Saturday, November 27, 2004

Major Google Backlinks Update and PR Expectations

This week Google had a major backlinks update. If you make a search for your site on Google, and then you click on "Find web pages that link to YOURSITE.COM" you will see that now you probably have more web sites linking back to yours than until the last week. However, does this mean that also your PR (Page Rank) has been updated? And what about SERPS (Search Engines Results Placement)?

No!Many People still think the SERPS and PR change with the backlinks. It hasn't happened that way for a long time, in truth. SERPS change all through the month, and a change in the number of backlinks dosen't necessarily means a better, immediate results placement.The Google PR, finally, is updated more or less every 3 months.

This means that this week's backlinks change is just the first step towards a better SERPS and a possible higher Google PR.
About PageRank, particularly, i don't think there will be any update before the end of the year.

Thursday, November 25, 2004

BackLinks And Anchor Text - Optimizing For Google Search Engine

Here is what Google has to say about anchor text and back links and it is imperative that you read this because this is what is at the CORE of Google. This will help you with your search engine optimization a great deal if you pay close attention.

2.2 Anchor Text and BackLinks
"The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases. This makes it possible to return web pages which have not actually been crawled. Note that pages that have not been crawled can cause problems, since they are never checked for validity before being returned to the user. In this case, the search engine can even return a page that never actually existed, but had hyperlinks pointing to it. However, it is possible to sort the results, so that this particular problem rarely happens.
This idea of propagating anchor text to the page it refers to was implemented in the World Wide Web Worm especially because it helps search non-text information, and expands the search coverage with fewer downloaded documents. We use anchor propagation mostly because anchor text can help provide better quality results. Using anchor text efficiently is technically difficult because of the large amounts of data which must be processed. In our current crawl of 24 million pages, we had over 259 million anchors which we indexed."

So, if we pay close attention to what the Google founders has said it is not only important to interlink pages BUT it is important to chose carefully which words to link and the more relevant the words the higher the ranking of the target page/site. Optimizing your site for better search results ranking is best done when you are contributing to making the internet a better place and you can do this as well as optimize your site at the same time. Remember, we do NOT promote the use of spam style search engine optimizing.

In other words simply providing a site map is NOT enough and linking all your pages to, say, the main page is not the end of the story. It is CRITICAL that the proper key words are linked to the page which:


  • Has those key words in the page title.
  • Has those key words in in the meta tags description.
  • Has those key words in the meta tags Key Words.
  • Has those key words and related key words in the body of the page many times.
  • OR it is a page/private forum where the search engine spider and the general public is not allowed, and requires special access.

Again, Google is concerned with search results relevancy but it bases the relevancy more on anchor text, page title and meta data along with the page's content AND related/relative words within the contents of the page. This last part seems to escape the small brains of so called SEOs.

As far as Google is concerned having 1000 pages which have similar or identical content is not good. Google will penalize you for it and you might just get blacklisted and once you get blacklisted you are screwed.

The Best BackLinks and Anchor Text Optimizer Technique
Obtain links to your site from other websites which are related to yours and ask the site owner to use your key words when linking to your site. For example, if your site is an investment site try to obtain links from a stocks picks site. If you want to link to Turnkey Online Success I would ask you to use "SEO - Search Engine Optimization Blog" as the words linking to this site from yours. This is called the "Anchor text"

If you do not plan to change your index page/your main entrance page ask the other sites you are getting links from to link directly to that page IF that is the most relevant page for your key words. otherwise give them the exact URL including the page itself to the page which contains the relevant content.

Do not try to obtain ALL your backlinks form other sites to the SAME page because if you get many backlinks for 2-5 related pages on your site you improve the PageRank of your whole site.

Never interlink ALL your pages because Google is on-to this technique and will penalize you for it. Try to interlink only RELEVANT key words to relevant content pages which are DIRECTLY related to the key words/anchor text.

If you have a Site Map, make SURE you name the title of that page Site Map followed by your website title and include the words "site map" in the meta description and key word section.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

2005 Predictions

by Bill McCloskey, Wednesday, November 24, 2004

ALRIGHT, IT'S THAT TIME OF year when I put on my prestidigitation hat and make my 2005 predications for e-mail. What do we think will be the issues next year and what new technologies will be in effect?

Gmail Effect: One of the most visible areas of change in 2005 will be how e-mail newsletters format their ads as a result of the increasing influence of Gmail. As we all know by now, Gmail strips out all graphics by default. You have to proactively turn them back on and do so on an e-mail by e-mail basis. This is going to dramatically effect how newsletter publishers embed their sponsor's messages into the e-mail since Gmail represents the e-mail equivalent of TiVo, at least as far as ad skipping is concerned.

For instance I have personally moved all my trade related e-mail newsletters to my Gmail account so that they no longer take up space in my business in-box. That way I can use Google's search algorithms to find specific articles or mentions in all the business related newsletters I subscribe to; this is a great feature for someone like me. The downside is that I haven't seen an ad in any of the these publications since I started using Gmail.

I expect that more of my peers will do the same thing over the next year, which means that if a company is trying to reach me, they better have the message in text format. Hence, copy rather than graphics will become more important in driving clicks. Newsletters devoting chunks of real estate to large banners and skyscrapers are probably going to have to rethink the design of their pages.

Deliverability: Just like 2004 was the year of CAN-SPAM, 2005 is going to be the year of deliverability and I expect we are going to see some dramatic gestures and relationships forged over the next year to guarantee deliverability through some of the larger ISPs. We will see some sort of postage mechanism in place whether it is in the form of a stamp on each e-mail or block payments to ISP's to insure e-mail gets delivered to the in-boxes and does not get blocked. E-mail marketers are willing to pay, and it could be a great source of income to the larger ISPs.

To support such a service, I expect that there will be an equivalent of an independent Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for e-mail marketers that will open up the in-box gates and let messages be delivered, and it will include things like insuring that the messages are truly CAN-SPAM compliant, rather than just appearing to be so and will require true double opt-in verification.

In fact, I predict that we will soon see an eBay-type rating system attached to each e-mail message. Customers rate each marketer like they do on eBay and only marketers that have reached a certain level of customer satisfaction can get offers through. We are already seeing community-based spam elimination systems such as Cloudmark.

Why not build a customer satisfaction index in as well? In fact, the entire e-mail industry should take a chapter from eBay's playbook. If ISPs started basing their deliverability options around their user's positive feedback with the advertiser rather than negative spam complaints, they might find they are not only servicing their customers better by providing community rated offers to those who want to receive them, but open themselves up to a nice revenue stream as well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Email insider Bill McCloskey is president and CEO of Emerging Interest, a company dedicated to educating the Internet advertising and marketing industry about rich media and other emerging advertising and marketing technologies. Emerging Interest has developed the Competitive Email Tracking System (CETS), an email tracking tool for marketers.

SOURCE: Email Insider

###

Monday, November 22, 2004

UK Word Of Mouth Comes Off The Fence & Goes Digital

A new startup interactive website for businesses and consumers plans to promote local services across the UK by recommendations from the general public. Information that is usually passed between neighbors over the garden fence can now be stored for all to share.

(TurnkeyOnlineSuccess) November 22, 2004 -- The idea for WordMouth.com (http://www.wordmouth.com) came after a conversation between friends about finding a decent restaurant. The Yellow Pages is great, but how do you know which of the listed entries is going to be any good?

The same goes for local traders, community groups and other services. Websites which rate products are already very popular, so why not have a place to rate and comment on local business? WordMouth enables the general public to discuss their experiences both locally and across the UK.

At the same time businesses have access to free, up to the minute graphical advertising and an easy method to receive valuable consumer feedback. The concept requires input from the public to succeed.

Alastair Shortland, developer of WordMouth says, "I believe that WordMouth has the potential to deliver a new, and fairer, way of marketing - promoting services not through money, but through reputation and recommendation. It should also help many people find a reliable and professional service, both in the UK and in their local area, removing some of the risk of hiring a rogue trader or receiving poor service.

The ultimate goal is to pull communities closer together and improve standards of service across the board. It is surprising to find that such a simple concept has not been developed into a viable solution already.

"Businesses create a graphical billboard to display up to the minute details such as their shop menu, special offers, opening times, awards, history, weblinks and any other information they choose.

The billboard provides a free platform for businesses to communicate directly with new and existing customers and a place for customers to recommend their good service to others.

WordMouth is a single employee business looking for support, sponsorship and partnerships. If anyone feels they can help then please contact e-mail protected from spam bots.

Alastair Shortland, WordMouth Ltd, Malvern, Worcestershire, +44(0)7740101098

# # #