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).
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
Google Analytics is updating their their system. To ensure AdWords continues to pass information to your Google Analytics account, a setting change may be needed. I have already taken care of this for my customers and in doing so found several cases where a change was required.
I wanted to alert other readers that you should check your AdWords account to be sure the information is correct.
For instructions see this Google Post Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing
Thanks to Rusty Brick at Search Engine Roundtable for the heads up and Brad Geddes for his coverage (here).
There is a new Canonical tag that is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. This is important news, especially as people are working more and more with CMS systems and database driven websites (such as Joomla, WordPress, etc).
The issue is that people can arrive at your content in a variety of ways. The simplest variation being www. versus non www. version of your site. What’s that, you say they are the same? Au contraire mon fraire, to a search engine www is a separate sub-domain. There are some easy programmatic ways to address the www versus non www issue, however the problem starts to get sticky in when you mix in the wide range of variables such as dates, tags, and categories that can be included in the URL structure.
The search engine spider may find variations like these all pointing to the same content:
Worst still are session ids (used on larger sites) which can cause a single page of content to be indexed hundreds of times:
Add to this that you can’t control how others link to your content and you begin to understand why duplicate content is such a large issue.
Why should you care? From and SEO perspective 1 page with 100 incoming links has far more relevancy than 100 pages with identical content having one incoming link each.
To address these concerns, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to take the content of the Canonical Link Tag as the preferred name for a page.
So adding a tag such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/search-engine-optimization“/>
will indicate that the page should be indexed as www.mywebsite.com/search-engine-optimization, regardless of how the spider found the page.
Here’s a link to more information on this topic by Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land:
http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537
Google’s Matt Cutts posted this video on the Canonical Link tag.
http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
The discussion begins hitting of some of the finer points of this topic starting in at about 12:05.
Google has a number of good resources for webmasters, but that have just released an Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. So, if you ever wondered if all that stuff you have heard about optimizing your website for Google is hooey or not… this is a great place to find out.
Google recently announced changes to its approach to Quality Score. Quality Score is the bane of my existence. It turns previous ‘best practices’ into bad practices and dooms the long-tail to obscurity.
Sure it makes sense to have the keywords relevant to the ad and the landing page relevant (duh!), but in practice Google weighs click thru rates (CTR) in the overall campaign to judge what you should be paying and if your CTR drops too low for the ad group, you’ll receive a Quality score minimum bid “penalty” of $5 or $10. This means you need maintain only small campaigns grouped with only top performing keywords.
Unfortunately when you launch a new campaign you don’t know what your top performing phrases are going to be. Many times it the second tier phrases that provide the most cost-effective conversion for your clients and finding those takes time. The problem is during the time when you are trying to build effective campaigns you are getting soaked by Quality Score penalties.
I can only hope the upcoming changes to Quality Score will improve the current strangle hold.
Here are three articles on Quality Score you may find helpful:
This is a short video by Google’s Matt Cutts. In the video he offers tips on basic things you can do to optimize your website for Google:
