Google's Supplemental Index

Pages in google's supplemental index aren't penalized, but they may as well be. The supplemental index consists of pages that are deemed to be similar enough to other pages, that they don't appear in the SERPS. No penalty, but no traffic to those pages, either. If you find you have a lot of pages in supplemental hell, you know you're losing a ton of potential traffic.

Problem is, you can't do a simple search to find out which of your pages are IN the index from hell. Whereas google used to show you on a simple search of "site:www.mysite.com", it no longer does.

Here's how to find out what pages you have in the supplemental index: A great find! Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator

What this calculator does is find out how many pages your site has indexed in google's database, then Finds the total number of pages in the main index and does the math to find the percentage.

Been a While

It's been a very long time since I've made a post here. I've been busy working on sites that actually earn me money, and this one doesn't! I've also been busy with some extraordinary new members of my family. Ferrets.

I have absolutely fallen in love with these little guys. So much so, in fact, that in the past few days I've created a Ferret Forum!

As far as SEO goes, I am entirely displeased with the performances of Yahoo and MSN. Google gets a C grade, but those other two are getting F's from me.

So many sites are getting to the top via blog spamming and scraping. It's disgusting, really. Another trick that's very successful on the SE's are using old domain names. They usually tack on subdomains to the main one and, you guessed it, get a bunch of links from blogs, and away they go.

Some advice that has always been given to webmasters who want to create content rich sites that are of quality AND get good traffic from the Search Engines, is to continue doing what they are doing; add content. Also, exchange links or try to get links from "authority sites" in their genre. Getting a Dmoz listing is helpful, also.

Google Sued Over Drop in PR

Have you heard this one yet? A webmaster who was raking in the cash selling links on his PR8 site is suing Google, because his rank dropped to a PR4.

Search King, Web site network and advertising seller in Oklahoma City, has filed a lawsuit against Google for allegedly bumping down it's Page Rank unfairly.

Search King states that they started a PR Ad Network - an advertising network sells text links on high ranking websites - in August. Their PR dropped at the end of September, from a PR of 8 to a PR of 4. Search King alleges that google did this intentionally.

Cited in the suit:

"Google, as a provider of a ranking system upon with the Internet community relies, must apply the system in a manner that is not arbitrary, nor aimed at restraint of trade."

As Dan Sullivan's article at Search Engine watch elloquently states:

Even if Google did take action against PR Ad Network, it might argue that program violates its webmaster guidelines against participating "in link exchanges for the sole purpose of increasing your ranking in search engines."

As far as profiting from google serps, Google's Terms of Service states:

"The Google Search Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Search Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales..."

They don't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning any compensation from google. But, just for argument's sake, let's say they did. Can you imagine the ramifications of such a ruling? Everybody and their dog who ever had a website that earned a penny on the internet would be filing a lawsuit every time google made an update.

In my opinion, these morons didn't file a lawsuit in hopes of winning anything. They're using all the publicity surrounding a sensationally idiotic lawsuit to pump up their pr and traffic via the articles and links they're getting from the coverage.

Blog Spamming

I have a few blogs hosted at blogspot.com. On these blogs I get some comments that are obviously put there by webbies to get some backlinks to their sites.

I don't try to stop them. After all, they've always left a nice little message...Now, I don't know if they're using any blog spam warez or not, but I don't really care. I just don't get all excited about blog spamming.

Some SEO people are dead against it - it's a black hat SEO tactic, after all. Me, I just don't give a darn. I figure that blog owners can stop it if they want. It's easy to do.

Besides, some day the search engines are going to figure out that blog links shouldn't be getting as much respect as they do. Then the sites whose backlinks are coming from blogs and virtually nowhere else are going to find themselves in the internet void.

SERP report - Month 3.

I don't know about you, but I'm a regular statistics addict. I check stats every time I sit down at the computer.  I just can't help myself.   So I figured that some of you might find it interesting to see what kind of traffic this new blog is getting without doing any of the usual SEO stuff, such as exchanging links, buying traffic, spamming forums for backlinks, blah blah and blah.    None of that good stuff going on here!

Ok, enough idle chatter - lets get on with the SERPS. We've gotten hits for a whopping 8 key phrases. W00t! Heading the list is one hit for the curious phrase:  " how to get scraper site spidered ".

The other 7 phrases SEO Ranks snared in it's web with one hit apiece:
- seo dynamic pages
- adsense serps
- google seo static dynamic
- age of a domain name
- get million backlinks
- seo dynamic urls
- google seo dynamic urls

And that's it for November so far. I'm going to keep track of this and post it once a month until the list is so long, I won't be listing every phrase.

Raise your hand if you think I've used this post as an excuse to repeat the phrases to strengthen the serps. :)

SEO Ranks in the sandbox

SEO Ranks has made it into the google sandbox!

I started this blog partly to experiment with pristine, white-hat SEO. I haven't given links out to anything or anyone because they asked, I've added links add value and interest to this blog.

I also haven't asked for any links - except that I have added the blog to a couple blog directories so that the search engine could find me. I haven't formally submitted this url to any search engines.

About a month after Google first spidered SEO Ranks, it appeared on the first page of results for "seo ranks" - it's own name. And not a bad phrase, if you ask me. Course I didn't get any traffic at all for "Seo Ranks", but some traffic did come in from google for some search strings that matched some content here.

As of two days ago, I do believe SEO Ranks has been firmly packed into the sandbox. It'll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

At the time of writing, Yahoo has SEO Ranks at #7, and MSN #1 and #2 on a search for this blog's name, SEO Ranks.

Yahoo! loving link spam - still.

I keep track of highly competitive phrases on the search engine. Every day I check out the serps for holy grail phrases in areas where webmasters are fierce and ruthless in their quest for serps.

Yahoo's serps seemed pretty reasonable until today. I checked out a couple phrases and found a huge shift in some areas - and a lot of crap in the results. Redirected sites and link spammed sites almost took over the top 20 in some areas.

I checked the links for a couple of these garbage sites and found them to have over 15K backlinks, according to yahoo - some of them were to internal pages! Over 15K links to an internal page (and a page which had no original content to speak of).

Yahoo, you suck. Just a couple months after you got rid of batches of these sites, they've been replaced. Yahoo needs to take a page out of Google's book and give incoming links a thorough going over. Maybe then Yahoo's search engines will give searchers some relevent results.

Reciprocal Linking 101

The jagger update is done, leaving some sites in its dust and elevating other sites to new highs. Something that has become very clear is google's refined link credibility: Quality of the pages who are linking to you are of the utmost importance if you want to do well with google.

- Avoid site-wide links and links that the search engines can easily identify as paid links. i.e. links under titles such as "Sponsored Links".
- Check the pr of the page a link partner would put your link on - consider exchanging links only if there is some pr on the actual link page.
- Link to good neighborhoods in your category - there are many tools to help you do this, such as Hub Finder.

What to do with all that recip linking spam in your inbox? Here is a very good article to help webmasters select link partners, and delete the crap: Link requests that should be deleted.

Measuring the Quality of a Site

Everyone who has done any SEO work on their site knows that getting backlinks is at least half the battle - if not more. Quality backlinks and quality content have always been, and will always be what makes or breaks a site in the SERPs.

Now, you can go out and get a zillion reciprocated links from any site that will link to you, but 1,000 links from 1,000 crappy sites is worth less than 10 links from 10 quality sites.

Most webmasters rely far too much on the google pagerank of a site to determine it's worth. What they are missing is that, the pr really doesn't stand for much at all - yes having a link from a pr5 is better than a link from a pr0. That's a given. But a more important way to determine how important google thinks a site is should start with the age of the domain name.

Do a search for the phrase you're optimizing for with this super cool Age of top 10 Websites with Backlinks Tool from WeBuildPages.com. You will probably see that the top 10 sites are at least 3 years old - and most of them older than that. Yes, the age of a site is something that google obviously feels strongly about. Authority, respected websites do not pop up overnight -- it takes time. Time to steadily add great content and obtain good incoming links.

So, the next time you're out looking for people to beg a link from, check out their site's age before you think about their pr. Just a suggestion.

Google's algo and the age of domains.

The recent changes happening at Google seem to indicate a much larger emphasis on the age of a website. I recently investigated the top 20 websites for my sought-after key phrase ( a very competitive one ) , and found that the domain names were all registered prior to 2002. Most of them were older than that, some dated back to the 1990's.

It would appear that the older a domain name is, the more credibility google is giving it. In the long run, this approach might just be what the search engines need to crowd out the thousands and thousands of scraper site, adsense sites, and other garbage sites that are clogging the serps.

Another interesting affect will be the cost of acquiring old domain names. If the age of a domain name is more important than the actual name of the domain name, you can bet your bottom dollar that any domain over 4 years old is about to become quite a valuable commodity.

If you want more information on the latest Google update, check out Jim Boykin's SEO Thoughts and Rand Fishkins SEOmoz.org. Both make some interesting reading and offer a lot of insight into Search Engine Optimization.

Pharma Sites Busted by DEA

Big changes to come at the pharm after 18 people arrested for allegedly selling pharmaceutical drugs illegally over the Internet. Those arrested include the "ringleaders" of more than 4,600 "rogue" Online pharmacy websites.   Read the DEA press release while trying not to gag.

Whether or not affiliate sites are in danger of facing legal action, they do bear some risk. At the very least, there is the very real risk not receiving commission payments when the DEA puts pharm affiliate companies out of business.

It would be prudent for webmasters to opt out of the online pharmacy industry.

Personally, I think it's a total crock of shit. Although I personally do not have any pharm affiliate sites, this news pisses me off. The vast majority of people purchasing medicine over the internet are trying to get their prescribed medications at a more affordable price - through Canadian pharmacies. The government should solve this problem by making prescription drugs affordable in the united states and not by creating more cyber "criminals".

Is the Yahoo! Honeymoon Over?

Is the Yahoo! Honeymoon Over?
Yes, I think it is. Over the last year and a half Yahoo! have well and truly won the hearts and minds of the blogging and tech community - no small feat, and very, very important. Yet much of that achievment, perhaps all of it, can be directly attributed to the Y! Search team - they get it, 100% However, there's a large disconnect between Y!Search and the rest of Y! ...

The Million Dollar Home Page
Check this guy out, he's bought his domain name (www.milliondollarhomepage.com) and he want a million dollars for college. He's selling ad space on the site, nothing new there. However, he's selling it off in 10x10 pixel blocks. There's a million pixels and he's selling each one for a dollar. At the moment ...

Getting Spidered: Static vs Dynamic

Search Engine Spiders prefer Static URLs

The structure of your site is very important for search engine spiders, and search engines seem to favour static urls over dynamic urls (urls that have a ? in them). Dynamic URL's are created by server side scripts, and the portion of the url after the ? is not static.

Yaho recommends avoiding dynamically generated urls for pages that you desire to be spidered and indexed. Google can handle dynamic URLs, but they warn webmasters about using dynamic urls:

Reasons your site may not be included: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index
-- from Google Webmasters

If your site depends on dynamically generated URLs and your search engine ranking isn't quite what you feel it sould be, then you might want to consider rewritting dynamic urls into static. There are plenty of resources online that illustrate how to use Mod Rewrite to accomplish this.

Fishin for MSN UK Serps?

Previously, MSN UK did not allow .coms to feature in the MSN UK search, whether or not they were UK hosted. That policy seems to have changed, since .coms, .nets, ecetera hosted in the UK, are featured in MSN SERPS.

However, instead of simply giving preference to sites hosted in the UK, MSN does not allow sites into the searches unless your site is either hosted in the UK, or is a .co.uk site (hosted in the UK).

What does this mean for webmasters? Well, if you want to have good search positions in UK based searches, you must host your site in the UK, and having a .co.uk domain hosted in the UK is even better.

MSN Paid Search

MSN Paid Search Details Emerge
Something missed in the week, but fortunately picked up by slashdot was this ZDNet Asia report on MSN Paid Search that details the launch in Singapore, with France to follow an...

Google Stuff

Google Showing Ads In Regular SERPS
I didn't see anything on TW or elsewhere about this, but it's really amazing to see how many more ODP descriptions and META descriptions are taking the place of snippets in Google's SERPs. If this keeps up, SEOs will be begging DMOZ to remove their sites from the directory, so they can get their META descriptions (aka ad copy) displayed. Google "...

Is Google PageRank Dead?
There have been several Blog and forum appearances that the PageRank in the toolbar is for entertainment purposes only - are they accurate?

Preventing AdSense Clicks by Home Network Users
"Some weeks ago, my wife nearly clicked on my ads, as she was searching for vacation destinations and found a page from me."

Google Employees Running Adwords Accounts - Conflict?
DougS pointed out this thread at Webmasterworld where on the second page, an anonymous Google employee confirms that many Googlers run Adwords accounts. As you can imagine, this has fueled much debate over the ethics of such an arrangement, particularly in light of the original posters situation...

Online Casino SEO Scam

A new scam is in the works. BeTheDealer Casino, who spearheaded the "fortuno Winnero Google Contest, offered a cash prize pool of $7000.00. Basically, to participate, webmasters were asked to put this on sites (I've made changes made to syntax show the code, not run it):


I'm participating in the challenging [a href='http://www.btdino.com']search engine optimization competition[/a][br]organized by BeTheDealer [a href='http://www.bethedealer.com/index.html']online casino gambling[/a].



Does it surprise you that an online gambling company would try to fool idiot webmasters into optimizing their casino for a popular gambling key phrase - Online Casino Gambling?

It's a very low form of search engine manipulation. Yeah, it might work, but it's shady. For more details, type www.btdino.com into your browser -- Heck, you didn't think I wanted to give these fools a link, did ya?

SEO Ranks . com

SEO Ranks is simply a fledgling site about Search Engine Optimization. It in no way pretends to be a professional SEO site, it's simply a site owned by a very interested webmaster. Complete amateur Optimizer. Optimizing for the search engines is always a moving target. What's true one day may not be true the next - at least it sure feels that way. But the basic principles for SEO always remain the rule.

Original Content, and lots of it help a site to make a splash in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Incoming links from authority sites of the same genre are also important. Two things - content and incoming links. That much is true.

Bloggers Legally Liable?

Are Bloggers Legally Liable For Readers'Comments?
sued Aaron Wall, who maintains a blog on search engine optimization - tactics companies use to get themselves to appear

New SEM Tools

New SEM Tools From Search Engine Strategies San Jose
Internet Search Engine Database - Aug 29, 2005 Links are a huge topic of discussion in search engine optimization. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer is a tool that lists the backlinks to your website.

Alt text and SEO

How Important Is ALT Text In Search Engine Optimization
WebProNews, KY - Aug 15, 2005
2. Use your keyword phrase in one or two instances of ALT text on the page - no more. Use moderation in everything you do in search engine optimization.

Web Design Templates And Search Engine Optimization
WebProNews, KY - Aug 23, 2005
I am worried that code bloat and other template issues might interfere with our search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Are...

Can You SuperSize that Web Page Please?
"Ever put up a super giganto web page? How'd it work out?"