Expert Answers to Hot Topic SEO Questions
| 5 top SEO strategies for maximizing the effectiveness of your inbound anchor text. | Guidelines for minimizing duplicate content when linking your internal pages together. | |
| Will Google penalize me for the legitimate use of CSS to hide content? | The most common mistakes SEOs make when creating a flat directory structure. | |
| How to shrink your .htaccess file for improved website performance. | What to do when you lose your domain name in a copyright battle. | |
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5 top SEO strategies for maximizing the effectiveness of your inbound anchor text.
Answer: The anchor text of your links will contribute to your rankings for every word they contain, but the effect will generally be the most pronounced for the complete phrase. So the phase how to lose weight quickly will boost your page's rankings for...
...among many other combinations. But the biggest boost will be for the complete phrase how to lose weight quickly. The complete phrase is also generally less likely to face as much competition as a shorter phrase, so you'll naturally rank for that quicker. Thus, the phrase how to lose weight quickly will allow you to target all the phrases you mentioned in your question, but that doesn't mean it's the only anchor text you should use. Other keywords might be much more effective at driving traffic and conversions. You should determine which your most important phrase is based on...
Then develop a strategy to make sure your best links target that keyword. While your site is likely to have many inbound links, in most cases you'll have a smaller number of links that are of sufficiently strong authority and high-PageRank that will be responsible for the lion's share of your rank. On those high-PageRank, authoritative links you ideally want to hit your most important keyword phrase exactly. Usually that's also your shortest and most competitive phrase, in your case lose weight quickly. On those less-important pages linking to you, mix it up a bit with phrases like how to lose weight quickly, fastest ways to lose weight, weight loss tips, and similar keyword phrases. This helps you rank for related secondary phrases, reinforces the keywords in the primary keyword phrases, and makes your incoming link profile look more natural and varied to the search engines. Additionally, with the goal of keeping your links natural looking, you'll also want to have links that don't appear to have their anchor text targeted specially towards helping your page rank. It's a good idea to throw a few links in there without targeted anchor text, such as:
This will keep your link profile natural looking, and it won't look like you're trying too hard to manipulate your links to target a specific keyword phrase. But be sure to hit those important phrases on your most authoritative and influential inbound links if at all possible. It's also important to realize that anchor text as a ranking factor has been severely abused in the past, leading search engines to add other factors into the mix, such as the overall authority of the links pointing at your site. So an authoritative link with worthless anchor text is still going to be worth more than a highly-targeted anchor text link from a low-quality site. While getting your best anchor text in your best links is ideal, it's not always possible. One alternative strategy we've used with success is to get a few high-quality, authoritative links to boost a site's reputation and put it firmly on the positive side of the spam mass equation, then employing lower-quality-but-easier-to-get links (such as a few reciprocals, press releases, syndicated articles, etc...) to beef up the anchor text we wanted. To sum up, here's our five rules for link anchor text:
Those methods work very well for us in the projects we work on, and they should work well for you too. 
Guidelines for minimizing duplicate content when linking your internal pages together.
Answer: You should always be consistent in how you link your own pages together and use the same URL format every time. For example, if you have a page on your site such as: http://www.searchenginetips.com/seo/index.html It's possible to link to that page from your own site in the following ways: http://www.searchenginetips.com/seo/index.html And there's even more possible combinations than that. Often, webmasters are sloppy and will use various combinations of these URLs when linking to the same page from within their site. If you don't use a consistent format when linking your pages together, you create confusion amongst the search engines regarding which is the proper URL for the page. In the worst case, the search engine can index the page under multiple URLs, identify them as the same page, then dump the page into the supplemental index because of duplicate content. Make things easier on the search engine and protect your pages from being de-indexed by always linking to them using a standard URL format. Our preferred approach is to use a 301 redirect to make sure only the www or non-www version of the site gets displayed, and to always use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. Absolute URLs utilize the entire URL string, including the http://, whereas relative URLs just use the path needed to find the page on the server. So an absolute URL looks like: http://www.searchenginetips.com/seo/index.html ...while a relative URL looks like: seo/index.html In our experience absolute URLs are a better idea because they don't force the search spider to calculate the rest of the URL string themselves. Also, if someone scrapes your content, at least the absolute URL means they link back to you. However, it's really a matter of personal preference, and using absolute URLs instead of relative URLs isn't strictly necessary. But being consistent in how you link your pages together is absolutely essential. Incidentally, if you are selling a product through affiliates and have inbound affiliate URLs where each affiliate links to the same page with their affiliate tracking code attached, such as: http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate-landing-page?affid=1289 http://www.yoursite.com/affiliate-landing-page?affid=4235 ... ...that's going to cause a similar duplicate content problem in the engines, as they'll be indexing the same page under multiple URLs. Fortunately, that problem can be easily solved with a 301 redirect, as we cover in our guide to se-friendly affiliate links.
Will Google penalize me for the legitimate use of CSS to hide content?
Answer: The possibility of being banned for legitimate use of hidden div or other CSS techniques is extremely small. Google's own Matt Cutts has stated that Google can generally spot this and similar uses of CSS, but he also said that Google doesn't penalize or ban for it unless it's deliberately being used to deceive search engines. You'd only have a problem if you were doing things like stuffing keywords in ways that you don't want your users to see. For example, take a look at Multichannel Merchant. Notice the navigation menu at the top of the page (print channel, web channel, etc...). You'll see how different sublinks pop-up under each when you mouse over them. If you analyze their CSS file, you can see they use css display: none to get that effect . You can see that Multichannel Merchant sports a PageRank 6 homepage and is well indexed and ranked. So this is certainly evidence that using display: none in your CSS source code won't hurt you. However, there's still some potential problems with the hidden div. First, Google tries to detect and penalize spam algorithmically whenever possible rather than rely on a manual review of the page. So, while you are unlikely to ever be banned for a legitimate hidden div, Google will still note it and (since hidden divs have created so many spam problems in past) that div may provide one small checkmark against your site that could suppress your rankings ever so slightly. In a hyper-competitive market (like personal finance, for example) where every little bit helps, you'd want to avoid anything that could be a possible negative, however small. However, in less competitive industries where many competitors are not heavily optimizing their pages it won't make a big difference, particularly if your site is not engaged in anything else that Google would consider remotely questionable. A more important problem could evolve if Google decided not to index hidden divs anymore because of over-abuse by spammers. In other words, no penalty would be applied — Google would just choose to ignore content in hidden divs. So far, this hasn't been the case and we currently see them indexing text in hidden divs. But if that were to change and your menus were in hidden divs, then Google would have a very hard time crawling and indexing your site. One possibility is that you could use JavaScript to get a similar effect with your menus. However, you again run into the issue of Google not being able to crawl those links (or crawl them poorly at best) so that's not a good solution. Also, JavaScript links lead to very poor accessibility, something that would limit the number of people who could use your site. As huge numbers of baby boomers in the US get older, making sure your site is accessible to people with low vision is increasingly important to your bottom line. Although avoiding hidden divs would be ideal, we really don't think you'll have a problem. If you're in a position where you're really battling it out with some highly optimized or very authoritative competitor and every little bit counts, you might want to reconsider. But most sites should be able to achieve their ranking goals with good on-page keyword placement and relevant links, and the legitimate hidden div shouldn't impact you.
The most common mistakes SEOs make when creating a flat directory structure.
Answer: You're correct that a flat site architecture is important. However, how you structure your directory tree (i.e. your folders) is not especially important, but how you structure your internal linking is. To elaborate, your directory tree is how you structure your site on your server; i.e. what folders you decide to put your pages in. Let's take a site selling pet supplies. If you have a page about cat beds, you might create a directory called cats in your root level directory, then another subdirectory within it called beds. Thus, your cat beds page is 3 directory levels deep. This directory structure also impacts the structure of your URLs. In the example above, your cat beds page would end up with a URL like: http://www.perfectpetgear.com/cats/beds/cat-beds.html While it's best not to go too deep with your directory levels (don't go any deeper than you need to, 3 or 4 at most is generally best), search engines will crawl and rank pages several directories deep as long as they have links pointing to them. That's why, when we talk about having a flat site architecture, we're really talking about the number of links a spider has to follow from your homepage (or from any other page on your site) to the page in question, not how many directory levels deep it is. If you linked to the above page from your homepage, then that page is only one click deep, even though it's three directory levels deep. The ideal rule is that a search spider should not have to click more than three times to find any page on your site. That's where a site map comes into play. If you link to your sitemap from every page on your site, then no page should ever be more than two clicks away from any other page. For a large site, you might have every page link to a page that links to several sitemaps (a sitemap of sitemaps). Then in that case, no page would ever be more than three clicks away from any other page. For more on sitemaps, see What's the advantage of a Google Sitemap over a regular HTML sitemap, as well as Chapter Two of our Unfair Advantage Book on Winning the Search Engine Wars. Many SEOs think they need to cram as much of their site into the first directory level or two in order to create a flat site, but that's not the correct approach. It doesn't hurt from a search engine perspective, but it can make the site very hard to organize and manage. While it's best not to go too deep in your directory levels, what's really important is that search engines shouldn't have to click too many times in order to find all your content. A sitemap solves that problem quite nicely.
How to shrink your .htaccess file for improved website performance.
Answer: Very large .htaccess files can slow down sites, but they generally need to be quite big before they create a problem. We've got a site that has a about a hundred lines in its .htaccess file and it isn't creating any performance problems. However, if you're looking at a 1000 lines or more you're likely to take a performance hit, since that .htaccess file is going to need to be processed every time one of your pages is loaded. You can break that .htaccess file apart into different pieces if you have sections that only pertain to certain directories. Each directory can have its own .htaccess file, so if some of your commands are specific to a certain directory then you may be able to move relevant .htaccess commands there. Also, you might incorporate regular expression pattern matching into some of those lines, so that a single line can deal with multiple types of URLs. However, those regular expressions can involve a fair amount of processing themselves, so that's not a perfect solution. If your .htaccess file is getting too big, our advice is to move parts of it into the relevant subdirectories.
What to do when you lose your domain name in a copyright battle.
Answer: First of all, we're not lawyers so don't take this as legal advice, but it appears it's the domain name that's the issue, not the site itself. So you don't need to actually change or move the site. You just point another domain name at it and change any text and graphics that are necessary to comply with the legal aspects. Ideally you don't want to lose your inbound links that you have pointing to the old domain, or the PageRank and trust associated with that older domain. For argument's sake, let's assume she's going to lose, as she's a small company going against a much larger one. In that situation we would start now and point a new domain at the current website, leaving everything as it is on the site where possible. Avoid changing content for now. You just need to 301 redirect the old domain to the new one, as we discuss in our report on Managing Your Internet Traffic Funnel Making this change now before you have to change the content on the site will likely transfer much of your PageRank, backlinks and trust over to the new domain cleanly. If you wait to both redirect the site and change the content at the same time, that might trigger Google to lose trust in the site and rankings may fall for a long period.That's because doing both at the same time could make it appear that you've sold the domain to a new owner, so search engines would wipe the PageRank and backlinks clean and start fresh. Redirecting without changing the content is more likely going to appear to search engines as just a domain name change, so they'll leave most rankings intact. After the new domain name is up and running and the 301 redirect from the old domain is in place, we would start getting your most important inbound links switched over to the new domain before the other company takes that old domain over. If she wins the case, then she can either choose to keep the site on the new domain, or she can switch the redirect around and point the new domain back at the old domain. Either way, she's going to likely suffer a month or two of disrupted traffic while the engines figure out where to index her site. Once they do, traffic should return to its previous levels (excluding any issues involved with what the new domain name is keyword-wise). If she loses the case, then she's done just about everything she can in advance to minimize her loss. Not taking action now and waiting until a decision is made would not give her the opportunity to use the 301 redirect and she will definitely have a ranking problem till she rebuilds all her inbound links and the trust the engines have given to her older domain. It's a big difference. You might have her mention to her lawyer that losing her domain is going to be a major traffic loss and it will take some time to rebuild that traffic. Perhaps some kind of agreement could be worked out where she turns the domain over to them in one year's time. The longer she has to update the links to her new site and has that redirect in place the better. One year should be enough for her to be able to recover most of her links and point them to the new domain name, which the engines will likely accept with as much trust as they had in the old domain name. Note that we're proposing a strategy to make the best out of the situation should she lose the case, which (given conditions) might be the most likely outcome. Essentially, the scenario we're laying out is the same for any site changing their domain name. If you wait till after the court case is lost, you're going to lose some of the opportunity to save the links. Then you'll be starting over from scratch with a new domain and no links at all. Changing the domain name now to the new one at least gives you some time to salvage the links to the site, get the inbound links updated and it tells the search engine that they are looking at the same company as before. Doing all this before you have to change the site content will help keep the site ranking. Truth is: there's no perfect solution here; these changes are more than likely going to hurt traffic short term. What we're proposing is the lesser of two possible bad situations should she lose. If she wins the case then this is certainly a lot of work and possible traffic interruption for nothing. It all hinges on how likely she is to win or lose the case and then moving forward with what will have the least negative impact on her rankings and sales. Personally we would prefer to do it in a managed way now versus getting a court order to release the domain name to the other company and be left sitting there with no ability to move PageRank, backlinks and established trust over to the new domain. Good luck with the case. We hope it works out for your friend. | ||
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