May 28th, 2010 |
Welcome to the SEO Chat newsletter! Memorial Day is fast approaching for those of us who live in the United States; as you enjoy the barbecues, the parades, the picnics, and the many other ways we celebrate, take a moment to remember the meaning behind the holiday, and be grateful to the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our freedom and our country.
Meanwhile, many of us are having a hard time just protecting our privacy, as any Facebook user could tell you. But the wildly popular social site says it's trying to make things easier. Don't believe me? Check out the article we're highlighting this week from eWeek. Personally, I plan to open my Facebook account in one tab with the story in the other and make my changes accordingly.
It's an all-news week at SEO Chat. Monday we told you about Togetherville, a social networking site designed to be safe for younger children. If you operate a small business likely to be reviewed online, you need to read Tuesday's article; it discusses some disturbing rumors about Yelp's ad sales tactics. Do you need an inexpensive office suite that makes it easy to collaborate? Wednesday's article took a look at the new collaboration features in Google Docs...capabilities that just might make it ready to take on Microsoft's Office.
If you're actively engaged in SEO, you probably worry more about links than you ever thought you would. Is there such a thing as a bad link? What happens if a spam site links to you? That's the topic for discussion in this week's thread. Be sure to stop by the thread and add your expertise to the conversation.
Speaking of adding your expertise, why not share it with the world by submitting a tutorial to Tutorialized? It's free, and you'll get a global audience. You'll find more than 100 tutorials on SEO-related topics such as choosing keywords and website promotion, but we always welcome more.
Finally, our Spotlight, just for our newsletter subscribers, focuses on getting your website indexed by Google. How can you be sure Google's spider is properly crawling your site, and what can you do to help it? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.
As always, thanks for reading.
Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff |
| |
|
|
|
Google's New Collaborative Docs
by Terri Wells
2010-05-26 Who would have thought that "organizing all the world's information" could cover so much ground? In following its mission statement, Google has become much more than a search engine. This means it ends up competing with many companies on battlegrounds other than search. This article talks about Google's updates to Google Docs, a product that has more in common with Microsoft's Word than the company's own search engine.
These days it seems as if Google is content to make enemies by stepping into other's territory without much of an apology. The latest example of this was in 2009 when Google Docs was taken out of Beta and widely released. In a very short amount of time, Google Docs has managed to become both a smash hit and a major rival to Microsoft Word.
Aside from having the huge advantage of being free (Microsoft Office, and specifically Word in this case, is quite expensive), Google Docs also comes equipped with many--if not all--of the same features as Word. We can�t dismiss the service�s non-existent price tag too quickly, though, because it�s something that not only sets it apart from Microsoft, but it also sets it apart from other document sharing services, which usually require users to pay a fee. Not only that, but Google Docs also has the added benefit of combining the features of Writely and Spreadsheets, essentially acting as a web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service.
Read Google`s New Collaborative Docs
|
|
|
|
|
How Online Reviews are Affecting Local Businesses
by Joe Eitel
2010-05-25
For restaurant and small business owners, a bad review in the local paper was bad enough. Now they have to worry about bad reviews online. Review web sites form an entire subcategory, and since reviews turn up when users search, they can contribute to making or breaking a business. This article not only explores the trend, but shows why it's a cause for concern, especially in the case of Yelp.
If you're a restaurant or small business owner, negative reviews are the last things you�d want to read about your establishment. Thanks to the Internet--where everyone�s a critic--these are the kinds of reviews being published online and viewed by millions of people searching for local eateries and businesses on Yelp , a hybrid social networking, user review, and local search site with over 31 million users worldwide. Successful establishments who don�t have much to worry about can make light of their bad reviews, but for small, struggling establishments online user reviews can make or break their business.
Online reviews have become a powerful tool that create new hot spots and make businesses boom, but bad reviews can close establishments and deliver a major blow to income, popularity, and the number of new customers and referrals an establishment gets. Because of sites like Yelp, small businesses are being forced to navigate a new and unfamiliar world: do they ask their customers for positive reviews? Do they write reviews of their own establishments? Is there anything they can do to get rid of bad reviews that plague their business? It�s complicated for many, and to make matters even worse, there�s evidence that suggests Yelp extorts businesses to make bad reviews go away.
Read How Online Reviews are Affecting Local Businesses |
|
|
|
|
Togetherville Offers Safe Social Networking for Children
by wubayou
2010-05-24 Thanks to a new social networking site called Togetherville, children will now have a safe and secure way to partake in social networking. Founded by Mandeep Singh Dhillon, Togetherville is aimed at children aged six to ten years old. Think of it as somewhat of a Facebook for kids that allows parents to oversee their children's online activities and also encourages interaction within a child's actual community, but in an online manner.
While some sites have tried to encourage children to participate socially with others via avatars and created online personalities, Togetherville has children use their actual selves. Children cannot be anonymous on the site, which allows them to be themselves and interact with others to help them grow and develop, rather than hide behind a fictional character.
Parents will likely find Togetherville reassuring as it places them in control. Parents can sign their children up for the site only via their own Facebook account. Once their child is signed up, the parent can then pick which of their Facebook friends they want to interact with their child. For example, one can select a few of their neighborhood friends, an aunt, a grandmother, and so on.
Read Togetherville Offers Safe Social Networking for Children
|
|
|
|
|
Can incoming links ever hurt you? That's the question being asked in this week's thread. Be sure to stop by the thread and add your two cents.
APTD361
What if a spam site is linking to my site?
So as I have been looking into our current backlinks, it seems like someone may have submitted our website to a site that is clearly spam.
It may have been submitted years ago by a coworker who didn't understand backlinking and submitted our site wherever we could get a link, or a bigger fear -- a competitor may have submitted it in an effort to diminish our rankings.
If the latter is true, should I be worried? Does Google take into consideration that this kind of thing could happen?
Enderhall
A link coming into your website can not hurt you. Otherwise it would be much easier for an SEO to hut your competition than to get you quality links.
Enderhall
Quote:
Originally Posted by APTD361
What about the cases of people that used link farms and ended up dropping on the SERP? I have heard of numerous instances where someone would be #1 with a couple hundred backlinks, bought more links, Google caught them, and they were dropped to #10.
Good question.
Links don't "hurt" you, BUT if your rankings were based on hundreds of crummy back links from a link farm, those links will get devalued and your rankings will suffer.
If, however, your rankings are based on good links and someone adds your site to a devalued site, then the worst that happens is that person wasted some time. The link has no value, so it will not help and it will not hurt.
Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread. |
|
|
|
|
Getting in Google's Index
You want to make sure that Google has crawled and indexed all of your site, so you get a shot at showing up in the SERPs when searchers use your keywords. How can you be sure that you're in Google's index? You can use the search engine's site: command. That may work well for small sites, but, as respected SEO Chat forum member PhilipSEO pointed out, it's ⤽wildly unreliable for large ones and tends to severely underreport the count.⤠What can you do?
For openers, you could try Google Webmaster Tools, but PhilipSEO thinks this could also be unreliable. Google Analytics could be helpful here, as it will show you the total number of pages that have received visits. PhilipSEO recommends manually running cache: checks of all of your most important pages and a sampling of secondary pages to get a feel for how well Google's spiders are crawling your site.
If you're not happy with what you find out, what can you do? While nobody can control Google's crawl rate (except Google, of course), there are things you can do to lure the spiders. PhilipSEO offers a list of 13 factors that may encourage spider visits. Not all of them are completely within a webmaster's control, but that shouldn't keep you from doing the ones you can control.
The most important factors, not surprisingly, revolve around backlinks. PageRank comes up first on this list, and that's heavily influenced by backlinks. ⤽Google's Matt Cutts has recently admitted, interviewed by Eric Enge, that your site's crawl rate and depth of crawling are roughly proportional to PR,⤠PhilipSEO wrote, and noted that ⤽SEOs have long known this.â¤
Just plain backlinks come up as the second factor PhilipSEO lists, but it's not a matter of numbers; it's also a matter of how fast. Take a web site that is rapidly adding lots of content. If it is not also adding a respectable number of links at the same time, what does that say about the quality of its content?
Deep linking � that is, linking to individual pages � can also help get pages indexed and keep them out of Google's supplemental index. So if you're asking for links from another webmaster, don't insist that they all go to your home page. And as you're building your internal links, make sure important individual pages receive some of these as well.
The last point I'll cover here from PhilipSEO's post (please visit the link to read the rest) is completely within your control: site navigation and hierarchy. Yes, setting this up in the first place is a lot of work, and changing it can be even more painful, especially for a large site. But neither Google's spiders nor your human visitors are likely to go more than 3-4 clicks into your site in search of something. So put all your main categories at your top level of navigation.
As an example of a content-based website, SEO Chat (and its sister sites) lets visitors follow this path: home page to category page to individual article. If you're looking for an article on a particular topic and you don't see what you need among the article blurbs on the home page, you can still get to a salient article in three clicks. This is what we truly mean when we say that the Internet puts information at your fingertips. Shoot for this ideal, and both human and spider visitors will return to your site again and again. Good luck!
Read the relevant forum thread. |
|
|
|
making the most of your products/services? Sometimes, prospects and customers simply need a push in the right direction.
powered websites. It is similar to Google Analytics in the way that it tracks visitors and traffic sources. However, one of the positive aspects of this application is the ability to block website hacking attempts. Aside from offering traffic analysis/monitoring and security benefits, it is open source, which means you can implement it in your website for free. 
Advice Should You Follow?