Digitalpoint Ultimate SEO FAQ

About 90% of the questions on this forum pop-up every couple of weeks. Over the last few weeks I've kept a record of some of the common ones.

I'll try to keep this updated, and if anyone wants to suggest any more questions to add I'll get them done

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What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?

This is an easy one - it's exactly how it sounds. On-page factors are things that you can change on the page itself. Things like page titles, description tags, page text, bold italic text etc.
Off-page factors are harder to influence. These are things such as links to your pages and the anchor text that these links use.
More on on-page SEO
On Page SEO - The Basics
Scalable On-Page SEO Strategies
More on off-page SEO
Link Development: The Key to Successful SEO
11 Experts on Link Development Speak Out

When will PR update?

The short answer is nobody knows. Google don't publicise their future updates date. You can see a list of previous Pagerank exports here. Using this we can see that toolbar PR updates approximately every quarter, though this can and does change. - It;s not really worth worrying about though.

How can I learn SEO?

Personally I'm not a big fan of reading forums to learn SEO, there is so much poor information being quoted, that as a newbie it's extremely confusing who to listen to and who to ignore. Some of the best SEO resources that I have seen are,
SEOMoz Beginners Guide To SEO
SEOMoz Serach Engine Ranking Factors V2
SEOMoz Beginners Checklist For Learning SEO
Jim Westergren - Link Building Guide
SEOBook - 101 Link Building Tips to Market Your Website
Ultimately the best thing you can do to learn SEO is to test and re-test things on your own sites. There is no substitute for experience, and over time most of the things in the articles above will be second nature.

Why does domian.com rank? It doesn't have any backlinks?

The chances are that it does have backlinks - you just haven't checked properly. Use Yahoo to check links, Google only show a very small selection.
Sites can rank well even for competitive phrases with only a few very good quality backlinks. The age of the ranking site is also another important factor.

Why does domian.com have PR5, it only has one link!?

That's all it needs. The Pagerank algorithm isn't any secret - in fact it's published here.
The formula for Pagerank is - PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Which, to put it in a very basic form is,
PR passed to a page = PR of the linking page/other outgoing links x dampening factor (theorised to be 0.85)
This means that all page page would have to do to get to a PR5 is get one link from a PR7/8 page with very few other outgoing links.

How can I get backlinks?

Backlinks can be obtained from many soucrces, some more influential than others. Most backlinks can be broken down into the following areas,

Article syndication
Paid/sponsored links
Paid blog posts
Directory submissions
Forum posting
Blog comment posting
Link exchanges
Social networking/linkbaiting

Some of my favourite linkbuilding articles,
The definitive link building strategy
Link Building Fundamentals: A Primer
What is the meaning of life, and link building?
131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies
Quality Link Building

How can I use social networking to increase baclinks?

The two main social networking sites that I have found to work really well for SEO are Digg and Stumblupon. People are correctly note that Digg links are nofollow, but if you're only looking to use it only for the direct link then you're being extremely short-sighted.

Submitting really great content to Digg/SU from a good established profile can mean that when the article goes popular, this results in a huge amount of links back to the original article. This is because a huge proportion of Digg/Stumble users are site/blog owners that use the site for inspiration for fresh news and things to write about. They see your story, they blog about it, they link to it. Personally the best I have ever experienced is 18,000 natural links - priceless as many of them could never have been bought or obtained in other ways.

How can I increase PR?
As I described above, PR increases are solely down to an increase in the PR sum of the pages that are linking to the page in question. To increase your PR get links from higher PR pages.

Why have I fallen down/out of the index?
It happens all the time, don't panic. Hang on for at least a week, the chances are that the site will reappear. If you still don't reappear then go back over any changes that have been made to your site to see if there is anything obvious that has been altered.
Also check to see if you lost any importnatant links.

Does my domain extension .com/.org.edu make a difference?
No, a .com ranks as well as a .info and a .us can rank as well as a .edu. The only reason people think otherwise is that they see lots of .com, .edu and .gov domains ranking well. This isn't because of the domain extension though, it's as these sites tend to be older and have better quality links.

Why am I still not ranking, I have a PR7?
High PR does not equal rankings. It can be a symptom of a site thats ranking well, which is why so many people are under the impression that getting a PR8 is going to be the same as getting to #1 for their search term - but this isn't the case.
Good quality links = rankings (though this is a very simplified way of looking at things), and these usually pass good PR which is why so many people fall into this trap.

Do nofollow links pass PR?
No, they don't seem to, though confusingly Google do seem to follow nofollow links and factor in the anchor text used. Read here and here

Why do my rankings move around so much?
Rankings always change, Google don't have the 'update' that they traditionally used to have, but the search engine results are now in a state of 'everflux' - constantly changing, you'll certainly notice changes each day.
Another reason you'll be seeing changes is that Google data is contained on different datacentres - the results on each of these are never exactly the same, and when you run search queries they won't always query the same datacentre. This is why two people in different places running the same query may well see different results.

URLs - Hyphens Vs Underscores

Always use hyphens, google don't read underscores as word separators. Google did announce that they will be treasting underscores as seperators, but it hasn't been changed yet.
Matt Cutts on Hyphens Vs Underscores
More Matt on the confustion after Google announcement

When outsourcing SEO how can I avoid being ripped off?

Ask lots of questions, get current client rankings, references and call these people up and talk to them. make sure they have what has been promised to them. Don't just look at rankings, but look at traffic and sales increases - sales is the metric that is important.
SEO Buyers Guide

More Resources
Google Webmaster Help Centre
Google Webmaster Central
Google SEO Advice Page
Matt Cutts (A Google Engineer) Blog


Further Reading
How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes
The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period
An Experts' Guide to Keyword Research
The Ultimate Guide to Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly

 

Good work MattUK.. Mods might want to make it a sticky but not many people read stickies you know

You included social networking but not social bookmarking for link building technique. How about sending a mail and asking for backlink?

 

Great stuff. All noobs should be reading this instead of BST "Get Google #1 for $5"...

 

I'm guessing the same number who use the search function

Yep, I would probably lump these together. I want to add a social networking section to the FAQ, maybe I'll add that tomorrow.

 

Cheers guys - I've just added,

What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO? and
How can I use social networking to increase baclinks?

Any more suggestions for questions?

 

Directory submission/directory submissions is a repeat . You should also include making free widgets that people can insert in their site. That's a good way of getting backlinks. Though WP/phpld theme sponsorship method has attracted some penalty but it's still a good method if mixed with other form of link building.

 

You win the prize for spotting the deliberate mistake Fixed

Again, I would include that under linkbaiting. It's probably the oldest forms of deliberate linkbaiting

 

Give us some helpful blackhat teqniques you have used.

 

I don't generally use blackhat techniques as I work on sites that are all longer trem projects.

All of my own sites that I work on are affiliate sites, and everything else is a client site. Using blackhat techniques on them would be madness.

The majority of blackhat techniques are short-term, they work for a few weeks and then the site gets banned or the loophole gets closed. I don't think any of my clients would be too happy about that even if they were all #1 for their chosen keywords for a few days.

One of my favourite tricks that doesn't work anymore is using a search query on an authority site to rank results for your own site.

You would go to somehwere like CNN and use the esrcah query to create a page like this - http://search.cnn.com/search?query=site:www.digitalpoint.com&type=web&sortBy=date&intl=false

You can then link to that page using specific anchor text and use it's authority and age to rank well for competitive terms.

Most little tricks like this stop working once they hit the public domain anyway.

 

Quite a good list of SEO methods, unfortunately the people that would benefit from it will probably start their own threads anyway.

 

How do we know that the algorithm forumula PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) is still what Google uses? How old is The Anatomy of a Search Engine at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html ? We all know that as we progress in business, things change when there is a better way of calculating things. It's safe to say that this formula could be old news. Right?

 

You're correct that it's old and it's the original algorithm. Things may have changed slightly, but testing shows that the basic calculation of PR hasn't deviated much from this. - Logically it wouldn't need to, there are too many other ranking factors that they can tweak to affect the results.

 

Any chance that a mod can add this to the original post? It's gone past the time that I'm able to edit it myself

URLs - Hyphens Vs Underscores

Always use hyphens, google don't read underscores as word separators. Google did announce that they will be treasting underscores as seperators, but it hasn't been changed yet.
Matt Cutts on Hyphens Vs Underscores
More Matt on the confustion after Google announcement

 

@MATTUK : You've done very Good Job , really appreciated it.

you've covered all the SEO Points so now we can send this URL of " Digitalpoint Ultimate SEO FAQ " to solve queries of Newbies.

also matt what about classified submissions work in SEO ?

I'd like to suggest you below two urls to add in "How can I learn SEO"?


1) 55 Quick SEO Tips : searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/


2) FAQ SEO Sitepoint forums

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915


Thanks
Eric

 

Brilliant thread MattUK, Thanks for sharing

 

Looks good, could of added about 100 other common questions but will be a great reference tool. +REP

 

Let me know what you want added and I'll get them written

 

Thanks.. I found this really, really helpful

 

Thanks for this great post , really useful if we have the same in other field of DP plus indexing.

 

great post, thanks...