Forum OpenACS Q&A: Approach to Google-optimizing

1) The Google toolbar for Windows provides PageRank information. I'm not sure if the Google API provides it. At least locating the exact search rank is possible through the Google API.

If you are willing to get dirty, the "professionals" have some nasty tricks to increase Google rankings. One guy I know maintains a special front page for each of his client sites that is only served to Googlebot (based on IP address I presume). This special page, which is sometimes (but often not) visible through Google Cache, contains links to popular sites, a search form (this is apparently a plus), as well links to all of his other clients.

This way he can exploit googlejuice between his clients without explicitly linking (they're often completely unrelated commercial sites).

Great link. I was going to recommend selfpromotion.com. It has a whole series of very effective tools for analying keywords, search engine ranking etc. It is very afforable, and you can use it very effectively to improve your web site's rankings as well as provide that service to your clients, if you are in that business.

I'm not saying that cloaking is a good idea or at all moral. It's just an example of a technique that's widely used.

Joel, here's a couple of other suggestions:

- there is a really great application for Mac OS X called Advanced Web Ranking. It allows you to monitor your search results by keyword on hundreds of search engines, month by month or week by week, and it displays graphs and reports -- very effective for showing your client what you're trying to do.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/advancedwebranking.html

- there was a great thread on openacs.org that discussed how to score better on Google, it refered to this great link:

http://wolfram.org/writing/howto/3.html

One of the most important things, it seems, is to have a lot of meaningful links, and to make the site useful to other people, so that other people will link to it.

After that, directory naming seems very important. I notice that my rubick.com pages are found iff I name the directories something meaningful.

So http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/ad_form

would be much better than

http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/notes_on_ad_form

because people would most likely search for openacs ad_form

I remembered Eric having some good experience at getting OACS sites a high Google ranking. https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=107569

Joel,

One simple way to get a more descriptive url is to convert the item title into the cr_items.name using util_text_to_url.

As of the February update, I have noticed that outgoing links are more important to Google. Google has added more weight to what it deems authority pages, and it appears that Google identifies authority pages/sites by the number and quality of related incoming links, number and quality of related outgoing links, number of related pages in the site, and possibly how long the page/site as been online.

As discussed in When Experts Agree: Using Non-Affiliated Experts to Rank Popular Topics, a paper written by two Google researchers, authority sites often link to other authority sites. This paper describes an algorithm for ranking "expert" sites.

A paper entitled Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment, written by Jon Kleinberg at Cornell, distinguishes between hubs and authority sites. Hubs have many outgoing links, ideally to related authority pages, and authority pages have many incoming links, ideally from related authority pages.

Improved Algorithms for Topic Distillation in a Hyperlinked Environment describes a query-based approach that ranks the interconnectivity of pages linked to and from the other top 1000 results for given query.

It is thought that Google has recently modified its algorithm to incorporate some or all of these techniques. In January I optimized a bank's site based on the algorithms discussed in these papers. The site launched in October, and I noticed substantial improvement in rankings after the Google February update.

It does not appear that modifying a page's outgoing links will have any immediate effect. It appears that site connectivity rankings are calculated once a month at the same time PageRank is calculated. In addition, the effects from tweaking the content of a page aren't as noticeable on a day to day basis. Until November, you could change the number of times you repeated a phrase in a page, and the next day you could notice a significant adjustment in the SERPs.

Also, in April 2003, Google acquired Applied Semantics. Recently it appears that it is more effective to use related keywords on a page/site than it is to optimize a page for a particular phrase. Patterns in Unstructured Data discusses the concept of latent semantic indexing. Use Google's Keyword Suggestion Tool to find a list of keywords Google identifies as related to your target phrase.

You can find links to all of the above papers, and ~40 others on my website: Search Engine Research Papers.

there are a few other things that I think originally hurt greenpeace..

1) redirects -- if someone links to http://www.greenpeace.org/, and it redirects to something else, google's engine used to treat the 302 as a 404 and then spider the resulting content.  Not a huge problem until you realize that you get no PR transferred to the domain from the cache of links pointing at the site.

2) keyworded URLs.  recently it seems that google is penalizing .php, .phtml, .shtml, .shtm as 'dynamic'.  I've tested this numerous times with two clients and every time we check, the conclusion is the same.  ? and & in the url are also dynamic triggers and one of my biggest pet peeves.  Yes, if you can, put keywords in the directory path so that the pages have some chance at a higher relevence.

3) Http 1.0/googlebot requests without the Host Header.  I don't know that google still does this, but they used to have a bot that would do checks without sending a host header.  If I recall, greenpeace's website pointed surfers to a non-existent host when that happened.

Other notes:

cloaking.  There are things that you can do that will help google, that are not specifically cloaking.  Yes, they do have some bot that checks whether the page looks similar and contains similar elements, however, you can unfold menus, present navbars that allow google to spider more efficiently, etc.

content location.  I've had a theory for many years that google seems to put more weight on the first 5120 bytes of a page.  Thus, when you design a page that contains css, menus, headers and comments, etc, you are pushing the important page content 'lower' on the page to what google sees.  This in turn affects the relevence to other sites.

keyword relevence.  Google seems to take notice of particular phrases in the <a> container.

For instance, if you link to Nike as:

<a href="http://nike.com/">Nike</a>

you bump the keyword relevence for Nike.  However, a better keyword relevence might be:

<a href="http://nike.com/">Running Shoes</a>

A few other things I've learned along the way:
If at all possible, no inline javascript or css.  Google will try to index it as content.  Use Alt tags that represent what is in the picture (rather than alt="picture1")

404s are the devils bane.  If you put content online, leave it there.  Disk is cheap.  :)

Just some random thoughts.

I am having a hell of a time getting my page to rank high in Google.  I am listed on page 5 for the search "winnipeg data recovery".  There are only a few sites that are even relevent.  I have done a lot of research on optimizing my page for google and nothing seems to help.  If anyone could look at my page and give me some tips please do so.

My site is http://www.winnipegdatarecovery.com and I would like to optimize for "winnipeg data recovery" and "winnipeg file recovery"

My email address is mailto:support@winnipegdatarecovery.com

PLEASE HELP!

Oh, and BTW, James,

Your page title goes "WinnipegDataRecovery.com offers Winnipeg a Data Recovery Solution for hard drives, Digital Camera's, CD's, ZIP and Floppy Disks, Password Recovery, File Repairs for Office Documents".

Wonder why it ranks #1 with "winnipegdatarecovery" but not with "winnipeg data recovery"? To find the answer is left as an excercise ;)

I am pretty new to this community and was interested in this topic considering i like following google stuff. And coming from India, I was obviously more interested in:
http://www.greenpeaceindia.org/

And related to google for thsi site, 1 thing straightly comes to mind... use of images. most of the links on this site that points to other major sections of the sites are images. which i believe is totally unneccessary. the menu on the left and the top is all possible creating using CSS stuff. Images makes it tough for google to guess what the linked page is all about and does not makes addition and editing of content easy!

I will be back with more as I get to study the site more! :)

Also read about Google's new Sitemaps feature - an API which lets you notify Google that dynamic content on your website has been updated.

For this to work, you will also need the directory "google-sitemaps" in the server root, which must be writable by the Web server.

The generated sitemaps can be downloaded at [ad_url]/google-sitemaps/index.xml. See

http://www.clasohm.com/google-sitemaps/index.xml

according to the Sitemaps docs, a sitemap can only refer to pages below it in the site hierarchy - so a map at http://example.com/google-sitemaps/index.xml will only be used for other pages below http://example.com/google-sitemaps/. So for this to actually help it looks like the sitemap file needs to be placed directly in the site root directory.