Tuesday, October 25, 2005

interlinking

We are currently using internal linking, which is not accessible to search engines. This was done the last couple months. It works well, and actually helped increase seo of the web pages. This came from removing non-related keyword links which previously reduced kw density. It reduced our links from around 100 a page, to under 50.

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Most of the millions of other users on our system consider this a handicap. It removes those links which are indexed. To improve seo, I have turned it into a major seo element, and made it work for rather than against me.

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That type of navigation is used to link from every page in the network, to all other websites in the network, without risking a manual spam penalty. Since it gives you no extra search engine ranking, it is merely there for visitors. It works well for those who want to connect their network, but don't need to use it for ranking for other websites.

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The mistake many webmasters make is using their site wide internal links for seo. If you seo the page properly, you don't need those site wide internal links on every page, indexed by the search engines. You just need to create a clear path for the bot to index every page.

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I use one set of site wide links. This is one page only, and that is it. All other links are subnav. These are links within a specific category to more pages or similar. This is useful to those who want to link to all their network of websites, on every page, without appearing to spam the engines.

The downside...

The downside to my navigation is in the header section of my code. This prevents using it more than once on a page. It's better to use it 3 times on the page. You want to include links within the network. However, in testing, it took up too much space in the top of the web page html. This pushed major keywords further down in the code, which gives them less importance. So... I used it for my extensive site-wide navigational system only. That did the most amount of good, seo-wise. Plus, it gave more room to get the visitor around the site, without keyword dilution.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Should scrapers be banned for life?

Their presence makes the whole browsing experience worse, and ultimately reduces the number of clicks on ads. If you did a search on widgets, and clicked on a couple of the ads only to find that what you thought would lead to a useful sites were scrapers, you'd stop clicking the ads. I no longer click ads in search because I know most of them are useless scrapers.

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The other issue as has been pointed out is that as Google's search is cluttered up with junk, people are finding it harder to find what they were looking for. If that's the case then people will switch to another search engine.

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Hopefully if Google are having a mass cull of scrapers, the browsing experience will improve.
The problem of having adsense chocked full of scrapers is that it's a financial disaster waiting to happen. It's called a "Bubble".

The business model of the scrapers who use adsense is to buy traffic cheaply, and hopefully convert most of the leads they get into clicks for other advertisers that are more profitable.

They don't have to make a lot of profit on the clicks - just have lots of them. However, most ads for scrapers lead to a site that is often cluttered with adsense ads for other scrapers.

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The current algorithm places scrapers highly based on CTR and will often remove ads from real advertisers that pay well to place them in the mistaken belief that they will convert better. The ONLY reason the convert is that there is no content on these pages, and people click out - often via an advert. But that madness is another thread.....

Scenario:

Visitor arrives on the site, and sees an interesting ad. Clicks on it and arrives at scraper. "This isn't what I want - this ad looks promising". Click - another scraper. All that has happened is webmasters have paid / recieved a few cents for a visitor to come and go. Nobody has purchased anything. Adsense can only work if people are flexing the plastic and buying goods and services off of genuine advertisers that have goods and services to sell.

Now if you have the situation where a lot of the advertisers are scrapers, and Google (in it's wisdom / madness) has placed ads for other scrapers on the scraper, then all that is happening is webmasters are exchanging small amounts of money in exchange for traffic. It's pure bubble mentality, and bubbles burst.

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Adsense HAS to be underpinned by real advertisers selling things to customers - marginalising them in favour of scrapers is absolutely crazy. Hopefully if Google are booting out scrapers they have finally realised this. What took you so long Google? Google's financial future rests on then not messing up adsense and their search engine - they HAVE to get rid of the scrapers, and SHOULD ban them for life.