| LED Digest 2346: When SEO Goes Bad |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. February 13, 2007 Issue no. 2346 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Sketchy Newsletter Archive --== Bad SEO ==-- ~ Thomas Hyde "My advice is to stay away from the optimization people unless you have *no other choice*." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Google Backlinks vs Yahoo! & MSN ==-- ~ Tom Schmitz "Google purposely crippled their link search operator years ago..." ~ Michael Martinez "Looking at backlinks...tells you absolutely nothing about which links help you..." ~ Jeremy Weiss "Last week Google announced the release of a new link reporting tool..." --== Down on Designers [was: File Naming...] ==-- ~ Veronica Yuill "...we try to encourage the client to maintain a news section using a blog..." ~ Barry S Mills "...you must have been unfortunate or careless in selecting the web designers you've dealt with." --== Sitemaps for Established Sites? ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "I've heard often that well-ranked sites should beware of adding Google sitemaps..." ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Doing a standard search caused me some alarm today. One of my clients (a pretty large Web retailer) has published a newsletter for several years. I helped them set it up and manage it, so periodically I do work maintaining the archives and optimizing the relevant pages on their site. What a found today was a site "scraping" hundreds of newsletters from all kinds of companies and publishing it on their own site, including my client's. I fired off the usual cease and desist message and received an immediate response from the webmaster: done. All references to my client's newsletter removed within 10 minutes. Here's the site: http://www.newsletterarchive.org. I have a sneaking suspicion that they're prepared to "cease and desist" daily :-) An interesting technique to scrape the content, too, check this out from their FAQ ( http://www.newsletterarchive.org/faq.php#q5 ): ----------------------- "5. How can I contribute? "1. Sign up for an account. "2. Details of an IMAP account will be sent to you by email. "3. Configure your IMAP account in your email software program. "4. Drag-and-drop your newsletters into your IMAP account folder. "5. Within a few minutes, NewsletterArchive will have read and archived your newsletters and made them available to anyone online. "To enable the automatic archiving of future editions of active newsletters you have submitted to the archive, sign NewsletterArchive up to receive those newsletters via your This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it email address." ----------------------- Nice one there, so basically they give you an IMAP email account at their domain and you pile all that newsletter content into it for them! I'm still scratching me head trying to figure out how they think this is okay? Make sure your newsletters aren't archived too... Adam ------------------------ From: Thomas Hyde Subject: Optimization by the Pros(?) I have had the experience of dealing with an optimization outfit and it turned out to be a nightmare. After getting my site optimized for better placement and keyword usage by a well known firm, I totally dropped out of site on the search engines. I was informed it was ONLY a temporary thing and I would jump right to the TOP of the list with the search engines. Well after 5 months I still had lost my listings with the search engines and could not be found anywhere within (50) pages from the top. Needless to say I climbed all over the people who optimized my site and got back the $3,000.00 I payed them as they could not provide the results promised. I went through my site changing key words, meta tag information and had to COMPLETELY change the home page. Over a 33 day period of careful changes to my site, I started to receive better placement. I now have many key words and key word phrases back in place which has created a page 1 placement for many of the words used. My advice is to stay away from the optimization people unless you have *no other choice*. When dealing with them, NEVER let them make a change unless you have personally reviewed the changes and OK them. You know your site, they do not. My listings I had on Google and AOL are still gone. Take the advice from someone who has been there, be very careful or you could lose out big time like I did. Thomas Hyde ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Tom Schmitz Subject: Backlinks > I recently saw the number of links back to my site > according to Google drop from 1620 to 538. My > number of links according to Yahoo and MSN > continue to remain around 10,000. - Jeff Schuman, LED Digest 2345 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1742/55/ Google purposely crippled their link search operator years ago in order to discourage scrapers, analytical tools that automate the process of grabbing and formatting information from Google. The "Google shows only PR4 and higher" hypothesis was popular for quite a while but never true. There is no real rhyme or reason as to what links the operator displays. The good news is that Google has added link research capability to the Webmaster Central toolset. It still does not display 100% of all links, but it is impressive none the less. Google has said they will continue developing the tool so they can display a larger subset of all of your lnks. If you have a web site you should check it out. Tom Schmitz, President SEOcritique.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Backlinks Google has never reported an accurate number of backlinks. However, a few years ago, they modified their "link:" operator to report only a random sampling in part because so many people pay too much unwarranted attention to backlinks. > I read somewhere that Google was now only giving credit > for a link from a PR4 website and above. Does anyone know > if that is true or why I would have such a large drop. - Jeff Schuman What you most likely read was the ridiculous speculation that the Google "link:" command -- after it was modified to report a random sampling of links -- only showed PR 4 links. That was never true. If you want to see a better sampling of links that Google knows about, register your site with Google Webmaster Central. You'll have to verify the site (to prove you're the owner) by inserting a meta tag in the root URL page or a special HTML file on the server. Keep in mind that the greater number of backlinks that Google is currently reporting includes "rel='nofollow'" links, does not include links from Supplemental Results pages, and does not distinguish between links that do and do not pass value. Looking at backlinks, either through Google or other search services, tells you absolutely nothing about which links help you, which don't, and which links help you more than others. Michael Martinez http://seo-theory.blogspot.com/ -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Jeremy Weiss Subject: Backlinks Jeff, It's long been known in the SEO community that doing a simple link search (i.e. link:www.your-domain-name.com) only displays a small sampling of the sites that link to you. Last week Google announced the release of a new link reporting tool (0)(1). Now webmasters will be able to get a better picture of who all is linking. Google still isn't going to display all the links, but it will display many, many more than the link search does. For example, here's an excerpt from Danny Sullivan's article on this: ------------------------ "That's showing about 3,000 links to the Search Engine Land web site (note, for some people, you might see no results, due to an apparent glitch). In contrast, the new system within Google Webmaster Central reports to me that I have 57,000 links pointing my way. From 3,000 to 57,000 links - what a different the new system makes!" (2) [0] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/discover-your-links.html [1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/who-links-to-your-site.html [2] http://searchengineland.com/070205-165836.php ------------------------ Just FYI, the following day Yahoo! Announced a similar service: http://ypnblog.com/blog/2007/02/06/counter-culture/ Jeremy Weiss -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Veronica Yuill Subject: Down on Designers [was: Page names] > Web designers on the whole do not know your business as > well as you do and of course they design something that is > complicated to update, so that they get the repeat business. - James Miller, LED Digest 2345 Heck, James, I usually find your posts make a lot of sense, but that seems a bit of a wild generalisation! Good web designers / developers make an effort to understand their clients' business and the goals of their website -- even though some clients aren't sure what those goals are themselves, we try to help them work it out ;-) Of course we don't know their business as well as they do, but our job is to provde a tool for communication. People who do know the business aren't always good at communicating what they know, so they do need some help. As for the second part of your statement, that's certainly not the way we work. All our websites come with a CMS (either custom or open-source) adapted to the needs of the client, plus a training session for staff who need to use it, unless it's a really small "brochure" site that doesn't change often, and the client doesn't want to get involved in maintenance. Even then, we try to encourage the client to maintain a news section using a blog, as you do. Regards Veronica Yuill -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Barry Mills Subject: Down on Designers James, you must have been unfortunate or careless in selecting the web designers you've dealt with. I have to take you to task over these remarks, especially the second part, as it is a sweeping generalisation and grossly unfair to many professionals in the field. I can only speak for my own firm, but I doubt we're that unusual. We do exactly the opposite of what you suggest - we make it really easy for the client to update any part of their web site that they want to, while protecting them from themselves and enabling updates via forms rather than code changes, so they can't break anything. And we don't do this because we don't want repeat business - quite the reverse. Repeat busines is vital to our success, but I've always believed the best way to secure repeat business is to ensure clients get a great return on whatever they spend with us, so they come back for more. We further drive repeat business by making sure we do understand our clients' businesses, and we hold regular brainstorms to generate ideas to put to clients that will bring in more fees for us, and more profits for them. One can't disagree that clients will generally understand their own business better than their web designers do, but (good) web designers or agencies generally understand internet business in a broader sense far better than the clients, and that can make a powerful combination. The question of who knows the most is a red herring, because it's not a competition, it's a partnership. The client and agency / designer pool their knowledge and then both of them know more about the business than either of them did before - at least that's the way we work. Barry S Mills, Chairman Netstep Corporate Communications http://www.netstep.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Sitemaps for ranked sites > [The] recommendation [of a trusted source] was to > leave the site map alone. He figured it could only hurt > me, getting some of my pages moved from the main > index to the supplemental index. - Tom Anson, LED Digest 2345 I've heard often that well-ranked sites should beware of adding Google sitemaps, unless they are squeaky-clean and dialed with nothing to alarm the search giant. I've concluded that since there's pretty much no way to know for sure if you'll upset Google (who knows, even clean sites may have a link or two that cause concern - how would you know?), for sites achieving rankings just leave 'em be. I had one client with a fairly large database-driven site (running Drupal). Her rankings were pretty good, top 10 for most of her terms. Her site wasn't completely indexed though and there was some concern it was caused by Drupal, which has a reputation for not being so SEO-friendly (but better than Joomla). Anyway, I warned her but she said "okay" to submitting her site to Webmaster Tools. After a few weeks we noticed no ranking penalties and Google added more of her site into the index (supplemental included). Over time, though, it began showing preference for other sites in her rather competitive niche, and her rankings fell. Just to be conservative, I removed the sitemap feed and things returned to normal pretty quickly. The indexed pages stayed about the same. I'm still not sure what to think, and this is nothing but anecdotal entertainment not empirical evidence, but I have a feeling it has something to do with duplicate content filters. Most content management systems (CMS) create garbage pages, endless stubs (generic footer or header content), print and email-to-friend and PDF versions, etc. Not to mention URL nightmares if you're not using mod_rewrite correctly. Check out how Google feels about duplicate content: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/duplicate-content.html. Overall I get the feeling it knows how to find dupe content and deal with it, but there's a chance you'll get nabbed for something inadvertent or just mistaken for intentional shadiness. With the way the 'Net is going it's only gonna become more of an issue, too. *pause to reflect on the wonderfulness of static html pages* Some resources to peruse: A useful post by Michael Gray: ------------------------ "... each of the sites using the Google Sitemap were deep crawled and deep indexed. Yes 100% deep crawled and 100% indexed, in some cases hundreds of files. None of the sites without sitemaps experienced deep crawling or deep indexing. So if you have a site that is not getting pages listed in Google, the sitemap tool will probably help you out. "One thing to be wary of is Google is probably monitoring for large increases in page counts (legitimate and auto generated), and this may trigger automated algorithmic penalties." Source: http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/google-sitemaps-review/ ------------------------ Nice summary of a WebMasterWorld thread called "Google Sitemaps Should Never Hurt Your Domain," spurred on by this comment from Mr. Matt Cutts: ------------------------ "I've talked to the sitemaps folks a lot. Having a sitemap for your site should *never* hurt your domain." Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003883.html ------------------------ Hope this helps, Nathan Holley holleymoney, gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The best mirror is an old friend." - Peter Nivio Zarlenga |
