What's this blog about?

Everybody seems to have a blog these days, so I thought I would have one on my Noia Galicia site. Hopefully this blog will be of interest to anyone wanting to develop a web site that is indexed and ranked in the google search engine. That in essence is what I am going to write about. This blog will take you through all the development and optimization strategies I intend to use, as I actually use them, in order to make this site as visible as possible on the google search engine (i.e. - .com/co.uk/.es). Optimization is a continuous process, so this blog will go on indefinately. By the way, the first few entries are retrospective and are taken from the odd note I made of what I was doing at the time.

Please excuse all spelling mistakes, I am writing this "off the cuff" and not using a spell checker.

Posted 30.12.2004

The aim of the site I am developing is to create a continually evolving and updatable holiday/travel resource about Noia and Galicia that will be highly visible when using the google search engine. (Google process over 60% of all search engine traffic, making them almost twice as important as all the other search engines put together.) I have finished the initial 3 page draft of the site and have up-loaded it on to my free host web space at www.noiagalicia.angelcities.com. I Intend to use various web analysis tools to focus and optimize the site for specific search criteria (i.e. keywords), this will be a continual process. I also need to get incoming links, so I am going to run some searches on spain related sites and see if I can find any link partners.

Posted 07.01.2005

Managed to find several sites who offer reciprocal linking arrangements, i.e. they will link to you if you link to them. General process seems to be, to fill in an on-line form with some basic site details, e.g. site url, url of links page if different, site title and 250 char max description of site. Most sites ask you to place a link to them (which they provide) on your site first. Some then put the reciprocal link on immediately, others review the site first. They don't seem to confirm, so it is necessary to check their links page periodically.

Posted 12.01.2005

Have now got some incoming links, but it is not as simple as that. Whilst a link may appear to link to you from another site, it may not have any value, i.e. the link may be in javascript or have some kind of redirect code associated with it - if this is the case google will not recognise it and it will not pass any page rank (PR) to you. I need to view the code for my link partners link pages. (on Explorer click: view >source). I also need to see if their link pages have google PR, but my google tool bar has become deactivated for some reason and I cannot get it to re-install.

Posted 13.01.2005

I mentioned page rank (PR) yesterday, but did not explain what this is. PR is a value that google gives each web page that it indexes (includes in its repository of web sites) based on that pages overall percieved value on the web to google. PR ranges from 0 (not indexed) to 10 (the maximum). Most people, even web masters, don't fully understand PR and place too much value on it. I will talk about this more in subsequent blogs.

Posted 14.01.2005

The PR thing is important to understand if you want a visible (appears in search engine results) web site, so I am going to go on about it a bit more. If you just put a web site on the net without any other sites (that are indexed) linking to you, your site will never get indexed (listed by search engines). Links are seen as references to a site and if another site with a high PR links to you, then that is considered (by search engines) to be a high recommendation. What actually happens is a little bit of that sites PR is passed to your site giving you your first step up the ladder, your own PR. Once your site has got some PR it can be indexed when it is spidered (examined) by the search engine robots. Will talk about this more later.

Posted 16.01.2005

Linking strategy going well, but a problem with getting an ideal "absolute url" for my home page. I will have to explain about this later, because the consept of absolute url's is quite hard to grasp and I need to come up with a good analogy in order to explain it here - will have a think. By the way I have found a couple of good sites which list directories that I can submit my site to and I have been making applications to them over the last few days. All these directories review the sites manually and can take anything from a few days to several months to do this.

It seems that there are sites that rely on authoring, i.e. having people produce articles for them. I will look in to this, if the articles can include a link to the authors home site, I might give it a shot.

Posted 17.01.2005

All the info I have found suggests that submitting sites to search engines is pointless. If a site has viable links directed towards it, the search engines should find it from those links automatically and more quickly than by requesting the search engines to spider it. It can take anything between 4 to 5 weeks and 3 months for the main search engines to find and spider a site for the first time. Have not thought of an analogy for absolute url's yet - but have not forgotten!

Search engine info: Google is No.1 (over 60% of all search engine traffic), msn is No.2 and yahoo, loosing traffic all the time is down at No.3. Really you can forget all the rest!

Posted 18.01.2005

You may have noticed that this entire site is in html/css. This is because it maintains a far higher text content than a typical badly put-together java script site. If you want your site to never get indexed, then design it on dreamweaver or frontpage, then take a look at the code. You will see anything from 70-90% of your page is javascript with the remainder being text. Search engines just love that (not). To get good indexing and ranking in search engine results you want high content pages (where content means text and nothing else), its no good having a fantastic looking site if nobody ever finds it!

Posted 19.01.2005

OK, absolute url's. By the way, sorry because this is quite complicated. Every web page has an address (a url) and that page can be reached by typing in that url in the address bar. However if you take my home page you will find that in addition to entering the site_name.com, you can also get to it by including the additional parts of the url extensions, eg, site_name.com/index or site_name.com/index.html. Although these url's all take you to the same page, they are infact all different and google sees them that way. More significantly, the internal linking of the site pages (on this site) has to use the site_name.com/index.html as the homepage address. In an ideal world I would make the absolute url of the home page the site_name.com version, but because I am on a free host package I don't have that facility. What that means in google spidering terms is this: If google hits my site_name.com url (home page), then uses the internal navigation to go to another site page, e.g this one, when it uses the link from this page to return back to the main page it actually goes back to the main page using the site_name.com/index.html url. Google sees this as a different page because it has a different url and actually indexes the page again (as what is called a ghost page - i.e. the same page, but with a different url). The result, I lose some of my page rank because it is split between the .com and com/index.html versions of the same page. In order to try an avoid this I have asked all my linking partners to place their links to me to the full home page url, i.e. site_name.com/index.html. Hopefully this will solve the problem.

Posted 21.01.2005

Managed to get some more links and have now got some directory listings (splut and Jayde). Should have mentioned before, the single token (word) being optimized for the home page is "noia" and the 2 token string (phrase) is "noia galicia". I am having problems with a three token string. One, I cannot think of anything suitable and two, my text date comments by the photos mean that strings like "Noia july 2002" are the most frequently occuring themes - annoying. I am still adding and ammending the text on all three pages all the time. My keyword density population for "Noia" is around 8% of the text and for "Noia Galicia" just over 5%. Text to html ratio is around 80% (very high). I have also joined the "zeal" community. They are a directory connected to (I think) infoseek, but everything about them is awkward and difficult, not least trying to submitt my site. They are also prone to sarcastic responses to messages posted on their message board - very unprofessional.

Posted 24.01.2005

Got confirmation I am listed in the greenstalk directory. This directory is new, but growing rapidly and has a good page rank on some of its pages. They thanked me for submitting my "quality site", nice people.

I have e-mailed a guy who is a major international internet guru and has massive complex online discussions with leading web masters, as well as authoring books Cd's etc about the internet and web design. I wanted to know a little bit more about the negative implications of having my site on free host space - I made the question as short, but comprehensive as possible. Not only did he respond, but he did so within 45 minutes with a really useful answer. People in web design seem to be the most accessible people on the planet, this guy is the equivalent of the CEO of a leading blue chip company or a nobel prize winning scientist in web design terms, but he still had time for the little guy. Half the knowledge I have used to structure my site was learned from his pages - must give a link to his site.

Posted 25.01.2005

I am not going to do any more to the site until it is spidered and ranked, so it's just a waiting game for now, hopefully it won't take 3 months.

Posted 27.01.2005

Used a web tool to see if any search engine has recognised any of my links (if they have I will have been indexed) - I do this everyday. Amazingly, as of today I am on msn, yahoo, altavista and alloftheweb (who ever they are). I have had my new site indexed inside 4 weeks - this is not supposed to be possible, great news. Now the downer. Searches prove that in real terms the site ranks so lowly as to be invisible. eg. Using "noia galicia" as a search string on msn.com, I could not find my site listed on the first 25 pages (250) hits. If I enter some obscure searches pulling out <100 results I manage to get on page one, two or three. My initial elation is followed by dissapointment. That's enough for now.

Posted 28.01.2005

(am) My wife phones me from work to ask if I have been on google today - I have not. She then gives me some rather good news. She ran a google.com world wide search on "noia galicia" which produced over 63 000 hits. My site is now indexed and ranked No.1* on google.com. It also ranks No.1 on google.co.uk and No.4 on google.es (Spanish google) for my primarly search string. It is the only non spanish language site on the first 10 pages of hits on Spanish google. I then go on google myself and run a search on "noia". I am ranked No.46, but out of >690 000 indexed results. Everything I have read, researched, you name it, says that it is impossible to create a new site and get it anywhere near the first few pages of a google search listing where there are more than a few thousands results, I have done it in exactly 30 days, I am extremely happy!

Posted 29.01.2005

I have to check google first thing to make sure yesterday's ranking postitions really are true - they are. I can now reveal my secret. I went back to Uni' a few short years ago and did a Science Masters in software development with a thesis on a little known technology called information extraction (not retrieval - that's different). When I started reading up about search engines and how they index sites I recognised that they wrapped, and then examined every token, verb phrase and noun phrase in exactly the way I had using my software deliverable. The difference was that when my software looked for characteristics that defined certain features I wanted to extract, the search engines, I summised, attributed what I think is a set of linking numeric values to text dense features based on populularity of occurance and placement of occurence within the text. In basic terms they relate how frequently a word occurs in the text to where it occurs, eg in an H1 heading or the first sentence of a new paragraph. they then use an algorithim to create a mathematical value for the page as a whole for each word or phrase that exceeds a certain text density. I can simulate how this is done and have used it to optimise my pages and, it would appear, my simulation is pretty close to google.

Posted 30.01.2005

Behind the scenes I have been developing a larger 7 page version of the site with greater optimization and enhanced content. I don't intend to upload the site to angelcities.com at the moment.

Angelcities (my host) are also starting to provide a potential problem. Because I am on free space I have limited daily bandwidth and, if I exceed that bandwidth, my site is suspended (removed) for the rest of the day. Up to now visitors have been using around ¹/₆^th of my bandwidth, but that was with neglegable exposure through search engines, potentially new traffic could exceed my limit. I may need to move to a paid hosting package. A further problem is that my site is actually on an angelcities template page meaning I may in effect have all my pages held within frames. If this is the case I am losing a lot of PR, PR I can use to elevate my ranking in the "Noia" search.

Posted 31.01.2005

Nothing new of any real significance. I am adding a Spanish language page to my development site which means it is now up to 7 pages.

Actually one thing that is quite interesting is that my temperamental google toolbar has decided to come back to life and I have therefore run it over my site. The result is one which will confuse all the so called web masters, but confirms my understanding of how the google algorithm works. My site (this site) is ranked No.1 on google when running a "noia galicia" search, yet has a rounded down google PR of zero (in reality it is between 0 and 0.5). The second ranked site on the same search has a PR of 4, this should not be possible (although I am certain I know why it is). The site has also risen 2 places to 44 on the "noia" search - I intend to focus all my optimizing efforts on this search from now on. I also submitted this blog to 2 blog directories today. Who knows, someone might even read this!

Posted 01.02.2005

Registered with a couple more directories and blog directories. A hint - don't automatically suggest your url in what seems the most obvious category in a directory. Look round first and see if you can find a category with good PR and limited links in it. Also be aware that most directories list alphabetically, so if there are 10 pages in a category and your site name begins with "X", your link will be on page 10. Whilst page 1 may have good PR, page 10 will almost certainly have none. If a directory will allow you to list in multiple categories, then make sure you do. Also make sure you link to directories, they like it even if it is not obligatory.

If you wondered why "splut" have their link on my home page, it is because they were the first directory to list this site and that's their reward. By the way, I know that when this site shows up on searches under holidaywatchdog that the redirect goes to an empty page -all there guide pages are empty at the moment, don't know why.

Posted 02.02.2005

The site has dropped on my main single word search of "Noia". It's moved as follows: 46>44>47>51. There are several potential reasons, the most likely being that the continual updating of googles index has resulted in sites, initially below this one, having made beneficial content changes that have just been indexed. The second reason could be PR leakage. Over the last 3 days I have placed extra links on this site which have yet to be reciprocated. If (unlikely) this site was spidered over the last few hours my small amount of PR will have diminished a little bit. A hint, try to have a separate page for links, or incorporate them on a less popular page - not your main page. It's better to get PR leakage (which is proportional) from a page with less PR than your main page. That way you give a benefit to your link partners with the minimum penalty to your own site.

Posted 03.02.2005

Got confirmation of listing in a couple of travel related directories and a blog directory. The overall result is that this site, which I now know has been spidered on each of the last 4 days by google, is up from No.51 to No.19 on my primary key word search of "Noia" on google.com. The PR of the site at No.20 is 6. This blog is No.2 on "noia galicia" search. The problem still remains that, even though my link popularity is recognised to a degree, I have no real PR - it is all going to the angelcities template frame. I need to have a serious look at purchasing a domain and getting a good host package.

2nd blog of the day. I have some how got confused with google.co.uk, this site is not indexed on them at all - very confusing. Also confusing, but in a different way, under a "noia galicia" search on msn.com (with 140k+ results) the site was listed at No.6. It's hard to believe 3 extra links takes it from oblivion to the 1st page - I just don't understand their algorithm versus link popularity formula.

Posted 04.02.2005

Msn.com, who yesterday listed me at No.6 on the "noia galicia" search have now removed my main page from their index all together. The reason, as far as I can tell, is because one of my directory listings (sortmytravel) have a redirect to my site, but rather than the typical redirect style heading normally used, they are using my header tag content exactly. The result: The redirect version of this site is now ranked No.1, and the real site (url) is removed because it is an identical page, but with a lower version of msn's PR. 3 things of interest here. 1. Given my actual site (url) listing's importance to me I need to ensure I do not list the new site with "sortmytravel" until my msn PR exceeds their's. 2. Potentially the same thing could happen with google, msn only indexed the redirect today. The redirect page has identical optimization and could therefore bump the real url. 3. If you have any kind of travel site and your aim is simply to get maximum visibility for it "sortmytravel.co.uk" can obviously do a fantastic job - but for me and my objective, a disaster.

Posted 05.02.2005

Search engines are constantly updating their indexes and naturally this leads to independent (of web site changes) variations in search engine listings. Eg this site has moved form 19>18>20 under a ?noia? (google.com) search over the last 3 days (I have made no changes to the site). However msn.com are in their own world and I am totally bemused by their algorithm (I really think they have a large bucket with ur?ls in it for every search and pull them out at random each day).

On msn.com, 3 days ago this site ranked at No.6 (?noia Galicia? search). 2 days ago this sites main page was deleted from their index, however a redirect to it via ?sortmytravel.co.uk? was ranked No.1. Today that lasting has disappeared but another redirect, this time going to a ?splut.com? directory page with this site?s link on it is ranked No.2. No wonder people say yahoo and msn don?t provide consistent search results, they?re a joke. Do they really have an algorithm at all?

Posted 08.02.2005

Nothing new with regard to this site, but I am working on the new version. My google tool bar has fallen out with me again - the real reason it happens is because i don't let the listener have access to the info it collects on the sites i visit and i also delete its temp folders. Anyway it will come back again, once it feels i am adequately reprimanded.

Posted 11.02.2005

Away for the weekend. The revised and extended version of the site is now pretty much finished. Just need web hosting and url.

Posted 16.02.2005

All but finished the new site. It is 6 pages plus a blog, links and spanish language page. It will definately be on a new url and should be sorted in the next 2 weeks. It now covers the 4 provincial capitols of galicia. I am also trying to format the content etc so that it will meet dmoz's standards , their PR would certainly be welcome.

Posted 22.02.2005

This site is currently being spidered by google at least once every 3 days. I have done no further optimisation as the the new site is on the way and that will be on a different url. Out of interest, since this site has been ranked on google, it gets between 20 and 35 visitors a day. Most of those visitors only have a one page view, suggesting that they are spanish language speakers - using google you can translate a page found in searches directly when opening it. If you navigate to other pages the translation is lost.

Posted 28.02.2005

Since last spidered 4 to 5 days ago, the site has dropped from ranking at between 18 and 20, to 25 on a "noia" search. I can only put this down to a couple of things. 1. I added a couple of internal links about the new site at the top of the page that will have affected my keyword density and distribution to a limited degree. (I also changed the header tag, but in a positive way to counter this, it obviously did not work.) 2. A really minor change in googles algorithm (unlikely) or, more probably, one of my incoming link has gone. Either way, I won't lose sleep about it at the moment

6 March 2005

I am trying to explore the world of internet directories a little bit more, there are a lot of them, but some are a waste of time and others have redirected links. I will come up with a list of some worthy ones (in the holiday and travel field) and list them here. The main site slipped from page two (ranking around 18 to 20) to page three (as low as 27) on a Noia search, so I have made a couple of changes to both header tag and "h1" and "h2" titles to improve things. It has been spidered again and was back on page 2 yesterday ? but for how long?

22 March 2005

The new site is now up and running and made it on to page one and page two (respectively) of my two primary optimized search terms on google within 2 days of being uploaded. Confusing however, is what has happened to this site. On 19.03.05, it appeared on Yahoo for the first time, and not only that, but ranked #1 on my first search term (out of 60k) and #46 on the second (out of one million plus). Simultaneously however (for the same search on google where it had been #1), it disappeared completely (on .com, .co.uk and .es). Yet the explanation of index deletion as a result of duplication (it is not a duplicate anyway) is dismissed by virtue of the fact that it still appears on p2/3 for the main ?noia? search. The other_places page also appears, although this blog seems to have done a vanishing act too ? I will have to look into it. Now the new site is up and running I will make more of an effort on this blog again.

Posted 03.05.2005

This site has disappeared from the google searches, no doubt because of algorithm changes to page size and key theme density. Up until 1 May, it ranked 1# on yahoo.com for ?noia galicia? for 6 weeks, but has also vanished from there. My efforts of late have been on the new site which ranks on page 1 and 2 for a number of google and msnsearch keyword searches (yet to appear on yahoo), but I am now making some changes here by creating a shorter, but high keyword rich index page. The original index page content now appears on the noia galicia page, increasing the internal page linking. So it will be interesting to see what happens!

Posted 26.05.2005

Just noticed that the index page here is PR3 and 2 other pages (inc this one) have PR2. Have re-vamped the main page which is back at 1# on yahoo and await its next spidering by google and msn. The galiciaguide site now hits almost every relevant serps with msnsearch on page 1 or 2, inc 19# out of 3m+ for "galicia". Google not quite as good, although 70-80% of all hits are google generated. Yet to crack yahoo, it is indexed and appears on serps, but other than one search, is on p4,5 or higher, in other words - invisible.

Posted 19.07.2005

This site is staying at PR3 (main page) and still ranks at 1 or 2 on yahoo and msnsearch (for noia galicia), although it has dissapeared from google on that search. I intend to do more work on this site in the nearr future, but producing a 100+ page site for galiciaguide.com has taken up a lot of time over the last few weeks and I have other projects lined up as well.

Just got back from one visit to Noia and about to embark on anther in a week or so. This sites still ranks well with yahoo and msn and actually generates a few hits every week to galiciaguide.com. Unfortunately, most visitors see the link to the other site and then leave this one staright away - I may make the link less obvious!
galiciaguide.com is up to PR4 now on google, but my extensive redesign using CSS 1 and 2 and the splitting and creating of 100 or so pages did not involve any optimisation and therefore it is not fairing quite as well on searches as one might expect. It gets about 35 unique hits/day. I want to add around another 50 pages, then I will take a serious look at some SEO work. I also intend to add a couple of extra pages to this site by the end of september if not before.

Posted 08.10.2005

The html manager stopped working on angelcities and would not accept my ftp attempts to update, so this is my first visit in a month plus.

This site improves it rank on msn and yahoo continuously. It currently stands at No.3 on an msn.com search for "galicia spain" - one of the biggies. Google however is a different matter and on all but one relevant search, one or more google filters are excluding it from the serps.

My main site, galiciaguide.com, is also suffering the same fate. Un-filtered google results place it at around No.7 for the"galicia spain" search out of 3m plus, yet it is excluded. Very infuriating since it is a "white hat" site with no spamming, no commercial content and over 100 000 words of original text. I have yest to find out why this is happening.

Posted 21.01.2006

Regretably I have neglected this site for some time as I have expanded galiciaguide.com to around 250 pages - although I have just given it a new link from a themed blog.

galiciaguide is now escaping whatever google filters were affecting its performance and appears on page one of several multi-million result searches, but the elusive "galicia spain" search still eludes it. It does make an appearance on page 2 (and sometimes three) on yahoo for that same search and has ranked at number two on msn for both that and the single word "galicia". The site is however constantly at No1 for the "galicia guide" search on google which is some consolation.

Posted 25.01.2007

I cannot believe that it is over a year since I last wrote anything here. I have been busy with web design and my other sites. My real job is as a web designer and search engine optimiser, my name is Martin Lambert and I live in the UK.

The son of this site, GaliciaGuide.com, has now become a major portal on everything connected with Galicia and appears on page one for hundreds of google searches related to the region. Other sites like GaliciaSpain.net and HotelsinGalicia.net also appear at the top of google serps and, dare I say it, they are also mine. I actually use them as demo sites to illustrate search engine optimisation although my interest in Galicia (and Noia) remains.

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A couple of blog directories to take a look at: