Jim's Marketing Blog - Latest Comments in Google and me!

Re: Google and me!

Start an Online Business — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:34:39 -0000

Content is King when it comes to Google but a few "quality" links don't hurt - Quality = topic related sites even if they have a lower page rank are valuable

Re: Google and me!

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:02:25 -0000

You make a really good point.

The challenge we all face as website or blog owners, is that no one (other than Google) actually knows what Google does in order to allocate rankings.

Re: Google and me!

official souvenirs — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:53:27 -0000

does it realy matter wether you use nofollow or dofollow,i mean in the eyes of google because they send traffic no matter wich tag you are useing and ive seen loads of dofollow blogs pop up now,everyone seems to be heading in the way of dofollow

Re: Google and me!

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:47:38 -0000

Andy,

All BIG companies blog in order to profit their business; usually with the PR company writing the blog for them. At least with a small business (like mine) you get content written by the actual company - in my case, me.

Re: Google and me!

Andy — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:09:57 -0000

I'm not sure what's worse - blogs written for Google, or blogs written by big corporations because their PR agency told them to...

Re: Google and me!

Ghostwriter — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:29:55 -0000

Hi Jim,

Excellent blog post and very well said. As a writer myself my primary focus when writing blog posts is my readers and how my words can help them. My blog has a PR of 0 at the moment but I'm really not worried. I have traffic and regular readers so that is all that matters to me. I am hoping to get recognised by Google at some stage though.

Amanda

Re: Google and me!

Mokokoma Mokhonoana — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:32:37 -0000

Most people are killing their website's content trying to impress Google.

Words are written to be read NOT crawled (search engines).

Bloggers will link back to your site because of well written content NOT because your site is well 'crawled'.

So prioritize the 'readers' not 'crawlers'!

Good read!

Re: Google and me!

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:32:30 -0000

Justin,

I agree. One of the main reasons people have been so kind in recommending this blog and linking to it, is that they know I'm trying hard to make it a valuable resource.

You make a lot of sense - thanks!

Re: Google and me!

Justin Parks — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:29:02 -0000

I think the SEO guys who advised you about the quality content deserve a drink and the other who mentions that do follow will harm your blog

... well...

they are possibly a little behind an being cautious about the leakage of "link juice" but in my opinion your 100% correct with Do Follow and long may it continue, after all you get out what you put in.

Re: Google and me!

John Waller — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:24:06 -0000

Excellent post and very good site. I have been struggling with what to do with the "no follow" tags on the site I am currently developing. I'd say if your site has PagePank of 4 after 4 months of blogging, allowing Google to follow is not doing too much harm.

I have subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to many more insightful postings.

Re: Google and me!

Ron McFarland — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:16:48 -0000

Do you know a good resource guide that explains the rules for duplicate content?

Is a blog post that has videos from YouTube or Blip penalized?

Or if something is reposted with only a couple of sentences introducing why it is there, is that a negative?

Appreciate the feedback.

Ron McFarland

Re: Google and me!

OfficeSupplyGeek — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:17:57 -0000

I was surprised to end up with a Google PR of 3 after only about 6 weeks of blogging on my site. I had very few links, but just wrote some very detailed posts about the specific niche that my blog is focused on.

I dont get tons of google referrals, but I think that I get a fair amount that is reflective of the volume of people searching for the type of info I provide.

Thanks for this article and all of the other info provided here and through your Tweets. I find much of it very useful.

Re: Google and me!

Bruce Elkin — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:03:10 -0000

Very refreshing info, and advice. Thanks.
I sometimes put things up on HubPages, but find much of what I read there to be "keyword rich" drivel. I've been trying to write good, meaningful content and have slowly been rewarded with more Google traffic -- without dumbing down what I write to accomodate keywords. Much appreciated!

http://hubpages.com/profile...

Re: Google and me!

Russ — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:02:30 -0000

Google SEO boggles my mind. Quality content is always key, but I still can't seem to get it just right...no matter how many people link to the site. Glad to see that your content is doing so well.

Re: Google and me!

greg cryns — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:48:41 -0000

Ditto on Lucy above. So many games are played about Google. Should we do this? Should we do that?

Let's just write good copy for our audiences. Period.

Most of what we think Google wants is questionable anyway.

Re: Google and me!

Lisa — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 01:33:21 -0000

I, for one, am tired of worrying so much about frequency of posting,do-follow versus no-follow - all the things we're "told" count with Google. I'm glad to see what your experiment proves, that if you provide quality content, Google will recognize it, and send you traffic.

Re: Google and me!

Successful Home Business — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:58:29 -0000

Thanks LoneWolf. I will look into it. Hopefully, Jim will have some further comments as well.

Re: Google and me!

LoneWolf — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:10:12 -0000

@Joseph Parton

The XML Sitemap Plugin is by Arne Brachhold and you can find it at http://www.arnebrachhold.de...

Joost de Valk has a number of plugins as well. I use Yoast Breadcrumbs and Yoast Sociable currently. He also has some good SEO articles. Check out http://yoast.com/wordpress/ to see what he has. It appears he has a new plugin for Tweetbacks for those of us on Twitter.

I hope that helps.

Re: Google and me!

Successful Home Business — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:40:53 -0000

@LoneWolf; care to offer some more specifics on those plugin tool?

@JimConnolly; could you offer some tips on setting up a base SEO blog to build your content on?

As far as PR, it seems to be that a good amount of targeted traffic to your site is the most important thing at the end of the day rather than PR?

To Success,

Joseph Parton

Re: Google and me!

LoneWolf — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:57:03 -0000

There are lots of tools/plugins for WordPress to help make SEO more automatic. I currently use one to make and upload xml sitemaps when I add a post and I've added breadcrumbs to one of my sites (still need to integrate it into the others). There is also a plugin which plays with the titles to make sure your title comes first, before the category, etc.

With these kind of tools you can focus on just writing good quality content and let the tools do some optimizing for you. Your readers will eventually (hopefully) do the rest via Twitter, Digg, Delicious or even email or just talking 8=)

Re: Google and me!

Winston Lawrence — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:31:56 -0000

Jim, this blog post is right on the money. Blogs that are written for SEO traffic either tend to be glorified "Landing pages" for products or simply regurgitate basic information with a changing set of google-friendly keywords. Blogs that are written for people tend to engage the audience and given the medium may even include pictures and other media that Google doesn't "track" well but which a human audience appreciates.

Re: Google and me!

Robert — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:39:33 -0000

@ RocknRolli: :) no worries, just that Toolbar PR is a pet hate for me. I loathe it! I would attribute it to being possibly THE reason for the current sold link/nofollow link fiasco that we now see.

Re: Google and me!

RocknRolli — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:22:42 -0000

@Robert: Sorry, I didn´t mean to teach a lesson. I just wanted to share some information. Your statement is absolutely correct.

Re: Google and me!

Robert — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:12:43 -0000

@ RocknRolli: If you go back to my comment you'll see that I do state that the PR has little effect on crawl rate. I can pretty much guarantee however that the real PR (that which Google calculates and NEVER shares) is quite valuable for deep indexing. If your homepage has a high Google PR (not to be confused with the Toolbar PR) then it is more likely that the deeper pages of your website will be indexed. This is particularly valuable for very large sites.

Re: Google and me!

RocknRolli — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 03:59:39 -0000

@Kim+Robert: Please don´t overestimate the significance of PR. Since its purpose is to give an idea of which quality your inbound links are, crawlers are likely to visit more often sites with high PR because they´re linked pretty good.
My special interest website has a PR of 1 and still the G**glebot visits every day.