Sebastian’s Pamphlets

Rustybrick runs a post on Secondary Navigation Links are Recommended, commenting a WMW thread titled Duplicate Navigation Links Downsides. While in the thread at WMW the main concern is content duplication (not penalized in navigation elements as Rustybrick and several contributors point out), the nuggets are provided by Search Engine Roundtable stating “having two of the same link, pointing to the same page, and if it is of use to the end user, will not hurt your rankings. In fact, they may help with getting your site indexed and ranking you higher (due to the anchor text)”. I think this statement is worth a few thoughts, because its underlying truth is more complex than it sounds at the first sight.

Thesis 1: Repeating the code of the topmost navigation at the page’s bottom is counter productive
Why? Every repetition of link blocks devalues their weight assigned by search engines. That goes for on-the-page duplication as well as for section-wide or especially site-wide repetition. One (or max. two) link(s) to upper levels is(are) enough, because providing too many off-topic-while-on-theme-links dilute the topical authority of the node and devaluate its linking power with regard to topic authority.
Solution: Make use of user friendly and search engine unfriendly menus at the top of the page, then put the vertical links leading to main sections and the root at the very bottom (a naturally cold zone with next to zero linking power). In the left- or right-handed navigation link to the next upper level, link the path to the root in breadcrumbs only.

Thesis 2: Passing PageRank™ works different from passing topical authority via anchor text
While every link (internal or external) passes PageRank™ (with duplicated links probably less than with unique links caused by a dampening factor), topical authority passed via anchor text is subject of a block specific weighting. As more a navigation element gets duplicated, as less topical reputation it will pass with its links. That means that anchor text in site-wide navigation elements and templated page areas is totally and utterly useless.
Solution: Use different anchor text in bread crumbs and menu items, and don’t repeat menus.

Summary:
1. All navigational links help with indexing, at least with crawling, but not all links help with ranking.
2. (Not too often) repeated links in navigation elements with different anchor text help with rankings.
3. Links in hot zones like bread crumbs at the top of a page as well as links within the body text perfectly boost SERP placements, because they pass topical reputation. Links in cold zones like in bottom lines or duplicated navigation elements are user friendly, but don’t boost SERP positionining that much, because their one and only effect is PageRank™ distribution to a pretty low degree.

Read more on this topic here.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Web Site Development

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I’ve just finished an article on hyperlinks, here is the first draft:
Anatomy and Deployment of Links

The targeted audience are developers and software architects, folks who usually aren’t that familiar with search engine optimizing and the usability aspects of linkage. Overview:

Defining Links, Natural Linking and Artificial Linkage
I’m starting with a definition of Link and its most important implementations as Natural Link and Artificial Link.

Components of a Link I. [HTML Element: A]
That’s the first anatomic chapter, a commented text- and image-link compendium explaining proper linking on syntax examples. Each attribute of the Anchor element is described along with usage tips and lists of valid values.

Components of a Link II. [HTML Element: LINK]
Based on the first anatomic part, here comes a syntax compendium of the LINK element, used in the HEAD section to define relationships, assign stylesheets, enhance navigation etc.

Web Site Structuring
Since links connect structural elements of a Web site, it makes sense to have a well thought out structure. I’m discussing poor and geeky structures which confuse the user, followed by the introduction of universal nodes and topical connectors, which solve a lot of weaknesses when it comes to topical interlinking of related pages. I’ve tried to popularize the parts on object modeling, thus OOAD purists will probably hit me hard on this piece, while (hopefully) Webmasters can follow my thoughts with ease. This chapter closes the structural part with a description of internal authority hubs.

A Universal Node’s Anchors and their Link Attributes
Based on the structural part, I’m discussing the universal node’s attributes like its primary URI, anchor text and tooltip. The definition of topical anchors is followed by tips on identifying and using alternate anchors, titles, descriptions etc. in various inbound and outbound links.

Linking is All About Popularity and Authority
Well, it should read ‘linking is all about traffic’, but learning more about the backgrounds of natural linkage helps to understand the power and underlying messages of links, which produce indirect traffic. Well linked and outstanding authority sites will become popular by word of mouth. The search engines will follow their users’ votes intuitionally, generating loads of targeted traffic.

Optimizing Web Site Navigation
This chapter is not so much focused on usability, instead I discuss a search engine’s view on site wide navigation elements and tell how to optimize those for the engines. To avoid repetition, I’m referring to my guide on crawler support and other related articles, so this chapter is not a guide on Web site navigation at all.

Search Engine Friendly Click Tracking
Traffic monitoring and traffic management influences a site’s linkage, often to the worst. Counting outgoing traffic per link works quite fine without redirecting scripts, which cause all kind of troubles with search engines and some user agents. I’m outlining an alternative method to track clicks, ready to use source code included.

I’ve got a few notes on the topic left behind, so most probably I’ll add more stuff soon. I hope it’s a good reading, and helpful. Your feedback is very much appreciated:)

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Web Site Development

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Blogger Aaron Wall sued over comments on his blog

The short story is this: Aaron Wall is being sued over comments left on his blog by his readers about a notoriously unsavoury company called Traffic Power, or 1p. Within the Search industry, these people are regarded as the lowest of the low, and if you dig through some of those Search results, or the links at the bottom of this post, you’ll find all the gory details. Suffice to say, they are considered theives and villains by the overwhelming majority of the Search Marketing community.

We don’t think it’s right, do you?

We feel this has to end here. There is far more at stake than a scummy company vs a blogger - this is about free speech on blogs, and the right for users to comment, without blog publishers having to fear lawsuits.

So, What Can YOU Do?

See the graphic at the right below the links? It links to the donate to Aarons legal costs post. You can start by giving him a few $$$’s to fight these people effectively.

Help Promote the Blogging is NOT a Crime Campaign

By using one of these lovely graphical banners on your blog, forum or website, you will help spread the word, and raise more cash - enabling better lawyers and legal council. Simply pick one that fits your site, and link it to the donate post.

Simple eh? Don’t you feel GOOD now?

Resources

There is much to the history of TP/1p, and you can find a lot of it in the Google searches linked above, but recently, these are the more notable posts and discussions on the subject if you’d like more in-depth information to quote and link to.

• Wall Street Journal: Blogger Faces Lawsuit Over

  Comments Posted by Readers

• LockerGnome: SEOBook vs. Traffic Power - Bloggers on Trial
• Slashdot: Blog Faces Lawsuit Over Reader Comments
• MediaChannel: Blogger Faces Lawsuit Over Comments Posted by Readers
• Search Engine Watch: Traffic Power Files Suit Against SEO Book
• Web Pro News: Aaron Wall Sued Over SEOBook Blog Comments
• Threadwatch: SEOBook Sued by Traffic Power Arsewipes, Considers Pulling Content

Please redistribute this ThreadWatch post if you wish.
And please put one of the banners on your blog to help spread the word!

Thank you for your support of free speech on blogs and elsewhere on the net!

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Before Yahoo’s Site Explorer goes live, Google provides advanced statistics in the sitemap program. Ms. Googlebot now tells the webmaster which spider food she refused to eat, and why. The ‘lack of detailed stats’ has produced hundreds of confused posts in the Google Sitemaps Group so far.

As Google Sitemaps was announced at June/02/2005, Shiva Shivakumar stated “We are starting with some basic reporting, showing the last time you’ve submitted a Sitemap and when we last fetched it. We hope to enhance reporting over time, as we understand what the webmasters will benefit from“. Google’s Sitemaps team closely monitored the issues and questions brought up by the webmasters, and since August/30/2005 there are enhanced stats. Here is how it works.

Google’s crawler reports provide information on URIs spidered from sitemaps and URIs found during regular crawls by following links, regardless whether the URI is listed in a sitemap or not. Ms. Googlebot’s error reports are accessible for a site’s webmasters only, after a more or less painless verification of ownership. They contain all sorts of errors, for example dead links, conflicts with exclusions in the robots.txt file and even connectivity problems.

Google’s crawler report is a great tool, kudos to the sitemaps team!

More good news from the Sitemaps Blog:
Separate sitemaps for mobile content to enhance a site’s visibility in Google’s mobile search.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Sitemaps

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There is a pretty interesting discussion going on search engine spam at O’Reilly Radar. This topic is somewhat misleading, the subject is passing PageRank™ by paid ads on popular sites. Read the whole thread, lots of sound folks express their valuable and often fascinating opinions.

My personal statement is a plain “Don’t sell links for passing PageRank™. Never. Period.”, but the intention of ad space purchases isn’t always that clear. If an ad isn’t related to my content, I tend to put client sided affiliate links on my sites, because search engine spiders didn’t follow them for a long time. Well, it’s not that easy any more.

However, Matt Cutts ‘revealed’ an interesting fact in the thread linked above. Google indeed applies no-follow-logic to Web sites selling (at least unrelated) ads:

… [Since September 2003] …parts of perl.com, xml.com, etc. have not been trusted in terms of linkage … . Remember that just because a site shows up for a “link:” command on Google does not mean that it passes PageRank, reputation, or anchortext.

This policy wasn’t really a secret before Matt’s post, because a critical mass of high PR links not passing PR do draw a sharp picture. What many site owners selling links in ads have obviously never considered, is the collateral damage with regard to on site optimization. If Google distrusts a site’s linkage, outbound and internal links have no power. That is the optimization efforts on navigational links, article interlinking etc. are pretty much useless on a site selling links. Internal links not passing relevancy via anchor text is probably worse than the PR loss, because clever SEOs always acquire deep inbound links.

Rescue strategy:

1. Implement the change recommended by Matt Cutts:

Google’s view on this is … selling links muddies the quality of the web and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results. The rel=nofollow attribute is the correct answer: any site can sell links, but a search engine will be able to tell that the source site is not vouching for the destination page.

2. Write Google (possibly cc spam report and reinclusion request) that you’ve changed the linkage of your ads.

3. Hope and pray, on failure goto 2.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google PageRank™

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Does Google systematically wipe out duplicated content? If so, does it affect partial dupes too? Will Google apply site-wide ’scraper penalties’ when a particular dupe-threshold gets reached or exceeded?

Following many ‘vanished page posts’ with links on message boards and usenet groups, and monitoring sites I control, I’ve found that indeed there is kinda pattern. It seems that Google is actively wiping dupes out. Those get deleted or stay indexed as ‘URL only’, not moved to the supplemental index.

Example: I have a script listing all sorts of widgets pulled from a database, where users can choose how many items they want to see per page (values for #of widgets/page are hard coded and all linked), combined with prev¦next-page links. This kind of dynamic navigation produces tons of partial dupes (content overlaps with other versions of the same page). Google has indexed way too many permutations of that poorly coded page, and foolishly I didn’t take care of it. Recently I got alerted as Googlebot-Mozilla requested hundreds of versions of this page within a few hours. I’ve quickly changed the script, putting a robots NOINDEX meta tag when the content overlaps, but probably too late. Many of the formerly indexed (cached, appearing with title and snippets on the SERPs) URLs have vanished, respectively became URL-only listings. I expect that I’ll lose a lot of ‘unique’ listings too, because I’ve changed the script in the middle of the crawl.

I’m posting this before I’ve solid data to backup a finding, because it is a pretty common scenario. This kind of navigation is used at online shops, article sites, forums, SERPs … and it applies to aggregated syndicated content too.

I’ve asked Google whether they have a particular recommendation, but no answer yet. Here is my ‘fix’:

Define a straight path thru the dynamic content, where not a single displayed entry overlaps with another page. For example if your default value for items per page is 10, the straight path would be:
start=1&items=10
start=11&items=10
start=21&items=10
…
Then check the query string before you output the page. If it is part of the straight path, put a INDEX,FOLLOW robots meta tag, otherwise (e.g. start=16&items=15) put NOINDEX.

I don’t know whether this method can help with shops using descriptions pulled from a vendor’s data feed, but I doubt it. If Google can determine and suppress partial dupes within a site, it can do that with text snippets from other sites too. One question remains: how does Google identify the source?

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google

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I’ve added my favorite feeds to my personalized Google home page. Unfortunately, “Information is temporarily unavailable” is the most repeated sentence on this page. It takes up to 20 minutes before all feeds are fetched and shown with current headlines. That’s weird, because Googlebot pulls known feeds every 15 minutes, often a few times per second.

It seems to me that Google does not cache (all, if any) RSS feeds. When I refresh the page while watching my crawler monitor screen, I can see Googlebot quickly fetching the ‘unavailable’ feeds from my server. After a while they get updated on the page.

Some feeds can’t be added. For example Google’s news feed ‘http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Google+Sitemaps&ie=UTF-8&output=rss&scoring=d’ doesn’t show, not even after dozens of clicks on ‘Go’ during the last week. The same happens every once in a while with MyYahoo too by the way. Microsoft’s sandbox even likes to crash my browser, what I consider the usual behavior of MS products, sandboxed or not.

Tags: Google RSS

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Matt Cutts starting to blog is great news. Bad news is that the blogosphere and search related sites shortly after the first announcement seem to generate that much traffic, that his blog is currently unreachable. If Google is not willing to host his blog, I’d like to be the first one to donate for a suitable hosting - Matt Cutts’ advice is worth a reasonable donation.

[Update] No slashdotting involved. Matt posts:

The site was down for a few hours today. I had visions of hordes of overenthusiastic SEOs, but my webhost said it was nothing to do with my site specifically–they said their server crashed “catastrophically.” I wanted to ask if they were sure the server wasn’t allergic to me, but they seemed rather busy.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Matt Cutts

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There is a lot of interesting reading in the SES coverage by Search Engine Roundable. Currently I’m a little sitemap addicted, thus Tim Mayer’s announcement got my attention:

Tim announces a new product named Site Explorer, where you can get your linkage data. It is a place for people to go to see which pages Yahoo indexed and to let Yahoo know about URLs Yahoo has not found as of yet …. He showed an example, you basically type in a URL into it (this is also supported via an API…), then you hit explore URL and it spits out the number of pages found in Yahoo’s index and also shows you the number of inbound links. You can sort pages by “depth” (how deep pages are buried) and you can also submit URLs here. You can also quickly export the results to TSV format.

Sounds like a pretty comfortable tool to do manual submissions, harvest data for link development etc. etc. Unfortunately it’s not yet life, I’d love to read more about the API. The concept outlined above makes me think that I may get an opportunity to shove my fresh content into Yahoo’s index way faster than today, because in comparison to other crawlers Yahoo! Slurp is a little lethargic:

Crawler stats (tiny site)	Page Fetches	robots.txt Fetches
Googlebot	7755	30	73.34 MB	11 Aug 2005 - 00:03
MSNBot	1627	98	39.86 MB	10 Aug 2005 - 23:38
Yahoo! Slurp	385	204	13.61 MB	10 Aug 2005 - 23:53

I may be misleaded here, but Yahoo’s Site Explorer announcement could indicate that Yahoo will not implement Google’s Sitemap Protocol. That’ll be a shame.

Tim Mayer in another SES session:
Q: “Is there a way to do the Google sitemaps type system at Yahoo?”
Tim: We just launched the feed to be able to do that. We will be expanding the products into the future.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Yahoo Google Sitemaps

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Google is always good for a few news: since yesterday news queries are availavle as RSS feed. That’s good news, although Google shoves outdated HTML (font tags and alike) into the item description. It’s good practice to separate the content from its presentation, and hard coded background colors in combination with foreign CSS can screw a page, thus webmasters must extract the text content if they want to make use of Google’s news feeds.

As for Google and RSS, to adjust Ms. Googlebot’s greed on harvested feeds, Google needs to install a ping service. Currently Ms. Googlebot requests feeds way too often, because she spiders them based on guesses and time schedules (one or more fetches every 15 minutes). From my wish list: http://feeds.google.com/ping?feedURI usable for submissions and pings on updates.

Google already makes use of ping technology in the sitemap program, so a ping server shouldn’t be a big issue. Apropos sitemaps: the Google Sitemaps team has launched Inside Google Sitemaps. While I’m on Google bashing, here is a quote from the welcome post (tip: a prominent home link on every page wouldn’t hurt, especially since the title is linked to google.com instead of the blog):

When you submit your Sitemap, you help us learn more about the contents of your site. Participation in this program will not affect your pages’ rankings or cause your pages to be removed from our index.

That’s not always true. Googlebot discovering a whole site will find a lot of stuff which is relevant for rankings, for example anchor text of internal links on formerly unknown pages, and this may improve a site’s overall search engine visibility. On the other hand sitemap based junk submissions can easily tank a site on the SERPs.

Last but not least Google has improved its wildcard search and can tell us now what SEO is all about *. Compare the search result to Google’s official SEO page and wonder.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google

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