Are You Website Changes Not Being Cached?

It can happen quite often. New website is published, taking down the 'in progress' sign, and you look at the Google cache of your site a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later....

But you are disappointed. The cache is still not the new site - it's still saying the site is under construction and all that hard work is going to waste!

This happens quite a lot. A customer registers their URL then comes to us some time later for a site. We publish the site and a month later we're still trying hard to get Google to visit. The owner of Empowering Confidence asked me why this is the case today, and this is her situation.

Basically, search engines visit your site when they first discover it. They come back a short while later and go over it again. If all they find is an 'In Progress' sign and no changes, then they will leave it longer before they next visit. And then longer, then longer, then longer as with every visit they find a site with little text and no changes.

They just lose interest in you. That's what has happened to Empowering Confidence and Google hasn't visited for almost 2 months, so now I have to persuade Google to visit the site. And that's not easy. It's far easier for me to work with a brand new URL than an existing one!

So what can you do if you desperately want to protect your preferred URL but aren't ready to build a site? Well, for a start, save yourself the hosting fees and just go for the email package. Why put up an 'in progress' sign? Is that going to get you more customers than no site? If you really do want to put up an in progress sign, then use the robots.txt file to ban all search engines from your site. As soon as the site goes live that file can be changed and then search engines will be all over it.

Sometimes You Don't Serve Yourself

I've spoken to a few people recently about my own Webdesign Site. It's a style that I was pleased with, 4 years ago, but doesn't really match the type of sites we're producing now.

I want it to make use of stock pictures and more graphics. But it's just a clean written, fast loading page. It doesn't really sell us. Potential customers could see the site and decide that it's not a selling point and not get as far as our portfolio.

What do I do? Well, obviously I've been intending to update it for 6 months, maybe more. But there just aren't the hours in the day. It's left to sit there and do us no favours, as with a few other of our own sites. I look after the customers, offer long standing customers refreshes of their sites when they are looking dated. But do I do the same for myself?

I suppose the answer is if the work is rolling in then why worry? But what happens when it dries up - then I'll regret not having worked on it.

Loads of work is waiting to be done and all of it for end of tomorrow. Maybe over Christmas I'll get a few hours to improve my own sites.

100 Posts

This post marks the 100 post benchmark. The blog started on 23rd August and to be honest I never expected to really keep up the posting, definitely not daily. Maybe weekly, but not most days!

The blog was originally going to be mainly about my own web design, but over time it's settled down more into thoughts and documenting little experiments and what I see happening with search results. So recently I started a new blog, again trying to get back to the original theme of documenting my Web Design Portfolio. That one is more self indulgence and memories of sites gone by. And some of them really shouldn't have been allowed to be published - they look dreadful!

Just a short post today - everyone wants work doing before Christmas, so not got long to get through it all. Need to get on with earning some pennies!

Description Tags

Do you use automated link building software on your sites - such as Link Machine?

I've successfully used this for a while now for my own and customers' sites and am very pleased with it. But I've noticed that sometimes the directories get good PRs - in the best case every page PR4 - whilst sometimes the pages aren't ranked at all.

I've also noticed a change of page rank in my own webdesign site. For years now, all of the main pages have been PR4. But in the last update many internal pages dropped to PR3, with 2 dropping PR altogether. I expect that the 2 that dropped totally have at least in part cause the others to loose PR.

What have these in common? Well I was going through my own site making some changes when I noticed that the two pages in question accidentally shared meta descriptions. Neither page has been SEOd - price lists etc, so I've never noticed before.

Then I remembered that the links directory pages all take one template page for each site. So within each links directory, all of the meta descriptions must be the same. So I started to look.

And then I discovered that my links directories in which all pages have a PR have the description meta tag missing. The others either are on a low PR site or all of the pages have the same meta description.

You can imagine how quickly that meta tag was removed from my site CompareMortgageRates.co.uk. It will take a while to see anything - especially as the site has currently lost PR. But it's an interesting theory.

The Best Anchor Text - Week 3

It's Monday so time to catch up on the experiment to find the Best Anchor Text before I post to them later today.

Site 1 has 6 pages cached. The home page (12 days ago), 2 archives (14 & 16 days) and 3 posts (12, 16 & 17 days). Like site 2, the home page is also in the supplemental results, from 14 days ago (I accidentally linked to them using www and not using that).

Site 2 has 9 pages cached. The home page (12 days), 2 archives (13 & 16 days) and 6posts (2, 2, 5, 6, 12, 17). The repeat of the home page is about the same as site 1.

From these results, site 2 would seem to be doing much better, but this is only a snapshot and does not reflect what has happened in the previous weeks. This is exactly what happened in the Target="_blank" experiment in weeks 3 & 4 - so I expect that the Christmas Eve results could be the same as today, but by the New Year it could all have changed.

Keep reading.

Variety Is The Key To Good Anchor Text

Continuing my look at how one site with a handful of links beats 489,000 other pages to reach the top of Google. Is it a matter of the anchor text is important, or is it more a case of the site that the link is on is important?

Most SEO experts will tell you how the link page should look. The page should be categorised and relevant to the site they are linking to. It should not contain off topic links. I even had one expert email me telling me to change my links page! My software not only put the link onto the chosen page, but also ran a featured list on the main links page. She wasn't happy being on that page with non-relevant links.

She should have been happy that for her one link I gave her 2 back. But she worried that other links were irrellevant. When I studied the few links that Google reports for the top performing site, I expected to see related sites. One or two were related, but the vast majority have nothing at all to do with the subject.

So if it's not relevance and the pages weren't high performing page ranked pages, then I can only assume that the on site SEO was great and the few links were powerful.

So now my own link building strategy is heading towards not hundreds of links using the same keyword text, but a few good links using different text. I can try!

Week 9 Results

There's been a lot of changes this week in the number of pages cached for each site. Seems as though Google has done a slight refresh.

Site 1 - home page cached 28 days ago and 2 archive pages cached 6 days ago and 2 posts cached 5 days ago (one being posted that day).

Site 2 - home page cached 14 days ago and 2 archives, again cached 6 days ago. 11 posts cached 4 X 5, 6, 2 X 7, 2 X 8 and 2 X 21. Most of these are within the last week, considering cached pages don't appear immediately.

Site 3 - the home page is the only one to have been cached in the last 'week' - 8 days ago and again 2 archives done 6 days ago. 10 posts were cached 2 X 5, 3 X 6, 7, 2 X 14 and 2 X 17.

It's interesting that all archives were cached 6 days ago. Sites 1 & 2 have Novermber & December archives and these are listed above the home page. But site 3 has Novermber archive listed above and the October archive listed well down the listing.

Average days since last cached on the posts is 9 and 10 days for sites 2 & 3, which I don't really think is significant. But site 2 has 9 cached in the last week against only 6 for site 3. Given each has 14 posts, in both cases that is quite low, especially on site 2 (43% cached against 65%).

There is a difference showing, whether it is significant I think only a few more weeks / months will tell.

JustGoMedia - Esther Wakeman

A lot of the traffic onto this site at the moment is looking for JustGoMedia and Esther Wakeman. I was contacted by her at the end of October and mentioned it here as she suggested their services could be useful for one of my sites.

At the time the JustGoMedia products seemed quite good and I signed up for it and put it onto my home page. I was a little disappointed with the click through rates and payment rates (JustGoMedia 52 clicks for 1451 displays - a little over 3.5% and £16.55 from those 52 clicks gave less than 32 ppc). Google policies prohibt me from reporting their figures, but these figures are not comparable. I even tried replacing the Google adverts with JustGoMedia's to see if the placement helped. But I found very little change.

Then Pat posted a comment having experienced JustGoMedia and when I checked my account it had also stopped reporting. For a week there were no impressions reported, even though I had seen the adverts in that time. We had both had our Yahoo adverts switched off because of low traffic levels, but JustGoMedia hadn't bothered to tell us. It would have been nice to be given a little bit of warning - I was planning to trial the adverts across the entire site, rather than just a single page. But I just can't understand the adverts being switched off and not being told.

If you have experienced JustGoMedia, whether the experience is googd or bad, please post a comment. If you would rather the comment not be made public let me know and I'll not approve it. But I would be interested to know what other people's experiences are of JustGoMedia.

What's The Best Anchor Text

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was reviewing the links in to a site that was getting top position on google. My interest in the site is that it is a direct competitor to one of my customers. I won't mention either site, for fear of upsetting the SEO team that did all of the hard work on the competitor!

When you see a site top of Google for many popular search terms, especially differing terms that don't bring up the home page, you would probably expect to see a site with hundreds of links in. But this site only had 19 links in, showing that it's not the site with the most links in that wins, but the site with the Best Anchor Text.

That's where I left off yesterday - what's the best anchor text? So I looked at the site's 19 links - and 11 of them were from the site itself, with 9 as supplemental results!

So what was so special about this site's links that it was able to beat 489,000 pages of results to take top spot in Google? Were all pages linking in with super rich anchor links?

Actually no. Some listed loads of brands, one or two the main keyword and the rest were the site name, with other bits added. Overall, it appears that Google considers the best anchor text> to be not the ideal keywords, but random words. After all, this must be more 'natural'.

The alternative answer is - was is the sites themselves that gave extra weighting. I'll look at that tomorrow...

What Anchor Text Is Best

Yesterday I looked at What Links Are Best - today, What Anchor Text Is Best?

The two go hand in hand. Pick a good link and good anchor text and you have a match made in heaven. A link that's sure to earn you grace and favour and move you up the search engine rankings. If it's a really good link, it will appear on Google when you check for back links, and looking at some really popular sites and some don't have that many links showing.

But others have huge numbers of back links showing, and don't necessarily perform well. It's not all about quantity - it's about quantity. So what should the anchor text include?

Traditionally it's been stuffed with the target keywords. But I think that if Google hasn't already started to ignore them, then it soon will do. I was with a customer yesterday and looking at his competitor's site, which recently dropped out of favour. The top site for a search term he's competing on has 19 links in, his site had 300+ links in. Yet it's the 19 links site that does best.

His competitor won't / can't divulge his link building strategy. He leaves it to an SEO company and they won't say what they are doing so that others can't copy. Sounds a get out to me. But why has the site with 19 links in listed so highly?

Simple, it has got better anchor text. I also happened to notice they have exchanged links with one of my (unrelated) sites. So I've started looking through their links to see how they link back - and I was very (pleasantly) surprised. More tomorrow when I've checked the rest of the links.