Search Engine Optimization

part 2 | part 3

About Matt Cutts | Blog

What are your views on PageRank sculpting? (Matt Cutts)

As always Matt stresses 2 key points:

• get high quality content
• work on the links

He also mentions that pagerank sculpting is not always about use of nofollow tag, but what you link to from the most powerful pages (keep in mind that Google discarded nofollow as a PageRank block almost a year ago http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3925952.htm). If for example your homepage has highest pagerank, than the pages you link to from the homepage get the benefit of its link power, so make sure you only link to the most important pages that you want to rank high in search results.

Matt also states that pagerank sculpting is something he wouldn’t focus on until the website has enough quality content and links.

Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets

Where does the snippet come from? Here are the places it can come from:

• Meta description Tag
• DMOZ
• Place within the page relevant to the search query. For example if you’re looking for someone’s name and that person’s name along with contact info is located on the bottom, Google will take that snippet from the bottom of the page with a couple of words close to the name or from other locations on the same page.

He also mentions something very interesting - Google knows synonyms, so if you search for car, then it will return results with words such as automobile. It wont bold them, because you searched for “car”, but it will definitely put weight on synonyms.

Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts

Though the video claims to explain trust rank, Matt Cutts only talks about the history of the algorithm. Yahoo was working on algorithm called Trust Rank and the same time Google was working on anti-phishing technology also called Trust Rank. As a result both companies got extremely confused with the names.

Matts answer does not explain the algorithm at all though. So how does trust rank work? According to research by Aaron Wall and other SEOs, trust rank work on the basis of seed pages. A highly trusted and authoritative page is called the seed page (for example a government or university directory). Each link from that seed page is given “trust” points. So for instance if X seed page, has 10 trust points to give out and has 5 links, than each website will get 2 trust points. If it has 10 links each site will get 1 trust point.

The seed pages are determined manually by Googlers. I’ve heard that DMOZ is considered one of the seed sources due to the tight review guidelines, however this is unconfirmed.

part 2 | part 3

This week Google decided to share SEO tips in a Google Docs presentation titled Search Engine Optimization. In it Google shares information on how to optimize your website and become leader in the field. Here are some key points from the presentation:

• Your goal is to be the authority on your issue.
• Understand what users are looking for in your issue area based on the keywords they’re typing
• Increase your use of these keywords (without going off the deep end) and fill in content gaps
• Increase the number and quality of links to your site
• Targets for optimization:
  • Titles
  • Page content and section headings
  • URL anchor text
  • Video tags and descriptions
  • Page meta descriptions
  • Image ALT tags and filenames
  • URL pathways and “vanity” URLs
• Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to

There’s nothing new that Google shares in the presentation, however SEO beginners may find it useful and authoritative, since Google itself is giving out the tips.

Matt Cutts Share Search Engine Optimization Tips

Is over-optimization bad for a website?

Can the excessive use of nofollow get your website penalized? According to Matt Cutts no, however if you cram too many keywords on the page Google may flag the site together with spam, so be sure to keep in mind keyword density. It is always best to write natural and put in keywords where they fit.

What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS?

• Try not change URL structure
• Do things one a time and avoid making big changes

Also keep Title Tags and content in tact as you do the changes. The goal is to change the back-end without affecting the user-end of the website. If you can keep URL structure, content and Titles in tact, there should be minimum fluctuations in search rankings.

Which is more important: content or links?

In the video Matt explains that the 2 correlate together very closely. If the content is mediocre, then it tends to attract mediocre links or no links at all. On the other hand if the content is exceptionally helpful and authoritative, than it attracts lots of quality links from all over the web. This is what Google tries to mirror. If the web considers a website important (many websites link to it) then Google would want to show that website as an important source and feature it high on search results.

How much does a domain’s age affect its ranking?

I found the answer from Matt blurry on the issue. He does not deny that it can be a ranking factor, nor does he confirm it. The answer reminds me of a politician, who cannot say too much, but has to say something for the camera. Matt’s advice is to focus on content and not worry about the domain age. On the other hand, what if you get your hands on 10 year domain vs a 1 year domain. There’s no difference at all? I think 10 year old domain wins.

Google announced on the Webmaster Central Blog it made improvements to its flash crawling capabilities. In addition to reading text files inside flash websites, clicking on buttons and following links, it now recognizes external resources in the flash file and associates it with parent SWF file.

Here’s what Google can do with flash (official):

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest. - source

Adobe Helping Google and Yahoo, not Microsoft

A year ago in July Adobe shared technology with Google and Yahoo that helps bots interact with flash websites. In a nutshell this technology acts as a user and can click on flash links and read flash embedded text. Google has been improving its capabilities, and so did Yahoo, however Microsoft has been completely left out.

The question that I have, can Microsoft crawl flash? I am sure that it has dedicated assets to develop this type of technology, but how far are they?

Flash crawling is must in the search engine war, especially now that Microsoft has a product which I believe has a long turn shot against Google, at least for few percentage points of the market.

The percentage of flash websites on the internet is small, with HTML/CSS, PHP, ASP and other languages dominating most of the world wide web, however there is a lot of undiscovered content that can be useful to searchers.

• Flash indexing with external resource loading
• Adobe, Google, Yahoo Team for Flash Search

Google’s paid search results are evolving. Google is testing product ads in search results, with actual images, prices and long descriptions of products offered by merchants. The ads are currently being tested on very limited basis on Google.com, by invitation. In order to participate merchandize must be uploaded to Google Base via feeds.

Unlike classic pay per click ads, Google product ads charge advertisers only in the event of successful conversion. The payout rate is a commission determined by the advertiser. The higher the commission the higher your ad will show in search results.

Ad Descriptions

Unlike Adwords, there is no set limit to product ad descriptions. Description length depends directly on XML feeds submitted to Google Base. The more detailed your Google Base submissions, the more detailed will be ad descriptions.

Targeting

Unlike keyword targeting, Google product ads will show up based on product descriptions. Google will determine when to show the ads, while a detailed description will help it show up for a broader number of key phrases. Google will also automatically differentiate between informational and commercial ads, making sure the ads only show up for commercial type searches with intention of purchase.

There are no charges per click, so advertisers do not lose money even if their products accidentally show up for non - commercial queries.

Ad Rank

Ad Rank = Commission × Quality Score. The quality score takes into account the relevance of your product to the user’s query, conversion rate of the query and the matched product ad on Google, your account history, and other relevant factors.

Basically the higher the commission the higher an ad will rank.

Small vs Big

The model will cut already slim margins for drop shippers and possibly start the demise of this poor business model. Shops who can afford to buy containers of merchandize will win, since they will able to offer high commission based on wholesale purchases.

• Google Product Ads Beta?
• Google to Test New Product Ads on Prize Real-Estate
• Google To Test New Product Ads
• Google to Promote Affiliate Product Ads in Search Results

Microsoft blog announced a new feature on Bing search.

The feature is very very neat, but is somewhat limited. You have to really land the words such as “translation”, “how to say”, etc. My guess would be they are still testing the feature (it rolled out few days ago) and it is currently limited. As it gain recognition (most likely) Microsoft will expand from single word translations to actual sentences.

The default language it translates to is English. It is logical to assume that the language is selected based on the country you’re in.

Microsoft is spending close to $100 million dollars to promote its search engine and already has over 15 commericals.

Here’s is the list:

• Bing: Decisions = You
• Bing: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Pregnant
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Bar
• Bing: The Cure for Search Overload Syndrome
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Cell Phone
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo - Stand In
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo - Shut Up
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo - Relatable
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo - Hotdogs
• Olivia Munn Bing-a-thon Promo - Coolest Cat
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Hawaii
• Bing - Search Overload Is Over
• Bing - A New Way to Search, Explore, & Decide
• Life Before Bing
• Life After Bing
• Introducing Bing - A Decision Engine from Microsoft

There’s a new impressive search engine on the scene - http://www.hunch.com.

The search engine is a real decision engine maintained by a group of 40,000 volunteers who manually craft questions and match answers. According to Catherine Fake who is the cofounder of Flikr and a past employee of Yahoo Answers:

it’s a hybrid of several different ideas, similar in some ways to both Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers, but different in others.

The search engine is truly a decision engine as it can help you make a decisions on the topic you’re not familiar with. For example, if you’re new to SEO, you can type in “how to hire an SEO company” and Hunch will give you pre-crafted questions that closely relate to yours. After you pick the question, Hunch will ask you more questions in order to find out details about what it is that you want to do. After it has enough information, you will be directed to several answers / options which Hunch found most suitable.

So far the search engine is limited in the amount of questions it can answer, however just like with Wikipedia - as the user base grows so does the amount of content. In case of Hunch it is not the content that gets added, but rather questions that are answered.

“It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity. Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002,” Fake says. “To me, what makes social software great is that it improves over time. Hopefully, Hunch’s knowledge accretes.”

Learn more about Hunch:

• Hunch.com
• Hunch: A Real Decision Engine
• Hunch: Your “Personal Decision Maker”

One of the well known SEO factors is the domain age. The older the domain the more trust Google usually puts in. Inbound links play a huge role, but age has its benefits.

• Go to The Google Keyword research tool and type in your keyword
• Export ALL the keywords that Google gives you.
• Go to the Godaddy.com bulk domain search and put in all the keywords for .COM, .NET, .CA, and .ORG. You can choose other TLDs but those are the most popular ones. If you’re in country other than Canada, than replace .CA with whatever your country TLD is.
• Godaddy will give you a list of avaliable domains.
• Take all those domains and put them into a domain age tool. I use the one over here http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php It allows up to 10 domains at time, so if you have 500+ it will be tedious. This is the only bulk domain age tool I found on the internet that actually works. If you find something more effective, drop me a line.
• Check all the domains and select the oldest ones.
• Repeat operation for all your keywords.

As you do the research you will old and expired domains with good backlink profiles, which ease link building part and already carry value. The best part of this - all domains you find cost $8 - $12!!! Perfect if you’re on a shoestring budget.

Domain Changes

Google knows when change of ownership occurs and may sandbox an old domains just like a new ones. The real benefit comes is if the domain you bought has old links that relate to the industry.

Go and try it now.

Hitwise reports that Bing UK is getting real usage, as opposed to curiosity visits, which is an extremely good sign for a search engine. Here’s a quote from Hitwise:

“[O]ne positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.”

It looks like this time Microsoft’s efforts and huge investment is starting to slowly pay off. Though around 60% of usage traffic came from Microsoft referrals like MSN, Live, etc, other 40% of visitors are brand new. We’ll have to wait for performance stats over several months in order to make better statements about Bing. Right now its flying.

After moving to a new a place our SEO Expert hurt his back.

Microsoft is rolling out it’s $100 million dollar campaign to promote bing, and Joewilcox.com already has a collection.

• Bing - Search Overload Is Over
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Hawaii
• Bing Search Overload Syndrome: Cell Phone

In my opinion commercials do not really give a good reason to make the change from Google. The Hawaii and Cell Phone show a couple of confused people that just look plain dumb, while the first one is a mash up of all the events that happened (financial collapse, viral videos, etc) and a promotion of Bing at the end. Where’s the big reason to switch from Google? A couple of dumb looking people aren’t going to do the job… in fact I think they’re kind of offensive… Show a construction worker and then show how Bing helps him, show the business exec, a student, a housewife and how Bing is way better than Google. Don’t just get them to say it, SHOW it. The proof is in the pudding…

I guess you’ve got to have the pudding first.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the new search engine, the problem is - it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Wolfram Alpha did, and it got rave reviews everywhere, but Bing doesnt.

I am personally disappointed by the ads and believe, just like Ask.com campaign, they are not going to help Microsoft.

What Microsoft needs is technology that can kick Google’s butt, and until Microsoft has it, I believe they are going to struggle.

Google has made an official announcement at SMX advanced that it will no longer support Page rank sculpting and treat sculpted pages as regular pages. Danny from search engine land has a simple explanation:

Consider it like this. Imagine authority is money, and a particular page has $10 in “authority” to spend. It links out to 10 pages, so each of those pages gets $1 ($10 divided by 10). If it links to 20 pages, each gets 50 cents ($10 divided by 20). If it links to 5 pages, each page gets $2 (you get the math by now).

With the update a page with $10 in authority an 10 links will give each links a $1 in authority, regardless if the links were blocked.

The way the links are blocked from passing authority is with the rel=nofollow tag, which goes:

<a rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”http://searchengineland.com/microsofts-bing-vs-google-head-to-head-search-results-20006″>Anchor Text</a>

The nofollow attribute tells Google not to crawl the link, which in turn prevents pagerank flow to the linked page. The nofollow is the invention of Matt Cutts, head Google’s Antispam team. The tag was a measure against blog spam, but since been recommended by Google to be applied to paid links.

Read more on the topic.

This guide will help you write keyword rich content targeted at search algorithms that reads naturally and satisfies keyword criteria.
The first thing to understand about search engine copywritings is – the focus should be on the end user, not the search engine. Write as if you were writing without any keywords considerations, and then go back and input keywords where they fit.

Latent Semantic Indexing LSI

Latest semantic indexing (LSI) is the science of natural language processing. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live have implemented LSI into their algorithms, meaning they have the capability to distinguish between meaningless collection of words and actual content. How does this affect your copywritings? You have to write natural copy and use synonyms and related words to your main key phrase.
For example: car, vehicle and automobile are synonymous and are naturally related. Words: engine, speed, wheels, gear and clutch are related, but not synonymous. Latent semantic indexing algorithm will look for both synonyms and related words on a page in order to deliver high quality results to the end user.

• If a copywriting lacks synonyms and related words the quality score of the page may go down.
• Use synonymous words in your content. This comes naturally if you forget about the search engines and write naturally for the end user. Just go back and edit writing once you’re finished.
• Use words included in key phrase separately. For example, if your key phrase is “montreal injury lawyer”, make sure that the words “Montreal”, “injury” and “lawyer” are used separately in the content apart from the key phrase combination.

Learn more about latent semantic indexing http://optimization.ca/Learning/search-engine-optimization/latent-semantic-indexing.html

Keyword Density

Keyword density was one of the key factors with earlier search engines, but it was too easy to manipulate, thus search engines had to find different relevancy indicators. With the rise of Google and its Page Rank algorithm ranking factors were switched from onsite to offsite rendering keyword density factor less useful.
Your targeted keywords must be present on the page you’re targeting, but whether they are repeated 6 or 10 times does not make any difference. Write naturally and try to repeat the key phrase anywhere between 6 to 15 times. Once you’re finished with writings, one of our professionals will review it before the launch and correct any issues.

Making Copy writings Readable

Online visitors DO NOT read websites, like books, or newspapers - they scan them. Visitors scan headlines, look for links and skim over images, but they do not read websites. Visitors ONLY read websites once they find the exact piece of information they intended to find, otherwise it is all scanning action.
Here are some of the tactics to keep low attention scanning eyes engaged:

• Use several headlines if your content in order to make copywriting easy to scan.
• Use 3 – 5 sentences per paragraph. Anything longer is hard to scan, thus it is simply skipped by the reader.
• Bold and underline important points.
• Use bullet points, since bullets are easy to scan.
• Use links within content to your pages. Links are one of the first things scanners look for within content.
• Use images to attract attention.