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Hi Everyone!
Happy upcoming ThanksGiving to everyone! I hope you all have
a
great and festive day. Now let’s talk turkey.
Here’s some Q &A to get us started.
Hi Kevin,
I’ve placed some text at the bottom of my homepage
that is one shade lighter than my white background. Will
I be penalized by the search engines for this?
-Zift
Hi Zift,
More than likely, your site will be penalized or banned.
I know
that some people fall in love with the design of their website
and sometimes there is a design trade-off when doing SEO
to a site, but anything that is meant to trick the search
engines or visitors is a bad idea. Most people resort to
these techniques because they don’t see alternatives.
My advice is to brainstorm alternatives that incorporate
the visible text you need to add into your website design.
Talk with your designer and perhaps you will come up with
an even better design that you hadn’t thought about
before.
Hey Kevin,
I want to optimize my site and get good rankings in the
search engines, but I like my site and don’t want to
change anything on it. Can this be done.
-John
Hey John,
The short answer is no. When you think of “optimization”
what
does this mean to you? Does it mean only changing the meta
tags
and not interfering with the visible elements? If you are
committed to gaining organic search engine traffic, you will
need to accept that changes will need to be made to the visible
text on your website. If you really don’t wish to change
anything, then perhaps SEO isn’t for you (its not for
everybody). You can still do PPC campaigns such as Google
AdWords, newsletter advertising, press releases, banner and
text
ad advertising, etc. The first thing you need to decide is
what
you wish to accomplish and what you are willing to do to get
there. The rest will fall into place.
-Kevin
News
Microsoft unveils its beta search engine to the public. Where
does your website stack up? See http://beta.search.msn.com/
for
more details.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are set to sell
7.2
million shares of Google stock apiece which could net each
of
them $1.2 billion each. For more details:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1248082.htm
ICANN announced its new Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy aimed
at
making it easier to transfer domain names from one registrar
to
another. Unfortunately, this also makes it easier for someone
to
hijack your domain name as well. Some registrars will lock
your
domain name for you for free and others for a price to foil
this
behavior. Its unfortunate that the board that governs domain
names has just made a move that will actually encourage fraud.
More details: http://icann.org/transfers/index.html
WebProNews has an article explaining the relationship between
the number of back links and Google PR. More info:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/searchinsider/wpn-49-
20041116RelationshipBetweenPageRankAndNumberOfBacklinks.html
The new FireFox browser is picking up steam and popularity
with
2.5 million free downloads within the first two days it was
offered. It seems that FireFox is also teaming up with Google
so
instead of the new Google browser that has been speculated
in
the news, perhaps a Google / FireFox partnership is blooming
instead. More details:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,
39173536,00.htm
This is the one-year anniversary of the famous (or infamous)
Google Florida Update which sent many number 1 ranked websites
spinning into the ranking abyss right before the holiday
shopping season. Let’s hope the Google Gods are wiser
this year
and that there won’t be any holiday “surprises”
this year.
Google has launched yet another beta service. This one is
called
Google Scholar and is aimed at those wanting to do scholarly
research on the web such as teacher, students, scientists
and
those in the publishing industry. Google has negotiated with
many resources to “unlock” their content since much
information
has traditionally been locked behind subscription service
barrier and thus not spiderable by the search engines. More
details: http://scholar.google.com/
Tip of the Week
Don’t fall prey to reciprocal link scams!
Since I wrote the last article on Reciprocal Link scams,
there
have been a few of more scams to report (unfortunately).
The first is the deep linking scam where an unscrupulous
webmaster will place your link 3 or more levels deep from
the
homepage where the search engine robots won’t travel.
The second is the use of the robots.txt file to disallow
the
robots from traveling to the links page.
The third scam is the use of dynamic pages with un-search
engine
friendly URL’s for their partners’ links and a perpetual
PR0.
Both of these methods gains inbound links for the unscrupulous
Webmaster while giving nothing in return and thus giving this
Webmaster a big pop in the SE rankings.
Have a happy holiday and see you next newsletter!
-Kevin Kantola
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