SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Getting out of Google’s Supplemental Index

First, you need to find out why you’re in it. That’s easier said than done, but Jim Boykin of We Build Pages has some ideas:

1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

I can vouch for these. And keep in mind that duped content can be from copying yourself, such as having a mirrored site, for example.

So how do you get out?

1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

But once you’ve changed what’s causing it, you’ve got to get Google to come back around. I agree that the best way to do that is to create a Google sitemap and to ping Google with it.

All Your Links Are Belong to Google

Interesting:

Google knows about your linking networks, it knows about your traded links and even some of your paid links. During the Organic Site Reviews session yesterday, people were calling out sites they wanted to review. I attended the session because the panel seemed pretty interesting. On that panel included Matt Cutts. Now Matt had his laptop with him and you can see he was doing his own research behind his computer, on the URLs brought up on the screen. While the panelist was looking at site architecture and using Yahoo’s Site Explorer to pick on the site links, Matt was using some of his own tools. And let me tell you, it was scary.

He was asking questions, why do you have links from this site. It shows that your part of this and that network. Why are you doing reciprocal linking with this and that group of people? I kept thinking to myself, why do these people keep calling out their sites when they know they did some unnatural link acquisitions? Or maybe they didn’t know? Either way, Matt clearly explained that the links are not hurting the sites, they are however not helping it rank in Google. And if they are paid links or if you are spending your time or resources getting those unnatural links - then it may hurt you financially.

Very interesting…

SEO Checklist - Common SEO Site Problems

I missed this a couple weeks ago, but Bill Hartzer at Search Engine Guide has a nice article about common site problems from an SEO perspective. I like it as a quick SEO checklist before taking on a client. His big four are:

1. Duplicate Content
2. Not Enough Content
3. Search Engine Spider Issues
4. Lack of Links

I would add:

1. Targeting the Right Keywords
2. Staying Within Your Niche

Be cognizant of those issues and you’re giving your SEO campaign a greater chance to succeed.

Matt Cutts at WebmasterWorld 2005 - Las Vegas

Here are the best excerpts from a coffee talk with Matt Cutts of Google:

Q: How does Google feel about SEOs, SEMs, Webmasters?
A: At times there is an element of conflict. In Matt’s mind, its best to work with Webmasters. He thinks as SEO and spam as two different things. Spam is outside of their guidelines and they don’t like that. Anyone who is whitehat or tweaking keywords or making a site navigation more crawlable are good. SEO is not spam, its only when you go against guidelines, when it is spam. There is a large online publisher that wasn’t doing well in Google. They changed the robot.txt file that said, no search engines can crawl the site. That is why. Changing your robot.txt file is not spam.

[...]

Q: Does the sandbox exist?
A: Matt said here comes the audience part? How many feel there is a sandbox? How many feel there is no such thing as a sandbox? SEOs normally split down the line. There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries. He knows it works to keep some spam out.

[...]

Q: Duplicate content, stolen content. What can we do to protect ourselves?
A: We watch what people are saying about this. They have projects on the way to determine who first wrote this text, its not a 100% done, but its on the radar.

[...]

Q: Aging delay? Is there?
A: Its like the sandbox Q. Just because a patent application is released, it doesnt mean they are using it.

Q: CSS positioning? How does it affect ranking.
A: Good question, I don’t know. If your doing an include, it probably wont matter either way. In his mind, positioning text at top or bottom, is over rated. But try it.

Q: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
A: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

[...]

Q: Let’s go back to text links.
A: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

Not much new here — all pretty standard answers. Though the CSS positioning one is interesting…

Google Analytics Not for SEOs

Not to imply that all SEOs are “blackhats,” but this comment from Matt Cutts alarms me:

Blackhat SEOs may be leery of using Google for analytics, but regular site owners should be reassured.

Rand recommends staying away:

It’s my opinion that Google is going to attempt to use the analytics data in the SERPs and while they may eventually get it right, my guess is that some folks are going to take the brunt of the data collection fallout in the SERPs. Why be a fall guy?

I agree.

Non-Google Patents

As an SEO, it is often my job to convince others that this is not a one-engine world - there is success to be had with other engines. Following the now-infamous Google patent, I’ve often thought about the patents of other search engines. Luckily, Gary of Search Engine Watch has compiled a nice list:

Title: Moveable interface to a search engine that remains visible on the desktop
Assignee: HP

Title: Method and system for identifying image relatedness using link and page layout analysis
Assignee: Microsoft

Title: Method and system for classifying display pages using summaries
Assignee: Microsoft

Title: Method and apparatus for performing a search
Assignee: Yahoo

Title: Method and system for ranking documents of a search result to improve diversity and information richness
Assignee: Microsoft

Title: Contextual flyout for search results
Assignee: IBM

Title: Method and apparatus for providing information
Assignee: Fujitsu

Title: Method and apparatus for identifying related searches in a database search system
Assignee: Overture/Yahoo

Title: Verifying relevance between keywords and Web site contents
Assignee: Microsoft

Title: Systems and methods that rank search results
Assignee: Microsoft

Title: Search systems and methods with integration of user annotations
Assignee: Yahoo

Title: Integration of instant messenging with Internet searching
Assignee: Yahoo

Title: Search system using user behavior data
Assignee: Microsoft

Jagger 3 Winding Down

Matt Cutts says that the Google Jagger update is winding down:

As Jagger1 and Jagger2 wind down and Jagger3 is visible at 66.102.9.104, I wanted to recap where things stand.

• Jagger1
  was visible at most data centers starting around 10/16/05. A second,
  refreshed version of Jagger1 was visible recently at 66.102.7.104 and
  was at all data centers by 11/7/05.
• Jagger2 was visible starting at 66.102.9.104 starting around 10/27/05. Jagger2 was visible at all data centers by 11/6/05.
• Jagger3
  was visible starting at 66.102.9.104 around 11/4/2005. Jagger3 is not
  widely visible yet (it might also be at 216.239.51.104), but I expect
  it migrate to other data centers over time.

Q: Is the update winding down?
A: It’s starting to. Recall that all of Jagger1/2/3 are separate
changes. Jagger1 and 2 are done, and you can see what Jagger3 will look
like at 66.102.9.104.

My one take-away from Jagger has to do with the Sandbox - I’m seeing sites coming out in record numbers…

Basic SEO - Rules for a Natural SEO Campaign

Though Todd of Stuntdubl prefaces his “logical SEO thresholds” with a disclaimer, “It should be noted that this is all sheer speculation from just a few minutes of pondering a subject that often comes to mind,” it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily an incorrect set of assumptions:

• Direct Reciprocal links
  Under 50% of backlinks
• 3-way and neighborhood links
  Under 70%
• Title tags
  Between 3 - 20 words seems about normal
• Heading tags
  3 - 10 words
• Alt tags
  3 - 5 words
• % of “keyword anchor text”
  less than 60%
• % of “natural anchor text” (click here, url, site name)
  greater than 10%
• % of unique anchor text (only occuring once)
  greater than 10%
• Unique linking domains to total backlink ratio
  Logic may dictate the lower the better for G (ROS links are a good indicator of purchased advertising)
• Deeplink ratio
  greater than 10% (but probably higher relative to site or size)
• Unique linking domains on same class C IP address
  Greater than 10(?) may indicate a network (like a web host) and be devalued
• Outbound link text characters to total content characters %
  Greater than 80% of characters as anchor text is probably bad

I wouldn’t agree with any of these as hard-and-fast rules, but it is good to keep these sort of limits and potential triggers in mind when developing an SEO campaign. Of his rules, I would outright disagree with the title and heading tag ones. Some of the others, like deeplinking and C-class links, seem a bit dubious in every instance, as well.

Web Accessibility, Web Standards and SEO

There’s a nice article in the new edition of A List Apart from Andy Hagans discussing the overlap of Web accessibility and white-hat SEO. An excerpt:

I have been a search engine optimizer for several years, but only recently have become infatuated with web accessibility. After reading for weeks until my eyes became sore, and painstakingly editing my personal website to comply with most W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, I have come to a startling revelation: high accessibility overlaps heavily with effective white hat SEO.

Jacob Nielsen, SEO guru?

One more reason not to use IE

If you build or design sites for a living, you probably use Firefox. If not, why? But we all know that you need to fire up IE every once in a while to check how your builds look in that dreadful browser that, sadly, most people use. Until now, IE View did the trick, allowing you to open your current page in Internet Explorer. Now there’s IE Tab:

Can you believe it? We really run Windows update from Firefox.

IE Tab, an extension from Taiwan, features embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.

If you look in the bottom right of your Firefox window you’ll also notice that there’s a Firefox icon that, once clicked, switches Firefox to IE. Nevermore, Internet Explorer…