Funny to think that search as we know it is only 7 years old. At least search as Google knows it. They’ve rewritten how users expect their search results and in doing so have become a powerhouse. Happy birthday Google!

This thread is a very interesting one on Virtual Promote’s forums. A site owner was emailed by Google to alert them that their site contained black hat SEO techniques and was being removed from the index for a period of thirty days. It appears that Google may be stepping up to the plate and starting to take action on sites that have been badly optimised. The website owner in this case knew he was using dodgy techniques and accepted it. The interesting point is that Google went to the bother of emailing him to let him know. Hopefully with this happening the use of these dodgy techniques might start to decline and honest webmasters and SEO’s will not be so frustrated by being trumped in the rankings by black hat sites.

Google have added another level of verification into their sitemap program. For those who have not been introduced to Google Sitemaps, it is an almost instant way to ensure that all the pages of your website are listed by Google. The onus is on the developer to keep the sitemap up to date and hence keep their Google listings up to date.

The extra level of verification means adding an empty text file with a unique identifying URL to your site in the same directory as your sitemap. Google then checks to see that the sitemap and verification file are there so that they can trust the person adding or removing sitemaps through their interface actually has server access and is permitted to make these alterations.
I can only imagine that this has come about through abuse of the system, perhaps with people registering their competitors sitemaps as their own then deleting them.

The good news is that if it’s all getting too complicated, Netpromote can do the whole thing for you.

If anyone is in any doubt over how serious the entire blogging phenomenon is, Google’s new Blog search service should put an end to your doubts. For Google to develop a dedicated search page for finding blogs and the content of blogs in almost real-time means that they are taking it very seriously. Blogs are here to stay and they remain an invaluable tool for the promotion of your ideas, your business or anything else you care to use them for.
http://google.com/blogsearch

I was reminded today to take another look at Google’s guidelines for picking an SEO company and was glad to see that we don’t fall foul of them in any way.

One of the main things that we are often asked for by clients is to provide a Guarantee that we can achieve #1 or top 10 listings within x months. Google clearly state that “No one can guarantee a No. 1 ranking on Google“. Netpromote have always reiterated that no-one can guarantee a listing in Google, let alone where it might occur in the rankings. (Combine this with the Google Sandbox effect and we can probably guarantee that new sites will NOT have a top 10 listing with 6 months).Some SEO firms might provide a guarantee but are likely to only fulfill their obligation for extremely obscure search terms.

For the most part the client is not trying to catch you out when they ask you this. They have a budget and they want quantifyable results. Guaranteeing top 10 results for particular search terms is probably not the way to go though. The process of SEO acts to improve the content and general accessibility of the entire site and while we might focus on a particular search term or two, our improvements could force another completely different term to cause your listing to appear in the number 1 position and drive insane amounts of traffic to your website.

I think if a guarantee were to be applicable, it would be along the lines of “All other promotional factors remaining constant, and taking seasonal variation into account, we guarantee that your website traffic will increase rather than decrease as a result of our optimisation and submission procedures.”

Anyway, nice to see that Google are giving this advice to help clients out. The more transparency there is in this business, the better it will be for everyone.

At Netpromote we were asked this question a few weeks back, and not for the first time either. Should I start submitting my URL even though I don’t have a website on it?

No chance!

I know the basis of the question is probably that the site owner has been told of the sandbox at Google and wants to be getting into the listings by the time their site is finished, but never, ever submit a domain that has no site at it. It’s SEO hari kari. Google will attempt 3 times to find a site there, and if it doesn’t your URL will be dropped. After that, it’s not clear how much it takes for your URL to be picked up again.

Same goes for other two big search engines. If they send their crawler to a site with no content they will drop the URL.

My best advice is to put together a small site of just a few pages covering all the main topics that will grace the pages of your fully developed site. Upload this site to the server and then submit to search engines. This way your initial listings will at least match what is going to be on the site, and you will actually get some listings, and maybe even some customers before your real site is live.

One other note, on this mini-intro site, don’t use phrases like “under construction” or “coming soon”. These are like raising red flags that show your site isn’t complete.

So, in summary: Build a small site and submit that. Don’t ever submit until you have some form of website live.

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