Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
We need to keep this thread focused on the followings:
- Changes on your own site ranking on the serps (lost & gained positions or disappearance of the site).
- Changes you have noticed on the new serps (both google.com and your local google site) especially in regards to the nature of the top 10 or 20 ranking sites.
- Stability of the serps. I.e do you get the same serps when you run the same query within the same day or 2-3 successive days (both google.com and your local google site).
- Effective ethical measures to deal with the above mentioned changes.
Thanks.
Could it be a results of that channel that GG opened at Google?
Here is my code on the index page:
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="index,follow,archive">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
Better, less coding:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="archive">
Is there a difference? One never knows when it is about coding?
KBleivik
Make it simple, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
[edited by: kgun at 2:55 pm (utc) on June 22, 2005]
Reviewing my logs - I am actually starting to get visitors for G.
Thank goodness I may not have to diversify (yawn to myself)
Clint:Here is my code on the index page:
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="index,follow,archive">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">Better, less coding:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="archive">Is there a difference? One never knows when it is about coding?
Don't know about a difference, but it's all unnecessary. Only use I make of these metas is noindex, nofollow, etc.
(edit)
What you have above is the default, which is why I said unnecessary. Regarding noindex, etc. robots.txt is probably a better bet. See: The Robots Exclusion Protocol
G caches (archives) all pages by default, right? So that 'archive' tag is redundant. (If I understand that "archive" means to cache the page). If you DON'T want G having the "cached" link next your hits, then you DO want the 'noarchive' tag there.
I would always put the Googlebot tag first before the generic robots line if the G tag has a different negative precedent than that of the generic robots tag. In other words, if you needed for example:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noindex, nofollow">
That would probably not be a good idea since the G bot would see the generic "index, follow" tag FIRST, and obey it. So you'd want the G-bot line first so *it* would not index or follow the page. Their order may not even make a difference if the bots parse the FULL <head> tag before doing anything.
e.g.
noindex and index.
Do you know why? I do not, but have an idea.
I take your advice.
KBleivik
Make it simple, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
KBleivik
Still
I would always put the Googlebot tag first before the generic robots line if the G tag has a different negative precedent than that of the generic robots tag. In other words, if you needed for example:<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noindex, nofollow">
Again, the first line, ie index and follow is the default and therefore unnecessary. The second line is correct if he wants to exclude googlebot as described here: [google.com...]
Don't Put All Your Promotion Eggs In The SEO Basket
By Gary McHugh (c) 2005
One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients is "What is the best way to promote my site?" If a brand new webmaster asks me that question, then I will take as much time as I can possibly muster to answer their request, before they learn about and put on the SEO and ranking blinkers so many webmasters wear with pride.
Allow me now to state the obvious, the success of any website is in direct proportion to the amount of visitors it receives. If success is about visitors, then why on earth would any intelligent business person devote 95% of their promotion time and budget to a single method of advertising their site?
Imagine for a moment you are the advertising executive for a large automobile company. Your company has just released the most economical car ever and your job is to make sure everyone knows about it.
Which of the following would you do?
1. Place a full page ad in one or two car magazines, then spend the next year rehashing and tweaking the wording of that ad, because it wasn't creating the sales you wanted.
OR
2. Advertise in every magazine and newspaper you can find, start national TV advertising campaigns, make sure you have slots on every commercial radio station in the country, advertise on billboards, in cinemas, sponsor sporting events and what ever else you could think of.
It doesn't take a genius to work out the second idea is a much better plan. Now this may come as a shock to you, but the major search engines are not the only source of visitors to your website. Many SEO gurus are quick to point out to you that search engines are the only way to achieve substantial traffic. That is simply not true. One disturbing idea promoted heavily by the SEO world recently is that "Links are dead". My answer to that idea is, if links were dead then there would be no web.
Links are how people travel the web, whether they are text links, banners or email links. To visit any site you need to click a link. Google itself is one enormous searchable link database.
Let's states something even more obvious. Google is not the only site on the web that links to other sites. There are directories, there are banner exchanges, and the big one there are hundreds of millions of other websites. How many of those carry a link to your site?
For any keyword or phrase on the major search engines there are millions of sites vying for just 10 first page places. Are you really devoting all your promotion time to SEO with those kinds of odds?
There is also much talk of the value of links, and nearly all of it is based on the value of links in a search engine's eyes, and how that will or will not improve your rankings. STOP! You need to get this! The value of a link is how many times it gets used, clicks and visits, NOT rankings.
While many will object to this statement, SEO is nothing more than educated guesswork. Why do I say that? Simple, because Google, Yahoo and MSN do NOT tell SEO experts how they order their results. Just the opposite, they regularly change how their results are ordered to stay one step ahead of the SEO experts. Why do they do that? Because they do not want their results manipulated, period! They want one thing, to deliver accurate search results.
Don't take my word for this, go and get the words from the horse's mouth here.
[google.com...]
Notice that all the advice is geared towards building your site for visitors not for search engines.
If you really want to build steady long term traffic to your site, then advertise your site in every legal way you can. Yes, it requires time and a consistent effort. As a wise man once said " The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary". In closing, how many of the following have you used to advertise your site? If you haven't done them all maybe you need to.
Have you?:
- Listed your site in a couple of hundred directories?
- Exchanged quality visible links with at least 200 sites?
- Exchanged banners with sites in your genre?
- Started a small pay-per-click advertising campaign?
- Written articles to do with the genre of your site and offered them to other sites for free inclusion in their newsletter or on their site?
- Had your site reviewed by a review site?
- Donated a product or free membership to a competition on another site?
These are only a few promotion methods that will bring visitors to your site. There are many many more, if you use your imagination. This is also advertising that will not be undone in one minute by a Google algorithm change.
Am I saying don't optimize your site? NO, I am saying don't rely totally on SEO for your traffic.
Are you putting all your promotional eggs in one basket? If so, isn't it time you stopped and gave your site the best chance of success.
It is not a question of putting all your eggs in one basket. Google is a near monopoly in the search engine world, and I don't see how diversifying to smaller search engines helps if Google ditches you. Google is bigger than all search engines combined.
I don't specifically optimise for Google, but they send me the most traffic anyway, just because they are the biggest out there. I am in a bunch of directories that supposedly have tons of random traffic but no visitor seems to bother digging through.
Here's a stupid analogy I just thought up: Not everyone has Linux installed in the off-chance that Microsoft may choose to screw with their computer in their next Automatic Update.
Teehee.
>Could it be a results of that channel that GG opened at Google? <
I think so ;-)
>It is not a question of putting all your eggs in one basket. Google is a near monopoly in the search engine world, and I don't see how diversifying to smaller search engines helps if Google ditches you. Google is bigger than all search engines combined. <
True if you assume that your site is bulletproof to Google´s successive brutal updates. But who could assume that, especially after Allegra and Bourbon updates?
Yahoo and MSN, for example, aren´t "smaller search engines".
66.249.66.169 - - [22/Jun/2005:08:27:01 -0700] "GET // HTTP/1.1" 200 16502 "-" "
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Notice the double //
I've never seen this before.
Is this supposed to happen?
When I go to "www.mydomain.com//" It returns my home page and STAYS //. It does not resolve to "mydomain.com/"
Could this be yet another upcoming canonical problem to be with G?
Is there a practical way to resolve this like by redirecting // to /. I can't seem to find a simple reliable way to do this redirect in the .htaccess without sending it into an infinite loop.
Recommendations?
The only nuisance is my magazine where inserting links to my local files will be distinctly clumsy.
So now I have visions of being able to get Google to lift my 10 page penalty. Assuming the 12% rule is what caught me out. I am so pleased to have been supplied with an explanation for my problems.
"GET // HTTP/1.1" 200 16502
I was told recently by admin of my hosting service that // resolves to root, hence 200 (OK) answer.
No idea how G treats such situation and if it creates or not canonical-url problem or something similar.
My // was done by some hacker poking my server with different GET requsts (trying to find bugged version of awstats between others).
Now we seem to have Google "poking around" in this territory and I'm getting concerned the next thing we'll be seeing is duplication penalties resulting from indexing mydomain.com/ AND mydomain.com//
and it's not just us, every other site I've tested works the same way. Even G!
Yahoo and MSN, for example, aren´t "smaller search engines". "
I meant that now matter how much anyone pushes the "diversification" idea, Google still matters a heck of a lot. In the old days, it was "if you ain't in Yahoo, you are nothing."
Anyway, from my experience, MSN and Yahoo accounts for single digit percentage amounts of my traffic.
... <base href="http://www.yoursite.com/">
</head>
<body>
<a href="/">Home</a> ...
could possibly produce that same result.
I wonder what Google would have called it, if it were up to them... any comedians want to volunteer?
Fire and Brinstone
Rampage
just remove the feeding tube ;)
>Does anyone know when this update is going to finish?<
I guess the main Bourbon update is completed and what we see now is handling reinclusion requests and tweaking.
I started to look at this as a wed developer and someone who's business has been mildly affected by this update.
I didn't lose sleep however was increasing annoyed with the same white paper on 3 different sites appearing in the top 10 for a 2 key word phrase however yesterday I was searching as a customer. I was looking for information. And after pulling my hair out I hit the cross in the right hand corner and started with a different SE.
Which is why this is such a shame.
It's been four days since I sent an email and my site's going backwards.
