SEO Consultant Services

There’s quite a bit of confusion over 301 redirects and how they effect SEO and a sites rankings. We’ve extensively used permanent 301 redirects on both our own and client sites and in this article I’ll explain how to use them and what you should expect SEO wise.

First some basic information for those new to permanent redirects.

What is a permanent 301 Redirect

A 301 or permanent redirect basically tells a browser (or search engine spider) that the site or page it is accessing has moved permanently. It then immediately redirects that page to the new one.

Search engines like Google will attempt to pass SEO benefit (PR and anchor text benefits) from the old page to the new page.

Was looking through the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines which used to be a great resource

Anyway, a new poster asked an excellent question regarding linking to non-cached pages (from the newsgroup thread “Re: should I reject non-cached sites?” edited version):

I run a modest linking scheme on my website and have always had a policy that we would only link to sites that are cached in Google. I’m not so fussy about PageRank at the moment as our link pages are not all ranked.

I’ve had a number of link requests from sites that look pretty well set up but the link page is not cached in Google.

A couple of months back I decided my SEO company should try selling text links via one of the text link brokers who list webmasters inventory in a searchable format allowing a potential purchaser of text links to find relevant sites. Basically saves us time dealing with site owners looking to add links to our sites (takes quite a lot of time!!).

The text link broker we tried was www.textlinkbrokers.com and this post is a review of their service from the perspective of a link seller. We are writing this review because it didn’t go well and feel we’ve wasted our time for nothing (I doubt we’ll get the money owed)!!

It’s that time of year again when Google invites college and university students to work on open source projects, see Now Accepting Student Applications for Google Summer of Code 2007 for how to apply etc…

WordPress (the CMS used for this site) is participating in Google’s Summer of Code and until the 24th March are open to ideas from users etc… for project ideas.

Will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What I’d like to see is-

1. The image/link bug fixed. When you post an image as a link WordPress forgets to add the closing link tag (/a). At least not fixed in WordPress 2.0.4 (can’t use latest version, need to update the server to run it).

Although I’m an SEO consultant who deals mainly with Google (it’s THE most important search engine) until watching a recent episode of the Dragon’s Den (TV program on BBC2) I’d not come across the term Google Consultant before.

The Dragon’s Den is a TV program where entrepreneurs/inventors pitch their businesses to a group of successful angel investors hoping to secure investment for a share of their business. In this particular episode someone was pitching something called StoryCode which is basically a book review service that is able to match similar books together, making it easier to purchase similar genres of books you previously read and liked.

PageRank (PR) confuses a lot of webmasters and SEO Consultants. Another SEO asked me in the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines why the site www.statcounter.com is PR10 despite having a lot of external links on the home page, basically why isn’t the leaked PR damaging the sites PR10 home page (the SEO consultant doesn’t believe PR leaks).

The SEO in question has misunderstood PageRank and how PR leaks from a site. Going to give a relatively simple explanation with what I hope is easy to understand maths.

How PR works

Every page has intrinsic PR, for ease of maths lets imagine every NEW page with no links to it has 1 PR point (not PR1, but an arbitrary unit we are calling PR points). This is intrinsic PR, our starting point for all those PR10 pages out there

Submit your site to many directories such as DMOZ. IF (and it’s a big if) your website is accepted for the directory you’ll gain a text link or two. This route can be a lot of SEO work and a lot of directories expect a link back (from the home page seems the norm which should be avoided for SEO reasons) for their link!

Unless you have an important site (then you won’t need text links from directories!) you’ll probably find your link deep within the navigation structure of the directory on a low PR (PageRank) page. Don’t make the mistake of seeing a PR8 home page for a directory and thinking your text link will pass PR8 benefit. You won’t get a link anywhere near the home page, on the rare occasion I’ve submitted sites to directories it’s lucky to receive a PR4 link, most are PR3 or less!