Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

With Google updating and expanding features for Google Base, you want to be aware how it works. Here’s some snippets from an earlier post, way back in September of last year:

 At first glance, Google Base looks like a addendum to Google for the purpose of basically flea-marketing your unwanted goods, but no - you can post PDF files, articles, etcetera - all with links back to your url.

The key is attributing, which is pretty much like tagging in the sense that certain things begin to be grouped and categorized by how well you tag. I have got to try this out and see if it makes a difference. I can’t help but wonder, if Google displays these on Product Search or their general search engine, what criteria do they use, and why?

Google does make a point of saying your product or items may appear on Google main web search, and upon further investigation, Google Base may have some merit all of its own just as a product search. A notation reads that ‘you don’t have to have a website to use Google Base - just a Google account (of course). Anything you submit to Google base without a url will be hosted on a special url.

Now it appears those who use Google Base will be getting teh chance to explor rextra ad opportunities in the near future, and that an RSS fee is the key to making sure you get to take advantage of this novelty - just make sure you use the attributing factor wisely as it is the only way to get keywords in for search queries!

Read more about the new stuff coming to Google Base on our news blog.

In the last post we saw how AJAX can impede our SEO results. In this post let us consider how PHP pages can hinder our SEO efforts. When compared to HTML pages, PHP poses special challenges to the SEO professionals. However this is not to say that PHP pages cannot be optimized effectively. We an indeed optimize PHP pages to get good search engine ranking.

One of the major factors that hinder SEO is the page loading time. When the search engine spiders access your website and if your web pages take too long to load because of the server response time, then you will not be able to get the best out of indexing. Spiders will indeed mark your website as unresponsive website. Why do PHP pages take longer to respond because it has to communicate to the database stored in the server. The database and the loop code affect the page’s response time. Though AJAX pages over come the server time delays using an intermediary engine, search bots cannot read Java Script. So we need to use a different technique to optimize our pages. One of the ways recommended to reduce the page’s response time is to avoid the SELECT calls. In place of SELECT calls, it is recommended that we use the names of the columns that we would like to retrieve. Further more we need to use duplicated codes instead of entering into loops that are of repetitive nature. Though loops make PHP coding easier and effective, it is not good for SEO. So in your coding try to avoid coding style that will throw the search engine bots into loops.

The second factor that you need to take into consideration is to the URL. Your URL should be crawlable. The trick here is to make your PHP pages behave like HTML pages. Normally it is done using Apache server calls. This will work if you have a large site and create duplicate URLs that imitate static URLs. You may have to use a different strategy if your website is a small website. Number of SEO professionals try to minimize the usage of GET variables. Never take chances here; faking URLs should be done carefully by experienced programmers to ensure that you server unique pages when the URLs are unique.

It is a known fact that PHP pages add session id numbers to the links if your browser should reject cookies. One of the ways of dealing with this problem is to disable the entire trans-id component.

These are just a few tweaks that you can do to your PHP pages. It is best to hire experienced programmers that are conversant with the principles of SEO. On the whole optimizing PHP pages is not as simple as optimizing HTML pages. Make sure you have the right resources at hand when you decide to go PHP.

This is one of the crucial questions among the SEO professionals and the responses are more speculative than definitive. This is one of the areas that is not been subjected to enough research. For those who are wondering what we are referring here, all of us would have come across various types of domain names such as .com, .net, .edu, .org, .gov etc as the second part of website’s domain name. Many of us wonder whether these domain name extensions have any special significance to our website’s SEO or ranking.

We can come across a number of varied opinions among the SEO experts. Some of them say that it is just an SEO myth and they do not matter to the search engines. Whereas others say that certain domain extensions have special significance for our website’s ranking. For example extensions such as .edu, .org, .gov etc. are considered to be more authoritative and they seem to get better ranking. However there are others who argue that they are considered as authority sites not because they are of certain TLD extensions but they have more references online making them have stronger online presence and better back link counts.

Certain SEO experts feel that domain names that are specific to countries such as .co.uk, .com.au, .in, etc., may be of special significance to websites that are country specific. If your website sells products or services that are country specific then it is better to go for domain names that are specific to our country. Today we have a longer list of options than before. Though there may be varied views against the TLDs, we will not lose anything by choosing an appropriate domain name. In case search engine’s should make a difference or implement something along those lines we will stand to gain. You must also remember that you cannot purchase all domain types as an individual or as a business owner. For example individuals cannot purchase .gov extensions. Therefore, you must first choose your domain TLD before you start working on your website’s content and design.

However, most commercial sites seem to prefer .com for their domain TLD. Also, when people make random searches for a business, they first search with .com extension and only when they don’t find the site in .com extension they will try to look for other extensions. Since .com was one of the first TLDs that we have known, it is more easily remembered and preferred over other domain extensions though they may not have any special significance on our ranking. Some of the extensions have been noted for their spammy behavior for example .info domain names are notorious for the spam mails that they generate. Incidentally, the cost of .info domains is much cheaper to register so this might have prompted the spammers to go for .info domains.

Is the Google Sandbox still around? What exactly is it, and what does it mean for new webmasters?

Google Sandbox was a term used by many to describe the period of time a site used to languish between launch and a solid appearance on Google, accompanied by PageRank and all the benefits thereof. Some sites under various penalties were also said to be ‘sandboxed’, until they had re-proven themselves to be of worth. Me, I always equated it with sitting at the kids’ table.

Getting OUT of the sandbox used to be the subject of much debate back in the day - especially as Google would neither confirm or deny that there was any such thing. Apparently an algorithm angle was being used to penalize certain sites, but no-one quite knew how it worked.

Presumably the ‘sandbox effect’ was set up originally to keep spammy sites from getting into Google’s top results (Hah, that seems to be working out well, now doesn’t it) but instead many webmasters complained that it was preventing their new sites for ranking for between 2-4 months.

There does seem to be a few tricks that can help if you are a new site, not practicing black hat tactics, and genuinely trying to get indexed.

1. Generate great content, and publish it daily if possible. A blog is great for this purpose, and you can link back and forth to your site. Add to your site as often as possible, as well.

2. Concentrate on worthy link building, and look for authority sites to link out to as well. This can help build your credibility and make Google take you seriously.

3. Don’t overdo the link building simply for volume - Google is suspicious of sites that seem to be piling on low quality links. A few really good ones are worth more than hundreds of iffy ones!

If you think you’ve been sent to the sandbox, the best thing to do is reexamine every link and every tactic to be sure you are complying with Google Webmaster guidelines. If you are, then waiting it out may be your only option - Sometimes they just have to decide you are big enough to move up to the grown-up’s table!

Matt Cutts wrote an interesting blog post the other day. It caught my eye because of some of the recent controversy over the permanence of stuff on the web (Facebook, plus a site I am involved with that is a knowledge sharing site).

Matt stated he gets a lot of queries about bad pages people find about themselves on the internet, along with requests for information on how to go about getting such pages removed. He finally decided to blog about it, so the information on why Google doesn’t yank pages on request will be out there for all who are interested. Here is Matt’s response to all of those who are ticked because somebody dissed them online:

Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web.

The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.” Our policies outside the U.S. might be different; I’m not as familiar with how legal stuff works outside the U.S.

That’s all he wrote, folks. If you have a problem, you’ll have to take it to the person who posted the defamatory page. Google isn’t in the position to help you! Matt says it in a clear-cut way that is typical of his blog, which you should definitely check out and add to your RSS feed.

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