Seo Melbourne, Search Engine Optimisation Services

To find out what Google thinks about your website, perform a “similar” search for your domain. Enter the following in Google’s search box:

related:www.domain.com/ ~domain.com

Replace domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no spacer after the colon. On the result page, Google will show you websites that it finds related to your site. If the websites on the search result page are related to your website then everything is okay. If the websites are about totally different topics, then you have a problem and Google probably won’t display your website in the search results for the right keywords.

Does Google care about the position of a web page on your server? Does it make a difference if a web page is in the root directory of your website or in a sub directory? How does your URL structure influence the position of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Trailing slashes and sub directories

A popular assumption is that Google prefers pages that are in the root directory of a website. If an URL contains many trailing slashes (meaning the page is placed in a sub-sub-directory) then Google might not think that the page is important in relation to the other pages. Although this statement is often repeated in SEO forums, it is probably not true.

The visibility of a web page counts, not its position

If a web page is linked throughout your website and if the page has inbound links then the web page will be indexed and ranked by Google without any problems. Most web pages on today’s websites are created dynamically and the URL that is displayed in a web browser presents only a virtual site structure that is not really available on the server. As there are no real folders on the server, search engines won’t find a valuable ranking signal if they look at things like presence or absence of directories.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to show search engines that a page on your website is important, link to it from many other pages of your website so that it can easily be found. A page that gets many links (both from your own website and from other websites) will get the attention that it deserves from Google’s indexing robot. When you should care about the structure of your URLs

1. URL stripping can cause problems

Rumor has it that Google uses URL stripping to index web pages. That means that Google shortens the path to an URL to find new pages on a site. For example, “www.example.com/folder/keyword.htm” would be shortened to “www.example.com/folder/”. If you use dynamically created URLs then you should make sure that all virtual folders return real web pages a “404 not found” pages. Otherwise, Google might think that you have many faulty pages and/or that your website has a low quality.

2. Shorter URLs can be better for your website visitors

Although most web surfers don’t pay attention to the URL in the browser address bar, shorter URLs can enhance the user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and they can improve the direct type-in traffic.

3. Short URLs get more clicks

A search marketing study found out that web surfers clicked short URLs twice as often as long URLs in Google’s search results. Long URLs are cut off in Google search engine result pages. Web surfers cannot see where they are going to go and this can decrease the click-through rate.

4. The URLs of your web pages can contain your keywords

The words that appear in the URL of a web page can influence the position of the web page for these words. For that reason, it can make sense to rewrite your URLs so that they include the keywords for which you want to have high rankings.

These are pages in your web site that are visible only to a search crawler. Hidden pages can also lead to issues like hidden keywords and hidden links. Keywords and links help to boost your search rankings, so many people try to capitalize on these requirements by hiding them within the body of a web page, sometimes in a font color that perfectly matches the site background.

There’s no way around the issue of hidden pages. If you have a web site and it contains hidden pages, it’s just a matter of time before the crawler figures out that the content is part of a hidden SEO strategy. Once that’s determined by the crawler, your site ranking will drop drastically.

Reason 1:
Your robots.txt file is damaged or it contains a typo. If search engine robots misinterpret your robots.txt file, they might completely ignore your web pages. Double check your robots.txt file and make sure that you use the disallow parameter only for web pages that you really don’t want to have indexed.

Reason 2:
Your URLs contain too many variables. URLs with many variables can cause problems with search engine robots. If your URLs contain too many variables, search engine robots might ignore your pages. Here’s Google’s official statement about web pages with many variables: “Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

Reason 3: You use session IDs in your URLs. Many search engines don’t index URLs that contain session IDs because they can lead to duplicate content problems. If possible, avoid session IDs in your URLs. Better use cookies to store session IDs.

Reason 4: Your web pages contain too much code. Of course, your web pages can contain JavaScript code, CSS code and other script code that is not directly related to your content. Visit your website with a web browser and select “View source” or “View HTML source”. If it is difficult for you to spot the actual content of your website then search engines might also have difficulty to parse your pages.

Reason 5: Your website navigation causes problems. Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menus cannot be parsed by most search engine robots. Flash or AJAX menus are even worse when it comes to website navigation. As mentioned above, search engine robots are very simple programs. They can follow HTML links, all other links can cause problems.

Optimized web page content and good inbound links are crucial for high search engine rankings. However, the best content and the best links won’t help you much if search engines cannot index your pages.Make sure that search engine spiders can index your web pages without problems so that your web pages can get the rankings they deserve.
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Link Farms

One unsuccessful method of increasing linkpopularity is by becoming part of a “linkfarm.” Link farms are networks of sites that have all agreed to link to one another. Each of the sites in the link farm has a page containing links to all the other sites that are part of the farm. One of the problems with this strategy is that the content of the sites that are linked together does not necessarily share any common theme. Therefore, even though your site may have a seemingly high link popularity score,most of the links carry very little weight since they lack relevancy to your site.

Some link farms have tried to improve on this by categorizing their members and only establishingl inks between members that have related content. While this is an improvement,it still does not address the core issue—a link farm is an artificial method of improving link popularity,and most search engines have mechanisms in place to either ignore or actually penalize link farm participants.

FFA Sites

Another worthless link popularity strategy involves submitting your site to FFA(FreeForAll)sites. These websites allow you to submit your site to them for free and will display your link on their pages. The idea is that users will go to these pages simply to find links to websites they might want to visit. In theory,this should help to increase your link popularity,since links to your site could potentially appear on thousands of other sites. However,these FFA pages only display a small number of links at onetime. As new website links are submitted, the older ones are removed without notification. Since it’s a free service,new links are constantly be ingadded. The chances that your link will stay on these pages for any significant amount of time are pretty slim. Many of the software submitters that advertise submitting to thousands of search engines are actually submitting to FFA sites. The problem is that since so many people use these software tools,you would constantly need to submit your site, possibly even hourly, for the FFAs to be of any benefit to your site.

Additionally,it’s unlikely that the content on an FFA site would have any relationship what so ever to the content of your site. Since the links are completely non relevant, they are given very little weight by search engines. You would probably be better off having 25 highly relevant links to your site than 1,000 non relevant links.

The worst part of this system is your required reciprocation for the service. FFA sites are actually e-mail address collection engines. They require you to give them your e-mail address when you submit your site. Then they sell your address to e-mail marketing companies,and you receive a deluge of spam mail that never stops.