huffman
11-07-2004, 04:00 AM
I'd like to say first that this is an amazing resource and thank you all for taking the time to put it together.
I was recently hired by a small web design firm and in addition to maintaining and designing, I have also become the SEO specialist. I knew next to nothing about SEO five days ago, so naturally I have some questions concerning my companies SEO practices and search engines in general.
From the limited research I've done, I'm concerned about a couple of practices already in place at my company. First, WebPosition Gold is used to generate some of our SEO report. It took me about five minutes to find out the search engines hate WPG. Question one is, how risky is it to use WPG? Can the search engines detect its use? Will search engines drop websites that use it? Is WPG even worth anything in the first place?
Link exchange is also an integral part of our SEO process. From what I gather, next to having a well designed site (tags, text, etc.), linkage is the most important factor for SEO. The way my company handles links is by creating a links page ("links.html" for example) which is hidden to the average surfer. This link page must be linked to our main site in some manner, correct? And is it better to have more pages on the main site link to this hidden page? Also, I'm pretty sure Google frowns upon this practice (reciprocating links to boost serp), and again, is there any penalty being risked by doing this?
Another method used to boost serp involves a type of site map page which is linked to from the home page by a hidden link. It's pretty much a mini site which has a listing of our clients, a listing of them by category, and all of them have their own page. It's basically a drawn out site map with a lot of links. If someone happens upon the page through browsing it does serve a purpose, but it's really there to boost serp. Now, my bosses would like me to make each site we host have it's own unique copy of this network. For example, the following urls: site1.com/sitmap.html, site2.com/sitmap.html, site3.com/sitmap.html, would all show the same sitemap info. Apparently this technique has worked for them in the past, but again I'm concerned about how the search engines would react to this. Also, how much of an impact would it make to have these pages repeated for every site (other than the impact on my sanity trying to update them all)?
I do have a couple less involved questions:
- Do spiders document pages which have a timed redirect in the META tag?
- My boss metioned, and I may have this wrong, that MSN is reformatting their search engine and they are currently using Yahoo's. Again, I may have it backwards, or just wrong, but any info on that would be much appreciated.
- Finally, how vaulable are the use of "crutch" sites, like the site map method above, or really any pages generated solely for SEO purposes?
I realize I have raised a lot of issues. Any help on any of them would be greatly appreciated. I hope it helps people like myself who have been thrown into SEO. Thank you.
I was recently hired by a small web design firm and in addition to maintaining and designing, I have also become the SEO specialist. I knew next to nothing about SEO five days ago, so naturally I have some questions concerning my companies SEO practices and search engines in general.
From the limited research I've done, I'm concerned about a couple of practices already in place at my company. First, WebPosition Gold is used to generate some of our SEO report. It took me about five minutes to find out the search engines hate WPG. Question one is, how risky is it to use WPG? Can the search engines detect its use? Will search engines drop websites that use it? Is WPG even worth anything in the first place?
Link exchange is also an integral part of our SEO process. From what I gather, next to having a well designed site (tags, text, etc.), linkage is the most important factor for SEO. The way my company handles links is by creating a links page ("links.html" for example) which is hidden to the average surfer. This link page must be linked to our main site in some manner, correct? And is it better to have more pages on the main site link to this hidden page? Also, I'm pretty sure Google frowns upon this practice (reciprocating links to boost serp), and again, is there any penalty being risked by doing this?
Another method used to boost serp involves a type of site map page which is linked to from the home page by a hidden link. It's pretty much a mini site which has a listing of our clients, a listing of them by category, and all of them have their own page. It's basically a drawn out site map with a lot of links. If someone happens upon the page through browsing it does serve a purpose, but it's really there to boost serp. Now, my bosses would like me to make each site we host have it's own unique copy of this network. For example, the following urls: site1.com/sitmap.html, site2.com/sitmap.html, site3.com/sitmap.html, would all show the same sitemap info. Apparently this technique has worked for them in the past, but again I'm concerned about how the search engines would react to this. Also, how much of an impact would it make to have these pages repeated for every site (other than the impact on my sanity trying to update them all)?
I do have a couple less involved questions:
- Do spiders document pages which have a timed redirect in the META tag?
- My boss metioned, and I may have this wrong, that MSN is reformatting their search engine and they are currently using Yahoo's. Again, I may have it backwards, or just wrong, but any info on that would be much appreciated.
- Finally, how vaulable are the use of "crutch" sites, like the site map method above, or really any pages generated solely for SEO purposes?
I realize I have raised a lot of issues. Any help on any of them would be greatly appreciated. I hope it helps people like myself who have been thrown into SEO. Thank you.