SEO 101

Yahoo Bing Site Searches

Ross and John discuss how will site searches be affected once Yahoo is taking over by Bing, plus they discuss a question on unethical SEO. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 37m
Broadcast on:: 28 Sep 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discuss how will site searches be affected once Yahoo is taking over by Bing, plus they discuss a question on unethical SEO.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the host, guest and callers. And do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of webmasterradio.fm. Any rebroadcast or retransmission of this program, without the express written consent of webmasterradio.fm is prohibited. Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on Search Engine Optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 10101 on webmasterradio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my co-host is none other than John Carkut, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. How you doing, man? Hey, doing real good, man. How are you this week? Good. That was a fun Monday session, eh? Oh, yeah. I love that. We've got to do more of those live sessions. Totally. And it was great to get some inquiries, you know, a few good questions in there. But, you know, I think we should figure out some way to get more and actually, one idea I had, I just talked to Brasko about, was if, I know a lot of people, a lot of you guys were listening to this, just download it. So what we were thinking is, if you would like to send us questions by email, I mean, we do have a Facebook site, which we always recommend you use. But if you wanted to send it by email, just short and quick, easy, send it to brasko@webmasterradio.fm. And he'll get those and pass them on to us, and we'll try and cover them on our shows. I think it'd be a great way to do it. And if any of you are out there are following me, Ross, I think on our personal social sites, Twitter, Facebook, it's okay, you can hit me up directly if you want as well. I don't know about you, Ross, but feel free to reach out to me directly. Totally. Yeah, I agree. You know, occasionally I'll listen. No, it's not. Yeah, of course. That'd be great. It'd be great to do that. It's a good idea. I figure email might be a good quick. You forget about it. You're done. Yeah. It's already off sent. And then you can just catch your name mentioned and your question mentioned question and answer on the next show. Yeah. Cool. Definitely. So for the last show, you know, we're told that this people are listening to the show, but like our local radio station, they always say they've got seven listeners. I didn't know. That's one more than ours. Yeah, exactly. I was like, I don't know. So price, can I say, well, let's put together a list of questions and we did. And well, we thought we might as well go through them together. So John, let's, let's go through some. Do you want to take one of the fun ones? I, I, in sort of everyone knows, I took a few and I thought, these are just too funny. We have to ask these questions of ourselves. So. Here's, here's my favorite one and I love seeing this on like SEO websites when they're talking about this, and I immediately know that's someone I'm not going to recommend because they talk about submitting your websites to get rankings and they say, we'll submit your site to, you know, 500,000 search engines and how, how can we possibly optimize for all of them? So what do you think Ross, how would you optimize for 500,000 search engines? Wow. I think you need a big SEO team. It's thousands. Yeah. Pretty important. So, so, when you have to build a site for each search engine, yes, yes, yes, or at least the page has to have a landing page for each one of course, we're just, we're just making fun of this question because obviously there is no way to optimize for 500,000 search engines. Even if there were 500,000 search engines, but I'm pretty sure, I mean, unless you count like site searches on all the everybody's like WordPress blogs, those could be search engines, I guess. Yeah. And then there'd be many, many millions, but billions in fact, however, yeah, let's say there are three to be focusing on. Maybe yes. Yes. And soon to be two. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So it would be Google, Yahoo and Bing and of course, Bing and Yahoo, making, making love and getting together a couple of years now, probably two years, and they're going to have the little Bing who baby. Yes. Yeah. Bing when I like to. Yeah. Realistically, if you only have a limited amount of time, Google is what close it. It's just under 70% of all searches are on Google right now through the Google network. So if you really have a limited amount of time or you want to focus on one particular thing, you know, as much as it's nice to think of these other ones right now, Google is the big dog and Google is where you should put most of your effort. Yeah. Fortunately, it's all Google, Google, Google, Google. I almost wish they changed their names so I get to say something different. I mean, I love them. Love them. I mean, such an evangelist is sick, but it's just, I'm so tired of just saying their name all the time. It really, really will be interesting when Yahoo and Bing join forces. And if you're not sure about how that's going to work, basically what's going to happen is Bing is going to be serving the search results for Yahoo. So Yahoo won't have its own, its own crawler and its own search results anymore. They'll be using Bing's. So what this does from a targeting perspective when you're thinking about SEO is now you have two sets of search results to target for. And on Macley, Yahoo and Bing, each going from a small little percentage, now make one big chunk of about 30% of the search results. That's significant. And that's definitely worth taking some of that Google time and applying to the Bing who. So it kind of wonder though, I wonder how much search share will be left when they finally merge for Yahoo. I'm guessing it's doing away at it. Yeah, I'm guessing about what everything, I think there's like five percent, it's everything other than the big three right now, and it'll stay that way. It fluctuates, but I think you can pretty much guess on it being in single digits for this day in there. I was actually thinking about like Bing is actually chewing away at Yahoo's right now. So when they finally merge, they may not be much of Yahoo to merge with. That's a good point. It's pretty cool actually. I'm very almost proud of Bing because it's so good to see Microsoft finally doing something right. And they really are, not along with Windows 7 apparently being amazing and that's coming and I'm impressed. I did see an ad the other day asking if I was ready to upgrade from XP, which I thought was hilarious. Oh, no, that's just where, you know, yeah, there's some pretty interesting stuff going on. Yeah. No, there are not 500,000 search engines really just focus on three. You only need to focus really on optimizing Google because why not? I mean, if you get a top ranking there, the other guys are our pittance, they're nice to get. You know, you don't want to forget about them, but Google, Google, Google, Google. What a little tidbit about that like throw in. If you are worried about optimizing for Google versus Yahoo versus Bing, I haven't got a real solid footing on Bing yet, but I do know that if you look at the difference between Yahoo and Google, or Google tends to rank a little bit more based on in about links and Yahoo tends to rank more a little bit based on content. So if you are going to look at trying to make a difference, but you know, and optimize for both of those major engines, that's one little tidbit. You can take links for Google, content for Yahoo, but most of it's the same. Interesting. And Bing is one I actually just finished putting together an interview article with quite a powerhouse. The guy is actually for the search marketing standard. It's all about Bing. What do these guys think of Bing and how to optimize for it? And I got Eric Inga, Stefan Spencer, Danny Sullivan, and Todd Friesen to do it. Nice. Yeah. So it's going to be really cool. I mean, their questions were, are the answers were awesome, as you expected. That would be really cool. I must have missed that email. Sorry, Ross. Sorry. Sorry. I was only led for, and I was just doing something. It's going to be pretty cool to have that kind of stuff out. You know, it's interesting to see what some of these guys think. And I already know what you think, so you know, I don't need to know. Good point. So you know, the other one is, how often do I need to submit? That was the other one. You were mentioning there. It's just too funny. I mean, first of all, these days you practically don't need to submit. No, practically about it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, if you're out there and you don't have any links to your site, all right. I guess you submit. But really, there's a problem there already. Even if you do submit without linking, you're not going to get any rankings. So it doesn't matter if you submit or not at that point. They know you're there, but they don't care. No one's going to see you. Unless you're going for an extremely obscure term. If it's really obscure, then, okay, maybe, but then there's no point because there's no searches. So get links, links will get, leave the search engine straight to your site and then really that's the best way to get found. So anyone who says that a big part of your package is getting your site submitted, move on. Yep. Yeah. It's a dead giveaway that they don't know what they're doing. Well, they knew what they were doing six years ago, but that's the last time they looked. Yes, exactly. I don't think any of our articles such as this stuff, come on. So another one I like is what software can I buy that will optimize my site? Do you have any affiliate links going right now? We should, should pant there's Ross or we should just talk through. Well, I would say by position, but no, they don't even offer it anymore. They shut down their affiliate program. So I don't like them anymore. Yeah. Plus Google calls them out very by name in the Google guidelines as software, not to use. So I kind of say don't use it because Google says specifically not to, so that's just my bad. In fact, I'm not making money on them. No, I can't tell. It's just, just, just my opinion, though, they're probably helping some people with something. Yeah. Well, and the thing is when it comes to down to optimizing your site with something automated, there's no way it can match the intuitiveness of a person going onto a page and optimizing because well, it makes sense, right? Whatever you read has to be readable and a machine doesn't understand what is readable. I mean, not yet anyway, and even what it does is I don't think it can even match what we can do because, you know, and if you think about it, I've said this over and over again, there's, there's, you know, three main portions of optimizing a site. You want to do your technology and your design. You want to optimize your content and you want to optimize your marketing or link building and social stuff and software may be able to handle a portion of that first one, but like, like Ross said, they're not going to be able to read the content and understand it. They're not going to be able to really identify all the things you need to do for offsite marketing. There's just no way. When I, when I do audits of sites, I looked at, you know, I looked at a couple hundred different points of analysis and I'd say a good 10% of those points or analysis are just to determine if there's a red flag where I need to dig deeper. And, you know, and when you dig deeper, it can be one of tons of different things if you have to. So there's, there's, there's not one piece of software that's going to do this for you. You know, that said, there are some, some pieces of software that will give you, um, heads up on things you need to look at that will actually go out and identify some of those red flags. But it's not going to optimize your site, it's just going to help you determine where to look. Yeah. Actually, I, I've got a list there. Unfortunately, web position is still there, but not as a suggested service for optimizing your site, mostly just for ranking, checking your rankings, which again, Google doesn't like just a note, but it is one of the very few options out there. So it's noted. But on Step Force, we have a recommended SEO tools page, which if you're interested, you can check out. It's got a few things that I do suggest, like OptiLink, I really like them. Have you tried them, John? I have not. What do they do? OptiLink, it's part of Windrow Software and it's great because it'll actually go around and check all your backlinks and using Yahoo's Site Explorer and download them all and then it'll actually compile, you know, everything, page ranks, how many inbound outbound links. It is a nice detailed report and I run it all the time when I'm working on a competitor analysis or even just when I get started getting in depth and in a site audit, because frankly, there's a lot of off-site details you can get out of it and there is a link on the site there for that. I recommend that. That is a good program and to be completely clear, yes, I do have an affiliate like, however, I also use it all the time. It's just a nice benefit. I'll tell you what, if you really need to rely on software for SEO, there's really two categories of software that I think really help SEOs out a lot. One category would be software to help you analyze your site. So things like keyword research software, link analysis software, even something like you're talking about that will do a top-level analysis to see if there's any red flags where you need to dig deeper. That's one category. A lot of tools that can help you do your analysis. The other category of software is really more about analytics and tracking results, you know, and I'm not just talking about, you know, like web position that looks at your rankings. And things that can be considered, you know, metrics for results in SEO. So those are, if you're going to get some software, there's not going to be a thing that's going to do the work for you, but there's a lot that will help you do the work and then determine the value of the work you did. Yeah. And I do know those programs that have tried to do it all. And the fact is they don't have a team that can keep up to date with everything. So I do find it more important to get one tool that does one thing really, really well. And that's just a, just to aid you in getting the details so you don't have to do all the grind of compiling all the data. That's the only thing we ever use automated tools for. That's it. So we're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to answer a few more questions from our list here. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com brought to you by Engine Ready. Learn your underperforming landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Conversion credit tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. You don't have to be an expert to use Engine Ready's conversion credit tools, but you'll feel like a landing page pro. Take the guesswork out of increasing your conversion rate, visit conversioncredit.com, and boost your conversion rate for free. 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Sign up for free at markethealth.com and start making money today. LPO, landing page optimization, Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific or on demand anytime inside the advertising channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carca, SEO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. For the break, we were discussing every number of questions. In this case, it was a recommended SEO tools, that kind of stuff, and really how to simplify some of the research you do, but you know, we've got quite a few other questions here, so why don't we move on? I know. What's your next one? How do I want to take you to come up with these, Ross? This is a pretty extensive list of everything I've ever heard a client ask. Actually, I went around to sites, quite honestly, to do it quickly. I just typed in top questions, and it's good. They came together quite well. There's so many to choose from here, but let's go to that very last one, because that's always a fun topic to talk about. What is unethical SEO? Wow. So, I'm going to throw it to you, Ross. What is unethical SEO? Okay, it's funny how everyone seems to have a different answer to this, unless you're schooled in some sort of, I'll bite my time there, but anyways, unethical SEO essentially is anything that deems the search engine to deliver a result, in my opinion, deliver a result that's, first of all, perfectly clear unethical SEO is trying to get a ranking that doesn't match the content on your page. That's as black as it gets. I would say there's all those different stages, right? The other one is to try and beat out your competitor for a ranking by using nefarious tag techniques like spam, where you're putting hidden text in, but you're using it in a way that Google currently hasn't caught. Between that and, oh my God, it's such a big list, isn't it? There's a ton of individual things you could say, and I think I like to, when people ask me that question, I tend to be a little bit more top level and philosophical, and there's really, for me, there's two different things that can be debated, and there would be a fun debate sometime, but two things to look at when you're thinking about unethical SEO. One is SEO that goes against what Google wants, or the engines want. A lot of people say that is completely unethical, and there's a big argument about whether it's unethical or not. The other is about your clients, or if it's your own personal site, it's a whole different category, because you're only dealing with your own stuff. But if you're dealing with clients, being ethical is pretty much anything that has to do with standard business ethics, and are you protecting your client's interests? Are you doing what's best for them without putting them at risk type of thing? To me, there's a lot of SEO out there that's unethical, basically because it puts their clients at risk, and people say, "Well, if you tell your clients, they're a responsibility." No, it's not, because the client really doesn't have as big or as detailed of knowledge about what's actually happening as you do, so it's your job to educate them, and if they still want to do it, my opinion would be to send them somewhere else once they've been educated. If you're looking out for your client's best interests, O could be something like we just talked about these people that promise to submit their sites to 500,000 search engines. In my mind, that is unethical, because it's a bait and switch, or you're charging them for something that you really can't do. Misrepresentation in a way. Exactly, so in my mind, ethics is really about your client and your relationship with your client, and it would be the same ethics that would stand up in any business relationship, really. Well, and I agree that from a top level, that's exactly what it is. I think I was getting too detailed, but when it comes down to anything, back to doing this, we've both been doing this close to 13 years now, or around 13 years, and when I started out, ethics was a very shady area, I mean, it's a mess. You couldn't even talk about it back then. If you wanted to mention ethics, you had to say, and I quote, the E word, if you're on a forum typing about something, you couldn't say ethics, you would get jumped on so fast. So you'd have to go like the E word, and then they let it slide. Yeah, those days it was all about just getting the rankings, and I don't really care about that. I mean, some did, there's always to some people, but anyways, what I found is, and the times when I did things that I looked back on now and I'm not very proud of, I think of how I felt at the end of the day, the clients get results, don't get me wrong, and all that. And at the time, there were people who weren't being jumped on in terms of rankings, you know, Google wasn't finding out, because Google wasn't around, it was infosec, which was what it was dumb as it gets. So at that time, when I just, I got nervous, I couldn't sleep as well. I didn't feel as good about what I was providing too, because I knew it was just, all it took was one simple change, and all of a sudden my client rankings would be down, and then I'd be frantic and triggering it. Now, everything we do is 100% ethical because we need to make sure, because ethical will mean you got a ranking in the long run. If you're trying anything out that is a little less ethical, well, from a business standpoint, you're doing more work, because when things do change, you're going to have to go back and redo things. And it doesn't make sense, because the way to get a top ranking in these days involves being as ethical as you can, because it's good content, and if you get good content, it's going to stick. You know, that's very basic, but it's true, you just got to make sure that content is nested in a really clear description of what the content's about, and it's backed up by links, thought it's based as it gets. Yeah. There's an old saying, and I haven't heard it for a while yet, so I don't know if people just haven't been saying it or what, but there's an old saying that if you're wondering whether what you're doing is ethical or not, ask yourself, would you do the same thing to your website if the search engines were not there? So if you weren't looking at it from a search engine perspective, would you do that to your site? It's a place to start to determine whether it's an ethical thing to do or not. Yeah, that's a good point. I think one thing you mentioned there was, you know, whatever that Google doesn't want, don't do. You know, essentially, whatever the search engines say, I'm starting to disagree with that more and more every time. Yeah. I agree. That one's definitely up for debate, and you'll find people in the industry on both sides of that. You know, I know there's some people, Doug Hill, who runs the Help You Forms, is a super duper whitehead, and he'll tell you if the engine say it's law and you have to do it that way or you're being unethical. Some people go that far. Some people say the other side where the search engines don't, you know, don't own me. I can do what I want if they can't figure out what I'm doing, it's their own issue. So there's both sides of that debate. Again, for me, it comes back down to the client. Well, definitely, and that's always priority. If it's something that's going to be risky to the client, that's another thing entirely. But if it's something that doesn't really have teeth, but they say, like, for example, they were saying it'll follow tag, don't use it, don't do it, you know, all these sort of things. And yet it was still working in a lot of ways. There were changes, but it's still working, and I'm not going to get into that, but the fact was there were elements where it still works. Well, I'm not going to just going to strip it up because I told me to. Yeah. And as long as it still works, it's not going to harm any client, I'm going to keep using it. Right. And it just doesn't seem to reason not to, and I don't want to be that fanatical about following everything they say. Right. And they are going to put some span on what they say because they have business processes and business objectives themselves, and they're going to try to influence them the best they can. And they know that people are following every word they say, and so why not? That's true. Everything they want done. Every site to get ranked at Google has to have a picture of a yellow duck in the bottom left hand coin. And now on. Oh, that would be great. I would love to see that. I was going to do an April Fool's booth one time about sympathy rank. I was going to come up with this whole thing about sympathy rank that Google just announced sympathy rank, that if your site has flashing graphics, it looks like it was built in 1992. You know, you get extra boost in your rankings because of it, but they could do that. If they wanted to, they could do that. Hold me one. That's a good one. Oh, sorry, our listeners wouldn't fall for that anyway, it's the others that would. I hear said a good one too, I think. Oh, she just jumped around there. There's a few good ones, but I got penalized by Google and I'm losing tons of money because my site dropped. How can I fix this loaded question? No doubt. Wow. It really, really, really depends on why you got dropped. It can be as simple as a mistake that a coder made or designer made that you fix the mistake quickly and you're just right back in as results. You could have done something that we discussed a little minute ago that might have been an ethical or dark-headed, so to speak, and you may have some kind of penalty, which takes a lot more work to take care of. It really depends on your issue. Yeah, I agree. And before I get into my answer for that, we're just going to take a quick break and get back home, I'll touch on that. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Hey, this is Danny Sullivan. To talk to you about the Bruce Clay Incorporated, they've made ink magazines list of growing private businesses and have exhibited and sponsored on my conferences since the very beginning. You've seen their search engine relationship chart or you've read their SEO code of ethics, so you know they're SEO experts, but did you know they can help you with PVC and web analytics, web design, marketing strategy, promotion and branding? Yep, get everything you need for success in the online marketplace. You can check it out from the professionals at Bruce Clay Incorporated for over 10 years with offices worldwide. They've got the answers you need. Check them out today at BruceClay.com. This is a test of the PRWeb content and news delivery system from PRWeb and PRWebAuthor.com. If this was a real release date, your story would reach more than 30,000 journalists, 250,000 RSS subscribers and just over 30,000 unique websites. PRWeb can reach your target audience online, drive traffic to your website, achieve high rankings on search engines and get your content on top news sites like Yahoo News. Editors are available 24/7 to help you optimize your content for maximum exposure to over 70 million people in the US alone. If this were a real PRWeb release date, your website would have so much traffic you'd be tempted to duck and cover. If you have an online marketing emergency, go to PRWebAuthor.com for 25% off. PRWeb, the premier online news release and content distribution service. For more information, visit our website at www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies and social media, and to purchase any of our videos, visit our website, or visit our website at www.beadaholique.com to purchase beading supplies andmusic. This is our performance bank, listen to it, I'm telling you, cause this is what you'd better do, join as a publisher and maximize your revenue, if we agree that money is what you need and need, you can get paid for sales and leads, not one thing lacking, don't get it cracking, even comes with state of the art tracking, where to the start, you can do it a couple ways, 866 XY7 pays, it's toll free, tell me what you ain't know, so log on to xy7.com Press this, Tuesdays at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific, or on demand anytime, inside the internet marketing channel, only on webmasterradio.fm Ok class, take your seats and no talking, recesses over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm, with John Carcutt, SEO manager for MediaWiz, and myself, Rasta and CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. For the break, we were discussing this question, I got penalized by Google and I'm losing tons of money because my site dropped, how can I fix this? John just answered the question from his perspective and I agree, there's just so many different ways of answering that, depending on what, well, what it was that resulted in that penalty. From my perspective, and I guess this is self-serving, but it's true, you need to talk to someone who knows what they're doing to help you out, if you don't instantly know that it's, if you don't know, ok, yeah, I did some keyword stuffing, I'm being caught, how can I fix this? It's almost two questions, really isn't it John, I mean really, how did I get penalized and then ok, now how can I fix this? And in general, just fix it, change your site, fix it, and well, you know, submit your site for reconsideration through Google Webmaster Tools, you can do that, I don't know how many people have found that really working well, I know that it does work, I have heard of some people, but I just don't, it's always working. That might help, interesting thing to note there, that if you do that with Yahoo, and this may have changed, because I haven't done it in a couple years for anybody, but Yahoo only gives you one chance, so if you're going to resubmit your site after a penalty, you better have it fixed because you only get one chance to resubmit, and if you've missed it or you fixed the wrong thing and it's not what you were penalized for, that's it, you're done. You know, that makes sense, because really these guys don't have so much time, and that's Yahoo, they've got more time than Google does, so Google guys are not going to have much patience. But then again, we've got Bing who moved point in a year, so if you're facing that right now, be careful. Yeah, and I got a hunch Bing is going to be a little better, at least for the short term, because they want as many people as they can in there as long as they do have good content, if you do fix it, or you at least appear to be making an attempt to fix it, I think maybe Bing who might be a little better for that. No, one of the great things Google is doing in this situation is if you have a Webmaster Tools account set up for your site, a lot of times, not every time, but a lot of times they will actually send you a message in your Webmaster Tools telling you that you have this problem, fix this problem. It can be something as simple as they've got an infinite redirect loop on your site, and because of that infinite redirect loop, they're having to drop your pages, but they'll come in and tell you that they may say we saw that you were doing this on this page and you need to fix it. I haven't seen many of these things come through, but they will do that from time to time. Yeah, no, I agree. And one thing that I was talking to, I was a bit Alessandro, I can't remember his name, but he was one of the engineers at Bing when I was at SMX or search engine strategies, pardon me. And, jeez, shot someone there. It was interesting because he really did want to make improvements on the Bing Webmaster Tools section and essentially using the SEO toolkit. I definitely had some different opinions on it, but one thing I did push was for them to actually mail everyone when something happens. One thing I want everyone to say your site is listed. If there's any issue with your site, they should let you know. You shouldn't have to go and visit it. And I think I've covered this before, but it's just, it frustrates me. It's good for them. It's good for everyone, and it's easy to send an email. I'll have to double check this, but I believe in the Google ones that you can actually get RSS feed to your messages. So, if you're using RSS, they will push it to you, but I don't think they're doing that email thing. Still, that's weak. You know, there's so many people out there that don't even know what RSS is still. That's true. It's got to be simple, and an email just makes sense. So, just back to the point that this is actually two different questions, and I think we just want to make it clear. You really have to know the answer to the first one, for you can even attempt to answer the second one. You have to know what is wrong with your site before you can even start talking about how to fix it. I've seen everything from some designer accidentally left robots meditag blocking search engine access to the site, and the site started dropping out and nobody knew why. And then we looked at the robots meditag, it's because they weren't letting the search engines in. As soon as they removed it, pages came back. So, it's as simple as that all the way up to, like Russ said, or stuff, and you're doing deliberate black-hat techniques that if you get banned, you probably knew why to begin with. But you've got to know why before you can know how to fix it. Yeah, and if you see your Google PageRank drop a bit, don't freak out. You know, if you don't see your results changing, just hold on. Unless again, you know you did something wrong, and then that's a good sign. It made me a little canary in the coal mine, but if you haven't done anything wrong, well, just don't worry about it. I mean, do you feel the same way, John? I mean, I know there's certain circumstances maybe, but... The main thing I use PageRank for is an indicator. If all of a sudden there's a massive change in PageRank, then something happened, and now I need to go dig and see what happened. I don't use it as a measurement or a metric at all anymore. Yeah, exactly. I find it's useful to just get a feel for what's happening and what's changing, but that's about it. Man, I can't believe we've only touched on a few questions, and they're already almost at our 30... well, just past our 30 minutes. So, this is cool. We've got lots to go on for the next episodes, and you know, like I say, please send in your questions. We'd love to help you guys out, and it's good for everyone. It keeps us busy and interested, and John, I don't have to go, "Oh, God, what's today's episode?" We will anyway, you know that. That's true, it's true, it's true. But then we have a fallback. Exactly. Yeah, we've got this master list here, and we've got plenty to talk about here. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, and John Carcut, SEO Manager for MediaWiz. We would like to thank you, and you know, follow us on Twitter. John, yours is @JohnCarcut. Correct. And Carcut's spelled C-A-R-C-U-T-T, everyone knows, and mine is @RossDone. And, you know, don't miss this coming Monday. Well, of course, our shows are always on at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern on Mondays. So, please check out for the live show, and tune in. I know that I try to be in the chat room, with Master Radio Chat Room, if I can during the broadcast time. And then there's a lot of people coming in with the chat room, so jump in there, too, if you get questions. Don't request it. Well, that's really good, I should try doing that too. Alright, thank you guys, and have a great week. [Music] You should be saving for the future. But savings accounts suck, and investing can be scary. We combine the ease of savings with the real returns of investing. 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