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    Google Hell: How the supplemental index can kill a company

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    Google Hell is a term being used to describe a sudden, far drop in a website’s ranking on Google. The ranking is usually for an important – or many different important – keyword terms. I’m pleased an article on Google Hell being covered in the mainstream press. It’s a phenomenon known to main online businesses, tied heavily to changes in the Google algorthym. Some of the excellent points in the article: The criteria for Google’s Supplemental Index can be vague. “Grey-area” techniques are sometime necessary to compete on the internet with larger stores. Duplicate content penalties exist! Newly created sites are especially vulnerable to falling into the supplemental index. Buying links may now be a deciding factor in whether your site ends up in the supplemental results. The article quotes Jim Boykin and Micheal Gray. Besides the great sources, it is refreshing that businesses are starting to see the importance of search engine marketing to the bottom line.

    3 things NOT to do: The importance of titles in SEO

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    Sometimes webdesigners get low blood sugar, or suffer minor head injuries. The effect? Bad HTML title tags. Title tags are an important piece of real estate on your page. In properly structured HTML, it’s the first chance for you to tell human prospects and search engine visitors what your page is about. Depending on the search engine, page titles are someytimes shown prominently is results – your page is likely to be passed up if it doesn’t look relevant to the potential visitor’s search. Think about your page title as an advertisement for your website! Since I’m feeling snarky today, here are three things NOT to do when creating your title tags: 1. “Welcome to our website” It sounds like a friendly greeting for your human visitors, but it completely ignores the wonderful gift that a title tag can be. A title tag is a chance to tell both human and search engine visitors just how helpful your content is. Use this chance to target keywords that BRING and CONVERT traffic. 2. “Unititled Page” If your web designer is using Dreamweaver, hope that they are properly caffeinated when they are working on your page. Otherwise, they may forget to change your HTML title tag from the default. Don’t expect quality traffic when you are one of the almost ONE MILLION pages that have “Untitled Page” as their title. 3. “Welcome to Adobe GoLive” You can probably guess where this default page title came from. Check out the ONE MILLION crappy page titles. Oh, that’s neat: version 6 is out. I think we can see what they DIDN’T improve. What SHOULD you do in your title tags? Keywords, focused sets of keywords. More on that in a later – and less snarky – posting.

    MSN adCenter Update: Will it compare to Google AdWords?

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    For those of you not currently signed up with MSN adCenter, you may want to give it a look(starting tomorrow). On April 26, 2007, we’re upgrading Microsoft adCenter with the improved navigation, reporting, and campaign management features from our beta site… While I currently like some of the MSN adCenter demographic targeting and PPC keyword bargains, I think they have room for improvement. Will this be MSN’s “Panama” upgrade that catches it up to Google? We’ll know soon enough! Also from the email: Additional feature upgrades will also occur on April 28, 2007. During this upgrade, adCenter will be unavailable for up to 24 hours starting at 12:00 P.M. Pacific Time. Your ads will continue to run as scheduled during both adCenter upgrades. With these upgrades, you’ll experience new features that will allow you to: Search within your campaigns. Use full text search to easily find ads, keywords, ad groups, campaigns, and accounts. Please note that orders are now called ad groups. Save important items in Favorites. Tag your campaign items for follow-up using Favorites. Quickly navigate your accounts. Use the improved navigation to quickly navigate to any campaign or ad group in your account. Easily access help content. Hover over the green question mark icons for pop-up help tips.1 Manage keywords faster. Bulk edit keyword settings and delete low-performing keywords. Save time importing campaigns. Directly import your campaigns from other search advertising programs. One click downloads. Download your datasets into Excel with one click. And more! View our blog and watch the webinar for tips and training on these new features. If you have any questions, please contact our adCenter support team. Sincerely, The Microsoft adCenter Team Frequently Asked Questions Why are you upgrading Microsoft adCenter? Over the past few months, we’ve been running improvements on the adCenter beta site, which has been available to customers in our U.S. Content Ads pilot. Now, it is time to share these new and improved features with all advertisers. Will my campaigns be affected? Your campaigns will continue to run as scheduled. With this upgrade, using adCenter is now easier and more efficient. The updates provide you with improved campaign management, navigation, and reporting. Where can I learn more about the most recent updates to adCenter? Our webinar, walks you through the features that will be included in this upgrade, and additional information can be found on our adCenter blog. 1 This feature will be available after the April 28, 2007 upgrade.

    How to get indexed in Google: Be friendly, predictable for the googlebot

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    This post is for server geeks. Everyone else should flee. Here we are talking about the underlying codes that every server sends along with html of a web site design when a page is requested from your website. There are really only a few httpd server codes that should ever be sent on purpose: 1. Code 200 OK This status code tells browsers (and the googlebot) that everything is a-okay. The content sent with the code appears to be just what was requested. Code 200 says “Yes, I have that content right here. This is the right location for requesting it, and I’m sending it to you now.” 2. Code 301 (A redirect) A status code 301 tells the googlebot that content has moved. There isn’t a penalty applied to 301 redirects in the search engines, which makes it ideal for: – Redirecting traffic to the www version of your domain (to solve possible duplicate content issues) – Redirecting traffic from old or broken URLs 3. Code 404 A status code 404 tells visiting search engine spiders like the googlebot that the content is missing. After receiving a 404 error after several visits, most search engines will remove the page from their listings. These are the HTTP status codes that should be sent to the server in most cases. Other status codes – like the dread 302 redirect – will usually only cause problems. One site we recently analyzed sent these codes when the hompage was requested: 302 (Redirected to another page) 404 (Missing. The page they were redirected to was missing!) Then the HTML of the homepage was returned as the 404 error page. What a wild ride for the Googlebot! Curious about what codes are being returned by your server? Try our new SEO Diagnostic tool, currently in beta.

    4 Google Adwords Tips: Save money by excluding visitors

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    Google Adwords opens your advertisement up to a vast audience. Sometimes it’s an audience that is a little too vast. You can save tremendous amounts of money on adwords by excluding the wrong audience: 1. Exclude surfers during the wrong time of day If your product or service is primarily marketed to businesses, be sure to turn off your ads during off hours. Business products and services are only sought during business hours, and there is little need to show ads in evenings and on weekends. 2. Never use broad match Broad match can be a horrible waste of money. If your broad match is for red widgets, your ad will come up in searches that include the word red, and searches that include the word widgets. With so much of the wrong traffic – searching for red gadgets, red ipods, etc. – there are bound to be costly clicks upon your ad. Instead of using broad match, use phrase and exact match. This will help save your clicks for visitors that might actually buy your product or service. 3. Exclude keywords that are unrelated For most any product, you can exclude some keyword. If you sell boats, you should exclude the word “toy” from most of your ads. Be creative, search Google and look for negative keywords. 4. Exclude other countries Make sure you are not showing ads in other countries. Some continents are also notorious for being involved in PPC fraud. More tips to save money with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing! Get Joy Milkowski’s “Amazing Results with Google AdWords” course – it pays for itself! Or you can continue throwing extra money to Google. 🙂

    What are Google’s supplemental results and what’s the problem?

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    Google defines supplemental results as follows: “A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.” If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then it is likely that your web pages could not be parsed correctly by Google’s standard crawler. The problem with Google’s supplemental results are that they are only supplemental. If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won’t be returned very often for regular search queries. How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com: site:www.domain.com *** Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Of course, you have to replace www.domain.com with your own domain name. How to get out of Google’s supplemental results Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. It means that Google had difficulty to index these pages or that Google had other problems with these pages. 1. Make sure that your web pages don’t contain any spam elements and that you don’t use any spam techniques to promote your web site. Using spam techniques to promote your web site is often the reason why a web site doesn’t get good rankings. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization methods. 2. Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages. If possible don’t use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol. Make sure that the HTML code of your web pages offers what search engines need. Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to prepare your web pages. 3. Make these pages easy to find for Google’s web crawler. The more links point to your web pages, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers fill find your web pages. Use ARELIS to get good inbound links to your site. Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. The easier you make it Google to index your web pages the more pages of your site will be listed in Google’s normal results.

    Five Ways To Save Money using Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing

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    If you are using Pay Per Click advertising with Google or Yahoo, you are probably aware of what it feels like to light money on fire. If you have a limited amount of money, you get a bad feeling in your stomach. Google and Yahoo have two main ways on displaying the advertisements you are paying for: to searchers, and across their content network. The content network consists of web pages that may have articles containing your keywords, and it is the focus of our five tips. You see, these content ads are shown to a completely different audience than search ads. Search ads are usually shown to visitors actively engaged in the buying process. Whether they are doing preliminary research, evaluating features, or comparing prices, search visitors are on a completely different wavelength than the group being shown your content ads. Here are some tips to make sure your Content ad campaign is as effective as possible: 1. Treat your content ad completely different from your search ad First of all, consider placing your content ad in a new campaign. You want to keep it separate from your search ad, and let it evolve in it’s own direction over time. Don’t let it get too close to your search ad – keep them separated! Be sure to use different ad copy and ad titles: Everything about your content ad should be different than your search ad. 2. Setup Google link alerts to see where your ads are showing Want to know where your ads are showing? Of course you do – It tells you where your money is being burned spent! Sign up for Google Alerts for the search term “domain.com” Using this service, you’ll receive email alerts whenever Google comes across your ad. Sometimes, you will see your ad has shown up on a page that you don’t necessarily want it to. Google’s guess may sometimes be wrong. After all, “Pad Printing” doesn’t always refer to printing on notepads. You should log back into Google AdWords – or Yahoo Search Marketing – and exclude that site from your list of allowed sites on which to show ads. 3. Use different display URLs to split test Your display URL is part of the advertisement. Google recognizes this, and so allows you to choose a URL different from the actual location to display to your prospective visitors. Try different display URLs and watch the results: Is one getting a better “Click Through Rate”? Improve the worst of the two, and test some more. 4. Split test your landing pages, too It might also be that traffic from certain content ads converts better than others. Set up a split test with two identical content ads, but send visitors to two different “landing pages”. These landing pages are just the destinations that your ad leads visitors to. They might be named “Contact-Us.html” and “Contact.html”, if you are selling a service. Using Google Analytics, you can sometimes see which landing page converts best into a visitor clicking your “contact us” form. 5. Make sure display URLs also redirect Google crawls through javascript links, and we’ve seen several cases where links from AdWords get into Google’s index. The URL that you choose for Google to display may actually direct traffic right to your site! We call this effect “PPC leakthrough”, because these links are leaking out of the adwords system and into Google’s main index. For example, on our myKarateStore.com advertisement for “Wing Chun Dummies”, we use “http://www.myKarateStore.com/dummy/” as the URL displayed in the ad. Even though that page is not the exact location Google’s AdWords system directs visitors to, we make sure it goes somewhere meaningful. More tips to save money with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing! Get Joy Milkowski’s “Amazing Results with Google AdWords” course – it pays for itself.

    Reducing page load times

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    With the ever increasing impatience of internet visitors, it is important that pages load as fast as possible. Here are some quick tips we implement when developing websites to keep the page size to a minimum: 1. CSS and Javascript should be in external files. This way, they are cached after the first page is visited. 2. For large images that cannot be optimized any further, load a placeholder and update it with the full version after the page has loaded. 3. Get faster hosting. 4. Use CSS instead of tables for layout. 5. Be a minimalist. Do you really need a sound on the home page? Are animations really needed to convey your message?

    YouTube as marketing channel

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    Brian Wiener has an interesting post over at AdAge: YouTube as marketing channel. I agree that the TV Networks should be controlling their content by distributing it themselves: 1. Full Episodes should be available online(with Ads, of course). NBC’s Heroes will probably never be bootlegged on Youtube, because there is no need for it to be. 2. Small clips – 2 minute highlight clips – should be purposefully uploaded everywhere on the web. These previews and teasers are perfect to drive increased traffic and gain exposure. I also agree that search optimization should be key. Networks should host blogs to encourage as much juicy user-generated content as possible. And by using search friendly link structures throughout their sites, these media empires could rise to the top of search results – right where their audience expects to find them!

    Broadband adoption in the U.S.

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    The United States is behind other nations when it comes to adopting broadband. According to a recent report, the broadband has finally been adopted by more than 50 percent of residences. Yet, U.S. web surfers have never been less patient: Studies show visitors will not wait more than 4 seconds for an eCommerce page to load. Page load times are vital to your visitor’s experience. We will have an upcoming post with some valuable tips on reducing your page load times. Most do not require a page redesign!