If you do fit into any of the categories above – congratulations, Google already loves you.

Otherwise, keep reading…

Make sure your site is crawlable

This may sound pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple, yet crucial step. Before getting links, optimising content etc. make sure your whole site is easily crawlable by the search bots. One of the easiest ways to do this is to do this is to use a text-based browser such as Lynx. If you can get from one end of your site to the other without any problem using Lynx, then you’re on the right track.

Using easy-to-follow text-based menus, sitemaps and breadcrumbs are just a few of the ways to effectively do this.

Avoid things like Flash, Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames and DHTML.

Write good, interesting, informative and unique content

Once again, pretty obvious stuff, but still there are people out there who believe they are helping their site by re-publishing hundreds of duplicated articles from other online sources.

Having good content serves a number of purposes – here are a few of them:

• Instills confidence in any potential customer who ends-up at your site
• It will help you attract long-tail search queries
• Can attract links from other websites

In-bound links from other websites

The last point in the previous section (about writing good content), has the pleasant by-product of also attracting links which is the final ingredient if you have your navigation and content all sorted.

Note: when I say ‘the final ingredient’ I’m really talking about a recipe for making a packet-mix cake… add milk, water, mix, cook… enjoy. If you want to make a wedding cake, well, it’s going to require a lot more skill and ingredients. The same applies for optimising a site in a highly competitive niche… so don’t expect to rank #1 for the word ‘free’ or ‘web’ based on the info in this post.

Ok.. now that I’ve made that disclaimer, let’s talk about links.

Jim Boykin has a great article on his site about Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks where he quotes:

It’s not always “He with the most links” who wins the game……often, “He with the right links” can win the game as well. Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links – I see it all the time.

So when looking for potential linking opportunities, I try and visualise the type of traffic I would get from these sites and if I think a site would bring the type of customer I’d like to work with – then it’s a good link. It doesn’t matter if the site has PageRank (PR) or if the link is nofollow etc. etc. If you get enough of these types of link, it won’t matter if you rank well or not because you’ll still be making sales due to the increased quality traffic.

Conclusion

Like I mentioned in the ‘note’ above, this post doesn’t cover the advanced techniques required to rank for a highly competitive term, but if you’re new to the search engine game, you can’t go too far wrong with the advice above.

If you’d like some further information about what Google loves – check-out Google’s Official Webmaster Guidelines.

Website traits Google finds freakin’ AWESOME!

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Over the past few years, Google has had many algorithm updates, data refreshes and toolbar updates… here’s the list I’ve been able to compile from the past few years:

Florida (Algorithm Update November/December 2003)
Austin (January 2004)
Brandy (Algorithm Update February 2004)
Allegra (February 2005)
Bourbon (May 2005)
Jagger (Algorithm Update October – December 2005)
Big Daddy (Infrastructure Update January 2006)
GoogleBomb (Algorithm Update January 2007)
Buffy (June 2007)
Directory Ban (September 2007)
Paid Links Penalty (October 2007 – January 2008)

The most current updates have targeted sites that have been selling links and if caught, your visible Toolbar PageRank will drop (fortunately, this doesn’t have any impact on rankings or traffic). Also some industries (the SEO industry in particular) have noticed some drops in PageRank, not because of link selling, but simply because of the nature of the industry and the types of links SEOs seem to attract.

Because everyone has been talking about the paid link debate, I figured that instead, I’d take a step back in time and look at some of the other penalties and issues that webmasters may have experienced over the years:

1. Google Sandbox
2. Google -30
3. Google Bombing
4. Google Bowling
5. Google Duplicate Content Filter & Multiple Sites
6. Google Supplemental Results
7. Google Domain name Age Filter
8. Google’s Omitted Results Filter
9. Google’s Trust Rank Filter
10. links.htm page filter
11. Reciprocal Link Filter
12. Link Farming Filter
13. CO-citation Linking Filter
14. To many links at once Filter
15. To many Pages at once filter
16. Broken Link Filter
17. Page Load Time Filter
18. Over Optimization Filter
19. Keyword Stuffing Filter
20. Meta Tag Stuffing Filter
21. Automated Google Query Filter
22. IP Class Filter
23. Google Toolbar Filter
24. Google’s Two Word Keyword Filter
25. Country Specific Filters & Weights
26. The Network Filter
27. The Hyphen Filter

It’s important to note that this list is really more of a stroll down SEO memory lane and a lot of the above-mentioned filters and penalties no longer apply (and haven’t for quite some time). But knowing about them helps us further understand the evolution of search.

If you’re new to the search game, then it wouldn’t hurt having a look through the list above and keep an eye on Bill’s patent reviews on SEO By The SEA. It’s a great way of finding-out with what the search engine’s could be up to. Also, thanks to Search Engine Land for the help compiling the above list.

Google Updates, Penalties and Filters – A Walk Down Memory Lane

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Basically what has happened is a lot of blogs and directories that promote the selling or buying of links; display sponsored or paid listings on their sites; or basically appear to have an inflated ranking possibly caused through gaming the system using effective optimisation techniques have now dropped two or three points of PageRank.

This topic has been discussed openly for the last month and there have been heated debates on whether or not Google were bluffing when they said they would start penalizing sites for engaging in such activities… as well as many debates about whether or not Google have the right to say what you can and can’t do on your own website.

So now a lot of people who made money from such activities, webmasters who don’t really know what PageRank means (but know it is important), and novice SEOs that think that the little green PR score in their Google Toolbar is the be-all-and-end-all, are crying themselves to sleep at night wondering why Google is being so harsh and punishing them.

I’m sick of it!

Here’s the thing – having a high PageRank does not:

• improve your rankings
• generate more traffic to your site
• mean you actually have a high PageRank (because it’s updated so infrequently anymore anyway and even the PR that we can see isn’t necessarily anywhere near what your real rank is)

If anything, these updates have been an absolute goldmine to the sites penalized due to the number of highly relevant inbound links they have now received from every blog in the SEO world talking about it.

So my advice to everyone obsessing over the PageRank updates:

1. Stop it
2. Start reading blogs like SEObook and SEO By The Sea because with the combination of Bill’s research and Aaron’s rants you should gain a better understanding of what really matters in search industry…
3. And if you really want something to obsess about – start trying to figure-out what ranking system Google will come-up with next (because I’m sure there has to be something going on in the plex)

Maybe the title of this post isn’t as far-fetched as it seems? I’d be really interested in hearing what everyone else thinks.

PageRank broken – is it time to introduce BrinRank?

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Obviously the trends above are due to the devastating fires occurring throughout the Southern California region and if you would like to help you can Donate to the San Diego Red Cross.

How does one find-out about what’s topical online?

There are many tools available to help monitor such trends – here are a few that might help:

• Google Trends
• Yahoo Buzz
• Technorati’s Popular News (for keeping track of the popular topics people are blogging about)

So now that you’re keeping track of buzzworthy trends and topics, how can you use this information?

Let’s take the Google Trend results above as an example. Even if you cannot relate your company’s products / services to the topic, speak of your concerns or thoughts on the issues – some celebrities have already started using this disaster as a publicity opportunity: Cruise worry over California fire – your business could do something similar – write an article and donate some funds to the cause.

If your a little less tactful or sympathetic you could have a sale and promote it online with a headline like “Our Prices Are Hotter Than A Californian Wildfire”.

By keeping an eye on the latest search trends and hot topics, it gives you the chance to sculpt your website content and hopefully capture some of this search traffic.

If you think long and hard enough, you should be able to come-up with an angle that can relate almost any topic to any service – sometimes the more obscure the connection is, the better it will work as link bait.

Google Confirms – Fires are so hot they are ‘On Fire’

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Despite those terms being the most searched for, a few months ago, Google’s VP of Engineering – Udi Manber gave a presentation at Supernova where he said 20 – 25% of the queries typed into Google on a daily basis have never seen before.

I wasn’t able to find any totally accurate and current figures, but based on some reports over the last few months from Nielsen/Netratings, it suggests that roughly 515,000,000 searches are performed globally each day… which works-out to be approximately 6000 searches done every second.

Now imagine that one in every four (or five) of those searches is totally unique and has never been typed into Google before – that’s a staggering 103,000,000 – 128,750,000 unique searches every single day.

So how does Google and the other search engines rank sites when they don’t know what a quarter of their users are going to search for? It’s a tricky problem that Bill Slawski discusses in his article: Predictive Queries versus Unique Searches

As a website owner, these types of statistics are fantastic. A lot of sites tend to focus on highly competitive terms (and there’s nothing wrong with that as Hamlet Batista points-out) but there are still a lot of non-competitive terms that you can focus on knowing that statistically, someone is likely to search for at some stage.

So how can you ensure that you’re targeting as many appropriate terms through-out your site? Three simple words – Content, Content and Content.

The more relevant content you have on your site, the more chances you have of attracting long-tail search patterns.

So what are you waiting for – stop searching for ‘myspace’ and start writing some additional articles and other relevant content for your website!

People aren’t just searching for myspace, ebay, youtube and craigslist

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If you can’t be bothered reading Jill’s article, she basically says that Google doesn’t like SEOs and that by applying some of the more common search ranking techniques (such as putting keywords in H1 and Title tags for example) your site could potentially be flagged by Google as spam.

Now I agree that if you’re using black or even grey-hat SEO methods or if you go overboard with SEOing your site, then Google will eventually find out. Otherwise there’s no problem and Google does and will continue to reward sites that follow a lot of the basic principles mentioned in Jill’s article. Why? Because helping people quickly and easily identify the most important information on your site creates better usability.

Having good website content; an easy-to-follow, text-based navigation structure; good use of Title and Heading tags; a sitemap; etc. etc. All of these things could be considered SEO techniques, but really all they’re trying to do is make your website easier to use.

Now before I go on, I can hear some of the sceptics thinking – Google makes its money from their pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, so for each site that ranks well in the free organic listings, that’s one less site that will purchase a sponsored ad.

The fact is, the only reason Google is able to sell advertising is because of the vast amount of traffic it attracts which is generated primarily through the organic listings. The other search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN need to run portals to help attract users – Google generates more traffic by doing nothing other than search.

So in my opinion we’re well liked by Google because we’re working with the search engine to improve the quality of pages indexed on the net and as a byproduct of this it continues to drive traffic to Google allowing them to sell advertising. Some SEOs even promote Google advertising.

Besides, if Google hated us they wouldn’t bother with such tools as Webmaster Central, provide countless official Google blogs or representatives like Matt Cutts who openly discusses SEO at conferences, on his own blog and many other industry specific blogs.

This is just my opinion and I could be wrong. If Google does hate SEOs, then it probably will hate this post too.

Is Google going to hate this post?

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Then later in the week, for the first time ever, Yahoo! services were given a better overall rating than Google’s. The thing that helped get Yahoo! over the line was Yahoo’s status as a web portal–as opposed to Google’s search only service.

Data from the University of Michigan American Consumer Satisfaction Index showed Yahoo’s customer satisfaction score rise 3.9 per cent to 79 out of 100 points, while Google’s rating fell about 3.7 per cent to 78 points. How did the other search engines fair? Microsoft’s score rose 1.4%, Ask was up 5.6%, while AOL dropped by 9.5%.

Not a good week for Google

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The fact of the matter is that no search engine is perfect and if they did manage to correctly rank every page that deserved it then a lot of SEO’s (including myself) would be out of work.

The biggest problems faced by search engines is determining a pages relevancy (which is very subjective) whilst deciphering the natural language patterns used in the search query.

To give an example, you could do a search for ‘monkey’ wanting to find-out information about animals from the primate family but someone could be doing exactly the same search wanting to find information about the cult television series from the early 80’s with the same name. Given the search query, both results are equally as relevant, but as you can see, relevancy is quite subjective. If you then throw-in the various idiosynchricies of the English language (or any language for that matter), it makes things even harder for the search engines to decipher exactly what it is that you are searching for.

We too, have to accept some responsibility for poor search results due to not articulating what we are looking for. Sometimes we genuinely won’t know the correct terminology for something or our spelling is so poor that the search engines need to fix our mistakes before returning the results.

If you’re looking for more reasons why you can’t find what you’re looking for, have a read of Hamlet Batista’s article on 7 Reasons Why Search Engines Don’t Return Relevant Results 100% of the Time.

For a more technical look into these types of issues, Bill Slawski covers a lot of search patents on his blog. If you’re interested, have a read of his post – Why Sometimes Best Search Results aren’t Always Top Search Results.

In my next post I’ll talk more about localised search which is one way the search engines are attempting to provide better results based on geographic location.

Can’t find what you’re searching for? Here’s some reasons why…

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What we mean by an “old” site

Before I go too much further, I should point-out that when I talk about the age of a website, I’m not talking about the date the domain name was registered, but instead the date Google first discovered and indexed your site. A domain could be 10 years old but if it has never been used, or if Google has never crawled the site, then it will have no more trust than a domain that was registered yesterday. So when we use the term “age of a site” we’re really saying “how long has Google known about it” instead of the actual age of the domain name.

It’s not just the age of your site but also the age of your inbound links

This is where things start getting a little tricky. Lets say you’ve had an “under construction” page for a couple of years and initially had a few friends or family link to your page to let Google know you exist. Now you decide to build a proper site and start collecting links thinking that your site will instantly do well because it has some age behind it.

Sure it will help, although it’s not just the age of the site which is important, but also the age of the links that point to your website. For the best results you need a nicely aged (and indexed) site with some equally aged, well trusted links. If you have this combination, you’ve got your hands on some SEO Old Gold.

Some myths about domain age

People have often tried to “game” the system by purchasing old domain names that already have PageRank, a good Alexa ranking, backlinks etc. only to find that they lose the PR and often the weight of the links when the Whois data is changed or when they upload a totally different website.

Whilst this technique can still work if done well (here’s some hints from SEOmoz on grabbing old domains), I believe you would be far better off devoting your time and money in building a solid brand and good content with a brand-new domain. Aaron Wall gives some of his own advice on how to make a new domain outrank an old one.

Another myth that I was asked about recently was if it makes any difference how long you register a domain for. Would buying a domain name today and paying for a 10-year registration up-front give you a better chance of out-ranking a domain that’s only been registered for a year? I personally don’t believe this makes any difference at all.

Parting words of wisdom

So if you have a domain name that you’ve been holding onto thinking that it’ll make you rich you’d best start building some content and links for it sooner rather than later and instead of chasing old domains, try and get nice old, well trusted links because Google respects its elders.

Google respects its elders

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The burglars tried to disable a security camera by repeatedly spraying it with WD-40 — it only cleaned the lens — and spent an hour and 15 minutes trying to open three safes, apparently unaware that some types require the dial to be turned two or three times. They finally did a Google search for “how to open a safe” and “how to crack a safe” on a computer in the next room.

So thanks to Google, these two idiots managed to get away with $12000. Sure, not something Google is probably proud to be associated with, but it does provide yet another practical use for Google.

You can read the full article here

This next one is a little more “above board” but still very ingenious – a pool cleaner used Google Earth to find the neighborhoods with the most pools and then created a targeted marketing campaign for those addresses.

The article is here.

To give an example of how easy it is to use Google Earth, the clip below shows that even the US President George W. Bush has used “The Google”…

Ingenious uses of Google

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