Will Google Help you?

If you’re trying to get your website ranked better, you should be aware that Google offers you the webmasters tools page that will offer you some training as well as advice on what to do to help your site rank better in their search engine. While Google isn’t the only search engine around, the thought is that if you can rank well in Google, you’ll also do well in the other major search engines.

Many webmasters are aware of this tool and very often have more questions than Google is providing answers for! So one of them wrote in to Google’s Matt Cutts and asked him about their non-responsiveness to webmaster’s questions.

Here is the official reply from the big G:

 

So as you can see, they don’t have the resources to answer everyone’s questions – not surprising when you think about it.

If you are a webmaster and have questions about SEO, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

Cheers!

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #5 “Hosting Viruses, Malware or Other Nasties”

This may seem obvious; no search engine is going to rank you well in their search results if their bots discover that there is spyware, malware, viruses or any other kind of internet nasties contained within your website. In fact, if a bot does discover such content, your site will most likely be removed and blacklisted for good.

So that’s simple – and most of you won’t even be considering hosting that kind of content anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about, right? Perhaps wrong. Many sites are subject to hacking, which leads to them being infected with the nasties that search engines (and internet users in general, for that matter) hate so much. Even sites with thoroughly strong security can be hacked and infected, quite without the owner’s knowledge. So you could be merrily promoting your site, working on its content and ensuring your SEO is tip top, but you may not be aware that your site is infected and only a few steps away from being blacklisted forevermore.

There are a few things you can use to prevent it. The first is obvious, but crucial: visit your site regularly with your anti-virus working, and check it seems okay. Secondly, you can get a good idea of what other people think of your site by installing a Firefox Add-On called “Web of Trust”. This displays a ring of one of three colors near the browser menu of a website; green means the website is ‘safe’, orange means ‘doubtful’ and red means ‘avoid this site’. These colors are user generated, so you can check that no one is experiencing problems with your site by installing this add-on.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #3 “Duplicate Content”

Among those well versed in internet marketing, duplicate content is something of a sticky issue. The exact nature of the problem is in what constitutes duplicate content, with some internet marketers insisting anything that has previously been written on any other website qualifies as duplicate content – while others say it only matters for the same text to be repeated on the same website.

The exact definition is not exactly known, and isn’t helped by the fact that the search engines are not particularly forthcoming on the issue. However, if you are found to be using duplicate content on your website and a search engine does have an issue with it, you can forget about getting a good ranking with that search engine.

It is more likely – though not certain – that the duplicate content rule applies to text used within the same site. You should not, for example, make lots of pages all using the same article with no changes. This is the lesser version of duplicate content, though some marketers still insist search engines frown on the same article or text being used from anywhere on the internet; and that this will trigger a duplicate content penalty.

The idea, of course, is to avoid plagiarism and for search engines to avoid publishing results that show the same text over and over again. To be absolutely sure you’re not committing the duplicate content sin, always write and use original content, both within your website and externally. That way, you can be sure – no matter who is right or wrong in the debate – that you aren’t going to be penalized for it.