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More answers to SEO questions

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 12, 2007 in SEO Theory, Search Engine Optimization, Supplemental Pages

I don’t really have time (or the inclination) to do 101 questions today, but it seems a lot of interesting queries have brought people to SEO Theory in June. So let’s dip into the mailbag — er, the query referral bag, and see what people want to know today.

ask algorithm

Oddly enough, the Ask algorithm remains one of the most popular queries for SEO Theory. We did discuss the Ask algorithm in our very popular SEO algorithm roundup article in April. Caveat: Earlier this year Ask announced they would be rolling out a new algorithm, code-named “Edison”, that would incorporate DirectHit technology. I don’t yet have any substantial information on Edison. Nor do I have much of an opinion (except that I think it will prove to be as disastrous for Ask to depend on click-throughs as it was for DirectHit).

blogs going supplemental

Yeah, “blogs going supplemental” is a bummer. Why does that happen? Well, one of the current myths making the SEO blog circuit is that blogs (like this one) create a lot of duplicate content pages and therefore the search engine start shoving duplicate content into the Supplemental Results Index. Nope. That’s wrong.

Matt Cutts did point out at the SMX Advanced conference that you might see a lot of duplicate content go supplemental simply because it doesn’t earn (internal, non-Toolbar) PageRank. I actually have a lot of duplicate content that is NOT Supplemental. Your mileage may vary.

So why do blogs go supplemental? One reason is that Blogger (aka Google) royally screwed up their service a few months ago. They slaughtered the automatic internal linkage so that every page on the blog automatically links only to the most recent posts. That’s a bad thing because it strips your oldest posts of their best link path. You cannot surf backwards through a Blogger archive except through the calendar links. That sucks. It also means crawlers cannot get back to them, either.

Internal deep-linking is critical to helping spread your PageRank as far as it can go throughout your Web site. The more internal links you have pointing to the same page, the better. Does duplicate content hurt you? Sure. And Wordpress by default can create up to 5 copies of each post. But you can still heavily influence your Wordpress internal linkage without bending over backwards. Give it some thought. Be creative.

internal links versus external links

Another popular query for us, “internal links versus external links” reflects ongoing Webmaster confusion over whether internal links help as much or more than external links. For years, many SEOs have wrongly stated that internal links help less than external links. That’s never been true. You influence your crawling and indexing more through your own internal links than through all your external links. Internal links are extremely important, and in this day and age where you don’t know which Web sites (that link to yours) are trusted by search engines, you will always know that your own pages are trustworthy. Right?

impact of supplemental pages on rankings

Um, well, the impact of supplemental pages on rankings is that Supplemental Results Pages are less likely to rank for anything (on Google). Matt Cutts recently disclosed at the SMX Advanced 2007 conference that Google does not parse and index Supplemental Results pages the same way it parses and indexes pages in the Main Web Index. Matt said specifically that Google only indexes “popular words” and “important words” on Supplemental Results Pages.

So you’re less likely to scarf up long tail of search queries with Supplemental Pages. A lot of people have begun to recognize this deficiency and they are taking steps to improve their internal linkage and their external linkage to get as many pages out of the Supplemental Index as possible.

how can i passvalue to a google search page

This is an old black hat spam trick, although it’s a slight variation on the original idea. Back when Inktomi was the master and Google was the pupil, people were more concerned about getting Inktomi to crawl their pages. One method of doing this was to feed Inktomi search results pages that listed a lot of URLs from your site. You wanted Inktomi to see the links to your pages on someone else’s site, because it gave them more credibility. For a while, the technique helped with Google, too.

But does a search engine trust its own search results any more than it trusts other search engines’ results? I have never seen any indication that it does. Google does tend to crawl itself but the problem is that idiot SEO bloggers cannot help but announce all the cool (and stupid) things Google does to help your SEO campaigns. Googlers read those blogs and fix the back-doors they have inadvertently created.

The moral of the story is: if you find a sneaky way to get some link love from Google, keep your big mouth shut. Don’t share Google backdoor information on blogs, in forums, on Web tutorials, at conferences, etc. And if you see someone else sharing a great Google back door secret, forget about it. Move on. Don’t waste your time with a technique that has just become obsolete.

verb noun pagerank google

Looks like someone is interested in some SEO glossaries and SEO terminology. You can actually find a great SEO Glossary right here on SEO Theory.

seo how long to appear on google

I can get new sites to appear on Google within a week. How about you? It really depends on what resources you work with. Some people drag out the process by avoiding all the good, safe avenues that they can use (because they follow advice in SEO blogs and forums that say it takes up to a year). So, “seo how long to appear on google”? As long as you want it to take. If you want to do it in a week, think about how quickly you can get your URLs to Google. Hm. What mechanism is there for getting URLs into Google quickly?…

answer to seo questions

Yes, I have “answer to seo questions” pages on SEO Theory. Every now and then, when I cannot think of anything neat to write, I decide to do an answer to seo questions post to see what people want to know. That’s a bit like giving people what they want, don’t you think?

why google dont show my internal link

I’ll guess that you are using Google’s link: operator and you’re only seeing a random selection of links. So now you want to know “why google dont show my internal link” and are looking for the answer on the Web. It’s simple: don’t use the Google link: operator. It’s somewhat disappointing how many people in the SEO world continue to rely on that operator, given that nearly every SEO blogger and forum admin has repeatedly admonished people not to use it.

goole penalize blogs

Does Google penalize blogs? Is someone asking does Google penalize blogs or does someone want to know how Google penalizes blogs? Queries sometimes provide too little information for people like me to figure out what the searchers want. I can only imagine what a search engine makes of them.

Google doesn’t penalize blogs for being blogs. Google will only penalize blogs for doing something Google thinks the blogs should not be doing. If you have a blog and it doesn’t appear in Google, you may simply not be creating sufficient content or internal linkage to keep Google happy. It’s tiresome but if you post at least 4-5 times a week you generally keep a lot of blog content in Google’s Main Web Index.

satellite sites seo

Ooh, black hat SEO spam queries. I love them. Yes, you can create satellite sites for SEO. Do search engines identify and block them? Yes. Who wins? Depends on the quality of the sites. If you create unique content and at least usable and halfway interesting designs you can make good use of satellite sites for SEO. Do I recommend you do this? Not really. If you are not paying attention to your on-page SEO factors, then you’re not ready for satellite sites SEO.

find pages in google main index non-supplemental

There is no reliable method to “find pages in google main index non-supplemental”. Sorry, but that method which was posted on a very popular SEO blog a few months back is just not reliable. It shows you results that are in both the Supplemental Index and the Main Web Index. And why do you want to know how many pages are in the Supplemental Index anyway? Have you decided there is some acceptable threshold and if you’re under that threshold you’re okay with being Supplemental?

A lot of the tools and queries that SEOs use just make absolutely no sense whatsoever. SEOs tend to spend a lot of time spinning their wheels and wasting their energy. Take competitive analysis. Most SEOs are pretty bad at it. Why? Because they only do snapshot competitive analysis, which doesn’t tell you much useful information about anything.

microsoft live new algorithm

Can’t help you much with “microsoft live new algorithm” because, frankly, if they have a new algorithm it doesn’t seem to work much differently from the old one. Microsoft’s Live Search is probably more trust-dependent than Google, if that makes you feel better. I find that getting content into Live Search is more challenging than getting content into Google. Your milage may vary.

navigation current page massive pages

navigation current page massive pages? Is that supposed to make sense? I’ll guess that someone wants to know how to keep the current page prominent in onpage navigation for large page Web sites. If my guess is correct, they are (I am thinking) looking for information on how to implement breadcrumbs, those navigational structures where you see link lists like “SEO Theory Home : Blog : This page”.

Try searching for “how to implement breadcrumb navigation links” and see if you find anything useful.

too many internal links in the footer and header spam

Um, well, you can have too many internal links in the footer and header but that doesn’t necessarily make them spam. It just makes your footer and header unwieldy, awkward to use. I generally recommend no more than 10-12 navigational links in a footer or header layout, and then I feel you should use an HTML sitemap page if you have more than that many links.

backlink theory

Backlink theory. Okay, that’s a new one on me. Can you develop a set of rules and tools around backlink theory? I suppose so, but why? You don’t actually learn much about why sites perform well in SERPs from doing backlink analysis (that is because it’s not all about links, it’s all about relevance). You can blame a lot of ignorant SEO bloggers for the silly idea that studying backlinks is going to tell you anything useful (and most of them either use Yahoo! Site Explorer or the Google link: command anyway, so they’re really off base).

Do some sites rank solely through links? Sure. I see them all the time. Do they need to? Usually not.

If you want to study backlinks, then learn what the inanchor and allinanchor query operators really do (the vast majority of SEO bloggers and “experts” seem to have no clue as to how these operators work). Tip: Using “allinanchor” tells Google to only show you sites that have the specified keyword(s) in anchor text pointing to them.

google not highlight my queries

Sounds like someone has a Supplemental Page issue. Either that or they are not getting very relevant results in response to their queries. Hint: If all the results for a query are relevant but you see no highlighted text, where do you think Google got the text from?

supplemental links count less

My opinion is that, in Google, supplemental links count less. Some people may or may not agree with me. But I think that “supplemental links count less”. Yes.

google 3.0

Also known as “Google Universal Search”, “Google 3.0″ is the latest version of Google’s search engine. I’m seeing some increased emphasis on news sites in Google 3.0 results, but that should not come as a surprise to anyone. The fact that so much of the news site content is very old, however, is a major disappointment to me. I think Google needs to tweak the algorithm a bit. Perhaps it’s time for Google 3.1?

how to find supplemental pages

“how to find supplemental pages” is kind of an odd query. If you just want to know that you have Supplementnal Pages then try a site search. If you have more than 1.000 pages on your site, then narrow the search to look for obscure words and expressions. Don’t trick yourself by using any special query formats that involve three asterisks (*). That doesn’t show you which of your pages are only supplemental. You have to do it the hard way. Sorry.

allinanchor query

What does the allinanchor query really show? It really only shows the sites that have links pointing to them with the anchor text specified in the query. Why is that so difficult for SEOs to understand? You can use the “allinanchor query” and the “inanchor query” to do some competitive analysis. By determining which sites are ranking based on link anchor text, you’ll know who is doing cheap SEO and who knows better than to depend solely on links. You’ll also figure out which queries are truly competitive (because, as competition increases, the reliance upon links increases).

do external links help search rankings

To those of you who want to know “do external links help search rankings” the answer is: Yes. Maybe. No. It depends. What does it depend on? Lots of things. Internal links can (and should) be constructed to pass link anchor text to your pages. It can (and should) be structured to help speed crawling throughout your site. But there are no guarantees. You should map your internal linkage so that it provides the most benefit to your visitors and that generally helps with your search engine rankings.

And that’s it for today. Hope it proves to be helpful.