Several months ago I moved tedmasterweb.com to a subdomain of clevernet.biz. I expected the PageRank of tedmasterweb.com (4) to flow upstream and increase the PageRank of clevernet.biz (3). For months I waited and waited but nothing seemed to happen. In fact, I appeared to have completely lost the PageRank I had for tedmasterweb.com.

About a month ago I did several things to try and regain my lost PageRank. Specifically, I planned on asking people linking to the old site to update their links to point to the new location (clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb), but in many cases I was unable to find the authors of those links, or the links came from USENET or forum lists and they couldn’t be changed.

Besides updating incoming links, I fixed several broken links on clevernet.biz, added the clevernet.biz Google Analytics code to the tedmasterweb.com templates, and added a robots.txt file disallowing indexing of “email to friend” and “print version” pages. And finally, in my last post, I sent a ping to Matt Cutts’ blog in which he asks about international search bugs (which this isn’t but it did seem odd that the PageRank completely disappeared).

I’m not sure which of all of those things was the culprit, but I seem to have regained my PageRank, or at least, I’ve regained a PageRank on clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb (it is now 4).

Over the weekend we moved clevernet.biz to a new hosting provider. I do not expect such a move to impact PageRank since all we are doing is changing the IP address. I do wonder, though, how it will affect searches originating from Spain since the new server is housed in Germany and previously we were hosting our web site ourselves right in the Canary Islands. As of this writing, a search for “salir primero en Google” has us at number 1. This holds true when searching from the Canary Islands or from Chicago. We’ll see how this changes over time…

What I find really interesting, though, is that my tedmasterweb subdirectory has a higher PageRank than my main web site (clevernet.biz). My theory that a higher ranked subdirectory will boost the main domain has been debunked. It will be interesting to see if that ever changes, especially when we publish the new version of my PHP BBEdit Clippings set (which gave me a PageRank of 5 on tedmasterweb.com some years ago).

Around 2001 I started a web site called tedmasterweb.com. It was my professional face on the web with “articles” I’d written and software I’d produced available for download. Some of the software was quite popular and garnered me a PageRank 5 for the site as recently as October 2006.

In the first half of 2007 I decided to try an experiment. Being a partner in Clevernet, it seemed logical to merge the resources on my personal site with those on clevernet.biz. Since merging the content could have been a time-consuming task, I decided to make my entire personal site a subdirectory of clevernet.biz: Basically, tedmasterweb.com would become clevernet.biz/tedmasterweb/.

Tedmasterweb.com had a PageRank of 5 prior to the move. Concerned that such a massive change could eliminate my PageRank, I followed Matt Cutt’s guidelines on moving a domain using a 301 redirect so that search engines (Google) would know that the content had moved, permanently, to a new location (and in this case, a new domain). I had also read other articles regarding 301 redirects and tried to follow their advice as well. I have since discovered a similar, but more concrete, 301 redirect experiment. The primary difference, though, between all of these experiments and suggestions is that I am not just moving content to a new domain, but also to a subdirectory, which may have been my downfall.

Today, several months later, it would seem that my PageRank of 5 for tedmasterweb.com has been completely lost. Just issuing an appropriate redirect, in my case, was not enough to maintain it. I suspect that if I could get all the people linking to resources on the old page to update their links to point to the new location I would regain some, or all, of my PageRank, minus the penalty for not updating the content regularly and for the links being somewhat old. As soon as I post this article, I’m going to go after those old links. My guess is my PageRank will suddenly improve.

Bottom Line: migrating a domain with a decent page rank to a subdirectory of another domain is a bad idea and in the end, inbound links really are key to a high PageRank.

(I am “reposting” this because I found a great link, near the bottom, and because I don’t think this got enough air-time the first time I posted it.)

“Every serious book of nonfiction should have an index if it is to achieve its maximum usefulness. A good index records every pertinent statement made within the body of the text. The key word here is pertinent.” (18.1, p. 512, The Chicago Manual of Style 1982)

A web page is a document and a web site, a book. Books go through a process of editing: several drafts are written before the final draft, and several proofs may be produced before the book is sent to the press for mass reproduction. At one point in the process, an index is created to facilitate finding the information a reader is looking for.

In brief, the Indexer (the person creating the index) makes annotations on a proof of the book about what should be indexed and how. They even include a “header” section with data about the context of the document, or general document-wide indexing information (page, chapter, date of publication, etc.).

Here is a sample of how books are marked up for indexing (The Chicago Manual of Style 1982):

The figures, lines, colons, and other annotations all have very specific meaning, but that is not what concerns us here. The point is some effort is made to objectively indicate what pieces of the text are considered important and how they relate to each other. This is a standard practice in manuscript and book publishing. If you want to maximize your web site’s usefulness, it should be a standard practice in web site publishing for any serious, nonfiction site.

What Is HTML?

The original intention of HTML was to allow scientists to share academic articles with some sort of search and retrieval capabilities to aid in finding articles that referenced their work, among other things. To accomplish this, web page documents are annotated in a fashion similar to the sample shown above. The annotations are known as “markup” from the verb “to mark up” and look similar to this: [title]Chocolate Chip Cookies in 10 Minutes[/title].

Hyper Text Markup Language is the term used to refer to this type of markup (“hyper text” = text that links to other text, a third dimension to a linear experience). The goal of HTML is to aid the retrieval of manuscripts from immense information systems, but historically HTML has been (ab)used primarily to aid the presentation (formatting) of a document. HTML optimized for indexing by the search engines is hard to produce. Most “modern” web pages are either missing such markup or the markup is inaccurate, which may be worse. A common example of inaccurate markup are web sites that have the same title for every page.

Many HTML editors provide the ability to include some of this markup in your documents. Markup that is strictly for formatting may make indexing more difficult and should be implemented via other means, typically Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

A good document index communicates the internal document structure to the search engines. Specifically, it communicates which parts are titles, subtitles, word emphases, citations, diagrams, tables, etc. This is where it gets difficult: How do you know what sections need to be identified and how to identify them? What Mark Up do you use to tell the search engines: “This is a main menu.”? There are many guides on how to do this on the internet and the answers are beyond the scope of this blog post. I will say, however, that technologies such as Flash, Java, and JavaScript are unable to be used as markup and should be avoided if you hope to have your web site properly indexed by the search engines.

The Bottom Line

If you facilitate indexing by the search engines, there is a higher likelihood they will get it right and return your page as the first result for exactly the right query. This can be accomplished with little or no negative drawbacks on the design (if you have the right tools, some training, and are motivated). Furthermore, this is likely going to make your potential clients very happy: the first result was exactly the answer they were looking for and the design led them directly to the answer. This, to me, is the definition of a web page optimized for search engines: your page is the first result for specific queries and the design makes the answer clear.

I would estimate 90% of all web sites would benefit from this kind of web site optimization. Although at that point, they would all be equally optimized rather than equally un-optimized and the benefit could be nil.

Bruce Clay has an excellent description of the search engine optimization process.

Bibliography:

The University of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637. 1982.
The Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

El otro día alguien me preguntó si realmente conseguíamos clientes a través de Internet. La respuesta es un “sí” rotundo y claro, pregunta siguiente: “¿Y cómo los consigues?”

Una personalidad cibernética

Conseguir clientes por Internet no termina con salir primero en Google. Hace falta tener una personalidad cibernética, por decirlo así. Los visitantes a tu web, tus posibles clientes, necesitan alguna manera de comprobar que eres quién dices que eres. Necesitan comprobar tu personalidad antes de iniciar un contacto contigo, y hay varias maneras de crear una personalidad cibernética:

• Crear una web personal
• Llevar un blog (ya lo estás leyendo)
• Participar en foros y listas de distribución (LISTSERVs)
• “Donar” contenidos a otros webs (siempre que aparezca tu nombre)
• Lograr que tus datos aparecen en las webs de otros (como referencia, siempre que hablen bien de ti, por supuesto)
• Publicar artículos que demuestran todo lo que sabes y en qué campos te especializas

En mi caso cuando alguien me quiere “investigar” metiendo mi nombre en Google, aparecen muchos resultados y pueden llegar a tener una idea sobre quién soy y si concuerda con lo que digo en mi web personal. De esta manera el posible cliente tendrá una cierta confianza, lo suficiente como para ponerse en contacto con nosotros y basado en la interacción posterior, contratarnos (o no).

No pretendo que todos los que se ponen en contacto con nosotros se conviertan en clientes, ni que nos estén llegando correos todos los días, pero sí llegan y con la frecuencia suficiente como para mantenernos vivos. Así que cuando otros hablan de la dedicación que hay que tener para salir primero en los buscadores, yo iría más allá y hablaría de la dedicación que hay que tener para tener una personalidad cibernética y de confianza.

Por cierto, lo publiqué el otro día pero aprovecho para repetirlo ya que tuvimos un pequeño problema con la página… Publicamos nuestro proceso de desarrollo de aplicaciones web que, aunque no vayas a trabajar con nosotros, podría serte de interés.