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"Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clark, 1972
Rank Magic is a division of Treloar Associates. More information about Treloar Associates can be found at TreloarAssociates.com.
The Rank Magic BlogSearch Engine Popularity ResultsNovember 29, 2006 ::: For those who follow such things, it's catch up time on search engine popularity stats. comScore and NetRatings put out October 2006 figures this week, and Hitwise released its own figures earlier this month. Google's still tops, Yahoo's still strong, MSN is still dropping and Ask beats out AOL's search share, according to comScore. Search Engine Watch displays trend from all of them over the past year, plus other comparison information and analysis.
Dogpile Gets Good Grades
Google Hits $ Landmark
Bad Links Can Hurt Your Rankings
What are bad neighborhood links?It seems that Google doesn't like the following type of web sites:
Linking to that type of site can
have a negative effect on your Google rankings.
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November
21, 2006 ::: Google shares broke the $500 mark early Tuesday,
making the company one of the most valuable in the U.S. By early afternoon,
the shares remained comfortably above the $500 level at $507, up 3 percent
on the day. The share price surge raised Google's market value to $154
billion, making it the most valuable business in high tech Silicon Valley.
November
18, 2006 ::: Linking to other web sites can hurt your rankings if
you link to the wrong web sites. Links to web spammers or "bad
neighborhoods" on the web can have a negative effect on your rankings on
Google and other search engines.
November
15, 2006 ::: Do you have a page that used to rank #1 in Google that
is now suddenly ranking #31? You may be the victim of what's being called a
"minus-30
November
11, 2006 ::: Dynamically created web pages are pages created by a
database on your web server. They're typically required by shopping cart
software, but may also be used with other database-driven applications. If you
don't know whether you have dynamic pages, chances are you don't. You can
identify them by their address in your browser's address bar: if they contain
a "?" character, they're dynamic.|
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 few. |
What did Google change?
Until November, Google had the following statement in its webmaster guidelines:
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Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index. |
This entry has been removed from Google's guidelines. Here's the official statement from Google's blog:
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[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is. Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic URLs. |
What does this mean to your web site?
If you have a dynamically created web site that uses only one or two parameters to create web pages then it's likely that Google can index your web pages without problems. If you use more parameters then you should rewrite your URLs. Rewriting your URLs makes sure that most search engines will be able to index your site.
If you cannot rewrite your URLs then it helps if at least one stable link points to a dynamically created page. If a web page can be found through a direct link then it is more likely that search engines index that page.
Important caveat: This affects on Google. Other search engines may well continue to have problems indexing dynamic pages.
Can You Trust That SEO Company?
November 9, 2006 ::: Below is an insightful and helpful article written recently by famed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com. If you're considering hiring an SEO company, or if you're trying to decide among multiple SEO companies, I hope this will help. The original article appears in High Rankings Advisor.
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Trust is always a tricky issue, and one that is
emotionally charged based on our individual experiences with others as
we navigate through the maze we call life. In search marketing, trust
issues are further magnified by the fact that the industry is still in
its infancy and there are no set rules or regulations. Let's face it,
you'd be hard pressed to get a handful of SEO consultants to agree on
a definition of SEO. Even amongst SEOs wearing the same hat color,
there is often a giant chasm that divides us. Where does this leave the person or company who wants to hire an SEO firm, but doesn't know whom to trust? SEO A tells them one thing, SEO B another, and SEO C, D, E, and F completely different things altogether! Who is right? Who is wrong? Whom should they hire? Whom should they beware of? Interestingly enough, according to an article I recently read in the Sept. 2006 Harvard Business Review ("To Trust or Not to Trust"), people weigh 10 different basic factors when deciding whether to trust someone. I found that many of them are those someone might go through before deciding to trust an SEO company with their business. For instance, one of the factors was how risk-tolerant the truster is. This one is important when it comes to SEO because there are certain risks involved with some SEO practices, i.e., those that are an attempt to purposely trick the search engines in some way. If those hiring the SEO firm are risk takers themselves, chances are they won't mind an SEO firm who might want to push the envelope a bit. They may even welcome it, and not want to hire an SEO who plays it very straight. And of course, the opposite is true. Another factor in the decision to trust was, "Does the trustee show benevolent concern?" Which simply means that they demonstrate that they care about the potential client and are concerned with helping them and their business, not only about making money for themselves. There's of course nothing wrong with making money, but it's definitely easier to trust those that show a genuine interest in the bottom line of their clients' companies as well. From a strictly SEO-company perspective, here are 5 additional factors that I believe businesses should weigh when choosing their SEO firm:
Like trusting a friend, a dentist, or anyone else, determining whom to trust as your SEO partner should not be taken lightly nor rushed into. Get to know the SEO vendors you're thinking of hiring, ask them lots and lots of questions, and most of all use your gut and your own common sense to determine if you'll be a good fit. If you are unsure, then keep on looking. There are plenty of SEO fish in the sea, and there should be a few who use the methods you believe in, who are within your budget, and who will work hard to help you accomplish your website goals! |
Everything Old is New Again
November 6, 2006 ::: NEW YORK—In a move into the old-fashioned business of ink on paper, Google is going to start selling advertisements that will appear in the print editions of 50 major newspapers. <read the full story in the Toronto Star>
Click-fraud rate on Google, Yahoo down, report says
November 5, 2006 ::: According to a new report on the scope of fraudulent clicks on search-related ads cited on C/Net's News.com, the click-fraud rate among top-tier search sites like Google and Yahoo is dropping. It fell to 11.9 percent in the third quarter, compared with 12.8 percent in the previous quarter.
But at second-tier search providers, it actually rose to 23.2 percent from 20.3 percent. The overall industry rate inched down to 13.8 percent from 14.1 percent, according to figures released from Click Forensics, which operates the Click Fraud Index. The index compiles data from more than 2,500 online advertisers and agencies.
Google's Sandbox and Google's TrustRank
November
3, 2006 ::: Google's Sandbox and Google's TrustRank are often
discussed in webmaster forums. What are they? And how do they influence your
web site rankings on Google? What can you do to get out of the sandbox or to
get a high TrustRank?
What are the Sandbox and Google's TrustRank?
The Sandbox and Google's TrustRank are part of Google's ranking filters. A very important factor for the ranking factors in Google is time. The age of your web site influences your rankings as well as the age of the various web sites that link to your web site. In addition, Google how long other web sites have been linking to your site and how your inbound links grow over time, etc.
If you have a new domain name, you may find that it's more difficult to get high rankings on Google. Google doesn't know your web site yet, so it it doesn't know if it can trust your web site or not. For that reason, new web sites usually have to deal with more filters than old web sites. It can happen that a new site gets great rankings and then it disappears from the rankings for some months. This phenomenon is called the sandbox effect, and we've seen it strike clients of ours on occasion
The Sandbox and Trustrank are two sides of the same coin
The Sandbox and TrustRank are just names for a set of filters. The Sandbox effect basically means that new web sites disappear from the search results for some time after getting good rankings. It probably means that time filters have been applied to a web site. (I say "probably" because Google (and the other search engines for that matter) doesn't reveal how its filters work. We can only try to infer what the filters are and what they do from what we can observe happening to our web sites and those of our clients.)
A high TrustRank means that Google has learned to trust a web site. That means the site is probably is several years old, a number of reputable sites link to it, it has a good inbound link history and it hasn't used spam techniques in the past. (By "spam", I don't mean that in the sense of the email spam we all receive, but search engine spam, which is the use of shady techniques to try and fool the search engines into giving your site an undeservedly high ranking.)
A web site that is in the Sandbox probably hasn't earned a high TrustRank yet. Conversely, a web site with a high TrustRank is unlikely to be put in the Sandbox.
What does this mean to your web site?
The older your web site is, the better. It seems that Google's filters tend to be stricter with new domain names so it's more difficult to get high rankings with new domain names. New domains have to prove that they are trustworthy before they can get high rankings. This is one reason we often counsel our clients not to change their domain name just to get one with a keyword in the name. The loss of TrustRank greatly outweighs any advantage of having that keyword in your domain name.
You need show Google that your web site is trustworthy. Get good inbound links to your web site and keep on working on inbound links over time. The longer other web sites link to your site the more likely it is that you'll get high rankings. And if new web sites establish links to your site on an ongoing basis, that helps, too.
You should optimize the links to your site. If the right web sites link to your site, you show Google that your web site can be trusted.
If you have a new domain name, you have to show Google that your web site can be trusted first. You can do this by getting the right links to your web site. That's the reason Rank Magic always provides a link to our clients early in the process; our link comes from a page that's been there a long time, has an excellent PageRank and a well established TrustRank. That allows our site to add a measure of trustworthiness to our client's site.
Weeding Out Click Fraud
November 1, 2006 ::: Business Week has run an extensive article on click fraud, in which they say "Its roots are deep, and while much has been done to stem the problem, the fixes aren't happening fast enough."
And they conclude, "Advertisers like us want only for the system to be more honest and fairer for everyone. That is not too hard to accomplish if the will to make changes is there. Whether Yahoo will come around willingly or as a response to stronger counter-pressures, such as advertisers' new Click Quality Council, more lawsuits, or government intervention, is the next chapter in this drama."
November
2006
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