This topic is for discussion of the article at A Padded Cell entitled 5 Steps to a Search Engine Friendly Site.
Post here if you have any questions or comments about the article.
Megan
My web design blog
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mscreashuns posted this at 16:44—23rd July 2007.
He has: 560 posts
Joined: Jul 2005
That link does not work (Access denied), but this one does.
EDIT:
Okay, I have read the article and decided that this is not one of my favorites. I have read several articles at A Padded Cell and have been pleased with the content and depth of the information. However, with this one, I feel it is simply repeated, fairly well-known material. I guess from a webmaster's standpoint, having an article like this relating to search engines is necessary. You want this information to be on your website. However, it seems this article contradicts what is stated in the article:
In my opinion, this particular article is neither unique nor more thorough.
One other thing I was not too fond of were the 5 section headers. From a writing standpoint, some of the verbs used are a bit weak. "Do" and "Get" begin two of the sections, and do not convey a strong meaning. These are my suggestions for the headings:
2. Research the market
...
5. Acquiring (or Obtaining) Links
In my opinion, these are active verbs that transmit a feeling of doing something instead of something happening. Perhaps these details are nitpicky of me, but I feel a site featuring articles (a sort-of literary-based portal) should be in-tune with a strong writing style.
Megan posted this at 17:05—23rd July 2007.
She has: 10,121 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Thanks for your feedback, Andrew. The reason why I feel the need to write articles like this is because, sadly enough, there are still a lot of people who don't understand the basics.
Thanks also for the feedback on the writing! Unfortunately, I'm lucky if I have time to write articles at all but I'll try to think about those things next time.
That's a good point, but I wouldn't say that I wrote this article expecing it to be linked to (other than by myself in the forums and in other articles). There are other reasons to write content other than getting links (that's beyond the scope of this article!).
Megan
My web design blog
mscreashuns posted this at 17:21—23rd July 2007.
He has: 560 posts
Joined: Jul 2005
Oh, believe me! I completely understand the need for the article and the reason for the repetitive content. Offering information bases like this is great for people who may stumble upon your website for a different article, and then find this article and realize how much they truly needed it.
teammatt3 posted this at 00:38—25th July 2007.
He has: 1,852 posts
Joined: Sep 2003
That's completely inaccurate! I know that you know that they can Megan (well, at least the major engines)! I agree it's best to put them in HTML but search engines can pickup links embedded in JS and flash. Details, details...
Other than that, it reads like every other SEO guide.
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Megan posted this at 13:06—25th July 2007.
She has: 10,121 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Actually, I wasn't aware of that. However, I would certainly not reccomend that people build sites with flash only navigation. It's definitely going to cause problems with crawling. I'm pretty sure it says something to that effect in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
This article as obviously an overview - there are other areas that I could have provided more detail on but I wanted to keep this one as an overview.
I'm sorry you all didn't like the article. We can't write perfect content every time, unfortunately. And frankly, Liam and I have both written worse articles than this!
Megan
My web design blog
demonhale posted this at 02:18—25th July 2007.
He has: 3,241 posts
Joined: May 2005
And I read somewhere, bots can follow PDF links too...
princess23 posted this at 06:44—25th July 2007.
They have: 40 posts
Joined: Mar 2007
thanks for the link you provided but i don't agree that much into what was written there
JeevesBond posted this at 00:33—26th July 2007.
He has: 3,516 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
Hmmm, well it would help if you qualified that comment with some reasons and evidence to back them up!
I'm not sure they can, what I heard last was that Google was experimenting with Flash and even if they could read JS, would they take any notice of it?! Have you got any evidence to back that up?
Agreed that the article might not be strictly true, but for a beginners guide it's fine, we don't want to confuse people too much! Maybe if the SEs can read links from JS and Flash a little footnote should be added, just for completeness? Although this could turn into a colour of the bikeshed argument if we're not careful.
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Megan posted this at 13:09—26th July 2007.
She has: 10,121 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
And then we'd end up with a huge list of footnotes because practically everything that was said in there could have an explanitory footnote.
No need to be overly fussy with details on this one - it's a general overview, not a comprehensive document about everything there is to know!!
Megan
My web design blog
teammatt3 posted this at 03:27—26th July 2007.
He has: 1,852 posts
Joined: Sep 2003
A few searches on Google hint at it:
SWF files indexed (doesn't necessarily prove they index the links inside them though)
(kind of) JS files indexed (doesn't necessarily prove they index the links inside them though)
And for you CSS cloakers, Google's ramping up their spidering of CSS files
You can read what other people say about it.
Now all that doesn't *prove* Google, Yahoo and MSN can read links embeded into JS and SWF, but it comes close enough for me and a lot of people
. I know Aaron Wall had a post on it, but I can't find it. But in his book (which is a little out of date)
If they're indexing all that stuff, it'd be a waste if they didn't use it when ranking other websites.
Maybe you should start an "SEO Experiments" section at APC so you could prove or disprove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Myth Busters for SEO (tm)
. Actually, that's not a bad idea...
My Site | Regular Expression Tester
mscreashuns posted this at 13:12—26th July 2007.
He has: 560 posts
Joined: Jul 2005
I think the article is fine. The details I pointed out were intended to indicate details that could be worked on in future articles. Since you started a thread to discuss the article, I felt it necessary to truly discuss the article.
JeevesBond posted this at 00:35—27th July 2007.
He has: 3,516 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
I reckon Matt's right to an extent; it's quite possible that while Google may check Javascript/CSS to see if people are trying to cheat it, that doesn't mean it would use those links when ranking pages. Also what Megan has neglected to mention here, but has told me (we do talk you know!), is that the Google Webmaster Guidelines explicitly tell webmasters to use 'normal' links:
So I don't think her advice is unsound for the intended audience. But as Matt pointed out: we'll never know unless we actually test it, that MythBusters thing isn't a bad idea.
Problem is that it would be so hard to do: Google is always moving the goalposts!
Agreed, that's fine with us: personally am happy someone cares enough to firstly read the articles we post at all and secondly comment on them!
Really though, I've got my head stuck in Drupal development and Megan is at work all day. We're a bit stretched for time so Megan wrote what she could in the timeframe given. It's not a bad article, but it's not the best either, we're aware that we need to keep posting articles semi-regularly: even if it's just to show that the site is still being maintained!
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Megan posted this at 13:25—27th July 2007.
She has: 10,121 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Having an area to test SEO practices would be very useful and could get us some good backlinks & traffic from the SEO community. The difficulty in testing SEO is that it's hard to create a level playing field for your test cases a lot of the time...
I can't say that we'll ever stop writing general overviews like this though. You can see by what many of the beginners are posting here on the forums that they do need advice like this. We can create value by having a lot of beginner resources in one place. I also think that it's good to keep things short and simple because otherwise the intended audience might not read it. Comprehensive articles are great as well (obviously), and we will continue to publish those. But some people might look at that and think it's too much detail, or it's too long and I don't have time, or I'm just a beginner and it's too much for me etc.
Megan
My web design blog
elena29 posted this at 09:01—31st July 2007.
They have: 28 posts
Joined: Jul 2007
The article posted in this thread speaks about general tips and tricks related to SEO, information that is of very basic requirement to every search engine marketing person.
I can say that it all comes down to personal prefferences and style which are in very tight conditions to financial power of investment in the marketing of a website. You get what you pay for is often the truth and for this reason various purchases and investments will have to be made in order to achieve a reasonable return in promotion results and high SERPs.
Try reliable web hosting service provided by MarbleHost.com
Megan posted this at 14:42—2nd August 2007.
She has: 10,121 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
I just found a good quote on the Javascript link following issue:
From my favourite site, once again:
This is important, because you want your link value to be passed from your home page onto other pages of your site. If your links are in Javascript or even images you could be reducing the amount of value that gets passed around your site and to other sites you link to.
Take a look at the question there about deep vs. flat site architecture as well (question #10).
Megan
My web design blog