SEO Experiments

A recent article by the Google Operating System blog resulted in quite a lot of excitement in the SEO world although I'm not entirely sure why. The observation that the author of the article shared is that Google is promoting new pages to the top of the SERPs despite that new content not having any authority because it is new. This phenomenon is 6 months old though and that's why I'm confused about the current excitement. I've seen new posts go to the top of the SERPs right after they were published including a recent experiment with auto-generated content. Such news posts would then drop away after a few days and then follow the normal process of climbing the rankings just like any other page.

Folder depth comes up every now and again as a ranking factor (albeit a small one). The most recent mention is in a list of 22 considerations for improving natural search performance from Search Insider (written by Rob Garner of iCrossing). Some of the items he listed are accepted by the majority, but one in particular mentions folder depth as being an obstacle to search engines without additional support or detail. And so I'm taking it upon myself to see just how search engines handle folder depth.

Note: The following text is auto-generated. It has been posted here as a test. Feel free to read this to get a sense of the state of free content generators, but you'll quickly see that despite there being a lot of words, taken as a whole it's all meaningless. I'm curious to see if this gibberish can obtain rankings. For this test, the target phrase is SEO Services Company which has about 1 million competing sites in Google. I'll add updates about rankings to the bottom of the article.

Google recently introduced an interesting feature to their Webmaster Tools console. With this option you can specify the geographic region for which a web site, sub-domain, or sub-folder is most relevant. This is particular useful for companies that have already dropped the SEO ball and chose to not register the country-specific top-level-domains (TLDs) for the international versions of their sites.

About 5 weeks ago I submitted an article to another site (the name of which is purposefully not written) on SEO strategy. I've now posted that same article on this site to see if I can rank better than the other site.

At the end of December I moved a bunch of SEO content from one blog to the one you're reading now. I made that move because SEO was taking over my other blog which originally had a broader technology focus including software development, project management, and IT in general. This blog, SearchGrit, focus on just SEO and SEM.

Images have always posed a challenge for search engine optimizers. The problem, of course, is that search engines can't read the text on images. And while the ideal is to have text as plain HTML, sometimes it's necessary to use images. So how do you tell search engines what content is in the image and therefore have pages rank well for such content?

JavaScript allows web developers to have their web pages react to user actions e.g. cascading menus. And despite the many incompatibilities between different browsers, the use of JavaScript is now ubiquitous and by all accounts a successful technology. However, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript is problematic.

When changing page names on an existing site the typical advice is to setup a 301 permanent redirect from the old page to the new page. The idea behind this technique is to ensure that search engines update their databases accordingly. Ideally, the search engines will also pass on any existing trust from the old page to the new page.