Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Here are some old faves and soon to become classics for Search Engine Optimization Advice and how tos.

• Jill Whalen of High Rankings has always been a fave of mine for decent no nonsense advice, and her Search Engine Optimization articles are great and kept up-to-date. Her site is always listed on Google’s first page of results for the search terms “Search engine optimization”,  a highly competitive field, so you know she has to be good. She’s recently started a forum dedicated to SEO questions which is very active and in which she participates often. Highly recommended.
• Aaron Wall’s SEO book has become “the book” when it comes to best Search Engine Practices. He also blogs regularly about SEO, offers cool tools on his site, and is even making video tutorials on SEO practices.
• These SEO Chat Forums are comprehensive, active, alive and friendly. They helped me out and delivered the sad news gently that I may not ever know why I got kicked out of Google. I also found a great Glossary of SEO Terms in there, which is great for beginnners.
• Connected Internet blog brought to my attention this just released document called Search Engine Ranking Factors, as listed on seomoz.com. It is culled from the wisdom and knowledge of 37 experts in the search engine optimisation field, including Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, and is sure to become the new canon.
• Matt Cutts’, who heads Google’s Webspam team, has become the unofficial face of Google. That’s because he’s the only face we can see in the closed Google world.
• And from the horse’s tight-lipped mouth itself, there’s Google Webmaster Help

If you have any favourites, please add them to the comments.

I sure did learn the hard way in my recent Google fiasco, the case where I mysteriously disappeared from Google’s pages.

My site Bitter Tonic was out of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for a total of 9 long, painful days. Then one day, just as easily as I had disappeared, I reappeared. And in pretty much the same positions, if not better.

In the meantime, I had done a whack of research on what could have caused my ousting and how I could fix it. The most interesting result being that a lot of the information that is out there is mostly speculation - and not fact. And because Google is very secretive about it’s algorhithms and the way it ranks pages, the speculation will no doubt continue.

I got pretty spooked when I read a bunch of horror stories of businesses being locked out of Google. Some were led astray by Search Engine Optimization companies promising them high rankings, only to be booted out for cheating (called black hat SEO). Others didn’t know why they were on the outs. Some of these companies were losing thousands of dollars in business a month. Some of them had been trying to get back in, begging on their knees unsuccessfully for months.

Which should make everyone’s number one rule - don’t go cheating on Google.

Hell hath no fury like this scorned search engine. And since Google is the preeminent and undisputed leader in its field, you should definitely play nice.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some think there are things that you could be doing that Google frowns upon and you don’t even know it.

I knew I hadn’t cheated the search engines on purpose. But what if I had been caught for duplicate pages? I read a post that the way Wordpress archives its pages may be considered duplication by Google. That scared me, mostly becuase I didn’t even know what it meant.

Perhaps I was linking to “bad neighbourhoods?” Or the nighbourhood used to be clean but unbeknownst to me, got bought by a scammer, and has since deteriorated in Google’s eyes. Did I have too many internal links? Too many affiliate links? What was too many?

Your number two rule should be - be super squeaky clean.

As I said earlier, I think the reason I fell out was just one of Google’s admitted glitches. But in the meantime here is what I did to ensure relisting:

• I got the Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure plugin from Badi Jones
• I got the Google Sitemap Creator for Wordpress plugin by Arne Brachhold, and submitted it to Google. Whatever Google wants, it gets
• I removed lots of affiliate links. Noone was clicking on them anyway.
• I removed most of the cross-posted links, though I don’t think it mattered.
• I asked to be re-instated into Google, and clicked that damn check box that says you admit to committing a crime
• I kept researching, reading and posting to forums
• I was patient. Well, more like dejected, but patient sounds better.

I also was really happy to find a wonderful and giving SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web community out there. I found no shortage of great sites, forums and communities offering up great tips and advice. So make sure to read on to my next blog entry where I list the places to go for SEO help.

Which brings me to my last point - write and create honest to goodness really good content. That’s what we humans like, and that’s what Google likes too.

Hmmm. I don’t think I ever said “honest to goodness” in my life - but it seems to fit in well here.

It’s true. The reason Google became and remains a popular search engine is because it manages to filter out the scammy and spammy sites, so that its results feature quality web sites and content with each query.

So, write for humans, and Google will follow.

Tags: google, search engine optimization, advice, SERP, page ranking, demotion

Last Wednesday morning I went to check my stats at my comedy blog, www.bittertonic.com, as I do numerous times throughout the day due to my stat-tracking addiction, and was pretty amazed to see that they were very low. I didn’t think too much about it as I continued my morning coffee and email reading.

But when I went to check in the afternoon, I realized something was definitely wrong. My numbers were about a quarter of what they should be.

Uh oh.

About a week prior I had started getting at least 200 page views a day, the majority coming from Google. Not tremendous, but OK, since I hadn’t done that much marketing work on them. The blog was built so that I could put up my original comedy stuff on it, but first I had to learn about blogging, how to do it and what to use, etc. and so original comedy creation had taken a back seat. I was going to do the big marketing and community building stuff when I put up more of my own content.

I had chosen Wordpress for blogging months before and that turned out to be the right choice. It is great open-source blogging software program with a super community who keep churning out unbelievable plugins that can really make the program powerful. It has also become one of the 5 most popular blog platforms, so that when you sign up for extra services or widgets with other companies, like Feedburner, or addthis.com, they always have a Wordpress version, so you never feel left out.

Some of the best plugins are Search Engine Optimization plugins, and I had added Aaron Schaefer’s Optimal Title, which move your blog’s name to the end of your Page Title, so that the important words come first, and Head Meta Description by Kaf Oseo, which creates a unique meta description tag for each page, and so I was pretty pleased with the number of visitors coming from Google. Most of them were coming to see a ridiculously funny unicorn video called Charlie Goes To Candy Mountain.

But not any more. Whereas for months that post was in the top 8 in Google’s search result for numerous permutations of the video name, sometimes hitting number 2 right under YouTube’s number 1 slot - for which I was ridiculously proud - starting Wednesday it was gone. Nowhere near.

In fact, all my posts were gone. Nothing was showing up in Google except my home page, which used to sit at number 1 for Bitter Tonic, but now was demoted to number 4. And when I searched my name, my Bitter Tonic profile came up dead last.

I was dumped from Google. Demoted. Banned.

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