Advertising Over IP

Apr 23 2010

Google makes some fantastic changes to the Webmaster Tools

Category: Google, SEO, Search Engines — Jay @ 1:21 pm

Google makes changes occasionally to their webmaster tools, and to date the Google Webmaster Tools are ahead of the game for most of the details when compared to Yahoo and Bing. Recently – about 2 weeks ago – Google made another change to their webmaster tools which have certainly placed them on top of the pile again.

Previously the “Top search queries” option in the webmaster tools, would indicate what keyword phrases your site had appeared in for a search done in Google. It would indicate what your ranking was in the search and there was a separate table to indicate if someone had clicked on your website in their search (Click Through Rate). All results were percentage based, but there was never an indication of how many times you had appeared.

The new version of the “Top search queries” now indicates the amount of queries that your website was listed in a search, the amount of impressions (the times that the user actually saw you website listed, and not buried on page 20 of the search results), the click through rate as a value and as a percentage, and a fantastic graph that now shows you how many impressions vs click through rate you have had over any time frame you wish (since the new system was implemented). Previously the top search queries was limited in the time frames department, and had preconfigured values that you could choose from, but this new start and end date feature is phenomenal.

Well done Google on improving an already fantastic tool. If only now the ‘links to your site’ and ‘internal links’ features were more stable and quicker to update

Tags: Google Indexing, Search Engine Indexing, SEO South Africa, SEO Tools

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Apr 14 2010

Google is now using the speed of a website to affect ranking!

Category: Google, PageRank, Search Engines — Jay @ 8:00 am

It is a well known fact that Google changes their algorithm for determining where a page should rank in the search engines on a regular basis.

Last week (4th April 2010) Google did their first PageRank update for 2010, otherwise known as the “Google Dance” and many site owners and webmaster were disappointed with the drop in PR that so many webpages received. This indicated that yet again another algorithm change had occurred since the last Google Dance, and yet again webmasters are scratching their heads working out what’s changed.

It has been speculated that Google would include the speed of a webpage as part of their algorithm to determine the ranking in a search on last Friday (directly before the PR change) Google officially announced that the speed of a webpage would indeed affect your ranking in a search.

Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts (principal engineer at Google) had quite a bit to say about this change, and below is highlight of the post on the webmaster blog.

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms.”

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there,”

“But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

The Google Webmaster Tools currently have a section regarding the speed of your website and up until now this was just a ‘nice to have feature’. It looks like from now on more focus will have to be spent on the speed of your website, and possibly shopping around for a new Webhosting Company and website redesigns might be in order.

Tags: Google Indexing, Google PageRank, Indexed in Search Engines, Indexing speed, Page Rank, PageRank, PageRank Escalation, PageRank Toolbar, Search Engine Indexing, SEO Johannesburg, SEO South Africa

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Apr 12 2010

Changing WordPress from non-www to www

Category: WordPress — Jay @ 8:00 am

By default WordPress will install using a non-www address and often this is not ideal for a multitude of reasons, including indexing from the search engines if the rest of your website is using www.

In all cases, your website and blog should always follow the same structure, either non-www or www, the choice is yours but they should both be the same.

Changing your WordPress installation to support www is straight forward but often people battle with it for a long time.

Note: If your blog is already indexed with the non-www it might not be recommended to change it as the search engines will have to re-index your entire blog unless you have a 301 redirect to the new www URL.

How to change from non-www to www

1/ Open the backend of your WordPress installation
2/ From the ‘Settings’ drop down on the left sidebar choose ‘General’
3/ In the edit box for “WordPress address (URL)” change your address to include www
4/ In the edit box for “Blog address (URL)” change your address to include www

You will lose your connection after the change has been made, you can now login again using the new URL format of your blog with the www in place.

Tags: Redirection, WordPress, WordPress Installation, WordPress Settings

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Mar 31 2010

Google PageRank Toolbar updates 2010

Category: Google, PageRank, SEO — Jay @ 8:00 am

Since there is so much hype around the Google PageRank updates, and when they occur, I thought it would be worth while writing a little about it and keeping up to date with the changes.

The updates for the Google PageRank toolbar so far for 2010 have only occurred once, on the 31st December / 1st January at Midnight.

Since no-one has any idea of when the next Google PageRank update will happen, apart from Google themselves, it’s impossible to be able to give an exact date for the next update however, based on previous updates and the times that these have happened, there is a good chance that another Google PageRank toolbar update will occur in the next week or two. (End of March 2010 to the start of April 2010).

As mentioned in a previous post Difference between PageRank and PageRank toolbar There is a major difference between the Google PageRank update, and the Google PageRank Toolbar update.

We have already seen some really impressive gains on some of our clients keywords and the rankings that they are receiving in Yahoo, Google and Bing, indicating that each of these search engines are already seeing those webpages as ‘popular’ due to the extensive link building campaigns we have been running.

Remember the Google PageRank Toolbar is just an indication of how many quality link backs you have at a certain time (the moment the PageRank update occurs) Your rankings and listings in the search engines will already be seeing an improvement if you have been running a successful link building campaign

Google PageRank updates for 2010

31 December 2009 / 1st January 2010 (Confirmed)

4th April 2010 (Confirmed)

Last week of June / First week of July (Estimated)

Last week September / First week of October (Estimated)

31st December 2010 (Estimated)

Tags: Google PageRank, Link Building Campaigns, PageRank, PageRank Escalation, PageRank Toolbar, SEO Johannesburg, SEO South Africa

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Mar 29 2010

Back links from Yahoo and Google

Category: Google, SEO, Search Engines, Yahoo — Jay @ 8:00 am

One of the most important aspects of SEO is the amount of links from other websites to your own. The more links you have pointing to you, the more popular you are seen in the eyes of the search engines. However trying to keep track of the amount of links you have pointing to your site can be quite a challenge.

The two easiest methods of identifying the amount of links to your site are the Google Webmaster tools, and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Both of these tools will indicate how many links you have internally within your website as well as how many links you have from external sources. However, we have noticed a big difference between the two tools for websites that are dynamically running a link building campaign.

Yahoo Site Explorer:

Yahoo seems to detect and report the links back to your website much faster than Google, however it can take Yahoo up to a month to find all links back to your site.
In order to see how many links you have going to your site, a simple search in Yahoo for “site:www.yoursitename.com” is all that is needed
Overall, it’s a very good reporting tool

Google Webmaster Tools:

Google seems to take it’s time with reporting the links back to your website and can take months to report all links
Google clearly states that they often don’t report all your links in the Webmaster tools, and the information shown in the webmaster tool is not necessarily a reflection of all links that Google is aware of.
When Google does report the links in the webmaster tools they are usually dated quite far back, illustrating that Google has been aware of the links for some time but chose not to inform you about them, possibly a ‘verification’ of the links for longevity.
Doing a search in Google for “link:www.yoursitename.com” doesn’t compare to the results seen in the Webmaster Tools, and can be quite disheartening when after a few months there is still nothing listed.

Although both search engines have their own method for identifying how many links you have to your site, and although both Google and Yahoo use these values highly in identifying where you will be placed in a search listing, it’s important NOT to over analyse the information and continue running your link building campaigns, over a longer duration of time things start to even out and your listings will improve.

Tags: Google Linkbacks, Link Building, Link Building Campaigns, Linkback Monitoring, SEO South Africa, Yahoo Linkbacks

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Mar 26 2010

What is the difference between PageRank and PageRank Toolbar?

Category: Google, PageRank, SEO, Search Engines — Jay @ 8:00 am

Literally millions of blogs and forums have questions and statements regarding PageRank and the Google PageRank toolbar.
There also seems to be a HUGE focus on the Google PageRank toolbar from people trying to increase their popularity with the search engines, and in my opinion taking it way to seriously…. in fact, scratch that… even Google says that you should not take it too seriously!

PageRank is vital, and is one of the key ingredients in a SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign, but what is the difference between PageRank and the PageRank toolbar?

PageRank is a internal scoring system that Google uses to identify how popular your webpage is based on how many other webpage’s link to yours and their popularity. This is CONSTANTLY updated by Google, and as their spiders crawl websites throughout the world the PageRank scores are calculated. As your PageRank score increases so will your position in the listings in a search.

The Google PageRank Toolbar on the other hand is substantially different. The PageRank toolbar is a reflection of your score at a particular time. Google only updates the PageRank toolbar 3 or 4 times a year and webpage’s are scored between 0 -10.

Getting a score of 0 or 1 is relatively quite simple with only a few links pointing to you, however each step from there becomes more and more difficult. It’s also important to understand that two websites that may both have a PR3 (PageRank) may be on totally opposite sides of the scale. The first webpage may have only just made the cut to be classified as a PR3 while the second webpage might have only just missed the cut to becoming a PR4. Google’s internal scoring method would still consider the second webpage more important as its internal scoring is far more granular.

So in conclusion, PageRank is vitally important for higher listings in the search engines and a major component of a good SEO campaign and is updated constantly by Google. The Google PageRank toolbar is a nice indicator that will show you how your link building campaign is doing, but it will only show you a snapshot of your webpage at a certain point in time and should not be taken too seriously. Of course, everyone likes to see this number increasing over time

Tags: Google PageRank, Page Rank, PageRank, PageRank Escalation, PageRank Toolbar, SEO Johannesburg, SEO South Africa

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Mar 24 2010

What is Google PageRank ?

Category: Google, PageRank, SEO, Search Engines — Jay @ 8:00 am

Doing a search in Google for PageRank will result in literally millions of websites being discovered (just under 100 million at the time of typing this), and there seems to be a major drive for everyone to increase their PageRank, but why? And what is it?

PageRank, named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was originally designed to identify how popular a webpage is based on the number of other WebPages that link to it. If I have a webpage and have a link to someone else’s webpage I am effectively giving them a vote, the more votes a webpage has, the more ‘popular’ it is in the eyes of Google.

This is then taken a step further…. Let’s assume that I have a webpage that has 1000 links TO it, that would make me relatively popular in the eyes of Google and they would allocate a value to my webpage illustrating the popularity factor. If I now put a link on my ‘popular’ webpage to someone else, I would be giving them a bigger casting vote. Hence, it’s better to have links to your webpage from popular webpages rather than unpopular ones.

Having 1000 links to my webpage is great, but having 10 links from very popular pages could be better.

So how does this help me and you?
When someone does a search in Google for a particular keyword, Google needs to identify how many webpages in the world have used that keyword so it only displays relevant results, but it needs a method to identify the order of that list. The PageRank value of a website is a huge factor in determining the order of each webpage in a search result.

Tags: Google PageRank, Page Rank, PageRank, PageRank Escalation, SEO Johannesburg, SEO South Africa

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Mar 22 2010

Indexing speed between Google and Yahoo

Category: Google, Search Engines, Sitemaps, Yahoo — Jay @ 8:00 am

So when it comes to indexing on the two most well known search engines, Google and Yahoo, who performs better?

We launched a new website for a client last month, and decided to keep a very close watch on the indexing speed and time taken for Google and Yahoo to fully index the website. In both cases, a sitemap was submitted to the search engines and the website was verified in both of the respective webmaster tools.

The results were as follows.

Yahoo:
Day 7 – 1 page indexed
Day 9 – 3 pages indexed
Day 10 – 11 pages indexed
Day 12 – 15 pages indexed
Day 15 – 18 pages indexed
Day 19 – 22 pages indexed

Google:
Day 3 – 1 page indexed
Day 8 – 5 pages indexed
Day 9 – 10 pages indexed
Day 10 – 17 pages indexed
Day 11 – 22 pages indexed

Google resulted in a full index in less than 2 weeks, and the clear winner in our little observation.

Note: This was the result that we noticed from one of the websites we have published, we cannot state that this would be the case for every website made and submitted to the search engines.

Tags: Google Indexing, Indexed in Search Engines, Indexing speed, SEO Johannesburg, SEO Pretoria, SEO South Africa, Yahoo Indexing

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Mar 17 2010

Do you need to submit your website to Yahoo for indexing?

Category: SEO, Search Engines, Sitemaps, Yahoo — Jay @ 8:00 am

We have read numerous reports over the years about how you no longer need to submit your website to the major search engines in order for them to index you, but just how true is this?

We ran a test on two separate websites, both of which were created for the sole purpose of testing the indexing speed from Yahoo, and both websites had a minimum of 50 webpages.

The Conditions

Website 1:
No Sitemap was created
Three inbound links were created to the main page so Yahoo had a chance to discover it.
Internal linking was done to ensure all pages could be accessed with no more than 5 clicks

Website 2:
A properly formatted sitemap was created and was submitted to Yahoo on the day of publishing the site.
Three inbound links were created to the main page (These were from that same three webpages as above – to keep things fair)
Internal linking was done the same as above, however with the sitemap submitted this was not required

The Results:

Website 1:
After 9 months of being live on the internet, Yahoo had indexed 1 webpage…. the main landing page

Website 2:
Within 3 weeks of publishing the site, every webpage in the website had been indexed!

Further to this test, we then decided to create a Sitemap for website 1 and submit it to Yahoo… within 2 weeks the whole site had now been indexed.

The Conclusion:

Although in theory the search engines should all be able to discover your website without a Sitemap being created and being submitted to the search engines, creating a sitemap and submitting it to the major search engines is still by far the quickest way to get your website fully Indexed.

Tags: Manual Submission to Directories, Search Engine Indexing

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