SEO Tips

Normally these ranking shifts occur during the week it seems like. But today I noticed lots of movement in several of my domains keyword rankings. Most for the better which was good to see. The odd thing is there has been quite a delay. I am tempted to think Google rolled back some sort of filter and sites popped back up as a result. One of these site came back from the abyss and I haven’t done much to it in months. Another was a client’s site and was somewhat spammy so I cleaned it up a few weeks ago. Another clients was done months ago and finally shifted back…again. You just have to wonder what changed in the algo.

I was beginning to think I was crazy. My site would get hacked and I would change the password. This would keep happening over and over. Yet every time I would call in they would say it was my fault. Well today I discovered that once again my site had been hacked as well as all the other domains in my userid for them. I have moved all my sites except for 3 off their servers b/c this has happened so often. While going through one of my sub domains I found a hackers control panel which I downloaded and took a screen shot. I even looked around in it. I realized quite quickly that I had server root access and I could see other peoples files like I was on a regular computer. This control panel seems to have it all. Anyway here is a screen shot for all you who wonder what is going on:

I have marked my info out to spare me as well as the folder I was browsing. But this control panel seems to have any exploits you want on it with very little effort.  It even has a handy self kill button which I used. Of course I am sure they will be back and hack right back in. Meanwhile I have to look into another host..l

I have seen some forums where people are saying there is no PR update going on and that nothing has changed. I can only assume these people have 1 or 2 sites. I own dozens so naturally I see the changes quickly and across most of my sites. It is apparent to me that Google is making a fundemental change in the algo that determines Pagerank. I have not quite figured out what is happening. But at this point more than half of my sites have fallen to a PR0. All but one of my other sites have dropped in PR 1 to 3 levels.

My guess is that Google is depreciating Pagerank and making it much harder to get to a 4 or 5 much less a 6 or higher. At this point in the game I would say a site with a PR2-3 is doing well and I have several sites at a PR0 that are competing quite well against sites with a 4.

This would logically fall in line with Googles statement that they want to get away from pagerank all together. If sites with a PR0 are ranking well then that may very well be what is occuring. It would appear that Google will count a back link towards a sites ranking in their engine but will not pass on PR, or only if it is a one way topic related link from a trusted source.

As Google continues to put the squeeze on where worthwhile links come from social networking sites are gaining in popularity as places to get links. The problem is many of these sites use the “nofollow” attribute on their links thus rendering them worthless. A quick investigations reveals that some of the top sites are not passing on link juice to users sites. Delicious, Twitter and Stumbleupon to name a few. Many of the other social networking sites have so little link juice on their interior pages it is more trouble than it is worth to set up a profile and then add links. But there are a few expections:

www.slashdot.org    
www.2collab.com
www.digg.com
www.mixx.com
www.hugg.com
www.folkd.com    
www.dzone.com    
www.searchles.com    
www.bibsonomy.org    
www.swik.net    
www.plime.com    
www.myvmarks.com    
www.kwoff.com    
www.jeqq.com    
www.bringr.com    
www.web2list.com    
www.quadriot.com    
www.unalog.com    
www.linkatopia.com

A client asked me to look at a website he was associated with today. They were having problems with the site ranking well in Google.  The site has a pagerank of 5 and should be near the top but was no where to be found in the top 100. So I did my usual investigation to see what was keeping the site down. I first checked Google to make sure the site was properly indexed. It was, I then checked to see how long it had been since a cache of tha site had been done. It had only been a few weeks. So i pulled up the source code and there was the monster in all its html hell glory.

It was obvious to me that the individual updating the site and changing it did not know did about html code. Maybe somewhere along the way a pro came in and created the site, but that was a long time ago and the site has been stretched to the max. The errors I saw were likely created by MS Frontpage, which anyone knows in the trade is a horrible program and creates more problems than it fixes.

Here is a run down of some big issues the site has:

• The style takes up half the source code on each page. There are styles on top of styles. They desperately need a style sheet to clean up the code
• There are several opening and closing <head> and <body> statements all over the page, this rendered the page essentially unreadable .
• <h#> tags are blank or have an image in them

The result is a page that indexs poorly and a site that is essentially worthless from an SEO perspective. They will likely have to pay heavily to have this fixed by a pro.

Without a doubt the single most important thing about links is to get them from relevant sites with a decent PR. But that can be a lot trickier than one would think. Google has recently devalued back links and it would appear that only relevant back links made the cut. That is going to significantly reduce the pool from which you can get links from. We must now go on long searches finding very relevant sites, then attempt to persuade the site owner that our site is well worth a link. Emails are not very effective. I get this things all the time from people looking to swap links from some lame site with very little content worth 2 cents. Do follow blogs offer a good opportunity if they are on topic. But most blog owners are either unwilling or unable to implement this.

I suppose what I see coming down the pipe is the complete commercialization of the internet. Anything and everything is going to cost money. If you want links your going to have to pay for them. Google frowns on this practice and is doing everything the can to outlaw it, but they are the one’s who set up the game to begin with.

I have noticed a very drastic update with Google’s Pagerank occurring this week. Without exception most of my sites went down in PR. Some went down from a 2 or 3 to a 0. I have a few sites that appear to have been penalized, for what I am not sure. It would appear that Google is doing another massive round of link devaluations.

I am not sure yet what is being depreciated but I suspect it is all the directories as well as any other perceived inflationary links that would help a site rank well. At the moment I have not noticed a loss of rankings for my sites, but I am wondering how a site with a PR0 can rank well in Google’s eyes. But from the look of things it would appear that a PR6 is now a PR4 or 5 and a PR3 is now a PR0 or 1.

If you are one of the lucky ones who did not have your PR moved down drastically I would like to know why. From my own research I think that the only thing keeping a sites PR are relevant on topic one way links. Of course those are the hardest to get and most people don’t just give them away. This may also be a push to move away from page rank. Or it could be some update that Google changes in a week. I have a site this year that started at a PR3 then became a PR4 and is now a PR2. I am not sure what the logic is in that equation.
I am sure, however, that a massive back link devaluation is running and it is hitting some sites quite hard.

I decided to install scribefire on Firefox as an addon so I could more easily control several of my blogs from one spot instead of having to jump all over the internet logging into Wordpress. I sood discovered just how frustrating this can be. A few blogs went just fine but others threw a fit when I tried to log into them with scribefire. I did my research and figured out it was an .httaccess file issue. If your not a net nob head then you may not know what this file even is. This file is in the root of your site and controls access to files and even blocks people who you don’t want to access your site. You can also block certain spiders and prevent image theft through this file. It is a very powerful file. On the fip side your ISP has another file upstream that sets default file access for all web sites. That was the case with my site.

In order for scribefire to work I had to change the default security on my site to enable the XML-RPC file. This was done by opening the .httaccess file and adding the lines:

SecFilterInheritance Off

I then loaded the xml-rpc.php file in my browser and it no longer had the 404 forbidden page showing up. It now said that I could only post to the site through this page and it had to be enabled inside wordpress. So i logged into wordpress went to settings>writing and tried to check the xml-rpc to enable it. Once again I got the 404 forbidden error. Upon further research I found out that once again my ISP had blocked this access. I had to add another line to my .httaccess file. That code is

SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off

Now the site appears to function fine and scribefire logged in with no problems. I hope this helps others.

When building a back link profile for a site the single biggest mistake people make is using the wrong anchor text. Many people tend to use the name of their company as the anchor text phrase. While this is worth doing a few times it should not be the focus of your campaign. Your anchor text should be based on your keyword phrase research.  When you begin you want to go after the less competitive phrases.  ” Cars” is going to be a lot more competitve than ” blue chevy cars.”  You will find there is a lot of traffic out there in the long tail, as it is called. These are the less used, less optimized keyword phrases out there. There are literally 1000’s of them for any given keyword phrase.

Variation is another key when building a back link profile. Google looks for a more natural link building profile because they don’t like people gaming their system. If you have 1000 backlinks you need to slice them up into several different keyword anchors.  This looks more natural and will result in better rankings over time.

Text Links are a quick and inexpensive way to help a site build quality back links. You can find very relevant sites to purchase links from and as a result your links have a great value and likely will even pull in traffic. It ends up costing less than running an ad on Google at .50 or more per click.

But there is a caveat. Google frowns on selling links. They consider a form of search engine manipulation, which it is. The ridiculous thing is they created this SE monster and don’t like the fact that people have figured out how to work the system. If you consider purchasing links you should do your homework. If the site advertises link selling or mentions the words sponsorship or advertisers, there is a good chance Google has devalued the outbound links. What you need to look for is a good clean site that just has outbound links and a very subtle reference to them. Maybe " sites of interest" or " More information". Much more may bring Google to the table and destroy the link’s value. The tragedy is you, as a buyer, will have no way of knowing. The site still has its pagerank and everything looks fine.

There are 2 main brokers on line that specialize in this category. Text Link Brokers and Text Link Ads. With either you can purchase a whole boat of site links with little effort.