On this bright day covered with love, SimpleSEM would like to say all it’s customers, readers, visitors and friends:

And don’t forget to send your SEO’s the special Valentine Greeting Cards!!!

The Google Sitelinks update that took place recently has lead to the appearance of Sitelinks to the sites that seem really worth assigning them, but haven’t got them previously (one of SimpleSEM client has also been assigned them after update).

However, those who haven’t seen additional links to their site in SERPs might wonder, what Google Sitelinks are and what could be done to achieve them. Here is how Google defines Sitelinks:

“The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”

What algorythims are used to choose the sites for sitelinks assignment? How are the particular pages within the site chosen to be shown among sitelinks? According to Google representative Vanessa Fox Google shows Sitelinks “when we think they’ll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for.”

To make some assumptions and recommendations on how to receive Sitelinks from Google, we aggregated the data known about Sitelinks, researched the sites that already have them assigned, gathered Google representatives comments on Sitelinks such as the following one from Vanessa Fox

“Ranking the plurality of links based on at least one of a number of accesses associated with web pages corresponding to the plurality of links, a number of web pages with a link pointing to a web page corresponding to one of the plurality of links, how closely the search query matches information on web pages corresponding to each of the plurality of links or the user’s history associated with accessing web pages corresponding to each of the plurality of links.”

Here are some tips that will not guarantee your site to achieve Google Sitelinks but will definitely lead to the increase of overall site quality and marketing efforts effectiveness:

• Structure site navigation clearly. Use special HTML and CSS features to achieve desired appearance.
• Define a limited number of logical destinations users might be interested in. Don’t overwhelm the visitor with too many choices.
• Include an XML sitemap of your site.

• Validate your site markup
• Create pages under semantic principles and naming conventions
• Provide the daily traffic of 1000 visits or more to your site
• Brand the web site with a unique name.
• Include useful and informative titles and META descriptions to the site

Check out your site in Google after the Sitelinks update. Maybe you already have them!

The goal of the 2007 SEO World Championship is to optimize the keyword phrase “globalwarming awareness2007″, and of course rank as high as possible on the 3 major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. The domain or site you use must be registered after January 15, 2007 to be eligible.

I am not sure if anyone on our team will have time to participate but we will be following the results and contenders closely here on our Blog.

Current Rankings:
- globalwarming awareness2007 on Google.com
- globalwarming awareness2007 on Yahoo.com
- globalwarming awareness2007 on MSN.com

Notes:
- February 10, 2007: Registered the domain: www.gwa-globalwarming-awareness2007.com

Why? Just because a world gets a bit more kind with every smile you bring to it (at least I still believe in it, don’t you?)

Google AdWords Operations team announced that they would like to decorate the new office they are moving into soon with the photos of their advertisers.

The AdWords Operations team will soon be moving, and we want to decorate our new building with photos of our advertisers as a way of recognizing that we owe our success to you. We’ll be showing the photos in the new building because seeing your faces inspires us and reminds us that we’re here to help make our advertisers more successful.

Sounds nice! Really why not sharing your photo and your pleasure of work captured on a photo? The guidelines to photo submitting are listed here.

I wanted to add my photo also, but my natural shyness stopped me from that

The results from SEMPO’s annual “State of Search Engine Marketing 2006″ report were released recently. The survey, having been conducted since 2004, track all the trends in search marketing and from year to year reveals some unexpected peculiarities.

Here are the aggregated and summarized results of the survey:

How does the search engine bot define the site quality? Which are the parameters it judges upon? What features of the site could lead to a better user experience and could make visitors return to your site?

I’ve found the thread at WebmasterWorld forum where the signals of a poor quality sites were discussed. Some of them are debatable and site-dependent, however they give a clear idea of what should mainly be avoided when building your website. The initial list gives 25 items:

1. Reciprocal link request pages.
2. No Privacy policy.
3. Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.
4. Error pages that don’t send 404 headers or send content regardless of the page requested/querystring entered.
5. Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
6. Dead/404ing links.
7. High link churn.
8. No published contact address, email address or phone number.
9. A high bounce rate (surfers clicking back on their browser and selecting another search result).
10. Too much duplicate content.
11. Whois info for the domain which is the same as other domains previously penalized or banned. (Could also be true of adsense publisher/affiliate ID’s and other identifiable footprints)
12. Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams
13. Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
14. Stagnation (Site never changes)
15. Excessively long URI’s/URL’s (query strings or folder and file names)
16. A high percentage of affiliate links vs regular outbound links.
17. No / very few outbound links.
18. No / very few inbound links.
19. All inbound links are to homepage only
20. Outbound links to questionable/spammy/crap sites.
21. Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.
22. Too many spelling errors.
23. Contains unrelated subjects (ex: a site that reviews toys and tries to sell insurance or viagra).
24. Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
25. MySQL or PHP errors in the pages

However, the discussion grew and came up with some more valuable additions:

• No real menu or information architecture.
• Excessive Adsense
• Big percent of links from blogs
• A large number of template-based, keyword-driven, computer-generated pages that contain little or no content
• Crappy html coding
• Images that aren’t compresses and take forever to load.
• Highjacking the browser back button
• Pop-ups , Pop-Under, DHTML Windows sliding
• Database related or server side errors in the pages
• Showing different content to visitors and bots

You could deep into the whole discussion on WebmasterWorld forum.

I assume you are familiar with Google Base already so we couldn’t ignore the update of this effective merchants’ resource. Online merchants are promoted to submit more attributes along with basic product description to give users more parameters to compare when searching for a particular item. Besides, Google reminds that “including as many attributes as possible will increase your items’ exposure in search results”. The required for each product attributes include:

• brand
• condition
• description
• expiration_date
• id
• image_link
• link
• price
• product_type
• Title

Google also “strongly recommend” the use of some additional elements which “will increase your items’ exposure in search results”:

• payment_accepted
• payment_notes
• pickup
• price_type
• quantity
• shipping
• tax_percent
• tax_region

While more sophisticated users can take an advantage of uploading additional information for their goods such as color, film type, focus type, megapixels, model number, resolution, size, tech spec link, upc, zoom for cameras or artist, department, material, occasion, style for jewelry.

The complete list of attributes defined by Google could be found here.