FREQUENTLY ASKED
QUESTIONS
What is doorway page?
Doorway page is an entrance page, and it is specifically designed to
rank high in spider search engines for a particular keyword or more
relevant keywords in a single page, and then redirect the visitors
into your specified main page. However it's not just a blank page
with a link direct to your site, but a powerful, content rich page
packed with keywords.
Why we need doorway pages?
Of course we are building a commercial website for profit, and
starting at the point of serving our users, instead of building a
website for search engines. Then when our job is done, we will find
that our website can't be listed in the first page in the search
result for our keyword, sometimes the worst thing is our website
can't be find in the search result. The most important reason for
this is that our site is new and traffic for the particular keyword
into our website is low, but this is not I'm going to talk here
because it's not the problem of SEO or website promotion issues. I
will talk another two reasons.
The first thing is that not all spiders will
visit your entire site.
The most important page on your site is your homepage, and this can
be viewed also as your doorway page. You submit this single page,
and the spiders will find the rest of your site. Unfortunately, it's
not always the case. Some spiders won't see your entire site, and
many won't go more than one or two levels deep. Because of this,
it's maybe a good idea to have alternate home pages for various
sub-pages in your site, and then you can submit each these alternate
home pages to search engines to attract visitors.
The second is that our site is not search
engine friendly.
As I said in Run Your Website for Users, not for Search Engines, we
start building a web based on the theme to serve users. To make our
site friendly and convenient to users, we design the page with
Flash, Javascripts and plenty of images. We pleased the eyes of
visitors, however search engines can't understand these elements.
Search engines welcome a site with text full of keywords, and
because of this, such kind of pages will achieve low ranking in most
cases.
There are few ways to solve this problem. First is to modify your
site to meet search engines' algorithm, however you will lose the
popularity in users, so we will not suggest you to do that. Second
is to use a technique called cloaking. Please read Cloaking for more
information . However it is time consuming and requires lots of
efforts.
Then the last and the fast and eaSitest method is to adopt doorway
pages. You can make another page which can be ranked higher in
search result, and when visitors visit the doorway page, it will
direct to you targeted link.
How to make a doorway page?
If you have a website with specific sub subject area, products,
services, or even localities, then specific doorway page can be
created for each one. Make sure each doorway page is keyword focused
(don't make a doorway page with more than 3 keywords), and meta tag
(description, keyword) concentrate on the specified products,
services, locations, etc. For a website like Global Travel Sources,
which has sub subject of hotel, restaurant, landscape, tour and
ticket, we can make doorway pages for each the sub subject. A page
specifically dedicated to search engine content for hotel will have
a better chance in search engine ranking than a page tries to cover
the five subject if you search with keyword "hotel".
Search engines generally give priority to urls
with keywords contained, so it's better to apply for a domain name
with the most important keywords for your doorway page.
My own personal view is to make a doorway page for each keyword and
each major search engine, though there thousands of search engines.
I do think you shall make a doorway page each for Google, MSN, yahoo, alltheweb, altavista, etc, and you
shall also make one for the local biggest search engine, e.g. for
service targeted at Chinese, a doorway page for baidu is very important.
If you made many doorway pages for you site, it's better to make
another one which contains all the links to all of your doorway
pages. By submitting this page, spiders can crawl the rest of your
links.
Many search engine submission software such as AddWeb, Dynamic Submission,
make it very easy to create doorway pages. However these templated
doorway pages are very simple and basic, they can't bring you too
much benefit. You shall fill in more creative content, add
information and links, if possible, manually design one starting
from a blank page. You'd better make the doorway page have human
arts, or spiders will know that and the result is not up to you.
Doorway page can't give you guarantee!
People visiting a doorway page as a result of search engine query
are presented either a link to enter the main site or they are
automatically redirected to the site. Sometimes maybe you can't tell
whether you visited a doorway page or a main site.
Doorway pages are not generally considered spam by the search
engines when they are used properly. However, if the search engines
are filled with millions of doorway pages, it will reduce the
quality of the index and lower the value of search result. Now there
is a growing trend by search engine providers to view them with
skepticism. For example, Altavista started removing doorway pages from its index, and in
some cases even banning sites using them.
Tips for doorway pages!
Put the navigation menu of your main site into the doorway pages.
Use the Robots.txt file to meets the search engines. Please search
the internet for introduction for such files.
Link popularity is very important to most search engines. Make sure
you have outside links to your main site, doorway pages, etc. If
not, it's very difficult to get the top ranking or indexed.
If you have hundreds of keywords, don't try to make doorway pages
for each your keywords. No site shall have hundreds of keywords, if
that's true, please make a complete audit for it.
Some SEO companies will offer to host your doorway pages. Be
careful, as if you are paying a monthly fee for the service, the
moment you stop paying, they have control over your top rankings!
Conclusion
Doorway pages do increase the accuracy
of the search engines index if they are used with responsibility.
What is ROR?
ROR (Resources of a Resource) is a rapidly growing independant XML
format for describing any object of your content in a generic
fashion, so any search engine can better understand that content.
RORweb.com is the official ROR website.
ROR promotes the concept of structured feeds (which is related to
the concept of structured blogging) enabling search engines to
complement text search with structured information to better
understand meaning. ROR information is typically stored in a ROR
feed called ror.xml placed in your website's main directory. Unlike
Google Base, ROR feeds can be easily accessed by all search engines:
at http://www.your-website-name.com/ror.xml
You can think of your ROR feed as a powerful structured feed for
describing all your objects to the search engines: products,
services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts,
anything you want.
The current object types and attributes of the ROR format can be
found here . ROR providers are working with several companies and
individuals in defining new object types and attributes for everyone
to use.
ROR Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is ROR?
A: ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object
of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can
better understand that content. You can think of your ROR feed as a
powerful structured feed for describing all your objects to the
search engines: products, services, reviews, discounts, images,
events, schedule, podcasts, anything you want.
Q: How is ROR different from Google Sitemaps?
A: ROR was created before Goolge Sitemaps, as a way to describe
website information for the search engines. ROR is much more than
Google Sitemaps, it does not only help describe your sitemap, but
also products, services, feeds, articles, reviews, archives, and
much more bjects. Also, ROR Sitemaps are automatically readable by
all search engines, including Google.
Q: How is ROR different from Google Base?
A: ROR was created before Google Base. But unlike Google Base,
ROR is for all search engines, not just one. Any search engine can
find your ROR information using this scheme: http://www.your-domain-name.com/ror.xml
Q: What is a ROR feed (ror.xml)?
A: A ROR feed is an XML file for describing your content to the
search engines (products, servives, reviews, classified ads, job
listing, anything you want). The main ROR feed is usually named
ror.xml and located in the main (or top) directory of your website
(in the same directory as your index.htm file).
Q: Can I call my ROR feed something other than
ror.xml?
A: Yes, of course. The name ror.xml is just the default name;
that's where search engines look by default. If they don't find it
there they look for a <link> tag in your main page (between the <head> and </head> tags):
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="ROR" href="http://your-site.com/ror.php" />
Note: Alternatively you can simply create a tiny ror.xml file and
use it to tell the search engines the real location of your ROR
feed. To do this, use the "seeAlso" property:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ror="http://rorweb.com/0.1/">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Your Site Name</title>
<ror:seeAlso>http://your-site.com/ror.php</ror:seeAlso>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Q: How do I create a ROR feed?
A: Just use the ROR Feed Generator or the ROR Sitemap Generator.
These tools make it very easy to create a ROR feed. If you have a
Froogle feed or Yahoo Shopping feed, you can generate a ROR feed
from either of them using the ROR Feed Generator. Or you can also
ask a ROR provider to create a ROR feed for you. All the details
about the ROR format can be found in the ROR specification.
Q: What is the difference between a ROR Feed
and a ROR Sitemap?
A: A ROR Sitemap is simply a special type of ROR feed, a feed
that provides sitemap information to the search engines.
Q: Is ROR free?
A: On most websites, including this one, you will be able to
create a ROR feed for free. Some websites will also provide help for
creating ROR feeds for a small fee (see our ROR providers page).
Q: Who is behind ROR?
A: ROR is an independant format lead by AddMe.com. The ROR team
is working with several companies in defining new object types and
attributes for everyone to use.
Q: How do I add the ROR feed (ror.xml) to my
website?
A: Just upload (ftp) the file like any other file into the main
(or top) directory of your website (in the same directory as the
index.htm file).
Q: Who uses ROR?
A: ROR is spreading very fast. There are currently tens, if not
hundreds, of thousands website using ROR. Here are just a few of
them.
META TAGS
Meta tags are
designed to give search engines information about your website, for
example brief description, products, services and advantages of your
company. Some other meta tags will instruct the robots or spiders
what action to take on your site. A site can have no meta tags, but
good meta tags will do influence the appearance of your website in
the search results, and thus allure visitors and increase traffic.
There are several meta tags, but the most important for search
engine indexing are the Keywords and Description tag, and another
unimportant but useful one is the Robots tag. While for others like
author, distribution tags, etc, are not used by search engines, and
you are suggested not to use them only if you do think it's
necessary. Some may put Title as meta tag, but generally it's not.
Before go ahead, let's clear up one thing, that meta tags are not
magic solution. You may have the best meta tags in the world, but
meta tags alone will not significantly raise the ranking of your
website if it lacks helpful content.
META TAG DESCRIPTION
The meta description tag is in a way to tell the search engines to
display the brief and essential description of your site under the
title in the search listing, and help the keyword relevancy. The
basic html format for meta description tag is:
<meta name="description" content="short
description of your website">
This tag is very important, since a magnetic description can arrest
searcher's eyes to stop on your listing and hit your link. If no
description in your website, search engines will go to your linked
page and find any text at the top, and then show it in the listing.
Maybe we always find listing in the search result as this:
Welcome to As Is Biz, Inc.
| Home | About Us | Products | Support | Contact Us | . Welcome to
As Is Biz, Inc., we are located...
www.asisbiz.com.com/ - 12K - Cached - Similar pages
This website doesn't have a description tag, so engines put the
texts found in the front page and list them in the search result.
From this listing, we can only guess that this company has something
with electronics, anything else we can't know. Will this listing get
a lot clicks? Probably the chance is very low.
Make the tag short and descriptive. Almost all search engines will
only give your two lines to display the website description, and the
exceeding part will be omitted and replace by "...". Two lines is
about 30 words, and try to make your description around 25 words.
Spend some time to prepare these 25 words, and they shall tell the
searcher what they will find in your website.
Keyword weight. Most search engines will consider keywords more
important if the keywords exist in the description tag, and the
closer to the beginning, the more important. So try to put as more
keywords as possible into the description tag and don't locate them
at the end in case replaced by "...". However, do remember
descriptive and short description is the preferred choice. Let's
look at two examples:
Site A: <meta name="description"
content="Cornet trading is a trading company located in Ontario,
Canada. Our main trading products are Copper Cathode, Mill Berry">
Site B: <meta name="description"
content="Copper Cathode, Mill Berry are two main trading products of
Cornet trading, which was located in Ontario, Canada">
For site A, keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill Berry" has the
possibility of being cut off by engines, and if this is the case,
reader will not know what Cornet are trading for. Site B will tend
to do better than site A for the keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill
Berry", because the term occupies more of the overall description,
and because they are the first words found in the description.
Though keyword weight is important for the description, repeating
keywords is a big no-no. Most search engines will consider this
spamming, and readers are unlikely to click a listing like this:
<meta name="description" content="DVD players,
portable DVD players, King Bug DVD players, DVD, DVD, DVD">
Searcher can't find a brief description of your DVD players, and
thus unlikely to click the link. A description like this will help
the site get ignored and un indexed.
Notice that description tag is not a factor in ranking algorithm for
most search engines, but it is a factor in alluring clicks.
META TAG KEYWORDS
The meta keywords tag is used to assist those search engines which
are meta capable in classing your website. This is important, the
search engines use this information to determine under what queries
your website will come up. A basic format is as the following:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,
keyword2, keyword3,...">
These keywords can be separated commas, space or both, and
separation method makes little difference. However inclusion of
commas does inflate the tag size, so they can be removed if you are
hovering around the limit. Just as a thing has two opposite sides,
reciprocally, including commas does have the effect of making the
tag much more readable.
How many keywords? You shall put all the keywords and phrases that
are important and relevant to your site in the list. Some experts
said that some search engines penalize pages that only use one or
two words in the tag, and the reason they gave is that engines will
treat those pages as doorway pages. Partially right and don't do
that. Besides, if you're only using one or two keywords, probably
you're going to miss out on traffic by focusing too narrowly. But
listing hundreds of keywords dilutes the keyword density, so you
won't score well for any of them. My own opinion is to list all your
keywords, but if the number exceeds 30, please think about
redesigning your website, because even for the most popular sites,
they don't have so many keywords.
The keywords listed shall focus on your central information and
services. If you are a company designing the shell for DVD players,
don't use "DVD" as your keyword because it's a too wide range,
instead you can use "Designer of DVD player" as the keyword.
Just as stated in meta description tag, don't repeat the keywords.
Never insert the same word twice in a row of the tag, even if you
are using different variations (Plurals, Caps, different tense,
etc). You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use
it more than 3 or 4 times within the keywords tag.
Keyword weight? You have 25 keywords and phrases covered all your
information and services, but maybe one or two of them are much more
important than others. This is where weight and position come into
play.
Most search engines will consider keywords more important if the
keywords have much more weight and prominence in the tag. In the
following example, the weight for keyword "copper" is 25% in site A
and 20% in site B.
Site A: <meta name="keywords" content="copper
scrap, mill berry">
Site B: <meta name="keywords" content="scrap copper, mill berry,
birch">
The prominence is how close to the beginning. The closer the
beginning, the higher the prominence. In the above example, the
prominence for keyword "copper" is 100% in site A and 80% in site B.
Of the above two sites, if the search engine reads meta tags, site A
will tend to do better than site B for the keyword "copper". So try
to put the most important keywords at the beginning and remove those
unrelated words.
Bad news is that though many search engines used to rely on meta
keywords tag heavily, more and more have abandoned this or rely less
weight on it. No matter using it or not, a good keywords tag can
give you a small boost in traffic in many engines, and it's better
than nothing.
META ROBOTS TAG
The meta robots tag is used to pass robots or spiders with
instructions on what action to take on your pages. Most of the
search engines accept robots tag, especially those major ones. The
script is as the following, and parameters are one or more words.
<meta name="robots" content="parameters">
The recognized parameters are: index, noindex (counterpart of
index), follow, nofollow (counterpart of follow), all, none
(counterpart of all).
Index = index this page (default setting, no
need for a tag)
nonindex = don't index this page
follow = follow the links from this page to get more pages
nofollow = don't follow the links from this page
all = index this page and follow the links from it
none = don't index this page and don't follow the links
Most spiders automatically assume that any page they come across can
be indexed and links from it can be followed. And you may wonder why
somebody wants his page doesn't get indexed. Consider private pages
on a site, login page, for example. It's better to put a robots tag
with parameters of noindex and none in the <head> part for that kind
of pages.
LINK POPULARITY - FACTOR IN RANKING
In recent years, almost every search engine has started to heavily
rely on a link popularity measurement to determine pages' position
in its ranking algorithm. This means the search engines don't just
look at the content on each page, and the same time they will
analyze link structures and clicks to determine the ranking in a
search.
What is link popularity?
In a nutshell, link popularity is how many websites link to your
site, and the websites linked to your site shall be indexed by the
search engine (just using those "free-of-all-links-pages" is not the
kind of link you are looking for).
Link popularity for a website is different for different search
engines, and it's easy to know your link popularity for a specifies
engine. For example, if you want to know the link popularity for
Google, just type in the search box "www.yourdomainname.com",
and this will give you a rough estimate of your link popularity.
However there is an added catch to the link popularity issue. Not
only are the quantity of links taken into account, but also the
quality of the website linked to you. If a site connected to you is
considered by the search engine as important, it will carry much
more weight, while those sites with less quality such as FFAs and
other random sites will often be ignored.
Furthermore, most search engines assign "themes" property to the
websites they indexed, and if you have a higher link count from the
websites with the same theme property, you will have a higher link
popularity. So please attempt to trade links with with sites that
are similar to yours in some ways, and try to exchange links with
those very popular ones.
Google uses a system called Page Rank, which is actually a
measurement of link popularity. Download Google toolbar, you will be
able to see Google's Page Rank calculation on a scale of one to ten
for every page you visited. But remember Page Rank != Page's Rank.
There are two very different things.
Make your site valuable to attract others'
linking
The internet is a web and it is jointed by links. If you are
offering good resources or services, people will bookmark your site
and come back. If not, they will forget your site. The fast way to
make your site popular is to spread your good information and
services one by one in the internet, just as Google and Yahoo, their
popularity is due to their content.
So at the beginning of designing your website, spend more time in
thinking "what information and services we can provide to the users"
than the time in web beautification and website promotion
techniques. For more information, please read the article Run
website for users, not for search engines.
Increase link popularity afterwards
In the case your website is already done, and the content can't help
you too much in increasing popularity. Then you shall adopt one of
more methods as following to get others link to your site.
Trade links. Find other people who are willing to exchange link with
you. Add his website URL in your pages, and put your link in his
site. Do it as much as you can, since it not only will benefit your
link popularity, but you are more likely to get more traffic from
them. First choice is to trade links with those very popular sites,
and second the ones with similar business as yours, even
competitors. Third reciprocate links with any pages if possible, no
matter they are larger or not, and no matter what's business they
belong to; don't be afraid that engines will carry more weight on
popular and similar sites, because not all engines do the same way.
There are also some "link share" services, for example, LinksToYou,
which can increase your link popularity. The way is to submit your
machine generated page on his site and links to that page from his
index page. Every page submitted just looks like a lattice point in
the site meshwork, and thus each page is linked to all the other
pages.
Bad news now are that many search engines regard them as spam and
some completely ban sites that participate in such program. Most of
all, for those search engines put more emphasis on quality and
similar business sites in their ranking, linking to such a site
sometimes will be useless or even harmful.
FFA sites, as stated above, some search engines will ignore links
from them. The FFA sites did once serve a good purpose, but this is
really no longer the case. The links on such sites are unlikely to
help you, and they really are not worth the numerous spam email you
receive as a result.
So trade link with anybody who is willing to do that, but take care.
Online Directories. Getting listed in the most popular directories
(strongly recommended, DMOZ, Yahoo, Looksmart if you have
spare budget) will not only boost your traffic, it will also
increase your link popularity. It is especially relevant to link
popularity because these directories are mega popular (remember the
more popular a site is that links to you, the more popular that your
site will be rated). If have enough time and effort, submit to other
free directory also.
PAGERANK
PR stands for P age R ank. As explained by
Google:
Quote:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by
using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual
page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to
page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more
than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also
analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are
themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other
pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which
Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course,
important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query.
So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching
techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to
your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term
appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content
(and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a
good match for your query.
As explained by WikiPedia:
Quote:
PageRank is a patented method (an algorithm) to assign a
numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of
documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of
"measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm
may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal
quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to
any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by
PR(E).
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence
the name Page-Rank) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project
about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and
led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after,
Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google
search engine, which still has PageRank as a key element.
Summary: PageRank is your page's popularity on the Web. (Notice I
didn't say website).
PageRank != Page's Rank. They are two very different things.
Google API
With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query
billions of web pages directly from their own computer programs.
Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program
in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual
Studio .NET.
To access the Google Web APIs service, you must create a Google
Account and obtain a license key. Your Google Account and license
key entitle you to 1,000 automated queries per day.
The only way to query Google's index without violating their terms
of service is through the Google API.
Google SiteMaps
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to
the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of
your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically
keep them informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes
to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.
The Google Sitemap is an XML file in a specific format that tells
Google the information it needs to find the pages of your website.
What is Googlebombing?
Googlebombing is a certain attempt to influence the ranking of a
given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often
with humorous intentions. Due to the way that Google's PageRank
algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link
to that page all use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is
created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.
Why does my site rank well in MSN/Yahoo but
not in Google?
MSN and Yahoo have vastly different algorithms then Google. With MSN
and Yahoo on-page factors (page titles and content) tend to have a
greater influence on a page's ranking whereas Google tends to put
more value in off-page factors (incoming links). Many websites tend
to rank well in MSN and Yahoo before they rank well in Google as it
takes time to acquire the backlinks required to influence Google's
rankings.
How do I find out what my PR is?
There are many different ways to do this:
Websites that check for you: DigitalPoint , PageRank.net , WebmasterBrain , StarGeek
PR Lookup Software: Google Toolbar , PageRank FireFox Extension
How often does Google update their PR?
Google representatives, such as engineer Matt Cutts, have publicly
indicated that the Toolbar PageRank is republished about once every
3 months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are generally
unreliable measurements of actual PageRank value for most periods of
the year.
However, PR is updated at Google daily (or close to daily). New links are factored into the equation
and they are applied to a page's PR. You just cannot see this this
PR until Google does its next public PR update.
When is the next Google PR update?
Estimated to be between June 1st and July 1st.
How important is PR in Google's algorithm?
This subject is open to great debate. It's overall weight has been
reduced since it's original inception. Anchor text has far surpassed
it in importance. The general rule of thumb is that PR is used as a
tie breaker amongst similar ranking sites.
How do I increase my PageRank?
Since PageRank is an indicator of a page's link popularity it should
be obvious how to increase your PageRank - GET MORE INCOMMING LINKS!
High PR links are ideal but don't underestimate the power of low PR
links. Afterall, PR does add up.
Why does <website goes here> have such a high
PR/high ranking with so few backlinks?
1) They have a lot of low PR links pointing to the home page. These
usually don't show in Google's backlink report but can still propel
a site high in the rankings.
2) They have a lot of links pointing to internal pages within the
website. These links will only show when you do a backlink report
for that specific page, not the homepage. These pages usually pass
on a lot of PR to the site's home page and propel it in the
rankings.
3) Web pages with high PageRank have linked to the site's home page.
High PR links carry much more weight then links from low PR pages. A
link from a PR8 or PR9 page can make quite a difference in a web
page's PR and ranking.
Why does my website have a higher PR with the
'www' then without it?
Google sees your website with the 'www' ( http://www.example.com ) as a different page the without ( http://example.com ). Pages that link
to the page without the 'www' are hurting your pages with the 'www'
as the PR is essentially being split between the two pages.
Fortunately this is easy to fix. Use a 301 redirect to redirect
Google, and everyone else, to the 'www' page from the non 'www'
page. The code would look similar to this (mod_rewrite required):
Code: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine
On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC] RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}
[L,R=301]
To go from the 'www' to non 'www' use
this code:
Code: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}//s%{HTTPS}
^www\.(.*)//((s)on|s.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^
http%3://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
How do I stop search engines from indexing
some of pages?
You can use a robots.txt file to tell search engines (and other
bots, too) where they can and cannot go. An excellent tutorial can
be found at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html And an excellent
example of one can be found at WebmasterWorld: http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt .
I just switched domain names. How do I
transfer my PR from one domain to another?
Use a 301 redirect. Put this in .htaccess file in the root directory
of the old website:
Code: RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1
How should I handle external links? (Because I
don't want to send PR out of my website)
Outbound links are a balancing act. You need to decide how much PR
is worth to you (as compared to your users' experience at your site)
and then decide what is the best way to achieve your maximum PR
without sacrificing a satisfactory user experience.
One thing you could do is use a robots.txt file to prevent search
engines from crawling pages with outbound links. Then no PR is lost
because the search engines aren't even crawling those pages. But
keep in mind that any internal links on those pages won't be counted
either. This is common to do with a directory.
Another thing you may want to try is to use a script that redirects
users to external sites (example: http://www.domain.com/outboundlinks.php?id=linkidhere
) and then put outboundlinks.php into your robot.txt file. Then the
search engines won't follow the links because they can't access the
script that does the redirect. Why would you want to do this?
Becasue search engines do follow redirect scripts so the PR is being
sent out of your site anyway.
The latest technique available is to put 'rel="nofollow"' in your
anchor tag. Google, and others I do believe, will no follow these
links and in Google's case not pass along PR.
Does having Adsense on my website help me with
my search engine ranking?
Not really. It may get Google to spider your site more completely
and frequently as it needs to know what the content is on your pages
so it may serve up the right ads. But it won't give you a boost in
any way in the rankings. Won't give you any extra PR either.
My site has gone from PR<whatever> to zero.
(Or the Google Toolbar is greyed out) Why?
or
My site has disappeared from the SERPs. Why?
This seems to happen on occasion and the natural tendency is to
think you've been banned. However, this is rarely the case (if
you've been doing bad things then you're not asking this question
because you already know why this has happened!). For reasons known
only to the powers to be this just happens. After a while, usually
next update, things return to normal. What can you do about it?
Nothing really. You can write to Google but all you'll get is one of
the generic responses that doesn't really tell you anything. The
best thing you can do is to sit back, have a beer or three, and wait
for things to be set right again....on their own.
Also, new websites can take a while to have visible PR assigned to
them. This doesn't mean the site doesn't have PR. It just means the
Google Toolbar or other methods of checking just haven't been
updated yet.
BUYING TEXT LINKS
For SEO purposes webmasters often buy links for their sites. As
links from higher PR pages are believed to be more valuable they
tend to be more expensive. It can be an effective and viable
marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of
quality & relevant sites to drive traffic & increase a webmasters
link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned Webmasters that
if they discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring
PageRank and Reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in
the calculation of other page's PageRank). The practice of buying
and selling links is intensely debated across the Webmastering
community.
What is "rel=nofollow"?
In early 2005, Google implemented a new attribute, rel="nofollow",
for the HTML link element, so that website builders and bloggers can
make links that Google will not follow for the purposes of PageRank—
they are links that no longer constitute a "vote" in the PageRank
system. The nofollow attribute was added in an attempt to help
combat comment spam.
How do I rank well in Google?
Ranking well in Google is fairly straight forward.
1) Acquire incoming links with the anchor text you wish to rank well
for (This is the most important by far).
2) Optimize your title tag
3) Use and optimize your Header tags (h1, h2, h3, h4)
Why does Google have less pages indexed then MSN/Yahoo?
This should be addressed by the Bigdaddy update. Google has admitted
to having issues indexing some websites. Their Google Sitemaps does
address this issue as well and is probably the best thing you can do
to ensure Google crawls your website. The PR of your pages is also a
likely factor. If they are very low (PR2 or less) they tend not to
be indexed well.
Why does Google show less backlinks then Yahoo
and MSN? Why doesn't Google show all of my backlinks?
Googles purposely does not list all links pointing to a particular
page. This is an effort to keep webmasters from manipulating their
system. They also only update backlinks on a periodic basis so you
may have acquired new backlinks but they haven't been refelected in
Googles update. That doesn't mean Google doesn't know they are
there. They just haven't publicly acknowledged them yet. It is also
important to keep in mind that Google only shows backlinks for the
specific page you requested (usually the homepage), not the whole
site like other search engines do.
Also, Google also only displays the number of backlinks to one
specific page. This is usually the homepage since that is what most
webmasters check for. Yahoo, and other search engines, report the
number of incoming links per domain.
Why doesn't Google index all of my site's
pages? Why does Google update some pages more often then others?
1) Your site is new. You don't really expect Google to index every
page you have immediately, do you?
2) Your site has low PR. Consensus indicates that Google will crawl
sites that have higher PR deeper then sites with low PR. They figure
the more popular your site is (PR is a popularity contest,
remember?) the better a resource it must be.
3) Your site uses dynamic pages/session ID's and they are not search
engine friendly. Session ID are search engines like garlic is to
vampires. They repell them. Have your site remove them when the bots
come around and you will fare much better (yes, this is ethical and
acceptable to the search engines). Query strings that are either
very long or contain"id=" tend to limit the amount of pages some
search engines will index (Google is a good example of this). Change
"id=" to "page=" or something similar and you should do better. Or
read the article about search engine friendly web pages.
If a site has high PR and updates its content frequently, Google
will index its pages more frequently (usually every few days or even
sooner) then low PR sites that do not update frequently.
FUTURE PAGERANK
Future PageRank is not accurate. It is for amusement purposes only.
If you choose to use one of these tools it is for your amusement
only. You should not be making any decisions based on the results
you get.
