Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s 950 penalty and gave an off the cuff solution to fixing it. 

Well it turns out that Google has now offered an official solution to recover from their dreaded 950 penalty, and what do you know… it resides in their very own Google webmaster tools.

Google are now offering webmaster guilty of purchasing links (among other things) to repent for their sins and apply for reconsideration.

So for instance, if you’ve seen your PR drop to 0 in Google’s PR update last week and you suspect it could be because of link purchasing, you can sign up for a Google webmaster tool account and click on the “request reconsideration” link which will take you to a form that allows you to ask Google to reconsider your site after you have fixed the suspicious problems.

I haven’t actually tried it as my sites do not violate wemaster rules and I do not purchase links  but other sites have tried it and specifically a fellow blogger who’s pr dropped from 6 to nil overnight, he submitted for reconsideration and his site was unpenalised and PR restored to 6.

If you’re reading this post you’ve probably been penalised for purchasing link so good luck with your reconsideration request and it may be worthwhile to read this post about purchasing links best practices.

Do you own your name’s domain name? If you don’t then this is the time to do so.

I bought my name’s domain name 4 months ago (omarkattan.com) and have been developing it as a search blog ever since.

The main benefit of owning your name’s domain name (especially the .com one) is that it shows up in first position when people search for your name.  This is becoming more important since more and more people are “googling” people they want to learn more about.  Googlers can include:

1. Employers wanting to learn more aout you

2. Bankers wanting to investigate you before they give you a loan

3. An ex-spouse wanting to research how much money you have before he/she sues. (Okay, okay they probably already know that piece of info but I ‘m trying to make a point here!)

It is therefore a good idea to buy your name’s domain name and the process can’t be simpler.

1. Go to a domain registrar like GoDaddy.com

2. search for your name.

3. buy it (it usually costs around $9)

4. Develop it.

Good luck and if you have any questions fire away… 

Did you know that you are able to change the characteristics of a static file such as a .html or .txt file to allow it to accept dynamic code such as php or asp?  Well you can, here’s how…

Lets say you’re looking to create a dynamic .csv  or .txt for a shopping feed for one of the shopping comparison search engines such as Shopping.com, normally, you would not be able to do so because .xml/.txt/.csv files are static and would not ordinalrily execute php commands to output the products from a database. 

The solution…

Place the following code in your .htaccess file:

<Files filename.csv>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

That should do the trick.  Change “filename” for your file’s name and the “.csv” to .xml, .txt or even .html depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re deciding to purchase links to boost your link popularity (I know I know, its against Google’s rules, but hey everyone’s doing it!) make sure you purchase the links for a long period of time. The longer the better.

There are a few things to consider when purchasing links:

1. As mentioned above, go for the long haul, the longer the better.  This is good from two perspectives; 1) you guarantee that the search engines recognise the link and award you the benefit of it. and 2) you’re more likely to negotiate a better deal when buying for the long haul (12-18 months)

2. When buying links, don’t buy site-wide links (ie ones placed in the footer of the site or in the site’s site-wide navigation).  This is a sure way to alert Google et al that this is a link buy.

3. Ensure you buy the link from a relevant site.  An obvious one I know but again an even surer way to alert the search engines that this is a link buy is by purchasing links on non-relevant site (such as a link to a mortgage site from a Viagra selling site)

4. Try and purchase links that are in-context not (ie woven into the content of the site rather than in the navigation or breadcrumb.

5. Make sure that the anchor text of the link (the text used in the link) uses strategic keywords that you’re aiming to rank for.  This re-enforces to the search engines what your site is about and gives you a better chance of ranking higher for that keyword.

6. Monitor your link to make sure that the site who has sold you the link has not fallen out of favour with the search engines.  If it has, dump it regardless of how long you’ve had it for or how much you’ve paid for it!

In conclusion, I would like to state that I am not in favour of link purchases unless you do not have the time to promote your site naturally.

Good luck with your link purchasing!

Search Engines love content, actually they crave fresh content, after-all thats their raison d’etre (theire reason for existing) to spider and index fresh original content.

If your site’s homepage is updated on a daily basis with fresh unique content, this will ensure that Google et al will visit (with time) on a daily basis to spider the new content you have to offer.

If you don’t have the time or the budget to add fresh new content on a daily basis, then here’s a little tip…

Add a few RSS feeds on your site’s home page but make sure they’re related to your industry.  Also make sure that these feeds are search engine friendly, some are not.  The feeds that are not search friendly use javascript to output the feed. Javascript cannot be read by search engines.  Make sure to output you feed with languages such as php or asp.

RSS Content Builder is a good tool that I’ve used to output rss feeds on one of my sites, its really easy to use and gives you the option to output your feed using Javascript or PHP,  guess which one I use ;-)