Preventing Links Counting

As I mentioned yesterday (Is Link Building Being Ignored) I believe that target="_blank" may stop Google from counting the link as a back link sometimes. This is a problem for link exchanges where nearly every link uses this.

First, what does this code mean? It opens the link in a new window so as not to lose the visitor to the other site. So I suppose it's saying “Give them the information on the page, but it’s not important to me and I want my visitor back.”

If it's not important to the web designer – and remember the search engines typically open windows in the CURRENT window for search results – why should the search engine find the link important?

If you don’t really want to point traffic to the other site, then why should the link really be important? If it's not important, then why should it count? If it doesn't count, Google shouldn't show it and search engines should ignore it.

So it would make sense that target=”_blank” caused search engines to ignore a link. But not fully. It's still a valid link and they do follow the link – I've had too many sites discovered quickly by search engines when the only link has used target=”_blank” that it doesn't stop them following the link. But I do believe it stops them from counting the link.

So how can we find out if this is true? Well, I'm starting an experiment to find that out.

Is Link Building Being Ignored?

Examining the sites linking to my own site (read this post for details) I’ve come across a possible pattern. A first, you would think it not to be true. Until you think about it.

I've noticed that almost without fail, all of my own sites listed as linking back to my own site have a PR2 or better and the link does not include target=”_blank”.

There was an exception. There's a PR4 travel site that is shown as linking to my web design site – but it does use target=”_blank”. Thought I’d broken the pattern, until I realised that hardly any pages on the travel site were listed – in fact only the links pages. When I looked carefully at the links pages there is a second link to my web design site, without target=”_blank”.

So from first impressions, it's highly possible that target=”_blank” stops a link from being listed in Google. I wouldn't go as far as saying it stops Google following the link, only it’s not shown as a backlink.

I've still got loads of non-listed sites to check, but I’ll explain why I think Google might ignore links with target=”_blank” tomorrow. And this is bad news for most link building – nearly every link swap in history must use this piece of code!

Returning Customers...

It's always nice when a customer's business is doing well and they branch out and return for a new website. It's really encouraging and complimentary when the email telling you that a new website is required arrives, without any question of price etc.

In today's case instructions for a website for a Puggle Breeder arrived. The customer gave clear instructions on how the existing London Dog Walker site should have a new page added to link into the new site. The pictures for the new site arrived, brilliantly sorted by page and a word document of her preferred text.

It's wonderful to have everything so easily to hand, but even better that customers trust me just to get on with the work and present them with a site they will like. There was no mention of style, just keep it the same colours as the first site.

In this business reputation is everything and once you start to make the contacts they spread your reputation. I'm looking forward to plenty more work coming her way from her friends!

Is Most Link Building A Waste Of Time?

As I said in yesterday’s post I've started to investigate why only 13 of my own sites show as linking to my site in Google.

I've identified a list of sites that I will look at carefully, excluding any published / taken over by me since April. This becomes a massive task – I've got to look through the 13 sites that are shown by Google as linking, document which pages are linking and examine the link on those pages. Then I've got to look at the home pages of the other sites and see what elements are different. There are patterns forming – but not surprisingly every so often there’s a site that breaks the rules.

But the fact is that only 13 of about 100 are shown as linking to me and there has been no intention at all of breaking the link back. Therefore, if you are spending hours link building, what's the chance that Google is taking any note of those links? Out of the hundreds of link swaps I've agreed over time, hardly any appear on the google search. And I wouldn't be surprised if I have spotted at least a couple of reasons why.

If I'm right – and I'm going to try to prove this theory with a small experiment, then it could mean that most link swaps you have ever agreed are a waste of time.

When Is A Link Not A Link?

We've all been sold the benefits of link building and we know full well that if we don’t have any links into a site it won't get listed on the search engines, or at least it won't stay there for long. But how much time and effort do you spend on this and is it really necessary?

SEO companies will tell us it is vital. And as these places are successful, it probably is. There are loads of pros and cons, I'll come back to them in a few weeks.

But a couple of weeks back I was looking at what sites link into my main web design site. Currently I've got around 100 sites live that I've built for customers, all of which should be linking to me.

When I look at Yahoo, there are thousands of links into my site. But Google shows only about 50 pages. And I would expect that Google won't count links in the PR algorithm that it doesn't display.

This was very puzzling so I started looking deeper into this and of the approximately 50 pages linking in, that represented only 13 of my own sites. What's happened to the rest?

So I started looking at the listed pages and the sites that weren't listed as linking. I don't know which is most beneficial (looking at the included or excluded), but this week I'm taking a look at the results and I'm going to start an interesting experiment…

Learning From Successful Keywords

If you are carefully watching what pages people are visiting and what keywords they are using to get there (and which search engines they are using...) it won't take you much effort to go one step further and work out what on those pages you are doing well.

You might find that you have accidentally optimised a page for a certain keyword or that you have lots of internal links to a page that are generating a lot of traffic. Look for these sort of freaks of traffic and as well as using them to target more sales from that page, review where the keywords are in relation to that page.

You are now in the position of being able to create new pages using different keywords and using the same strategy as the successful page. If might be that you need to use lot of page, each with genuine information about different subjects, to get the required number of visitors. This can be a lot of effort, but a lot less than is required to get you top (and remain top) for a hotly contested keyword.

Reviewing Successful Keywords

Well my hosts have got my stats back up and running and are in the process of filling in the missing days, so now I can look at what's working on the site.

One of the first things I noticed when I reviewed what pages were being hit and what search terms are getting people there, is that there was a misspelling on a page. In short, AllianceandLeicester.co.uk was generating some traffic for those sort of keywords.

When I reviewed the page, it had 1 link to the Alliance & Leicester website, whereas through my affiliate links I was able to display 5 different adverts, with another couple I was able to sign up for.

This was a very useful weapon. If you know what search terms your visitors are using to find a popular page, then you know what they are interested in. Therefore, you can give them more of what they want. In this case, more links to different parts of the Alliance & Leicester website.

This is a big advantage of monitoring and reviewing successful keywords. You can be certain of why people are visiting you and use that knowledge to convert more sales / leads.

Traffic Monitoring

It is a little more than ironic that in a week when I'm spouting on about how important it is to run accurate monitoring of your website traffic, my own host's system for displaying and reporting traffic goes down totally.

So far, it's around 48 hours and counting since I was able to access my traffic reports. Also ironically, Google adsense reports are showing me that the traffic is really high this week and I'm desperate to know why!

What have I done well that's suddenly bringing in a lot of traffic - but at the same time leads are down compared to last month?

It's that sort of question that you must be able to answer. Long term monitoring of traffic would tell me that when certain keywords are performing well I get a lot of leads, when others perform well I get a lot of adsense. Then I'd know which keywords to push to really increase leads.

Hopefully the reports will be sorted today.

Monitoring Traffic - When it Goes Wrong!

Of course, all of these ideas are great whilst they work!

Looking at my stats for yesterday, it appears that my mine site had 0 visitors, 0 page impressions and 0 search engine activity. Hmmm. Considering how much it made in adsense, not very likely.

Resorting to the old server logs they also agree - absolutely no activity. But Google is showing massive amounts of traffic and very respectable earnings.

This does come at just the wrong time as I've got an advertiser who wanted to know which relevant pages were doing well this week so that his advert could go onto them next week. This is where having multiple ways of checking traffic is a bonus, but it's not usually critical, so not really worth the bother.

But it would be possible to set up the Google adsense to monitor exactly which pages clicks are coming from and this would also show me relevant traffic logs. A quite easy way around the problem of monitoring traffic.

Back to the subject of monitoring traffic tomorrow - hopefully I'll have some logs to look at myself by then!

Why Should You Monitor Site Traffic

I've already looked at How to monitor website traffic, but why? What are the advantages?

Quite simply put, if your website traffic is at a good level now, why should you spend time & money looking at where it's coming from?

Put it another way - if in 6 months time your website traffic has dropped - what are you doing right now to raise that traffic?

That's the key to monitoring website traffic. If it's good now, you want to keep it that way. Run reports, find out which search engines are sending visitors for important keywords and what pages they are being sent to. And record this information.

In the future, if traffic is low or sales are lower, then you can easily look back to what's happening now and compare results. If traffic is the same but sales lower then it could be that you are being found for different keywords. These could be keywords that aren't as important or relevant.

If you have a change log for the site, you can then look back and see what's happened and maybe you can quickly reverse the changes and get the traffic back up again.

Traffic comes in peaks and troughs so it's easy to miss a gradual change in traffic and by the time you have noticed server logs have gone. So record key weeks while you have the chance.

Tomorrow - we'll look at what benefits we can derive from studying traffic.