Effects of Bad Outbound Links
One of Rand Fishkin’s posts at SEOMoz.org, discussing some issues about Google with Matt Cutts, got me thinking.
A week ago, one of the sites I was working on promoting suddenly dropped in rank. It was rather… annoying, since things were just starting to get rolling. I couldn’t really figure out why. I had been out getting inbound links for the site. Why would it suddenly DROP, if inbound links were supposed to be GOOD for a site.
In Rand’s post, one of the issues discussed was the effects of bad outbound links. The question revolved around the usefulness of generic web directories. Including the ones designed just to help webmasters increase their rank and relevance.
Matt’s statement was that: Google still feels that directories are valuable. Even ones that are generally built for SEO purposes. Google treats all directories the same. If their authority/PageRank is high and content relevant, they can still pass a lot of link value.
But here is the kicker. Rand: “Directories (and all websites) that link out need to be very, very careful of who they link to, as this is a big way that Google’s algorithmically identifying and discounting paid and other types of links they don’t want to count.”.
Basiclly, if a site or directory is linking to lots of low quality or spammy sites, Google will consider that directory or site less authoritative. IE: Sites listed there get dinged. So, with my drop in rankings, I must have listed my site in a directory that Google considers “spammy”.
Bummer.
Directories that have an editorial process and keep those spammy sites out, can better maintain their level of authority with Google. So I guess you really have to watch WHERE your site gets listed.
Hitwise Demonstration
Unbeknown to me, our company was recently contacted by Hitwise. They arranged with one of our division managers to do a presentation. I got invited as an afterthought, but it gave me opportunity to sit though a one of their presentations. I guess it’s always good to bring “the guy who works on the website” and who “does that optimization thing” to something internet related.
If you don’t know, Hitwise is a “online competitive intelligence service”. Which when translated into English means, they know a lot about who is visiting what on the internet. This gives them the ability to profile market sectors, consumer behavior and demographics. From a corporate point of view it lets you get a look at what your competitors are doing, how you match up and what you are missing.
The entire presentation is tailored to your company and as you go along they show you live market data. Looking at it from a sales point of view, our presenter, Eric, adapted the presentation very well to what we were interested in. Our company doesn’t describe itself very well, so he wasn’t completely sure what we did at the beginning.
It was interesting to see where our company “ranked” in our sector. I think it was somewhat of a wake up call to the managers. I was surprised to see how much Hitwise knew about our consumers and competitors. If there was “big brother” on the internet, it would be Hitwise, they know way too much.
Included with their information, they had a lot of SEO related data. They had relevant keyword data for our sector, they knew which keywords our competitors were using, and which ones were driving traffic to them. In addition they have the ability to show you which keywords you are targeting well, which ones you are weak on (IE: do more SEO work with these) and which ones we were missing (long tail data).
All in all, they have an amazing amount of useful information. But it also comes with a corporate price tag that most people consider a yearly salary.
Remove Wikipedia from the Organic Listings
Recently Squidoo got hit with the Google authority whacking stick. They were “over ranking” for various terms and Google decided that they should be given less relevance in the search results. And of course as a result they were beaten down in the Google serps. So from Google’s point of view, when a website starts unduly influencing the search engine results, you adjust them so they fall back in line.
What I want to know is what about Wikipedia?!
Wikipedia is literally dominating search rankings across the board, and in more categories than any other single organization. Please understand, I am a Wikipedia fan. I think what they have built is absolutely amazing. They are the role model for what mass collaboration can do. And it’s a great resource. But it’s really grown out of control in the search engine results. They literally show up for everything now (rank position #7 in Google, 4 in Yahoo, 11 & 12 in MSN for “everything”).
The have so much authority that they can rank for whatever they want. And that’s fine and great. But given their size, isn’t it time to start treating them as a special case? Why doesn’t Google just make a special entry at the top of the search results for Wikipedia (like local search results)? They almost always show up anyway. Just add a line at the top of the page: Wikipedia has this to say about everything and they know it all.
Then…
Take them out of the organic listings completely!!!
By giving them their own special listing, if people are looking for more information they can visit Wikipedia. Everyone knows that Wikipedia is a good informational resource. But when they want to buy something why should Wikipedia show up in the search results? By taking Wikipedia out of the normal search engine results, the other people who are actually relevant to what the searcher is looking for are there where they belong.
And incase you were wondering, the Answer to the Ultimate Question about Life, the Universe, and Everything, is 42.
PHP 301 Permanent Redirect
After starting this site, it came time to shut down the predecessor. But, my other site had at least some authority/PR that I wanted to pass along. So I sat down to figure out how 301 redirecting worked. And, it’s some really simple PHP code.
Here is a sample redirect:
<?php
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: http://www.new-domain.com/new-folder/new-page.html”);
exit();
?>
That’s it!
Google Check No 1
Sweet! Today was a big day!
For the last couple months I’ve been building a couple sites. My small amount of traffic finally built up enough advertising revenue…
Well, I got my first check from Google today! It wasn’t huge, but for someone starting out, just getting your first check is huge! 
It’s more of a morale booster than anything. It’s like… OMG! This might actually work!
It took 5 months to build up enough with my little low traffic sites. I guess the low traffic problems was pretty much the reason I really started getting into SEO. And it must be working… The second check is coming a lot quicker. Wohoo!