SEO News and Information - The Topositionseo Blog

Too Much Reading - Too Little Blogging

It’s been all quiet on the Topositionseo blog-front lately. Not to bore you with too many specifics, but Topositionseo started as a repository for interesting SEO/tech articles that I came across in my daily reading - sort of like a personal bookmark manager set in blog form. But now that I’m hooked on Google Reader, I can manage and broadcast a greater number of interesting links much easier and quicker through the Google Reader interface than I could ever do blogging, all while still trying to get my daily tasks done. It just makes sense - I comb through the news, you get more signal and less noise (echo) from the SEO/tech world. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to my feed or view the dynamic feed below. It’s the only feed you need.

Important SEO Reads For October 27, 2006

• 101 Web Marketing Ideas and Tips
• Long List of Link Searches
  • Link Search Tool
• How to beat the Google Sandbox
• Jim Boykin’s Favorite SEO Writings

The Google Algorithm Simplified

Over at SEOmoz, Rand supposes a simplistic way of looking at the Google algorithm. Generally, I agree with the weights and factors enough to move on to what that means in a general sense for a webmaster.

1. Use/buy/steal an old domain
2. Use keywords in your domain name/URLs
3. Use a local host/top-level domain that reflects the area in which you desire to rank
4. Get relevant links (with keyword-rich anchor text) to your domain and keep them for extended periods of time
5. Use keywords in your title, headings and body text
6. Use keywords in internal links

Google’s Trustbox - Older is Wiser

Jim Boykin has an excellent post on Google’s Trustbox - more commonly referred to as the Sandbox in SEO circles. In the post, he suggests that time is the most important factor in ranking well (and easily) in Google.

In case you didn’t know, TIME is a huge factor to Google’s rankings. How long you’ve been around, how long you’ve had people link to your site, how old are the site that link to you, what has your backlink growth and history been, etc, etc…..it’s all about TIME Factors.

[...]

I know that I won’t touch a site that’s less than 2 1/2 years old (a webuildpages policy for almost a year now). Yea, there is no sandbox really, only levels of filters. The newer the site, the more filters it has to flow through.

The biggest drawback to new sites is that their put through much more rigged filters than the older sites are put through.

I agree. The Google judicial system operates under two distinctly different principles when it comes to the age of websites. Older sites are deemed innocent (not spam) until proven guilty (caught spamming), while newer sites are deemed guilty (spam) until proven innocent (accumulated a nice track record in line with a legitimate website).

Note to Client: No Splash Pages

No, you don’t need a splash page.

Matt Cutts’ SEO Cliff Notes

Via Digg comes this gem from SEO Egghead summing up Matt Cutts over the past couple years. It’s a nice, succinct SEO tips list straight from the horse’s mouth.

Jim Gives SEO Tips

Jim’s got a weekend series of good Q-and-As on all sorts of topics. See Google’s Florida Update, Keyword Research, Link Building and Linking Out.

I take particular interest in Jim’s comment on linking and content.

Often in my past I used to say “90% links”…but ya know, today it’s so much both that I’d say it’s equal…with only 1 (content or links) you’ll get nowhere. I might have once said things like “Content is King, and Links are Queen”…but again - you need them both to survive today.

I agree, they are evenly matched these days. That, and I’ve always thought too many name-brand SEOs concentrated a little too much on links for my tastes (if only in conversation) and almost completely disregarded the content side of the equation - it’s absolutely a symbiotic relationship.

I also like his advice about finding authority sites to link out to:

For example….if you sell “shoes” and we were creating this expert resource page for you, I’d start by searching Google for site:.edu shoes to find quality pages…hum…#3 looks good “History of Shoes” at www.otal.umd.edu/~vg/amst205.F97/vj08/introduction.html that’s one I’d add…prob with the anchor text of “History of Shoes Page”…then I’d find a few more nice .edu’s…then I’d maybe grab some .gov’s by searching for site:.gov shoes and I’d grab some of those….(and give them good anchor text…yes, linking out to related site with “shoes” in the anchor text I belive is good.

While the SEO benefit is up to debate, linking out to quality, related sites definitely benefits the end user, which is something the search engines have professed their desire to rank by.

Matt Cutts: Keywords in URLs Improves Search Relevancy

From the horse’s mouth:

Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.

It can’t get any clearer than that.

SEO and Your Own IP Address

Danny Sullivan, one of the foremost authorities in the field of SEO and SEM, has been making waves recently with his departure from Incisive/SES/SEW. His post over at his personal blog, Daggle, has all the information you need.

As for what the news means for the industry at large, I’m definitely noticing more participation by Danny across forums and blogs. One comment of his I particularly liked. It’s about the general consensus about getting your own IP address - see Jim Boykin’s post on the topic.

From Danny:

So while I think it’s good advice for people to think about having their own IP, that just wasn’t a priority there.

When I think about it, there are two major reasons to do so:

1. To hide other domains you have from the competition. In my case, I’m not trying to keep anything (that) hidden.
2. To avoid being lumped in with bad sites on the same IP.

In terms of the second, it’s been a really long time since I’ve heard of someone innocently being wiped out because they were on a shared IP. Instead, you hear more about someone who was massively spamming and lost all their sites, since they were on the same IP. So again, not something worrying me in my case. Plus, I know that my site has a lot of high quality links pointing at it, which I feel confident will help the search engine do the right thing in knowing it’s not something that should get wiped out.

When in doubt, I’m with others, though. I’d get my own IP. In my case, it’s just not something that’s been that much of an issue.

Danny’s thoughts pretty much mirror my own - I’ve never understood getting your own IP for SEO purposes; unless, of course you’re engaging in spammy techniques or are setting up massive website networks. Far too many websites are hosted on shared IPs (including reputable, large sites) for Google and the like to penalize by such a dubious association.

Links, on the other hand…

Bandwidth Optimization - Web Page Speed Report

If you do any sort of bandwidth optimization or code-to-content ratio tweaking, this web page speed report is nice to benchmark and compare to your final result.