Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, Susan Moskwa informed us in the Q & A section of last weeks phone conference that even if a page is blocked by Robots.txt that it still can have PageRank passed to it from pages that are linking to it unless you use nofollow within the link.

Let’s say that you don’t care rather or not your Policy & Procedures page is indexed by Google or not so you decide to add the page to your Robots.txt file. This will effectively tell search engines that abide by the rules set fourth within Robots.txt to not index that particular page.

Let’s say that you have a footer link to your Policy & Procedures page as well as a link to this page immediately below your order form or other forms found through out your website. If these links are not property created with the nofollow tag then you are going to be passing PageRank to your Policy & Procedures page that doesn’t even have the privilege of being indexed by Google.

This goes to show us that taking the time to make sure something is done right is going to be far better then having to go back and fix things later. If your website is leaking PageRank then that can affect how well certain pages of your site performs within Google SERPs.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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What are they? How do you obtain them? How do you find them once you obtain them?

I’ve had many clients ask about them and I’ve seen other Internet marketers ask about them on forums, webmaster related chat rooms, blogs and even the most recent Google phone conference last week (March 28th 2008).

What Are Sitelinks?

So what exactly are Sitelinks? Well first off they allow people who might be searching for your website to pick and choose which page of your site that they might be looking for. At this time Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed… if any.

This is one example of what Sitelinks look like when they show up for someone searching.

News, Games, People and places and so on in the above image are considered Sitelinks. At this time you can have a maximum of eight Sitelinks. Keep in mind though that if within your Webmaster Tools your site is only displaying three or fewer Sitelinks then Google will not show Sitelinks for your website.

Speaking of Google Webmaster Tools, you can find what pages Google has identified for Sitelinks by going to Links and then to Sitelinks.

If Google has declared any Sitelinks for your website then you’ll see something that looks like this inside Google Webmaster Tools.

How Do You Obtain Them?

I’ve already mentioned that Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed. However the decision isn’t entirely out of our hands. Like anything else with search engine optimization, there are things that can be done to help Google along.

For example, if you want your contact page to show up then make sure you have one or more of the following on site optimization techniques covered (preferably more than one).

1. Name the page according to what it is about. Creating ‘Contact-Us.html’ gives search engines and visitors a pretty clear idea of what the page is about.
2. Include the page within your Google Sitemap AND your on site Site Map if you have both of them; if you don’t then you should.
3. Within the content of the page use the words, ‘Contact Us’ and see about using H1, Bold and other formatting to help make it stand out.
4. Link to the page from other pages of your website using the anchor of ‘Contact Us’. Make sure this isn’t just done in your navigation though as search engines pick up constants on a website like navigations.
5. Link to the page from other pages of your website using images that have Alt Text of ‘Contact Us’; maybe even go as far to have the image named ‘Contact.jpg’ or something similar.
6. Off site linking to that page should also help as it gives an outside referral that search engines will hopefully detect.
7. If you are building your meta tags properly then you will naturally be mentioning ‘Contact Us’ somewhere in your title and description.

You’d obviously want to repeat the above steps for other pages that you want to stand out a little more than others do.

How Do You Find Them?

Google displays Sitelinks based on what the searcher has searched for. Google will return the most useful and relevant results. If Google thinks that some of your pages listed within Webmaster Tools are relevant then they will display.

Above I showed you an example of five Sitelinks that can possibly show up for my wife’s tutoring company in Southern California. However I have not yet conducted a search within Google that has caused the Sitelinks for that site to show up. Others on the other hand may have done so and seen completely different results than I have due to the types of searches i’ve performed and they have performed.

If you’d like to see a live version of Sitelinks simply search for MSN on Google and you’ll get some results.

Sitelinks Management

There are some pages within a website that just shouldn’t be displayed as a Sitelink yet alone indexed by a search engine. Removing a specific page from Googles index is a completely other post but you can choose to block a page from showing up in Sitelinks. Notice the third image above? Simply select Block next to the URL you don’t want displayed and Google will take it out for 90 days. Of course 90 days comes and goes pretty fast so you’ll want to make sure that you are purposefully MANAGING SITELINKS.

In Conclusion

Sitelinks have been around for some time now. They help increase your advertising space within Googles SERPs and help potential clients locate exactly which page of your website they are looking for if you take the time to help Google determine what should and shouldn’t be considered a Sitelink. You won’t always see them when conducting searches and just because Webmaster Tools shows that you have them doesn’t mean they will always display.

For more information on Sitelinks directly from the horses mouth, I’d consider this Google page titled, "How does Google compile the list of links shown below some search results?"

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

• Uniqueness: 6.7
• Overall Rating: 8.0
• Usefulness: 9.3

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For many months now a group of friends and co-workers of mine have had this little ranking game going on with a particular keyword in Google. The objective was to out rank one another and stay at the top of Google’s SERPs for as long as
possible.

Good old Matt Cutts rocked our world on Thursday when we discovered one of his posts sitting at the top of our little competition. Our little side competition suddenly became much more interesting. Now instead of out performing one another we will have to set our scope on beating Matt Cutts in a game he robably doesn’t even know he has interrupted at the time of this posts writing.

I’ll be the first to admit that not all of our tactics to game one another have been all that kosher but at least in my case I figured it was a harmless term that very few people actually search for.

From blog category names to creative usage of titles and even creating the post with a keyword rich name and then renaming it so it wouldn’t be so obvious at first; we have pretty much done it all just to game one another.

All four of us involved in this little content writing competition have had our fair jokes about how Aaron Wall virtually made the term “SEO Book” popular. Before he came into the picture I think I read somewhere that it wasn’t a widely searched term. (If anyone reading this knows a link to an article that talks about that i’d appreciate you letting me know so I can reference it). Our little posse of small time bloggers figured that just maybe we’d make our term a big success like Aaron has. Well Matt; it looks like we now have a lot to work to do.

As far as I know only two of us have seen Matt show up at the top for our term so this post is somewhat of a head start for me but I think I will be giving the advice that we all should work not only towards out ranking one another but that each of us should work on pushing Matt down just for the added thrill… That is IF Matt allows us to have our fun without getting creative with his Super human Google Powers.

By now I’ve probably triggered a few Google Alerts. Somewhat purposeful and somewhat accidental I assure you. However it is what it is and I’m sure that Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts have probably browsed this post by now or at least have been informed that their names were brought up in one way or another.

Let me introduce the game players so that everyone knows who all might be involved in this little game of ours that has taken a serious interesting turn of events.

Zak Nicola - Zak happens to have some of the most interesting posts out of all of us simply because they aren’t all related to Internet Marketing or SEO related topics. He has a page or two on the ever so popular cat frenzy that seems to keep everyone occupied and let’s not forget Zak in drag! This very sexy picture of Zak Nicola got us laughing and smiling for a long time.

Jeremy Rivera - Jeremy is to blame for this competition. He is fairly new to Internet marketing in general and prior to that he was a Customer Support Supervisor. He got nosey and started asking questions one day and never stopped. It was a surprise to us all when the company we all work for decided that Jeremy deserved to be the Marketing Manager.

Jeremy originally ranked for this keyword term prior to his promotion. We all thought that it would be funny (and easy) to push his blog down on our targeted keyword so set out to write a lot of content (some useful, some not) around the topic. So the game began and has gone on for several months now.

Shirley Tipsy - Many people might recall Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006. There were two ladies who attended the conference that wore “Matt Cutts is a God” and “Matt Cutts Makes Me Google” T-shirts. Needless to say; to this day Shirley Tipsy still Googles over Matt Cutts. I was unfortunately not brave enough to wear any of those shirts during that trip so I didn’t go down as the guy wearing a “Matt Cutts Loves Me” T-shirt or whatever Shirley had planned for me.

Shirley Tipsy is also known as Audrey and she is our former Marketing Manager. She still works for the same company but now she is in charge of our company site and not our client sites. She has been involved in this game since the beginning but has been an even bigger game player in the SEO industry for many many years.

(Compliments of http://www.webuildpages.com/)

John Jones - That’s me! Jeremy first showed off his new blog to me via instant message at work one day. Later that evening at home he sent me another instant message letting me know that he was ranking for a keyword that looked rather impressive at first.

It is always easier to write about other people yet it is always easier to speak highly of oneself; why is that? I’m not exactly sure what to say except that I’ve been honored to work with the people I’ve worked with. I’m also very happy to have been contacted by people like Rand Fishkin and Rebecca Kelley for very small and non important issues all the way up to Barry Schwartz aka Rustybrick
over at Search Engine Round Table right around the time that Google launched their Adwords Print Campaign capability.

So now that I’ve introduced the players of this game I’ll tell you that the targeted keyword is “Content Writing Advice“. Many posts and many links have been purposefully established just to target and rank for this keyword term.

Zak probably has one of the best posts out of the four of us while my original post is probably the absolute worse out of the bunch. Now that Matt and others may be taking a small interest in this little game of ours though I hope that we will all be able to step it up a notch and show that we really truly deserve those top positions instead of Matt’s post on, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love“.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Update 3/7/08 4:18am: For the record, Matt has always had a ranking
for this keyword term; he simply has never been number one for it. I should have
taken periodic screenshots and certainly a screenshot for last night. This morning
my obsessive compulsive self checked CWA (Content Writing Advice) and Matt is
no longer at the top again. Possible Google fluke last night or maybe this morning
but I still think this will be a fun addition to our competition to follow through
on.

• Uniqueness: 10.0
• Overall Rating: 10.0
• Usefulness: 10.0

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I think I’ve caught myself saying that I wouldn’t get into the conversation about the Page Rank (PR) that is displayed on the Google Toolbar. However here I am writing a blog about the topic.

Titus Hoskins from Marketing Tool Guide recently had one of his articles published over at Site Pro News titled “The Big Google PageRank Slap - Perception Is Everything”

I felt that the article was a good read.  I often am guilty of telling people that the Page Rank displayed in the Google Toolbar is useless because it isn’t an accurate rating of what Google actually has within their system at any given time. While this is a true statement, it doesn’t mean that the PR on the Toolbar is useless as you’ll find out when you read the article.

Thoughts on Recent PR Update

In October webmasters everywhere noticed a series of updates made to the Google Toolbar Page Rank.  Aaron Wall from SEOBook said there was at least three updates.  He also goes on to say that “If you rank you rank” - Source: [Video] Google Lies: Oh My _______ Google PageRank Penalty.

I’ll have to agree that if you rank you rank.  Page Rank might be important for perception purposes like Titus Hoskins wrote about but it has very little to do with how well your site performs within the SERPs. For example, a well known directory was lowered to a PR 3. However, according to a source within the company they’ve seen a huge increase in gross sales and increased volumes of Google Bot visits. They know what they did wrong and have taken appropriate steps to correct the issue but in the meantime a really good directory got slapped with a PR 3.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important for a sales team?

If they are looking to use a high PR as leverage while talking to a corporate big wig with money spending capability I’d say that it is highly important.  However, I say it is important only because there is a good chance that the corporate decision maker doesn’t have a clue in regards to what it is, how it helps or how it hurts. All they know is that someone showed them a scale from 0 - 10 and that the scale is tipped in the solicitors favor. This is perception working in the sales teams favor.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important to a search engine optimizer looking to increase rankings within Google’s SERPs?

I’d have to say not so much because it has very little to no diverse affect on how well your website ranks or doesn’t rank. It has been proven countless times that a website can out rank another website with higher PR for competitive keyword terms.

Is Google’s Page Rank all that important to a mom and pop shop who wants to increase potential traffic by advertising on directories or other vertical marketing vehicles?

I highly doubt they even know what the Google Toolbar is and those that do know what it is probably have never even enabled the option to see the measurement tool. The only way it really becomes valuable to them is when a sales team utilizes it as a leveraging tool.

I’ll close this post up with something else that caught my eye in Aaron’s post above.

“Google has a long history of deceiving webmasters, in order to push Google’s business interests and keep their search results clean.”

• Uniqueness: 3.0
• Overall Rating: 2.0
• Usefulness: 2.0

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1. You purchase a link to enhance your chances of ranking.
2. You show visitors one thing and Google another.
3. You fail to submit to relevant directories like the Open Directory (DMOZ)
   or Yahoo! Directory.
4. You purhase a link at Yahoo! (See Violation #1.)

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Note / Update: This is just a fun post that took me five minutes to write. It is an observation on how Google is tightening its reigns on paid directories and at the same time still encouraging buying a link from Yahoo!.

• Uniqueness: 1.0
• Overall Rating: 1.0
• Usefulness: 1.0

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Looking at two different sites I own or manage I can see a pretty significant difference between the two. One is this marketing blog while the other is a client website that I’ve been working with for well under a year now.

Notice that my 10 minute marketing blog has links to several internal pages instead of just the home page. However this client’s website has all of their links going straight to their websites home page.

One thing I’ve always been bad at is remembering terminology. There may be another name for these practices but for the sake of this blog I’ll say that when you only obtain links to your home page then you are practicing top level link building. When you are building links to other pages of your site you are practicing deep linking.

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Yesterday began a multi part series of blog posts with observations made about Google. Today I want to provide some fun facts that I can provide proof of actually happening as of the date of this blog post.

Within Google Webmaster Tools when I was looking at my top search queries I noticed that I was ranking for the phrase, “adultfriendfinder im”.

On September 23 2007 I wrote a post titled, “Variable Marketing Strategies” and I mentioned Adult Friend Finder within that post. I didn’t provide a link to that site or combine those words.

This tells me a few things:

#1. Google can create compounded words and can split compounded words. If you are targeting the term ‘Sunshine’ you may end up achieving your goal but you may also end up doing well for ‘Sun Shine’ as well. Other examples would be ‘Rainbow’, ‘Drywall’, and ‘Birthday’.

#2. Content is as equally important to the search engines as linking is. I say this because I am ranking #16 for the search term ‘adultfriendfinder im’ and I didn’t do anything special other than mentioning both words in passing.

#3. Google can strip punctuation. The description Google decided to use for my position within the SERP’s for this term is:

“Anyone that knows me will know that I’m not one to encourage or promote the … to a website is unfortunately a dating type site called adult friend finder. …”

Notice that I didn’t actually use ‘im’; I used ‘I’m’.

#4. A keyword phrase doesn’t have to be found within the content together. Looking at the post itself or the description that Google pulled, do you see anywhere where I used the exact phrase of, “adultfriendfinder im” or “adult friend finder im”?

I really didn’t combine the two sets of words together in my post. They are all found at different locations of the post.

#5. Before today I’ve never used ‘adultfriendfinder im’ or ‘adult friend finder im’ on my blog. I’ve now used them both at least twice within this single blog post and my guess is that I’ll move higher in Google’s SERP’s for my current #16.

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Today I’ve been inspired to write a few posts for my blog that takes a closer look at the advantages of looking at the Google Webmaster Tools for the different websites I built or manage.

The first thing I noticed was that this part of Google has undergone an update and navigates a lot cleaner then it did previously. I know my habits when I log into this service so I have no doubt Google changed navigation based on what happens to be the most popular patterns they’ve tracked us doing.

For example, after selecting a desired site, it takes you to the typical Overview page that looks familiar but I notice a new link towards the top that takes people to the sites ‘Top search queries’ section. You can still get to this page the same way you did before with some minor navigation changes but it is nice to be able to skip right to this page.

The top search queries part of webmaster tools is what I like to visit often by the way and this is why I believe Google has made these changes based on user activity. I may be wrong but a lot of people probably look at this part of webmaster tools.

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Today I received an instant message from a former co-worker that I’ve had the benefit of watching go from not knowing much to out performing me in pay scale. She started from the ground floor and worked her way to the top and when there was nowhere else for her to go in our company she moved to Arizona to work for a Scottsdale SEO Company called Obu Web Technologies as their Director of Search Marketing.

While she is still getting her feet wet with blogging and social marketing, I found her post today titled, “How social networks feed you to feed Google the goods” to be very well written and worthy of mention on my blog.

The post kept me interested the whole way through and I felt she explained her viewpoint rather well.

While I’m not looking forward to Google getting all psychological on me or my clients, I am always interested in the twists, turns and ups and downs that Google puts us through so as Melinda stated… “So go ahead and take over the brains of all us Google guppies, analyze what we’re into, and give us the results we want.”

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Today I was looking into some rankings for one of my clients. At the bottom of page two I noticed the following message by Google:

“In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.”

Now, I have my search set to 100 results per page in Google so if you want to do the search yourself and are at 10 results per page then you can skip over to about result page 20 for the term Summerlin real estate or you can click on the link and it should take you to the exact page.

I’ve never seen this before. Does anyone else have any additional sightings of something similar? I’d like to see more instances of this and I’d like to have that fax number! I’d also be interested to know if the offenders are alerted to their removal in the Google SERPs or know about the ability to file a DMCA Counter-Notice.

One thing I’m not so sure I agree on is how easy it is to identify the offender through the on line copy of the faxed complaint. (Read the DMCA complaint)

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