SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Old Domains in Google

I missed this one late last week but it’s worthwhile reading about the preference of older sites in Google:

It seems Google has intensified the ranking factor of one key data point that is very tough to manipulate: the age of your domain name. I have been keeping an eye on trends with Google’s search results and it seems that there is an increasing trend towards “trusted sites” owning page one. A “trusted site” is loosely defined by me as: an older domain, a nice mix of anchor text, links built over time, links coming in from all kinds of c class blocks, maybe a .edu snuck in there, etc.

More:

Simply put it seems you have almost an unfair advantage with an older domain in today’s Google, particularly if it passes some kind of “trusted site” test. I would like to keep writing on this but I am off to make some offers on some domains from the 1990’s.

What are you doing with your old domain names? ;-)

Check Google Rank Free

If you’ve ever wanted to check your Google ranking but don’t want to shell out the $300 for Webposition or Ranking Manager, check out Free Monitor for Google.

I found this neat little program while browsing the SEO Chat forums, where one crabby member is lamenting the Jagger update. Or so it seems. But as far as free SEO programs go, this one is a gem. After giving it a quick test drive, here’s what I’ve found.

Pluses:

• Free
• Export capabilities
• Ability to check multiple keywords at once
• Manages keyword campaigns
• Check as far down in the results as you want (verified up to 500)
• Stores SERP results for easy reference
• Tracks rankings over time

Minuses:

• Doesn’t check Yahoo! or MSN
• Only works with the Google API
• Quite limited in scope

Final Verdict: If you’re serious about SEO, don’t waste your time; purchase Webposition or Ranking Manager (or the upcoming Website Manager). If SEO is a hobby of yours, go for it. It’s free!

Google Update Jagger Hits Phase 2

In a nice new tradition, Matt Cutts is providing weather updates during the second of a three-phase Google Update.

As usual, the forums are abuzz with the topic. You can find the most noise at WMW.

Advice on SEO - 10 Free SEO Tips

Jill Whalen of High Rankings fame has her updated advice on SEO - a top 10 list for better rankings.

1. Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to.
2. Optimize your site for your target audience, not for the search engines.
3. Research your keyword phrases extensively.
4. Design and categorize your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research.
5. Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.”
6. Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible.
7. Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.”
8. Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag.
9. Make sure your site is “link-worthy.”
10. Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings.

If you’re an SEO, I would really suggest hammering home that last statement. The biggest disparity between a successful or failed consultant-client relationship (as far as managing expectations) has to do with watching the SEO campaign as a whole or just a few keywords. Algorithms change, sites drop and keywords shift. It’s part of the game.

The Future of Search: LSI

What is LSI?

LSI is a methodology for automatic document classification. It examines all the words in all the documents of a corpus and calculates similarity measurements for each document or for individual terms. It can gauge very accurately which documents in a corpus are really relevant to a search phrase even if that search phrase does not appear in a document.

How do search engines use LSI?

When you query a search engine that uses LSI, the search engine examines similarity values calculated for every content word. This method examines the document collection as a whole and knows which documents are semantically close or distant based on the relationships between all the words in each document and all the words in the rest of the collection. LSI does not require an exact match to the query phrase to find relevant documents.

What does LSI mean for SEO?

What this means for the search engine optimization (SEO) specialist and anyone with a website who wants high visibility in the search engines is that every word on your web page is important, not just the keyphrase(s). It is the right combination of all the words in your content that really matters here. What you do with your keyphrase(s) is still important but now you must go beyond that . . . way beyond that. You’ve got to have the right context to support your keyphrase(s).

LSI as promoting a better Web.

As an added benefit, by using LSI, search engines provide an incentive for web copywriters and SEO professionals alike to produce better content in their web pages. This, in turn, increases the quality of a search engine’s database.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Building Deep Content Links

A recent article over at Search Engine Guide goes over a neat little technique of building deep content links for your sites using a program called Blinkx Desktop Indexer:

From here the usual link building tactics should come into play. Click on the links which Blinkx returns and review the site(s) to see if they are indeed relevant to your content. If they are, see if there is a way you can submit your page to the site.

For example, if its a blog, you may be able to comment on the blog post. Add you comment as something like: “I read this article and found it very useful. I also found this page (and insert a link to your page) which is related and provides more information” or something to that effect.

If commenting is out of the question, perhaps you could email the blog owner directly and send him the link to your page. He may add it to his post for you.

If it’s any other “regular” website, you could see if there is an Add URL link on the page, and you can submit your page that way, or you can look for webmaster or site owner contact information and email them, again submitting the page URL to them and let them know the content is relevant to the specific page on their site.

It’s not much different from surfing related sites and doing the same, but I can see it being useful when composing an article on a specific subject, for example.

Google PageRank (PR) Update

While not what they once were, the new Google PageRank update is still interesting - it seems to have hit this morning, at least for sites I watch. As Matt Cutts reports:

And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks. Looks like this update may yield my first green pixels. I’m hoping for a PR12.

For Topositionseo.com, it is interesting to note that root page PR (/) went down to a 1 while the blog (/blog/) went from to a 4. Strange.

Top SEO Friendly Directories List

Andy Haggans of Text Link Ads has revisions to his top seo-friendly directories list up at the Link Building Blog:

• DMOZ
• Yahoo (if I want to spend the money)
• JoeAnt
• GoGuides
• MSN bCentral
• 01 Web Directory
• Web Beacon
• Site Snoop
• Linkopedia
• Bigall
• MassiveLinks (allows keyword links)
• Tygo (allows keyword links)

Good list. And make sure you’ve read this important note about the benefit of a Yahoo! directory link.

Determining Quality Websites

The goal of search engines is to match up searchers with quality websites and the information that the user is looking for. Under that assumption, shouldn’t search engines attempt to determine what’s a quality website outside of pure linking and content factors? What about:

1. being hosted on a dedicated IP
2. outbound links (these might be the biggest IMHO — not only to put your site in its topical neighborhood, but also just a plain old GOOD neighorhood)
3. doctype and language metadata in your header
4. valid code
5. invalid code but linking to the W3C validator (”we tried!”)
6. existence of a print stylesheet
7. a file named privacy.*
8. the existence of Access keys (accessibility best practice)
9. a ’skip navigation’ link (accessibility best practice)
10. Long domain registration period
11. Consistent link acquisition over time
12. Low link rot
13. Few broken links
14. User repeat visits
15. Adds or notes on personalized search results
16. Visitor duration - though often argued by SEO that like to rationalize their links’ pages as “resources”
17. High level of users that bookmark the page
18. Steady SERP position
19. CTR of links
20. DMOZ
    listing (yes, I hate this too, but I think a lot of us have seen decent
    evidence of it at least to speculate it a quality indicator)

I like 2, 3, 4, 11, 16 and 19. The rest seem too arbitrary to adequately go by.

Matt Cutts and the Google Update

Now this is what a Matt Cutts post should look like:

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.

Update: Just to clarify, these days with lots of smaller and larger changes happening at different points in time, it’s a little arbitrary to decide when to call something an update. That decision has usually fallen on Brett Tabke’s shoulders over at WebmasterWorld (WMW also chooses what name they want to call it when Brett decides enough has changed to call it an update.) Given that there should be new PageRank/backlinks visible in a few days (assuming no issues at our end), I wouldn’t be surprised if Brett slaps a name on it pre-emptively, even though there will still be some flux to come.

Sorry, Matt. But the Gmail posts don’t quite do it for me. ;-)

Now for what’s going on (via Threadwatch):

• Data loss at Google causes an incomplete index - suggestions of Googlebot panic spidering to rebuild it
• Semantic processing of links that mean established and varied links are weighted more, giving more power to internal links and less weight to link development work
• New filter for site-wide links
• Increased weighting of authorities to reduce presence of less established sites even further, to limit spam
• Google is evil, blah blah blah

There’s also much talk on the forums…