Tag Archives: Search Engine

How To Make Your Blogger Blog More Searchable?

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Question

I am a blogger for a year already. But my blog is just hosted for free by blogger.com. I wanted to shift to WordPress self-hosted blog but I don’t have the money to be spent for the webhosting plan and domain.

For a year of blogging a blogger blog, I realized that it’s really hard to optimize it although I admit that there are many blogger.com blogger who succeed in blogging.

Now, my question is, how can I make my blogger blog more searchable? I got this question because I noticed that I couldn’t find my own blog from the search engine especially Google.

Answer

If you really want to make your blog searchable through the search engine, especially Google (googleable), then you need to optimize your blog so that it will be in accordance to Google’s Webmasters quality guidelines.

This is the reason why a blogger should learn the SEO or Search Engine Optimization. I already wrote articles related to this. Read my post, “What is SEO?” and then follow the links from that post and try to learn something from the articles.

Anyway, since you’re asking me tips on how to make your blogger blog more searchable, here’s my few cents:

1. Make the Search Engine (Google in particular) Trust Your Blog

Google loves a website that provides quality content. And it even loves more a website that frequently released quality content.

So, what you need to do are:

  • Write quality articles. When I say quality article, it’s an article that contains useful and helpful information and is targeting the human reader not the bot readers.
  • Frequently Write Articles. Tell Google that you are frequently publishing articles into your blog by doing it. If you can publish one quality article a day, then it would be better. If not, then why not publish article 3 times a week.
  • Gain positive reputation. Google consider the backlinks to your blog as votes. But the backlinks your blog should get, are not just be backlinks but natural (based on Google’s definition) backlinks or quality and relevant links from other quality and relevant blogs or websites. The more backlinks your blog has, the higher is its reputation. And the higher your blog’s reputation is, the more Google will trust your blog.

2. On-Site SEO

Now, once Google learn to frequently visit your blog, the next thing you must do is to apply the “On-Site SEO“.

  • Make sure that the important keywords of every post you have are present in the Title. Remember that the Title of your post is automatically the title of the webpage of that post and at the same time the title is included on the URL of that post. But of course, it is true if you are using the templates made available by Blogger.Com. If you are using a template made by someone else, then make sure that the header section of the template contains the code: <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
  • Make sure that you mention the important keywords in your blogpost’s content.
  • Use header tags.  Header tags are H1, H2, H3, etc. Make use of this. However, for you to be able to insert these tags, you need to shift to “EDIT HTML”. First you need to divide your article into sections and then use the header tags to the title of every section. For example: The first part of the section is the introduction and its title is Introduction. While you are in the “EDIT HTML” view, insert the <h2> before the word “Introduction” and then the closing h2 tag which is </h2> will be placed right after the word “Introduction”. By doing so, the word Introduction will be in BOLD and bigger in size.
  • Use the ALT tag for the images embedded on your blogpost.
  • Link to your own posts using the descriptive anchor texts. If you are linking to a post within your blog that talks about making money online, then you can use the keywords like “Make Money Online“, “Making Money Online” or any words or phrase that best describe the post as the anchor texts in linking to that post.

Just try the tips I gave you and see for the result.

How to Make Your Link-Building Campaign Natural?

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We all know that “link building” is one of the techniques in the field of the Search Engine Optimization. I consider it actually the most effective SEO technique in getting the top rank at a SERP of a particular and targeted search.

But most of the SEOptimizers who understand the power of link building abuse it. They try to manipulate the search engine result ranking by doing the three  popular SEO techniques. Google hates backlinks through these techniques which are:

  1. Link Buying. Lots of bloggers, or webmasters buy links directly from other websites. These links do not wear link-condoms which is the “nofollow” tag. Other bloggers and webmasters use the middle man (broker like TLA, etc.) in getting link.
  2. Exchange linking. This is the most common thing that bloggers and webmasters do. They find prospect websites for the exchange linking and then they establish links from their websites or blogs to the target website, then ask the owner of the target website to link back to their websites or blogs.
  3. Link Farming. Those who couldn’t afford to buy links and don’t have the ability to ask other bloggers and webmasters for an exchange linking tend to link-farm. They create a fake network of blogs from a free-blogging service like that of Blogger.com, WordPress.com, i.ph and similar service. Then from that fake network, they establish links to the target website.

But the algo of the search engines, especially Google, was modified so that those blogs and websites that are caught manipulating the search engine result ranking will be penalized, if not, they will never gain page rank points from the links detected as the result of manipulation.

However, SEO found a solution to this new change in search engine algo. They still use the three SEO techniques mentioned above in getting more backlinks for the websites and blogs they’re optimizing without being detected by the search engine, thus avoiding the penalty. They called it as “building links with natural profile.”

How can you build natural-profiled links?

Backlink is one of the criteria used by Google in ranking websites at the search engine result pages. It is considered as votes of other websites to your blog. The more votes your blog got, the higher is your blog’s ranking at the SERP in a particular search.

However, not all backlinks are considered by Google as valid votes to your blog or website. Only the “natural links” are accepted by Google.

Talking about Natural Links… Well, each of one of us has our own definition of the term “natural links”. You can define it as the links from other websites that are made by the websites’ authors not by the computer program. You can even consider the backlinks your blog got from the three techniques in building backlinks mentioned above as natural as long as those links are established by human not by bots.

However, Google and other search engine have their own definition to the term “natural links”.  Since we want Google and other search engines to rank our blogs high up the SERP, then we need to forget our own definition of that term and consider just the definition that the search engine give to that term.

For Google, “natural links” are links given by site’s owner to your blog or website not because they are paid to link to you or just requested to link back but because your blog is linkable. Your blog can be linkable if your blog has the authority over the topic.

For example… If an article of your blog talks about “How to Make Money Online by Blogging” and it really contains the information that everybody need to know, including techniques on how to do it and proofs that your techniques really work… then other bloggers will tend to talk about you at their own blog with links back to your blog.

This kind of links is considered as the best link. And according to Matt Cutts, best links are earned and given by choice.

However, getting a natural links is much difficult to obtain especially if you only have a limited knowledge in link-baiting or in writing articles with high authority. And because of that, you’ve got no choice but to do the link-exchange and other possible methods of getting links back to your blog.

So, to avoid getting any problems with the search engines and at the same time enjoying the benefits of the back-links that your blog got, you now need make your campaign looks natural in the eyes of the search engines.

Here’s how:

  1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Get backlinks from different blogs and websites with different PR rating but are relevant to the target webpage.
    Well, it might be true that backlinks from a high PR domain has the higher PR value for your targeted webpage, but getting tens or hundreds of backlinks from high PR websites will only raise the red flag.
    So to stay at the safe side, you better get back-links for your target webpage from websites, regardless of the domain’s PR rating, as long as the content is relevant to the target webpage.
  2. Vary the anchor text. If I can get hundreds of backlinks to this blog with the anchor text “Make Money Online by Blogging” from different websites or blogs with different PR rating but are relevant to this blog, then I’m sure that this blog will stay on the top position of the SERP when searching “Make Money Online by Blogging”.
    However, having that huge number of backlinks with just one kind of anchor text will just raise again the red flag that might result to a search engine penalty.
    To stay on the safer side, you better vary the anchor text when linking back to the blog.
    For example, I can link back to this blog with the anchor texts: “SELaplana“, “Selboy“, “visit here“, “check the website“, “Earn Money Online“, “Make Money Online“, “Online Money Blogging“, “Make Money Online Through Blogging“, etc.
  3. Build the backlinks over time. Just like what they’re always saying, “don’t go out and do all possible things at once for it might ruin you. Do the things as what you have planned and scheduled.“

While you can make your link-building campaign looks natural in the eyes of the search engine, but it is better if you will try to earn “natural links” through link-baiting and by writing quality and with authority articles.

Why Does Google Deindexed Some Webpages of my Blog?

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Checking the number of webpages of this blog that are indexed by Google is one of my daily activities. It’s like I’m already addicted on seeing the result when “site:”- searching Google. And I am really happy upon learning that there are more or less 11,000 webpages of this blog, “I Make Money by Blogging” that are already indexed by Google.

You know, I am always working hard so that Google will index every webpage of this blog. And having more than a ten thousand of webpages that are already indexed by Google is quite a success.

But why am I doing this? Why am I trying to let Google index every webpage of this blog?

I’ve been thinking these past days and I realized that the more webpages of this blog are indexed by Google, the more chances that my blog has to top the SERP of Google.

Just imagine if your blog has 100 posts but only 10 of them are indexed by Google. This only means that only 10 posts of your blog have the capability to bring traffic into your blog from the Google SERPs and the other 90 posts are useless.

Now, what if all the 100 posts of your blog are indexed? If your blog’s 10 posts bring 1000 visitors into your blog from the Google SERP, then how much more if all the 100 posts are indexed by Google?

Getting high ranking in SERP of Google is really a competition between webpages of the indexed blogs and websites. And I understand that those webpages that are better SEOed are the ones that will be ranked at top position of the SERP.

To let you know, I targeted a lot of keywords that have large volume of searches. At first I successfully got the top position of the SERP of Google, but as time goes by the competition in getting the top SERP is also getting higher and my blogposts failed to stay on the top position of the SERP.

I haven’t lost hope. I continue SEOing those important posts hoping that one day, they will be ranked high up of the SERP again.

Webpages are deindexed by Google

But the problem is, as I am doing the SEO, other webpages of the blog are being dropped by Google from its index.

There were times that Google revealed that there were 12,000 webpages of the blog that are already in the index. However, this June 2009 I noticed that there were only more or less 8,000 pages of this blog that remained in the Google index.

SEO experts suggested that the possible causes why Google deindex webpages are:

  1. Duplicate content within the blog. Google found several pages and indexed them even if in reality those pages were just duplicate contents. That’s the reason why the number of webpages in the index was high. But after Google realized that those are duplicate content, Google immediately dropped those pages from the index.
  2. Google Penalty. SEOing a certain webpage should be done in moderation because over-SEOing them will only lead to deindexing of the affected webpages, or the entire website or blog.
  3. Google consider those pages untrusted. There are lots of websites and blogs out there that contains malicious codes in which everytime you visit one of them, the code is automatically downloaded and installed into your computer. There are other websites and blogs that are used by blackhat SEOptimizer in linkfarming for their websites being optimized.
    Now, if one of the webpages of your blog looks similar to the mentioned websites, then there is a possibility that Google will deindex the webpages of your blog, or the entire website or blog.
  4. Server problem. Some experts said that when Google tried to access a certain webpages of your blog but then failed to access them because of server problem, those webpages will be dropped from the index and consider them “unreachable”.
    This is what I actually noticed too.
    In the Google Webmasters tools, webpages of my blog that are included on the “Unreachable” section are not also included on the index.

Now, our problem is how could we avoided the deindexing process of Google? And how could we made Google index all the the webpages of our blog or website?

Here’s what we need to do:

  1. Install a sitemap into your site and make use of the Google Webmaster’s tools. Errors in indexing webpages of your blog are reported once Google finds them, so it can help you a lot in fixing the problems.
  2. Make your content unique even if the topic you’re talking in every webpages of your blog is common. The title and meta tags of every webpage should be unique too. This is to avoid being considered by Google as duplicate contents.
  3. Avoid being penalized by Google. Make your own linking strategy natural and don’t over SEO your blog. You’ll never succeed in blogging and making money online once your blog is penalized already by a search engine, except of course if you can duplicate the ability of John Chow.
  4. Get more quality backlinks and avoid getting links from a linkfarm. Getting backlinks from a relevant webpage and from a high PR domain is considered the best thing for a blog. But links from a link -farm will only harm your blog.
  5. Find a better webhost which will host your blog. This is to make sure that every time Google visits your blog and every webpage of your blog, Google can access them, and avoiding the possibility that any webpages of your blog will be included on the “Unreachable” pages.

I think, these five steps can help us a lot so that Google will index 1,000% of the total webpages of our blog. If that happens, then I’m pretty sure that our blog’s webpages will have a better chance in ranking well at the Google SERP in various searches.

And just like what I am always saying… the more webpages of your blog that are ranked well on Google SERP, the more visitors your blog will get…. the more income you’ll gain from your blog.

Yahoo! Abandons Its Search Engine for Bing

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Finally, Yahoo surrendered and abandoned its own search engine for the newly revamped search engine of Microsoft, “Bing”.

The deal between Yahoo and Microsoft that was announced last Wednesday, signaled the change in the search engine market.

Prior to the deal, Yahoo had 30 percent of US users, while Bing had only more or less 10 percent and the other part was almost owned by Google. But with this deal, it seems that Yahoo’s market share will fell to zero percent while that of Microsoft’s Bing will jump up to 30%.

What’s with the deal?

Well… According to the report, Microsoft will now power Yahoo’s searches with its new revamped search engine called “Bing”. Then Yahoo’s obligation is to monetize the searches.

Actually, I am currently wondering if it’s a good deal to Yahoo!. For me the better deal was when Microsoft offered Billions of money for the ownership of the entire Yahoo company or part of it.

Google Still Better than Bing

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Since the launching of Microsoft’s Bing on June 2009, its market share in the US is continuously increasing.

According to the reports, Bing initially got 7.81% market share in the US and it increases to 8.23%. And many techy people who are observing the trend believed that it will be stealing more market shares from Google, especially that Bing started to include the tweets on its search results.

However, when Michael Jackson died, Bing users started to learn the failures of Microsoft’s Bing. Bing just couldn’t cope with the demands of its users on the fresh news updates through its search results.

Bing’s Jacquelyn Krones stated that, “By most reports, Bing did not deliver the best experience for our customers soon after TMZ posted the news on their blog, …As Search Engine Journal pointed out, we had the story but it was hidden at the bottom of the main page and even deeper in our xRank result.“

How to Decrease your Blog’s Bounce Rate?

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Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of the number of single-visit in your site.

For example, if there are 100 visitors visit your site, and 80 of them leave the site without visiting other pages of that site, then the bounce rate is 80%.

The process can be expressed mathematically as:

Bounce rate = [ (no. of single visit) / (no. of total visit) ] x100

To make it clearer, bounce means the visitors exit the site from the landing page or entrance page itself. If the visitor visit the homepage of this blog and leaves the blog from this page without visiting other pages, then it is already a bounce.

There are actually several ways of leaving your blog that are considered as bounces. Few of these are:

  • If your visitors leave your blog through the link from within your blog to the other blogs. For example the visitors click the links in your blogroll listed at the sidebar, or the links within the article to the other blogs or websites that are used as references.
  • If your visitors leave your blog through the Adsense ads or any other ads displayed on your blog.
  • If your visitors leave your blog by closing the tab or the browser’s window.
  • If your visitors leave your blog by clicking the “Back” button of your browser.
  • If the visitors open a new website by typing the new URL.
  • If your visitors do nothing after landing on your blog. What I mean is that, your blog is opened for a long time.

But what does high bounce rate of my blog really mean to me?

Actually, having a high bounce rate means two things: Either you failed or you succeed. Whether having high bounce rate is good or not depends on your goal in blogging at a particular blog. For example:

  1. If your blog is made for Adsense, having high bounce rate means two things: (1) your visitors click the Adsense ads; (2) your visitors leave your blog immediately after knowing that your blog is just made for Adsense.
  2. If your blog is a marketing type, having high bounce rate means two things again: (1) maybe your visitors clicked the ads on your blog; (2) maybe your visitors were not interested in the content of the landing page.
  3. If your blog has only 1 post, then you’ll be expecting that your blog has high bounce rate, from 80% to 100%. It’s because there’s no other post that your visitors could visit.

Bounce Rate and the SERP

It might be advantageous to you if your blog has high bounce rate especially if the visitors of your blog leave your blog by passing through the Adsense ads because it could mean huge Adsense income for you.

However, bounce rate is already considered by Google as a measure of quality visit and that the high bounce rate indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. And there was an speculations from SEO experts that bounce rate could greatly affect your blog’s ranking on the SERP.

What I mean is that if your blog has high bounce rate, especially in a certain googling or searching, your blog will be outranked by those blogs or websites or webpages that has low bounce rate.

It happens because the main goal of the search engines is to serve the internet users with the relevant search engine result. And one factor considered by the search engine in learning whether your blog is relevant to that certain googling or searching is the bounce rate.

So, how can you decrease the bounce rate of your blog?

Few of the ways that might decrease the bounce rate of your blog are:

  1. Make your blog user friendly. Your blog should be clean, orderly and appealing to the visitors. The text should be readable and the downloading should be fast.
  2. Write Quality and Relevant Contents. The articles published at your blog should be interesting and useful. Give your visitors the reason to stay longer at your blog.
  3. Inter- linking articles. Offer your visitors more articles to read that are relevant to the landing page. This can be done by
    (1) linking to the other articles by using the relevant keywords within the article;
    (2) by listing few related articles at the bottom of the article.
  4. Proper SEO. In optimizing your blog or every pages of your blog for the search engines, you need to target the keywords that are relevant to the page being optimized.
    For example, if your targeting the “Pinay Scandal” keyword, make sure that the landing page contains relevant content because if the content is not related to the keywords used to find a page of your blog, mostlikely your visitors will immediately click the “Back” button of the browser to check for another websites listed at the SERP.
  5. Brother Mapiles added this: Make at least two parts for a long post. I usually do this to get at least two page visits on my post. I don’t put everything in one page. If I’m posting series of videos, the next videos could be found on the other page.

Other articles:

Why You Need to Gain Loyal Readers for Your Blog?

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Loyal Readers vs Strangers

I was talking to a new blogger and asked him, which of the two: loyal reader and stranger; is important for him.

The Loyal readers are those who subscribed your feed or those who frequently visit your blog. While “Strangers” are those visitors who came from the search engine result pages or from any other sources and they don’t have plan on visiting your blog again.

For this new blogger, the important visitors of his blog are those strangers because according to him, these kind of visitors are the ones who would likely click on the ads displayed on his blog.

His thought is actually similar to the comment posted by Rich at my article,
“Making first time visitors to revisit your blog“:

This is an Interesting post. However, one must not forget that

first time

visitors who do not return to our blogs are also fine if the blogger is making money from Google Adsense. This is because these

first time

visitors came more or less from search engines and are looking for something to buy, and therefore will click the ads.

Returning

visitors are more important if you are into affiliate marketing, selling ad space, or building an email list. Otherwise, you can hardly make money from them immediately. Readers love to read, leave comments, and follow the blog. But they don’t want to buy or click ads. Most of them may even leave you if they learned that you are selling them a product.

But my way of thinking is a little bit different, although I believe that the idea of Rich contained on that comment is true. For me, loyal readers and strangers are both important and equally important. But, it would be better if you target first the loyal readers.

Why?

Targeting Loyal Readers

To let you know, everytime new bloggers asked me advices on how to blog, I always told them these things:

  1. Blog on the topic you are passionate of. You can write more articles (quality contents) related to your blog’s niche if you have passion on that topic.
  2. Don’t just blog because you want to earn money from it. Blog because you want to share your knowledge and expertise to others. In doing so, you’ll never lose your interest in blogging.

And these things will lead you to aim on gaining more loyal readers.

I am not saying that you should not target visitors coming from the search engines. Actually you should target them too because just like what Rich had said, visitors coming from the search engines result pages (SERP) are those who would likely click the ads, thus giving you the chance to earn more from the ads.

What I am actually trying to point out is that target first the loyal readers. I already told you how to target loyal readers in my article, “how to make your first time visitors return to your blog“. Actually, there is only one way, that is to write more interesting and useful (helpful) articles.

Now, why should you aim first to gain more loyal readers for your blog?

Well, it’s because these loyal readers will tell you what to write for your blog. Based on my experience here on this blog, “SELaplana“, loyal readers tend to react on what you are telling them on your articles by replying the copy of the article they received at their email or feed readers, or by dropping their comments at the comment section of the live version of your article.

From their emails or comments, you can picked ideas on what to write for your next article. So, you’ll never lose ideas on what to write.

And then, for sure, search engines will spider the articles you published at your blog. By the power of the SEO you applied into your articles (or blog in general), some of your articles will be listed at the top position of the search engine result. This also means that your blog will gain more visitors coming from the search engines. These visitors might not be loyal to you but at least most of them will give you the chance to earn lots of money from the ads displayed on your blog.

But that’s not the only things you’ll get from loyal readers.

More Advantages of Loyal Readers

1) Earn Money through your loyal readers

Just like what Rich had said on his comment, you can make money through your loyal readers by selling them products, and services.

But did you know that you can also earn money from the ads through your loyal readers?

It might be true that most of them are ad blind, but it is also true that some of them are not and are actually visiting the advertised products or websites that interest them.

To let you know, this blog is also earning from the Adsense embedded on the feeds of it (Adsense for Feeds).

2) Loyal Readers Keep Your Blog Alive

I frequently tell my readers that traffic is the life of their blog. Without traffic their blog is dead.

So, while you are still optimizing your blog for the search engine and there is no visitors yet coming from the search engines, your loyal readers will keep your blog alive.

3) Loyal Readers will make you popular

I don’t know if you’ll agree that: The visitors that I considered as strangers will just make you rich through the ads displayed on your blog. But your blog’s loyal readers will make you popular.

How?

Well, for sure, some of your loyal readers are bloggers also. There will be times that they will talk about you at their own blogs. Then they will establish link from their blogs to your blog or to the particular article of your blog.

And didn’t I tell your that popular bloggers are the ones who became more popular?

Finale

That’s the reason why I am  always aiming to gain more loyal readers of this blog. If you want to become of my loyal readers, then you can either subscribe the feed of this blog or by simply revisiting this blog to check for updates.

How to know If my Blog has been Penalized by Google?

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I mentioned in my previous post, Canonicalizing Duplicate Content, that search engines really penalize websites or blogs. There were lots of websites and blogs that experienced penalty from search engine (especially from Google). John Chow’s blog is one of those penalized blogs.

Why do search engines penalize websites?

Just like what I said already on my previous articles, the goal of the search engines is to provide relevant result on every queries made by the internet users. Engineers behind the search engines wrote algorithms which are responsible in indexing websites and returning the list of webpages as the result in every searches made through the search engine.

From time to time, search engines became more popular. (Should I say, search engine is now the most popular tool in finding information from the internet.)

Webmasters (including bloggers) on the other hand realized how important is the search engine in getting traffic for their websites or blogs. Almost all internet users use search engine in searching for the information they’re looking for. And those webpages listed at the top of the list at the result page are those that are most likely visited by the internet users.

So, webmasters studied how the search engines rank webpages at the search engine result pages. After learning the secrets of these search engines, they then optimized their websites or blogs so that the webpages of their websites or blogs will be listed at the top at the search engine result pages.

Because of the competition in getting the higher rank at the search engine result pages, some webmasters or bloggers use tricks to win the top position of the SERP. This trick is called as the “Black Hat SEO“.

Black Hat SEO really embarrass the engineers behind the search engines because people practicing Black Hat SEO are gaming the algorithm of the search engines. So, to retain the high quality and relevancy of the search engine results, the algorithm of the search engine has been modified so that those who gamed it would be penalized and would never be included on the SERP, if not, the page rank weight of the webpages of their websites or blogs would be lessen.

So, to make it short, search engines penalize websites that violates the existing policies and guidelines imposed by the search engines.

What are the techniques that can cause the penalty?

Among the search engines that I knew (ie Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc), I think only the Google search engine is strictly penalizing websites.

For example: John Chow’s blog is under the penalty imposed by Google search engine but it’s not penalized in Yahoo search engine.

So, we’ll focus our discussion here on Google search engine.

According to Matt Cutts, one of the engineers of Google, any techniques that manipulates the PageRank and the page rank at the search engine result will lead to being penalized by the search engine.

These technique are:

  1. Link Exchange.
  2. Link Buying without “nofollow” tag.
  3. Link Selling without “nofollow” tag.
  4. Creating Fake Network of Blogs. Some webmasters create several blogs from the free blogging hosts like blogger.com, wordpress.com, blogsome.com, etc. Then all these blogs are linking to the real blog.
  5. Keyword Stuffing. Flooding each webpages with keywords.
  6. Linking to Bad websites.
  7. Cloaking. Configuring the webpage so that the content seen by the search engine is different to what the users have seen.
  8. Hidden Texts and Hidden Links in your blog’s webpages.

Is there a way to check if your blog has been penalized by Google?

Actually, only Google knows which websites were penalized in their system.

You, as the webmaster of your website,  can only tell that your website or blog has been penalized already by Google if you know that you’re doing some techniques enumerated above and then your blog or website experienced big changes in its PageRank, page rank or position at the SERP, or anything related to SERanking.

There are actually several kinds of penalty imposed by Google to those websites that found by Google’s algorithm guilty of manipulating the PR.

  1. Your blog will receive lesser weights to inbound links. So, your blog would have the hard time getting the higher rank at the SERP.
  2. Your blog is totally deindexed. Before if you’ll use the “site:example.com” search, you’ll find pages being indexed by Google. But now, the search returns nothing.
  3. The drop of PageRank (PR). Before, your blog has a site PR of 5, but now, the PR is only 2.
  4. Your blog doesn’t rank well for its own keyword. For example, my blog is “SELaplana”. If I’ll google “selaplana”, my blog is listed on the top of the SERP. Once it is penalized, this blog will never be found at SERP.
  5. Your blog’s outbound link has no weight at all.

For me, it’s just fine if your blog will experience the 1st, 3rd and 5th mentioned penalty because at least your blog has still the chance to top the ranking at the SERP.

The real problem is when your blog will receive the 2nd and 4th penalty because it only means that your blog is already banned from the Google SERP.

So, how do you check if your blog is penalized by Google?

We can check your blog at the Google SERP in few ways:

1) “site:” search

Search Google using “site:example.com”. Replace “example.com” with your blog’s domain.

By doing this search, Google will return in the SERP the list of webpages of your blog that have been indexed by Google.

However, we couldn’t say that your blog was penalized by Google if your blog is new and you don’t know if it was already included in the SERP before.

2) PR checking

Check the PR of your blog if it drops. For example, the PR of this blog before is PR5, but now it’s only PR 2. So, my blog experience a drop of PR.

3) SEO Experiment

You have to do an experiment or an SEO campaign by following the steps below. But it will work only if your blog is not yet banned by the Google.

step 1: Think of the words in which if you google it Google will return nothing at its result page.

For example: My name is “Sustines Laplana“. Before if you’ll google my name the search engine will return no result. But now, if you google my name, the first webpage on the SERP is the About Page of this blog. (view screenshot)

So, why not use your name? But if you think you name is very common, so why not use the name of your father, mother or siblings? You can also invent any words. Just make sure that if you google that term the result returns nothing.

step 2: Write a short article about the term you picked from the step 1.

step 3: Establish a link from your blog’s sidebar to the article you wrote in the step 2 using the term you picked from the step 1.

For example: In step 1, I picked my name “Sustines Laplana”. Then in step 2, I wrote an article and published it here in my blog with the title “About Me”. And on this 3rd step, I put a link at the sidebar of my blog with the anchor text “Sustines Laplana” and it is linking to my article “About Me”.

step 4. After 1 month, google the term you used as the anchor text on the link you did in step 3. If your article is not included at the SERP, then there might be some penalty imposed against your blog.

Old Related Articles

This article is my answer to the request post at the comment section of my article, “Duplicate Contents and Canonicalization“.

And by the way, I wrote articles before that are related to this topic. These are:

  1. Is My Blog Penalized by Google?
  2. About Supplemental Index
  3. Text Link Ads is Banned
  4. Google Banned John Chow
  5. PR is now useless

How to Optimize Domain and URL for the Search Engines?

10 Replies

We started our discussion related to SEO or Search Engine Optimization through our article, “What is SEO?”. In that article I told you that there are two SEO jobs that you need to do for the better ranking of your blog at the search engine result page, and these are the “On-Site SEO” and the “Off-Site SEO“. And then one of the parts of a website that should be optimized is the Domain Name and URL. And that is what we’ll discuss through this article.

Optimizing Domain Names

Through the article, “How to Register Domain Names”, you’ve learned that Domain Name is the easy to memorize address of a website. And the example to this is the domain of this blog which is “selaplana.com“.

And here’s the list of few of the things you need to consider in picking domains for your blog which can help your blog to be ranked higher at the search engine result pages.

1) Make your domain relevant to your topic

I already mentioned on my previous post, “performing the on-site SEO“, that a domain that is relevant to the topic or niche of your blog could help your blog to be ranked higher at the search engine result page especially if the searched keywords are used in your domain.

For example: If the domain of your blog is “make-money-online.com”, search engine might rank your blog higher in the searches made using the keywords “make money online“.

2) Make your domain short

Making your domain short is not just good for the search engines but also for the internet users. Remember that short domain is just easy to memorize.

3) Using of hyphens or dashes to separate the words in a domain.

The SEOs and SEMs are still debating about using hyphen to separate words in a domain.

There was a theory that if the domain name contains 2 or more words, you should separate every words from the other by using hyphen or dash symbol. Why? It’s because search engines according to them are not yet capable of identifying words from the 2 or 3 words combined into 1 domain.

For example: The domain of your blog is “makemoneyonline.com”. If it is true that search engine couldn’t identify the words contained in that domain which are “make”, “money” and “online”, then it means that search engine will consider the words in that domain, “makemoneyonline”, as 1 word and therefore your blog will not be given weights by search engines in the words “make”, “money” and “online” but only on the term “makemoneyonline”.

But, there are other SEO experts who said that search engines consider the blog with domains that contains hyphen as spam site.

Is that really true?

I couldn’t answer that with regards to other search engines except Google.

Matt Cutts, a Google Guy, said that Google doesn’t penalize websites that has dashes on their domains.

That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.

At least we’re sure that you are still in the safe side with Google if you’ll use dash or hyphen to separate words in a domain.

Optimizing URL

Don’t be confused with Domain Name and URL. URL stands for “Unique Resource Locator” and is used to identify specific webpage.

Remember that Domain Name can be considered a URL but not all URLs are Domain Names; and that Domain Name is always part of the URL.

To understand what I am saying, let’s take my article, “Adsense Income“, as an example.

The URL of that article is “http://www.selaplana.com/2009/01/21/my-adsense-income/”. But the domain name is “selaplana.com”. In other words, the domain selaplana.com is considered URL because it is used to identify the homepage of my blog, “SELaplana“. And it is still part of the URL of my article entitled “Adsense Income”.

Here’s what you should do to make the URL Search-Engine-Optimized?

1) Use the static looking URL

Use the URL that looks like this:

http://www.selaplana.com/make-money-online/

And avoid using this kind of URL:

http://www.selaplana.com/p?123

2) Make your URL relevant to the content

If a certain webpage of your blog talks about “how to make money online by blogging“, it would be better if the URL contains your targeted keywords for that webpage. For example, you’ll target keywords: “make”, “money”, “online” and “blogging”. So, the URL should be:

http://yourdomain.com/make-money-online-blogging/

3) Make your URL short

First, strip off those terms in the URL that is not relevant at all. For example if you are using this URL:

http://www.selaplana.com/2009/2/1/make-money-online/

Then strip off the “2009/2/1/” from that URL because these terms are just making the URL longer. So, the final URL would be:

http://www.selaplana.com/make-money-online/

Second, limit the URL to contain 3 to 5 words only. The words contained in the domain are not of course included on this number.

Search Engine, especially Google, consider the URL with 3 to 5 words as normal URL, but a URL with words more than that number is already considered worse and that certain webpage will not be weighted with those keywords in the URL.

4) Write the URL in the lower case

URL is case sensitive.

If the URL of a webpage of your blog contains upper case terms, like:

http://selaplana.com/Make-Money-Online/

Then the links will be valid only if the link from other webpage is using exactly that URL (including the upper cased letters). However, that certain webpage will never be credited with the Link Juice or Back Link if other bloggers will link to that webpage using the lower case:

http://selaplana.com/make-money-online/

5) Help search engines identify the right canonical URL

Canonical is a new word used by search engines. Canonical URL is the URL that best represent all the URLs that have similar content.

For example:  The URLs in the list are all valid URLs and each of them is considered unique webpage. However, all these webpages have the same content.

  1. http://selaplana.com/?p=5312
  2. http://www.selaplana.com/?p=5312
  3. http://www.selaplana.com/2009/01/21/my-adsense-income/
  4. http://selaplana.com/2009/01/21/my-adsense-income/

In other words, search engines normally considered them duplicate contents. But, search engines are very much considerate and they understand that these webpages are just a result of the imperfection of the platform used by certain website. So, search engine perform the canonicalization so that only one of them will be included on the search result pages.

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL from the URLs found.

More Updates

Search Engines are constantly evolving. From time to time its algorithm changes  in order to make sure that the search results are always with high quality and are more accurate to satisfy the needs of the internet users searching the internet for important information.

So, the above tips are not the only things that you should consider in optimizing the domain and URLs of your blog. There are other things that I failed to mention here. But I will strive hard to learn more things especially those related to SEO so that I can share them to you.

And one more thing… The explanation in every points I mentioned above doesn’t contain the details on how to do a thing. So, just reply this email if you have questions. Of you can just visit the live version of this article, “Optimizing Domain and URL” and drop your questions at the comment section.

How to perform On-Site SEO?

12 Replies

In our previous article, we mentioned that there are two types of SEO job that you need to apply into your blog so that it will be ranked high up the search engine result pages. These are On-Site SEO, and the Off-Site SEO.

What is On-Site SEO?

On-Site SEO, is an optimization for the search engine which is done on the website itself. The job is to make the parts of every webpage of the website appealing to the search engines.

If you already had set up your website, then what we need to do is to modify the parts of your website especially those given more weights by the search engine in ranking webpages at their organic search result.

But you should not forget that even if you are trying to make your website appealing to the search engine, it should also be appealing to the human who visits your website.

Major search engines, i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, will penalize websites that are made for the search engine alone. So instead of getting the higher ranking in the search result, if your website has been penalized already, you’ll never find it on the SERP, not even on the last page of it.

Why should they penalize websites intended for the search engines alone?

The search engines are just tools. They are created so that internet users would easily find the specific website that contains the information they are looking for.

Now, if you’ll make a website which doesn’t have content that are useful to the internet users, then you are just disturbing the normal result of the searches made through the search engines and you are only helping the search engine to fail to fulfill their missions and visions. So, to avoid this scenario, the people behind the search engines decided to penalize these kind of websites.

In other words, what we need to do is the proper and acceptable modification of the parts of the website.

On-Site SEO application

1.) Domain

If you haven’t setup yet your website, then consider registering the domain which is relevant to the topic of it.

For example, if you want to build a website that talks about Basketball, basketball products, and basketball events, then you need to use a domain that mentions basketball, ie. “yourbasketballinfo.com”.

However, if you already had register a domain which is not relevant to the topic of your blog, it’s just okay. But it would be better if the domain is relevant to the topic for its greater SEO weight.

2.) URL

The URL of every pages of your blog should contain important information about the page. For example, in a webpage that talks about the schedule of PBA events, you can use the URL: “yourbasketballinfo.com/PBA-schedule-of-events.html”

The reason for doing this is because there are other bloggers who tend to link into your blog’s webpage by simply using the URL instead of using anchor text.

In other words, a URL that contains information about the webpage will give the internet users and also the search engine a relevant information about that webpage. While the internet users will be enticed to click on the link at the other websites, the search engines will give more weight to that particular webpage in the keywords found at the URL.

But then you need to avoid using excessive keywords in the URL for it might just cause a penalty from the search engine.

3.) Page Title

Make the Page Title accurately describe the blog. In our example, our blog is about Basketball, basketball products, and basketball events. So, making your Page Title accurately describing the blog, it should be “Basketball: Information, Products and Events“.

Make sure that each of the webpage has its own Page Title other wise the search engine will be forced to consider other webpage with the same Page Titles as duplicate copies and therefore the search engine will also be forced to choose 1 webpage as original and the other will be thrown into trash for they are just duplicate.

And one more thing, the Page Title should be short but much descriptive.

4.) “Description” Meta Tag

SEO gurus have different thoughts about the “Description” meta tag of the webpage. Others say that it’s not already used by the search engines in ranking webpages. But others say that search engines are still giving weights to the content of the “Description” meta tag.

Whatever is true, we should still make use of it. It’s because search engines often times use the content of it as the description of the webpage listed on the SERP.

5.) Content

Your blog’s content are the articles you published in your blog.

Make sure that your articles have quality and are relevant to your blog. Make use of the relevant keywords and their synonyms in composing your article.

Use properly the H tags (H1, H2, H3, H4) and the “Bold” (strong) style of text. Some SEO experts said that search engines are giving greater weights on the keywords enclosed by the “H” tags and “Bold” tags.

And of course, make sure that you interlink your articles using your targeted keywords as the anchor texts.

And if you’ll use images in your articles, make use of the “ALT” tag.

6.) Sitemap

HTML sitemaps might be helpful to your visitors in finding the information they are looking for. However, HTML sitemaps and also the XML sitemaps is very much important so that the search engine will find and spider every pages of your blog.

More SEO Articles

I will be writing more articles related to On-Site SEO so that I can explain every details on how to apply the on-site SEO into your blog. If you have questions and suggestions or comments, simply reply this email or just visit the live version of this article, “On-Site Search Engine Optimization“.