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Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

At Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization we know that knowledge is power. That's the reason we started this SEO blog. We know that the better informed our visitors are, the better the decisions they will make for their websites and their online businesses. We hope you enjoy your stay and find the SEO news contained within this blog useful.

October 17, 2012

New Webmaster Guidelines Part 2 – Technical Guidelines

This is part 2 of an in depth look at the newly revised Webmaster Guidelines from Google. Google has recently updated their list of best practices and suggestions for site development. To give your site the best chance of ranking well, and to keep a competitive edge, the Google guidelines should be read like the gospel.

• Did you ever wonder how Google processes your site to determine its focus and content? Try using a text-based browser like Lynx to understand what Google is using to interpret your site.

By displaying the page without dynamic elements such as Flash, JavaScript, cookies, sessions IDs or DHMTL, you will gain a keen insight as to what is actually visible to the Google. If there is not enough content to be read, then Google is going to have a difficult time indexing your site and establishing you value in the SERPs

• Allow bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that are designed to track a user activity. Disallow specific URLs that you don’t want crawled in your robots.txt file. Sessions IDs are antiquated and should not be used in any new site development. You can use cookies instead for monitoring site traffic.

• Check to see that your web server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header. This tells Google if your content has changed since it last crawled your site, saving bandwidth and overhead.

• Use the robot.txt file to exclude directories that do not need to be crawled from Google. Keep it updated in your Webmaster Tools account and ensure that you are not blocking Google bot from crawling your site by testing it in Webmaster Tools.

• Keep advertisements (such as Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick) to a minimum and ensure that they are not affecting your rankings by making sure they are excluded in your robots.txt file.

• If you use a content management system (CMS), makes sure that it support seo friendly URL structure and is easily crawled by bots.

• Test you site in several browser’s (IE, FireFox, Chrome, Lynx, Opera, Safari) at different resolutions.

• Use tools to monitor page load speeds. This is becoming an increasingly bigger factor for rankings. Use Google’s Page Speed, or Webmaster Tools Site Performance Tool to gain insights on how to boost you page loads speeds.

SYNOPSIS:

• Make use of the robots.txt file to keep your site accessible to the Google bots
• Block unneeded/irrelevant content from
• Use SEO friendly urls and move away from parameter-based urls
• Monitor your page load speed and take steps to improve it.

SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 12:09 pm

Categories: Google,Google,Rankings,Search Engine News,web design,web hosting
Tags: robots.txt, webmaster guidelines, webmaster tools —

July 5, 2012

Particle Physics and Search Engines

If you’ve been hiding under a rock then you may not have heard the news of the ‘God Particle’ discovery.

As someone who is fairly scientific, I look at this as more of a proof of concept than a discovery, and ‘God’ really needs to give Peter Higgs some credit for his theories.
A proton-proton collision event in the CMS experiment producing two high-energy photons (red towers).

I won’t dwell on the news surrounding the Higgs boson particle confirmation, but there are parallels between objects colliding and revealing previously unseen matters.

When Search Engines Collide

It’s been some time since Bing and Yahoo merged, so the data sets should be the same right?

No. That would really be a wasted opportunity, and Microsoft is clearly smarter than that.

By not merging the search data or algorithms of Bing and Yahoo, Microsoft can now experiment with different updates and ranking philosophies without putting all it’s eggs in one basket.

An active/healthy SEO will be watching the updates to search algorithms from as many perspectives as possible which means a variety of sites on a variety of topics tracked on a variety of search engines.

Say a site gets a ton of extra 301 links from partner sites, and this improves traffic and rankings on Bing, causes a stability of movement on Yahoo, and a drop in traffic on Google?

It’s possible to say that the drop on Google was related to a ton of different factors, untrusted links, link spam, dilution of keyword relevance, keyword anchor text spamming, you name it. This is because Google is always updating and always keeping us on our toes.

Bring on the data..

Lets now take the data from Bing and Yahoo into consideration and look at what we know of recent algo changes on those search engines. This ‘collision’ of data still leaves us with unseen factors but gives us more to go on.

Since Bing has followed Google on some of the recent updates, the upswing on Bing for position of keywords would hint that it’s neither a dilution of relevance or spamming on the keywords/anchor text.

Stability on Yahoo is largely unremarkable if you check the crawl info and cache dates. It’s likely just late to the game and you can’t bet the farm on this info.

What about the other engines? Without paying a penny for the data we can fetch Blekko and DDG(DuckDuckGo) ranking history to see what changes have occurred to rankings on these engines.

Since Blekko is currently well known to be on the warpath for duplicate content, and they are starving for fresh crawl data, a rankings drop on that service can be very informative especially if the data from the other search engines helps to eliminate key ranking factors.

In the case of our current example I’d narrow down the list of ranking factors that changed on the last ‘Penguin’ update and contrast those with the data from the other engines and probably suspect (in this example) that Google is seeing duplicity from the 301s, something Bing wouldn’t yet exhibit, but Blekko would immediately punish as badly or worse than Google.

The next step would be to check for issues of authority for the page content. Is there authorship mark-up and a reciprocal setup on the author’s end that helps establish the trust of the main site content? Does the site have the proper verified entries in Google WMT to pass authority? Barring WMT flags, what about a dynamic canonical tag in the header, even as a test if it’s not already setup?

Start making small changes, watch the results, and be patient. If you’re not gaming Google and you’ve done something accidental to cause a drop in rankings, you need to think your way through the repairs step by step.

It’s not easy to evaluate but the more data you can mash-up, and the better you understand that data, the closer/quicker you can troubleshoot ranking issues and ensure that your efforts are going to be gains.

SEO news blog post by Ryan Morben @ 12:12 pm

Categories: backlinks,Bing,Code Tests,Coding,Google,link building,Rankings,seo articles,SEO Tips,Technology,Yahoo!
Tags: authorship, Blekko, canonical tag, ddg, duck duck go, Higgs Boson, webmaster tools —

February 5, 2007

Google Updates Offerings

Thanks Google – Now I Can See My Backlinks !!!

Only a couple hours later and there’s already an update below.

Well today appears to have been an even bigger day than I first thought. First there was the launch of Yahoo!’s Panama and now I’m reading in Google’s press center that there are some great enhancements over there too.

At 2:44PM Google announced on their blog that they are providing even more information in their Webmaster Tools than previously. We’ve all done the backlink checks with link:www.domain.com only to be disappointed with the resulting list. Google hasn’t shown a full list of backlinks in ages so how were we to know where are backlinks were from and where they were going. Well now we know.

In their Webmaster Tools the fine folks at Google are now showing a full list of the backlinks they know about that point to your domain and even better, they list off all the pages in your site so with a simple click of a button you can see the backlinks to any given page. The reason Google stopped showing the backlinks in full was that this list was too easily manipulated by SEO’s (those crafty buggers but not knowing the status of one’s own site worked against website owners favor. This is a great addition to their tools and wins a BIG THUMBS UP from this SEO. Don’t give my backlink data to my competitors, but thanks for letting me see it. Oh, but if you like you can give theirs to me.

If you haven’t already, create an account at Google’s Webmaster Central. You’ll be glad you did.

And Now, Personalization …

And today I had brought to my attention an interesting page on the Google Search Results help area. A big thanks to Jim Hedger (co-host on Webmaster Radio) for pointing this out to me. The post reads:

When you’re signed in to Google Accounts, you’ll now get more relevant, useful search results, recommendations and other personalized features. For example, if you use Google Bookmarks or Google Search History, you’ll get more targeted web search results and recommendations for videos or gadgets. You can easily access these recommendations by adding the “Interesting Items” gadget directly to your personalized homepage.

And so the lives of SEO’s everywhere gets just a little more complex. Truly personalized results? Now, if you see different results than I do, how exactly is a company like Beanstalk supposed to honor guarantees when what we’re seeing may be different?

Alas, that is our problem to sort out and not yours (how happy are you about that?) but one this is sure, with better, more personalized results being fed, users are sure to win and SEO’s will need to adapt. As I noted to Jim when he asked how it would affect SEO’s, I replied:

“In the long run it will force SEO to do what they SHOULD do. Write compelling content for the target market, push into social media and establish links from industry hubs.”

It might take more to rank sites when the exact variables are so specific to the end user however in the end the big winner is the client (oh, and the searcher). It might make my life a bit more difficult but it makes the industry and search engine stronger, and that can only be a good thing. Unless you’re concerned about Big Brother.

I refound a blog post from none other than Google patent guru Bill Slawski on the subject of personalization. I love patents as much as the next guy but noone can do their analysis justice like Bill so rather than try in vain to capture what he has to say on the subject I’ll just link to his post below. In his work you’ll find great analysis and links to a number of related Google patents that will open your eyes as to what this all means. Thanks Bill and keep up the great work.

You’ll find Bill Slawski’s blog post titled, “Google Personalization Methods” here.

SEO news blog post by Dave Davies, CEO @ 9:07 pm

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: backlinks, google, personalization, webmaster tools —