Here is an archive of articles related to Search Engine Ranking. From here you can read the articles related to Search Engine Ranking, visit my blogging tips archive, or visit my home page.

This post kind of goes hand in hand with playing the roll of someone who asks another, “hey, what’s the phone number for 911?” or, “hey, what’s the phone number for 411?” Anyway, I went to Google and searched for the term: Search Engine. Ironically, Google didn’t pull up number one. In fact, Google didn’t pull up at all on the first, second or even the third page.

You see this all started when I discovered that my blog didn’t rank #1 for make money online in Google, go figure! I immediately knew that there was some kind of problem. As is turned out, I was right. You have to know that Google is really trashed up that it doesn’t even rank #1 for search engine. The good news is that I now know why I don’t rank #1 for make money online. All this time, I was thinking that I was doing something wrong. I feel totally at piece now. Continue reading »

If I were Google I would constantly be looking for ways to improve how I display my search results. I’d want to make sure that I do the best job and provide the most relevant information that people are looking for. Over the years, there have become many tweaks, hacks, tricks and tactics for publishers to attempt to thrust their content above and beyond their other organically ranked competitors.

Google isn’t a perfect system; it is however, a great one for sure, but it is far from being flawless. It can indeed be gamed and done so quite easily. In fact, I am sure you know that people pay big bucks to hire people or businesses to help them with that. And sure enough, it works. It may cost you an arm and a leg, but you can indeed pay a professional to help you with ranking very well in Google.

Search engine optimization service is a huge money maker. In many cases I consider the SEO niche to be at times equally as profitable as the MMO niche, if not more. Both niches are heavily saturated with competition and are extremely cut throat, competitive and political. It’s a dog eat dog world in the realm of MMO and SEO and being wrapped up too deep into it, you can easily become a dog too without even realizing it.

With that being said, I have to consider that Google is all to aware of how their system is being gamed. I have to consider that they are taking action to thwart these efforts. While SEO is truly a legitimate business, it commonly is an abused business as well. SEO should be a professional act of consultation and service done for a customer’s web site that will make it more friendly for users as well as search engines.

Part of that includes making sure the web site makes use of proper HTML code, proper CSS, proper navigation menus, proper display order of the content found on the source page and much more. What SEO shouldn’t include are advice, tips and tricks on how to tweak the Google index. Examples of that would be supporting and endorsing business and services such as Text-Link-Ads or PayPerPost. Businesses that render these type of services are clearly ignoring the policies that Google as well as many other search engines have set forth.

The biggest problem I see with companies such as the above mentioned, is the fact that many of the customers are unaware of the policies set forth by the major search engines including Google. They are simply business owners who are seeking out ways to legitimately and fairly increase their business Internet exposure. What they don’t know are all the politics and debated policies regarding the act of providing services designed to game Google PageRank.

Needless to say, when many of the companies or customers discover how participating in programs that game Google and attempts to exploit PageRank, they bail out and immediately have concerns as to whether their professional business web site will end up getting banned or penalized.

I am actually surprised to see that there haven’t been any lawsuits placed against companies like that. Perhaps there may be but they haven’t gone public. Who knows, but I can tell you this, if I owned a somewhat large business and placed a focus on seeking out ways to increase my business brand on the Internet and happened to have been lured into running a campaign on Review Me dot Com or other places, and to soon discover the high risks involved after the fact, then I for sure would be aiming towards a law suit filed against that company.

While I am sure that there is actually information in the fine print of the TOS that protect these companies, can they really hold up against a very high paid team of lawyers? I think not? My prediction is that it’s just a matter of time before The Times or some other high caliper publication picks up on a story that involves Text-Link-Ads going to court against a larger company that got banned from Google.

So what about Google Bookmarks? Do you think that Google Bookmarks influences Google SEO? Consider the position that Google is in. They are the number one search engine on the Internet. They produce the most accurate results. Ranking well in their search engine opens up huge opportunities to many people including medium to large scale businesses. And because of those facts there will always be the business as well as the desire for SERP hacking.

What can Google do about this? Well, they can revise their existing system of PageRank to factor in what other people are naturally bookmarking in their iGoogle accounts and Google Bookmarks. Why not? This would make perfect sense to me and it would be something that I would do if I were Google.

Using Google Bookmarks to place a level of weight towards how pages rank in Google’s main index makes perfect sense to me. Users of the iGoogle service typically take a lot of pride in how they bookmark, file and archive the information they find on the Internet. I have to assume that how I use my iGoogle and Google Bookmarks accounts would be similar to how others use theirs.

I am not really anything more than an average Internet users who makes excellent use of the free and wonderful services that Google provides me. I use Google Bookmarks to make a record of the sites or pages that interests me. Secondly I use the tools made available to me to build a folder and filing system that allows me to organize the things that I add into my Google Bookmarks.

In the Google Bookmarking system I am able to assign the pages and sites that I archive a Title, a description called Notes and relevant keywords called Tags. Commonly these are all attributes that I manually enter into the system myself using my own words that I feel are valuable to me. Consequently, there are thousands of other Internet users just like me who do the same thing. It would be foolish for Google to ignore this wonderful and natural organic pool of data.

If Google were to decide to use this information in Google Bookmarks, which I believe is made available to them - read their privacy policy, it would greatly improve on the quality of their main index because it would allow them to factor in what iGoogle users value privately.

Could this newer and revised algorithm be gamed just like the current one? Sure it could! But I believe that it would be less likely to be gamed for the fact that users would be forced to spam their private and personal bookmarking system in order to do so.

Here are some angles that I think would work in Google’s favor by doing all the above. For one, as already mentioned, people will not want to bookmark things into their private Google Bookmarks system that they don’t value. Archiving content that isn’t truly important to that end user will only dilute the effectiveness of their Bookmarking system.

People depend on their bookmarks to find information they have archived that it important to them. Doing things that dilute the effectiveness of their system is non-productive and lessens the quality of their Internet experience.

The second aspect which is a very deep one, so please hold on to the bar, I believe that Google records your activities and behaviors on the Internet and shapes and molds a digital fingerprint on the Internet that is assigned to your online identity. In other words, Google can interpret your natural personality and discover your personal interests in life in general based on your activity on the Internet.

This includes your Internet surfing habits, the various types of web pages you visit, the various subject matters and topics you tend to research and follow, etc. All in all, I believe that Google can come to a conclusion and successfully assign certain labels to your digital identity or as I call it, your digital fingerprint. The more time you allow Google to log and archive your activity, the more accurately it can assign labels to your digital fingerprint.

The purpose of Google assigning labels to your digital fingerprint or online identity is to constantly cross reference your newer submitted information into your Google Bookmarks against older items you have archived towards looking for trends of relevancy. I believe that Google could create a safety net which protects the integrity of their index by placing a filter on your digital fingerprint that checks to see if newer archived content is relevant to previously archived content.

Another consideration against gaming this newer system is the fact that the more you use your Google Bookmarks and the more you allow Google to monitor and record your Internet surfing behaviors the more influence your digital fingerprint will have when Google takes into account the information you archive. This in itself thwarts people from creating new accounts in Google for the purpose of mass Google Bookmarking content for the purpose of trying to game their algorithm.

Are you still holding onto that bar? Good, hold on tighter as this ride is going to get much more intense and in depth.

Google Bookmarks are held as a private and personal archive only visible to the logged in iGoogle user. The information archived into the Google Bookmarking system is not made available to the general public unless the archived information is transferred into Google Notebook and made accessible by the user. With that being said, I mentioned that most users would not want to dilute the effectiveness of their bookmarking system by creating archives of information that doesn’t interest them.

I believe that Google will eventually thwart additional efforts against Internet users who attempt to mastermind their system by creating fictitious identities, or rather false digital fingerprints, which would then be used for the purpose of exploiting Google’s revised algorithm.

In order for Google to create an even tighter meshed safety net, I believe that Google has an invested interest in working with Yahoo and their Del.icio.us Bookmarking system. The chief difference between Google Bookmarks and Del.icio.us Bookmarks is the fact that Google Bookmarks are private and Del.icio.us Bookmarks are public.

While the majority of common Internet users will be discouraged in archiving information that they don’t want in their own personal bookmarking system, there will remain a smaller group of people who will attempt to create fictitious identities or false digital fingerprints for the sole purpose of gaming Google’s algorithm. To prevent these adverse behaviors from being effective, I believe that Google will eventually come to an agreement with Yahoo so that they can pull data from Del.icio.us and use that information towards having yet another source of information for cross referencing.

The reason being is simple. While mastermind SERP hackers might not be bothered by diluting their private bookmarking system, they certainly do not want to dilute their public identity, or rather their public digital fingerprint. One thing is for sure with human behavior on the Internet and that is the fact that users are very cut throat and judgemental. Internet users tend to feel more confident knowing that there is a computer screen that protects them from other users in the digital world.

With that being said, Internet users typically aren’t reluctant to call out their opinions as they see it. With Google tapping into Del.icio.us, they have a source of information that has already gone through the scrutiny of mass public opinion. In other words, while there will be smaller groups who have the intelligence and abilities to create false digital fingerprints on the Internet to be used towards gaming the Google Bookmarking system, their efforts will never pass through the scrutiny of public bookmarking within systems such as Del.icio.us.

Furthermore, I believe that Google will keep a tally on the number of times certain pages or sites are archived across the board within their own Google Bookmarking system in addition to the how well these same pages and sites rank according to mass opinion within public Bookmarking systems such as Del.icio.us. All in all, I believe that Google not only has the resources and the technological advances to develop a system of this nature, I believe that in many ways it is already happening.

Jeremy Schoemaker touched on a topic recently that kind of makes sense to me. In his post titled, SEO Has No Future, he proceeds to tell his readers that there is no future in the strategy of optimizing your blog or web site for search engines. He explains his thoughts by saying, “From my experiences I am seeing Google SERPS results strongly influenced by Google Toolbar data, Google User history, and Google Analytics data. Googles combination of SEO and social voting via toolbar/history/analytics will continue to sway more in the realm of social voting. I feel this technology will only get better. I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.”

I can seriously relate to that. If you step back for a minute, I believe that you’ll start to see the light on this too. Google has been slowly working on many things that allow them to get a better feel for the content that people feel are personally important to them. While this data isn’t shared with others and it is kept private, the information is all stored on their servers and I believe is being used to help calculate the how certain things rank in their search engine.

Google Web History

When you’re logged into you iGoogle account, and if you have enabled Web History, Google is keeping a record of everything you do on the Internet 24 hours per day, 7 days per week and 365 days out of the year in your Google Web History account. Google follows your trends, they know what your favorite web sites are, they look for patterns in your surfing habits such as the time of day you commonly check your email and they know what your primary interests are based off the different blogs, pages and sites you visit.

In plain English Google says this, “ Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations. In addition to enabling the Web History functionality, the information we collect when you use Web History may be shared among all of our services in order to provide you with a seamless experience and to improve the quality of our services. We will not disclose this information to other companies or individuals, except in the limited circumstances described in our main Google Privacy Policy, or with your consent.”

Source: Google Privacy FAQ for Web History

Does your surfing habits which are being logged into Google Web History have an influence on Google SERPS? I’d like to think that they do.

Google Subscribed Links

Google Subscribed Links is an amazing service. Register for the service and get all your friends to subscribe and basically you can incorporate the things that you find on the Internet which are important to you into the search results of Google. People who subscribe to your Google Subscribed Links will see instances of things that you have added into your Google Subscribed Links database when they search for something that has the same keywords as an entry you added into the system.

Google explains this service by saying, “Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers, provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions, calculate useful quantities, and more.”

While this information isn’t shared or sold to third party companies, is it far fetched to believe that Google will use this information internally to place an emphasis on how things rank in their main engine? Could it be foolish to assume that Google will consider the subscriber base of some of these custom engines and place a level of authority in these micro engine sites? I would think so. End users who have successfully gained a large number of opt in subscription to their Google Subscribed Links system are natural magnets for great quality. People don’t subscribe to garbage and if the custom engine was indeed a link pool of bad information, then there wouldn’t be a large mass of subscribers. I believe that Google is or soon will be looking at end user’s Google Subscribed Links engine when considering how to rank content in their main index.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is something I am really going to start making use of. The service is absolutely amazing as you can highlight content on the Internet and paste it into your notebook to make a forever long and permanent archive of the information. In Google Notebook, you have the ability to make many individual notebooks, all of which can have their own individual sections. You can make a Make Money Online notebook and capture all your favorite articles related to that. Secondly you can make sections such as the John Chow section in your Make Money Online notebook and snip copies of his articles in there.

All in all Google Notebook is a very exciting feature. Your Google Notebook(s) can all be made public, they can all stream an RSS, they all can be imported into your Google Bookmarks, they all can be imported into your Google Reader and then added into your shared items folder. All of which I believe will soon if not already impact how things rank in Google’s main index.

What About Traditional SEO Strategies and Tactics?

I am going to agree with ShoeMoney on this one. I think his insight is superior to many others in this niche as he tends to downplay his level of knowledge. Are the old days of making sure you make use of the proper <title> tags; <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags; <img alt=”, <a title=”, and other related tags over? The use of traditional SEO strategies and tactics very well may be limited. The days bartering for link exchanges and asking your friends to provide search engine friendly links on their blogs that point back to yours may start to have little to no impact on your ranking in Google. To me, it would seem more logical of Google to make use of their services such we Web History, Bookmarks and Notebook to place weight on how content ranks in their search engine.

To me, it would seem less likely to be gamed successfully by people who are trying to exploit their ranking system. I am not saying that their evolving ranking system can’t be gamed, but I am saying that people will have to work much much harder to successfully do it. Long story short is if you’re going to invest the time into saving content into your Google Bookmarks and adding an entry into your Google Notebook and possibly even adding the content into your shared folder in Google Reader or adding the content into your Subscribed Links via Google COOP, the content you are adding into your iGoogle account most likely will be good content as most end users are not going to want to crap up their own personal accounts with junk and garbage. Secondly, your public reputation is also on the line.

In the realm of social bookmarking, maintaining a good standing order in the many various networks including your public activity on Google is crucial towards building and maintaining a good online reputation among peers. In many ways, I believe that Google is banking on this factorization which inadvertently prevents web spam due to end users not wanting to be classified as a spammer publicly among their peers. In my eyes, it is superior thinking on Google’s part and it is something that I think will evolve into a much more accurate and powerful ranking system compared to the traditional PageRank system. I look forward to it as it continues to evolve and shape into form as I feel that it is a system that I will do very well in. In fact, in many ways I have been making very proactive measures towards establishing myself in this shifting and evolving ranking system. You should too. Now that you have read my article and understand more about what I think, take a moment and drop me a comment and share your thoughts.

So many bloggers are concerned with how well their blog and posts rank in the search engines. Time and time again, I get questions sent to me via email and instant message asking the same thing. “Garry, can you please take a look at my blog and tell me if it is search engine friendly?” or, “Garry, how come my blog doesn’t rank for the keywords I want?” or, “Garry, where do I start with learning more about search engine optimization?”

With the obvious demand for a better understanding of search engines, how to rank in them and how to market your content in them, here is a search engine checklist that I believe you’ll find helpful. It is a simple Yes/No checklist. The more questions that you can answer yes, the more you’re on your way to search engine traffic bliss! Drop a comment with your scores if you’d like.

1. Are you creating content that your readers are interested in?
2. Does your content contain focused keyword phrases?
3. Are you optimizing your pages with three to five keyword phrases?
4. Do most of your important keywords appear above the top fold?
5. Are your keywords hyperlinked?
6. Do your graphics on your post contain focused and relevant keywords?
7. Does your post title contain focused keywords?
8. Does your post URL contain focused keywords?
9. Can search engines and people easily find your content from the home page?
10. Do people link back to your home page and post pages?
11. Are you using basic HTML coding (e.g. H1, h2, h3, Bold, Alt text, etc.)

If you can answer “Yes” to all these questions then you should have a healthy blog for users as well as search engines. Feel free to drop a comment and also I’d love it if you’d share this post with your readers on your blog.

Come on people… you know me! I make changes to my site more than the weather changes. For some people, you get aggravated, for others, you get puzzled. Please keep in mind that in my business, I have to learn! I have to be top of my game in order to provide clients and customers the ultimate service for the things I do.

How do I stay on the top of my game? Easy, I use my personal blog that gets well over 5000 visits per day direct from search engines as a testing ground. Sorry… that just comes with the territory of reading my blog. LOL!!!

Anyway, to make light of this change, I’ll explain what I did and why I did it. The change today took place on my home page only, it will soon extend into my tag pages. I have removed tags from being shown on my home page, I have also removed showing the full posts from the home page.

Back when I redesigned by blog (LOL you’re thinking… ah, yeah which time!) I started showing the full posts on my home page. Quickly, I noticed that it was taking much longer for search engines to pick up my newly written content. Displaying the full posts coupled with showing my tags is what I believe to be the problem. What you see today is the action I am taking towards this.

While my blog continues to grow regular readers, I can NOT deny myself of getting my content indexed into the major search engines. And the home page reflects a design that will quickly allow for search engine crawlers to find my content very quickly and easily.

And let’s not fail to mention how much easier it should be for end users to also find content they want to read want to read directly off my home page. The way my home page is presented, you can quickly scroll and scan for articles that appeal to you. Secondly, you can also get a snap shot on how many people have commented. All in all I believe that my home page is very user friendly which in many ways also goes hand in hand with being search engine friendly.

Here is a wonderful post submitted in by a guy named Owen who runs a blog titled, The Linux Blog. Some pretty good strategy about assessing and dealing with your competition. I am sure you’ll enjoy it. My family and I are going to Disney World in five days and will be gone for five days. If you’d like to see your posts go live on GCDC you can register for an account and write your post. Simply save your post and “Submit For Review”. I’ll then review it and schedule it for inclusion.

In business knowing your competition is vital for staying in business. The same goes for your website or blog, if you want to make it to the top you should scope out your competition to aid in your success. In this article I am sharing some tips in checking out your competition.

Firstly you have to know who your competition is. Performing searches on your keywords is a good way to find out who your basic competition is. Searches in Yahoo, Google and MSN will produce different results. Take note of all of the sites that are listed for the keywords that you want to be listed for. You can choose to include every result from each engine, the results that appear in two or more or just those that appear in all three.

After getting a list of sites that are competing with me I generally browse to the pages by copy and pasting the URL into my browser so that the owner does not get any more statistics on the keyword I used to find them.

Once I am at the competitions website I determine the quality of the content, design and navigation so that I know the quality of the product I need to produce. Sites with hard to find content, bad designs and navigation are annoying to the end user so they are more likely to move on (hopefully to your site.)

Note the age of the competition, how long have they been in the game? Are they new in this business or are they a seasoned expert? If it is a blog a post date is a good indication but for a site or to get a specific date check out Whois records and the Internet Archive. Performing site searches on the domains in major search engines will give an idea of how many pages they have indexed, how many links they have and the last time they were cached. For Google try the following:

site:thelinuxblog.com
link:thelinuxblog.com
cache:thelinuxblog.com

Knowing how many pages are in the cache for this site, how many links they have and the last cache date is useful information to have. You will have a better idea of how many pages need to be indexed, how many links you have and the quality of the content.

DomainTools.com have some great information on sites. They give you some good information for free but want some money for detailed information. Check out: http://whois.domaintools.com/<target domain>

Other sites your competition may own are easy to scope out and you shouldn’t need to pay for the information DomainTools provides in their detailed report. Once you find the IP address of the server (found from domain tools) go to windows live search (live.com) and type the following:

IP:<site ip>

This will list all of the websites that are hosted on that IP. Whois all of these domains and see which ones are owned by your competition. Note: this will not work 100% on shared hosting.

Check out how well the competition is optimized for search engines. Manual assessment can be used or tools like http://builtwith.com/ and http://www.domaintools.com/seo-score/

Some people may scoff at these next two tips but I believe that it is also good information to have.
The first is Google Page Rank or GPR. This has some effect on how you are ranked in Google so you might as well take a quick look at your competing GPR.
Alexa Information. I know its not all its cracked up to be, but you can at least get some additional information from it.

I hope that this information helps you climb to the top with your ventures in on the internet.

- Owen.

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3. I’m Mark Sierra. MeAndMyDrum is the flagship of my online presence. It launched in Feburary 2007 and has been growing ever since. Topics range from blogging tips, software reviews, discussion on current events, and more.
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Earlier this year if you asked me about search engine sitemaps, I would have told you, “Yes, you need a sitemap.xml and you need to make it top priority!” but now I question the effectiveness of having one.

To be honest, the process in how I started to question this is largely because I just got lazy and didn’t feel like taking the extra time to create a sitemap or install the WordPress sitemap generator.

As time continued to pass by, I didn’t notice any difference in the frequency in which content got indexed on sites with sitemaps compared to sites without sitemaps.

I run a lot of sites and today, most I haven’t even bothered with installing a sitemap, or even registering in the many webmaster programs made available by the search engines.

Long story short… I just blog. I blog and I blog and I blog and all my content gets indexed.

Now, with all this said, I do feel that a robots.txt without a doubt is necessary. This controls where robots are allowed on your site.

A sitemap, I really don’t think it helps or harms you. I am sure that programmers of the major search engines understand that only a small percentage of people really know what a sitemap.xml file is. I am sure this is taken into consideration.

Lastly, I have spent a little time researching various sites and pages that pull up in the SERPs for random keywords. You would be amazed to discover the amount of sites that return first in the index that don’t have sitemaps.xml files.