SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Linking, Linkbait and Building Link Popularity

Graywolf has an excellent linkbait piece of his own over at Threadwatch - a nice collection of link building and linkbait articles.

Building Links in 2006

Even though it’s linkbait itself (what isn’t these days?), Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans at SEO Book have put together a list of 101 ways to build links in 2006 inspired by the old Search Engine Workshops’ Over 125 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies. It’s quite an exhaustive list and covers a lot of good techniques for acquiring links.

Competitive Analysis - An SEO Guide

While most of the articles in Search Engine Guide tend to border on the more intellectual side of SEO rather than SEO in practice, I did enjoy Ross Dunn’s article about competitive analysis in SEO.

His article is a bit wordy, so let me break it down:

1. Check you competitor’s site for keywords in the:
   • Title
   • METAs
   • Body Content
   • Internal Link Text
2. Check the accessibility of your competitor’s site in the major search engines: site:www.competitor.com. Then compare that number to a crawl with a program like Xenu
3. Check their backlinks: Yahoo! Site Explorer. Or use the Firefox extension, SEOpen
4. Do the above on your site and compare

AOL Clickthrough Rate Data

From Earners Forum comes some interesting data about clickthroughs garnered from the AOL data blunder last week. I like the presentation of data found in a comment on Jim Boykin’s blog the best, though:

Results in:
Total Searches: 9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

% of clicks
Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

Over 42% of searchers clicked on the first result, while only 10% of searchers clicked past the first page. Interesting.

Google Sitemaps now Google Webmaster Central

Until now, I haven’t found much use for the Google Sitemaps program. Register your site. Lame. Notify Google of your sitemap. You can do this outside of the program - it’ll even get crawled automatically if you leave it in the root under the name sitemap.xml. And there’s a couple other things that always seemed like they were more about collecting information on webmasters than providing help for webmasters.

But I do like the new and improved Google Webmaster Tools; news here and here.

I like it not only because there’s a neat 301 canonical URL fix in there, but also because it seems Google is moving in the right direction.

Some features:

• Set a Google crawl-rate for your site
• Notification of site crawling issues
• Mini-site analysis reports
• Improved sitemap error reporting
• File a reinclusion request

Good job, Google. Keep it up. A few more carrots in there and it’ll be hard to justify not using the program.

SEO Answers on Google Video

If you follow Matt Cutts’ blog at all, you would have seen his SEO Answers on Google Video series here, here, here and here in response to questions asked here.

It’s an interesting way to promote Google Video, as well as to touch on video blogging, but if you’re like me and think the videos are a waste of time, check out SEOmoz for a nice text wrapup that you can zip through a lot quicker than the videos: here, here, here and here.

Some highlights:

• Do updates in Sitemaps depend on the page views of a site? No.
• What are some general guidelines and recommendations to increase a site’s visibility on Google? Make them crawlable.
• What about the cleanliness of code (ex. W3C)? Any chance that the accessible work will leak into the main algorithm? He recommends that in general it’s a good idea to have your site validated, but he wouldn’t prioritize it as the most important thing to do to your site.
• Does Google treat dynamic pages differently than static pages? Page rank flows to dynamic URLs in the same way they flow to static URLs. Matt provides a more detailed answer as well. The example the question asker gave had five parameters, and one of them was a product id with “2725.” Matt maintains that you definitely can use too many parameters. He would opt for two or three at the most if you have any choice whatsoever. Also, try to avoid long numbers because Google can think that those are session ids. It’s a good idea to get rid of any extra parameters.
• Does Google Analytics play a part in SERPs? I’m not gonna categorically say we don’t use it anywhere in Google
• When does Google detect duplicate content, and within which range will duplicate be duplicate? There are different types of duplicate content. There’s certainly exact duplicate detection. So if one page looks exactly the same as another page, that could be quite helpful. But at the same time, it’s not the case the pages are always exactly the same. So we do also detect near duplicates, and we use a lot of sophisticated logic to do that.
• Ah, I get to clarify something about strong vs. bold and emphasize vs. italic. Google does treat bold and strong with exactly the same weight.
• [What might be some of the topics] in the Duplicate Content Session of SES? The best advice I’d give is to make sure that your pages that will have near the same content, look as much different as possible [coding, templates, etc.].
• Does Google index or rank blog sites differently than regular websites? Not really. Somebody else asked about links from .govs and .edus, and whether links from 2 level deep .govs and edus, like .gov.pl, were worth the same as .gov, and the fact is we really don’t have much in the way to say, “Oh, this is a link from the ODP, or .gov or .edu, so give that some sort of special boost.” It’s just that those sites tend to have higher Page Rank because more people link to them and reputable people link to them. So, blog sites, there’s not really any distinction, unless you go off the blog search, of course, and then it’s all constrained to blogs. In theory, we could rank them differently, but, for the most part, just the general search, the way it crawls out ends up working out okay.

There’s also a lot of fluf in there. If you keep up on the industry, there’s not much you learned from these videos. But it’s nice to have things reaffirmed every once in a while. Cheers, Matt. And kudos to Rebecca for getting the videos into text.

Google’s 301 Canonical URL Paradox

There’s an interesting post over at Search Engine Roundtable about a WebmasterWorld thread in which one member documents his canonical 301 issues. It seems that upon implementing a sitewide redirect from the non-www form of his website to the www form, he experienced a drop in rankings sitewide. When he reversed the 301 - bam! - back in. Odd. That’s certainly not how Google advertises it. But with all the canonical issues they’ve had, I’m not surprised. Yet Yahoo! and MSN seem to have no problem with it. Go figure.

SEO for Firefox

Aaron’s new SEO for Firefox extension just plain rocks. I’ve added it to the Pimp Your Firefox - SEO Extensions list.

Spying on Digital Point

Digital Point has added an excellent AJAX app to their repertoire - a forum spy that shows you in real time the activity on the Digital Point forums. Beware, though. It’s highly addicting.

Demystifying the Google Sandbox

Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, has an excellent down-to-earth article about the Google Sandbox. The way she classifies the reasoning behind the effect known as the Sandbox goes a long way toward demystifying why some sites avoid the Sandbox with ease while others can’t get away from its oppressive nature for close to and beyond a year.

The answer, she explains, is in the competition:

What there IS, is a growing understanding on the part of Google and other engines that they need to deliver quality results. That means that new sites are going to be judged and “allowed” to rank based on how they compare to the sites that already exist in the index. After all, how many mortgage application sites does Google really need to list? Why should they think that your brand new mortgage site is any more worthy of a ranking than the 1.5 million (yes, MILLION) sites that are already indexed for the phrase “mortgage application.”

I wrote a bit about the lack of a sandbox back during the 30 Day Lactivist project. Readers of the series will remember that I started getting Google traffic to my brand spanking new domain within a week of launching the site. I even gathered some great top ten rankings for phrases that people actually search for. No sandbox effect in play there.

Why? Because there weren’t 1.5 million sites out there selling breastfeeding t-shirts. In fact, there were only 46,000 sites listed for the more generic “breastfeeding shirts.” Thus…Google could see that they had “content holes” on that topic and they were more than happy to let my site in. Especially since it had good content, relevant keywords and a steady growth of incoming links. All of those things told Google “this site fills a need and people like it.”

[...]

Is that mortgage site I mentioned filling a need? Do people like it? Perhaps…but they’re going to have a LOT harder time convincing Google of that. Thus…it’s going to take a lot longer for Google to “see the light” and decide that they should let that site in the door.

I like that explanation. Simple, yet complete. Webmasters and companies tend to get caught up in the “magic” of search engine rankings, yet seem to lose sight so easily as to why they deserve rankings above their long-established competitors. Because they are willing to pay for it. Bah! What makes their website/offering/portal better than the next? Answer that and you’re one step closer to achieving top rankings.

It’s no wonder that natural link growth as a result of linkable content and information wins the long haul. Call it “link bait.” Call it whatever you want. It still rules SEO.