I have a new site that our company is working on. I noticed that in google all of a sudden we have all of our pages listed in Google with very weird things added to our URLs.
http://www.mysite.com/(A(XobqNFPtxwEkAAAAMzk3ZTU
4NzQtZGFjZS00OGUxLWExYzYtZDBiYjc1Mzg1N2YwP7fq1em0HKYJ5
vYMP8lm4NCf3241))/subdirectory/Default.aspx
I found out that this works on any IIS server. Even on www.microsoft.com. I have no idea what this is. I do know it is a bad thing for SEO and any site hosted on IIS needs to address this. This goes back to what I say about site architecture. Your site needs to have a URL policy set up and enforced. Nobody can go to any page unless that URL is already known to the site owner. This means no page can be access from 2 or more differnt urls. The site owner needs to redirect any rogue URL to the correct one and 404 anything you can’t predict. What this does is create duplicate content that the search engines do not like and can even hurt a sites rankings.
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I was looking at a clients logs today and saw a referrer from a site named www.rankmon.com. I went there and it showed keywords that I rank for and where I rank on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I then realized “hey I just got referrer spammed”. Oh well at least this time it was something interesting. It seems the site spiders the internet reading keyword meta tags and then scrapes the search engines and gives a ranking report. I really like this. The site does not have an about page or anything that mentions who they are or how it is done or how you can work with them.
There has been a lot of talk about the long tail. According to Wikipedia “The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article”. I think shoemoney is the one who made it popular for SEO and SEM. The idea behind the long tail is not new just what we call it. I have talked about it for years.
to me is a phrase typed into a search engine that is 4 or more words. 3 words I consider medium tail. There are some 3 word phrases that are easy to get and some that are very hard. One of the things that goes with long tail is that most of the time you may only get 1 visitor a month or even one visitor from that term ever. I used to run some pretty busy spam sites that were auto generated from lots of keyword research. One of the things I would see in the logs was that over 50% of my traffic over a month period were from phrases that were only typed in once that month.
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Internal linking is very important in SEO. One of the first things you can do is change the link to your front page. Most people put “Home”. You should change that to your keywords like widgets or my service or whatever term you are trying to get on your front page. You could even have a different keyword per page. Another mistake is people put the link to their home page as /index.html. Don’t do this your going to be telling search engines you have 2 front pages. They will see www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html as 2 pages and they will see them as duplicates. You will not be passing any of your internal link value to the home page. I try to use absolute URL’s. (i.e. http://www.domain.com/page.html) If someone hijacks your site they can only hijack one page this way. Every so often to hack comes out where somebody can hijack your site. It does not happen often but why risk it. Another thing I try to tell people is don’t put a link to your home page on your home page. You are just wasting space.
Next you want to have all your pages pointing to other pages on your site. If you have a small site with 10 pages or less you can just have each page point to each page. If you have more you will need to pick a number of links you want on each page. Then you will need to make sure that each page has that many internal links plus the link from the front page or directory page. So if your number is 6 then each page should have at least 7 internal links. Be sure that the links to each page have the right anchor text for that page.
This will give you the power of keyword rich anchor text to help boost each pages rank. It will also make sure that when you do rank for something you will get a second indented result in the SERPS because you have that keyword on at least 2 pages. It is good to organize the links into groups so that you also get more keyword density on the page that has the links.
I was looking over at www.ask.com and noticed that several terms brought up a special Wikipedia result at the top of the page above the ads.
search engine marketing
maritime law
data structures
Mathematical logic
Also DaveN on the Webmasterradio show www.strikepoint.co.uk pointed out that Ask is now showing the ads with a blue background instead of making them look like the organic results. I have no idea what kind of deal Ask has with Wikipedia but I think this is new.
This is from a thread I posted on www.webmasterworld.com in the Supporters section on Nov 29, 2004.
Many people talk about backlinks and anchor text and that it is the most important aspect of SEO for the Google search engine. Don’t get me wrong they are important but on-page SEO is still very important. If you do the on page stuff right you will need much less PR and anchor text.
Here is a list of important factors. I will discuss each one further down. They are not in any particular order. Some people like to order them and give the values of how important they are but I just make a list and do all of them.
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I am writing this article to be a guide on the proper way to set up the front page of a website. There are two things to consider when creating a front page: getting visitors to your site and getting them to do something on your site. One of the biggest mistakes that most web designers and company owners make is that they think a website is similar to other media like TV, magazine, and radio. Most people are on the web to find information quickly. They are moving from site to site and spend very little time deciding if your site is worth using. I have some rules about what to do with your front page. Some are general website rules and some are SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules.
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Well I guess the Bush administration is hell bent on being big brother. I read an article where everybody else has given in to the government. This so disturbs me. They know what we type into the Internet they know what we say on the phone. Anybody who knows the Star Wars plot knows this is the first step in getting rid of a pesky republic. We will give Bush more and more power until he does not need to ask us before he does anything. He does not want the war to end. He has so much power and wants more and more. All they have to do is decide that you are a threat and they can do whatever they want to you. The Clintons and Gore have all said negative things about his running of the way. Would that be considered enough for them to listen to their phone calls and see what they type in a search engine.
I read on seoroundtalbe that MSN lets you find all the websites hosted on the same IP. All you do is type in IP: then the IP like ip:64.236.116.57. I thought this was quite neat.
