Category Archives: SEO

Understanding Search Engine Penalties

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A friend of mine contacted me asking my opinion on why Google isn’t loving Celebrity Cowboy. Celebrity Cowboy is a celebrity blog that should be ranking well for a variety of terms is, for some reason, continually under-performing for its niche.

Celebrity Cowboy

I told him that I would take a look at it, and while my speciality isn’t really search engines, I did notice a few things right off the bat.

Code

Positioning
One of the first things I noticed about the xhtml generated by the theme used at Celebrity Cowboy is that the blogroll is near the top of the page, with more than twenty items linking out to other sites. While this is only on the front page of the site now, it wasn’t always like this and could have lead to a black mark for the site.

Then there is the content, and then the list of internal links to each one of the more than two dozen categories. Could Google be penalizing the site for having so many outbound links at the top of the page of code, and so many links near the bottom? Could they see this as an attempt to effect search engine rankings by stuffing links in a site?

Things like this have happened before and Google has always been harsh on such things. The flip side though is that all of these links are relevant. Google doesn’t penalize for relevant links, do they?

With Google’s war against paid links, I would be surprised if a few sites got caught in the crossfire, and with these links being site-wide, Google may have mistaken them as paid links.

No doubt they would like sites to make sure to no-follow their blogrolls and other external links that aren’t part of the normal daily content, despite being relative.

Validation
The theme that Celebrity Cowboy is using doesn’t validate. Google has proved time and time again that if you don’t work hard on making your code valid, you can cause yourself to drop in the rankings, and even sometimes to be marked as a “bad” site.

Sometimes sites get listed on stopbadware.org just because their JavaScript doesn’t work correctly, or advertising doesn’t load properly. I have seen this happen to more than a few sites.

Fixing up as many validation issues as possible, could help remove the penalty placed on the site, as Google’s indexing bots might then be able to index the content more efficiently, and without error.

One of the things I first noticed was that there is an ID used more than once, something that probably doesn’t effect the Google search bots, but something that is not correct in xhtml. Classes should be used for repeating items, not ID’s.

Correcting such things should also improve how various browsers render the site, which could have the side effect of increasing traffic, page views, and even links to the blog.

Just Plain Strange
There was one more thing about the coding of the site that really got me scratching my head. It seems that the header image is displayed via CSS, and so rather than showing an image with the proper hyperlink code around it, the coder chose to use JavaScript to make the div that the header is shown thanks to, into a clickable item that uses location.href to bring the visitor back to the index page.

To me this seems like a very bad way to do this effect, and probably not one that Google looks highly on. Continue reading →

Originally posted on January 9, 2008 @ 9:36 am

Another SEO Book Sale

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SEO BookJust recently, I received an e-mail letting me know that another copy of the very useful SEO Book had been sold thanks to this site.

I currently receive twenty-five dollars each time someone purchases the book through one of the banners I have up. So far, I have earned nearly one hundred dollars from sales of the book, and while that’s not an amazing amount of money, I am very happy to see people purchasing the resource.

Near the end of November, the SEO Book was updated to include more up to date information on what is going on with search engines, search engine optimization, and blogging.

I highly recommend purchasing the SEO Book if you haven’t already. The only reason I promote it, is because I own a copy. It is $79 and comes with a 90 day, money back guarantee. As new updates are released, you can download the newer versions, so that you always keep up to date on the best search engine optimization advice in the industry.

I have no doubt that any blogger can learn at least a thing or two from this book.

Originally posted on January 11, 2008 @ 10:04 pm

SEO Book Gets Updated

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SEO BookAaron Wall’s popular SEO Book is well known online, with sound advice, and advertisements for it everywhere, but it hasn’t been updated since November 2006. That changed today with an update that has improved the usefulness of the guide in todays market.

Topical updates include:

  • Google PageRank
  • Google Supplemental Results
  • Google Filtering & Google Search Result Re-ranking
  • Ranking Search Results by Re-ranking the Results Based on Local Inter-Connectivity
  • Human Review & Query Deserves Freshness
  • Universal & Personalized Search
  • Google Webmaster Central
  • Google AdSense/AdWords
  • Google Data Factoids
  • Yahoo!/Microsoft Search Changes
  • Search Analytics
  • Nofollow & Internal Site Architecture
  • Robots.txt & Meta Robots Directives
  • Eye Tracking of Search Results
  • Noteworthy PPC Changes at Smaller Portals
  • Blogging
  • Link Building Tips: Using PPC to Drive Links
  • New SEO Tools
  • Additional Reading Resources

So if you haven’t spent the money to buy Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, now is the time. The best $79 you can spend if you want to really dive into understanding search engines, and growing your blog or website.

Originally posted on November 20, 2007 @ 6:35 pm

Read More Links or Full Posts?

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Don’t you hate it when blogs take forever to load due to the dozen full length posts including images that the person has decided to put on their front page, and every page of their blog? You wonder if it is worth it to stick around to see what they have written.

Or how about when you go to a blog that shows only the title, and the first few sentences, and asks you to click read more on every single post? Feels like you have to jump through hoops just to read their content.

The choice to only show summaries or full posts on your blog can be quite difficult, but each has its advantages and disadvantages. I try to have the best of both worlds.

The Decision

One of the things that I have done here at Xfep is to make sure posts on the front page show the full post, and after they transition to other pages, I only show a summary. I did this for a few reasons, including search engine optimization, and better presentation of my previous work.

People have questioned me about this practice, as I do it on all my blogs.

Why don’t I make all the pages show full content? Well, with having full posts on every page, you begin to delay page loads, and making people wait is a bad idea. Also, most people don’t read past a few paragraphs unless they really enjoy the content.

There are also search engine benefits to limiting your duplicate content as much as possible. If I wanted even more search engine optimization benefits, I wouldn’t show any full articles, except on the single article’s own page.

Doing this has some negatives though, as using a system like mine means that readers are interrupted during their read of an article. They must perform an action to continue to the end of the post, and this turns some people off. Also, we come back to the waiting issue once again, as when people do find the article they want to read, they have to wait for that full page to load.

I find though that the positive aspects of the system that I use outweighs the negatives.

The Steps

If you want to do what I have done, and automate the whole process, I can show you how I do it. It might not be the best way, but it works for me. Please feel free to give me tips or tricks you might have, if you know a better way.

I will assume you are using WordPress to publish your blog. I am sure other systems can do something similar, but this will show how to make pages two to infinity show partial posts, while the main page shows full articles.

Once logged into your WordPress administration panel, go to Presentations and then Theme Editor.

Over in the right hand side, you will see a list of files. We will want to edit the Main Index Template, also known as index.php.

If you are unable to edit the file inside the WordPress administration panel. You will have to FTP into your hosting space and download the index.php file from your theme’s directory.

In this file we are looking for the code that allows us to show the post content.

The line should look something like:
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>

We want to change this so that we test to see where we are, and that will determine how the content is displayed.

The below basically says that if we are on the home page, page one, the search page, single page, or content page, we should display the full content, otherwise, we should show an except.

<? if (is_home() && (!$paged || $paged == 1) || is_search() || is_single() || is_page()): ?>
<?php the_content("Continue reading →"); ?>
<? else: ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<? endif; ?>

Once you update the file with the new code, replacing the old one line content code, your first page should show full articles, while every other page should show only excepts. A great way to boost the search engine optimization of your site, and display teasers to your posts in a quick loading fashion.

Originally posted on August 21, 2007 @ 2:09 am