The SEO Mantra: Tips, Tricks & Musings

My Experience of SEO, Especially in Indian context…

Archive for July, 2008

Do outbound links leak pagerank?

Posted by sumedhinamdar on July 24, 2008

When I read about this issue…my first reaction was “what nonsense!”. I mean why would my PR suffer when I am giving some contextual links to my visitors, to read some references?

I found very contradictory opinions on this. Here are my learnings.

1. If you are providing only links, but no useful content of your own, then regardless of PR leak, you will certainly have visitor leak. This makes a lot of sense. If you don’t have anything to offer other than links, why should visitors visit that page? But again, if you have classified links, with some comments about every reference you are citing, that might be very useful to a reader, and your page might be worth bookmarking for him! an may be Google considers bookmarking as a factor.

2. If your site, as a whole has no outbound links, then crawler can’t proceed to some other interesting place from your site. This is not so good! This is called link sink. Flowing water to good to drink…once it’s still…it becomes undrinkable.

3. It is true that a link “donates” pagerank, rather than just “voting”…but still you are better of by giving out at least a few links to good quality sites. Google penalizes the sites that hoard pagerank like this.

4. If you give out some links, you can get back some links. Now, this is a very general rule. As with a normal social interaction, it might not result into reprocation. For example, frankly, I haven’t received any backlinks to this blog so far from the links that I put in my previous posts. Now, here is a contradiction…if you give out a link to an “authority” site, it might be good for you, but it’s unlikely that they’ll reciprocate and donate PR to you. So may be an ideal strategy would be to donate links to an “upcoming” site, than an “authority” one, who is more likely to have the manners and time to return the favor. Isn’t this eerily similar to real world social interaction? :)

5. Linking out helps in establishing context. My friend Saptarshi performed an experiment in which he proves that outbound links help Google to put the page in SERP for that particular context.

6. There are a lot of (over 100?) ranking factors in the ranking algorithm. Even though outbound links do reduce PR, they might have positive effect in some other parameters.

7. There might be different rule based on class of the site. Directories have huge number of outbound links, many of them not reciprocal.

8. You can use nofollow links to prevent leakage of PageRank.

The golden rule is always, as they say, content is king! If you have great content, and a decent site strcture, you will not need to worry too much about technicalities of PR.

I’ll keep posting more information as I find it… :)

Posted in Links, PageRank | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Removing META name=title tag in Symfony for SEO

Posted by sumedhinamdar on July 20, 2008

A little technical tip for people who use Symfony framework…

The <?php include_metas() ?> call in Symfony includes META tags…there is a tag <META name=”title” in it…which is not the real Title tag…

From SEO perspective, this META tag might be dangerous, and is certainly useless…Google might think of your site as it’s repeating keywords too much…though I am not sure about this…may be I’ll post an update on this based on my experience…

There is no straightforward way to remove it…but I found a great way with the help of some great hackers on Symfony google group…

Basically, you need to write a class overriding the default sfWebResponse class…and unset the META name=title tag in it…like this:

class myWebResponse extends sfWebResponse
{
public function getMetas()
{
$meta_tags = $this->getParameterHolder()->getAll(’helper/asset/auto/meta’);
//find mata title tag and if find then reset to blank.
if (array_key_exists(’title’, $meta_tags))
{
unset($meta_tags['title']);
}
return $meta_tags;
}
}?>

Now, you just need to modify your factories.yml file to use this class instead of default sfWebResponse class, and you are done! :)

I thought this problem would be faced by other people…so posted quickly… :)

Posted in META tags | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

SEO Review: Online Custom T-shirts in India

Posted by sumedhinamdar on July 12, 2008

A google query for custom t-shirts gives me some interesting new startups in this space. Let us try to review their SEO efforts.

Note that this the data below is very dynamic, and note that this post is written in July 2008. Also, the search ranking position in Google is dynamic and personal. So it varies a little for every search. I’ve used Google.co.in with “search only Indian sites” setting.

———————————————————————————-

1. DilseBol:

  • Pages indexed on Google = 128 (That’s clearly too less guys!)
  • Pages indexed on Yahoo = 241 (this doesn’t happen usually, Google is way faster in crawling!)
  • Pagerank = 4
  • Back-links given by Google = 10
  • Back-links given by Yahoo! = 122
  • Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 1-2
  • Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
  • Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
  • Alexa rank = 495,102

———————————————————————————-

2. Myntra:

  • Pages indexed on Google = 44,600
  • Pages indexed on Yahoo = 16,178
  • Pagerank = 4
  • Back-links given by Google = 27
  • Back-links given by Yahoo! = 8,816
  • Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 3-4
  • Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
  • Google Position for “custom tshirts” = 1-2
  • Alexa rank = 29,709 (Wow! that’s really great!)

———————————————————————————-

3. Pringoo: They are a relatively new entrant, from my lovely home Pune… ;)

  • Pages indexed on Google = 14,400
  • Pages indexed on Yahoo = 968
  • Pagerank = 4
  • Back-links given by Google = 20
  • Back-links given by Yahoo! = 1179
  • Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 2-3
  • Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
  • Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
  • Alexa rank = 142,758

———————————————————————————-

So with my very preliminary research, it looks like Myntra is leading, and Pringoo is fast catching up! Here is the Alexa comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know Alexa is not a great tool for Indian traffic… :) …but in this case, it should be a fair comparison as all these sites belong to India and target pretty much the same consumers.

Alexa comparison for online tshirts sites

Alexa comparison for online tshirts sites

I thought guys from Dilsebol need to do some catching up in terms of getting more pages indexed by search engines. This helps a lot in attracting long-tail traffic.

For example, search for Diwali t-shirt designs yields Myntra and Pringoo on first page, but not Dilsebol!

Here is a features based comparison review on desistartups blog (a little dated).

I looked at some of their inner pages…and dilsebol clearly has a long way to go in making the site use friendly in terms of navigation! The other two also can improve on their Title tags…(putting t-shirt category in the title might help significantly!) For example, the cricket t-shirts page on myntra, does not have the word cricket in the title tag at all! It is a generic title text…of course the amount of work these guys have done to create a community, create tie-ups and get more and more designs online, is tremendous!

I must have missed a few startups in the same space here…may be you can put some more stats in the comments… ;)

Do you buy custom printed t-shirts online? which site you like the most? By the way, you can buy a tshirt of Puneri patya, from myntra… :D …a little shameless sales is not so bad!

Disclaimer: Business is lot more than how many pages are indexed on Google…so this comparison is not necessarily translating into proportionate profits! I am not associated with any of these companies, and am not getting any money for telling you one is better than others :). I did this out of sheer curiosity.

Posted in SEO Review | Tagged: , , | No Comments »

SEO & Keywords: Plural or Singular, Ek or Anek?

Posted by sumedhinamdar on July 11, 2008

If a search engine did understand English completely, it would not need to run those complicated algorithms! But yes, especially with English, they do understand quite a lot about words and linguistics.

Does a search engine understand plurals?

I did a basic experiment. First I searched for “New Delhi Properties“.

Google SERP for "New Delhi Properties"

Google SERP for "New Delhi Properties"

Now here, you can see that the word ‘Property’ is also given in bold by Google, so presumably taken as a keyword from the search term.

Nothing wrong, right?

But, the real surprise came afterwards, when I searched for “New Delhi Property“.

Google SERP for "New Delhi Property"

Google SERP for "New Delhi Property"

Here, as you can see, the word ‘Properties’ is not bold! So, a simplistic conclusion would be that Google converts plurals to singulars, but doesn’t convert singulars to plurals!

Is this true? Should we always use singular nouns on our sites and META tags because of this reason?

Actually, this is not that simple. People searching for ‘Property’ and ‘Properties’ would expect similar results, but people searching for apple and apples would probably mean different (apple as a company and apple as a fruit). Also, even if Google does not show ‘Properties’ highlighted in the second example, it might not necessarily mean that the keyword wasn’t given any importance…

I found various conflicting guidances in this regard

1. Try to use both forms on the page and tags, as it is natural, and people do use both forms to search.

2. If you need to choose, always choose plural form, as generally it contains the singular word with an ’s’ in the end. (But as we saw above, the example for word ‘property’ goes against this logic.)

One important aspect here is of course traffic conversion. If singular and plural forms of a word actually means something pretty different (apple and apples), you must use whatever is appropriate for you, so that you get right kind of visitors.

Honestly, I didn’t find any great article that proves anything conclusively on this. If you find one, please let me know. :)

My conclusion would be this -

1. Yes. Search engines certainly do understand that property and properties are different forms of a single word. So if your site is about ‘Property’, you will get hits for ‘Properties’.

2. But still, the exact match is better than inter-form match. So, if all other factors are exactly the same, a site about ‘Properties’ will get better ranking for keyword ‘Properties’ and vice versa.

So, normally speaking, a safe strategy would be to use both the forms, as you see ‘natural’ in English language, and hope that Google will understand more and more English with every passing day!

Posted in Keywords, SEO | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Nofollow Links & SEO

Posted by sumedhinamdar on July 10, 2008

Links at have rel=nofollow attributes are a significant issue from search engines and SEO perspective. It is a mechanism to tell a crawler not to follow a link. In simple words, a link with nofollow has no “juice” from SEO perspective.

All external links on the Wikipedia are nofollow links. Blog comments are generally nofollow links. Yahoo answers links are nofollow links. A lot of the social bookmarking sites use nofollow. (Here are some that don’t).

Of course, a lot of people don’t like nofollow. To quote this article, Nofollow tag is like “reaching to shake someone’s hand, but stopping to put on a pair of latex gloves.” :) His argument is that No-follow is a poor search engine’s solution to conceal its own failure to rank websites appropriately. Well, that’s somewhat true! For example, some blog comments that actually add good value to the content do deserve some link juice…but they are not getting due credit because of some spammers. There is definitely a backlash going on against this. For example, this WordPress plugin allows you to add a nofollow attribute to all the links going to sites like wikipedia, which use nofollow attribute themselves. Some people say that this anti-nofollow campaign is all bull shit and nofollow is fair enough! In the end, it’s a fact we need to accept that putting comments on blogs and linking back would not be so useful nowadays as it was once.

But interesting part is that a lot of people say that search engines do follow these links! It’s just that they don’t give them as much importance, which actually makes a lot of sense. This post shows that the target page is certainly spidered, but might not count it as a vote. Also, there are a few differences among search engines on this.

Nofollow links can surely be used to optimize internal link structure though. If a few links on your sites are getting repeated (say in the footer) and they are not so important, you can use nofollow to reduce their overall weight in the site. A typical example would be the “Disclaimer”, or the “Jobs” links in the footer. Also the links that create some javascript popup DIV’s, or open a feedback popup would be good candidates to use nofollow, so that Google doesn’t show weird errors in your webmasters account.

One more aspect of the nofollow link is that it saves your “PR juice” (I really like the analogy of link-condom :P) from leaking out. But again, whether “normal” links leak pagerank is a topic of debate and discussion.

Posted in Links, SEO | Tagged: | 1 Comment »