Google has just released a new SEO starter guide. The new guide is more complete, has more examples, and covers wider range of issues, including mobile content and images. I highly recommend that anyone who is launching or reworking a website review this document before you start.
In a recent article in Inc Magazine, a on-line merchant of gift baskets discusses how a link building campaign cost him 4 million dollars. The loss comes both from a direct drop in traffic to his site and indirectly from the money that he had to spend on AdWords to bring traffic while his site was banned.
While link building is an important part of any marketing effort, I would disqualify anyone who is sending bulk emails promoting this as a service. I feel that anyone doing link building in volume is going to raise flags with the search engines and is very likely to get you banned. Sure, automated and/or assembly line link-building may provide dramatic short-term gains, but you have to ask yourself, is it worth the risk.
Google Official Webmasters Blog discusses the legitimate side of link building and provides advice on building links (here).
It looks like the transition of Yahoo to Bing for it’s advertising platform (Micro-hoo) is finally happening. In case you were not aware, Yahoo has been testing the use of Bing for its search results for several weeks. Yahoo made the full-time switch to Bing results last week (if you search on Yahoo, you now get Bing results). The date for Yahoo to start using Bing’s AdCenter platform has been less clear, but it appears now that the transition will start later this week.
see: http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2010/08/17/important-updates-on-search-transitions/
An update to Bing’s webmaster tools was announced today. Webmaster tools provides valuable insight into the search engine’s view of your website. Unlike Web Analytics, which shows you what traffic came to your site, webmaster tools tells you what search phrases triggered the Search Engine to display your content in the search results and if that content was clicked or not.
Bing’s new interface does list the search phrases your site is displayed for, which is especially useful when your site is displayed for the wrong things, and what was actually clicked. However, since it doesn’t show the URL that was displayed or your position in the results (you can preform an actual search to figure this out), you don’t have a compete picture of what content is working and what isn’t.
Crawl errors are recorded and graphed, but Bing provides no specifics to guide you as to what the errant links are or what they are linked from. And the tool lacks reports for incoming links, linked phrases, and ranking information.
In summary, Bing’s new interface is slicker looking than the previous product and has some attractive charts. However I am hoping this is just the first pass and that Bing will flow-in additional information to expose the critical details that are currently missing.
On July 14, 2010, I will discuss how to maintain Pagerank when you update or launch a new website with the North Alabama Web Developers group.
In this meet-up we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting). Please visit the meet-up site for details and sign-up.
http://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/
Slides from this discussion are here:
Maintain Pagerank when you Launch a New Website
When dealing with a decline in traffic it is important to determine the source of the problem. Is the change something indirect that you can’t control such as change in a search algorithm or a new competitor in the market, or is the change due to something more direct, like recent (well intentioned) changes to your site or a a server outage?
The clues are all in your Analytics data.
Jill Whalen with High Rankings in Boston has a really great write-up on looking for the root of the problem here.
To summarize:
On July 14, 2010, I will discuss how to maintain Page Rank when you update or launch a new website with the North Alabama Web Developers group.
This issue can arise when companies or divisions combine; product lines are renamed or when a new face is placed on an exiting website. Money spent on redesign and years of traffic building can be squandered, if this critical step is missed.
In this session we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting).
Please visit the meet-up site for details and sign-up.
http://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/
I attended a seminar today that discussed the Microsoft (AdCenter) /Yahoo (Panama) transition. I have hit several preliminary discussions on this topic at conferences, but this was the first one that had any real information about the Microhoo transition.
The seminar was lead by representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo and they set forth a time-line that showed the transition starting in August for completion by mid-October. They were careful to point out that this transition only effects search results and paid search campaigns (not other services such as Yahoo/Hotmail mail, Yahoo/Live log-ins etc).
After the transition, all organic and paid search results on Yahoo and Bing displayed will come from Microsoft. Presentation of the results may differ, but rank and ad order will appear the same in search results for both.
Once complete, the plan is to use the AdCenter interface to manage and view the performance of ads running on Yahoo and Bing with a single bid strategy across both engines. There was a good deal of discussion about improvements being made to that AdCenter desktop to provide better support and performance for very large campaigns. The interface will have improved import/export capabilities.
Yahoo users will see new features including.
The transition sounded somewhat like the transition from Overture to Yahoo Marketing. If you already have campaigns running in Yahoo (Panama), you won’t be forced to migrate (at least not immediately). Once Panama users migrate their accounts to the AdCenter, any accumulated conversion history from old campaigns will be lost.
More information at:
