issue #19, April 2005. Search Engine Optimization News & a new RSS news feeds Tutorial

Today´s topics

1) How a new Google invention might affect your rankings.

2) Tutorial: using CARP to display newsfeeds on your site and

• how to modify the appearance of the feeds.
• how to combine multiple feeds with CARP

Information retrieval based on historical data

It basically describes how a document (read: web page) can be identified, which types of history data associated with the document can be obtained and how the system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on one or more types of history data.

1) historical data collected from off page factors (backlinks)

The rate at which (i.e. how fast) new links to your site appear can be used to determine your website ranking, either in a positive or negative way. Therefore your effort to increase the number of backlinks should be constant and rather slow than fast in order to simulate a natural growth of backlinks. (see below)

[0077] The dates that links appear can also be used to detect "spam," where owners of documents or their colleagues create links to their own document for the purpose of boosting the score assigned by a search engine. A typical, "legitimate" document attracts back links slowly. A large spike in the quantity of back links may signal a topical phenomenon (e.g., the CDC web site may develop many links quickly after an outbreak, such as SARS), or signal attempts to spam a search engine (to obtain a higher ranking and, thus, better placement in search results) by exchanging links, purchasing links, or gaining links from documents without editorial discretion on making links. Examples of documents that give links without editorial discretion include guest books, referrer logs, and "free for all" pages that let anyone add a link to a document.

So be careful with your backlink building. If your website has only a few backlinks and you want to purchase more links to your site, you should avoid site wide text links from large sites as this will cause a big spike in your backlinks.

Instead consider submitting your site to some more web directories, because human edited directories provide links with "editorial discretion" (contrary to bad links without editorial discretion like described above), exchanging links with relevant sites and/or purchasing small text link ad packages from relevant sites (an action which can be seen as editorial discretion, too).

Link weights are also determined by freshness and authority of the document that contains the link and if the document is trusted. Link weights further depend on the amount of content changes of the link carrying document in relation to the anchor text.

This means that a backlink is more worth when it resides on a regularily updated page (like web directory pages) and also that it´s more worth when the anchor text stays the same while the document content is updated.

[0119] According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information regarding unique words, bigrams, and phrases in anchor text may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with a document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor web (or link) graphs and their behavior over time and use this information for scoring, spam detection, or other purposes. Naturally developed web graphs typically involve independent decisions. Synthetically generated web graphs, which are usually indicative of an intent to spam, are based on coordinated decisions, causing the profile of growth in anchor words/bigrams/phrases to likely be relatively spiky.

coordinated decisions --> synthetically web graphs --> spam
This means that it looks unnatural if your backlinks always have the same anchor text (coordinated decisions) and thus be an indicator for spamming the search engines.

Diversify the anchor text you use in your link exchanges. Natural backlinks also often include anchor texts like "click here", "read more", your domain name or the URL of the linked page, a phenomenon which occurs for example when you distribute your articles to other website owners.

2) domain, traffic and rank history related data

The following describes how the length of your domain name registration may affect your site´s rankings.

[0098] Individuals who attempt to deceive (spam) search engines often use throwaway or "doorway" domains and attempt to obtain as much traffic as possible before being caught. Information regarding the legitimacy of the domains may be used by search engine 125 when scoring the documents associated with these domains.

[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith.

If you are planning for your website(s) to be around for a while, you should consider to increase the registration renewal period for your domain name(s) to at least 2 years (or more).

Scoring documents based on ranking history

[0109] In addition, or alternatively, search engine 125 may monitor the ranks of documents over time to detect sudden spikes in the ranks of the documents. A spike may indicate either a topical phenomenon (e.g., a hot topic) or an attempt to spam search engine 125 by, for example, trading or purchasing links. Search engine 125 may take measures to prevent spam attempts by, for example, employing hysteresis to allow a rank to grow at a certain rate. In another implementation, the rank for a given document may be allowed a certain maximum threshold of growth over a predefined window of time. As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a spam document, search engine 125 may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that spam documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news. Any or a combination of these techniques may be used to curtail spamming attempts.

Don´t expect high rankings for competitive keywords fast. Target a well balanced mix of low competitive keyphrases (for quicker results) and higher competitive keyphrases (for long term results).

While you should avoid "spikes" in the number of backlinks (f.ex. caused by site wide text link ads), it´s perfectly o.k. to get a big number of backlinks from news articles and forums. Ergo: Write useful articles / web content and participate in forums.

How changes in traffic patterns can affect your rankings:

[0058] ... For example, one query-based factor may relate to the extent to which a document is selected over time when the document is included in a set of search results. In this case, search engine 125 might score documents selected relatively more often/increasingly by users higher than other documents.

Use eye catching title tags - these are the headlines in the search engine results, so make them attractive that people will select you instead of your competitors.

[0089] In one implementation, search engine 125 may compare the average traffic for a document over the last j days (e.g., where j=30) to the average traffic during the month where the document received the most traffic, optionally adjusted for seasonal changes, or during the last k days (e.g., where k=365). Optionally, search engine 125 may identify repeating traffic patterns or perhaps a change in traffic patterns over time. It may be discovered that there are periods when a document is more or less popular (i.e., has more or less traffic), such as during the summer months, on weekends, or during some other seasonal time period. By identifying repeating traffic patterns or changes in traffic patterns, search engine 125 may appropriately adjust its scoring of the document during and outside of these periods.

One conclusion that can be drawn from the above paragraph is that increasing your website traffic - for example using ppc advertising - might improve the natural search engine rankings of your web pages.

Your web pages can even achieve better rankings based on the time your visitors spend on them (see next paragraph).

[0094] If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively. For example, assume that the query "Riverview swimming schedule" returns a document with the title "Riverview Swimming Schedule." Assume further that users used to spend 30 seconds accessing it, but now every user that selects the document only spends a few seconds accessing it. Search engine 125 may use this information to determine that the document is stale (i.e., contains an outdated swimming schedule) and score the document accordingly.

So what ? -- Simply provide interesting content that keeps your visitors glued to your pages !

3) web page specific historical data (on page factors)

Depending on the frequency and amount of changes, your web pages might be ranked better than stale pages. That´s probably why everybody´s going crazy about adding newsfeeds to their web pages - but be careful:

Not only the update frequency of your web pages will be checked but also compared to former update trends, i.e. if you haven´t updated your web pages for a long while and suddenly add a newsfeed to all of them, this looks unnatural and might be detected as spam. (or at least you won´t benefit much from the effort of adding these feeds to your pages).

So I would advice you to add newsfeeds only to your most important pages and later add the feeds to some more pages, too.

Newsfeeds are a great source of relevant fresh content and "hot" topics to be used to update your web pages, which is important as you can see from the cited paragraphs below.

[0046] According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, information relating to a manner in which a document's content changes over time may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with that document. For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time.

[0059] ... For example, terms relating to a "hot" topic that is gaining/has gained popularity or a breaking news event would conceivably appear frequently over a period of time. In this case, search engine 125 may score documents associated with these search terms (or queries) higher than documents not associated with these terms.

[0051] ... For instance, content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA (note: UA = update amount score). On the other hand, content deemed to be important if updated/changed (e.g., more often, more recently, more extensively, etc.), such as the title or anchor text associated with the forward links, could be given more weight than changes to other content when determining UA.

2) RSS news feeds Tutorial

Ok, ok - you want newsfeeds on your pages. I can´t blame you for that, after telling you the benefits of having fresh content on your web pages. So I think it´s only fair I provide you with a tutorial how to use a free tool called "CARP RSS newsfeed parser" to make the magic happen.

I´ll also show you how to configure the code to modify the display of newsfeeds, where you can find hundreds of thousands of different feeds and how to combine several niche feeds to make the content on your pages more unique.

The tutorial is available for subscribers only and can be accessed from the vault.

Use the latest username and password you´ve got in my last email to log into the vault.

3) search engine friendly web directories

In issue #11 of my newsletter, I gave you a step-by-step strategy to promote new websites from ground up. One great technique to build valuable backlinks to your site is to submit it to a couple of quality directories.

I´ve reviewed lots of them and included only those directories in the list whose pages are indexed in the search engines and provide a static link to your website, thus sending search engine spiders to your site and passing PR value, too.

New list of good web directories

4) Easy content building for your website ?

This week I´ve got an email from a friend who told me to look at Haden McCabe´s site and check out all the proprietary web content generators and marketing software tools he´ll be offering to a small group of people in a week or two.

Looks very promising and I´m curious how it will be, although I´m a bit sceptical about it, too.

But at least you should take a quick look at Revenue Insider yourself and see what kind of software and business information is offered.

That´s it for today - hope you enjoyed my newsletter.

Have a great weekend !

Sincerely Yours,


Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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