MAFFO News Mod & Page Rank Questions

[bgordon]

Thanks for finishing that news mod maffo!

I have a question about implementing it to best entice the search engines to visit often and get my page rank up.

1) Should the newsfeed be on just my home page or on all pages? Does it matter?

2) What is the best meta tags to have on the site to get page rank?

3) I understand that pagerank is largely based on links to your site on the web, but does this include links to your site from within your own site?

4) What other tidbits can you offer to boost page rank?

5) Do these tactics work with Google and Yahoo equally well?

6) What other search engines should we focus on? I have heard that most engines draw their data from Google anyway or is this false.

Thanks for your opinions

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by bgordon

Thanks for finishing that news mod maffo!

I have a question about implementing it to best entice the search engines to visit often and get my page rank up.

1) Should the newsfeed be on just my home page or on all pages? Does it matter?

Content is king but can be a double edged sword as well. Honestly I am not familiar with Maffos news mod so cant speak specifically in terms of it but much of the validity a search engine assigns to your site is based on content so content is good. Duplicate content from page to page however can be bad so if you can incorporate at outside feed into your site to boost content it should help but I wouldnt recommend having the same content on all your pages.

Originally Posted by bgordon

2) What is the best meta tags to have on the site to get page rank?

The best meta tags will be determined by the your sites target market and competitors pages. Find the sites that compete with yours and try and one up their meta info.

Originally Posted by bgordon

3) I understand that pagerank is largely based on links to your site on the web, but does this include links to your site from within your own site?

Links from your own site I do not beleive count. Also remember its not jusrt external links to your site but the PR of the site that is linking to you as well.

Originally Posted by bgordon

4) What other tidbits can you offer to boost page rank?

Get external links to your site from other pages with a high PR. There are many directories that are human editied, try and add your site to as many of them as possible.

Originally Posted by bgordon

5) Do these tactics work with Google and Yahoo equally well?

That I am not sure about but I would say to a large degree yes.

Originally Posted by bgordon

6) What other search engines should we focus on? I have heard that most engines draw their data from Google anyway or is this false.

Thanks for your opinions

As I mentioned above look for and add your site to human editied directories. These target quality sites and all submissions are human approved.

[juven14]

I would also use Larry's sitemap, I noticed a drastic improvement in rankings with this and the seo module.

Also, killing that session id in the url seemed to improve it a bit.

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by juven14

I would also use Larry's sitemap, I noticed a drastic improvement in rankings with this and the seo module.

Also, killing that session id in the url seemed to improve it a bit.

hehe, forgot all about that good catch John.

[bgordon]

Originally Posted by juven14

I would also use Larry's sitemap, I noticed a drastic improvement in rankings with this and the seo module.

Also, killing that session id in the url seemed to improve it a bit.

What do you mean "killing the session id". I noticed that sometimes the SEO mod leaves that and other times it does not. I was having problems with my SEO mod and today it started working again. I visited the site and noticed the session id appended after the .html but when I reloaded the page those extras seemed gone again. It works but now that you mention it, I noticed it on my site... what is that all about and was it something that the SEO mod used to do but now does not?

Also... sorry to be thick, but who is Larry and what is sitemap?

[juven14]

sorry, larry is lhotch. I'll find a link to the thread that discusses the php session id.

EDIT:
link to the sitemap thread:
google sitemap

I can't find the thread where we discussed the sessionid - which Larry just described.

Here is what I added to my .htaccess to disable this cookie. I agree with Larry, my personal web browsing experience is that many sites require cookies to function, Just try spending a couple hours online paying bills and authenticating at various sites and you will eventually need to enable cookies. However, not eveyone pays bills online nor spend much time online, so you could essentially run into troubles.

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_flag session.use_trans_sid off
</IfModule>

[Lhotch]

Originally Posted by bgordon

What do you mean "killing the session id". I noticed that sometimes the SEO mod leaves that and other times it does not. I was having problems with my SEO mod and today it started working again. I visited the site and noticed the session id appended after the .html but when I reloaded the page those extras seemed gone again. It works but now that you mention it, I noticed it on my site... what is that all about and was it something that the SEO mod used to do but now does not?

Also... sorry to be thick, but who is Larry and what is sitemap?

In regards to the session ID, php creates a sessionID to track visitors. This session ID will be written to a cookie if they are enabled and will be appended to the URL if cookies are not enabled.

Search spiders dont accept cookies so every time they visit your site they will get a new session ID that is appended to the URL. What happens then is that the same page when viewed on 2 different days will appear to be differnt URLs because the session ID is tacked onto the end.

Turning off trans session id for php gets rid of the session id from the url to make your site more index friendly. The only drawback is that visitors will need to have cookies enabled to use your site, which isnt uncommon.

As for who Larry is and the sitemap....

Im Larry

Google offers the ability to use a sitemap. What this is is basically a file that maps out your site and it makes it easier for google to index your site. Many people use a static map but to to the dynamic nature of a classifieds site we use a script which builds a map file on the fly so its always current.

68c in the past came with a sitemap file, I simply modified it to work with the new SEO mod and the new version of 68c.

Read more here.

Sitemap.php

[Maffo]

1) Should the newsfeed be on just my home page or on all pages? Does it matter?

Thats entirely upto you Bgordon, If you put the headlines within your Layout.tpl they will appear on every page. I personally only use them on the home page (home.tpl) If a spider crawls your site its 99% going to be the homepage it spiders. Once it hits the news feed it should (in theory) pretty much crawl everything inside there. I added 10 stories to a newsfeed on my site the other day, all have been spidered and are appearing on google.


2) What is the best meta tags to have on the site to get page rank?
With the news feed, all your tags are automatically generated. The key is to give your your news article a good title, something relevent to both the article and your website. If you sell yachts, have articles about yachts, not carrots. Make sure the article is full of yacht information. On your homepage you will have a link to this article. The link is to a page about yachts. The link title contains the words yacht(hover over the title) and the text in the link itself will contain the word yachts. When you arrive at the article about yachts, there will also be two links on there about these same yachts. The title of the page, description and keywords will all have this information. So I repeat, its the content. DONT have any articles that have nothing to do with your website.


3) I understand that pagerank is largely based on links to your site on the web, but does this include links to your site from within your own site?

Only true on some search engines such as google and the new msn. Sites using the overture system such as Lycos, altavista and yahoo have a completey different method and its all about your keywords description, title and page content. Apart from the htaccess, everything on the news mod is optimised. Sites on your own site do count but obviously not in the incoming URLS. All my sites have the URLS optimised, all logos and images are always fully optimised. I do this as standard practice.

4) What other tidbits can you offer to boost page rank?
I could talk all day on this one. I have worked for two search engine companies. I am soon to be setting up my own website, searchenginemaster.co.uk. With the hope of trying to help the small business of the world compete with the corporate giants. Anyone wishing to join up and help with input etc would be welcome.

5) Do these tactics work with Google and Yahoo equally well?
Answered above

6) What other search engines should we focus on? I have heard that most engines draw their data from Google anyway or is this false.

False, where did you hear this?



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and to add....

another benefit of having this news mod is because the more information you have on your site , the more chances you have of being found. If your article is 500 words long, if somebody types in a combo of any of these words and that page has been crawled, you WILL appear in the results. There is no telling where you might be 10,000 for some crazy combination of the words in your article, but you may also come near to the top or even 1st. You are giving yourself more oppertunities to be found.

As well as offering news articles regarding the content of your site, you can also have news about the location you are selling from, eg,if you sell in colorado, have stories about colorado, have your visitors mail you in articles etc. People doing searches for anything regards colorado, your site has a chance of being listed.