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Today I was going to address some of the comments that Stu Drew left about managing to get a high ranking for his private-label rights articles blog entry, but I’m going to defer that to a later time. If you’re interested in that topic, let me point you to an article I’ve written about the so-called “Google Sandbox” that should address some of the questions: Redcowl Bluesingksy: Why the Google Sandbox Doesn’t Exist.

I want to talk some more about Google’s indexing of AdSense pages. In case you hadn’t heard, Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the AdSense crawler is feeding pages into Google’s new “BigDaddy” search indexes. This confirms what others had noticed about what the AdSense crawler (usually referred to as the “mediabot”) is doing. Or does it?

As always, there are different ways to look at what’s happening. We know that pages crawled by the mediabot are now making their way into the Google search index. What we don’t know, however, is whether those pages are being pushed or pulled into the index. Let me explain.

Let’s think of the innards of the Google search engine as a bunch of black boxes. (Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge of how things actually work internally.) For our purposes, we’re only concerned with three of those boxes:

What is relevance in SEO?
“Relevance” is a central concept in search engine marketing, but you will be hard pressed to find any reasonable definition for it. Most SEO experts take the term for granted, and the rest of us just nod along It is not very complicated, but it does involve some very core ideas.

In SEO, relevance is a criteria used by search engines to determine the importance of a target (page, keyword, website) within a niche. Since search engines are primarily concerned with serving user queries, the role of relevance comes up most often during searches. For example, if I search for the term “search marketing” on Google, the search engine will analyse its index and provide me a list of web pages ranked by how “relevant” they are to “search marketing” – in this case the top result is www.overture.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Note that search engines don’t explicitly deal with niches or categories of websites. Instead, an SE treats the Internet as a loosely defined grouping of topical pages, with those topics forming sub-groups of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting somewhere between September 22 and November 17, 2005, Google launched a major update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine optimization (SEO) community and millïons of website rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished.

The keywords that people used to find your site within Google may not be producing as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your rankings to plummet. Of course many people have seen their rankings stay the same or improve in Jagger’s aftermath too.

If your site’s rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you were or better in the post-Jagger Google world?

There are still a lot of questïons to be sure, but there are some good beginnings of answers as well. Since this update was rolled out over months and in three distinct phases, it has been much more difficult to determine what factors have been given more or less weïght. Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations, you have a blog! Or are thinking of starting one. Here are ten tips to keep in mind while blogging.

1) Post Titles

When writing a post title, it needs to be specific and interesting as this is what will be used in your title tag and what will be used to draw in readers.

Bad: Old Barns and Houses
Good: Minnesota Historic Barns and Farm Houses

Thinks to keep in mind are ‘What would people search for?’ ‘Is it specific to a certain person, place or thing?’

2) Paragraphs

Yes, use paragraphs. Keep them short and split up different thoughts. It’s much easier to read four small paragraphs rather than one large block of text. Even if they do contain the same information, this will make it easier for the visitor to read.


3) Categories

Categories are a must for blogs. If someone visits your site and is looking for information related to barns and you don’t have categories, or you lump everything under “general”, it will be hard to find what the visitor is looking for.

Think of it like the library. There are different sections for different kinds of information. Categorize it and make it easy on the visitor. Read the rest of this entry »