How healthy is your website's SEO? With the recent Google page rank update, many folks are wondering.

It pays to do your homework if you want to excel at optimization. Helpful resources abound, but a discerning approach is imperative - not all self-proclaimed "oracles" to SEO wisdom can back up their claims. Google's Webmaster Central is essential reading, and participation on forums such as High Rankings is a great way to learn from others in the search marketing community.

Blog Marketing Tips #2: Increasing Traffic with Killer Slugs

Whether you're a new or seasoned blogger, you may not have known about this excellent tip. Blog 'Slugs' are the default post URL strings or permalink settings.  Andy explains it wonderfully and I picked up a new trick - while you may be crafting your blog posts to include keywords, Andy warns,

I usually review my website statistics every morning to track who's coming to my website and where they're referred from.  Statcounter.com offers a nice, easy interface and their free service keeps me informed.  However, today I got a nasty surprise.  I found a referrer link and after taking a closer look at the site that referred to mine, I noticed they had copied just about every page of my website and even foolishly linked to my own portfolio (very dumb).  Normally, I try to track nasty plagiarists via CopyScape.com , but their dumb mistake led me right to them.

WannaGirlFriday.com is the site in question, and they've just been reported to Google for copy theft.  Why should I bother?  Because Google hates duplicate content - and while Google might realize that my content is the original, I'm not willing to take any chances on getting a ranking hit.

Just about every single page of this site is a carbon copy of mine - the owner even put a Meebo widget on her contact page!  While this angers me, if I suddenly have less relevant content at Google because of it - I'd take an economic hit.

The lesson to everyone:  Once you achieve high ranking, you absolutely need to take time to hunt down and deal with thieves. 

There is a Virtual Assistant that I owe a great deal of gratitude to - today she saved my hard earned Google ranking simply by being kind enough to let me know that I was asleep at the wheel. 

If you've tried search engine optimization on your website ever, you've probably done a lot of research at a lot of different websites.  You've also probably been spammed by some pretty creative boneheads that promised the moon and never actually visited your website before spamming you.

Hoorah for Google as evidently last Friday, September 29th 2006 - Google updated those Page Rank toolbars and we now have Page Rank, Captain!  Go, now!  Take a look at your site - check all your pages and see how your page rank is doing!  If you've been in the sandbox, you may be out!  One day you're in, the next day you're out. (In my best Heidi Clum german accent).

Yes, I bet you think this is yet another blog post about search engine optimization and reciprocal links, but I promise it isn’t!

So often, my clients and us web gurus are so totally focused on how to get our site linked from other sites that we sometimes forget that we can have great success the other way around, too!

This is a response I posted to the Real Talk listserve - thought I’d post it here as well…

Reciprocal linking isn’t quite the panacea it once was, but there is a reason. Google’s Oct 2005 algo change adopted a
means of checking those recip links and analyzing the sites you’re linking to - they analize that link partners links and so on and - if your link partner links to less than relevant sites, then the impact of their link to you is lessened.

In other words, you have to take extra time to actually check out the sites that you’re ‘recommending’ with your link exchanges to make certain that they’re actually a quality site.

One of the most popular forms of exercise among many search engine optimizers—both the third-party firms that do it for others and the advertisers who spiff up their own Web pages for better natural search rankings—is a periodic workout called “chasing the algorithm”. The race begins when Google or Yahoo! updates some portion of the software that determines how they look at Web pages and decide which are most relevant and valuable to a searcher. The engine makes that change; Web operators see their rankings rise or fall as a result; and they, or their outside search engine optimization (SEO) firm, scramble to get back the old rank by providing the new elements the search engine now needs. After a few months, the engines make another change, and it’s off to the races again.

Well, optimizers on Google are lacing up their running shoes for another race. Only this one promises to be more a marathon than the usual sprint. Google is testing a new data center infrastructure, a feat much bigger and comprehensive than an algorithm change. Dubbed “Big Daddy” both in the search marketing blogs and forums and by the friendly folks at Google, this new data center—still in shakedown mode—will reportedly add new ground-level capabilities into the Google search function and drive those powers deep into all the algorithms with which Google searches, studies and indexes the Web.

Read More!

Matt Cutts, the 'Net's resident Google Doctor of deciphering crazy rank changes has confirmed that we are in the midst of a heavy duty Google algorythm change. For the first time in over three years, our very own website ranking has veritably disappeared for all but our main homepage keywords. Our inbound links according to Google have dropped by 50% and as a result, many of our clients websites have also dropped off the map. Some dropped from the top ten at Google to below 10,000 and are slowly climbing back up - several now in the low 40's.

You've been approached by an amazing search engine optimization team that promised they can give you top ten placement for "Your Seattle Real Estate," and you can't wait to sign up! But, you have a little nagging doubt in the back of your head... Would anyone really search for "Your Seattle Real Estate?"

That's a really smart question! Absolutely, it's very important that if you try to get great ranking that it be for phrases that real people would use to find your services! And yes, beware anyone who promises to get you in the top ten or top five for ANY keyword phrase, because there are NO guarantees in search engines.

Google is doing one of their algorithm updates this very minute and it's a mess for some sites and an amazing boon for others.

A search engine spider, (also sometimes called a robot or crawler) is no creepy bug! It's simply a small program that the search engines "send out" to travel, or "crawl", from link to link throughout the 'Net, reading and saving content from websites and adding it to search engine indexes (also called the "cache".)

Spiders, while great, aren't too smart. They can only travel from link to link, from one page on a site to another page, from one website to another site. It can't "guess" at where your site may be, nor does it automatically know when you put a website up on the Internet. This is why inbound links to your website are so very crucial in generating results in the search engines.

Have you been trying to get your site to the top of the search engines, but you're confused about just how to do it? Don't worry, you're certainly not alone. Even within the SEO industry, experts argue quite frequently about the real 'how to's' of good ranking.

So, why would you want to try and figure the whole mess out? Because the benefits far outweigh the pain of wrapping your brain around the concept of SEO.

You can take some of the pain away by simply trying to understand the mind and needs of your target consumer and building a site that delivers those needs. The goal of any good search engine is the same.

Are you avidly seeking good ranking at Google and other Search Engines? Then you may want to pay close attention to your web host or website provider and ensure you have only one chief domain assigned to your site. It's fine if you have other domains that point to your site via a forwarding feature, but if they're all assigned to the same folder or to the same template account, you could be "telling" Google that you have multiple websites, all with the same exact content.

How can you avoid the Google "Duplicate Content" penalty? Simple... Contact your website administrator and ask them how your secondary domain names work - are they assigned to your main website with a 301 redirect? Are they pointing to your main site with a forwarding feature? If not, then your webhost should be able to adjust your domains for you. If you manage your own website, what you'll want to do is create a separate folder from your main website and 'assign' your secondary domains to that new folder, then create a simple plain text file called htaccess.txt - all it needs to contain is a line like this for each secondary domain:

Redirect permanent / http://www.yourotherdomain.com

The performance of your other domains won't suffer in the least, but this way Google will realize that you only have one main website and several other domains pointing to it. Good luck in all your SEO efforts!

Google is experimenting with a new feature that lets someone block unwanted sites from showing up in their search results.

Now "with one click you can drop that URL," Google software engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a recent account on his blog. The new feature was developed to sate Google users that wanted to "block unwanted sites," he adds.

The feature is available to anyone with a Google account and can be activated through Google's My Search History/Personalized Search. The offending site must first show up in search results.Only then will the feature stop it from showing up in the future. Google also allows users to block domains' worth of Web pages, Cutts wrote.

Before Google began testing the remove site feature, the only options users had were to ignore the dubious-looking listing, or report the Web address to Google via its spam report form. 

The feature is in line with the commonly held belief that most search engines' success depends on more easily letting users personalize search results. The new removable site effort, which is similar in intent to one from Google rival Yahoo, is in line with those core beliefs. But it's not without problems, according to some of those with knowledge of the feature.

"This may be a good way to get rid of spam in your search results, well, after you find it, which is a little too late," blogger wrote on the site Googleblogscoped.

Should you exchange links with a site whose links page has zero PR?

The page rank of the link page doesn't matter too much, provided you can drill down to that page from the homepage with a spider simulator. If it has a PR of zero - that's not too uncommon. If it isn't cached by Google, it could just mean that the page is new and hasn't yet been spidered.

Typically, you'll want to look at each potential link partner carefully - what you're looking for:

1. PR of the homepage - the better this is, the more impact you'll get

2. Can you use a spider simulator to drill down to their links pages?

3. When you go through the site, are all the pages on the same domain name? (i.e. - the homepage is www.myREsite.com but once you start clicking it changes to www.myOTHERsite.com)