Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Every time Google indexes a page, it checks to see if the page is already in its database, if Google detects duplicate content, or notices a page that has not been accessed in a long time, Google automatically marks the content as a supplemental result. More and more webmasters have expressed their displeasure at their sites being labelled as supplemental results. The truth is that Google almost always labels a website as a supplemental result because it detects duplication of content or design elements.

Duplication of content here could mean many things, the most popular is making multiple pages on the same website, as this improves the keyword density of the website, and hence improves its chances of coming up multiple times for the same keyword. This is one of the oldest ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques in existence; only thing is that Google does not allow such methods any more. The moment Google detects similar content; it automatically labels all the similar content as a supplemental result. This means that not only the duplicate pages, but also the original page or website becomes a supplemental result!

Another method that results in Google labelling a website or page as a supplemental result is by giving all the pages on a site the same heading, or assigning similar attributes. This causes Google to detect (sometimes incorrectly) that the same page name has been used with different content, another search engine optimization technique that is no longer of any use. In fact this also proves that the term duplication applies not just to content, but also similar structure.

If you are wondering why blog sites, and forums are not reported as supplemental results, simple Google crawlers do actually have AI (artificial intelligence) they detect and they know which sites are blogs and forums, and which ones are simply abusing the power of content, by creating duplicate content. So in essence its becoming increasingly difficult for webmasters to fool Google. Another reason for Google marking sites or pages as supplemental results is when the site receives very low traffic, Google naturally assumes that a page that has not been visited in months, can hardly be useful and automatically catalogues it as a supplemental result, however these types of supplemental results are rare, and the simplest way to get out of supplemental results is to increase the web traffic by using search engine optimization.

How to get out of Google supplemental results

If your site has been labelled as a supplemental result, the first thing you need to do is to remove any duplicate content, or duplicate web structure from your site(s). Google is a fair search engine and it does start indexing sites once it detects that a site is no longer duplicating content. In addition increasing the traffic to the site and improving the overall structure of the site also helps speed up the processing of Google, but the single most important way to get out of Google supplemental results is to delete duplicate content.

Many webmasters have tried smarter techniques like redirecting pages to a new address, or deleting old content, and creating new pages with the same content but different file names, all these techniques are doomed to failure as Google will eventually detect the duplicate content, and might no be as lenient this time around. So once you are in supplement it is best to do the honourable thing and delete all duplicate content. Also using white hat search engine optimization techniques, and improving the overall traffic to the site, should speed up the recovery process of the site.

Regards
Rishi Modi - Certified SEO Professional
email me at rishi@submitedge.com

Having dealt with many SEO related sites, I often get asked what will be the impact if a webmaster makes changes to his site content, or structure. Usually the answer is what they don’t want to hear, making changes in the site’s structure, or changing around the content of the site too often, does impact the site’s ranking. To put it simply, every change you make forces Google to reassess your sites ranking, Google stores a copy of your website on it’s server, so whenever there is a change in the structure, content or any other aspect of the site, Google detects the change. Once the change is detected Google will recalculate your ranking based on the new pages it has indexed. Now depending on the changes you make your ranking might go up, or it might go down, but the probability that it is completely unaffected is pretty low.

For example, if you were to change the structure of your website so that after the change there was very little content left, or you have added more content thereby reducing the keyword density of your content, this results will more often than not, adversely effect your ranking. The same goes for your web design, if you frequently make changes to your web design, and shift around the structure of your links on a regular basis, you might end up harming your web rankings. But don’t think see change as all negative, if you have made changes to the text for the better, and have improved the structure of your web page, there will definitely be improvement in your site ranking.

Another thing to remember is that whenever you make a change to your website, make sure you keep the regularity of Google indexing in mind. If your site is indexed say once a month, make sure you have made all your changes before the indexing, this way any changes will be reflected in a go, if you keep making changes spasmodically, it will end up harming your ranking more than anything else. In addition make sure you keep as much of the original content and site structure in tact. As the saying goes, don’t fix something that isn’t broken. If you notice even popular news sites, have a set pattern of displaying data, only their content changes on a daily basis; pretty much everything else is the same; this is because they want to makes sure that the there are as little variables involved as possible.

So then how do you make changes without adversely affecting your website ranking? Well the first thing you might want to change is the content, make sure the new content you add is not impacting your keyword density, if possible try and add new content on a separate page, this way your original content is in tact. Many websites have done something similar and have added a news or what’s new? feature to their site instead of making frequent changes to the website. This is a smart and search engine friendly way of adding new content to the site. However there is another consideration to make, don’t put a link for every new page on the home page, this might decrease the ranking of the home page, instead just make a separate what’s new section and add new pages or events to that.

The second thing to remember when making changes to the website is to try and keep as much of the original structure in tact, if you have to make changes, make them as discreetly as possible. This ensures that the distribution of Page Rank is not effected throughout the website, even if you have to make changes you are better of revamping the whole site and starting from scratch, instead of making a change a week. If you notice this is why most major sites just shut down for a day or two and prefer a revamp.

No matter what the change to your website, the change does impact your ranking, but this is not all a bad thing, if you do it right and have made changes to improve the ranking, then you will benefit from these changes, however if the changes have not been made with SEO in mind, then you might end up loosing some valuable ranking.

Regards
Rishi Modi - Certified SEO Professional
email me at rishi@submitedge.com

Some time back Google launched its new service, called Google Base. Not many people know about Google base, and even search engine optimizers have very little idea as to what Google base is, in fact considering that its an innovation launched by Google, Google base has yet to gain much popularity. This however does not mean that Google base will not gain popularity, Google base is still in the beta version, and should eventually be popular.

The first thing that you need to know is what is Google base? Google base is designed to offer people the opportunity to host their web content, documents, videos and other multimedia files, without having to make a website or without having to spend money on domain names. For example, if you want to sell off his old LPs, then all you need to do is register with Gmail, and then create an entry with Google base. Just like any regular website, the next time anyone searches for old LPs, your entry with Google base might just show up in Google search, even without you having a website. That is the power of Google base.

If you do have a website, that does not mean that you cannot make use of Google base, just like ebay, and other auction sites, you can make an entry into Google base, and you can then create a link to your website. The search engine optimization value of Google base is still not clear, not many people have been able to understand the complete working of Google base, and also since Google base is still in beta version, no one really knows what Google’s objective is. Google base can be used as an alternative to ebay, as it does have pretty much all the same elements, only there is no bidding system like ebay, and it does not look like an ebay clone either. On the other hand people claim it will assist in Google’s dream of the Google universal search, as people can freely upload whatever they want like documents, presentations etc, without having to have a website, thus making a Google database of multimedia components that can the be searched later using Google universal search.

Currently however even the examples mentioned in the Google base database, no longer show search results from Google in the first page, this is because Google is biased to websites, more than anything else. And from a search engine optimization point of view, websites can be optimized, where as there is very limited optimization that can be carried out on a Google base entry. As per Google the most effective way of improving your Google base ranking is to optimize the attributes that are assigned to each item (that is the term that Google base uses for all its entries, be it a service, a product or a document) in Google base. However apart from that there is very little you can do to optimize an item in Google base for better search results.

At the same time lets not overlook the potential that Google base has to offer to search engine optimizers, you can make an entry into Google base, (base.google.com) and then add to your website’s popularity. The overall impact of the link from Google base results is still not know, and a a search in Google base will reveal mostly websites, but the objective of Google base seems to be to create a database of pretty much everything, a person can make new entries to the existing categories of Google base if he feels his category is not listed there. So what the overall impact of Google base on search engine optimization is going to be no one can say, but it would be foolish to completely ignore Google base.

Regards
Rishi Modi - Certified SEO Professional
email me at rishi@submitedge.com

Paid links, as far as Google is concerned its spam, and as any good search engine should do, Google plans to stem this so called evil in the bud, only problem is how does Google differentiate between a genuine link, and a paid link? Surely unless Google opens up the site, and assess without a doubt that the link was paid for, they cannot count the link as a paid link. Only problem then is how does Google know without a doubt that the link was paid? Do they subpoena the website’s financial records and see if in fact they have actually received a payment for the link? A little bit of a problem wouldn’t you agree?

But before I go into further discussion into what Google is doing to get rid of paid links, let me just first give a brief description of what paid links really are. A paid link as many search engine optimizers define it, is a link that does not constitute part of any directory service, and is a link that would other wise have not pointed to a website, unless the recipient paid for the link. Still confused?

Lets take the example of a website that has a page rank 7 and a website that has a page rank 0. Lets also assume that an SEO firm has analysed that a link from the page rank 7 site will benefit the page rank 0 site, only problem is that the page rank 7 site has no reason to offer the page rank 0 site a link, unless of course the page rank 0 site paid for the link, what I have just mentioned is in totality a paid link. Sure directories are also paid links, only thing is that a link from a directory makes sense, as an online directory is supposed to store links to websites, and store these links in various meaningful categories.

So getting back to the point I started the topic off with, how does Google figure out which link is paid, and which one is a genuine link? Well so far Google is relying heavily on people reporting competitors for buying paid links, any webmaster can log into Google webmasters and can report a paid link, by clicking on the report spam link, and putting the word “paidlink” (all one word), in the subject line; the webmaster can then enter a brief description of the paid link he wants to report with the URL and Google will ‘look’ into the matter.

The second and the AI (artificial intelligence) method is the Google paid links algorithm, designed to actually assess the genuineness of a link based on the relevance of the link. Google scouts the internet, and analyses the nature of all the links it encounters, it then calculates the probability of the link being a paid link, the criteria and the exact method that Google algorithm uses is not known, and like so many of Google’s algorithms we might never know how the algorithm is working. However we do know that Google has developed an algorithm to find paid links, and also that Google is actively looking to webmasters to report suspected paid links.

The new Google paid links algorithm, is not just targeted at paid links, it has been designed to take care of some of the many black hat methods that search engine optimizers have been using over the years, this includes hidden links, or back door links. The verdict on this aspect of the Google paid links algorithm is unanimous, webmasters and search engine optimizers alike agree, that it was high time Google cracked down on stuff like hidden links, and back door links. However the next section of this article will explain why the Google paid links algorithm is believed to be fundamentally flawed in its approach.

Criticism of the Google paid links algorithm

The first and the most basic thing to remember is that a paid link is not in any way different from a Google adwords advertisement, just like Google ads rewards users for displaying their text ads similarly; instead of using Google adwords a webmaster can go directly to a website and offer them money to place his text ad on their website. The purpose of the above mentioned link could be to increase page rank, or it could be a relevant site and the advertisement could be genuine. However the Google page rank algorithm will actually see such a link as a paid link, and if reported this link will not be counted as a valid link for link building or page rank calculation. The above mentioned case is a very strong argument against the Google paid links algorithm, and many search engine optimizers believe that Google is only against paid links, because it is taking away their advertising base.

Another criticism of the Google paid links algorithm is that like most of Google’s algorithms there is no mention of how to avoid being wrongly listed for buying / selling paid links. If for example a company has actually got a text based advertisement on their site, and they do use the rel=nofollow property on the link, does that mean the paid link is OK? Well apparently most search engine optimizers believe this little act will save the website some future trouble with the algorithm, another suggestion is that websites should clearly state that the link pointing outward is an advertisement or is a paid link. Eventually as is the case with most Google related changes, only time will tell if the measures mentioned earlier are effective or not.

Another talking point among most search engine optimizers is that Google is actually opening the door for future chaos and anarchy. If one search engine optimizer can actually report another for paid links, what stops the first from falsely reporting the second too? So far there has been no report of Google actually giving a webmaster a slap on the wrist for falsely reporting a false paid link, and for good reason; if Google were to start reprimanding webmasters and search engine optimizers who are reporting false links, then genuine webmaster will think twice before reporting a paid link. Also there is the rather underhand trick of company A buying paid links to company B and then reporting that company B is using paid links. What does Google do in that case?

With so much criticism and overall confusion surrounding the Google paid links algorithm, surely Google will come up with a system sometime soon that is more transparent and works much more efficiently than the one that is currently in place. After all Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”.

Regards
Rishi Modi - Certified SEO Professional
email me at rishi@submitedge.com

I had previously written an article on how page rank works, and how Google works on assigning the page rank to any web page, today’s article will be based on the mathematical approach to the Google page rank formula. If you are looking for a quick refresher on what is page rank, and how Google works on assigning the page rank, please read the previous blog entry titled “All about Page Rank”. For the purpose of this article, I shall consider a scenario where there are 4 web pages A, B, C and D. Based on these web pages I shall explain the impact various factors have on the page rank of a page.

There are a couple of basic theories that are circulating the internet, however the core of all theories on the internet is the same, any page when it receives an incoming link from another page, gets a certain percentage of the page rank from the page that is pointing to it. To put it in prospective if I were to say that page B has an outgoing link to page A, then B will contribute a certain percent of its page rank to A. But what percentage of B’s page rank actually reaches A depends on a very important factor, according to the page rank formula the number of outgoing links from B has an effect on the percentage of the page rank that A receives from B. So in effect if if B were contribution say .6 page rank value to A, if it were to have 2 outgoing links (other than A), then it will contribute only .2 outgoing value to A and .2 each to the remaining pages that B is linking to.

Now if we were to expand our scope to three pages that were giving an outbound link to A, then the page rank of A (if only B,C and D were pointing to it) can be written as:

PR(A) = PR(B) + PR(C)+PR(D)

The above formula holds good only when B,C and D have a single outgoing link to A. However if B had 3 outgoing links, C had 7 and D has 9 then the formula would become

PR(A) = PR(B)/3 + PR(C)/7 + PR(D)/9

This means that how much of a page’s page rank goes to another page is inversely proportional to the number of outgoing links from the page. So the higher the number of links from a page, the lower the contribution the page will make to other pages per link. Hence the formula for page rank can be written as:

PR(A) = ∑ incoming links to A/ number of outgoing links from each page that points to A

What however is not clear is how Google assigns initial page ranks to new pages, it has been noted sometimes Google simply guesses the page rank of newer pages, till the page rank is calculated. Also it is not necessary if page B has page rank 5 and only one link to A that it will give all of its page rank to A, it could only contribute just 3 or 2 of its page rank 5 to A.

All said and done the formula is very important for search engine optimizers, as it clearly illustrates that even if a page has high page rank, and thousands of outgoing links, it might not contribute anything in terms of page rank to a new page, in spite of its high page rank.

A practical approach to page rank

Apart from the theoretical approach to page rank explained above, there is something more important to understand about page rank, that the number associated with page rank is actually exponential, this means that the number of links required to take a page from page rank 4 to 5 is not simply 10 links or so, it is more like a thousand more incoming links. As the page rank increases, the number of incoming links increases exponentially.

Let take an example, lets assume that a page rank of 1 represents 10¹ or to put it simply 10 incoming links, then a page rank of 2 would require 10² links or 100 links. Already you can see the difference between a page rank 1 and page rank 2 is 90 links. Now if we were to extrapolate this to the difference between a page rank 4 and a page rank 5, the difference in the links would be close to 90,000 links! Although there are certain factors that help ease the difference, for example; instead of 90,000 links one can get links from high page rank sites, and the search engine optimizer would then require only 100 high page rank links.

The above illustration is just an example of what I mean when I say that page rank is actually an exponential representation of the number of links. All in all the object of writing the article was to put into perspective mathematically how page rank works.

Regards
Rishi Modi - Certified SEO Professional

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