Notes, Tips, Questions, & Answers...
aka, topics too short for an article, but too important to leave out!
| Question Topics | ||
| Q&A - Will adding more outbound links to my site hurt my rankings? | Q&A - What is the best blogging software for my business? | |
| Q&A - Should I host my company's blog on a subdomain or a subdirectory? | Q&A - Will my rankings suffer if I change my pages from .aspx to .php? | |
| Q&A - What's going on with DMOZ? Are they broken? | Q&A - How concerned should I be with keyword density? | |
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Q&A - Will adding more outbound links to my site hurt my rankings?
Answer: You actually could experience some negative effects if you do this. This would come from diluting the PageRank you're spreading around to your site's internal pages. Let's say you have a PR4 page with 10 links on it, one of which links to another site, and the other 9 which link to pages on your own site (homepage, internal navigation, etc...). In that case, you're sending 90% of the link juice back into your own site, while 10% goes offsite. Now if you add links to that page so that there are now 10 links to another site and 10 pointing to pages on your site, your site is getting just 50% of the linking power of that page returned to it, while the other 50% goes offsite. Generally, this isn't a huge issue, but it is a good idea to be aware of the way PageRank and link popularity are passed around on your site. The more links pointing out from your site, the less those pages are able to help other pages on your site rank well. On a small scale it's not really an issue, since what's most important is the external links you have pointing to your site. However, on a large scale like the one you're mentioning you'll likely be adding many hundreds of outgoing links all at once, so there is the potential for a negative impact on rankings. Don't mistake this advice for saying that you should never link to anyone. "Hoarding" PageRank is not productive. Just be aware that suddenly adding large numbers of outgoing links could effect the power of your internal linking strategy. You might consider implementing this idea on a small scale at first. Outgoing links in themselves are not bad. It's the radical alteration in the way PageRank is distributed on your site that could hurt you. If you do decide to add these outgoing links, be sure to build additional incoming links to your site to help offset any negative impact of adding a large number of outgoing links. 
Q&A - What is the best blogging software for my business?
Answer: Movable Type and WordPress are both great blogging platforms. We use each extensively. SearchEngineNews.com is actually run on a version of Movable Type which we had our programmers modify to work as a content management system. WordPress is nice because it's free and fairly easy to use, plus it comes with a huge number of default templates to allow you to select how you want your blog to look. Movable Type is more complicated and you have to pay for it, but it comes with excellent customer support. In simplest terms: Choose WordPress if you want something that's free and easy to use. Go with Movable Type if access to customer support is more important. Do not go with the hosted versions, however. These include TypePad for Movable Type and the version WordPress hosts on their subdomains (like yourcompany.wordpress.com). You want to install the software on your own server to ensure that you maintain complete control of your blog. This becomes especially important as your blog grows. You don't want to have to deal with moving it to your own server at a later time and have to redirect all your incoming links. Another option is Google's Blogger. This platform used to be quite limited, but has been steadily adding features. Blogger has both a version you host on Google's servers (as a subdomain of blogspot.com) as well as a version that allows you to publish pages directly to your own server. Blogger is extremely easy to use and can be a viable option for business blogging. At this point, however, we still recommend the more robust and flexible Moveable Type or WordPress platforms.
Q&A - Should I host my company's blog on a subdomain or a subdirectory?
Answer: It won't make a difference one way or the other in terms of PageRank. The PageRank of the pages on the blog will depend on what links you have pointing at the blog, not on whether you're using subdirectories or subdomains. Our recommendation when starting a new blog on a site is to go with the subdomain. Google lists subdomains as separate sites in their search results. So if someone does a search for your domain name, they'll see multiple listings from your site, such as: www.xyz.com This allows you to occupy more top spots in the search results. When it comes to things like reputation management, the more top listings you can control on searches for your business or domain name, the better. If your blog is already established on one of your subdirectories, however, you should leave it there, as the ranking headaches involved in moving your blog and changing all your URLs usually outweighs the advantages of having your blog on a subdomain.
Q&A - Will my rankings suffer if I change my pages from .aspx to .php?
Answer: You will hurt your search rankings if you change your URLs - there's no two ways about it. A 301 redirect can be used to minimize the damage, but we typically only recommend changing all of a sites URLs in extreme cases, such as when a site has lost their domain in a copyright dispute and is forced to move to a new one. 301s are the best option if you must change your URLs, but it's always best to avoid changing your URLs at all (unless those URLs have serious problems like too many dynamic variables making it hard for them to get indexed). Anyway, you're not actually moving pages here, just changing extensions, so a 301 redirect is the wrong choice. However, we can see why your programmer would want to change to PHP if that's the language he or she prefers, although we wouldn't say that there's necessarily anything inherently better about PHP over .NET. But you might get more bang for your buck if your web developer is using a programming language they like and are more productive in. One option would be to set up your IIS server so that .aspx pages are processed by your PHP engine (typically php.exe). This a simple tweak in the configuration panel of your IIS server and one that can be easily reversed if you decide you want to go back to .NET. If you take this approach your URLs stay exactly the same (with a .aspx extension)—they'll just be processed by a different programming engine. To sum up:
Q&A - What's going on with DMOZ? Are they broken?
Answer: The servers hosting DMOZ crashed on October 20th, 2006. This led to much of their data being wiped out. What's even worse, it turns out no one was really backing up most of that data on a regular basis. This meant that DMOZ had to be reconstructed from various sources like their RDF file used by various DMOZ clones such as Google Directory. Even though the contents of DMOZ were restored after a few weeks, the panel editors used to edit their categories still needed work, so most editors were prevented from logging in until a few days ago. Thus new submissions weren't being accepted. DMOZ is back up and running at full force on a new set of servers, and they appear to have learned their lesson about regular backups. However, you should be aware that most sites that were submitted but not yet reviewed have been wiped out. It appears that data is unrecoverable. So if you've submitted in the past and haven't been listed yet, be aware that your site is probably no longer on the waiting list since the waiting list was deleted. This means you should resubmit your site if you want to get listed.
Q&A - How concerned should I be with keyword density?
Answer: We don't spend a lot of time on keyword density because it gets overshadowed by more important ranking factors like quality of incoming links and the trust your site has established by being older and having the right incoming links. However, keyword density can still play a role, particularly with Yahoo, which is more focused on on-page factors than Google or Microsoft. We generally focus on getting our keywords in the right locations on the page: titles, header tags, internal link anchor text, lists, image alt text (particularly important if the image is also a link), and the actual text of the page. We break down where you should be putting your keywords in the following report: A Top-Down Approach To Designing High-Ranking Web Pages Once we have our keywords in the right locations, we try to write as naturally as possible while keeping an eye towards incorporating the keywords we want to rank for. Focusing too much on keyword density results in awkward-reading text, while writing naturally tends to incorporate the keyword variations and modifiers that both help a page rank for a greater range of keywords as well as looking more natural to search engines. By the way, this topic touches on the concept of latent semantic indexing and how it's used by search engines. Latent semantic indexing is essentially a technology that allows search engines to determine what keyword a page should rank for even if that keyword isn't found anywhere on the page (or in the anchor text of the links pointing at that page). For instance, a page which contains words like laptop, monitor, keyboard, hardware, compaq, hp, and pc is probably about computers, even if the actual keyword computer doesn't appear anywhere on the page itself. By using related keywords and variations of a keyword (like computers or computing) you reinforce your primary keyword and increase your ability to rank for it. And, of course, you also boost your page's ranking for those related keywords. Here's a few good resources for finding related keywords:
We also cover latent semantic indexing here . Keyword density still plays a role but it's no longer as simple as just using a keyword 4% of the time on a given page. It's now much more about getting the right links, getting your keywords in the anchor text of those links, making your site easily crawlable, putting your keywords in the right places on your page, and writing in a natural-looking way that uses related keywords that reinforce your primary keyword. | ||
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