How to Make Google Crawl Budget Work in Your Favor

Keep your Google crawl budget uncut...

As I look at many blogs on a daily basis during my blog audits and other consulting services I provide, I run into the problem of bloggers squandering their precious time with Google bots on all sorts of links that shouldn’t be on their home page to begin with.
In order for me to explain what I mean, we first need to address the way Google crawls any website and how they determine how much time they would spend there.
The way Google bots first discover and consequently index and rank your blog pages is by following the links from other sites and within your own blog.
This is how Matt Cutts describes the process in one of his interviews:

“The best way to think about it is that the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank. So if you have a lot of incoming links on your root page, we’ll definitely crawl that. Then your root page may link to other pages, and those will get PageRank and we’ll crawl those as well. As you get deeper and deeper in your site, however, PageRank tends to decline.”

I need to remind you here that there’s a difference between the PageRank displayed in your toolbar (visible PR), which is updated every once in a blue moon and is obsolete the minute it’s updated and actual PR that Google updates on an ongoing basis.
According to the green bar, Traffic Generation Cafe has no PR, yet Google crawls my blog on a daily basis – a sure sign that my PR is higher than Google would like to show, for whatever reason.
Learn more about the difference between real and visible PR in this post:
So, Google follows links from other websites to your home page.
As they crawl your home page, they discover other links that lead deeper into your blog. But since Google bots won’t follow all those links to the infinity, wouldn’t you want to make sure they definitely crawl the most important pages first?
And that’s precisely why what you link to from your home page and other important pages is so vital for you to maximize your face time with Google bots.
Now let’s talk about some to the links that I often see on the home page that really have no business of being there.
Do you have that little link at the bottom of your blog that says “WordPress Admin Login“?
Sure it might be useful to you as far as logging in to your dashboard from any page on your blog, but what if I told you that this is one of the most linked-to pages on many blogs I see?
Do you really want to waste your crawl budget on an admin page? I know, rhetorical question…
Plus, now WordPress gives you an option to display an admin bar on any page of your blog without it actually being shown to your readers.
It’s an option you can choose under Users ==> Your Profile:

So how do you get rid of the link?
Your theme is what you should look into.
I use Thesis theme on my blog and with Thesis, I would go under Design Options ==> Display Options ==> Administration.
If you are using any other theme, just poke around to see if you have a similar option.

I had no idea this was an issue until very recently when I started seeing these kinds of most linked-to pages on different blogs:
http://www.YourSite.com/page/2/
As I did a little digging into, I realized that my blog had it as well, and it all stems from using a plugin that would display page numbers on your home page for all the posts you’ve ever written as opposed to just giving you the default “Older Posts”, “Newer Posts”.
What happens when you use a plugin like that is that you are essentially adding more and more links to your home page, sending Google bots all over the blog, as opposed to strategically showing them the posts you’d like them to crawl.
So get rid of any plugins that create pagination like that and stick with the default Wordress way to separating your blog posts into pages.
You can find this option under Settings ==> Reading.

Just choose the number of posts you’d like to show on each page and you’ll be all set to go.
By the way, the same goes for comment pagination.
When you choose to break up your comments into pages, not only do you create the extra clicks your readers have to navigate if they want to see the whole discussion, but also create a bunch of useless pages with DUPLICATE content on them.
To learn more about duplicate content and its effects on your blog, read the following post:
Getting rid of comment pagination is pretty simple: go into Settings ==> Discussion, and make sure your “Break comments into pages” box is unchecked.

Even though duplicate content is a common problem that you can find on pretty much any site with more than a couple of pages, there’s a good reason to be aware of it and how it affects your face time with Google bots.
Here’s another excerpt from Matt’s interview:

“Imagine we crawl three pages from a site, and then we discover that the two other pages were duplicates of the third page. We’ll drop two out of the three pages and keep only one, and that’s why it looks like it has less good content. So we might tend to not crawl quite as much from that site.”

The duplicate content post above will give you all the info you need as to how to avoid the issue of duplicate content on your site as much as possible.
This is one of the most overused blog structuring techniques I see on so many blogs.
Somehow many bloggers decide that the more categories and tags they use, the better – not quite sure why.
Your categories and tags determine your basic blog structure as well as the theme of your blog.
The more categories you use, especially generic ones or the ones that are not really related to your blog theme (see the screenshot below), the more diluted your overall blog theme will appear to both your readers and particularly Google bots, which might in turn affect your search engine rankings.

What is the benefit for your readers to see a category “focusing”? Or “success”?
Look at it from the search engine perspective as well. How are they supposed to theme your blog with generic categories like these?
My suggestions on categories:
Keep the focus as narrow as possible – I’d suggest to stay within 5-8 categories. I know it’s an arbitrary number, but it’s a good one to keep in mind, IMHO.Use your KEYWORDS as category names. Take a look at mine in the navigation bar below my header – these are my categories and I would love to rank for each and every one of those keywords.Don’t dump each post into every imaginable category; pick one or two only.Don’t link to categories from your home page UNLESS they are well-researched keywords and are highly related to the theme of your blog.
TAGS:
The same goes for tags.
Tags are nothing but well-researched keywords you assign to each post hoping to rank for them at some point.
To learn more about tags and how they can affect your rankings, read this post at Kikolani.com:
Here’s also some additional reading on how to correctly structure your blog:
Whether it’s big or small, they are still links, and your page rank will be leaking from your main page to the tag pages.
It’s smarter to have your page rank flow to your individual posts rather than tag pages.
I would definitely remove the tag cloud, if you are still using one.
More on the topic:
Affiliate marketing is how many bloggers make their money online, including yours truly.
So of course I won’t tell you to get rid of your affiliate links on your home or any other page you’d like to display them on, but at the very least, NOFOLLOW those links! Plus, make sure they open in a new window to prevent your readers from leaving your blog.
Let’s face it: we all feel pressured to display all kinds of social media icons and widgets in our sidebars.
Their positive effect on getting connected with our readers in social media realms is debatable, yet their negative effect as far as leading both our readers and Google bots away from our blog is obvious.
Once again, I am not going to say you shouldn’t have them, but use common sense as far as how many different widgets and icons you choose to display: once again, this is the case when more is not better.
ALWAYS nofollow those links though and make sure they open in a new window as with affiliate links.
Personally, I would stay away from displaying various networks that are not widely used by most of your readers, as well as widgets that display Twitter feed, etc. Not too many of your readers find any use for them, trust me, yet they add the amount of links that lead away from your blog.
I am definitely a big fan of displaying one of these widgets in your sidebar, but only one.
To me, popular posts widget, which is determined by the amount of comments each post has, makes the most sense to display.
If you choose to show recent posts, you are just duplicating what your home page already shows, plus it’s easy to find that info by clicking over to home page from anywhere else on the blog, whereas getting to most commented/popular posts is impossible without the widget.
This is how you can easily improve your rankings for the posts you are trying to rank for.
Create a sidebar widget where you simply link to your best cornerstone pages using keywords as anchor text and you instantly gain some great internal backlinks leading both your readers and Google bots directly to those pages.
Take a look at how I do it on my blog (you can see the widget towards the top of the sidebar):

Displaying hundreds of links that send your visitors as well as Google bots on a wild goose chase looking for your best content isn’t a great way to go, as you can see.
I would strongly suggest you strategically narrow down the number of links you display on your home page that will be beneficial to your overall linking strategy.
Don’t be afraid to give your visitors fewer choices. Clean, uncluttered look definitely shows to convert much better and decrease your bounce rates, providing for easy navigation that makes sense.
Can you think of other links I forgot about? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

Image credit: TheChive.com


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Top Google Ranking Factors of 2011: The 60 Second Tour

It’s not every day that the world’s leading SEO experts get together to collaborate on a project of this magnitude: coming to a relative consensus on what presumably are the most important ranking factors in Google algorithm right now, how they changed in the past 2 years, and what Google has for us in the future.
That’s exactly what Rand Fishkin’s of SEOmoz.org 2011 Search Engine Factors report is all about.
It contains the findings from 132 world’s leading SEO experts and their collective opinion represents what the SEO world perceives to be the most important factors to organic search engine rankings.
The report itself is quite lengthy and requires a lot of digestion, so I decided to present it to you in a more concise manner and the goal of the post is to answer the following question: how does or should this report affect how you do (or should start doing) SEO for your blog.

1.   SEOs believe that the power of links is declining, although it still represents 43% of all the deciding factors (down from 67% in 2009).
2.   Diversity of links outweighs pure quantity. (Link Building Mixology: Your “How To Do It The Right Way” Guide)
3.   Exact anchor texts appear to have slightly less significance over partial anchor texts. (Your Ultimate Anchor Text Tutorial – from Basic to Advanced)
4.   Domain authority matters when ranking pages (the more authority your domain has, the better your posts will rank).
5.   Presence of nofollow links is important to good search engine rankings.
6.   Among the most important on-page factors are the title tag, preferably with your keyword as the first word, URL (see my post on What’s in a Slug? for more on that), and H1 tag.
7.   Content is EXTREMELY important: the freshness, the uniqueness, the length – longer posts tend to rank better.
8.   Long titles/URLs are still likely bad for SEO.
9.   Social sharing factors appear to have a fair significance in rankings, i.e. get more retweets/FB shares! (PageRank, Meet SocialRank: How Does Going Social Help Your Search Engine Rankings?; also, check out this helpful post on social bookmarking tools.)
It’s important to remember that these are just opinions, but since Google is not telling, these opinions are the closest thing we get.
Have an opinion? Comment to show me that you’re alive!



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But What If Google Thinks YOU are an Internet Marketer?

I’ve read several accounts this morning in Facebook and across several blogs that lead to the possibility that Google is shutting down content from Internet Marketers, or content believed to be associated with internet marketing. And at first glance, some folks think that’s a good thing, believing that they’re all a bunch of spammers and scammers, so what does it matter?
Well, first, hasn’t that mistake been made before? Franchising was thought to be a scam in its early days, rather than a legitimate business practice. Google didn’t use to like search engine optimization firms, and at one point, it seemed they were at war with them, and anyone who looked like them. Now there’s a relationship between Google and the search industry, to the point that Google representatives will come to speak at events.
When I first came online, I thought internet marketing was all about scamming me out of my money too. Then I encountered the kindness of Allen Says, without whom I would not have made my first affiliate sale. He was very supportive and kind to me in my early days, way back in 98 when people would look at you blankly if you told them what the World Wide Web was.
Then there’s Marlon Sanders, who rescued me from having to retire due to health problems. And Mark Joyner, who I had the pleasure of working with for three months, who has taught me so much over the years.
Now, I don’t consider myself an internet marketer, and never really have. It’s not that the industry has a bad name, or that I don’t want to be associated with it. It’s that internet marketers aren’t my target market, though I get a wonderfully supportive fan base from there. I’ve always targeted other audiences. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love my IM audience.
Still, I’m lumped together with internet marketing as a C-list guru, one of the “underground” players, and I’m okay with that. But here’s what should scare you in this case – it’s possible that so are people who work in social media, as far as Google is concerned.
Because in observing the pattern of what’s happening with accounts that are getting locked or suspended, it looks as if they’re going after a subset of keywords across the entire YouTube site, and shutting down anyone in that family of words, then going back through and manually reinstating people whose content isn’t of the typical fare that’s associated with that area. One site got a note that a mention of YouTube in the title was why their account was shut down.
Darren from Problogger, who later was reinstated, was shut down because one of his videos had a title that included “making money online”. And he’s a YouTube partner.
Some of the visible people got their accounts back but what about people who are as legitimate but aren’t as popular, or don’t have any influence or leverage? What if they come after you?
While I like to think how great it would be to see less spam on YouTube and in Google results, if my theory of how they are deciding is right, it seems like the execution is majorly flawed.
People take what Google says as fact, not opinion. So using the same violation message they use for accounts they’re reviewing and accounts that are legitimately posting “how to scam YouTube views” or “how to make a living online” type of video content is damaging to the reputation of people who may not deserve it.
Where this gets scary is that Google decides, ultimately, who they think is an internet marketer and who isn’t. I’m not an internet marketer, but I have lots of fans from that industry, party due to some advertising and partnerships with some of the more recognizable names.
And yeah, YouTube is a free service, and we should play by their rules to use their service – but that’s not the issue. Go take a look at some of those blog posts. Many of them were not in violation, and I don’t mean that in the sense of “well, technically” or “legally speaking”. If they’re getting booted for bogus reasons, and no one really cares, or automatically sides with Google because “well, they’re Google, they must be right,” then what happens when they come after you?

OH HAI New Person! We love new people.
It would be great seeing you back again, so please subscribe by RSS feed, or get updates by email, before you forget! KTHXBAI!
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How To Use CTL to Pinpoint Your Traffic Sources

Tracking... Now you are talking!

How To Use Campaign Tracking Links to Pinpoint Your Traffic Sources

Chris blogs over at MisterFong.com. He just recently launched Smart Affiliate Links, a link cloaking, keyword conversion tracking Wordpress plugin that will help you improve your SEO and convert traffic into sales.
Many of us use Google Analytics or similar tracking script to see where our traffic is coming from.
This works well as it shows us which visitors are coming from Google, Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, and any other traffic source our site may get visitors from.
There are times though, it would be more useful to drill down further and see which specific tweet, Facebook post, or email message is sending us traffic, like when you are promoting a product and you want to see which traffic source is giving you the best ROI.
Luckily, Google Analytics and most other popular analytics software support Campaign Tracking links.
By tagging your links in a specific way, you can create different tracking links that will help your analytics software break down exactly where your traffic is coming from.
Ana recently wrote a post titled Does Bribing Your Readers and Twitter Followers Really Work?

In it, she writes about her experiment with trying to bribe her followers to tweet her post and to see if there was any resulting traffic spike from it.
The problem is, the traffic from the tweet is mixed in with the rest of her twitter traffic so she can’t pinpoint exactly how many visitors were coming from that specific tweet.
If she had used a campaign tracking link though, that information would be easily accessible in her Google Analytics report.
So lets see how to create one…
Tagging your links is a relatively simple process.
Basically, it’s just a normal link with few added parameters at the end of it that allow your analytics software to figure out exactly where your visitor came from.
Here’s an example.
Lets say Ana wants to promote her post How to Build a List: Rich Man, Poor Man List Building using Twitter and by sending out an email broadcast. So she could create two tracking links like this:
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/list-building-tips/?utm_source=list-building-tweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=list-building-campaign
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/list-building-tips/?utm_source=-list-building-email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=list-building-campaign
Looks kind of ugly, right? But let’s break it down.
There are five possible variables that can be used in a tracking url, but the three I’m using in these two links are required. (You can read more about the campaign variables here)
utm_source – Identifies the specific traffic source where the visitor came from (google, hubpages, list-building-tweet )
utm_medium – Identifies the medium (search engine, email, twitter)
utm_campaign – A name to use to group associated traffic sources together (list-building-campaign)
Now all Ana would need to do is tweet the first link and embed the 2nd link in her email broadcast.
Once she starts receiving clicks on her links, she can then look at her Google Analytics report under Traffic Sources > Campaigns and see exactly how many visitors came from her tweet, and how many came via email broadcast.
Now you may be saying to yourself, “It seems like too much trouble to create one of these tracking links by hand”.
… And you would be right.
It’s error prone, and who’s going to remember all these weird variable names?
Thankfully, all you need to do is bookmark the Google URL Builder tool. Then all you need to do is fill out a few fields and it will generate the tracking url for you.
Not only are campaign tracking urls supported by Google Analytics, they also work with most of the other popular analytics scripts out there that I’ve checked, including Clicky, Woopra, and Piwik.
While campaign tracking is a slightly more advanced topic, I highly recommend you use it since it can be really powerful.
By taking advantage of campaign tracking, you can learn all sorts of interesting stuff about your traffic. This will help you to optimize your efforts and allow you to focus on the sources that actually send the most traffic to your site.
Not only that, but try using campaign tracking together with Google Analytics’s Goal Tracking. You can setup different goals on your site and then figure out the ROI for each particular traffic source.
This is super powerful stuff, and it can really increase your profits if you use this data correctly.

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Thinking of Creating an eBook?

Here’s a System to Guide You Through It

If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other at the moment it is about eBooks. In fact there are three main questions that I’m asked on the topic of eBooks more than any other:
How do I create content for eBooks?How do I design beautiful eBooks (covers and internal design)?How do I market and launch eBooks to maximise their potential?
Over the last few years selling eBooks has become a larger and larger part of my business (in fact its now the #1 way I earn a living) and these three questions have been the same three big issues that I’ve had to grapple with time and time again.
To be honest I’m still refining my systems even now after years at it but in the early days the process was very very messy and quite hit and miss.
The learning was slow – nobody had written a comprehensive guide to walk me through the process, so I had to really develop my own way forward.
This week Kelly Kingman and Pamela Wilson have released a fantastic guide to walk eBook publishers through a great system of creating, designing and launching eBooks.

It’s called the eBook Evolution.

Having just reviewed it today I can safely say it is what I needed a few years back when I was starting out – it would have paid for itself many times over by now.
Pamela and Kelly bring some great skills and experiences to this eBook. Pamela is a graphic designer with many years of experience and Kelly is a published author and experienced eBook creator. I’ve been so impressed by Kelly’s previous eBooks that we’re actually working together on a photography eBook to be released in the next weeks – she knows what she is doing!
Together they’ve created eBook Evolution which is divided into 3 areas corresponding with those 3 common questions about eBooks:
Write it – from choosing your topic through to writing your manuscriptCreate it – eBook Evolution gives you some great templates to use to help you create a beautiful eBook. You also get a Cover Recipe book to make attractive covers. This section has some great screencasts as well as templates you can use to do your own eBook design.Launch it – some fantastic tips on how to get word about your eBook out there to the right people to help you promote it.
On top of that you get some great bonuses including a Quick Start Guide, a brainstorming guide to help you come up with ideas and some useful interviews.
The eBook Evolution is available for $147. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.
If eBooks are on the horizon for you (or even if you’re already publishing them) but you’re unsure how to develop a system to write, create and launch the – this is a guide that you’ll seriously want to consider.
As I said above – if this had been around 2-3 years ago I could see that it would have returned the $147 investment many times over (all I’d have had to do is sell an extra eight $19.99 ebooks over the last few years from what I learned to make the money back).
Learn more about what the eBook Evolution includes and secure your own copy here
Disclaimer: While I am an affiliate for this product I am also a big fan of Kelly, Pamela and the wonderful resource that they’ve created.
Note: This post has been updated after the initial launch special of this product ended.
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