Monday, November 2, 2009
Web site owners and marketers have always craved more information with regards to how Google sees their site. Google Webmaster Tools address these and other needs as they provide support for those looking to diagnose errors, improve a site’s visibility and declare preferences on how to handle web site listings.
Of course, before you can begin using Webmaster Tools, you will need to have an active Google Account. Once you have an account, you can get started by accessing:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Verification
Before you can get too far, you need to tell Google what sites you want to have controls over. Just enter the URL as prompted, and you’ll soon see that you need to verify your control of a site. You can choose to upload a blank HTML file, or, paste a META tag in your home page’s HEAD. Either way, it’s a quick way for Google to ensure that you have access to the domains before you can view any information.
The Overview
With your web site verified, you can now access a web site’s profile. To do so, you’ll want to click on the Manage: http://www.yourdomain.com link in the Webmaster Tools Dashboard. You will then be directed to the “Overview” screen. This screen contains high level details of the most important information on your site as well as links to specific Webmaster Tools.
For the sake of clarity, we’ll work with the menu on the left, starting at the top and working our way down…
Diagnostics
The Diagnostic tools are here to tell you about any errors that Google has encountered on its normal or on its mobile crawling sessions. In other words, if GoogleBot came through your site and found some 404 errors, pages that were excluded in a robots.txt, or other faults… this is where you will find out.
The mobile and standard reports provide the same types of information. That is a breakdown of the following errors:
* HTTP errors
* Not found
* URLs not followed
* URLs restricted by robots.txt
* URLs timed out
* Unreachable URLs
Obviously, you’ll want Google to encounter as few errors as possible. Therefore, you should check these reports often to make sure that no problems exist and that all new content is being spidered.
Statistics
The statistical tools are the gold mine for site marketers. Here, you’ll gain access to a number of reports, each of which I’ll highlight below…
Top Search Queries
The top search queries report shows you how people are getting to your site from a Google Search. Once accessed, you’ll see tables that represent which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked. One cool thing that many overlook here, is that Google will show you where in the SERPs your site was listed for particular search terms. It’s not always exact, but it does tend to accurate within a position or two.
What Googlebot Sees
This is a great way to learn how others link to you and how those links are considered alongside your on page content. Three sections exist on this report… phrases used in external links to your site (anchor text), keywords in your site’s content, and in inbound links, and finally the actual content on your site ordered by density.
Crawl Stats
The crawl stats report is less about actual crawling stats, and more about PageRank values. Google breaks your site down and shows you how your site’s PageRank is distributed on a range of Low, Medium, High – and “not yet assigned”. While this information is helpful, it’s often discouraging as most pages in most sites will always be seen as low on the PageRank scale.
The best part of this one tool is the bottom table that shows what specific page on your site carries the most PageRank. It’s updated monthly, and could be used to measure how successful singular link building campaigns are.
Index Stats
The index stats are nothing more than a shortcut to advanced Google queries on your site using operators. Shortcut links are provided on the following operators…
* site:
* link:
* cache:
* info:
* related:
Subscriber Stats
Since much of the world now involved RSS feeds, readers and content syndication – Google makes stats on your feed subscriptions easy to find – assuming of course that you use their feed management systems.
This isn’t a bad tool, but it is new to the Toolbox and could certainly benefit from some updates. If you’re not already using an RSS feed manager though, it’s an excellent option.
Links
Google is all about the links from page to page and domain to domain. The link reports here in Webmaster Tools are limited, but do provide you with ways to measure internal and external link popularity. This becomes handy if you’re trying to force increased exposure on new areas of your site, or, you’re looking for a way to stay on top of your link popularity over time.
Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps are what the entire Webmaster Tools were initially built around. Here you can upload and manage XML based sitemap files that catalog all of the pages on your site. Using these XML files, Google can then access all of the pages you’d like for them to.
Sitemaps have been around for a while now and are a much deeper issue that this article can do justice on. If you’re interested in reading more, I’d first refer you back to an article here on Search Engine Journal from July 2005 from Stephen Brennan.
Tools
Last, but certainly not least – is the tools area of Webmaster Tools. Seems redundant, right? Sure it is – but this is where you’ll get the most from Webmaster Tools, so stay tuned!
Analyze robots.txt
If you don’t already know about robots.txt, it’s basically a protocol for Googlebot and other spiders to immediately find instructions on what they can and cannot have access to on your site. If you don’t want spiders indexing your images, just disallow them. If you’d prefer not to have certain areas of your site indexed and available for the searching public – go ahead and restrict access.
Here though, you can check to make sure your robots.txt file is not only up to date, but also valid in terms of how it is written. Many times, a simple change on a robots.txt file will force Google and other engines to drop dozens or even hundreds of pages at a time. With that in mind, use this tool whenever you make changes to your robots.txt files!
Manage site verification
Remember the first step involving the META tags or blank HTML files? Well, here you can go back and alter how your site is verified – and even protect your site. Say for example your SEO provider enrolls you in Webmaster Tools, and then you pull the plug on their services. If not for this area of Webmaster Tools, your information would remain available to them forever.
Instead, Google’s actually watching your back and reporting if others aside from yourself have access.
Set crawl rate
This area of is very informative, as it provides an overview of Googlebot’s activity on your site. Many people view this area and figure it’s useless (unless the rare option to adjust crawling speed is enabled).
I’d like to offer up some tips though to make better use of the activity graphs.
First, let’s realize that you’ll be limited to a 90 day span. Second, think back to when you’ve recently launched new content, began new link campaigns or began hosting some rich media like videos and streaming audio.
All of these events may lead to spikes in the graphs. It’s these spikes that I really want you to review actively. For example, if you’re using new resources for backlinks, you can measure how responsive Google is by seeing how those spikes correspond to your efforts. The same holds true if you’re making any efforts at all to improve link popularity of any kind.
The end goal though with these, is to get Google coming in more often, requesting more pages and interacting more with you. That will allow you to get new content indexed and ranked more quickly in the future.
Set preferred domain
Tired of seeing www.domain.com and domain.com in your search results? Or, maybe you have become worried about canonical URLs and how they may be impacted your optimization and links? Well, the set preferred domain tool is one way to help police things a bit.
Using this tool you can instruct Google to display URLs according to your preference. Now you can have all listings appear as being on www.domain.com.
Of course, if you’re not worried about this – you can also opt to have no associations set at all.
Enable enhanced image search
If you love to appear in the Google Image search results, you might be able to have some fun with this tool. It’s important to note though, that many have had a poor experience, ultimately losing out on a lot of traffic.
The core of the issue is this. Enhanced image search allows you greater control for labeling images that reside on your domain. While that sounds fun and exciting, Google’s trying to make a game of it. Literally.
Altering labels on images means that you are also using Google Image Labeler (http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/). Image Labeler is a way to help improve image relevancy, but users are encouraged to use the labeler by earning points.
What can you do with the points? Nothing yet. Maybe there’s a perk associated with it down the line, but for now – my advice would be to stay away form enhanced image search until some more information is available.
Remove URLs
For some reason I love any tools that allow me to tell Google what to do. This automated tool is available to help resolve issues on pages that no longer exist or create problems for you by being in the Google index.
A great example is how people leave their servers wide open for Googlebot to explore. Common mistakes include having your web analytics indexed (folks with Webalizer, AWStats, etc. are commonly guilty vulnerable). Using this tool, you can go in, remove them from the index – and then go back and make the necessary edits on your robots.txt files.
In short, it’s a great way to expedite the removal of information that simply has to go.
Conclusion
While the above serves as a guide to each tool in the entire Webmaster Tools line, there are certainly ways to make the most of your experience with Google.
First, make note of all the information Google will allow you to download. Then, make sure you put it in your schedule to download all information on at least a 60 day cycle. Since Google is providing information on 90 days at a time, you’ll want to have historical reports to overlap and analyze.
As you use these tools more, you’ll find a number of new ways to review the data. I’ve spent days reviewing all of the inbound links to some of my domains, and suggest you take a few hours to do the same. You’ll learn a lot more about your site than you thought was available – and in the end – information is the power you need to be successful.
Monday, November 2, 2009 0
Google's implementation of Universal Search has changed the whole search landscape and settled the often debated SEO issue of whether the use of ALT
text and keywords in image file names have any effect on rankings. In two words- they do.
1. Context is extremely important. Images can rank based on what surroundsthem on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc. on the page.
Image-only sites generally only work well if it is an extremely well-known brand or product. Otherwise, you need keyword rich text.
2. URL content text is important, too. The text of your URL is looked at as partof the context surrounding the image. The domain name, directory name and
filename of the image (name it with keywords) are taken into consideration as faras relevance.
3. Use captions if possible. Take a tip from newspaper photos and placekeyword rich captions with your images. Make the text good, quality content, not
keyword spam.
4. Proper image type is crucial. Make absolutely sure your photographs are.jpg and not .gif. The .jpg format is standard for photographs whereas the .gif
format is normally used for graphic images.
5. Images can effect reputation management. Non-flattering images can reallyhurt you. Optimizing your images can help push any images you would rather the
public not see off the results pages.
6. Create a sitemap feed of images. As with web pages, the search enginescan follow a sitemap that you create of images that you want spidered.
7. Use descriptive ALT text. Search optimizers used to debate over whetherALT text had any influence on rankings. That debate is over. Optimize your
images using descriptive keyword-rich ALT text. Don't stuff the ALT attribute.Make it short and to the point. The keyword rich ALT text for your images could
be the tie-breaker over who gets the top spot, so always use it.
8. Use the word "picture" or "photo" in your ALT text. Some searchers do usethose words when they search for images.
9. Label images with your brand or URL. This will capture some home pagetraffic for you. Watermark the images or just add your URL somewhere.
10. Use high quality images. Unique images with good contrast tend to be thebest.
11. Add photos to Google Maps. Fluff up your Google Maps listing with photosand images. These can influence visitors who find you through local search, etc.
12. Post images to Flickr. Open a Flickr account and put unique photos in youraccount. Basically, each photo you put up is its own web page with a title,
description and tags. You can include a link back to your site and share thephotos with other Flickr users and social sites.
Search engines obviously place a lot emphasis on a site’s content when assessing its relevance to a particular topic. There are many ways that they evaluate the content. Many years ago, search engines figured if a word was mentioned a lot on a page or site, then that site must be relevant to that topic. However, it became far too common for people to stuff a site full of keywords; many times the wording was unnatural, and people hid text by making it color of the background, etc. Search engines realized that this did not help provide their users with truly relevant results and have since lessened the emphasis they place on keyword density. While it is important to use a target keyword on a page or site, the search engines are aiming for relevance, and density isn’t the only measure. Therefore, it is very important to use target keyword(s) found in the target audience’s natural vocabulary.
When looking at content, a small way that search engines determine the importance of a word is its characteristics on the web page. Is it linked to another page? Is it in bold? These are hints that search engines can use since it makes sense that a word that is somehow made to stand out has some importance.
A common content issue for websites is duplicate content (both on the same site and amongst many websites). There are many reasons why content may be duplicated throughout a site (like browser and printer friendly versions of the same page). Search engines feel it is important to direct their users to the most relevant and original version of the content. Further, it can confuse the engines when identical content appears on a site in more than one place. There are a few ways to deal with this situation. One is redirecting from one version of the page to the main version of the page using what site administrators refer to as a 301 redirect. The other is to use the robots.txt file, a simple text file housed in the root directory of a website’s file structure that instructs web spiders to ignore a particular web page.
It is also important to note that search engine spiders cannot read all types of content. They cannot read the text within Flash; they cannot interpret the words in an audio file; and they are unable to determine the words used within a video. However, site designers can use tags (such as <ALT> tags with images) to help the web spiders know what a piece of media is about. The Flash, audio, or video can also be surrounded by regular HTML text content that is descriptive of the content. Using <ALT> tags is only really crucial when the majority of a website’s content is unreadable to web spiders.
Creating a robots.txt file will not improve your search engine positioning, but it does provide robots with information concerning which files you will not allow to be crawled and indexed in the search engines.
When a robot crawls your site it looks for the robots.txt file. If it doesn't find one it assumes automatically that it may crawl and index the entire site. Not having a robots.txt file can also create unnecessary 404 errors in your server logs, making it more difficult to track "real" 404 errors.
What is a simple robots.txt file?
Please note: This will allow all robots to crawl and index all files.
This allows all robots to crawl all files.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
What if I don't want a particular file crawled?
Please note: Disallowing a specific file to be crawled will keep it from being indexed. The file disallowed will not show up in the search engines. HOWEVER, this is only effective for friendly robots. Robots can choose to ignore your instructions.
This allows all robots to crawl all files except the images file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
This allows all robots to crawl all files except the images file and the stats file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /stats/
What if I want to disallow a particular robot?
Occasionally you may find that you would like to disallow specific robots from crawling your site or limit which files they may have access to.
This denies access to Googlebot-image to any files in your domain
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
This specifically denies Googlebot-image to your images file
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /images/
Importance of Sitemaps
There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.
Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.
Why Use a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.
Generating and Submitting the Sitemap
The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.
Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.
Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Internet is a spectrum of ideas and information. Searching the net for the right webpage can be a cumbersome task. Search engines explore the Internet on the basis of the keywords or a combination of words that are present in different websites. These search engines maintain an index of words that help them easily locate a website. Search engines have become an integral part of an Internet user.
The earlier versions of search engines indexed only a few thousands of pages. With the advent in technology, the search engines have become more compatible with Web pages to such an extent that they can list any site by using different permutation and combination of words. It can even respond to millions of queries in a day.
How does a Search Engine Work?
Internet search engines search the databases by means of a list of words or a combination of words they have stored/cached over a period of time. The search engines have a computer program called spider that indexes the list of words found in different websites. This program further travels through the links connected with different sites and index another set of words.
Only those sites that are being harvested by the search engine are opened. The spider searches a copy of the site, and when the user clicks on links, the actual site opens. The spiders are programmed to omit articles that appear in a page and detect terms that appear in titles, subtitles and meta tags.
Timeline of Search Engine Evolution
The first search engine, called Archie, was developed by a University student named Alan Emtage. He created the program to search file names from the Internet. In 1993, another program called Aliweb was launched. It was a manually constructed web directory that had several limitations. In the same year, JumpStation was developed by using spider technology. It allowed the users to search keywords in the titles and headers of Web pages.
As the numbers of Web pages increased, the search also became slow and this search engine stopped functioning in 1994. JumpStation, however, can be considered as the first modern search engine. In the same year, WebCrawler was launched. It had better features than JumpStation and searched the entire contents of a Webpage. This search engine was later sold to Excite.
The next one was Lycos that added a few more features to the conventional search engine, such as proximity to matching and listing in the order of relevancy. In 1996, the first meta search engine MetaCrawler was developed. This tool was capable of searching on other search engines and compiling the results. In the following year,
David Filo and JerryYang, two Stanford University students, launched the famous Yahoo. Around this time, Altavista was gaining popularity. It used the spider technology and indexed and responded to millions of pages per day.
Towards the end of 1997, another search engine named Google was launched. The entry of Google marked a major milestone in the history of search engines. Google uses a “page ranking” system on the basis of number of links to a particular site.
At present, Google is a very popular search engine with a huge list of websites in their index. It is so popular that it lead to origin of the term“Googling,” which means to search for information using Google. Bing is a search engine developed by Microsoft, which categorizes searches allowing for improved image and video searches along with preview searches.
Some Popular Search Engines
Following are some of the popular search engines: Baidu (Chinese), Bing (formerly MSN Search and Live Search), Cuil, Duck Duck Go, Sogou (Chinese), Sohu (Chinese), Yandex (Russian), Rediff.com, and Guruji.com.
Future of Search Engines
At present, most of the search engines work on tha basis of the exact matches of the keywords entered for search. This can be confusing as a single word can have different meanings. In future, search engines will be developed on the basis of concept-based searching and natural language queries, and this phase of evolution in search engines has been keenly awaited by users around the world.
How Search Engines Operate
Search engines have a short list of critical operations that allows them to provide relevant web results when searchers use their system to find information.
1.Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders" that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Estimates are that of the approximately 20 billion existing pages, search engines have crawled between 8 and 10 billion.
2.Indexing Documents
Once a page has been crawled, it's contents can be "indexed" - stored in a giant database of documents that makes up a search engine's "index". This index needs to be tightly managed, so that requests which must search and sort billions of documents can be completed in fractions of a second.
3.Processing Queries
When a request for information comes into the search engine (hundreds of millions do each day), the engine retrieves from its index all the document that match the query. A match is determined if the terms or phrase is found on the page in the manner specified by the user. For example, a search for car and driver magazine at Google returns 8.25 million results, but a search for the same phrase in quotes ("car and driver magazine") returns only 166 thousand results. In the first system, commonly called "Findall" mode, Google returned all documents which had the terms "car" "driver" and "magazine" (they ignore the term "and" because it's not useful to narrowing the results), while in the second search, only those pages with the exact phrase "car and driver magazine" were returned. Other advanced operators (Google has a list of 11) can change which results a search engine will consider a match for a given query.
4.Ranking ResultsOnce
the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.
Friday, October 30, 2009 0
WHAT IS SEO?
Search engine optimisation is all about making your website visible in the right context. When web users search on Google or Yahoo and other search engines for key terms that are included on your website, you want them to find your website easily.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the term given to the methods you can use to make this happen, and to optimise the ranking your website gets in search engine results.
WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT?
A considerable proportion of website traffic (up to 80 per cent) is directed from search engines. The more established your site is, the more likely it is that users will come directly to your website, as returning visitors.
Search engines are an important tool in building traffic to your site from occasional or lapsed users – as well as new ones. These visitors may not know your website URL, or may not even know about your organisation – so will most likely find your website through a search engine.
Therefore, increasing the presence of your website on search engines is key to driving traffic and visitors to your site.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements
META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements, are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. META Tags are still relevant with some indexing search engines. You should utilize your META Tags in accordance with the W3C - World Wide Web Consortium Metadata Specifications and those of the search engines you are targeting.
The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.
We've provided HTML Comments (look for this <!-- Comment Here -->) in the source code to help you understand the metadata elements referenced in this series of topics.
1. TITLE Element - Page Titles
Every html document must have a TITLE Element in the head section. Some refer to the <title> element as a meta tag (title tag) when it is not.
<title>META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements</title>
To see an example of where the title element is placed in the html, view the source code of this web page. Look at the very top of the page right after the opening <head> tag.
2. META Description Tag
Some search engines will index the META Description Tag found in the <head></head> section of your web pages. These indexing search engines may present the content of your meta description tag as the result of a search query.
<meta name="description" content="META Tags or what are officially referred to as Metadata Elements are found within the <head></head> section of your web pages. The following is a partial list of metadata elements that may be used in the overall site structuring, organization, and search engine marketing strategy.">
3. META Keywords Tag
The META Keywords Tag is where you list keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that specific page. There have been numerous discussions at various search engine marketing forums surrounding the use of the keywords tag and its effectiveness. The overall consensus is that the tag has little to no relevance with the major search engines today.
<meta name="keywords" content="META Tags, Tips, Metadata Elements, META Description Tag, META Keywords Tag, Language Tag, Link Relationship Tag, Title Element">
4. META Language Tag
In HTML elements, the language attribute or META Language Tag specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
5. META Link Relationship Tag
It is helpful for search results to reference the beginning of the collection of documents in addition to the page hit by the search. You may help search engines by using the link element with rel="start" along with the title attribute. The META Link Relationship tag is part of the metadata that appears within the <head></head> section of your web pages.
<link rel="start" href="/meta-tags/" title="META Tags Tips - Metadata Elements">
6. META Robots Tag
The Robots META Tag is meant to provide users who cannot upload or control the/robots.txt file at their websites, with a last chance to keep their content out of search engine indexes and services.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
* META Robots Tag for Googlebot
Googlebot obeys the noindex, nofollow, and noarchive META Robots Tags. If you place these tags in the head of your HTML/XHTML document, you can cause Google to not index, not follow, and/or not archive particular documents on your site.
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive">
* META Robots Tag for MSNBot
MSNBot obeys the noindex and nofollow Robots META Tag. Placing these tags in the heading of your HTML document prevents MSNBot from indexing or following specific documents.
<meta name="msnbot" content="noindex, nofollow">
7. META Revisit-After Tag
The revisit-after META tag is not supported by any major search engines, it never was supported and probably never will be. It was developed for, and supported by, Vancouver Webpages and their local search engine searchBC.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">
8. META Tags Abuse and Misuse - Metadata Structuring and Standards
This is a search engine marketing article published by our System Admin (Edward Lewis) that discusses the use of HTML Comments Tags and proprietary metadata elements.
9. META Tag Myths - The Mythical META Tag
2009 Article discussing the perpetuating myths surrounding the use of the META Description Tag and META Keywords Tag.
10. DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross domain information resource description.
<meta name="DC.title" lang="en" content="DC Dublin Core META Tags - DCMI Dublin Core Metadata Initiative">
11. HTML Comments Tag
HTML comments are not metadata but, are typically found in the <head></head> section of web pages. HTML comments can be utilized anywhere within your documents HTML structure.
<!-- HTML Comments (treated as HTML markup) -->
There has been a myth that has perpetuated over the years where keywords and keyword phrases listed inside HTML comments tags would add a boost to the overall relevancy of the page. This is not true based on numerous tests we've performed during the years 2002 through 2009.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 0
Google SandBox - An Introduction
The Google SandBox is a metaphorical term coined by SEOs and Webmasters, not associated with Google, to explain why most new Websites have very poor rankings in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). The existence of Google SandBox has not yet been clearly proved but there seem to have some changes to Google's Algorithm sometime around March 2004 that denies top ranking for newly launched web sites. Of course, there are exceptions and many Web pages have made it to the top of the SERP in spite of the sandbox, but the sandbox seems to be an inevitable page rank dampening concept.
In November 2003, Google implemented what was popularly known as the "Florida Filter", a filter added to the Google Algorithm to reduce spam. The "Florida Filter" proved to be a disaster as it wiped out many small online shops but didn't fight spam producers as much as it was expected to. Spammers and link farms generate zillions of websites and millions of links every day adversely affecting the SERP rankings of certain legitimate sites. Thus Google might have decided to keep away new sites from getting good ranks till they proved themselves.
How It Works?
It seems of late Google has been withholding high ranking ability of newly launched websites for 2-4 months. The penalty is applicable to new sites only and doesn't affect domains that are 4 or more months old and have good backlinks. The sandbox effect also doesn't affect new pages on long standing websites.
After the newly launched websites prove their worthiness by developing good back links and spend some time on the web they are given a weight and eventually the sandbox effect goes away.
Are You in the SandBox?
Google's spiders may pickup your site through an inbound link or you may have submitted your site to Google but almost all newly launched websites successfully get into the sandbox. Although there are some exceptions mostly all new sites are relegated to the sandbox for sometime.
But How do you know if your site is in the SandBox?
* If the page is in the SandBox, Google doesn't give the page a pagerank
* A "link:www.yourwebsite.com" or "site:www.yourwebsite.com" search on Google doesn't return any results. i.e Google doesn't show signs of any other websites linking to yours nor displays pages related to yours.
* No pages other than your HomePage are listed. Sometimes even the homepage isn't listed.
How Long Does This SandBox Effect Continue?
Although no accurate information is available in this regard, it is generally believed to last for 3-4 months.
What to Do When You Are Struck in the SandBox?
SandBox can really be a boon instead of a bane if you know how to utilize the period of dormancy to optimize your site for better ranking when it comes out of the slumber. Use this time to
* Write good content: Content is the king. A better content will attract more visitors to your site.
* Optimize your web pages: This could be tricky as there would be no way you can measure the effect of your optimizations. But it is worth it, for when you are listed, all this optimization will pay off.
* Build Links: Inbound links go a long way in improving your page rank on SERP and your Google Pagerank. Therefore, start building links.
* Optimize for MSN and Yahoo: These two search engines are growing fast and can definitely bring quality traffic to your site if you concentrate on optimizing for them. MSN and Yahoo don't have a sandbox, so it's worth a try.
How to Get Out of the SandBox?
All though the effectiveness of these methods is not guaranteed, some people claim they work.
Method One: Join Google Adwords or Adsense Programs. Google seems to have different spiders for adsense / adwords and general site crawling but it is widely believed that subscribing to the adsense/adwords programs gets your pages spidered in minutes even by its search related spiders.
Method Two:The most widely used, this method involves purchasing an old domain for its longevity and back links.
But beware Google is known to change their algorithm quite often and the rules for sandbox may change too.
Conclusion
From the various discussions that have been going around the SEO world, it is quite evident that your newly launched Web page might not show up well on the SERP rankings in Google because of Google's dampening filter, the Google SandBox. Sandbox is inevitable and has to be lived with. Thus, it is the duty of the Webmaster or the site owner to plan the site launch date in such a way that there is minimum damage. During the sandbox period of a site, there is a great opportunity to improve incoming links, apply for directory listings, improve content, and so on. Please note that if all these are properly done, when you come out of the Google SandBox, you can get listed in the SERP with a good rank.
With some planning and by properly utilizing the tips mentioned in this article, you can utilize the dormancy of your Web page during the sandbox period to burst into the top rankings of the SERP pages when you come out of the dormancy.
What is Google Page Rank?
If you're involved in SEO, or have the Google Toolbar installed in your browser, chances are you'll have come across Google page rank.Google Page Rank basically a score for your website out of 10 based upon how important Google think you're page is in the whole scheme of interweb searchery.
By important, Google means how many people link to your page, the more pages there are, the more relevant your page must be. But that's not quite it, it's no good having thousands of links to your page if they're not important pages themselves, so in turn, it is also determined by the quality of the pages that link to you.
Google themselves say the importance is made up of over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms, whilst Wikipedia have a "simplified" algorithm that in my opinion is anything but, mind you, maths was never my forte.
In a nutshell, more quality links = higher page ranks. Like with many SEO techniques, Google page rank alone will not guarantee you a high ranking, but it will help, it's more than likely that pages with a lower page rank will appear above yours if they have managed to crack other areas of SEO.
Rest assured though, if you have a number of quality links to your page, it's SERP (search engine results page) ranking will improve along with it's page rank, which will do you no harm at all in the SEO world.
Realistically speaking, as a small business owner you should probably be aiming for a score of around 2 or 3 once you're site is established in the Google. High scores of 7 or above to be reserved for the big players, such as Microsoft, Apple and Google themselves (the google home page gets 10)
Google Page Rank Inbound/Backlink Implementation
The page rank of a page depends on the number and page rank metric of all pages that link to it. A page that is linked to, by many pages with high page rank receives a high rank itself. Implementing BackLinks from other high page rank sites will determine the popularity or importance of your website and result in a higher ranking in Google.
