Looking for help on understanding search rankings
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Hello, I’m looking for some help better understanding the linking process that leads to page rankings.
Do WordPress links to me count towards page ranking? Like, if I put a tag of “democrats” then click the tag, I see a whole page of posts, one of which is mine. Which to me means a link to me. Do search engines count that?
Do links to me expire? I’ve seen a few links to me show up in me “who’s linking to me” box. But after a few days, they go away. The page with the link is still there, but WordPress doesn’t show it anymore. Do search engines also ignore it after a few days?
If you go to bing.com and search for political book summaries you’ll find four links to me, all to posts none to my main page. Two to my current url of politicalbooks.us, and two to the true url of politicalbooks.wordpress.com. Can someone explain why they list both urls and why four of my posts are there, and not my main page.
If you do the above search in google I’m third from the top, kinda. Instead of sending it to my main page, google sends them to the blogcatalog listing of my page. :( Someone once told me that that was because there are a lot more people linking to blogcatalog than me, but that makes no sense to me.
Do the same search in Yahoo and you’ll find me at number 6. yahoo actually manages to find my main page, which is nice, but they use the politicalbooks.wordpress.com url. Odd about them though, is instead of using the posted title of the page, they grab something from a text widget as both the title of the page and the description of the page. Can someone explain how to fix that on my end?
Do links in blogrolls count towards search rankings?
In general, I’m actually pretty happy that I’m on the front page of all three big searches for what I wanted. And I’ll really appreciate if anyone can answer these questions, even if just half-answers. Thanks a lot. :)
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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There’s a meta-answer to your questions, which is: nobody really knows how this stuff works except Google, Bing and Yahoo. The rules change regularly and without notice. Everyone else is just guessing and/or selling something.
Spend your time and energy making your blog better, and the other details will look after themselves.
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The WordPress links DO at the moment count towards your pagerank, but pagerank itself isn’t as important as it used to be for search engine optimization. Telly’s advice is correct. If blogcatalog outranks your blog, it’s because Google’s settings at the moment filter for that; they will correct it in future, you may be certain, because they own Blogspot and have a vested interest in featuring blogs, not aggregators.
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Google http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
Bing webmasters guide PDF http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/9/0D94EECB-C767-445E-B708-9C829275995F/Bing–NewFeaturesForWebmasters.pdf
Yahoo: To optimize and rank highly on Yahoo, specific areas need to be addressed. On Yahoo! the major areas are as follows:
* Keyword density
* Site structure
* Backlinks
* Aging
The only Yahoo guides I have found are for RSS -
Instead of sending it to my main page, google sends them to the blogcatalog listing of my page. :( Someone once told me that that was because there are a lot more people linking to blogcatalog than me, but that makes no sense to me.
Previous to the introduction of the BlogCatalog “toolbar” the links were direct to member’s blogs and posts. After the toolbar was introduced all links were redirected and filtered through the BlogCatalog and then down to member’s sites and posts.
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Well, firstly, thanks very much for your kind answers and time.
Saddly, it seems there’s no good answer. I’ve read a bunch of stuff on so-called white-had seo, and I think it’s had a positive affect as I do get a fair number of hits through search engines. But some of the results confuse me. (one of my pages gets about 20 hits a day from search engines. I don’t know why though because using that key word I can’t ever find me…)
nice to know the wordpress pages count towards my ranking. I’ve heard that links in comments don’t count. I assume that counts towards the auto-link in the name. Does that also apply to blogrolls?
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Oh, and how about pages that are automatically created? For example,
http://carboncapturereport.com/cgi-bin/biodb?PROJID=3&mode=viewpersonname&name=beth_fouhy
I don’t know abouthing about them, but they’re site managed to spot one of my posts and is linked to somewhere in the middle of that silly useless page. Frankly, it reminds me of the black-hat link swapping thing that search engines don’t like. Would that page linking to mine help my site, hurt my site, or have no affect at all?
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Stuff like that is basically what Google pays hundreds of engineers to teach their search engine to ignore. It shouldn’t hurt your site (although sites that steal your content and repost entire posts DO hurt you, so make sure you fight them) but it won’t help either.
And the art and science of SEO is more like snake oil sales than anything else. Even if the person teaching is a true believer, that doesn’t mean following his advice will help. And SEO advice gets stale FAST! I wouldn’t bother reading anything more than a year old on the subject, really.
Links in comments here don’t count, because WP.com and most responsible blog platforms know spammers always put links in comments, so they make them invisible to search engines. That doesn’t mean people won’t click on them, but it means they won’t artificially boost your rankings. That includes the autolink in the name.
It does NOT apply to blogrolls. But a link in the text of a post is worth WAY more than a blogroll link.
Even John Chow of http://johnchow.com will tell you the main thing to do to increase your search engine rankings and dominate Google is to WRITE GOOD STUFF THAT PEOPLE WANT TO READ, AND DO IT OFTEN.
Sorry for the caps. I have obviously had too much coffee.
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