JC Penny managed to absolutely own the #1 Google position for a huge number of consumer items. How? By hiring an SEO company that used so called ‘black hat’ SEO techniques.
Then Google’s new algorithm took hold and they took a slight dip. Then Google learned about how they were managing their SEO and manually intervened… essentially burying them from search engine results. Continue Reading
While it has become second nature to webmasters and designers to include sitemaps in their site files, many amateur site builders or site owners who lack a useful webmaster don’t necessarily know how important a sitemap is.
XML Sitemaps are a protocol allowing site owners to inform the search engines about the pages on their website. In addition to listing the pages that you would like the search engines to know about you can also specify some additional information such as the time a page was last updated, its importance relative to the rest of the site and how often the page is expected to change.
Accessible via the Google Webmaster Tools, you can tell Google that something has changed simply by prompting Google to re-download your sitemap. Even if you don’t perform the prompt, Google (and other search engines we pretend to care about) will download the sitemap every time they re-index your site.
Why do we care about Google knowing we have updated a page?
Well, one of the most important ranking factors in the Google algorythm is how fresh your content is. A site that has frequent updates to content is considered a trustworthy site that someone is taking care of. In a world where content is king, it is crucial to let the search engines see update is changing as soon as possible.
While using a sitemap does not guarantee that the search engines will index all pages of a site, they provide better information for the search engines to make use of when they do come visit.
And now for the best part of all… Making a sitemap is easy thanks to automated sitemap generators like the one here:
Google today announced the release of their new search index, called Caffeine.
This is not an update to their existing system but rather a completely new system.
The biggest change with Caffeine is that Google no longer separates the indexing of the web from the updating of search engine results. The previous Google index would crawl the entire web (or close to it) and store the results in a massive series of databases. Periodically, this stored index would then be used to update the search engine results. This resulted in a noticeable delay in getting new sites indexed and changes noted.
The new system will crawl the web in chunks and offer near immediate updating of the search engine results. News sites, twitter feeds, blogs etc will all be crawled with more frequency and the results made live very, very quickly. Web sites with rapidly changing content will also be noted and crawled with more frequency.
So the big question is “what does Google Caffeine mean to site owners?”
Essentially this is yet another instance of Google catching up to what they have been telling us for a long time. For the past few years Google has been hammering webmasters with the claim that they value fresh, relevant content over static, irrelevant, or downright neglected sites. While their actual index algorithm sometimes said otherwise, it appears that Caffeine is the proof of their intentions.
In short, this new release by Google means that the focus on well-maintained, constantly updated sites is finally here. While there has been no announcement regarding the level of preference Google will show fresh content in the search engine results, common-sense would dictate that the algorithm behind the system will be more heavily weighted towards the ‘new’. If anyone has noticed the new tools and ‘side wiki’ on Google’s search pages, you’ll see that they are making a real push to be more useful at finding social media updates, twitter updates, etc.
So finally, let’s look at what you can do to harness the power of this new index.
Today Google announced that they have addded site speed as a part of their ranking algorithm.
This has been expected for quite some time and Google states that they are concerned with site speed as an indicator of improved user experience on the web.
“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs” – Google
It is still unknown exactly how much of a factor site speed will be on your site’s rankings, Google has indicated that it will lag far behind site relevance yet it can still have an effect.. .especially for users with bargain-basement hosting plans on crowded, shared servers.
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools Google has suggested to evaluate the speed of your site:
* YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
* WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
* In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
By now everyone hopefully has noticed that Google is working hard to give geographical relevancy to search results. This is done through the local search listings that now appear at the top of the search results, along with a map, when a searcher enters a search phrase that includes a geographical descripter, most usually the name of a city or municipality.
These local listings are a tremendous tool for both searcher and website owner. Here is how to use this feature for your website:
Focus Your Efforts:
Step 1: Get Listed
Step 2: Get Help
Once on the local listings, get your friends and customers to provide reviews directly from those results. More reviews equals greater strength in the local listings when they come up.
Step 3: Optimize Your Site
Helpful Links
Google Local Listings: Add your business
Recently we have received numerous questions concerning link building for new websites.
The word is out that Google likes to see inbound links to web sites when deciding how well you will rank for a particular keyword. This is certainly true, but client requests that we help them build as many links as possible are wide of the mark.
When trying to keep up on Google’s ranking algorithms, we have to accept that Google doesn’t necessarily give us the whole truth. Often we hear Google speak of what is, yet they are actually speaking of what they wish was the truth. Linking is one such issue.
Ah yes, that great cuddly Panda we all know and love has once again taken aim at the evil interweb. More specifically, a number of rapidly updateable sites including the ubiquitous Twitter.
What’s the reasoning?
Well, we are coming up on the 20th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre. It is thought that there may be additional demonstrations, remembrances or other gatherings that the Chinese government does not want to see get out of hand.
Bounce rates are that percentage of your website visitors who leave your page after viewing only the entrance or landing page.
Some recent web discussions have focused on whether Google may now be using bounce rates as part of your site ranking for particular terms. The evidence, while intriguing is still rather flimsy. Yet the discussion continues to miss an important potential confound: Bouncing is the result of visitors not finding your site useful to their needs (needs indicated by their search terms)
One of the most common questions I hear when building a new site for a customer relates to domain extensions.
Someone needing a website in Vancouver, for instance, will often ask whether they should be using a .com extension or .ca (the canadian domain extension).
Here’s how it all works:
.ca .uk .au and other 2 letter extensions are ccTLDs. Or, ‘country code top-level domains’ the rules for registering one of these domains vary by country but they are generally reserved for companies or individuals who are citizens of that particular country.
It used to be that registering one of these domains helped ensure that Google gave regional preference to your site. For example, having a .ca domain meant that google.ca would weigh your site heavier in search results. This was in addition to server location, page language and inbound links from other sites.
However, this changed last year with the addition of Google’s Geographic Target tool. This component of their webmaster tools allows site owners with any domain extension (.com, .org, etc) to specify a particular region or country to be associated with.
If you own a ccTLD you cannot specify a geographical preference. However, for those with .com or other classic domain extensions this feature helps you give your site a bump without the need to purchase localized or regional hosting.
The most exciting part is the ability to set a preference to a sub-domain. What this means is that you could own one site, let’s say yourname.com. You could build a regional preference into unlimited sub-domains and target each towards a different country. For example, france.yourname.com , england.yourname.com, canada.yourname.com. Each subdomain could hold pages specific to a particular country with all files being hosted on one hosting plan in one location. This is a tremendous time-saver for international organizations.
There still appears to be a preference for server location built into the search ‘pages from…’ option on Google that will look toward server location. This is still worth considering for highly competitive areas.
The downside? Once you have a ccTLD you are locked into the region represented.