Cash the Web

Using Internal Linking To Get Better Search Engine Exposure

Anyone who runs a website should be aware of a few basic search engine linking tactics. Used properly you can interlink your website so that Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines will rate you higher in both page rank and search engine results for your keyword/key phrase niche terms. If you’re unaware of what internal linking means, here’s a basic overview.

Internal linking involves the links on your website that point to other pages on your website. Internal linking is very important because it allows the search engine spiders, those automated bots that scour the Internet looking for information, to find all of the pages on your website. In comparison, external linking are links that are on your website which link out to other websites, and there are specific tactics for those as well. In this article, however, we’re going to cover a few simple tactics and strategies to get your internal linking up to speed.

When you’re developing your website, you will tend to put a whole lot of pages of similar information tailored to a specific niche or subject that you want to convey to your visitors. You probably will have information, news, how-to articles, tips and sales pages, where informed visitors can buy your products or services. Your internal linking structure will not only benefit your visitors, but it will help you rank better with the search engines as well.

Having a good navigation system makes Google and Yahoo happy, and in turn, they will reward you because you are doing things to improve the visitors’ website experience. So, for example, if you have an internal linking structure that is seamless, intuitive and allows your visitors to quickly find what they’re looking for, search engines will give you more page rank, index more of your web pages and return higher search results for user queries.

Why? You have taken the time to help your website visitors have an excellent customer experience. As a result, your tactics and strategies should be geared towards giving arriving visitors not only the information that they seek, but have it presented in a way that they, and search engine bots, will love.

So how do you accomplish this? There are a few basic tactics, you can use that will improve your internal linking structure right off the bat.

Number 1 – use the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag for pages that you don’t want to pass rank to Google. For example, let’s say you had a three-page site. Now, we all know that most people have more than three pages for an entire website; however, this will make it easier to follow.

The first page is your home page which gets 100% of the search engine ranking and love. The second page is an information or information/sales page, with the third being a checkout page. If you don’t use the nofollow tag on one of the pages, both pages will be passed half of 50% each for the link from the home page. So, they’ll each get 25% of the ranking and love passed through from the spiders. The search engine spiders will naturally give your home page the best page rank and index it first. Say, you want to link to the information/sales page and make sure that a lot of people find it, because the information page is what will sell your product or service. For ranking and indexing purposes, you consider the checkout page as useless, so you don’t care if the search engines find it or not. In fact, you’d prefer it if they didn’t index it all. What do you do?

When you link from your home page, you can do one of two things.

Link to the information page only from the home page. Link to both pages but use the no follow tag to the checkout page. In that way, if someone arrives who is already sold on your product, they can go directly to your checkout page and buy the product. However, if it is an uninformed visitor, they can clickthrough to your information/sales page or they click on the indexed Google or Yahoo link that’s been picked up by the spider.

Two things happen with scenario #2. You give the customer/visitor the option. Because, the search engine is applying SEO love to one page and not two, the page rank passed will not be 25% and 25% for each page, but 0% for the checkout page and 50% for the information page which needs it. You maintain the search engine indexing and page rank for those pages that are important.

This is just one thing that needs to be considered when setting up your website. Professional SEO firms use this algorithm in order to get specific pages on your website to rank higher and return results in the search engine results pages that are much higher than other pages like your checkout pages which you don’t care about.

Number 2 – Add extra links in your navigation area or footer area that link to important pages and main sections on your website. This extremely easy tactic is often overlooked by many websites, but it does return very good results for deep linking, and most SEO firms will review your footer links when they take you on as a candidate in order to utilize that other form of deep linking.

The reason for this is that so many people forget to do it, and many Web designers add really cool buttons, images and all kinds of funky image stuff that do nothing to improve your page rank or your results in a search engines. You should remember that search engines can’t follow image links or links created in JavaScript. So, you want to add simple text links that the robots can follow to index your website more fully.

These are only two of the tactics that are covered when you hire a professional, savvy SEO firm to optimize your web layout and linking structure.

Tags: Google, internal linking, link, msn, PageRank, yahoo

Did Google revalue PageRank?

Today I noticed many of the sites I manage got PageRank reassigned. Many got rank lowered by a single point.

Couple of months ago, I think that’s when the Google updated its algorithm, many of the sites under my administration got a PageRank boost which got reversed now.

Definitely they have implemented a new variable, during the last update, to assign PageRank. My best guess is the frequency of updates to a site made this drop in PageRank. I’ll be watching this closely and let you folks know about it.

Tags: Google, PageRank

How the age of websites affects its rankings

High rankings on all major search engines are influenced by the number of factors. The age of a site matters a lot. As I have a friend with a site only contains 5 pages and never updates in the last 4 years got PR 5. This revels me a secret. The age of a site.

As we already know, the link to a page from a quality site which has a higher PR will give your page positive points. Links from popular and trusted web pages have a bigger impact on the search engine rankings of a web page than links from less popular and trusted pages.

A new patent application with the name “Ranking Domains Using Domain Maturity” indicates that there is another factor that helps search engines to determine the quality of a web page.

How the new method can be used to detect high quality links

Here’s the abstract of the new patent application:

“Ranking domains for search engines is provided herein. To rank a domain, contributing domains associated with the domain are identified. Additionally, the maturity of each of the contributing domains is determined.

A rank for the domain is then determined based at least in part on the maturity of each of the contributing domains. The domain rankings may then be used to order results for search queries.”

The patent applications indicates that newer domains are more likely to be spam or part of a link system that tries to game search engine algorithms.

Web pages that have links from older domains may be ranked higher than other domains in the search results.

Why do search engines think that new domains are likely to be spam?

Domain names are cheap and some domain name registrars even offer free domain registration and trial periods.

Spammers can easily take advantage of these offers to build a network of websites that link to each other (a so-called link farm).

The new patent describes how search engines can use the age of websites to specify the value of their links. For example, links from websites that are several years old could have a high effect on the search engine positions of the ranked sites while links from newly created websites might not have any effect at all.

Actually, there are several dozen factors that decide whether your website will get top positions on Google or not. Having them all in place makes the difference between a success and a fail. Get your blog right from the beginning to avoid disaster :0)

Tags: age of web site, Google, PageRank, ranking

A major Google algorithm update might be on the way

Webmasters in a discussion forum have noticed changes in Google’s search results. Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? How will this influence the ranking of your web pages in Google’s search results?

What changes did webmasters notice in Google’s search results?

Not all webmasters noticed the same changes. Here’s an overview of what has been reported:

• Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
• It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
• Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
• The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.
• The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

What does this mean to your Google rankings?

It has yet to turn out whether this really is a ranking algorithm or not. If your rankings haven’t changed yet, there’s no need to act. The whole thing might just be a temporary hiccup.

Keep optimizing your site and provide quality content to maximize SEO to make money online.

Tags: algorithm, Google, PageRank, ranking, SEO

Google PageRank algorithm in 2008

It’s time to start with web 3.0. Google has changed the way they rank each page. If you are still hunting for incoming links, you can drop it now and start to focus on getting your site higher in Digg and YouTube.

In the New Year, Google seems to be changing their algorithm and making the search results more time related. The leading search engine has been ranking items from popular sites like Digg higher than factual or historical sites like Wikipedia. Is this a move towards a Web 3.0? In other news, Kara Ratliff reports that Yahoo’s Chief Performance Expert, Steve Souders plans on joining the Google team on January 7th, 2008. For more details, keep visiting http://CashTheWeb.com

Here’s a hint: Do a bit of research on those press/news distribution sites and blog providers that currently have high PageRank from Google. Then focus your efforts on those. You’ll find that your additional content not only ranks highly, but shows up relatively quickly (usually within a day or 2, if not a few hours). Take about a month just to focus on creating additional content that can be mass-distributed to major sites like YouTube and Digg. Content that can be shared becomes viral marketing, and will do you much better than a few static websites in the end!

Cheers to Google!

Tags: algorithm, digg, Google, PageRank, SEO, youtube