October 2006
Are you Willing to Wait a Year for Google Rankings?
Posted by Aaron on 07 Oct 2006
Clients sometimes look at me funny when I tell them that their new site will probably not have any rankings in Google for a least a year. It sucks, but it’s true. Part of being a professional like myself is that you want to tell clients and potential clients that your expertise will overcome any obstacles encountered. But, just like in most professions, there are some things that are out of the control of even the top people in the field.
And Jim Boykin is one of the the top folks in the SEO field. Jim says:
I know that I won’t touch a site that’s less than 2 1/2 years old (a webuildpages policy for almost a year now). Yea, there is no sandbox really, only levels of filters. The newer the site, the more filters it has to flow through.
The fact is that getting around Google’s age filters (or sandbox or whatever you want to call it) is nearly unavoidable. So, as much as I would like to say that I’m such an incredible optimizer of all things search that I can easily skate around those silly Google age filters… sorry.
Read all of Jim’s post and click through to the “additional resources” posts for some great information on Google’s domain age factor.
Google Ranking Filters: Trust and Age Factors. - Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog
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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, Link Building, Sandbox, Jim Boykin, Age Filter, Google Sandbox
Keyword Spending Continues to Rise
Posted by Aaron on 04 Oct 2006
More energy continues to go into PPC advertising. According to DoubleClick, while the cost of keywords held steady in Q2:
Year-over-year overall spending on search and impressions grew by almost 50 percent; active keywords grew by 58 percent while total clicks increased by 32 percent.
Obviously marketers are getting smarter about how many keywords they’re using in their campaigns. Without knowing, though, how these increased keywords and increased spending have affected the overall ROI - or effectiveness of PPC advertising - it’s hard to assess what these numbers really mean for marketers.
Clicks increasing by 32% and the fact that terms that previously cost between 21 and 99 cents now go for more than $1, does mean that the engines are making hay.
I’ll bet that when Q3 numbers come out we’ll see an even greater proportional increase in the take for the engines. With 60% of the market share, Google’s recent update is bound to boost its take considerably.
All this can’t help but make me wonder how much longer natural SEO (non-paid results) are going to be relevant. What’s to gain on the part of the search engines by putting any development, resources, etc. into natural results? Especially for Google, who doesn’t have CPM advertising all over their pages…
MediaPost Publications - Performics: Q2 Keyword Costs Flat - 10/02/2006
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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, Analytics, PPC, MediaPost, DoubleClick, Adwords
301 Redirect in Action
Posted by Aaron on 02 Oct 2006
On Friday I upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress (2.0.4); hopefully I didn’t screw anything up too bad. In the process I found that Yahoo still had a bunch of pages from my old blog indexed in its search engine. I had imported all of those posts to this blog, so they weren’t really doing much good out there.
So, I decided to use a mod_rewrite 301 to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new. I didn’t do it on a page-by-page basis since I wasn’t really getting any human traffic to the old blog, the new pages are already indexed, and I didn’t really feel like it was worth putting the time into redirecting each of the permalinks.
So, I decided just to 301 redirect every page at the old blog to the home page of the new. That way the search engines will drop the old pages and any real visitors will find the new site.
I opened up my .htaccess file in the directory where my old blog resides and added the following code to it:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^blog(.*)$ http://www.aarondalrymple.com [L,R=301]
“blog” refers to the old directory name where the old blog lived. So, all traffic to that directory now forwards to www.aarondalrymple.com. To see it in action, go here: http://www.aarondassociates.com/blog/.
I should note that if your site is on a Windows server, there is a different process for this, which you should be able to find by digging around this post on redirects.
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Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Blogging, Other, 301 redirect, redirects, WordPress, mod rewrite, htaccess
