Does Google Rate You As Safe

You can now use the google safe browsing diagnostic service to confirm that google rates your domain as safe. Here’s an example for the BBC opening in a new window - all looks fine. You can get the detail on this service by reading the official blog post.

I’ve noticed that you sometimes see this as part of the report:

What happened when Google visited this site?

Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.

but I don’t think that it means your site hasn’t been spidered in the last 90 days.

As a check, it’s another worthwhile item to add to your domain maintenance checklist. If you’re a wordpress user I’ve previously offered a couple of security tips too.

Post from: upthejunction.com by John Cronin.

Cache Back

How odd. After reporting yesterday that this site’s homepage didn’t have a cache in google, I check again this morning and it’s back (dated 4th April). Not at all sure why the cache wasn’t available yesterday?

Great opportunity for this post title!

No Cache?

This is a little odd and is something I can’t recall seeing before. Currently (at time of writing) google has no cache for my homepage, though it does for others - like my about page for instance.

I’ve checked my webmaster tools account and that all looks fine. The site is certainly being indexed because my last post of only a couple of hours ago has already been indexed and is searchable - which is fine. Visible pagerank as shown in my toolbar is 4 and not greyed-out or anything.

I’ve just tested for an iffy robots.txt via webmaster tools and that’s fine too.

I upgraded to wordpress 2.5 yesterday but then I’ve upgraded other sites and they have cache.

hmm? Not sure if it’s just a temporary blip or a problem somewhere?

Website Playgrounds

Several months ago I came up with the idea for a blog containing embedded youtube (+ others) videos related to search marketing, SEO, website design and the like. I hosted it on blogger, added a few posts and then simply forgot about it.

But as I fancied having a wordpress playground and I’ve recently seen some useful videos I thought I’d kill two birds with the one stone. So, I’ve gone back to my seo videos idea, deleted the blogger version and hosted it on wordpress at seovids.net instead. It’s content light just right now but I’ll be adding new videos next week. I’ll no doubt monetise it too at some point, though I’m not intending it to be much of a revenue earner - I’d much rather learn some new seo stuff!

It’ll be useful as my (admittedly public) wordpress playground where I can mess about with new themes, plugins and the like. I already have a similar playground for static websites where I sometimes develop out new (or major revamp) sites and when I’m happy I just simply edit/replace the html with the true domain name and host on the proper site. If you block all spiders in the test site’s robots.txt you can mess about with your hush-hush ideas without the engines (or anyone else) finding them.

If you’re aware of any decent SEO related videos, themes, plugins, etc then please do visit seovids.net and use the contact form or leave a comment.

Do you have any website playground tips to share?

Revolution Theme Optimisation: Image Alt

I’m a big fan of Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme for wordpress - we use it here of course. Since purchasing the original theme, Brian has added a few variants to the Revolution portfolio, so do take a look at them all. I love these premium, magazine style wordpress themes - South Africa based Adii Pienaar offers his premium news theme which looks rather smart too.

I thought I’d post about any little tweaks that I make to my installed Revolution theme and hopefully others can add theirs in my comments or via email. I’m no wordpress expert though (unfortunately) so I’m not offering my services as a wordpress support line!

Today I’d like to mention the image alt descriptions. By default the Revolution theme seems to use your blog title for the image alts for the home page images hp-main, hp-1, hp-2 and hp-3 and could therefore do with a little optimisation. Within the file home.php search for the references to those images and edit the alt=”<your image text here>” and then test.

I’m currently using the firefox toolbar plugin webdeveloper and it was that that highlighted the image alts.

Subscribing To Comments

I’ve finally got around to installing the subscribe to comments wordpress plug-in so I’m now able to let readers receive an email notification for additional comments on a post. I’m assuming the etiquette is to have the option off by default?

I’ve been meaning to install the plug-in for ages but just never got round to it, but having watched blogger now offer the same facility (but only for other google account users I might add) I decided to act.

I’m also currently playing with the all-in-one seo plug-in too on my running blog with the intention of using it here (and elsewhere) too. Need to upgrade to the latest wordpress first on this blog.

The more I use wordpress the more I like it!

Tell Google Your Geo-Target

It’s now possible to tell Google where your target audience is geo located (see here and here for info). For those of us who like to purchase inexpensive .coms and hosting from the States but whose target audience is the UK this is a useful facility.

For example, you’ll now be able to buy expatsinsunnyspain.com from someone like godaddy for about £5, host it on a server with a USA IP address but indicate to google that your target audience is Spain.

If your domain is already country specific (.co.uk .fr .ie etc) then whilst you can’t set the country for such a ccTLD you can further refine to a city/town/street address/post code. I suppose this could be useful if you had a local photography club, church, village take-away, whatever and wanted to define it’s physical location. If you are a local business you should be listed in the local business centre too.

I see that you can undo any geo-targetting preferences that you set, though presumably any intial and subsequent changes take time to filter through the system.

I’m going to use the facility for my running blog (which is a .com, hosted on USA servers) to start with as a test.

I’m not aware of any similar geo-targetting facilities from yahoo or msn, so consider that before you go on a .com spending spree!

Is Your Home Page Exactly That?

It is very common for websites to have a sitewide link (a link on every page) pointing back to the home page. If for no other reason, it gives your sites users an easy navigational route back to the (presumably) starting point of your site. More often that not users expect to easily find a link back to the home page.

But just what is your home page? Is it the same as your domain name or is it something like www.mysite.com/default or www.mysite.com/index.htm? Whilst the content and therefore visual appearance is no different you are creating a mixed message if your home page isn’t just your domain name.

By not pointing back to your domain name you are making the search engines decide for themselves what your homepage is and this could be detrimental to your search rankings, possibly causing duplicate content issues. So wherever possible, always refer to your homepage as www.mysite.com when you link your pages yourself and when other people link to your home page.

Vanessa Fox (ex google) shares the same advice over in a recent blog post where she says:

But the home page? I think that’s better off resolving to the domain, in this case, www.jonestshirts.com. As before, if you do have other URLs for your home page, you should 301 redirect everything to one URL, and for the home page, I would keep things simple and do all of that resolving back to the domain. Make sure all internal links are to that one URL and encourage external linking to do the same.

One additional issue to consider is the use of www. To avoid what the search engines call canonical issues you should ensure that (if you can) you configure your website so that www.mysite.com and just mysite.com (without the www.) are one and the same . You can simply tell google whether your site uses the www prefix or not within their webmaster central services.

Is title= Spammy Or Not?

You’ll be aware that you can use title=”something” as part of your html for a url link. Hover over this link to google to see what I mean. This one hasn’t got a title when you hover over.

Used sensibly I think that link titles can look quite smart. Question is, are they considered spammy or not? Should you never use them, or only sometimes, or all the time if you do use them? Do they improve your sites usability?

Even Vanessa Fox is inconsistent in her use of them in her google blog posts. For example, in this post she’s used them all the time, but in this post it’s 50-50.

Anyone have an opinion?

html spam

Will Removing Crappy Links Help Me?

I’m working on a long overdue revamp for one of my sites - actually, I’ve been working on this revamp for absolutely ages but I keep allowing myself to be sidetracked onto other stuff. The site is about four years old and it includes a couple of links pages. Bog-standard (on-topic) reciprocal links pages that I’d built in the hope of improving my search rankings in Google and the rest. I suspect it never did make a blind bit of difference really! Well it might have helped page rank I suppose.

I’ve just spent an hour following these links. All of the sites still exist so I’m not linking to non-existent pages. A couple seem to be now offering cheap hosting deals or that highly relevant mix of mortgages and ringtone downloads. Most have either deleted their reciprocal link back to be me or buried their links/resources page where it’ll never be found anyway. Some sites that I recall having page ranks of 5 or 6 are now zero. So, with the exception of one or two, I’ve removed all these crappy outbound links from my site and I’ll wait and see if it has any positive impact. I can’t see it being detrimental at all anyways.

Search Marketing Reciprocal Linking

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