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.

August 22nd, 2006 by metapilot

I’ll tell you–it’s when your page is in transition from a page that is not listed in the regular index to one that is listed in the regular index.It was just two days ago that I was sorta thinking that I might start seeing some action for the “site:www.metapilot.com” search within a week or so, and voila!, here it is–5 days early.

August 20th, 2006 by metapilot

As of today, there is evidence that there is not an all out ban on the new domain name with Google. I like to set up alerts in Google (I like the real-time option) so that I know when there has been a change in the in output from the Google algos for site’s I’m working on and today, I received my email that there was a change in the output for metapilot.com. Since the alert is for “metapilot” which covers both domains, I have to check the source code of the alert emails that I receive to see which domain the included link is alert is referring to (probably should just change it to “metapilot.com”).

Here’s the alert:

Read the rest of this entry »

August 20th, 2006 by metapilot

At least I can now say that the site is not banned in Yahoo. Yahoo site explorer shows 12 pages still in the .net index and it has been stuck on showing only two of the new .com pages for several days, now. It is also showing one of the previous owner’s .pdf files in the index (although not in the cache).At least there are two new pages now showing in Yahoo, though. For a couple of days, only the home page was showing as indexed and current wisdom states that when just your home page shows in the Yahoo index, it is a sure sign that the site has been banned. Of course, being very aware of the possibility that my site will suffer from the legacy of the previous domain owner’s “poor neighborhood” practices and the resulting penalties placed on the domain, I was holding my breath while wating for more pages to show up. When another page did show up along with the home page in the Yahoo Site Explorer, I could finally let out a little sigh of relief. Now, only in Google is there an indication that an all-out ban is still possible.
Google is not cooperating at all. Though the site was submitted two weeks ago, there is no aknowledgemnt from Google that a site exists at that domian. Granted, two weeks is no time at all but I was hoping for a best case scenario–an older siter (even though it was purchased as an expired domain), with a lot of back links (even though they are from irrelevant, bad neighborhood sites), with fully indexed pages from another site being 301?ed to same page name pages on this site–it’s a good scenario–it’s a very good scenario, except for the litte issue of the domain having been BANNED.

Over the past six months to a year, or so, however, Google has greatly increased it’s grip on expired domains. For “domainer”- types, who have tended to rely on continuity of domain name aging (regardless of whether the registration had expired and ownership had changed hands) to help their site’s ranking ability, this turn of events hasn’t been particularly advantageous. For me, however, it means I can have a greater expection of being able to seperate my site and my owership of this domain from those that came before me. It is a double-edged sword, though. For it also means that I’ll most likely be subject to the euphamistically named “aging delay”, aka, the “sand box penalty”. Bleecchk, I hate that thing but it is better than being banned and not going through it.

MSN, on the other hand, currently lists 27 pages for the .net site, including the metapilot.net/index.html page. Eleven of the cached pages point to the “Permanently Moved” cached pages. The rest still point to standard caches of the originals. On the site:domain search for the .com site, it shows 29 pages in in the index, including the metapilot.com/index.html page(4 of them are from the previous owner’s site) .

Interestingly, when you click on the “Cached page” link in any of those 4 results from the previous owner, you get an empty page–not an actual true version of that previous page.

August 19th, 2006 by metapilot

Real estate of all types is very competitive in Florida and with the market going through the changes it has recently, it’s getting more so every day. This increase in competitiveness is very evident online, where real estate oriented website owners are putting substantial resources towards optimization for their sites in order to reach more online traffic.

All of this means several things for new real estate oriented sites: 1) It is taking quite a bit more effort for new sites to reach traffic-producing search engine rankings on primary keywords. 2) Niche keyword spaces are getting more difficult to find. 3) It is taking increased vigilance to defend your rankings from other sites who want to claw their way up into higher rankings.

Firms who are not competing directly against mainstream realtors do have it somewhat easier, though. A strong optimization campaign can find keywords that will bring in traffic, yet doesn’t pit them against all the “heavy hitters” engaged in real estate search marketing. Such a campaign would enable Signature Residences to bring in targeted traffic while their website matures and gains strength over the next 12 months. In addition to optimization of the existing site, it is recommended that these companies focus on adding to the site’s content and that it strive to develop strong back links to its site as a foundation for continued strong rankings in the future.

August 19th, 2006 by metapilot

Yahoo starts to show .com results and as it does, it starts removing pages from its “site:metapilot.net” results. Currently, just the index page from the .com domain is showing up. Notice I was (unintentionally) doing the search without using “www”.

Note: This was the last date that I was able to use the site:domain command and get standard Yahoo results. For the past week, Yahoo has fluctuated between serving me standard site:domain results and forcing me to be logged in and serving me results via the new Site Explorer (Beta) interface. Hence, all site:domain querries are redirected to the Yahoo Site Explorer interface. This is something that has been talked about in the forums over the past week or two and seems to be the case for a growing number of searchers who use the site:domain query.

August 19th, 2006 by metapilot

Real Estate SEO in 2006-2007

August 19th, 2006

Real estate of all types is very competitive in Florida and with the market going through the changes it has recently, it’s getting more so every day. This increase in competitiveness is very evident online, where real estate oriented website owners are putting substantial resources towards optimization for their sites in order to reach more online traffic.

All of this means several things for new real estate oriented sites: 1) It is taking quite a bit more effort for new sites to reach traffic-producing search engine rankings on primary keywords. 2) Niche keyword spaces are getting more difficult to find. 3) It is taking increased vigilance to defend your rankings from other sites who want to claw their way up into higher rankings.

Firms who are not competing directly against mainstream realtors do have it somewhat easier, though. A strong optimization campaign can find keywords that will bring in traffic, yet doesn’t pit them against all the “heavy hitters” engaged in real estate search marketing. Such a campaign would enable Signature Residences to bring in targeted traffic while their website matures and gains strength over the next 12 months. In addition to optimization of the existing site, it is recommended that these companies focus on adding to the site’s content and that it strive to develop strong back links to its site as a foundation for continued strong rankings in the future.