August 1, 2010

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The ever going saga of how much weight links carry

June 24, 2010 By Bruce Hopkins Leave a Comment

One of the main items anyone can do to improve the rankings in the search engines is to build up incoming links. There has always been a discussion on how different links are counted. One of the main items that most people talk about is getting links on .edu or .gov sites as the holy grail of link building.

This is discussed on marketing forums all over the net and most people believe these links carry some sort of additional authority. Links from social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook are normally looked at as lower quality links than ones from sites such as government sites or education universities.

I guess this comes from the notion that its a lot easier to create a new profile on a social site and fill it up with links to your site than it is to obtian a link from your local college. But do these really make a difference.

Well according to Matt Cutts from Google, it does not matter. They are looking for a variety of links and while they may give more rank for a page coming from a page with a higher page rank, the actual url really plays no part. A follow link is a follow link. The higher the page rank of the linking page the more valuable it is. Seems like a good reason to build links to your profile pages on sites that are not no follow on your social networking sites.

Here is the video on this from Matt’s own mouth, so you can make up your own mind as to whether you believe him.

 

So what are your thoughts is Matt putting out disinformation? or do you believe what he says about the domain extension not having anything to do with the assignment of weight to a particular link?

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Will Google’s new ranking mean the end of Trend Blogging

January 1, 2010 By Bruce Hopkins 1 Comment


Well its a new year in Internet land. The past year has produced a lot of items that IMers need to be thinking about especially in the area of how Google ranks websites. There has been a lot of talk about Google Caffeine and many people are already seeing the results of the combined search results, that Google has been introducing to their results. There are several blogs that I read regularly that have seen some drops in their rankings and it seems that Google is ranking blog posts slower than it was just six months ago. This slower ranking of posts has been something I’m keeping my eye on as it would hint that there is something new going on behind the scenes when Google analyzes a page and puts it in the index.

I posted before about how I will watch and write about current hot trends on some of my blogs and this slower indexing has affected how effective this practice is. Of course over the past year many people have released information in the forms of ebooks or tools to capitalize on hot trends. This has increased the competition with more people chasing hot trends in Google. It also brought out all the sploggers and many auto spam blogs have jumped up. Well a few months ago Google seemed to be catching on to the spammers. At first they reduce the Google trends index to 40 of the top searches and now its down to 20.

I can only assume that this is in response to all the spam blogs, but its also hurting the people who where not creating spam, but actually writing good relevant content on the topics that appeared in the Trends list. I thought of writing one of these books as I was able to do some pretty good things utilizing the information in Google Hot Trends in 2009, but now I’m glad I did not because I have not seen all my tricks mentioned in the books I’ve read. I’m going to keep those to myself for now.

But this does raise the question whether Hot Trends will even exist in the coming year. Will Google kill it off totally? I hope not as its very useful for webmasters. Perhaps they will just introduce some new features to help combat the autoblogs. One area that could be done in this area is in the speed of a website. Since most spammers have 100s of autoblogs on a shared or reseller hosting account then speed could be a way to cut down on this spam. Of course the downside of this is it would also give people who have dedicated boxes and advantage over the people who host good websites on shared hosting plans.

Of course people who have dedicated servers should be given preference just because their investment is higher. Its been long rumored that the number of years a domain is registered is a factor in ranking. The reason given for this is because of the investment a person puts in the domain name, but if you look at pure dollars someone who hosts a site on a dedicated box puts a lot more investment into their website in a single month than if they just registered the domain name for 10 years or so.

So perhaps Google is going to start giving a little boost to the people who invest in their websites with a dedicated box as it appears the speed of a website is going to come into play very soon.

Google’s Matt Cutts hinted that site speed is important to Google, and it may be considered a factor when ranking websites in 2010.

Here is an excerpt from the interview: "Historically, we haven’t had to use it(site load speed) in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much".

Last year Google had already introduced Page Load Time as a ranking element in Google Adwords ads.

You can watch the video interview of Matt Cutts here :
http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/

How to optimize site for better loading and performance :
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ has added a new section in the “Labs” menu titled “Site Performance”. This new feature provides statistics about how fast your web pages load, how that speed compares to other websites, and tips and suggestions for speeding up your page loads.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns.html is yet another tool Google has released for webmasters to increase their site performance.

Google recently released http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/, an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements which impact page load times (such as Javascript and CSS files, image file sizes, etc).

Additionally Google has released http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html that allows the GA tracking code to be loaded asynchronously, which also helps reduce the load time of your webpages.
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/11/introducing-closure-tools.html is yet another tool launched by Google to optimize scripts and remove un-necessary whitespaces thereby helping the site to load faster.

All this is in addition to http://code.google.com/speed/ where you can find many more tips & tricks to make sure your site loads as fast as possible. This isn’t just important to protect your search engine rankings, it’s also a vital part of conversion rate optimization – users don’t like to wait, and a slow site will lose customers.

So get to optimizing your site as it may become very important very soon. If you look at all these resources that Google has released the past few months all designed to help the speed of a site’s loading then it stands to reason that speed is definitely on their mind. I’ve been watching Google for years and they always have a purpose for money they spend.

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Generating Traffic to Blogs

September 7, 2009 By Bruce Hopkins 4 Comments

I have not written about traffic generation in quite a while. I read the posts I made on this a couple of years ago and realized how much my views how changed over the past couple of years. While the post is still relevant, my techniques for generating traffic have evolved over the years. The techniques listed on the Traffic Generation pages are still valid, they are just not near complete. After reading the post again I would say these are good techniques for starting a blog and getting it ready for traffic, but there are a lot more methods that are very effective for really bumping up your traffic.

I got to thinking about this from a meeting I had this weekend and the subject of traffic came up. Traffic is something everyone needs if you are going to make money on the internet, but traffic alone is not enough. A better term would be to say targeted traffic, because traffic alone is not enough for you to make money. For you to make money from your website you need targeted traffic. Personally I would prefer to have 1000 visitors who where interested in buying something from me then to have a million visitors who could care less about my offerings. I’ll make more money off the 1000. All a million untargeted visitors will do is to increase your hosting costs. I will have to quantify this because if you are getting advertising dollars by the CPM, then more would make more money, but lets assume for this discussion that you are earning your money from Affiliate type programs or selling your own product.

Okay so how do I build traffic today. There are a few tips that can help you no matter what the niche you are targeting.

Twitter – Twitter is a great way to generate traffic. Of course its also easy to make this traffic un targeted. Building a twitter following should be exact. Don’t just follow anyone on twitter. Take a look at the topics they have commented on and then follow the ones who tweet about the topics of your site. As these people follow you back then they will be interested in what you have to say. Once you have a targeted following on twitter, then you can tweet your blog post and people will come to your site from Twitter. You can even find Wodpress plugins that will automatically send Tweets to your account every time you make a blog post. I send a tweet to twitter everytime I post and it always brings me a decent amount of traffic, plus considering that Google just loves to crawl Twitter pages it helps with getting the Google bot to come by can check out your new content.

Facebook – A lot of people use Facebook as a way to stay in touch with others, but you can use it to drive traffic to your sites. A couple of features that you should be using is to incorporate your facebook and twitter accounts. Also make sure you add your blog’s RSS feed to your facebook account. These two things can help you a lot with generating traffic. Of course you need friends on your facebook account for this to help. A great way to get a lot of friends is to spend some time on facebook apps which encourage you to have friends. Be A tycoon is great for this, but you have to be careful because that is an addictive game and you may spend too much time playing the game instead of working.

In fact there are many different social media sites which you can add your RSS feeds to. Adding your RSS feeds is another great way to build up traffic to your site. I have a software app RSS Blogs that I use for this. It allows me to easily submit my feeds to a lot of directories. I also use SENuke for this purpose, but RSS blogs is targeted for just RSS feeds so its a little better for this task.

SeNuke – SeNuke is another software package I use to generate traffic. It really helps me to dominate the Search Engines for almost any term I decide I want to target. I will mention that SeNuke is a little gray hat so you have to be careful when using it on your money sites. I prefer to utilize SeNuke to build up sites that are pointing to my main sites. Regardless of how you use it, you can really bump up the traffic to a site with this software.

There are quite a few other ways you can increase your traffic, but I’ll save those for another post.

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