Caydel’s SEO Blog

Here’s the second in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

Alright! Well, I am trying to upload the last take to Google Video, so we will see how it looks. While I am waiting, why don’t I do few more questions and see if we can knock a few out. I am realizing that with this video camera that I’ve got, I can do about 8 minutes worth of video before I get 200 megabytes and then I have to use the client upload or so. I’ll probably break it into chunks of 5 to 8 minutes each.

OK. Ryan writes in.

He says,”Can you put an end to some myths about having too many sites on the same server or having sites with IPs too similar to each other or having them all include the same java script of a different site”.

In general, if you are an average webmaster, this is something that I wouldn’t really worry about. Now, I have to tell a story about Tim Myer and I have been on the same panel together and somebody said, “you took all my sites out” and he said, “both Google and Yahoo did. I don’t really have that many”. And so, Tim Myer asked, “Well, how many sites did you have?”. And the guy looked a little sheepish for about a minute and then he said,”Well… I had about 2000 sites”.

So, there is a range, right - there’s continuum. If you’ve got two, three, four or five sites and they are all different themes, stuff like that, you are not in the place, where you really need to worry that much. If you have 2000 sites, you need to be asking yourself, do I really have enough unique value add content to support 2000 sites? Becuase the answer is probably not. But if you are just an average guy, you’ve got a few sites, I wouldn’t worry about them being on the same IP address, I definitely wouldn’t worry about them being on the same server. That’s something that everybody does.

And the last thing Ryan asked was including the same Javascript off a different site. Well this is a very common idiom. People use Javascript trackers. Google Adsense is Javascript included off another site. So this is something that a lot of sites do on the web, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it at all. Now again, if you have 5000 sites and if you are including the Javascript that does the sneaky redirect, then you do need to worry. But if it is just a few sites or if you are doing something that is entirely logical with your Javascript, I wouldn’t worry at all.

Alright! Erin Shear writes in. Its kind of an interesting question.

He says, “I am having trouble understanding the problems that we face every time we launch a new country. Typically, we launch a new country with millions of new pages at the same time. Additionally, due to our ambitious PR Team, we get tons of link from our network of sites as well as press, during every launch.”

So he is saying that the last time they did this, they didn’t do very well in French and they lost a site in Australia that didn’t do very well at all.

Erin, this is a good question, primarily because the answer has changed somewhat since the last time we talked. Somebody asked me this question at SES Conference New York and I said, ”Just go ahead and launch stuff. Don’t worry about it. It may bring more scrutiny but in general you will be fine.”

I think if you are launching sites with millions of new pages, you want to be a little more cautious, if you can. In general if you are launching with that many pages, its probably better to try to launch a little more softly. So, a few thousand pages and then add a few thousand more… stuff like that.

It could be… Millions of pages is a lot of pages. I mean, Wikipedia is only, how many, 5 or 10 million pages. So if you are launching millions that could be attracting scrutiny and you want to make sure that they are all good pages. Otherwise you might find yourself, not doing as well as you had hoped for.

Alright! Quick question.

Classic Nation writes in and says, “I am wondering what the status is on Google Images and if we can expect to see an update on the indexing technology of the future.”

Actually there was a word on this at the Web Master World. We just did an index update, (just I think last week end) of our index for Google Images. And, I was talking to somebody on the Images team and they are always working hard. So a lot of that stuff you may not see, it may be as simple as bringing in new infrastructure that the main web index has, but they are always working hard to make Google Images index better.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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Here’s the first in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

OK. lets try a few questions and answers. I don’t know if this will work. So, lets give it a shot. (Picks up the first letter) Ralph writes in. He says,

“Some comments on sitemaps please. It seems updates on sitemaps depend on page views of a site”.

No Ralph. that’s not really true. As far as I understand it, page views are not really a factor on when things are updated in sitemaps. So, there are different pieces of data with in sitemaps. Imagine five different little pieces of data. They can all be updated at different times and at different frequencies. Typically they will be updated, you know, with-in days or worst case, with-in weeks. However, as far as I know, its not dependant on page views.

Lets try another one. (Picks up another letter)

“What are some general guidelines and recommendations you would make to people who desire to increase their site’s visibility on Google.”

Wow! OK. So, this is a meaty topic. Definitely a longer issue. But lets go ahead and dive into it.

So, in general, the number one thing that most people kind of make mistake on, on SEO is, they don’t make their site crawlable.

So you want to look at your site, either through a search engine’s eyes or you know, use a text browser, do something and go back to 1994 and use Links or something like that. If you can get through your entire site using only a text browser, then you are going to be in pretty good shape, because most people don’t even bother about crawlability.

You also want to have things like sitemaps on your site, and you can also use our site maps tool in addition to that.

Once you have got your content and you want to have good content, content that’s interesting you know, a reason why somebody would want to link to you and your site is actually crawlable, then you need to go about marketing, promoting or optimizing your site.

So, the main things that I would advise are, think about the people who are really relevant to your niche and make sure that they know about you.
If you are associated with a doctor, because you have got some medical kind of website, make sure that the doctor knows about you and if he has got a website, it might be appropriate for him to link to you.

You also want to be thinking about a hook, something that’s viable. It can be really good content, for example, newsletters, tutorials, I would set it up all these video stuff, trying to make it look semi-professional.

There were tutorials by a company called Photoflex(??), they were saying here is how to make the fill light, the key light and all that sort of stuff and oh by the way, you can buy our equipment to do that. That’s really really smart and infact, another photography site that I went to, they had syndicated their tutorial lessons to that other (photoflex)website. So, content can be a great way to get links. You can also look at things like digg, Slashdot, Tearrank(?), Reddit, you know, social networking sites, MySpace, those sort of things.

But fundamentally you need something interesting that sets you apart from the pack.

Once you got something like that, then you are going to be in much better shape as far as promoting your site is concerned. But again, the biggest step is making sure that your site is crawlable. After that, making sure that you got content, and then finally trying to do the best you can to find some hook, some reason why users would love your site, return to it and bookmark it.

Alright. Lets do another one! (picks up another letter)

“What conditions”, asks Brian M, ”call Google to use DMOZ snippet when there is already a valid meta description tag on the page?”

That’s a really good question. I actually had to go and ask the snippets team. I was like “Hi, why does this happen?”.

I am not going to go into too much of detail, but here’s the way you should think about it. Suppose that you have a page about Christina Aguilera or something like that and your open directory snippet is something about Britney Spears. Well, if you type in or some user types in Britney Spears, that’s going to be a much better snippet.

So the way I would be thinking about it is that there is always a scoring process which does all this selection to say, OK you are the best document to be returned. Once we have selected and scored your document, so that, you are going to be returned at a certain slot on the search engines.

Now what you need do is to think, is the open directory snippet or my meta tag a better match for what the user actually typed in.
Its actually ‘query dependant’. That is, depending on query the user typed, we say, well, we think that the meta description tag from the open directory project or from your meta tags is going to be a better match for the user’s query. Then based on that, we try to say, OK, in that case lets go with the meta-tags, or in this other case lets go with the open directory project.

Now you can, If you don’t like the open directory snippet, you can use the meta ‘noodp’ tag and that will prevent us from using the description from the open directory project. So you have sort of the ability to scope things a little bit and choose which things you want to have happen(?).

Alright! (Picks up another letter) This one is a good one. Lara McKenzie(??) writes in.

She says, “does Google favor ‘bold’ over ’strong’ tags?” (Sigh).

In general, we probably favor bold just a little bit more, but its so slight that I wouldn’t really worry about it. I would go ahead and do your markup how ever you want to do it, not worrying so much about “oh if I use a tag like this I am going to get a little bit of boost in Google” or something like that. Any kind of effect like that is relatively small. So in general, I do what ever is best for users or whatever is best for you site and then not worry much about it after that.

I think I am going to go ahead and upload what we got so far, see how it looks and hopefully I will be back in a bit.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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Kevin from Adbrite just let me into Adbrite’s new video ad program. The ads are currently running on a CPC basis. This will be a very nice feature. Users who view the video will be able to embed it in their own site, or send to friends, and you collect the revenue for all embedded copies as well.

If a video were to go viral and make it’s way around the internet, you could potentially be collecting revenue on thousands or even millions of views.

Above *should* be my first attempt at using the system. This is a video of Jesse Cook playing ‘Rattle and Burn’ in Montral at Jazzfest 2006 from his latest DVD. He is one of my favourite artists - I had the pleasure to see him play in Dec. 2004 and he was simple amazing!

Note: To get this code working, I had to modify the Adbrite code a bit - remove the noscript tags and anclose it in a div. But - it’s working now!

Update: It appears that clicking on an ad in the video causes a popup. This popup is blocked by default for Firefox, so I doubt we see the revenue for it…. Hope they find a way around this.

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LinkedIn has been generating a signifigant amount of buzz in the last few weeks. First, a lot of noise was made over the launch of the new LinkedIn Answers section, then Guy Kawasaki’s great ‘10 Ways to Use LinkedIn‘ post.

Where is the value of LinkedIn? LinkedIn is a network of over nine million professionals, with full profiles on them including their education, their industry, and their work histories. In short, LinkedIn has control over a staggering amount of data. This information is a goldmine for data mining purposes, market research, or any one of a thousand different uses.

But that is only the smallest part of the value of LinkedIn. The real value becomes apparent when you go to Account Settings > Advertising in your profile and read the following text:

LinkedIn is developing or has developed a method to serve ads based upon the content in your LinkedIn profile. Any time you are logged into LinkedIn, the ad code they are developing will likely read a cookie in your browser to gain the stored profile ID, then delve into your profile to pull out the information to serve ads.

Think of the value in this - they know your industry and your work experience. They could tune advertisements exactly to what you as a professional want and need to see. This technology could be worth potentially millions to the Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing programs. For all we know, LinkedIn is already licensing out this data to other companies for marketing purposes.

Before too long, we will likely see LinkedIn purchased by either Google or Yahoo! in order to get control of this data. It could potentially form a large part of the algorithm of either company when determining which ad to display on a site to a given end user.

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This afternoon, Aaron from the City of Angels Children’s Home in Tijuana, Mexico contacted me for some SEO advice. It seems that since yesterday, the homepage of the site (just the homepage, not the entire site! http://www.tjkids.org) has been dropped from the Google index.

I’ve taken a look at it, and identified a few possible factors:

1. Very low link strength - The site has only 17 backlinks according to Yahoo, with only 14 distinct domains between them.
2. No internal links to the root domain - The menu bar linked to http://www.tjkids.org/index.html rather than to the root page.

If you have a spare minute, here’s some things you can do to help Aaron and the orphanage.

• Are you an SEO? Do you see anything else on the page that could be causing Google issues? I’d appreciate it if you could post anything else in the comments, so I can relay it back to Aaron!
• Are you a blogger or webmaster? It would help a lot if you could write a post or story linking back to the City of Angels Children’s Home. This will help them to get indexed again.

Thank you for taking a second to read this, and please consider helping out!

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Roughly one month ago, on December 11, I signed up for Jim Kukral’s BlogKits service. Blogkits was designed and is marketed as a way to monetize blogs, aiming at taking over the advertising positions on blogs most often filled with Google Adsense or a similar PPC service.

The truth is that the vast majority of blogs don’t make more than pennies per day using Google Adsense. And here’s a little secret that even the “big” bloggers (the ones with tons of traffic) don’t want to tell you… Even they only use Google Adsense to supplement their blogs. They make a lot more money selling other ads because they have traffic.

It’s true, if you don’t have a ton of traffic like the vast majority of blogs, running Google Adsense is a waste of time. Take our challenge. Sign up and run BlogKits partner ads on your blog for 30-days in place of your Adsense ads. Then compare the earnings, and you decide which one is more worthwhile.

I was definately interested in giving it a shot, so I signed up and placed a BlogKits block on my blog, which is visible to the right, above my existing Adsense ads, as well as in a text link following the title of each post. Now, nearly a month has passed, and I have made my decision.

Before I comment on my earnings, I should mention that I cheated on the BlogKits challenge a bit - I did not remove my existing Adsense ads. I figured that the influence each ad service had on the other would be minimal; if people are interested in an ad, they will click it, regardless of what else is on the page.

For the time period from 11/12/2006 to 08/01/2007, BlogKits has taken 61 clicks, with a 0% conversion rate, and $0.00 earnings. For the same time period, Adsense has had 22 clicks, with $8.33 in revenue.

Now, I realize that the click volume to each is somewhat small; it may take more clicks before I see any conversions with BlogKits, and even a single conversion has the possibility to pass my Adsense revenue. Nevertheless, after just under 30 days, BlogKits has not performed for me!

I will leave BlogKits up for another month or two to collect more data, but so far I am not holding my breath! How has your experience with BlogKits been - has it worked well for you?

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After reading Guy Kawasaki’s post on ‘Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn‘, I realize that LinkedIn is catching on at a quick rate.

I think it has a lot of potential both for job hunting and just for having a professional contact network. Additionally, with the new LinkedIn Answers section, it will only become greater as a resource for professionals to rely on.

I’ve had up for about a month and a half now, and have built a small contact list. However, there is nothing about it that even really shouts out my interest in SEO or Web Design. I know I am a capable programmer and decently knowledgeable about the SEO industry, but due to a lack of professional experience (I’m only in University, remember), I don’t have a wealth of previous positions to include which might indicate my knowledge and interest in these fields. Additionally, none of my previous employers use LinkedIn, and so I can’t draw on their recommendations either.

I want to clean up my act a bit on LinkedIn. So how would you suggest I optimize my LinkedIn profile and make it more professional looking? I want to be able to apply for jobs via LinkedIn and not immediately dismiss me based on the sparseness of my profile.

Any suggestions are very much appreciated. Additionally, if you want to add me to your contact network, go right ahead. My email address is . Thanks for any help!

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