Re: My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please

On Sun, 11 May 2008 15:29:11 -0700 (PDT), Prisoner at War put finger
to keyboard and typed:

>On May 11, 4:19 pm, Mark Goodge <use...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> No, and the guidelines I've referred to explicitly say otherwise.
>>
>> To summarise Google's guidelines, ranking is all about three things:
>>
>> 1. Content
>
>I'm curiously about this point: google doesn't actually explain how
>their bots determine "good content"...now I can imagine them using
>some kind of text string comparison algorithm to test for originality
>of content, but unless "good" simply means "original," how would their
>bots know anything about content??

Mostly, yes, it's about being original.

>> 2. Structure
>
>Not entirely sure I understand this point; that google advisory talks
>about their bots choking on certain things but other than flash
>animation and such I'm not sure why a billion-dollar company like
>google doesn't just develop better bots instead of forcing people who
>have otherwise valid HTML to keep an eye out for how google programmed
>their bots!

Two rasons: a) it's a lot harder than you seem to think to develop
bots capable of parsing content from images, client-side scripting,
etc, and b) Google's guidelines are nothing more than a restatement of
the W3C guidelines here and merely reflect what is good programming
practice. A website that meets Google's requirements will also be more
likely to have valid HTML/CSS and be more accessible to human users as
well as spiders. So there's no sensible reason to want to do things
differently to the way Google suggest, and therefore there's no reason
why Google should want to develop algorithms to index sites that don't
at least try to adhere to published standards.

Google won't punish you for simply having a few typos or a bit of bad
HTML syntax in your pages - even the best sites often fail validation
here and there - but the less valid and accessible your code becomes,
the harder it is for Google to index it.

>> 3. Popularity
>>
>> The first two are entirely under your own control. They're also the
>> two that can't be faked - if your structure looks good, then it is
>> good; if your content looks good, then it is good. "White hat" SEO is
>> all about getting these right; it's about making sure that your
>> content really is good and your structure really is good. But getting
>> these right isn't just about SEO, it's also about making your site
>> useful and accessible to your target users. So it's something you
>> should be doing anyway, as a fundamental part of your website design
>> and authoring.
>
>Yes, certainly, but I fear we're getting into chicken-or-egg territory
>here: my concern is that people won't find my site, whereas you seem
>to be saying that search engines will somehow "automatically" wind up
>listing me if my site is useful and accessible...my understanding is
>that those factors, utility and accessibility, are what keeps them on
>my site (and coming back for more), but my issue is how to get them to
>know about my site in the first place, and that's about SERP and PR,
>isn't it...I know I can't be bothered to look beyond the Top 5 results
>oftentimes, much even the Top Ten or the next SERP....

You can get your site spidered initally by telling Google about it.
That's what the "add my site" page is for:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Even if you don't do that, it only takes *one* link from an
already-indexed page to get your site listed. Additional inbound links
don't affect the speed at which your site is listed; they merely
affect the pagerank algorithm for ranking the site.

>> The third is the hard one, because you can't directly control who else
>> links to your site. Manipulating apparent link popularity, therefore,
>> is the focus of most "black hat" SEO, because there is scope for this
>> aspect of ranking to be faked by means of things like link farms,
>> gateway pages, referer spam, etc. Some of these methods can be very
>> effective, at least in the short term (referer spam in particular was
>> hugely effective until people wised up to it), but they're not
>> reliable in the long run as the search engines develop algorithms to
>> weed them out.
>
>Yes, I certainly don't plan on using any such tactics.  As a matter of
>fact, aside from certain (outdated) principles like keyword density, I
>haven't a clue about SEO.
>
>Do you do anything to help your sites list highly on google?

I follow the first two guidelines. It seems to work. Google for
"motorway services" and "british surnames" and my sites are top, both
times.

Mark
-- 
Pointless waffle (again) at http://mark.x.tc
"Time is tickin' and we can't go back"