Cirencester Website Design

Should I pay for links to improve my Google page rank?

No!  Not at any time, nor should you be convinced to hire a link building expert.  It is a complete waste of money.

The problem with links and page rank is that it has gotten out of control.  The original idea was “if a bunch of people think a page is great they will link to it”  Assumption – if a lot of people do that it must be good content right?  No wrong!

Well maybe if you are an authoritative source then people may well ink to your content. But this would be for tax or legal advice or other specific topics that are not usually associated with buying or selling.

But in reality, if I own a burger bar in my local town are people really going to link to my menu..  “Wow visit this site they sell burgers!”  No I don’t think so.  So then what is point of  having a good page rank?

Page rank as a measure of value of your website does not work.  Google got smart and using your IP address knows where you live.  So now it can serve results based on where you are in the world / country.  Page rank is no longer required.  The shuffle in the systems has seen some huge shifts in the top spots of search results as Caffeine was rolled out.

Optimising your website does work.  The shift away from using page rank, to a far more sensible “relevancy” indexing algorithm, means that if somene is searching for a local burger bar your website now has far more chance of being found..  Without any page rank at all..

So optimise your website for what you do and where you do it.  Forget page rank, links are good if they increase visitors to your website, but there is no value in just a link for the sake of page rank.

Website GEO Targeting same language getting it right

Scenario I want to target both the UK and US markets from the same website.  The issues are:

1. How do I target two markets from one website
2. How do I avoid being penalised for duplicate content

The options seem, at first, to host a .co.uk in the UK and a .com in the US.  This will work provided you have unique content for each website.  This causes problems of maintaining two website’s with twice the workload.  So in the long term managing two website’s becomes messy and expensive.

The right way to do this is to consolidate everything into one website.  Using a non geographic TLD such as .com or .org you can create country versions.  I.e. mywebsite.com/uk/ or mywebsite.com/usa/.  Using Google webmaster tools you can use their geo targeting option to specify where you want to target specific url’s.  You may decide to make mywebsite.com, main site, to target the USA and then use mywebsite.com/uk/ to target the UK.  You add both URL’s to Google webmaster tools and specify the target for each.

Pretty simple really.

So maintaining the website and avoid duplicated content.  You MUST localise key pages such as the home page and any other important pages.  But for universal pages you can duplicate the content to reduce administration.  But you must add link rel=”canonical” tag to those pages so that Google understands what you are doing. More info..

SEO tips – link strategy

Gaining good quality links to your website is like receiving a vote for your website. This is why search engines use links to determine your page rank.

Links take a long time to as it can take quite a while for people to discover your website and find it compelling enough to want to link to it.  So it is important to have great & compelling content that is well presented and easy to link to.

Avoid paid links and reciprocal links.  These have little value and can do more harm than good.  The best way forward is to participate or to invite participation.  Contributing to an open forum that is relevant to your business / website is great.  Overtime you build a reputation and other people using the forum will begin to notice you and see you as an authority on the subject matter.  As well as that you can add a blog to your own website.  Having a blog within your domain will contribute to your overall ranking.

But having said all that and you should still be concerned with your page rank.  Page rank now has less to do with your positions in search engine results.  There is a shift to relevancy to a search keywords.  This will become clearer as Google Caffeine is rolled out in the first quarter of 2010.

What we know about Caffeine is sketchy but we do know it is to increase relevancy and load speeds.  See SEO in 2010 article

SEO tips – Geo targeting

Your website address is an indication of the geographic market place you target. A “.com” is generic and as such it is harder to position the website for a specific geography. A “.co.uk” is specific and Google will understand that the website is specifically targeted at the UK. In the same way a “.eu” would work for Europe.

The other consideration is where your website is hosted. If it is hosted in the USA, for example, Google will assume that is targeted at the US market.

Using Google webmaster tools you can specify the “geo target” but selecting an appropriate URL and hosting your website in the appropriate country helps.

Of course we take care all of this as part of the Winning Inch SEO service.