Recently in Seo Tips Category
It looks like the latest pagerank update is currently underway.
Based on previous updates this could take several days to complete and stabilise.
Some people will probably be very happy, while others won't be ....
Such is the way
Based on previous updates this could take several days to complete and stabilise.
Some people will probably be very happy, while others won't be ....
Such is the way
I've seen a few posts from people on forums over the last few weeks complaining that GoogleBot is misbehaving and chewing up silly amounts of bandwidth.
Unfortunately it's all too easy to pretend to be GoogleBot (or any other bot for that matter) simply by spoofing the UserAgent string ie. telling the world that you are something that you aren't.
So how can you tell if a bot really is from Google?
One of the official Google blogs has the answer - DNS lookups:
Basically you need to check that the forward and reverse DNS entries are valid ie. that the A and PTR records are from Google...
That's a bit of a pain, but will save you headaches if you're seeing strange activity in your logs...
Unfortunately it's all too easy to pretend to be GoogleBot (or any other bot for that matter) simply by spoofing the UserAgent string ie. telling the world that you are something that you aren't.
So how can you tell if a bot really is from Google?
One of the official Google blogs has the answer - DNS lookups:
Basically you need to check that the forward and reverse DNS entries are valid ie. that the A and PTR records are from Google...
That's a bit of a pain, but will save you headaches if you're seeing strange activity in your logs...
Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox support extensions which add functionality to the browser.
Personally I prefer Firefox and since I don't use Windows that much I don't have the option of using IE7 that often.
One of the more interesting extensions that I've come across recently is called SEO Quake.
The plugin is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer and gives a webmaster, marketer or SEO access to a wealth of information about the sites you are visiting, search engine results and whole lot more.
For a full range of features and an explanation of how they work have a look at the article on the developer's site
Personally I prefer Firefox and since I don't use Windows that much I don't have the option of using IE7 that often.
One of the more interesting extensions that I've come across recently is called SEO Quake.
The plugin is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer and gives a webmaster, marketer or SEO access to a wealth of information about the sites you are visiting, search engine results and whole lot more.
For a full range of features and an explanation of how they work have a look at the article on the developer's site
Losing traffic through laziness or silly mistakes is simply unacceptable.
What am I referring to?
If your site resides at www.domain.tld and you've been marketing it successfully both online and offline people will forget about the "www" part. It's only natural.
While back in the mid 90s most sites were ONLY available via www.domain.tld that's no longer the case.
(there was some odd RFC that a lot of people referred to for this reason)
So the first thing you should do is check that both www.domain.tld and domain.tld point to your site.
There's no technical reason why your hosting provider can't set that up for you. If they tell you that they can't then you should really look elsewhere.
The one possible problem that you might face is that robots might treat the "www" version of your site and the non-www one as two separate sites. They shouldn't, but it can happen.
The simple solution to this is to force people (and spiders) to use either one or the other using a redirect.
Richard has a case in point with regard to the NCH in Dublin that could so easily be fixed! Others have fixed theirs already.
What am I referring to?
If your site resides at www.domain.tld and you've been marketing it successfully both online and offline people will forget about the "www" part. It's only natural.
While back in the mid 90s most sites were ONLY available via www.domain.tld that's no longer the case.
(there was some odd RFC that a lot of people referred to for this reason)
So the first thing you should do is check that both www.domain.tld and domain.tld point to your site.
There's no technical reason why your hosting provider can't set that up for you. If they tell you that they can't then you should really look elsewhere.
The one possible problem that you might face is that robots might treat the "www" version of your site and the non-www one as two separate sites. They shouldn't, but it can happen.
The simple solution to this is to force people (and spiders) to use either one or the other using a redirect.
Richard has a case in point with regard to the NCH in Dublin that could so easily be fixed! Others have fixed theirs already.
PhpLinkDirectory is a PHP/MySQL link directory that offers SEO friendly URLs. Instead of appending crazy queries to the URLs (eg. index.php?cat=4545) you can have semantic and keyword rich directory paths.
The full source code is available for you to peruse and, if you are up to it, improve on.
One of the system's weaknesses is that you have very little control over page titles "out of the box" ie. you cannot specify the order in which elements appear (some other systems do allow you easy access to this).
By default the page title tags appear as:
Site Name - Sub-Category Level 1 - Sub-Category Level 2
So if you had a site called say "Seo Directory" and a category "Google" you'd end up with:
Seo Directory - Google Seo Directory - Google - Adwords Category - Site Name {capture name="title"}
{if count($path) > 1} - {/if}
{foreach from=$path item=category name=path}
{if $smarty.foreach.path.iteration gt 2}
>
{/if}
{if not $smarty.foreach.path.first}
{$category.TITLE}
{/if}
{/foreach}
{/capture}
This needs to be replaced with:
{capture name="title"}
{section loop=$path name=foo step=-1}
{$path[foo].TITLE}
{if !$smarty.section.foo.last}
>
{/if}
{/section}
{/capture}
You then need to make one minor change to header.tpl:
{if empty ($TITLE)}
{$smarty.const.DIRECTORY_TITLE|escape|trim}
{/if}
{$smarty.capture.title|strip|trim}
{$smarty.capture.title|strip|trim}
While a lot of SEO experts tend to diss other search engines, such as MSN and Ask, I've always felt that it was a bad idea to ignore their users. A customer (visitor) is still a customer regardless of how they ended up on your website.
A few months ago I did a bit of not too scientific analysis of browsers etc., that were being used to access a number of sites that I manage. The results reinforced my suspicions.
But what about the search engines?
What are people actually looking for?
Is there a significant difference between a Google user and a Yahoo! user?
The 2006 Search Wrap-Up would seem to suggest that there are some significant differences.
Google users tend to be more technical it seems, while Yahoo! users are into popular culture if the top search terms of 2006 are anything to go by.
From an SEO perspective I guess that means that you still can't ignore Yahoo! et al :)
Forums can be an incredibly rich resource. Even a moderately active forum could have hundreds of posts and provide plenty of keyword rich content. Unfortunately due to their very nature it can be quite hard to get the most out of a forum.
If you are using Vbulletin to run your forum(s) there are a number of options open to you.
If you have a look on the Vbulletin hacks and mods site you can come across a number of modifications that combine mod_rewrite and a few other tricks to make your site that little bit more search engine friendly. However there are always ways that you could improve on this, but do you really have the time and the skill to do it?
VBSeo is by far the best solution that I've found for this.
Not only does it convert all the ugly URLs into more keyword rich static links, but it also offers a wide range of custom options to help remove duplicate links and give search engine spiders rich and unique content to spider.
It may seem like a hefty investment, but it can definitely pay dividends both in terms of traffic and earnings, be they from Adsense or other sources.
The launch of the .eu domain for the European Union countries has led to a certain degree of controversy, as many domains may have been squatted.
But how will Google and other search engines deal with this new TLD?
Up until now ccTLDs, such as .ie (Ireland), .co.uk (United Kingdom) etc., have been used, in part at least, by Google and others to provide "local" results.
Will this lead to a new Google search option?
Instead of choosing "pages from Ireland" will we have the option to choose "pages from Europe"?
Maybe we'll see Google.eu launching to deal with this at some point in the future, however it won't be immediately, as the current application is still pending with Eurid (like so many others)
Of course a lot of this is quite academic. What will be of real interest is how the .eu will affect a site's page rank and general search result positioning.
Unfortunately it is too early to tell, as the domain has only been "live" for a few weeks.
A question I keep seeing time and time again is "how quickly can I get my site indexed?" or "Why hasn't my site been indexed yet?"
The first question I have to ask is:
Is it a new domain or a previously owned one?If it is a previously owned com/net/org/info/biz domain then you may find that it is sandboxed for quite some time. This is because domain name speculation on dmoz listed sites is becoming a serious issue. In either case I would recommend that you start by making sure that it is optimised and spider ready. You should then try and build links to it (without spamming) from other sites that you manage. If you do this carefully you will see an increase in spider activity. The other obvious thing to do is submit it to search engines and directories. NB: Ensure that you have actual content before you do this, as lack of content will hinder your seo strategy
