There are just so many factors that you need to look and analyze when it comes to traffic stats. Where to begin with? The Business Insider summarized 9 essential statistics that everyone who does website stuff should understand.
Unique Visitors
Page Views
Referrers
Search Terms
Entry and Exit pages
Bounce Rate
Visit By Hour
Visit By Country
Funny that the title says 9 but only 8 was listed.
This is interesting. I was renewing some of the domains my company own on network solution. And this tip box showed up during the checkout process.
I know that having a domain that has longer history helps to increase the search engine ranks but registering a longer term also helps? I don’t really know.
If you heard a so-called SEOer telling you that you should use Keyword meta tags to gain higher rank in your niche, you can tell them to shut up. Because Google now confirms firmly that Google does not use keywords meta tag in its web search ranking, at all. No matter how many keywords you put on and no matter how good they are, they don’t mean a thing, at all.
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking? A: In a word, NO.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag? A: Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags? A: No, Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.
Q: Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag? A: Unlikely.
Nice, thanks Matt. You just cleared up another area that confuses people a lot.
BAM, you woke up one day and only realized that your money-making site went straight to the hell and was completed removed, de-indexed, and banned from Google. It’s complete a worst nightmare to anyone involved on doing business online.
There is a popular myth about duplicate content, basically saying that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. Well, it is just a non-proof myth that now has been cleared up by Greg Gothaus of the Search Quality Team in Google from his blog post on Google Webmaster Central Blog along with a 15 minute video and presentation slide.
In short, the truth is that this not the case. Google won’t penalize sites for having duplicate content. However, that’s also not saying that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings. There are actually a lot more covered in his video, so I highly suggest you take your time watching it through.
If you haven’t realized, Google now can crawl links buried in the JavaScript code, which means the old trick no longer applies. If you are the guy who uses this trick hiding those links that Google don’t like in the JavaScript code you probably should revisit them again to make sure they are Google compliance before the nightmare happens.
That also doesn’t mean you can’t have the paid links on your site. As the Matt guy says in the video below, you definitely can have them on your site, as long as they don’t affect the search engine. And there are a number of ways doing that. For example,
1. Make the link as no-follow by adding rel=”nofollow” to every single paid link.
2. Block them in the robots.txt file, if you are using link cloaking technique.
Surprised? Yes, Video below from Google’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, finally confirms and sets the record straight.
In short, that’s because majority web pages on the internet aren’t validate. Making it factor in Google’s ranking would effect search results. Well, make sense. But don’t put wrong that you shouldn’t care about the W3C validation. In fact, you still should, because it’s much easier maintaining a web page that’s W3C validated than a page that isn’t.
My last post touched the first step what to do when the website is banned or penalized by Google. Now, let’s move to the next step.
It’s definitely not end of the word if your websites got banned or penalized on Google. Just face it if it does happen to you. It doesn’t matter whether or not your site is still indexed on Google. If it happens it’s the time to seriously go over the Webmaster Guidelines again, especially the guidelines that specifically tell you what NOT to do, such as:
Avoid hidden text or hidden links
Don’t use cloaking or sneaky links
Don’t send automated queries to Google
Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, virus, Trojans, or other badwares.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines.
If the site participates in an affiliate program, make sure the site adds value that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If you have one or more places that violate these guidelines make sure fix them first, and submit reconsideration request to Google telling them you have fixed the problems on your site. It’s required that you have a Google account that participates in Google Webmaster Tools. It’s also much easier because the communication will be all within the Google Webmaster Tools program. However, it takes time for them to get the issue resolved, usually can take a few weeks.
It does seem a lot easier if your site only got penalized but still is indexed on Google, because that also means you are not so bad that you only have one or two things that need to be fixed. It is a lot more serious if your site got banned because that indicates that you are doing something really bad that Google doesn’t even want you being in their game anymore.
There will be another one or two posts on the same topic, stay tuned.
If you are wondering why your site isn’t doing so well on Google, and suspect that your site may be banned or penalized by the giant, the first thing you may want to know is if your site is completely out of their database and banned.
You can do that by either performing a search for site:domain.com, or following this site status wizard from Google. If both results come back showing positive, your site most likely is still well indexed but still has something that Google doesn’t quite like. Otherwise, you are screwed, it’s quite obvious that your site is deadly banned.
Either way, the next thing you need to do is to go over the Webmaster Guidelines to make sure your site completely follows them.
It was still ranked as 3 yesterday but went to 0 this morning when I checked. I believe that’s something to do with the Google Webmaster Tools I set for this website yesterday. Once all data were got indexed properly in Google’s database they finally realized and corrected the wrong PR they assigned to mine earlier.
It makes more sense that way, and I was actually glad that it’s all got corrected. I rather prefer a natural, generic PR than a mystery only looked good number, because you don’t know when you will lose it.
Anyway, since I am back to the ground, it’s time to start building it up.
