Posts Tagged ‘seo’

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!

SEO for PDFs - Optimizing PDF Files for Search Engines

Monday, September 21st, 2009

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.