Add URL to Directories

As I was checking the links that have been popping up to SEOmoz, I noted that many come from international SEO communities, forums & blogs. I’m flattered and certainly quite pleased, but it also got me thinking about the value of international links in the eyes of the search engines.

Following this out to its logical conclusion, I surmise that international links could actually lend weight and legitimacy to a site in the eyes of the search engines. If I were an IR engineer, one of the things that could point me to quality sites would be their referencing across geographic and national boundaries. After all, it is much more difficult to build a link manually or purchase a link from a country not your own, especially so on a website who’s language is not your own.

Certainly, blog spam & other types of malicious link building need to be ruled out in order for this usage to be effective, but I think there could be great value to measuring the geographic locations of links to help lend or pull legitimacy from a website. After all, if 500 hundred english language sites all link to you, but your compeititor has links from 10 or 12 different countries or languages, clearly your site is not as “internationally” or “universally” encompassing as your competitiors.

This is definitely something to think about for the future. There’s even a thread on the subject at Cre8asite.

Even a great technological innovation like PageRank will eventually be supplanted. For a web information retreival model, PR has already had a remarkable long life, yet its downfall has been predicted across the web by some of the very best in the industry. Here’s a short list:

• Does Google still use PageRank Algorithm? - from SEW Forums
• New Versions of PageRank Employing Alternative Web Document Models - Research paper from Mike Thelwall & Liwen Vaughn
• How to Fix PageRank - from Threadwatch

As a global popularity model, PageRank also has some inherit flaws. PageRank is ignorant of the temporal nature of the web and links, favoring old content rather than updated or new information. PageRank also uses a flawed ‘random walk’ theory, which does not take into account the purposeful nature of a typical web session. Lastly, PR doesn’t account in any way for the manipulation or commercial interest aspect of the web, and thus ignores the global popularity spam that prompted Google to show PR updates on a quarterly basis.

Many in the SEO world have long questioned the neccessity of re-writing dynamic URLs - those that pull content from databases - into static URLs that appear to end with a finite .php/.asp/.html/etc. A dynamic URL is often criticized by search optimizers because of the difficulties search engines have had indexing and reading them in the past.Currently, however, Yahoo!, MSN, Google & Teoma all have dynamic pages in their index and in the top search results for many different searches. It would seem the issue with search engines has dissipated. However, the usability issue of dynamic URLs still exists. From a user perspective a URL in the form of - http://www.site.com/page.html is considerably friendlier than a URL written as http://www.site.com/page.php?ID=2&TAGformat=945bb399ls3.

No matter if it’s posting the URL to a website, sending it in an email, or writing it on a notepad for later, the dynamic URL is something that is distinctly unfriendly for users. The advantages of mod_rewrite and other tools that allow for the conversion of dynamic URLs into static ones may be lessened by the new abilities of the search engines, but they are not altogether gone.

The great advantage of a sitemap (for SEO purposes) comes from its ability to reduce the number of links that must be followed in order to reach all pages on a site. Sitemaps have a unique ability to garner the attention of search engine spiders and crawlers - making for much faster indexing, and thus, faster rankings.

The boost provided by sitemaps hasn’t been measured in full, but many SEOs suspect that bots may have an innate ability and preference for spidering sitemaps. Several rules govern the construction and maintenance of sitemaps to achieve optimal benefits:

1. Make sure your sitemap is linked to by every page on the site (this ensures even distribution and increases the frequency of spidering.
2. Don’t have more than 200 links on a sitemap page. In Google’s ancient recommendations page, this number is 100, but reports from around the SEO community indicate there is no detriment to having up to 200 links on the page.
3. Try to refrain from external linking on the sitemap page. For both users and spiders, the sitemap has an established purpose as the index of your website’s own pages. Externally linking is a detractor.

Code validation is an issue that has been tossed back and forth in the SEO world for years. The W3C’s standards appear to have the general support of the validation and standards organizations across the Internet, thus leading SEOs to ask the leading question,

Does having validated code help with search engine rankings

The general consensus on the issue has been a resounding NO. Authorities from every forum, SEO company & private sector appear to agree that search engines would be remiss indeed to reward W3C valid code. However, many SEOs have noted that the advatanges from having valid code are worthwhile, regardless of rankings. The most prominent among these being that search engines can understand exactly what your page is trying to say, without getting confused.

To check your own code for validation, visit the W3C’s HTML code validation tool.

The duplicate content penalty has been around for several months, perhaps even a full year, but SEOs still aren’t fully aware of how dangerous and malicious this tactic can be.

The penalty starts when Google or another search engine finds an exact duplication of a certain amount of web content on two URLs. In order to avoid both ranking well and diluting the diversity of results the search engine provides, one of the pages/sites is penalized, pushing it down in the rankings. Usually, the site with fewer in-bound links, smaller pagerank, more recently added to the index, etc. is the one that suffers the penalty.

Wily spammers have been taking advantage of this by duplicating hundreds of thousands of pages of web content on old, large, established domains, pushing thousands of smaller sites out of the rankings and taking their place by stealing their content. This practice is commonly called content-theft. It is unique from page-hijacking which uses a re-direct process to take over a page’s URL.

Naturally there is a defense and response that can be taken, but it is plagued with inaccuracy, very time-consuming and not always resolved to the satisfaction of the site owner.

You can resolve the issue by contacting Google and requesting that they remove the offending pages. The first step is to file a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) complaint with Google through their DMCA page. If you follow the instructions carefully, you should be able to get a response from Google indicating they will look into it. Resolution for my complaint took approximately 6 weeks.

Duplicate content is a nasty penalty and one that can severely hurt your rankings. If you suspect your content is being stolen, take immediate action - just make sure you do it properly.

The following is a quote of a Google representative writing to JohnGalt of search engine watch forums:
“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequently because is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of zero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t been updated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the Google Toolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results so there is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If a site is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PR of zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”
The full forum thread covers several interpretations of the quote. This is some great information to share with those who may be confused about the meaning & importance of the PageRank shown in the toolbar. Taken together with some of GoogleGuy’s comments earlier, SEOs can infer that toolbar PageRank has become quite ancilliary to SEO work.

source: seomoz.org/blog/a-google-reps-comments-on-pagerank-in-the-toolbar

Three phenomenal tools from MarketLeap offer SEOs some great, all-in-one services. The link popularity check is straightforward, but the comparison piece and graphic interface are an excellent touch. The search engine saturation checker and keyword verification are nice additions, although the latter is more of a ranking tool than anything else, albeit a good one.

An excellent thread at SEOChat is helping to uncover an uncomfortable phenomenon at Google - sites that rank well are very, very old. While this has been speculated about for many months, these are the first publications of any scale to be released.

Read the thread - Proof Of Search Position Based On Age Of Domain?

Then, check out the great tool for checking the age of up to 10 sites at a time - Find Age of Website Tool. Using this tool and a variety of other factors, I have generated some data about Google’s neophobia. Don’t miss - Age of Sites & Google’s SERPs.

source: seomoz.org/blog/age-of-websites

In the initial testing of the survey, one fact that consistently appears in the results that rank in the top 10 are sites that have been around a long time. Obviously, these sites have had greater time to build links & content, but there appears to be little correlation between these items.

The data seems to suggest that age by itself is playing a role in how Google is ranking websites. I’ll continue to look for other factors that could be a result of age that are influencing results, as age alone seems like an unlikely factor to build an algorithm around.

source: seomoz.org/blog/older-sites-succeeding