Not too long ago a document was making the rounds of the Internet that appeared to be the newest official Google Quality Guidelines document.  This document, most people hoped, would hold the secrets to ranking well within Google.

Now, you might wonder how this can happen.  After all, Google is especially secretive about what it takes to rank well within their site so how could it possibly be that the document used by Google Raters made it’s way online?  Was it a fake?  A distraction?  Something conjured up by a savvy online marketer to gain exposure?  Sounds very conspiracy-theorist doesn’t it?

Well, it’s actually not as exciting as one might think.  The fact is, Google hires folks from all around the world to do work for them and help them detect whether or not a particular web site should be ranked where it is based upon a variety of factors.  These people that Google hires, receive a document that tells them what specifically to look for and how to determine the merits of a site.  Due to the vast numbers of people who do this work, it’s not unheard of for one of these documents to make its way online.

The document (which has since been taken down online at the request of Google), contained an area that talked about spam; and how to determine what should be flagged as spam and what should not.

Whenever one of Quality Raters took a look at a website, it is their job to mark a site as:

• Spam
• Not Spam
• Maybe Spam

Pretty basic right?

The criteria for marking a web page as spam should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been in the industry for even as little as a few months.  It’s really very basic knowledge, but just to clear up any confusion, here are the definite “no-no’s” when it comes to your own site (and which you can also read here:  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3).

• Don’t use cloaking;
• Don’t use hidden text;
• Don’t use framed pages;
• Don’t keyword-stuff your URL’s;
• Don’t use JavaScript Redirects
• Etc.

Again, pretty common sense stuff.

But, what you don’t see here is that according to this document, Google Raters are to mark pages without any useful content and designed only to make money, as spam.

There’s no doubt that you’ve come across these pages yourself.  These are the ones that have domains parked on them and where there is nothing more than a listing of ads; pages that are chock full of ads that have very little unique content on them, etc.

And yes, it should be noted that even if a site is attempting to generate income using AdSense ads (Google’s own product), that this will likely be marked as spam as well.

As a matter of fact, the blatant abuse of this has likely prompted Google to recently announce at PubCon that they (Google) will be taking a look at content that is immediately above the fold on a web page.  The assumptions are that Google will begin to penalize those sites that show ad-related content above the fold; above the fold meaning the content you can see on a web page without needing to scroll down.

Which brings me back to the whole point of the title of this post.  Does it make a difference in where you rank if you aren’t trying to sell anything?

Well, yes, and no.  We don’t know how sites are going to be affected by this new rule of having ads above the fold, but it is unlikely that major retailers who say, show products at the top of their pages in response to a specific product query, will not be penalized.

On the other hand, if a site is nothing more than a few bits and pieces of content yet chock-full of ads, especially ads above the fold, then it can be assumed that you would be penalized.   We’ll all just have to wait and see how it plays out but for now, if you’re one of the ones who has advertising listed above the useful content on your site, it would be advised to move those ads to a different location.

First off, what are “rich snippets”?  Actually, it’s better to show you rather than just tell you.

Here, I’ve done a search for “peanut butter cookie recipes”.  The arrows in the image below show you how the search engines display these rich snippets.  In the first example, we have reviews of the recipe as well as links off to other recipes on the same site.  The last example shows us the sitelinks of the page.

It’s been observed that sites that make use of these snippets are out-ranking their competitors.  The bottom line is, if your site / business has reviews, prices, products, etc., then it would be extremely advantageous for you to use these rich snippets on your own site.  Not only does it appear to have an advantage where ranking is concerned but as you can tell with the image above, it makes these listings stand out from the rest.

While getting into all of the separate details on how to mark up your site so that it displays these rich snippets would be extremely time-consuming, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing have all partnered up to give you a site that literally contains everything you need to know about them.  The site is at http://schema.org/ and they give you specific examples along with a variety of ideas that you can use including:

• Book
• Movie
• Event
• Organization
• Person
• Local Business
• Product
• Offer
• and so, so much more.

Finally, Google gives you a rich-snippet testing tool at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to help make sure that you’re on the right track.

Now, all this being said, it is important to note that just because your site is using these snippets, doesn’t mean that they’ll automatically display in the search results.  There are a few tests that your site needs to go through in order to qualify – two important ones are

• You can’t have any errors on your site.
• You can’t hide any snippets to help you rank better.

To be honest, the use of rich snippets can be an entire book in and of itself but just know that if you implement these on your own site, and it gets the approval nod from Google, you definitely have an advantage in the search engines – while it’s no guarantee that you’ll rank better, if you can draw more eyeballs to your listing, the better off you’ll be all the way around.

I cannot say enough good things about SEOmoz.  Click here using this special link to get 30 days for free.

The video focuses on ways to get links and mentions for your own site.  Here are some of the tips that Rand offers:

• Give away your writing!  Guest post for others by doing a search in Google for “guest author or guest writer or guest blogger or guest contributor” – it’s also helpful to include your keywords as well to find sources you can write for.  ”Guest Blogger + Dog Training” for example.  Also, Rand suggests using Google blog search and Google discussion search.  Both great resources for places to promote your writing.
• Give away your videos.  In this video Rand recommends Wistia which actually gives you details on what your viewing audience is doing (a must have when you want to know if someone is bored to tears or if they have to keep going back and forth to re-watch something).   What Rand doesn’t mention in the video is that you must be certain your videos are branded.  Whether you use Wistia or another service such as YouTube, your brand must be somewhere on that video so that others can recognize you.
• Give away your product.  If you give something of yours away you can ask others to cover it or talk about it.  Be wary of saying “Hey, here’s my product, could you link to it?”
• Similar to giving away your product is giving away your time.  Offer to do something pro-bono and you could have not only a very happy client but someone who will sing your praises, link to you, and mention you quite often.
• Give away your contact details.  So often you’ll see folks post helpful information, whether in forums, blog posts, on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and yet, if the person is interested in what you have to say, there’s no way for them to contact you.  Make this as public as possible!
• Be sure you allow your images to be used.  You can add a creative commons license to them, etc.  But just be sure you’re getting the credit.  (This is really paraphrased – the video will give you more details).
• Within your RSS feed, you have the ability to publish only partial feeds or full ones.  Choose the full feed.    Contents of feeds get used quite often and it’s best to have the full feed available for someone.  Also, when you do link within your own feed, use the full url including the http:// portion – otherwise that republished content won’t link back to you.
• It’s likely you’ve collected data on your site visitors, etc.  This data may be extremely valuable to others.  But, you won’t know until you ask.  Refer to the end of the video for more details on this but suffice it to say, you can reach out to others whom you think may find your data valuable and then see if they’d be interested in receiving it.

After all, if you’re linking to one of your own sites, you want any PageRank to pass along to your own site, you need to be especially careful when you’re choosing a URL shortener so that this does in fact occur.

This has been a question in many SEO’s minds for quite some time.  Before Google started indexing sites like Twitter, it really wasn’t all that big of a deal.  But now that Twitter, as well as many other sites like them are getting indexed more and more frequently, it’s important that if a page does follow a link that the shortener that was used passes along that PageRank.

That said, it should be noted that Twitter does not follow links – therefore the PageRank theory is null and void in this case but this does not mean that other services like Twitter don’t employ the same tactic.  I use them as an example only because it’s one of the more well-known micro-blogging platforms online.  As a matter of fact, there are many, many places where you would employ the use of a URL shortener and when you do, you want to make certain that you are getting any and all PageRank passed on to you.

Most URL shorteners are pretty good at this and do it the correct way by using a 301 redirect.  In case you’re still unsure which one to use, in the video below Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam team specifically says that shorteners such as bit.ly and goo.gl do in fact employ a 301 redirect.

Here’s the question that came into Matt and his answer on the topic:

In a recent Google Webmaster Help video (see below), Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam Team answers one of the most popular questions that many websites have and that is “Does Google use Twitter and Facebook Links as a ranking signal?”  The definitive answer, from Matt is “Yes”.

To be honest, this rather surprised me because rarely have I ever heard Matt answer a question with such forthright authority.  Usually the answer is more along the lines of “Yes, but…” with all kinds of subjective material added to the answer; making it virtually impossible to detect if what you’re doing yourself actually matters at all.

This question stemmed from a recent article written by Danny Sullivan Editor-in-Chief at Search Engine Land.

In this article (which is a great read by the way), Danny offers responses by both Bing and Google on specific questions such as:

1. If a link is retweeted or referenced a lot in Twitter, do you count this as a ranking signal?
2. Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets?
3. Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending upon who Tweeted it?
4. Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook?
5. Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight on Facebook depending upon who posted the link?

It’s very interesting to read the answers and even more interesting to associate it with your own activity on both of these social networks.

Part of the curiosity with Twitter in particular, is because Twitter does not follow links.  They used to, but I believe it was back in 2009 some time, they added nofollow to all of their links.

What this means is that even though you’re tweeting a link and others may retweet it, the “nofollow” portion of that link is telling the search engines “Hey, if you see this link, don’t follow it to its destination and give that destination credit for it.”

But what’s so much more important here is what Danny has referred to as “SocialRank”.  And I am totally on board with him here…let me explain…

Years (and I mean years ago) when Google especially was gaining ground as the “go to” search engine, people realized that you could manipulate the rankings by:

1. Stuffing a bunch of keywords into your meta keywords tag (and if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter any more anyway).
2. Stuffing your page full of keywords in order to rank well for the keyword you were after.
3. Hiding text on the page in the same color as the page background so that the search engines could read it but your site visitors couldn’t.

When this failed to work any longer, people realized that links were a major factor in where you ranked.  And so…reciprocal linking came along (that’s when you trade links with someone else in an effort to help increase the importance of your website.)

Again, Google soon realized that this wasn’t really a *true* indicator of authority and so it began discounting these kinds of links.

So it became important to try and get links to your website from other important websites (“important” as deemed by Google), in order to help your own website ranking.  This “importance” at least in reference to Google is referred to as PageRank which you can see by installing the Google Toolbar within your browser.

But…it’s also important to understand that the PageRank that you see in your browser for a web page is NOT the *true* PageRank of a web page or website.  As a matter of fact, it’s quite old information.  According to Google PageRank Data, the last time it was updated was April 2, 2010 (it’s now late December 2010).  So…over 8 months ago.

The fact is, Google updates this internally quite often but what you may be looking at today is in fact, 8 months old.

So, all this comes down to this:  Google has hundreds of ranking factors that determine where to place you within it’s search results and for what given terms.  People know a little about how Google determines importance of your web pages, but like all indicators that we at least know of, it can all be manipulated.  Whether or not you choose to manipulate it is up to your own moral standards, but the one thing that is extremely difficult to manipulate is your online reputation.

Who believes you?  Who trusts what you say?  Who retweets your links?  Et cetera, et cetera…

This is what Danny refers to within his article.  And I truly believe that this is the wave of the future for websites and their owners; simply because it is so difficult to fake.  If people trust you, they’ll read more of your stuff.  If you offer valuable information, you’ll be talked about more online, and so on.

Consider a great example of Mari Smith who is trusted by thousands of people online for her information and advice on how to use Facebook effectively.  She is a fantastic example of how SocialRank likely works.  I guarantee that if Mari posts a link, it’s retweeted and shared on Facebook a thousand times over.  She has “SocialRank”.

Take the time to read the article by Danny – I think you’ll find it very enlightening.

P.S.  The video by Matt is below…

A New ONLINE SEO Report:
From One Gutsy Internet Home Business Owner to Another

During a recession like this, learning about how to increase profits is often the most rewarding experience for experienced business leader.

How does this happen? Amazingly, it is no surprise that the absolute top way that is manifested for the corporate executive improve the bottom line is to publish and market a book and become a bestselling author.

Wonderful, you’ve made the decision to publish and market a book. Congratulations, success is in your future! A book can give you recognition and help you to attract more clients to your business. If such things are your only reasons, then it would be important to learn to market your book fast. But you might miss one of the best reasons for having a book if you just concentrate on getting it done fast. That reason is to make money

Getting an eternal bestseller credential and attracting more clients can actually be achieved quicker and easier says book business expert DrProactive Randy Gilbert, if you “slow down and take some time to create a bestselling business around your book”. He says that you will be rewarded with an outstandingbook, higher profits, and a passive income that far exceeds what you would have otherwise made with just a book.

It can make you a bestselling author, and a millionaire at the same time, which is why DrProactive named “bestselling business”. Learning how to write and market a book and building a business around it at the same time is crucial.

No matter what subject your book is about, there are several ingredients that are helpful when marketing your book. If you want to sell lots of copies and make it a bestseller, then some features are essential. Everyone knows that in order for your book to be sold in retail stores, it must have an EAN barcode, an ISBN number, and certain bindings and features.

However, if you add certain less well known features to your book, you will hugely expand your book’s marketability. Did you know that there are a few common features in almost every New York Times bestseller? You can take advantage of the marketing research of the giant publishing houses to help your own book sell more copies.

Listed below are the top 7 features that will make it much easier to promote and market your book into becoming a bestseller. When you design these features into your book (right from the beginning), you will market your book faster and better than other authors who fail to do so.

Feature 1 – Begin with a powerful theme and grow it. Give your book a zesty title that grabs attention. Write your book outline to be specific about what will attract the right people to your book. Don’t just grab a bunch of your best ideas and slap a cover on it. That will get you a book, but it won’t be a bestseller. You want something that you (and others) will be proud to promote.

Feature 2 – Become known as the top expert by collecting stories from others. Ask people in your field to share a personal story with a self-help element relating to something in your outline. You’ll reach a bigger audience if each story provides benefits and helps the reader to see how they could apply the lesson to their own situation. Important resources, specific examples, strategies, tips, and insider secrets are things you should add to every story, whether it be yours or others.

Feature 3 – You can build in marketing value by quoting the top people in your field. Choose the quotes wisely so that they match the theme of each of your sections. Consider using quotes from “live” people who might be flattered enough so that they tell others to buy it and help with promoting your book to their customer list. And, they might even buy some for themselves to give away to colleagues and special clients.

Feature 4 – Proactively seek out interviews and testimonials, and find the right person to do the Foreword. Interview other experts if you can and use the opportunity to get relevant examples for your section of the book and audio clips for promotion. Your book will have greater credibility by including interviews and endorsements from experts.

Feature 5 – Give credit to the individuals and groups who helped create the book. You can also try to find a company to cover the costs in return for notable attention in your book. And it is often very helpful to seek out a sponsor to partner with in your promotion.

Feature 6 – Add an index so that your book is easier to read and use. This feature will make your book much easier to sell to libraries which will enlarge your readership and help you draw more customers to your website. Yet this feature is often ignored in the book writing process.

Feature 7 – Make a list of associations, organizations, services, agencies, and other professionsals in fields around the subject of your book, and include it in your book as a topical rolodex in the resource section of your book. This feature will help increase your audience, and give those listed in the rolodex a reason to help you distribute and promote the book.

Bonus Feature – Have a bibliography in your book. Many people want to buy copies of books that reference their own book in a bibliography. Also, it makes your book more attractive those doing research. Be sure to include the books from any experts who contributed stories, interviews, or examples.

SUMMARY:

Add in as many of the above features as possible to your book. Put emphasis on the features that cause other people to want to help promote the book for their own sake. This makes the Law of Reciprocity work for your benefit because as they are helping themselves, they are also helping you, and vice versa.

If you need help to know more about write and market a book that makes money and becomes a bestseller, then you must use the recipe that the top 1% use to reach that goal. Make a decision to use the Key Factors outlined above and keep your eye on the ball, and you’ll hit a home run every time.

Ideally, their hope is that if they link all of the smaller niche websites to the main website, that this will give that main website more credibility in the search engines.

This is what’s called a “Mini-Net”.  A set of websites that one person owns and that are all inter-linked together.

Let’s take an example shall we?

Let’s say Webmaster Joe likes the topic of hair removal.  So he builds a website that focuses on laser hair removal.  But, Webmaster Joe has also learned that if you build other, smaller websites that talk about a nichier (is that a word?) topic yet one still related to the main overall topic, and then link them together that this will help where his main website is listed in the search engines.

So Webmaster Joe creates 5 more websites all on similar but less competitive terms:

• cosmetic hair removal
• skin hair removal
• upper lip hair removal
• affordable hair removal
• hair removal surgery

These smaller, nichier sites aren’t high-quality by any means but they all have an article or two on them about the main keyword phrase they’re focused on.

The point of these additional sites is not to have them rank well but to have the main website that talks about Laser Hair Removal rank well which is his money phrase.

So Webmaster Joe visits a hosting company (HostGator is a good one that I personally recommend) and purchases a shared hosting package that allows him to have multiple websites on the same IP address.

What this means is that Webmaster Joe can add as many websites as he wants to his hosting account; doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that they’re all on the same IP address.

This is important because when search engines like Google come to pay a visit to all of these websites, they’ll see that they’re all linked together but they also all reside on the same IP address which diminishes their importance.

Think of it like this:

Let’s say that someone recommends a movie to you.  Later, five other people recommend that same exact movie to you so you start to think “Wow!  This must be a really great movie!”.  You find out later that all of these five people live in the same house, maybe they’re related to one another maybe not.  The point is, the only time you’ve gotten a recommendation to see the movie was from someone who lived in that house.

All of a sudden, that recommendation doesn’t seem so great does it?

The search engines feel the same way with websites.  Obviously if there are multiple websites all linking to one place, but all of those links reside at the same address (the IP address) of the site they’re linking to, then all of a sudden, it doesn’t look so great to the search engines.

And will eventually get you penalized.  Can I say that for certain?  Can I guarantee that?  Obviously, no, since I don’t run the search engines but I can tell you this.  It’s not something that I would recommend you trying during your online career…unless you’re into that kind of thing.

The bottom line is, a mini-net is nothing more than a group of websites usually all owned by the same website owner that link to one another in the hopes of getting better rankings for those websites.

Do these mini-nets always reside on the same IP addresses?  Obviously, no.  The savvy website owners have come to realize that this will get them penalized in the search engines, and so they’ve scoped out ways of getting around this IP issue.

Does that always work?  No.  As a matter of fact, it borders on “black hat seo” techniques.  Or in other words those techniques that the search engines frown upon.

But, that’s not the purpose of this post.  This post is to explain to you what a mini-net is and why people use it.

As always, leave your comments if you feel up to it

Transcript

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is “How do I get my site into Google?” And the process is a very easy and simple one.

There’s actually one of two ways to get your site found by Google.  The first way is to have another website that is already listed in Google link to you.  This can be done in various ways:

• If you’re a regular on a forum in the same industry that your website is about, you can add your new website in your signature.  Forums, especially active forums, tend to get indexed quite regularly.
• You can write an article on the same topic as your website and submit that article to places like EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com.  Both of these places get visited very often by Google.
• You can leave a real (not spammy) comment on a regularly visited blog.  Typically when you leave blog comments, the blog owner allows you to add your website URL.  Be sure however that the blog is a “do follow” blog.  That is, they allow the search engines to follow the links off of their site back to the site source.  Click here for a list of do follow blogs.

The second way to get your site indexed by Google is to submit your sitemap to them.  A sitemap file is a list of all the links contained on your website and is Google’s preferred way of finding and indexing your website.

Sitemaps are XML web pages that are created for the purpose of letting the search engines know about all of the pages on your website and they’re essential for getting all of your web pages indexed in a search engine.

Although XML format of a web page might sound a little intimidating, you’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of services online that will create one for you.  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com is one of them.

Once you have a good set of pages created for your website, you can simply tell xml-sitemaps to create a sitemap file for you which you can then move to your web host.  Once there, you’ll want to create a Google Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and then submit the sitemap URL to Google.  This way, Google will be notified that you have submitted a sitemap and will generally visit that page within 24 hours; oftentimes less.  Aside from a search engine robot finding one of your pages through a link, this is one of the best ways to notify Google that you have a new website with content.

While Google doesn’t always guarantee that they’ll crawl your sitemap, you’ll generally find that they do so within 24 hours of you submitting the sitemap to them.

In our Premium BoneheadSEO membership, I discuss Google’s Webmaster Tools in depth.  Visit http://BoneheadSEO.com for more information.

Using either or both of these ways will get your site indexed in Google.

Spam is there in our email, and in our blog comments.  But thankfully, we can control our email – marking something as spam (note this is not the same thing as marking something as *spam* if you simply didn’t feel like reading today) and we as site owners, especially those who have blogs, can moderate the comments so that you don’t get those nasty Viagra links everyone just loves *chuckles*.

But, with the Google SideWiki … drumroll please…you CAN’T control what spammy comments are made even though it appears as though it resides on your own site!

Let me explain…

If you have the new Google toolbar installed, you will have an option in that toolbar called “SideWiki”.  If you click on that SideWiki button, a window to your left will open up and you can then leave any kind of comment you wish in that box.

Now, granted, you have to sign into your Google account to leave a comment in a site’s SideWiki area but anyone and their brother can sign up for a Google account.  Big deal.

Once you’re signed in, you can then leave a comment on that website (and note, it does not have to be a blog.  It can be any website whatsoever.)  And those comments can be good, bad, indifferent, nonsense, jokes, whatever.

Now, most people will (hopefully) adhere to that unspoken rule to be “an adult” online and actually leave helpful comments – even if some are bad, there is such a thing as constructive criticism.  But it’s the “others” that you, as a website owner should be concerned with.

You see, you, as a site owner have absolutely no control over what shows up in that Sidewiki.  (is your mouth hanging open in astonishment yet?)

Scary isn’t it?

Anyone, anywhere, at any point in time now has the ability to make comments on your website and you, as the site owner, have no say in what’s there.

There’s no place in Google where you can choose to opt-out of having this SideWiki show up on your site, and for those who are less familiar with how the SideWiki works, your typical website visitor will most certainly believe that you chose to have those comments there, good, bad or indifferent.

You can report a Sidewiki comment to Google, but this doesn’t mean that they’ll rush right out and remove it for you…frankly I think that Google is getting too big for it’s britches and for some reason believes that IT knows better than the site owners themselves.

Say, that reminds me of something…oh yeah, the Borg.

So, all that said, here’s a somewhat bright side (kind of).

In the Google Webmaster Help forum, there is a link to a JavaScript file which states that using the file will block those who try to use Sidewiki on your site.

BE WARNED!  I have not used this file – I don’t know if it works or not, and I also have no idea of any SEO implications it might have.  But it’s there, if you decide to use it.

Since it blocks those who try to use SideWiki on your site, this will hold true for both good and bad comments – so use it at your own risk.

If I get ballsy enough, I’ll toss it in on one of my sites to see if it makes a difference at all for SEO purposes – but, in the event that you already have good rankings on a site, I wouldn’t go using it.

Hopefully, Google will come to their senses and allow website owners to moderate the commentary there themselves, or, better yet, do away with it all-together.

Anyhow, there you go.  Have a great day!

You can view the videos by clicking on the SEO Videos link at the top of the page.  There are 9 videos in all.

Enjoy!