I’m starting to believe that meta description tags are no longer worth bothering with. Now a lot of SEO people will throwing a small fit reading this but hear me out and I’ll try and win you round.

Previously I have always tried to add relevant meta descriptions to the majority of my websites and projects to help encourage click throughs from listings within search engines. So for example I would add something like “…cheapest deals on mobile phones…” or something along similar lines to catch the eye and make the listing more appealing. But now search engines are starting to pull relevant information from your webpage and use this text as your description and this has a few advantages.

Firstly if you wrote a meta description all about blue widgets and someone is searching for blue widgets and spots your meta description then everything should work perfectly. But if your webpage also sells red widgets and yellow widgets and people search for these terms then there will be no mention of these in your search listing description. But without a meta description tag the search engines will pull some relevant text from your webpage and will show what would be a more targeted description in your listing. This also means that the keywords in your listing description will be bolded making it stand out more.

I don’t believe that meta descriptions have any weight at all in search engine rankings so I doubt there would be any effect to your positions if you remove the tag. The one thing to make this work is that you have to have good content on your webpage which will provide the search engines with enough information to create a listing description from. Of course in SEO, the first thing you advise a client is to get the content right so this bears even more importance if you are to rely on the method above.

So it is something I will be keeping a close eye on in the coming months and deciding whether my sites benefit from removing meta tags and if it is something I will advise future clients about.

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The first thing you need is some weight on an automated link building tool such as the Digital Point Co-op Advertising Network or Link Vault. You can purchase the weight from other users through the respected website forums.

Then you need to be signed up to an affiliate program that creates a landing page on the merchants site with your own affiliate id in the URL (rather than going through a network redirect link), for example Amazon or Mobiles4Everyone.

Then you look at which are the latest products and find the landing page with your affiliate id, for example:
Cheap Nokia N81 on Mobiles4Everyone with my affiliate id
The reason I suggest the latest products is because you will have more chance of ranking for these rather than something that has been around for a long time and has lots of competing webpages.

Then you point your automated weight (Link Vault, Digi Point) at the chosen link targeting the search terms that are relative to that page, eg. if you look at the page <title> tag you on the above example you will notice that it is “Cheap Nokia N81 8GB deals” so I would target “Cheap Nokia N81 8GB”, “Nokia N81 8GB deals” and “Cheap Nokia N81”. It is important that you target search phrases that are within the titles or page otherwise Google will filter out the pages thinking that you are just Google Bombing

Then just give it a month or so and keep a check on the targeted search terms. The advantage of pointing direct to the merchant’s domain is that you will benefit from their website age and authority within the search engines, so you will have more chance of the webpage ranking through this method than you would if you were using a new website. And what you will find is that Google will see your page as the original due to the incoming links and will prevent the websites own page without your affiliate id from ranking.

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YES. Though it is probably not a single filter it is more likely to be a combination of aging filters that prevent new websites from instantly ranking for competitive search terms. I know this because I have experienced it with several websites. This is also the reason why big SEO firms tend to shy away from optimising websites that are less than a year old. Let me explain a couple of my experiences.

The first time I experienced it was when I was building reciprocal links for Glass Block Outlet back in 2004. When I did an allinanchor: search in Google for the search terms I had been targeting (“Glass Blocks”, “Glass Block”, “Glass Bricks”, “Glass Brick”) the website was ranking top 10 but in the real search results I was 300+. Once the site reached about 9-10 months old it jumped straight into the top 10. Nothing had changed.

The AffiliStore website was created back in December 2006 and each of the scripts that visitors downloaded and created websites with had footer links targeting the AffiliStore website with either the brand term “AffiliStore” or the more competitive term “Affiliate Marketing”. Obviously there was no problem ranking for “AffiliStore” as no one else was really targeting that search term (apart from a few affiliates who blogged about the scripts) but, as with Glass Block Outlet, the site was ranking top 15 for “allinanchor:Affiliate Marketing” but 300+ in the real search results. This time there was thousands of one way incoming links which also included some nice PR4-5 links from popular affiliate related blogs but again it took until November 2007 for the site to jump from 300+ to top 15 in Google for “Affiliate Marketing”.

Now it seems to me that there is an aging filter which says “If this site is less than 6-12 months old and has incoming links targeting competitive search terms, then dump it down to 300+ in the rankings.” I also know that the longer an incoming link is in place the more it will benefit your website. I’ve heard (but not experienced) that getting a link from an authoritative website, for example the BBC, with your anchor text targeting the competitive term will kick your site out of this sandbox effect. This would make sense as Google is about providing users with the best experience so if a website such as the BBC is recommending your website for a search term then you must be providing a good resource.

Another way of getting around the sandbox effect with a new domain is to use a domain name that contains the exact search terms. So for example if I had just bought affiliatemarketing.co.uk I would have a lot less hassle trying to rank my site for “Affiliate Marketing” through building links. But these domain names are very hard to come by as they have been snapped up years ago.

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In a previous life I used to work hard on building reciprocal link partnerships with related websites to get my sites ranking in Google. Some people think this process is now next to useless as Google can see you are exchanging links with other websites with the sole intent to increase rankings and therefore gives the incoming links less weight.

So how does Google know that you are exchanging link? Well, obviously it is because you have a page with a link from your website to the website that is linking to you. Now what I have come across quite a bit are people attempting to trick Google into thinking that the incoming links from the reciprocal link partners are one way links. They do this by trying to hide their website’s links page from Google.

The first two things you need to check on the website you are exchanging links with are the webpage HTML and the robots.txt. In the webpage HTML have a look to make that they have not added a tag. In the robots.txt file see if the links webpage has been disallowed. These bits of coding will prevent the webpage from being indexed in search engine listings, therefore Google will not know that the link to your site exists. To check if the links page is listed in Google, do a site: search specifically on that webpage:
eg. site:http://www.website.com/links.html
Also check to see that there are no rel=”nofollow” tags on the links to prevent passing PR.

The next tactic that is used is cloaking. The webmaster uses a server side script such as PHP to detect who/what is viewing the webpage. If it is a visitor viewing the links webpage in a browser then they will see the list of links and will not blink an eyelid. But if it is googlebot spidering the page for Google’s index then the PHP will detect this and will show it some completely different code that does not contain the links to other websites. You can check if this is happening by viewing the cached webpage in Google:
eg. cache:http://www.website.com/links.html

Cloaking is black hat SEO and reporting the website to Google is likely to get it banned. Blocking pages from Google’s listings using robots.txt or meta noindex tags does not violate Google’s guidelines.

In my opinion building reciprocal links still works and I have seen many sites rank well through just this process. But it is a painful chore, especially when other webmasters are focused only on Google PR and don’t understand how they would benefit from a link with their anchor text from a related website. Plus Google now penalises your site if you are linking to a bad neighborhood so you have to be more careful these days and check every website and the websites they link to! Nowadays there are a lot easier and quicker ways to build one-way incoming links.

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I was reading away at SEO Chat the other day when I came across a technique that I’ve never seen before (yes, this does happen ) and thought it would be worth sharing on my blog.

It basically involves tricking Google into thinking you are gaining more clicks from a brand search in Google’s listings. How? Well basically you do a search in Google for your brand name (eg. bal4) then, using FireFox, copy the link shortcut from your own listing in the search results and use this shortcut as your “home” link in your website’s HTML. So now each time someone clicks on you home link on your website it will seem to Google that this user has clicked on the search listing for your brand term.

Recently “SEO Gurus” are beginning to believe that click throughs for brand terms in Google are influencing the search results, which when you think about it would make sense if clicks were true, but as you can see it can be easily manipulated. I personally feel click throughs will only influence personal search results when you are logged in to your Google account (something Google have tried with PPC results), for example if you have searched for “bal4” 10 times and clicked on other sites but not clicked on my site then it would slide down the results, but when you log out it is back to its original position.

So would I use the technique above? Not a chance in hell, it is blatantly obvious that you are trying to trick Google and I guess that if someone reported your site then it would result in a penalty. Though I would like to test it somehow to see if it does have any effect, maybe try it on a client’s site… hmmm… just kidding.

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