Web Site Design Blog

According to Matt Cutts blog, Google has penalized sites that used the service traffic power to optimize and seo their sites:

I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. If you are a client or former client of Traffic Power and your site is not in Google, please see my previous advice on requesting reinclusion into Google’s index to learn what steps to take if you would like to be reincluded in Google’s index. 

Ouch! That means that if you were an innocent site owner hiring and SEO and they used some trickery to get traffic to you, it’s your fault for being that stupid and not investigating their tactics. That makes sense. (no sarcasm here).

Meanwhile, we noticed some pagerank drops in sites and pages being pulled down in rank completely since last week - although still indexed, their ranking is gone. Why? The most obvious reason floating around is purchased text links, but in this case the only payment involved in the links on the pages I’ve noted are cj.com links, which relate directly to the site promoting a related product, and links to other related sites. This makes one huge reason to have a single website that handles EVERY aspect of your company as Google’s robot can not seem to differentiate between your other companies, your revenue production and pure spam out there. Linking between your various sites can give the impression of spamming text links to the index. The best recourse is therefore to only list those “resources” on a single page not related to any other content on your site, lest you find your entire site gets caught up in the mix.

Seems that many people have the impression that google shows backlinks of 4 PR sites only and not others, or in general those are the ones that count. Not so. We note that we have backlinks from sites that have PR3 and some other sites are not mentioned that are PR4 plus. It’s mish moshing when it comes to Google. While you can certainly open up a webmaster account on Google and look at what is really happening, it should be noted that what you see from the Google toolbar is not the end all of what you are getting.  Google is certainly counting links to your site, unless of course they are filtering out some, of course, and unless you work at Google it’s not likely that you’ll crack their algo. So keep on making links to relevant sites and don’t pay attention to those little rules that people are making up in SEO land.

Okay, so you need a sitemap, where to go to make this easier?

Try http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

The other day I was checking cache on a site and saw that the Google toolbar shows cache a couple of days behind. It delivers it into the Google Search a day or so later. Therefore, if your site is crawled on Monday it could take until Wednesday for the cached site to show up. So this leads one to immediately surmise that the cache is not really in the index, that this is not searchable until later. However, it should be noted that Google actually serves some content within a few minutes of it’s being put online, specifically blog content. We posted a news headline on one of our blogs and it was in Google immediately. Wow. We are talking within 5 minutes of the post.

If you visit that blog you’ll note that the cache for homepage is October 2, but the article that we posted October 5 is actually in the index. How does this happen?

Ping servers listed in your options usually notify Google to index the page. The minute you post a ping is sent out to those servers and they are pinging Google. Technorati is usually one of the first to deliver content from a ping, but Google actually picked it up on their own much faster.