Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Those of you who do SEO might have noticed how some site owners as well as webmasters haven't been paying much attention to important on-site factors which might affect the ranking and indexing of their sites.
For example, I was shocked lately to see a big site home page which covers 60+ internal links, carries the following meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
And how about that big site which has chosen to write only one word within <title>News!</title> of its home page?
Another big site has its robots.txt file excluding (disallow) big portion of its content. After investigating that matter it appeared that for few years ago there were some legal issues about the said content, which were then resolved for around two years ago. However, it seems that the owner as well as the webmaster of that site just forgot to to update their robots.txt file to allow again for the contents to be crawled and indexed by search engines.
As you see, we are talking about basic factors which we expect site owners and webmasters to be obvious factors to pay attention to. Not so, unfortunately.
And lets talk about "exporting" your visitors to other sites. A site owner is buying traffic redirected to his home page. On that same home page several external links for what he consider "authority" sites (of which he is not paid for anything at all). I.e. he is channeling part of the traffic he buy to those "authority" sites for free!
And how about all those broken internal links on a home page?
etc...etc...
I'm sure you know also of such "sad-stories" to tell us about, including may be your competitors sites ;-)
Lets take a short break of advanced SEO techniques, and go back to basic SEO. Because it could be those basic SEO factors which are killing your indexing and rankings.
Another one is that since Google dominates everyone's discussion, most people don't include keyword or description meta tags anymore thinking they're irrelevent.
I wouldn't agree with you about linking to other sites (authority or not) for "free". There's a use for it and you can minimize the traffic leak by lowering their profile on the page.
All the techniques which I had applied to non-news sites seemed to be failling... I was also caught up during the sandbox and the various updates of the last 12 months or so in Google.
The problem as I see it when publishing news is that you do too many stories about say Bill Gates:
Article Title 1: "Bill Gates donated that much to charity"
Article Title 2: "Bill Gates hires XSys CEO to chair board"
Article Title 3: "Major restructuring announced by Bill Gates"
There are probably hundreds of stories with this type of title. Maybe only the name changes... The same applies to the first paragraph and the meta description.
I have tried explaining this to the journalists working on the site but it is difficult to understand when you are not aware of the concepts involved. Thus I think what hurted us was the duplicate titles.
Despite making several changes and applying tactics discussed in great detail here, my rankings are simply non-existing.
On the new site, I have NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW on all articles. I have checked carefully all the canonical and duplicate issues (cause I am using a content management application) and the site ranks a treat and for very competitive keywords... It even outranks some very big boys out there and I have done it with ease. So I am very sceptical of letting google index all articles and not just the sections of the site.
One friendly advice, check very often and very well you logs IF you are NOT an old site (e.g.: over 3 years). Noticing any weird URLs especially pages that don't link to you DO NOT IGNORE THEM!
It is important to do a research and find those behind this. It will be many domains suddenly doing this and Google DOES get affected by it. Guaranteed!
And lets talk about "exporting" your visitors to other sites. A site owner is buying traffic redirected to his home page. On that same home page several external links for what he consider "authority" sites (of which he is not paid for anything at all). I.e. he is channeling part of the traffic he buy to those "authority" sites for free!
One the biggest mistakes I see on ecommerce sites, especially new ones, is that they put a bunch of links, including such things as meaningless "seals of approval", on their sites.
My theory has always been that you NEVER send people off site. If you MUST have an outbound link, make it open a new page.
My theory has always been that you NEVER send people off site. If you MUST have an outbound link, make it open a new page.
If your site is worth visiting, people will revisit and even bookmark it. When you have links opening in new windows it simply annoys 90% of your visitors, especially the ones with old computers which are too slow. They can open the link in a new window with their mouse if they want to.
Any input would be helpful.
On planet Zork maybe.
Here on Earth offsite links opening in new windows are appreciated by users who care about your site and are not interested in fighting the back buton to find where they were.
Another basic SEO mistake which I have noticed in several sites is that the sites owners / webmasters don't pay much attention to:
Make Sure Your Website is 100% Crawlable By Search Engines
You might wish to consider adding a site map which covers basic HTML links to every page or at least to every directory on your site, not just your main directories. Such site map will help search engines to crawl every single page in your site.
In addition, your site map will help your site visitors to navigate your site too!
Thanks for informative post.
Would you be kind to elaborate more on this one:
One friendly advice, check very often and very well you logs IF you are NOT an old site (e.g.: over 3 years). Noticing any weird URLs especially pages that don't link to you DO NOT IGNORE THEM!It is important to do a research and find those behind this. It will be many domains suddenly doing this and Google DOES get affected by it. Guaranteed!
Thanks!
I have provided more details and a possible solution about the issue here: [webmasterworld.com...]
On our competitive keywords these sites were ranking higher than ours (not saying they were top 10, but they were in the top100 and we were not in the top 1000 or so...)
Here on Earth offsite links opening in new windows are appreciated by users who care about your site and are not interested in fighting the back buton to find where they were.
Steveb, this depends on the sites you link to. Opening links in new windows is blocked in Firefox by default if I remember right and everyone that I know of (even those outside the computing industry) gets annoyed by windows popping up.
And in planet UK not that a significant part of consumers have a 3 GHz processor on their windows box.. They run on old cloggy pentiums... Opening a link in a new browser is a pain. It is a pain if you are also doing CPU intensive stuff at the same time..
But honestly, doesn't it annoys you to visit a site and when you click on a link to open a new browser window?
I want my visitors to COME BACK and thus try to avoid anything which might annoy them. But all this is quite speculative, and the "second window issue" is really worth an empirical investigation on dissertation level. Cannot imagine noone has done that yet, but I haven't come across any studies.
Outbound links to thematically related pages are very important means to help SEs find out what your site is about. I would even dare argue that this semantic issue today outweighs the "negative" effect of leaking pagerank in the ranking algos.
Reseller, do you recall googleguy talking about approximatley 40% (was that the figure?) of all webpages being broken (broken links, syntactically illformed if not unparsable?). So let me add these two issues to your list of basics:
1) allways check w3c-conformity of any newly submitted page
2) run a link-checker/crawler from time to time.
Outbound links to thematically related pages are very important means to help SEs find out what your site is about.
Sure, on other pages, but not on the home page which usually has the highest PageRank on a site. Unless you wish to pass some of your home page "PageRank juice" to other sites ;-)
Furthermore, home pages usually receives relatively high traffic. Are you really ready to export some of that valuable traffic to other sites, instead of channeling it to your other pages?
and everyone that I know of (even those outside the computing industry) gets annoyed by windows popping up.But honestly, doesn't it annoy you to visit a site and when you click on a link to open a new browser window?
For myself (as a surfer), the most frustrating thing is that there's no standard. When I'm reading articles etc., I almost always open all interesting links (offsite or not) in a new window while still keeping the main article, listing or whatever, open in the main window. Perhaps it's more a matter of the type of content a person is surfing.
As an ordinary user of the Internet, I find it very annoying indeed when other webmasters leads me to an external page or another website without opening a new window for me.
Then I'll have to find my own way back via the 'back button' in the browser (thru, who knows how many pages I've visited since leaving the first website), or open the link in a new window myself (wich I don't do that often).
Often when I, as an ordinary user, follow a link to an external page - and the page is opened in the same window - I useualy return to the previous page if I don't want to leave the first website.
I don't mind having more than just one open windows (useually I have 10 or 15 opened windows at the same time when surfing on the Internet). In fact I wouldn't like it any other way.
[edited by: OutdoorMan at 11:47 pm (utc) on Oct. 22, 2006]
Of course not. It annoys me to suddenly find myself on a different domain altogether.
I know this issue boils down to people who care about and cultivate users versus those who seek to send them to some other site as fast as possible. I want my users to like my domains. I don't want them to feel tricked or lost, or worse, have them waste time fighting the backbutton on domains that I don't control who do things to make it hard to get back to my domain (or off their domain at all).
Making my users happy is something I like, so off domain links open in new windows because it is convenient for them, respectful to them, and it makes them a helluva lot happier. Since it also make me happier, it is win-win.
Common Error -- pointing several domain names to the same content, especially if you start posting links that use more than one of them.
But then I noticed that similar pages were ranking differently. I couldn't figure out why. The content on those pages was different, but similar enough that they should rank similarly. One was doing well and the other one wasn't, with comparable competition for their keywords. Finally, after going over everything with a microscope, I discovered that my HTML Editor had designated different sizes for the fonts. (These are older pages that haven't been updated to CSS yet, which I am doing now.)
At any rate, the page that ranked higher had a font size of 2, while the one that was ranking poorly had a font size of -1! And when I changed the -1 to 2, the font size stayed the same when viewed in the editor as well as online. So obviously this must have something to do with the font size I have chosen for the HTML Editor program software, it allows me to select different fonts and sizes for the HTML and the preview page in the editor.
I'm not sure how -1 and 2 can look the same on the Internet, but they did, but to Google a -1 font could be interpreted to be almost invisible, which would penalize that page somewhat it seems.
At any rate, I've made the font size change to most of those pages and I'm going to watch to see if that makes any difference. The message in this thread is a good one: there may be innocent mistakes in your site coding that you aren't aware of, and some of them may not stand out until you take a good, hard look for a few days.
