The Page Just Isn’t Being Crawled That Often
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is an old version of your page (You can tell by doing a search that usually brings up the individual page in question as a result and then clicking on the “Cached” link at the end of your snippet–the page that then shows is going to be the version of your page that the search engine saw the last time it crawled your site, aka, the cached page.), and the snippet is from an old version of your page, it is most likely that the page has simply not been crawled by the search engine since the new version of the page replaced the old one. When the search engines do crawl the new one, the snippet will likely change (if you’ve revised the text on the page and/or the page title and meta description) and the cached version of the page will be updated.

Stuck With a Yahoo Directory or DMOZ Snippet
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is a new version of your page but the snippet and the link don’t look anything like the new page’s title and meta description then, in most cases, your snippet is being pulled from either the your site’s listing in the Yahoo directory or the DMOZ directory. This occurrence is seen less often than it once was but we still see it here at Metapilot from time to time. If that is the case, first go to the Yahoo Directory and search for your business name and domain name (minus the www) and see if your business comes up as a result. If it does, edit or have your web designer edit your site’s homepage by adding this meta tag below your description meta tag: . If not, go to the DMOZ directory and search for your business name and domain name to see if your site comes up as a result for one of those searches. If so, edit your homepage’s html by adding this meta tag beneath your meta description tag: . Once you’ve added one or both of these meta tags it can take a week or two to a month or two for your snippet to be corrected.

Redirects
Other reasons for the search engine snippet to be out of sync with what you may consider to be the current version of the page, such as domain masking or meta refreshes are beyond the scope of this post but contact me if the other fixes didn’t work and you need to look at other options.

Regardless of which fix you need, it is the time it takes for the search engine to return to your site to see the revised data that will determine how long it will take for the fix to become evident in the search results. I’d say the average time between crawls for a typical site with a small number of links is between one to three months. That amount of time is influenced by you website’s popularity and authority (i.e., how many other websites are linking to your pages within your site and how important do the search engines think those pages that link to you are. More links from sites that are of greater importance will mean that your site gets crawled more often.

Well, first off, you want to find your low hanging fruit:  Go to your analytics, research what keywords are currently producing search engine traffic for your site (long tail or otherwise) and what landing pages visitors are arriving to your site on via those keywords. (For example, if you use Google analytics, go to traffic sources|keywords for your list of traffic-producing keywords and then either manually do a search with each keyword to see where your site ranks or drop them into rank tracking software, such as that which is included in WebCEO—which, besides providing ranking info, will also show the landing page for each search, as well.)

Then analyze each keyword’s ranking vs. the optimization of its landing page. For example, if you’re getting some traffic for “distance running training” but your landing page for that keyword ranks in Google in the middle of page two and hasn’t yet been well optimized, then you should expect a decent bang for your buck by spending some time on that page and working to bump it up to page one.  Do this for all of your keywords.

Once you’ve completed all of that, move on to the harder-core tasks of keyword research and content creation.  My keyword research tool of preference is Nichebot because its excel-exportable lists are generated not only with a (very) rough ballpark of daily traffic potential for each keyword but also with a tailorable computation of the amount of competition that exists for each keyword.  Whether you prefer to massage your lists in excel or within NicheBot’s online environment (which is quite robust) it’s easy to sort your columns to view which keywords fall into the sweet spot of less competitors and higher expected traffic.

Then, starting with the most appropriate combinations of keyword relevance, keyword competition, and predicted traffic, start creating content that will support a page focused on each keyword (and maybe a small handful of closely related but secondary keywords or phrases).  When creating your pages, keep in mind your optimization basics: A page name that will get the keyword included in the URL, a short title tag that uses the keyword near the beginning, a description meta tag that broadly and succinctly describes the information on the page, an H1 header near the top of the HTML, and two to four (or more) paragraphs of content that utilize your keyword in a variety of forms, as well as broad spectrum of vocabulary that closely relates to your keyword.

And there you have it.  Before you know it, your site will be all optimized, you’ll have your feet propped up on your desk and your hands clasped comfortably behind your head and you’ll be thinking to yourself “Shoot, if I knew it was going to that easy, I wouldn’t have waited so long to take care of it!

On rare occasions there may be a legitimate reason for a website owner to use such a technique but if search engine rankings and long-term success of domain2.com are of importance to the owner, then it should be approached with caution.

The problem is, spiders see nothing more (and often much less) than your browser does. If the spider sees the content for domain2.com but domain1.com is the address it believes it’s seeing in address window then then what happens when the spider actually arrives directly to domain2.com from some other link on the web? It sees the exact same content on that domain as it saw when it thought it was on domain1.com. So you have duplicate content issues–not an ideal situation for SEO.

The other issue you have is back links.  If people find the content on “domain1.com” interesting they may link to it, which may help it in the rankings. If people find the content on domain2.com interesting, they may link to domain2.com and that may help that site in the rankings. The problem is, your main site is only getting half as many links as it could be if everyone was linking to that one single site. Meanwhile, your competitors with linkable content are getting 100% of their links going to a single domain, giving their one site twice the ranking power of either of your two sites.

I’ll typically advise my clients not to use a strategy of forwarding a visitor in this fashion.  Putting content on single domains tends to be time better spent and when you do have to redirect a visitor, be aware that a 301 redirect is often your best choice.

IIS:   both URLs will get a server response of 200 and google will index both pages as different URLs

Linux: the correct URL will get a 200 and the other will get a 404

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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 during the show between Oilman, Web Guerrilla, 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 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.

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