I recently received another please help email from a gentleman named Ian who runs an adventure company in Tanzania. Ian was concerned about the effect of a variety of issues including indexing and link dampening, and was desperate for help. Unfortunately, he had read some fairly misleading articles in the past, so he had a somewhat mixed up understanding of the factors at play. Because I suspect hes not alone in his concern and confusion, I decided to publish the details of our discussion.
Ians website is http://www.betheladventure.co.uk. His email consisted of several questions. Ive listed each separately below, followed by my response.
Q: When I search for the number of backlinks to my site using link:www.betheladventure.co.uk, I see only 23 results. It appears that only 23 of our backlinks have survived Googles dampening link filter. Is there a time delay before they are credited to a site
A: Firstly, I think you may have the dampening link filter a little confused. According to the dampening link filter theory, your links are found and recognized by Google, you just dont get the full benefit from them until a given period of time has elapsed. The dampening link filter (if it exists) doesnt stop links from appearing in Googles results when you search for them. (The only reason your backlinks might not appear in a Google search is if Google hasnt yet indexed the pages containing the links.) Also, dont worry too much about things like the dampening link filter. For a start, its far from established / accepted fact. Many well regarded SEO experts dont believe in it at all. Furthermore, even if it does exist, it only affects those businesses with the budget to generate the huge numbers (hundreds or thousands probably) of links reputedly required to trigger it. If your number of backlinks suddenly increases by 20, thats no problem.
And secondly, dont believe everything Google tells you. By searching for link:www.betheladventure.co.uk, you generally only see a small percentage of actual links to your site. The best way to search for links is to search for just the URL www.bethaladventure.co.uk , then on the page that displays next, select Find web pages that contain the term www.bethaladventure.co.uk . When you do it this way, youll see all the pages that contain your URL. In most cases, the URL will be an active link (or at least it should be, and you should ask them to make it so). When you do this search, youll see that your site has about 169 links, not 23.
Q: Another question is about indexed pages (using site:www.betheladventure.co.uk). I understand this is a record of pages that have been changed. I had 32, it went down to 28 and now this morning it is down to 26. Do they only keep the pages for a month or is there more to the indexed pages than I realized
A: The number of indexed pages is simply the number of pages on your website that Google knows about. Theoretically, the only time the age of a page comes into play is when the page is too young*, i.e. Google spiders havent visited it yet, or Google hasnt updated its index. As to why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing, I suspect its just a temporary shift. The number of results in Googles searches varies pretty much constantly.
*Actually, technically speaking, it has been suggested that Google is not capable of indexing all 11.5 billion pages currently believed to be online (and the 10 million more that are added every day), and that as it indexes new pages, old pages are pushed out of the index. (This is a very rough description of the theory - if its happening at all, its likely to be far more complicated than this.) If this is happening, it may explain why the reported number of indexed pages is reducing. Although I think its a long shot, a good way to deal with it is to maintain high quality content, to keep increasing it, to keep generating backlinks, and to generate a which you can do automatically with a .
I know theres a lot of confusion surrounding these issues, so I hope youve found this exchange helpful.
Happy indexing!
Glenn Murray is an and . He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of . He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at . Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.
Recently I wrote an article discussing the merits of using free reprint articles on your website to increase your search engine ranking. (The article explained how Google loves lots of content on your site, how it loves that content to be regularly updated, and how you can get lots of keyword rich content for your site, absolutely free.
(See ArticlePr.com/Top_Ranking_Free.shtml.)
A few days after publishing, I received a please help email from Loren, a small business owner. Her , and she wanted some clarification on some of the points I made in my previous article. Lorens questions were good ones, and the answers important, so I thought Id publish them.
Q: We have a site for glass art. From your article, I gather that if I create an articles page with free reprint articles (written by other people) containing glass art type keywords, Ill get higher search rankings for those keywords Is that correct If so, what page comes up in the rankings The article itself or my Home page Also, if the article is being used by other webmasters, wont the search results also include their version of the article
A: In answer to your first question, yes, having an articles page with keyword rich free reprint articles generally has the effect of increasing your ranking. Google thinks highly of sites with a lot of helpful content, but it all comes down to whether other webmasters do as well. If your site contains heaps of helpful content about glass art, other webmasters in the glass art field (be they suppliers, distributors, or competitors) will be inclined to link to you simply because that link implies (to their customers) an association with you. That association boosts their credibility because youre obviously an authority in the field. It also may help their own search engine ranking a little as Google will then see them as part of an expert, credible community of sites (although the benefits of this for the linking site are minimal and arguable). So, in a roundabout way, Im saying that yes, article-based content can help your ranking, but only if it increases the likelihood that other related sites will link to yours.
As to the question of which page (the article itself or your home page) displays in search results, that really depends on which page has the most links to it*. If you have an article which is just THE BEST source of info in the industry, and everyones linking to it, that page will display in the search results. This is good because people who click on this result are interested specifically in the content of the article. So when your website displays, they get the information they want, and theyll be pleased. And assuming your navigation is clear and easy to use, it is likely theyll at least visit your home page.
And finally, yes, if other sites have published the same article, they may display in the results alongside you. The same is true of the original authors website. But its important to remember that, generally, the site with the highest PR will rank highest in the results, and its this site that most users will visit. You just need to work hard to make sure thats you! For an example of how this works, do a search for a very specific term related to the article of mine which youve obviously read. Search Google worldwide for Googles love affair with content (including the quotes). Youll notice that the no.1 result is actually a page on EzineArticles.com which contains my article. The page on my site (DivineWrite.com) containing the article only ranks no.2. This is because EzineArticles.com has a higher PR than DivineWrite.com, and overall, the keywords are considered more relevant to the rest of the content on their site than they are to mine. Obviously, this means that a good article can display several times in the same search results, but thats ok - it simply adds to the perceived authority of the article and the sites containing it.
* Above I say that the page that displays in the results will be the one with the most links to it. There are some complicating factors here. For instance, the text in a link plays a big part in how effective that link is. A link to your site that says Click here or check this site out, wont do you as much good as a link which says Glass Art sales or glass art creator. So if lots of people are linking to the page containing the article, but the text in their links is generic, then that page may not rank as highly as a page with fewer - more keyword rich - links pointing to it. Of course, this assumes that both pages are equally well optimized for search engines and for the same keyword phrases.
I know that the above is a very specific question and the answer is full of ifs and buts, but hopefully this exchange will answer a few questions for a few people.
Happy reprinting!
Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and . He is a director of article PR company, Article PR, and also of . He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at . Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for further details, more FREE articles, or to download his FREE SEO e-book.