SES New York: Organic Listings Forum
Moderator: Mike Grehan, (Acronym Media)
Speakers:
- Jill Whalen, (www.highrankings.com )
- Greg Boser, (www.gregboser.com)
- Dave Naylor, (www.davidnaylor.co.uk )
Description:
The Organic Listings Forum took place in a Q&A format. Each speaker offered their thoughts, stories, and analogies on the topics posed by the audience. In this posting, I've condensed the information into topics and shortened the responses to ease reading.
Page Rank: What does it mean to Google? How do you Sculpt it?
Background: Page Rank is a link attribution algorithm that is patented by Google. The use of rel="nofollow" attributes on links is used to control the flow of Page Rank from one page to the next.
Jill: Toolbar Page Rank is not real Page Rank. Real Page Rank is still important.
Greg: It's not as important as it used to be. Page Rank affects Crawl Rate (How often spiders index the site), Index Depth (How many pages are indexed from the site). To Sculpt it, use rel="nofollow" on links to a privacy policy, terms of service, and other dead-end pages which aren't useful for search. Use the toolbar simply to see how the page rank is flowing (assuming there has been an update since you last made changes). It's more of a gauge.
Dave: If your way above average, you'll get more scrutiny from Google. Matt Cutts of Google did endorse Page Rank Sculpting with rel="nofollow". You should be very careful though as you could just as easily mess things up. rel="nofollow" is more for auto-generated content to neutralize the fact that the pain-threshold to get those links is 0 on a scale of 0-10.
Other Points: In the past, JavaScript Links were used to sculpt Page Rank but Google sometimes crawls them now.
Blogs: How do they rank compared to static sites?
Background: Some blog postings, news articles, etc... appear to be indexed much more quickly than static pages.
Jill: Blogs should primarily establish yourself in your field, not rankings for big terms. Blogs get long-tail term traffic naturally.
Greg: It's RSS specific, not "Blog" specific. Blogs, News, etc... are indexed more quickly.
Dave: Blogs get short-term rankings. 2-3 weeks. Blogs can begin ranking within a few hours of posting. It's good for these spikes but not as good as permanent static pages. It's a great place to be controversial.
Other Points: Blogs get authority links naturally. The more authoritative the site, the more on-page factors are used. They don't get anchor links as well.
Link Buying: How do they tell if it's a paid link?
Jill: Search engines are smart. They can tell if words don't make sense in the context of the page.
Greg: Search engines have spys that join networks and wipe their power out. You're better off with places that have fresh inventory or select inventory, just for you. You're even better off if you negotiate your own deals. Use something like AdBrite and contact them directly (this means more money to the publisher). Use with new sites to get the crawl rate up. Use the internet Archive (Wayback Machine) to see if competitors ads are still up and if they're working.
Dave: It's too risky. We don't do it now. Link Buying has gotten alot cheaper. It's the new black hat. You're better off doing Page Rank Sculpting to better use the links you already have.
Mike: They can profile the footprint of link-buying networks.
Other Points: Often network the links have a signature in the code or they're just a bit too suspicious.
Top Level Domains: How do search engines treat them?
Greg: Never saw a good .info or .us site. Those are spammers domains. .net .org. .com are all good.
Mike: .cn for $.25 each are often used for spam networks.
Dave: 301 spam networks to your competitors may hurt them.
Server Uptime, Response Time: What does it mean to search?
Dave: The network infrastructure in some countries such as India cause slow ping rates which is why some people host outside of the country.
Other Points: It matters in that it can slow down crawl rate and the size of the index. Search engines will try again but you should try for a 99.9999 percent uptime. I.E. fix your server.
Country-specific Search: How do TLDs, and hosting matter to country-specific search?
Jill: Hosting, country-specific TLDs help. There may also be something in Google Webmaster Tools to help geo-location as well.
Greg: Both hosting and the TLD are a good idea. Also get links from other sites in those TLDs.
Dave: Search for things like "Football" differs greatly depending on the country. They haven't perfected the country-specific search yet.
Domain Names\URLs with Keywords: How important are they?
Jill: Go for brandable first. Don't think about keywords.
Dave: Brandable is more important. A completely unbrandable company/domain is a big mistake.
Greg: It may help clickability to have the keyword in the URL.
Hidden Content: How does Google tell if it's acceptable or bad?
Dave: Google has an (EWQ?) team that is documented on the internet. They basically distinguish between cloaking to deceive (i.e. cloak with one topic to sell another) and cloaking to help (i.e. css zen garden's use of image replacement).
Greg: What the company says and does are different. It's more of a tattle-tale system. IP delivery is the most appropriate way to cloak if needed. It shouldn't be deceiving.
Jill: If you get in trouble for cloaking and you didn't have a deceiving intent, submit a reconsideration request.
That pretty much wraps it up. All in all, these industry veterans covered a wide number of topics.
There are some very interesting points about links brought up here and answered a lot of questions. I work from home managing websites for clients, and am often asked many of these questions, but you know that sometimes they can be difficult to answer. Particularly the questions about link buying, it is such a common practice, and everybody has different views on the validity of those links. Anyways, thanks for the post, I enjoyed it.
Posted by: Work from Home Guru | March 18, 2008 at 03:03 PM