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photo credit: Svadilfari

First of all, If you’ve been here before you might notice that I’ve changed WP themes. The reason is that my previous one quit working for no particular reason (hacked?) and because I’ve been too busy (or lazy) I just turned on the default WordPress theme for a couple of weeks until I got around to dealing with it. Sorry about that.

The SEO Experiment

I have a couple of SEO questions that so far I haven’t been able to get a satisfying answer to.

1. For organic search rank (not type in traffic, or navigational searches that include the TLD) does a domain name which is an exact or near match for the query phrase rank higher – all other things being equal.
2. If the answer to that is yes, and the exact match domain is 301ed to another domain does it pass that higher ranking?

Because of some work that I’ve been doing I think that the answer to both of these questions is yes. But, my evidence is anecdotal, and I know that I could be wrong. However if I’m right this could be a useful tool.

So, I’m going to do an experiment to attempt to answer these two questions. Here’s what I have in mind:

1. Obtain several domain names (at least 3 but more would be better) that consist of more or less random combinations of letters. Ideally they would be of equal length, bought at the same time and perhaps alphabetically sequential. I have to control the cost of the experiment so ideally these would be nice cheap .info domain names.
2. Also obtain two or more .com domains that are an exact match for a bogus key phrase(s). The main point of this is to target valuable long tail searches so these domains would need to reflect this goal, thus – abc-defg-hijk.com or abcdefghijk.com although the distribution of vowels and consonants should be at least word like. There should be 0 results for a Google search of the bogus key phrase “abc defg hijk”.
3. Set up bare bones web sites for each domain on the same shared host. While not ideal for real SEO this should help to prevent hosting from being a factor in relative rank.
4. The web pages should be very simple plain vanilla html with no style formatting at all. Content should be extremely similar but not at all duplicate. I’m thinking something along the line of recipes with the bogus phrase being a key ingredient – not lorum ipsum gibberish. It needs to look like real content, and I’m thinking not optimized for anything on page.
5. Submit site maps, and wait to be indexed. In the mean time don’t give any link love at all, and hopefully no one else would either.

Now my guess is that at this point the exact match domain would rank #1 and the others would fall out randomly behind it.

• Now 301 the exact match to one of the others and see if it now consistently ranks at the top.

Another experiment that could be done simultaneously with the same domains plus another (different) exact match domain would be to redirect it without it ever containing any content at all – nothing but an .htaccess file. Just to see what happens. I’ve actually done this, and it seems to work, but there are too many other factors to tell for sure.

I realize that a larger number of domains and repetitions of the test would be required for defensibly valid results, but this is what I have resources for, and I think that if it’s properly executed this could yield worthwhile results.

Questions? Comments? Predictions? Anyone see any problems with the method? Anyone know if this has already been tried?

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
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Google’s Adsense program has probably spawned more search engine spam than any other single creation in the history of the Internet. For a while the SERPs in almost any vertical were chock full of MFA sites that had little if any content other than Adsense ads or scraped excerpts from other sites. We’ve all seen this, and it’s been a real nuisance. Google seems to have taken effective steps to neutralize this particular technique and it’s really improved.

Once however I ran across a case where content consisting entirely of Adsense ads was extremely helpful, and actually led me straight to what I was looking for when the search engine results were not - and probably earned the spammer a decent income while it lasted.

I wanted to blog about this as soon as I found it, but I really hate to spoil someone else’s well crafted scheme. Anyway the circumstances have changed for this particular niche so here it goes.

I was shopping for a construction contractors bond (as in “licensed and bonded”) and really not having any luck with the search engines. This kind of bond is basically a third party guaranty that a contractor will do the contracted work within the terms of the contract agreement - kind of like a specialized insurance policy, but not exactly. Most government and commercial (EI most profitable) jobs require the contractor to supply a bond.

Anyway, the organic search engine results just didn’t contain what I was looking for at that time, so I clicked on an Adsense ad - something I don’t usually do. However, in this case I was taken to a whole page of Adsense ads that were all completely relevant to what I was looking for, and I ended up clicking on several of them and even bookmarked the MFA site.

Here’s what the Adsense Arbitrager knew that the bond vendors didn’t: Their potential customers call their product “bond”, “performance bond”, “construction bond”, or “bid bond” while the companies that sell the things call them “surety”. This terminology was so ingrained into the industry that they hardly used the term “bond” at all on their web sites, so they just simply didn’t show up in the search engines at the time. Once I realized that and started searching for “surety” I found tons of vendors who were in competition for my business.

I got two points of information from this experience:

1. It’s not spam if it’s what you’re looking for.
2. Know thy keywords - more to the point, know thy customer’s keywords.

It was also the most outstanding example of Adsense Arbitrage that I ever saw. But now when you search for “construction bond” those companies that were formerly sequestered behind “surety” pop right up.

I’ve notice the same kind of keyword disconnect on other sites as well like where the website uses the term air bed and miss out on traffic from searchers looking for airbed or air mattress, but the surety industry a year ago was really out of touch with what their customers were looking for.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
2 Comments »

photo credit: orngejuglr

In a recent post on SEOmoz “…Only the First Anchor Text Counts” Rand Fishkin relates an experiment and the conclusion that for a given web page only the first link pointing to another page counts toward Google pagerank. In other words you could have 50 links on your page all with different anchor text, all pointing to the same document, and it wouldn’t count any more than if there were only one - the first one that Googlebot finds on the page. All of the rest are just so much content text according to Rand.

As is often the case on SEOmoz the comments contained what I consider to be a real gem:

As I work on loads of small sites with 5 - 10 pages, I tried all sorts of bits and pieces - my mistake was to assume that the the anchor text in a top horizontal navigation count the most - this clears it up.

Say for example I am targeting “prostate cancer surgery” for one client - if I dont have a 100% relevant URL, then I make sure that the top horizontal navigation has a text link with those words linked to a page that has strong content centered around that phrase and the URL matches perfectly.

I tried this with a range of pages and it always worked.

Your post kind of clears up why.

Rishi Lakhani

There’s some degree of controversy among SEOs about which is a stronger link - one in the editorial content, or one in a global element such as the main navigation. So use your own judgement, because there are good logical arguments for both positions - and Google ain’t talking. However it’s usually going to be a lot easier to add a bunch of identical links to your site by incorporating it into a global element.

So here’s the light bulb that went off in my head: Want to give a page a boost? Craft your best relevant anchor text - exactly matching the URL and main key phrase of the target page - and put a link to it in a global element such as the top navigation found in Wordpress - Presentation>>Theme Editor>header.php. This should result in sending about as much link juice to the target page as your site is capable of.

This also means that you might want to take a good look at your global elements and make sure that you want to spread the joy to every thing that you have in there, and if you don’t then get to work adding nofollows (define) to some of it.

These strategies are sometimes called siloing or pagerank sculpting in SEO speak by the way. Here’s a timely article about pagerank sculpting and the controversy around it.
Needless to say you should get your on page elements and site wide structural SEO in order first .

Speaking of nofollowing - Joost deValk’s Robots Meta Plugin allows you to nofollow or noindex a page or post with one click from the WP editor page. This powerful plugin does much more than just that, and I highly recommend it if you want to control the flow of link juice through your site.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
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photo credit: Maproom Systems

I just had a random thought. What if I had an evil secret black hat seo plan to eventually sell toasters from Metatoast.com? It would go something like this: [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
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Is your WordPress blog search friendly? Can your content be easily crawled and indexed, or are you sending the spiders away empty handed and confused by duplicate content and convoluted navigation? With a little work you can make your website SEO Friendly, get the rankings that you deserve, and improve usability for your readers.

This post is part three of a series on Wordpress Structural SEO. The other two are: On Page SEO for WordPress, and WordPress Optional Excerpt. I’ve tried not to rehash very much of the information contained in those two articles, so to get the full picture (my version of it anyway) you should check them out if you haven’t already.

There’s more to SEO than just using keywords in your copy and generating a site map - things like networking, link building, and leveraging social networks - things that happen outside of your site. That external SEO work is very important, but the structural SEO that you can do on your WordPress Blog prepare it for the attention that you hope to get from search engines. Structural SEO is kind of like getting ready for a date - you still have to go out there and interact, but if you aren’t properly groomed and dressed you’re unlikely to get lucky - unless of course you’re really hot.

Even though at first glance this looks like a lot of work, it’s really not, and much of it only has to be done one time, and not even all at once. When considered over the lifetime of your website the benefits from just a few hours work can be huge. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
8 Comments »

It’s come to my attention since I wrote my post On Page SEO for WordPress that I left out a pretty important part of that recipe for blogging nirvana. On the WP post edit page there is a field labeled “Optional Excerpt” which I simply overlooked. Sorry about that, but I’m still learning myself. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
8 Comments »

… or quadruple, or quintuple - you get the idea.

Want more subscribers? More links? More reach? Of course you do. The answer is simple - make your material accessible to as many people as possible.

My previous post On Page SEO for WordPress has been fairly popular (for me anyway) receiving a few subscribers, links, comments, and pingbacks. Some of those pingbacks came from non - English blogs. I like to say thanks for those kinds of things, and when I dropped in on one of those sites the post seemed to be mostly a citation of my article, but the one comment - as near as I could tell - was saying something to the effect that it was too bad that the article was in another language. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
3 Comments »

Applying On Page SEO Factors to a WordPress blog is easy and can be somewhat automated once you take a few simple steps.

If you’re an old hand at SEO and WordPress then little if any of this is new to you. However if, like me, you’re still learning about one or both subjects, then a cheat sheet like this might help you get up to speed much more quickly than going out to aggregate all of this information yourself. I hope that a few people find it helpful even if it’s not new and original.

The 4 Factors
1) On Page Keyword Usage & Content Relevance
2) Link Juice
3) Incoming Anchor Text
4) Domain Authority

According to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz On Page SEO is one of the 4 factors that account for 90% of the search engine ranking equation. It’s the only one of the four that webmasters have complete control of.

Choose Your Keywords – You can’t optimize until you know what you’re optimizing for. Once you have your keyword / key phrase you need to put it on your page in all of the following places:

• In the Page URL – this is a two step process in WordPress:

1. In the administrative interface select Options>Permalinks, then select an option which includes the postname in the permalink structure. You may also want to include the category names in the Permalinks – and thus in the URLs – and propagate broad keywords via the categories.
2. When you write your post/page include your keyword/phrase in the title of the post. If for some reason you want the page URL to be different than the title then you can change the URL by modifying the “post slug” in the menu options on the right side of the write post page. [Read more →]

   Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
   20 Comments »

Ranking in the SERPs for broad competitive terms is hard and requires that several factors all come together to convince the Search engines that your page is the best result for that term. One thing that you need in order to rank for a competitive term is several high quality links from other sites.

An ideal link would have these properties:

• It would come from a page that ranks for your keyword
• The anchor text would contain your keyword
• The linking page would have few if any other out going links
• The link would not be “no followed”

Unfortunately these are all things that you have no control over unless you own the linking website. Which brings me to leveraging the long tail… [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
1 Comment »

This was so cool that I just had to pass it along. If you want to rank well in the search engines you need other websites to link to yours. Link building is the difficult process of getting those inlinks. One of the problems that you might come across during a link building campaign is that once you find a site that you would really like to get a link from sometimes you can’t find any contact info for the webmaster.

This tip was presented in a comment by Brent David Payne to a fine article about link building by Melanie Nathan on the SEOmoz.org blog:

…Go to: https://www.networksolutions.com/manage-it/forget-login.jsp

Type in a domain name that you know is registered with NetSol (i.e. Amazon.com). Click GO. [Read more →]

Tags: Search Engine Optimization by David LaFerney
1 Comment »