What are other people doing in response to Caffeine/MayDay?

Anonymous said:

Hi, I've been following some of your threads over the last few days and like everyone i'm battling with the may day google crap, your method about keywords hidden in html code how does it work? is it visible only in the source code and not on page? and do i just edit my html code on my webpages and add some code to hide it, just read the threads and i'm just a bit confused about which is the best way to go about it.

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Thanks for the reminder! I did promise a number of weeks ago to share my MayDay methods and to provide data on the effects. Once again it is time to make good on a promise.

What are other people doing in response to Caffeine/MayDay?

No cloaking or blatant stuffing ... Google will punish that when your competition reports you... here is my new whitehat checklist:

1. No relative URLs in the source

2. Make URLs keyword rich for the pages they link to

3. Unique meta descriptions for every page

4. Unique title for every page

5. Short HTML Comments using keywords to describe content areas

6. No more than 2 entries in meta keywords

7. Paragraph of 200-500 words with 12% keyword & related word density and at
least 8 words link to other relevant pages

8. Sitemap widget in footer links every page to every other page

9. Tune every possible alt text and title attribute

10. updated robots.txt, favicon, apple-touch icon, google sitemaps, google base feeds, privacy page, security page, contact page, copyright statement, about us page, press page, email address, physical address and phone number on contact page, register with google webmaster central, RSS feeds, twitter & facebook buttons

11. Canonical Tags on every page

12. Microformats wherever possible

13. Integrate Google Checkout and PayPal into the shopping cart

14. One field on page newsletter registration form with dynamic jquery "2nd opt-in" method instead of using "double opt-in" which seriously hurts registration conversion rates.

15. Related store blogs

16. PR, PR, PR, oodles of legitimate PR

17. link to us campaigning via social

18. Shifting budgets from AdWords to Facebook methods... "Note to google: blow back is coming you assholes, we're taking our $1.5M annual spend anywhere else that can match or beat our $10 per customer AdWords cost. AdWords is only going to get more ugly heading toward Q4. Making enemies of your paying customers is not wise."

19. Dropped $3K on Yahoo directory links

20. Re-submitted applications for dmoz... sucks that a 10 year old PR8 website that is praised by the media and has more traffic than Oprah according to comscore still can't get listed... I do believe dmoz is corrupt and derelict... I also believe that 2% of the editors do 98% of the work but that their fault too. I still want my link... the 5 year old spam site that beats me in the SERPs has one... thats probably the reason I can't.

21. IMAGE MAP ALT TAGS! KILLER KILLER KILLER legitimate keyword tuning tool.

22. CSS & JS filenames contain keywords, CSS Classes and Tag IDs and in HTML JS variable names contain keywords if applicable. Product options, advanced search options, tag clouds, related products, similar products, bestsellers, new arrivals, customers who bought also bought, customer reviews on every page to keep content fresh and changing.

23. Investing in more tools to make my SEO work easier... particularly in the area of bulk rank checking on Google. I could care less about the other 450 search engines. Don't get me wrong... Bing is AWESOME especially for PPC and I'll buy every click I can get from them because they convert better than any other clicks in the market. They don't have enough clicks for me to buy... not even close, but they are ten times more genuine in their reporting and much more of their traffic is actually human beings as apposed to AdWords scanning B2B services for SEM...

24. 800 Phone Number and Email address on every page

(I use Mac OS X, which is why my list is so short.)

1. hxxp://www|link-assistant|com/rank-tracker/ - Rock solid coding... very cool handling of captchas, built for consultants though. Its a bitch to use if you own a number of websites that overlap in keywords... You have to make separate projects for each and you can't compare them side by side.

2. hxxp://www|advancedwebranking|com/ (winner) - Rock solid, but not as polished... performs the same functions as rank tracker but lets you track multiple sites together... this is what I am moving to in the next 2 weeks when the 30 day evaluation expires.

if you know of an even better tool or other cool tools for OS X please let me know.

Here is a snippet of my RankTracker measurements 4 days after using the above list on my 15 production sites (PR 6-8). I started to see movement in the serps 4 hours after deployment. (Keep in mind that this effects over 14000 SKUs across 600 retail categories... expand the pattern out to that scale and this is big big change.) I don't have order conversion data yet, but so far it looks like my long tail pages are coming back into the indexes as well as reclaiming a lot of the territories I lost to Caffeine/Mayday.



What are other people doing in response to Caffeine/MayDay?

Could an admin please prepend a "W" to the title? Not a big deal if its work... but if its easy I would appreciate... I suck at proof reading... and grammar... and probablly SEO too!

You are now asset for BHW.

Thanks for the awesome info!

That is one sick checklist!

I want to make sure one point is clear though, as even I was not certain of its meaning:

"Paragraph of 200-500 words with 12% keyword & related word density and at
least 8 words link to other relevant pages"

Is that 12% keyword related + 8 words links to other pages, or is that 12% of which 8 of those 12% should be linked to other pages?

I am leaning towards 12% overall as that would keep it relative. I thought that should be a point clarified though.

That's a much higher ratio of internal linking than I have ever tried. I will give it a shot.

I have been considering getting rank tracker for a little while now. Your endorsement makes me think I should reconsider it seriously.

And YDir, how the heck you drop $3k in their? Do they allow a single URL to be listed in multiple sections?

DMOZ sucks elephant balls. I wish I knew some of the corrupt there.

All the rest is an excellent checklist for anybody looking to operate an ecom site. Great stuff!

Correct: 12% of which 8 of those 12% should be linked to other pages

Rank Tracker is great if you only work with one website at a time, like most SEO consultants... its not for people who have dozens of sites and almost 800 parked domains...

The other tool is more price but will save the latter much time and effort. Hopefully RankChecker fixes this fundamental limitation... it is a great product for a certain kind of SEO person.

Re: YDir... keep in mind I have 15 production websites PR 6-8... Y! is $299 per url per year.

MisterGemini said:

That is one sick checklist!

I want to make sure one point is clear though, as even I was not certain of its meaning:

"Paragraph of 200-500 words with 12% keyword & related word density and at
least 8 words link to other relevant pages"

Is that 12% keyword related + 8 words links to other pages, or is that 12% of which 8 of those 12% should be linked to other pages?

I am leaning towards 12% overall as that would keep it relative. I thought that should be a point clarified though.

That's a much higher ratio of internal linking than I have ever tried. I will give it a shot.

I have been considering getting rank tracker for a little while now. Your endorsement makes me think I should reconsider it seriously.

And YDir, how the heck you drop $3k in their? Do they allow a single URL to be listed in multiple sections?

DMOZ sucks elephant balls. I wish I knew some of the corrupt there.

All the rest is an excellent checklist for anybody looking to operate an ecom site. Great stuff!

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Awesome share..as always.

Whats your experince like with Facebook PPC..?

all i can say is hell thats a load of info to take in, but boy lets rock n roll, been linking out for some time and do it within the first paragraph which i put the first 4 links and then the same at the last paragraph i put the last four links, am i getting this right that i should links out my target keywords to other sites? or do i just link out to what takes my fancy? also about the paypal cart stuff, what if you just entered order buttons will that work?

TheTRUTH said:

Awesome share..as always.

Whats your experince like with Facebook PPC..?

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PPC...crap... (marketing to and growing) our fan pages... The guy managing social at my work is claiming 40% ROI every 2 months and averaging about $0.27 per new customer and says currently looks unlimited. The company accountant is reviewing his reports... sounds too good to be true to me... but if he is off by less than 400% its still better than adwords and if his numbers are right then its the single best investment anywhere for retail and Google wont see another dime from us until the well goes dry.

I've seen his work before and he is usually on mark but about 5% of the time he'll make a 30-100% error margin because he is kind of to new marketing analysis and general accounting principals... If anyone feels behind on that front I recommend reading a book called "The 24 hour MBA" it is a good primer to the 80% of an MBA you would use from day to day wherever you go.

about your first point

1. No relative URLs in the source

I have links like these in the footer of my wordpress sites that you can see in m y source code, eg about us, sitemap and contact page, should i now change them to normal links?

thestig said:

all i can say is hell thats a load of info to take in, but boy lets rock n roll, been linking out for some time and do it within the first paragraph which i put the first 4 links and then the same at the last paragraph i put the last four links, am i getting this right that i should links out my target keywords to other sites? or do i just link out to what takes my fancy? also about the paypal cart stuff, what if you just entered order buttons will that work?

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I say cherry pick what makes sense for your site... I would link from words in the sentences. They don't have to be external links...they could just as well be information pages on your site that are tuned for specific words... then you could always link to those pages whenever you use those words in a sentence.

Only use the checkout stuff if you have a cart... the reason those help is that there is a trust vetting with both... obvious google trusts google checkout the most... you see it in the product feeds results for ecom product searches... Google Checkout with about 40 positive reviews makes you #2 in all your product SERPs for most cases. It also get you the eyecandy bullet in your adwords and other places... even if no one uses it to check out it pays for itself in other ways. I don't expect that to last forever, but until they can afford to stop bribing merchants with the free placements and special formatting... sucks to implement though... a lot of totally legit stuff they wont accept...

thestig said:

about your first point

1. No relative URLs in the source

I have links like these in the footer of my wordpress sites that you can see in m y source code, eg about us, sitemap and contact page, should i now change them to normal links?

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If you have keywords in your domain or further up in the absolute path... hell yeah... more keyword matches per page without violating webmaster guidelines...

if not...then reconsider your url structure because you are at a disadvantage... take a look at SEO.com for the search SEO... behold the FULL URL power!

I dont want to be spoon fed but can you show me an example of the two points below.. and how important are they now?

11. Canonical Tags on every page

12. Microformats wherever possible

Microformats apply to articles, events, products, organizations, people, places,times, dates, etc... google the following:

amythest bracelet
iron man

google pulls the star ratings from the source via microfomats... if you want google to understand the context of on page data this is how its done and will be more so in the future.

just google canonical tag... you just provide the most appropriate URL for the page in it... that way all the possible variants wont count as dupes...

Canonical is a MUST HAVE. microformats will be a slight advantage now and a must have 1 year from now.

thestig said:

I dont want to be spoon fed but can you show me an example of the two points below.. and how important are they now?

11. Canonical Tags on every page

12. Microformats wherever possible

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I use wordpress so i can put it in the header or should i enter it into the html of each page?

thestig said:

I dont want to be spoon fed but can you show me an example of the two points below.. and how important are they now?

11. Canonical Tags on every page

12. Microformats wherever possible

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For Canonical tags, there are wordpress plugins that can do this for you. I like the Ultimate SEO plugin for this.

For the Microformats, I have to agree with ipopbb. I think they will be a must in the future, if not more so now to help identify your content. To understand what they are all about, goto microformats.org and check out their wiki. There is tons of information there.

Hey ipopbb you should check it out too, Google just accepted a few other formats last month it looks like.

nice one brother, i started using twitter buttons, but apple icon and favicon, even html comments i thought i worked out a lot of the stuff such as product details and descriptions and buy now buttons, but the infor that you guys are providing just rocks.

Thanks for a great share ipopbb. I thought I had a good understanding of SEO Just this one thread shows I am but a minnow.

thestig said:

I use wordpress so i can put it in the header or should i enter it into the html of each page?

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Has to be in header... there is probably a plugin for it if it isn't already supported. I don't use wordpress.

Okay, so I read through the list and maybe I missed this, but here:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/205465-june-2010-tag-rankings.html

It appears that the most important optimization factor right now is outbound links. But I don't see that on the list above do I? What am I missing?