31 Aug
We have not had a PageRank update for almost 5 months and now watchers are saying that they are seeing the early signs of Google getting ready for an update. So, will there be a major September Google PageRank update?I personally think that there will be. It has not happened for a while and Google is desperate to keep us using the PageRank toolbar widget, so it must update soon. Why is it desperate for us to maintain the use of that tool? Well that is a whole series that I am supposed to be typing up when I get the chance - check back in a couple of weeks and hopefully it will be ready by then!
Aside from that, really any changes to your search engine positions will happen week on week as there are the smaller changes to the PageRank that Google does not show to us. It is just once in a while that the search engine teases us by giving us a new insight into its ranking of our websites.
On the whole, an update is nothing to fear. As long as you have good content and so on you will be seeing pretty much the same traffic now as next week, whether or not it updates. It is only if you are selling links that a climb could be excellent news and a drop devastation!
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10 Jun
I never really believed that site wide links could be damaging to a site, but I was wrong. I set out to disprove the theory and ended up proving that there is a damaging effect from them.I had frequently read on SEO forums that some people thought that site wide links were damaging for a website, but I was not convinced. I tended to agree with those that said they could not be damaging, reckoning that a site wide link was something out of the site owner's control and, therefore, not an influencing effect that Google would consider.
But, people did keep coming up with evidence that they were damaging. However, these people never provided full evidence wanting to protect their sites. I thought that maybe that the reason there were two different schools of thought is that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, so I set up my own experiment to prove, or disprove, the theories for myself.
I run many of my own sites and one of them is a relatively new site, which I had recently "claimed" on a ranking system. This claim involved the placement of a random claim sentence on a post, which also appears in many other blog posts. This, I decided, was great for my needs as no-one else would be optimising for a junk sentence, but my site was mid way down the 4th page of Google search result when the sentence was searched for.
So I inserted a link to the post page from a well established and ranked site, using the sentence as the anchor text. No surprise when a few days later the blog page suddenly moved to the middle of the 2nd page of Google and a few days later to the top of that 2nd page. Evidence that link building works and that the link had been picked up and done its business.
Next I made the link site wide before Google again visited the linking site. A few days later I checked the search engine results and that post was no down on the bottom of the 3rd page and then the top of the 4th page a day or two later. And yet, this was after Google had only picked up 20 pages containing the link.
So never mind site wide, 20 pages out of 3,000 pages on a PR3 site that is 3 to 4 years old made the blog site go from middle of page 3 to top of page 2 then drop to top of page 4.
Therefore, the bad news is that Google ignores site wide links and the tolerance was very low, about only 20 pages. Although rather than an actual punishment as a lot of people claim, it did seem to be more of just ignoring the effects of all of these new links that had suddenly appeared. But as a website designer, or for those designing blog themes, this could mean that placing a link in the footer of new websites or in new themes could be not getting the benefits you are hoping for.
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1 Jun
I have recently been conducting a few experiments with search engine optimisation, aimed at proving to myself that site wide links were harmless. I failed - instead I convinced myself they are damaging!It started off with two sites, which I'll call PR0 and PR3 (there's a hint there as to their page ranks!). PR0 contained on a page a claim sentence - a random set of words that don't make sense that "prove" you are the owner of the website.
I chose to use the claim sentence because it is appears on plenty of other sites, but people would not (normally) be optimising for it. So I then put a link from the home page of PR3 to the PR0 page with the phrase on it, using the claim sentence as the anchor text. At this point, PR0 appeared 35th on searches for the sentence.
A few days later and Google picked up the link and shot PR3 to 11 and PR0 to 15th. Great, proof, if needed, that link building helps. Over the next week they danced a little and PR0 finished the week 11th and PR3 finished on 14th.
So part two of the experiment - go site wide. The same link was then placed on about 40% of the pages or PR3 the day that Google was due to visit. When I next checked the search results, PR3 was 11th and about 18th, whilst PR0 had fallen to 37th and over the week tumbled to 43rd. It was as soon as Google had about 20 pages with the link pointing to it that the damage was done.
This meant that the site fell more than it rose. That was caused, in part, by the insertion of two pages from my site PR3 and possibly other new results appearing in the middle. At best, a site wide link means that all of the links are ignored, at worst there is a slight punishment.
So then I moved on to the next part of the experiment - all but the home page link had rel="nofollow" added to the links. I forgot about the sites for a few days (a Bank Holiday weekend) and when I next looked Google had picked up this change on the 80 or so internal pages it had listed so far. But better still, PR0 had started to recover. When the search was performed using quotes, the site is back up to about 14th. It is still down on page 4 without quotes, which I cannot (yet) explain.
So be aware that site wide links to seem to be capable of damaging your link building efforts!
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27 May
I have noticed the some SEO experts seem to be using a clever trick for their link building. It is a trick that hides the immediate effects and risks of artificial link building and seems a great, but very simple, idea that we can all use now!On some of my blogs I accept paid posts as a way of making an extra income. This also lets me see what other SEO experts, who are sometimes paying me to write the posts, are up to. And I have noticed that a few different experts are trying a variation of the same basic trick.
It is nothing complicated, but at a stroke, it mitigates any chance there is that the site you are link building for could be found out and punished, whilst being extremely effective. And here is the secret that they do not want you to know -
do not build links direct to your own website.
So, how do you link build then? Well, I have seen it done in two ways. The first and more complex was to pay some bloggers to write posts about the target site followed by a round of paid posts, through the same bloggers, pointing to the original posts. Too complicated for me!
The easier way around this is to submit articles to an article directory and to build links to those articles, which in turn link back to you.
What benefits would this have?Well, should the search engines detect that you are building incoming links, the damage isn't to all of the incoming links, but only to the links to one of the articles. Plus, if those incoming links are a little off topic they still help to build the page rank of the article page. You then have a high page rank article page pointing at your site using your choice of incoming anchor text.
But, do you still get page rank?Yes, if you are careful! If you link to a link directory page with yours and 50 other links on then you are wasting your time. But, if you link to a third party post that just links to your website or to an article that just links to your website, then it can work.
Without going into boring details as to the entire Google Page Rank algorithm as it was first published, basically 85% of the Page Rank of that page is shared out between the websites that it links to. So, if that page points to 3 websites and yours is one of them, then you get a third of 85% of the page rank. But, if yours is the only external link on that page, you win a full 85% of the page rank of that page.
Better still, you have controlled the content of that page and exactly what the link anchor text is. Because of this high level of control over the content of the page, I think that this more than compensates for that little bit of lost Page Rank. It is far better to have 1 on theme Page Rank 4 page pointing at you than a whole host of off topic other pages.
So something to think about - build links to your articles, not to your websites. Feel free to leave a comment or two about the idea!
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25 May
I have been experimenting recently with site wide links to see if the horror stories are correct, whether they maybe help or whether they are just a waste of space.So, I picked a random phrase on a PR0 blog and searched Google on this term. The term was actually a claim sentence for a paid blogging system, so it us used on plenty of blogs, but none of them are probably optimised for it. At first, my PR0 blog was 35th on Google for it. Then, I linked from the home page of a PR3 blog to the post page with this phrase and watched the results.
Once the PR3 site was visited by Google, it itself appeared on page 2 of Google's results, around about position 13. A day or two later and the PR0 blog jumped to 15th and then slowly up to 10th position, overtaking the PR3 site.
Now, I cannot explain why it continued to climb up after the initial jump, but it did. But the effect of the single link is not what I am trying to look out.
I left the sites alone for a week whilst I monitored the movements, watching them balance out. Then, I put the same link onto the rest of the PR3 site in exactly the same position.
Now suddenly thousands of pages of the site had a link to the PR0 blog, using the random phrase as an anchor text. This really was a site wide link if ever there was one. Not much happened, for all of 2 days! Then suddenly the position of the PR0 site started to crash off.
Within three days the site was down to 39th on the search engine listings, even though only 2 dozen of the pages on the PR3 blog were reported on Google as containing the link.
So, this points to a few things.
First, by introducing a site wide link the effects of the single link are knocked out. A single link on 1 page can give a benefit, but put the link across the site and there are no benefits.
What about it dropping to 39th, from the original 35th? Does this mean a site wide link is damaging? I think not. Out of those sites above it in the listings, 2 of them, are the pages from the PR3 site, plus a couple of new high ranking blogs have also displayed the claim sentence. So that explains why it fell further than it climbed.
The second point to notice is that a site wide link is anything but a link on every page. Only about 23 pages are cached with the link out of a few thousand pages across that site. So, it looks as though if you get more than about 5 - 10 links from any one site in a short time period then the links are totally ignored.
This means that if you are writing WordPress templates in the hope of getting lots of links in, you are probably wasting your time! The same for a lot of other tricks. Whether further site wide links when they are built up over time on an older website have the same effect, I cannot say. That experiment will take a lot longer!
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