What is Link Rot?

Basically it occurs when external sites or your merchant (if you’re an affiliate) changes the links in their system so your links produce a 404 (page not found error). I started looking at my test data from the recent PageRank Update and noticed that a high percentage of sites that had a drop in PageRank, also had lots of dead links throughout their site.

Was this the main cause of the drop? Was it partial? I don’t know. Regardless, it is always a good idea to “keep a good house” which includes checking your links at least on a quarterly basis.

So, if you haven’t checked your links in a couple months, do it now. Here is what you do:

1) Search for “Xenu” in Google.
2) It should be the first site listed.
3) Click the link to go to the site.
4) Click “download” and then install the program.
5) Do a complete internal and external link check.
6) I like to view the report for each page.
7) Fix all the dead links (both internal and external).
8 ) If you had ten or more internal pages with problems, rerun your Google XML Sitemap

That’s it. It should take you about 1-2 hours to run the report and fix the main broken links. The benefits will be huge for you.

Get this done first thing and I will have more steps for you to improve your site coming.

SEO consists of two components: On-Page and Off-Page Factors. Since Google is generally known as an Off-Page Factor search engine, many SEOs and webmasters have started to ignore the On-Page Factors. This is a big mistake. While you can’t rank well for competitive phrases just focusing on the On-Page factors, if you get the On-Page stuff wrong, your ranking suffer. To help you, I’ve put together the following checklist:

1. Validate your HTML Code so it is “Spider” Compliant. Your code should be “close to” W3C Compliant. W3C is not perfect and often will flag a problem when there isn’t one. Before making radical changes, discuss them with your webmaster.

You should know that there is a big difference between “W3C Compliant Code” and “Search Engine Compliant Code”. According to my testing, having “search engine compliant code” is what you want.
You should also check your Code to Text Ratio. Having more body text than code can give you an edge in securing a good ranking for your site. One of the best ways to improve your code to text ratio is to make your JavaScript external files and use CSS for your formatting and make that file external too. That can save you as much as 30% of your file size.

2. File Naming – Hyphens Not Underscores.

Why? Because…
blue-widget.html = blue widget (good).
blue_widget.html = bluewidget (not good).
In terms of getting a “boost” from the keyword being in the URL, if a search for “blue widget”, the first URL gets the boost. To get the second to receive a boost, a search for “blue_widget” must be done (with the underscore). Do you search that way? Of course not, and neither will anyone else. I recommend you use zero or one hyphen in your domain name. More than that it looks spammy and you will lose credibility.

3. Text Link Navigation at the Bottom of the Page.

Having text link navigation at the bottom of your pages allows you to target the specific keyword in the anchor text and send valuable PR juice to the pages you want and nofollow all others. Which means you will have better control over the terms used in anchor text as well as where your PR will go. Remember having the text link in the body text will give you the most “juice”, but if you can’t force it, the bottom of the page is better than nothing. Also, remember of the recent bug in Google – if you have an image link, you have to have a text link too somewhere on the page.

4. Character Set Tag.

First, your Character Set Tag must be correct. Which one you use depends upon what you want to do. Examples of the two most often used are:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
The biggest advantage for UTF-8 is its extended character set, thus it can display a higher number of foreign characters. If you aren’t accepting foreign characters in your forums and are mainly using “Western European Languages” (English, French and German), you want to use 8859-1. Current testing results show no differences in terms of crawlability with GoogleBot between the two character sets.

Tip: The Character Set Tag should appear as the first tag after the <head> tag. Why is it before the Title? You want the Character Set Tag before any other tag that displays text in the browser so that you are defining the character set and not allowing the browser to choose for you.

5. The Title Tag.

In terms of SEO, the Title tag doesn’t carry the same weight it did years ago in Google. The Title not only displays at the top of the browser window, but also appears when potential customers perform a search in a search engine and review the results. Therefore, in terms of clickthroughs and conversions, your Titles are extremely important. So you should focus on creating killer titles that are highly compelling and focused.
Every page should have a unique Title.
Maximum of 66 characters. Google shows 66 characters in the SERPs.
The Title should be the second tag (the character set tag should be first).
Try to formulate a question or a strong statement. If you pose a question, answer it in the Description Meta Tag.
Describe what the page is about and keep it focused.
For highest click-through, incorporate a “Call to Action” into your Title.
If you use the keyword phrase in the Title don’t keyword stuff. I recommend it as the keyword phrase will be bolded, thus drawing attention to your listing. If the keyword phrase is at the beginning of the Title, testing shows it helps “anchor” the eye to the Title.

What not to do:
Do not use ALL CAPS. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each major word.
Don’t use more than one Title tag per page.
Duplicate use of keyword in the Title.
No long Titles (more than 66 characters).

6.The Description Meta Tag.

In terms of SEO, the Description Tag is not very important to Google. The Meta Description appears with the Title in the SERPs. So, it must work hand-in-hand with the Title to attract potential customers. If you do not include a Meta Description, Google will use the first 30-40 words of your page, which could look very unappealing to a customer.

Recommendations:
Include a unique Description on every page.
Maximum of 150 characters (including spaces).
If you posed a question in the Title, answer it in the Description Meta Tag.
Your focus should be in creating curiosity in the reader. Don’t satisfy it with your Description. If done right, you will achieve higher traffic to your site.
Include offers, guarantees or even phone numbers to a install Call to Action.
Should be placed in the <HEAD> section after the Title.

What not to do:
Do not use ALL CAPS. Instead, capitalize the first letter of each major word.
Do not repeat any keyword more than three times, and do not have the same keyword repeated back-to-back.

Before moving on:
Is your Title and Description compelling?
Do they solve a problem?
Do they suggest that it solves the problem quickly?

If you answered “no” to any of the above, you need to do a rewrite. Think of your Title and Description as an Advertising Campaign and spend as much time as it takes writing an important ad. They are THAT important.

7. The Keyword Meta Tag.

Due to spamming issues in the late 90s, the Keyword Meta Tag has been devalued
– Google has never indexed it.

You should never include your “money phrases” here as there are plenty of programs out there to scrape keyword tag information. Instead, it is best to fill this tag with very general or generic terms.

Note: Commas are not indexed, nor are they used by the engines to separate the keyword phrases. Commas are for aesthetic reasons only.

A word of caution: Do not use your competitor’s company name, trademarked products and/or words in your keyword tag. Most legal experts will tell you permission is required before using a trademark on your site at all. There have also been lawsuits filed because phrases used sounded or looked similar to the owned trademark. Keep these very important factors in mind when selecting your keyword phrases. Don’t risk a lawsuit.

8. DTD statement.

According to my testing a DTD is not required in order to allow your site to be displayed in a browser, or for a search engine spider to crawl your site. Why is a DTD Statement necessary?
Using the correct DTD Statement also allows for your site to get indexed faster and deeper in Google and, according to my testing, shortens the time your site spends in the Sandbox by an average of 12 days. However, if you use a 4.01 statement, and your code was written in HTML 3.2, the engine will make note of it and there is a strong likelihood that the page (or site) will be dropped or penalized. So be sure it is the correct tag. If you don’t know, hire someone who does. I strongly recommend the Transitional tag, as it allows you some flexibility with code, especially with the use of HTML editors GoLive and DreamWeaver.

Without a DTD Statement, if the engine comes across code it doesn’t know what to do with, it may “hiccup” causing it to prematurely back out of the site. However, with the DTD Statement, it will know how to handle the code and continue to spider the site.

HTML 3.2 Warning: I suggest upgrading your code. Testing results show that HTML 3.2 does not rank as high as it would if it was HTML 4.0 or 4.01.
HTML 4.0/4.01
Strict: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
Transitional: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”>
Frameset: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd”>
XHTML 1.0
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

9. JavaScript.

Due to indexing issues and ensuring your page file sizes stay as small as possible, I recommend you send your JavaScript code to an external file, especially if you have the same JavaScript appear on every page.

The process is simple:
Cut your JavaScript from the page
Open Notepad
Paste your code in Notepad
Name the file “code.js” (or whatever you decide to name it).
Load the file to a folder called “JavaScript”
Disallow the folder in the robots.txt file.
I have noticed Google will index .js files from time to time unless they are disallowed in the robots.txt file.
Then add the following code to the page:

<script language=JavaScript src=”javascript/code.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

10. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

CSS is a file that allows for consistency in all of your formatting throughout your page or site without having to place font code at the beginning of every paragraph. Having your CSS files embedded into your pages is just a bad idea. It takes up space and pushes your importance code downward.
Create a file such as style.css, include your formatting, and a reference to it in the
<head> section of your page like this:
<link href=”style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”>
Note: Using processes to hide keywords or text in your CSS file can be detected by Google. Be very careful if you use CSS to stuff keywords or adjust the formatting to allow your page to receive a bigger boost from On-Page Factors.

11. The Heading Tag(s).

There are six types of headings: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>.
They are ranked in the same order for importance, with <h1> being the most important in terms of On-Page SEO. Headings must be compelling and include the keyphrase to add the most value to your page. You can use the headings to list your “headline” (h1) with its “tagline” underneath (h2). For example:
<h1>Complete Home Security System</h1>
<h2>Self-install your home security system in One Hour or Less!</h2>
In the above example, it allows for the key phrase “home security system” to be used naturally in both headings, thus increasing the on-page optimization score.

12. Do your main graphics use the ALT tag properly?

Google indexes the ALT tag; however, over the last two years I have seen a trend which shows using ALT text for SEO purposes has diminished. According to a Google engineer, what you should do is create an ALT [text] that is relevant to the picture, so it gives the user a good experience, including the visually impaired. The ALT text is indexed, but it is downgraded in the algorithm. “‘We see ALT text as being about as relevant as the Keyword Meta tag,” said the Google engineer. That should say it all as Google has never used the Keyword Meta tag due to the high spam rate.

The American Disabilities Act (ADA) has strict guidelines as to what your site needs to contain in order to be ADA compliant. I guarantee they do not look favorably at ALT text that has been keyword stuffed. There are people who are “sight impaired” and there is nothing worse than having 200 meaningless keyword phrases jammed into the ALT text read aloud by an OCR. Don’t ruin someone’s day. Don’t practice what I refer to as “ALT Text Spam”. Use ALT text in the manner in which it was designed to be used by the W3C: to describe the image for the benefit of those who surf the Web with images turned off and for those who have the contents of Web pages read out loud to them. If appropriate, a keyword phrase can be used, but under no circumstances should you stuff the ALT tag with keywords. Keep it to a simple description. Basically, remember to be compliant, not just with the W3C, but also with the ADA.
SPAM Tip: Although ALT text may or may not be counted for relevancy, search engines may utilize it when evaluating sites for possible “spamdexing.”

13. Keyword Phrase.

If you can, meaning if it makes sense and is readable, place your keyword phrase in the following areas:
Title Tag
Meta Description
H1 tag to begin the content
First paragraph of content
Appearing in Bold or Italic in the first three paragraphs of content
Appearing in the filename.

Used in anchor text to either an internal page or relevant external site. This will help indicate to Google which keywords are important on your page as well as your overall site. Taking appropriate action on all 13 steps above should give you a nice boost in Google.

Many have requested a Top Ten list of the items to concentrate on the most when building or revamping a site with Google in mind. This is more of a list on taking either a new site, or a struggling site and getting better performance.

1. You will need your web hosting company to assign you a unique IP address for your domain. Make sure it is a new IP address and not a recently recycled one. If they do not have a new one available, make sure you ensure that the IP address is clean from being on any blacklist. Having your own clean IP address is critical to start out on the right foot with Google. We will have a series about how to pick the right web hosting company and even tell you about a few that we use and why we do. Also included is who to avoid.

2. Create the redirect so non-www URLs resolve to www. This is more important than you think which is why I put this as step #2 after getting a web host. Do this first thing so it off your list.

3. Create a robots.txt file and upload it to your server (same place where your index.html file is located).

4. Create all CSS and JavaScript as external files. This is vital not just for the page size, but also the indexing. Testing shows that by removing CSS and JavaScript from the content of the HTML improves all aspects of your site being indexed.

5. Check your site for compliancy. You need to have a good understanding of HTML to know what to change and what to keep. You need, or your webmaster needs, to understand the difference between “W3C Compliancy” and “Search Engine Bot Compliancy”. You also want to be “Google Compliant” too. Keeping yourself familiar with the webmaster guidelines is just a good idea.

6. Keyword research should be done to target keywords that can be converted into sales, not just clickthroughs for traffic. Shoot for keywords in “the long tail”, meaning those people who are deep into the buying cycle and are close to making a decision. Usually these are phrases in the 3-6 word range. Your pages (in the body) should be in the 400-600 word range, with a strong headline (keyword included) and a keyword density of 1-2%. You also need to Create Solid Title Tags. This is often very misunderstood for SEOs. You should also review the on page factors.

7. Google Sitemaps. This is an absolute must. If you are having difficulty with Google, often this is how you find the cure to your ills. New site? This is how you don’t get into trouble. Spend 2 hours on Friday, every Friday going through and fixing problems that Sitemaps shows you and you will see continued increases in your traffic.

8. Submit your site to the top directories.

9. Get moving on solid link exchanges – and obtaining links inward to your site – not just to the home page, but to subpages as well

10. Get a blog and post to the blog every other day (at least) and get on a schedule to update your content, and add new content on a weekly basis. This will ensure that Googlebot will continue to come back and index your site on a regular basis.

Every so often it is good to address this topic again as a refresher. All of these statements are backed with testing results.

1. Google gives more weight to the “body” of the document more than they do the top, left, right and bottom navigation areas. TRUE. This is especially true with links. Placing links in the body of the document cause massive upswings compared to links in the navigational areas on the same page. This was also confirmed in Vegas by an engineer. It seems it is one of the gauges they use to detect duplicate content.

2. Having non-compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. This was a “link bait” article that was debunked by us last year. It is total garbage.

3. On the flip-side, having compliant (W3C) code on your site will increase your rankings. FALSE. While a couple of years ago I noticed trends of increased spidering and ranking per compliant code, that has ceased. Instead, the search engines are looking for “bot compliant” code, which you can test with Leslie Rohde’s OptiSpider, which is a program I am completely hooked on.

4. Using a hyphenated domain name will harm your rankings. FALSE. What usually happens is spammers use hyphenated domains due to their push a few years ago, and thus they will practice “spamming tactics” which causes a drop in the SERPs not the hyphens in the domain.

5. Buying links will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. Buying the wrong links can do that, but link buying in general is standard advertising practice. My advice is to deal directly with the webmaster as too many link brokers are selling “Fake PageRank” links.

6. Using Google Sitemaps will get your site banned or penalized. FALSE. If this were true, there would be a lot more articles about this.

7. Google uses human editors to change the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). FALSE. Google’s index is too massive and searches in the trillions. There is a human factor and that is filtering out Spam that the filters let through. Google has an office in India where they are doing just that.

8. Using a Dedicated IP increasing ranking. FALSE. Unless, of course, you are sharing an IP with a known spammer and you risk getting nailed by the penalty they suffer. Mostly, having a dedicated IP is for business protection as previously discussed in other articles.

9. Pages in the Supplemental Results indicates a serious problem with the site. FALSE. Google has pages in the Supplemental Index. I have pages in the Supplemental Index. Being in the Supplemental Index is usually caused by:

a) lack of links to the page
b) no internal link pointing to the page
c) indexing error when fetching the page
d) dynamically generated content
e) site is untrusted

10. PageRank isn’t important. FALSE. The main issue here is too many people just don’t understand PageRank. While pages with no PageRank appear in the top ten of the SERPs, that doesn’t diminish the value of PageRank.

Often when your rankings go down you look at many causes, but XSS (Cross Site Scripting) isn’t usually one of them. If you have a free form text area, like a search box on your site, and your server’s security hasn’t been updated in awhile, you could be vulnerable to an attack.

A great way to check to see if you have had any hidden links injected into your site is to do searches in Google. The five I do are:

site:domain.com porn

site:domain.com casino

site:domain.com XXX

site:domain.com viagra

site:domain.com sex

Note: The above five are the most common terms used by spammers, but be sure to sub your domain for “domain.com”.

If the search results come back with content you didn’t put into your site, you’ve fallen victim.

Here’s what to do:

1) Contact Your Host: request a security upgrade, which can often mean an upgrade of CPanel.
2) Change Your Password: never use a word found in the dictionary.
3) Remove the hidden links from your page(s).
4) Submit a re inclusion request to Google through your Google Webmaster account.

Hope this helps you.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

An interesting article by Sven Naumann, from Google’s Search Quality Team, indicates that there are two kinds of duplicate content:
Internal – Identical content appears in more than one location on your site.
External – Your content appears on other sites, outside your own.

It even states that the duplicate content whether internal or external doesn’t negatively affect a site. My testing shows otherwise. Here is one example. Most “duplicate content” issues revolve around your site and your site only. External duplicate content is rare, even though Google would want you to believe otherwise. For example, do a search in Google on a recent news story. Hundreds of results will be displayed in Google’s results carrying the exact word-for-word story from the AP.
Another example is if you take two pages of your site, each page with different content, but you use the exact same Title and Description on both pages, Google will mark one of the pages as duplicate. However, if you take two pages with the exact same content, but you create unique Titles and Descriptions, Google will treat the pages as unique. I doubt this will last as Google should fix this issue by the end of the year.
Here is what you can do to combat internal duplicate content:
• www-Protection: Be sure you have the fix in your .htaccess file. (Apache servers only).
• Use 301s: If you have modified your site, use 301s in your .htaccess file to redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders to the proper page.
• Block Bots: Never give Google the power to make a decision you should make. You choose which version of the document you want indexed and block the bots (by use of the robots.txt file) from the other versions, such as “Printer Friendly” versions.
• Link Consistently: Use relative or absolute links for your internal linking, but not both.
• Top Level Domains (TLD): TLD help Google serve the best version of the document for country-specific content. www.mydomain.de indicates German document better than www.mydomain.com/de.
• Preferred Domain Feature: In webmaster tools, there is a feature that allows you to indicate to Google which version you prefer to show in the SERPs. This is not a replacement for the non-www redirect.
• Avoid Repetition: If you have a lengthy copyright, disclosure or other text that is required on every page of your site, think about putting the text in an image and serving it via external css or JS.
• Understand your CMS: Be familiar with how content is displayed on your site, blog, and/or forum. Be aware that they may show the same content in various formats and locations. Work with your provider for different ways of solving this duplicate content problem – whether it is disallowing bots to a page or removing the option to view in another format altogether.
• Syndicated Content: Include a link back to your site within the content.
• Titles & Descriptions: Confirm you have unique titles and descriptions on every page. This is a good practice even if Google fixes the issue listed above.
For dealing with the latter, Sven claims that Google looks “at various signals to determine which site is the original” and “that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google for site scraping.” In my testing, I’ve seen that this is not the case, your site can be negatively affected in rankings and in traffic. Remember, traffic is related to rankings. Yes, there are other aspects of getting the click – a compelling title and description – but ranking is also part of the equation, because few if any users go past the top ten results.
In more instances than Google would care to admit, the scraper out ranks the original content. Here’s what to do if that happens:
Confirm your content and pages are accessible and have not been blocked by your robots.txt file or any meta tags on the page.
Ensure your site is well within the guidelines set forth in the Webmaster Guidelines.
Review your sitemap to see if you had made any changes for the content that was scraped. Changes to the original could make it appear as the counterfeit version in Google’s eyes.
File a DMCA Request if you have fixed the above and see no change in the rankings.