The Maine SEO Blog

You’ve launched a great new website and you’re awaiting patiently for it to be indexed.

You Google. Relentlessly.

Your homepage could be indexed within a week or so. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for it to take an entire month (or even two) for the deeper level pages to be indexed.

But if you’re not careful, you’ll never see your website in the search results. Why? It could be a few things…

If you use WordPress

You have an option during development to stop search bots from crawling your site. You should take it. The option is in a small space in a deep corner of your Admin: the privacy settings.

If you use the setting, great; just make sure upon launch, make your site visible!

NoIndex, Nofollow, Robots.txt

Not to get too geeky, but when you check the privacy setting above in WordPress, what you’re doing is adding a robots.txt file and noindexing the site.

However, you don’t need WordPress to do this. You can add a robots.txt file in any website – and there are certain pages you might want to use it for like your Privacy policy.

That being said, don’t nofollow, noindex your entire site after launch…

…or add any pages deeper than the homepage to your robots.txt file. In this case, that little backslash can make a world of difference.

How to make your site index faster

So you’ve launched. You’ve gotten rid of your noindex, nofollow tag and you’re ready to be found. Here are some ways to get found faster:

• Add Google Webmaster Tools. By adding this simple (and down the road, helpful) tool, you’re killing two birds with one stone and also submitting your website to Google.
• Add the Bing Toolbox. Like Webmaster Tools, this automatically submits your website to Bing, along with some other added benefits.
• Create a sitemap and submit it to your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Toolbox account. While it may not help your site be crawled faster – it will certainly help search engines find those deeper pages a little quicker.
• Get links. Lots and lots of links. The links from quality, established websites you have, the better! Think about it: those websites get crawled on a regular basis, follow a new link to your site and voila! Not to mention…now you have a link to establish expertise.
• Along the same lines, submit to directories.
• Submit yourself on social sites websites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc. Then have friends/colleagues help you go “hot” on those sites.
• Create a presence on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Then link to your new website.

Nicki Hicks
Get indexed

There’s been a lot of talk of late about PageRank sculpting as it relates to nofollow tags. Why? Because the way PageRank works changed just over a year ago and now they’re telling us.

PageRank has always flowed like this to pages from links that are not nofollowed (affectionately known as dofollow).

When you add a nofollow tag to a link, you stop PageRank from flowing. This result remains unchanged; but now, you’re not adding any benefit to the other (dofollow) links on the page. They still pass the same percentage of PageRank, as if all the links were dofollow:

What does this mean? Nofollow isn’t as strong as it once was. You can’t use it to PageRank sculpt.

Should you stop nofollowing? No, I don’t think so. To those pages like your Search page, Contact page, and perhaps Privacy Policy, I think nofollows are still a great idea. They are pages where you wouldn’t necessarily need PageRank to flow.

There’s a lesson to learn here. If you don’t trust a website enough (or just don’t want to pass the PageRank) to dofollow a link, you probably shouldn’t be linking in the first place.

The right way to PageRank sculpt? An intuitive site architecture – for both searchers and search engines.

Nicki Hicks
Sculpting is an art

I don’t expect clients to entirely understand search engine optimization when they come to us – or really even know what it is at all. And in all honesty, that’s fine, because that’s why I have a job. (Thanks for that.) 

But, after reading this perhaps you’ll know a lot more and be that much the wiser when you talk to your Search Marketer.

1. How bad is it to use white on white and write in a bunch of keywords?

Umm really bad. Probably as bad as you can get actually. In the olden days (probably all of 10 – 12 years ago), you could possibly get away with stuffing keywords. Today? Not so much.

2. I know SEO is important, so I’m going to do it this once and get it done with It’s a one-step process, right?

Sorry, no such luck. We’ll talk about it a little more later, but with search moving toward other venues like social media, local reviews, RSS, blogging, and other modern forms of web marketing, there’s no way you can do it once and be done. SEO requires constant massaging and experimentation.

3. What are these meta-keywords I keep hearing about? Can you make me a huge list of them?

Well I could. But it probably wouldn’t do a whole lot.

The thing with meta-keywords is 1) only Yahoo uses them and 2) if you use too many, they’ll hurt you. So, what do I suggest? Using a small group of focused keywords for each page if you’re intent on using them. And remember – even though Yahoo uses them, they don’t have much weight at all.

4. I just don’t have time for social media. Plus, I can get away without doing it.

Again, it’s really not an option any more. Soon, folks who haven’t hopped on the social media bandwagon are going to be struggling to catch up with the rest of the crowd.

So…create a LinkedIn account, get yourself on Facebook, and – if you’re feeling really socially frisky - join Twitter!

5. I’ve heard about this nofollow thing. Do I need to do that to all of my outgoing links?

Nofollowing links is sometimes a good strategy. But that doesn’t mean you should do it to every single outgoing link. 

Nor is it PageRank sculpting. To demonstrate that point, I like this short, sweet description by @Halfdeck.

(more…)

That is the question…

First of all, what is a nofollow tag? I think the best way to wrap your mind around it is by using pictures.  Think of all of the link/SEO juice your website has being held in a bucket.  Creating links pokes holes in that bucket and passes the juice to sub-pages within your site and to external sites.  Nofollow tags essentially plugs those holes.  So while search engines can continue to follow those links and index them, they do not pass link juice to them.  This visual should help:

(Picture credit: eVisibility)

To nofollow

So, nofollows are a way to control the way link juice flows through your site.  In other words, think of those pages which don’t necessarily need to rank well on SERPs.  By controlling the flow of link juice, you can concentrate it on the important pages – and hopefully increase PageRank by doing so.

Pages typically nofollowed are those like:

• Privacy Policy
• Contact
• Search
• Shipping information/Shopping Cart pages
• Affiliates

Not to nofollow

Like every positive, there are also negatives for nofollow tags.  However, you’ll see this article is somewhat dated and talks mainly about nofollowing blog comment links (a default setting for most blogs these days, in an effort to control blog spam).

Also, SEO experts argue why should you link to someone if you’re just going to nofollow that link?  I would say that links are meant to bring added value to the user’s experience, and while the link may be helpful, you don’t want to pass along link juice.

In the end, maybe nofollows are a passing fad, then again maybe not.  Although in SEO, experimentation is often the best way to find out what works.

Nicki Hicks
Nofollow-er

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers:
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Todd Friesen, President, Oilman SEO
Rae Hoffman, Owner, Sugarrae Internet Consulting
Jill Whalen, CEO and Founder, High Rankings
Mike Greban

Topic: Social Media

• Bruce Clay: site has spiked on search engines due to traffic from social media links
• Rae Hoffman: great for letting Google know that people are visiting your site and using it
• Mike Greban: Social search – people searching social networks; “new signals to search engines”; bookmarks give search engine weight

Topic: Content

• TF: become the expert in your industry – and show you are with the content you provide
• JW: are you answering people’s questions?
• MG: content is NOT just compelling copy: video, images; “Build good content and build it for the end user”
• RH: content doesn’t need to be perfect or great every time – just good content all the time, and tastes of great (example: cool content for flower shop: the funniest cards they see)

Topic: nofollow

• MG: why link to sites that you are nofollow’ing? Doesn’t think you should waste time with nofollow
• JW: thinks Google will eventually stop using nofollow tags, she doesn’t use them
• RH: thinks it’s a new fad, that it’s better to have good external links, thinks it’s a red flag
• TF: doesn’t believe in them
• BC: works for him

Topic: Blogs

• MG: how does the end user want to receive your information?
• JW: watch dead blogs and hackers
• RH: suggests to read about Wordpress SEO, Feedburner for WP (“mybrand”); Google knows # of subscribers of RSS feed
• BC: add relevant blogposts faster than relevant pages; dedicated bloggers; integrate info into site

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.