Archive for October, 2009

Yahoo! Shuts Down GeoCities & Blows SEO Opportunities Worth Millions

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Yahoo! purchased the popular free web hosting service GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 Billion dollars in stock. And on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities for good. Any website on GeoCities that was not transferred to a new web host by Monday is gone forever. Granted, most sites built on GeoCities were festering eyesores and for the most part nobody will lose sleep over its demise, but Yahoo! really screwed the pooch on handling the closing when it comes to SEO.

Let me explain.

As of October 28, 2009, there are 7.45 Million GeoCities URLs still indexed in Google. Go ahead, click that link and try to visit one of the sites listed. For example, Dr. Doo Wopp’s site “all about me and my love of the doo wopp sound” at http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/ is no longer available and redirects to a Yahoo! 404 page. Multiply that one site times 7.45 Million and we’re dealing with a huge number of sites that will simply vanish.

I just did a search on SEMRush to find out the popular keywords for which GeoCities URLs rank in the Top 20 in Google for, and it came back an astounding 686,270 different keywords that generate an estimated 11,947,000 visitors from Google each month. It’s hard to fathom a website that got nearly 12 million visitors a month from Google alone will disappear.

For example, one of the keywords reported by SEMRush is the keyword “sayings.” According to the Google AdWords Keyword tool, this keyword gets over 1.2 Million searches a month.

Currently, the GeoCities website at www.geocities.com/heartland/lane/2470/lslists.htm ranks 4th in Google for a keyword that gets 1.2 million searches a month. Once Google re-indexes that site and is served a 404 error page, that site will be removed from the index.

At the very least, you would think Yahoo! would put forward some effort to preserve their search engine rankings and most of that traffic, right? Apparently that isn’t the case. Since Yahoo! is simply forwarding the GeoCities URLs to 404 or 410 permanent error pages instead of redirecting the sites with SEO friendly 301 redirects, the search engines will eventually drop all of the missing URLs from their indexes and Yahoo! will lose out on all of the invaluable search engine rankings and traffic that has amassed over the years. It baffles me that a company as big as Yahoo!, not to mention a major search engine, would make these decisions without keeping SEO in mind.

UPDATE - LocalSEOGuide.com made a similar post called Yahoo Flushes GeoCities, PageRank & Million$ Down The Drain. Check it out!

Streamline Metrics Attains Recognition as a Qualified Google Advertising Professional

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I am proud to say that I have been officially recognized as a Qualified Google Advertising Professional. In order to be recognized as a QGAP, the following requirements must be met:

To become Qualified, this individual has:

• Accepted the terms of our program.
• Managed at least one AdWords account in a master account for 90 days.
• Built and maintained our 90-day spend requirement.
• Passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam.

You can view the official Qualified Google Advertising Professional profile page for Streamline Metrics at https://adwords.google.com/professionals/profile/org?id=015187405271492007149&hl=en. To find out how we can help your business with your online marketing efforts, please contact us for more information.

Google Caught Manually Changing Search Results for The White House

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I caught this tweet from RustyBrick this morning: “Amazing, Google changes search results for White House http://bit.ly/1BuL80.”  The link points to an article on SERoundtable.com which explains how Google has appeared to have “made a change” to push a certain page on www.whitehouse.gov show up at the top of the search results for a specific query. What is even more striking is that the original poster mentioned that Bing already served the “correct” page, and Google apparently rushed to fix it.

This is significant because Google has had a longstanding philosophy of  “no manual intervention.”  Below is an excerpt straight from the Official Google Blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html.

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

I am curious to see Google’s response to this. I am sure they will say something along the lines of “we didn’t directly change the SERPs manually, but we tweaked our algorithm to get the desired result.” Either way, incidents like these can definitely shake the trust of Google’s loyal userbase.

How to Redirect PDF Files with PHP, ASP or .htaccess for SEO

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

This is the follow up to my previous post “SEO for PDFs - Optimizing PDF Files for Search Engines” in which I recommended NOT using PDF files whenever possible. In this post, I will explain how to go go about redirecting PDF files with .htaccess, PHP and ASP.

301 Redirects
When it comes to SEO, the best redirect to use is a 301 permanent redirect. This is because search engines still have trouble handling 302 temporary redirects. And don’t even think about using a Meta Tag Refresh redirect or a redirect generated by a client-side language such as JavaScript if you care about search engine optimization.

.htaccess 301 Redirect
This is the easiest and most straightforward option to use, but it’s only available on a Linux server. Simply add the line below to your .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 /oldfile.pdf http://www.example.com/newpage.html

PHP 301 Redirect
This is also normally a pretty easy way to redirect pages by adding a couple lines of PHP on each page you want to redirect.  But since PHP code cannot actually be inserted into the PDF file, we have to treat it a bit differently. Follow the steps below:

1. Rename oldfile.pdf file to filename2.pdf.
2. Create a new directory named “oldfile.pdf” in the same directory that the PDF is in.
3. Add an index.php file in the new oldfile.pdf directory.
4. Add the following PHP code to the top of the index.php file:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com/new-page-to-redirect-to.php" );
?>


Now when the search engines access http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf they will actually be served the http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf/index.php file which contains the 301 redirect to the new page.

ASP 301 Redirect
This is very similar to the steps for the PHP 301 redirect above, but this is websites that are hosted on Windows servers and use ASP.

1. Rename oldfile.pdf file to filename2.pdf.
2. Create a new directory named “oldfile.pdf” in the same directory that the PDF is in.
3. Add an index.asp file in the new oldfile.pdf directory.
4. Add the following ASP code to the top of the index.asp file:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.example.com/new-page-to-redirect-to.asp"
%>

Now when the search engines access http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf they will actually be served the http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf/index.asp file which contains the 301 redirect to the new page.

I just realized I haven’t explained how to identify PDFs which are already ranking in the search engine results and thus are prime candidates for redirecting, so I’ll do that in another follow up post shortly!