SEO Question:
If I have a furniture store website in a first page position on Google for “home furniture Houston” and I decide to do a separate website for my “kids furniture division” and it gets a top position for “kids furniture Houston” and I do two more separate sites for (example) outdoor furniture and recreation room furniture and they all get top positions on Google, AND they all link to each other, does Google discourage this? It’s like building my own linking network.

SEO Answer:
This sounds like a sound business practice. Too often in the Internet world we base on decisions on what Google would want. Google, in fact, says to market your site as if the search engines weren’t involved. Straight from Google’s Guidelines, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?” I personally would say this is a solid idea and focusing on product lines on each website can be a seen as a clever business decision. Interlinkng between them is would also be encouraged. Why would it be considered bad to link to your similar themed sites? If you owned more than one brick and mortar store you would certainly point visitors to it, so why should the web be any different.

You should make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your sites. If you are going to break out your outdoor furniture from your “main” furniture site, be sure you aren’t showing the same products with the same descriptions. Interlinking should be done strategically and with an eye towards marketing. Just don’t place a link in the footer, create a page that talks about the other site and its line of products and place multiple links to the other site. You want to drive targeted traffic that is well-informed of its link destination.

In summary, creating topically focused product sites isn’t a bad thing, it is a business decision that should be thought out. There will be more work and stores to admin, of course and cross-site linking won’t encourage visitors to view other related products as much as everything being on the same site. Pros and cons to each, as with most things in life. Just don’t let Google control your business decisions, after all, controlling the search results is enough power, don’t you agree?

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please send to contact[at]bigoakinc.com.
Due to time constraints and the fact we run an SEO business we may not answer all questions.

ShareThis

Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “e” in engagement rings. Click for larger image.

Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase”E” in Engagement rings. Click for larger image.

Searching with a capital “E” gives different results than searching with all lowercase letters, and I also noticed discrepancies between lowercase and uppercase letters with that keyword at the 64.233.183.107 datacenter.

Now, look at the differences in the SERPS at the 64.233.171.107 datacenter for the lower and uppercase version of the keyword “dog tags.” The results change after the second search result.

Screenshot of Google results with a lowercase “d” in dog tags. Click for larger image.

Screenshot of Google results with an uppercase “D” in Dog tags. Click for larger image.

Assuming this isn’t a temporary glitch, the SEO landscape will undergo another transformation. If this reflects a real change in the algorithm, keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery will have to be adjusted to compensate. They currently don’t differentiate between searches with lowercase and capital letters. Since the Google search results were believed to be identical for each, they had no reason to.

We’ll have to wait for an official word from Google (if they give one), but right now this is looking at lot less like a glitch and a lot more like a real shift in the algorithm. And it would be a significant one. I would guess that people search with different forms of capitalization as often as they misspell words or use the plural form of words. But it’s just a guess, as there is no keyword research data to back that assumption up….yet.

We’ll have to keep our eyes on this one.

ShareThis

ShareThis

We then asked friends and colleagues who they considered the top wuss rock bands. So I included them below in order of wussiness, based on the number of times a band was listed. The top five bands have a link to a YouTube video for your listening and viewing pleasure.

Top Five Wuss Rock Bands (based on votes):

1. Air Supply - Two guys you hope weren’t actually singing to each other.
2. Chicago - Does every Chicago song sound the same to you?
3. Abba - I was never sure if they were friends, siblings, spouses or what.
4. Loverboy - The name says it all.
5. REO Speedwagon - I can’t fight this feeling any longer…I’m numb.

Other bands receiving votes, in order of number of votes received. (I published comments as well):

• Coldplay
• Foreigner
• Hall & Oates
• Jefferson Starship
• Journey
• Radiohead – great musicians, but let’s face it, the Backstreet Boys could probably take them in a fight.
• Styx
• Survivor
• White Lion
• Winger
• A Flock of Seagulls
• Aaron Carter – it’s bad when your brother was a Backstreet Boy and he’s referred to as the “hardcore” one.
• A-Ha
• Ambrosia – Holdin’ on to Yesterday was their biggest song and their destiny.
• Backstreet Boys
• Bang Tango
• Bread – I found your Diaper underneath the tree?
• Creed
• Culture Club
• Dashboard Confessional – been singing about the same girl that left him for nearly 10 years…get over her dude.
• Dire Straits
• Everything But the Girl – I still have EBTG worship issues.
• Extreme - Hole in my heart makes me want to put a hole in my head.
• Fall out Boy
• Fleetwood Mac
• Genesis
• Goo Goo Dolls
• Heart
• Huey Lewis & the News
• Maroon 5
• Mr. Big
• N Sync
• Nelson
• New Kids On the Block (reunited)
• Night Ranger
• Teenage Fanclub
• The Carpenters – They had a chick playing the drums. If Mama Cass would have given Karen a sandwich, they’d both be alive.
• The Scorpions
• Toto
• Warrant

If you would like to contribute, feel free and post a comment.

ShareThis

Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time.

If you’re paranoid that having your link appear on a black hat scraper site will hurt you from an SEO standpoint, don’t be. The odds are against that happening in this situation. Google should be able to figure out that the only reason your link was involved with a bad neighborhood was because it appeared in content scraped from Wikipedia.

The other common opinion is that if you manage to pickup an external link on a popular or semi-popular Wikipedia page, many people will see your link and naturally create backlinks to it. Wikipedia pages do tend to get loads of Google traffic. This isn’t April 2007, so Wikipedia doesn’t rank number 1 for everything anymore, but I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s still fairly popular in the Google SERPS. And by “fairly” I mean “extraordinarily.” I’m digressing, but Wikipedia is the classic example of a site who’s success was truly driven off the back of Google. In fact, I would venture to say that if it wasn’t for Google, Wikipedia never would have entered into the mainstream.

Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:

1. Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
2. Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.

Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.

ShareThis

Wrap your head around that number. Wow. Some small companies hope to bring in 1 million sales a year. Here’s a tip for you, start a food catering business and cater to Google!

Get your fill and read the full story on Softpedia.

ShareThis

Brand Recognition

One thing to remember is that the big guys have resources, but because of that they often focus on the more traditional avenues for gaining traffic to their sites and stores. Take the diamond engagement ring business for instance. While any number of us can probably name a dozen national chains off the top of our heads (DeBeers, Zales, Kay Jewelers, and Jared to name a few), not a single one of them shows up in the top 50 for the term “diamond engagement rings”. In fact, only Kay is in the top 100 and Jared isn’t in the top 500. Why? Because they don’t have to be thanks to brand recognition. How does this help you?

Because they rely so much on brand recognition, most of your larger companies never bother to engage in SEO. For example, the #5 result for “diamond engagement rings” is Danforth Diamond, who’s home page title has the words “diamond engagement rings” in it, where as Jared and Zales both have only their company name in the title. Probably why Danforth Diamond is ranked #5 and Jared and Zales are both outside the top 50.

Red Tape

When it comes to writing copy for your website, you usually have one, maybe two writers, and yourself to answer to. When a big corporation decides to write copy for their website, they have to have one of their writers come up with copy that is SEO friendly, then that copy has to be worked over by the marketing people to make sure it works with the brand message, then it has to go to the legal department to make sure that they aren’t making any claims that can’t be substantiated, then it can go back to the writers for more edits, then back to…well I think you get the picture.

Smaller companies have the advantage of not having to deal with the same red tape that larger corporations do when deciding to make changes to their website. While you only answer to yourself, larger companies have to answer to their CEO’s, board of advisors, stockholders, and anybody else that has a corner office with a view.

Site Maintenance

SEO takes work, especially on your website. Between changing titles, adding products, adding content, installing a shopping cart, there’s a lot going on with your website. While smaller companies can handle having systems that are SEO friendly and perhaps take a little longer to make changes on, larger companies need changes made over night, and that typically means a content management system (CMS) that is less than SEO friendly.

Because the larger companies use CMS that aren’t SEO friendly, many of them don’t bother engaging in SEO and instead rely on brand awareness (which I mentioned earlier) to help drive traffic to their sites. Going hand in hand with this is the fact that since the larger companies don’t engage in SEO, when you do find them you’ll find their home page and have to search through their site for what you’re looking for, whereas with smaller sites you can have focus on internal pages to take customer to exactly what they’re looking for. This helps conversion rates, which ultimately means more profits for the little guy.

Reporting to Everybody

As I mentioned when talking about red tape, larger companies aren’t just answering to themselves. Zales might do a lot of business, but they have to report to their shareholders, board of trustees, and everybody else. When the little jewelry store down the street has a good quarter, the only person they’re answering to is themselves.

Because of having to answer to shareholders, larger companies need to be able to quantify their numbers into something that is easily understood, and that usually means time, energy, and resources channeled into producing these reports, as well as a system in place on the website that can easily produce the numbers needed. Those systems are often not SEO friendly. So while Zales might be able to tell their shareholders how much money they sold in the 3^rd quarter of 2005, the small jewelry store down the street can figure out how much money they made, how many of each product they sold, and still rank in the top 10 for their big keywords.

Keep on Fighting

Sure, it can be discouraging to look at big companies and the money they can spend, but in this digital age with more and more people finding the products and services they want online through search engines, smaller companies can compete with larger ones through quality SEO and user-friendly websites. With a little work your company can get more internet exposure than those that spend millions of dollars on commercials, radio spots, and billboards. That’s the beauty of quality SEO.

ShareThis

Finding software that would build the PDF easily was not an easy task. In the end, the software did a credible job, but it isn’t exactly like I wanted it. But rather than tweak it endlessly I have decided to release it as is. The good news is it is free and I think most of those in the SEO industry can learn from it. I certainly learned something while putting it together.

So please visit the download page: 52 SEO Tips Download. Give a link back to us if you find it helpful.

Shell Harris
http://www.bigoakinc.com/

ShareThis

I counted 171 words starting with Filehostfactory and ending with “your own site.” Out of those words, 34 are being sold as Chitika ads. That is 20% of your content being sold to advertisers. Wow! And it doesn’t make reading it any easier either.

According to Chitika big money by top bloggers is a certainty so this type of in-your-face link advertising may be more prevalent as small-time bloggers seek a bigger piece of the blog advertising pie.

Has anyone had monetary success with this type of advertising? It would seem to drive viewers away in my opinion.

I do appreciate the link to our comic.

ShareThis

For the past few days, many people who create new Squidoo lenses have been met with an unpleasant surprise. All the links on the lenses have been turned to nofollow, as demonstrated in the screen shot on the right. Apparently, this is a bug that popped up after Squidoo changed servers. The lenses are jammed in WIP mode, and in this mode, all links (including internal Squidoo links) are nofollow. It normally only takes the daily lensrank update to break free from this mode and, in turn, have all the links transformed to dofollow. The bug can be traced all the way back to April 9th, so it seems a bit funny that it still hasn’t been resolved.

Hopefully, this bug isn’t a preview of things to come. Most people would flip if Squidoo actually added nofollow tags. Although, Jason Calacanis might be pleased since he views Squidoo as nothing more than an outlet for spammers.

We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. It seems like a long time for a bug to still be acting up.

ShareThis