Google Webmaster Central To Solve Canonical Issues

The rebranded Google Webmaster Central (formerly Google Sitemaps) is set to finally resolve Google’s canonical issues. For some time Google has had problems with the www.domain.com/.. and domain.com/.. versions of site URLs (detecting if they are one and the same site, distributing linking popularity properly). Many websites have incoming links pointing to both the www.domain.com and domain.com URL versions. The problem was exacerbated when the internal linking structure uses relative URLs (links like /article.htm opposed to links like www.domain.com/article.htm).Recently Google added a new feature in their Webmaster Tools section (former Google Sitemaps), where every webmaster could set a preference for www. or non-www. URLs on every validated domain. Instead of guessing, you simply tell Google to use the www. or non-www. URL versions for every site of yours. This helps properly aggregating PageRank and showing the proper URLs within the SERPs.In addition, Google offers a variety of other goodies like giving you crawling stats, problems, penalization info, reinclusion requests for penalized sites etc. I’ve been using these features for some time and they are getting better and better and are a must for every webmaster.It is interesting to know what kind of stats does Google keep for every site in its index. Judging from their Webmaster Tools section, Google keeps ranking information (for which keywords does your site rank and at what positions). As I have written numerous times, ranking for as many keywords as possible (even non-competitive) gives you a ranking boost for more competitive ones (content is king).Another great stat that Google shows is the most common words used within content on your sites and in the anchor text of links pointing to your site. I have noticed that Google has associated the anchor text keywords of some of my sites with words that do NOT appear in the anchor text, but words close to the links. So, yes, Google looks at text around links and probably uses it for scoring purposes.The keywords associated with your content and links do not appear for all sites. I’ve noticed that when I added my sites using the www.domain.com version as the URL name of the site, I didn’t get these stats. When I set a domain preference for the www.domain.com versions, Google added the domain.com versions to the list of my sites and now shows these keyword associations when I click on the non-www. versions. I think that’s a glitch, but anyway, Google shows these vital stats when you have your sites added as non-www. domains.I highly recommend the Google’s Webmaster Central Tools to all webmasters, especially the domain preference feature.

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Site Navigation and Search Engine Optimization

Optimizing site navigation for high rankings is easy and very powerful. Follow the recommendations in this article and you will improve your search engine positions.

No Graphical Menus, Please!
Graphical menus may look good, but they prevent you from exploiting one of the most important factors - anchor text. Search engines cannot recognize text on images. However, they give a lot of weight to anchor text (the text of your links). Use simple text links for navigation.

Put your keywords in the anchor text of all your navigational links.
Let's say that you optimize your main page for the phrase "keyword1 keyword2". You certainly have no benefit of links such as "products", "information", "articles", "about" etc. Use longer navigational links with the anchor text "keyword1 keyword2 products", "keyword1 keyword2 articles" etc. etc. Put a maximal number of instances of your key phrases in your navigational links. Anchor hits help both the page the link it is placed on, and the page it points to. To accommodate the longer links, you may need to redesign your whole site. Do it. It's worth it.

Use good and descriptive anchor title tags
Your navigational links should look like this: keyword rich anchor text. The anchor title tags are given a tiny amount of weight, but it is better to have it, than not.

Divert PageRank to your most important pages
To do it, follow these two rules:
1. Link to your most important pages from every page of your site using appropriate anchor text
2. PageRank is divided among all links on a page. Remove all unimportant links from every page and you will concentrate your PageRank power into your important pages. For example, you may not need a link to your Contacts page from every other page. For every page, think about which unimportant links you can remove without making your site strange and unusable, and do remove them.

Quick Search Engine Optimization Check List

This article provides a list of quick do-it-yourself search engine optimization tips.

1. Capitalize
Google keeps capitalization information and capitalized keywords are given slightly more weight. Go over all page elements and capitalize the keywords, wherever applicable. Capitalize your titles, alt image tags, anchor title tags, anchor texts etc.

2. Write your Alt Image Tags
Don't leave an image without an alt image tag. Use your keywords in the alt image tags. Capitalize. Check your site all over for images without alt tags.

3. Write your Anchor Title Tags
All your links should use anchor title tags with keyword rich descriptions. Links should be written as: keyword rich anchor text

4. Use simple Text Navigation
Search engines don't recognize text on images. Use keyword rich text links for navigation.

5. Rewrite your Anchor Texts?
On page links with your keywords increase the relevancy of the page the links are placed on. If you have a page about colon cancer, use links such as "Colon Cancer Info", "About Colon Cancer", "Colon Cancer Articles".

6. Bold your Keywords
Wherever applicable, bold your keywords. Bolded on page text carries more weight. Note: bolded links don't help.

7. Rework your Title?
If you page targets a short keyword phrase, use two instances of your keywords in your page title. That will help a lot.
8. Use more Keyword Phrases
Think about including more keyword phrases throughout your page. Use direct phrases, because they carry a lot more weight. Example: use "Search Engine Optimization" instead of "Search Engine …some words.. Optimization".

Quick Search Engine Optimization Check List

Crawling is the process of collecting documents from the web. When it comes down to search engines, the purpose of crawling is to refresh the pages that have changed since the previous crawl and to discover new pages and expand the index.

The major problem that crawlers face is the growth of the web. Should a search engine crawl new pages or refresh old ones? There are too many pages to crawl and search engines must choose wisely. It is important to crawl documents that change frequently and documents that are of high quality as often as possible.

Crawling Priority

Search engines assign a crawling priority to every page. Crawling priority is a number that denotes the importance of a page in relation to crawling. Pages with a higher crawling priority number will be crawled before pages with a smaller priority number.

Main Factors that determine Google's Crawling Priority

PageRank - pages with a higher PageRank have a higher crawling priority

Number of slashes ('/') in the URLs - pages with fewer slashes in their URLs have a higher crawling priority because they tend to change more often. In other implementations, Google uses the number of slashes ('/') in the links that point to a page. Getting a link from a page with a lot of slashes in its URL results in a smaller crawling priority number.

New Sites and Crawling

It is really frustrating to release a new site, and discover that in the following 3 months Google has crawled just 5% of its pages.

In order for a new page A to get crawled:

1. Google must crawl/index a page B that contains a link to page A
2. Google will discover a new page A sooner if page B itself has a high crawling priority (if you get a link from a low PageRank page, Google might crawl it 6 weeks later to find about the existence of your site)

The worst situation happens when you have a new site with a lot of pages that are more than 2 clicks away from the home page. These new pages might get crawled months later because the pages that link to the 3rd ++ level pages are also new (they have to be found and crawled first, and at the same time have a low crawling priority).

Tips to get a new site crawled faster

1. Start working on getting incoming links. That is the fastest way to get your home page crawled. Obtaining many incoming links will get the PageRank of your home page up, which will propagate to the second, third etc. level pages and bring them up in the crawling queue.
2. Use an internal linking structure that minimizes the path (number of links it takes to get) from your home page to the majority of your pages
3. Point 2. can be augmented by the usage of site maps. Site maps can link to fourth, fifth etc. level pages.
4. Avoid having pages with too many slashes in the URLs such as mydomain.com/articles/section/1/article/2/article_title/
5. On sites with a tree-linking structure such as directories, you can rotate the third-level categories displayed on your home page. Usually on such sites, the home page lists the main categories and under each main category there are links to some of its subcategories. Rotate the subcategory links.

How does Google Rank Pages?

Google has dramatically changed the way they rank pages in the last few years. What worked once upon a time does not seem to work now. What worked before? PageRank and keyword rich incoming links. Webmasters just swapped keyword-rich links, bought high PageRank keyword-rich links etc. Optimized sites could dominate the results, but Google wants genuine sites that have natural incoming links (votes).
In my opinion, Google has introduced new ranking scores that operate mostly on whole sites (domains) and lowered the weight of some of the older page-based scores. Some sites get high rankings for almost anything (amazon). I have noticed that the rankings to all my pages within a site jump/fall uniformly. Basically these new scores tell Google how reputable/trusted/quality is a whole site and these factors influence the rankings of all pages of a site.
When your site (not page) gets a higher overall domain score, you get more traffic/rankings to all your pages and vice versa. These new domain based scores are connected with the infamous SandBox effect. To me, a sandboxed site is a site with a low general domain score.

How did Google change the weight of the older factors (PageRank, anchor text)?
1. Google de-emphasized the weight of anchor text keywords. Why? Because that makes it harder to rank internal pages. Webmasters tend to link more to sites than to internal pages. Giving too much weight on the anchor text of links pushes up the rankings of home pages. Webmasters countered this over-emphasis of anchor text with two strategies:

textual keyword-rich internal navigationbuying / swapping keyword-rich links that pointed to internal pages
In Google's eyes, when a site has thousands of natural incoming links to the home page and internal pages, this site must be of very high-quality and even the internal pages with zero incoming links deserve to rank high. That can be achieved by lowering the weight of anchor text and introducing domain based quality scores. I also think that Google spreads the anchor text value of links to all related pages on a site. What does it mean? If you have 3 pages about widgets, an external link to one of the widget pages with anchor text "widgets" may also help the other two widget pages.

2. Google in my opinion has changed the way they calculate PageRank. I believe the toolbar PageRank does not reflect the real way they calculate PageRank at all.
Consider this fact: when you get a high PageRank with site-wide incoming links, your rankings don't get the same boost, as when you get the very same high PageRank with links from a lot of unique domains. The toolbar PageRank is useless.
Link popularity is still important, but we don't know what modified version of calculating PageRank Google uses.
What are the major new domain based factors that Google introduced?
Google seems to be going in the direction of their "Information Retrieval Based On Historical Data" and follow-up patent(s).
Domain Age
That has become too obvious. Newer sites are less trusted than older sites. This is a factor you cannot control.
Freshness/Staleness
Google factors in how fresh or stale your site is.
Your site is considered fresh when:You have recently updated it (changed content or added new pages). The site acquired new incoming links recently. Most of the sites that link to the site are fresh (recently updated, got linked to).
Your site becomes stale (outdated) when:You have not updated it recently. You have no new incoming links. The sites that link to you have not been updated and linked to.
Content Updates/Changes
Have you updated your site recently? If all your competitors constantly update their sites but you don't, your rankings may go down.
User Behavior
Your pages get ranked high for some keywords. Do the searchers actually click on your pages? If they don't it may get your rankings lowered. When searchers frequently click on your ranked pages that is a good thing in the eyes of Google.
Query Based (In my opinion, Content is King factors)
Every time one of your pages gets ranked high (top 30) for some keywords that tells Google that you have good content. Before you get ranked high for competitive keywords, you need to get ranked high for non-competitive ones. When you have a lot of unique content, there is no way your pages will not get ranked high for at least some non-competitive keywords. The more content you have the more times you get pages ranked high for non-competitive keywords, which helps in the future rankings of more competitive keyphrases.
Google may influence the rankings of certain queries, by looking into the rankings of their related keyphrases. When you rank high for some keyphrases this helps ranking high for related queries. Content is King. Don't over-optimize but use a variety of related words. That helps better in the long-term.
User Maintained Data, Traffic etc.
Do your visitors bookmark your site? Do they stay long at your site? Do they come back?
Focus on the visitors and Google will find it out and boost your rankings.
Linkage of Independent Peers
How many unique domains link to your site? The more usually the better unless the links grow too fast.
Anti-Spam Factors
Google tries to detect when you do aggressive link building. Again, don't overdo it. Focus on content. Over-optimizing content also does not help too much because it lowers your chances to rank well for related/synonymous keyphrases.
In a nutshell, how do I get top Google rankings?
1. Add new content frequently (at least once a week).
2. Write long in-depth content instead of short pages. Longer pages will always outperform shorter ones.
3. Don't over-optimize. Think about making your navigation readable, your text readable and include more keywords only if you think it is appropriate to your users. Write naturally and include related terms, synonyms etc.
4. Don't be over-aggressive with link building.
5. Link out to other good sites/pages in your articles.
6. Cross-reference your content by putting links within your content to other pages on your site.
7. Use long descriptive anchor text. Keyword density in content/links is a myth.
8. Publish unique content. Forget about duplicate content. It does not work on Google.
9. Have some patience. Let your site age and don't stop working on any factor (content, links).
10. It is better to lay off link building than adding fresh unique high-quality content.
11. Content is King.
When you do all of these above, you will get a very high domain based score and you will easily outrank the over-optimized competition.

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