A conversation with Google
A conversation with Google’s automated crawling software (or
“spider”), otherwise known as the Google-bot, might sound something like
this.
You: Excuse me, Google-bot, why doesn’t mysite.com rank well in Google for the keyword “help me?”
Googlebot: (raises a harried eyebrow and looks
annoyed) Where shall I begin? First of all, your code is a mess. You
have more lines of code than actual text and so many nested tables it
makes my head spin.
Your home page has a keyword density of 24 percent, which is
suspiciously high compared with the top-ranking sites in my database,
all of which average about seven percent. Are you keyword stuffing? You
know I don’t like doorway pages!
You only have 12 backlinks going to your home page that I recognize,
and six of them are from within your domain. The top ten sites have an
average of 300 backlinks in
my database and literally thousands of backlinks in Yahoo and MSN (not that I care about those hacks).
I’ve slapped you with a duplicate content penalty because I noticed
that www.anysite.com has the same exact home page copy as you. Don’t
look so surprised – I don’t care whose fault it is! On average, your
site is 60 percent slower to download than every other site in my
database and all your dynamic URLs are giving me a headache. Honestly,
do you really need so many variables?
You don’t have a site map so I can’t easily crawl through the pages
of your site, and all of your navigation is represented in images
without meaningful ALT tags, so I don’t know where I am when I click
away from the home page. Your link partners are abysmal – they are not
contextually relevant (which makes me suspicious) and you repeat the
same exact words in the linking text, which makes me think you’re doing
automated link swapping. I’ve been here three times in the past month
and your content has not been refreshed once. I can’t be bothered with
you and your stale, over-optimized content. I will be back to crawl you
again sometime this century.
You: (sobbing)
So you’ve been dismissed by the Googlebot. Get yourself a pint of Rocky Road and join the club.
{mospagebreak title=SEO Tools that Can Help You}
My theoretical response from Googlebot is based on a combination of
things that I look at as an SEO, and tools that are freely available
online to help me analyze a site. Google’s assessment of your site is
obviously proprietary, but there are certain things you can look for
when your site is in trouble and/or if you want to get a better ranking
on Google. These matters are fairly common knowledge in SEO circles.
Let’s break down the response a little.
Your Code is a Mess
- You have a lot of code compared with actual text (e.g., nested tables, JavaScript)
- Your keyword density is high compared with your competitors
- You’re keyword stuffing
- Your home page looks like a doorway page
- You have fewer backlinks than your competitors
- You have poor link partners
- You’re linking to a site that’s banned
- Your backlink text is repetitive
- You have no fresh content
- You have duplicate content
- Your site is slower to download compared to your competitors
- You have dynamic URLs
- You don’t have a site map
- Your navigation is image-based
- You have no ALT tags or meaningless ALT tags
The above list represents an amalgamation of variables that can
affect your positioning in Google. It does not represent the full list
of search engine faux pas that can be committed by unwary or unknowing
webmasters (e.g., frames and Flash are not mentioned here). It’s a good
start though. Simply diagnosing the problem is half the battle toward
getting better rankings ,and all of the above information is freely
available using tools that are either Web-based or part of your browser
software.
{mospagebreak title=Diagnostic Tools for Achieving a Better Ranking}
Problems:
- Your code is a mess
- You have a lot of code compared with actual text (e.g., nested tables, JavaScript
Google doesn’t see your Web page the way you do. Google sees the
code. Most browsers have a function that allows you to view the source
code of the page at which you are looking. Internet Explorer and
Firefox, for example, enable you to right click on the page and “view
source.” Pick a spot on any Web page and give it a try (make sure the
mouse pointer isn’t on an image).
Not too pretty, is it? Code that is messy or profuse can hinder your search positioning. A good way to clean it up is via
HTML Tidy, an open source program created by Dave Raggett and available via download from Sourceforge.net (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tidy). HTML Tidy cleans up the code produced by WYSIWYG editors or poor coders (like myself), and it’s completely free.
When viewing HTML code you’ll also want to evaluate the quantity of
code versus actual text. Search engines like Google seem to put more
weight on keywords the higher they are in the HTML document. If your
text is buried under hundreds of lines of code, then you’ll be at a
disadvantage compared to the top-ranking and well-optimized websites
that compete for your keyword. There are many ways to get around
this; first and foremost is to choose your programming language wisely.
I’m not a programmer, so I can’t recommend the best programming language
to use for SEO. I can only flag this as an issue, as it is something to
consider when analyzing your Web page for SEO.
Here is a tool that simulates what a spider “sees” when it visits your site:
http://www.stargeek.com/crawler_sim.php. If
you’re not seeing a lot of text when you enter your Web page’s URL,
then neither is the search engine spider. It’s time to add some.
Problems:
- Your keyword density is high compared with your competitors
- You’re keyword stuffing
- Your home page looks like a doorway page
The above three problems are related. If your keyword density is too
high, Google may interpret this as a spam tactic called “keyword
stuffing.” Likewise, Google may interpret a page with very high keyword
density as a doorway page. A doorway page sticks out to Google in that
it is optimized for a number of terms that are only loosely connected,
or not connected at all, to a site’s main theme.
The best way to find out whether your keyword density is too high
compared to your competitors is through a keyword density analyzer tool.
I use
GoRank.com or SEOChat.com’s own keyword density tool
to analyze the top ten ranking pages in Google for my desired keyword. I
generally take an average of the keyword density of the top page and
compare it to my own page. If my page is much higher than the top-ranked
pages, I will revise the copy and tags (ALT, Title, Meta) and tone down
the frequency of the keyword in question.
{mospagebreak title=More Problems and Solutions}
Problems:
- You have fewer backlinks than your competitors
- You have poor link partners
- You’re linking to a site that I’ve banned
- Your backlink text is repetitive and/or bad
- You have no fresh content
Google is the best tool to use to diagnose the above problems. The
Google “link:” operator allows you to check your backlinks and evaluate
the sites that link to your page. You can tell whether Google has banned
a site, if the URL is not in their index at all. Use the “site:”
operator for this.
You probably know whether the content on your site is fresh or not,
but if you want to know what Google thinks, then click on the “cache”
link next to your listing to see the last time Google paid your site a
visit. If it was over a week ago, Google got bored and wandered to
greener content pastures. It’s time to add some new content. You can
also use the “cache:” operator to get cache information. Here’s a
complete list of
Google’s operator commands (what they mean and how to use them). You can also download and utilize the
Google Toolbar to check PageRank and view your backlinks.
Google may only show a handful of backlinks, when you have thousands.
The reasons for this are not entirely certain, though it may have to do
with how Google weighs each incoming link in terms of popularity and/or
relevancy. With this in mind, I recommend using one of the free link
popularity tools available online. A couple of my favorites include the
link popularity tool on Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com,
MarketLeap’s Link Popularity Checker and SEOChat.com’s own tool to evaluate
link popularity.
If you have a lot of backlinks it will quickly get tedious to try and
read all the link text to check for duplicity in language. The best tool
I’ve found to do this is
SEO Elite, which isn’t free but will save your hours of time (and time is money, folks!)
Problems:
- You have duplicate content
- Your site is slower to download compared to your competitors
- You have dynamic URLs
- You don’t have a site map
- Your navigation is image-based
- You have no ALT tags or meaningless ALT tags
The above is a miscellaneous list of problems that can be diagnosed as follows. Check
CopyScape
for duplicate content or perform a search for an exact line of text on
the page you are evaluating. Alexa.com will tell you how fast your
website downloads compared with others competing for your key term
(assuming you are in the Alexa database). You probably know whether your
site uses dynamic URLs, but if you’re not sure, click into an interior
page and check for odd characters in the URL, such as question marks or
equal signs. You can use any browser to see the URL string of a
particular page in your site. Google has been indexing dynamic URLs, but
if the string is particularly long and the variables particularly
profuse, Google may not index the entire site as well as it would if the
URLs are search engine friendly and/or do not contain as many
variables.
A site map is self-explanatory. It’s a page that lists links to all
the pages of your site. If you don’t have one, create one so that Google
can find all of your relevant pages easily.
If you use images for all of your navigation and don’t assign
meaningful ALT tags to them, a site map is especially critical.
Googlebot can’t read images; it just sees code. If you scroll over a
navigation image and no text appears, it means that you have not
assigned an ALT tag to that image. You can also view the source code and
review your images that way. Assigning meaningful ALT tags to images
helps with usability as well as search engine friendliness (for people
with slow connections or browsers that have images turned off, for
example), though the best case scenario is to use text-based navigation
in place of image-based navigation.
Conclusion
The tools that are available to help you analyze your search engine
friendliness are profuse and often free. This article just scrapes the
surface of what’s out there. Read forums to see what the experts use and
try out the tools yourself to find your favorites. Proper diagnosis of
search engine friendliness is the building block for creating a
comprehensive, competent search engine optimization strategy that will
definitely give you an edge over the competition.
Keep in mind that while it is helpful to approach SEO from the search
engine’s perspective, you are not writing for the search engines. You
are writing for your visitors. So don’t overdo it.
