Topics can sometimes grow organically as you write about them and do a little research. The topic here was to throw out a challenge to develop the best 125px x 125px ad since I had developed one today that I thought was pretty good. I still would be interested to hear whether you can do better than the ad on the right here. However there’s more to all this than meets the eye.
The Search world is all a-twitter with the news that the Google Spam team has downgraded the search rankings for the Google Chrome group because their actions resulted in bloggers being paid to write posts that included links to Google Chrome web pages. That is in violation of the Google Quality Guidelines.
This is a guest post by Sam Peters.
The biggest rage in the world of social media is Tumblr. People equipped with smartphones are taking to the streets, collecting images, and posting them to the specialized blogging service – all while gaining massive amounts of followers.
If you think that is a very un-Godin-like title, you’re in for a surprise. You may have been thinking about Seth Godin’s post on Small Is The New Big.
Small is the new big only when the person running the small thinks big. Don’t wait. Get small. Think big.
If you are concerned to bring lots of traffic to your online property, then there’s no discussion about which is the better choice. A blog will perform very much more strongly than a website for reasons we will shortly discuss. Indeed if blogs had come along before websites, there would now only be a small fraction of the websites we see on the Internet.
The biggest reason why blogs outperform websites is that blogs are proactive while regular websites are reactive. A blog can signal to Google or the other search engines the instant that new material has been added. On the other hand, if you change a web page, Google will only be aware of the change the next time one of their spiders happens to check out that specific blog post. That factor alone has an enormous impact on the search engine visibility of blog posts. However the specific visibility of any particular blog can be improved or diminished by more detailed decisions on particular features of the blog.
By observation, this search-engine visibility of blog posts is greatly speeded up now with the adoption by Google of its new search infrastructure, ‘caffeine’, during the summer. You can check this by doing Google Alerts on keywords in your post and seeing how rapidly these are triggered. It really is most impressive.
Two particular practices can materially improve blog posts visibility.
Regular blog posts have a number of important benefits, all of which ratchet up the search engine visibility:
The other useful way of strengthening important blog posts is to add links to them from other blog posts. Although internal links are probably not as important as external links, they do provide paths for spiders to follow and will encourage more thorough indexing.
Although blogs do have this inherent search engine visibility, it is possible to severely handicap how visible the individual blog posts will be. The key parameter here is the number of times a new blog post appears on the blog front page. It turns out that the extremes reduce the impact of individual blog posts.
With a static home page, new individual blog posts only appear as singles or as entries within category or tag pages. Although they may be no less visible to humans or search engine spiders that follow the news feeds, general readers visiting ‘the blog’ may never click on a link to spot the latest web page.
If one goes with the default home page of a blog, where say 5 or 10 blog posts may appear in sequence, then again the potential search engine visibility of the individual blog posts is reduced. By showing only say 3 or even only the latest blog post, that content gets the added advantage of recency coupled with the greater ‘PageRank’ strength of the home page.
Sometimes these ‘big picture’ questions about the basic blog site architecture get forgotten, However by making some right choices, the overall search engine visibility of the total blog content can be significantly improved. That is something no blog owner should casually overlook.
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This SMM blog, BPWrap, after five years has moved to a new home. It had been located at a Cre8asite Forum’s subdomain (blog.cre8asite.net/bwelford) since it started in March 2004. At its inception for four days it was called BWrap. Almost instantly it was noted that the name was already in use, so the name was switched to BPWrap.
There are disadvantages in having such a complex URL as a location so finally it is now to be found at its new domain, www.BPWrap.com.
At the old location there is still an htaccess file which arranges a 301 permanent redirect to this new location. This maintained the search engine visibility throughout the switch and ensures continuing high rankings in keyword searches.
The only minor dissatisfaction is that the Google Toolbar PageRank indicator has not yet returned to the 4 or 5 level that has been seen recently. This visual indicator is not updated frequently so it may be a month or two before the correct value is showing.
If in your blog or your website, you linked to any of the BPWrap posts, it would be most helpful if you would ensure the correct URL is now showing. Visitors do not get lost in using the old URL but this will help confirm the switch with the search engines. We look forward to many more years of providing insights and revelations on the Internet marketing world from this new home.
Update
A Search Engine Journal article, URL Structure: The Closer to the Root – the Better?, provides a pleasing confirmation of the wisdom of this move.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for blogs is often not done effectively and posts rank below where they should be in keyword searches. One particular problem can be hanging/dangling web pages created by the blogging software coupled with inappropriate use of robots.txt files and tags. Such hanging web pages can act as sinks or black holes for PageRank, a key factor in the Google search algorithm. This article provides a simple explanation of the issues involved and appropriate solutions.
"You are creating hanging/dangling pages", wrote Andy Beard in a recent comment on a post on Avoiding WordPress Duplicate Content. After an e-mail exchange, I could understand his concern. It is a potential problem that robots.txt files could create. As Andy wrote some time back, it is one of the SEO Linking Gotchas Even The Pros Make.
More recently, Rand Fishkin has pointed out that you should not Accidentally Block Link Juice with Robots.txt. Rand advised doing the following:
Link juice is just another term for PageRank. This PageRank value for any web page is an important element in how well it will rank in any keyword search. It may be one of over 100 factors but it probably is the most important in the Google keyword search process. Avoiding losing PageRank that a web page could amass is an important function that SEOs should pursue.
After doing some research, it turns out to be a somewhat more complex issue requiring an understanding of some weighty articles. Anyone involved in doing SEO or hiring an SEO consultant should be aware of the potential problem to ensure things are done correctly. I also realized that there was no simple explanation of the issues so this post will attempt to rectify that omission.
If you want to do some of your own research, before checking out the later explanations, I found the following useful:
Of course with search engine algorithms, things are always in evolution. The official word on the Google website gives the following information on rel="nofollow".
How does Google handle nofollowed links?
We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.
That lead to the practice of PageRank sculpting, whereby people try to manage how PageRank is distributed among the web pages in a website. More recently Matt Cutts of Google in a Q&A session at SMX Advanced 2009 in Seattle, WA, provided the current thinking on nofollow as recorded by Lisa Barone:
Q: It seems like you supported PageRank sculpting a year ago and now it seems like you don’t support it anymore. Why is that and will it become a negative indicator?
A: No, it won’t hurt your site. You can do your links however you want. You can use it to eliminate links to sign in forms and whatnot, but it is a better use of your time to fix your site architecture and fix the problem from the core. Suppose you have 10 links and 5 of them are nofollowed. There is this assumption that the other 5 links get ALL that PageRank and that may not be as true anymore (your leftover PageRank will now “evaporate”, says Matt.). You can’t shunt your PageRank where you want it to go. It’s not a penalty. It’s not going to get you in trouble. However, it’s not as effective. It’s a better use of your time to go make new content and do all the other things. If you’re using nofollow to change how PageRank flows, it’s like a band-aid. It’s better to build your site how you want PageRank to flow from the beginning.
Let us now try to pull all that together in a short number of simple explanations covering the important issues involved.
Google is not always completely open on what is involved in its search algorithms for obvious reasons. The algorithms also evolve as the Q&A quote above shows. The following is a best judgment on what is involved, but if anyone has corrections or modifications to what is shown, they are encouraged to add a comment.
The following diagram illustrates how PageRank is calculated for any web page and how fractions of the PageRank flow to and from linked web pages. PageRank here is not the value that appears in the ‘thermometer’ in the Google Toolbar, and which goes from 0 to 10. Instead this PageRank is the mathematical value used in the Google keyword search algorithm. It is calculated for any web page and represents the probability that a random visitor would visit the given web page as opposed to visiting other web pages.
Here we have multiplied this mathematical value by a huge multiplier to give values that are easier to talk about. We will use the term, PageRank factor, for this derived number. The resulting number would normally be a value like 5.6 or 16.2 but here we have simplified yet again to round off to whole numbers. This illustrates a typical web page (but with very few links). Some links are external links involving other web pages on other websites (domains). Some are internal links from web pages on the same website (domain). The inlinks are hyperlinks on other web pages leading to this web page. The outlinks are hyperlinks on the given web page to other web pages.
What the image illustrates is that the PageRank factor of this web page (16) is determined by the sum of the PageRank factor contributions flowing through the inlinks. This PageRank factor then flows out via the 4 outlinks with an equal PageRank factor contribution (4) on each link.
You can imagine this particular web page as being only one among the whole set of web pages on the Internet. For the technically inclined, we should mention that these PageRank values all are interdependent so they are developed by a process of iteration starting with starting values and repeatedly recalculating to determine what the values are. That goes beyond the scope of this article.
If a robots.txt file disallows this web page for crawl visits by the search engine spiders, then provided they obey the robots.txt file, they would record the values and links shown in this image. These PageRank values are the same, whether or not the web page is blocked to crawlers by the robots.txt file. The record is indexed because there is an external inlink that the Google robots are crawling and they would also note the outlink going to another domain. The outlinks to other web pages on the same domain (internal links) would not be recorded so these PageRank contributions are lost. In this sense the web page has become a sink or black hole for these PageRank contributions. They can no longer contribute to the PageRank of these other web pages.
Note that the PageRank factor values on the remaining links are the same as they were when the other links were being included. Merely saying the links should not be crawled, does not necessarily mean they should be assumed not to exist. This is in line with Matt Cutt’s most recent pronouncements.
Even if this web page was not excluded by a robots.txt file, a similar effect is created if all outlinks from the web page carry an attribute, rel=nofollow. Again this assumes that the search engine correctly observes this attribute. If on the other hand the links are assigned a follow attribute, then the PageRank contribution would flow through to all such links.
As Rand Fishkin suggested above, if more than one web page contains the same content, you can use a meta tag on all the secondary ones to signal noindex. Then only the primary web page is in the search database, provided the meta tags are being observed. Coupling this with a follow attribute in the meta tag, then assures that the PageRank contributions still flow out to the other web pages.
A better approach according to John Mueller, a Google representative, is to use a Rel=Canonical Tag rather than NoIndex. Here is how Google describes this canonical tag.
We now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.
Apparently Google treats this as a hint rather than a standard so it is not fool-proof. Others see Reasons to use rel=canonical, and reasons not to.
As Matt Cutts recommended, given the wooliness in some of the above, the preferred approach is to develop the website architecture so that duplicate web pages do not arise. Then one does not have to rely on the canonical tag or the noindex follow combination. In this way one avoids the hanging / dangling web pages problem.
The exact methods will depend on the architecture. One very useful approach is to show only an initial excerpt on the blog Home Page with a … more link to the full post as a single web page. For category or tag archive pages, you can show only the titles of items so this again avoids the duplicate content problem. The important thing is to be vigilant and look out for essentially duplicate web pages as revealed by a full website scan using the equivalent of a search engine robot such as Xenu.
The WordPress blogging software is quite rightly immensely popular. The Open-Source community that supports it has developed a whole raft of supporting code and applications that make it a pleasure to use.
This blog and the other SMM blogs now have a slightly different look. This is because we are now using a feature of WordPress, Multiple Loops. The beauty of WordPress is that the concepts are all very easy to understand. This particular feature will hopefully give much more reader satisfaction.
There are two elements to the change. The first is that you will now only see one blog post when you visit. Although Google tries to be helpful, it can occasionally provide more from a blog that you wish to see. Now you will see precisely the blog post that is relevant to your keyword query.
The other element is that at the bottom of this single blog post you will now see a list of the most popular blog posts as determined by our visitors. If you like what you see in the initial post then perhaps some of the other blog posts may tweak your interest.
The changes to the theme required for this new look are very straightforward. Hopefully this simple explanation will help you apply this same approach to your blog if you so wish.
Web pages in a blog are produced by WordPress templates. These are files with names such as index.php or single.php. Within these template files, the heart of the WordPress software is code which is called The Loop. The WordPress Codex gives a more detailed explanation of The Loop In Action.
The content of all blog posts is held in an associated mySQL database. When a blog web page is displayed, the web page will show certain information for every blog post entry that fits the particular database query implied by your selection of web page. For example, if you want the most recent blog post, then the loop picks up only the information on that blog post. This is illustrated by the following image of a WordPress blog page.
When you visit the home page of the blog, you are often seeing a series of blog posts that are created via the file named index.php. The number of blog posts is selected by the blog webmaster. For example if it is arranged that the blog would normally show the 3 most recent blog posts, then this is illustrated by the following image.
When Google sends you to a single blog post to fit your keyword query then you are often seeing what a file named single.php produces by applying the loop. Normally in the index.php and the single.php files, the loop starts with the following code (note that a space has been inserted after < in the following code samples to ensure the code could be printed.):
< !-- start of the loop --> < ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
The Loop is then all the code before a final < ?php endif; ?> terminates the Loop (again as mentioned a space has been inserted between < and ? to allow this code to display correctly).
As mentioned the new feature is that we are now using Multiple Loops in the WordPress software. The following image shows what is being displayed. The first post is produced by a first Loop. The list of Most Popular Posts is then produced by a second Loop.
In order to have only one post appear in the first loop, we use a Template Tag, query_posts. This query_posts tag can modify what the Loop accesses from the database. In this case we wish to have only one blog post to appear so the first Loop starts off as follows:
< !-- start of first loop -->
< ?php query_posts('showposts=1');
if (have_posts()) : ?>
The only complication here is that as entries are taken from database in The Loop, the database software maintains a count of the data that has been used. Normally other applications of the Loop will access only new data since past data has already been accessed. In order to see the posts which are of interest, we use another WordPress Template Tag as the second Loop starts to reset the count. This tag is the rewind_posts tag.
In order for the list of Most Popular Posts to be displayed, a new category, popular, has been created. When visitor traffic confirms that a blog post is popular, then it is assigned to this category in addition to whatever category may have been appropriate.
The code to start the second Loop to achieve the effect shown here is as follows:
< !-- start of second loop -->
< ?php rewind_posts();
query_posts('category_name=popular&showposts=-1');
if (have_posts()) : ?>
In addition to displaying popular posts for greater visitor satisfaction, this also ensures that such posts have more links pointing to them. This should ensure greater search engine visibility for these posts. In all, this format would seem to have only benefits. It will be interesting to see what reactions blog visitors have to this new format.
Actually there is bad news and there is good news.
The bad news is that the extra 10% discount available on orders during February no longer applies.
The arrangement is that you can buy display ads on all four SMM blogs with a discount arrangement if you buy the same space on more than one blog. The other three blogs are:
The more blogs on which you purchase display ads, the bigger the discount. Detailed information on visitor traffic, rates and discounts is given on the SMM Blogs Display Ads web page.
The good news is that ad rates were set on the basis of visitor traffic for the month of February. Currently in March for all four blogs the total pageview traffic is over 20, 000 pageviews per month. This represents on average more than a 100% increase in visitor traffic over that for February. The cost per impression is thus half of what it was in February.
As usual, it is first come, first served. Click here to learn more on Display Ads traffic and rates.
Exponential marketing is another way of describing viral marketing. It brings out more strongly that each person in the chain of communication passes on the word to several other people. In a way it has similarities with MLM – multi-level marketing.
A meme is a new word created to describe a catchphrase or concept that spreads quickly from person to person via the Internet. This works because each person is encouraged to tag as many people as possible and ask them to spread the word. Like MLM, the meme process can occasionally run out of people to whom to pass the word but in its early stages it can be very effective.
There is one on the go at the moment to publicize the IM Spring Break. This is a conference put on by IMBroadcast.com, the first video sharing site strictly for the Internet Marketing community. It was founded by three Internet Marketers, Loren Baker, Jordan Kasteler, and Dave Snyder.
On their blog, they describe a contest involving a meme, whereby the winner will get free attendance at the conference. The winner will be the person getting the most involvement in the meme-spreading as mentioned by pingbacks to their blog post. The blog post should list the 7 things you think will happen at IM Spring Break with emphasis on news-worthiness.
Alysson Fergison (aka SEOaly) hopes to be that winner and she tagged among others David Leonhardt of The Happy Guy Marketing. He in turn has included me as one of his tags.
I must admit it sounds to be a very amiable event with a really good crowd. Just see some of the attendees: Loren Baker, Jordan Kasteler, Dave Snyder, Chris Winfield, Rae Hoffman, Greg Finn, Kenny Hyder, Steve Plunkett, Zaibatsu (Reg Sadler), Neal Rodriguez, Brent Csutoras, Todd Malicoat, and Jeff Quipp. With such participants, one might question what will not happen at this IM Spring Break. Rae Hoffman is even discussing NDA so perhaps what goes on at the Hilton Deerfield Beach will stay there in the spirit of Non-disclosure.
Perhaps those I tag for the meme will be more creative on 7 things that will occur. I’m tagging via their Twitter presences Ruud Hein, Donna Fontenot and Peter Meyers. After all we have got to do our best to get SEOaly to that Break for the mud-wrestling event.
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