Save $75 on SMX East in NYC on October 6-8, 2008

SMX Conference Comes to the East Coast!

Join SMX East in NYC for 3 days of search marketing information presented in over 50 sessions and keynotes covering paid search, organic SEO, link building, local search, mobile, social media, analytics, and more!

Save $400 by registering by Sept. 8th, plus take an additional $75 off with the High Rankings discount code: smx75hra

 

Hey everyone! 

It's time once again for an SEO Q&A email bonanza issue of the HRA. For those who are new here, the email bonanza issues are basically me digging up some of the SEO questions I've received during the past few weeks and posting them with my answers.

Enjoy! – Jill

Search Engine Marketing Issues

++Can Google Follow Non-www Links?++

Dear Jill,

To begin, I love your website. Very informative. On to my question. I am creating a site map for my website and have run into a problem.

For purposes of discussion, let's say my main URL is www.example.com. I have a plethora of links in my site for indexing purposes between pages. The page links all go to their respective pages properly, but are linked to example.com (without the www part).

So, long story short, a person can follow these links without a problem and get to the page they clicked on, but can Google follow these links?

I am unsure as www.example.com and example.com might be considered different URLs.

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Levi

++Jill's Response++

Hi Levi,

Google can and does follow both www links and non-www links in your website. They used to often see them as distinct URLs, and would often index both versions, which is not good.

That said, for the past 6 to 9 months or so, Google seemed to have figured out that the www version and the non-www version of URLs are the same pages on most websites.

While I haven't seen others online mention this much, I noticed this when every website I reviewed in this past year has not had a problem with Google seeing the www and the non-www as different. This is indeed a big switch from past years when it seemed to be a problem.

To be sure that Google (and the other search engines) index only one version of your URLs, you can have your server people redirect the non-www version to the www version. That's still good practice, regardless of how Google currently sees things.

I wrote about this previously here as well: 

Redirecting Non-www to www Version

Hope this helps!

Jill

Share your comments and thoughts here.

++Blog on Different IP++

Hi Jill,

I'm wondering if there is more link value provided by a new blog if it is hosted on an IP with a different C block than the IP address of the web site itself. The owner of the business would be writing the blog and sharing business expertise with the idea of building the brand of the business.

Also, in this case, the domain name could be different and include keywords.

Thanks,

Gaya

++Jill's Response++

Hi Gaya,

The whole "IP on a different C block" thing is a red herring. There's no reason to worry about different C blocks unless you are attempting to trick the search engines into thinking that the blog was somehow unrelated to the website (which I don't recommend doing).

Most companies create their blog as part of their main website because it's easier for most to remember that way – e.g., www.example.com/blog. You could also make it a subdomain – e.g., blog.example.com. Either way is fine for the search engines and your users.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jill

Share your comments and thoughts here.

++Getting Search Engines to Re-crawl++

Jill,

I recently set up a new site, which isn't something I often do, and forgot to set up the meta title and description. Now what is called up on Google for my site is HOME and a sentence from mid-page. Now that I have fixed the Web problem, how do I get the search engines to do another crawl of the site?

Sincerely,

Dorothy

++Jill's Response++

Hi Dorothy,

First, because I'm a stickler for always trying to use the proper SEO vocabulary, you should know that there's no such thing as a "meta title." I believe you are talking about the "title tag."

It's not that big of a deal that you didn't have your Titles customized when you first went live. While you can't force the search engines to re-crawl your website, they do it fairly frequently these days, depending on the overall popularity of your website.

So basically, don't worry about it – they'll crawl in their own time. Most likely, they already have!

Best,

Jill

Share your comments and thoughts here.

++Top Search Engine Ranking Software++

Hi Jill,

I'm about to renew our contract with our search engine ranking optimization software, but thought I'd check out other options before committing. What do you folks use?

I've done a bunch of research and asking around, and besides a few recognized applications, the one we use seems to be the tool to use to see how well we improve search engine rankings for our clients.

Thanks for your input!

Best regards,

Melinda

++Jill's Response++

Hi Melinda,

We actually haven't checked search engine rankings for clients in years, besides a few manual spot checks. Search engine rankings are simply not a metric that makes sense anymore.

Please see my article "5 Reasons Why Search Engine Rankings Are a Poor Measurement for Success" for more info.

Along these lines, recently Google has made an effort to stop allowing automated queries by many of the search engine ranking optimization software programs.

Rank-checking programs use up a lot of Google's bandwidth, so it's not surprising they don't want people to use them. You used to be able to get a Google API key and use the programs with Google's blessing that way, but for some reason Google is no longer giving out API keys, which is unfortunate. If you have an old key, it will work, however.  If, after reading the article mentioned above, you still want to check your search engine rankings, be sure to do it only via Google's API database.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Jill

Share your comments and thoughts here.

Stuff You Might Like

Recent Interviews

I had the pleasure of being interviewed recently by a number of online marketing folks and thought you might enjoy learning more about me and my thoughts on a plethora of search marketing issues.

Here are two latest of the latest:

Google, Ethics and The Myths of Social Media: An Interview with Jill Whalen by Nick Wilsdon

Search Feature Interview with High Rankings CEO Jill Whalen by Mike Dammann


If you're really interested, you can always keep up with my latest interviews in our press section.

Advanced SEO Forum Threads of the Week

++Will Google Suggest Changes in the Way You Optimize?++

Google has announced that they are rolling out "Google Suggest" this week, which will provide searchers with a list of query suggestions when they start typing into the search box.

Some High Rankings forum members are wondering if this will change the way (or the words) in which you optimize.

Read the thread and share your comments here:

Google Suggest

++Important Hub Pages in Supplemental / Not Ranking++

Forum member "don h" discusses a website problem that's been plaguing him for ages.

Read about it here:

Important Hub Pages in Supplemental / Not Ranking

Advisor Wrap-up

That's all for today!

Lots has happened since the last newsletter. Had a belated 25th anniversary dinner celebration with my husband and saw a rainbow on the way out (we saw one on our first date too!). There's a pic of the rainbow.

Also, our August SEO training class went really well. Yet another great group of 6 budding search marketers attended. We're looking forward to the September class in a few weeks.

And last, but not least, the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose – especially the Google Dance – were a lot of fun. My 3 panels seemed to go really well. The Black Hat / White Hat panel got a lot of attention. It was an interesting panel to be on because it was mostly Q&A. I think I held my own against the evil-doers and even got a few good one-liners in when I could!

On the home front, only a week or so left of freedom for Tim before he starts back up in school. Last week he entered the computer game he was programming all summer (called "Anti Matter") in a contest. You can play it here.

It's pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. Hope he wins! (I'm stuck at level 11.) Be sure to give it a good review on the website if you like it.

Catch you in 2 weeks! – Jill

Today's issue is also available online in the newsletter archives.

If you prefer RSS/XML please feel free to use our newsfeed here.

Feel free to forward this email in its entirety to anyone you feel might be interested in it.

Paid sponsor ads are clearly marked as advertisements and neither High Rankings nor Jill Whalen take any responsibility for the claims made within these ads, nor the websites they point to. Paid ads do not constitute an endorsement for the products, services or companies advertising in the newsletter. Please visit our sponsors and use your own due diligence for any purchases you make on the Internet.

To ***, change profile information, or to choose a text-only version:
click here.