Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Google Ranking Factors
Alleged positive and negative on and off-page SEO Google ranking factors in an overview.
21 Great SEO Tips From Google Engineer Matt Cutts
SEO Egghead has Tracked most of the Interesting things Google Engineer Matt Cutts has said about SEO and getting your site to rank in Google in the past year. These SEO tips may be better than what you can get from any so called “Expert” because they are coming right from the horse’s mouth.
Firefox Extensions recommended by a Google engineer, Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts show his must-have firefox extension’s list. You’ll probably know this guy if you are in the SEO industry.
Google Acquires SEO Company in DoubleClick Deal
One of the results of the Google-DoubleClick acquisition is Google buying Performics, one of the largest SEO companies in the US. Conflict of interest?
SEO for FireFox Launches!
Are you curious why a certain page on Google or Yahoo! ranks better? Do you ever wonder how many links your competitor has, but don’t feel like logging into your SEO tools? If so, the SEO for FireFox extension is for you. Created by Aaron wall - it will save you countless hours of research frustration and complexity.
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Tags: firefox extensions, google, google doubleclick, google ranking, google yahoo, link, matt cutts, performics, search, seo company, seo tools
Posted in Advertising, Internet, SEO, Websites | No Comments »
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
This is a follow up post to my previous posts about my friend’s Google ranking drop. As you may remember, his Google ranking was restored a few weeks after he blocked the proxy website from copying his entire website and submitted a Google reinclusion request. As you may have guessed, he was quite thrilled to see his SERP ranking shoot up again.
Well, as luck would have it, I received a phone call last night from my friend telling me that his website was bombing again. I Googled his favorite keywords and they seemed to rank fine over at my end, but he explained that he traffic stats from Google was flat. They nosedived a day or two ago. I chalked up the results I was getting to Google adjusting the results.
This new twist got me thinking. What in the world could be making this website’s ranking bounce around like this? Looking back, the proxy website may not have been 100% at fault. There has to be something else.
I began doing a little research and learned about few things about duplicate content. The reason I looked at that particular area is because there is absolutely nothing else I can find wrong with this website. Duplicate content seems to be a rather popular culprit.
I came across a pretty well laid out website called “Google Rankings Diagnostics” that describes a whole heck of a lot of issues you might be having with your website. This website validated what I pretty much already knew…that if you have multiple URLs (on a domain) with the same exact content, Google has trouble figuring out which page is the original and may throw all of them out.
I took a very close look at my friend’s website. Again, I took a unique line of text from his homepage and searched for it in Google (inside quotes). A funny thing happened. I saw the homepage result, but there were a few extra results as well, all on his domain. There were about 5 extra pages in total.
Now, some of these extra results have been there for years, so I don’t attribute the issue to those pages being duplicate content. What struck me was one of the extra pages.
A few months ago, my friend moved one of his pages. He put a 301 redirect in his .htaccess file, which was the correct thing to do. So now, the old directory where the page was held forwarded to a new page. It looked something like this:
Redirect 301 /olddirectory/ http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.php
The redirect worked fine, but here is what that extra page in the search results looked like:
http://www.hiswebsite.com/newpage.phpoldpage.php
Guess what page was showing at that URL…yup, the homepage. The dynamic nature of his website sends unknown page results like this to the homepage. This was a fluke. My friend forgot that there were pages inside the old directory he redirected to the new page. Every old page in that old directory was tacked on to the new page, like you see above. To make matters worse, there were a bunch of links from other websites pointing to the old pages in the old directory.
I am not sure if this would cause the ranking drops that he is experiencing, but the timing certainly lines up with when the issue began. It is also certainly considered duplicate content.
So, here is what I did to deal with the issue this time. I deleted the redirects in the .htaccess file and blocked the URLs of all those extra results in the robots.txt file. Hopefully, this will tell Google to not spider or index those pages and it will also tell Google that those links into the site are dead.
Now, we have to wait. I am not going to submit another reinclusion request to Google because I want to see if the ranking returns naturally. If it does, this was the problem for sure.
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Tags: Duplicate, duplicate content, File, google, google ranking, homepage, htaccess, htaccess file, HTTP, keywords, link, php, Proxy, REQUEST, search results, traffic stats, URL, urls, website, website content, website diagnostics, www
Posted in SEO, Websites | No Comments »
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
This is a follow up post to my “Sudden Drop In Google Ranking” post.
This morning, I checked the ranking of the website in question. To my surprise, the site had again ranked number 4 in the Google Search Engine Results. This was most definitely good news. In fact, all key phrases now ranked on page one of the Google SERPs.
I can only hope this persists. So, what did we do? Here is a short list:
- Noticed the website had dropped in Google ranking.
- Took a unique phrase from the website homepage and searched Google using quotes, “like this.”
- Found a direct copy of the website and discovered it had been “Proxy Hijacked.”
- Found IP address of website that Proxy Hijacked our website and blocked it using the .htaccess file.
- Submitted a “Reconsideration Request” to Google.
After about a week and a half, our website had regained its ranking in Google.
I read a long article about Proxy Hijacking and it mentioned that Google had fixed the problem. If this was the case with my friend’s website, this certainly isn’t true. While I can not be totally sure Proxy Hijacking caused this case of Google ranking loss, the facts seem to lead down this path.
What is my advice to you? Check either Google or Copyscape once a month to see if someone has taken text or Proxy Hijacked your website.
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Tags: copyscape, google, google ranking, google search, google search engine, google serps, Hijack, hijacking, homepage, htaccess, htaccess file, ip address, ip proxy, Proxy, proxy address, proxy ip, reconsideration request, REQUEST, search engine, search engine results, search results, website, website homepage
Posted in Internet, SEO, Websites | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
There may be cases when you would like to see what your webpage HTTP headers look like. Why? Well, because they are kind of important. As Wikipedia states, the HTTP headers define what the returned data looks like.
Still you ask, “Why in the world do I care about that?” Ok, I’ll keep going. The main reason I look at the HTTP headers is to find out what the HTTP status code is. The reason the status code is important to me is because this is the code the search engines use for a multitude of things.
Let me give you a little example, and this related to my previous post regarding the sudden drop in Google rankings. As I was doing research into what the problem may be for this particular website, I came across an issue where someone had recently put custom “404 Not Found” error pages up on some of their websites. Everyone knows that custom “404 Not Found” error pages are cool, but what some people don’t know is that if those 404 error pages show a “200 OK” (successful HTTP requests) code, the site may be in big trouble, SEO-wise. The reason for this is because there are going to be many “404 Not Found” error pages on a dynamic website. If you have your custom “404 Not Found” error page showing a “200 OK” response code, the search engines will think that all the instances of this page are duplicate. You know as well as I do, that spells trouble.
What’s worse is if you set your homepage as your “404 Not Found” page. Your homepage is going to return a response code of “200 OK.” That’s not good, because now you have multiple instances of your homepage…all duplicate content.
It’s my opinion that the search engines are smart enough to figure this out. The page (such as your homepage) with the highest Pagerank will prevail. Still, I have some websites that I am working on that have multiple instances of the homepage and they all have Pagerank, which isn’t good, because the duplicates are taking the Pagerank from the real page. Now, again, that’s my opinion.
Here are two tips:
- How to check your HTTP headers - visit this website or just Google “Website header check”
- How to set a particular page as your “404 Not Found” error page in your .htaccess file - Just place this code in the file: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.php” without the quotes. The 404.php file is the actual error page in this case.
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Tags: 404 error, 404 not found error, Codes, custom, data, Duplicate, dynamic website, ErrorDocument, google, google ranking, header, headers, homepage, htaccess file, HTTP, ok response, pagerank, php, REQUEST, response code, search, search engine, search engines, SEO-wise, status, webpage, website, Websites, wikipedia
Posted in SEO, Websites | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
Do you remember my article from yesterday about the sudden drop in Google search ranking for my friend’s website? Well, I just can’t stop thinking about it.
From what I have been reading, it seems as though my conclusion may be correct. At least I am hoping it is. If I ever conclude anything semi-concrete while thinking about Google, it’s a good day for me.
Ok, I found this very helpful and thorough website that pretty much described the exact problem my friend is having. It’s titled “Google Proxy Hijacking” and tells the whole story.
Here is what struck me as I think about this some more.
- My friend’s website has been live since 2004.
- The site seemed to be in the Google sandbox for the entire 4 years.
- For his most competitive keywords, he was ranking past page 20 on Google.
- About two months ago, he made some changes to the homepage copy as well as an HTML overhaul.
- About a month after that, the site ranked number 3 for his most competitive keywords.
- The site ranked on page 1 of Google for about a month.
- The site now sits at page 25 for its most competitive keywords.
Here is my theory. I think the website has been proxy hijacked for a number of years. This is what caused the poor rankings for such a long time. When the homepage text and HTML changes were made about 2 months ago, Google visited the site and found it unique. Google ranked the site well, due to this new unique content. During the month, Google noticed the proxy website was now a duplicate of my friend’s website once again and dropped the website’s ranking.
Does that make sense? From what I read on the website I linked to, it does.
Here are the similarities with what we are experiencing and what the author wrote on the other website:
- My friend’s website has never been banned.
- We did a quoted Google search for supposedly unique content on my friend’s website and a proxy website showed in the search results.
- The proxy URL looked like this: proxysite.com/cgi-bin/pxy/nph-pxy.pl/000010A/http/www.friendssite.com/
- The proxy site was an exact duplicate of my friend’s website.
Now, I am not sure if this is what caused my friends ranking to drop, but all the factors are there. The keywords we are talking about are very competitive, but the fact that his site showed so well in the search results for a month shows me that the potential is there.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
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Tags: content, Duplicate, google, google ranking, google search, Hijack, hijacking, homepage, homepage copy, homepage text, html, HTTP, keywords, Proxy, proxy url, proxysite, sandbox, search ranking, URL, website, www
Posted in SEO, Websites | 4 Comments »
Monday, September 15th, 2008
A colleague of mine gave me a call yesterday morning with some rather upsetting news. Apparently, one of his websites took a plunge in its Google Ranking. He wanted to know what could cause such a sudden drop in Google Ranking like this.
I really didn’t have an answer for him. The site has been alive (but in the Google Sandbox) for about four years. It always struck me as strange that the site was sandboxed for such a long time. It literally took four years to come from page 30 in the Google Rankings to page one. Suddenly, last month, the website appeared on page one for its most prime keywords. Now, this wasn’t a gradual change in ranking, it was a huge jump.
The website doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. I gave the entire site a once over. I checked the typical meta information and linking structure and found nothing wrong. The website really hasn’t changed in months, besides the content, so it led me to believe there are outside forces at work.
The question I have is, “Why would a website, with a poor ranking, suddenly rank number five on Google one month and then fall back to page 24 the next month?”
I tried to get some information out of my friend. The only thing major he did in the past few weeks is to add a custom 404 or Not Found error message. I checked the 404 page to make sure the headers were correct and not giving 200 results. They error 404 pages were fine.
Then, I went over to Copyscape to see if there were any copies of his homepage. I have heard this can cause a sudden drop in Google rankings. I did find a proxy website that had almost his entire website cached and was trying to pull it off as its own. This wasn’t a typical proxy server trying to speed up the internet. This was something else…more like an intercept proxy.
I looked in the log files to find the IP address of this proxy website. I found it and blocked the IP address in his .htaccess file and then checked the proxy website again. His website no longer showed and was replaced by the Red Hat error page instead.
We will have to give this a few weeks to see if anything changes. I am now thinking that is something does change (for the better), this may have been what was causing the extremely long Google Sandbox issue as well.
If you have any further suggestions, please let me know via comment.
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Tags: custom 404, error 404, google, google ranking, htaccess file, intercept, ip address, meta, plunge, rank number, red hat, sandbox, website, Websites
Posted in Websites | 2 Comments »
