March 3rd, 2008 by metapilot
In the quest for driving visitors to the blog, I ran across a site that has had quite a bit of commentary about it over the past six months or so. It’s called blogcatalog.com and it’s value has been discussed by many online including Andy Beard, Sphinn, and problogger –just to name a few. I think I’ll join in and see what all the action is about.
February 13th, 2008 by metapilot
Yes, METAPILOT is a local Miami Company. Check out our site here: Miami search engine optimization . We’re available by phone or in person to speak with you about meeting your site’s sales goals.
Everyone should understand the difference between rankings and profitability.
There are numerous companies out there that speak primarily about getting you rankings for keywords. On the surface it may look good but when you look more closely and correlate your web stats with your marketing spend and your online sales, you can get the feeling that things are a little too heavy on the budget side and much too little light on the sales side. Working with a company that is focused on your business goals and your profitability on the other hand, a company experiences a symbiotic relationship between their traffic, sales, and search engine optimization budget.
December 17th, 2006 by metapilot
I noticed a couple of hits coming from Google’s direction over the past week and since I haven’t paid much attention to metapilot.com’s indexation for some time, so I figured it was time to take a look.Google:
site:www.metapilot.com shows 4700+ results and it looks like about 35 of them are my actual pages–not the previous owner’s. Of those 35, about 15 of them are from the blog
Yahoo
The site: command shows something interesting. Back in September, Yahoo results for this search showed only pages from my site, it now shows results in the thousands –the same as Google does. Unlike Google, however, no cache version of all those old pages are available. Of the 6,400+ results, about 65 of them are mine and about 63 of those are from the blog. Another interesting point is that while the home page is listed as the first result for this search (thank goodness, at least for that), it is pages from the old site that populate results 2 through 33 with some of the blog pages kicking in between 34 and 39. This is interesting because Yahoo is known to list the pages in this search in order of importance.
MSN
MSN shows 69 results for the site:www.metapilot.com search and 39 of them are from the blog.
September 4th, 2006 by metapilot
You may have read recently (August 2006) that AOL inadvertently released information about searches done through the AOL site. SEO Scoop discovered a forum post detailing the click through rate for ranking #1 vs. #2-#10. While AOL users, as a group, do tend to be less web savvy than the average web user, the sample size is large enough that we can now make more educated guesses about the way people use search engines.
Results from:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623
In the above sample of 4,926,623 clicks,
2,075,765 of the clicks (42.1%) were on the #1 ranked result.;
586,100 of the clicks (11.9%) were on the #2 ranked result (3.5 x fewer clicks than the #1 position);
418,643 of the clicks (8.5%) were on the #3 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #2 position):
298,532 of the clicks (6.1%) were on the #4 ranked result (1.4 x fewer clicks than the #3 position)
242,169 of the clicks (4.9%) were on the #5 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #4 position)
199,541 of the clicks (4.1%) were on the #6 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #5 position)
168,080 of the clicks (3.4%) were on the #7 ranked result (1.2 x fewer clicks than the #6 position)
148,489 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #8 ranked result (1.1 x fewer clicks than the #7 position)
140,356 of the clicks (2.8%) were on the #9 ranked result (1.05 x fewer clicks than the #8 position)
147,551 of the clicks (3.0%) were on the #10 ranked result (1.05 x more clicks than the #9 position)
September 2nd, 2006 by metapilot
With Google steady at the 9000 to 12000 (old-site, supplimental) pages showing for the site:metapilot.com search and up until today showing only two pages from my site (at the very bottom of the all the other supplimental pages), and Yahoo up the page count of the new site by page or two a week, I getting figitty.Google had shown one of the blog pages in that search, but today that is gone and only the home page, indexed Aug. 21, is showing. I’m not at all sure how google found that blog page since it wasn’t until at least a week later that I put any sort of public link to the blog. The only thing I can think of is that in messing around during the installation, and working on making a static home page (coming) I had an index.php page in the root along with the index.html page and somehow that got picked up? Thing is it wasn’t even the index.php page that was indexed, it was an archive page. Anyhow, It’s gone at least for the moment.
Since I am getting figitty, I re-crawled the site with my trusty dusty sitemap tool (I use the one over at auditmypc.com) so that my sitemaps included all the pages currently in the blog. I have two sitemaps, urllist.txt and sitemap.txt because urllist.txt used to be the only filename that Yahoo look when you submitted a sitemap as a feed–that was before Yahoo Site Explorer, which doesn’t clearly define a specific file name. Sitemap.txt is the file name Google suggests if you are using a text file as the sitemap you submit to Google Webmaster Tools and rather than telling Google to look for a file created spefically for Yahoo Sitemapts, I make one with that name too. For the time being it is faster and easier to have these two sitemaps than to figure out the ideal way to have a single one. (Did you get all that?)
So the new sitemaps were submitted to Google and Yahoo yesterday and the domain submitted to MSN, as well. I’m hoping this jogs some changes in the index in the next week or so. Of course, I won’t be able to be sure that this is what caused them but at least, it’s gives the felling of doing something to help push the process along.
September 1st, 2006 by metapilot
Following Google’s lead, Yahoo has came out with their own version of a sitemaps tool and rolled into the the Yahoo Site Explorer Beta tool. There is a lot of debate over the value of Google’s sitemap tool and Yahoo doesn’t really make any advances over it. One nice thing about it, though, is that you can now easily get the last-crawled date for any page that you have listed in “My Sites” (you have to have a free yahoo acount in order to access My Sites information).
In order to set up a new site in Yahoo Site Explorer, enter the site’s URL and click “Add My Site”, afterwhich you’re presented with links to Manage and Authenticate your new site. The coolest thing about the tool is that you can communicate to Yahoo that you want it to visit your site and it will go there and grab your feed in “real time”. Your feed can be RSS, Atom, a txt file or a compressed text file (.gz only) and by real time, I mean that you might have to wait a few minutes for it to refresh your screen and show you that it’s verified your feed exists.
The feed is the conduit through/by which you are telling Yahoo about URLs you want it to crawl. Google Sitemaps adds an additional conduit, or feed choice– a .xml file with which you can make your list of URLs dynamic by running a python script on your web server and I expect to see something of that nature coming from Yahoo in the near future. Very basically, though, all you need for Yahoo Site Explorer is a .txt file with a list all the URLs on your site that you wnat crawled (one URL per line) named urllist.txt.. Upload it to your root directory and after you click on “Manage Site” in Yahoo Site Explorer, type “urllist.txt” into the field and off goes the bot to check it out.
Before you can get to the “good” information about your site, you have to authenticate your site. This lets Yahoo know that you currently have access to the site’s rood directory, which means you’re likely to worthy of knowing the any little insights Yahoo Site Explorer might provide you. Whey you click on the “Authenticate” link, you can choose to download an authentication file (which you can save directly to your root directory, if you want) or make your own authentication file with the file name and contents presented. Once the file is placed in your root directory, click “Authenticate” and your site gets put into a pending authenication que until Yahoo crawls the feed. Within 24 hours, I could see that my status was no longer “Pending” but rather, I was now a “processed” site.
On to the real business, Yahoo has racheted up the number of indexed pages to 12. It’s good to see things filling in there. Over on the marginally more useful Google Webmaster Tools, I can see that the index is ranking the old site for some odd keywords, however zero traffic comes from any of his old link partners or search engine listings–at least not from anyone directly clicking on a link.
August 28th, 2006 by metapilot
I do a lot of optimization support for web design firms who have clients needing a dedicated search engine consultant. I love these jobs because I get to work with a lot good web designers and a lot of good clients that I probably wouldn’t have gotten to work with otherwise.Something I see more and more often in firms that have several designers is that there is a premium on those designers who have a keen eye for the designs, templates and techniques that assist search engine visibility. What’s most noticeable about them is that they don’t seem to stay in one place very long. It’s hard to blame them, it’s hard to turn down a pay raise and the opportunity to do what you really like doing at the same time.
Web site design and programming that is compatible with the efforts of the optimization specialist is highly prized today and the designer who specializes in search compatibility and likes partnering with algorithm specialists and SEO copywriters is like the holy grail. A site can sure move up to the top quickly when all the players are focused and determined to out rank the competitors.
Web Designers: When you’re commencing work on a site that will have a web site optimizer working on it–think CRAWLABILITY. This is the time to work on platform and navigaion. What will the spiders, which are just high-powered browsers with the JavaScript and images turned off, see? If you want to see what a page looks like to the spiders, take a peek at it through the SEO Browser–it can give you a whole new perspective on your web creations. Time spent thinking about these things early on is well spent because if you have to deal with them once the site goes live, you can count on it taking a lot longer and and you can count on having a lot more people breathing down your neck as you do it.
Templates
On-Page Factors
Navigation
Meta Tags
For more info, check out our meta tag optimization service.
August 26th, 2006 by metapilot
As I noted back on Aug 17, all my site:domain searches required that I be logged into my Yahoo account. Since then I noticed, in passing, that I seemed to be getting link:domain searches back in that same interface. Now I realize that you do have to be logged in and you do have to use the Yahoo Site Explorer for the link: searches as well.It doesn’t make that much difference to me which I use, although in some of the forums, people have remarked that the site:domain search gives you different results depending on which interface is used and he the Yahoo Site Explorer is, to some degree, deficient, compared to getting results through the standard search interface.
That’s not been an issue for me but what seems to be an issue is some my research tools the make use of Yahoo link information have been eratic and in some cases not working at all. I can’t help but figure that it has something to do with changes in structuring the queries for the new interface. Some of my tool vendors seem to have come up with a fix already but some have not.
August 26th, 2006 by metapilot
For some reason, I thought 1300 pages was the max size of that spam site that was at my domain name before me but I see that as of today, the count’s up to over 8000 pages–
and growing every time I go back to look (10 minutes after I wrote the previous sentence, the count is over 11,00 pages–
(Note the new link to Google’s video search)
Now that I think about it though, these different numbers are most likely due to results coming from different data centers.Obviously, Google maintains all of this page information in the index even though the domain’s been banned for some time. It is appearing that when Google turns the domain back on, the results start back up as though the ban hadn’t existed. What I can’t tell, though, is whether Google continued to crawl that previous site while the ban was in place or if it stopped crawling it once the ban kicked in.
In any case, as the those old pages continue to populate the site:domain search in Google I’m seeing that it is showing the cache for these pages and it shows the “View as HTML” link for the couple of dozen PDF files that had been indexed from the site.
Here’s an example of the fine writing style that filled up those (now) 12,000-plus pages:
I’d guess this is from early or very low quality content auto-generation software that was probably built into the spam site creation software used to deploy the site.
August 23rd, 2006 by metapilot
Recording the search engine results changes as my new site moves onto a previously banned domain is providing a glimps at algorithm characteristics that I don’t get to witness on a daily basis. Not only does it highlight characteristics of the individual search engines, it points out differences in how they approaches a particular situation.Now that Google seems to have turned everything back on for the domian, I went from having nothing listed in the site:domian search to 1300 pages (all pages from the previous owner). It wasn’t exactly all in one swoop, though, over the last two days, I’ve been seeing different results at different data centers–sometimes there would be nothing for the site:domain search, sometimes three or four old pages, and then back again. Now with all these pages showing, it looks like they’ve gone ahead and opened the flood gates.
I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I posted a question on this week’s SEO Rock Stars guest speaker’s site, Stuntdubl SEO Consulting, regarding what to do with all the inbound links pointing to metapilot.com from websites that used to be cohorts of the previous site owner. There was some interesting discussion durring the show between Oilman, Web Guerilla, and Stuntdubl that you can listen to at WebmasterRadio.fm, if you’ve got a little time to kill.
Yahoo’s showing one more result than it did before and still hanging on to an old .pdf from the site. I wish it would just drop that. and MSN shows 36 results for the site:domain search.
