SEO 101

SEO 101 Q and A

Ross and John answer questions from the WebmasterRadio chatroom like sitemaps, foreign content, crawl errors, black hat, xml sitemaps, duplicate content and more. 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:: 51m
Broadcast on:: 21 Sep 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John answer questions from the WebmasterRadio chatroom like sitemaps, foreign content, crawl errors, black hat, xml sitemaps, duplicate content and more.

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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The opinions expressed on this webmasterradio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests 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 mind, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basics. 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 today is John Carcutt, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. What am I saying? You're always my co-host. What are you talking about here? Hi, I'm John. So, you plan on replacing me, come on, come on. You sound pretty clear, you're on your phone, right? Yes, I am. Okay. So, there's probably a little bit of delay, someone's Skype that should be all good. So, today's our special one hour. Wow. We're going to be put on the spot for one hour answering your questions on the webmasterradio chat room. And we're pretty excited to have you guys on. We see Dana there, Luca doo's on there, page one results. Yeah, I'm sorry, man, I always forget your name again. I know one hour, it looks like, with you guys on there, I'm a little bit scared. We're going to be put on the spot, isn't it? Exactly. So what have you been looking forward to there, John? I sure have. I've been really looking for them, I'd like to see Dana on there. A lot of people don't know, hoping to get to know over the next hour or so. That's some good questions. Great. Well, I just asked, start your questions, my friends. Let's see what you got. Ross, if you wanted to, we didn't have questions already starting up. When we first started, I was letting you know before we started up, we did have ISIS in our chat room asking about how to pre-qualify clicks was first on tap. Now, John, how do you interpret that? I think I have to get the essence of that question in my head a bit better. I think pre-qualifying clicks sounds to me like quick quality. I mean, looking for good quality click-throughs, that's the best I can think of. We're talking about pre-qualifying a click, pre-qualifying traffic from quality traffic, it's really the only way to understand who your audience is and what they're looking for. You're going to offer your audience what they're looking for to really pre-qualify them and get those quality clicks, if that's what you're asking. Does that make sense to you? It sounds pretty much paper-click, I mean, just target the marketplace where your ideal audience is hanging out and make sure your marketing statement is as clear as possible, and you know it's going to attract them. I'm not sure exactly what else to say there. Was there any other questions there, Bresco? There are and they're already starting to go through. If you want, I can go ahead and direct traffic for you and let you know what questions drop in. Hey, that rocked me. I get to then be on vaults, so page one results, page one results asks, is the keywords element still relevant? Ooh, we're starting off with tests here. So, no. What do you say, John? I guess, to find keyword relevance, what are you talking about when you say it is still relevant? You have to have the keywords on your pages, to people using them to search still. I guess a little more detail of the question would help me understand. He said, is the keywords element still relevant, so I would assume that a tag, I understand. Keyword element? No, no, no, no, no, not at all. Never has said actually. I don't think there's a single, and I'm assuming again you're talking about keyword meta tag or the actual HTML element, keyword meta tag, that's what she's talking about saying it comes through. So, yeah, keywords meta tag never has been relevant. Google's never used it, MSN's never used it, Yahoo used it a little bit for something that wasn't quite organic search related, so they used it a little bit, but neither of the other major engines have ever used the keyword meta tag. Well, and one thing that page one results again asks, is there a fractional value for the keywords meta tag? I guess that means, is there any element to any usefulness to it? Now, all I ever do is whenever I get asked that by a client, I just say, you know what? If you want to use it, I don't think there's a lot of power to it, but why not put some misspellings in there, some lingo from your industry? It can't hurt. I mean, it don't spam in it. I mean, obviously that'll just get you killed, they may not use it, but if they look at it and they see spam, they're in hot water. What do you think they're jumping? Yeah, I mean, if you're going to put something in there, definitely do it right. I mean, assume that they're going to look at it, and put it under the spam microscope, and if you're going to spam it, they're going to bust you for it. In my experience, and they're not even really going to look at that meta tag, so that's just different experiences. I've never used it and never had any problems by not using it, because I don't think the engines use it. Interesting. Patreon results that use the consumer to talk about it. Did you mention that Yahoo promotes the use of the meta keyword tag in a spontaneous documentation, but there's never been any tests that have ever been done, have shown that it makes no difference that I've seen. Maybe there's some tests that I haven't seen that shows it makes sense, so my guess there would be that Yahoo had some people writing their documentation that may not have been complete hiding with their algorithm. They're not going to tell us everything, but from a testing perspective, they've never seen it used. Can we talk about micro-formats? Okay, throw a question. What else we got here? Well, I could tell you there was one other question I mentioned in a gun, tell you about G-O-D-V was in the chat room also asking about, he's trying to figure out how to get more US traffic with Spanish contents, I guess that's languages in general. I have to admit, I haven't done a lot of foreign SEO. How about you, John? Repeat the question again, Beth, because I was reading the list at the same time. The question is, how to get more US traffic with Spanish content or foreign content? US traffic, if the person is still on, let's ask, are they looking for Spanish traffic on a US-based site or a foreign-based site? He's following up. He's following up. The same SEO methods apply to any language, SEO optimization, especially in Spanish. The same methodologies apply, the real difference between the Spanish language and the English would be where you're targeting, so if you're in South America targeting a Spanish language site that's based in South America, you're going to be doing different types of linked fields, different things that if you're in US, trying to get Spanish-language people in the US, because you want those local, you're going to focus more on geo-targeting with that international traffic than if you're just trying to get a different language in the US. One thing I'd like to note, too, is we've done a little bit with French, being in Canada. We've got that as our second language, and in some instances, we've been asked to optimize another portion of the site for French. We've hired someone to actually apply the optimizations, but in essence, it's worked just fine, and by applying the same principles. Does that work for Spanish? I'm sorry. I don't know from my experience, but John gave you a good answer there, too. You've got content, and you've got links, no matter what language it's in. I heard that the server has to be in, oh, I see, I get the name, it has to be in the country. Is that what you're saying there, GODV? Yes, US server. I don't think it has to be, but I know it does help. Go ahead, Ross. No, that's pretty much all I had to say. As far as I know, it's highly recommended, but I don't think it has to be in the US. What do you say, John? I think it's more important when you're on international, so if you're in South America somewhere, you're in Brazil. You're much better if your server is down there, and if not even so much your server as it is your domain, if you're using a geo-targeted domain, the IP location may have a slight effect, but I'm not thinking it's going to. It's more your domain than your IP location. Also, if you're going for local rankings, it definitely matters. If you're trying to go for a local listing, and you're trying to get a local ranking for Whistler, personally, you need to have an address there, but say your site's hosted another country, I don't know, things like that start to look a little fishy, so there are certain issues. And set your location preference in Google Webmaster Tills in exactly Hamster. Definitely. I just love how we're going by IDs here. I have no idea who these people are, but Hamster, it works. Another thing, someone asked about English and Spanish, you can actually have two different locations set for the same website. If you have an English version and a Spanish version on the same website, you can register both of those in Google Webmaster Tills and separate websites, and register them both for different languages, so you can do that as well. Okay. We've got a question here from Dana, showing us Luca doing here, or Luca do, Luca do serve them. What are the best practice recommendations for syndicating content, other than the rel equals canonical? How much of content needs to vary from the original source? Original for syndicating content. Well, how much of the content needs to vary from this original source? So are you trying to get a premium ranking for the person's original source? If so, then you mean it would have to be quite a bit different. You're still going to get, in my opinion, you would still end up, in a perfect world, you wouldn't get a top ranking above the other person because they deserve the top ranking, but I don't know, what do you say to that, John? I would say that it's not a big deal. You shouldn't really be trying to change it anyway. Yeah, I'd agree to that. I mean, if you're trying to manipulate the system here, you're going in the wrong direction. Just publish it as it is, use that canonical tag like you mentioned, Dana, but I think it might have been you, Ross, that said, when you publish something like that and you're going to syndicate it, publish it on your site and then wait a few days before you syndicate it, give yourself that little extra boost as far as hoping it gets fired first and found first. That always helps as well. Yeah, if you can. I've noticed I publish anything on the Stepforth blog and instantly a few people are following it and automatically propagating their own blogs, like content, so as mentioned here, first-to-market usually wins, unfortunately that's true. Only in my opinion, only if that other site that reposted your content has more popularity than yours. Yeah, first-to-market usually wins if you get more links. If the third-to-market ends up with more citations and references to the article, they may just win over you. Yeah. So, I don't want to jump all over here, but there's a good one here from page one results. Thoughts about using the non-WW now and in the future? Just strip that damn-W-W. So yeah, I don't know, I don't like stripping the WWW. I like using it, although admittedly it's a little more of a pain to write. It looks better. One thing I've noticed people saying is they don't use the non-WW redirect on their site because they just specify it in the Google Webmaster Tools, but I don't like that because there's other search engines. Yeah, sure, they're less important, but there are other search engines and if they don't see that redirect, you could end up with some mild issues because two sites are being indexed. Just because you put it in your Google Webmaster Tools as WWW or non-WW, if you read that closely, that's how they're going to display your results in the search engines, which is fine. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's how they're going to, if you have links coming in with WWW and links coming in without WWW, if you don't do those redirects, you may have split your link use between that same site. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's very important and a vast number of people don't have it implemented. Well, frankly, because it's not -- it's SEO 101 in concept, but in application, a lot of people in altering their HD access, all that stuff is way beyond them, although there are great plugins and WordPress that allow you to automate that. I think if you just type in non-WW, WordPress plugin, you might find something that at least does that for you. Anyone here know one right off the top of your head, just plug it, and I'll put it on there. Hey, Ross, we had one other question we might have skipped on just before we got to this, and if you want to, we're going to get this before we get into a break. Hamster asks, "Do either of you know an automated XML sitemap tool or plug-in for blogger like WordPress has?" For blogger? Correct. I don't know of any -- I used Blogger up until this recently, until we changed the WordPress, and I tell you what, an improvement, but else there's any -- less just been changes, like I said, haven't been following Blogger quite happily, far as I know, there's no way to do plugins even in Blogger. Do you know whether wise, John? No, I mean, I'm not very familiar with Blogger, I've been using WordPress since the beginning, sorry. Yeah. So, I'll tell you what, Google, if you're familiar with code.google.com, they have -- I'm going to actually copy this link in here and put it in the chat. They have a list that they've created that really is a bunch of sitemap generators, server-side programs, one specifically for a bunch of different CMSs, including WordPress we just talked about, but oh, it's commerce, Drupal, copper mine, and some downloadable tools. There's a really good resource, let me push this into the chat room here real quick, so I'm going to get it one second. Yeah, for us, go your right, switch to WordPress, I tell you, it's worth it in the long run, too. Yeah, I totally agree, and all my ideas are of perfect description. And on one note, it's worth the process of transferring an ungodly amount of posts, pretty much six years of blog posts in Blogger to WordPress, and I just want to just swallow a gun, it's just -- it's hell. But there is a way to import it, there is a plug-in, however, not all of our stuff was in Blogger. Anyway, it's a mess, but anyways, even if you do the import, a lot of images are broken, titles are too long, there is a lot of manual stuff to clean it up, just a good note. Yes, there is a plug-in for everything, however, I don't think there is one to completely clean up all that stuff, so anyway, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be come back, we're going to answer a few more questions, and please send a whole bunch of questions now so we can key them up, okay, thanks. SC0101 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. Turn your under-performing landing pages into cost-effective sales-producing machines. Be sure you're not wasting your precious PPC budget. Engine Critic Tools give you the ingredients to create high converting landing pages. 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Did you know 99 Designs connects you to a community of over 35,000 designers who will compete to do the best work for you? Did you know 99 Designs allows you to post projects for low-level design, web page design, t-shirt design, and more? Did you know? 99 Designs projects need average of over 70 different design options for a price that you set. 99 Designs. When designers compete, you win. Search Engine Marketing Formulated for Web 2.0, SEM Synergy. My broadcast Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific, or on demand anytime inside the Search Engine Optimization Channel on webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over, and SEO 101 is back in session only on webmasterradio.fm. Oh, and welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. Here was John Carca, the SEO manager for MediaWiz, and I'm Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing. It was a special day, we're answering questions live at webmasterradio.fm/chat, and it's just exciting. We're getting some good questions coming through here. Please keep on sending them through. John, you want to pick the next one? Sure, we can pick the next one. Let's see, we've got the Yahoo Bing thing, it's the one on my screen, it's kind of interesting to ask. Do you think the Yahoo Bing thing will actually go through? The Yahoo actually be displaying things some day. If you think it will, how long will you think it will take? That's a good question, whether it will go through. The odds are fairly good that it will go through, but I don't think it's scheduled for SEC hearings until January of this coming year, 2010, and Yahoo has said, if it does pass through the hearings, it's going to take them at least another 24 months to fully implement everything. To me, that means fully implement search and all the paid search advertising switch they're going to be doing. I think it will happen, but it's going to be a couple of years out before we really even notice it. Yeah, I certainly think it could take that long. There's a lot of benefit, I think, to getting it done faster once this is approved and all that, but who knows whether that's how possible that is. There's always a chance, I guess, John, that they could just get everything absolutely ready and when they're approved, they just press start. I think it's the technology, because integrating the search is probably not going to be the hardest part. The hardest part for them is going to be integrating all the two different paid platforms, the Yahoo paid advertising and the ad center stuff for being. That's going to be hard. I wonder how it works in systems like this, where they think they know they're going to get approval, but they're absolutely not sure. Do they just put all their money in and just go for it and pretend it's happened? Yes. They combine these systems now so that when it's time, they can just, like I say, flip the switch. Yes. Well, I think even if they did that, they're only going to get a few months head start on their two-year timeline, because if they do the processes by January, that's really only three or four months away, it's going to take two years to make the whole conversion. My guess is Microsoft's big enough bankroll, they're going to start one way or the other, just because they want to get it done, being the whole thing for them. True. Although a few months in the Internet world is years. Right, exactly. So, it's interesting. A good question there, Hofstra. Let's see here. What's the next one? What we could do would be in Flash SEO, recommendation for resources other than for embedded Flash and latest SEO aspects for Flash. What really works and what doesn't? I'd like to say I got a lot of experience in that, but I've been avoiding it like to play. Any time anyone's had Flash, I've mostly had them create something else as well, so we've got alternative content. John, have you been forced to stick with it? I've been lucky so far that I've been able to convince people that if they have massive amounts of Flash to back off a little bit on it. What I tell people is, use Flash as an element on a page, not as a page. So, realize that some of the content in your Flash file may be indexable and some of the links may be followed depending on how dynamic your Flash element is, but it's still risky to put really important content and really important links solely in Flash on your page. You know, you can put it in Flash, but make sure that you have that link and text form somewhere else on the page too, if it's really important and same with the content. Yeah, and I would say that it is being indexed. In many cases, I haven't really done a lot of research to say it all the time, but the thing is, it's too limited. You can't do a lot of the optimization techniques that help getting a ranking when all you do is pretty much have the equivalent of a text file to index. There's just not a lot there. So, I just think it's too limited and get the hell out of it if you can. If you've got a client, Dana, like that, I would just, like you said, keep it as embedded and work around it if you can, maybe restate the primary message somewhere, not a comfortable situation to be in, that's for sure. And something else to say about Flash is, if you run across the client or if you have your own website and you're so tied to the look and feel of the Flash and your activity to Flash, there's people will talk about all other kinds of techniques, you know, layering your Flash over top of a text page, just tons of things people have tried, and really the best, absolute best thing to do is keep it as simple as possible, build your page as a standard page, use your Flash as an element, the trickier you try to get with this stuff, the more likely it is going to bite you. You know, if the Flash is that important to you, you've got to weigh it, is the Flash more important than your search rankings or your traffic. If it is, then stick with it. But if rankings and traffic and visitors from search are important, then you're going to have to make some compromise. Stage 1 results is afraid to ask about validation, you should be. I've got to put on notice, and fair enough, because my site was horribly XHD mail, it was like the validation was pathetic on my site, and you know what, I'm very pleased I even thanked them for doing it, but it was a bit of an awakening. It's so easy to have a website that's not valid transitional text or content. I'm trying to think how to put words exactly what I'm talking about, what is, if someone actually asked me, what is validation? I guess it's W3C, well, it is W3C, conventions that are actually making sure that your code on your site is 100% in, help me out here, John, it's in sync now, lack of words here. Basically, with validation, make sure you're conforming to the standards, so they've set specific standards for HTML, that's just one form of validation, there's also validation for style sheet, CSF, if you want to get really picky in, I know page 1 results is going to happen, but you can view validation for accessibility, the 508 validations, there's tons of them out there, and depending on who your market is and what kind of regulations you have to follow, and government sites have to have validated in accessible sites, so it doesn't help from a SEO perspective, there's two lines to stand in, and this one, yes and no. Half the people I talk to says you do it, half the people say it doesn't matter whatsoever, here's the deal, if your site is valid, it may or may not help, but if you validate your site, you make a better site, and it might help you, so why not do it? Oh, I'm a bunch of jokesters out there, they're saying, "Hell of validation, it's just a front page, it makes perfect code." Ross, you've got to keep a straight face when you're watching that chatroom boy. I'm still waiting for front page 2010 to come out, then I'll try it again. I hate front page, oh my god, I've had such nightmares with that over the years, dealing with sites that are dealt in front page for everyone who knows who doesn't know this can be a real nightmare, although I've heard people, I'm not sure if they're half joking you're not, that I've heard it's gotten better, I don't know, but page one, I really really suggest you switch the word for HTML development, it's just as good as front page, oh my god, tears, tears, okay, yeah and as page one mentions RSS and XML validations are important, there's all sorts of validation required and it would help me if I had to get into that too. One thing at a time, I'm going to start with our website, just the main pages and make my programmer cry when I throw more changes at our site where he still has to validate it again, so it's good, it's all good, we've got to get into it and we've got to show, I think we would just have to be a good example for everyone, so I think it's a great thing. How about page load times? How much does that impact things, that's a great question, I would say lift your sites, if your site is so slow that you're dealing with Google getting timeouts, you're going to get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools then that's something to be concerned about, what else do you think you could apply to, obviously for people, it's horrible, if your sites are loading people are going to leave. Well if you think about it, Google says over and over and over again, they're all about user experience and quality results, and if they have a lifting in there that takes forever to load, it's a huge page, they're not going to consider that quality as one, it's really crisp and clean and loads up right away, I don't think, I mean I haven't seen or done any personal tests to see if load time actually affects rankings, but with, you know, they say there's over 200, you know, items that look at the algorithm, I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of them. We should have Stefan on here, Mr. Tester, I'm sure he's tested it, interesting. Yeah, Stefan would be able to tell me, tell us, or he might not tell, he said, yeah I tested that but I'm not telling you. Well I think, yeah, obviously it has more of an effect on conversions, now one of the things that I know are sites on a really, I admit a really cheap server right now, and I know there are times when we have a bit of slow time, so we're looking at upgrading, but you know you can get pretty crazy, getting a web hosting company that they're all 100 percent uptime quote unquote and all this stuff, but the fact is you're on shared server, the times, there are times of the day where the CPU is going to get overloaded, you're going to have some issues with load time. Ways of completely avoiding that get pretty crazy, I think Yoast has some pretty cool system, I noted that I thought would be pretty slick to use, and I'm going to see if I can find it here, he uses NetDNA, which is a network of servers around the world that host his content, so everyone gets a fast load time, I mean wow, but I think the starting amount is almost a thousand a month for that, so you're looking, or 200, no sorry, not 1,200 a month, so, yeah, I'm definitely trying to move all my stuff personally to cloud servers, just so not so much for load time, but just for, so as sites grow, you don't have to worry so much about whether you want to run out of bandwidth or run out of space, cloud computing is to me where it's at, the future without a doubt, that sounds like that's part of that. Totally, and as a tie into what I just said about Yoast, his site, Y-O-A-S-T is awesome, Y-O-A-S-T.com, he's one of the hosts for WordPress on the Webmaster Radio. Press this. Thank you, 24 hours from now, he's the man, he knows a lot about the WordPress plugins, in fact he's created quite a few of them, so if you want to check that out I highly recommend it, great guy, and knows his stuff, and his site's got some good content as well if you need to find out about any of that stuff. Let's take a look at some of the backup quite a bit, TPM have to question a while ago about affiliate links, any pages regarding Google searches, anyone know how bad they were, so TPA, I just want to clarify, are you talking about links off of your pages that use affiliate code, or are you talking about affiliate links to your site, affiliate links off your page to using, so he's asking about affiliate links from your pages to others with affiliate codes attached to them. He says, "Yes, off my page." We've seen the engines, particularly Google, take a stance against affiliate sites. I guess it will really depend on how much your site was dedicated to affiliate, to outbound affiliate links. If it was just a small mixture, if you linked to other resources and had affiliate link here or there on your pages, I don't think that would be an issue at all. However, if you have nothing but affiliate links, all of your site, and that's all you have outbound wise, you're probably not going to rank as well as you would. There's no help. I think there's a specific penalty we can point to, but everybody that I know that does affiliate games says, "If that's the way it is, you just have affiliate links, you're not going to rank well." Yeah, what I've done in the past is I included a separate directory. It's best actually for tracking. A separate directory, my site, called Exit. Even there, I've got the various affiliate sites. I haven't done this in a while. In fact, I haven't done it on our new site yet, but it's really effective because you can put in, let's say, keyword discovery is the page. And then everything you send there essentially gets scrubbed. I actually blocked that whole directory. And then I also just be careful to put no follows or all that stuff. Be absolutely clear that you don't want these things to impact your rankings. But even if you do that, I believe that if you get the only type of link you're throwing off your site, you're going to have issues. Sorry. What's that? I missed you. So even if you do the scrubbing, I think if that's the only type of link coming off your site, you're going to have issues. That's true. You've got to have some clean links. You've got to have some links to valuable resources to map your fans as strictly affiliate site and be lumping with that group. Excellent. Yeah, I think that's effective and I just want to make sure I've got that across that last bit. You know, being able to tell how much you're sending in terms of traffic to affiliate sites is really good because frankly, you'll start to figure out whether or not you're getting ripped off. If you send a thousand visitors to an affiliate site and you're not getting any conversions, I'd start wondering whether or not a little money's been kept. I used to do a bit of service stuff and that's something that always concerned me. That's like shaving, are you? No, I'm sure none of them do that. No. So what else we got here? Brascalee, anything come to mind? Yeah, there's one more question. If you want to get it and we can go to break it, I guess real quick, GODV asks, should categories and tags be followed and indexed if not which is the best setting? John, you pretty feel strongly about this. I've got my own well. I've got a few different variations, but why don't you start with yours? I have some sites I work with that do very, very well with their tag pages. It's really important though that we separate the tags from the categories and they don't duplicate you. So the category is not the thing with a tag or vice versa. And depending on how you lay out your category pages or your tag pages, I don't mind following them and having an indexed as long as they're not too similar to the individual article pages. So if you have a category page for college football and you have five articles on college football, if you're displaying the whole tag of all five articles, you're probably doing yourself a disservice. But if you're displaying a snippet of an article and then link over to a full article, there's no reason not to have that category or tag page indexed and followed. Pretty much the answer to it for me there. I mean, on our site right now, I've got categories indexable and I'm still messing around with it. I don't think we have our tags indexable right now. We tried to tighten it all the way down to categories, but I've, you know, John's pretty much convinced me otherwise to do a little bit different. We're always learning, right? So right now we're just going to take a quick break. I was going to give you an example, but take a break, okay. Come back with it. Come back with that. So everybody stick around so you can hear what John's going to say after the break. How about that? There you go. 101 will be back right after recess. This is a test of the PR web content and news delivery system from PR web and PR web author.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. PR web 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 PR web 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 PR web author.com for 25% off. PR web, the premier online release news and content distribution service. So you're telling me your affiliate program on the local pages affiliate network is performing as well as your handicap? Absolutely. Thanks to their top tier XML feed, I'm able to monetize all of my traffic. They handle all of my volume to anywhere in the world, plus I also get high cost per click and the most exclusive of advertisers to work with. You should join the club. Sounds good. I can't wait to join, but first let's work on that team shop. Use the power of local pages with over 5 billion searches per month and the largest database of paid search listings. 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Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my co-host is John Carca, the SEO manager for MediaWiz. So we've had quite a few great questions. We've got the last set coming up here, so please do shoot some through. I've noticed one good one, it is a basic question, but it's always good to cover the basics. Where did I put it here? It's about... Oh, I can tell you what it is. Does anyone still give a crap about sitemats, not XML ones? He did not say crap, he said poop, thank you. That was hamster by the way, I do, I still give a poop about HTML sitemats, and you can quote me on that. That's gonna be all over Twitter. Yes, it is. I know Dana is tweeting it right now. Yeah, I do too. Yes. So my opinion of sitemats is they're useful as a backup navigation. You still want to have that primary navigation as spider bowl as possible, but sometimes, because if you run into a CMS or a design firm that's really, really finicky about their navigation, sitemaps are a great backup way to make sure everything gets crawled and it sends some relevancy, text-based links that pass into it that you might not get elsewhere on the site. Not as good as regular navigation, but it helps. Yeah, I find it as a great backup. Why not? There's no harm in doing it. It's a great way to offer at least a different access to different parts of your site. So, yeah, exactly, it's fun to get creative with sitemaps. One thing I've always enjoyed doing is doing categories of it's a big site, making the sitemap a list of categories, and actually putting in descriptions for each category. That way, it's a very functional, effective sitemap for anyone who actually happens to enter in the page. I've actually seen sitemaps get better rankings than other pages, which is a good and bad thing. Well, at least it's a ranking, right? What's next here? Let's see. Here we go. Page 1 results asks, "Why do people still hard code root level pages index default?" Well, okay, first of all, the way I understand it, the only reason they do is because that's what the servers tend to look for and to provide for the home page. That's the default for home pages. Like Dana said, it's kind of rhetorical. Am I missing something there, John? No, I think it's mostly when you see that it's a content management system doing it because it was written by programmers who want to be really exacting and they know it's going to go to this page and not the other page, so that's what they write it to. There's nothing other than the fact that I think it's just programmers and designers not being on the ball when it comes to how that impacts the search or your site itself. Now, I'm curious why page 1 results calls it a bad practice. I'm not sure how it would really be bad. I agree with it. It is still in a bad practice. It's a routine. If you're dealing with, let's use an example of a home page. If you have your internal navigation of your site, thinking back to your home page instead of going to the root, going to index.html or default.asp or ASPx, what that does is a vast majority of your links from off-site are going to come to your root and not include index or default. Now you've got duplicate pages that are splitting your link juice, so you've got your internal linking structure adding juice to your default page and your external off-site links adding juice to your root, so you're splitting your weight there. If they were both going to the same thing, you'd have a much more powerful home page. Gotcha. All right. Definitely missed that. Makes sense. It's something that I think is going to be a tough thing to break. I know a lot of people who just do that by default, it's such an old practice. That said, that does need to be fixed. It's a good one. Yeah. That's something that you can fix with 3012. I'm not sure there's probably is, but I'm not sure there's a code that'll do that dynamically throughout all the site. If there's a page that's indexed to default to 3012 to the root, but if not, depending on the size of your site, you can create those manually if you need to. So for the sake of everyone else, then, what should they name it? They should go to the root, so if it's your whole page, you'd want to get a .com/ or without the slash, depending on your server set up, on the set of .com/default.ac. If it's an internal directory.com/blog, you don't want it to go into .com/blog/default, you want it to go into .com/blog. If it's a subdirectory, you just link to the root of the subdirectory, don't add the index or default. Yeah. Well, and I get that part. What are you actually talking about in terms of the file name? It still has to be indexed or default. It's just the system shows it as just for a search. The file name would be indexed or default, but the server knows at the root of a directory or the root of the site that you can leave it blank, and it'll still show that page without actually having to put that page in the URL. Exactly. Okay. I just wanted to be sure that wasn't going to be confusing to anyone else. I did catch it as a bit of a confusion. So good. Got lots of people sending stuff in here. We need another question though. Come on, guys. Oh, here we go. TBA says, "How about our sites like Dig, Zimbo, etc., regarding duplicate content?" I don't think they're bad at all. I'm sure they've got a lot of duplicate content, but that's their nature of them. I think that's just Google seeing the credit. It's almost a citation back to the main person who wrote it. It's all in the good of the internet. It's another way of being found, of building a reputation, and something gets a high ranking in Dig. It's a good thing for the person who wrote it. Now, that said, if it's someone else who's duplicating and then gets a Dig, that person who copied the content and gets a Dig, well, I just think that's unjust. But the fact of the matter is they may get all the benefit done. I agree. All right, next. We might have run out unless there's one more question in here. Maybe we might have a show. We're going to get the final question. It's a rate. And we've got some other ones here. Oh, here we go. Look at Duke's dropping in. Might be the last one. What if you have an increasing number of parasite links or links from black hats that are creating crawl errors 404? Yeah. So, let me understand this. You have a bunch of people linking to your site to pages that don't exist. Is that correct? Russian site, she says. Yes. Yes. Okay. Someone told me a really neat trick to do with this. Let me try to remember real quick. Basically, you take that and you, I'll kind of remember how to do this. Hampshire says order the bride and have fun with his audience. Sorry, guys. We just lose it. Basically, Dana, if you can find a way to capture those specifically, either through picking out all your Russian referrers or picking out an IP block that you can identify as being a source, you can send that traffic back to them in a way, and if you don't hold them off the effect, there's a way to send the traffic back to them that will not make them very happy at all. So, I want to know that one. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. And I tell you what it was, but for two reasons, brass could probably give mad at me for saying it on the air. The other one I have to remember, I don't want to tell you the wrong information, so I have to look it up. But there's a way to send it back at them. Cool. Yeah, I love this. I love learning these things. All right. TV asks, you want to jump in or you want to say it? So what is the best permalink to use and does it have, does it help having a custom one regarding search results? Hmm, best permalink to use. I essentially would just say the, see, I always, I found that funny, you know, this is because I'm, I didn't do a lot of blogging, or at least I didn't worry about the technology in blogging. Really, to me, a permalink should just be the same link the page was written in. And if, as long as you make sure that that page was the, it was well, you know, the URL was well optimized. In our case, our permalinks go to the actual page it was posted on now. What am I missing here? I know there's more conflict. You're right. I do the same thing, Ross. Some people have two different links. One for their article and one for their permalink, which to me is a problem because of duplicate content issues, but, but besides that, I think either ask, are you asking about the structure, TPA, you know, what's the best way to do it, because if so, I've always used basically just the article title dot HTML or dot backslash, and then people argue against that because there's a chance that you can have duplicate page titles that way or duplicate URLs that way. You just have to be careful. A lot of people say you have to put it in some kind of bait structure so it's, so it's archived correctly. I don't think you have to. I just see it with the, the title of the article dot HTML or dot, or slash it's work fine for me. Yeah, and yes, I knew that permanent permanent link, just I guess it was just, I just, I just, I just considered obvious that a lot of the stuff, yeah, I think I've been in it too long. In my case, we actually did the dot PHP and I have to say I regret it in a lot of cases. I think it did that on my own personal site anyway. I would wish I had done the directory angle, but that's just my own experience. Anything like that on there, John? No, I'm, I'm, I'm good. All right. I guess we got last five minutes. Please thank for asking another question. If there's one more, if not, we're just about out of time. We'll see if anybody has one last one. I don't know about you, but this is a pretty fun. I like this. I do too. Yeah, I like this too. And I would like to do a live SEO review. I think that'd be fine. Do some sites. Yeah. Sorry, I'm trying to beat you to it on that other, on the other site where the site review that the TPA has, but you know, Darren, Darren's always begging for site reviews, so I have to give him, throw him a bone. All right, I guess that's it. There we go. Okay. Well, on behalf of my staff, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and John Carcutt, SEO manager for MediaWiz, I would like to thank you for coming. And let's do this again. Let's see if we can get some more people in too and get it. Yeah. The verse questions. Yeah. Right. Thank you. Thanks for all your questions, everybody. Yeah. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)