The Rank Magic Blog

Link Building Strategy

3/31/05 :::: A link from a web site that's related to yours may count more heavily in your favor than a link from a more popular site that's not related.

Very Cool New Niche Search Engine

3/29/05 :::: A neat new niche search engine focuses on people information. Have fun and do a vanity look up on yourself! It's at ZoomInfo.com.

Google's Sandbox

3/28/05 :::: There's a phenomenon with Google that's termed the Sandbox, which is a place where Google sends brand new web sites to play nicely for awhile before allowing them to mingle with the other sites in their rankings. One of the earliest descriptions is from about a year ago in Web Pro News.

What this means is that our initial Keyword Status Report, which we run about two months after submitting a newly optimized site to the search engines, may show disappointing results for brand new sites in Google, AOL, Netscape and some other search engines. Sites that may be newly optimized but which have existed on the Web for some time may not be affected.

We've seen sites that caused us some consternation on the initial Keyword Status Report until we checked them again in another couple of months to find that they'd nicely popped up onto the first page in Google.

Link Text

3/24/05 :::: A piece of advice from the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC earlier this month: Don't request a link for the PageRank benefit: concentrate on the anchor Text.

What that means is this. Very often people request links from pages with high Google PageRank because that link will share a portion of that PageRank score with the page it links to. That's not nearly as important as making sure you have an important keyword in the "anchor text". Anchor text is the text that's actually part of the link. On this page, for example, anchor text is blue and underlined.

A link with a keyword in the anchor text is far better than a link that says something like www.easthanoveronline.com. That link might pass along a little bit of PageRank to the target page, but a link like East Hanover Restaurants does far more - it passes keyword relevance along as well.

Where you rank in any search engine is essentially a function of two variables, relevance and reputation. Relevance has to do with how relevant your page is for the keyword being searched. This is what classic SEO addresses: on-page keyword relevance. The other variable is reputation, which search engines essentially measure by your link popularity. A link with a keyword in the anchor text helps on both accounts.

Links gain weight with age (as we all do).

3/23/05 :::: Tip from the Search Engine Strategies Conference:

Gone Phishing

3/21/05 :::: A recent security threat report from Symantec reveals phishing attacks are up an astounding 366%. "By the end of December 2004, Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam antifraud filters were blocking an average of 33 million phishing attempts per week, up from an average of 9 million per week in July 2004." Unfortunately, Symantec expects this trend to continue its increase.

SpyWare: Keystroke Loggers Can Rob You

3/19/05 :::: I've been warning clients and others for a long time about the need to be protected from viruses, trojans, spyware, and so forth. Here's a piece of news from SecurityProNews that illustrates how serious this kind of thing can be:

An attempted bank robbery in Britain has raised a number of questions concerning the possibility of using keystroke-capturing software to help carry out such a scheme.

London Police, finishing an investigation that began in October, foiled what is being referred to as "Britain's largest attempted bank robbery." The investigation revealed computer experts were attempting to electronically transfer £220 million (around $420 million) from the Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui to 10 different bank accounts located around the globe.

According to the BBC, the thieves managed to infiltrate the system with keystroke logging software that would have enabled them to track every button pressed on computer keyboards. From that they could learn account numbers, passwords and other sensitive information.

The attempt on Sumitomo Mitsui marks one of the first recorded attempts at using malicious software in order to defraud such a large financial institution.

Rant

3/17/05 ::::  I just discovered that my article in Entrepreneur Magazine Online has been altered to insert advertising links, similar to the proposed new Google Toolbar functionality that has been excoriated in the industry press lately. There are five words in my article that have been turned into green hyperlinks which bring up ads for such things as HP laptops and printers and Microsoft products. Not only are they distracting for the reader, but they disrupt the flow of the article. Watch for this trend to catch on elsewhere.

Spammy Web Hosting Companies

3/15/05 :::: When you choose a web hosting company, you don't expect that they are going to change your web pages. You also don't expect that they change your web pages for their own benefit. Unfortunately, that's exactly what some web hosts seem to do.

What do these web hosts do to your web pages?

These web hosting companies change your web pages when a search engine spider requests them. For example, if Googlebot visits your web pages, the web host will return a different web page than the web page that is returned when a normal web surfer visits your web pages (a technique with the name cloaking).

The changed web pages contain links to the web host web site so that the link popularity of the web host site is improved. In addition, the web host creates new page and complete sub directories full of links on your web site.

Note that these changed URLs and the new pages cannot be seen by you. The URLs are not static and you cannot see them with your FTP client. Only search engine spiders can see the changed web pages because the web host intercepts the requests and dynamically creates the pages.

Some hosts also seem to add links to some of their clients on your web pages. They do this to artificially improve the link popularity of their clients' sites. If you see any Secret backdoor to Google offers from your web host without further details, you should be skeptical. If a web host changes the web sites of other people, it is likely that they will also change your web site.

How can you find out if your web host changes your web pages?

Go to Google, search for your domain name and click on the "Cached" link next to the results. You'll see the web page that Google has indexed there. If the web page in the Google page has links to other web pages that you don't know, chances are that your web host has changed your pages. In that case, you should contact your web host or Google so that the problem can be solved.

Web hosting companies with ethical business standards don't use these techniques. If you find out that your web host changes your pages, you should consider a new hosting company.

Search Engine Spam

3/13/05 :::: Some SEO firms use techniques that may give their clients a fast bump to the top of the rankings but which violate the search engines' terms of use. An example is stuffing keywords into a page but making them the same color as the background (for instance, white text on a white page) so that humans looking at the web page don't see them but the search engines do. This kind of thing is unfair to web sites that play by the rules, and often results in web sites gaining high rankings for keywords that aren't truly relevant for the web site.

The search engines don't like this, for obvious reasons. And if they become aware of it, they'll penalize the offending web site. If you've done everything possible to make your web page relevant for a critical keyword phrase, you have great content, and your link popularity is competitive, yet you can't seem to get those high rankings, take a look at the sites that do get the top rankings.

Are they spamming the search engines?

Search engine spam is "pages created deliberately to trick the search engine into offering inappropriate, redundant, or poor quality search results" according to Tim Mayer, VP of Web Search at Yahoo. Here are a few types of search engine spam:

Unrelated keywords Hidden text Hidden links Duplicate pages Doorway or gateway pages Keyword stuffing Gibberish

Teeny, tiny text Link farms Redirects Cloaking Page swapping (showing one page to visitors but another to the search engines)

In her presentation at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs claims this to be her favorite quote from Google: “Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.” [Google Webmaster Guidelines]

If your competitors are cheating with search engine spam, that doesn't force you to do the same thing to compete. Bad idea! Instead, consider turning them in. Drop a little note to the search engine pointing out what the web site has done that seems to be at odds with the search engine's guidelines. If you're right and your competition has flagrantly defied the guidelines, their rankings will probably be adjusted by the search engines, giving you a chance to compete honestly for those high rankings. Here's where you can do that:

• Google or spamreport@google.com
• Yahoo ystfeedback@yahoo.com
• AltaVista search@support.altavista.com
• FAST Search or spam@fastsearch.com
• Teoma help@teoma.com
• MSN Search

Best Bang for the Buck?

3/11/05 :::: In 2004, only 12% of Internet marketing dollars were spent on organic SEO. However ... 69% of clicks in the search engines are clicks on organic listings. Organic listings are natural listings based on a web site's relevance to the search term and it's reputation -- as opposed to "sponsored listings" where the web site owner is paying to have their ad listed near the top of the results. Sponsored listings, also known as Pay per Placement or Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are usually labeled as such and often appear with a pastel colored background so people can distinguish them from the preferred organic listings.

To turn these statistics around, 88% of Internet advertising is going toward PPC ads, but only 31% of people are clicking on them. At Rank Magic, we believe you'll get the best return on your investment with organic SEO and that's why we concentrate on that segment of Internet marketing.

Welcome!

3/7/2005 :::: Well, here we are, starting a blog. I feel like we're somehow behind the curve, not having started one sooner. What do we hope to accomplish here? Well, I'll be posting information about Internet marketing that should be helpful to you, whether you're a client of ours or not. I hope to provide some interesting links and some general commentary.

I attended the Search Engine Strategies Conference in NYC last week and picked up some neat new information that I'll be posting here.

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