Google Now Crawling Forms and More
Posted by reviews on Apr 13, 2008
Google recently announced that they can now crawl data submitted via forms.
The other part that I found interesting is that they apparently can “scan” javascript and Flash to find links. Previously, spiders were not able to crawl javascript, but this “scanning” now allows for data retrieval. That’s big news! All those links that I thought were useless because they were displayed via javascript may count for something now!
Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.
In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a
SEO - Regionally Targeting Your Traffic
Posted by reviews on Apr 7, 2008
SEO - Regional Targeting for Geographically Specific Traffic (geotargeting)
How does one target a specific geographic region/country/city?
There are a few areas of SEO and marketing that you can do to improve your site ranking within a particular region, known as ‘geotargeting’. The biggest challenge would be ranking well in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) across a range of regions. It would probably require several regional campaigns.
- Domain TLD: You can register your domain with a country specific TLD, such as “.co.uk”. This should help you rank better in the UK. The same can be done for other countries.
- Hosting: This is a major factor, if web host server is located in France, then you are likely to rank well in France. Unfortunately, you may not rank well for search engine users in other countries. You should look around for webhosts from that area, for example: you can be hosted on a Maui server, if you are targeting a Maui audience.
- Languages: If your site includes more than one language, you will have a better chance of ranking well within countries where that language is spoken.
- Keywords Usage: If your website has too much content for “German”, as apposed to the “UK”, then the search engines may perceive this as the website is targeting the location mentioned in the content. I do not believe in keyword density as being of any value, but I do believe that including the keywords within the content would be relevant.
- On page/site SEO: Create individual pages or sections of your website for the area you are targeting. Your efforts should then focus the traffic to these pages/areas. This includes link building, advertising, and other means to direct traffic and improve your rank in the SERPs.
- Localized Link Building: Find local bloggers and websites (government city, state, country too!) and see if they’d link to you. Even better, see if they would write an article or two about your site or services.
- Create a network: Buy domains and host them on localized webhosts. Create original, good content and point them to your main site. You may even get some referral traffic from them as well.
- Google Local Business Center: By using the Google Local Business Center, you are also narrowing your site down to local areas.
Use the Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Maps for local information, they’ll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even coupons to print out and bring to your shop. It’s easy, free, and you don’t need a website of your own.
- as soon as it happens
- once per day
- once per week
- Slashdot PR9
- Mister-Wong PR7
- Furl PR7
- Bibsonomy PR7
- Spurl PR6
- Unalog PR6 - Registration not currently available (thanks dauclair)
- Jumptags PR6
- Searchles PR6
- Plime PR5
- BlogHop PR5
- MyLinkVault PR5
- A1 Webmarks PR5
- ClipClip PR5
- Diigo PR5
- Listible PR5
- MyVmarks PR5
- Complore PR4
- OnMyList PR4
- Kapely PR3
- info4it PR3
- MyPIP PR3
- SyncOne PR3
- Yattle PR2
- Faves PR0
- UPCHUCKr PR0
Google Alerts: How to Use It to Monitor Link Building
Posted by reviews on Apr 4, 2008
Google Alerts: How to Use it to Track Backlinks
If you’re not using this, it’s worth giving it a try. The purpose for this is to have notification when new links to your site are found by Google. This can be very good for any linkbuilding campaign.
Click Here: Google Alerts
The search terms should be similar to any one or all of the following:
link: http://www.example.com <— notice the space between link: and http?
link:http://www.example.com
link:www.example.com
link:http://example.com
The question has been asked, “what does the space do?” It’s strange, but it does bring up different results of backlinks, so it’s worth using this modification. Why there is a difference, I have no idea.
It’s very handy for watching progress of Google picking up new links to your sites.
You can set the frequency to:
Also, it can be set it for Blogs, news, web, etc.
What is the maximum number of alerts I can create?
You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address. Please remember that you can only have up to 10 unverified Alerts at any given time.
NoFollow is Not the Only Way to Block Link Crawling
Posted by reviews on Mar 18, 2008
Other Ways to block search engine spiders from crawling
Actually, NoFollow does not “stop” the search engine spiders (robots) from crawling, but instead Google and others simply do not pass “link juice” to the backlink.
| rel=”nofollow” Action | Yahoo! | MSN Search | Ask.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Follows the link | Yes | Yes | Not proven | Yes |
| Indexes the “linked to” page | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shows the existence of the link | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
| In SERPs for anchor text | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
However, as Geoland points out so well, there are other ways to block the crawling of links. The other methods are much more limiting than rel="nofollow", because at least NoFollow still allows the crawling and indexing.
Normal methods to check for NoFollow will not show you if a link is truly crawlable (including SEOQuake, right-clicking on a link and looking at properties, etc). In other words, “what you see is not always what you get.”
Robots.txt
One method is to use Robots.txt to control the crawling of spiders. Robots.txt is kept in the top level of the domain.
Examples
Blocks all robots
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Blocks all robots from crawling specific directories
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /tmp/ Disallow: /administrator/
Meta Elements
The robots attribute is used to control whether or not the search engine spiders are allowed to index a page and whether or not they should follow links from a page. The NOINDEX value prevents a page from being indexed, while the NOFOLLOW prevents links from being crawled.
The robots attribute is supported by all of the major search engines. In addition there are several additional values for the robots meta attribute that are relevant to search engines, such as NOARCHIVE and NOSNIPPET, which are meant to tell search engines what not to do with a web pages content. Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website. A more reliable and efficient method is the use of the Robots.txt file.
NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page.
NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page.
NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page.
NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results.
Example
<html> <head> <title>Create Backlinks to My Site</title> <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> </head>
Javascript
Any link written in javascript is not crawlable by search engine spiders. It will look like a normal link and will not be lined through (SEOQuake addon) or highlighted (Search Status addon)
Dynamic URLs
Some spiders may also avoid crawling any url that has a “?” in it (dynamically produced) in order to avoid spider traps which may then cause the crawler to download an ‘infinite’ number of URLs from a Web site. Thus it would probably prevent links on these pages from being crawled.
What is linkbait (with examples)?
Posted by reviews on Mar 16, 2008
First, what is linkbait?
Linkbait is simply creating something that sparks peoples’ interest enough that they would create a link to you or use something that you offer, such as an image or a tool. They may knowingly or unknowingly create a backlink to your site.
With Google’s Matt Cutts doing a writeup of linkbait recently and an older one, it made me think more about it. The real thing always serves as the best example, rather than just explaining it. This seems to be an acceptable way of getting links, according to Google.
Here’s his definition: “On a meta-level, I think of “linkbait” as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There are a lot of ways to do that, including putting in sweat-of-the-brow work to generate data or insights, or it can be as simple as being creative. You can also say something controversial to generate discussion (this last one gets tired if you overuse it, though). Sometimes even a little bit of work can generate a reason for people to link to you.”
Examples of Linkbait
www.stclaire.com - PR4 - Links 2,630
Matt Cutts used this “Technical Communications” site that had a clever sign making section.
24 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites
Posted by reviews on Mar 13, 2008
DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites
The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.
Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.
Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.
NoFollow - How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.
What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox
Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.
You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.
DoFollow Forums
Posted by reviews on Mar 8, 2008
As you may know, Google implemented the nofollow tag a few years ago, but a short time later, others chose to create what is known as Dofollow, which is really nothing more than purposely allowing the “link juice” to pass from one site to another or, at least, not hindering it.
The definition of nofollow:
nofollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.
As a possible incentive or through a lack of desire to block links in forums, some forum owners and moderators have decided to allow backlinks within a forum post or within the signature (aka sig). One reason for having nofollow links and/or not allowing sigs in a forum is to prevent spam.
For this reason, I do not encourage or condone the abuse of these forums. I see it as a perk for actively taking part in the forum. Along with possibly getting some “link juice”, you may get some traffic from readers of your posts, especially from forums related to your links.
What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox
Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.
I have organized a list of dofollow forums into categories and alphabetized it. It is a permanent page within this site and will continue to be updated.