Does Googlebot crawl videos:

Recently I have noticed surge in videos from YouTube ranking for competitive phrases. If you see YouTube page all you see is a video without proper text, few comments shown and all other are just junk data. So here are my questions?

1. How a video ranks on top of Google results when it doesn’t have any proper optimization done or it just has keywords in title.

2. How does Google determine the content of a video? Does it have a program that somehow analyzes the video and evaluates its content, even when there are no spoken or written words, as in this case. Or does a Google employee actually watch the video and personally evaluate its content?,

Doing a bit of more searches I feel Google will be seeing the popularity of the video, real backlinks coming to the video, no of instances the video has been embedded etc.

Google can also see the comments and valuate the quality of the video some videos attract 1000s of comments so I feel Google will have ability to crawl all the comments though many contents are hidden.

Also the quality of the domain itself matters youtube.com is PR 9 domain which signals very high level importance and popularity in Google’s eyes. You can expect pages under youtube.com to rank because of the quality of YouTube domain.

Video views can also signal Google that the video is important.

In fact only Google knows the algorithm behind ranking YouTube videos. I will leave it to them.

Removing advertising or not advertising will show credibility:

Advertising on a new site is self-defeating. Shouldn’t you be highlighting the quality of the content to show why your site is linkworthy? Removing ads shifts the focus to your content and why someone should link to the site.

In my experience it helps the link building process to remove advertising from a new site because webmasters like to link to quality information that is free. A lack of advertising presents a more positive face because some people tend to overlook the high quality of the content because of the ads, not even give the content a chance. Leaving out the ads puts your content front and center, there’s nothing to distract from it. Even Google didn’t have advertising when it first started.

New sites with advertising are a turnoff

I receive many requests to link to new sites. Number one reason I’ll decline is advertising. It’s poison. Advertising sends the message that the reason this person wants my link is so they can make a buck off my traffic. Why should I link to that?

What is the point of trying to monetize a new site with a trickle of traffic? Advertising revenue depends on traffic. Shouldn’t you focus on building traffic first then monetizing the site after it’s acquired?

Works for older sites with low traffic

Sites that have been around awhile but aren’t performing well should be considered candidates for removal of advertising. What you have to gain long term may outweigh what little earnings you’ll lose while you focus on building traffic to the site.
Works on established sites, too

Even established sites can benefit from temporarily removing advertising. If a sub-section is not performing well because of a lack of links/traffic, you may want to consider temporarily removing advertising in order to boost the success rate of your link building effort.

Personally I like sites which are ad-free, if you want to have a site link worthy don’t show your visitors that you are madly money minded. Looking to always make money through advertising will spoil the trend to attract backlinks to your website. If you want quality links you need to back off on strong advertising on your website.

Pagerank update – April 2009

Google is updating its toolbar pagerank data, its confirmed and we have PR data for almost all of our websites changed. You can check your altered pagerank here:

http://www.searchenginegenie.com/future-pagerank-checking.html

Wikipedia wins on the death of Microsoft Encarta:

Encarta encyclopedia the largest and most used before Wikipedia came into existence is now laid to rest. Microsoft had decided to put Encarta to rest after a long and exhausting battle with Wikipedia.

We can call this the death of one monster and the rise of another. According to MSN Encarta website:

“Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Why are these Encarta Web sites and software products being discontinued?
Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past. As part of Microsoft’s goal to deliver the most effective and engaging resources for today’s consumer, it has made the decision to exit the Encarta business.

Microsoft’s vision is that everyone around the world needs to have access to quality education, and we believe that we can use what we’ve learned and assets we’ve accrued with offerings like Encarta to develop future technology solutions. In doing so, we feel strongly that we are making the right investments that will help make our vision a reality.

http://encarta.msn.com/guide_page_FAQ/FAQ.html

I remember my school days when I used to run around to get a copy of Encarta, my cousin gifted an encyclopedia book to me and I still have it. We never had a great resource like Wikipedia. Today Wikipedia is the most dominant resource on the website. Its one of the most used website today and the content quality is great. Also big difference between Encarta and Wikipedia is the commercial option. Wikipedia is totally free but you need to subscribe for Encarta encyclopedia. I am happy that encyclopedia is laid to rest. There is no way it’s going to compete with Wikipedia and win the race.

Google introduces broader keyword suggestions and longer snippets:

Google on 24th march released a new technology that can better understand concepts and associations related to the search done by end users, this advancement will help provide more related keyword suggestions on top and bottom of the search result pages.
Example, if you search for [principles of physics], Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

Longer snippets in Google results page:

Now Google in offering longer snippets for longer queries. A snippet is the dark blue title and is followed by few lines of text which was previously indexed from your website. Below are a couple of examples.

Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun]. A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics. In addition, the extra line of snippets for the third result shows the word “sun” in context, suggesting that the page doesn’t talk about Earth’s distance from the sun:

Keywords in URls and domains – is it still useful?

I think most would agree that a keyword friendly domain can be a major help for SEO in various ways. Domains and URL paths are a bit of a different consideration.

The URL itself is less of a signal these days, and so thinking too much about where in the URL keywords appear is probably too finicky.

However, as with any question that affects URLs, you need to make sure your URLs serve their major purpose as a user route into your site. If you have meaningful but short URLs, that should help SEO.

Generally, I would read from right to left in a URL – going from most specific information to least specific. So, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I is not great. www.youtube.com/entertainment/very-funny would tell a user (and a search engine) that you had something very funny, filed under entertainment, in a site named youtube.

A quick test that can help you evaluate the search engine impact of keywords in URLs is to compare results for a keyword to results for the same search without the keyword in the URL. But I would say instead of concentrating on these stuff if you can do what is best for your users I am sure you will do fine.

Best CMS for adapted copywriting and search engine performance:

A content management system is a software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. Since the CMS manages all your content, you don’t have to.

Joomla: Joomla is currently the best and leading content management system that will help you to build great content rich websites with ease. Joomla is an open source software means you get it totally for free from www.joomla.com , It is currently the best and most easy to use software it have got various awards for best performing CMS.

Drupal: Drupal is an other quality CMS that helps to easily publish , manage and organize variety of contents including blogs, content sites etc. You can use Drupal to build :

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

Umberco: If you use .net hosting you can go for Umberco a friendly CMS which again is easy to use and comes with a load of great features.

Mattcutts discusses PR sculpting:

Matt Cutts, talks about the best ways to stop Google from crawling your content, and how to remove content from the Google index once we’ve crawled it.

Sebastine explains pretty well on that topic:

As for password protected contents, are you sure that you don’t index those based on 3rd party signals like ODP listings or strong inbound links?

You totally forgot to mention the neat X-Robots-Tag that allows outputting REP tags like “noindex” even for non-HTML resources like PDFs or videos in the HTTP header. That’s an invention Google can be very proud of. 🙂

@Ian M
Actually, Google experiments with Noindex: in robots.txt, but that’s “improvable”.

@Google

Currently Google interprets Noindex: in robots.txt as (Disallow: + Noindex:). I think that’s completely wrong, because:

1. It’s not compliant to the Robots Exclusion Standard.

2. It confuses Webmasters because “noindex” in robots.txt means something completely different than “noindex” in meta tags or HTTP headers.

3. Mixing crawler directives and indexer directives this way is a plain weak point that will produce misunderstandings resulting in traffic losses for Webmasters and less compelling contents available to searchers. All indexer directives (noindex,nofollow,noarchive,noodp, unavailable_after etc.) do require crawling when put elsewhere. I do Webmaster support for ages and I assure you that Webmasters will not get it. If nobody understands it and adapts it, it’s as useless as Yahoo’s robots-nocontent class name that only 500 sites on the whole Web make use of.

4. The REP’s “noindex” tag has an implicit “follow” that Google ignores in robots.txt for technical reasons (it’s impossible to follow links from uncrawled pages). When I put a robots meta tag with a “noindex” value, then Google rightly follows my links, passes PageRank and anchor text to those, and just doesn’t list the URL on the SERPs. When I do the same in robots.txt Google behaves totally different, for no apparent reason. (Of course there’s a reason but I want to keep this statement simple.)

Having said all that, I appreciate it very much that Google works on robots.txt evolvements. Kudos to Google! However, please don’t assign semantics of crawler directives to established indexer directives, that doesn’t work out. I see the PageRank problem, and I think I know a better procedure to solve that. If you’re interested, please read my “RFC” linked above. 😉

@all

Do not make use of experimental robots.txt directives unless you really know what you do, and that includes monitoring Google’s experiment very closely. If you’ve the programming skills, then better make use of X-Robots-Tags to steer indexing respectively deindexing of your resources on site level. X-Robots-Tags work with HTML contents as well as with all other content types.

Link Building rap – funny

I found this when I was going through youtube for some SEO related videos. I thought this one was funny but not so informative. Its worth watching just for the sake of fun:

Here is the lyrics / transcript for that video:

Chuck raps about link building.

You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in the bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement

Quote for SEO criteria.

1. Competition: Competition is one of the most important factor when deciding a pricing for SEO. If the competition of the keywords is lesser then I am sure you can get ranking in a shorter period of time which will result in lesser price.

2. Keywords: Lots of sub factors are involved when it comes to keywords to determine the price for SEO service. Keywords can be global , regional , very much targeted, country wise and lot more. If you can get a clear picture of the keywords that will be targeted it will be easier to give a price.

3. Niche: You need to analyze the website thoroughly to know the niche the site targets its an important factor before deciding the price for SEO.

4. Time: SEO is a time consuming process it cannot be done in a day or week or month some sites take years to rank and some can be ranked in 2 months before quoting a price it’s important to know how much time its going to take to rank a website.

5. Website quality: Some clients will come to you with a low quality website and will want you to rank, its much easier to rank quality websites with quality unique crawl able content than sites which doesn’t have sufficient information pages. Make sure you set this as a criteria when you give a price quote.

Deciding the right price is very important you can scare away customers by quoting very high yet you can’t burn your hands by quoting less. Make sure you have sufficient experience in giving price quotes. I have been giving price quotes for more than 6 years and it hardly takes me 10mts to decide the price for SEO for a website but it cannot be the same for amateur people. Research more I am sure you will get more ideas.