Q: When using your company name in your title tag, how can you avoid having something like a pornographic site also including that so that customers get porno sites in their search results?
A: Although you can’t prevent others from incorporating your trademarks and trade names into their sites, you can take legal action and compel them to stop. Monitor your company name and trademarks as keywords in the search results with a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts), so you’ll be notified when new sites show up in the top results. Then, if they are using your trademarks illegally, notify your attorney. A more likely threat is “Google bombing,” where sites link to an alternate site other than yours and use your company name in the link text.
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Q: How often should you submit your website to Google? How long does it typically take for Google to index your site after you submit? Is there any way to reduce the time?
A: That’s easy: never. There’s no need for it. If other sites link to your site, then Googlebot will find you on its own. If no one links to you, then that’s what you need to work on - not on submitting. Furthermore, since a large chunk of the sites that submit themselves are spam or porn, your own site could be flagged as probable spam or porn if you submit. Once you have links pointing to your site, the process of getting into Google can take as little as a few days, or as long as several months. The higher the quantity and quality (i.e. PageRank) of those links, the more likely Google will index you quickly. And definitely don’t resubmit your site once you’re already in Google. Google will pick up your changes.
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Q: Explain what alt tags are and their significance, please.
A: An image alt tag is the text that appears in a small box when you hover your cursor over an image. Alt tags should convey the key information from the image that the user would not receive if she had image loading turned off or she was visually impaired. Search engines also look at alt tags to a limited degree, so it’s helpful if the alt tag contains relevant keywords. Not all images have or should have alt tags defined. For example, graphical borders should not, as that would make for a very frustrating user experience for a blind person using a screen reader.
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Q: Our site is a coupon site, password protected. Does this mean the search engines cannot get to the thousands of pages behind the password protection?
A: That’s correct. If you want those pages in Google’s index, then you’ll need to allow Googlebot access to the pages without requiring log-in or cookies. The way to do this is to provide straight text links into the protected content and then check each visitor’s user-agent and/or IP address when the link is accessed. If the user-agent/IP range matches Googlebot’s, then serve up the content; otherwise, serve up the log-in form.
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Q: How many keywords should be in the anchor text of a link?
A: There is no hard and fast rule. Personally, I like to keep link text relatively succinct and tightly focused on just one keyword or key phrase. The longer the link text, the more diluted the overall message conveyed to Google in the link text. So, for example, if you wanted to do well for the key phrase “nanotechnology conferences,” good link text to the conferences page would be “nanotechnology conferences”; bad link text would be “click for a list of upcoming nanotechnology related conferences.â€?
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Q: Are the links that are returned in a backlink check (using the link: command) ranked any way?
A: Not that I can tell. They are certainly not organized in order of PageRank score, which would have been nice. However, there’s a great free tool from SEO Chat at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search that will sort and display the links by PageRank score for you.
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Q: How often is PageRank updated?
A: There is a distinction between PageRank scores that are updated visibly to us outsiders through the Google Toolbar and PageRank scores that are used within Google’s ranking algorithm. Lately Google has been very spotty with its updating of the PageRank scores on the Toolbar server. In fact, it’s been so spotty over the past 6 months that it’s no longer reliable. Prior to the last update, there wasn’t a major PageRank update in the Toolbar for a stretch of 3 months. In contrast, the PageRank scores used by Google’s ranking algorithm are certainly updated MUCH more frequently than that.
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Q: If a site has no backlinks except internal links, will Google add it to the index? Or add it to the index and not assign PageRank?
A: A site with no links to it from outside websites must not be a useful, link-worthy site. Such sites, not surprisingly, tend not to get indexed by Google, or by Yahoo! for that matter. If they do for some reason get indexed, they don’t get a PageRank score and don’t rank well at all in the search results.
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