Is it okay if a web page is 6 clicks from the index page (discussion)?

Google's John Mueller says:

"Depending on your site's size and the business behind it, you may also want to look into the paid Google site-search solutions, which index all of your pages regardless of how they're linked (provided they're in a Sitemap file).

This does not guarantee indexing in the normal web-index, but may be a solution should you just need something to help existing users of your website find specific content. That said, personally speaking, I'd have no problem clicking through 5-6 links to get to highly specific content if I needed it and your site had it. [...]

I wouldn't worry too much about priorities in Sitemap files (I think your system would generally be fine) -- they won't make or break the crawling, indexing or ranking of your site, they're just additional hints."

Googlebot crawling fictional URLs in JavaScript

"With Google evidently trying to increase the amount of content stored in its index, the situation sounds ideal for many webmasters - however, others are not so enthusiastic.

Recently, it has been reported that Googlebot's intrusive crawling of JavaScript has resulted in the search engine creating fictional URLs - web addresses that do not exist. Analytics packages have been the single biggest contributors to this problem, including Google Analytics itself."

What boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google

"You know how Google sometimes 'predicts' what you might be searching for by giving you a little drop down menu of suggested search queries? These suggestions, of course, are based on what other users frequently search. [...]

This shows Google’s remarkable power as a source of data on a range of human behaviors, emotions, and opinions. It gives us insights into what people might care the most about concerning a given topic."

Magazine on Google Goggle's face recognition and more

"Google has my name (their form asked for it), they got my bank account (Google Checkout), and certainly they got personal data (like my Gmail emails, which include passwords, or Google Docs texts and spreadsheets). All voluntarily, but saying it ain’t so doesn't make that data less existing. Or does Google suggest we should lie and register as Donald Duck to protect our privacy?"

Related: How Google collects data about you and the Internet

Fast Flip now available on Google News homepage

"Near the bottom, we're now displaying stories from Google Fast Flip, the article-reading service we launched in September. Fast Flip is still in Google Labs, so we'll continue to experiment with the format. But so far we've found that the speed and visual nature of the service encourages readers to look at many articles and, for the ones that catch their interest, click through to the story publishers' websites."

Search engine newslets

• Bing admits that their crawler MSNbot is slow.
• December paid search benchmarks.
• Google launches "near me now" feature for smartphones.
• Yahoo stops its Yahoo! Shopping API.
• Yahoo hires more social science experts.
• Bing bringing basketball to you.
• Facebook's Zuckerberg says the age of privacy is over.
• Google becoming "giant monopoly" - German minister.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

"The small investment in IBP is now saving me more than $1500 per month."

"The best thing that I have done was to buy IBP, and only wish I had found it sooner.

I have a website for a dental clinic in Tijuana. As a short term solution, I started with pay per clicks. I have spent as much as $2000 a month, and justified it with the fact that the advertising was producing results that paid for itself.

However, there are seasons when the business drops off, and I would end up spending the same amount for fewer patients, thus eating up my profits.

I decided to start focusing on SEO. I hired a company to do the initial SEO on my home page. The cost for the optimization for that one page, plus the promise of building 100 back links per month was $4000.

The optimization immediately helped my rankings significantly. Then I found IBP. I decided to use it to optimize my other pages. Through this process, I realized that if I had had IBP in the beginning, I wouldn't have needed the SEO company.

Through IBP, I realized which keywords were truly the best ones, and started focusing on them. Now, several of my secondary pages rank higher than my home page.

As I have learned now how to build back links on my own. I believe that IBP has help me to better optimize my website, than the SEO company. I don't need them anymore, and will be cutting them loose as soon as they fulfill their contract.

Of 35 keyword phrases, I now rank on page one of Google on 24 of them. With Yahoo, I rank on page one on about 30 key word phrases. I have cut way back on my pay per clicks, to less than $500 a month, and I have doubled my business.

I can see that the small investment in IBP is now saving me more than $1500 per month, and even more in time."
Jim Crayne, www.goodsamdental.org

Tell us how IBP helped your business and 230,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

Click here to tell us your story.

• How to get in Google's real-time results
• Holiday jigsaw puzzle (solve it online)
• Will web page speed become a more important ranking factor?
• Google's duplicate content patent
• Google Caffeine: how will it affect the rankings of your web pages?
• Official search engine statement: link building do's and dont's
• Image optimization: get more visitors by being listed at the very top of Google's search results
• View all past issues...