Web Site Performance and SEO

If you keep up with my posts on Search Engine Watch, you will notice that I regularly talk about how site performance can be a significant driver in SEO, especially with Google. Many large companies take this data for granted; they are worried about up time and browser performance. Which in most cases is a good thing, however a search engine like Google may be testing your response rate and attempting to predict your level of capacity. In both IIS and Apache it is possible to throttle a search engine so it crawls at a lower level. In most cases this application or module may produce a 500 server busy error. Search engines interpret this as an end user experience and may limit the number of pages and or keywords that may rank at the same time. This practice ensures users commonly find an active page when they click on a listing. How fast are your servers?

Pages of Links

Sorry everyone, I have been really busy and have not had much time to write about anything lately. But I thought it was about time to see another SEO post from me that is not on Search Engine Watch.

As you may or may not know a recent algo change has affected the value of pages that contain a list of links to other pages. This could be a site map or a list of relevant pages to a topic. A tip that you may want to consider is adding unique and interesting content to these pages as well as relevant links from the outside world.

However the best tip I can provide after the basics are done, make sure you link to these pages from your standard navigation. Without these links these pages could be considered irrelevant and may not move up.

Changes to Google algo since March 1st

It looks like Google has changed how they view pages with more anchor text than regular text now. To prevent lists of links ranking that may not be very good quality.

I have finally seen enough cases where I think this is a significant part of an update that went on back in March 1st.

Simple suggestion would be add descriptions to what’s at the other end.

Posts on WMW about the Google Search Quality Team Responses

I was taken back a bit by some of the “Angry” posts about the type of help given by the Google Search Quality Team. As an ex-Inktomi guy, supporting users I know that it’s a tough line between providing information and giving away something that can be taken out of context and used in court. Thus not everything they get can be responded to in the same manner. Personally I appreciate any data I can get back it absolutely helps me with my diagnostics even if it’s a minuet detail. Just a late night thought.

Observation, while trying to think like Google

I have been reading new blogs today to see what people are talking about and I ran across this SEO site, who claims to have been in business since the mid 90’s. I though wow, why I have I never heard of this firm before? After a simple whois search I noticed that the domain was originally registered in 2001 and there isn’t a reference to another company name before that.

I just thought this would be an interesting observation, especially since there is so much talk about age of domains and rankings.

My thoughts on the Google infrastructure update

I was happy to see that Matt Cutts posted an article about Google's infrastructure updates. Most importantly the one talking about Supplemental Results, an area that most SEO’s believe is a sign of a penalty. Like many search engines one giant database with a ton of content in it is just not logical and too expensive. Thus having a second or third database with additional content, makes a lot of sense. You can slice it up any way you want to look at it, but now that they are going to surface these results more often we may have much less to worry about.

The following question still remains in my mind, if you are competing in a highly competitive space. Would it make sense for Google to blend in supplemental results within this type of search? My general thought is no, you would only see the benefit if the results are tail or less competitive. But we won't really know until it happens.

Google funding Al Qaeda & Hezbollah Terrorist Groups with Ad Sense?

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal details out an interview regarding the use of Click Fraud on these sites for funding. I shouldn’t be surprised since it is so easy to get a Google Ad Sense account, however its appalling to me to think that an American company could be sending money to these groups. I don’t want to ever talk about politics on my blog, but I feel that this needs to be shared.

I completely understand how Google is innocent of knowing this, but how does a company that typically prides themselves on doing the right thing react to this?

Google closes the doors on Google Answers

Actually this is a great sign that Google is starting to think about their bottom line. Why offer a charity service like Google Answers when you can focus on revenue? Could this be a sign of changes to come? They stopped investing in unknown highly risky new businesses just a few months back, now we are seeing actual services being shut down.

I am not saying that I do not like free services that Google has offered for years, however if they expect to maintain that ridicules stock price they need to start innovating towards profit and less towards the “that’s cool this month”.

New Look and Feel with Google’s Webmaster Tools

It looks like Vanessa Fox’s team has been pretty busy with another cleanup of the Google Webmaster Tools. Now you can expand or contract different boxes and the error messages seem a little easier on the eyes. Nice job!

Big Google News Day Today

First I hear that Google has halted new product development. Then I hear they decide to buy You Tube for a cool Billion. It seemed to me that if Google continued to spit out new products at the rate they where going no one would ever know what products they have. It makes a lot of sense to focus on the products they have out, other than search every launch has been equivalent to a Beta release without any updates.

The first sign of this was with Groups, the new interface was highly needed. Groups really became stale almost immediately after launch. What’s next? A re-vamp of gmail would be nice.

Supplemental Results Missing on Google

Jeremy Schoemaker’s posted earlier that Supplemental Results seemed to have dropped out of the index. I am seeing the same thing here, intermittently. However they are still showing up in German results. Zusätzliches Ergebnis or Additional Results are appearing on Google.de

Tips on launching a new website from Matt Cutts and SEO Blogs

I feel the need to post something funny today.

Make sure your URL’s look good; here are several articles on common mistakes with URL structure.

Dashes VS Underscores who will win?
Fight the evil, no session id’s!

Are you sure you are not using hidden text?


You can use flash!
Google just won’t do anything with it.


Frames VS No Frames

What does your trained eye see?

And above all, learn how to crack the Google Da Vinci Code


Now based on this scattered data you too can be SEO Friendly. This post of humor is sponsored by my sleep deprived brain that should not be blogging.

Supplemental Results

For the most part I have ignored the Supplemental Results and the useless information and predictions on why it’s happening and how it’s the end of the world. It looks like when you examine the supplemental results with a fine tooth comb, you can notice one major factor. A lot of this content is duplicate content; I am seeing this on a large range of sites.

This raises the question, how different do you need to make each site to rank well. I get the distinct feeling that this is going to become a much larger issues than before within the SEO community. Especially since so many spammers still use the screen scrapper mentality.

I am wondering if anyone else is seeing the same thing?

Google’s plan to do the right thing

I have been very impressed by the recent activity with the Google search quality team. They genuinely seem to want to do the right thing, by caring about spam and really listening to the community. As many know Matt Cutts is one of the busiest guys around Google and about 6 months ago brought on Adam Lasnik who has really done his part. Kudos to these guys, they have a lot of work ahead of them.

Froogle

If every major shopping site runs on a taxonomy structure and companies are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get this data. Why would Google suddenly decide not to use attributes any longer within Froogle? It seems pretty interesting based upon the attributes that are being introduced within the standard search results. Just a random thought.

Building a new site, how fast is too fast theory.

Based on Matt’s comments today, it looks like you can build a site too quickly. This makes a lot of sense; if you are going to spam Google it would be easy to generate millions of pages at the same time just throwing junk out of a dictionary. This is now problematic for the larger sites out there, if you can actually build a real site with millions of pages you need to slow down the release. But how fast is too fast and how slow do you really need to go? Generating a ton of content can be done, as mentioned with Wikipedia. They produce thousands of articles a day without issues.