Archive for May, 2008
May
13
Posted by admin
Perhaps the main factor that webmasters ignore as far as google are concerned these days has to be the issue of duplicate content;
all to often to I hear “but my site doesnt have duplicate content” to then take a look at a given website and find that there are up to 10 variations on essentially the same page. For instance, does your site have PDF downloads of information otherwise available? Do you have a printer friendly page? Do you have a “send this page to a friend” link on your content pages?
Any of those functionality aides will often result in the same page being repeated many times over, and google will not catalog these individual pages, which isnt necessarily a bad thing, but what is a massive penalty to your website is that the spiders will miss out on other genuine content pages as they have spent their alloted time for your websites strength, filtering out duplicate material that neednt have been there!
In extreme cases google may penalise the whole site and in some instances I have seen websites not ranking for their domain name or their brand name, down to google interpretting masses of duplicate content as spam.
How can I avoid this? Well, a structured approach needs to be taken to your site but duplicate content can be avoided in a number of key ways. The first and most important of which is to have an up to date robots.txt file. This is an often misunderstood piece of seo “black magic” but it neednt be, the most basic application of a robots.txt file will be to disallow google from indexing certain folders on your site, for instance if you DO have pdf copies of relevant content on your site, then you would use your robots.txt file to prevent the spiders from recording any information in your /pdf/ folder.
In some cases the content isnt however stored in an ordered environment, but you need to disallow certain pages from being indexed, an example of this would be if you have a shopping cart on your website, and you can sort by php your products. If you have 10 products sorted by price, and then a link to sort them alphabetically, your sorted page will look like duplicate content to google.
The best way to avoid this kind of duplicate content is to add a rel=noindex tag to your link on the sorting page, that way only the first page will get indexed.
Duplicate content is an issue for all sites of all sizes, and its something that is liable to get you “google slapped” so check out your sites cache in google now (by searching for site:www.yoursite.com) and see what the search engines have recorded for your site, you might be surprised!
anyway, off for my calimocho!
mm
May
03
Posted by admin
Well, its saturday morning, the sun is out, the birds are singing, and Im checking my SERPs. ahhh, the life of an SEOer - its days like this that I know why I do what I do!
No, its not because I am stuck here in front of my monitors in what I affectionately call my “SEO War Room” (my multi monitor setup makes the office seem like the bridge of a destroyer when they are all on!) its because I have just stumbled across some decent search engine rankings for a few competitive keywords I started targetting a few months ago.
When I set the website MOGmedia up, a little over a year ago, it was my intention to rank first page for some seo related terms specific to my co-location living, namely Kent and the Costa Del Sol. Well, I was surprised to find that my last post, along with the MOGmedia homepage rank 2nd and 3rd respectively for either term!
You can check the websites, and the search terms that yields their positions as follows:
SEO Kent #3 in google.com for seo kent
SEO Costa Del Sol #2 in google.com for costa del sol SEO
These updates to the SERPs appear to have only happened since the last pagerank updates so Im not seeing a huge impact on traffic yet, but with some further refinement of inner pages and their relative keyword densities along with some creative linking, I think I might see an upturn in the next few weeks.
Anyway, back of to continue my SERP searching sessions!
MM
May
02
Posted by admin
Its an often misunderstood important factor in Search Engine Optimization, “Deep Linking”.. while it sounds dark and mysterious its dead simple infact.
If you can visualise pagerank arriving at the index.xxx page of your website and being distributed downstream with each stage filtering out some more and more, until your last content pages pick up very little pagerank, deeplinking is the practice of getting outside links to “deep” within your website with a view to increasing the pagerank distribution to the rest of your website.
An example would be the blogroll link on this blog to my main site, MOGmedia well, thats just a link to the main page of my website, and google will spider the pages and assign value to them using the main page as an entry “doorway”, and in doing so it will drop a bit of pagerank there first before it moves on and values the other pages.
If I were to link to my OTHER website pages from an external site such as:
MOGmedia SEO services
MOGmedia Portfolio of SEO
UK SEO hosting
SEO Services Kent
Contact MOGmedia Staff
These links will pass on the same amount of pagerank to the inner pages of the site. Now for all intensive purposes the juice that will be passed on from this post is minimal as it will be “diluted” by the total number of outgoing links, but for an example it will do for now….
So, if you are trying to get more pages indexed in your website, choose a relevant “deep” or inner page to link to, and get link building!
anyway, Im off for another calimocho, or four!
MM