of low value and should be in supplementals like tags and duplicate content. Google does a pretty good job of deciding what is the best path to the most valued content but you can help Googlebot by eliminating duplicates yourself.

Matt Cutts from Google says:

- Yet another “pay-for-blogging” (PFB) business launched, this time by Text Link Brokers. It should be clear from Google’s stance on paid text links, but if you are blogging and being paid by services like Pay Per Post, ReviewMe, or SponsoredReviews, links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. The rel=”nofollow” attribute is one way, but there are numerous other ways to do paid links that won’t affect search engines, e.g. doing an internal redirect through a url that is forbidden from crawling by robots.txt.

Doug Heil (who often pisses people off) comments:

I find it hilarious that text link brokers is now doing this. “Performancing” tried and failed. The main reason is that this pay for post stuff is mostly to do with Google and we all know it. The crying about Google saying to use nofollow on ALL paid links is not something new. Afterall; if you sell links on your website, are you not selling them for the targeted visitors your site will send to your advertisers? If not, why not? …… I know that answer.

Let’s review: Any link that affects search engines and is paid risks your ability to pass pagerank, so if you do not care about sharing PR go for it. I prefer to use my PR to help get my new sites crawled (the only known value of pagerank), so to insert paid links or write paid posts would be downright foolish.

My friend graywolf on the other hand openly writes paid posts and is a text-link-ads affiliate. Michael obviously does not care about using his PageRank to influence other sites and he still ranks pretty well for “SEO” related stuff in Google. Why? You currently only risk the loss of your ability to influence other sites with your PageRank but Google has been known to makes changes in it’s algorithm so beware.

As for agreeing or disagreeing with the nofollow rules set by Google (for ranking in it’s search engine) that you can take it up with Google.

Google also might want to update it’s rules because average humans do not have time to follow Matt Cutts around online (to get the latest news) which is a source of frustration.

The dabate over the nofollow tag is a tricky one and can cause loss of friendships and trust with other SEOs. It doesn’t have to be this way if we just admit that anything “paid” and discovered by the Google algorithm is weak SEO.

1. Selling Text Links – Links that use the nofollow are fine.
2. Paid Reviews – As in PayPerPost and ReviewMe, if you are doing “paid” reviews use the nofollow tag and clearly state that it is a paid post.
3. SEO Contests – Ah yes, Google doesn’t want a website that has HUGE PageRank™ (after winning a contest) sharing it with ringtone and travel sites.

Why might Google be concerned with people sharing PR in the above ways? You got it, PageRank™ matters and this doesn’t even scratch the surface of loss of trust.

Don’t believe me? Look closely at what Matt says here, thanks Matt! ;o)

Update: I was asked where Matt states that “paid” post require the nofollow tag, listen here.

Note: Some may think I am a dick for pointing these “truths” out but I find snake oil advice (that can hose a website in Google) to be even more troubling. The above are facts, if we like them or not is open to debate.

Does your Feedburner feed validate? Mine didn’t. Check that here.

I had neglected to see the value of “feeds” but recently noticed a positive trend.

Most popular bloggers have 8000 or more subscribers which is kind of impressive, it looks like time to play around in this area.

I have fixed the feed to comments and regular posts, added a “subscribe to feed” icon at the top right of this blog and in just a day or two see 46 new subscribers.

Won’t you also subscribe to SEO Buzz Box? Thank You!

IncrediBill said:

We all know AdSense works best when people are actively looking to purchase goods and services, which doesn’t tend to happen reading sites like Guy Kawasaki’s which really isn’t selling anything except Guy Kawasaki.
What Guy has sadly pointed out is he should stick to VC and leave the AdSense to people that know what to do with it ;)

Guy Kawasaki is infact converting extremely well in marketing himself, thanks incrediBill, after reading your comment I had a “nuff said” moment and went back to watching the game. =)

One thing that was new to me was something called “boilerplate repetition”:

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.

One thing that calmed my nerves was the following:

Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.

I have been known to go off when I find someone scraping my content.

So there you go, some more good basic advice for webmasters, thanks Adam.

Here are the rules:

Stefanie Ulrike Dürr from Google tells us more.

I am really loving this and am surprised that it is not getting more buzz! Notice the phrase “link weighting algorithm”, nice!

Have you noticed that user friendly images might even be 1 of the 200 or more factors that goes into ranking pages organically?

If you “opt in” to human collective tagging you are allowing people to associate your images correctly which in turn should make them show up more often in search.

Instead of recycling what she said go visit Vanessa and learn how to correctly use images.
Image of Vanessa stolen from Danny Sullivan’s photostream – I am going to “opt in” to the collective tagging game and see if someone can tag her correctly (man that sounded kind of wrong) sorry Vanessa!

I have a neglected off the grid living blog that I haven’t posted to in awhile. Do you think search engines like Google have forgotten about it? Not at all, I could start posting stuff there again today, ping Google and I would be off to the -=races once again.

I got a patriot blogger blog with only 1 post, do you think it is dead? Nope!

Want is the value of posting daily to a blog then?

That is all.

My original 25 peeps linkbaiting study is haunting me though (am still being found for all kinds of p-o-r-n-o-g-r-a-p-h-i-c phrases in search engines).

I can do the following to repair my reputation:

The good news is that websites and blogs can be easily repaired for increased organic traffic. For advanced admins. you can even turn an entire site in a new direction if you are thoughtful and understand the factors that go into ranking websites in search engines.

Not at all, learn from master Christopher Hitchens by reading “Why Women are Not Funny”

And remember, the power of the written word will outweigh search engine optimization every time.

Ever wonder why competitive SEOs like Bruce Clay and other Savvy marketers don’t have a comment area in their blogs?

Comment text can increase your rankings with a whole encyclopedia of relevant words and phrases but you have no control over the conversation. This is not to say that Bruce Clay is a control freak but it does show that he is all about business. On the other hand this blog is (and always will be) about fun, learning and lunacy so I have no control over the conversation.

The SEOMoz blog is a different story, it is the place where SEOs make comments to impress new clients and other SEOs (much like they do in SEO Forums). That highly targeted conversation increases the rankings in search engines for SEOMoz so it would be foolish to turn comments off there. SEOMoz is all about shared conversation to obtain high rankings and yes — business just like Bruce Clay.

Anyhow, the phrase in the image above was from a long conversation that people had in the early days of this blog when it had less text and Google and other search engines had yet to make sense out of it. That 25 peeps post (a linkbait, now deleted) along with a few others that turned a bit p-o-r-n-o-g-r-a-p-h-i-c built a negative (or positive depending on what you are into) site flavor. This explains why I ranked for all kinds of junk that people from darker areas of the net would have paid for.

So in my study of social media (before it became known as “SMO”) I had already made good sense of this all. The value of the conversation is exactly what the sum all the text (including the comments) is believed to be. In other words, your blog is an encyclopedia of words and phrases. If you do not want to be associated with comments you have no control over, turn your comments off or stand and be counted, judged and ranked in search engines accordingly.

If you are being found in search engines for all kinds of trashy stuff and you have not been fooling around in your blog, you might also have been hacked, so before you go yell at Matt, take a good look at your blog, stats, comment history and in Google Webmaster Tools to verify.

First Review:

Once again, I sat on the end and had my wireless and VPN working so that I could use all of my Google tools. The promotional gifts company had a couple issues. For one thing, I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites also belonged to the promotional gifts person. -Matt

SEO’s often have many of their own sites on the same IP, let’s checkout mine here and it shows you this:

seobuzzbox.com has address 216.227.217.163
Found 3 websites with the IP 216.227.217.163

1) aaronpratt.com
2) seobuzzbox.com
3) webmaster404.com

Yes those are mine, all on the same IP, who needs a top secret Google widget for that?

The other sites offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different urls. -Matt

If you look at my three sites above they are very different and cross link very little so they are ok.

The larger issue was searching for a few words from a description quickly found dozens of other sites with the exact same descriptions. -Matt

Now that is a valuable lesson, descriptions for competitive phrases require variation. No wonder why is it hard to rank for anything descriptive for “internet marketing” phrases which are the most spammed keyword combinations around.

We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when youre running lots of sites. -Matt

If you are running multiple sites all with mixed content the feeds are of little value BUT unique sites with unique feeds are great!.

One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.). -Matt

Add value to a site by building it for humans and include them in the creative process.

The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index. -Matt

Google can now determine all of the above algorithmically so don’t even bother mixing up content to make it appear non duplicate.

Truths:

1. Google can determine ownership of multiple sites.
2. Descriptions for competitve phrases require variation.
3. Cross linking sites and content devalues.
4. Forums and reviews add the much needed human element to websites.
5. All is and will be done algorithmically in the future at Google.

Yes you can say that the above is all basic stuff but it extremely relevant. There are a few more website reviews Matt Cutts did, go read them but also remember that Matt has been online for awhile now. To study Matt is to learn what makes websites succeed.

Matt also quickly implies (listen closely) that the disclaimer that Reviewme and others will use (designating a post as “paid”) might not be good enough.

So will paying per post pass page rank benefits? Doubtful, and it could even devalue ones site if they get too heavily into this new form of link building. In other words, if it influences search engines Google will not allow it to go forth and prosper.

As for how Google plans to police the vast network of paid blog posts algorithmically, I have no idea or care to know.

Look at how fast this alternate viral path expanded: Here

Look how this blogspot auto-generated content system cocitates Matt Cutts and Brandon Cornett as if they are on the same team: (broken link sorry)

Do these alternate viral paths bring success? I will ping Brandon Cornett to see if he would like to respond to this question.

Others: Eric Lander – October 23, 2002

Answer from Brandon:

Hi Aaron. Thanks for the invite!

I have to start by correcting one point you made above. I did not write this article to sell my e-book. I wrote it to genuinely help readers.

In fact, the kinds of websites where this article appears are not commonly frequented by my target audience (real estate agents). I sell my e-books through a newsletter list I’ve built over the last 3 years.

I only point this out for the benefit of authors and marketers. In my mind, there’s a big difference between quickly spun “top ten” articles and the kinds of articles I try to write. I’ve published hundreds of articles online, and there’s one thing I’ve learned that all webmasters, authors, marketers and SEO folks can benefit from knowing.

It’s actually a simple lesson, and I should’ve known it all along: Heartfelt articles designed to help readers will travel ten times farther than rapidly churned-out articles or “link bait” articles.

Every time I sit down to write an article, I literally say to myself: “What can I write that will give people some solid ground on this subject, or somehow make their jobs easier?”

Those kinds of articles are a joy to write. And it’s even a bigger joy to see them republished and cited all across the web.

Message to article writers: Don’t think “viral” when you write your articles. Think “helpful” and the viral part will come automatically.

Thanks again Aaron.

Brandon Cornett
www.ArmingYourFarming.com

Last year at this time I decided to combine something I did in real life with a correctly worded blog post. The above image is from my home and garden blog, it’s a background image I made with my son for Halloween. The page is currently getting from 1-2 thousand hits per day from Google, Yahoo and MSN image searches. It also was on page #1 of Google for “Halloween Background” until I edited the page a couple times (doh!).

Todays Lesson:

Everything I have ever made on a whim has done extremely well in the search engines.

Everything that I think too much about and combine things I have learned in SEO forums gets very weak results.

Good SEO is no SEO