Google Code Jam 2005

Think that you’re an amazing programmer? Try your powers competing other C, C++, Java and VB programmers at Google’s Code Jam 2005. Prizes start from $750 and go up to $10.000 - isn’t it a good chance to earn on things you do better than others?

Register here: http://www.topcoder.com/pl/?module=Static&d1=google05&d2=overview

Where You Buy Links?

Please, share information where and how you find and buy links? Or if you are doing link exchange strategies, then how you decide what kind of link you’d like to have and how you appreciate your future link partners?

Maybe some list of criterias or any suggestions?

Iteresting Free Pinging Service

It is very same to pingomatic, but pings more services for free - just take a look at it:

http://pingoat.com/

Have More Fun With Google!

Like Google? Then you will definitely love these things:

See search results in da cool gangsta slang or see your pages translated in it: http://www.gizoogle.com/

Like 1337 sp34k? Go http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

Have fun!

Getting Out from Sandbox (Opinion)

Recently, I have discussed sandbox problem with one of my friends, who has lots of sites and deals mostly with global SEO, than with separate sites. He says that one of useful methods of getting out from sandbox is to get rid of all inrelevant pages and update your site with as much fresh content as you have.

I have tried this method on one of my sites, that was sandboxed and stood lower than 100th page in SERPs. It seems to have already helped (two weeks) - some pages are already on first page, some pages are in first 10 pages of SERPs. Here is what I’ve made:

I referred to sites description and keywords and picked out a couple of most important. I left all pages relevant these keywords and keyword phrases having deleted the rest. I mean pages that doesn’t correspond general keywords. Usually if you build an ordinary site and care SEO only afterwards, site appears to be half-filled with various dust (that is why my latest sites are thought down to the minutest details: even each sentence and each HTML tag is inspected to correspond my aim.)

Сlean out everything unnecessary. Even “contacts” page can be deleted: you can put your e-mail, address and/or other contacts on your index page, where they’ll be accessible and easy to find. You can target “Contacts” link in your navigation to index page with anhcor on exact row. It just seems that there’s nothing to delete. In fact you can do much. After deleting of all dust, inspect your text content. Try to keep it short and keyword rich. Throw out everything unnecessary, because it is a commercial website, not a novel, where you must give some glamourous idioms and pretentious locutions. Plain text is perspective for SEO purpose and understandable for foringers, which may also visit your website. Probably all of you know that Russian greeting sounds “Zdravsvujte”, but I think that probably nobody will understand it’s synonim “Priverstvuju vas, dobro pozhalovat”. Care everybody, who may visit your site.

After completing your cleaning work, start adding new content. It is much better to add a bit, but daily, than to hold a week and then bring down 100 pages. Regularity is very important.

Using this strategy, you can make good results in recovering a site from sandbox. Good luck!

//Max

Optimal Title and META Tags Length

Building sites, we use several HTML tags, but usually there are three of them: title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags. But do you know what is the optimal length of these tags? Many reputable SEO guidelines figure the following length for tags:

60 max chars for title tag;
150 max chars for meta description;
800 max chars for meta keywords;

Why believe “reputable” sources, which general aim is to earn money selling copies to information-seeking webmasters? Let’s go places, where this information is for free and moreover, wherefrom this information comes. I mean that resources, which give such rules.

Let’s start with the W3C, which says that the title should be not longer than 64 chars. Thus you will prevent your title from getting broken or incorrectly displayed in the majority of viewing applications that have limited lines length for title tag. You can read it here: http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html

In case if your target is Google, keep your title tag not longer than 68 chars – the rest of your title will be lost, when your site will get displayed in SERPs. See the following phrase, which is longer than 68 chars:
This is a good phrase about title tag and how it will appear in Google

This is how such phrase will appear in serps:

This is a good phrase about title tag and how it will appear in… (Last word is cut due to 66 chars limit).

Using more than 66 chars can be only useful if you’d like to intrigue your visitors. For instance such title will look attractive even though it will appear broken in Google SERPs.

Cool freebies and discounts are available in our online shop till … (Looks attractive, huh?)

In other cases, you’d prefer to keep your title tag under 66 chars to inform potential visitor about your site’s content correctly and attractively.

Unlike Google, Yahoo! allows titles up to 120 chars long, but it will crop your title right at 120th tag regardless whether it was the end of word or not, thus the end of your title in Yahoo SERPs can look as follows: “the end of a cool phra…” instead of “the end of a cool phrase…” or, as Google cuts it “the end of a cool …”.

Thus targeting your title for both engines consider making it significant for both cropping cases. For instance take a look at this phrase:

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google and Yahoo search engines.

In Google it will look as follows

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google…

And in Yahoo it will be full, because total length of this phrase is 91 chars of 120 allowed by Yahoo:

Cool description of a title tag and how it will appear in Google and Yahoo search engines.

Due to meta keywords and meta description tags – they can be of any length you’d like to, but remember that they have become probably useless for SEO. But we still need meta description: site description is used when listing it in directories, thus keep your meta description precise and cute and not longer than 120 chars (usual description length in directories).

Broken Links Software

I have already mentioned how broken links and inaccessible site directories can corrupt SEO. Recently I have found good software to find broken links on your site:

You can check your site for broken links online at: http://www.dead-links.com

Or download useful broken links check software: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Keep your site clean and cute :)

//Max

Sandbox Amnesty

Have anybody had his sites recovering from sandbox in June or July? If yes, please, share the following details: age of domain, quantity and PR of inbound links, some other circumstances.

Analyzing summary from forums and private discussions I have concluded that mass sandbox amnesty took place in May. Then a lot of sites were sandboxed in about 5-10 of June, since Burbon update.

Since then, sites are recovering from sandbox in solitary instances. It seems that Google is giving mass sandbox amnesty time to time. What do you think?

Check Your Site Right After Starting

It is a great mistake to leave your site not checked after you launch it. Lots of webmasters make sites, host them and wait till mistakes will appear. This is a completely negative approach to webmastering, because since a search spider has come and failed to access some separate pages, or directories of your site, or whether it was confused with some misworking script, it will be very hard to force search engine to index your site properly once more.

I’m writing this, because recently I had such problem with one of my sites. It was checked, but I’ve missed a broken line in one of pages and it took long time and hard work to force it to get re-indexed properly.

Strange Indexed Pages Quantity

Recently I have noticed that quantity of my “indexed pages” in Google has overcome real quantity of pages on my site. The real quantity is 150 pages, while Google shows bout 300. Checking and counting indexed pages through “site:” search, I found actual quantity of indexed pages and number of pages displayed by Google differ. It is more likely to be a bug, but I think that it can be some kind of concealment, just like they’ve did it with backward links.

Dedicated or Shared IP?

There’s much controversy about usage of dedicated and shared IPs in SEO. During forum debates I have seen a lot of opinions concerning this question, so I’d like to give you some excerpts of discussion to think about:

- Google dislikes shared IPs; one should park domains on dedicated IPs.
- Google don’t care if you have shared or dedicated IP for each domain
- You need do have IPs from different networks to make safe linking between such domains
- If you have your domain on shared IP and there is a cheater or spammer having his domain on the same IP, you can get banned along with this cheating site
- If such cheating site will be banned, you won’t be banned too, but lowered in SERPs
- You will experience no changes, when site from same IP will be banned

You can see that there are much opinions and guessing about this problem I have concluded that:

If you have a couple of domains with sites, that are sometimes similar in code, names of images and affiliate links - you must avoid putting these sites on domains parked on same IP, or IPs from same network. In case if sites are completely unlike and you don’t link between them - it is not necessary to host them on different IPs.

IPs from the same network means that IPs vary in last digit(s): for instance xxx.xxx.xxx.1 and xxx.xxx.xxx.2 - Google will definitely ban or penalize you for cross linking of sites hosted on domains parked on close IPs. IPs from various networks must vary in at least third group of digits.

How do you find out whether your domain is parked on dedicated or shared IP and what sites are hosted on this IP along with yours? Try http://whois.sc/IP adress

Picture Optimization

I have noticed that pictures that have proper titles and links are giving about 15% of all target traffic that comes to one of my site. Did anybody tried to do the same? I mean get target traffic by optimizing pictures?

Usually I give a name that corresponds to general site title and specific item of pic. For instance in the site is about cars and there is a Lamborghini Diablo on a picture, I’d call it lamborghini_diablo_cars.jpg, or cars_lamborghini_diablo.jpg - depending on which keyword it must be stressed.

What do you think about optimization of pictures? Do you use pictures optimization on your sites?

//Max

Indexing How-to.

Normally, a small site with proper structure, correct linking, clean code and a couple of good backlinks gets indexed in very short time and you start finding it in SERPs. But what about large sites and doorways?

Some webmasters are building sites with over 100k pages with several levels of linking. If you have troubles with indexing of such sites, then use these tips to get your huge site indexed quicker:

- You need some links to force GoogleBot read your site, so buy, or exchange links.
- Don’t point all links to the index page of your site, but put several of them to the index page and put at least one link per each subcategory. This means that if, for instance, you have four levels of linking - each category of each level must have an inbound link.
- If you haven’t got enough links to feed all your subcategories, put them to second level only and when it will get properly indexed, change links to feed thrid level. However, this way is not recommended.
- In case if your site stays unindexed, refer to some site analyzing software that will spot broken links, inaccessible areas of your site and other mistakes related to linking.
- Check your .htaccess and robots.txt files for consistency with current project.

It is also possible to create site’s categories and subcategories on subdomains of general domain and link there. It’s up to you what strategy to choose, but remember - there’s nothing impossible in SEO, so even very huge site can be forced to be indexed.

//Max

Overoptimization. What is it?

Many of us have heared about overoptimization, many of us had experienced it. So what is overoptimization and how to avoid it. Actually, I know just few examples of what overoptimization is and I’d like you to share your opinions concerning this question.

Most frequent overoptimization mistake is too high keyword density, proximity, frequency. This means that you overstuff your page with keywords. To avoid keyword overoptimization one should use keyword density analisying software.

Then we have overlinking mistake, when you put too much inbound links to your site and get sandboxed. To avoid this mistake - try to increase quantity of links slowly, I’d say “naturally”. Imagine that your are not a SEO webmaster, but an ordinary webmaster, who had created an interesting site. Site will probably receive one link after week of existance, one more after two weeks, plus two in three weeks and so on. This is what “natural” way means.

Third mistake is overoptimization in anchor text - overstuffing of anchor text with keywords. It is probably the same to keyword density and almost all analisyng software includes anchor text in check.

These are that important overoptimization spots of a site, but maybe you will tell about your own experience and what overoptimization mistakes have you seen?

Make Your Banners and Design Always Visible

Due to wide popularity of banner blocking software many sites are displayed without banners, or even without pieces of design, because these pieces had some attributes of banners and were recognized by ad blocking software to be banners. To avoid such mistakes and to make your banners visible, throwing ad blockers of guard, do as follows:

Check that neither images, nor banners displayed on your site are of the following sizes, which are standard for banners:

300 x 250
250 x 250
240 x 400
336 x 280
180 x 150
468 x 60
234 x 60
88 x 31
120 x 90
120 x 60
120 x 240
125 x 125
728 x 90
160 x 600
120 x 600
300 x 600

Don’t use the following words in banner links and titles:

link, ads, ad, click, banner, ban, clk, ban-clk, promote, sponsor, advertisement, adv, page, top, and the majority of adult site queries.

Ad blocking software also kills banners and images of the most popular banner exchange services, adult websites, commerce websites, but it cannot kill link of such kind: asd.php?349

Share your thoughts and suggestions.

//Max

Moving from HTML to PHP

This is a problem that many webmasters are ought to deal with sooner or later. Especially those, who have old sites, which were all based on .html files. Of course one can just change all .html extensions to .php and replace the same characters in pages’ code. However, if you deal with SEO and your old good site occupies good position in SERPs, such changes can be fatal for your project for the following reasons:

1. All indexed .html files must be indexed again with .php extensions.
2. All links pointing particular page will be lost, unless you report all of your link partners and site owners, who link to you (re-indexing of new links will take some time too).
3. You will lose a lot of traffic from search engines during re-indexing of the whole site will occur, even if you put an error page that will redirect surfers somewhere to your .php pages.
4. Nobody knows whether your site will return back to good positions in SERPs after it will drop out.

So, what to do if you don’t want to change file extensions for the purpose of SEO, but need to include some php code in your pages anyway? There are several methods.

The first, and the most obvious is to use mod_rewrite (in case if your server supports mod_rewrite and you have permissions to modify .htaccess file). If yes - put the following strings in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html $1\.php

Now all requested .html pages will be automatically substituted with .php pages.

Another method works with .htaccess again. Add the following string to .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm

I think that this method is the most convenient one, because it simply allows executing PHP scripts to run in .html files. If you have no access to your .htaccess file, contact your hoster and request to make appropriate modification of httpd.conf for your site.

If you were using SSI on your site, for instance like this:

Than you can replace it with the following string in your .php files:

< ? include('file.txt'); ?>

You can also ask your hoster to add the following to httpd.conf file. In this case you can avoid using mod_rewrite:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml .htm .html

//Max

Publishing Borrowed Content

Sometimes you need to put somebody’s content on your site. This may be some unchangeable documents, FAQs, excerpts from articles, pdf documents, etc. However, you risk to get penalized for duplicate content. I have got such problem and this how I guess it can be solved:

I have a couple of downloadable archives with software of side publisher, but I had to put support documentation of this side publisher on download and support pages. Of course it is nonsense to rewrite long documents, which sometimes contain over 100 pages. I wrote short preview passages for each document with a link to the original document. Then I forbid indexing of full documents. That’s how it works on my site over a year and I have no problems with duplicate content penalty.

Sincerely yours, Max.