SEO Review

By Trey Pennewell (c) 2009

In August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.

In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences…”

After Thanksgiving, Google said that they had taken Caffeine out of its “sandbox” phase, and that it launched Caffeine on only one of its Data Centers. Search Engine Land was able to confirm that Google had launched Caffeine on the IP address 209.85.225.103, and it was running on this IP address for at least half of its searches. However, the full roll out of Caffeine continues to remain in holding pattern, until after the Christmas season.

Analyzing Google’s Search Engine Result Pages…

Several online publishers and SEO companies jumped into testing the Google Caffeine search results in August, when the original announcement was made public.

The results of testing were somewhat mixed…

Everyone pretty much agreed that the Caffeine infrastructure was faster than the original Google infrastructure, except for results that included Advanced Search queries, such as when you are using subtraction signs, quotes in query, etc. Mashable suggested that Google Caffeine actually doubled the speed of a Google search.

• Google Caffeine tends to show a larger data set for the number of search results for a particular search.
• The weighting of Video and Universal Search is scaled back in Caffeine.
• A slight value increase to exact match domain names.
• Google seems to be putting a little bit more emphasis on the age of a website.
• An increased weight for domain authority and tag pages on authority websites.
• A substantial increase in weight for social media websites. Currently FriendFeed seems to carry more weight than Twitter or FaceBook.
• Google Caffeine has shown a tendency to put more weight on keyword phrases or keyword strings, as opposed to singular keywords.
• Another major change, which is a reflection of how Google deals with breaking news stories, is that Google is willing to show the title and a description of a page, before it even caches the page in its index.

An interesting change in the Google Search Engine Results that I noted while doing the research for this article is that about half-way down the page, Google has added a real-time element to news items…

What they have done is to load a self-updating Iframe to the search results that shows updated news items on a topic as they become available. The image results are located just under this real-time news block. You can see it now, by doing a quick Google search for Barack Obama.

Also of interest about this real-time news window is that it is actually capturing some of its results from Twitter and other social media websites.

What This Means To Webmasters and SEO Providers…

If you have been relying upon video to push you to the top of Google’s search results, this is no longer a sure-fire method of achieving top search placement quickly.

If you thought that Twitter and other social media websites were worthless to you in Google, then you might start taking a second look.

If you are not getting listings or mentions on authority websites, then you may be missing out on some SEO opportunities.

If you have a keyword-heavy domain name, then your investment may start to help you more going forward.

If you have focused on single keywords and bypassed keyword strings for optimization, you may begin paying heavily for that decision going forward.

Domain age will become more important after Caffeine is fully rolled out, so it is in our best interests to seek links from older websites and to put more emphasis on older sites in our domain portfolios.

Old Google vs New Google Comparisons

Some SEO Providers have noted major changes between the two search engines, although in my own experience, the placement for my target keywords has not suffered, but I have not made major gains either.

In the Old Google, I could put a search result on page one of Google in as little as 15 minutes. I hope that remains unchanged moving forward into the future. Of course my stuff isn’t news, so I will be holding my breath that I can put a web page on page one of Google in only a few minutes.

The main difference we are going to see going forward is the emphasis on keyword strings as opposed to keywords in the new Google Caffeine roll-out.

If you have been targeting single keywords for your website or the websites of your clients, be prepared to scramble to overcome your losses in Google’s search rankings… But if you have been targeting those long-tail keywords for any length of time, then you will probably be dancing on the ceiling once Google Caffeine is live across all of its data centers.

In Conclusion…

We have seen a lot of testimony that Google will not change its appearance that much after the Google Caffeine roll-out…

But we have seen enough testimony to expect that some people will be crying rivers of tears, while others will be dancing the jig, after the Google Caffeine launch…

The only thing we can know for sure at this point, is that we really won’t know the impact of Caffeine until after the roll-out as 2010 gets underway.

About The Author

Trey Pennewell is a writer who has written about SEO and online business for a number of years. He encourages you to learn about and purchase the new SEO ebook titled, “Karma SEO and the Great Search Engine Ranking Dance” at www.LinksAndTraffic.com.

This morning I woke up to someone having submitted a pile of SEO questions using our newsletter question form. At first I thought, “Yikes, that’s kind of pushy to think I have time to answer all those questions!” But then I remembered that this was a newsletter week and I still had no idea what I was going to write about. A second look at the questions made me think that you guys would probably be interested in the answers to many of them, so it worked out perfectly.

Most of these questions have been answered in greater detail in various articles that I’ve written, so if you’d like more info on any of them, I’ve linked to the relevant ones for your convenience.

Thanks to Umair R., who submitted these questions.

1. Is there any fixed rule for Google as far as SEO is concerned? If so, what are the steps?

If only! There are no fixed rules because every website is different and has different needs. There are basic things that all websites need to do in order to improve their chances of showing up in Google search results for relevant phrases, but no magic formula.

See “The Art of SEO” article for more on this.

2. Do the following play important roles in website page ranking and positioning?

• PR

Yes, real PageRank (PR), the kind that only Google knows about plays a very large part in websites showing up (or not) for search queries that are relevant to it. But toolbar PageRank is another matter entirely. What you see there doesn’t correlate very well to where your page will show up in the search results.

See: “Getting Into Google” (Scroll down to the “Google Still Loves Its PageRank” part.)

• The number of incoming links

Not so much in and of itself. Real PR, as mentioned above, is calculated not only on the number of links, but also on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages should far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

See the High Rankings Link Building Forum.

• Keyword density

Not in that there’s some special percentage that you need to aim for. Certainly it’s helpful to have the keyword phrases that you’d like to show up being used within the content of your page. But that’s just common sense, if you ask me. Surely, if your page is about a certain something (your keyword phrase), how could that phrase NOT be on the page?

See the various threads on keyword density on the High Rankings Forum.

• Page response time

This is important only because if it takes too long to load, it might not be properly (or completely) indexed.

• Bounce rate

It’s doubtful that this matters, because there’s no way for Google to know the bounce rate of every site. And it wouldn’t be fair for them to only count the bounce rates of those sites that have Google Analytics installed, so my guess is that this is not a factor.

See various High Rankings forum threads.

• Time on site

Like the above answer, they don’t know this number unless the site has Google Analytics installed. That said, they may sometimes incorporate the old trick of seeing if a searcher clicks to another site in the search results after clicking one result, and how long it took them to click another. In other words, if they find that lots of people who clicked to one site in the search engine results pages (SERPs) always end up back at Google to try another site, then perhaps that first site wasn’t a great answer to the search query after all.

• Domain page / Page age

From what I can tell, this can often be a factor. But it doesn’t seem to be as prominent a factor as it was a few years ago.

3. Is there any special technique for content writing?

There’s no special technique, but I highly suggest hiring a professional marketing copywriter. You will see a positive return on your investment very quickly if you do. In addition, the tried and true SEO copyediting techniques in my “Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines” may come in handy if you’re not sure how to integrate your keyword phrases into your professionally written content.

4. Should we cater to code-to-text ratio while developing websites?

There’s not one shred of evidence that this would have an effect on where a page would show up in the search results for a relevant search query.

5. If active scripting is a must for webpage development, how harmful can it be for PageRank and positions?

It’s typically not harmful at all because it’s usually done before a browser (or search engine spider) sees a page. To users and search engines, your dynamically generated pages are just static HTML by the time they get to them. Still, not all dynamically generated pages are created equal. There are some ways of developing your site that are less search friendly than others. For example, some JavaScript menus, some AJAX, etc.

See “Diagnosing the SEO Health of Your Website“.

6. If a webpage is ranking top for a specific keyword, if we make textual changes in that webpage, is there any chance that we lose the rankings?

Any changes you make to a page’s content can affect how relevant the search engines believe it to be for any particular search query. That doesn’t mean it definitely will change the search results, but it could. The only way to know is to try it and see. Usually, if you’re rewriting your page to be more useful to your site visitors and you don’t remove all the instances of the keyword phrase, you should be fine. Because nothing is permanent with SEO, if you don’t like what you see you can tweak it until you do.

About The Author

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Being a full-time SEM (Search Engine Marketer) I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog (not a pretty picture) to jump every time Google twitches. Lately Google has been doing a lot of twitching.

Specifically, the rather startling news from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa that Google has ditched PageRank from Webmaster Tools.

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” states Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.” (Source: WebProNews)

Now, for SEO reasons or for ranking in Google’s index, PageRank has long been eunuchified by Google. However, even missing a few dangling bits, history has shown us, eunuchs still wheel tremendous power. PageRank is no different.

Regardless of what Google wants to happen, PageRank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web, especially if you’re selling SEO services or operating a web business. Try selling SEO services when that little green bar on your site is pointing to PR0 or worst yet, pointing to a solid gray bar.

Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank. People know how to count and they learned long ago, a ten is a lot more than a big fat zero.

Placed against a PR1 site, a PR8 will win more respect in the eyes of potential clients and can produce enormous profíts for the site owner and we won’t even mention the still widely practiced habit of selling links, which Google is desperately trying to stop. Total and full elimination of PageRank would be an honest start, but it will still be an uphill, if not an unwinnable battle, for Google to fully eliminate link selling.

Even with my modest sites, I have turned down a small fortune by not selling text links on any of my sites. When I had a PR6 site instead of a PR4 – those link requests were nearly doubled. So one can easily understand Google’s position and the need to downplay PageRank, if they want to put even a small dent in all this link selling and buying, which is still running rampant on today’s web.

PageRank is Google’s creation, and unless they drop it fully from their system and the Google toolbar, then PageRank still Counts. Actually, in the whole scheme of marketing your website on the net, PageRank counts big time. And in more ways than one.

There are several reasons why you shouldn’t count PageRank out.

For years Google has been downplaying the importance of PageRank and states it’s only one of about 200 ranking factors which determine how Google ranks its index for keywords. Obtaining top organic rankings for popular lucrative keywords in Google simply means money in the bank. Actually, even a movement of only one or two places on those first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) can make a major difference to any online marketer’s bottom line.

Now while you can have a lower PR number and still rank above other higher PR pages for your chosen keywords, I have even had many times when my PR drops but my actual SERPs rankings in Google goes up, mainly due to building related relevant backlinks. So PageRank counts little towards your keyword rankings, but it can’t be totally dismissed.

Mainly because, even if PR is just one ranking factor, in close competitive keyword battles (I am presently fighting tooth and nail for some very choice keywords) just one ranking factor such as high PR can make the difference of whether or not you get to the top spot. Big dogs are still jumping and for those of us who know how to count, getting a number one spot in Google makes all the difference in the world.

Not only because Google controls roughly 80% of all search engine traffic, but more importantly Google has established unmatched credibility and brand recognition in the eyes of potential customers visiting your site. Web users trust Google. Web users look to Google for guidance and direction. Web users believe what Google is telling them. In the online world, rightly or wrongly, perception is everything.

As an online marketer, I am completely amazed each day at the marketing power Google now commands with web surfers and with the general population. Google is king of online search and no other search engine even comes close to Google.

PageRank is Google’s ranking system, and in the eyes of those who notice these things, it still wields tremendous influence and power. By default, PageRank is Google’s opinion of your site, and web users can count (at least to 10) and if Google believes people are still not counting when it comes to PageRank, then they are fully mistaken.

About The Author
Titus Hoskins is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools. If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7 Day Marketing Course here: Marketing Tools Copyright 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Google algorithm updates always bring the fears of webmasters to a boiling point. In the aftermath of an algorithm update, some people come out swinging, making claims that Google is trying to put them out of business. Others look at their Google rankings and pat themselves on the back for having survived another “algo” update.It has been known in search engine optimization (SEO) circles for quite some time that one could successfully implement what is referred to as a GoogleBomb. The best example was a search on the phrase “miserable failure”. A search on those words within Google would show George W. Bush’s biography at the White House website, in the top three or four results of the search results. This would occur, despite the fact that neither word in the search criteria resides on the White House website. At one time, Bush’s biography had been in the Number 1 spot, but counter-bombing campaigns moved Bush’s listing down the page a bit.

Many people have written about this phenomenon in time’s past. I have even written about it myself. When I wrote about it, my point was to show the importance of anchor text in a link to build the value of a web page in the Google search engine result pages (SERPS).

The “miserable failure” GoogleBomb came to exist within a loophole within the Google algorithms. Google puts a lot of value on the anchor text that points to a particular web page. It is part of their “one link – one vote” philosophy as to the value of a web page.

Bloggers joined forces to create thousands of links pointing to the White House website with the words “miserable failure” in the anchor text. The shenanigans of the George W. Bush bashers were eventually countered by their fellow bloggers on the other side of the political aisle. Eventually, the search phrase “miserable failure” would also bring up the Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter websites in the top few results for that search phrase.

The average person who did not understand the nature of the SEO game would occasionally stumble across these esoteric search phrases and get him or herself into a huff, because they thought that Google was stating their own political views. Of course, Google really does not have an opinion, at least not one that would ever appear in their search results.

The GB Update…

In this case, the GB Update is not so-named because “George Bush” disappeared from the “miserable failure” search results. Instead, it is so-named because it is the “GoogleBomb” update, which Google implemented in January of 2007.

Once the update was implemented, the “miserable failure” search began to only return pages that talked about GoogleBombs from a technical standpoint.

With the GB update officially rolled out, people began the standard Google-update panic process.

Hundreds of posts began appearing on forums concerning the GB updates and the fear that link-building efforts undertaken by search engine marketing (SEM) companies and webmasters would be hurt as well.

So, I did a bit of research. I have run several linking campaigns on my own behalf, and on the behalf of clients. Those campaigns were put together with a mix of keyword phrases nestled in the anchor text of links to our websites. I checked the status of all of the websites I represent, and without fail, our linking campaigns had not been hurt by the GB update.

Interesting Changes From The GoogleBomb Update

According to Matt Cutts of Google, the changes in the GB update were all completed within the Google algorithm. Cutts has always said that Google does not like to manually rearrange the search engine results, so an algorithmic solution to the GoogleBomb was in order. A few of the Google engineers worked together to find a solution to the GoogleBomb issue.

In an attempt to understand what had changed, I looked at a few of the more notorious GoogleBombs of past and discovered some interesting facts.

Broken Google Bombs:

• “Miserable failure” no longer returns George W. Bush, Michael Moore, or Jimmy Carter websites.
• “Worst president ever” now only returns pages that make the claim the GW Bush has earned that title.
• “Waffles” no longer returns results that point to the John Kerry website.
• Tony Blair’s homepage no longer comes up under the search term “liar“.

Unchanged Google Bombs:

• A search for “Scientology” still has the “Operation Clambake” listing in the #2 spot (2007-01-31). Operation Clambake is a website that is critical of Scientology.
• “Clíck here” still points to the Adobe website (although this was not actually a GoogleBomb).
• “French military victories” still goes to the same page on Albino Black Sheep when you hit “I feel lucky” on Google’s search page. (I still get a kick out of this one.)
• The “great president” GoogleBomb survived. It still points to Bush’s bio on the White House website.

The Question On Everyone’s Mind

Everyone seems to be asking the same question. How does Google defuse Google Bombs?

Well, Google isn’t saying, so we are left to figure it out on our own. Based on what I was able to uncover in my study of Google Bombs, I came up with a theory. What I have been able to take from the results shown above is that Google may have targeted only “negative links”. If you want to review what is shown above, all of the Google Bombs that are now gone had negative connotations to them. All of the Google Bombs that survived can be construed as having positive, or at least non-negative, connotations to them.

If my assertion is correct, then average, ordinary webmasters will have nothing to fear from the Google Bomb update. My sites and my clients’ websites also reflect that the Google Bomb update did not have any affect on us.

Maybe I am just grasping at straws, but I don’t think so. You be the judge… “Worst president” is gone, and “great president” survived. To me, that says a lot.

The Google Bombing Legacy Continues…

Following my logic, Google Bombing is still a possibility for those who Google Bomb with a positive set of anchor text keywords. So, some Google Bombs will continue to live well into the future.

In 2004, Search Engine Watch suggested that Google Bombs are better defined as Link Bombs, since they can affect all of the major search engines, including Yahoo and MSN.

Google has finally addressed link bombing in a positive way, but Yahoo and MSN are still prone to link bombing attacks. For example, as of this writing, MSN still has George in the top spot for “miserable failure” in the MSN Live results.

About The Author
Bill Platt has been involved in article marketing and link building since 1999. If you are in the market to have someone build keyworded anchor text links to your site, using unique and interesting content as the foundation, then Bill’s team can help you: LinksAndTraffic.com – If you would prefer to talk to Bill by telephone, he can be reached at 405-780-7745 between 9am-6pm CST, Monday thru Friday. Platt Services, Inc.