Google is all that really matters right now as far as search engine optimization goes. As a good SEO, I’ve done my best on my websites to make sure that Google can:
1: Crawl the site
2: Find appropriate content based on searches
3: Place my site well within certain keywords
Those things, of course, are all easier said than done. Nobody really knows how Google works and no one can say with any degree of certainty if a certain strategy will indeed work to place your site well on Google’s search results. It was with some delight that I saw this video yesterday that Matt Cutts posted on his Blog.
Matt talks about how Google creates the snippets that you read when a Google result is returned and from where the information comes from. I found it interesting that he did talk about meta tags in the video; something which I had heard before as being obsolete. It’s also interesting that he only teases us about creating sitelinks but he never really talks about how to structure your site so that sitelinks are created by Google’s magic algorithm.
I enjoyed this video and wish that they would do some kind of an SEO Tutorial series highlighting the imprtant aspects of SEO. This is a good start and I have already made improvements to my sites based on this video.

Google and I are on an on again off again kind of relationship with one of my websites. Right now, we’re on the “off again” stage. I really like Google and know that it’s a super powerful weapon; the only weapon of choice for some marketers.

For the last few weeks, I noticed that my website had completely fallen off the face of Google’s rankings for a certain keyword (I’ll reveal my work for this particular site someday…I promise) only to start making its way back…first at around 120 then slowly back to the top hundred, to the top fifty, to the top 10, and finally resting at number 7 for about two weeks. I was very happy with this result as I was making a few bucks every day. Every visitor to that website ended up netting me about $2.12, so the ranking at #7 was working well for me and I was trying to get the website to rank higher.

At that point in time, roughly 3 weeks ago, I loved Google for that website! This website is also my highest earner, so when I noticed that, without any changes on my part, the site was ranking at roughly at #120 I was very shocked, surprised, and confused.

For the last three weeks I have been working on redesigning the website and trying to figure out exactly what made it fall from grace. I know its not the competition…no offense to their webmasters but their sites are bad and have very little original content and my website is completely original with the exception of a little bit of text taken from the affiliate program’s website. All in all, my site is more original than a lot of Hollywood movies and certain TV shows.

Last week I found out about Google’s supplemental index and how it can impact your SERP. Google’s supplemental index, from what I gather, is where bad pages go to pasture. The supplemental index is where Google places pages that are either duplicate in content to other pages of the website or pages that it considers low in quality. The supplemental index is also a problem for anyone running a Wordpress blog, like me. Wordpress creates more than 1 copy of each page upon publishing: 1 on the main index page and one on the archive as a permalink. So every time that any Wordpress blogger publishes a new page, Wordpress creates (at least) 2 pages and Google sends those pages to the supplemental index, eventually.

What can you do to fix the supplemental index problem? I’m not exactly sure how to go about removing pages from Google’s supplemental index, but I know that it is possible to control the Google Bot for future crawls by having a well done robots.txt file. This is what I have done to my robots.txt file in order to control my supplemental index problem:

sitemap: http://www.URLGOESHERE.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /design/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: */wp-images/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror

Disallow: /

There is a lot to talk about here, so the details will have to be for another post. The long and short of it is that I want Google to not go to certain parts of my website and hope that from here on out, my supplemental index entries will be kept to a minimum.

The following is a snippet from an article in the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

Yesterday I wrote that I liked a lot of things Google has to offer its users. As a user, I am fond of Google and its offerings. However, as a marketer and budding webtrepreneur, I must say that there are several things that drive me crazy about Google. Google represents more than just a search engine when you’re a web developer. As a content creator, Google represents your challenge. Some may even say that Google is their nemesis. What I mean is that Google can make or break your business and dreams. One day the engine may rank you favorably, and the next day you may be gone from the first hundred pages of results, rendering your site invisible.

Organic search is, in my opinion, the best way to get traffic. Not only is it free, but it drives in people that are looking for your content. In contrast to advertisements, social media sites, or forum communities where people click through and stay on your site for less than 30 seconds, organic search results drive curious people who are looking for what you have to say and these people are the ones who are most likely to buy what you are selling. Your search ranking on Google or any other engine (but really, do they matter that much?) can equate to a lot of money or it can make you cry at night because you are not even bringing in enough money to bay for your hosting bill.

It is from this perspective, the perspective of a website builder and content provider, that I write this list. This represents what I find most frustrating and difficult about Google and feel that I can’t possibly be the only one on the entire Internet who feels this way.

SERP Fluctuation

SERP (Search Engine Results Page or Search Engine Ranking Position) is how high or low your website ranks when someone does a search for a given term. For example, a search for “Nicaraguan coffee” yields over 1.3 million results. If you are serious about internet marketing and are actively trying to make money from a site that sells Nicaraguan coffee, then the ‘rank’ that you receive from the search is very important. If you don’t come up in the first 10 spots, your profitability drops very rapidly. That is why SERP is so important. If you place well, you can stand to get a lot of visitors and make a lot of money.

This is my #1 frustration with Google. It is impossible to know exactly how Google ranks certain pages. From experience, I have been nearly driven mad. One day I had a term ranking #2. It brought me a lot of traffic for a certain niche and I was making about $60 a day. Too bad that this only lasted for 3 days. The 4th day after ranking at #2 consistently, my site started showing up at #146. I’m not making this up. I did not change the site other than add quality content to it but the site stayed at #146 or lower for about 2 months. Sometimes the site wouldn’t show up at all even after I searched over 400 results. It is finally making its way back up the list but it caused me to nearly quit that site.

Backlinks

Simply put, backlinks are links from other sites to your site. It is assumed that the number of backlinks coming into your site affect your search engine rankings. My opinion is that more backlinks help to place a site better on a results page. Google even offers a way for you to check for backlinks to your site. The problem is, I’ve never had a site show up in those results. I don’t know what Google considers a backlink but their backlink check only ever returns 1 results in all of the sites that I own. It’s rather frustrating, especially if building backlinks is the foundation of results placement.

SPAM Sites Do Well

Along the lines of SERPs comes the topic of SPAM. In certain niches in which I have sites, there are a handful of sites that are completely crap but they rank higher than me. These sites include sites with only 1 page, sites with irrelevant domain names, and sites that are written very poorly. How is that fair? I spend a lot of time making sure my sites are accurate, well written, standards compliant, more accessible, etc…and somehow they end up at the bottom of the pile.

My lesson so far has been to not give up. Eventually, I hope, Google will have its algorithm squared away in a way that it will eliminate the SPAM and eat up the ham. I just hope that day arrives soon.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t use Google. Especially as a graduate student, I find myself on their website more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve even stopped taking notebooks to class and use Google’s notebook to take notes instead. With so many features, it’s no wonder that their share price has spiked in recent months.

I do think that, as a user, Google has a lot of good things to offer and this is a list of my favorite things I get from Google.

Gmail

Gmail has really changed the way in which I do email. I used to have 5 or 6 email accounts that I looked at daily. It was quite a pain to switch from website to website, enter lots of passwords, and fight all that spam in my mailbox. Not to mention that whenever I had to find a certain message I’d have to waste a lot of time finding it. Additionally, I’d almost always be running out of space with those email services of old.

With Gmail, I am now able to manage more email accounts in a much more efficient manner than ever before. For starters, all of the domain names that I own have email addresses associated with them and I’ve set it up so they go directly to Gmail. Secondly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to run out of space on Gmail. Thirdly, finding messages is a snap. If you don’t have Gmail, you’re missing out.

Google Search

As a curious person, grad student, web developer, webtrepreneur, and web jockey, I must use Google’s search engine at least 50 times per day. With Google, I really don’t think there is much that can’t be found online. Not much more needs to be said about this, so if you’re not using Google search, you’re missing out.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is one of those things that a lot of people I know don’t even know exist. It’s one of the features that at first I thought: “huh, that’s nice” but now find that it’s very useful. Google Notebook lets you create a seemingly unlimited number of “notebooks” and write as much as you want in each book. I use my Notebooks for class notes, business ideas, plans for blogs, to-do notes, to paste interesting things I find online, and whatever else I can think of.

Google Notebook also has an extension for Firefox that allows you to cut and paste into the notebooks much more efficiently (right click > send to notebook).

Google Documents

Google Notebook’s big brother, Google Documents is a productivity suite that keeps growing. With Docs, it is possible to create Microsoft Word like documents, Excel like spreadsheets, and PowerPoint like presentations. In addition to being full featured, Google Documents is completely free and the best part is that you can share your documents and work in a collaborative environment with others (as long as they also have a Google account).

Google Maps

I gave up using Mapquest a long time ago. Mapquest always seemed to get me lost and turning at the wrong place at the wrong time. Their descriptions weren’t very good either…one time it told me to drive “slightly straight”. I mean, what the heck does that mean? That’s why I was so glad when Google launched their alternative to Mapquest. Since then, my driving directions have been more accurate and nearly fun to get. The map interface is detailed and using it is a breeze.

Bonus: Google Reader

RSS Feeds have become a daily part of information getting and analyzing for me. It’s so simple to go to one place and find my favorite sites’ contents all in one place. Google reader is full featured, easy to use and organize, and with me wherever I go. If you have Google Reader or are about to, make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed!

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