Google 2006 and Jagger’s Aftermath by Jason OConnor Copyright 2005 Jason OConnor Starting this past fall (2005) Google launched a major update to their search algorithm which shook up the search engine optimization (SEO) community and millions of website rankings. The update has been named Jagger and is apparently finished. The keywords that people used to find your site with in Google may not be producing as many visits any more because the Jagger changes caused your rankings to plummet. Of course many people have seen their rankings stay the same or improve in Jagger's aftermath too. If your site's rankings have decreased, what can be done to get back to where you were or better in the post-Jagger Google world? There are still a lot of questions to be sure, but there are some good beginnings of answers as well. Since this update was rolled out over months and in three distinct phases, it has been much more difficult to determine what factors have been given more weight or less. For instance, IBL (inbound links to your site) have always been important to achieve high rankings in Google. But there are many different kinds of IBL's. Link trades, where you put my link on your site and I put your link on my site may be less valuable than a one-way link. This has been the case for a while, but is the importance of each changed now since Jagger? Probably. I don't know all the answers, and I don't think anyone knows all the answers save the people at the 'plex (short for Google-plex). What are some theories? Here are some of the top ones, but I am not saying they are necessarily true or false. And this is not a full list, there are most likely numerous other factors that affect Google rankings after Jagger that no one has recognized at all yet. The following list consists of ideas I have read online, which I spend hours each day doing, or some of our own hard-earned observations using the large number of clients' websites in many different industries to learn from. Read the following with a grain of salt, which is always a good idea when reading any articles or forum posts about SEO or Jagger. Things That Could Possibly HELP You More In Jagger's Aftermath • Aged Domains - Sites with domains that are older rank better now - the older the domain, the better its rankings with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree). • Very Relevant Links - IBL (inbound links) and OBL (outbound links) relevancy is more important after Jagger. This means that if you point to related sites or you get links from other sites that are related to your website, you may rank better after Jagger with all other things being equal. (This is probably true to some degree as well). • Links From Trusted Sites Help - TrustRank (or a similar concept) is more important than ever after Jagger. TrustRank is a concept that says if you get a link pointing to your site that is highly trusted by Google (trusted either programmatically or by human editors), then you will rank better with all other things being equal. (See http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF). • Variety of Links - Links from .edu and .org websites are good for increasing your rankings and are more important than ever. (It's vital to get links form a wide variety of websites. Just like your investing, you need to diversify your IBL’s. (This has probably been true even before Jagger). • Aged Links - The older the link that points to your site, the more weight it's given now. (This also has probably been true even before Jagger). • Embedded Links - Links that are embedded in sentences and paragraphs instead of stand-alone links are weighted more heavily now. (This may be true soon if not already). • Article Links - Articles are what directories had been a year or two ago for link building. Links from the author by-line or within the article that point back to your site will positively affect your rankings. (And this is one reason I've chosen to write this article). • Fresh & Unique Content - Now, more than ever, regularly updated and added ordinal content will help your rankings. (This is almost definitely true.) • Be a Big Guy - If you are a big behemoth site like Wikipedia, Yahoo, AOL, Ebay, Amazon, etc., you will rank better than you did before Jagger. • High Traffic & Stickiness - User popularity statistics now, or will soon, affect rankings. In other words, user actions on your website, like how long they stay (stickiness), how many pages they visit, and even how many people visit your site in a given period, can all affect how Google ranks your site. (This may be true soon if not already). Things That Could Possibly Not Help You Anymore, or May Even HURT You More In Jagger's Aftermath • Duplicate Content - Any kind of duplicate content can hurt your rankings. Some say this only refers to other sites having the same content as you while others say even duplicate content within your own site can be bad. I find the latter hard to believe since all sites have repeating slogans, phrases, checkout instructions, or any number of other duplicate sentences within the same site. (Use http://www.copyscape.com/ to find people who are stealing your original written content and publishing it on their site). • Hidden Text - Hidden text within your html, in tags, CSS, or comments, can negatively affect your rankings. (This is something you should never do). • Footer Links – Some say links in the footer are disregarded now. (This is one we have found no evidence for). • Directory Links - Links from directories are weighted less now. (This is one we have found no evidence for, but is most likely true or will be soon). • Decreased Rate of Link Building - The speed and volume of inbound link creation to your site from other websites, if changed, can negatively affect your rankings more so now. (This one is most likely true too). • Reciprocal Links - Reciprocal link trades are worth less then they were before or are worth nothing now. (It’s probably true that they are at least worth less now). • Linking to Bad Neighborhoods - Reciprocal link trades hurt your rankings when you link to sites that are considered 'bad neighborhoods' by Google, such as link farms or sites that are banned by Google. (This is most likely true and has been for a while). • Link Schemes - Participating in link schemes such as Co-ops or Link Vault can hurt your ranking more than help them. (I have not found any evidence of this so far for my client's sites, but this could be true). Again, I don't think anyone outside Google knows which of these factors above are true or false, and how each one affects a given keyword phrase's ranking. In fact, that's the idea. Google doesn't want people 'gaming' their system. There are so many variables that need to be considered that it is very difficult to figure out which ones affect what. So, what do you do now if your site's ranking have dropped since Jagger? If your site was ranking well in the Google SERP's (search engine ranking position) before Jagger, then it was nowhere to be found right after Jagger hit, and now your site has still not bounced back at all, then you probably tripped a filter, got penalized or even banned. You may have duplicate content on another site, or someone copied a lot of your content, or you may have canonical issue (where yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com are considered two different sites by Google causing it to look like duplicate content). You may have hidden text, or keyword stuffed your pages or any number of other things. You’re definitely going to need more knowledge than this article can give you to get your rankings back. Some say that Google updates have happened before around the same time of year, and many sites that tanked came back after the first of the year. I don’t know if this is true, we'll just have to wait and see. For those who have still not rebounded, this may be nice to know. Interestingly, most of our clients' sites either stayed the same or improved after Jagger. Our own company site improved. But unfortunately, a few of our other clients saw some decreases in their rankings right after Jagger, and have since rebounded, but not at quite the same pre-Jagger levels. Here's what we did for them: • Scoured their site for bad outgoing links and made sure that each site they linked to was indexed by Google and was not trying to game Google. Any questionable links were deleted immediately. But we did not get rid of all our link partners, we just culled. • Determined the ratio of the different types of incoming links to learn where improvements were needed. In other words, we determined the percentage of links to their site that were link trades, one-way links from related sites, one-ways from unrelated sites, link advertisements, directory links, forum signature links and more. We then advised them to increase their one-way related inbound links that are embedded in sentences, and not concentrate so much on link trades and stop getting one-way unrelated link development altogether. • Cleaned up the HTML on every page, made sure all tags were closed and that there was no extraneous code on any page. And we put CSS and JavaScript’s in separate files. • Took out any inadvertent hidden text. One client had keywords in comment tags in their HTML that we deleted. • Decreased file size of pages, by taking out old links and superfluous verbiage, and by re-optimizing the .gif's and .jpg's. • Wrote much more succinct Meta descriptions and on-page verbiage. • Made sure that every title tag on every page within the site was different. • Coached them about the importance of continually developing good, quality, original content. • Brainstormed ways in which their sites could entice other webmasters to link to them because of what their site offers, such as good content, free Web tools, articles and many other things. This is called natural linking and what Google regards as the only legitimate way to build links. Therefore, this is vital. We tried to look at the overall link development strategy, the value of their site, and the quality of the site, both the content quality and the html quality. A clean, simple, fast-loading site with natural links pointing to it from a variety of other related websites, some .org's and .edu's, others from trusted authority sites, and many from small related websites, that adds fresh and unique content daily, will rank well in Google over time and won't be affected by any update, including Jagger. The best way for you to learn what to do in Jagger's aftermath is to read articles like this, participate in forums that discuss these topics, and most importantly, by experimenting with your own sites to see what works. This takes time and patience. So does building quality sites that have things to offer and that subsequently get natural links. But it's all worth it. Jason OConnor owns Oak Web Works, LLC, a full-service Web firm. He also runs A great website to get sports & rock concert tickets. Jason OConnor is a web expert who owns and operates Oak Web Works, a full service web shop that specializes in e-strategy, web construction and design, web programming, and e-marketing. Jason has been invloved with the Internet from the beginning and has helped organizations such as Intel and M.I.T. with their web needs. Learn more ate http://www.oakwebworks.com and check out Cheap NFL, MLB, Broadway and Las Vegas Show Tickets too. | Cheap Concert Tour Tickets too. Jason OConnor may be contacted at http://www.oakwebworks.com or jason@oakwebworks.com Website Manifestation - 7 Steps to a Successful Site by Jason OConnor If you are in business for yourself, an executive with decision making power, or the head of your company, you are probably bombarded with advice, opinions and information about how to build or re-vamp your website and how to use it to your advantage in business. To be as successful as possible in your e-business, you’ll need to plan ahead and you’ll need to properly fuse the disciplines of design, technology and marketing. From conception to reality, the process of manifesting a website draws upon a multidisciplinary approach. The more time and effort you put into planning and building your website, or revamping an existing one, the more successful you’ll be. Your new site will have more potential in accomplishing your business goals, your business will look more credible to all the people visiting your site, and you’ll increase your bottom line. The following is a guide for building a new website. It shows how a corporate webmaster or Web department creates a world-class website, and it is the same step by step process that every organization, no matter how small, should follow. Step 1 – Discovery: The first phase involves determining the scope of the project, the timeline and scheduling parameters, everyone’s expectations, and your current human and technical resources. Step 2 - Concept and Planning: The next step is to determine site requirements, business goals, types of functionality, site features, and a timeline and due date. You’ll need to determine who your site audience is, the demographics and psychographics of your visitors. In this phase the architecture or organization of the information that will be included on the site needs to be planned as well. The most important part of this step is determining your goals for the site. You need to ask yourself and any other stake holders exactly what the new site ought to yield when completed. What do you expect the site to do? What do you want to get out of it? What messages do you want to convey to all the people who will eventually view it? What are the priorities of the site in terms of your business and making money? What types of people will be using the site and what will they want to accomplish while there? Step 3 - Design Specifications: This is when the look & feel and a visual design specification are created. Here you’ll determine the fonts, colors and size and layouts, always trying to keep consistency paramount. You’ll want to write specifications for the images you’ll be using on the site as well. It’s also the time to decide upon and design the technical infrastructure and architecture of the site, server, environment and platform. You’ll determine what programming languages and databases will be used, if any, and any other technical features your site will need. One of the secondary benefits of following Step 3 is that you’ll have a document to refer back to later on when adding to the site. If you hire a new Web person of company, you can give them this design specification document for them to follow whenever they work on your site Step 4 – Production: Before this phase begins, everyone who is involved in this project, including people who give the final ‘ok’, need to know that there will be a technical and look and feel design freeze at this point. If any changes are needed during this point, then those changes will be done in the next redesign. The production phase can be broken down into three areas and will include: Step 4a - The design production: The artistic look and feel design production, usability designing, the navigation production, and image and button creation. The homepage of the site and the inner page template both need the new design applied to them. The homepage design may use the same template the rest of the site uses, or it may be unique. If it differs from the rest of the site, then make sure its look and feel is very similar to the look and feel of the inner page template(s). Also, if it differs, consider applying this entire step-by-step guide to the homepage as well, treating it as a separate, but related entity. Step 4b - The technical production: This entails the html coding, any other coding to contribute to the functionality and the configuration of the server’s environment. The technical aspects could also include any server side coding in a major programming language, database design and development, and site security measures. Step 4c - The marketing production: This area includes creating the homepage and pre-determined inner pages to be search engine and index friendly. It also includes the copy writing for every page. Any mechanisms for interacting with the visitors will be produced here. For example, forms on your site that asks users to give information are ways for a user to interact with your site. Although the look & feel of the form falls under ‘design’, and the actual mechanisms that make the form work falls under ‘technology’, the purpose of the forms will be very marketing-centric. What you ask, how you store the data, and how you retrieve it and use it later are all marketing issues that should be addressed in this step. Step 5 – Testing: The produced site now must be loaded onto a staging area that is exactly like the production environment, or made accessible to testers only. During this phase, various people will test all aspects of site, including functionality, spelling and grammar, hyperlinks, and all other elements. This is often called the Quality Assurance phase. Step 6 – Publishing: This phase is the push of the new site from staging to production. Here the site is made live and is now on the World Wide Web. Step 7 - E-marketing and maintenance: Unless the site is marketed, it won’t matter how well-designed or technically robust it is, no one will ever visit or use it. Therefore, the final and ongoing phase entails implementing e-marketing techniques, keeping the site’s content fresh, and making continual adjustments based on site specific and customer research. Whether you decide to tackle building a new website yourself, or you choose to hire someone else to do it, the steps outlined above ought to be followed. If you decide to do it yourself, you’ll need to read up on graphic design and usability, Web technologies and e-marketing. If you hire an outside company to build a site for you, ask them how they plan to accomplish it. Ask them if they have a set method for building a new site or re-vamping an old one. If they have a good system, it ought to look a lot like the steps above. They ought to be proficient in all aspects of website development and be able to communicate to you everything they are doing and why. Remember, the better your site is initially and the better you manage your new site going forward, the better your business will be. Jason OConnor is a web expert who owns and operates Oak Web Works, a full service web shop that specializes in e-strategy, web construction and design, web programming, and e-marketing. Jason has been invloved with the Internet from the beginning and has helped organizations such as Intel and M.I.T. with their web needs. Learn more ate http://www.oakwebworks.com and check out Cheap NFL, MLB, Broadway and Las Vegas Show Tickets too. | Cheap Concert Tour Tickets too. Jason OConnor may be contacted at http://www.oakwebworks.com or jason@oakwebworks.com Search FAXTS powered by FreeFind A Webmaster’s Toolkit and Tricks by Jason OConnor A Webmaster’s Toolkit and Tricks If you own a website, operate or run a website, or you’re a webmaster, this article is for you. A successful website is created and managed by a person with an effective toolkit who knows how to use each tool. There are a huge amount of software applications out there for people to use for creating, building, coding and running websites. Here are the ones you’ll find in my tool box. I’ve been using these for many years and have had wonderful success with each one of them. As a bonus, I am going to include a few tricks for some of the tools that may be of interest to you. (These ‘tricks’ are for pc users only.) ** Toolkit Item 1 – Dreamweaver ** I have a client who owns and runs a small business website and who has been using Microsoft Frontpage since he started. He is not a programmer or Web designer and has been very frustrated managing his website. Frontpage adds strange html code behind the scenes that takes control away from the user and often produces undesirable results. I suggested that he try Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, which is the software I have been using for many years. It’s excellent and does exactly what you want, does not add extraneous code and makes the life of a webmaster a breeze. After playing with it for a while, my client thanked me profusely for suggesting it. Get it at http://www.macromedia.com. Dreamweaver Trick: To make a global change in your website, that is, change some specific text or html code on every page in your site, here’s what you do: In your top menu bar, choose ‘Edit’ > ‘Find and Replace . . .’. In the dialog box that pops up, choose ‘Entire Local Site’ in the top dropdown box labeled ‘Find In’. This will allow you to make a global change. Also, note the other choices in the dropdown box. Using this feature will save you lots of time. Dreamweaver Trick: Did you know Dreamweaver has a ‘Check Spelling’ feature? If not, go to the top menu bar and click on ‘Text’ and then choose ‘Check Spelling’ at the bottom of the menu. Or you could simply use your ‘Shift’ F7 keys. ** Toolkit Item 2 – Photoshop ** Since images on the Web are both illustrations and photos, Adobe’s Photoshop is hands-down the best choice for graphics manipulation for a webmaster. It has a little bit of a learning curve, but well worth it if you want to include awesome graphics on your website. It allows you to create buttons, borders, shapes, symbols and of course, it allows you to change, alter, edit and improve any kind of digital photograph. Get it at http://www.adobe.com. Photoshop Trick: The Web allows two main graphics file formats, .jpg and .gif. Therefore, any image you plan to use on your website needs to end in one of these two extensions. (The Web allows the .png extension too, but you ought to use either .jpg or .gifs only). So, whenever you plan to use a graphic on your website that you created or edited in Photoshop, you need to save it as one of these two file extensions. And you also want your images to be optimized so they are not large causing long download times for your site visitors. Do this by going to your top menu bar and choosing ‘File’ > “Save for the Web . . .’. You will then be able to choose .gif or .jpg in the top right of the dialog box that opens up. You’ll also be able to see 1, 2, or 4 versions for the same image, optimized in different ways and having different sizes for you to choose. Always use this tool in Photoshop for Web graphics. Photoshop Trick: Want to create soft, almost rounded edges on your rectangular images? Here’s what you do: In your vertical ‘Tools’ window in Photoshop, choose the top left tool called ‘Rectangular Marquee Tool’. Then click and drag your mouse on your image to make a rectangle that is 5 to 10 pixels smaller than your actual image. Make sure that it is equidistant on all four sides. Then go to your menu bar and choose ‘Select’ > ‘Inverse’. This chooses (or selects) everything outside the rectangle you just made. Finally, go to your menu bar and choose ‘Filter’ > ‘Blur’ > ‘Gaussian Blur’ and type 1-5 pixels in the dialog box. That’s it, and now your image will have soft edges. ** Toolkit Item 3 – WS FTP ** This is a great tool for moving your files back and forth from your pc to your server. Dreamweaver has a feature that allows you to connect directly to your server to download and upload html files and images for your website. But I prefer to have more control over moving files back and forth from my local pc to my server that houses my website. Therefore, I use WS FTP (FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol). This tool enables me to move my files with ease and with complete control. Get it at http://www.tucows.com. FTP Trick: This is more of a suggestion than a trick. To make changes in your html files, always download the latest file(s) from your website’s server down to your local machine first. Then make your changes, edits or updates, save your work, and upload the file(s) back to your server. In other words, do your entire html editing on your local machine and upload the latest version after your editing back to your live server. Try to avoid editing files directly on your server. This methodology will help ensure that your site visitors don’t see files ‘in progress’ or errors. ** Toolkit Item 4 – WebTrends ** This tool is vital for anyone wishing to conduct intelligent e-marketing campaigns and has interest in improving one’s website. It allows you to analyze your website statistics. It tells you how many people visited your site, how they got there, where they went once they arrived and a huge amount of other critical data. Get it at http://www.webtrends.com. ** Toolkit Item 5 – WebPosition Gold ** If you want to know how your website is ranking in the search engines, this tool is a must have. It allows you to set up a profile for your website asking you to enter keyword phrases and choose search engines. By running the program after you complete your profile, it will tell you where you rank for each engine for each keyword phrase. If you find that you’re not ranking well, you can make changes to your website and run the program again in a few days or weeks to determine if your rankings have improved. Get it at http://www.webposition-gold-2.net. If you purchase these tools and learn to use them properly, you’ll have everything you need to create and manage a website. Your toolkit will be complete. I am sure there are other great tools out there, but these are the ones I use, (and I have no affiliation with any of these companies). I’ve found them to be extremely helpful. Another webmaster ‘trick’ I use is to utilize great websites that contain excellent tips, tricks and resources for creating and managing websites. Below is a partial list of the websites I visit regularly. Webmonkey – http://www.webmonkey.com HTML Goodies - http://www.htmlgoodies.com World Wide Web Consortium - http://www.w3c.org Webmaster Directory - http://www.webdevsites.com Free HTML Validator - http://www.feedvalidator.org Webmaster resources from Webmaster Toolkit. - http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com Webmaster.org - http://www.webmaster.org The Webmaster's Reference Library - http://www.webreference.com SitePoint : New Articles, for Web Developers and Designers - http://www.sitepoint.com Webmaster's Color Lab - http://www.visibone.com/colorlab SiteProNews - http://www.sitepronews.com Webmaster Tool Collection - http://www.webmaster-tool-collection.com Jason OConnor Copyright 2004 ****************** Jason O'Connor is president of Oak Web Works (http://www.oakwebworks.com) where you can get a free webmaster newsletter and he also runs Sports & Broadway Tickets (http://www.bestshowticketslasvegas.com). ****************** Jason OConnor is a web expert who owns and operates Oak Web Works, a full service web shop that specializes in e-strategy, web construction and design, web programming, and e-marketing. Jason has been involved with the Internet from the beginning and has helped organizations such as Intel and M.I.T. with their web needs. Learn more ate http://www.oakwebworks.com and check out Cheap NFL, MLB, Broadway and Las Vegas Show Tickets too. | Cheap Concert Tour Tickets too. Jason OConnor may be contacted at http://www.oakwebworks.com or jason@oakwebworks.com Visit 44 forums on ... www.Paradise-Love.com ... Friendly members, specials features and much more ! Discussions on everything such as vacations, websites, blogs, MSN, hobbies, lifestyle, music, movies, advice, columns, graphics, beauty & fashion. This is a forum for both guys and girls. Join today - everyone's welcome. :)