Blog for Alex Internet Domination Strategies
April 8, 2010
Accidental Mirror Sites
Many business owners have extremely well performing websites and subsequently decide to use the exact same website on another domain expecting to double their traffic and sales as a result. However, it works just the opposite with both being removed from the results. Then it could take up to six months before their spiders come around for another visit and update their information. This is what has happened to one of my clients Selected Benefits Health Insurance Houston Texas. They have another domain www.selectedbenefitsinsurance.com and www.trbenefits.com which contained an exact duplicate of www.selectedbenefits.com and subsequently they have lost their rank on major keyword phrases. If you have this situation you will need to create a 301 redirect from one domain to the other. This is the only way to do this that is allowed by the major search engines. And the beauty of this is more than likely the redirected domain will actually start showing up in search engines.
However there is a dark side to mirror sites that unethical web designers sometimes employ. Here is a warning to any business that has a very heavily traveled website. I have recently discovered an attack against one of my websites of the most sinister kind as stated in the previous blog. Six months ago while checking search engine positions for one of my clients sites I found that someone had copied the entire website and put it up on another domain. At first thought you might think it was to my clients benefit but on the contrary. After being told they put in an illegal redirect trying to do the same thing. So you need to be versed in how to know what an allowable redirect looks like. When a search engine sees two websites identical in a lot of respects the engine can ban both sites from their results. This is a very diabolical attack since it is extremely hard to detect until the damage has been done since it is very difficult to trace. What happens is both get penalized and then no one, let alone you, can find the mirror site unless you employ a search pattern that I use every day. What is required is to take your title line out of the head tag and search that phrase with quotation marks around it in Yahoo; this provides a better yield than Google. Also search all you major keyword phrases and look at the results even 10 pages in as this will yield mirror sites latter. Once you have identified the culprit go and pull the registration records for the server that the website is on since this kind of web designers will make the mistake of putting all of the mirror sites up on the same server. The reason why I say this is because I discovered one mirror site, for a heavily traveled website, and then found two more exact duplicates.
If not detected the result could have been that you lose position on search engines and never know why or what happened.
October 30, 2009
The New Age of Cyber Attacks SEO
In the beginning of the Internet the biggest worry you had was called a “Denial of Service Attacks”. These attacks were orchestrated by someone or many continually surfing through your site until all your bandwidth for the month was used up; in the beginning bandwidth was expensive. Then your site was shut down on the internet until the next month or your purchasing more bandwidth and that is if you noticed it happened. Today that would be virtually impossible.
I have seen these attacks on websites that I have designed and administrated in other industries and the only reason I caught them is by putting my domains address into the address bar with another ending than my .com to see what else is out there.
However there is a new type of attack that is very hard to detect until you have lost your position on search engines. I call this a “SEO Attack”. There are two ways ones accomplish this: 1) Mirror Sites and 2) Redirects, and they are rather easy to accomplish.
Mirror sites are exact duplicates of yours down to every detail. The reason for the ease of accomplishing this attack is your site is easily captured off the internet. Then they put up the mirror of your site on a domain the same as yours but with a different ending; for instance if your domain is www.timbucktwo.com then a mirror site would have an address www.timbucktwo.net or .us or .info. Now you might ask how this could possibly hurt you.
Search engines have set them up by using algorithms. These algorithms can have several hundred different variables and they are all designed to stop SEO specialist from playing tricks on them to get better position. With a mirror site they see two sites exactly alike and on different domains; this is a definite no-no.
The second attack, “Redirects” is even easier to do than the mirror site. To understand how this one works you need to know what redirects are ok and what are not. Redirects can be done in several different ways but the only Search Engine Approved redirect is by what is called a “301 Redirect”. This type of redirect tells the search engine that it is not a new site but just redirecting you to the real one. You can tell yours is correct by going to another page, in the site, and you not see the address bar change.
To set up a redirect that will get the intended website penalized by search engines is to first purchase a domain that has the same body address but a different ending. For instance the real domain would be www.timbucktwo.com and the site they would purchase would be www.timbucktwo.net or .us or .info. This where the easy part comes in; while you are still in your account, for registering the domain, just assign the domain address you purchased to forward into the real one (ie the one being attacked). The other way would be to put an html script that forwards the surfer to the site being attacked.
These two ways are definitely underhanded and done by thugs. And here is the kicker say you do not catch this before the search engines do then your site is penalized for a long period of time and thus you will not show up in search engines. If you business relies heavily on the internet then you will not survive.
So I recommend you do what I do and check to see if there are mirror sites up that you did not do. And update your site on a regular basis so it will be impossible for them to mirror you site exactly.
July 23, 2009
Sorry for the Long Lapse Between Entries
Importance of Web Site Logs
I have been extremely busy the last 50 days. As the Marketing Manager for Leisure Pools I not only manage our internet marketing strategy but I am also a consultant for our independent dealers.
My days are either adjusting websites or publishing new website but also requires analysis of website logs. All internet servers, the place that host your website, offer web site log analysis software as part of the package. Also Google Analytics is a good source of information. I prefer a software called Mach 5 which can give you a world of information if the settings are adjusted right.It will provide you much more information than Google Analytics. You will also need to get your website hosting service to open up all the log data settings to really benefit from Mach 5. Of course to really know what is going on you will need to run the logs each day. It will only take approximately 20 minutes.
There are a number of stats you will need to monitor:
- Page Views
- Visitors
- Bounce Rate
- Sticky Rating
- Modified Sticky Rating
- Entry Keywords
- Site Entry Pages
- Site Exit Pages
More information on the above stats will come shortly.
May 29, 2009
Naming Your Business and The Internet
What is in a name? Well just about everything when it comes to the internet. The name of your business is the beginning of your brand (how your business is viewed by the consumer). If you are going to stay a mom and pop business putting your personal name in the title is okay however it does not work well for the internet and especially search engines. The reason being is there are can be millions of people out there with the same name. This will cause problems with search engines and positioning especially if the surfer is searching by your name.
For many decades the publication of choice to find products and services was the Yellow Pages, or some other publication of the same type, consumers have been trained to search by topic and not by name. This is the reason why there were white pages and yellow pages. Since the characteristics of the consumers are moving their searches for products and services from the Yellow Pages to the internet they are searching in the very same way. This is the reason why I did not name this website “Internet Domination Strategies by Alex Gilmore”. If I had done that the searchers would have gotten all the Alex Gilmore’s out there in their search results.
So in essence pick a name that identifies what you want your business to be that has the keyword phrases in it that is going to bring surfers to your web page. By doing this you will find more customers with the least amount of effort which allows earning money to be your focus instead of having to promote yourself. Marcus Sheridan of River Pools and Spas wrote about this on his book called Pool School..
The interesting thing is Todd Stahl of Viking Pools criticizes his view of not putting your name in the title of your business but actually encourages this. The thing to note is the business Todd Stahl is part of has no personal name in it unless their name is either Viking or Pools.
May 11, 2009
Search Engine Optimization for Files
I have finished testing a strategy for Search Engine Optimization "SEO". This has to do with not only optimizing pages within a website but also pictures, pdf's, videos, and all the other files that will be put up. This type of optimization is also called long tail descriptions. These will also get position on Google, Yahoo, and MSN and thus bring searchers through them. This type of marketing is often expressed as "Viral Marketing" which will surprise you with a significant increase in traffic.
April 27, 2009
Consumer Characteristics in an Economic Downturn
Tradeoffs are a principle discussed in Economics. In a nut shell everybody makes tradeoffs. When the price of gasoline went to almost four dollars a gallon. This caused, what is termed in economics, what is called welfare tradeoffs. People started taking mass transit. Others cut back on the amount of fuel they used like staying home and watching a movie rather than going to the cinema. Using this logic we can deduce that this would be the same for fiberglass pools. On the contrare consumers also start looking for bargains. In my experience, in the luxury item category, consumers are looking for the best buy for their money. This is where a product differentiation strategy is extremely important and knowing full well the strategic marketing advantages your product has as compared to the other products in the market. Let me know what you are experiencing in your area.
January 15, 2009
Website Performance
When I started designing websites 15 years ago I asked my client what is your purpose of the site; are looking to show up in search engines or not. After pay per click came along it began to be called organic searching. Personally I do not build sites with Flash since it does have several issues with search engine spiders. Spiders have a hard time getting past flash. That means if you have content further down the page that you want spiders to see then flash prevents that. Now if you are an optimzation guru you can use that for your benefit but that is left to the experts. All the websites I do now is in CSS or Cascading Sheet Style. If you can put the flash on a template then Google and Yahoo will be able to read and index your content. However the Flash will not be indexed. I personally go with the philosophy of what the internet was called from the beginning "The Information Highway" and not the entertainment Highway.
I have taken many sites that had Flash to not having Flash. This resulted in the improvement of 5 key statistics, below, that will tell you how well your site is doing.
1. Sticky Rating
2. Bounce Rate
3. Modified Sticky Rating (subtract the number of visitors that bounced)
4. Search Engine Entrants Ratio (how many visitors that came from search engines divided by the number of visitors)
5. Average time of your visitors
Below is the numbers you want to match or be above.
1. Should be at least 3 or higher
2. You want this less than 40%
3. This should be 4 or higher
4. This should be better than 30%
5. This one needs to at least 4 minutes but I shoot for 5 or more.
