SEO News Tip of the Day!

So Much Spam & So Litle Time

Well as per usual this will be the first post I've made for a while which is due to a heavy work load and the huge spam problem I've at present (I'm that close to jacking this blog in and starting a new one).

Anyone reading this blog (not automated programs that is) will be able to see the huge amount of spam comments being added to the blog. These spam comments are just people exploiting the ability to leave comments with a nice little anchor rich text link. I can see why it's tempting to do so and wouldn't mind so much apart from the manner in which there being posted.

I followed one of these links the other day, only to find a redirect to a page selling an automated blog comment and pinging tool. I didn't read that much into it (far too busy at present) but read enough to get the picture.

The tool allows you to search for specific keyword focused blogs and place a pre configured comment with your text link, creating thousands of backlinks that influence PR and link popularity. It then pings the blog hoping to allert crawlers to the new comment spam. Well we all know links are a must for competing in competative markets but surely you need to either be desperate or simply not care about pissing blog owners off to fall to these drastic measures.

I know there is probably a way of preventing this from happening but have not had the time to conduct any research. So any automated programs reading this, please feel free to a leave comment on how I can prevent you from returning ;) or anyone reading this who knows any methods please let us know.

All work & no play

As mentioned before my recent work load has been incredibly high, this has been a combination of pre-xmas search engine positioning for a higher number of clients than usual but mainly the last few componants required to have our brand spanking new eCommerce Solution up and running with it's own dedicated website to advertise the truly amazing / revolutionary features it contains.

I've been mainly focusing on the SEO side of things. The first thing was to completly anoy the hell out of the developers by telling them "no, your just going to have to do it this way" in order for the front end to be complety search engine friendly. Which doesn't sound like much work, but when you think every little change has to be left for a few days, waiting for each of the main search engines to pick up the changes before you're able to view and conclude the results, a frantic work pace was required from all the team if we were going to meat the launch date set by the management.

How many test shops?

In order to even come close to the launch date, we had to set up a total of seven test shops. Each shop containing a few dozen or so products, just enough to create a site requiring deep crawling for all pages to be indexed. This allowed us to test seven different additions to the SEO at the same time. Then it was just a simple case of studying the impact of each development and choosing which was the best to include in the end product.

My favourite development has got to be the SOE componant "self optimising eCommerce", which basicly automates a large quantity of elements that effect SEO. When the shop owner adds each product via the CMS, it will take things like the name of the product and use it for the title and alt tags on corresponding images. This allows people who no knowledge of SEO to optimised pages but also allows who want full control over the SEO elements to adjust them as well.

At the moment the dedicated site is not up and running but we do have the demo shop online which shows off the eCommerce Solution quite well.

Google PageRank Explained

PageRank - an exclusive technology developed by Google which can have a major impact on the success of your website. This article will attempt to explain the concept of PageRank and how your ranking can be improved without spending any money at all.

How is PageRank beneficial?
Google refers to the technology as a way of evaluating the usefulness, importance, and quality of a website. The PR of a webpage can mean different things for different people.

For a webmaster, a high PR is a sign of accomplishment. It shows that your website is moving in the right direction and has the potential to become successful. PageRank also directly effects your Google search engine listings. Acquiring a higher PR than your competition could mean more traffic for you, and less traffic for your competitors.

Visitors to your website probably won't care about the page's rank (most surfers have no idea what PageRank is). However, visitors who understand PageRank may use your PR as a sign of how credible your content is. Would you rather use the information from a website with 0 PR or a website with 5 PR and hundreds of other websites linking to it?

How is PageRank determined?
PageRank is basically determined by backlinks. A backlink is when another page links to your page. For every page that links to you, that page is "voting" for you. The more votes you get, the better your PageRank will be.

However, it gets more complicated than that because some votes weigh more heavily than others. The weight of the vote is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple links from pages with high PR could be more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But it gets even more complicated - each page can only transfer so much PageRank. The set amount of PR that the page can transfer must be split up between each "vote" that the page gives out. This means that a PR 7 page could actually give out as much weight per vote as a PR 3 page if it had too many outgoing links.

How can I improve my PageRank?
There are many different methods to obtain quality backlinks to your website. You will find that some methods work better than others depending on the subject and popularity of your site.

Directories
Submitting your website to directories is one of the best ways to increase your PageRank and even get some traffic at the same time. But submitting your site to just a few directories won't be good enough. You need to sit down and spend the necessary time to submit your site to a large amount of directories. This may seem like a painstakingly long process, but you'll be glad you did it when you notice results. I have taken the time to make a large list of free directories with high PageRank which you visit here. Although directories with low PR may seem like a waste of time, you should submit your site to them too because it still helps and they could eventually become a high PR site which charges money to submit to.

Link Exchanges
A very common practice to improve your PageRank is a link exchange. This is simply where two people link to the other person's website. It's best that you only link exchange with someone who has at least as much PR as you and the subject of the two websites are similar. If you receive a link from a website with a subject which has nothing to do with yours, you'll find that very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.

Forum Signatures
If you are an active user on a forum or message board, it would be wise to put a link to your website in your signature. This could help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, it could help improve your traffic from the forum members seeing your signature, and your site could get spidered more often because it is linking to a forum (forums generally have a lot of new content every day and search engines love new content).

Buy Advertising
Although it isn't the best of choices, many webmasters will buy text link ads on websites with high PR. Although this can be effective, it can be very expensive and only a temporary thing. If you purchase text links for just a couple months, after the months are over you won't have the backlinks which were giving you the "votes" you needed to keep your PageRank. So you have now spent a large amount of money on text links, but in the end you're right back where you started.

Articles
This is a method which not many people know about. Basically, you write articles about the subjects you know a lot about. You then let other people use these articles as long as they provide a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you'll find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks. This method can work well with anything which you develope and give away for free such as scripts, web design, etc.

Stay On Google's Good Side
The most important thing to remember when trying to increase your PageRank is to not cheat and to always follow the rules. The people which run Google aren't fools and they have many ways of catching cheaters. Don't even think about using any of the "link farms" or trying to hide keywords on your pages. If caught, you may not get unbanned for many months.

Make A Quality Website
If you have a quality website which your visitors enjoy going to, then you will receive backlinks without having to do anything. Websites will link to you with the intention of informing people of a helpful resource, or showing off a cool new website they found, or any other reason other than trying to increase your PageRank. If you build it, backlinks will come...

This article is from PRchecker.net
Instantly check the Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, indexed pages, and backlinks of any web page! Also has detailed articles on webmaster issues such as improving PageRank.