Weekly SEO news: 25 May 2010

Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

No matter how good your company is, some people will always write something negative about your site, even if you tried your best to help them. What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on Google's first result page for your company name?

In the news: Google employees answer SEO questions, Google reveals AdSense share data, buying expired domains won't increase the link popularity of your website and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. Six things you can do to remove bad press from the search results

No matter how good your company is, some people will always write something negative about your site, even if you tried your best to help them.

Reputation first aidSome customers might write negative comments about your company in their blogs or some of your competitors might like to damage your reputation by creating fake comments about your site.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on Google's first result page for your company name?

1. Fix the problem

If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do is to fix the problem that caused the negative review.

2. It doesn't hurt to ask

Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue.

3. Give web pages with positive comments a boost

If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site.

Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results.

If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg and Delicious.

4. Ask for testimonials from happy customers

If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages

Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is important enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia.

These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results

If your own website comes first for your company name then most people will click on your link and don't look further. Use IBP to make sure that your own web site has position 1 in the search engine results.

Removing negative comments from the search engine results can take some time. It's best to avoid negative experiences at the outset by providing high quality products and good customer support.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Matt CuttsGoogle employees answer SEO questions

"Duplicate content within your site is generally not a problem, however it always makes sense to try to limit it to a reasonable amount to make it easier to recognize your preferred pages. [...]

Matt Cutts addressed this issue in a Webmaster Central video recently and confirmed that the length of a domain name registration isn't a ranking factor. [...]

Google's quality guidelines are clear on this point: paid links shouldn't pass PageRank. [...] We may treat links across different areas in a different way, as some areas of a page might not be as relevant to the content of the page as others."

Editor's note: If you want to find out if your website has all elements that are necessary for high rankings on Google, check your pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer.



The AdSense revenue share

"AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. [...]

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations."



 Does buying old domains help your rankings?

"Whatever backlinks dropped domains had won't count toward ranking. Backlinks get reset. This has been the case for several years now. Previous to the change the backlinks would acquire whatever PageRank they formerly had prior to the drop. After the change, which happened quite a few years ago, the backlinks got reset. [...]

Google's Matt Cutts told me: There are some domain transfers ( e.g. genuine purchases of companies) where it can make perfect sense for links to transfer. But at the same time it wouldn't make sense to transfer the links from an expired or effectively expired domain, for example. Google (and probably all search engines) tries to handle links appropriately for domain transfers. [...]

The sort of stuff our systems would be designed to detect would be things like someone trying to buy expired domains or buying domains just for links."



Carol BartzYahoo's Carol Bartz interviewed

"Yahoo is a company that is very strong in content. It's moving towards the web of one. We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It's all customized. [...]

Half of our revenue is from search. The fact that you can crawl the web is a commodity. We're about search, but we're not a search company. We do a lot of things."



Ask.com introduces related questions

"Recently we launched Related Questions, a right rail section where we provide interesting questions that are related to your query. [...]

We take your query terms and search through the questions that other users are asking us, questions that are being asked on the web and questions that are currently being discussed in the news. From these we select and render the most interesting and what we hope will be the most useful questions related to your query."



Search engine newslets

  • Play Pac Man on Google's home page.
  • Google announces Google TV.
  • Yahoo and Nokia announce cooperation.
  • New York Times: Sure, [Google is] big. But is that bad?
  • Google Reader no longer supports MS Internet Explorer 6.
  • California Supreme Court to consider age bias case against Google.

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3. Success stories

Tell us how IBP helped your business and 250,000 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.

IBP

 

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4. Previous articles

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