Google submission, Add URL, Google Submit…. Can’t believe people are still searching for this stuff…

A client told me yesteday that they had “done the Google Add URL stuff” and was still sat twiddling thumbs weeks later, waiting to appear on Google - minutes later I got their website into the Google index - like Magic!

It’s not rocket science - any web marketer reading this will think it’s really obvious - but to many people it’s not, and judging by the amount of people who still try to get their website on Google the old fashioned way, the info out there isn’t all that great.

If you have a website, and you just want it in the Google index fast - email me for more info.

I’m writing this post today in response to a comment made to my blog post titled “Who Cares About Google Pageank?

industrial adhesive Says:

interesting perspective on pagerank. it is considered by many to be the “currency” of the internet due to its far reaching influence. but i do tend to agree with you that it is somewhat overrated. what really should be the measuring stick to a site’s success is the relevant traffic it draws.

I’ve replied briefly to this comment, just to say that PR shouldn’t be seen as currency, as a currency it’s losing value even faster than the pound is at the moment - but I just wanted to delve deeper into why Google pagerank is no longer a currency worth investing in.

Firstly - Google pagerank is NOT ours to buy or sell.

When Google started to show us an indication of link popularity with the toolbar pagerank tool, they weren’t intending this to become currency, encouraging higher PR sites to sell backlinks to anyone willing to pay & thus effectively wreck their system of algorithmically determining the value of a website.

So Google have been working hard to devalue PR as a currency, they do not want PR being used to encourage backlink selling.

As the reply rightly states, the true currency online us TRAFFIC.

If you have a high traffic site, then your site is valuable, traffic IS yours to sell, and you should sell links based on the traffic you’ll pass - this is what Google want, and this is why they state that sold links should be NoFollow.

You may look at backlink from a PR5 website as being worth a lot of cash, due to the amount of currency there in terms of pagerank - but this website may actually be passing nothing at all.

The pagerank may drop significantly at the next PR toolbar update, or it may not - just because it doesn’t drop, doesn’t necessarily mean its still passing PR.

So - I would recommend that you stop looking at pagerank as currency - see traffic as currency, and see the pagerank toolbar as a pretty little decorative green line at the top of your browser if you like looking at it - or better still just get rid of PR from your toolbar.

When looking for backlinks, yes it is worthwhile looking at the PR of potential link sources - but remember that what you’re looking at is our of date, you don’t know if the site is actually passing PR, and if you’re just going for high PR sites & ignoring PR0 PR2 & PR3 sites, you may be actually ignoring PR3 or PR4 sites, because what you’re looking at is out of date info.

So look at a potential backlink source based on relevance & the quality of the site, and the quality & quantity of the backlinks into that site, and the number of outbound links on the page your link is likely to appear  - and focus on the quality of your site so that high quality sites will link to you even without you requesting - but don’t be lead astray by the little green bar!

Cheers

Kev

This is just a quick one..

We all agree that Twitter is a good SEO tool?

For those who’re not sure - I’ll write another longer post shortly about this,  or join my search engine marketing tips newsletter (form over there on the right hand side) but basically, getting your URL into tweets doesn’t have immediate SEO benefit as the links have the NoFollow tag on the tweet, so the search engines ignore it - but, there are a couple of places that these links do actually go to, that don’t have the nofollow attribute, and that do have an SEO benefit.

This is one of the reasons you should make your tweets as good as possible, and the pages / blog posts you’re including in the tweet, as high value as possible, so more people will re-tweet.

Anyway - for now just know that there is an SEO benefit from including your link in the tweet.

But, if TinyURL is used (either automatically, or manually) this SEO benefit will still come, but it will take longer to come - this is because the tinyURL 301 re-directs to your site, so the search engines will pick this up & pass any pagerank that is flowing, to your site - but using a tinyURL it’ll take a bit longer for this to flow - also, if you want to create a brand, you can’t do this using tinyURL, all you’re doing is helping to build someone else’s brand.

So - consider registering a much smaller domain name, and either building a new site on this domain, or 301 re-directing this domain to your longer domain name.

What I’ve just done, is I’ve registered a smaller domain - s-e-o.tv & I’m now using this to link directly to my blog - and as the latest blog is always at the top of the blog, I don’t really need to link to a specific page, just linking to s-e-o.tv will do.

OK - you can still say that there will still be a delay in any flow of link juice through the smaller domain to my main domain, and that’s true in this case as I’m just 301 redirecting it to my blog, but A) I could very easily just build the blog on the smaller domain - and B) even if I don’t do this, using a smaller domain that I own, to re-direct, instead of a tinyURL, means I get the benefit of any branding that is done via my tweets.

That’s all for now folks

Kev

A  flash designer has just replied via twitter to an article I wrote some time ago, to say that the info is 10 years out of date, as flash is fine for search engines.

So, as well as replying to that message via twitter, I thought hmm this guy does have a point, so I’ll write a post about it.

Firstly, it’s not ten years out of date, haha, talk about exaggerating, it was only towards the end of last year that Adobe made a real breakthrough in making flash more SE friendly, and it’s still not perfect, there are still limitations. But I do have to admit, there have been a lot of developments since I wrote the article, so it is slightly out of date.

But having said that - do I think that it’s a good idea to design sites completely  in flash?  No!

Why?

Well - first of all, I went to view the website of the flash designer who sent me the twitter message, and guess what - I can’t view his site….

It tells me it was designed for Flash version 10, and that I need to upgrade to this version to view it.

When you’re searching Google for something, and you get a message that you have to upgrade or download something in order to view a site - do you have the time & patience to do that?

Probably not, you’re just as likely to click the back button & go back to google & find a site that works first time, aren’t you?  It’s certainly what I would do.

And if you get to a site that is completely designed in flash, and you do have the correct flash player to view it - are you going to wait while it downloads?

And then when it downloads, and you find that the navigation is “clunky” a pain to browse, a strain to find what you’re looking for through the OTT flowery design, at some point there’s a good chance that you’re going to get fed up & leave well before you buy anything or sign up for anything, wouldn’t you say?

Not to say that all sites designed with flash are over the top & hard to view - in fact I see some, and I’m just at a loss to why flash had to be used. A client came to me recently with a website with a black background, and a white logo, and some navigation - that’s it, and completely designed in Flash, it had cost him way over the top for such a simple website - he had been told that he was getting a state of the art website because it was designed in flash….

Why? I don’t get it, it looks like a standard text based site, so why design it in flash? weird.

The fact is, it’s still a lot better for lots of reasons, and mainly for user experience, to have the main content text based, not embedded in flash & images.

If a site needs something that flash can provide, then fine, have a flash header designed - having elements of flash to achieve something in specific is fine - but having a site designed completely in flash without any strong reason - I just don’t see the point. Am I missing something?

Please - someone tell me, am I really missing something here? I may be. If you know, if I’m being really stupid here and there is a really strong reason to design a site that could easily be designed without flash - please leave a comment & let me know.

For instance, the website of the flash designer who left the post on twitter correctly advising me that one of my articles was out of date (though over exaggerating on how out of date, 10 years, haha), when I finally managed to get onto it, after faffing about trying to get flash 10 to install on firefox, giving up & reverting back to IE (yuck!) I found a simple website, with a photo of a piece of wood, and his name, phone number & email.

Why build this in flash? I don’t get it. Knowing that a certain number of visitors won’t be able to view the site, - what is the plus of using flash to build a site that could be built in html in 5 mins?

Not putting the site down, it looks fine - but it would look exactly the same in HTML, I can’t see what using flash has brought to the table here - and it’s rare that I do when looking at a flash site.

There’s an obvious negative to using flash, in that a certain percentage of visitors won’t be able to view the site - and usually they cost more to have designed, so what is the benefit of using flash to design a site if there is no specific reason that html wouldn’t do it?

SO i quizzed the guy a bit more, trying to find out what the reason would be, his reason was that you can do a lot of stuff with flash. Yes, I understand that - but why use flash just because you could do a lot of stuff with it, if you’re not using it to do any of this stuff with the site in question?  So - I still don’t have an answer.

So, yes flash is improving in terms of SE friendliness, but I still wouldn’t go out of my way to have a site buit in flash, I would happily use some elements of flash in projects when required, but I wouldn’t have a site completely built in flash unless there was a good reason - and if there was, I would also make sure there was an HTML version of the site for those who don’t have the correct flash player & can’t be bothered messing about upgrading at that particular time.

You’ll more than likely of heard of URL canonicalization, particularly “Google URL canonicalization issue” but what is it, and what do you need to do about it?

It’s a big word used by Americans, they like big words, especially at Google, makes them sound all clever! (well, they are clever, so we’ll let them off)  ;-).

Canonicalization simply means making something canonical, and canonical means (According to the dictionary)  “conforming to accepted principles or standard practice.”

So basically URL canonicalization just means URL standardizing.

The most common requirement for URL canonicalization is with the home page.

For instance you could link from your pages to “site.com” or “www.site.com” or “www.site.com/index.htm” an so on - quite a number of options.

It doesn’t really matter which you choose, what matters is that you standardize, in other words pick one & stick with that consistently throughout your navigation.

You can  301 re-direct the other URL’s to the one you decide to make standard, so that if someone types into their browser “website.com” they’re re-directed to “www.website.com” this is good practise, it’s not crucial though - so don’t be too concerned with it. It’s one of those things that is definately a good idea in theory, and is certainly likely to help rather than hinder - but it’s very unlikely to make any huge difference.

So, if you’re concerned about URL canonicalization, just make sure you pick onr form of URL & stick to that as the standard - and if you want to be sure you pull out all the stops, then also use a 301 re-direct to redirect the other options to the URL that you choose to make the standard.

For more info see the Matt Cutts Blog

Just a couple of years ago, paid backlinking was a major part of SEO for many people, in fact I have first hand knowledge of many SEO consultants who only dealt with paid backlinks, and many web marketers who didn’t bother with anything BUT paid backlinks - buying them was easier & far faster. (just to point out, I never got involved with paid backlinks personally, not because I’m some angel, but because I expected Google to have taken this action against PR buyers & sellers a lot sooner than they did, I knew it was going to happen at some point).

However - just like any other loophole or shortcut, Google will find a way to stamp it out - and they did this with paid backlinks quite some time ago.  October 2007 in fact is when the results of “the Google campaign against buying & selling Pagerank” began.

I’ve just called it this by the way, I’m not sure that Google officially had a name for it or specifically sent a memo around the office saying “the Google campaign against buying & selling Pagerank officially starts today” although I like to think that they did, and that they were hand written memo’s on post-it notes, that were stuck on monitors while members of the Google team were taking a dip, or having a quick game of pool ;-).

Basically Google just decided to take stronger action against this violation of their terms, and it was October 2007 when the results of this were first seen after the toolbar PR update that they did at that time.

If you weren’t aware of this - and you’re not sure whether or not I’m talking out of my behind read…

Google’s thoughts on paid backlinks

Email from Matt Cutts of Google, to search engine journal confirming that Google had begun to take real action against the buying & selling of backlinks that pass on PR.

Very detailed official information from Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye including a timeline on action taken against the buying & selling of links that pass PR, on the Google webmaster central blog

How?

Quite simply Google found ways to figure out which sites are selling backlinks - and they stopped trusting these sites as “voters” towards link popularity.

What?

For those who think i’m talking in double dutch : Every backlink to your website (to your home page, or a sub page) is a vote towards the link popularity of your site (well, your home page, or sub page).

The link popularity of the website giving the link, and the number of outbound links on the page the backlink is coming from determines how much this backlink increases the link popularity of your website.  There are other factors such as relevance of the linking page to the linked to page, and relevance of the keywords in the anchor text (the linking text), and probably about 10 zillion other slightly less important factors.

But - if the site you have the link from, is selling backlinks, the chances are that NO good stuff will pass from the website via the backlink. The vote will be ignored.

Google clearly state in their guidelines that they do links being sold in order to sell PR  is against their terms - so if a link has been sold - this is OK as long as the “NoFollow” tag is used to tell Google not to follow that link.

Google say :

“Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

But of course if a site is selling backlinks, they’re usually not going to use the Nofollow - because this would make it clear to the link buyer that the link does not give them the value that they’re paying for.  Some may direct to a page which tells the search engines not to follow, in the robots file - but even if they do, would you have bought the backlink if not for the boost in pagerank you thought it was going to bring?

I’ve got no problem with buying links - buy links from sites that do follow Google’s guidelines, as long as you’re doing it to buy the traffic you’ll get from these links, because obviously if the nofollow tag is used, there will be no benefit in terms of SEO.

So - if you’re buying backlinks as part of your SEO efforts - the chances are that a good chunk of your budget is just being completely wasted, as far as SEO is concerned.

Will Google specifically penalise my website if I buy backlinks that pass Pagerank?

The simple answer to this is maybe. but it really doesn’t matter - the fact is most paid backlinks will not have a positive effect, so what is the point of doing it, regardless of whether or not Google will actually penalise your site for buying links?

Google say : “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Plus if you follow the links above to read other statements from Matt Cutts, and other snippets on google webmaster central, you’ll find lots of comments which give the impression that this may be the case, but I’ve yet to see any definite clear answer that says “Yes, if we find a site is buying backlinks we will penalise that website”

So, to be honest, I’m not 100% sure, I’ve not seen enough evidence to know either way for sure. But if they’re not doing now - this doesn’t mean they won’t do in the future.

I know that most paid backlinks will have no positive effects in terms of SEO, but whether Google actually penalise websites for buying backlinks - despite a lot of opinions out there on both sides - I can’t say for sure.

There is one theory that google discount a certain percentage of ALL backlinks to a website once they know that link buying has taken place, or that link popularity is dropped by a certain percentage as well as all of the paid backlinks passing on no linkjuice.  I can’t agree or disagree with this - they may do, who knows, I’ve not seen anything from Matt Cutts to indicate whether ot not this is the case as yet.

But again - what does it matter? We know that buying backlinks that pass pagerank is not going to help you - so don’t do it, simple

Does previous paid backlinks negatively effect future SEO efforts?

Some people are under the impression that if a site that has been involved in link buying in the past, but then linkbuying has been droppe, and the webmaster has decided to go down the straight & narrow (avoiding other temptations to violate Google’s terms in order to try to find shortcuts) future efforts will be hampered by the websites previous “convictions” as being involved in buying backlinks.

I wasn’t sure about this, you never really know for sure unless you happen to be lucky enough to work for Google - and even if you do you may not be trusted with this info, as a lot of it is likely to be on a need to know basis & closely guarded.

But recent experience has shown me that this does not appear to be the case, and as far as I am aware from my own experience past link buying doesn’t appear to negatively influence future efforts, currently.

One of my best clients have a website that had previously had a LOT of link buying done for, the previous SEO consultants appear to have been prolific in this area (we’re talking thousands of very obvious paid backlinks, completely non-relevant in most cases) they suffered a big drop in PR at the end of 2007 as a result. I was brought in to help them at the end of 2008, and within a few months they’re at the top of the search engines for many of their main terms, including some pretty competitive terms, competing with some huge brand names.

So as far as I can see, Google don’t appear to hold a grudge against websites that used to be involved in link buying.

But I’ve asked the question to Matt Cutts - I’ll post a follow up if I get a reply.

One of the most commonly talked about aspects of search engine marketing, is Google Pagerank.

The questions I’m very often being asked is “how do I increase my pagerank” “Why is my Google PR low” “What has happened, my Google Pagerank has dropped through the floor, what did I do?” or “how do I get high PR backlinks?”

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By the way - if your website has suffered a drop in PR after a recent toolbar PR update and you know you’ve done something that’s against Google’s terms, then it’s probably safe assumption that this is the cause, especially if you lost positions some time before the toolbar update.

If this is the case just focus on doing good SEO, making sure you don’t continue to break Google’s Terms.

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I’m going to say something now that will probably cause people to gasp with disbelief!

IGNORE GOOGLE PAGERANK!

Yep that’s right - forget about it.

Focus on the value that your website delivers in terms of the quality of the content and/or the features that your website offers to your visitors, focus on gaining relevant & high quality backlinks (which means backlinks from other sites which are focusing on delivering value, and gaining high quality backlinks)

Focus on making sure that Google are indexing all your pages, focus on your stats (use google analytics, because it’s ace, and free!)  Focus on the tools that are available free in your google webmasters account.

But ignore the google toolbar pagerank. 

In the past I’ve said that pagerank is important - and it still is important, but what is not important is toolbar PR - and unless you happen to have a buddy who works at Google, who’s willing to risk his job at probably the best employer ever (they have swimming pools, pool tables, and let you work on your own projects in company time, how cool??) by leaking real pagerank data to you - which is very very unlikely ;-), then you’re never going to know what your website’s real Pagerank is.

The toolbar pagerank is only updated every so often, and to no particular schedule really - just as & when Google feel like they need to do it, so usually its out of date info you’re looking at.

But even when it is updated - you’re never going to get an exact picture of the pagerank to any site - Google have no real reason to do this, but many good reasons not to.

Think about it, people have been using pagerank as a tool to value backlink selling, which is something Google do not like, so they’re not likely to want to help people to do this, in fact they’re more likely to want to hinder people who’re using PR as a link selling tool - so the PR toolbar is never going to be anything but a rough gauge.

It’s not a particularly bad thing to do to look at Pagerank as a very rough rule of thumb when looking to gain important backlinks - but I would advise not to even do this, because this often leads people to ignore many great potential sources of backlinks, which have a low toolbar pagerank for whatever the reason may be (could just be that the site has been very active since the last PR update) - but do actually have the potential to give the site a real boost in link popularity.

It also sometimes causes people to waste energy focusing on trying to get backlinks with seemingly important websites which have lost their importance.

What I mean by that, is that high PR directories for example - some of them may show that they have a high pagerank, (which may well change after another toolbar update) BUT if  they have been selling backlinks, Google may not trust them as a voter towards link popularity, so they may have stopped this website from passing on anything of value via their outbound links, regardless of what the toolbar is currently showing their pagerank as.

So personally I think that for most people, Pagerank is NOT a good tool to use, it leads people astray, and has people focusing on the wrong things.

So ignore pagerank.

Just focus on the value your website is offering, this in & of itself will help you to gain backlinks from high quality important websites within your niche - and focus on gaining as many decent backlinks as you can, and avoid the pitfalls of trying to loophole you’re way to search engine traffic by trying to outsmart Google - unless you happen to be Stephen Hawking, you’re unlikely to be able to outsmart Google for the longterm!