I bought SEO Elite a few days ago and I learned a lot from it and reading my free ebook from SEO Elite. For instance, on page and off page optimization.
On page optimizing
page title: Keep it short, take out useless words.
header tags: I always forget to add H1 and it DOES matter.
alt tags: I always use alt tags but if using on an image, add “image” to the alt so it doesn’t look spammy.
meta tags: I try to reduce clutter and be specific.
bolding, italicizing, and underlining: Mix it up. Some bold, some italic, some underline.
placing keyword in the correct position on the page: Mostly in the body and because Google reads left to right.
Off page Optimizing
Who links to you and how they do it
What their PR is
Their Content as it relates to yours
The age of their site
I was really impressed with the software because it’s like three in one. Not only did it let me rank against others and spy on keywords but it also has a link exchange program built right into it so now I don’t have to use my separate software for asking good sites to trade with me. I can even email the potential partners from right inside the program. You can use your server info or anon.
I’ve bought a couple of SEO software programs for ranking and submission and I’m usually disappointed. I expected to be disappointed with this one too but I wasn’t. Even the free ebooks that came with it were good, offering really valuable material on how to have a good Google friendly site. It wasn’t filled with any blackhat SEO strategies, all of the tips were on the up and up so that impressed me. I got 3 bonus items with my order and all in all, I am very satisfied.
Speaking of Google… incidentally while I was reading up about good Google strategies, I got slapped with my first Google timeout or at least I think I did. I cant think of anything I did wrong because I am very careful but I went to one of my sites and it was a PR5 and now it’s a big fat zero!
I emailed Google from the webmaster console and asked them to please explain what it was I did but I don’t expect an answer. It really pissed me off because the site they slapped has never spammed anyone, never bought links, never ever practiced any tricks that would violate Google’s TOS and the sites it links to are all reputable sites.
I’m kind of stumped as to what I did wrong. I have heard others say before that they have seen their Google PR drop to zero and then come right back. Funny thing is, they are still indexing the site and just downloaded my sitemap again today AND I am still showing up number one for many of my search terms so what gives??!
If you are sent to the Google litter box don’t they remove you from the top search terms too? This whole experience has me thinking that someone needs to slap their ass with a lawsuit like people did Microsoft for hogging the whole market. You are basically at their mercy and their TOS are so ambiguous that it’s hard to know when you do something wrong.
If they are going to penalize really good reputable websites without so much as an explanation then what does that say about them? Monopolizing the market doesn’t mean you are invincible and someday I see people turning on their asses and I hope a big ass class action is out there somewhere waiting.
I read another article today that got me fired up. it was on Website magazine and spoke of how Google does this to MILLIONS of reputable businesses and then doesn’t offer a good way to resolve the issue, essentially costing businesses million of dollars.
if you are going to potentially cost a website millions of dollars, then shouldn’t your GOOGLE SLAP be something you should warn the site about or at least leave a message in their webmaster account??! It’s not rocket science. You’ve got all these algorithms that can do amazing things but you can create one to auto-inform people that they’ve been punished and give that entity a chance to respond or correct the issue?
What if it was an absolute error, like Google thinking you had a pop up issue but in reality it was pop ups intended for certain visitors to join or log in. What if they assumed you had hidden text but you didn’t and you could explain this? Nope, they just cut you off at the knees and could give a shit.
That’s why I always have tons of avenues for my sites. I never rely on Google solely for my traffic. I am always prepared for the unexpected and so should you.
Okay, this was my official Google rant and I hope they read it because if anyone ever does decide to go after them for monopolizing the market and then costing innocent businesses millions, I’ll be right there to bitch about it with them!
PS: Don’t bitch about Google on your site if you aren’t willing to take the punishment (I don’t want to be responsible for your PR nightmare). I have a valid reason to be mad as hell and I could care less if they ever PR this site. This is where I rant and I don’t expect this site to be a niche or anything like that. PR really means very little anyway but they’ve made it such a big deal that everyone thinks it’s a big deal.
All I ask is if you are going to suddenly slam a website then a simple warning or heads up would be nice. Think about it. What other business could do that and not be sued? The way their TOS are written and the fact that they disallow so many things, it’s almost impossible not to get slapped at one point or time. It’s like the mob. You are supposed to take the intimidation and sit quietly back. that’s just wrong.
To ad injury to insult, I spend a lot of money through them, I promo a lot of their ads, I utilize all of their tools and they should care about that. If we all stopped, where would they be? It’s worse than the damn cable company. At least I can get them on the phone!
I hope there is a shift soon in that they become more level with other search engines (again) because what they are doing isn’t fair. If there are sites out there that are blatant blackhat, spam or obvious abusers then shut them down, don’t penalize real businesses who may have made a mistake.
Use your damn common sense and some of your billions to put a support team together to handle these issues. If you work at Google and your job is to ban sites who you think did something wrong and you look at the site and see that it’s been around 10 years, never had even one issue or complaint, has always used all of your tools and advertising then consider advising that site that you THINK they may have done something wrong and to explain it to them. Then if I don’t, you have a valid reason to ban. You don’t ban first then make the innocent party wait months to get back where they were and lose a shit load of money!
Basically Google wants you to have a site that answers the needs of searchers but God forbid you do anything, even ethical, to increase the odds that you’ll be seen! What is wrong with ethically trying to have a better page ranking through adjusting your titles, tags, text etc. Well, apparently even that can get you banned.
Tags: advertisers, banned, blackhat, bonus, clutter, correct position, elite, free ebook, google, google PR rank removed, googleslam, header tags, link exchange program, marketing, meta, money, niche, optimization, page, potential partners, pr5, seo, server info, sitemaps, software programs, spy, timeout, tips, tools, traffic
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some questions, since you seem to be so good at this SEO thing - why wouldn’t I have ANY pagerank for my two Blogger blogs? - ie grayed out PR bar. Should I re-submit, and should I include the ‘www’ or not
and why is the H1 tag critical?
many thanks in anticipation of your assistance
Hi Jenny,
There can be a lot of reasons that the Google PR bar is grayed out. Sometimes its due to the Google update which can make your Google bar do funny things for several days. If I see that, I empty all my temp files, uninstall the bar, restart and reinstall it.
I have heard some webmasters say that there site’s PR is fine when they go to the site http://www.mysite.com but that it’s grayed out when they go to mysite.com without the http://www. You can try setting the association between the two in your Google webmaster tools.
For the H1 tag, I noticed when I forget to add it, especially to an important part of the page, Google doesn’t give it as much weight but if you add the H1 tag to the “meat” of what your page topic is, it gives it more weight.
I think it’s because Google determines that if you are giving a certain paragraph an H1, then it’s the most important part of the page. It also makes more sense to the search engine when reading the page, i.e, Heading, paragraph, footer etc. It looks more organized.
When I create a page, I make sure my first paragraph is the most powerful and I make sure to give it a H1 tag.
I did want to note Jenny, that I went to your site both with the www and without and both are grayed out.
I then typed site:http://www.mygreetings2u.blogspot.com/ into Google which will tell me how many of your pages are indexed by Google and there were none.
I’d really get working on the webmaster tools in Google webmaster central and be sure to include a sitemap so Google can find all your pages.
If it’s a new site, it can take a few weeks. LatestRant.com is new too, I just created it in Sept but all of my pages are indexed in Google (site:http://www.latestrant.com) which is where you need to start. Then you can get working on customizing great page titles etc.