Streamline Metrics Attains Recognition as a Qualified Google AdWords Advertising Professional
I am proud to say that I have been officially recognized as a Qualified Google Advertising (Google AdWords) 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
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
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!
SEO for PDFs – Optimizing PDF Files for Search Engines
There has long been a myth that “search engines can’t read PDFs” so it is better to put all content on an indexable HTML page. This may have been true a few years ago, but nowadays most of the major search engines have no trouble crawling and indexing PDF files. There are several fantastic guides out there about how to optimize a PDF for the search engines, such as this one from 2007 on Search Engine Land.
However, even though I just clearly stated that search engines can crawl and index PDF files, I still recommend putting text-rich content on an HTML page over a PDF file (whenever possible) for a few reasons:
1. No website navigation in PDFs. More often than not, the PDF does not maintain the same look and feel of the website, let alone provide any navigational elements. While it is true that PDFs can include clickable links, the vast majority of them do not have the site’s global navigation, and thus users will be left with nowhere to go but back to the search results.
2. Not able to track user behavior on PDFs. Sure, we can analyze server log files to see how many times a PDF file has been accessed, but we are not able to track visitors with JavaScript based tools such as Google Analytics. Accurate tracking is absolutely essential to the success of any online marketing campaign.
3. Users may not be expecting PDFs. This may be just me, but I personally hate clicking through a search result and not immediately viewing a web page, but rather waiting for my browser to unfreeze while Adobe Acrobat takes its sweet time launching to load a PDF file. By the time the PDF is finally loaded, oftentimes I am already regretting that I clicked to view it while directing my cursor to the Back button.
There are some cases in which PDFs should remain as PDFs, such as brochures and other print material, but articles and technical papers certainly can be converted to HTML pages. I will follow up shortly with another post on how to go about doing so.
Welcome to the New Streamline Metrics Website & Blog
After being in business for over a year and a half now, we are happy to finally announce the launch of the official Streamline Metrics website. One might think that an online marketing company would make sure the company website was up and ready before actually conducting business, but the truth is that we’ve been lucky enough to stay busy with new business through word-of-mouth referrals on top of working with our existing clients that we just kept putting the site on the backburner. However, we certainly realize the importance of establishing an online presence to convey to people that we actually are a “real business” and acknowledge the fact that the site needs to be put up sooner rather than later. The site is not 100% complete but now that it is finally up, we will be more likely to finish the pages which need to be fleshed out as well as add new pages, sections, tools and update the blog on a regular basis.
Stay tuned!
