Hot answers tagged google-ranking
87
Yes, putting important keywords closer to the beginning of a title does help SEO. SEOmoz's ranking factors survey agrees, as do other sources.
Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name
60% high importance
...
39
This is very likely Google can estimate your bounce rate, if you take into account a new feature that detects when the user is clicking the back button:
Search Google:
Click a search result.
Click back.
Google is showing a new option, "Block all [site] results":
Obviously, that is a guess, but quick back clicks may be good indicators of irrelevant ...
23
To the best of my knowledge, the rankings team does not use bounce rate in any way.
— Matt Cutts, June 2010, Search Engine Land interview
I have an issue with the concept of long/short clicks being used in their ranking algorithm. There are too many scenarios where both short and long clicks occur that are the opposite of what the ...
13
Per Matt Cutts
Without reading the article [trying to confirm a connection between rank and bounce rates], I’ll just say that bounce rates would be not only spammable but noisy. A search industry person recently sent me some questions about how bounce rate is done at Google and I was like "Dude, I have no idea about any things like bounce rate. Why don’t ...
8
Backlinks still form the #1 contributing factor in getting a page to rank in Google.
Generally speaking:
High Quality back-links are better than high quantity back-links
Freely-given links are better than procured back-links (procure can mean artificially gained in any manner, not just bought)
Page Rank still matters in terms of the currency of ...
8
I think that the problem with using bounce rate for ranking is that it doesn't take into account the fact that bounces aren't always a bad thing. This metric needs to be taken in context because there are some sites for which you might want to actually increase your bounce rate!
In fact, as an example, your sites might be that type of site (at least from ...
7
I manage a site that brings in around 30k pageviews per day. It lost 1/3 of its traffic around April 11th (panda international rollout). The entire domain lost traffic across the board. The overall average bounce rate hovers around 65% (pre-panda was 71%). The hardest hit pages have bounce rates over 75% however. It's an interesting theory.
To google's ...
7
No.
I'm responsible for a site that has one of the largest implementations of Google Maps (per impressions) outside of Google Maps itself (in Australia). Both with that, and with overlay (including links) of data, we have seen on 1million+ pages that with or without Google Maps has zero effect on the page's ranking.
I'm not going to speculate on the ...
6
Hint: The answer won't be in a 3x3 table because it's not that cut and dry :)
The more words in an external link the less targeted that link is for for each word individually. So having a link that just says "widget" will help you rank better "widget" then an external link that contains the phrase "best blue widget". But both will help you as they both ...
6
As long as the domain and content remains the same, changing IP addresses should have not affect on SEO. Moving from Canadian to US IP's wont affect your SEO.
The only potential gotcha could be if somehow the IP address has been backlisted due to spam or other misuse, although this is more commonly, but not exclusively, an issue with Email than Web Domains. ...
6
New sites often do drop in rank
Sadly the chances are that Google is repositioning to where it believes you should be, most often new sites and pages get temporary boosts to allow them to catch on so to speak. I've seen what your experiencing hundreds of times and can assure you what your seeing is most likely out of your control until your site becomes ...
5
Google does not consider 301 redirects to be duplicate content.
What might be happening, though, is that when Google first crawled your original redirects, they added the target pages to their queue for later recrawling. But by the time they got around to actually crawling those pages, you'd reversed the redirects so that they were pointing back to the ...
4
Frames are not search engine friendly and frame forwarding is definitely not how you want to do this. As you can see it is not search engine friendly and only hurts you. Plus users can find it confusing because the URL in the address bar never changes. Basically it's a bad idea all the way around.
What you need to do is a proper 301 redirect from the old ...
4
I would call it a day now in terms of recovery actions. Without knowing your friend's budget or the relative importance of the site in the overall business strategy, this sounds like a lot of money spent on mostly correct corrective actions.
The only remaining step that you have not mentioned is asking for a manual reconsideration request to get the ...
3
Matt Cutts covers this in two videos:
What impact does server location have on rankings?
Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?
Basically, it does affect your rankings, but primarily for personalized search results.
3
You will have to include video information in your sitemap. The "more information about..." link near bottom of that page will give you the specifics on elements, etc.
If you happen to already produce an mRSS feed, you can also use that.
3
Joel,
While the question is interesting in the hypothetical sense, it lacks the action-ability part of being practical.
Suppose for a minute, that the answer is yes -Google uses bounce rate for ranking sites -what would you do about it? The only way to reliably increase this metric would be to put artificial blocks between the user, and the answer marked ...
3
This won't help or hurt you. Links from completely unrelated sites will carry very little weight so there will essentially be no benefit from those links. Additionally, they can't hurt you because you have no control over them. If you were penalized for what other sites did then a competitor could crush you just by linking to you from some of there websites. ...
3
Were your personal search results turned off? When was the page cached? It's likely your blog pinged Google along with other search engines once you published the post. Well Google blog search at least which is different than Google Bot.
Search results work just the same for a blog post page compared to any other content page. Google has been crawling, ...
3
Before he gives up, I would recommend some usability testing. Have him set up a senario like
You need to learn/buy/find widgets. You type 'dark blue widgets' into Google. You see the following search result: http://mysite.example.com/blue_widgets.html You click on it. Does it tell you what you want to know about widgets?
Use ...
3
The last time I tested this, it does not. If you put some weird word in the meta description (something like "xenylotior"), then you will not be able to find it in Google search. If you put that word in the text of the page, you will be able to find it. Words in the meta description are not used for ranking because they are not indexed and not searchable. ...
2
I'll point to John C's answer here: How long does it take for a page to be assigned Google page rank?
Public PR is updated only periodically so whatever PR you see via reporting tools is a snapshot of the past. It does not reflect a page's current PR.
So to paraphrase - don't worry if google toolbar doesn't show a page ranking, as it isn't a real time ...
2
According to most SEO providers for local search, the critical factors are as follows:
Optimising your Google Places entry
Citations
Reviews
User content
Here are some good resources to get you started with optimising for Google Places:
http://www.smallbusinessonlinecoach.com/blog/seo/setting-up-google-maps-listing-within-googles-lbc/
...
2
You'll be fine. Hidden text is only a problem when it is done for the purposes of manipulating the search engines. It's not what you do but why you do it that causes most penalties and this is a perfect example of that. Hidden text in this example allows for the menu to be more user friendly. Countless websites do this without penalty. You'll be fine.
2
If all you did was link to the other page then the odds are this isn't what caused your rankings to drop. One external link isn't going to cause big changes like that unless the other site is a link farm or something else that is considered against Google's Terms of Service.
The odds are that a minor algorithm change was implemented in that time or Google's ...
2
Wordpress.com offers domain mapping so there is no need to start a new blog (if you intend to keep the one on Wordpress.com).
Also, here is a forum thread regarding domain mapping and SEO.
2
These tools are always a bit sketchy and require constant maintenance by the provider depending upon how the search engines change how information is queried by them. There are also other factors that can affect the results you get when testing an automated tool versus doing it manually such as:
i)Whether you are logged into your own account (personal ...
2
Search engines don't like frames. If a site's content is in a frame it essentially is invisible to search engines.
It's duplicate content which is considered low quality content. Even if #1 wasn't an issue, the site would the duplicate content and as a result filtered out of the search results.
So this will only hurt you, not help you in any way.
2
1. If a page is crawled by Google, it automatically gets into the index
(unless explicitly blocked by robots.txt).
False. The page can be crawled without being indexed. The page gets into the index except if it's not blocked by robots.txt or by meta robots noindex. On specific case I can't detail, a page only bocked by robots.txt can be indexed.
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