Search Engines Show Links They Like, Beating The Slap, Seo Un-plugins

Knowing which links are search engine friendly, recovering from slaps, reducing plugins and more...

Podcast: Download (Duration: 3:58 — 3.8MB)

In this episode:

00:05 – Google are now reporting crawl errors in more detail
00:33 – New, more effective maps released
01:03 – How to get a slapped site re-instated
01:49 – Reducing your SEO plugins dependency
02:35 – Allowing Google to follow your inner pages properly
03:00 – Permanent links versus rentals!
03:10 – Uh Oh – watch out for this trap

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Transcription:

James Schramko here with a SEO news update.

Google are now reporting crawl errors in more detail so your Google Webmaster Tool is the best place to get that. Also in there you can now download the links that they find for your site and they tell you what date they found them so that’s really good to know which links are working.

New maps available
Our research and development team have been working really hard setting up all these test sites and finding out which ones Google pay attention to. And what we’ve done is we’ve gone back over our maps. We’ve put in the new winning results; we’ve taken out the losing results so our brand new maps have been released today.

Based on the results we’ve been getting on our test sites we expect our own customers to improve for all the work that is going on a continuing basis. The results will get better and better because the properties that we’re using are getting found in the Google Webmaster Tools and that’s a sure sign they’re effective.

Recovering from a Google slap
I had a site a little while ago that got taken out of Google’s index and they said it was violating their web spam guidelines. Now it was still a good site, it had original content but for whatever reason, perhaps a human reviewer didn’t like it that day and it got knocked out. What we did is we deleted the site; we put up a brand new site with a new design and a new purpose. We turned it into a services site rather than a publishing or content site.

We put in a resubmission request and they approved it and the site is back on and indexed. It’s a page rank 4 site so I’m really happy about that. The process does work if you can come up with a brand new theme and if you can give them what they want.

We’re not using a lot of SEO plugins for our site, I think people overcomplicate this or get too techy. Really what you need is a unique description, a natural page title, preferably including your keyword and you can manually put that into just about any WordPress theme; below the post you’ll see there’s a description field. That’s what you should type in every time, every post and you don’t need a lot of plugins.

Reduce Plugins

We found some people being too tricky with their plugins and guess what they’ve actually put no follow for either their site or for other pages or posts or categories within the site and Google just can’t find the content. So if you’re not sure, just remove all your tricky plugins and just keep it natural.

You do want Google to follow your inner pages because that’s what’s actually going to rank and just like an iceberg. You can have quite a big site that looks small from the surface but Google indexed all those pages. You want thousands of pages indexed. For that reason, we allow Google to follow our categories and our tags. But we only select 1 or 2 categories and we select 3 – 6 tags on our sites.

Permanent vs. Temporary
Now when we’re putting your content on some of the sites that we own, your links are going there permanently and their follow links and you’ll get the benefit. I noticed that one of the blog networks that got shut down has sprung back to life but as a link rental service. They allow you to rent a link for 30 days on a homepage. I’d use things like that with extreme caution. I certainly wouldn’t use it on any money site that you can’t afford to lose.

Be careful.

Anyway that’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed the update. I’ll look forward to catching up with you next week.

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