SoloSEO

Hyphens and Underscores, Together at Last

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 24th, 2007

Big news for small punctuation! SERoundtable.com reports that underscores will now be treated as word separators as hyphens have in the past. This might mean a little ranking change up (maybe we already saw this change in effect, or it could be occurring right now). Most wordpress blogs (and others) already use hyphens in the URL naming structure, but I know many sites use exclusively underscores out of habit (I used to!).

Matt Cutts on dashes vs underscores

The announcement from WordCamp (covered by News.com)

Let me point out that domain names only allow hyphens, not underscores, and I don’t think they will ever implement underscores in domain names.

Some links about using your URLs to enhance your SEO:

Keywords in URL the New Google Search Optimization Winner?

Matt Cutts stating that they do contribute to rankings

1 comment Visited 5659 times July 24th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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The Googlerithm

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 17th, 2007

The Googlerithm is the “Google algorithm”, rolled into a single, catchy term. Ask a programmer what algorithm means, and he’ll probably tell you something like: “An algorithm is a set of instructions to accomplish a task.” In the case of Google’s algorithm, the task is to take a search term and end up with a relevant set of content, sorted by relevance. To accomplish this task, Google has a set of instructions that their machines follow for identifying and sorting relevant content based on the keyword search. This is the Googlerithm. But what exactly are those instructions?

The exact instructions, weights, and specifics about the Googlerithm are probably only privy to a few people on earth that work in Mountain View, California. However, years of SEO experience from SEOs across the globe have contributed to understanding much about the Googlerithm from the outside, based on experimentation and testing.

This is an attempt to condense the Googlerithm into its most basic components. It can serve as a good checklist for your sites, to make sure you aren’t missing important elements in your search engine optimization. Keep in mind there are many more factors, but this is a simple list of the most important items.

Backlinks

• Anchor text of links
• Context of link (subject matter of site and surrounding text)
• Strength of page and site (The Page Strength tool is helpful)

Content

• Keywords in title, header tags (h1, h2), main text, and URL
• Content quality (readability, spam-like?, and possibly manual ratings)
• Internal links (and here, and here, and here)
• Outbound links (topic, quantity, and reciprocal; case study here)

Other Factors

• Age of domain
• Visitor metrics (time on page, click-through rates from SERPs)
• Freshness (see indexed in an hour article)

Take a long, hard look at each of these 3 areas and identify how you are doing in each factor. If you need some more information, I’ve included links to some authoritative articles on most of the factors above. A new version of SEOmoz’ Search Ranking Factors that gathers opinions of experts on a long list of factors. Make a list for yourself on what needs done for each area so that you can make the most out of the Googlerithm.

8 comments Visited 6832 times July 17th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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7 Months to Get Past Google’s “Did you Mean…”

Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 2nd, 2007

One of my early posts to the SoloSEO blog was How to Get Your Web 2.0 Brand Past the “Did you Mean” in Search, and I discussed how in Google if you searched for our brand name “soloseo” Google would come back and say “Did you mean: colosseo”. Well, it’s time to celebrate around here…we have overcome! No longer will Google give a suggestion, but now it knows that when people search for “soloseo” they mean it!

What contributes to that? It’s very hard to tell, and I don’t have case studies beyond our own, so it’s all just a guess. I think the main factor is the two main focuses of SEO, content and links. We establish our brand through both content and links, producing content from our site, and obtaining links to our site (many of which have soloseo as the anchor text of the link). Since November 2006 when we first launched SoloSEO, we have gained thousands of links and have created hundreds of pages of content.

My blog post mentioned above gave another example, this one with Alexa.com. Alexa also has a “did you mean” when searching for our domain name. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed there. If you type in soloseo.com it says: “Did you mean: solosexo com?”. How crazy is that?

What experiences have you had with getting past the “Did you mean” in search engines?

1 comment Visited 5006 times July 2nd, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google + SEO = The New “AOL Keyword”?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 18th, 2007

We all remember TV, radio, and even print ads back in the AOL era that left us with an AOL Keyword for finding their site. Over time, and as AOL became less important, TV/radio/print ads gave you a domain name instead. Today on the radio I heard a commercial from Honda Certified Used Cars that sounded eerily similar to “type in the AOL Keyword”. The radio ad said to visit Google or Yahoo! and type in the keyword “Honda Certified Used Cars”. Searching for this in Google brings up Honda’s Certified Used Cars site (http://automobiles.honda.com/certified/) as the first listing in the results. Obviously telling us to search for the keyword in Google/Yahoo! is much easier than telling us to go to “automobiles dot honda dot com forward slash certified”.

Plus, they can always control the PPC page. Their PPC page appears to go to the same place, but it actually goes to a page hosted on googlepages.com, so they must be doing some landing page testing.

As I was pondering this, my mind brought me back to last year’s PubCon when John Battelle talked about Google (et al.) as “the new interface to technology”. It literally is our yellow pages, our 411 service, our encyclopedia, our calculator, etc.

Some cautions are in order

1) Obviously if you’re buying radio and TV spots, you need to give out a keyword that you can realistically be in the top for a long time. It should probably include your company name. But if your company name is weird, hard to spell, hard to remember, or just plain dumb, you’re probably a good fit.

2) You’ll need to make sure your SEO is in tip top shape. Honda isn’t going anywhere ranking for that term, but you’re not Honda. Content alone is not going to do it, you’re going to need to build and/or buy some links.

3) You must also realize that you are setting yourself to lose some advertising dollars from your consumers finding alternatives on just their first look into that search space. Hopefully you control more than just 1 listing in the organic results, because otherwise the search results page has 9 other results just on that front page alone, and probably 9 more advertisers running ads on that page.

Is it a Good Idea?

I think we may see it be more common, especially for advertisements about specific products from a company. Honda sells new cars too, but this commercial is to boost their used cars product, and because it takes two clicks (on small text even) from their home page to get to the same place, it makes a lot of sense just to direct them to Google.

Another advantage is that in Honda’s case, they have local dealers selling Honda Certified Used Cars and the ads are geo-targeted. So I can not only find Honda’s site, but I can also find my local Honda dealer and search their inventory from their site (hopefully).

5 comments Visited 9643 times June 18th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Does Punctuation Matter to Google or SEO?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 11th, 2007

Nope. Except for @, -, and ‘. @ is nice to find someone’s email address. – and ‘ are less helpful because Google goes ahead and searches for the word with the – or ‘ but also without them (substituting a space, or for – it combines the word).

I wouldn’t start writing everything without punctuation though, but that’s just me.

Also see my recent post on Does Keyword Capitalization Matter to Google or SEO? That one is better (and longer) than this post.

If you haven’t subscribed to our monthly newsletter, sign-up today before we send it out! You get a newsletter-only article along with some other cool stuff.

1 comment Visited 5548 times June 11th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Does Keyword Capitalization Matter to Google or SEO?

Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 5th, 2007

There are two types of people out there, those who capitalize and those who don’t. When you search for something, do you bother capitalizing your query? Whether you do or don’t, capitalization would seem to be an important characteristic of a search engine query.

Keyword capitalization gives insight into the user’s intention. For example, if I search for “Apple” instead of “apple”, I am probably interested in the company Apple. Before you compare for yourself, what’s your guess on how Google handles results from capitalized or uncapitalized terms?

Apple (company) vs apple (fruit)

Fox (TV network) vs fox (animal)

Bears (sports team) vs bears (animal)

If you guessed what I assumed, you are wrong. Google doesn’t care if you capitalize your search or not. There are really only two noticeable differences:

1) In very few cases the estimated number of results found were different by a few thousand.
2) In all cases I tried the order of the “related searches” were switched around (see bottom of the listings).

These differences have no real significance and may vary from data center to data center even. From a quick check with Yahoo, there are also no differences in results.

The Big Question

So if capitalization doesn’t matter to Google, should it matter in SEO?

Certainly there is the potential for capitalization to have an impact on search engine algorithms and results, especially because Google is always tweaking their algorithm. They aren’t right now, but that doesn’t mean someday they might. Here are some ideas of how capitalization could have an impact in SEO:

Links – I wrote about the importance of anchor text last week, now think if not only the text, but the capitalization mattered? A link to your site could pass more or less link juice depending on if they meant some type of brand, sports team, trademark, slogan, product, or service.

Content – Content is obviously an important part of Google’s algorithm, especially when it comes to 3, 4, and 5+ keyword phrases. What if our content was weighted differently because you were referring to some type of brand, sports team, trademark, slogan, product, or service?

Can SEO’s Capitalize on Keyword Capitalization?

Probably not, not at this point at least. I don’t think Google is going to be integrating capitalization friendly results anytime soon (oh and if they do, I’ll need some type of commission for the idea). They’ve obviously done what they have done for a reason, and breaking that would be huge. One place they could start is modifying the search snippets. Only time will tell.

8 comments Visited 13664 times June 5th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google… Here they go again.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 1st, 2007

I read an interesting/alarming Associated Press article by Dibya Sarkar, AP business writer, in the local paper yesterday. Four states, including Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, have agreed to “free consulting services” provided by Google. Essentially Google is going to help these states make searching and finding online public documents much easier. While I am the first to admit the Utah state web site needs some serious help, I have been frustrated more than once looking for items which should be much easier to find then they are, I am not totally okay with the planned partnership. I will admit there have been occasions I have been navigating around utah.gov to no avail, not finding what I needed, and actually have attempted to use Google possibly find a page indexed in their SERPs, but with little success there either. Turns out states really haven’t done a good job making these documents truly public, there are those tax dollars at work again. But despite the mess, is Google the best way to go as “search consultants?”

There are those in the article who raised some concerns over Google’s occasional privacy gaffs, and the possibility that some private information might make its way to the search public. I think the hesitation is legitimate, none of us wants our Social Security number out there for the ID thieves to pilfer. So I too hope these states will be responsible and keep all private information private, even at the risk of holding some important documents back for now, before they go and throw the vaults wide open to the brutally efficient, ravenous spiders of Google.

From a business/SEO perspective this partnership also raises other concerns. Are we now going to be forced to compete for keywords against state governments and their Gigabytes of content to rank in the SERPs? Some industries will be hurt more than others, but off the top of my head I could see legal firms, business consulting firms, and accounting firms being big losers in search if all this content is indexed and added to Google’s already gorged servers. As more content pours online, competition for keywords is going intensify, and the situation may make search a more frustrating and difficult task if the SEs don’t change. This content boom adds a strong argument to the importance of categorized search ASAP. If the public is without a simple way to categorize search results, many businesses are going to find themselves buried in the SERPs underneath content created by their own tax dollars. How grossly ironic, how patently unfair.

Add comment Visited 2728 times May 1st, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 16th, 2007

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.

My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.

Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:

Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.

And now, for what you all have been waiting for…

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.

To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):

SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE

How to implement Paid Link Disclosure

Step 1

Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).

a:hover.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a:hover.linky {}

Step 2

Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.

Step 3

Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.

Step 4

Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.

Step 5

Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.

Step 6

Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.

This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.

If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):

a.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a.linky {}

If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.

UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.

13 comments Visited 7501 times April 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Yes, you SHOULD Submit a Sitemap to Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

While others have spoken against submitting your sitemap to Google et al., I am going to stand up for sitemaps all across the web, and give you several good reasons for having a sitemap (now you can do sitemap autodiscovery instead of submitting).

1) Get to know your site – Every site owner should know what a sitemap is and to have at least physically seen what it looks like and glance at the pages it contains. Many sitemaps, interestingly, end up with images, favicons, and stylesheets listed in them, which is not what the sitemap is intended for.

2) Improves index freshness – If you blog once or twice a day, run a news site, or have user-generated content, your sitemap can help search engines get familiar with your pace so their index keeps up nice and fresh.

3) Trust and Credibility – Although probably not a huge factor, submitting a sitemap does show to search engines you are real, exist, and care enough to create a sitemap. I doubt the majority of the spam sites that steal blog posts (mine and yours) for their own content actually use and submit a sitemap. My philosophy is that anything that can improve credibility and trust with a search engine is a good thing, especially when establishing a new domain.

Some people have complained about seeing pages drop out of the index because of submitting a sitemap, and then once they remove it they see an increase. There’s a nice thread over at digitalpoint on this topic. Ultimately I don’t think it’s necessarily your sitemap. The number of pages indexed can fluctuate week to week for any site. And if there is a huge drop in pages, you may want to consider checking out your sitemap to see if it is giving full coverage to all the pages of your site.

So my opinion is yes, you should submit a sitemap. Some people think the search engines are “evil”, but they’re really trying to deliver a fantastic product that users will enjoy and use. They’re not trying to “trick” us by asking for a sitemap. They have spent millions of dollars supporting the ability to submit a sitemap, and its not so they can drop pages from their index. They want to be better and they want you to be better.

So go ahead, create a sitemap!

If you need some help creating a sitemap, sign up for SoloSEO where you can easily create and update your sitemap. There are also many other tools out there, although we think ours is pretty slick.

2 comments Visited 8271 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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How to Configure Sitemap Autodiscovery in Robots.txt

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

At Search Engine Strategies New York it was announced that you can now have your sitemap automatically discovered by configuring it in your Robots.txt file. It is simple and easy to do, you’ll just need to know the URL or web address of your sitemap.

First, open your Robots.txt file on your server for editing. Then you will need to add the following line to the end of the file (it can be anywhere, but the end is probably a good place).

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Save the Robots.txt file with the new line for the sitemap URL. There you go! Your whole file may look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /somefolder/
Disallow: /somethingelse/
Sitemap: http://www.soloseo.com/sitemap.php

Search engines already come to your Robots.txt file when they visit your domain, so on their next crawl they will automatically find your sitemap file.

If you have a new site/domain you will probably still want to submit the sitemap URL to the search engines. To submit you can either submit the URL through their interfaces or use a ping.

Submit Sitemap to Google or Ping Google with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to Yahoo or Ping Yahoo with your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to MSN Live.com
Info for Ask.com Sitemaps or Ping Ask.com by hitting this address: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

10 comments Visited 19374 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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