No one wants to get banned from Google, but unfortunately, it does happen. As Michael Stebbins of Market Motive explains, it is important to understand why some websites do, in fact, get banned from Google in order to prevent it from happening to you.

First of all, he suggests using Google’s Webmaster Tools to know for sure if you are banned. The dashboard offers very helpful information in this type of situation.

To make sure that your site doesn’t get banned, Stebbins tells WebProNews that you should think like a search engine. In other words, you have to realize that they are looking for genuine relevance and genuine popularity. If you try to fake either of these elements, Google will not want to partner with you.

Some people fake relevancy and popularity by linking to questionable websites, taking advantage of JavaScript redirects, and selling links. All these factors could result in Google banning your site.

To get re-included in Google’s index, Stebbins says you need to first decide if it is worth investing time in the re-inclusion process. There are some cases in which users commit so many “mortal sins” that is nearly impossible to rebuild a relevant and popular website.

At this point, he advises users to invest in another a site and apply a 301 redirect from the old site to the new one.  However, if you have not violated many of the guidelines, Stebbins says you could send a letter detailing what you did wrong and how you have fixed it. By doing this, it increases your chances of getting back into the index.

Are you taking preventative measures to make sure your site doesn’t get banned?

Posted by randfish

As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it’s by request.

I’ve been hearing from a lot of our PRO members that they feel both overwhelmed and confused by all the offerings in PRO. I know it’s tough when there are 30+ pages on which unique types of PRO content exist and even the dashboard doesn’t link to all of them (that’s our fault for bad organization – I promise it’s getting better by the end of summer). Hence, this post is all about what to do in your first 15 minutes inside PRO to get lots of value that can actually move the needle on your SEO actions and search traffic.

Step 1: Find Your Big Missed Opportunities via Top Pages

 

When you run a report in Open Site Explorer, click to the "top pages" tab and browse through the list of the most-linked-to pages on your domain. You’re looking for two things – any troubling codes (302, 40x, 50x) and pages that have lots of links, but aren’t targeting competitive keywords for relevant search traffic. In the former instance, you want to get those pages up and pointing to the right place. In the latter case, you need to run that page through OSE, determine who’s linking to it and with what anchor text (there’s a tab for that, too), then see if you can put together good content to match the links & ranking ability. You can do all that, later – for now, just export the list to CSV, or make a note to revisit.

Elapsed time: 3 minutes

Step 2: Crawl 3,000 Pages on Your Site and ID Potential Errors

 

The new Custom Crawl Prototype will mimic a search engine spider and crawl up to 3,000 pages on any domain, then email you with a CSV of the results in 24 hours. It identifies duplicate content issues, HTTP headers, missing titles & meta descriptions, and many more potential SEO pitfalls. Get a report on a site or two and dig into the results tomorrow.

Elapsed time: 3 minutes 30 seconds

Step 3: Run Keyword Difficulty Reports for Your Top 5 Keyword Targets

How tough, relatively speaking, are the keywords you’re chasing and where might easy opportunities exist? Keyword Difficulty can help answer this question and provides a terrific CSV export of the top 25 sites/pages ranking for any query with metrics for each. Often just a report or two can help you identify keyword targets where small quantities of links or optimization effort can take you a long way. They’re also ideal for showing management/clients exactly how far you have to go to catch up with the competition.

Elapsed time: 7 minutes

Step 4: Uncover Some Easy Link Targets with Link Intersect

Tom Critchlow and I call the Link Intersect Tool "cheating," because it’s just too easy to find good link opportunities. Plug in your site and at least 2 (up to 5) competing sites (or just sites that you think have relevant/acquirable links) and it spits back a list of sites, pages and metrics that link to 2+ of the competitors but don’t link to you. It’s like shooting links in a barrel! (that’s a thing, right?)

Elapsed time: 11 minutes

Step 5: Sign Up for a Webinar (or Download a Past Presentation)

I’ve personally run a dozen 60-90 minute webinars for our PRO members on topics ranging from "reverse engineering the SERPs" to "competitive link building" to "actionable analytics" and more. The feedback we get on these is overwhelming positive and we’re running two each month (one with a specific content focus and another reviewing members’ sites). The webinar archives contain video+audio downloads of the presentations plus a link to register for upcoming ones. If you like a more interactive/participatory learning environment, these are a great option. 

Elapsed time: 12 minutes

Step 6: Track Rankings on a Few Dozen Key Terms/Phrases

My recommendation is to Track Rankings for 10-20 key terms you’re targeting, a handful of mid-range "nice-to-haves" and a healthy helping of long-tail keywords to help give a sense of how you’re performing across the keyword demand curve. When traffic fluctuates, it’s great to be able to see if rankings were the cause, or if other factors (demand, downtime, errors, analytics capture problems, etc.) could be the culprit. The best part about the current rank tracking system is the ability to choose between multiple engines on any TLD (and to select "entire subdomain" so it catches any page from your site in the top 50 results).

Elapsed time: 15 minutes

---

OK, your quarter-hour is up, but so are your chances for a lot more search traffic in the next few weeks and months. When you’re ready to devote some more time, you can install the mozbar, check if any deals in the Discount Store are relevant/useful, distribute some PRO Guides to your compatriots, give Trifecta a spin, watch some PRO Whiteboard Videos, ask a question in Q+A, review the hundreds of PRO Tips, leverage the Link Acquisition Assistant to find some sexy new link opportunities, dig around in Labs, well… you get the idea.

And, as a tease, here’s an early comp of what we’ve been busy with in 2010:

 

ETA: Late this summer

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According to Gil Reich of Answers.com, “The most important thing to remember about links is that you’re trying to get somebody else to put your message on their site.” So, how do you do it?

As Reich points out, one way of doing it is through flattery. This tactic should come naturally since most all of us have probably used flattery to get things in the past.

The approach however, is often difficult. Popular link builder Debra Mastaler of Alliance-Link suggests looking for the source instead of targeting sites such as CNN or Digg. Reich also adds that users should target the people who are at the center of the community.

For example, see who is frequently being linked to and tweeted. He says Twitter and other social sites are very helpful because the best link building is done through relationship building.

Reich does offer a word of caution in regards to outbound links. He says users need to be careful and monitor when linking out. With WikiAnswers, Answers.com has to be especially careful since it is user generated content. In addition, they use nofollow and hope the community will not take advantage of them. (Correction: See Comments.)

As for the future of link building, Reich does not see it changing dynamically. He says it is similar to the search industry in that the “Wild West” phase is over and people are doing what works. Talking about on-page optimization, he recalls Google’s Matt Cutts saying that SEOs shouldn’t chase the search engine and alternatively, chase the user. Applying that idea to link building, Reich says, “It’s don’t chase the engines, chase the community.”

Are you link building through relationships?

Posted by Lindsay

When I was an in-house SEO I hired outside SEO consultants. Now as the outside SEO consultant I often work with in-house SEOs. In the comments of my most recent post, an interesting question came up, "…why would a company who has an in-house SEO expert hire an external company?"

Here are 8 excellent reasons why talented in-house SEOs often bring in outside help.

1. Specialized Expertise

Not too long ago, SEO was a niche marketing specialization. I remember when even Internet Marketing was considered a highly niche specialization. In fact, my college marketing instructor tried to talk me out of Internet Marketing because it was too niche and I ran the risk of limiting my prospects down the line.

Times have sure changed. As the search engines have matured and the SEO industry has evolved along with them, it is becoming increasingly difficult to be on top of every SEO related factor. Even something as specific as SEO is segmenting into specializations. Experts have emerged in social media promotion, local SEO, mobile SEO, copy-writing for SEO, link-building, and so on.

I like what Duane said about the hiring of external consultants ramping up your program quicker. By knowing and doing what you do best and outsourcing other tasks, you can super-charge your site’s SEO and get closer to your potential traffic level.

If I worked for a national business comprised on thousands of brick-and-mortar locations (think Burger King), I’d definitely look at retaining the services of someone like David Mihm to ensure I had all the right pieces in place. I doubt that many people reading this post are as well versed on the intricacies of Local SEO as David.

How about mobile? You have the choice to either delve into the details yourself or do as other talented in-house SEOs have done and hire someone like Cindy Krum who wrote the book on Mobile Marketing. Literally.

Why bumble around yourself on such specialized niches when you can focus on the pieces you know best and outsource those pieces to a more qualified expert? You don’t need to be everything SEO all the time. Give yourself a break!

2. Too Much to Do. Too Little Time.

Effective SEO is a lot of work. Managing the internal politics can be a full-time job unto itself! Perhaps you are confident that you have the strategy nailed down but you just can’t get your projects through the pipeline fast enough. In order to keep things moving while you consider the next big project it can help to hire an outside consultant.

Once you’ve established what needs to be done, hiring an SEO consultant can help you push through a task list and get closer to your goals.

3. Fresh Perspective

Working on the same website for years on end can get mighty boring. You can only come up with so many interesting articles related to nylons, and if you have to rewrite the homepage title tag one more time you’re going to scream. With boredom comes creative stagnation. Bringing in the right SEO consultant can help get the creative juices flowing again. Fresh eyes bring fresh ideas to help your business grow.

At SEOmoz we used to provide whirlwind audits in our boardroom. The client would bring along their best and brightest SEOs, marketing folks, and development staff. We’d go through their site and point out areas for improvement. One particular client comes to mind; well known brand, important website, talented SEO expertise… They’d blocked an important directory in the robots.txt. Sometimes when you are too close to a problem you can miss little details like a line in your robots.txt or an important redirect.

4. Educational Purposes

At SEOmoz we often sold an educational component along with our site audits. We’d go in with slide decks and teach anywhere from one to dozens of in-house resources some of our knowledge. This empowers the in-house team to move forward on their own, knowing a little more. Training can be formal or otherwise. Topher describes his outsourced project as a learning experience.

5. Validation

SEO enhancements can be expensive to implement and sometimes take months or even years to complete. Based on high level experience across more web properties, an outsourced consultant can help you prioritize your enhancements and validate your project plan to ensure you make the most of the development investment.

At SEOmoz we enjoyed working with strong in-house SEO individuals or teams for our consulting gigs. I suspect that this is true for most SEO consultants that specialize more on strategy and less on implementation.

6. Collaboration

As in-house SEOs, a lot of folks work independently. It can be refreshing and rewarding to expand on the one-man show. Marty describes how he and his employer benefit from expanding his team from time to time to meet a need.

7. Overcome Internal Politics

Of course you know your stuff when it comes to SEO. That is how you got your in-house SEO job, right? Then why do you spend so much of your time selling the value of your projects and negotiating for resources? One challenge that a lot of in-house SEOs face is finding the time to do actual SEO work. External consultants can help pave the way to get home grown ideas implemented.

8. Breadth of Knowledge

As an in-house SEO for a growing business, the challenges you face for the first time have more often than not been considered and successfully addressed by another SEO somewhere out there in cyberspace.

Lets say you’ve inadvertently landed yourself a Google penalty. How do you diagnose the problem, get it fixed, and request forgiveness with a successful outcome? A consultant who has helped other websites work their way out of a penalty situation can be invaluable.

There are plenty of less dramatic examples. How do you implement a WordPress powered blog as a sub-folder of a .Net site? How do you handle millions of constantly expiring pages (as is common with job boards and classified ad sites)? How will you write a compelling link bait piece?

Action Items

The next time you get push back when proposing to hire an SEO consultant, choose from the reasons outlined in this post to support your case.

1. We need specialized expertise.
2. We have too much to do. We’ll get this project moving faster if I can get some help.
3. We can learn a lot from an outside expert.
4. We want to double check our strategies before we get going.
5. We would benefit from collaboration with other SEOs.
6. A consultant can help us work through the concerns of marketing/IT/executives.
7. We need the help of someone who has done (insert complicated initiative) before.

In-house SEOs hire outside assistance for all kinds of things from strategy, implementation, retainer, special projects and more. Are you an in-house SEO that has worked with external SEO experts? I’d love to hear your experience.

Happy optimizing!

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Any time Google makes an update to its algorithm, it’s a big deal for webmasters. Following this trend, the Web community has reacted strongly to MayDay, a recent algorithm update from the search engine.

As Google’s Matt Cutts explains to WebProNews, one of the primary goals of MayDay was to address the people who do the “bare minimum” to avoid being classified as spammers. This type of content is often referred to as content farms. Due to the many complaints Google received about these content farms, the search company made changes to its algorithm to ensure that it returns the best sites for users.

“We’re trying to spot what are the signals for quality for pages or sites that really are going to be good for users,” says Cutts.

If webmasters find themselves affected by these changes, Cutts suggests that they re-evaluate their content to make sure they are providing the highest quality content. According to Cutts, the sites most readily affected are those with auto-generated pages.

On the topic of Caffeine, Cutts compares the index changes as moving from a bus to a limo. Back in 2003, the updates were slow, but with Caffeine, the index is faster, fresher, and richer. He says as soon as a document is documented, it is indexed.

In this interview, Cutts also encourages webmasters to submit video sitemaps. Just as regular sitemaps are important to help Google discover pages, the search company wants to be able to have a comprehensive view of all the videos on the Web as well.

The computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha, is continuing to fascinate many. WebProNews spoke with Barak Berkowitz and Schoeller Porter both of Wolfram Alpha to understand more about how the engine works and where it could be headed.

At the time of the taping of this interview, Berkowitz had been with the company for only a matter of days. He has been in the tech industry for 30 years and his resume includes early search engine Infoseek and more recently the social platform Six Apart.

Based on his experience, he has noticed that, with technology, people have the power to do things that they never thought were possible.  Berkowitz tells WPN he sees that same “powering factor” in Wolfram Alpha since people have not previously had access to the facts and calculations the engine provides.

Many people have wondered where Wolfram Alpha fits in regards to the other search engines. As Berkowitz explains, people look at search engines to find information on the Web. He says Wolfram Alpha creates facts.

The engine is already embracing social media with location and customization aspects. Over time, Berkowitz says the engine will include more social features that are relevant to user needs. Porter also points out that the engine wants users to be able to easily share Wolfram Alpha information with their friends.

Wolfram Alpha has partnered with Bing and Berkowitz indicates that the engine would like to be integrated everywhere people go for information. He also believes that the factual information Wolfram Alpha provides is the next level of search.

Posted by laura

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me!  Do you feel your value as an SEO rising?

If you’re jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap, you can find the previous three steps here:

• Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
• Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy
• Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy

DEFINING CATEGORY COMPETITORS

Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.

We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric.  For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only. 

I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up.  True.  That’s part of it.  But because we’re going to do some serious dissection in Step 5, we’ll want to make sure we get the right competitors to dissect and compare ourselves against.

We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you’re working on large enterprise-sized sites).

What I mean when I mention defining competitors by categories is this: If I am working on a site all about celebrities, my competitors might be OMG, TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc.  But that’s only at the high level.  My keyword categories from step 2 might cover subtopics like celebrity photos, celebrity news and more. Each of those subtopics has someone who is dominating those rankings.  It may be the same one or two sites across the board, but it’s likely that each subtopic will have different high-ranking competitors.  We want to know specifically who’s doing well for each topic.

HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPETITORS

There are several ways you can do this. If you’ve already got a method you like and want to stick with – by all means do (and if you’re compelled to share your method with us in the comments – you know we love to hear it).  I’m going to give you an example of how I pull this data together. 

Here’s how I set it up:

Grab a new Excel worksheet and name it something like ‘Competitors’.  Create one tab to keep track of your overall site competitors, and if you’re tracking any subtopics on your site (likely the keyword categories we defined in step 2), create a tab for each one of those that you’re going to do competitive research for.  We’re not going to do any calculations or fancy stuff with this worksheet – it’s just for keeping track of your competitors in one place.  You can use a Word doc or good ol’ pen and paper if you want too.

The easy way to figure out who your competitors are is to type a couple of terms into the search box and see who shows up.  So let’s look at that method. Here’s what I see in the top 5 results for [celebrity gossip]. 

Take note in your Excel sheet of who’s appearing in the top rankings for a couple of terms for each tab/topic.  You don’t have to look up the competitors for every term in your keyword group, just pick a few and make note of what comes up.

You can also choose to check the top rankings in all three search engines, or just pick one. It’s up to you.  In the end you’ll be looking for which site(s) show up the most often for this keyword group.

Another method of doing this is to use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The cool thing about the Difficulty Tool is that you get extra insights along with your top competitors.  But for this example I just want to get my top-ranked competitors in a downloadable csv file that I’ll just copy and paste into my Excel sheet.

To get this info, type in one of your terms:

Below the difficulty score and authority comparison graph are the top-ranked results…

…and at the bottom of the page you can export the results.  I’ll do the same thing for a few more terms that represent the topic I’m researching, and add the results all to the tab for the topic.

In the end I have something that looks like this – here’s my general terms (there’s only two for this example, but the more terms you can use the better idea you’ll get of who shows up in the rankings the most):

I’ve highlighted the sites that show up in the top 5 rankings for both terms and made a note of it on the top.  This is a competitor I know I want to target.

Here’s another example of one of my subcategories:

Here I see two sites appearing for multiple keywords. I’ve highlighted them and made note of them at the top.  These are competitors I’ll be targeting for my competitive dissection of sites for the Celebrity News subtopic in Step 5.   Again, there’s only 3 terms in the screenshot example above – I recommend pulling the data for at least 5-10 per topic.

Note that you can also choose to target 2 competitors or 5 competitors for each category – whatever you prefer (I usually like to do at least 3).  The more sites you choose the more work you have to do in Step 5, but the more insight you’ll get back. 

That’s the jist of it folks.  Now you have targeted competitors defined for each topic you’re interested in.  In the next post we’ll look at how to dig into the competitive landscape to uncover site features, content, and SEO strategy that should be built into your site in order to outrank your competitors. This is where we really start to take SEO to another level. 

In the meantime, if you use any of the vast selection of SEO tools out there to define your competitors, or just do it in a different way, please share with the readers in the comments!

 

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Posted by randfish

A few weeks back, Stephan Spencer (one of my Art of SEO coauthors) authored a post for SearchEngineLand entitled 36 Myths that Won’t Die But Need To. I certainly recommend checking out the post, but be warned of some highly contentious comments. The tweets and offline feedback were similarly up-in-arms and it’s easy to understand why.

SEO is a field where reputation is a huge part of your ability to perform well. Because the search engines don’t publish comprehensive guidelines (or even guidelines that cover 1/10th of the material necessary for good SEO work), businesses rely on the savvy of individual consultants, contractors and employees. If your boss reads Stephan’s article and sees him contradicting advice that you’ve been giving for years, faith erodes and with it, job security. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), there’s probably 5-10 articles you can find on the web that support your side of the story, many from quality, trusted sources.

The lack of standards sucks. But, it’s also the reason our industry is so exciting. New experiments & experiences can reveal critical data about search engine operations. The ability to become an expert is open to anyone with the skills and perseverance to see it through. But, no matter how hard you try, it’s hard to overcome some of the persistent myths of the SEO field – I’ve been caught in plenty of them myself (and who knows, maybe still am today).

This post is going to look at some of those nagging, lingering falsehoods that continue to thwart good SEO efforts, specifically those that Stephan called out and faced strong resistance. As always, this is my opinion, based on my experience (see the moz disclaimer) except in cases where research and data exists, in which case it’s my opinion that the research cited is good enough to warrant that opinion

How Significantly Does Personalization Affect Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Although it is true that Google personalizes search results based on the user’s search history (and now you don’t even have to be logged in to Google for this personalization to take place), the differences between personalized results and non-personalized results are relatively minor. Check for yourself. Get in the habit of re-running your queries — the second time adding &pws=0 to the end of Google SERP URL — and observing how much (or how little) everything shifts around.

Comments Include:

I’m not sure I agree with your statement under #5 that personalization changes are “relatively minor”. I’ve been seeing some drastic rank changes due to personalization. I just posted about it at http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/49-are-google-serp-personalizations-relatively-minor.whtml While there are still “absolute rankings” that display most of the time, your site can be ranked much higher or lower, based on personalization.

My Opinion – They’re both right. Personalization seems to primarily affect areas in which we devote tons of time, energy and repeated queries. This means for many/most "discovery" and early funnel searches, we’re going to get very standardized search results. It’s true that it can influence some searches significantly, but it’s also true that, at least in my experience, 90%+ of queries I perform are unaffected (and that goes for what I hear/see from other SEOs, too). The linked-to post above actually helps to validate this, showing that while rankings changes can be dramatic, they only happen when there’s substantive query volume from a user around a specific topic.

Do We Need to Update Our Homepages Every Day to Maintain Rankings?

Stephan Says:

"It’s important for your rankings that you update your home page frequently (e.g. daily.)" This is another fallacy spread by the same aforementioned fellow panelist. Plenty of stale home pages rank just fine, thank you very much.

Comments Include:

It actually is important. Sure, a stale home page might rank, but Google definitely takes freshness into account in rankings. I’ve seen rankings boosts whenever I post new content.

This varies from niche to niche, of course a site can rank well whilst remaining static, it may also have a considerable number of links pointing to it. In a competitive niche where the link volume/quality is pretty even, then regular updates to the home page, and other pages within the site can make all the difference – to describe this as a fallacy is a fallacy itself.

My Opinion - There was a time when I was pretty convinced this was true. I did lots of testing around it for my clients sites and would put in time each day making sure new content appeared on their homepages. Today, I’m much less of a believer. Stephan is certainly correct that plenty (if not the overwhelming majority) of homepages and, indeed, web pages that rank well for many queries are static. I do think it’s a great idea to continually have new content linked-to from homepages – by linking to the latest blog posts, YOUmoz posts and marketplace postings, the SEOmoz homepage helps drives spiders to revisit frequently and crawl these new posts (though RSS pings may make that obsolete).

Overall, I wouldn’t advise updating pages just for the sake of possibly getting a "fresh content" boost. QDF operates on unique, fresh, individual pages (or older pages that are earning newly fresh links). I’d have serious doubts as to whether anything in Google’s ranking system rewards pages that simply change frequently – it doesn’t pass my smell test.

How is Google Treating "Reciprocal" Links?

Stephan Says:

Trading links helps boost PageRank and rankings. Particularly if done on a massive scale with totally irrelevant sites, right? Umm, no. Reciprocal links are of dubious value: they are easy for an algorithm to catch and to discount. Having your own version of the Yahoo directory on your site isn’t helping your users, nor is it helping your SEO.

Comments Include:

Google places less weight on reciprocal links that they used to, but they still count. I’ve done numerous link exchange campaigns for websites, and seen huge boosts in rankings. At the end of the day, would you rather have a reciprocal link from another site in your niche, or no link at all? The answer is obvious.

Reciprocal links aren’t necessarily of dubious value. Consider this example:

I’m a news site. I link to CNN because it’s CNN and they have news. One day, CNN links to me (huzzah). Technically, this is a reciprocal link, but no way in hell is Google going to discount the value of the link because the sites are linking to each other. So now you have to determine intent — and how do you do that?

In many niches, every authority site links to every other. Not only is it natural, but these are the most relevant possible links. So what you seem to be saying is that Google lowers the value of a site’s most relevant links — thereby increasing the relative value of irrelevant or off-topic ones. That makes sense how?

My Opinion - This one really depends on how we’re defining "reciprocal links."

The post you’re reading links to Stephan’s SELand article. Would Stephan updating that post with a link here potentially hurt both our rankings? No.

However, if SEOmoz built a link directory on our site (ironically humorous because, as long time readers may recall, we used to have one) and promoted linking to your site if you reciprocated with a link back here, I’d be more concerned. This is essentially link graph manipulation and while it’s a fine line to tread, plenty of folks have crossed it in the past and, as Stephan notes, unnatural reciprocal link behavior is remarkably easy to spot on a link graph.

I wouldn’t be concerned at all with a technically "reciprocated" link, but I would watch out for schemes and directories that leverage this logic to earn their own links and promise value back to your site in exchange. Also – watch out for those who’ve evolved to build "three-way" or "four-way" reciprocal directories such that you link to them and they’ll link to you from a separate site – it’s still attempted manipulation and there’s so many relevant directories out there; why bother!?

Keyword Density is Not Used – How Many Times Do We Have to Say It?

Stephan Says:

Keyword density is da bomb. Ok, no one says “da bomb” anymore, but you get the drift. Monitoring keyword density values is pure folly.

Comments Include:

Folly? Hardly. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, you want to make sure you use it a few times on a page. That’s just common sense. Of course, you don’t want to overuse a keyword, or it might come across as spammy. Any smart SEO pays attention to KW density.

My Opinion - Again, we’re likely coming down to semantics. The formula for keyword density – a percentage of the total number of words on the page that are the target phrase – is indeed folly. IR scientists discredited this methodology for relevance decades ago. Early search engines and information retrieval systems already leveraged TF*IDF as a far more accurate and valuable methodology.

In my opinion, the reason the myth persists is that sometimes, optimizing towards a keyword density can actually improve your relevance and targeting of TF*IDF. I’ll make an analogy – let’s say you believe flight is accomplished not by lift, thrust, drag and weight, but rather by reaching a particular velocity in a bird-shaped device. It’s entirely possible that you might stumble upon flight, or flight-like elements even without understanding the physics. That said, could you honestly call yourself an aeronautics engineer?

If we’re going to call ourselves professional SEOs, we should bother to learn the science. Yes, adding additional instances of a keyword term or phrase to a page might indeed help your rankings (usually not massively and almost never in highly competitive spaces), but that does not mean that the keyword density average you’ve been using is accurate or that engines leverage the metric. Spreading this ignorance of math and science does little to further the SEO field’s reputation - let’s end it. 

Do Hyphens in Domain Names Really Suck for SEO?

Stephan Says:

Hyphenated domain names are best for SEO. As in: san-diego-real-estate-for-fun-and-profit.com. Separate keywords with hyphens in the rest of the URL after the .com, but not in the domain itself.

Comments Include:

Hyphens in domain names are less than ideal for flagship businesses because they’re hard to communicate, but you better believe Google ranks domains with keywords in them highly, even if they contain hyphens. Again, it’s less than ideal (a hyphen-less .org or .net is preferable to a hyphenated .com), but if the top choices aren’t available, a domain that includes a hyphen can be a decent substitute.

Don’t make a blanket statement that having hyphens in your domain hurts your potential. This is just fallacy. Yes, hyphens suck for direct traffic, as the domain is more likely to spelled incorrectly. But when it comes to search, domains with hyphens in them do just fine.

My Opinion – They suck. Yes, I realize that technically, they may not have a formal algorithmic component (though I’m guessing part of Google’s spam filter early warning system does look at hyphens, particularly when there’s more than one in a domain name). But, they certainly correlate with worse branding value, which means fewer links and citations, less reputation in the eyes of visitors and potential business partners, less viral spread through word-of-mouth and, as the comments note, lower type-in traffic.

All of those are going to have a 2nd-order impact on rankings through metrics like inbound links, social mentions and usage data (to whatever degree you believe that mya be a signal). Thus, hyphens in domain names do, indeed, suck for SEO (and lots of other stuff). I’ve never liked SEO practices that operated in a vaccum or didn’t consider usability, virality, positioning, branding or other basic marketing techniques. Going back to the analogy above, it’s like the aeronautics engineer who doesn’t consider seats a necessity. Sure, it flies, but who exactly will pay for a ride?

Does Click-Through Rate Matter?

Stephan Says:

The clickthrough rate on the SERPs matters. If this were true then those same third-world link builders would also be clicking away on search results all day long.

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Don’t assume that clickthrough rates don’t matter just because of some potential abuse that would happen if absolutely zero logic were built in.

In regards to CTR influencing rankings, there are a number of things that lead me to suspect that user behavior does affect search results.

I’m sure you are familiar with the so-called google \honeymoon period\ that seems to occur when a new site launches. The site will rank highly for a few weeks, and then see a dramatic drop in SERPs. I’ve launched over a dozen sites in the past year, and have noticed this pattern.

I believe this goes beyond QDF, it’s a site-wide phenomenon. The hypothesis is that Google will temporarily rank a new site highly, to see how users perceive the site. If people visit the site, and then immediately hit the back button to return to the SERPs, that’s a good signal that the site did not meet the needs of the user, and that google should not rank it as highly.

I am on the fence, I could literally flip a coin whether it is myth, magic, or the CTR really does make a difference. If it does it is such a small difference it’s nothing I would ever focus on for success.

My Opinion – I’ve written and spoken about this extensively in the past and it doesn’t need a great deal of re-hashing. I will, however, say that should any SEO ever discover that it substantively impacts rankings, we’re going to be faced with an army of zombie botnets trying to take over our computers not to send email spam, but to click on links through our "reputable" Google accounts. Just look at the hacks of Facebook, Twitter & WordPress over the past few weeks and ask yourself – if any spammer could show any financial incentive or ability of clicks to influence Google, would we really have as (organic) click-fraud free a world as we do today? 

We do have one data point from Google that suggests they look at some kinds of less manipulate-able click data. A Googler speaking at the first SMX East show in New York mentioned during his session that Google will record searches that are performed frequently with no clicks, followed by query refinement or abandonment, as potential searches that need work (because it seems no one likes the results). If this is what you mean when referring to click-data being used in the engines, I think that’s completely reasonable.

Do H1 Tags Help with Rankings?

Stephan Says:

H1 tags are a crucial element for SEO. Research by SEOmoz shows little correlation between the presence of H1 tags and rankings. Still, you should write good H1 headings, but do it primarily for usability and accessibility, not so much for SEO.

Comments Include:

H1 tags are very important, I’ve seen pages rank well for targeted keywords once the tag has been tweaked to be more targeted, not spammy or purely for SEO, but well written. Ok, in some cases it may not be “crucial” but after the title tag I think it’s up there as one of the most important on site factors.

My Opinion - Covario’s research is spot on; I got to listen to and speak with their chief scientist, Dr. Matthias Blume, at a conference in Silicon Valley. It also matches up to our correlation and rankings model data. You’re invited to repeat on-page keyword prominence testing and check the results for yourself (more on search engine testing methodologies here). H1 tags are very slightly better than Bold/Strong tags for keyword usage and both are barely better than simply using the keyword on the page (in any text format).

In every instance I’ve seen a report of H1s improving rankings, it’s been because the keyword phrase was now included as some of the first text on the page and provided an additional instance of the target term and title element in the on-page copy. As Stephan recommends in the comments, try taking a site with H1s and replacing them with CSS styles that mimic the text formatting. You may see tiny fluctuations in a few close rankings, but likely little else.

All that said, H1s are still a best practice. If you’re building a site from scratch today, you should certainly use them for headlines, and they do provide some (albeit quite tiny) benefits for SEO. However, I feel incredibly guilty about the many times in my SEO consulting career I pushed hard for engineering and development teams to get H1s right in the markup when it generated such tiny results. That time would have been far better spent on dozens of other projects. If I can, I’d love to save you that same embarassment and disappointment. H1s may fit with SEO stereotypes, but that doesn’t make them a high priority, high value activity. If you don’t believe the research of others, do your own, then listen to the results.

Can Linking to Other Sites Help You Perform Better?

Stephan Says:

Linking out (such as to Google.com) helps rankings. Not true. Unless perhaps you’re hoarding all your PageRank by not linking out at all — in which case, that just looks unnatural. It’s the other way around, i.e. getting links to your site — that’s what makes the difference.

Comments Include:

Not true. Matt Cutts has said that linking out to high quality websites is one of the many factors that they use to evaluate a site. NOTE: the comment references the below copied text below from this post by Matt Cutts (on Google’s webspam team):

Q: Okay, but doesn’t this encourage me to link out less? Should I turn off comments on my blog?
A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

My Opinion – I suspect there may be some small, positive effects of linking out to relevant, quality sites and pages for SEO. However, Stephan’s likely correct in his assertion that just linking to a "high Domain Authority" or "high PageRank" site won’t normally help. He’s also right to say that hoarding link juice is likely a very bad move. You can listen to the NYTimes’ SEO, Marshall Simmonds, talk about how adding external links to articles on the site had a noticeable positive impact on the Times’ rankings and traffic.

I don’t have correlation or ranking models data on this, nor have we experimented internally to the degree that I’d feel comfortable calling this a settled debate. My instincts say Google probably considers outbound links in some form or fashion, but I doubt it’s a huge ranking factor. It might be more important than H1s, though

PageRank is a Good Predictor of Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Your PageRank score, as reported by Google’s toolbar server, is highly correlated to your Google rankings. If only this were true, our jobs as SEOs would be so much easier! It doesn’t take many searches with SEO for Firefox running to see that low-PageRank URLs outrank high-PR ones all the time. It would be naive to assume that the PageRank reported by the Toolbar Server is the same as what Google uses internally for their ranking algorithm.

Comments Include:

Come on now. It’s true that a lot of people place too much emphasis on PR, but let’s not take it to the opposite extreme and say it’s irrelevant. PR is not the be-all-end-all of rankings, but it still matters. Having a high PR homepage clearly means *something*.

I probably couldn’t disagree with anything more than this one. I guarantee a website that has homepage PageRank 6 and then 2 page deep pages having PageRank 5 and trailing off into 4’s and 3’s get’s WAY more traffic than the one with PageRank 3 and trails off into 2’s and 1’s. PageRank is not 100% accurate, but it’s an extremely good indicator, it’s not just make believe or useless non-sense that authoritative sites have PageRank; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

My Opinion - They’re both right (though the "guarantee of traffic on the PR6 vs. 5 site" sounds like a bet this commenter’s opponent could win many, many times over). Our data on PageRank correlation is very solid and suggests that yes, PR is positively correlated with rankings on Google.com (though much less so in Google.co.uk – sorry Brits!). However, the degree of correlation is not overwhelming and there are far better single metrics if rankings correlation is your goal.

I would strongly get behind Stephan’s statement that what the toolbar server reports is not what Google uses internally. They’ve messaged this many times. It’s also very true that PageRank is only one of a plethora of ranking signals, and plenty of PageRank 3 pages outrank PageRank 6 or 7 pages for given queries.

Does Great Content Equal Great Rankings?

Stephan Says:

Great Content = Great Rankings. Just like great policies equals successful politicians, right?

Comments Include:

I see no one is criticizing "Great content = great rankings." This is job number one.

My Opinion – I think the commenter may have missed Stephan’s intended sarcasm. I am in full agreement that great content ≠ great rankings. This is no more true than the statement: "the way to win elections is to propose the best legislative ideas."

Marketing, promotion, networking, partnerships, virality, incentives and hundreds of others feed into the inputs for a site’s success on the web. Unless you believe that links are meaningless and Google’s content analysis systems can read and rank content like a human (e.g. Google thinks the Times’ article on Brown’s stepping down was more adroitly perceptive than the Post’s), the ability to draw in links, which is not and likely never will be about the "best content" will have an overwhelming impact on rankings.

The future likely holds greater usage of data from social media and social web interaction, but even this depends on far more than the content’s quality. Those brands and sites that have early-adopting, viral-sharing, people-connecting, idea-distributing users invested in promoting their work are likely to be long term winners with little regard for comparative levels of content quality. 

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There’s lots more fun and interesting discussion on the SearchEngineLand post, but hopefully these will spark some interesting chats in the comments here as well.

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As most everyone knows, large and complex websites require a lot of hosting systems. Unfortunately, a problem occurs since many hosting systems create duplicate content issues. As Richard Chavez of iCrossing explains, hosting systems often display the subdomain or server number in the url, which produces duplicate content.

As a result, this creates problems for your website and the search engines. On the search engine side, the engines will have trouble indexing the content on your site. Also, it will penalize your site’s rankings and therefore hinder performance.

According to Chavez, the best solution to this problem is to do it right the first time with a lot of technical SEO implementation. He tells WebProNews that webmasters need to set it up so that it displays the same url, regardless of what server is hosting it.

However, if it is already set up incorrectly, he suggests doing a url proxy rewrite. He says both Google and Vanessa Fox agree that a 301 redirect is not a good option because redirecting to a preferred version defeats the purpose of load balancing.

The canonical tag is also an option, but Chavez does not believe it is as effective as doing it right the first time.

Posted by randfish

I spoke this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to a room full of curious marketers & site owners. After the session, there was a lot of requests for the slide deck and thus I’ve shared it below.

This presentation opportunity comes courtesy of O’Reilly, who published The Art of SEO late last year (somehow, I’ve neglected to mention it on SEOmoz until now). Big thanks to my co-authors, Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer & Jessie Stricchiola for helping out.

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