Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Thursday, March 13th, 2008 |
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Dr. Peter Carr is a long-time reader of our blog and I have corresponded with him previously. He has done quite well performing his own SEO tactics to his Seattle Chiropractic site. He was gracious enough to write this post about his success with local search rankings. I wrote a similar blog post on posting reviews last year.
I am a small service business, (chiropractor, to be exact) and I really only make money when people come through the doors. I perform many SEO tactics for my website www.dynamicclinic.com to the point where I’m #1 for Google searching for “Seattle chiropractor”. But people don’t come to chiropractors because of an organic #1 ranking, they come because of referrals. That’s where I’ve found that companies like www.Citysearch.com (a Ticketmaster company), www.Judysbook.com and www.Yelp.com come into play.
People (customers) want to go to hair stylists and chiropractors because their friends go there, and barring that, they want someone to say they like them.
Citysearch is a better bet in my opinion, as they have linked with Google to add their reviews on Google Local, which gives customers a map to the business location and number of ratings. I’m no expert, but it seems like only Judysbook and Citysearch do this.
Google local is trying to get in on the act, too, where people can leave reviews right on Google. Google prefers you leave your ratings and reviews with them directly.
The bottom line for SEO is this: Search engines exist to give the end user the BEST result for their search. If the search engine doesn’t, then people will go somewhere else. Yahoo accomplished this using humans “back in the day” to review individual sites, and now Google is doing something very similar, as well, with these review sites. After all, Google would love to refer you to the best chiropractor in Seattle (me) and have you be happy with their recommendation. Reviews provide that opportunity much better than, or at least more “humanly,” than any algorithm that Google could possibly come up with.
To that end, I request that all my patients who had great results with my service leave a glowing review on Citysearch or other review site, so that others can see how awesome we are. If you are in a service-oriented business, this is one area you simply can’t overlook in your SEO campaign.
Dr. Peter Carr, www.dynamicclinic.com
Posted in Google, SEO Strategies, Website Conversion | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 |
Google has updated its advanced search page. While most people probably don’t look at the advanced search page very often, it has some nice features, especially for an SEO Expert. One of the best features is the ability to see 100 results at a time rather than the usual 10. Add the CustomizeGoogle Addon for the Firefox browser and you can view numbers beside your listing-now you don’t have to count to find you are at position 67, there will be numbers beside each listing to show you.
Also, selecting the Language as English will more realistic results. (You can also select the English language in the preferences.)
For example searching for ‘big oak seo’ returns 77,900 English pages with results when English is selected language. If you search with Any Language selected the results return 88,100 pages. Not a huge difference, right? It gets worse with more generic phrases. Searching for ‘search engine optimization’ with English shows 1,900,000 and without shows 36,900,000. These number will fluctuate, but using English as the language will get you more accurate resutls, especially when you are trying to factor the level of competition for a key phrase you may be targeting.
Of course you can filter your searches through the Advance Search form in a variety of ways and that’s for the for the power user as well as the Mom looking for the best place to groom her pet. Getting familiar with the advanced features can help you do research for keywords as well as finding information about how to grow an avocado plant or a video on growing an avocado seed.
For the SEO enthusiast or the small Internet business owner you can search by date, usage rights and even where the keywords show up on the page. All helpful information when trying to create your SEO plan. Google provides a wealth of information you just have to know where to start digging. The Advanced Search page by Google is a great place to start.
Posted in Google, SEO Research, SEO Tools | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 21st, 2007 |
How many companies can make Google Blink? At least one and that company is eBay. Take a look at the no. 74 in the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business as reported by CNNMoney.com. You’ll read that Google invited eBay’s top sellers to a party promoting Google’s Checkout payment system, a competitor with eBay’s PayPal. eBay found out and pulled its ads from Google for a week, just to test. “Mysteriously” Google’s party was canceled.
Its good to know Google “respects” someone. Even it is must cost them a lot of money before they do
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 |
Should you buy links through a link service? Ever since Google slapped Text-Link-Ads.com (it no longer appears in the first 30 results for its own name), that is a question webmasters have had to wrangle with more than ever. Generally, Google regards buying links as a form of spam and as threat to their business model.
Google hasn’t been shy about punishing sites who engage in this behavior lately either. Many who bought and sold links with Text-Link-Ads have reported a significant drop in their PageRank since the last Google update. This is partly because escaping the eyes of Google is difficult. Doing a search for function tla_ads will uncover all the sites selling links using Text-Links-Ads who have not yet upgraded to the latest TLA plug-in, which hides this information. If Google can see who is selling links, they can logically conclude who is buying them as well.
JohnChow.com’s recent Google slap represents one of the more drastic punishments doled out to a webmaster. Chow had ranked number 1 in Google for the keyword “make money online” for over a year, but he also aggressively pushed link selling services. Now, he doesn’t even appear in the top 30 results for the keyword “John Chow.” (He clocks in at #57 from the datacenter I’m hitting).
Analyzing Google’s behavior becomes confusing when one considers that Chow’s site still has a toolbar PR of 4. Likewise, Text-Link-Ads still boasts a PR of 7.
If one wants to remain in the good graces of Google, avoiding the use of link brokers such as TLA or TNX.net would probably be judicious. But reading Google’s mind is not an easy task, as evidenced by the erratic nature of their penalties.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, Link Building, SEO Mistakes | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 |
This is the height of hilarity. It just goes to show the underlying hypocrisy of Google. Google can play the holy-than-thou card due to their popularity, but what they want from other sites would certainly change the look of their site if they followed their own advice.
Take a look at what Google would look like if they had to design their site based on their recommendations. See the Google madness.
Well done by the folks over at MeanGene.
Posted in Google, SEO Mistakes | 8 Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2007 |
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb, SEO Mistakes | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 |
As a senior member of a successful SEO company I’m always on the lookout for ways to make my job easier. Usually my job consist of defining an SEO strategy that will help our clients achieve high rankings in the search engines. High Rankings are supported by high-quality links, so how do we find high-quality links without doing a lot of work?
Hello, Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is a nifty tool that will monitor Google results with predefined search terms and then email you those results. They will send the email to you once a day, as it happens or once a week. You can insert any topic or query that you wish to keep tabs on.
For example, you can type in a competitor’s business name and/or his web address as an search term alert. Every time Google finds the search term they will send an email detailing where it was found in an email. It is like having a paid researcher always on call for free.
How best to use this for SEO you ask? Easy, here are just a few ideas. Let’s assume you have written an article or press release. You submit it through your normal channels but then you set up Google Alerts to notify you everytime it finds the exact title of your article. Be sure to put the search term in quotes so it looks for an exact match (“My Article Title”). Now you can track in real-time where you article gets picked up and then contact any of the sites that have placed your article or press release and contact them directly about a partnership. Maybe the next article you write can be given more prominence on their site or you can provide the webmaster original content with embedded links to your site.
Or you can track competitors by their name and URL find websites where that information has been posted and follow the same strategy by offering original content of your own. If you find a blog that has posted about you or your industry maybe you can become a contributor.
You can track a product name or service you want to sell or any word or phrase that will help you market your site to the search engines. And since Google is providing the information, you have a good shot at Google finding your link the next time they visit the site you have partnered with.
As with most SEO strategies you need to be creative with this idea and strike while the iron is hot. Constant alerts can keep you motivated and attentive to the market within your industry as well helping you keep a vigilant eye on your competition.
Has anyone employed this strategy for link building? I’d love to hear success stories.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, Link Building, SEO Strategies | 6 Comments »
Monday, September 24th, 2007 |
Could this be the beginning of the end for the venerable DMOZ directory? (Dmoz homepage Google cache) Google does not have the home page of DMOZ cached and with Google’s recent devaluation of directories, who knows what this means. Of course this could be a momentary blip, but still you have to wonder if Google, like most webmasters, has had it with DMOZ. Frankly, I have.
Screenshot is attached in case this get “fixed”. Click for larger image.
Posted in Google | Comments Off
Thursday, September 20th, 2007 |
We are currently looking to hire an SEO Specialist and so I have been creating interview questions and researching what other companies ask their potential employees.
In doing so I came across these sample interview questions asked by Google. After reading them I know I don’t want to work for Google and probably couldn’t get passed the first round, for that matter. Here are some of the quirkier, less technical questions, for your amusement.
- You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”
- Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
- How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?
- You have a sheet cake. There is a rectangular piece missing from the inside of the sheet cake. The location of the missing piece is arbitrary. I was told I could assume I had the means to make the cuts. How do you divide the sheet cake into 2 even proportions with 2 cuts?
- It’s 2PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area. You’re minutes from the Pacific Ocean, redwood forest hiking trails and world class cultural attractions. What do you do?
- What will be the next great improvement in search technology?
- Why are manhole covers round?
- A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
- Explain the significance of “dead beef”.
- You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. Would you accept the wager?”
So if you have any answers, post them in our comments section. I would love to know the next great improvement in search technology. 
Posted in Google, Out on a Limb | 4 Comments »
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 |
There are two types of redirects you can use, a 301 and a 302. These numbers refer to the HTTP Status Code returned by the server for a given URL. A 301 redirect tells the search engine that the page has moved permanently to the new URL. A 302 redirect tells the search engine that the move is only temporary, and you may decide to show content at the original location in the future without a redirect.
301 Redirects
All three major search engines handle 301 redirects the same, that is to say they ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. For example, www.beekerfurniture.com uses a 301 redirect to www.hendersonsfurniture.com and Google, MSN and Yahoo all return the result www.hendersonsfurniture.com when searching for “beeker furniture”. The word beeker doesn’t appear anywhere on the hendersonsfurniture.com site, and a site search in Google shows that only the home page has any relevance for the word. Clicking on the Cached link in the site search results further shows that the word only exists in links pointing to the site, “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: beeker.” Those links Google is referring to are actually pointing to www.beekerfurniture.com and the 301 redirect is passing along the relevance of the word beeker to hendersonsfurniture.com.
301 redirects can be very powerful when you redesign your site and the URLs change, move to a different domain, acquire a new domain, or implement a URL rewrite. In most cases, this is the type of redirect you want to use because you know exactly how the search engines will respond.
302 Redirects
The three major engines handle 302 redirects very differently, and because of this 302s are typically not recommended.
Google treats 302 redirects differently depending if they are on-domain or off-domain. An example of an on-domain redirect is athletics.mlb.com which uses a 302 redirect to http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=oak. If you search for “oakland a’s” in Google you will see that athletics.mlb.com is displayed in the results because links point to that URL, which in turn uses a 302 redirect to the destination page. This is a great example where 302 redirects can be used effectively, since the shorter URL looks much more enticing in the results pages.
Off-domain 302 redirects would be ripe for hijacking situations if treated the same way. Because of this, in most cases, Google will treat off-domain 302 redirects like 301s, where they will ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. I say most cases because Google will sometimes determine that the 302 is legitimate & index the original URL instead. An example of an off-domain redirect is pets.roanoke.com which uses a 302 redirect to a third-party site http://www.gadzoo.com/roanoke/pets.aspx. In this case, Google determined that this was a legitimate use of a 302 redirect and displays pets.roanoke.com when searching for “pets roanoke”.
MSN treats 302 redirects exactly how it treats 301 redirects, it will always ignore the original URL and instead index the destination URL. A search for “oakland a’s” in MSN shows the URL oakland.athletics.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=oak in its results. And a search for “pets roanoke” shows www.gadzoo.com/roanoke/pets.aspx in its results.
Yahoo takes the same stance that MSN takes, except that they reserve the right to make exceptions in handling redirects. A search for “oakland a’s” in Yahoo shows the URL www.oaklandathletics.com in its results. (www.oaklandathletics.com also uses a 302 redirect to http://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=oak) But a search for “pets roanoke” shows www.gadzoo.com/roanoke/pets.aspx in its results.
There are very few times where you actually want a 302 redirect, although they are used more often than 301s merely because most people don’t know the difference. 302 redirects are often the default redirect in website control panels, and JavaScript or Meta redirects will produce a 302 status as well. In certain situations however, 302 redirects work wonders.
As with all our tips, please use them responsibly. When in doubt, use a 301 redirct.
Posted in 52 SEO Tips, Google, Live Search (MSN), Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, SEO Strategies, Yahoo Search | 25 Comments »
Thursday, August 9th, 2007 |
Google representatives posted this on August 1st, “Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.”"
Well, this isn’t good news. Google announced that the supplemental index label is being removed. Google claims, “The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow,” but I’m still skeptical. This now means we won’t know which pages need help and which pages are doing well. We use the supplemental label to help us see which pages need more attention as well as to see if a page can provide a quality link.
The bottom line is this, the supplemental index will still be there, we just won’t know which pages are in and which pages out. Seems to me Google is providing less information and trying to keep SEO companies and site owners in the dark.
Supplemental Results are pages residing in Google’s supplemental index, a secondary database containing pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’s algorithm.
Posted in Google | Comments Off
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