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I guess the title says it all. The topic is one of those that has been running for some time now, but as of yet is far from being resolved (conclusively anyhow) and since I’m going to be creating a new section on the akamarketing.com site soon I decided I would write about it, just to document my research of course, not to help you guys :-). The major issues surrounding this topic are outlined below.

More valuable keyword rich URLs?
It’s known that search engines provide at least a small relevancy boost for URLs which have keywords in them. MSN is in my experience particularly fond of keywords in URLs, I’m sure that Google and Yahoo do ‘take notice’ too. Many SEOs will for this reason place keywords in various sections of a URL to try and boost their rankings. Given the current topic at hand this brings us to the following question - Is a keyword in a sub domain more valuable (in terms of relevancy alone) than a keyword in a directory name?

Well as sub domains are generally considered as separate domains altogether by the search engines the keyword located in keyword.domain.com would I imagine be perceived as being more valuable than the keyword in domain.com/keyword. This is just my opinion of course, others are entitled to offer a different take on things. My thinking on this matter stems from the fact that traditionally sub domains have ‘housed’ very unique sections (like most regular domains themselves) of content and were not created arbitrarily when a need for a new section arised. Directories on the other hand get created without a second thought and are often created to organise content that isn’t really that unique when compared to the content in other directories on the same www space, thus directory names and the keywords in them have less ‘value’ in the eyes of the search engines.

What about link building issues?
Link building in the context of sub domains versus sub directories should I believe be thought of both in terms of actual getting links in the first place and then also in the relevancy of these links too. You will understand what I mean over the next two or three paragraphs.

Is link building easier for sub.domain.com or domain.com/sub? The ability to conduct an extensive link building campaign via directory submissions is a major advantage of using sub domains over sub directories for me and many other SEOs. The reason for this is that most directories will not accept a sites internal pages (or internal directories) for listing consideration if the main domain name is already listed but sub domains are generally considered to be a separate (but often related - so still some directories will not accept them) entity from the main site and thus getting links from directories for sub.domain.com will be much easier than getting links to domain.com/sub.

Depending on how you plan to get links for the new site section the directory element of this topic may force your hand one way or another. If you plan to get most of your links for the new site section from link exchanges, article marketing, press releases, link buying etc. then you could go either way without too much difficulty, but if your main efforts are going to be focused around a strong free & paid directory submission campaign well then if you are to avoid shooting yourself in the foot before you even start you really have to go with the sub domain option (assuming its compatible with the needs of a certain special someone).

As far as the relevancy of links are concerned, webmasters who are naturally linking into your new site (without being asked) section will often simply use the URL as the actual link text. Having a keyword.domain.com URL usually means that this happens more than if the URL was domain.com/keyword. The reason for this I’m not sure, but perhaps it’s because the sub domain looks neater and fits in better with existing links on the webmasters link page, anyhow this provides you with not just a standard issue link which simply points to your site but a keyword rich link which is much more valuable to you in terms of boosting your search engine rankings.

Is there any technical implications of using sub domains I should know?
From a technical point of view you must be aware of the fact that you can’t use relative URLs for linking between your main domain and your sub domain. This can be seen as a slight inconvenience but unless you absolutely need relative URLs at your disposal this shouldn’t effect your decision and besides your not going to want to do intensive crosslinking anyhow because this can raise a few suspicions with the Google anti spam team.

Should I choose sub domains or sub directories?
Above I’ve kind of come down in favour of sub domains slightly, no? Well yes to a large degree that’s true, only from a purely SEO perspective though, I’ve still to touch upon the most important entity (that aforementioned special someone) which you must factor in before making your decision however. That entity is of course the user.

The users considerations will often help with SEO but not always. In this context you must decide if it makes sense to serve your new section from a sub domain from the point of view of the user. This means that the content must be distinct and deserving of a site (which a sub domain effectively is) in it’s own right, regardless of SEO considerations. If the concerns of both your users and your SEO needs are aligned by the choice of sub domains well then go with sub domains, if not then stick with the standard issue directory or even the “everything from root” structure. Please ’stick it to me’ via the comment box if you think I’m wrong with something (it’s been known to happen :-)).

Since I’m still suffering from last nights work social to get drunk with my now ex boss one last time before he left our ICT team and since I’m off to the fight tomorrow (no not in the Swiss Cottage - in the point depot!) and hopefully the big Dublin & Kerry game in Croker on Sunday I’m just going to take it ham & cheesy tonight and relax with a few beats and update my blog.

For this update and in true Richard Hearne style (see Unison & Continuum) I’m going to ‘out’ someone for not playing by the rules. The unfortunate ’so and so’ on this occasion is popular Dublin based radio station Spin 103.8 who appears to be conducting some good old fashioned meta jacking on their offical website located at http://www.spin1038.com/. Meta Jacking is the process of putting your competitors names in your meta keywords and or meta description tags in the hope that if someone searches for your competitors name your website would come up in the results too. Spin have done this by including the names of rival radio stations such as 98FM, FM104, Today FM and some others in their meta keywords tag, similar stuff is being done with their meta description tag too. Although I’m not a lawyer I believe I’m right when I say that this is a form of trademark infringement and could potentially result in a day in court for the Spin 103.8 legal eagles. The meta keywords tag as lifted directly from their home page is below:

I’m wondering who does their search engine optimisation because even putting aside the legal issues this sort of technique doesn’t even work. It may have worked somewhat years ago but these days meta tags aren’t given much value at all by the search engines so it’s actually a complete waste of time. Your thoughts are welcome, additionally I wouldn’t mind a couple of trackbacks :-)…

We all know that links are what makes the world go round as far as search engine optimisation is concerned, they can literally be the difference between position 100 and position 1 in the search results. Links can be aquired on a shoestring budget, they can even be aquired with no budget at all. In this post I’m going to outline how I regularly get links for sites I’m working on.

Starting then - I download the lastest directory excel file from http://info.vilesilencer.com/. This regularly updated excel file basically lists all free SEO friendly directories (along with PR information) that are actively adding sites. At the moment there are about 500 directories maintained in the list. It’s quite a time consuming, tough and boring task but what I do is literally submit to each and every one of them, even those with a PR of zero. I’d say about 60% of links I get from these directories are of less than average standard but it’s a numbers game and every little helps.

Most of the time submitting to these 500 or so directories results in about 150 new links within four or five weeks of completing the last submittal. If you were to attempt something similar I recommend using two or three variations of your target keyword for your listing title because this is what most of the directories use to link to the listing URL and using only one variation might look like artificial link building to Google, MSN and the other search engines. Be sure to use a throw away email address as some of the directories will send you spam. If your not in an uber competitive industry these links will shoot you right up the rankings.

After I’ve a good base of links from free directories, I then move on to using content to get more higher quality links. If I’m promoting a site about something I’m knowledgeable in I will write up two or three articles myself, if however I’m working with a client that’s in the gardening industry for example which I know nothing about I’ll hop on to http://www.elance.com and have one of my regular content writers do up the articles. Elance have a tonne of talented freelance writers who can do up content about pretty much any topic for very moderate amounts of money.

Articles in place, I then use Google to search for sites which may be interested in publishing them in return for an embedded link of course. Examples of search queries which I might use include ‘keyword1 inurl:submitarticle’, ‘keyword1 keyword2 inurl:addarticle’, ’keyword1 keyword2 intitle:”submit article”‘ as well as a couple of other variations. Sites which are returned from searches like this are highly targeted and therefore likely to publish your articles, these sites will most likely publish a lot of ‘guest’ articles however and thus your link(s) will be of lesser value.

What I often do is just search for related sites (without any ’submit’,'article’,'content’ type keywords) and simply just email the webmaster of each appropriate result asking him/her if they’re interested in publishing my articles. With this approach I find that I usually have about a 20% (assuming content is always at a high standard) success rate, which I think is pretty decent. This means that to get published 20 times (which equals 20 links) I would have to visit and email approximately 100 sites which is obviously time consuming but well worth it as it can result in some very high quality links which can do wonders for your rankings. After being published by a site I add that sites details such as url, topic, webmaster name, webmaster email etc. to a excel file so I can try and have content published on that site again at some stage in the future. Additionally I pretty much always submit my articles to the top ten or so article directories which usually results in another handful or so of variable quality links.

There you have it, cheap, perhaps free (if you can write content yourself) methods of link building. I use these same methods all the time when working with akamarketing.com and with clients and I’ve seen really good results. Be warned though that link building, no matter what approach you take is a very time consuming task. Happy linking!

Was doing a search earlier today for a Dublin based company called Sureskills who provide a variety of IT Services & Training. Logically my first step was to search for ‘sureskills‘ on Google as I wasn’t sure of the exact URL. Google being Google returned their site #1, however I noticed that one of Sureskills competitors namely New Horizons Ireland was running an Adword ad triggered by the keyword ’sureskills’. This is obviously an attempt by New Horizons Ireland at taking business directly from their competitors and is completely allowed under the terms and conditions of Google Adwords. If however a competitor of Sureskills tried to plug the term ’sureskills’ into their actual ad text well that’s something that can find its way into court quite quickly.

I found another example when I searched for ’Webtrade‘. Webtrade are a web dev/design company (who I actually interviewed for a couple of years ago) based in Rathfarnham, Dublin. In this case however not one but two competitors are bidding on Webtrades’ name. Not quite sure where I stand in regards to the question of ethics in relation to bidding on competitors names, the more striking question for me however would be the value (or lack of value) of bidding on competitors names. If someone is searching for a specific company, for example Sureskills, is it likely that they will click through to a website that isn’t that of Sureskills? Perhaps it’s useful for a competitor to simply get their URL/ad seen anyhow just in case the searcher might visit them after being on the Sureskills website?

Incidentally you may also notice a lot of companies actually bid on their own names. Examples of companies which I’ve spotted doing this recently include Vodafone, PaddyPower & Clearscape. These companies are doing this perhaps as a counter-measure to anyone else bidding on their name. Whatever the reason the technique of bidding on your own name is advocated by one of Irelands leading PPC experts and thus may be worth some consideration.

Has anyone noticed how clumpy and verbose the source code is of some .NET generated .aspx pages are? I mean this can’t be good food for the stomaches of the major search engines, nor can it be good for download times. There is no point is creating a feature rich .aspx website in comparatively double quick time with an advanced IDE like visual studio 2005 which runs on an equally advanced framework like .NET 2.0 when that very same IDE and framework is causing so much code blote and badly placed code (much of it probably unnecessary) that it is likely hampering your positions in the search engines and/or causing people to leave your site before it is even fully loaded.

Of course the amount of bloat created depends on what type of pages your programming but often the end produced source code can be ‘cleaned up’ regardless of what controls, interfaces etc. you are using. It’s just a matter of knowing what to look out for really. One of the main culprits are as far as I can see is ASP.NET’s ViewState mechanism.

ASP.NETs ViewState is the built in mechanism which enables controls such as textboxes, labels, datasets etc. to maintain their states (data) between postback requests for the same page. It does this by hashing the current state of the page and controls into a string and saves this into a hidden field called __VIEWSTATE. At the server, ViewState is used to recontruct the web page and its server controls. This is fine and prevents an ASP.NET developer having to manually repopulate form controls using POST values like is the case with something like PHP, however it is not without a cost. Have a look below at the value of a hidden __VIEWSTATE textfield which was produced from a .aspx page with only a menu and treeview control on it.

‘/wEPDwUJMzg4NTE1Mzc4D2QWAgIDD2QWBAIDDzwrAAkCAA8WCB4NTmV2ZXJF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 ‘

Obviously if I was to add more controls this value would grow accordingly. ViewState is enabled for all controls by default, luckily though ASP.NET has made the EnableViewState property available for setting true or false on a control by control basis and thus you can disable it for certain controls which you might never change like a label or a readonly datatable which might be populated from an external source such as a database or an XML file. For example below is the value of the same __VIEWSTATE hidden field (from above) with EnableViewState set to false for the menu control which gets populated from an XML file when the page loads and thus its state will not change between requests/postbacks.

‘/wEPDwUJMzg4NTE1Mzc4D2QWAgIDD2QWAgIDDzwrAAkCAA8WCB4NTmV2ZXJ
FeHBhbmRlZGQeC18hRGF0YUJvdW5kZx4MU2VsZWN0ZWROb2RlZB4JTGFzdEl
uZGV4AgFkCBQrAAIFAzA6MBQrAAIWCB4EVGV4dAUJQ3VzdG9tZXJzHghEYXR
hUGF0aAUQLypbcG9zaXRpb24oKT0xXR4JRGF0YUJvdW5kZx4QUG9wdWxhdGV
PbkRlbWFuZGdkZBgBBR5fX0NvbnRyb2xzUmVxdWlyZVBvc3RCYWNrS2V5X18
WAQUJVHJlZVZpZXcxU1/1MUWW6NZaM/KXGnbkTXRYJ3w=’

That’s quite a difference right? And because the control does not change between requests/postbacks the page works exactly as before. Disabling the ViewState for the treeview control would further reduce the contents of the __VIEWSTATE hidden field, it too is populated from an external data source and thus does not require ViewState enabled. Therefore to reduce filesize and keywords to source ratio for SEO purposes turn off viewstate for each control which will not change between multiple requests for the same .aspx page. You can find the biggest ViewState contributors by examing the ‘Control Tree’ section of the trace.axd file. You need to have first enabled tracing of course.

Additionally the usual good practice of using external .js files rather than in-source embedded code will further reduce unneeded bloat and allow your .js file to be cached which should enhance download times.

Aside from generally cleaning your code up there are some other steps of optimisation which can be taken too. Specifically in terms of search engine optimisation an interesting feature of ASP.NET 2.0 is URL mapping. This allows a defined friendly URL such as akamarketing.com/televisions.aspx to be mapped to a complex SEO unfriendly URL such as akamarketing.com/store.aspx?productid=202030&basket=303303&name=television. This means that the actual URL which is the long complex one can be accessed from the shorter SEO friendly one. The original URL will of course still work too. From a programming point of view everything is exactly the same which means all the GET query parameters in the URL are still available. From an end user and search engine perspective the URL is much more friendly and spiderable. Additionally the improved keyword density in the shorter nicer URL versus the longer complex one should facilitate ranking boosts on MSN which deems keywords in URLs to quite significant and it should certainly help on the other major search engines such as Google and Yahoo too.

URL mappings must be manually defined in the web.config file, so if your adding dynamic content including new products, categories, articles etc. to your website/database a lot you will have to manually add a new mapping entry into the web.config file for each item you wish to be accessible via an SEO friendly URL. The entries follow a standard layout though so I’m sure a script could be written which examines your database and outputs the relevant mapping XML code which you could then simply copy and paste into the web.config file, infact I may write one myself over the next week or so if I get the chance. The format itself is shown below.

As you can see the individual mappings must come between opening and closing tags of the urlMappings element and this element in turn must be included within the system.web element of the configuration file.

Moving on then let’s mention page titles. Not suprisingly ASP.NET provides you with the ability to dynamically change the content of a webpages HTML title tag - you know the one at the top of the browser which Google, Yahoo and MSN love to see your keywords in. It is very important that what’s included in this tag reflects your page content specifically, having something generic just won’t do. When your content is being read from a database (ie - it’s dynamic) the title tag will need to be set dynamically at runtime based on the current content item. There are a number of ways to do this, however the most simple is to access the title property of the HTML header and update it as needed. Before you can access a pages header programatically you have to set it to run on the server side by including the runat=”server” directive in the pages opening HTML head tag. To then access the title tag it is a simple as Header.Title = “new title value”; Of course in a live website you would set Header.Title to some database derived value.

In addition to the pointers above the usual common sense SEO techniques such as good content, good structure and good navigation of course still apply just as they would for any webpage or website, so try not to get completely caught up in the ‘power’ of ASP.NET while at the same time disregarding the cornerstones of SEO as you’ll most likely find yourself stuck in a bit of pickle.

OK so the whole sitewide links debate may not ever reach the ‘epic’ proportions on forum threads, blogs and websites that the absolute links versus relative links ’saga’ did but it still deserves its 15 minutes of fame. I wanted to raise the issue because I’ve recently come across a couple of threads in which the original poster and most subseqent posters came out heavily against the idea, some claiming that it can actually be damaging - as opposed to just not beneficial.

To agree or disagree with this outright would be unwise because as with many facets of search engine optimisation this really isn’t something that be divided into black and white or right and wrong because it all depends on how its done. Personally though I have found sitewide links to be of great benefit for some of the keywords I have targeted in the past if done correctly. Further down I have given two examples of websites ranking well for keywords which are used as anchor text in sitewide links.

Sitewide links should if you choose to make use of them be part of a much bigger offpage optimisation campaign, it’s a bad idea to rely predominately on sidewide links as this stinks of someone buying links (which Google hates). This is particularly dangerous if a website is relatively new. Imagine for a moment Google suddenly finds 25,000 keyword rich links pointing to www.newsite.com which has been in the index only a few weeks and has only 3 other links pointing to it that Google is aware off, you can bet your bottom dollar that alarm bells will go off in the GooglePlex. Now whether or not www.newsite.com will be penilised for the particular keyword used in the anchor text, penilised across the board for all its keywords or indeed have nothing positive or negative come from it is something I’m not yet willing to bet my house on. I do know however that this is the wrong way to use them, so if one likes to play with fire and has a new site then give sitewides a go.

I feel the real benefits of sitewide links are seen when they are obtained for established websites which have an already decent amount of indexed existing backlinks. This way the links don’t appear out of the blue (like links which have been bought) to Google, Yahoo and MSN because existing links indicate quality content and thus a couple of thousand new sitewides isn’t the strange anomaly it otherwise might have been as there is seemingly something of value at the receiving website. Existing links instil a sense of credibility onto a website and if some of the anchor text used for these links matches or is similiar to the anchor text used for the sitewide links well then this further serves to ‘decriminalise’ the sitewide links thus allowing them to provide you with at least some SEO benefit.

As mentioned further above I will share some of the anchor text rankings of two sites which I link to from my all my forum pages. When I do an inurl query for my forums 22,100 pages seem to be indexed. Now admittedly these links are not on every single page of my site, but they are on 22,100 pages which is a massive amount of pages and thus these links might as well be considered sitewide.

>> Rankings for http://www.redflystudios.com/ for the key phrase ‘web design ireland’ are:
>> GOOGLE.COM - 1st ||| YAHOO.COM - 1st ||| MSN.COM - 3rd
PR 7 with lots of varied links thus sitewide links wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. Other keyword rich links are coming into this site but I definitely feel that sitewide links from the akamarketing.com forum have had a big positive on its rankings as it seemed to shoot up the rankings for this phrase fairly quickly. This phrase is one I have monitored for the last number of years. Of course I could remove the link and see what happens to the rankings or would that be considered cruel… you tell me Mr. Davis?

>> Rankings for http://www.netricks.com/ for the key phrase ‘fresno web design’ are:
>> GOOGLE.COM - 2nd ||| YAHOO.COM - 1st ||| MSN.COM - 9th
Again a varied about of links coming into this site so sitewide links from akamarketing.com fitted in well I think. Backlinks from akamarketing.com make up the majority of results on a link: search on Google so I definitely think sitewides played a big role here too. This link is actually very likely to be taken down soon so I may post an update back here in a couple of months. [UPDATE - this link was taken down on the 18th of March - on that day www.netricks.com was 3rd on Google.ie for the phrase 'fresno web design' - let's see what happens]

I personally feel the above examples shine a positive light on the use of sitewide links for the purposes of SEO - not a penalty in sight and real perceived rankings boost. I say perceived as without actually removing the links and then confirming a significant drop in rankings 3 or 4 months down the road one cannot be 100% certain of anything and even then all other things such as the algorithm, the other backlinks, the competition and the pages themsevles would have to remain exactly as they are now. 

I guess sitewide links are just another one of those topics which search engine professionals can offer conjecture, guesstimations and argument on and thus there is always going to be opposing views on the issue. I certainly won’t be ruling them out just yet, you?