The Next Big Web Thing - Loving Teh Web !!!1!1!11
>> Return to The Next Big Web Thing Index
Thursday, December 28, 2006
10 Tips To Get Your Content Ranked In Google In 2007
Ok, I enjoy the raft of end of year light-hearted lists that the time of year brings, and would like to add one of my own for your entertainment. Today, let's take a look at what I believe your average webmaster will need to do to see their content ranked highly in Google over the coming year. These are based on things I've seen on my sites and things I've seen happening in the search world recently.
#10 - Have A Proxy Site Link To It
Some kind person linked to the proxy site framed page of my site, and before I knew it the proxy site was indexed and at the top of the SERPs where once my site was.
#09 - Post It On A Web Forum
Don't waste time setting up a site to hold your precious content, cut out the effort involved in making and optimizing a site by posting it directly on a forum like Digital Point Or Web Master World Forums. What ever happens, it will always rank higher than you and show up for all sorts of long tail terms.
#08 - Get it Dugg
Ok, we've done link baiting and digg baiting around these parts so I won't go into to much detail. Let's just say, if you manage to get dugg, don't worry about the links you'll pick up as the digg page and the pages of all the more relevant bloggers who covered your content will outrank your site before you know it. If you set up the digg yourself, at least you know your content on the digg page will be at the top of the pile.
#07 - Brush Off That Domain You Forgot You Had
#06 - Ask Someone Close To Add It To Their College Site
If you haven't got that old domain, speak nicely to a younger brother or sister or friend who may have access to some nice educational webspace. Add it there and forget about your own site showing up above it. In fact, don't even waste your time adding it to your own site.
#05 - Put It On Wikipedia Or Squidoo
Forget about link building and optimizing your own site, just make a lens at Squidoo or feature an article at Wikipedia. Either way, that content is going to be at the top of the SERPs above your own stuff. Don't forget to leave a link to your site so you can at least pick up the scrapings.
#04 - Have Someone Else Scrape It
Hey! What's that doing there in the SERPs? Oh, someone scraped it off me. Nice to see them doing so well with it.
#03 - Find A Creative Way Of Getting Your Site Banned
Then get Matt Cutts to blog about why you got wiped out. You'll be gone, but there will be plenty of good screen grabs of your wonderful content on Matt's and a hundred other SEO sites, all of them ranking.
#02 - Post Your Content On An Authority Blog's Comments
Doesn't matter what the blogs about, but if it's old, authoritative, forgotten and not comment moderated, then leaving your content on their comments will see your content at the top of the rankings super fast. Once again, don't waste your time making your own site and following the white hat way, get your content seen, albeit far down the page of another's blog.
#01 - Buy AdWords
If all else fails, there's always AdWords. Some suspicious people may tell you that your site's not doing well just so you might be forced to get AdWords. Pay no heed though - AdWords rocks for the banned failed webmaster and is the sure fire way to get your content seen.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
The Problem With Authority - Google And Comment Spam
I've been following events myself over the last couple of years as I enjoy the mass of information and disinformation that comes with the coverage of this behind-the-scenes war. In some cases I've had to learn to protect against the tools being used by spammers in their battle, in others the information has helped me to gain an edge without stepping over the line. Once in a while, I've suffered as a result of going that step to far and then had to learn how to get it back in line with what the engines see as acceptable - you have to love this stuff and keep on top of it if you spend so much time working on the web.
Over the years, various methods have been developed by blackhat SEOs and spammers that have helped slide sites up the search results. Their methods include a range of practices from sneaky cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text to cross site scripting have been used to gain that all important edge in the results. Their methods have changed and developed alongside the changes in ranking algorithms of the search engines.
In recent years if you've owned a blog, forum or guestbook, you've no doubt come across comment spamming. Now not so long ago, Google put a lot of weight on the amount and quality of links your site had to rank it. Comment spam was generally and automated method of boosting this vote for your site. If you've seen waves of nonsense or heavily linked comments on your blog, you've been visited by spam bots trying to influence the search engines.
Now Google tried to encourage the use of the sometimes misunderstood nofollow attribute on blogs to try and combat this. Most blogs are nofollowed in their comments with little success - comment spam comes as thick and fast as it ever did, but at least where it's nofollowed, it's not passing any benefit to the sites it's linked to.
The Increasing Importance Of Authority
Most of what I'm talking about here is concerning Google, thanks mainly to its massive share of searches and the traffic it generates, but the effects do happen with the other main sites as well. So, one thing Google has done the last year to try and improve it algorithm is change the emphasis away from links to authority.
This means some sites are more trusted than others thanks to a number of factors that decide what makes a trusted domain. These factors include the age of the domain, the purpose of the domain and the quality of the links pointed at it. I believe the theory is that blending the results using quality and links as a yardstick is a potentially more valuable method of ranking sites in the search results. Educational and government sites are on the whole generally at the top of this authority hierarchy. It's widely believed that a link or two from a .gov (government) or a .edu (education) site will be a supercharged vote in your site's favour, and as such have become highly prized.
This is all good and well, but like any arms race, spammers are on the ball and comment spamming those sites also, especially so given the power of these links. But this new move towards domain authority is causing some new ranking problems - for starters, if a site with a lot of authority gets a page on something unrelated to it's main theme, it can rank highly for something it really shouldn't thanks to its authority in the eyes of the Google algorithm.
As an example, summer 2006 saw David Naylor and Danny Sullivan ranking highly for searches on Sky HD - not because they were authorities on the new technology, but because they'd mentioned in their blogs they'd got their hands on one. I get the same problem on one of my blogs - it ranks for stuff it shouldn't over other sites of mine that are bang on target for the theme, but not as old and established as my old personal blog.
Blog Spam Content Now More Relevant Than Real Content
Ok - if you're still with us, this background info leads to my concern at this authority based approach. I've spotted something the last couple of days that makes me think this authority trust slant in Google's algorithm has gone to far down the domain authority road, when it comes to how it ranks sites in the results. Tying together these ideas of domain authority and blog spam, Google is starting to rank the actual comment spam content on authority sites as more relevant than actual real content. And it's not just comment spam it's doing it with - it's comment feeds as well.
Ok, so let's look at this. I only spotted this because I saw a drop in my traffic on some nice terms that I had highly relevant and authoritative content on. I've not done a lot more research, but I've seen the same thing happening across a few terms and also, on Yahoo and MSN. Furthermore, it's the fault of spammers, but ironically, it's not doing them any good.
Now - a robotic spam attack will leave the same comments on a range of sites. Look at this page - and note the .edu domain and the theme of the site. It screams authority. However, scroll down and look at the comments, it's been spammed the hell out of on a load of terms designed to boost the rank of the sites it's pointing at.
No fear though - the links are all nofollowed so the spammers are getting no love or power from the links. But, this has led to a curious side effect - the actual comment spam content itself ranks highly because the site is such an authority site. Not only does it rank highly, it was spidered very quickly - check the dates and the content of the comments below.
So, all of a sudden, the page about a jobs fair on the Stanford Computer Forum is ranking for all sorts of terms, and highly. If it was one site it wouldn't be an issue - but lets not forget this is automated, so this has happened across a whole range of sites and they've all ping-ponged to the top of the search results, driving extremely relevant but not as 'domain authoritative' sites out the SERPs, and yes - that includes one of mine.
Just look at the results for the following two search terms - 12 Contract Month Nokia Vodafone and Galabingo Sharon and the sites in the top of them.
Notice how the top sites are all either RSS or Comment Spam. On the Gala Bingo search the top page is even more spammed than the Nokia search and the Stanford site's a bit further down the results. Worse still there's not a single relevant site ranked on the first page, or indeed the next 5 pages (I gave up there) - they're all comment spam pages.
Conclusion
OK, this is quite a limited set of results, I haven't explored it a lot further than searching for some of the terms on the Stanford site - the same happened on a number of them - not all of them, but enough to cause me concern across a couple of terms. It looks like the spammers have scored a big hit here. Ok, so they're not going to get the link love they were after, but at the very least, they've got the possibility of the click through traffic and the knowledge they've pushed relevant sites out of viewers eyes.
Google on the other hand has some work to do on the amount of weight it gives to a domain's authority. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on their search engine, but up until two days ago, it was doing something right as I could actually get to the proper content (not just my own) on the one search term. The sites in the SERPs then at least all had something to do with the subject. Now, none of them do. It looks like the spammers have won this battle for now, but as to if they'll win the war... Time will tell.
Friday, December 08, 2006
BBC Online Needs To Improve Its Search Engine Friendliness
During the time I worked at BBC online, I learnt a lot from what is at heart a great service. But there's one area that they continue to fall down on and need to improve. Having spotted a major issue with their service today, it seemed like an apt time to do a piece on what I perceive as some of their continuing failures to improve in the area that concerns me - search engine friendliness.
Find Me If You Can...
Now, one area that continues to grow, and ticks a lot of the Graf report recommendations is their message boards, but personally I think they're selling their current batch of users short. Having spent a lot of time on the boards in the past, one thing I frequently moaned about was their outdated technology and lack of usability. Being a minion the complaints often fell on uncomprehending deaf ears, or at least ears that weren't really worried about doing anything to improve them. That's one whole ball park I'm not going to go into as frankly, the poor quality of the actual technology is not the thing that concerns me.
The problems I wanted to raise here was the fact that currently, every single link on the boards is wearing a condom thanks to their robots meta tag. Hey! What! If you don't know what a link condom is, learn more here.
Why is this worthy of note? Well, it's basically rendered the whole message board system invisible to the great search engines of the world. If you can find a thread in the thousands (millions?) of threads on the site via Google or any other engine that adheres to the nofollow tag, then you're doing a better job than me.
Now, I don't know about you, but for me, some of the best information I ever got online was on message board posts I found via Google - surely you have too? Ok, we've all had some bad advice also, but being able to get it either way is important. What this nofollow robots tag does is hide the acres of good advice, opinions, tips and thoughts from being indexed by the search engines, and as a result being seen by searchers in the outside world.
Really, what they need to do is link condom the external links posted on the message boards. Then they could be seen to be doing something to avoid and thwart link spammers. More importantly, by doing this on external links only, they'd still be found by the search engines and searchers. With this blanket approach, they're fighting search spam by keeping all the best user generated content out of the search realm!
Also, let's not forget the usability issues of nofollowing all your internal links. You can't even search for a BBC Message Board thread on the BBC's own MSN Live powered search engine, because, well, Live supports nofollow. Foot, own, gun, bang...
I could be missing the point of this, it could be a potential money saving move by the BBC in these cash strapped times. I mean, think of all those extra billions of hits they'd get if people came to the site via search engines and the related bandwidth costs. Nofollowing the whole page isn't just to be seen in the message boards, I've seen this in other areas such as CBeebies.
General Lack Of Consistent SEO
I can actually brag that I've done Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the BBC. It was very basic, I was staff and it was merely on my few pages, bit none the less I did try to practice good SEO to improve my sections rankings. As a result, I know for a fact a lot of the basics of making your pages good to go for both users and robots is severely lacking on the BBC sites. Hell, I don't think I was asked to use a H tag in 4 years of making pages for my former division - and still there's a complete lack of understanding to the importance of basic SEO practices on many of the BBC's sites.
Entire sections with the same hard-coded meta descriptions and keywords are common. So are pages bloated with table layout code and layouts lacking in headlines and semantic mark-up. Don't believe me, just look at the code on a typical BBC page before you get to any content. If I was a spider, I'd be choking on it.
I won't mention the number of times I brought up some of these issues, it was a regular bugbear of mine. It's all the more surprising given the BBC have a team dedicated to search and ranking issues, as well as talking to the major search engines about good practice and the like. To be fair, I got some great advice from their occasional talks to us and still use some of their tips now. Unfortunately, there seems to be a real disconnect between them and the page/layout designers. Things are starting to happen, but they are so far behind and with such a backlog of bad pages, I can't see this ever being improved.
External Links Rendered Pointless
Another thing the BBC is trying to do with it's websites, partially because they've been told they have too, is making them more outward looking by increasing relevant external linking. This is great if you're a webmaster as we all know the value of links from quality domains like the BBC. Over the years I have received a couple of highly relevant links to my sites from them. I should be over-joyed at this, but as a SEO aware webmaster, I most certainly ain't.
Why? Well, they're hidden behind some tracking script that renders the links invisible to the prying eyes of the search engines. Take a look at this page of external links and see what I mean. And why are they doing this. Well, to gather statistics to prove that they are doing their bit by increasing external linking. I know...
Yeah, okay, their consideration is sending traffic to external sites, I realise this, but the links I have I get maybe one or two visitors a month, which is of no real value to me. What I want is the link love, and at present, I'm not getting it! The search engines can't find any inbound links to my sites from the BBC, so the other kind of value I could get from them goes to waste. Frustratingly, BBC News give clean links to any related stories or sites.
And finally...
Ok, so maybe the BBC isn't as aware of these issues as basically, it's too big to care about them. But increasingly just this sort of head-in-the-sand approach could see them losing out to other more SEO'd media outlets. The BBC doesn't have the commercial cares of getting the volume traffic that other people need, there's not ad revenues and the like to worry about. Don't hold your breath waiting for improvements as change at BBC online is glacial.
It's important as the BBC needs to be seen to be 'the' destination for UK web surfers. Removing the nofollow could instantly create millions of new impressions via the search engines once the material is indexed for starters. That's one consideration, but more important again is usability.
Addressing these issues could have a big impact on usability issues related to search and finding things at the site both internally and externally. Let's face it, if it was a toss-up between researching something via the BBC or Wikipedia, I know which one I'd prefer to trust. Increasingly though, Wikipedia is sitting on top of the search results where the BBC should be, and it's missing out on both mind share and traffic. It's not a lot to ask to make things better, after all, that's what we're paying for.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Let's Hear It For Christmas Web Clichés
I say enjoy, what I actually mean is tolerate. And by tolerate I mean moan, obviously. I know it's Christmas as since mid November I've been seeing lots of logos with snow on them. Don't you love it, nothing says Christmas like snow. Unless of course, you're an Australian.
As well as snow on logos and brands, now's the time to keep an eye out for that other old favourite, the snowing website. To be fair, I'm seeing less and less of these, but it's still a seasonal treat to wind up on a site and see snow falling. I can feel the chill right off my monitor.
And then there's the seasonal memes. Don't you just love them? If it's not a Christmas meme then it's a round up of the year. And if it's not a round up of the year gone, then it's one of the year to come. Yes, I'm guilty. I've been planning my annual music round-up for one of my other blogs since last January, about a week after I wrote the last one.
We're yet to see much of a real Web 2.0 Christmas movement, and I'm not quite certain how that would work. The first person to spot an over-sized, drop-shadowed RSS button topped with snow gets a free kiss under the mistletoe. Bah Humbug.
Home
Our Mission
Hall Of Internet Shame
Hall Of Internet Fame
Are You Going To Be Web Famous?
Archive
Links
Contact Us
Archives
- January 2006
- February 2006
- March 2006
- April 2006
- May 2006
- June 2006
- July 2006
- August 2006
- September 2006
- October 2006
- November 2006
- December 2006
- January 2007
- February 2007
- March 2007
- April 2007
- May 2007
Home |
Our Mission |
Hall Of Internet Shame |
Hall Of Internet Fame |
Are You Going To Be Web Famous?
Archive |
Links |
Contact Us |
Site design and maintenance by Day Trip Media © 2006 - 2006. The material on this page is protected by copyright laws and cannot be used without the express written consent of the owner. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
Contact Us | Terms And Conditions | Privacy Policy
