Pedro Sttau

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.

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.

1. No hidden text on any of the pages
2. No Keyword dumping in the ATL tags or anywhere else in the pages
3. No Duplicate content – Even the print version of the site used nofollow
4. No Reciprocal links
5. No purchased links. (well..at least no too many )
6. No sneaky javascript redirects or anaythung remotely similar
7. 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.