What are some things you are mystified about Google? PageRank, sandbox, supplemental results or maybe how to achieve a high ranking, sitemaps, the differences between white hat and black hat seo? What are things you would like to learn about? Things you don't understand. Don't be afraid to let us know. We all started at the bottom and only got to be were we are because we were willing to ask for help when we didn't understand.
Hi Visio, I read your article about Conquering Google for beginners, it was a good read and I learned a lot. So thank you! =) Some things I don't understand about Google is #1. Why does my site get crawled but only 1-2 pages get indexed by Google? For example My site www.politicalrundown.com got crawled on Dec 19th, 2006. When I go to Google and type in my site only one page comes up. I've submitted a site map and everything. Keep in mind my site is only 45% finished! Another question, I'm sort of unclear on back links. These are just basically any links to your site right? Like my signature in this forum counts as a link? When should a site that's being built start advertising and getting back links? It's not like you want people to come to your site when it's not finished, but at what point is it a good time to start? Thanks for the article and any help in advance!
It will index more pages if you get a higher pagerank / more links to your site. Yes, back links are links to your site. Yes, forum links count, when there isn't a no-follow tag on there. A no follow tag is a tag that tells google not to count the link as a backlink. DP doesn't put those tags on. Personally I always make sure that I don't build links until the site is ready for people. Doesn't mean I stop developing the site after that, just don't advertise it before that time. But a good content site keeps growing, so you should finish the site to the point that it is ready for visitors, start slowly building links like having the link in your signature here - and then when you've added a few more articles, start looking for extra links to it. See the link in my signature for some SEO for dummies tips.
Here's my laundry list of questions about google. 1. Site age, seems like some say it's better to be old, some say better to be new. 2. Does site traffic have anything to do with how you show up in the search queries? If so, isn't that a bit of a catch-22? 3. Content... are copied free articles good, or treated as bad because they are duplicate content? Also, when you run a small business like ours, there's just so much you can write about shoe repair, yet... big sites like about.com can run one little article about shoe repair, and completely smoke your whole site's listings, because they have tons of articles about how to peel bananas. 4. Backlinks... much of the same as content... it's hard for the little guy to compete with thos big sites - when their information is not relevant to someone who wants a service performed. 5. PR's of incoming links... is this a stie wide PR, or just the page rank of the page that links to you? THanks!
Goto your favorite article directory and perform a google search for some of the older article titles with quotes. If the article's title is: "Learn the quickest way to replace your shoe strings." copy that title and wrap it in quotes, click search. You'll find many, many, many results - all with the exact same article.. I think the duplicate content is BS - just my opinion, of course..
Glad you enjoyed my article! Google crawls sites all the time by following links. So the more places your link is on the more often you will get crawled however the more frequent crawling does not mean that you will get indexed. Google will not index or keep a site indexed which does not have atleast one link. This means a link Google counts. If you only have a couple links mostly low quality ones you may just see your home page indexed. To get your other pages indexed you need to get some good backlinks pointing to the inside pages and not the home page. There are different varying values links have. PageRank has absolutely NOTHING to do with this. Anyone who tells you different is not a real seo because it doesn't take much time to figure that one out. Google decides the value of a site by the backlinks pointing to it and the quality of the backlinks and the relevance. A link on a tractor site to a flower site will be low value because they are unrelated and most likely is a purchased link or somehow affiliated with the other site. A link on a flower site to a flower site has much higher value. A link on a flower site with an article about flowers will be even higher and a link from a flower site to a flower site which has a bunch of other links pointing out will be slightly lower depending on the relevance of the links out. I hope you understood that. Sometimes I write things and I know what I meant but it doesn't turn out right on paper or in this case post In the cases I provided above PR has no influence here at all. Google only worries about the quality of the site, whether they link to irrelevant sites and if so how many(if alot then discredit the links value), is the site related and is there any content?, what kind of backlink structure does this site have? Google takes this data and figures out your value. It is a complex algo but pretty simple when you think about it. So what you need to do is find relevant sites/blogs that will give you a link. Link exchange, links page(page full of links), directories, forums are all dis-valued forms of links. They still count unless they are banned but there value may be so low that it is practically useless. I would not use forums as a link building method. Use them to gain some traffic if you wish. I have gotten about 1000 people this month from Digital Point not to mention other forums I post at. But I have not seen any Search Engine value from my sig links. Don't request links or publish links anywhere until your site is totally done. Unfinished sites are bad. Especially if Google starts getting 404s. So wait till it is totally done. hope that answered your questions! If you can purchase a older site cheap do it assuming it is a actual functioning site and you don't plan to change it over to new topic. A old site is more trusted by Google overall unless it does something to be put on the blacklist. But the thing most webmasters don't realize is these sites are generally held by their site age and not a great deal of links which means a small link building campaign will get you over a old site for most keywords. For more competitive phrases the older sites are likely to have a lot of backlinks because they have had so much time to build them naturally and artificially. So if you can get a old site within your budget get it. If your competing with a old site just work on beating them at link building. A linkbait idea if good can dislodge anybody. No not yet. Danny Wall made a article on how Google will change over to this. It is alot of stuff to chew so read my article on it. Danny Walls New Google Rules Yahoo! and MSN won't be doing it for a long long time even if Google does. If you still have questions on this please send them through my blog and I will get back to you on those. About.com is a large trusted authority site. Your basically right. All they have to do is right a article and it will rank however don't think they don't do Search Engine Marketing. They do.... Small sites publishing duplicate content can be hurt even if they were the original so it is best to use a service such as CopyScape.com to make sure no one steals your content. Don't publish someone elses articles on your site. It disvalues the quality of your site/page. If at all possible write your own. If you can't hire a professional writer. Ohh and did I mention you can get a link on that About article. I have clients who have links published there all the time. So try that. A link to your site from one of their articles can be pretty valuable if only for traffic. The little company can have an advantage over those large companies. Let your visitors know you care about them because you are little. Publish testimonials as well. By themselves this will do little but as you grow it can help you greatly. Depending on your site topic you can create some sort of linkbait idea which cna get you thousands of links overnight. I gave a few ideas in my Conquer Google article about how to build some links. They are simple ideas but for small sites sometimes work very well. Try to get some wikipedia, about and related links. Of course you will need to have some resource info that would be useful or they won't be linking to you. PR is useless. A link to a sub page will increase that pages PR. The links from that page to others on your site pass it around but again that is meaningless.
Thanks! If it helps someone out it is good enough for me. I would need your url to give you good advice. It is hard to tell if you are being penalized. Have you changed anything on the site lately? Most likely you are fine and just got outsmarted by a competitior or didn't keep up with it as well as you needed to. But I can tell you one thing you can NEVER get penalized for building links too fast. If you link to the wrong guy or have alot of link exchanges it can hurt you especially for small sites but building one-way links fast will never hurt you. Give me more info and I will see what I can do...
If anyone else gots questions please post them. Ohh and please don't send me PMs asking for link exchanges. I will be ignoring those.