Thoughts On SEO

A number of SEO/SEM related questions are generally floating around so I created this page so that we can inventory the questions, accumulate answers if we know them and identify the ones we should seek outside help for.

Changes in the Aug/Sept timeframe that might impact unique visitors

  • Adult Content Splash screen
  • Exhausting the supply of sites of value
  • Penalized by Google (why?)
  • Our own help pages, etc.?
  • Reduced focus on featured sites / reduced number of featured pages
  • Active pages are not attractors
  • Turning on Advertisements
  • Number of pages accessible from front page
  • New skin
  • CAPTCHA
  • Awareness of AboutUs / avoidance

Action items

  • Bot server saturated? Jason to see if healthy
  • Think of mayshures for each of the above - Ward / Julia
    • collect evidence from historical information we already have
  • Google site map - Brandon
  • Hire SEO consultant - Ray

  • Should we be submitting anything to the major Search Engines?
  • Google Webmaster Center can tell you tons about your web site, nothing else can be submitted to a search engine besides a sitemap; but, I've never had to deal with a sitemap for this many pages. Maybe make a sitemap with the main pages in it?--Simon | talk
  • Should page names be CamelCased?
  • CamelCased or not should not affect the Google search rankings.--Simon | talk
  • The issue here is if a page title is CamelCased, then when users search for the CamelCased term it is much more likely to show up. On the other hand, it is probably less likely to show up when searched with spaces. So it may be a toss up, unless anyone has a theory as to why one would be better?
  • How does the Google indexing work, i.e. why does the number of pages run up for a while, then run down
  • The Google Bot comes to your site (most likely daily or more than daily) it has a few records of your domain, and does a cache probably each time because aboutus is so big. Sometimes it runs into errors, there are more or less people linking to you everyday. Also Google does not links to and from, so because when most people link to AboutUs they link to their page and not the Homepage Google goes there and sees a link back to them and think your trying to rid the system and can count you down for that. The Google "algorithm" is quite complex, and nobody can possibly say on why today your site is up or down, I can only give you general terms. --Simon | talk
  • ...

Thoughts from Nathan:

  • Search engines such as Google will spider us regardless. We're not in directories (ie. Yahoo or dmoz) so I'd say let's add listings there.
  • It's purely a question of user preference and style and the answer is subjective, depending on who you ask. I think it doesn't matter. Ask someone else and you may get a different answer.
  • That's what I'd like to know; for example, my website url in Google gets lots of results (not many originally from the website) and my PageRank is (sadly) 4.


Retrieved from "http://aboutus.com/index.php?title=Thoughts_On_SEO&oldid=11332395"