| LED Digest 2005: IP Addresses and Google |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest post, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. August 3, 2005 Issue #2005 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Changing IP and SE Rankings ==-- ~ Jim Berry "We've researched and can find very little consistent information on how to address this issue..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Acceptable Marketing ROI? ==-- ~ James Miller "I had an interesting result with a quasi-legal web site..." --== Not Just Linking ==-- ~ William Ernest Waites "...most people can't be bothered to remember how they actually decided to contact a company." ~ Tom Aman "All the info [at google.com] should clarify the facts..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Recommended Email Clients? ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill --== Important Google Update ==-- ~ Michael Martinez ======= NEW ===================================== From: Jim Berry Subject: Does Changing IP Address affect Google rankings? After a couple of years of marginal service from our Hosting company, we are looking at changing to a new company. Our dilemma is that we've achieved exceptional visibility and results from Google (as well as MSN and Yahoo) over this period and understand that a new IP address will likely result is some fall-off of visibility while the Googlebot locates our new IP. We've researched and can find very little consistent information on how to address this issue, so our hope is some of the experts on LED might help! Some questions we have are: Should we run our site on both IPs while the migration takes place? Should we put a redirect on our old IP address and does that help the Googlebot? What else do we need to know? We've wanted to make a hosting change for some time, but dread the likely drop in indexing and are seeking the safest method of transitioning. Many thanks to all for their feedback! Feel free to email privately too if you like. Jim Berry www.bookkeepinghelp.com jim, bookkeepinghelp.com ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: James Miller Subject: ROI I had an interesting result with a quasi-legal web site, www.indepmed.com, offering mediation services. As with many web sites, we reckoned that the ultimate clients would be shown the site, by such as lawyers, accountants and other professionals. So the first thing we did was make sure that all pages printed correctly as A4 pages, by just clicking the print button on web browser. We also put lots of forms, both printable for faxing and on-line, on the site, so that they could be filled in quickly. We also created a cartoon postcard which was mailed to about 2,000 professionals. The outcome was a threefold increase in business. Why this was, we weren't strictly sure, but perhaps that shows you need a really well thought out campaign, that fits how your target audience does business and also you need to tell them about the website in a memorable way! James Miller Daisy Analysis www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: William Ernest Waites Subject: Yellow Pages: It's a directory. > It seems a good review for the ROI for advertising > in Yellow pages is needed. - Viggie Bala, LED 2004 Some years ago, I worked for a client, a private educational institution, that was absolutely convinced that YP was the source for most of their leads. Sure enough, tracking data (always dubious when done by humans asking humans) indicated that the largest single percentage of inbound calls were attributed to the YP. But they agreed to run a television campaign as a test. After the campaign had run, we went back and looked at the lead tracking data. YP again showed up as the largest single source of calls. But all calls including YP went up when the tv campaign ran. And the margin of advantage for YP was even higher during the period the tv advertising was running. We concluded from this that people saw the advertising and used the YP to locate the phone number. Would they have used the YP without the outside stimulus. Maybe, but who knows what other media stimulates them to look in the YP? We know from other research that most people can't be bothered to remember how they actually decided to contact a company. When asked, they either cite the "last' source of information or the easiest to think of. In real estate, for example, if you asked most people how they decided to visit an open house, they would say "just driving by." But how did they get in their car and just happen to be in the neighborhood where the open house was? And why did they follow one open house sign instead of another? There is much to learn, and much of it may never be learned, about how customers find service and product providers. Sincerely, William Ernest Waites, Eyewriter "Words that make pictures." (c) -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Linking Links to Google quoted by Michael Martinez, LED 2003: > http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html > http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html > http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html > http://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html Really good stuff Michael. And obviously many of your commments in LED are based on this info. I suggest anyone interested in this area (and that should include anyone who runs a Web site) should start at http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html and check out all the linked items. All the info there should clarify the FACTS about some of the things that have been discussed / argued over in LED. For example, regarding dynamic content, "We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index." This goes a long way to explaining why all the pages on a site served dynamically don't always get indexed. On Frames: "Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL)." Just verifies that framed sites can sometimes be problematic for the search engine bot. About a site disappearing: "It's possible your site was temporarily inaccessible when our robots tried to crawl it." or "...setting up pages / links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index". Any questions on the second point? With regard to the first, if your site is hosted by a hosting company, do you monitor it to ensure that they really are providing the "up time" they advertise? There is software available that can do the monitoring for you and give you real numbers on "up time". On some of the bells and whistles designers like to use: "Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." Basically, if you want the search engine bots to do a good crawl of your site, remember the KISS principle. Try a link checking program. If it can't see your entire site, then chances are a search engine bot will have the same trouble. There is a lot of information on these Google pages that should go a long way towards dispelling some of the SEO myths that abound as well as providing info and guides on how to design a site that is both user and search engine bot friendly. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Email apps > I am looking for a SAFE e-mail client that can live > on a small network and share a common message > file / database. It has to be easy to use, and safe. - Richard Stubbings, LED 2004 One word: Eudora. I've been using it since roughly 1995, and as fashions in email clients come and go, it has soldiered on. The interface is not very stylish (no fancy graphics, icons etc.), but for heavy email users, it's the business. It has all the features Richard mentions, plus: -- it stores its email in text files, easy to back up, recoverable / searchable by other applications -- built-in Bayesian spam filter (essential these days!) -- available for PC and Mac There is a free version, or an ad-supported one, but this is one piece of software that's well worth paying for! Regards Veronica Yuill Archetype Information Technology Ltd http://www.archetype-it.com/english/ ------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Important July 25, 2005 Google update Although I have been calling it the July 25, 2005 Google update in several other forums, I have now found reference to changes at Google going back to July 22. What has become clear to many people now is that something changed at Google last week, something substantial. The search results are no longer dominated by the kinds of sites that I have, for months, been calling "SpamAd" sites. These Web sites tended to fall into three categories: 1) DMOZ clones. These are sites which take the datafeed from DMOZ and replicate it under their own domains. Unlike Google, they don't usually massage the results. 2) Scraper sites. These sites are pseudo-directories that grab listings for Web sites and organize them by topic. Many people feel they were scraping Google or other search engines for those listings. 3) RSS feed-driven sites, often organized in directory-like structures. All three types of sites feature Javascript-fed ads like Google AdSense in very prominent view, usually forcing the visitor to scroll past screenfuls of advertising to get to the "real" content. Regardless of their structure, these SpamAd sites are clearly designed to generate affiliate revenues from the ad programs. The content was essentially fluff. One of the recent trends I had noticed was that listings for individual Web sites on these SpamAd pages could supercede or replace the listings for legitimate Web sites in Google's search results. GoogleGuy advised people last week that Google was going after these kinds of sites (the reference has been moved to a subscription-only forum, but his comment has been quoted by me and at least one other person elsewhere): ..from listening to feedback that the search engineers heard at the the last WebmasterWorld pubconference, I have a strong hunch that we're going to be taking a closer look at sites that are just scraper sites, or throwing up a copy of the ODP with no value added. So I wouldn't be surprised to see (for example) sites that are just scraping Google (or possibly other sites) not doing as well over time. There are two popular hypotheses circulating in the SEO forums at the present time. The first one is that Google may have targeted directories for filtering. Quite a few people who claim to operate manually administered directories have complained of losing listings. Debra at Jill Whalen's HighRankings Forums posted the following comment: http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=15808&hl= ..Of the handful of Directories I'm watching fall out of Google's index, all but one have been hard at work adding footer / site wide links instead of content. Others fill pages with Adwords and offer only a handful of "real" sites and some never build out cats. Search engine bots take note of changes / updates / additions and most importantly, inbound links. Directory owners need to cultivate a link and search marketing plan just like any other site. The other hypothesis is that Google implemented some sort of new duplicate content filter. This is just a shot in the dark, based on absolutely nothing but wishful thinking. I have looked through more than a dozen forums for information to corroborate this hypothesis and have found nothing. Of course, the lack of evidence seems to be spurring the popularity of this hypothesis, as people are now voting for it in favor of anything that fits the facts. Your mileage may vary. The SEO forums themselves make it difficult to evaluate these changes in behavior because most of them forbid people from posting links to their own Web sites. The SEO communities tend to wallow in ignorance and hyped-up drama because of these kinds of restrictions, but that is just the way things are. For now, my hypothesis is that Google targeted sites which were featuring Javascript-served ads (formatted like Google AdSense) as the prominent, primary content of the pages. There is no way to confirm this hypothesis, but it fits the clues better than some black box filter that has magically left all other duplicate in the index. In any event, what we can all (or nearly all) agree on, I think, is that Google has improved its search results tremendously. After months of complaining about the spam-cluttered listings, I finally have something good to say about Google. I think many other people will stop complaining, too (except for those whose sites have vanished). For the record, I do operate several directories myself. None of the carry Google Ads or competitive ad programs (several of them do carry my own internal banner ads). These directory sites are all doing well in the search results. They have not been filtered, not even sub-sections (one variation on the directory hypothesis is that deep-linked category pages were thrown out -- that is not so). I do expect to see some more magic black box theories make the rounds. One of the most popular ideas that is trotted out during every major index update is that Google is targeting eCommerce sites. I would not be inclined to give that one credence, either. So, draw your own conclusions, jump on the "magic black box" bandwagon if you wish to do so, but rejoice (if you do not run SpamAd sites) in the fact that Google FINALLY listened to a lot of complaints and did something about the garbage that was ruining their search experience. Yahoo! and MSN now will really have to work hard to compete, unless Google undoes this change. I hope the SpamAd sites are gone for good, though. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal." - Albert Pike |
