Does search engines crawl Javascript links ? – search engine optimization tip – march 13th 2005

Scripts are complex codings which difficult for some browsers and crawlers to read, Some tough javascripts are read only by advanced browsers, search engine crawlers are not advanced browsers some of the browsers that search engines use find difficult to index high graphics, So it is best to avoid too much javascript,

Prevent creating menus in javascript or in any scripting language, Create menus in simple html or other crawler understandable language, Javascript menus wont be crawled by search engines, Best is to avoid using clickable menus and other important inner page links in javascript,

if you cannot avoid using javascript menus just add the links to a sitemap and attach the sitemap to the homepage or any other important page,

SEO BLog Team,

Does outgoing links affect your site – seo tip march 12th 2005

Outbound links are links going out from a site to an other site, Whole internet/WWW was built upon links, Inbound links and Outbound links make up the web, Outbound links are good to maintain the quality of a site, search engines like links, they like outbound links too, If you link out to a collection of quality sites then definitely there is a small boost to that page,

Jon M. Kleinberg proposed that hubs are a collection of quality links, More information on hubs and authorities in this paper, http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf

Outbound links are good for usability too, For certain references it is important to give the source so that people are guided in the correct way, Especially non commercial sites need to link out freely for people to find relevant information if they are found elsewhere on the web,

SEO Blog Team,

Do tracking parameters dilute ranking of page? – search engine optimization tip march 10th 2005

tracking parameters dilute ranking of page?

many will be having question whether tracking URLs like the one below will dilute pagerank/link popularity/ranking,

www.myURL.com/page.htm?trackingid=theirURL

Nope they dont dilute much, if you think they are diluting the link better option is to 301 redirect them to the main URL, that way all link popularity is passed to the main URL and no duplicate pages are formed,

Do search engines index flash?? – search engine optimization tip march 9th 2005

Flash is not good for search engines, Most of the search engines have difficulty in parsing code from the complex DHTML coding of flash, Google has been recently reported on following links from flash .SWF files, We have seen google read text within a flash file and follow links from a flash file,

But yahoo don’t read flash they are not sophisticated to do so, Similarly MSN, gigablast and lot of other search engines don’t follow flash, Best bet is to avoid flash sites if you are planning to do search engine optimization,

Flash has always been a hindrance for search engines better avoid designing full sites with flash,

SEO BLOG TEAM,

What is duplicate content for search engines – search engine optimization tip March 8th 2005

Various search engines have various thresholds on duplicate content issues, Some search engines like yahoo, exalead are unable to detect duplicate contents across sites, they seem to detect within a site but are not able to detect across sites, Best is to make the pages atleast 5 to 7% different from other pages of the site,

Google is the best search engine on detecting dupe contents, They strip away the main template of the site and take the remaining part into their algorithm consideration, We recommend making the page atleast 8 to 15% different from other pages to avoid dupe content penalty for a particular page, Remember to give proper file names if you cant create too unique pages, File names are indexed by search engines and good 5 or 6 word file names add upto unique contents,

Overall 10% is the best bet to make pages different,

SEO BLog Team,

Is alexa ranking worth looking at ? search engine optimization tip March 7th 2005

Alexa has a unique ranking system where the measure the ranking of a site based on their toolbar users visiting certain sites, Alexa’s ranking criteria can give you an idea how good a site is and how well they get traffic from various sources,

But it is not a definite measure since there are not many Alexa toolbar users, Only Alexa toolbar users are taken into consideration for ALexa site rankings and it is not a good measure,

But Alexa will give an idea of the quality of the site, If there is a hike in traffic to a particular site as reported in Alexa then we can judge definitely there is some increase in popularity for that particular site,

SEO Blog Team,

does spamming guestbooks, phpbbs and wikis work ? SEO tip march 6th 2005

Does spamming forums, blog comments, guestbooks wikis work, Search engines like google have already written effective algorithms to ignore links from these sources, Whether it works now is a big question, It might work to certain extent but is it good for competitive ranking is a doubt,

Apart from that google, yahoo, MSN and some more blog providers all combined recently launched the rel=nofollow tag, this tells search engine crawlers to ignore that particular link where this attribute is used, Wikis and certain blog providers have already implemented this tag automatically, So it will be difficult to spam in future,

Better option is to avoid it and work inaccordance with search engine guide lines and build quality sites which search engines will be proud to rank,

SEO Blog Team,

What is an Authority site? – Search Engine Optimization Tip March 5th 2005

An authority site is determinded the Number and quality of links that site has and the quality of content that site has,

If the site has lots of quality contents it attracts lot of quality inbound links and this will make that site an authority site,

For example microsoft is an huge authority site for computer related questions and windows related doubts, they get backlinks for most of their inner pages from various sources which makes them an authority,

They just dont get links to their homepage but to their 100s of 1000s of inner pages too, Simply saying an authority site is an great source of information which attracts all sort of crowd,

SEO Blog Team,

Do No of links per page matter these days for search engines – SEO Tip March 4th 2005

Number of links per page for search engines has been a major debate among search engine optimizers,

There are no definite rules when it comes to number of links per page, Google suggests having 100 links per page, But that is not a rule just a suggestion, Googlebot is known to follow more than 1000 links on page, Google used to have an indexing limit of page size upto 101 KB now that rule too seem to be removed, Google these indexes more than 101 kb and all links are followed, If the pagerank of the page bearing the links is high then there wont be any problem following those links or passing pagerank to those links,

Simiiarly yahoo and MSN too doesn’t have any set of rules, These are known to follow more than 1000 links per page, So better don’t see what is good for search engines, see end users if the no of links per page is good for your users, then use them,

SEO Team,

Is Google Toolbar and other search engine toolbar useful – Search engine optimization tip 3rd March 2005

Google toolbar is a BHO ( Browser helper object ) which has pagerank display and other unique features, Some features of google toolbar are autolink, highlight button, blog this button, pagerank display , news button, backlinks button, auto fill, spell checker etc,

Auto Link: Auto link automatically changes certain part of the text in a site you browser into hyperlinks to other sites, This feature sometimes changes the links and points to specific maps or to other sites like amazon,

Pagerank Display: Pagerank is the technology of google in judging a quality of a site based on the links pointing to that pagerank, The more the links and the better quality the links are the pagerank passed with be more, Pagerank display helps in judging the quality of a site to a certain extent,

highlight button: Highlight Button helps in highlighting certain text specified in the search box,

Search Box: helps in searching the web,

Auto Fill: Helps in filling out online forms much faster,

Yahoo, MSN, A9, Teoma all have their unique toolbars,

Search engine toolbars helps in search engine optimization in various ways, options like the highlight button helps in judging the keyword density and keyword distribution of a page, Pagerank display helps in determining the pagerank of a site etc,