| LED Digest 2419: Blocking Bots, plus SEO Advice |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.GetWebContent.com/LED : the LED's Key Sponsor The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. May 30, 2007 Issue no. 2419 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Blocking Bots ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "I am having two (related) problems with automated bots." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Losing Rankings to Scraper Sites ==-- ~ Ron Coble "Cut down on the length of our title tag to 8 words or less..." ~ Maty Matyszak "...there is a lot of discussion about a Google purge of its adsense publishers." ~ Melissa Fach "I have never had an experience where those sites stay high." ~ Lorelle Smith "...here are 6 simple things you can do..." ~ Baruch Avraham "The internet is not free anymore, and SEO is obsolete." --== Traffic Expectations ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "...the most relevant search terms [may not be] close to what you think they are." ========== NEW =================================== From: Shaun Johnston Subject: Keeping out the bots I run a travel directory. I am having two (related) problems with automated bots. Can you suggest best ways to stop them? 1. "booknow" pages. Traffic to a "booknow" page appears to be mainly automated price-checking bots -- travel prices are a much-sought resource on the Internet. I want to erect a barrier to stop the bots from getting through to the booking engines of lodgings listed on those pages. Obviously, I won't call these sections "booknow" or anything with "book" in it any more. After that, though, what's the easiest way to erect a barrier, without inconveniencing my real visitors. Is there a way that doesn't make visitors fill in some text? 2. Visits to lodgings' websites. Visitors I send to my clients' web sites work out as less qualified than other directories' visitors. I suspect it's because of 100-page-view bots diminishing the value of visits from me. I could set up a session cookie and cut off visits after, say, 15, since someone looking at that many lodgings' websites isn't a very discriminating shopper. Any better ideas? I could solve both problems by asking visitors, when they first apply for access to either booking engines or just website visits, to enter a "yes" or "999" (easier) to help stop the bots. Or check off two checkboxes out of a dozen? Are people understanding about this? Or, since bots move very fast, I could set up a session cookie and average out intervals between page access times. But I'd rather not bother with this if I don't have to. Shaun Johnston nycgetaways.com Comment? ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Ron Coble Subject: Lost rankings > I am watching the formerly pretty good ranking of my > web site dwindle... when I look at sites that rank higher > than mine, they are "placeholder sites" and link farm > sites, and sites with "scraped" content (sometimes > even MY CONTENT). - Peggy Deras, LED Digest 2418 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1822/55/ First let me say that I by no means wish to project myself as some kind of so-called expert on SEO. I am simply offering my suggestions based on some of the things "I" would do if your site were mine and I was attempting to improve the rankings. Second, it would appear that the kitchen180.com site you reference is no longer located in Google's index as far as I can tell by doing a site:theirdomainname.com search. I also noticed that you are sitting at position 13 for the search term kitchen designer which isn't too bad considering the competition I see in the top 10, i.e., bobvila.com and hgtv.com, kitchens.com etc.. However, I do believe you can improve your rankings with a few tweaks here and there and making some changes to the way you get links to your site, so here are some of the things I would do: 1. Re-write the information on your blog in which you have your link to your site so that you can use the search term "Kitchen Designer" as your anchor text for your URL. 2. Referring back to item 1, there are 1,060 mentions of your site "kitchenartworks.com" in google (as of today) but in the half dozen or so that I looked at, NONE had anchor text keywords of "kitchen designer" - they all simply use the URL. I believe not having links to your site with the keywords in the Anchor Text is a big mistake and something you should concentrate on getting changed. Yes, branding is good but when someone looks at the URL www.kitchenartworks.com what does that say to them? Nothing against your domain name, but Is this a site that sells art for my kitchen? If you think I am off base on the anchor text issue, do a search for kitchen art works and see the number 3 listing you hold in Google. Now to prove this further, I did a search in Wordtracker for kitchen designer and kitchen art works. Kitchen designer shows a predicted 105 searches daily for this term - for kitchen art works, well it came up zero. So basically I am saying, focus on changing any of the links you have any control over by using the anchor text kitchen designer. You can also use this approach for the internal pages of your site if they are focused on a specific term that is often searched for when someone is looking for that service. Most links probably cannot be changed so concentrate getting new links with the anchor text in them. 3. Cut down on the length of our title tag to 8 words or less and be sure you have the keyword / phrase you wish that page to get ranked for in the title. 4. In reference to 3 above, you have the website title as the first two words on each of your pages. I would get rid of those keywords and make sure the title includes the search term / keyphrase you want the page to be ranked for. There is another reason for getting rid of the same site name keywords on each page and it has to do with the potential for Google's programming taking these pages as being duplicate of one another. 5. It might help you to get a one day subscription to Wordtracker.com to research what words and phrases are actually being searched on for your industry and begin to use what you find in the titles and content of your pages if you wish to be ranked higher. I hope these suggestions help. It would be interesting to hear if you implement any of them, how it may have changed any of your positioning in a month or so. Good luck. Ron Coble Coble International Marketing Services http://www.importexporthelp.com Comment? -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Maty Matyszak Subject: Lost rankings Help may be at hand, Peggy. Over on the webmasterworld forum there is a lot of discussion at the moment about a Google purge of its adsense publishers. A number of publishers have been told that as of June 1 they are out of the programme due to 'inappropriate business models'. How comprehensive that purge will be, and whether it makes any difference remains to be seen, but many people who have seen their hard work abused by get-rich-quick parasites are hoping that Google has decided not only not to be evil, but to stop allowing evil-doers to degrade the web with spam disguised as content. That said, it is proverbial that websites dependent on Google for business success run <Module: eggs_onebasket(fragile)> by default. Good luck Maty Matyszak www.knowyourcat.info Comment? -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Melissa Fach Subject: Lost rankings Peggy, I have had the same thing happen to me several times. However, I have never had an experience where those sites stay high. My experience has always been that within a few weeks, or sometimes a month or two, those types of sites drop off. I hate it as much as you, but wait it out. Check your optimization and make sure everything is OK and then just wait. Oh, and one more thing. Check this site and if you see keyword stuffing, meta tag stuffing or anything that could be considered spam report it to Google here http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Melissa Fach http://www.panacawriting.com Comment? -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Lorelle Smith Subject: Lost rankings When I Googled for the keyword phrase "kitchen designer" I saw only legitimate sites. Peggy Duras's site came up on the second page. She should be thrilled! The thing is, her home page really shouldn't rank more highly for that phrase; it appears only twice in the body copy and it's 7 words down on the title tag, which is the clickable part that starts each listing in search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, it's truncated right out of existence in Google. Word order matters. You don't have to sacrifice branding; just be more creative and succinct. The crux of the matter is that Peggy's home page is not ABOUT "kitchen designer." That it ranks for that term at all is probably due to some incoming links with that description (and that's why the other sites rank also, for the most part, but they're also more authoritative sources). Unless you want to spend all your time getting high-quality incoming links, here are 6 simple things you can do, Peggy: 1. Optimize your About page for "kitchen designer." That's the most appropriate page for that term. Be sure to include your location. Wouldn't you rather that people searching for a kitchen designer in the Bay Area find your About page with all that great info about why they should choose you? Why send them to your home page, which isn't really a match for what they're looking for? 2. Write an article about how to choose a kitchen designer. Maybe you could make it an offshoot of your "How to hire a professional contractor" article. Again, this is a good page for people to find in the search engines. They can enter your site through a back door of sorts. 3. Make the anchor text of your internal links keyword-centric. For example, your kitchen remodeling and kitchen flooring article links have the word "more" as anchor text. This isn't proper optimization strategy. 4. Decide what your home page is *really* about. Many home pages can't focus on just a few select keyword phrases because they must serve as a table of contents for the entire site. Still, you should be able to come up with a few terms that describe the site as a whole and are still 100% relevant to the home page. Conduct some keyword research to figure out what keyword phrases used by real searchers are completely, totally relevant to your home page. (Hint: Don't optimize for broad, untargeted phrases like "kitchen design" unless you want to cater to bandwidth-wasters who are looking for free information -- *not* a kitchen designer to hire.) 5. Don't shoot for competitive 2-word phrases. Instead go for the 3- or 4-word relevant phrases that contain the competitive 2-word phrase. This way you get traffic for what I call the "low-hanging fruit" while you build up external incoming links to eventually get ranked for the 2-word phrase you wanted. Besides, most serious searchers revise their 2-word searches to tack on additional words. 6. Advertise on pay-per-click engines. Google has an excellent program. You need your site to rank highly for a keyphrase for which it's not optimized? This is the way to do it, and you can even take advantage of geotargeting to show your ad to only those in your specified area. There are about a zillion other things you can do as well to help your site rank better, but hopefully the above tips are enough to get you started. Good luck! Lorelle Smith, The Keywordsmith Professional Keyword Research & Analysis Consultant http://www.keywordsmith.com/free-website-reviews.htm Comment? -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Baruch Avraham Subject: Lost rankings Hello Peggy and everybody. Same thing happened to my site. On some pages I lost ranking totaly. (Zero on Google). I tried to search complete sentences from my home page that is ranked , and the page did not show on the first three pages of search results. The drop in ranking started as google got more ads from competing site of same field, Jewelry is one of the worst, biding is over $ 4 per click. I do belive that those who advertise much with Google , Yahoo and MSN , do have better ranking. The internet is not free anymore, and SEO is obsolete. Pay more and you will have better ranking. It is free only for none commercial sites. Baruch Avraham. www.aris-titanium.com Comment? ============ Sponsor Message =========== Want a fresh pizza delivered? Call Domino's. Want some fresh web content? Visit GetWebContent.com. We deliver fresh, we deliver fast and, unlike Domino's, every pizza copy we bake is different. We custom write it to fill your order and then burn the recipe. After that it's all yours to use on one site or 1,000 sites. www.GetWebContent.com/LED fresh, fast and only for you. ============ Sponsor Message =========== -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Traffic estimates > ... is there any way to know how much traffic > our competitors are getting? - Sandra Combs, LED Digest 2418 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1822/55/ Yes, you can get a feel by viewing their Alexa stats (great way to view trends); you can also check out what terms they're optimised for and view competitiveness in Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, etc. Finally you can use a tool like KeyCompete to see what kinds of PPC spending they're doing. > How do we measure success? We know that the most > relevant search terms are infrequently searched for... You need better optimisation, more focused keywords, more professional research and implementation. The most relevant search terms .... what does that mean exactly? Relevant to you as a designer, the site backers, or to the internet and what people are *actually searching for*. You may be surprised to realize that the most relevant search terms aren't even close to what you think they are. Thus the beauty of keyword research! Hire a professional or have a crack at it yourself. Right now you haven't got enough focused SEO on your site. Nathan Holley Comment? ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by GetWebContent.com The Web's Most Experienced SEO Content Providers. Free no-obligation proposal: http://GetWebContent.com/LED 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. 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