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Earlier this year, I moved my site to a new ISP and picked up the Mambo Open Source content management system to handle my blog entries (like this one). One of the first things I noticed was that when I searched Google to try to find pages that I knew full well were here, I couldn't find them. That means that anyone out there who might be interested in my article on sump pumps, my cigar reviews, OS X scripts, VBScript code, etc., probably isn't going to find them. Naturally, I'm concerned about that and I've been on a quest to get my site to show up at all in Google, and then to improve where and how often it shows up. If you publish content yourself, this article should be of interest to you. If you use a content management system to publish that content, it should be of even more interest. This article contains a journal of my experiences to improve this site's accessibility in Google search results.
06/27/2005: Google has taken a beating in the past because “spamming” sites were able to get their advertising pages ranked high up in Google search results even though their pages had nothing to do with the topics the user was searching for. As a result, Google has been hard at work refining their methods of indexing and ranking sites. The article “Great Site Ranking in Google – The Secret’s Out” discussed several ways to make that happen: - Register your domain name for longer than a year. Many spammers don’t do that because they know that a domain name they use will end up in blocklists within a year, making it useless. My site’s registered for 2 years, so I should be good there.
- Provide content that others will want to link to. The more links pointing to your site from others, the more relevant your site will appear to Google’s ranking system and the higher your page will appear in the listing. This is something I’m going to need to work on, since a search using Google’s link searching tool says no one is linked to me right now. Ouch. I hear that link exchanges can help with this, if they’re used “ethically” to promote related sites. Fewer but better quality links will help more than lots of low-relevance links.
- Clicks from your site back to the search results are monitored. That probably is used to determine if people thought your article was worth reading from what was in their search results. For example, if they were looking for an article about the Model T Ford and found your article about a Ford Mustang GT instead, they’d probably hit the “back” button and return to the search results quickly. Google would “remember” this and rank your site lower in the results in the future.
- The frequency and number of page updates on your site is monitored. Sites that appear to be stale will probably be treated as outdated or obsolete. By the same token, sites updated too much and too often will probably look like spam sites or attempts to flood the search results.
- The “density” of the search keywords in your text and the rate at which the density changes is monitored. If you notice that many people are searching for “possum casserole” recipes and start reproducing that phrase over and over on your page for a few days, Google will notice that and start treating you like a spammer. Finding the right balance of “enough” keyword references in your page text to make it into search results without having so many that you appear to be a spammer will be critical.
Something I also noticed is that the content management system I am using doesn’t list specific “.html” type files in the URLs for the blog articles. That makes it a little harder for search engines to figure out if there is really any relevant content there. Earlier today I read a bit about Google’s Sitemapping capabilities. By creating a simple file in a text editor that helps Google figure out where your pages are, how often you update them, and how you rank different pages against one another, you can improve your appearance in search results. For example, my review of the CAO Black cigar appears at the URL “http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/28/1/”. I typically update my cigar reviews occasionally, as I have another cigar of the same type, or decide to adjust the numeric review so that if I thought “Cigar A” was a 9/10 but now realize that “Cigar B” is a better one, I change “Cigar A” rating to (for instance) an 8 and give “Cigar B” a 9. If I wanted to describe that page to Google’s Sitemap feature, I might do something like this: <url>
<loc>http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/28/1/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-05-25</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority>
</url> This tells Google that the page was last modified on May 25, 2005. I expect the page to change approximately monthly. An average page on my site would get a 0.5 priority, but this one is important to me, so I’m giving it a 0.8, meaning that of all the pages on my site (not all the pages on all the sites Google monitors) I consider this one to be of much higher than average value. I then submitted this information to their sitemaps page. It tells me that they had a problem with a couple of the URLs in the file. I didn’t quite understand why the URLs were a problem based on the error messages, since the URLs in question were definitely a part of my site. Going to have to do some digging to sort this out, I guess. The good news is that many pages on my site that previously didn’t show up in Google results now do… so I am making progress. 06/28/2005: Knowing from yesterday's research that search engines care a great deal about how many other sites provide links to yours, I set about today attempting to get the word out that my site exists. I did this in two general directions. The first was to locate the various directories of blog sites and submit mine to the ones that appeared to be better ones. The second was to use the RSS feed feature of this site to get my RSS feed listed on various other sites. My hope is that this will generate enough linking back to this site that the search engines will recognize it as being a bit more valuable than some. A good starting point for this activity was the following page:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
I also made sure that MSN Search and Yahoo knew where to find my site. That should also generate some links back in this direction from sites that Google and other engines spider, again improving my ranking in the search results.
But I also learned yesterday that keyword density makes a difference. I have considered including invisible (to humans) text at the bottom of my articles that packs a lot of the keywords onto the page. For example, if I'm wanting a "cigar review" page to come up early in a search for one of the reviews I've done (e.g., "Perdomo Reserve cigar review") then that page should have a lot of those words packed into it so that the search engine can recognize that the page is, in fact, a relevant result. One way to do this would be to go back and paste in lots of extraneous references to the keywords in an article. That would certainly increase the density of the keywords and potentially bring us to the forefront in the search results. However, I'm concerned that this technique would also be close enough to that of some of the crappy "spammer" sites that I might actually hurt my site more than help it. So what I'm going to try is an experiment. In my Perdomo Reserve cigar review, I've added a paragraph at the end. It contains mostly nonsensical text that repeatedly uses the keywords I think are most relevant to the article. I formatted the text as "crossthough" and put a disclaimer above it so that people know it doesn't really apply to the article and is only there for search engines to find. In a few days, I'm going to Google the appropriate phrase again and see if my review has now moved further up in the rankings. Right now, a search for the phrase "perdomo reserve maduro cigar review" places my review in the 16th position, on the second page of search results, below some pages that clearly are NOT reviews of this particular item. I'm hoping that the addition of all the keywords will move my article to the first page. I'm not looking to secure the first position, just a placement that's appropriate given my article's relevance to the search terms compared to other listed pages. 07/05/2005: Well, the changes I made to the cigar review page have now been out there for a few days for Google to find. Looking at the cached copy of my home page, I see they've kept it pretty current, which means they should have picked up the keyword changes and the content listing I provided. Let's see if that has helped my search results. I enter the search phrase "Perdomo Reserve cigar review" and check things out. It appears that I've dropped from 16th to about 21st in the list of results. This is movement in the wrong direction to be sure. Perhaps it's the fact that I "struck through" the extra keywords I dumped in there, or maybe the keywords are so dense that it looks more like a spammer tactic than legitimate text. Let's test the strikethrough approach first... I'll remove the strike-through from the text and also use a bit of bolding here and there to emphasise key words in the article. That may help. 07/07/05: I'm now at #11 in the results, which places me at the top of the second page. Considering that some of the first 10 results have nothing to do with reviews of the cigar in question, that's a bit of a bummer. I've also noticed that for some reason the Google results are pulling my "keyword heavy" text as the page description instead of the actual meta tag with the description in it. Could be an error on my part. Need to look at that. On the good news side, it does look like my efforts are moving the page in the right direction. 07/11/05: What do you know... I moved up to #10 in the results, putting me on the first page finally. And several of my other cigar review pages are in the top 10 as well. Improving the keyword density helped considerably, as well as getting some other sites to link to me. I got word this morning that at least a couple of the sites have linked to me now. To further improve things, I got on some online forums and posted links to my articles about Mac OS X scripting as "how to" guides for doing different administration tasks. If people follow those links, it should generate more traffic to the site. Even if they don't, odds are Google will find those links back here and mark my pages as being a bit more "relevant" since other sites reference them. Right now my OS X scripting articles are virtually invisible in the flood of Google results when I try to query for them. 08/04/05:
Looks like Google finally finished spidering my web site. The last time I asked it to search on pages from the site mikesalsbury.com, they pretty much all had names and details. That also explains why the number of hits and unique visitors is increasing. The "GSitemap" program I found seems to do a great job of helping you build and maintain a sitemap for Google, even with the Mambo OS content management system. The only thing you have to watch is that the first time it "finds" a new page on the site, it may list it several different ways in the URL list. You should uncheck those "extra" ways to avoid an unnecessarily large sitemap.xml file. 08/17/05:
Found some good information about search engines today:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/search/ 08/23/05:
Today I read the Amazon Associates Central page on improving your visibility in search engines. Most of what they have to say is comparable to what's in my "Teaching Google to Mambo" article. A few new or slightly different thoughts included these: - Get yourself a good domain name. Not surprisingly, URLs containing clear keywords generally perform better than those that appear random or are excessively long. And in addition to getting you higher placement in search results, having its own domain name gives your site added credibility. You'll want to make sure the name you choose logically pertains to the subject matter of your site, isn't too long to remember, and isn't easily misspelled. Use keywords that a crawler will understand, and try to avoid numerals or abbreviations.
- Content matters. You will also benefit from providing rich content on your site. It is important that you include at least a few paragraphs of copy that is visible to crawlers and full of keywords, which will enable search engines to better classify your pages. Use the keywords you included in your <META> elements, and don't be afraid to use them many times within your copy. But, of course, what you write should make sense and be easy to digest, as readability is vital. You should also display text on your site as text, not as images, which crawlers cannot read. Use <ALT> tags for pictures you do use, so that crawlers can get some information out of them, and incorporate HTML navigation wherever it is possible, even if this means adding redundant navigation at the bottom of your pages.
- Avoid pitfalls. Your goal is to increase your search-engine rankings, not to decrease them, but there are some things you can do that will accomplish just that. For example, some search engines don't index dynamic content on framed pages. If this applies to your site, therefore, think about ways to modify it so that it can be more easily indexed, or create alternate, crawler-friendly versions of your pages. Also, keep in mind that many search engines are familiar with common spamming techniques, like hidden text and irrelevant metadata, and will take appropriate action when pages using them are detected in their indexes.
08/24/05:
Found an interesting article about a new kind of "search engine spam":
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/raw/org/org.html
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