domains/URLs

May 8, 2014 by Bill Treloar 4 Comments

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?

On May 8, 2014 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, links, redirects, web design / 4 Comments

It’s sad to say, but we see this all too often. An old website gets a facelift, and the new site looks great. But it’s not long before the website owner notices that they’re no longer getting any business from people finding them on the web. What happened?

We’ve written before about why good SEO consultants make lousy web designers, and vice versa, and there are just some SEO techniques that great web designers don’t really think much about.

The two mistakes that kill your online visibility

There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines

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There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines: Relevance and Reputation. A significant problem with either one of them will cost you rankings in the search engines.

Relevance

During the website redesign, the text copy on your pages may be updated. Certainly the HTML code behind the pages is changed. It’s not at all uncommon for the new copy to fail to use some of your essential keyword phrases or for them not to be included appropriately in the code. This makes it difficult for search engines to recognize that your page is an appropriate match for those keyword phrases.

The solution to this is to go back to your original optimization recommendations and re-apply them to your webpages. (You do have optimization recommendations to reapply, don’t you?)

Reputation

This accounts for 40-50% of where you rank in Google. It’s important in other search engines as well, but Google weighs it more heavily than the rest of them. Your reputation (sometimes called “authority”) is measured by your link popularity:” the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. Over time, the pages on your website have earned significant link popularity, helping them to rank well in the search engines.

Unfortunately, most website redesign projects result in new URLs for the pages on your website. Without explicit action, all the link popularity earned by you or previous page URLs is simply lost. This is related to the issue of canonicalization we discuss in the SEO portion of our website, as well as in our blog.

The solution is to do the proper kind of “redirect” from the old URL to the new URL so that the new URL can inherit the link popularity and reputation earned by your previous version of the page. There are multiple kinds of redirects that will ensure that anyone who tries to go to your old page will be sent to the new one. But only one kind, the 301 permanent redirect, will also redirect the link popularity value from the old URL to the new one.

Only a 301 permanent redirect, will redirect link popularity from an old URL to the new one.

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Don’t Panic

Obviously, if this happens to you you need to jump on it as quickly as possible and get things fixed. Better still would be to anticipate this potential disaster and deal with it before your redesigned website even goes live.

If this has happened to you and you need help recovering from the loss of search rankings, Rank Magic can help.

Has this happened to you? Share your experience in the Comments below.

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March 14, 2013 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Are You At Risk For an Exact Match Domain Slapdown?

On March 14, 2013 / domains/URLs, Google / 1 Comment

For a long time, SEOs and some website owners have known the value of selecting a domain name that exactly matches a keyword that a site is optimizing for. Let’s say you want great search rankings for the keyword “NJ real estate lawyer”. You might attempt to register the domain NJRealEstateLawyer.com or RealEstateLawyerNJ.com. It used to work very well and the owners of those websites enjoyed a quick and easy path to the top of the search engine rankings.

Are the good times over?

Last fall, Google released its EMD algorithm update. EMD stands for Exact Match Domain, and this update is designed to reduce or eliminate the preference given for domains with an exact keyword match like those above. It’s not designed to penalize them, but just to reduce the tendency to give preferential rankings to low quality or mediocre websites just because their domains were an exact match for a popular keyword.

In our experience, the EMD update has begun to do what’s intended. It doesn’t seem to be 100% effective yet, but the trend is clear: exact match domains no longer own the top rankings. According to an article in Search Engine Journal, these are some notable EMD websites that have seen significantly reduced rankings

www.bmicalculatormale.com
www.charterschools.org
playscrabble.net
www.purses.org
www.teethwhitening.com

Has this affected you?

If you’re not sure whether this has affected you, you need to do some monitoring of your keyword rankings. If you know you’ve suffered as a result of this update, the solution is to improve the quality of your website with appropriate SEO techniques. A high quality website should not feel any pain from the EMD update.

A high quality website should not feel any pain from the EMD update.

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How to recover

The article linked above at Search Engine Journal has a good list of steps to take to recover from any EMD slapdown you may have suffered. Rather than duplicate them here, I refer you to that article.

Of course, if you need help with any of that, Rank Magic is here for you.

October 8, 2012 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Google’s Crackdown on Low Quality “Exact Match Domains”

On October 8, 2012 / domains/URLs, Google / 1 Comment

EMDs

We’ve blogged in the past about comments from Google that they recognize websites with an exact match to a popular query get ranked higher than they really deserve and that Google planned to address that.

Well, Google’s EMD algorithm update hit a couple of weeks ago.

EMD stands for “Exact Match Domains”. If you search for brown widgets, BrownWidget.com is likely to show up very highly, even if it’s a crappy website with no link popularity. (At this writing there’s no such website, but you get the idea.)

In recognition of the fact that low quality websites shouldn’t rank highly just because of their domain name, Google’s published the EMD algorithm update.

Google’s Crackdown on Exact Match Domains

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It’s no longer necessary to pay a domain squatter lots of money for a domain just because a lot of people search for the domain’s phrase. Recently a company asked us about an offer to sell them the domain njit consulting.com, citing the large number of searches for NJ IT consulting. We suggested they decline. The domain would start out with no link authority and would not be likely to be ranked nearly as highly as it once would have simply due to the domain name. They would have to work as hard on the SEO for this domain as they did for their current domain.

How big a deal is this?

This is a new algorithm change, and it will take awhile to gauge just how severe it is, but Google anticipates it will significantly impact at least 0.6% of US queries. If you have an exact match domain and see a significant dropoff in Google rankings and traffic, the antidote is effective SEO.

We can help with that.

May 4, 2011 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Protect Your Domain Name — A Cautionary Tale

On May 4, 2011 / domains/URLs / 1 Comment

Two cautionary notes here about protecting your domain name.

Make Sure You Own Your Own Domain Name

The first step to protect your domain name is to be listed as the Registrant (owner) of your domain name. Otherwise your business is at the mercy of someone else.

Case in point: a client of ours has had their domain name (roughly equal to their company name) for the past 3 years. They had the person who hosts their web site register it for them. Now that they’re thinking of moving to a different hosting service, they find they can’t access their domain to do that because they’re not the registrant.

Their web hosting company is the registrant.

Irritated to be losing a customer, the web hosting company wants a sizable monetary payment to relinquish ownership of the domain name — so much that our client feels the need to hire a lawyer and sue to get possession.

Not sure if you own your domain? Go to www.whois-search.com and enter your domain. You should be listed as both the Registrant and the Administrative Contact. If you’re not, ask whoever is listed as the registrant to make that change for you. Do it before you have any sort of falling out with them.

Domain name expiration can be a disaster!

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Don’t Let Your Domain Name Expire

The next danger you need to protect your domain name against is Domain Squatters or Cybersquatters. A client of ours had a compelling domain name and hadn’t started to use it yet, but it was the perfect domain name for his business. Sadly, he forgot to renew it one year. and the registrar he’d used neglected to tell him it was expiring. By the time he noticed, and wanted to use it for his website, he discovered that a cybersquatter had registered it themselves, and wanted a premium payment to give it up. Our client had to spend $2,000 just to get their domain name back. For many, the price is much steeper.

Whoever you use as a domain registrar, always make sure they give you plenty of notice when it’s time to renew.

Don’t make either of these costly mistakes! Protect your domain name.

Need help with SEO for your small business? At Rank Magic we’re THE small business SEO experts.

November 23, 2010 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

5 Rules for Choosing a Domain Name

On November 23, 2010 / domains/URLs / Leave a Comment

We’ve had some fun in the past, pointing out “unfortunate” domain name choices. Clearly, having a good domain name is important for your business. Choosing a domain name, though, may be trickier than you think.

For awhile it was the rage to create many web sites, with each domain name using a different keyword phrase for your business. Having keywords in your domain name are substantially less helpful now.

How do you select a good domain name? Well, I have a modest list of rules that should guide you through the process.

5 Rules for Choosing Your Domain Name

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Make it easy to remember.
You want people to return to your web site, right? They’re not going to search for you every time; they’ll just type it in. So keep it easy to remember.
Make it hard to misspell.
There are web sites out there with common misspellings of domain names, lurking either to download malware onto a user’s computer or to entice the user to click on a Google Ad. There’s even a name for that: typosquatting.
Choose a .com name for your business.
If the domain name you want is already taken, it may be tempting to register the same domain name but with a .info or .biz extension instead. Most people, though will type in .com at the end out of sheer habit. Some use the handy Ctrl-Enter key combination to automatically enter the “www”. at the beginning and the “.com” at the end. That’s bad enough if the .com version is an unrelated website, but if the .com version points to a competitor, you’re sending customers to them.
Avoid hyphens.
People never quite remember whether to use the hyphen or not … or just where in your domain name the hyphen belongs.
Finally, shorter is better than longer.
You always want it to be as easy as possible for people to do business with you. Don’t make them type in a long, complicated domain name. First of all, that’s likely to cause you to violate rules 1 & 2, but also, you don’t want to make it more difficult than it has to be to enter your address in a browser’s address bar.

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?