Nashville SEO

A quick little note on my progress in June, which wasn’t much and not very impressive. The biggest reason is that Ive been busy working on other projects and haven’t had the time to promote this site as heavily. I’ve also seen a drop in my rankings. I think age is playing a huge factor in my rankings right now.

Rankings:

Nashville SEO: 15 was 28
Nashville Web SEO: 21 was 1
Nashville Online Marketing: 22 was 19
Nashville Internet Marketing: 36 was 15
Internet Marketing Nashville: 14 was 7

As you can see, my rankings drop for many of my keywords, but none of it was drastic enough to make me concerned. My site is still “new” (less than 6 month). Its authority will build with time and my rankings will solidify. Right now I’m bouncing around a lot, which is fine. The biggest drop was Nashville Web SEO, but that can be explained by the change of my homepage title, which use to include “Nashville Web SEO”.

My Links

The number of links showing is constantly changing. I haven’t done much this month to build links, so there isn’t any improvement here.

Yahoo Linkdomain: 1,540 was 1,850
Yahoo Site Explorer 1,813 was 2,130

Technorati Authority: 31 was 23

Traffic

Unique Visitors: 1,839 was 1,258 last month.

Conclusion

So like I said, nothing too impressive, but I’m not too concerned. I’ve been really busy. I’ve picked up some SEO jobs and I had some server issues on one of my big sites. I haven’t put the attention here like I should, but little this domain age is also important. I plan on putting more effort into it this month.

I’ve had a few people comment that an ebook that outlines basic SEO would be useful. I was considering this, but I’m not sure how I feel about having my own ebook?

What do you think?

What would you like to be in it?

I was considering an organized, step by step, walkthrough of SEO and blog promotion. It’d take a while to finish, but if people are interested, I could do it.

So I just switched a domain over to BANS and noticed that dead URL’s return a 200 status code instead of a 404. It is hardcoded into BANS to return the main index page content with a status code of 200 if a page is not found. Well, this is a problem in terms of SEO.

The 200 status code tells Google the page exist and can be indexed. (and it will index it) If there are links pointing to a page on your site that should be 404, it will get indexed as a duplicate of the main page.

Standard methods of dealing with 404’s don’t work. A .htaccess entry won’t do the trick. You could manually disallow these pages in robot.txt, but that could be a horrible task if you have many pages. The site I switched over had 100 indexed pages before the switch. I now have about 80 duplicate pages indexed by Google with nothing but item listings and no content. All with same title. This is a big duplicate content problem.

A Solution

I found a cool hack from sonjay on the BANS forum, but it didn’t 100% solve my problem. I didn’t really like the solution 100%, and I’m not 100% happy with my solution either. But I played around and I’m getting the effect I want.

Go Into Your Index.php

I inserted this at line 563, right after

// End –>

</script>’;

and right before

if ($front->q != ” && $front->mainCat != ‘

INSERT THIS

Wordpress  messes up the code, so here it is in a txt file

Why the 301?

Well, I could have gone with the 404 and had the pages deindexed, but I had links pointing to some of those old pages. I wanted to keep the link juice, so I went with the 301 redirect to send all incoming traffic to the homepage.

I Make No Promises

I got that code off a forum. I make no promises and assume no responsibility for its use. I got it to work fine on my BANS, but I can’t be responsible for it messing up any of your sites. I just thought it was worth sharing.

If you’re serious about SEO, Internet Marketing, or Making Money Online; you need to spend some time learning about footprints, how to not leave them, and how to detect them. I’m making this post because recently I discovered someone’s entire network by discovering a couple of footprints they were leaving. And since I don’t like the person, I documented the entire network, made a list of the sites, noted the search I used to find them, and sent it on to Google =P I’m not some almighty white hat, but it pays to be smart and hide your tracks (especially if you’re in an ultra competative niche or walk around ticking people off).

What Is A Footprint?

An online footprint is the imprint you leave on the internet that can be used to trace your activity through various sites. It can be used to locate multiple accounts and multiple sites you own. If you’re an SEO, this is important. A footprint is an obvious sign of search engine manipulation and can be used to by Google or competition to rip apart your network.

So How Are Footprints Created?

Basically, not enough variety. No creativity. Being lazy.

Do you use the same theme on several sites you own? Do you have the same link in the footer on every site? Use the same anchor text or wording on every site? Do you get links in the same places for all of your sites? All of your sites on the same server? All sites have open whois?

Starting to get the point? All of that kind of stuff can be detected by a smart SEO. I backtrack your links and notice you’re getting sitewide links on 20 different sites with the SAME anchor text. I check them out and they’re all BANS or all wordpress or all directories. A quick IP check shows that they’re on the same server. I check out the whois and they have the same owner … And I’ve busted their network. I look for a pattern they use, then do a search on that pattern. If I can do this, you can bet Google can too, especially if they’re tipped off.

How Can You Find Footprints?

Lets say you’re interested in Make Money Online and want to research your competition.

Find You Competition’s Links

Go to Yahoo
linkdomain:site.com -site:site.com

Find Backlinks for Given Keyword

linkdomain:site.com “make money online” -site:site.com

Find Backlinks from Footprinted Software

linkdomain:site.com “Powered by Build A Niche Store” -site:site.com

Find Backlinks from .info Domains

linkdomain:site.com +site:.info -site:.com -site:site.com

Find Backlinks from .info with Keyword

linkdomain:site.com “make money online” +site:.info -site:.com -site:site.com

Find Back Links From .info with Footprinted Software

linkdomain:site.com “Powered by Build A Niche Store” +site:.info -site:.com -site:site.com

So, those are just a couple of searches that can be used to locate and track your competition’s footprint. You can use a variety of combinations and keywords to location various sites your competition is using to get links.

What Are You Looking For?

All of the above searches return hundreds of links, but what are you looking for. You’re looking for links that do not appear natural. These may be footer or sidebar links. These may be tons of links with the same anchor text. This could be a lack of variation in themes. Once you find this, you can check out the IP and whois information to determine the owner.

Once you’ve found a few footprints your competition uses, you can locate sites on their network. Then continue the process on their network sites to find even more sites. They might be link laundering and layering their network sites to hide them. Its possible to work your way back pretty far if they don’t make effort to mask their footprint.

I’ll make another post soon with ways to hide you footprint on the internet.