Archive for July, 2010
Is Your Web Site Leaking Page Rank?
Posted by Dave Jesch in SEO on July 10, 2010
Many shared web sites and blog templates, and this includes many WordPress themes, have promotional links placed in the footer or sidebar. Often times, these links are simply promotional links for the theme’s author. Promoting a theme author isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes the theme author places multiple links. Or places links that are paid advertisements to other sites. Any link from your site passes the Page Rank from your pages to the referring page. In most cases, this is okay. But when there are links to unwanted pages, this is referred to as “leaking Page Rank.”
The first step in resolving this potential situation is to identify the existance of unwanted links. Sometimes this can be done by simply looking at your footer’s contents. But if the theme author is sneaky, the links can be hidden. There are some tools available on the web that can help with this but you can also look at the HTML source for the page if you’re feeling adventurous.
Fortunately for WordPress users, it’s very simple to change themes. So if you find that there are extra links that come with your theme, you can look for a new one that doesn’t have them. Another possible remedy is to find a consultant that can modify your theme to remove the excess links. Depending on the complexity of the theme and the talent of your consultant, this could be done in just an hour or two.
It’s good to allow credit to the theme author, but you also don’t want too many unnecessary links from your pages. One possible solution would be to have your consultant change your theme to limit the links to the theme author to be from your home page only. So rather than having links from every page on your site, you’ll have them from only one page. You can also place rel=”nofollow” attributes on the link.
There are some simple solutions to the problem of having too many outbound links. The first step is identifying if there is a problem. Once identified, changing the links or changing the theme entirely is a relatively simple process. Since it’s your site you should be aware of the implications and choose to have or not have the links.
How the Search Engines Work
Posted by Dave Jesch in SEO on July 3, 2010
Many webmasters don’t really know how search engines work. But anyone who is interested in Search Engine Optimization should know at least the basics in order to improve their own page’s ranking.
Any search engine works in three basic parts: the crawler, the indexer and the query processor. Understanding how these parts work together is crucial to your online success.
The Crawler
Google’s craler is called “Googlebot.” This tool is what crawls the web looking for content. The crawler works a bit like a web browser in that it visits your web site and requests pages. Doing this, it can build up a picture of the organization and content of your site. After crawling your site, the indexer follows all of the links on your site, looking for more content. This is how the crawler determines what sites are related to each other and how they’re related.
Most crawling programs don’t know about a new web site until it finds a link to it on another page. Some search engines also have a URL submission tool where you can add your own domain name to the list of web site to crawl.
The Indexer
The Indexer takes the page content found by the crawler. It sorts all of the content and puts it into a database. While doing this, the indexer usually ignores what are called “stop words,” such as is, on, and, the, etc. It pays more attention to keywords and phrases.
Query Processor
The Query Processor is the search engine’s public face. This is the web site that most people would identify with the the search engine.
When someone types something in to the search engine, the request is sent through the Query Processor. This searches through the pages in the database to find what the user is looking for. The different search engines use different algorithms to determine the order in which to display the search results.
Each piece of the system is dependent upon the other. It starts with the crawler and ends with you typing something in to the search engine’s web site. A better understanding of how these tools work together allows you to use them to your best advantage.
