how-to seo Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Gravity Search Marketing

Ask the Experts: How can I keep private materials…

April 18, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We have some private materials on our site, but we’re not able to use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to disallow the pages from indexing. As long as we don’t link to the pages, and only send them out as links in emails, will Google have any way of indexing these pages?

A: As we’ve said many times, the only way to keep materials truly private online is to password-protect them. Even if you don’t link to your pages, here are a few ways that your private URLs might find their way into Google’s index:

People have reported seeing links from within Gmail messages spidered by Google, although this isn’t something that we have experimented with first-hand. We do know that Google spiders Gmail content emails and uses “content extraction” in order to match advertisements, but there is no documentation of other uses of the spidered content.
Private URLs can be seen by Google in other odd ways. For example, if somebody clicks from your private page to another website, then your private URL would show up as a referrer in the server logs. Some server logs are public, or find their way into the public realm, and that could expose the private URL.
If someone visits the private URL while having the Google toolbar activated, then the URL could get collected and find its way into Google’s index.
If the link is included in a listserv email (seemingly private), then that could be scraped and republished on the web.
One of your authorized visitors could post a link within a forum post, on Facebook or Twitter, or somewhere else that he/she believes is private or semi-private, and that link could eventually be followed and indexed.

As you can see there are a lot of possible sources for leaks!

The best safeguard would be to password protect the individual pages, and your second-best approach is to deindex using the robots meta tag. Without password protection, robots.txt or meta robots to prevent indexing, your next best line of defense is to watch for indexing and then do one of two things:

remove any files that have been indexed and put them in a different URL; or
place all of the private content in the same folder on your server, and then use Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to remove the files or folder from the indexes if/when it gets indexed.

These should give minimize your exposure in Google, but if your materials are truly confidential, you need password protection. And without a doubt, ixnay on the social security umbers-nay!

Uncategorized

New Developments This Week in Google and Bing

December 3, 2010
by Jennifer Grappone

There’s been a lot of discussion this week about two recent announcements concerning Google’s and Bing’s ranking algorithms. We’ll boil them down for you here.

1. Twitter authority is factoring into web rankings
Google and Bing have disclosed that they assign authority to Twitter accounts, and that a person of high authority may give a rankings boost to a page by tweeting a link to that page. This is a similar concept to Google’s PageRank, in which Google assesses the strength of a web page. At this time there is no official name for Twitter authority, and no specific value that is available for the public to see.

While we’ve always known that links from within tweets are beneficial because they can drive traffic to a site, it was previously believed that tweets did not pass any ranking power. We now believe that, at least in some cases, tweets that link to a page can help improve that page’s organic ranks.

What this means to you
This revelation underscores the importance of getting your website talked about on Twitter. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, advises that website owners should think about Twitter as a form of link building.

Although this was not explicitly stated, we believe that being linked to on public Facebook venues also carries some ranking benefits in Google and Bing.

Read Danny Sullivan’s excellent article on Social signals and search rankings.

2. Merchant reviews appear to influence rankings
We are keeping an eye on a new algorithm change announced by Google this week. The official wording is ambiguous, but the catalyst for this algorithm change was a recent New York Times article about a high-ranking, highly unscrupulous online merchant. Top SEO analysts believe that merchant reviews (the reviews that users post about online stores in venues such as Google Checkout, Shopzilla, and Pricegrabber) are now factoring into Google’s determination of ranks. Merchant reviews, which reside on review aggregator sites, are different from individual product reviews, which typically reside on the merchant’s own site.

Positive merchant reviews are expected to have a positive effect on ranks, so it goes without saying that the more highly regarded a business is (as evidenced by merchant reviews) the better the potential rankings benefit.

What this means to you
We believe that any online store should have a merchant account set up in at least one venue to begin accruing and encouraging positive merchant reviews. This is something we always recommend, but it’s something that now deserves a higher priority on your list of SEO endeavors.

This is a very recent announcement, and the interpretations are still highly speculative, however we believe that this is most likely to strongly affect merchants with very poor reviews at this time. We expect this algorithmic factor to evolve in the near future.

Read Google’s announcement on their recent changes.

Ask the Experts: How can I keep private materials…

Q: We have some private materials on our site, but we’re not able to use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to disallow the pages from indexing. As long as we don’t link to the pages, and only send them out as links in emails, will Google have any way of indexing these pages?

New Developments This Week in Google and Bing

Get An Effective SEO Strategy