Web Blog of Greg Mathews

In my post here ‘PR and is it important‘ I told you that one of my sites had a PR 0, well shortly after that post I visited my site to find that in the latest PR update the site was given a PR4.

What will it mean, I do not know, the traffic increased substantially yesturday but I don’t beleive that is down to PR or at least not PR alone. We will wait and see.

For the ten years I have had a web site every server has used a Server Alias in the web server configuration so that domain.com and www.domain.com both point to the same site.

This is great as it means that the site is accessable with or without the www. in front of the domain – I am surprised the amount of sites where this does not happen.

I found out recently though that by having a server set up this way could lead to problems with search engines as they are treated as two seperate sites and could therefor be punished for duplicate content.

There is a way around this problem using a 301 redirect. What a 301 redirect does is tell the visitor/search engine that the url they are trying to access has moved. So you could set up a 301 redirect to redirect all traffic from domain.com to www.domain.com or visa versa. This way the search engines will treat both urls as the same site and duplicate content would not be an issue.

A 301 redirect can be set up in either your servers configuration file or in the .htaccess file.

Here is an example based on a 301 redirect I have set up in my server configuration file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://domain.com$1 [R=301,L]

This redirects http://www.domain.com/anything.ext to http://domain.com/anything.ext

PR (Page Rank) is a figure generated against your web page by Google.

According to wikipedia

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of EPR(E).

This all sounds very impresive and webmasters everywhere strive to get a good PR for their site, but I ask, what is so importent about it? how does it effect your site?

Google do not give full details of how they calculate PR nor what they do with it. Many rightly or wronly believe your site’s PR effects how well it is indexed on Google but I question this.

Take two of my sites, one is a PR 4 site, it has links coming in from other sites and it is established, but if you search for a related search term on Google it will be found quite a way down the results. The 2nd site has a PR 0, it has very few links pointing to it from other sites and it has only been around for 4 months. When you search Google for related terms it comes up on page 1.

Now I accept the two sites are completely different, and the number of ‘competative’ sites all competing for top spot varies drastically with site 1 having to compete with a lot more sites, but surely should this not be reflected in the PR value assigned to a site?

Personally I am not like many other webmasters, I don’t go out of my way to improve my page rank, if the site is indexed well in the search engines and getting the traffic I want for the site then I am happy.

What do you think about Page Rank and is it important to you?

There was once a time when FFA (Free for all) pages appeared to be a good way to increase the number of links pointing to your site and hence increase your sites traffic.

Then you had link exchanges, these again appear to be great but as with FFA’s joining a link exchange can have the wrong effects.

That is now no longer the case, Search engines frown upon such sites and can ‘punish’ your site when it comes to indexing your site.

A new method of gaining traffic is called link baiting but after reading this post on the Google ‘Webmaster Central’ Blog I would not be surpised if this is dealt with firmly by the search engines in due coarse.

Google recommend that you should think of the users experience rather than the search engines and links to your site should be placed on sites that are relative to your site, ie simular subject etc. This does make sense to a point in my opinion, if a person is looking for a widget, they are more likey to follow a link, to your site selling widgets, from a widget manufacturers site.

The problem as I see it, is that your widget may be unique, it may be something you manufacture and sell, who is then going to link to your site? someone else who is manufacturing and selling the same type of widget on your site? I don’t think so.

Everyone needs to know, Link Popularity does effect the search engine results, you need to get it right, ensure your site has good internal links to other pages on your site, beleive it or not it does help. Make sure if you use javascript navigation that you also have normal html links somewhere as many of the bots that crawl your site do not read/understand javascript and hence will not detect the links within it.

Google provide a very useful tool in the form of Webmaster Tools which allows you to track how your site is doing in the Google search results.

Google describe the tools as

Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

You will need to get a Google account to use the Webmaster tools, if you already have a gmail account then you can use that. You will need to verify your site which simply involves either uploading a file to your server with a specific file name or adding a ‘verify’ meta tag to your sites home page.

Once verified you can obtain all sorts of information such as whether or not your site is in Google’s index, when your home page was last crawled by Googlebot and even the top keyword searches that found your site in the results.

I have been able to use this valuable information for all sorts of things since I started using it.

Well I’ve been monitoring Yzoo for the past few days and things appear to have started to settle down.

The amount of traffic the site is getting is now up to the level it was in mid November 2006, and is gradually climbing. It is unlikely to reach the December 2006 peak this month but I am hopefull this month will reach Novembers peak traffic.

I need to get a few months of good steady traffic now before I decide what to do on/with the site.

1. I could sell the site, based on the monthly income currently generated from adsense. This would be a nice short term option but long term, as it’s not costing me much to keep going it might be the wrong move.

or

2. I could keep the site and look at maybe finding another advertising source. I’ve looked at various advertising networks to see if there are any that are worth switching to:

i. YPN – looks OK but for some reason is for US only publishers so counts me and the site out.
ii. Adbrite – I tried this in the early days of the site but it did not earn as much as adsense. Maybe it would earn me more now but I am sceptical.
iii. Using a ‘context advertising’ script that I have almost completed writing push individual ads and maybe Commission Junction ads. This situation though means I need to have a lot of advertisers sign up or a lot of CJ advertisers to make it worth while.

or

3. Change nothing – this is the front runner at the moment, the past two months have earned my 4 figure sums and this month looks like it will also hit 4 figures, this is a nice income to have each month for very little work.

Time will tell

Greg

Well it appears that I am not alone when it comes to sites disappearing over the past few weeks.

I read a post on the Google forum where the author called it the ‘Google Dance’

Once again the site is returning to the Google SERPs and traffic is up, traffic from Google is now back up to about 70% of what it was orriginally.

Strangely enough yesturday Google did some ‘Scheduled Maintenance’ and today other parts of their website have been intermittent. Is this all related? who knows?

Greg

Well I really do not know what google are doing, are they just updating their index/datacenters or are they punishing the site for some reason?

The amount of traffic from Google and the positioning of Yzoo.co.uk in the Google SERPs did improve for a couple of days but then it dropped of again and known ‘good’ searches are not returning the site in the results once again.

The strange thing is if you do a search on google for site:yzoo.co.uk the results show about 8 pages from the Supplemental index before anything from the main google index. What does this mean?

I have added another search engine to the script so there is even less chance of duplicate content being the cause. The script now searches any 4 of 6 different search engines so the page content should change each time it is updated.

We will just have to wait and see over the next few days to see if things straighten out. I’ve never before spent so much time monitoring google results.

Since my last post I have monitored my status in google SERPS.

The incomming traffic from google is now back up to 65% of my total incoming traffic for the month, this is not as high as it has been but does show that the site has been reindexed which does make me wonder if there was some kind of ‘Google Glitch’.

I confirmed that the site is back in good standing in the Serps by checking a few of the top searches that have in the past found my site, and hey presto they are back on page 1 of the results.

I have also tried to look into the issues I raised incase this was not a ‘Google Glitch’ and have done the following:

1. Christmas and New year

Well there is not alot I could do to change this apart from get over my hang over

2. Duplicate Content

I have made changes to the design of the site, they are minor changes but to a certain point make it obvious to a ‘real’ user that the two sites are NOT the same.

I have also made changes to my results, I have added AOL to my search engines, but at the same time modified the script so it only searches 4 of the 5 search engines. I am hoping that the fact the results pages will contain different text each time it is generated, because of the randomly selected search engines being used, there is going to be less chance of duplicate content existing.

3. Keyword Generation

I have made a few minor changes here but nothing to take note about.

I will update this blog over the next days/weeks as I monitor how google is dealing with my site.

Just got one peice of good news reguarding Yzoo and Google, today my Adsense earnings for November hit my bank account.

Why the sigh? Well before Yzoo I was earning just a few dollars a month on Adsense. In October it jumped to a few hundred US Dollars for the month. In November it jumped to a 4 figure number, even 4 figures in Pound Sterling.

Looking forward to next months payment now:)