A little while ago I read the following thread over at SEOmoz:
Results of Google Experimentation – Only the First Anchor Text Counts
This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank. I think someone mentioned in the discussion that even if the 1st link was nofollowed, it would still be the only one that counted. This would have meant that I was supposed to be completely shafting myself.
I got rid of the 1st links to the homepage altogether hoping to see a rise in Google for my main phrase, but I did not. I did however rise over 60 places, within less then a week or so on MSN/Live search.
I wanted to know for sure with Google, so when I 1st changed over my design less then a week ago, I made it so that every post in this blog linked to the about us page, with my name as the anchor text. I have just checked today and it is ranking 4th on Google UK, just behind my Yahoo! post.
- The 1st anchor text always says about
- There is very little on-page for it, other then the links in these posts
- There are other pages with far more David Eaves links (external ones)
- There are no external links to that page using that anchor text
My conclusion: Google does not only look at the 1st link to a page for anchor text, MSN/Live search does and I am not too sure about Yahoo!
Good advice and practice from SEOmoz anyway though, if only for MSN. Why take a chance on it? Make sure that you have your good anchor text in the 1st links to your pages.
Update: Seeing how VanDeMar seems to be the one who started this whole thing off, here is a link to his original post:
You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 2nd, 2008
I have been working hard over the last week or so, on the new design for this site. I have still got a long way to go, but I certainly feel like things are starting to fall into place.
I have changed a lot of the URLs on the main site and as you would expect everything is going fine with Google. Yahoo! seems to be very slowly getting there and I have no doubt sent a kiss goodbye to many of my MSN/Live search rankings for quite sometime.
The new logo is what I like best about this new design, if you look carefully at the blue design, that is actually a little SEO, with an arrow pointing upwards at the top. When the designer James was showing it to me, he was like;
“the abstract design contains the letters S,E and O and the arrow pointing upwards represents your clients rankings going to the top.”
I just loved it instantly and I was like:
“you had me at S”
I am not too sure about this font and one or two people have commented that it is a little small, I will probably be changing it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to get this hacked up, broken thing looking like a blog as well.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 1st, 2008
Image Credit: copyright
The following post has been written by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, more of his articles can be found at his blog.
There are a number of ways to protect your blog from piracy, but there is a tangible cost no matter what you do, and sometimes letting them steal it actually helps you in the long-run.
The first method of protection is filing DMCA requests with Google, other search engines, and perhaps the host of the site scraping your content. But honestly this can be tough to keep up with if it happens over and over again, and is probably a poor strategy given that the internet is truly global.
An easier method of protecting copyright is to simply publish partial feeds instead of whole RSS feeds. This means that while an RSS scraper may steal your content, they will not be getting much of it from you, and what they get should not be able to harm your rankings.
The third strategy is to use their content theft as an SEO & link building strategy. If you frequently reference your older blog posts in your current blog posts (using absolute links – not relative links) that means that the scraper sites will be providing free links to your content. Over time as you build up a real audience and your authority you should *usually* outrank the scrappers for your own content. A friend of mine named Joost de Valk created a Wordpress extension which automatically adds links to your site in the footer of your RSS. If you have pages that are hard to build links to and hundreds or thousands of scrappers are linking to them that could help boost your rankings for related keywords. If you use an extension like RSS Footer make sure you mix up your anchor text and footer occasionally in case anyone trained their bot to strip it out AND to help keep your anchor text profile a bit more natural.
Copyright is increasingly irrelevant each day, and being unknown is a bigger risk for most bloggers than getting outranked is. If you really push eventually you should get credit for most (if not all) of your content. In the next year or two if they have not yet solved the RSS scrapper issue I believe the major search engines may launch tools to help you register your content by submitting it to them before publishing it so they know the source.
Many people copied my ebook and distributed it across the web widely without my permission. My three solutions to that were to either encrypt it with DRM software, stop selling information, or break information into smaller pieces and keep adding premium content and sell it as a membership site basis. Instead of giving up or crippling my product I decided to launch an online training program and back it up with a community forum that turns it into more of an experience rather than just a commodity piece of information.
Posted in SEO News By Aaron Wall.
March 21st, 2008
Although I do not currently use read more tags on this blog one of my clients does. I decided that it was a waste of PageRank to have the more tags followed and went about finding some information on how add nofollow to the links. But I could not find any, after a good couple of hours of tweaking I figured out how to do it, here is a quick tutorial:
More Tag Nofollow Fix for Versions 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3
You need to make changes to the post template file in the WP includes folder. On line 124 you will see the following line of code:
$output .= ‘ <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . “#more-$id\” class=\”more-link\”>$more_link_text</a>”;
You need to add the nofollow tag just before the link text. Simply replace the existing line of code with this one:
$output .= ‘ <a href=”‘. get_permalink() . “#more-$id\” class=\”more-link\” rel=\”nofollow\”>$more_link_text</a>”;
Once you save the file all of your more tag links will be nofollowed.
I do not think that this will make a huge amount of difference to your search engine rankings, but PageRank is precious and it could help prevent some of your posts being dropped from the search results.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
March 19th, 2008
Image Credit: earth from space
A couple of weeks ago Barry reported that Google’s country specific weights may be getting stronger. Some changes have been made and one thing is obvious, UK sites have had their rankings reduced on Google.com for many commercial phrases.
One thing that seems to have gone un-noticed is that around the same time the Google webmaster central set geographic tool began to work.
Webmasters who’s sites are hosted outside the of the UK can now have their sites rank properly on Google UK (including pages from the UK), simply by changing the geographic target via Google webmaster tools.
I know of at least one site that this is working properly for, the site is hosted in the US and it has been set up so that the UK sub directory of the site now shows up on pages from the UK.
If webmasters with international sites leverage this properly it could have a huge impact on the amount of traffic they receive. Certain sites that spring to mind are ones like Dmoz and BOTW.org, these sites could now have their UK sub directories show up and rank properly on UK only Google.
Also this is not just a UK thing, webmasters can now have the relevant sub-directories/domains of their international sites show up on country specific searches worldwide. Can you imagine how much more traffic that would mean for Dmoz if this was set up correctly?
To make this work you need to have a general top level domain like a .com, .net or a .org, with the sub directories of your site specifically targeting individual countries, you then need to claim the different sections as separate sites and set the relevant geographic target for each one.
This is supposed to take about 2-3 months to kick in, but it could take much longer depending on the size of the site and the amount of links and PageRank etc.
The tool is still not perfect but this is a large step in the right direction. Congratulations to the webmaster central team and thanks to Richard for some good info.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
February 12th, 2008
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