SEO Blog

Many new sites, or sites that have not been significantly developed, have a hard time ranking right away on Google. Many well-known SEOs have stated that a good way to get around this problem is to just buy old sites. Another option is to place a site on a subdomain of a developed site, and after the site is developed and well-indexed, 301 redirect the site to the new location.

The whole goal of the Sandbox concept is to put sites through a probationary period until they prove they can be trusted.
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Popularity: 6% [?]

Good website usability can greatly improve the conversion rate of your website. If your website gets many visitors but only a few sales then it might be that your web pages are too cluttered and that you have to improve your website design.

Google has a similar patent application with the name "Detecting and rejecting annoying documents" so it seems that good website design becomes more and more important if you want to get high search engine rankings.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Yahoo's patent applications provides a list of 51 web page elements that can be analyzed to determine the clutter of a web page:

• Total number of links
• Total number of words
• Total number of images (non-ad images)
• Image area above the fold (non-ad images)
• Dimensions of page
• Page area (total)
• Page length
• Total number of tables
• Maximum table columns (per table)
• Maximum table rows (per table)
• Total rows
• Total columns
• Total cells
• Average cell padding (per table)
• Average cell spacing (per table)
• Dimensions of fold

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Why can usability be important to search engines?
The patent application contains a short paragraph that explains why search engines might consider the usability of web pages:

It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages it is desired to monetize. […].

If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be jeopardized. One conventional indication of whether a web page is easy and pleasing to use is called 'clutter.'

Web pages with good usability usually have a higher conversion rate than cluttered web pages. Web pages with good usability often have a higher quality than other web pages and search engines try to return high quality web pages in their search results.

Popularity: 4% [?]

High rankings on Google can make the difference between an extremely successful online business and a total failure. The position of your website in Google's search results can make or break your business.

But how much exactly is a top ranking on Google worth? What can a top ranking on Google do for your business?

Paid search results are worth $37.7 million per day
Google published its earnings last month. Google-owned sites (i.e. mainly the search results) generated revenues of $3.40 billion in the first quarter of 2008 (that's about $37.7 million per day).

Advertisers wouldn't pay Google so much money if they didn't profit from it. The dollar amount indicates how much it is worth to be listed on Google's first result page. And these numbers only represent the value of the paid search results.

Listings in the natural search results are worth even more (more…)

Popularity: 6% [?]

First off, common sense usually goes pretty far. If a page or site links to a bunch of off-topic or low-quality garbage, you can feel safe, assuming the page does not pass link authority. If you have doubts, you probably do not want to link.

Secondly, Google has a toolbar that shows how it currently views a web page or website. The Google toolbar is one of the top search engine optimization tools for a person new to search engine marketing. It works on Windows and is downloadable at http://toolbar.google.com/.

PageRank is a measure of link popularity, which can come and go. It’s not hard for a successful business to rent a few high PageRank links into their site and then leverage that link popularity for link exchanges. A site with decent PageRank can get penalized just the same as a site with low PageRank. Usually, you will want to error on the side of caution off the start.

Instead of making PageRank your primary criteria when evaluating a page or site, just think of it as a baseline.
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Popularity: 60% [?]

Backlinks is another way of saying "links into a page".

When you check backlinks in Google (link:www.whateversite.com,) it only shows a small sampling of your total backlinks. Many links that do not show up when you use the "link:" function in Google still count for your relevancy scoring. In addition, there is a time delay between when links are created and when they will show up in search results.

To get a more accurate picture of links, you will also want to check backlinks using Yahoo! or MSN. Yahoo! typically shows many more backlinks than Google. The code to check Yahoo! backlinks to a site is "linkdomain:www.site.com."

Popularity: 61% [?]

I use the free Digital Point keyword ranking tool to determine where I rank in Google. The Digital Point keyword ranking tool also supports Yahoo! and MSN. Tracking various sites helps me determine some of the ways Google may be changing their algorithm.

If you sign up for the Google API service and are doing lots of sketchy stuff, then it makes it easy for Google to cross connect your websites. Google generally is the slowest of the major search engines to trust and rank new websites.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Google is primarily driven by linkage data.

The Google Toolbar provides a 0-10 logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages. PageRank helps provide a quick glance how important Google thinks a page is.

Google would like you to believe that their PageRank algorithm is the core of their search technology, but they also use many other technologies to improve their search relevancy.

Many webmasters exchange links with as many people as they can, but there is an opportunity cost to everything you do. There are algorithms for sorting good links from bad links. Many link schemes increase your risk profile much quicker than they increase your potential rewards. When you link into the wrong circles, you run the risk of being associated with them.

It is important to note that this PageRank value is only one component of the Google search engine algorithm. Many times, a PR 4 site will rank above a PR 6 site because it was optimized better and has a well-defined descriptive inbound link profile, which means better, more natural links from more sites (and more related sites).

Popularity: 24% [?]

Some directories have recently been removed from Google’s cache, while others are not crawled very deeply. Additionally, some of them have not had their cache dates updated in a great deal of time. Google might be trying to slow the growth of directories by not counting the links from many of them. Make sure you check the cache before paying for a listing.

Some of the directories will have a greater effect on relevancy in MSN or Yahoo! than they do on Google, so even if a directory is not counted by Google, the link price might still be cheap for its effects on other search relevancy algorithms.

Many directory owners are building multiple related directories. Some search algorithms such as Google Hilltop are likely to automatically filter out some of the relevancy score from a second directory if it is easily identifiable as being related to the first directory.

The one-time listing fees make directories exceptionally appealing, but expect that many directories will eventually be ignored by some of the search engines. In my perspective, that cost is factored into the listing prices. I average out the link costs for links from a number of sites. If I can spend $1,000 and get a dozen or two dozen well-trusted links, then that is going to be a good buy for launching a site.
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Popularity: 22% [?]