FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is doorway page?
Doorway page is an entrance page, and it is specifically designed to rank high in spider search engines for a particular keyword or more relevant keywords in a single page, and then redirect the visitors into your specified main page. However it's not just a blank page with a link direct to your site, but a powerful, content rich page packed with keywords.
Why we need doorway pages?
Of course we are building a commercial website for profit, and starting at the point of serving our users, instead of building a website for search engines. Then when our job is done, we will find that our website can't be listed in the first page in the search result for our keyword, sometimes the worst thing is our website can't be find in the search result. The most important reason for this is that our site is new and traffic for the particular keyword into our website is low, but this is not I'm going to talk here because it's not the problem of SEO or website promotion issues. I will talk another two reasons.
The first thing is that not all spiders will visit your entire site.
The most important page on your site is your homepage, and this can be viewed also as your doorway page. You submit this single page, and the spiders will find the rest of your site. Unfortunately, it's not always the case. Some spiders won't see your entire site, and many won't go more than one or two levels deep. Because of this, it's maybe a good idea to have alternate home pages for various sub-pages in your site, and then you can submit each these alternate home pages to search engines to attract visitors.
The second is that our site is not search engine friendly.
As I said in Run Your Website for Users, not for Search Engines, we start building a web based on the theme to serve users. To make our site friendly and convenient to users, we design the page with Flash, Javascripts and plenty of images. We pleased the eyes of visitors, however search engines can't understand these elements. Search engines welcome a site with text full of keywords, and because of this, such kind of pages will achieve low ranking in most cases.
There are few ways to solve this problem. First is to modify your site to meet search engines' algorithm, however you will lose the popularity in users, so we will not suggest you to do that. Second is to use a technique called cloaking. Please read Cloaking for more information . However it is time consuming and requires lots of efforts.
Then the last and the fast and eaSitest method is to adopt doorway pages. You can make another page which can be ranked higher in search result, and when visitors visit the doorway page, it will direct to you targeted link.
How to make a doorway page?
If you have a website with specific sub subject area, products, services, or even localities, then specific doorway page can be created for each one. Make sure each doorway page is keyword focused (don't make a doorway page with more than 3 keywords), and meta tag (description, keyword) concentrate on the specified products, services, locations, etc. For a website like Global Travel Sources, which has sub subject of hotel, restaurant, landscape, tour and ticket, we can make doorway pages for each the sub subject. A page specifically dedicated to search engine content for hotel will have a better chance in search engine ranking than a page tries to cover the five subject if you search with keyword "hotel".
Search engines generally give priority to urls with keywords contained, so it's better to apply for a domain name with the most important keywords for your doorway page.
My own personal view is to make a doorway page for each keyword and each major search engine, though there thousands of search engines. I do think you shall make a doorway page each for Google (http://www.google.com), MSN (http://www.msn.com), Yahoo, alltheweb (http://www.alltheweb.com/) etc, and you shall also make one for the local biggest search engine, e.g. for service targeted at Chinese, a doorway page for Baidu (http://www.baidu.com/) is very important.
If you made many doorway pages for you site, it's better to make another one which contains all the links to all of your doorway pages. By submitting this page, spiders can crawl the rest of your links.
Many search engine submission software such as AddWeb (http://www.addweb.com), Dynamic Submission (http://www.dynamicsubmission.com/), make it very easy to create doorway pages. However these templated doorway pages are very simple and basic, they can't bring you too much benefit. You shall fill in more creative content, add information and links, if possible, manually design one starting from a blank page. You'd better make the doorway page have human arts, or spiders will know that and the result is not up to you.
Doorway page can't give you guarantee!
People visiting a doorway page as a result of search engine query are presented either a link to enter the main site or they are automatically redirected to the site. Sometimes maybe you can't tell whether you visited a doorway page or a main site.
Doorway pages are not generally considered spam by the search engines when they are used properly. However, if the search engines are filled with millions of doorway pages, it will reduce the quality of the index and lower the value of search result. Now there is a growing trend by search engine providers to view them with skepticism. For example, Altavista started removing doorway pages from its index, and in some cases even banning sites using them.
Tips for doorway pages!
Put the navigation menu of your main site into the doorway pages.
Use the Robots.txt file to meets the search engines. Please search the internet for introduction for such files.
Link popularity is very important to most search engines. Make sure you have outside links to your main site, doorway pages, etc. If not, it's very difficult to get the top ranking or indexed.
If you have hundreds of keywords, don't try to make doorway pages for each your keywords. No site shall have hundreds of keywords, if that's true, please make a complete audit for it.
Some SEO companies will offer to host your doorway pages. Be careful, as if you are paying a monthly fee for the service, the moment you stop paying, they have control over your top rankings!
Conclusion
Doorway pages do increase the accuracy of the search engines index if they are used with responsibility.
What is ROR?
ROR (Resources of a Resource) is a rapidly growing independant XML format for describing any object of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can better understand that content. RORweb.com is the official ROR website.
ROR promotes the concept of structured feeds (which is related to the concept of structured blogging) enabling search engines to complement text search with structured information to better understand meaning. ROR information is typically stored in a ROR feed called ror.xml placed in your website's main directory. Unlike Google Base, ROR feeds can be easily accessed by all search engines: at http://www.your-website-name.com/ror.xml
You can think of your ROR feed as a powerful structured feed for describing all your objects to the search engines: products, services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, anything you want.
The current object types and attributes of the ROR format can be found here . ROR providers are working with several companies and individuals in defining new object types and attributes for everyone to use.
ROR Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is ROR?
A: ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can better understand that content. You can think of your ROR feed as a powerful structured feed for describing all your objects to the search engines: products, services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, anything you want.
Q: How is ROR different from Google Sitemaps?
A: ROR was created before Goolge Sitemaps, as a way to describe website information for the search engines. ROR is much more than Google Sitemaps, it does not only help describe your sitemap, but also products, services, feeds, articles, reviews, archives, and much more bjects. Also, ROR Sitemaps are automatically readable by all search engines, including Google.
Q: How is ROR different from Google Base?
A: ROR was created before Google Base. But unlike Google Base, ROR is for all search engines, not just one. Any search engine can find your ROR information using this scheme: http://www.your-domain-name.com/ror.xml
Q: What is a ROR feed (ror.xml)?
A: A ROR feed is an XML file for describing your content to the search engines (products, servives, reviews, classified ads, job listing, anything you want). The main ROR feed is usually named ror.xml and located in the main (or top) directory of your website (in the same directory as your index.htm file).
Q: Can I call my ROR feed something other than ror.xml?
A: Yes, of course. The name ror.xml is just the default name; that's where search engines look by default. If they don't find it there they look for a <link> tag in your main page (between the <head> and </head> tags):
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="ROR" href="http://your-site.com/ror.php" />
Note: Alternatively you can simply create a tiny ror.xml file and use it to tell the search engines the real location of your ROR feed. To do this, use the "seeAlso" property:
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:ror="http://rorweb.com/0.1/">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Your Site Name</title>
<ror:seeAlso>http://your-site.com/ror.php</ror:seeAlso>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>
Q: How do I create a ROR feed?
A: Just use the ROR Feed Generator or the ROR Sitemap Generator. These tools make it very easy to create a ROR feed. If you have a Froogle feed or Yahoo Shopping feed, you can generate a ROR feed from either of them using the ROR Feed Generator. Or you can also ask a ROR provider to create a ROR feed for you. All the details about the ROR format can be found in the ROR specification.
Q: What is the difference between a ROR Feed
and a ROR Sitemap?
A: A ROR Sitemap is simply a special type of ROR feed, a feed that provides sitemap information to the search engines.
Q: Is ROR free?
A: On most websites, including this one, you will be able to create a ROR feed for free. Some websites will also provide help for creating ROR feeds for a small fee (see our ROR providers page).
Q: Who is behind ROR?
A: ROR is an independant format lead by AddMe.com. The ROR team is working with several companies in defining new object types and attributes for everyone to use.
Q: How do I add the ROR feed (ror.xml) to my website?
A: Just upload (ftp) the file like any other file into the main (or top) directory of your website (in the same directory as the index.htm file).
Q: Who uses ROR?
A: ROR is spreading very fast. There are currently tens, if not hundreds, of thousands website using ROR. Here are just a few of them.
META TAGS
Meta tags are designed to give search engines information about your website, for example brief description, products, services and advantages of your company. Some other meta tags will instruct the robots or spiders what action to take on your site. A site can have no meta tags, but good meta tags will do influence the appearance of your website in the search results, and thus allure visitors and increase traffic.
There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the Keywords and Description tag, and another unimportant but useful one is the Robots tag. While for others like author, distribution tags, etc, are not used by search engines, and you are suggested not to use them only if you do think it's necessary. Some may put Title as meta tag, but generally it's not.
Before go ahead, let's clear up one thing, that meta tags are not magic solution. You may have the best meta tags in the world, but meta tags alone will not significantly raise the ranking of your website if it lacks helpful content.
META TAG DESCRIPTION
The meta description tag is in a way to tell the search engines to display the brief and essential description of your site under the title in the search listing, and help the keyword relevancy. The basic html format for meta description tag is:
<meta name="description" content="short description of your website">
This tag is very important, since a magnetic description can arrest searcher's eyes to stop on your listing and hit your link. If no description in your website, search engines will go to your linked page and find any text at the top, and then show it in the listing. Maybe we always find listing in the search result as this:
Welcome to As Is Biz, Inc.
| Home | About Us | Products | Support | Contact Us | . Welcome to As Is Biz, Inc., we are located...
www.asisbiz.com.com/ - 12K - Cached - Similar pages
This website doesn't have a description tag, so engines put the texts found in the front page and list them in the search result. From this listing, we can only guess that this company has something with electronics, anything else we can't know. Will this listing get a lot clicks? Probably the chance is very low.
Make the tag short and descriptive. Almost all search engines will only give your two lines to display the website description, and the exceeding part will be omitted and replace by "...". Two lines is about 30 words, and try to make your description around 25 words. Spend some time to prepare these 25 words, and they shall tell the searcher what they will find in your website.
Keyword weight. Most search engines will consider keywords more important if the keywords exist in the description tag, and the closer to the beginning, the more important. So try to put as more keywords as possible into the description tag and don't locate them at the end in case replaced by "...". However, do remember descriptive and short description is the preferred choice. Let's look at two examples:
Site A: <meta name="description" content="Cornet trading is a trading company located in Ontario, Canada. Our main trading products are Copper Cathode, Mill Berry">
Site B: <meta name="description" content="Copper Cathode, Mill Berry are two main trading products of Cornet trading, which was located in Ontario, Canada">
For site A, keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill Berry" has the possibility of being cut off by engines, and if this is the case, reader will not know what Cornet are trading for. Site B will tend to do better than site A for the keywords "Copper Cathode", "Mill Berry", because the term occupies more of the overall description, and because they are the first words found in the description.
Though keyword weight is important for the description, repeating keywords is a big no-no. Most search engines will consider this spamming, and readers are unlikely to click a listing like this:
<meta name="description" content="DVD players, portable DVD players, King Bug DVD players, DVD, DVD, DVD">
Searcher can't find a brief description of your DVD players, and thus unlikely to click the link. A description like this will help the site get ignored and un indexed.
Notice that description tag is not a factor in ranking algorithm for most search engines, but it is a factor in alluring clicks.
META TAG KEYWORDS
The meta keywords tag is used to assist those search engines which are meta capable in classing your website. This is important, the search engines use this information to determine under what queries your website will come up. A basic format is as the following:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3,...">
These keywords can be separated commas, space or both, and separation method makes little difference. However inclusion of commas does inflate the tag size, so they can be removed if you are hovering around the limit. Just as a thing has two opposite sides, reciprocally, including commas does have the effect of making the tag much more readable.
How many keywords? You shall put all the keywords and phrases that are important and relevant to your site in the list. Some experts said that some search engines penalize pages that only use one or two words in the tag, and the reason they gave is that engines will treat those pages as doorway pages. Partially right and don't do that. Besides, if you're only using one or two keywords, probably you're going to miss out on traffic by focusing too narrowly. But listing hundreds of keywords dilutes the keyword density, so you won't score well for any of them. My own opinion is to list all your keywords, but if the number exceeds 30, please think about redesigning your website, because even for the most popular sites, they don't have so many keywords.
The keywords listed shall focus on your central information and services. If you are a company designing the shell for DVD players, don't use "DVD" as your keyword because it's a too wide range, instead you can use "Designer of DVD player" as the keyword.
Just as stated in meta description tag, don't repeat the keywords. Never insert the same word twice in a row of the tag, even if you are using different variations (Plurals, Caps, different tense, etc). You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use it more than 3 or 4 times within the keywords tag.
Keyword weight? You have 25 keywords and phrases covered all your information and services, but maybe one or two of them are much more important than others. This is where weight and position come into play.
Most search engines will consider keywords more important if the keywords have much more weight and prominence in the tag. In the following example, the weight for keyword "copper" is 25% in site A and 20% in site B.
Site A: <meta name="keywords" content="copper scrap, mill berry">
Site B: <meta name="keywords" content="scrap copper, mill berry, birch">
The prominence is how close to the beginning. The closer the beginning, the higher the prominence. In the above example, the prominence for keyword "copper" is 100% in site A and 80% in site B.
Of the above two sites, if the search engine reads meta tags, site A will tend to do better than site B for the keyword "copper". So try to put the most important keywords at the beginning and remove those unrelated words.
Bad news is that though many search engines used to rely on meta keywords tag heavily, more and more have abandoned this or rely less weight on it. No matter using it or not, a good keywords tag can give you a small boost in traffic in many engines, and it's better than nothing.
META ROBOTS TAG
The meta robots tag is used to pass robots or spiders with instructions on what action to take on your pages. Most of the search engines accept robots tag, especially those major ones. The script is as the following, and parameters are one or more words.
<meta name="robots" content="parameters">
The recognized parameters are: index, noindex (counterpart of index), follow, nofollow (counterpart of follow), all, none (counterpart of all).
Index = index this page (default setting, no need for a tag)
nonindex = don't index this page
follow = follow the links from this page to get more pages
nofollow = don't follow the links from this page
all = index this page and follow the links from it
none = don't index this page and don't follow the links
Most spiders automatically assume that any page they come across can be indexed and links from it can be followed. And you may wonder why somebody wants his page doesn't get indexed. Consider private pages on a site, login page, for example. It's better to put a robots tag with parameters of noindex and none in the <head> part for that kind of pages.
LINK POPULARITY - FACTOR IN RANKING
In recent years, almost every search engine has started to heavily rely on a link popularity measurement to determine pages' position in its ranking algorithm. This means the search engines don't just look at the content on each page, and the same time they will analyze link structures and clicks to determine the ranking in a search.
What is link popularity?
In a nutshell, link popularity is how many websites link to your site, and the websites linked to your site shall be indexed by the search engine (just using those "free-of-all-links-pages" is not the kind of link you are looking for).
Link popularity for a website is different for different search engines, and it's easy to know your link popularity for a specifies engine. For example, if you want to know the link popularity for Google, just type in the search box "www.yourdomainname.com", and this will give you a rough estimate of your link popularity.
However there is an added catch to the link popularity issue. Not only are the quantity of links taken into account, but also the quality of the website linked to you. If a site connected to you is considered by the search engine as important, it will carry much more weight, while those sites with less quality such as FFAs and other random sites will often be ignored.
Furthermore, most search engines assign "themes" property to the websites they indexed, and if you have a higher link count from the websites with the same theme property, you will have a higher link popularity. So please attempt to trade links with with sites that are similar to yours in some ways, and try to exchange links with those very popular ones.
Google uses a system called Page Rank, which is actually a measurement of link popularity. Download Google toolbar, you will be able to see Google's Page Rank calculation on a scale of one to ten for every page you visited. But remember Page Rank != Page's Rank. There are two very different things.
Make your site valuable to attract others' linking
The internet is a web and it is jointed by links. If you are offering good resources or services, people will bookmark your site and come back. If not, they will forget your site. The fast way to make your site popular is to spread your good information and services one by one in the internet, just as Google and Yahoo, their popularity is due to their content.
So at the beginning of designing your website, spend more time in thinking "what information and services we can provide to the users" than the time in web beautification and website promotion techniques. For more information, please read the article Run website for users, not for search engines.
Increase link popularity afterwards
In the case your website is already done, and the content can't help you too much in increasing popularity. Then you shall adopt one of more methods as following to get others link to your site.
Trade links. Find other people who are willing to exchange link with you. Add his website URL in your pages, and put your link in his site. Do it as much as you can, since it not only will benefit your link popularity, but you are more likely to get more traffic from them. First choice is to trade links with those very popular sites, and second the ones with similar business as yours, even competitors. Third reciprocate links with any pages if possible, no matter they are larger or not, and no matter what's business they belong to; don't be afraid that engines will carry more weight on popular and similar sites, because not all engines do the same way.
There are also some "link share" services, for example, LinksToYou, which can increase your link popularity. The way is to submit your machine generated page on his site and links to that page from his index page. Every page submitted just looks like a lattice point in the site meshwork, and thus each page is linked to all the other pages.
Bad news now are that many search engines regard them as spam and some completely ban sites that participate in such program. Most of all, for those search engines put more emphasis on quality and similar business sites in their ranking, linking to such a site sometimes will be useless or even harmful.
FFA sites, as stated above, some search engines will ignore links from them. The FFA sites did once serve a good purpose, but this is really no longer the case. The links on such sites are unlikely to help you, and they really are not worth the numerous spam email you receive as a result.
So trade link with anybody who is willing to do that, but take care.
Online Directories. Getting listed in the most popular directories (strongly recommended, DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.com/), Yahoo, Looksmart (http://search.looksmart.com/) if you have spare budget) will not only boost your traffic, it will also increase your link popularity. It is especially relevant to link popularity because these directories are mega popular (remember the more popular a site is that links to you, the more popular that your site will be rated). If have enough time and effort, submit to other free directory also.
PAGERANK
PR stands for P age R ank. As explained by Google:
Quote:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
As explained by WikiPedia:
Quote:
PageRank is a patented method (an algorithm) to assign a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine, which still has PageRank as a key element.
Summary: PageRank is your page's popularity on the Web. (Notice I didn't say website).
PageRank != Page's Rank. They are two very different things.
Google API
With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query billions of web pages directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET.
To access the Google Web APIs service, you must create a Google Account and obtain a license key. Your Google Account and license key entitle you to 1,000 automated queries per day.
The only way to query Google's index without violating their terms of service is through the Google API.
Google SiteMaps
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps you can automatically keep them informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.
The Google Sitemap is an XML file in a specific format that tells Google the information it needs to find the pages of your website.
What is Googlebombing?
Googlebombing is a certain attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous intentions. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner.
Why does my site rank well in MSN/Yahoo but not in Google?
MSN and Yahoo have vastly different algorithms then Google. With MSN and Yahoo on-page factors (page titles and content) tend to have a greater influence on a page's ranking whereas Google tends to put more value in off-page factors (incoming links). Many websites tend to rank well in MSN and Yahoo before they rank well in Google as it takes time to acquire the backlinks required to influence Google's rankings.
How do I find out what my PR is?
There are many different ways to do this:
Websites that check for you:
DigitalPoint (http://www.digitalpoint.com/),
PageRank.net (http://www.pagerank.net/),
WebmasterBrain (http://www.webmasterbrain.com/),
StarGeek (http://www.stargeek.com/)
PR Lookup Software: Google Toolbar (http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/index.html), PageRank FireFox Extension
How often does Google update their PR?
Google representatives, such as engineer Matt Cutts, have publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank is republished about once every 3 months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are generally unreliable measurements of actual PageRank value for most periods of the year.
However, PR is updated at Google daily (or close to daily). New links are factored into the equation and they are applied to a page's PR. You just cannot see this this PR until Google does its next public PR update.
When is the next Google PR update?
Estimated to be between June 1st and July 1st.
How important is PR in Google's algorithm?
This subject is open to great debate. It's overall weight has been reduced since it's original inception. Anchor text has far surpassed it in importance. The general rule of thumb is that PR is used as a tie breaker amongst similar ranking sites.
How do I increase my PageRank?
Since PageRank is an indicator of a page's link popularity it should be obvious how to increase your PageRank - GET MORE INCOMMING LINKS! High PR links are ideal but don't underestimate the power of low PR links. Afterall, PR does add up.
Why does <website goes here> have such a high PR/high ranking with so few backlinks?
1) They have a lot of low PR links pointing to the home page. These usually don't show in Google's backlink report but can still propel a site high in the rankings.
2) They have a lot of links pointing to internal pages within the website. These links will only show when you do a backlink report for that specific page, not the homepage. These pages usually pass on a lot of PR to the site's home page and propel it in the rankings.
3) Web pages with high PageRank have linked to the site's home page. High PR links carry much more weight then links from low PR pages. A link from a PR8 or PR9 page can make quite a difference in a web page's PR and ranking.
Why does my website have a higher PR with the 'www' then without it?
Google sees your website with the 'www' ( http://www.example.com ) as a different page the without ( http://example.com ). Pages that link to the page without the 'www' are hurting your pages with the 'www' as the PR is essentially being split between the two pages. Fortunately this is easy to fix. Use a 301 redirect to redirect Google, and everyone else, to the 'www' page from the non 'www' page. The code would look similar to this (mod_rewrite required):
Code: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www\.|$) [NC] RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
To go from the 'www' to non 'www' use this code:
Code: Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}//s%{HTTPS} ^www\.(.*)//((s)on|s.*)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^ http%3://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
How do I stop search engines from indexing some of pages?
You can use a robots.txt file to tell search engines (and other bots, too) where they can and cannot go. An excellent tutorial can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html And an excellent example of one can be found at WebmasterWorld: http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt.
I just switched domain names. How do I transfer my PR from one domain to another?
Use a 301 redirect. Put this in .htaccess file in the root directory of the old website:
Code: RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1
How should I handle external links? (Because I don't want to send PR out of my website)
Outbound links are a balancing act. You need to decide how much PR is worth to you (as compared to your users' experience at your site) and then decide what is the best way to achieve your maximum PR without sacrificing a satisfactory user experience.
One thing you could do is use a robots.txt file to prevent search engines from crawling pages with outbound links. Then no PR is lost because the search engines aren't even crawling those pages. But keep in mind that any internal links on those pages won't be counted either. This is common to do with a directory.
Another thing you may want to try is to use a script that redirects users to external sites (example: http://www.domain.com/outboundlinks.php?id=linkidhere ) and then put outboundlinks.php into your robot.txt file. Then the search engines won't follow the links because they can't access the script that does the redirect. Why would you want to do this? Becasue search engines do follow redirect scripts so the PR is being sent out of your site anyway.
The latest technique available is to put 'rel="nofollow"' in your anchor tag. Google, and others I do believe, will no follow these links and in Google's case not pass along PR.
Does having Adsense on my website help me with my search engine ranking?
Not really. It may get Google to spider your site more completely and frequently as it needs to know what the content is on your pages so it may serve up the right ads. But it won't give you a boost in any way in the rankings. Won't give you any extra PR either.
My site has gone from PR<whatever> to zero. (Or the Google Toolbar is greyed out) Why?
or
My site has disappeared from the SERPs. Why?
This seems to happen on occasion and the natural tendency is to think you've been banned. However, this is rarely the case (if you've been doing bad things then you're not asking this question because you already know why this has happened!). For reasons known only to the powers to be this just happens. After a while, usually next update, things return to normal. What can you do about it? Nothing really. You can write to Google but all you'll get is one of the generic responses that doesn't really tell you anything. The best thing you can do is to sit back, have a beer or three, and wait for things to be set right again....on their own.
Also, new websites can take a while to have visible PR assigned to them. This doesn't mean the site doesn't have PR. It just means the Google Toolbar or other methods of checking just haven't been updated yet.
BUYING TEXT LINKS
For SEO purposes webmasters often buy links for their sites. As links from higher PR pages are believed to be more valuable they tend to be more expensive. It can be an effective and viable marketing strategy to buy link advertisements on content pages of quality & relevant sites to drive traffic & increase a webmasters link popularity. However, Google has publicly warned Webmasters that if they discovered to be selling links for the purpose of conferring PageRank and Reputation, their links will be devalued (ignored in the calculation of other page's PageRank). The practice of buying and selling links is intensely debated across the Webmastering community.
What is "rel=nofollow"?
In early 2005, Google implemented a new attribute, rel="nofollow", for the HTML link element, so that website builders and bloggers can make links that Google will not follow for the purposes of PageRank— they are links that no longer constitute a "vote" in the PageRank system. The nofollow attribute was added in an attempt to help combat comment spam.
How do I rank well in Google?
Ranking well in Google is fairly straight forward.
1) Acquire incoming links with the anchor text you wish to rank well for (This is the most important by far).
2) Optimize your title tag
3) Use and optimize your Header tags (h1, h2, h3, h4)
Why does Google have less pages indexed then MSN / Yahoo ?
This should be addressed by the Bigdaddy update. Google has admitted to having issues indexing some websites. Their Google Sitemaps does address this issue as well and is probably the best thing you can do to ensure Google crawls your website. The PR of your pages is also a likely factor. If they are very low (PR2 or less) they tend not to be indexed well.
Why does Google show less backlinks then Yahoo and MSN? Why doesn't Google show all of my backlinks?
Googles purposely does not list all links pointing to a particular page. This is an effort to keep webmasters from manipulating their system. They also only update backlinks on a periodic basis so you may have acquired new backlinks but they haven't been refelected in Googles update. That doesn't mean Google doesn't know they are there. They just haven't publicly acknowledged them yet. It is also important to keep in mind that Google only shows backlinks for the specific page you requested (usually the homepage), not the whole site like other search engines do.
Also, Google also only displays the number of backlinks to one specific page. This is usually the homepage since that is what most webmasters check for. Yahoo, and other search engines, report the number of incoming links per domain.
Why doesn't Google index all of my site's pages? Why does Google update some pages more often then others?
1) Your site is new. You don't really expect Google to index every page you have immediately, do you?
2) Your site has low PR. Consensus indicates that Google will crawl sites that have higher PR deeper then sites with low PR. They figure the more popular your site is (PR is a popularity contest, remember?) the better a resource it must be.
3) Your site uses dynamic pages/session ID's and they are not search engine friendly. Session ID are search engines like garlic is to vampires. They repell them. Have your site remove them when the bots come around and you will fare much better (yes, this is ethical and acceptable to the search engines). Query strings that are either very long or contain"id=" tend to limit the amount of pages some search engines will index (Google is a good example of this). Change "id=" to "page=" or something similar and you should do better. Or read the article about search engine friendly web pages.
If a site has high PR and updates its content frequently, Google will index its pages more frequently (usually every few days or even sooner) then low PR sites that do not update frequently.
FUTURE PAGERANK
Future PageRank is not accurate. It is for amusement purposes only. If you choose to use one of these tools it is for your amusement only. You should not be making any decisions based on the results you get.
