Strategic Website Traffic

Matt Cutts held a question and answer session with webmasters all over the world concerned with getting a top ranking in the Google search engine the other day at the Third Online Webmaster Chat. The entire chat can be found here Google Webmaster Help. A nice little summary of the major topics and issues can be found at Web Pro News

I’d say what I found most interesting is that Google confronted the issues of website age, article directories, online directories and page rank.

Here’s the Google response when asked about website age and whether or not website age has an effect on search engine rankings:

Maile Ohye answered this way: “a site’s reputation can be a indicator to search engines, but of course, it’s not everything. Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility. Of course, newer domains can also gain users and credibility. It seems like running a good site is a bit like running a reputable business. So yes, if your domain has been credible for years it can help. If you buy an old domain and put all your content on it in hopes of getting instant rankings, that’s not the best idea.

But, when the question was rephrased from another webmaster, Cutts answered: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.“

In light of this response Google will still “sandbox” a new site that moves up the search engine results too quickly in most instances… the only time I’ve not seen a new website get sandboxed when it moved up the search engine results too quickly was when it was in an under served niche/ longtail keyword phrase. In my opinion an aged domain will outrank a new domain if all other factors are the same any day of the week. Particularly if the new site is less then a year old. Whenever possible I continue to buy pre owned domains over at Fresh Drop but I also don’t hesitate to buy new domains so I can keyword stuff my longtail into the domain name which you usually can’t do with pre owned domain names.

Someone asked if the number of links  you have going out form your site affects the “link juice” you pass on to thos sites you link to. Googles response;

“PageRank is split up over the links from a page, but I would recommend not concentrating on this (as you won’t be able to “measure” and act upon it anyway) and instead making your site as usable as possible for your visitors.”

Anyone who has ever built a Blog farm is aware of this and knows that to build page rank all you have to do is get a lot of links coming in to your site and then be very selective with whom you link out to. Like link only to your money site and sprinkle a few more links to authority sites to make it “look good.”

Google recently removed a suggestion on their webmaster guidelines to submit websites to online directories for seo purposes and was asked about the effectiveness of submiting websites to guidlines. Their response:

“Google’s Answer: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.”

Basically what Google is saying here is don’t pay some guy on the Digital Point forum $10 to submit your website to 10,000 directories. DMOZ, the open directory project, is the holy grail of online directories and the PR8 link you get back from them is usually enough to get you to the top spot of Google for most long tail keyword phrases. The bad news is that it takes like a year, if not more, to have them review your site… On the other end of the spectrum are directories that are basically link farms and worthless as far as link juice is concerned because of all the links they have going out.

My take on the directories? Submit to the good ones… I usually submit to at least all PR5-8 directories right off the bat.

And finally Google was asked about article directories. Here’s their response:

“In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience. If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.”

Imo artcile directories will be treated much the same as online directories. Basically not all article directories are created equal and some are junk and some like Ezine articles are worth a PR6 link back to your site. End of the day I think google is looking for article directories that keep mostly only original content and will be discounting all the rest.

I think the most interesting notes from this webmaster chat are the comments from google about article and online directories. The next Google page rank update will probably be bringing with it some pretty hefty slaps for low quality artcile directories and online directories.

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