SEO 101

Completing Google Optimization

Completing Google Optimization, plus a look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided. 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:: 16 Mar 2009
Audio Format:: other

Completing Google Optimization, plus a look at a number of other considerations which play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on some tactics which are best avoided.

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

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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 basics. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and unfortunately today my co-host Jennifer Evans can not make it, but today is the third part of a three-part series on how to optimize for Google. An article written by my guest and colleague at Stepforth Web Marketing, Scott Vanack. Welcome Scott. Hey, good afternoon, good to be back. Yay, we took about a 10-minute break there, but yeah, it works out. So in part two, we discussed links and Google Webmaster Tools. Now, links obviously is a big topic, actually both of those are, we were actually discussing that, we're going to have to do full shows on those and it's just too much of a topic and I know Jennifer's going to have lost to say about that too. But today we're going to be discussing the tail end of things, you know, completing the optimization process, what other considerations are there. And ultimately, what you shouldn't do. And we, Scott cleverly called that, "Do not try this at home." And for those who want to read the article, you can easily find it. This is a three part series, it's based on a three part article series called How to Optimize for Google, by Scott Vanack. And that is available on news.stepforth.com/blog. And I think it's a good read. So do not try this at home, this is the second part of today's show, and then tools. So Scott, completing the optimization, what other considerations do people keep in mind? Oh, you know, there are so many little things that a lot of people don't think about them. I'm not sure we'll start here. So I'm just going to start right at the top of my article that I originally wrote. And that was with redirects. And never, there are so many bad things you can do with redirects. Don't use a meta refresh redirect, don't use JavaScript redirects. When you start to play around with redirects a lot, you can actually make Google think that you're trying to game them and trying to screw around with rankings. And once upon a time you actually could. So but right now, you know, if you find that you need to redirect somebody to a different page, if you've changed the file name of a page, if you're, well, even if you've changed your domain name, use permanent 301 redirects or temporary 302 redirects. That's the best way you can do it. And Google likes it. It makes sense. If you're moving a page around, then Google sees that, okay, this page is formally moved to this other location. This is where it's going to live forever. And they will actually attribute your any rankings you have over to that page. Inbound link credit, that kind of stuff will actually follow you over to that new page. If you do the proper redirect, if you move a page and you just put up a splash page that says this page has moved, please click here. And then maybe you have a meta refresh redirect at about two or three seconds or five seconds. You're not going to get that value of that ranking following you to the new page. So you really, you know, you go through redirects. So which of the two, and I think you mentioned that three is that the 301 redirect that you're discussing? Yeah, the most common are the 301 and the 302. The 301 is a permanent redirect. So that means I'm moving this page over here. It's going to stay there basically forever. And then there's a 302, which is a temporary. And the 302 you'd want to use, you know, I've never actually seen a situation where someone would need to use. But if for some strange reason you need that page to move somewhere else for a while, but ultimately it's going to come back to where it currently is, then you'd use a 302. So if you can think up a situation where you'd need to do that, that's where you'd need to do it. Well, actually, Scott, we did do that once. We did that with Barb, but we can't say even more about that client. But the fact was, yes, she had a client had a site which she was, I think she was doing work on it and she needed to, wanted to send traffic to another site temporarily. And we didn't want Google to think that her other site, which was the one with all the link juice, it was the powerful site, it was the one that was getting all the rankings was going to be changed completely. So we used a 302 and it worked quite well. I don't even sure there was any downside to it. Was there? You know, I remember that now. I totally forgot about that. Yeah, I was worried about her rankings just plummeting with all this, but it was a necessary step that had to be done. And if I remember correctly, I think her rankings actually went up instead of down. And actually, Scott, there is an instance where we have used a 302 redirect for a client. It was for Barb. And in her case, we actually took the 302 redirect and used it to transfer her traffic to another site that they were doing. I think it was a testing on or something. It was not a situation we would have, well, we were necessarily behind, but it had to be done. And I don't believe there's any fallout from that. I think it worked out pretty well. What was your recollection of it? Yeah. I remember we were quite, you know, I completely forgot about the 302 with Barb. I remember I was quite worried about her rankings dropping, and it was a risk that she had to take given her situation. We got quite lucky. And by some fluke, her rankings, if I remember correctly, actually went up, but certainly not something in the norm. And I wouldn't take that as something that would happen. Right. Now, one of the other things you discussed in here is using non-WW redirects. Now that sounds really, I mean, even in saying it sounds confusing. Now in that case, how would you describe that to the listeners who don't have a clue what this is about? Well, basically your website can be seen under a number of different URLs. One of which, or two of which I should say, would be www.abc.com and then just adc.com without the triple Ws. The exact same content is being served up when somebody visits your site under either of those two versions. Now the problem is, Google sees that, well, not as much now, but we'll get into that. The search engines in general will see both of those two different URLs as separate URLs and index them as two different pages, which can bring in duplicate content issues. With Google, it can cause your page rank split. Every page in your site has Google page rank. And if you want page that breaks into two, you split the value of that page essentially in half. And so what you want to do is make sure that when somebody visits your site, and they just type in http colon slash slash abc.com without the triple W, that they are 301 redirected to the version with the triple W. And that helps keep your site whole. It keeps the value of that page higher, and it eliminates any duplicate indexing problems that you may occur from that. So that's something you need to implement. Yeah, and people may wonder why would anyone type it in without the WWW? Well, the fact is, there's a lot of people who will link to your website, and they may not use the WWW. And then they may link to an article within your site. And all of a sudden that triple W is gone, Google sees this lingo, is this a new page? It gets confused, it looks at the page and considers it a second page. And as you said, this isn't so much now. And I'll fill that in for you, like essentially, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to specify which one. Do you want the non-WWW or the WWW as your main URL? Now that's just Google, though. Actually, I can't recollect, Scott, does Yahoo or MSN Tools allow you to do this? You know, I don't believe either of them have that preference setting in there, but, you know, I hate to be wrong on something, but I could be wrong there. I'm not sure offhand. Well, and you know, that's a great example, though, because the fact is good idea to still do this because there are other search engines out there, definitely lesser than Google, but they're out there and they do have traffic, so you've got to make sure this is done. And it's very simple to do. And another thing, I'm not sure we highlight it on enough, is that with the 301 redirect, not only do you transfer the traffic and everything, I know you mentioned PageRank, but I really want to put out there that PageRank gets passed completely. So say you change over your website, or maybe even move it completely, you moved it from one triple W site to another triple W site, and you want to make sure that all your hard work, all your links, all that stuff is passed, all the benefit from all that work is going to be passed to the new site. The 301 redirect is the magic way of doing that, and I just can't stress that enough. If you don't do it, even if you wait too long, that link juice can just go into space. And there's nothing sadder than that, especially if you've been out for a long time online and you need that really to function. So that touched on, I'm just looking at this, I guess we're really technical with their names here, but it's really how it has to be, HTTP headers, Scott, describe that one. Well, in a nutshell, what an HTTP header is, it's the core of your HTTP request. So when your browser goes out there, or the search engines, or whatever goes out there to access a website, that header defines various characteristics about the data on that page. So that could be the type of the server information, even the IP that it posted on, and I don't even know all the stuff that's in there to tell you the truth, but it'll give you the page status, and that's really one of the key things you want to look at. If, actually, I would check this for most SEO cases in the beginning anyway, just to make sure it's clean, type in your domain name, triplew.abc.com, and see what a header checker will give you for information. If it gives you, I believe it's a 202 if it's clean, I could be wrong there, but it's a 200, thank you. So if it gives you an error, I guess it wouldn't be an error, if it gives you a code of 200, you know your page is good, everybody's happy, it's all good. If it gives you a 404, which would be a page not found error, it could give you all kinds of different things. If you see anything other than a 200, you might want to investigate a bit more. For example, if you had a 301 setup to point it to another page, you're going to see that code 301, and then it's going to show you the page that it's actually being read direct to. So it can help you sort of troubleshoot problems that might be happening on your website. On our website, on Step Force website, we have a little tool that you can go in and type in your domain name, and it will tell you what those status codes are, and then it can give you some insight as to what you may need to do, if anything. And we have a list of what the different codes mean and that sort of thing. And to find that, you can go to news.stepport.com/seotools, and you'll see a link to it on the right hand side. Yeah, now the HTTP header checker is also, like you mentioned, it's useful to double check things. Well, the best thing I like to do anyway is to have a recommend that people use it whenever they do implement into 301. So say you're doing it on a website, you're doing the move, double check the work, even if you didn't do it, your webmaster did it, go and double check it. If it was accidentally put in as a 302, you better change it, because a 302 was, again, the temporary redirect. You don't want it to be temporary, well, perhaps you do, but in this case, you don't. So you say, okay, that wasn't done right, I need this to be a 301. Things have to be fixed, and these are great little tools just to double check all the work and make sure you're in a good position. So we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll touch on some more considerations for completing your optimization. Go behind the scenes of SEO 101 with their Facebook fan page, search for SEO 101 podcast on Facebook now. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. 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This is the third part of our three-part series on how to optimize for Google and we were just discussing HTTP headers, non-WW redirects and other redirects and really complex names, but we tried our best to make them understandable. I hope that is the case. If not, please drop a note on our Facebook page. There is a note on it at the end of our show and I think at the beginning of our show on what our address is. Right now we're going to discuss the home page URL. Scott, why do you include this? Give us a little background on this. Well, you know, I say more and more often, people have the links in their internal pages of their website, link to /index.html or /index.php.ASP, whatever their site may be, and that could be a big problem because, again, it's similar to the www redirect issue in that you're duplicating your home page of your website. Google will then look at www.abc.com/index.html and www.abc.com as the exact same page. And again, you're splitting your page rank and the value of that page and it's just something you don't want to do and so it's incredibly easy to fix. All you really need to do is change all the links throughout your entire website, which I guess it may not be that easy depending on your site. All your links on your site that point to your home page, drop the /index.html and put in an absolute link. An absolute link is, in source code, the full URL of the home page or any page you're linking to. In that case, http/triplew.abc.com. That will eliminate the duplicate page. It will help put those two pages back into one to boost up your page rank again, potentially, and eliminate any potential risks for duplicate content issues. Great, yeah, and I think that as much as these may seem a little bit nitpicky, they can't help. I mean, maybe it's just going to take you a little bit extra page rank to get the number one ranking or just move up one more spot. One more spot means that many more eyeballs, so I really think that these things can help a lot. Now, we touched on the XML sitemap a bit, but do you want to just know why you've put it on here? Well, I put it on here because we talked about it in part two a little bit and the reason I include it in part three is because it is one of those extra little things you want to do, and I wanted to make sure that people that didn't read part two could still see it in part three. Basically, make sure you've got an XML sitemap with all the links to your website included in that. Submit it to Google, and again, it's not going to directly impact your search rankings, but it can't indirectly help by ensuring that Google indexes everything and sees updates. If you change a page or you add a page, Google will find it that much more if you have that XML sitemap. Yeah, no, no question. I think it's necessary in most cases. You can get away without it, but I think it's quite a benefit, especially if you've got a large site. I mean, if you've got a page site, it might be kind of useless, but if you've got a thousand or even a couple hundred page site, that can be quite beneficial. The next thing you mentioned is the rotebutts.txt file, and I think it's ignored a lot. There's a lot that can be done using it, and why don't you just expand on that a little bit? The rotebutts.txt file, I'm going to start with a very basic of it. Every time a search engine comes to visit your website, the very first thing they do is look for that robots.txt file to see if you've established any rules for that end and saying don't look at this page, don't look at that page, and so on. Every time that a search engine comes looking for that file, if it doesn't exist, you're going to get a 404 error appearing in your log files, and that can add up, and it just kind of clutters your analytics. The first thing you do is upload a file, robots.txt, put it in your root folder next to your index page, and even if it's completely empty, you've just saved yourself some potential headache on the road. Probably the number one thing, well, there are two main things I use the robots.txt file for, one of which is blocking Google from certain parts of your website, if you need to do that. The vast majority of the time, you're not going to need to block anybody, but sometimes there may be forums that are very specific or used for in-house purposes or confidential info that you need to log in to see or something like that, and then you might want to try blocking it with the robots.txt file. Another thing you can do at file, and this is why I see it being used for the most commonly now, is add a link to your site map file, and it's really quite simple. You add a line in that file that says site map colon space, http colon slash slash triple w dot abc dot com slash site map dot XML, or whatever location you've got that site map saved to. There's really not a lot you need to do here though, in general. Okay, cool. I think that, again, putting in that kind of a link just to your site map is just a great insurance policy, you know, that the search engines will find it, especially if you're using a non, I guess a non-common name for your XML file, site map dot XML in the root of your website is the most common way of doing it, and I believe that's even the default for search engines when they're looking for it. So potential blockages, you know, if your site's not being indexed, what do you need to do here, like I noticed you've noted as a major area. Yeah, I think the number one thing I do, if I'm looking at a site and I'm trying to figure out why Google is not indexing it, is I go in and I go back to the http header checker that we talked about, type in the domain name and see what kind of codes I get. If I get a 200 code, I know that Google can see the site, it's all good, and then I may check an internal page or two, and if I get a 200 code, great, I'm not going to worry about that anymore. The next thing you want to do, oh sometimes you might want to check this first, there's not really any hard set rule which you should check first. It could be your site navigation. If the main navigation on your site is using Flash, a JavaScript dropdown menu, a DHTM HTML dropdown, even image maps and things can prevent Google from being able to see your site. So what you want to do is make sure Google can look at all the pages of your site and get to them, and that's where Google Webmaster Tools actually comes in again a little bit because you can go in there and see if they have any errors. Just because you don't see it when you do a site call and check in Google doesn't mean Google doesn't have an index, it just may not be refred in their active index. So you can check in your Webmaster Tools and see if you have any errors or even messages because if your site has been banned, sometimes you will get a message from Google that will appear in your Webmaster Tools. It's pretty rare unless you've been doing something you shouldn't be doing that you'd get banned, but at least if you are banned, you might get some indication as to why it in there. And you won't even know you're being banned unless you go in there too. I don't know the fact that you've lost rankings, but I mean Google does not actually send you an email from Google Webmaster Tools saying check it out, you know there's been an issue. Only way you'll ever find out is by checking Google Webmaster Tools regularly, and we highly recommend that. I mean, I'm bad at it, I do my best for our own site, but in the fact is you probably won't do it every day, every week, but try to do it as much as you possibly can. Now, fresh content, regular updates, duplicate content, site age, all these things are potential blockages, or not blockages necessarily, but they may provide a reason why you're having issues with rankings. So do you want to expand on that a bit? Yeah, there's not a lot that needs to be said about duplicate content, but certainly if you are duplicating pages on your website, Google may look at that and say, "Well, what's a point? 10 pages are all the exact same content, they're not going to rank you." And they may not penalize you necessarily, but essentially you're penalizing yourself. So make sure all your content is unique and highly relevant to what your site is, and certainly don't steal content from other websites. If you start scraping content, not only are you risking your rankings, you're risking copyright infringement and legal issues and who knows what else. So keep your content fresh, unique, and regular update it quite often. If you find that your site hasn't changed in 10 years, you may find your rankings to totally disappear because Google's looking at you saying, "What's the point? This stuff is 10 years old, why do I care about this?" So keep it up to date, keep it fresh, current, and that'll be a big help for your search rankings. Or at the very least, Google would actually just say, "Yes, it's been around 10 years, but this site hasn't, and it's got better," and then this content seems fresher. So it's not like your site would be bad, it's just that you're at a date, you've got to keep up to date. Exactly. Yeah, and site age, the age of your website, I'm pretty confident, does play a small role in your search rankings. The problem with it is there's almost nothing you can do about it. You register your domain name, and there you go, and you just wait. The only thing you can do is to not change it. So you think, "Oh, hey, there's this new domain name that's great. Maybe I'm going to change everything over to it." Well, for the most part, you're starting from scratch if you do that. So once you pick a domain name, stick with it in the long term. There you go, that's all you can do about the age of your site, really. Okay, well, before we move on to the other stuff here, we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll touch on some server up time and Google local. 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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. That's www.conversioncritic.com. Please hold while we connect you to one of the most sought-after experts in SEO, analytics, and web development. Office Hours with Vanessa Fox, Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific, or on demand anytime inside the Search Engine Optimization Channel, only on webmasterradio.fm. OK, 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 with Ross Dunn, myself, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing, Inc. and my guest today, Scott Van Act. This is the third part of our three-part series on how to optimize for Google. Just a moment ago, we were just discussing some of the potential barriers to rankings online, what could be about your site that may be causing problems, why particular pages aren't getting the ranking you expect, and we're just going to continue that on a couple more points. Server up time, Google local, and compliant code does the last three, so why don't you just whip those off for us, Scott. OK, server up time is pretty straightforward. Google comes looking for your website, they want to spider it. If your site is not there, you're in trouble. And I kind of use a three-strike zero rule. If Google comes once, your site's not there, not a big deal, they're going to come back. They come back a second time, your site's still not there, well, it's not looking good for you, but if they fail to find your site three times in a row, your rankings are probably going to just vanish. Now the good news is when your site's back up and Google finds you again, and they will spider you eventually again, chances are your rankings will come back because nothing else has changed, you have the same density, the same links, the same content, and so on. So long term don't necessarily have to worry that unless your server, I should say, is going down all the time. Easy way to fix that, well, not necessarily easy, but change hosts, and not necessarily something you want to do, but if your server and your hosting server is down all the time, you're not getting your money's worth, so switch it up. Google Local, if you have a brick and mortar store you're selling, well, we'll go back to the bakery example I used before, you're selling loaves of bread and you want people to find your store, submit to Google Local, and that way, every now and then, if somebody does a search for, say you're in Victoria, they just Victoria Bakery, your site might come up number one or in the top grouping, at least, with the Google Map, and a little arrow says where your store is located. And for local searches, for people looking for a store in their area, definitely something worth considering, you help drive a bit more traffic to your site and get your site bumped up there a little bit. So do it, it's free, doesn't take too much effort, go for it. W3C compliant code is something, to not get too technical, basically there is a big set of rules, and if your site doesn't fall into those rules, some people think that you're going to lose brains, and those rules are coding rules, what tags you can use, how to close tags, all the nitty gritty, under the hood type of stuff. And I'm a firm believer that your site does not need to be compliant. The reason I say that is, I can't count how many number one ranking sites I've seen that were far compliant. It doesn't need to be there. That said, if you can easily get compliant code on your site, you just need to make a few changes and that sort of thing, you may as well do it, it doesn't hurt, it may help improve your visitor experience, it may help the way your site renders in your search browsers, or sorry, in your regular browsers, and it's just a good idea to have it if you can do it, but don't stress over it, probably does not impact search rankings. There's always a benefit of course, but you're right, I mean, how can it be that much? That important when, frankly, everyone can see that there are a lot of design sites, I'm trying to be nicer, poorly designed sites that are in the top rankings. They may be just using strips that are out of this world front page, so there are sites out there that may be designed by some rather less quality tools and those can be exactly. Yeah, yes, actually. If Google required this site to be compliant, they'd have, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred pages in the next, so don't worry about it. I wonder if even Google pages are perfectly compliant, you never know. I think I might have to check that after. That'd be kind of funny, I get a little article actually. So do not try this at home, I love that one, so, wow, this is fun stuff. Let's just switch off here, one on one, I want to talk something, hidden text. This includes any text, so what sort of text might be an issue on your site? If you're hiding text behind images, you're hiding text, same color on this, you know, if you make the color of your text the same as your background or even make it close to your background, Google can see this in most cases, this is all shady stuff, why bother, why do this? You're obviously trying to gain the search engines, the search engines are going to see this. Do not try this at home, it's essentially a topic on spam, you know, do not do this stuff. It's old, as I've dated, it's going to cause the trouble, and if it doesn't, it's going to catch up with you at some point, it's just on each of the internet. Things are always getting better and more complex, Google's algorithm is getting way better at catching anyone, doing any of these tricks. That's why there are industries, big get-togethers for black hats, people who are doing this stuff for a living, just to keep up the date on all the latest stuff. So the next one would be excessive keywords, Scott, why don't you take that one? Yeah, basically keyword stuffing, if you have a sentence that's talking about, well, I'll use a bakery example again, and you're trying to rank for bread, don't say we have whole bread, white bread, fresh bread, great bread, multi-grain bread, you know, don't include the word bread over and over and over and over again in your content. If you overuse it, you're going to, you know, I don't want to talk about keyword density right now, but essentially you're going to drive up your density to percentages that are way too high, Google's going to think of you as obviously trying to spam and specifically rank for that phrase, and you'll probably get degraded down. So you're going to cut yourself off for rankings, and then, not to mention, when someone comes and looks at your website, they're going to say, "What is this garbage? Who wrote this?" So really, you know, be conservative with your use of keywords in your page content. Yeah, and the next one would be duplicate content. Yes, we have to butcher this now with the time we've got, but duplicate content is, again, something you've already mentioned, don't try to copy content on other sites, frankly. That's bad news, and don't try and copy it on your own site, and then try to post it on another page and get another ranking for that. And some people actually mirror their entire site on another site and try to get rankings for both. But don't do this, it does not work, and actually, we've only got about three minutes here. So let's say doorway pages, doorway pages is cloaking, all flash, go for a sky. There you go, doorway pages are a lot like duplicate content. It's basically creating a page specifically to try to gain rankings in Google by tailoring, you know, maybe of ten identical pages, and you're just tweaking each one a little bit to try to get one of them to rank. You know, in a nutshell, that's basically what you can be doing. The only good way or a valid way to do that is if you're doing it for pay-per-click and you want destination pages specific to ads, in which case you block those pages to Google anyways, it's not an issue. Bloking is when you serve up content that is different from whatever the else sees. So when Google comes, they see a totally different website than what, you know, your mom sees when she comes to your website. Very bad, Google frowns on it, if you get busted for that, you're done. What about your rankings, buy a new domain, you know, sell your website, move on, you're finished. All flash websites, you don't want to do that either. Don't utilize flash for your entire website because it's just going to kill you. The main reason is Google won't index everything and, you know, we could go into for an hour about how Google can index flash now, but really it's still not working some day maybe, but don't utilize your whole site in flash. And, you know, I guess the final topic was really iframes. And iframes are basically a little area of your page, a little frame on your page where you're serving up content, whether it be from an include or from another site. Anything within an iframe, Google cannot see, it's invisible. So that's not so much a bad thing in that you're going to get in trouble, you're just not doing yourself any favors. You're basically giving your users stuff that Google doesn't know you have. So don't use an iframe, use a div layer instead. You can do all the same stuff with the div layer as you can with an iframe. Yeah, and the complex, yeah, make this English but essentially, you know, when you're going to a site and you see a lot of content in the middle of the page, you see some sort of a scroll bar just in the middle of the box, that's no good, so you got to fix that out. You've got to make sure that that content is seen or removed entirely because it's frankly it's not doing any good for you. I've got so much more to talk about, but I'm afraid that's the end of our show. Thank you so much, Scott, for coming in doing these three parters and it's just, it's been awesome. It's good to have you on board. Well, thanks for having me. It was definitely a lot of fun. Good. Well, on behalf of myself, Rastan, CEO of Stepport's Web Marketing and my temporarily absent co-host, Jennifer Evans-Lekock and director of Social Marketing at SiteLogic. Thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm. [Music]