Have been looking at this for a while. I just published a quick post on link buying and within 10 minutes my google alerts fired me an email saying it was indexed.
Did a quick check and yes…there it is.
Willing to bet it has a lot to do with breaking news being part of the algorythm and has aspects of “freshness” to it.
We hear it all the time, paid links are blackhat, paid links are whitehat, unethical, part of the normal marketing operation of any business blah blah blah. The discussion is irrelevant whatever you think about paid links they are here to stay.
Now before Googles witch hunt it was a free for all, people throwing money at paid links, loads of sites selling links and to be honest alot of the links were junk, ad blocks or irrelevant placement. With paid links (no condom!) being “illegoogle” the world of buying links has completely changed. It has put off a great many webmasters for fear of Googles hairy side (backhand slap :-). Buying links (and not being caught) is now a lot more difficult because we all have to operate under the radar and we have to make certain demands on the way the link is presented.
I personally like this situation, buying links has become much more of a skill than it used to be and with many a webmaster unwilling to risk it, the power and value of expertly sourced paid links has increased significantly.
Inevitably (unless you are very lucky) you will come across a site that needs to be completely changed. Nothing on the site is right, awkward navigation, disorientating site structure, unweildy urls and an almost unfathomable buying process.
The part of the site that I’m going to concentrate on today is the url structure. Overly complicated variable stuffed urls have several problems. Firstly they do not indicate the structure of the site (modern users are more commonly using the url as a means of orientation and navigation), secondly they do not contain the keywords that are relevant to the page and thirdly, depending on the number of variables, they may not be adequately crawled by the search engine spiders.
Effectively your only option is to change the url structure. But this can be fraught with dangers. If they have worked hard to get their site ranking (even with the url structure as it is) you really don’t want ot lose this.
There really is only one option that is open to you as far as mapping your sites is concerned and that is the use of the 301 redirect. This tells the browser/search engine that the page they are looking for no longer exists and that it has moved permanently to another address. I won’t go into why search engines love this but trust me they do.
Depending on the technology your site uses please be cautious who you use to implement these redirects. Problems can and do occur
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/asp-net-2-and-url-rewriting-sometimes-harmful/
http://dev.communityserver.com/forums/p/476049/536640.aspx
Now the process of mapping your new sites urls to your old sites urls is always going to be tedious and time consuming. In an ideal world you would find the equivalent pages on your current site and your new site, redirect the old to the new and thats it job done. However things are never that simple. You will probably find that every page you currently have does not have an equivelent on the new site.
The site I am currently working on has around 10,000 pages indexed. I am fortunate enough to have three years worth of analytics and stats data with which to work. Without this data your job is going to essentially be guesswork until the site goes live.
So i run a report for the landing pages over the last 3 years and get a list of around 8,000. I then cross reference this with a report on the most popular pages and what pages have referers over the same period and get an excel sheet with the url, landings, refered pages and visits in columns. This is just to check that i am not missing any pages that may have significance but have never been an entrance page. As i expected, over the course of 8,000 urls the two data sets virtually merge into one and no important urls are missed. I am then left with several thousand urls that i wish to work with.
Now some of these urls are no longer going to exist and some of them had had less than 10 visits. I prioritise the pages based on number of entrances and then write a short PHP script to crawl each url and pull out the title of the page. So I now have a list of all the urls on the old site that i want to have equivalents for on the new site. I also have information about the contents of that url to help whoever is doing the mapping.
You guessed it, i have no intention of doing this myself, but my web monkey is more than happy to oblige. Once he is used to the practice of finding the relevant page on the test version of the new site and copying that into the spreadsheet he can do a lot in a day! Within a week or so we have a full list of all the urls and their equivalents ready for the 301 magic.
What magic? …well i will elaborate in a future post but please do not migrate 8,000 urls all at once!!
notes
From experience Google will cope with largish numbers of redirects but it may take time for the new site to settle down to the same (and hopefully improved) state of the old site.
Where there is no equivalent page I simply redirect to a page that has similar content and matches the perceived intenet of a visitor to that page (a bit of thought required from the web monkey).
This is not the only thing you should be doing to ensure your new site suffers as little as possible (think site map and notifying sites that link to you amoungst other things)
You may suffer in the rankings in the short term due to your pages losing trust rank but this should sort itself out over time if your SEO efforts are up to scratch
Excellent discussion on this here
I dream of holding documents containing the deconstructed google algorythm. All its weaknesses and vulnerablities laid bare for me, all its ranking criteria accurately described. Who doesn’t? We all conduct our own tests and draw what conclusions we can from them but they are time consuming, complicated and require investment. So imagine how my sceptisism leapt when the managing director of a company I was working with mentioned that he was friends with someone who had just been given the SEO directive documents of very large UK SEO company. A company with huge resources for research and development.
His friend had been told to never let these documents be seen by anyone else and that they held the core SEO practices of this company. Cutting edge secrets that only a privilaged few are aware of.
So, I swear that i will not copy a word of the documents and eventually I am allowed to view them on his laptop. So I open search.doc and what do I find……
Pages of algorythmic experiments and conclusions, highly controlled test sites and insider conversations? No.
A rewritten version of
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
!!!!!
So I carry on, hoping for nuggets of gold. I open Social.doc and get….a description of how social media sites work (join, make friends, comment of stuff etc) and a list of social sites.
and on and on it goes. Click.jpg is….
Project.doc is site evaluation, keyword research, competitor analysis, link evaluation, hub finding, link building (directories, social and reciprocal!) etc etc.
Now the information contained in the document was good, don’t get me wrong. Borrowed from some of the best in our business. However it does make me think about how many top SEO companies are just reading the blogs and writing it down. It seems to be the same old story.
So I get to the final document and it is their pricing document. £15,000 for all the above.
Bargain.
