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Guide to a (hopefully) successful 301

On December 28, 2009, In Link Building Strategies, SEO, by Patrick Gavin

I just made a major change for me and 301′d PatrickGavin.com to Searchengineoptimization.net The focus of this site moving forward will be more of a SEO resource than my personal blog so I wanted a name that says this loud and clear. I wanted to kick off the new site (new design coming soon btw) [...]

I just made a major change for me and 301′d PatrickGavin.com to Searchengineoptimization.net The focus of this site moving forward will be more of a SEO resource than my personal blog so I wanted a name that says this loud and clear. I wanted to kick off the new site (new design coming soon btw) with a quick guide on how to properly 301 a domain. If you would have done anything differently please let me know in the comments! In the end, the judge will be Google and how it handles this 301.

Goal is to 301 redirect www.abc.com to www.123.com

1. Register both www.abc.com and www.123.com with Google webmaster tools. Note that you will have to insert a snippet of code or upload a file to both of your sites to verify you do own or control both websites.

2. Make sure www.123.com takes on the exact design, look and feel, etc of the original www.abc.com site. This is important as Google doesn’t like too much change going on at once. Keep the design the same during a 301 so you don’t throw too much change at Google at once.

3. Make sure you keep the url structure the same, ie www.patrickgavin.com/2009/04/19/april-sandbox-update/ should be moved to www.searchengineoptimization.net/2009/04/19/april-sandbox-update/

4. Follow Google’s steps technical guidelines on completing a 301

5. Double check your redirects. Use a 301 redirect checker to make sure your redirects are seo friendly (http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/). Also, test a handful of urls from your old domain to make sure they are getting redirected properly. You can easily do this by googling your old domain name and clicking through your sites indexed pages. Be very sure that every single page of your old domain is getting redirected to another active page at your new domain. You definitely don’t want to be left with a bunch of 404 not founds. Additionally, it is recommended that you chose to redirect everything to either the www or non-www version of your new domain.

6. Let Google Webmaster Tools know about the 301 by submitting a "Change of Address" request.

7. After the 301, it is highly recommended you build some strong links and add some content to the blog to show the site is still active & growing. If you want to go further, have some of your old incoming links update their link to point to the new site (this is not required, but it shows that the sites that linked to you before still want to link to you now indicating it’s the same site as before). Remember Google logs redirects just like they log your backlink data so don’t rely on 301’s as your sole link strategy.

8. Wait patiently and have some faith! Your original site can disappear for a period of time from Google’s index leaving you with NOTHING for a period of time. This could be days or weeks. What should happen is the new site you 301′d to should appear taking on similar rankings that you had for your original site give or take a few spots up or down.

Now we will wait and see what happens with my 301 and I will keep you updated. The PatrickGavin.com domain is currently ranking #6 for the coveted "search engine optimization" query so this is a bit of a gamble and it will be fun to see if it pays off!

UPDATE! +3 days after the 301. My PatrickGavin.com site has lost all Google keyword rankings! I have lost all rankings including #1 for "patrick gavin" #6 for "search engine optimization", etc. Here is the good news: this is what happens when you do a 301. Fingers crossed but the SearchEngineOptimization.net domain should* reappear in the coming days/weeks…

New Region Tags For .com, .net TLDs

On December 11, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

Why would Google do that? Obviously, it’s because [...]

Google announced on Dec. 1 that it had added a new region tag to top-level domains where a website’s location could not be discerned by a title tag or snippet and where the country code isn’t a clue. In other words, for .com, .net and .org TLDs.

Why would Google do that? Obviously, it’s because things can get confusing if you are looking for a specific result and you know where an organization is located, but you don’t know its URL. You perform your search and the results do not give you the clues you need to find what you want. Google’s example can be found on the official Webmaster Central Blog.

I think this is going to be a helpful tag and if you want to give away your location to help searchers find you more easily, all you need to do is log in to Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration – Settings – Geographic Target. Choose a country or region to associate with your site and your region tag will appear when appropriate.

My only concern with this is will you get pigeonholed into that region? Will, at some point, Google decide to show your website only to people searching from that region or will your site still be available globally? I hope the latter. I’d hate to see people’s businesses fall off because a search engine decided that because you are located in South Africa your site should only be seen by South Africans. That would be bad of that business conducted business throughout the world.

Tagged with: affordable search engine optimization • arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • blog • Clue • Country Code • Geographic Target • google • Internet Marketing • Org Tlds • phoenix SEO • professional search engine optimization • search engine • search engine optimization • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • South Africa • South Africans • Title Tag • Top Level Domains • Web 3.0 • Webmaster Tools

Are Yahoo Snippets Good As Google Snippets?

On December 5, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

We’ve discussed Google’s snippets before. But few people discuss Yahoo! snippets. Maybe the search community has written Yahoo! off as irrelevant?
Regardless of what any of us think about Yahoo!, they are still a part of the search game. And I’d say a major part since they are still the second largest search engine around. Recently, [...]

We’ve discussed Google’s snippets before. But few people discuss Yahoo! snippets. Maybe the search community has written Yahoo! off as irrelevant?

Regardless of what any of us think about Yahoo!, they are still a part of the search game. And I’d say a major part since they are still the second largest search engine around. Recently, SEO By The Sea wrote a blog post detailing a patent application regarding a method for selecting a snippet for a search page. Bill Slawkski, as usual, has some interesting insight.

The gist of Yahoo! patent application boils down to three things:

* A query-independent relevance for each line of text – a degree to which the line of text of the document summarizes the document.
* A query-dependent relevance of each of the lines of text – a relevance of the line of text to the query.
* The intent behind a query.

It’s interesting to note that keywords and semantic language are not mentioned here at all. Rather, Yahoo! focuses on two types of relevance – query dependent and query independent.

The query dependent relevance is a reference to how many times a query might appear within a line of text on a web page. It might also be a percentage of the query terms that appear in a line of text. In other words, if a line of text has 10 words and a query of 4 words turns up all 4 words in that line of text, that would be pretty high.

But the one I find interesting is this:

Whether the query is a substring of the line of text.

It’s really simple, but if you query a six-word query string and that entire six-word string shows up in a line of text on a web page, that’s pretty significant. I think it’s significant for all the search engines and I’d be surprised if a web page that met that query substring for a particular page didn’t rank that page at No. 1, or close to it, for the query. I mean, the odds of any one web page (out of millions) having the exact six word query string (with all the words in the right order) that a random searcher enters into a search box are phenomenally low.

Sorry to say, that’s not particularly sophisticated when you think about it. But the technology to make it happen is. And I think Yahoo! has some pretty sophisticated technology tools. Still, Google is light years ahead of them. I think it may be because Google started out light years ahead.

Tagged with: affordable search engine optimization • Amp • arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • Gist • google • Internet Marketing • Largest Search Engine • Odds • Patent Application • People Search • phoenix SEO • professional search engine optimization • Query String • Query Terms • Relevance • Search Community • search engine optimization • search engines • Search Game • Search Page • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • Snippets • Substring • Web 3.0 • Word Query • Word String • Yahoo Google

Visible Control Over Your Site in Google

On November 28, 2009, In SEO, by Nick Stamoulis

One of the most important elements of web marketing is search engine optimization and a very important aspect of that is your listing in the search engines. It’s important to understand that Google does not use your meta data for ranking purposes. However, your meta data is important for Google in its display of your site within the rankings. Two of the most important meta tags are the Title tag and Description tag. Your Title tag appears in Google SERPSs as a blue clickable link in large font size above your Description, what Google calls the snippet.

Google’s primary concern is delivering quality content to searchers. If you don’t provide good Titles and Descriptions for that purpose then Google will substitute your information for something it deems more useful to searchers. In your meta title tag you should provide the most important keyword for the page you are optimizing, but don’t stuff it with keywords that you want to rank for. That will work against your. Also, don’t make your Title too long or Google will rewrite it. You don’t want it to be more than 60 characters.

In your meta description tag you also want to use your most important keyword for the page and possibly a secondary keyword. Again, don’t stuff it with keywords you hope to get ranked for. Also, don’t make it too long. 160 characters or less is optimal for a meta description tag.

You need to also understand that your Google snippet will be different based on a searcher’s search query. That means Google will not always use your meta description. But if you provide quality content on your web page then no matter what search query a searcher uses the snippet will always come from your page. If your content is not helpful or less than reasonable quality then Google could replace it with its own description of your site. That’s a good reason to make sure every sentence of your web page is of the highest quality.

If you write your web page content and meta data with quality and your visitors in mind then you can maintain control over your Google SERP listings. Don’t be careless with your content.

Tagged with: affordable search engine optimization • Amp • arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • Clickable Link • Elements • Good Reason • google • Internet Marketing • keyword • marketing • Meta Data • Meta Description Tag • Meta Tag • Meta Tags • phoenix SEO • professional search engine optimization • Quality Content • search engine optimization • search engines • Search Query • Searcher • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • Title Tag • Visible Control • Web 3.0 • Web Page

Bing UK Out of Beta, But Too Soon?

On November 19, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

About a week ago, Bing announced they have taken Bing UK (www.bing.co.uk) out of beta. They basically said, you can now get more relevant UK results when in the UK and searching in the UK. Here is a snippet from the blog post:

When you search for Football, what kind of answers do you expect to find. Well, I guess it depends on where you are doing the asking, if you are in the UK you probably don’t want to see NFL schedules. You probably mean what we in the US call soccer. Well today, millions of searchers in the UK can rest assured that Bing knows what they are talking about. We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag. We want to congratulate our pals over in the UK on a huge milestone.

A HighRankings Forum thread is taking issue with this. Two searchers from the UK were not satisfied with the localized version of Bing. They said:

I did a study yesterday and the example they provided (Football) still returns the NFL – something they said that the UK ‘wouldn’t be interested in’. The universal search results are even worse with US today results of ‘American Football’ being returned (and two images of an American Football).

You are certainly right, doesn’t look like Bing UK has any UK inteligence, I just did a simple search for the word ‘analyse’ , and the no.1 result returned was spelt with a ‘z’ , looks like Bing has a long, long way to go yet eh Andy!

I personally tried a search for football in Bing.com and Bing.co.uk and I am seeing tailored results for each region. Yes, NFL.com comes up in the UK, but not in the top result. Since I am not from the UK, it is hard for me to judge.

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

When you search for Football, what kind of answers do you expect to find. Well, I guess it depends on where you are doing the asking, if you are in the UK you probably don’t want to see NFL schedules. You probably mean what we in the US call soccer. Well today, millions of searchers in the UK can rest assured that Bing knows what they are talking about. We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag. We want to congratulate our pals over in the UK on a huge milestone.

A HighRankings Forum thread is taking issue with this. Two searchers from the UK were not satisfied with the localized version of Bing. They said:

I did a study yesterday and the example they provided (Football) still returns the NFL – something they said that the UK ‘wouldn’t be interested in’. The universal search results are even worse with US today results of ‘American Football’ being returned (and two images of an American Football).

You are certainly right, doesn’t look like Bing UK has any UK inteligence, I just did a simple search for the word ‘analyse’ , and the no.1 result returned was spelt with a ‘z’ , looks like Bing has a long, long way to go yet eh Andy!

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

Tagged with: American Football • arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • Beta • Forum Discussion • Forum Thread • images • Milestone • Nfl Schedules • Pals • phoenix SEO • phoenix web design • professional search engine optimization • Relevant Uk • scottsdale website design • search engine optimization • Searchers • seo consultant • seo expert • Simple Search • Snippet • Soccer • Tag • Uk Www • Universal Search

Google Rich Snippets Coming To Smaller Sites?

On November 12, 2009, In SEO, by rustybrick

Back in May, Google launched rich snippets that enabled webmasters to markup their HTML with richer data for Google to display. For example, you can often see results from Yelp and other sites like it for reviews that display reviews in the Google results. Here is a picture:

In fact, most webmasters said they will markup their HTML to take part of this richer snippet experience. Then in September, Google added a rich snippet testing tool because although many marked up their HTML, they never knew if it was actually working because Google rarely displayed the richer snippets for smaller sites.

Now, I am hearing via a WebmasterWorld thread that some smaller webmasters are now noticing rich snippets being displayed for their sites. I tried a few sites myself and was not able to see it myself, maybe he is hitting a different Google data center. I do hope that rich snippets do make its way down to more sites so that the playing field is evened up a bit.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Tagged with: arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • Forum Discussion • google • Google Results • Markup • phoenix SEO • phoenix web design • professional search engine optimization • scottsdale website design • search engine optimization • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • Snippets • Testing Tool • Webmasters • Yelp

Best Of: Website Analytics Tools

On November 10, 2009, In SEO, by David

For a majority of bloggers, developers and designers we all seem to running many sites at the same time, if not were busy building websites for clients. Knowing who is coming to your website and how they got there is an important factor to building a successful website, the information is invaluable and can allow you to make changes to your website that allow for greater growth and profit. With this in mind lets take a look at some great free website analytics tools and their merits.

Free Web Analytics Tools:

Clicky

Clicky is a real time web analytics service. This means that when you login and view your stats, you are seeing up to the minute data on the traffic to your web site. Most services don’t let you see what’s happening “today” until the day after.

Real time data lets you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. For example, if you had an article that hit the front page of a popular site like digg, you would see the traffic spike in Clicky immediately, along with links back to the sources sending you the traffic. Knowing this, you could make changes to your site or to the article itself to take advantage of the situation.

Snoop

Running in the System Tray (Windows) / System Status Bar (Mac) you no longer need to endlessly flip between your work and stats. When something happens, Snoop will let you know.

Snoop will run on any website or blogging platform that allows JavaScript. Simply insert the tracking snippet on any page you want tracked and we take care of the rest.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Grape Web Statistics

Grape is a free, open source program that allows web developers to keep accurate statistics of visitors. The program is currently in a beta testing phase, although it appears to be reasonably stable. Bugs may be reported through the Launchpad bug reporting system or at our forums, which we will address as fast as we can.

Piwik

Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you).

Yahoo! Web Analytics

Yahoo! Web Analytics is a highly customizable, enterprise-level website analytics system designed to help website businesses increase sales and visitor satisfaction, reduce marketing costs and gain new insight on online customers. By storing data in raw, non-aggregated form, Yahoo! Web Analytics is more than simply a reporting tool. It is a powerful, and highly flexible, data analysis tool. Both near real-time AND historical data can be segmented instantly and even visualized with advanced graphs to help marketers and site designers answer specific business questions and find new insights to improve their business.

WordPress.com Stats

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Woopra

Woopra is the world’s most comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. We deliver the richest library of visitor statistics in the industry through our innovative desktop application. But Woopra is more than simply statistics.

FireStats

FireStats is a free to use web statistics system.

GoingUp

Why spend time guessing with trial and error changes and adjustments? Know your audience before you make a change. Know what they expect, know what they want, and consequently, know that you’re making changes for the better. Your website represents the investment of large amounts of time, physical and mental effort, and more-likely-than-not, a significant portion of money as well.

MochiBot

MochiBot is a Flash traffic monitoring tool (similar to a hit counter) that tracks the performance of individual Flash content files (SWFs) no matter where they end up on the web. If your SWF is on 5 different servers, then MochiBot will count the number of views that SWF got for all 5 servers. It’s perfect for tracking how viral your Flash content is.

Mint

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard.

Blog Tracker

Blog Tracker is an invisible tracker that will count your blog visits and other blog statistics. This product is completely free! We will not put any ads on your blog.

Statcounter

A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg if you want more ad revenue, Care what visitors do, Need to make improvements, Like things that are easy

W3 Counter

See who’s talking about you, who’s linking to you, and what your visitors are clicking on now. Don’t wait a day or more for the latest reports — W3Counter shows you what’s happening as it happens.

Paid Web Analytics Tools:

ClickTale

ClickTale delivers innovative In-Page Web Analytics that reveal the mystery of what visitors actually do inside website pages, allowing you to analyze and optimize website performance and usability.

Omniture

The largest technology company focused on CMOs and Online Marketers.

Shiny Stat

ShinyStat PRO is the professional web counter for tracking your website visitors in a simple and effective manner.

Tagged with: arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • blogging • Building Websites • Class Web • digg • Enterprise Class • google • Google Analytics • Marketing Initiatives • Merits • phoenix SEO • professional search engine optimization • Real Time Data • Rich Insights • search engine optimization • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • Spike • System Tray • Time Web • Traffic Data • Web Analytics • Web Stat • Website Traffic • Windows System

SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin Version 1.2 Released

On November 1, 2009, In SEO, by John Lamansky

SEO Ultimate, the powerful WordPress SEO plugin from SEO Design Solutions, has just been upgraded with a new Competition Researcher module that provides you with 3-step access to the investigative tools of search engines.
The Competition Researcher comes with a total of 9 tools to help you analyze the competitive landscape of relevant search engine result [...]

SEO Ultimate Version 1.2 Released with New Competitor Research Module

The Competition Researcher comes with a total of 9 tools to help you analyze the competitive landscape of relevant search engine result pages. These tools help you research either the general competition for given keywords, or the websites of specific competitors.

When you install or upgrade to the newly-released SEO Ultimate 1.2, your “SEO” menu will include a new “Comp. Researcher” menu item. Just click the item to open up the Competition Researcher interface. The options are delineated into 3 steps.

The first step is to choose which of the 9 research tools you’d like to use. Each one includes a small snippet explaining which information the tool will help you obtain. Next, based on the tool you chose, you either enter in the keywords you’d like to investigate, or the URLs of competitors’ websites.

The final step is to set additional options if desired to customize the quantity and/or compactness of the search results returned (feel free to experiment to find your preferred settings). Then just click the “Submit” button to open the parameter-modified search query results in a new window (i.e. no illicit scraping/crawling/automation is used). You can study these search results to glean information about the general competition for a keyword or about specific competitors’ websites.

Here are a few of the factors you can investigate with the Competition Researcher:

How many webpages are competing for given keywords
How many webpages your competitors have indexed
What other sites your competitors link to
How many incoming links your competitors have
Which competing websites have the highest title-tag relevance for given keywords

…and much more.

The Competition Researcher provides an investigation-oriented application of powerful tools from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Thanks to the direct integration of this functionality into the WordPress admin for easy access, the SEO Ultimate plugin has just acquired a new functionality facet that further entrenches its position as the ultimate search engine optimization solution for the WordPress blogging software.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download your free copy from the WordPress plugin directory today! Or visit our plugin information page to watch an informative video that gives you an overview of SEO Ultimate’s features.

Tagged with: arizona search engine optimization • arizona SEO • Automation • Compactness • Competitor Research • Design Solutions • interface • Investigative Tools • Landscape • phoenix SEO • Preferred Settings • professional search engine optimization • Query Results • Relevant Search Engine • Research Tools • Researcher • search engine optimization • search engine optimization expert • Search Engine Result • search engines • Search Query • SEO • seo consultant • seo expert • Snippet • Urls • WordPress