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Succeeding In SEO Requires Change

Chris Crum — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:20:31 +0000

As you know full well, the search industry is constantly changing, and that means SEOs and businesses must adapt. This is always made abundantly clear at the change of each year as the previous year is reflected upon, and predictions about trends in the upcoming year are discussed. SEOs know that adaptation and ongoing education are crucial. The problem is that businesses don't always understand just how much the search landscape actually does change. This can present a whole different set of challenges for both the small business and the professional SEO.

What are some SEO tactics you've had a hard time convincing clients to employ? Discuss here.

Searching for Profit founder Amanda Watlington recently discussed some arising trends in the search industry and how understanding the changing search landscape is of vital importance. One example of change is the possible inclusion of site speed as a ranking factor in Google. Matt Cutts dropped that bomb a couple months ago, and while many welcome it, a lot are dreading it.

For one, businesses and clients of SEOs simply may not be so eager to put forth the time and money required to make the necessary adjustments to their sites to optimize for speed, although it is clearly in the best interest of the customer's experience anyway.

Another challenge, as Watlington mentions, is personalized search. Companies don't always get that not everybody is necessarily going to see the same search results for any given query, and it can sometimes be difficult for SEOs to convince them that this is the case.

Although things appear to be looking up, budgets have been tight, and businesses are demanding better results for their bucks, but they are not always aware of the big picture, which is why it is up to the hired SEO professional to educate them as best they can, and for other businesses to educate themselves.

Luckily, there are plenty of industry resources freely available on the web. After all, you've probably read about the very tactics you have in mind there yourself. SEOs should find instances to back up their case to convince stubborn clients. Some of them are just hung up on outdated trends. Obviously this can make it hard to produce the results they are after.

"The evolution has been slow, and I don't think we've helped it as much as we could," Watlington says of companies' understanding of SEO trends.

If you are the client of an SEO or a business trying to get things done yourself, don't stay hung up on old tactics that might be outdated. At this point, these are some of the things you should keep in mind:

- Site Speed (it's going to matter, so don't ignore it...here are some things to consider)

- Personalized Search (Not everyone is going to see the same Google results)

- Universal Search (Showing up here requires attention to different indexes)

- Real-Tme Search (look for more evolution in this area)

- Changes in Local (there are frequently tweaks made by Google here)

- Some things do stay the same (things like reputable links will always be in style)

- Most importantly, stay informed (just keep up with the latest in industry developments)

As Watlington notes in the interview, metrics are very important, and there has been a great deal of focus on them in the industry in recent years. New metrics come about, just as new tools do. Metrics can help illustrate the bigger picture, custom-fit to a particular organizations goals.

What are the biggest challenges you face when dealing with changing SEO strategies for your own companies or your clients? Comment here.

Related Articles:

> Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

> Google Ditches Local Listings for SEOs and Designers

> Can You "Rank" in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?

> What's Better: PPC or SEO?

> Things to Consider if Page Speed is to Become a Ranking Factor

Is PPC More Important to a New Site Than SEO?

Chris Crum — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:00:20 +0000

In a recent article, we looked at a debate over what is better between search engine optimization and pay-per-click. Of course both should be used typically, but on a recent panel at SES Chicago, participants were asked to pick a side to highlight the benefits of each compared to the other. It made for some pretty interesting conversation.

Both SEO and PPC are important, but do you think one carries more weight than the other? Share your thoughts here.

That conversation extended into our comments. The general consensus seems to be that you should use both when possible, but that SEO is better for the long term, and PPC is better for quick results. These notions were backed up by both Michael Gray and Christine Churchill, who were on opposing sides of the debate at SES.

Gray and Churchill both shared their thoughts in more detail in two separate interviews for WebProNews. Gray noted that Google is making changes that could have some effect on the success of organic rankings. One of these changes is the introduction of personalized search to all Gooogle users. You no longer have to be signed in for Google to personalize your results, and that means it is much more important to get that first click from a user. Gray talks about this and the other change, being Google's banning of AdWords advertisers with what he thinks is not the best communication.

Churchill elaborated on the usefulness of PPC to people who are just establishing themselves on the web. The reality is that SEO takes time, and while it is of great importance and provides long-term benefits, it is very hard to be competitive right out of the box.

When you have a brand new domain name, a new site, and no links, you're probably going to have a hard time jumping up in the rankings for any competitive keywords. PPC lets you do it and start getting your ROI quickly. She also talked a little bit about flexibility vs. control between SEO and PPC.

Not everyone agrees that PPC should be used for a brand new site. One reader commented on our previous article:

SEO is an absolute must when dealing with new web sites. None of the search engines are going to rank you very high in the organic searches if you are not meeting their criteria. And...the Organic search results are 24 hours per day ads. Not so with PPC, unless you are dealing with an unlimited budget.

PPC should be used after SEO to target special sales, or services. It is a great way to help searchers locate your products when they are on sale, or your services when a special price can be obtained.

One thing to keep in mind, however, as Gray touched upon, and some other readers suggested, PPC can be used up front to help you determine the directions to take your SEO efforts in. You can use PPC quickly to determine what keywords convert better, and use that to your advantage in your optimization practices.

Do you think paid search is becoming increasingly important to marketing? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Does an Organic Search Presence Help Paid Result Performance?

> Can You "Rank" in Google if Everyone Has Different Search Results?

> Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don’ts

Chris Crum — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:52:13 +0000

It's easy for businesses to get caught up in Google's expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That's certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

I'm obviously talking about Yahoo and Bing, but Yahoo's share is declining, while Bing's is gaining. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway.

Do you take Bing into account when optimizing your site? Comment here.

We don't hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don'ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing's policy, does not differ too much from advice that Google would give you. It is, however, still always nice to see how they feel, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

What Not To Do

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

1. The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time

2. Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites

3. Using hidden links in your pages

4. Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web

5. Linking out to known web spam sites

"When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction," says DeJarnette. "If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalized with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index."

What To Do

DeJarnette also shared some tips for getting more quality links. Following are Bing's tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

1. Develop your site as a business brand and brand it consistently

2. Find relevant industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, and media folk, and make sure they're aware of your site/content

3. Publish concise, informative press releases online

4. Publish expert articles to online article directories

5. Participate in relevant conversations on blogs/forums, referring back to your site's content when applicable

6. Use social networks to connect to industry influencers (make sure you have links to your site in your profiles)

7. Create an email newsletter with notifications of new content

8. Launch a blog/forum on your site

9. Participate in relevant industry associations and especially in their online forums

10. Strive to become a trusted expert voice for your industry, while promoting your site

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any savvy search marketer is not already aware of. That said, there are clearly plenty of online (and offline for that matter) businesses out there that don't have savvy search marketers on the payroll. It can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and what not to do to help webmasters get better rankings.

Related Articles:

> What Bing, Twitter, and Facebook Mean for SEO

> Don't Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing

> How Does Bing Rank Tweets?

How big is Google? Why should you care?

Jonathan Leger — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:00:44 +0000

Remember way back when Google used to show the number of pages they have indexed on their home page? Remember the war between Yahoo and Google where they competed to get the most pages indexed? It seemed that the operators of the big engines felt that if their index was bigger, they were the better search engine. It was fun to watch at the time, but eventually those numbers quietly disappeared.

However, when the Cuil search engine came out last year, its creators made the bold claim that it was the largest search engine in the world. Its home page, as of this blog post, proclaims its index to be 127 billion pages. Interestingly, just three days before Cuil officially launched on July 28, 2008, Google made the statement that their search engine was aware of one trillion urls, but added that they “don’t index every one of those trillion pages.” For a moment I wondered whether the number wars were going to start up again. They didn’t.

But is it true? Does Cuil index more pages than Google? And why should you care either way?

First, let’s see if it’s true, then we’ll talk about the implications to you as a webmaster.

Here’s a simple way to find out: search for a single word term in Cuil and Google and see how many pages comes back in the result counts. For optimal results, the word should be extremely common — likely to appear on just about every single (English) content page indexed by both engines.

For example, the word the. I searched for “the” in Cuil and Google (and, for fun, Yahoo and Bing). Here are the numbers I got back, sorted with the engines having the most results first.

Results for “the”
Cuil	89,042,476,840
Yahoo	32,700,000,000
Google	14,850,000,000
Bing	6,700,000,000

Rather dramatic differences! Based on these results, Cuil does seem to index a lot more pages than Google and the other major search engines (at least pages written in English).

Remember, though: Google made it clear that they don’t index every page they are aware of. In fact, assuming that Cuil actually indexes most of the publicly available content on the web, that means that Google is choosing not to index more than 80% of pages which contain the word “the” (which it’s safe to say appears on pretty much all content written in English).

What causes Google to filter a page from its index? The previously referenced blog post on Google’s blog says that “many [pages] are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content … that isn’t very useful to searchers.”

Google is notorious for making vague statements that are understood by just about nobody. So what’s the real truth? Let’s disect their statement a bit and find out.

Google says that pages which are “similar to each other” aren’t necessarily indexed. These kinds of statements from Google have really caused a lot of misunderstanding and the dissemination of misinformation by self-proclaimed gurus of search engine optimization, who often claim that your page will get penalized if it’s a duplicate of some other page.

We can prove from Google’s own results that the engine does, in fact, index duplicate content. How? It’s easy: Hop over to EzineArticles.com and grab the title of the most published article in any given category, then search for that title in Google using the “intitle:” operator.

For example, the most published article in the last 60 days in the Finance category right now is titled “Same Day Loans – When You Are Running Out of Options!”

Go to Google and search for this:

intitle:”Same Day Loans – When You Are Running Out of Options!”

Right now 7 results show up. When I click the link at the bottom of the results to show duplicates as well, I get 87 results. That means Google has 87 copies of the same article in its index. Clearly, the fact that the content is the same doesn’t prevent Google from adding a page to its index.

Reading Google’s own words about duplicate content in their support material gives the impression that when they refer to duplicate content, they’re mostly talking about content on the same site. They also state that “duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”

So Google appears to be indicating that similar content is not indexed if it’s perceived to be for search engine manipulation.

That may be their goal, but it’s not the case in actuality. Content is very often created and syndicated for the purpose of building links that get a page ranked in Google. That practice works very well, too. Perhaps if the duplication is egregious enough… but unless you’re doing some large scale duplication and distribution you generally have nothing to worry about.

The second part of Google’s statement indicated that a page may not be indexed if it’s “auto-generated content … that isn’t very useful to searchers.” An example they give is a calendar script that would create an infinite number of pages if the search engine crawler kept following all of the links for all of the dates going forward in time. Google was not specifically talking about page content that’s generated by software.

Again, we can prove that Google indexes software-generated content by using their own index. I went to Google’s shopping page and clicked on one of the “recently found” links (in this case, it was “bicycle trailers”). The first result was from Amazon.com, which has an API that allows people to use Amazon product information on their own sites (e.g., you can create Amazon-like product pages using software).

I searched at Google for two sentences found in the product description (with quotes):

“The Burley Solo trailer is the top of the line when it comes to a single child trailer. With its newly designed reclining seat and full suspension axel your child will be riding in comfort.”

That search returned 10 pages, and when I clicked the link for showing filtered results, 46 pages. So obviously Google has no problem indexing that kind of content, either.

So what is it, then, that will prevent Google from indexing a page? The answer is simple, and it’s one that you’ll probably never hear from Google.

Sometimes I wonder why Google bothers putting up support materials when they never give you a real answer to anything. They want to be vague to prevent people from manipulating the results, but guess what? People manipulate it all the time anyway!

So here it is, the real answer to why Google’s index is 80% smaller than Cuil’s, and why so many pages go unindexed:

No links = No Indexing

That is, if a page is a duplicate of some other page on some other site, but the page has no links to it, Google will crawl the page — and even put it in their index for a while — but after a few days or weeks the page will usually be removed from their index.

I say “usually”, because if the site that the duplicate page appears on has enough links to it overall, then the page will stay indexed even if there aren’t any links directly to it. That’s why sites like EzineArticles.com, for instance, has 4,690,000 pages in Google’s index even though many of those pages don’t have any external links to them — the site as a whole has enough links for Google to feel it’s worth keeping anything that appears on that site indexed.

That makes sense, right? Why muck up the index with massive amounts of duplicate content that isn’t important enough for anybody to link to it?

What all of this means for you as a webmaster is simple: if you’re going to distribute articles or other duplicate content in order to build links to your web site and rank better in Google, you need to make sure that the content you distribute is linked to by other external pages. Whether you accomplish that by social bookmarking or writing additional articles on EzineArticles that link to your articles on “lesser” sites or though some other method, you need to be sure that the content is linked to.

So, sure, Cuil’s database might be a lot larger than Google’s, but that doesn’t mean that it’s better — Google just does more filtering. That’s important for you, because if you want your content to stick around, you need to make sure Google considers it valuable by throwing some links at it.

10 Search Topics That Require Further Discussion

Chris Crum — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:50:48 +0000

The search industry has changed a lot since it was conceived years ago. The rate of change shows no signs of slowing down either. That's one reason why it pays to keep up with the current trends and discussions surrounding the industry. One way to do this is through attending conferences. WebProNews attended and covered Search Engine Strategies in Chicago this week, and we've put together ten selections that can help you learn a thing or two for your own search engine marketing endeavors.

What do you think the most important topic in the search industry is right now? Discuss here.

1. A Black Hat Debate

There was an interesting discussion about the difference between "Black Hat" and "white Hat" SEO, and how their meanings change over time. This led to talk about Google's place as the enforcer of rules.

Read here.

2. What's Better: PPC or SEO?

If you've ever wondered whether you should focus your efforts on PPC or SEO, some experts looked at the pros and cons of both, which could help you in your decision. Of course using both is always an option, but does one fit your plan and budget better than the other?

Read here.

3. Ranking In Real-Time Search

Real-time search has been the subject of much discussion throughout the industry in 2009. Now the year is almost over, and Google has finally introduced its version right into its regular search results. What does this mean and how can you optimize for it?

Read here.

4. The Future Of Online PR

PR tools change over time, but the principles remain relatively consistent. In the age of social media, many PR professionals have discovered just that, and many more marketers continue to do so as time progresses. That said, PR must still evolve to utilize the evolution of tools and go where the people are.

Read here.

5. Lessons from Political Social Media

Social media has changed politics. There's no question about it. The last U.S. Presidential election really highlighted it, but you can expect that every election from here on out will accentuate that point further. Dan Siroker, former Deputy New Media Director for the Obama Presidential Transition discussed the topic at the conference and pointed to five lessons that should be taken away.

Read here.

6. Be Proactive to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content is one of those topics in search engine marketing that comes up over and over again. It never really goes away. Though Google has come right out and said that it doesn't exactly get you "penalized" in their search engine, there are still reasons it should generally be avoided in most cases (though there are exceptions). Experts discussed ways to better manage your content to avoid duplicate content issues.

Read here.

7. Small Businesses And Social Media

The big companies often make social media look easy, but let's face it. Small businesses just don't have the same resources. That doesn't mean that small businesses can find a tremendous amount of benefit to using social media channels to connect with the customers and the general public. Need some advice?

Read here.

8. Moving Beyond Google

There's no question that Google is a dominant force on the Internet. You can hardly ignore Google as a marketer or webmaster. Still, it's not the only thing people use on the Internet, and it's not the only way they find content, products, and sites. It shouldn't be your only area of focus. At SES, some tips on moving beyond Google were discussed.

Read here.

9. How Marketers Can Find Success Via Search

Search is getting harder for marketers all the time. Search engines frequently change how they deliver results. Google has really driven this point home in the past week with the announcements of personalized and real-time search. Search marketers have to constantly adapt. Still, there are some things that never change. Experts discussed how marketers can find success with search in one session at the conference.

Read here.

10. Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

One of the ways search is getting more challenging for marketers is the inclusion of mixed media search results like Google's Universal Search. Google sometimes delivers news search, image search, blog search, local search, and other kinds of results (now real-time results) in SERPs, and while this can be great for users, it also means less focus on organic search results. That means as a search marketer, you really can't ignore the mixed media result being pulled.

Read here.

As always WebProNews conducted a number of exclusive interview at the conference. These will be posted over time, so check the WebProNews Video Blog frequently. Here is a taste of what we have live so far:

Conferences like Search Engine Strategies and others frequently provide great discussion about topics that WebProNews readers care about. That's why we attend so many of them. We also like to extend the discussion that takes place at the conferences to our readers. That's why we encourage you to comment on our articles and extend the conversation even further.

Share your thoughts on any of the ten topics mentioned above.

The problem with link-based search results.

Jonathan Leger — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:16:02 +0000

If you've been following my blog for any time at all, then you know that I am fascinated with search engines, ranking, algorithms and the like. It's my dream one day to design a better search engine, and I'm always tinkering and working on ideas to that end.

As I run queries on the major search engines these days, I'm finding that link-based ranking of pages has a major drawback: the most relevant results often don't make it to the top.

Let's take, for instance, the query "acne home remedies". Run that phrase through Google and you'll get back the results that are the best optimized (that is, that have the most in-bound links related to the query).

As of right now, the #1 ranking result in Google for "acne home remedies" is rather mediocre. You have to click onto a bunch of other pages linked to on that page to get to any real information. It's time consuming and difficult.

For me, the number one result would ideally contain a general summary of information related to the query. That is, "acne home remedies" should show pages that list a number of home remedies for acne on the ranking page — not just links to other pages that talk about those remedies. And the top ranking pages should talk about a number of remedies, not just one. Also, the remedies that are talked about should be well known and referenced on other web pages so that I, the searcher, can have a reasonable amount of trust in the information.

How well-linked a page is should play a part, because those links help establish some authority for the page, but they should not be so strong a factor that the links cause mediocre pages to rank the way they do for a lot queries in Google and Yahoo and Bing these days.

So how do we get search results that use linking to help judge authority, but that contain solid information that is reasonably trustworthy?

That's the goal of my latest search engine, Shablast. The way it works is pretty simple, but very effective (in my opinion):

Get the top ranking pages from a major search engine (in this case, Bing).
Analyze each result to see what topics are being discussed on the ranking pages.
Resort the results, showing the pages that touch on the greatest number of popular topics first.
Filter out the obvious spam.

The results I'm seeing from this four step process are pretty good so far, but I need a lot more people to test it out and let me know what they think about it and where it falls short (which, no doubt, this early in the game it does for some queries).

So what I'd like for you to do is hop over to Shablast.com and run some subjects through it that you are familiar with and let me know if the results are good or poor, and why the results are good or poor. Keep in mind that Shablast is designed primarily for informational queries, so don't expect grand results when doing product-based searches.

You can post a comment here, or (preferably) you can go to the Shablast Forum and post a message with the keywords you searched and what was good or bad about the results returned by Shablast. I can then ask you questions (if needed) and refine the algorithm to improve the process.

If this is something you're interested in experimenting with, why not take a moment to hop over to Shablast and give it a go?

Thanks in advance, and please feel free to post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Niche site case study 2 year update.

Jonathan Leger — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:12:38 +0000

Back in August of 2007 I decided to perform a case study by building a small, 10 page niche content site from scratch and see how well it performed over time. The prime purpose of that case study was to prove that my 3WayLinks.net network was a powerful way to get sites ranked in Google — and keep them there.

It's been a little over two years since I created that case study, and I thought you might be interested in knowing how things are going with that little content site. Yes, it's still up and running. Yes, it's still well ranked in Google. Yes, it's still making money. No, I haven't done any additional work to keep it ranked.

As a recap, here's what I did:

I did some research and discovered a niche in the fitness market that I felt was ripe for the picking (today I use Niche Horde for that–it's a lot easier).
I used my Instant Article Wizard software to create 10 unique articles that would make up the site content.
I submitted an additional 10 articles to EzineArticles.com so that each of the inner pages would have a few links to it.
I added the site to my 3WayLinks.net network to grow the backlinks to it.

When I setup this site, there were some dissenters. "Oh yeah," they said, "it does well right now, but Almighty Google is going to catch on and deindex the site, just you wait!"

Well, that's dissenters for you. Over two years later, here's my latest AdSense report from that little niche site that sits untouched, happily generating income for me month after month:

If you were around when I did the original case study, then you might recall that my goal for the site was $3 a day, or about $1,000 a year. As you can see from last month's AdSense revenue, the site is doing much better than that. It actually earned over $7 a day — more than twice my original goal.

But was that a fluke? How has the site done overall? Here's the total 26 month report:

Yup, this little 10 page site (which doesn't look very professional, btw, and only took about 5 hours to create) is about to hit the $5,000 earnings mark. That means that the site has earned, on average, $6 a day since I first created it — twice my goal. It also means the site will soon have earned me $1,000 for each hour of work I put into it.

It has required no extra work on my part, with one small exception: I had a 3-day server outage in January of last year that caused the site to drop out of the Google rankings until I installed a blog and threw up some fresh, relevant content for a couple of weeks. That would not ordinarily be required, but since the site disappeared for three days Google wanted some affirmation that it was not dead and gone, and fresh content was the ticket to get the rankings restored.

I just can't emphasize enough how many people threw up contrary opinions, proclaiming how the Google Deity in its all-knowing wisdom and power would discover and neutralize my 3WayLinks.net network. And yet the site still ranks #4 and #5 for its primary and secondary keyword phrases, and has done so consistently for the last two years — and it is not alone, not by a long shot. 3WayLinks is more powerful than ever since I've continually made improvements to the way the network builds and maintains links to your site.

You may not be able to live off of $5,000 in two years, but imagine building 50 or 100 successful sites like this one (certainly possible considering it only took five hours to begin with). Even if you could only spare 10 hours a week, that's two sites a week, or more than 100 sites a year. Even if you could only reach my original $3 per day per site goal, that's $300 a day, which comes to over 100,000 powerful reasons each year to start building content sites and putting them into 3WayLinks.net.

Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.

Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

Chris Crum — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:13:32 +0000

Update: Google announced today that it will now be rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in seach results on a global basis. They will only be used in place of some URLs - mainly the ones that don't give the added context of a link the way that the breadcrumbs do. Google says:

Some web addresses help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of Vint Cerf (Google's Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result, "www.google.com/corporate/execs.html," shows that the page is located in a page about "execs," under "corporate," which is on the "google.com" site. This can provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.

Often, however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information.

That's where the breadcrumbs come in. Google says the feature should be available globally within the next few days.

Original Article: Google appears to be testing breadcrumbs in some search results, at least in some areas. If you are unfamiliar with the term breadcrumbs, it refers to the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page.

Do you utilize breadcrumbs on your site? Comment here.

Several bloggers have noticed Google displaying these types of breadcrumbs in various places in seemingly random results to some queries. For example, Rob Hammond provides the following screen shot:

Leo Fogarty provides another, which shows the breadcrumbs displayed in a different position within the search result:

Google's use of breadcrumbs appears to only be a test, and a limited one at that. Google has talked repeatedly about sites having good site architecture in the past. This allows Google to more easily and quickly crawl sites.

Bing acknowledges this too. Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently said, "You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines."

Here are some tips from both Google and Bing regarding site architecture issues. In addition, Google recently provided this related information on getting your site crawled faster.

If Google begins incorporating the breadcrumbs display as in the above tests, on a mainstream level, that will be all the more reason to clean your site architecture up, at least in the navigation area. Site architecture certainly goes beyond this, but it is a key part of usability anyway.

Have you seen breadcrumbs show up in Google results? What do you think about the idea? Share your thoughts.

Linking Out Will NOT Reduce The Google PageRank of Your Pages

dailyblogtips — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:46:56 +0000

It is a Google’s world, and as webmasters we live and die by our search rankings, right? Now one of the factors that both influences search rankings and that most people seem to care about is the Google PageRank. More specifically, we want as much PageRank as possible! Now aiming to increase the PageRank of your pages is fine, the problem is when misconceptions around the PageRank algorithm affect the way webmasters behave. One of these misconceptions is to assume that when you link to external websites you will be losing PageRank from the page where the link is placed. I call this the “bucket view” of the PageRank algorithm. That is, people mentally compare web pages to buckets, and backlinks to streams of water. The more streams of water you have, the more water your bucket will have, and thus the higher your PageRank. However, under this analogy external links on your page represent little holes in your bucket, so every external link will leak some water and end up reducing your PageRank. Put 100 external links on your page and all the water will be gone! This analogy is somewhat logical, but it is NOT how the Google PageRank algorithm works. The PageRank of a page is only affected by the number and quality of its incoming links, and not by the outgoing ones (you understand this by taking a look at the equation used, but I won’t get into that because it is beyond our purpose here). Obviously if you link to 1,000 sites or to bad neighbors from your page it might get flagged as spammy and be de-indexed, but that has nothing to do with its PageRank, which would remain intact. If you have an internal page with a PageRank of 5 (keep in mind the real PageRank values are not integers but rather floating points), placing 10 external links on that page would in no way affect its PageRank. The only thing that would happen is that each of those linked pages would receive a link juice of 0.5 (the value of each link is equal to the PageRank of the page where they come from divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page). Now the reality is a bit more complex and we would need to take into consideration other details to make a complete analysis. For example, you will still lose some PageRank if you link to external websites because if you had not linked there the link equity of that page would flow back to your homepage and be distributed equally across your website. This is the so called PageRank leak, but it is not as significant as most people believe. Despite these nuances, therefore, the moral of the story remains: linking out is not supposed to directly reduce the PageRank on your pages. In fact there are plenty of pages that contain dozens of links and yet rank in the first positions of Google’s result pages for competitive keywords. If you ever refrained from linking to an external site because you feared you would lose PageRank (I have been there too), forget that. Linking away to relevant and valuable pages is good for everyone.

6 Tips for Writing for Web Readers

dailyblogtips — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:13:02 +0000

This is a guest post by Debbie Dragon. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here. Gone are the days of padding your Internet articles with hundreds of keywords hoping to find yourself in the top spots of Google’s search results. While keywords still play a role in search engine positioning, you can actually be penalized if your content seems to contain too many of them – not to mention how difficult it is for a person to read an article that contains the phrase “insurance NY” every 5 words! Here are some tips for writing for web readers that will help you create informative and easy to read content. 1. The headline is the most important thing. You have about 6 seconds to attract attention from an Internet user before he clicks off your site and look somewhere else. This is about the same attention span of a two year old child, so you need a headline that is going to pull them in immediately, and capture their interest long enough to get them reading the rest. 2. Turn off the advertising and commercial stuff. While the objective of a website is often to make sales, a website visitor is looking for information. Provide content that educates and is interesting, and your site visitor will spend more time on your site. More time spent on your site means they are far more likely to click on other areas which generate income for you than if you create article after article of marketing jargon that people have no interest in reading. 3. Write at an 8th grade level. You don’t have to dumb-it-down, but keep your article easy to read and avoid complicated words and really long sentences. It’s not that you think your readers are unintelligent – you’re keeping it simple because of the attention span factor of your potential audience. 4. Think about how YOU use the web. What makes you stay on a website? What headlines and topics catch your eye and keep you reading until the end of the article? You’re a typical web user – analyze your own Internet activity to get ideas for creating content that will interest other typical Internet users. It’s like market research that doesn’t cost you anything to perform. 5. Write about popular topics. Writing about the topics you like is a good idea, but you should also try to compromise a bit and cover popular topics. If you are looking to get traffic you need to satisfy the readers. Examples include money, health, movies, technology and so on. 6. Get to the point. Even if the topic you’re writing on is worthy of a 400 page book, as a writer for the web, you need to keep it short and to the point. A blog post should rarely ever go over 1,500 words. Learn to select your words carefully and keep your articles as succinct as possible.