Technorati Tags: google,subdomain,host crowding,search algorithm

You may have already read that Google’s Matt Cutts went into more detail about changes Google made concerning subdomains. At first, many Internet marketers thought Cutts’ original comment at PubCon meant that no more than one subdomain would appear in the SERP’s for each domain. It turn’s out that the change was actually implemented several weeks before Matt made told audience members in Vegas and has gone pretty much unnoticed. Matt posted a new blog entry Monday that clarified the point of the change. Google is trying to fight ‘host crowding” - many SERPs coming from a single domain. Matt emphasized that the changes won’t effect every search. If a subdomain is relevant to a query it can still show up even if more than two subdomains are already included in the results. Here’s the relevant quote from Matt’s post:

For several years Google has used something called “host crowding,” which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future.

This change doesn’t apply across the board; if a particular domain is really relevant, we may still return several results from that domain. For example, with a search query like [ibm] the user probably likes/wants to see several results from ibm.com. Note that this is a pretty subtle change, and it doesn’t affect a majority of our queries. In fact, this change has been live for a couple weeks or so now and no one noticed. The only reason I talked about the subject at PubCon at all was because someone asked for my advice on subdomains vs. subdirectories.

To read the full subdomains and subdirectories post on Matt’s blog click here.

After all the noise Matt’s comments made you may still be confused about when to use subdomains and subdirectories even after the clarification. I think a big area of disconnect is between the way Google expects subdomains to be used and how they’re used by Internet marketers. From personal experience, many marketers use subdomains to host separate sites with different content such as: ringtones.domainname.com, dateingoffers.domainname.com, insurancedeals.domainname.com. Google expects subdomains to offer specific content around a similiar theme or single provider like images.google.com, video.google.com, or groups.google.com. In the first case, marketers shouldn’t be affected since the SERPs those subdomains show up in will come from very different queries. But what about subdomains like ringtones.domainname.com, superringtones.domainname.com, bestringtones.domainname.com, and hotringtones.domainname.com? This is where Google doesn’t want to see a search for “ringtone deals” to return the ringtone subdomains for “domainname.com” in 7 of the top 10 results. If you’ve been doing this, stop. It probably wasn’t working anyway.

Former Googler Vanessa Fox has posted an article that goes into great detail about subdomains and subfolders that should answer all your questions. Check out Vanessa’s post on how Goolge’s subdomain changes could affect you here.

There’s a great post at zephoria.org which asks the question "Who clicks on ads?". Whether you’re writing pay-per-click ads, using banner ads, or building landing pages; you must keep in mind who clicks on ads and and who ignores them like the plague. For instance, did you know that ad-clickers are predominately female and Midwestern? Click here to read the full article.

If you use multiple email accounts in your SEO efforts, especially free accounts, you know how annoying it can be to check those accounts on a regular basis. A new web service called Fuser is now available which lets you add multiple email accounts, both web and POP based, to a single web-based login at fuser.com. The service is currently in beta and is still very buggy, but once the kinks are worked out Fuser should be a real time saver for SEOers like me who have to manage dozens of email accounts. Check out Fuser here.

There’s a new resource for finding domain names thats an invaluable time saver for those of who buy a lot of keyword domains. The site, bustaname.com, is one of the new breed of ‘Web 2.0’ sites with an interactive interface. The home page gives you two easy options for finding good domains. The first option lets you enter one or more keywords in a search box that will return a list of available domains that contain the entered keywords. Further, you can edit the list to by selectively deleting keywords or finding similar keywords. The second feature allows you to type in a domain name and see instantly whether the domain is available or not – as you type in real time. No more entering a domain name, waiting, going back and searching for another. A great feature that sites like godaddy.com should emulate.

In a previous post I pointed out a questionable use of adsense placement on the popular blog lifehack.org. Lifehack finds personal productivity articles from around the web and posts daily blog entries linking to the relevant site. They also format the link to look almost identical to an adsense ad – while surrounding the link with real adsense ads. I posted about this practice because when I first found the site, I almost stumbled onto this ‘trick’ and nearly clicked on the adsense ad instead of the link to the mentioned article. I asked readers what they thought about this – whether this was a brilliant use of adsense or underhanded visitor manipulation at the expense of adword  users who had to pay for clicks from visitors who didn’t necessarily intend to click on their particular ad. Personally, I still haven’t made up my mind about this example.

Recently, a colleague here a ranktopseo.com found an even more pernicious example of “creative” adsense usage. Take a look at this screen shot from the site www.top-affiliate.com:

On the left hand menu bar, the first 4 links below “Ads by Google” are in fact adsense ads. I don’t think this is in any way falls into some grey area like lifehacks site. In my opinion its pretty black and white. This is blatant manipulation of Google adsense code and as a paying adwords user, clearly in violation of Google’s TOS. But, maybe I’m over reacting. Leave a comment and let us know what you think. Is top-affiliate.com going too far, or do you feel that everything’s fair in the adsense game (until you get caught)?

Not all links are the same. And each search engine gives slightly different weight to each type of link. As Google attempts (once again) to crack down on paid links now is a perfect time to refresh your free link strategy. Of course reciprocal linking, unless its with a partner in the same industry/market, is not effective as it was a few years ago. These days you have to focus on requesting one way links from authority sites in your market, link baiting, and social networking. Today, searchenginejournal.com posted a good article that breaks down the separate link types you should understand while implementing your link building strategy. From the article:

1. Link popularity: simply links coming into any website from any and all sources. This is a broad term as other popularity types will fall under the effect of Link Popularity because the link is the method.
2. Industry Popularity: the relationship of a site in its known industry to the industry, so are the big industry sites pointing to the site. There are always a few blogs in every industry that stand out, and become celebrity blogs. Matt Cutts, Graywolf, Shoemoney, these are celebrity blogs they gain high industry traffic and link out to their some of their industry. The “BlogRoll” becomes the popularity factor and passes far more power than any directory. Industry popularity focuses on a sites’ prominence in the industry, it can be effective, but it tends to make a group popular and misses the larger core of the industry, so this popularity needs to be factored appropriately. Problems with Industry popularity include blogroll spam, now very common and a potential cause for future devaluation of blogrolls.
3. Social Popularity: very similar to Industry popular, except here it is values passed from social sites like digg and del.icio.us. Multiple instances of a site on a social site are factored in the algorithms.
4. Click Popularity: used lightly and in conjunction with analytics data to determine bounce rates. Since this is the least accurate measurement, it is believed to be used lightly in its importance for ranking. Click popularity is pulled mainly from the main search index and clicks are counted. Click popularity tends to me more of a theory and is definitely used in PPC campaigns to track and determine traffic patterns on sites.
5. Blog Popularity: this one is a “throw in” and is related to Google more than other engines, Google places more emphasis and trust in blogs, mainly because they have almost grown up on them and because they feel the human element is there. You can negotiate this till the cows come home, but there is more than enough evidence to say that Google favors blogs and blog links over the more traditional website. So, in summary, Blog Popularity is the ration of incoming links solely from blogs – in theory.

Read the full article on link types here.

Yesterday, I watched a video at lifehacker.com that showed blogger Robert Scoble demonstrating how he kept up with over 600 web feeds a day. Scoble, who became famous for his blog Scobleizer during his time as ‘technical evangelist’ at Microsoft, uses Google Reader to quickly scan for interesting articles to write about on his own blog. What I found interesting from an SEO perspective was the three attributes of a blog post that gets Scoble’s attention and causes him to take closer look. Those three things were:

1. Post Author
2. Number of Links in Post
3. Image in Post 

Unfortunately, becoming recognized as a trusted blogger only comes through quality content and time. However, including several links in your post and adding an image or two are simple, but often overlooked, things you can do for every post to increase readership. Scoble said that a link-dense post indicated to him that a post was well researched. And an interesting image is simply an attention grabber that will slow down a reader who is scanning through lots of text. Keep these basic tips in mind while implementing your blog strategy. If you’re not using blogs then get started. Blogs are content rich and search engines love them. Google’s purchase of Feedburner is an indication of their interest in blogs. The only caveat I’ll add to these tips concerns those of you who use automatic blog generators. Blogger.com, also purchased by Google, may flag a blog as a possible spam blog if it has too many links in its posts. If you use automatic blog software, limit yourself to three links per post. Wordpress.com doesn’t seem to be as strict, but better safe than sorry.

If you’ve tried linkbaiting, you know what a traffic and ranking windfall it can be – and you also know how difficult it can be as well. Don’t let anyone tell you that SEO hasn’t gotten harder over the past five or six years – it has. As the web evolves and new SEO strategies are developed, old tactics lose steam. Linkbaiting is one of those new strategies taking place of old standards that don’t work well anymore. I wish I remember where I read it but an SEOer recently said ‘Linkbaiting is the new reciprocal linking’. Unfortunately, pulling off a successful linkbaiting campaign is not nearly as easy as trading links. To help you out, check out the article ‘Golden Rules of Linkbaiting’ on smashingmagazine.com (a web development blog). The article covers the basics of linkbaiting and provides some good tips that help maximize the chances of making a link popular.  Smashing Magazine is not an SEO resource so it’s interesting to see linkbaiting techniques move from SEO to the wider world of general website promotion.

No, this post is not an advertisement for Apple Computer, but instead a title inspired by an article written by Eric Ward, “The Coming Link Apocalypse”. Eric’s article is a wake up call to all of us who are employing the same standard and well known link building strategies. Eric writes:

Everyone uses the same tools, the same tactics, the same tricks, the same companies, the same link requests, the same link-ridden press releases, the same approaches, with almost no thought or differentiation.

And this is why many link building tactics people use now—whether they work now or not—ultimately won’t make a difference in your ultimate success or failure on the web.

We are creating a vast gray landscape of marginal links that will not stand out, will not help people, will not give the engines confidence, and which will not really do anything other than make it harder to find anything of value.

The coming apocalypse won’t happen in one terrifying moment. In fact it’s already begun. Search engines are reacting to the worn-out strategies SEOers are using to build links. Search engines will always counter tactics that result in poor, spammy content coming to the top of the SERP’s. Such content dilutes their product – quality, relevant information – and as long as strong content is fighting with irrelevant results the battle between SEO and search engines will never end. Effective link building is going to move out of the mainstream as once reliable methods continue to fail. Methods that have traditionally helped push content search engines deem undesirable.

Don’t wait for your sites to nose-dive in the SERPs if link building is your primary weapon for high ranking. Target specific, semantically related links from authority sites rather than following a saturation strategy that is quickly becoming worthless. I strongly suggest you click the link above and read Eric’s article.

Do you have a systematic approach to your SEO projects? I’ve found that if you don’t have a clear purpose when you begin a SEO campaign, you may omit and overlook key factors that make the difference between success and failure. So how do you make sure you cover all the bases? Start by determining the high-level goals every SEO project should have.

The first priority is pretty simple - get indexed. Of course this will happen without any intervention on your part, but part of any SEO campaign is helping search engines spider your site as fast as possible. How do you do that? The easiest strategy is to create a sitemap and submit it to the engines. A sitemap is a shortcut search engines can use to find all the pages on your site in the shortest amount of time. Traditionally, separate engines have had different methods of reading an accepting submitted sitemaps. Luckily, search engines have just agreed on a common format for finding and reading sitemaps. Now, you can use your robots.txt file to point to your sitemap and the major search engines will find it. Your link building campaign also affects how quickly your site is indexed. Create, or buy, links on high ranking sites and your site will be found and indexed that much quicker. If you’re creating a new site, considering buying a domain name that already has pagerank and traffic. The search engines will already be aware of the domain and will quickly index it. But be warned, if you radically change the content, the site will lose pagerank. Make changes slowly if possible - assuming you are able to buy the actual site content as well as the domain. If not, find out what content the site currently hosts and semantically include that information in your new site. That way you’ll manage the change with as little damage as possible.

After indexing, your next tasks should focus on ranking for the terms you’re targeting. As with indexing, link building comes into play here. After optimizing your site, getting links on high ranking pages with good anchor text and, if possible, on sites that are thematically related to your site, is the best way to get your site high in the SERP’s. This is an ongoing process that should involve many different approaches - blog posts, paid links, article submissions, and reciprocal linking. Don’t make the mistake of putting all your energy in one method. That’s a quick way to draw attention from search engines - and not the good kind of attention.

Finally, once your site develops consistent traffic, you need to find out how to turn visitor intention into action. This is where marketing and analytics come into play. The only way to improve conversion rates is to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t. Many times this can come down to image placement, differently worded content, or site usability. Though there are a few tips you can follow when you building your site, increasing conversions often involves trial and error until you find that sweet spot where targeted customers are consistently guided toward the action you want them to take - clicking a link, calling a phone number, etc….

One rule I’ve learned in SEO is that what works for one campaign does not necessarily work on another. There is no standard formula which will work for every site every time. Learning and implementing new methods will be a part of SEO as long as SEO is effective. But as long as you stay focused on the fundamentals, and make sure the techniques you use are for either indexing, ranking, or converting, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the curve and see results.