What will really get the old grey matter working is if when the pages that went down the rankings in Google start coming up they also start moving up in Bing. One of my favourite sayings – if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, fly’s like a duck and quacks like a duck then 99% of the time what you’re looking at is a duck.

I believe the answer to this question is yes you can, but it depends massively on what page you are pointing the links at. I took 2 websites, one with a page rank of 3 and just under 2000 links to the home page. The other was a page rank 1 website with under 30 links to the home page. I added a relevant article to each website and waited a couple of weeks for Google to index the new articles and settle on a SERPs position. This is all quite straight forward.

I then set about pointing links quickly at the 2 new pages. I decided on the article marketing route and over the space of 2 days added in excess of 200 back links to each page. I was only using the target phrase as link text. I then waited a couple of days for the results.

On the page rank 1 website my new article was nowhere to be found after those couple of days. From a respectable page 3 it had gone completely from the search results. With my page rank 3 website the new page had jumped from page 4 to page 2. I should point out that the page that was lost from the search results did pop up again 4 days later but was way lower than where it was initially positioned (without any back links being built for it). Just to make sure I tried another new article on the page rank 1 website and repeated the back link process, but this time only creating 5 back links. The end result after 3 days was a page that moved several places up the search results.

So what can you take from this? To me it appears as though the more respected a website is the more you’ll get away with creating lots of back links to individual pages on it. If you attempt to create a load of back links to a page on a less respected website then you do appear to be running the risk of an algo slap. None of this is conclusive because there are so many variables involved but it’s significant enough for me to personally make sure that I don’t go overboard with my article marketing efforts for my less popular websites. Slow and steady would seem to be the order of the day. On the other hand it also means it’s open season on my more popular sites

Has anybody else tried anything along these lines? I’d love to know if your results were the same as mine?

In order to play it safe it’s best to have a privacy policy, perhaps for no other reason than you want to run Google Adsense. If you’ve got no idea what should go in a Privacy Policy then I’d suggest you use this generator. Once you have your text you’d think it would simply be a case of just linking to it? The trouble with this is that since Matt Cutts revealed that nofollowed links still impact what link value you pass on (I’ve always recommended nofollowing Privacy Policies in the past) having every page on your website link to a page that is 99% duplicate content that has no outgoing internal links on it is a complete and utter waste of you hard earned link juice.

Soooo, we need to add a page to our WordPress blog and copy our privacy policy text into that. That’s all fine and dandy, your privacy policy will now be on your standard template and all those internal links will be there. At least using a followed link to your Privacy Policy will result in some of that link juice spreading back to your actual content pages. Only thing is now our Privacy Policy is included everywhere where our pages our included in your theme – most likely that means a prominent menu. This isn’t what we want at all; we prefer to keep our Privacy Policy in the footer or somewhere less prominent than our main menu!

The final piece of the jigsaw is to stop our Privacy Policy page appearing in our menus. I tried several ways of doing this including setting various statuses (based on some wrong info from the net) and even manually altering the database (worked but was a pain). In the end the easiest way I found of excluding a WordPress page from your menu was to use the Exclude Pages From navigation plugin, it’s a piss of piss to use. On each page it adds the option to “Include This Page In User Menus”, leaving it unchecked gives us the result we’re looking for. It’s now just a case of manually linking (using a standard followed link) to our Privacy Policy in the footer template of your WordPress theme. What we end up with is a Privacy Policy that is linked to from each page that also passes link juice back to your other content.

(I have a confession to make, it looks like I never implemented this technique on this blog since changing the template, will do it now!)

How Did I Find This Out?

I love my little experiments and what I was setting out to prove with this one was does post frequency affect how often your website gets spidered? I’d heard a myth about this several times so I wanted to see if it was real or not. Luckily for me I had the perfect 2 websites to test it so over a period of 8 weeks I created a split test.

On one domain I would post content once every 2 weeks. On the other I would make at least 2 posts every single day. Both domains were in the same niche and both domains would have content sourced from the same place (come on you didn’t think I’d be writing all those articles did you?) I would then monitor spider activity and actively check the indexes to see what pages were and were not being indexed.

After 8 weeks I had conclusive evidence. The blog with daily postings had no more spider activity than the blogs with once fortnightly posts. Even more significant was that only approximately every 6th post was being indexed and included in the search results. Every single post on my less frequently updated blog was indexed. This got me around to thinking that what IF this was a more important blog. Authors who post every day tend to have a similar pattern, some low quality posts, lots of average posts, 1 or 2 good posts. How would that stack up if the majority of the pages being indexed were in the low to medium category?

What Does Influence Spider Activity?

Because I was curious I decided to run a second experiment, this time for only 4 weeks. I wanted to see what does influence spider activity. I decided to carry on with my existing 2 blogs but switched them both to posting once a week. With one blog I would go out and actively build links for it. The other I left to its own devices.

It only took 2 weeks to see a drastic change in how often the search engine spiders where visiting. As I built links spider activity went through the roof. Not only were my pages ranking quicker (after 200 links I was seeing posts rank within 6 hours, 3 days for the other blog) but the content was ranking in the top 3 pages of the results as well. After a week as the first post on my blog the ranking was creeping ever up. Bingo. It seemed letting the content mature was working.

Why Posting Less Frequently Works

As a lot of people suspect what I’ve discovered is that spider activity seems to directly relate to your link profile i.e. your number and quality of inbound links. So if you’re posting every day and have a bad link profile then the search engines aren’t actually seeing your new posts on the front of your blog – your most important page. Even if they do spider it on the home page once by the next time they come around it’s nowhere to be seen, that post either needs to garner some backlinks from elsewhere or it’s gone. If you’ve spent time crafting that post then that’s a bit of a crapper.

The key to this seems to be matching your posting frequency to your linking profile. As you gain more and more backlinks then posting every day, or even 5 times a day for that matter is fine. Your content will rank. With enough backlinks you can post and check Google 10 minutes later to find your content ranked. To do this though you must have the backlinks in place. Posting every day in the belief that your new content will increase spider activity is a waste of time and may in fact be doing more harm than good.

The lesson for all you new guys and gals is simple, rather than concentrating on posting every day you should spend at least as much time researching and gaining quality links. Once you’ve got the links you can increase your post frequency.

The Old World With NoFollow

For years now we’ve been told what NoFollow represents and how as webmasters we should be using it. Put simply the search engines would neither count that link as being a positive vote for whatever it linked to nor would it include the anchor text when ranking the destination page. In short although the search engines spidered those links they ignored the value from them. Does that sound fair? The way we could benefit from this was to use the rel=nofollow attribute on our websites to shape where we wanted our link value to go. So pages such as the terms, contact, privacy etc were all nofollowed as were most links left by user created content out of our control. This was a totally acceptable strategy by Google who even pushed it at several conventions. In essence we were pointing out to Google and the other search engines what we considered to be our most important content. Assumptions were that because the search engines were active in this process that the nofollow attribute would do us no harm. We were right, well up until a year ago we were, and then Google decided to change the rules without telling anybody.

NoFollow In The New World – Why It’s Not Worth Using It

In the scenario above it was taken for granted that because a nofollow link wasn’t counted then it didn’t impact on the other links on our page. In the last year this is what Google changed. Each web page on the internet has a certain page rank value (not the visible thing we see in page rank checkers) but an actual big number calculated all the time. Say we have 5 links going out from a page, 2 of which were no followed and 3 of which were normal links. In the old world and simplified to hell each of those 3 normal links would pass on roughly 33% of that pages value to their destinations. However in the new world and how things currently exist it’s different, now Google would divide the total value of that page by 5 (the total number of links) and then pass on the value to each normal link, so each of our normal links get 20% and 40% gets sent to the ether/heaven or wherever else Google decides to send it. In other words an amount of our link value has been passed back to Google. They did this without telling anybody so over the last year we’ve all been happily using nofollow without any regard with how it affects our websites when in fact one of the oldest rules in SEO is now very valid again – you must control the NUMBER of outbound links from EVERY page.

Of course that’s a simplified way of looking at it but the rule still sticks. The more links you have on a page (whether nofollowed or not) the less each of those links will pass on. You’re a blogger right? Well think of your average blog post with say 10 comments. Then imagine if you’re using the CommentLuv plug-in? Then you’ve got your categories, top posts, top commentators, archives, friends links down the side of every page? It’s no wonder that blogs have been on a steady slope down the rankings over the last 6-12 months. The visible page rank for most blogs has been hit hard. Internal linking strategies are being shot to buggery by the sheer number of links on your average blog webpage. Matt justified the recent announcement of this policy by saying that nobody noticed. Sorry Matt but I sure as hell noticed, the trouble was that because of the search engines pushing nofollow that nobody would have guessed for 1 minute that it was this that was having the impact.

You can already see how I’ve started to change things, I’ll be minimizing the number of links in my sidebar as much as possible. As of an hour ago I had over 1400 comments approved, I now have less than 1200. All I’m doing is removing those 1 liners that add no value to a post but in the same respect weren’t seen as being blatant spam in the past. Now just having those comments damages my content so they have to go. The other side of this coin is that if simply by having links (i.e. comments) affects my content then there is no point whatsoever in having them nofollowed. So in the next day or so I’ll be moving my blog back over to a do follow blog. In other words commentators will get link value passed. Because of this I’ll be very strict with approving comments, if I consider it to be in the slightest bit spammy then it will be deleted. The good news for genuine commentators both passed and present is that when I hit the switch a good amount of juice will start flowing their way, more so because the number of outbound links from each post will be limited to those good comments. It’s a simple philosophy, contribute and benefit.

On my other websites there are things I’ll be changing as well. In the past I’ve put privacy policies on their own pages and not as part of the template. This made it easier to update them and as they were nofollowed it did no harm to have these “dead end” pages. Now however they are impacting on me, not least because these are the sort of pages included in the footer links on every page. That’s just more link juice being given back to Google! Every single page needs to be part of the template and include menu links. This is so that when my followed link to my privacy policy is followed by the search engine spider some of that link value comes back into my other pages. I’ll never be using nofollow on any internal link on my websites again and very rarely on outbound links (think affiliate links only).

So if you couldn’t be bothered reading all that above here’s the thing. Before you place any link on any of your web pages give it some serious thought. NoFollow no longer gives us a free reign to link out as and when we like, with each and every single outbound link you’re giving a little bit away, either to the website you are linking to or if not to Google.

An excellent bit of dance music from the early 90′s, the Shamen were bang on with LSI. So how has it come to be that LSI is now better known as Latent Semantic Indexing – not quite as interesting is it? But Latent Semantic Indexing is one of the hottest subjects in the world of SEO and if there’s one thing guaranteed to cause a fight between SEO professionals it is the mere mention of LSI. So what is LSI, does it really exist and should you worry about it?

Latent Semantic Indexing Explained

Lets break down what LSI actually is:-

Semantic – This is what the words mean, much more than how they are spelt. It’s dealing with what the words actually stand for in the same way as humans understand words. For example we know that the words bird and avian are very closely related, but if you looked at just the spelling there is no correlation. We know that, computers don’t.

Latent – Semantics are cool but in order to artificially recreate the human understanding of words and their meaning would require huge CPU power. It’s just not realistic. So the Latent in LSI relates to finding the meaning of words based on how often they are used and how they are used in relation to other words. It’s a sort of short cut of the human process based on many examples.

Indexing – Maths fluff.

So in short LSI works with the meaning of words and allows computers to figure out how 1 word relates to another based on a whole sample of examples of how that word has been used in the past. There’s a lot of maths involved. Got it?

If a search engine was able to implement LSI into it’s search algorithm it would significantly improve the results, or so you would hope. Articles written in a natural way using variations (synonyms, plurals etc) would be far more likely to be recognised than the standard “use the target keyword over and over” approach favoured by spammers/SEO experts. The good news/bad news (depending on your point of view) is that it is believed that Google are using LSI in their algorithm.

Are Google Using LSI?

It’s a fact that Google have never patented anything LSI related for their algorithm. They did patent a load of things in 2006 that seemed to be related to LSI but nothing that was explicit. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not using it, after all the common belief is that LSI is a major part of Google’s algorithm. Personally I don’t think so. If LSI was part of Google’s algorithm then words with the same meaning, plurals etc should return very similar if not identical results. Try it yourself.

A Google search for beach returns roughly 116 million results, a search for beaches returns roughly 59 million. There is almost no overlap in the top 10. If a page is authorative for beach then surely (if LSI is applied) it would also be authorative for beaches and vice versa? Not on Google. It’s my own opinion that it’s just not in there. How about fabric and material, pen and pens – give it a go.

The thing is that there are so many myths out there about search rankings and what is and isn’t important. One of the best examples of this was the fuss surrounding reciprocal linking. They don’t count anymore? Reciprocal links are worthless? Google just doesn’t count them? At the same time all this was at its peak a certain Mr John Chow found his way to the number 1 spot in Google for the search phrase “make money online” using nothing more than reciprocal linking. He asked people to link to him with those words and in return he’d provide a link back. Google’s algorithm did NOT stop this occurring, the only way John got binned was via a manual penalty. He made Google look stupid.

I really don’t believe that LSI is part of what Google are doing. Sure they have there own way of grouping related words together but it’s actually at a much simpler level than the analysis that goes on with LSI. I know there are whole guides on how best to set out your site to comply with LSI but for my money I still think they best way of achieving great rankings is as simple as

1. Getting backlinks from pages which are themselves indexed
2. Link text that matches what you want to rank for
3. CREATE CONTENT THAT PEOPLE WANT TO LINK TO

Just do that and you won’t go far wrong (Yeah , “just” because it’s as simple as that)

1. The closer words are to the start of a block the more important they are

2. Fluff words are ignored

The URL is still one of the most important blocks associated with any page.

Using “The” in front of a keyword rich domain is an old SEO trick, “Is”, “And” and many more also work just as well. I have always worked with keyword rich domain names and this is one way of getting a good (in terms of SEO) name in a very competitive niche. The search engines ignore the “the”. If I was brave enough to show you my keyword stats for the past 2 years I think you’d be surprised by just how much natural “make money online” traffic this website has attracted. I’m not brave (or stupid) enough by the way to give you a list of my top performing keywords. Every single page on this website has a URL that includes the words make money online – when that is apended with the various post titles then it creates lots of long tail make money traffic. Obviously with Google’s ever increasing emphasis on off-the-page factors it doesn’t work quite as well as it once did but with Yahoo and MSN it’s still very effective. When starting in a niche I will always 100% go with a keyword based domain name, search traffic is what I do. The other bonus to having make money online in the URL is the links, most people who link here totally ignore the “the” as well and just link with “make money online”.

This is all great so far BUT when I started this website I certainly wasn’t looking long term. This website was just another way of getting high value Adsense clicks. In terms of traffic it certainly doesn’t come into my top 20 websites. In terms of the amount of time I spend updating this website it is more than any other I own. In short this website has sort of become my spiritual home online. I never ever expected it to happen. I do have a personal blog but it is here where I enjoy posting most. I had a schedule, post lots initially and then maybe once a week after that. Get to my income goal and then just keep the traffic steady. It’s never happened because as much as this site makes me very little I really enjoy writing for it. I enjoy sharing what I’m doing to make money and replying to comments/enquiries. I’m now at the point where I have to decide what to do for the best. With all the will in the world I’m not going to be able to grow a readership and brand this website with a domain name like themakemoneyonline.net . Sure I’ll always get nice search traffic but with this website I now want more than that (I think I do anyway). This is all new territory for me. So what do you reckon, do I take this website to the next level? Do I go for the new domain name, the custom template, the cartoon picture of me waving cash whilst sat in my car? Would that even go with the type of content I create? Or then again do I back away and spend the money on building more of the websites that have traditionally made me money in the past? I’m going on holiday soon so at least that will give me the chance to have a think.

I don’t think there is a SEO’er out there who doesn’t appreciate the benefit that leaving comments on blogs can bring. WordPress in particular gives you a very easy way of getting a 1-way link back to whichever website you specify in the comment form. The major problem with this is that these links are nofollowed by default, in other words Google won’t count them. There are a number of WP plug-ins designed to bypass this and reward your commentators with a followed link, one of the best (and one I’ve been using since it was first written) is CommentLuv. The CommentLuv plugin works by looking for an RSS feed associated with the domain you specify in the comment form, it then creates a followed link to the top entry in that feed. If you’re the sort of person that only creates blogs then commenting on blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin is a perfect way of building your link profile. My problem is this, most of my main money makers are not blogs, they are static websites. Where there’s a will there’s usually a way though. This is a trick I’ve been using for a while to get the CommentLuv links back to my static websites and it’s one I’m going to share with you now.

The trick is of course to hand code an RSS feed for your static content and then use the “link – alternate” tag to let CommentLuv know about it. What where when? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. Download this RSS file. If you open it and have a look you’ll see the basic guts of an RSS file. All you need to do is replace the Title, Link and pubDate values with your sites information (make up the pubDate). The title value will be used as the anchor text for your link from CommentLuv. You’ll notice that the RSS contains 5 items, I prefer to do it this way. When I first tested with only 1 entry CommentLuv didn’t seem to pick it up so I’ve settled with 5. Don’t forget that you can always rotate the items pubDate’s if you want to change what page is getting the link when you comment. Once you’re happy with your RSS file upload it to your website, call it whatever you like, I usually go for rss.xml – make sure you can surf to it by entering its URL into your browser.

Now that’s done all that’s left to do is alter your home page HTML. Here’s what you need to add to the header:-

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Site Names Feed" href="http://www.yourdomainhere.com/rss.xml" />

This is assuming you uploaded your RSS file (called rss.xml) to your home directory.

From now on every time you leave a comment on a CommentLuv enabled blog with that domain your most recent item in the RSS file will be linked to using the link text you specified. It’s a fantastic way of getting a followed, keyword rich link back to a static domain.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention. There are also several forum scripts that pick up on this as well

1. No Inbound Links – A lot of landing pages in particular used to be created as orphan pages. No links in and perhaps only an affiliate link out. This isn’t the way that Google wants the web to work, so if you’re creating pages like this seriously consider adopting the new standard for landing pages and think about building it into a mini website. Even just 2-3 INTERNAL links can move an orphaned page from unranked to some rank.

2. A Lack Of Text – This is my biggest problem with unranked pages. The problem is exaggerated where you have a page within a text heavy menu system (this blog is a decent example). I have created many pages in the past that are set out in the form of a table, full of interesting data but when push comes to shove barely 100 words of content. These have always been a nightmare to budge from unranked. The easiest solution to this is to get your thinking cap on and add 150-250 words of written content somewhere on that page. Seriously if you’ve a sparse looking page that’s been through several page rank exports and is still unranked there is a 99% chance that it’s simply a lack of text (here’s a perfect example)

3. Your Outbound Links – The search engines know that we can’t control who links to us – punishing us for dodgy inbound links would be stupid. However, they also know that we do control who we link out to and in my experience this can be enough for Google to land your page with a Page Rank of unranked. There are 2 problems here, the number and quality. Too many links from a single page and you can get hit for it. Perhaps an even bigger problem though is putting too many affiliate links on a page. Who hasn’t in the past built up some great page rank/traffic and then nailed the page with affiliate links only to find your page rank either drops or goes back to unranked? It’s something I’ve been guilty of plenty of times! Besides the obvious cut back on your links advice I’ve also got a pretty cool tip that can help out with this. Link to Wikipedia. It’s just a case of balancing the quality of your outbound links and linking to Wiki can really help out with this.

In writing this I can see that my top menu items are suffering from some of these problems. I’m going to do a little bit of work on 2 pages in particular that are currently unranked (Adsense List, and my Money Makers) just to show that these methods do work. Come the next page rank update I’d expect to see a little bit of green on those pages.

THE BIG DISCLAIMER – Increasing your page rank in no way, shape or form guarantees a better ranking in the search results. Over the last 3 years Page Rank appears to have less and less of an influence in Google’s ranking algorithm. Put it this way, in the last 6 months I’ve seen a home page PR drop from 3 to 1 (despite a huge increase in high quality links) but at the same seen my organic search traffic increase a lot. Worrying too much about page rank is neither healthy or a wise use of your time – talking about page rank in the pub may get you slapped.