Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes that's my thoughts too. What's interesting is that they made a switch after a while.

Very nice find - thanks!

I haven't heard anything regarding DMOZ shutting down. Where did you hear that?

Have you picked the right category? If not a lot of bouncing around can happen internally.

I doubt it Though, let's wait and see....

It crawls and maps the structure. There is no way of manual entry, but it can be exported.

Toolbar PageRank updates seem quite frequent this year. When they did the re-update in July after Twitter stuff-up I thought they were going to settle down for a while. Now in August there is a new one. From what I can see the data is refreshed and the snapshot seems to originate from at least 29th July with the calculated values as recent as 25th July.

I wonder why they're doing this and what they are up to...

I know what you're going through. We built our own tool as there was nothing out there that's suitable.

I've developed a WP plugin which works like Tynt except it doesn't add the annoying # tag at the end: http://dejanseo.com.au/copylink/ - it's great for getting automated attribution and link when people copy your content.

Hi, I am a DMOZ editor for Mount Gravatt (Brisbane suburb) and I prefer to see listing like this:

Powertalk International
Public speaking coaching services. Features programme structure, meeting schedule and contact information.

Not like this:

Best Public Speaking Caching | 100% Money Back
We offer the best and fastest service in Brisbane. Call us now for guaranteed results.

Writing a nice objective description without sales jargon gets you in faster as well as submitting to the correct category. The internal DMOZ system is a bit silly and it can be a pain to move listings around - you basically get shoved into somebody else's backlog. Pick your category right, not by pagerank but by common sense.

Some editors are very busy - while others who manage very niche categories are not. Also the frequency of them logging in varies heaps. I believe an editor must log in and edit at least once every 6 months before their account is suspended.

Agreed.

Thank you. That explains it!

Hi James,

No link building was done for these two domains. If they have links they would be random and automated from various places such as whois services scrapers etc.

Not sure I understand this part:

"a funny thing is if you view the cache version of the website Google notes that the hyphen domain as splitting up the text with spaces."

Are you talking about these two:

• http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fdejan-seo-loves-testing.com%2F
• http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fdejanseolovestesting.com%2F

In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it.

Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.

I think I'll do that test!

http://dejanseo.com.au/comprehensive-guide-to-reliable-search-results/

(scroll to the bottom).

Some of my elaborate articles have very long URLs:

1. http://dejanseo.com.au/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-pagerank-but-were-afraid-to-ask/
2. http://dejanseo.com.au/relationships-in-large-scale-graph-computing/
3. http://dejanseo.com.au/influencing-user-behaviour-through-search-engine-optimisation-techniques/
4. http://dejanseo.com.au/obstacles-in-experimental-testing-and-reverse-engineering-of-google-algorithm/

They rank well yet if you look for them in the site list you get this:

http://www.google.com.au/#q=site%3Adejanseo.com.au

speed, about, faq, inference

note that these are both pages and posts - so linked from different levels.

What do you make of it?

Last time I tested to see what impacts it was a balance between page strength, crawling date and URL length. This last one is interesting and you will notice that short pages tends to be towards the start of the list and very long URLs closer to the end.

We're building one on client's request

Nope. (according to Google)

Back in the day I would say it's two datacentres being queried. Then again I've seen algorithm testing do the same thing. Latest observation was the PageRank stuffup by Google and it was interesting to see results jump up and down as they were recalculating it. Not a factor guys huh! Think twice

Interesting question. In theory PageRank splits up evenly across all links and in the case of two links it merges back into the same page (minus the dampening factor). It would make an interesting experiment if you were to take two pages and from each link to one of the two pages via 1 and 10 links respectively. End result? See if one ranks better due to dampening factor in the original PageRank formula.

Relevant mathematical analysis:
http://www.bcamath.org/documentos_public/archivos/actividades/TalkBCAM20090908KA.pdf

I'll be looking forward to reading the full article.

In a natural situation brands typically get exact anchor text only if it's their brand "acme plastering" and not for what they want to rank for "plastering london". If Google starts seeing 100% exact match on all your anchor text you're going to raise a few flags with them. Including what you do is a good idea next to the brand like it was suggested above.

OK, I was going to discuss some techniques which can be employed with Flash but this site hardly has any content and it's all very visual. User experience / navigation could be improved as well.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Awww.ziba.com.au shows a few URLs in index. What confuses me is why go from index to main - what does that achieve?

Options you have are:

Focus on TITLE & Meta description in combination with inbound links.

If you can add some descriptive text under flash which would explain to search engines (and users who do not support flash) what the site is about including basic contact information.

The effect will be minimal and other factors will outrank these subtle variations by far. I recommend that you do what makes sense for yourself and your users. Go easy on bolding terms on the page, excessive amounts are not a good thing.

Pretty much if you follow advice from this page you can't go wrong. As far as I know there isn't a "content comprehensiveness tool" out there (yet).

Yes, I forgot about that post. These rules became guidelines for my team as soon as they were launched. They fail to provide specific technical guidance however. For example "Would you trust this information?" - how does Google figure that out? Surely there are algorithmic signals involved.

I like this. It makes so much sense and Google does have the data to put the criteria together.

Topical relevance can be stretched with a bit of creativity and create a perfectly legitimate reason for it. I would say you provide guidelines and examples to authors on how to properly structure links to avoid potential spam filters and flags with Google. I literally just posted a discussion item on this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/elements-of-a-quality-article

In your opinion, what are the signals Google uses to judge the quality of an article or post?

Here are some of my ideas:

• Reactions:
  • Comment history
  • Sharing (Twitter / FB / Social Bookmarks...etc)
  • Citations / Mentions / Pingbacks
• Word count
• Content (Topical and qualitative analytsis, uniqueness)
• Domain (Qualitative analysis of domain article is published on)
• Use of images and media
• Use of references
• Timeliness (News, current affairs)
• Presence of date of publishing
• Spam filters:
  • Anchor text usage
  • Number, type and relation of outgoing links
  • Content (Topical, semantic, qualitative analysis including keyword usage)
• Author data:
  • Presence of author name
  • Connection / link to author profile (hyperlink, rel tag, meta)
  • Reputation of author (prior content, domains published and reactions)

Looking forward to your contributions.

Dejan SEO website was done about a year ago.

It took us weeks to detect the problem and it was finally discovered once Google Webmaster Tools updated. It suggested that most of our content contained words "serial number, adobe, crack...etc". Upon inspection we found that we were hacked and a cloaking script was installed showing pirated software to Google and clean site to users. The links were visible in the source of the cached page.

We cleaned up the site and did 301 from dejan.com.au to dejanseo.com.au
(this was not needed, but I wanted to do it for branding anyway)

Back in the results within a week.

There are countless little resource/ppc/affiliate websites out there trying to earn a few bucks. Most of them are pretty thin, but every now and then you will run into a good one. I would start by targeting each country and finding those quality forex sites to cross-promote with.

If you provide data/information a widget/graph/tool might be an ideal way to earn links.

Yup. This is pretty much default view for all my searches now. The who and authoriship seem very important to Google right now. So if you're nobody you won't do well. Issue for start-ups?

That sounds like something Google will hate by default. Your problem there is page quantity to quality and uniqueness ratio.

While we had it there it got very little action. We removed it in order to fix the styling, will be back up next week - hopefully with renewed enthusiasm after Google+

I like that! Thanks Rand.

OBL (from page) is not going to be a problem. OBL (from domain) could be - depending how large the site is. However to check each of 20,000 links we have in Google to see if it ranks would require some insane scraping power - not so keen on that one. Perhaps we can do it manually as we go or prioritise by most commonly used links. Ideal situation we have one unified metric which gives link builders what "PageRank" was meant to be years ago.

You do have an option of reporting them to Google (with detailed explanation of what they did). I have to admit in all my years of SEO I have never actually done it. Firstly not all spam submissions get looked at and actioned and many are used to simply improve the algorithm on a global scale, secondly there are much better things to do.

I would suggest that you continue marketing, branding, networking and building compelling content for your site and products. Create as much buzz about your business as possible and get people talking about it.

On a technical side of things there are probably links that you SHOULD have and didn't think of it.

Here's a few tips:

• If your web design company linking to you via their portfolio page?
• Have you given testimonials to service providers you used?
• Are you involved in the local chamber of commerce?
• Where you rent your office space, do they have a website with a tenant directory?
• Do you allow user generate content on your site?
• What happens when people buy on your website? Thank you page can be a great time to get people tweeting and sharing what they just bought. Use the momentum of after purchase to get links for free

Are they your (or your clients) direct competitor?

We're currently observing a crumbling empire of websites with auto-generated content. Google is somehow able to understand how substantial your content is and devalue the page and even the whole site if it does not meet their criteria. This is especially damaging for sites who have say 10% of great unique content and 90% of their pages are generated via tagging, browsable search and variable driven paragraphs of text.

Having citations is perfectly normal but I would include reference section just in case.

OK, let's keep the various colored hats out of this for a sec. What they did is simply against Google's Quality Guidelines - and that's it. The level of severity is not as high as if they hacked somebody's website - nevertheless still in breach and it could bite them back if Google should ever audit their link profile.

Yes. The address is one of the signals, this has been confirmed by Google. The address on your website doesn't need to match WHOIS though.

Here is an interesting article which takes the trust explanation further:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

In a natural link profile there will be both followed and nofollowed links, if you only ever get dofollow links and your link profile is big - it will certainly look unnatural. I like nofollow links which come from great places, especially if they mention my brand (citation) or bring traffic and recognition.

Thanks for the update Rand. The reason we did the test is because we have a very large, searchable link database which our 20 link builders regularly update and add to. Sorting by PageRank was not so great and lot of great links were missed so we decided to go with Moz metrics - primarily PA/DA.

What other signals can you recommend?

• Alexa (or some other traffic metric)
• IBL (to domain)
• IBL (to page)
• OBL (from page)
• Page topic (keywords?)

I was always curious about this so we did a test and the results are as follows:

Over a sample of 1000 domains:

• PageRank average = 2.71
• MozRank average = 2.34

Quite close.

Does this render MozRank near-useless, especially since recent downplay of PageRank by Google? What is your favorite metric at SEOMoz? Mine is PA/DA combo.

The best kind of competition is when it gets personal. Not necessarily about prize but more about status, ego, achievement and daring.

Apart from competitions you can try viral content. Here are a few examples of viral content I created:

• http://www.giantstars.de/ (Flash & Video)
• http://analogik.com/acid_trip/ (Flash)

Hope this helps.

Is the page lacking content so that's the only thing Google can scrape?

Try running a competition. We've had good success with it.

One pattern I've noticed is that if you have a site with a large number of useless or thin content pages your good content will lose rankings as a result. basically one drags the other down. Could this be the case with you?