Pedro Sttau

So things are heating up!

I have been getting a couple of emails of people asking me why the hell do I watch the show, the answer is simple, it’s fun, and it’s entertaining!

I think the pace is really picking up and the producers are showing real versatility, listening to feedback and changing/improving the show accordingly. Something that I forgot to mention in my last post, is that the new sketch “share something in 60 seconds” is really nice, and Jonathan is doing such a great job presenting it, he is by far the best communicator in the show as far as I am concerned.

As expected Episode 3 focuses a lot more on what the teams are doing and not so much on the “how’s”. I don’t really think any of us were expecting technicalities from this show, so it’s nice to see the producers keeping it simple.

Although quite expected to those of us who have experience with affiliate marketing, one of the main things that we have seen so far is that even if you have a lot of experience and connections, making money overnight is very hard. We will be seeing the revenue consistently increase as the days pass and as the “marketers” processes settle, but I can’t help it but feel that the results will always be rather “factitious” since the team leaders are relying on their connections to get the revenue. I understand that connections are a huge part Affiliate Marketing and business in general, but I was looking forward to see a “stock” event rather then to find out who has a better machine under the hood.

On this episode we saw Shoemoney’s team seriously underachieving, while Ken Mcarthur’s team continues to dominate. It’s very early in the game to make performance evaluations, so right now I’m content to sit back and enjoy the Shoe.

As some of you know, I completely changed the URL structure of this blog. I only got away with it because the this is a relatively recent blog and I don’t have that many inbound to specific posts yet.

For those of you who have well established Blogs/websites, and don’t have a lot of technical knowledge, or are not familiar with the Apache Mod_rewrite this might come in handy.

Principle nº 1: Don’t move posts unless it’s absolutely necessary.

If you have you have no choice, I suggest you go for a simple Mod_rewrite redirect that will do a clean redirect to the new location of the old post.

Simple .HTACCESS redirect:

1. Obtain all of the old Urls
2. Open your notepad and add the following line of code
Redirect 301 /old.php http://www.yoursite.com/newurl.php
3. Save the file and name it: .htaccess
4. Upload it to your server.

Redirection Rewriting a Rule

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ newurl.php

So I’ve been reading all about SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin’s supposed vendetta against Web directories. In all fairness I hardly believe he has anything against Directory owners at all. He is merely expressing a point of view that is valid in many ways.

To kick this off, let me just briefly state where I stand on this. I believe that whilst the sale of links through a Web Directory platform is not a very good business model, it is undeniable that they bring value to their clients, even if Rand states otherwise.

Every SEO in the process of Link building submits his client’s websites to directories. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or in denial. There could be cases where this step simply isn’t needed because the SEO holds control over a Network of websites that provide him enough “link power” to discard the directory submissions process; this might be the case for Randy.

A Web Directory, as product to the end user is simply worthless. Keep in mind that the owners of the websites that are listed in the directories are not the end user, or better yet, they shouldn’t be.

Why is it not valuable? To be put it very blatantly, because no one will use it to search for content.

Also, in a Webmaster perspective, I serious doubt that directories generate enough traffic in quantity and quality in the regular category listings to represent a good ROI .

Web Directories have one single purpose, to pass link weight to the websites listed in the various categories.

I have seen some very surprising reactions by directory owners who seem to be taking this rather personally. I’m guessing that the most extreme reactions are coming from owners of small directories, because the ones who have been around long enough know that they have nothing to worry about.

My final take on this, is that of course that certain directories will have a good impact on your SERPS, just select the most contextual directories for your business, and the ones that are authoritative, even if they are generic.

One of the things I love about this industry is that every day you discover people who are willing to test things out, that don’t simply take things as they are. Kuddos to them!

Shaun Anderson tried to figure out how Google would treat and index a title with 50 terms inside the tag. The results were very surprising to say the least.

Hobo SEO UK : “You can put 50 words in your title tag, we’ll read it”

Just the other day I was recalling the infamous David Pasternak affair with a friend of mine that pretty much agrees with his points of view.

In every industry there are fundamental basic procedures that are easy to follow and that don’t necessarily require a lot of technical know-how in order to get them done.

SEO isn’t an exception to this. If you implement a couple of simple steps in your line of development, you will be alright, but you won’t do well.

However, you must not forget that we are dealing within an industry that is in constant movement, reacting to every social, economic and financial change. Like no other media, what is today isn’t necessarily and most likely what is tomorrow.

So what is this 5% of grey matter that I am referring to?

This is where the professionals gain the real leverage. 5% refers to information acquired by extensive testing or privileged sources that help you gain a substantial advantage over your competitors.

Now, anyone who states that SEO is a one time process that can be integrated in a line of work has never optimized a site in his life.

SEO is an ongoing process. There is no way around this.

If you are running a any type of website, your content will have to be constantly analyzed and subject to change in order to adapt to the Search Engine criteria’s that will give it more exposure.

Your content order of importance will also necessarily change over time, and even the keywords that you are investing in might change taking into consideration that the market/search trends are constantly changing.

Inbound links. Do you really think that the high ranking commercial websites have not undergone precise aggressive link building campaigns? Of course they have! And like every other component on SEO, it is an ongoing process.

The value of links change, some of them are eliminated, others simply loose their weight and value, and all of this will have a direct impact on how well you will do.

So if you’re not an SEO professional, do you have time to keep up with the pace and run your business on the side? And do you want to?

Give that one a thought.

SEO is all about following a couple of simple procedures, but above everything else, it’s about following your innate common sense.

The purpose of this post is not to tell you what you should be doing, but rather what you definitely should avoid doing.

1. Too many links in a short time

This is a very common mistake that even the most experienced SEOs seem make.
If you are marketing a new domain, and don’t want it to get sandboxed, and believe me you DON’T, do not get too aggressive with your link building efforts. Keep your inbounds under 20 per month.

2. Do NOT attempt to hide keywords using CSS

Google has automated ways of detecting this. Don’t do it, you will get caught and your site will get wiped out. It’s as simple as that.

3. Don’t buy links in the wrong places

The politically correct advice would be “don’t buy links, period”. But in the real World, everyone buys links, and anyone who will tell you otherwise is in denial.

At present, and despite claims otherwise, Google will not penalize your website for buying links, at worse it will neutralize the inbound that they suspect has been purchased.

I have never heard of Yahoo inbounds being “zeroed”, nor have I heard of Aviva Directory links having a negative impact on a site, and guess what, in one way or the other they are both link brokers, and Google knows about it.

Therefore, try and limit your investment to safe reputable directories/websites.

4. Don’t gather too many reciprocal links

A reciprocal link does not necessarily hold less value then a one way link, but too many reciprocal links might trigger a spam alert that could neutralize all your reciprocals.
So it’s ok to have a couple of them, especially if they are in context with the content of your website, just don’t over do it.

5. Keyword density, there is a limit

Having the proper keyword text density is a very important factor. By density I am referring to the ratio of keywords or key phrases to the total number of words on a page. I have seen evidence that a ratio above 5% will have a negative impact.

6. Don’t publish too many outbound links in a single page

Especially if the links are not relevant to your website’s content. This can be detrimental as not only will it affect your ability to pass PR juice to the site’s your linking too, as it will also affect the way the content is perceived by the bots.

7. Don’t spam the Header Tags

Header tags are interpreted by the Major search engines as indicators of the order of importance of the content. Abusing this concept will not help you at all, as it will trigger a spam alert.

I strongly believe that the content ratio within header tags is a factor that is analysed by the SE’s, either there is literally character count, which would mean for example, that a if you have too much text within a h1 tag, that specific content would be homogenised and wouldn’t benefit from being placed within a header at all, or it would simply be marked as spam.

Either way, it’s not a good idea to try and alter your content structure just to gain an advantage that in the end isn’t going to happen.

8. Duplicate content

Let’s face it; even though they have come a long way, the crawl process used by the SEs is still very much rudimentary in certain aspects, and good intentions don’t really seem to count. Sometimes you are duplicating your content without really intending too, and without knowing it.

Duplicate content within the same domain is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Be careful with your print versions pages, duplicate articles allocated to multiple categories, etc…

9. Too many inbounds from the same IP

I’m not even talking about Inbound Networks (which is naturally also an issue). But try to keep a track of your campaign inbound links, noting the IP address of each domain that is linking to you and do your best not to get too many links from the same Class C IP range.

10. Title Keyword stuffing

Let’s use our common sense here again, if the content in the title of the pages is extremely relevant to the SEs, abusing this element will carry the same degree of exposure. Stuffing your Titles with keywords is not the way to go.

In most countries, with the exception of Colombia, governments combat drug traffic by going after the source of the problem. They do this because it is quite simply the most logical and efficient thing to do. By cutting the supply chain you consequently create a market imbalance that although doesn’t solve the issue; it is highly effective in reducing the intensity of the problem.

If the offer is more scarce, the product price will naturally inflate, and will make it less accessible to buy. Doesn’t take away the need, but it makes it a lot harder buy the product itself. Additionally, the existing consumer base will not just go away, it’s just not that simple. Once an addict, always an addict, and as soon as Google realizes this better for all of us.

So what they are obviously looking into is the sites that are selling the links, hoping to impact the way the market is perceived by consumers who aren’t already in them.

As for us link junkies, I’m guessing at worse we will see many of our inbound links neutralized, but that is pretty much the worse case scenario.

Using the Narcotic analogy, marginalizing Webmasters that buy links like criminals is the same thing as marginalizing narcotic consumers, it won’t solve the problem, it will just help create more and more.

So the only way Google can fight this is by killing the supply chain, and I believe that it is exactly what they are doing, regardless of all of the Fire-works stating that they are after the buyers.


read more | digg story

Two weeks ago I talked about a post on WebStraction’s blog about the new Yahoo Class Directive.

The blog has a very interesting insight about how content should be dealt with by the SE’s. On a recent post webstractions reinforced the idea that the Bots should be told what constitutes content within a webpage. By doing so we are assuming by default that webpages don’t have content, but in reality, isn’t the primary purpose of a webpage to provide content?

I don’t necessarily agree with this concept.
So as far as I’m concerned, it makes a lot more sense to filter out what we don’t want indexed then the opposite,

On a more technical aspect Webstractions proposes the usage of the robots tag with new elements present and defined in an attribute within the tag. Very interesting read.

WebStractions Selective Page Indexing Directives

Just read a great post by webstractions that I would like to share with you guys.

He comes up with a very interesting concept that seems to provide much more logical approach to the new indexing filtering method that Yahoo is deploying.

WebStractions presented several alternatives. One of them is the creation of a new tag such has that I presume would wrap around the content that you wish not to get indexed.

However, the most interesting idea was the usage of the old REL attribute (Relation) to dictate the purpose and origin of a given content. Could agree more with WebStractions, if it’s not original content, it quite simply shouldn’t be indexed as if it were.

I still that Yahoo is leading the way, and it’s much better having this tool then nothing to work with, using a CSS class to filter our content is a rather dubious decision., would certainly be very interested to know the reasons behind this choice.

WebStractions Yahoo’s Robots-NoContent Another shade of NoFollow

So it seems that in this case the common knowledge is accurate.

I am very surprised at how fast the site’s IP change affected our SERPs.

Our website (www.easylogics.com) was crawled 23 hours ago. Precisely 2 hours later the following SERPs changes occurred:

Keyword: Web Design - We moved up one position on Google.pt: from #11 to #10
Keyword: Web Marketing- We moved up an astounding 3 positions on Google.pt: from #9 to #6

So clearly, this is an indication of how important the Server IP in relation to the place where the query is being made from.

In the next hours I will post an additional the other websites I mentioned that will be transferred from the US to a local IP and will post the results.

So for a Blog that holds in it’s title SEO Experiments, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of experiment going on here!

So I decided to kick things off by beginning our first SEO experiment that I have been considering for quite awhile.

How does the server IP affect a given site is being hosted on affect the SERP.

It is common knowledge among the SEO community that being hosted in the same country where your market is will benefit your website in relation to the SERP of the keywords you wish your website would rank for

So let’s put it to the test.

I am changing three websites (currently hosted in the US) to Portuguese Data centers.
The first website is my own company’s website, so let’s start with that one:

http://www.easylogics.com | Ranks #11 for Web Design on Google.pt | Ranks #9 for Web Marketing on Google.pt

If the theory is correct, I should see some immediate changes after the next time the site is crawled (Will check Webmaster Central and post the info) and after the next index update.

Naturally it’s impossible to predict when an actual index update will occur, but usually we are talking about a couple of hours.

Now, what those changes will be is quite unpredictable? Will the website start to tank better for any of the keywords we are marketing? It might even be the case where this is true and there are no visible changes, meaning that although it positively affects the Rankling position, the factor doesn’t have enough strength to cause any visible Position increase.

Guess we have to wait and see. Will keep you posted.

Two days ago I was making my regular internal and client SERPS check and my company’s page was no where to be found. I pretty much had to perform the search 10 times to believe my eyes.

Now, we averaged at about SERP #3 and #5 for the term “Web Marketing” on Google.pt, as for “Web Design” we tend to rank#11.

Upon further research, I realized that my internal pages were showing up as usual, maintaining a steady rank for the usual keywords that they were ranking for.

By searching for the company name itself (easylogics), I realized that the root page of my domain had simply been removed from the index, leaving the first result as the https://www.easylogics.com

By now, everything was going through my mind. Could it have been too many inbounds at a short period of time? (Although this was very unlikely as I was very cautious not to link build too aggressively)

Although I do tend to venture off to rather gray waters at times, I do not subscribe to any SEO Black hat techniques whatsoever.

• No hidden text on any of the pages
• No Keyword dumping in the ATL tags or anywhere else in the pages
• No Duplicate content – Even the print version of the site used nofollow
• No Reciprocal links
• No purchased links. (well..at least no too many )
• No sneaky javascript redirects or anaythung remotely similar
• No unrelated outbound links

Basically no misdoing was going on. So I began looking for answers somewhere else. Why were our first results replaced with the exact same page but with the HTTPS?
I believe that Goole somewhat favours HTTPS pages in detriment to regular pages. I haven’t read or had any proof of this beyond what happened to me, but it does make sense.

An HTTPS page is a secure page that not only provides a safe way for the user to interact with the web platform, but it usually also assures a bigger degree of veracity regarding to the website itself.

Disclaimer

Now, in all honesty it is impossible to assure that any of the actions that I took had any influence at all in the resolution of my problem. Nevertheless, it was quite a coincidence that everything went back to normal after the last time crawl seeing has it had been crawled 3 times before I made the changes though any improvement in my situation.

1. Prevent Google from indexing your HTTPS pages

One of the other issues I was facing was a potential Duplicate content problem caused by a mistake of my doing.

If you have HTTPS enabled, it might be a good idea to mess around with your Robots.txt file and disallow Google from crawling these pages. Additionally a no-follow should be implemented on the Meta-tags.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

Example of a Robots.txt disallowing HTTPS indexing

User-agent: *
Disallow:/https:/

Also, if you use Sitemaps, remember to remove the HTTPS links from the XML file.

Remember, and HTTPS version is treated as an independent page, even tough the content is the same as in the regular HTTPS version.
Google FAQ - HTTP V.s HTTPS

2. Chose your preferred URL format

Making life easer for the Google Bot may actually help you. Now please notice that this is highly speculative, and there might not be a direct correlation between this and the problem it self, however, I find it logical that the easier you make your site to crawl the better it get’s crawled!
Login to your Web Master Central account, and on the diagnosis tab select “Preferred domain”, chose the domain format that you would like Google to display on your Results page.

3. Resubmit your Sitemap

Even if no changes were done to the XML file, resubmit it.

Try to be patient and wait

Easier said that done, I know! Just try and wait out for 24 hours.

My guess is, if within these 24 hours your site was crawled and nothing changed, none of the above had any effect.

Just in case you’ve missed this, some time ago graywolf posts this fabulous video entry about making Wordspress SEO friendly, covering lots of interesting issues, including how to avoid duplicate content.

P.s. Would love to see more of these Michael.

I have always wondered why this feature wasn’t developed before.
Yahoo brings us the robots-nocontent tag that literally allows us to prevent indexing of specific content within our webpage that for some reason we don’t want indexed.
The first thing that came to my mind when I first heard of this was – Duplicate content.

This seems to be the perfect solution to avoid the unnecessary duplication of content on WebPages and subsequently on the Search results.

Quoting should be about bringing value to the content that is being quoted, not the other way around. This new Tag does just that, it doesn’t remove the whole intend behind quoting, but at the same time doesn’t remove the ownership from the original content providers.

Step Forward towards better search results

Most importantly, if used properly, this new features improves the relevancy of the search results.

I don’t want nor do I need to find the same content regurgitated over and over again on the search results and WebPages. Using this tag should be instated has a good practice just as the no-follow usage was initially was intended to be used.

How does it work?

Very simple. Just assign a class attribute - robots-nocontent within a div, span or paragraph tag. It will affect the entire contents within that tag just like any other class attribute would.

On a final note, on Danny Sullivan’s Daily Search Cast I heard that even Matt Cutts praised this feature, which might indicate that we might see Google using it in the very near future.

Reference: Yahoo Supports New Robots-Nocontent Tag To Block Indexing Within A Page

So it seems that Google is starting to take more active measures against the purchase and sale of links. In a recent post in his Blog, Matt Cutt’s states that Google is testing new systems against the purchase and sale of links. Whether this involves a direct Algorithmic change or not is not clear, but it is definitely something that is being prioritized.

My guess is that Google is improving the mechanism used of find sites that are selling links and automatically preventing them from passing on Page Rank and Link weight.

It doesn’t seem plausible that Google is pursuing the purchase of links itself, as it is pretty much impossible to attribute responsibility for external content.

Even the new Spam reporting system isn’t very clear. Matt Cuts encourages Webmasters to report sites that are selling and buying links by adding the “transaction” trace in the report form.

But how exactly does this prove anything except that site A is selling links? What prevents anyone from buying a bunch of cheap links with his competitors URL and then sending a nice tidy report via WebMaster Central?

Additionally, before selling links, many directories add sites without asking the owners for permission, making it impossible to know if a purchase was done or not. So it is obvious to me that Google is going after the source of the problem rather then those who are taking advantage of this loophole in Google’s Algorithm concept.

If the Anti-Spam team finds an effective way of neutralizing the sites that are selling links, spending money in buying them will be useless.