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In a week I was able to move the site (thanks to the awesome tips this forum provides) from page 23 to page 15 then to page 12. My latest attempt dropped the site back to page 20 (ooops) so at least I'm learning...well maybe not learning well, but I'm learning.
My main question is, how often can I update the site? I've made the above changes within the course of a week...should I wait a certain amount of days between content changes? Is this something you can be penalized for?
Thanks,
Khem
vc
im also working on my site changing different keywords and content etc...are you saying that everytime I make a change I need to 'publish' it somewhere?
I thought SE would do that automatically?
if im missing something really obvious can someone let me know?
Thanks"D
I'm not an SEO person at all, but I don't think you'll get penalized for updating per se - obviously many of the top-rates sites are news sites that change daily. If changing content hurt in and of itself, WebmasterWorld and slashdot would be the lowest-rated sites on the internet. Consider, for example, that the front page of WebmasterWorld has a PR7 and the subforums mostly have PR6. Slashdot's front page is a PR9.
That said, you need to wait at least long enough for the site to get crawled and updated in order to be sure which changes are actually affecting your rating. Make sure, for example, that your current page is the one that's in the cache before making any changes.
Tom
Khem
If your trying to tweak an existing page to see what effect it has in Google - I'd wait a month or so between modifications.
After a new version of a page is crawled by google - it can take a week or two to actually end up in the index. After that - the changes may take another week (or more) to actually reflect in your ranking.
The real key is creating new content / pages on a regular basis.
I try to add 1-3 pages of real content every day. Those pages then link back to my other 'focus' pages using the appropriate keywords in the anchor text. I've been doing this for the last 4 months and my traffic is up several-fold (presumably as a result).
The more frequently you create new content - the more often the googlebot will drop by - and the quicker your new content will end up in the index.
also - you say your using PHP - which is fine. just make sure the pages aren't dynamically generated using query strings.
ie:
mycontent.php - good
article.php?story=mycontent - bad
I'd link them to whatever pages are appropriate. Ie - if you mention 'blue widgets' in your content - link 'blue widgets' to your page going into detail on 'blue widgets'.
I don't want these 'related products' links to appear as 'random content' to the SE's since in my experience SE's don't give much thought to randomly generated links - seems better that they stay put for a while. Question is, how long?
It'd be nice and convenient if the SE factor corresponded with the cache lifetime, but I haven't got terribly concrete in decision-making in either of these. Thoughts?
example.com/mycontent/ - bestdefinitely w/ergophobe on this one. One thing to note though is that it's been reported that the Yahoo bot strips all trailing slashes when collecting url's, and tries the non-stripped url's. This means you can't return 404's or just do anything you want with the non-slashed equivalent; if you want yahoo traffic, you really need to return a 301 moved-permanently that points to the slashed url. Maybe a bit of a pain, but worth it.
for example....www.mydomain.com/newpage.php
from the main site i usually just create a normal link, then from this newpage.php have a anchor link to other pages as well as the main.php.
How would I turn newpage.php into a directory?
Sorry if this doesnt make sense....
However if your ranking back at page 12 or 20, then maybe looking at a structural overhaul of the site is a good route, rather than learning how to spam-it-up.
No matter how much you spam it, if its bad its bad.
www.jesmonddenehotel.com
How would I turn newpage.php into a directory?
You would create a subdirectory right off of the root of your site called "newpage". Within this new sub directory would be an index page with your new content.
I have recently used this strategy on a new site and have had great success with it.
Plus it's much easier to remember a URL like www.mysite.com/newpage/, than a url like www.mysite.com/newpage.php or some other page extension.
If you're fairly new to php, don't worry too much about the 'absolute best' type of link structure since linking to files works just fine, for SE's as well. This would be more of an 'advanced' issue for people who already have a lot of experience with a number of options, but if you don't have that experience, going with the one you know best is probably safest. People who use directories exclusively are probably doing this with apache's mod_rewrite or the equivalent in IIS, who are just trying to figure out how to get the GET variables linked up without using?urls=like&this=see , i.e. having a whole bunch of parameters in the url.
btw, you might want to remove that url in your posting before a mod gets to it ;) it's not permitted according to the general board rules.
If you are adding new content and pages, I would update as frequently as possible. SEs like nothing more then fresh content. Keep it unique if you can and just keep going. It seems to work well especially for Google.
If you are updating a site for SEO, you need to make changes slowly and see what effects your changes have before continuing to the next change. Another thing I have noticed is that some times it takes 2 crawls before a site will "settle down" into the SERPS, especially in Google since it seems to be more of a roaming update rather then a monthly dance. Always keep this in mind when doing SEO.
Sometimes, if you make changes too quickly in the SEO mode, it is hard to determine exactly what changes are affecting what returns. When I started out, I would read something in these forums about the correct way to do titles and anchors and text, etc. etc. etc. and I would do massive updates to all my pages and sit back and see what happened. Usually it went bad. But changing a title and waiting to see the return, then changing some text and wating to see the return, is a much better way to go AND you learn a lot in the process. The only problem is it is a slow, slow way to go. But once you have learned the basics and have a better understanding as to what is affecting what, the next site goes much faster.
Just my 2 cents!
