Matt Cutts on Google Snipits

This is one of my favorite Matt Cutts video, simple straight to the point and a must view for any Internet Marketer. It is also a video I have viewed many times over just to remind myself of a few core fundamentals of how Google decides to display search results.

Enjoy
Scorp

At last, a better show in the Google index

Google finally have a better snipit for the Download TV Free website, which means they have re indexed the site. As you can see from the screenshot below, not only do we have a better description in the snipit, but we are also #5 out of 27 Millions results, that said, breaking into the top 3 is going to be the hard part, and only then will we start getting daily sales.

Google now also have 5 of our pages in their index, it is going to take a little more time to get deeper pages indexed, but once that happens we should start to see some indented listings and better rankings.

What’s is interesting is that when I check the cached version of the page in the results, Google indicates that the site was indexed on the 4th of December, however the page only started to appear in the search results yesterday, the 7th of December, so I now know that there is a few days delay between caching a page and actually showing it in the search results.

This week I am going to be focusing on building more website content, getting more articles published in different article directories and Video marketing to help drive traffic and build external links.

Have a great Monday!
Scorpio Africa

Google Webmaster Tools Rock!

As part of an SEO project one must be armed with all the best tools. My primary weapon is Google Webmaster Tools, and today has been really helpful in trying to get to the bottom of why Google is still indexing a cached version of the Download TV Free web site.

In a previous post I mentioned how I had renamed the hoe page which resulted in Google dropping the site from its index. I fixed this by updating the default home page of the site to the renamed page which got it back into the index, however logging into Google Webmaster Tools this morning revealed the following:

 

Web Crawl Errors

The Web crawl errors show that the spider is still detecting a “Not Found” 404 error. Clicking on the “1 Details” links shows the following:

 

Not Found

The not found page shows that the page www.downloadtvfree.net/home (The original home page name before I changed it) page cannot be found. It also shows that 2 pages in the site are currently linking to it. Clicking on the “2 pages” link shows the following:

 

Link To

This page shows that the site map and the home page link to the old page name which no longer exists.

Solution:

Drupal allows you to create page aliases, what are those, well they are basically virtual page names which redirect to any page on your site, very cool and useful. In this case I created the alias “home” (Which is the page Google indicates is missing) and redirect this alias to the new home page called “free-tv-downloads”

On another note, just wanted to say congratulations to WordPress, today they released their new Dashboard, it is awesome!

Till later
Scorpio

Some Traffic Stats for Download TV Free

The numbers below may seem small, and they are, but remember the site has only been live 1 week, had a problem with being removed from the Google index and not a cent has been spent on advertising

Gotta love SEO and Free traffic!

Scorp

Download TV Free First Pay Day

The Download TV Free Website generated its first sale yesterday, a whole $19.95.

What does this mean? Well, two things:

1. Part of my payment as an SEO Consultant is 50% of all revenue for the first three months which starts from the first sale. So, my 3 months start now.
2. I need to up the effort in order to get to at least 10 sales a day by the end of the first 3 months, so time for some cleaver SEO work.

All great fortunes start with just a single sale.

Scorp

Back in Google’s Index, But it’s not all good news

Just checked, and I have managed to get the Download TV Free website back into the Google index, see last few posts for how I did this. Unfortunately Google is still showing their cache of the page containing the Drupal default content (Defiantly won’t make that mistake again!)

Anyway, what’s important is the game is back on and Top 3 Domination is on the way!

Cheers
Scorp.

Trying to get Indexed, again!

Now that the Download TV Free website has been removed from the Google index, see this post for details, I have been working hard on getting the site back into the search results. Here is what I have done today:

1. Added link to the site in http://del.ico.us There is also link list that is generated from del.icio.us on this blog (see the left hand column)
2. Linked to the site from some new posts on this blog
3. Submitted 2 new articles to Ezinearticles (Pending Review)
4. Created a new Blogger blog at: http://downloadtvfree.blogspot.com
5. Added my new articles to the new blogspot blog

I have now also added all the RSS feeds from the websites and blogs that I have created to:

• www.feedage.com
• www.feedbite.com

My only hope now is that my assumptions as to why the site was removed from the index in the first place are right and it is not for some other unknown reason.

Time will tell.
Scorp

Silly Mistake costs me Big Time

Another silly mistake in the Download TV Free project has cost me big time. Yesterday I added the Meta data module to Drupal so as to update the description keywords Meta tags on the home page in an effort to encourage the Google spider to re-index my home page using actual site content rather than the default Drupal text (see earlier posts).

At the same time I changed the page title from “Home” to “Free TV Downloads” but because I have the SEO module installed, it changed the home page alias as well. What this meant is that, because this is the home page, Drupal was still looking for the page named “home” when showing the home page when accessing www.downloadtvfree.net but because it was renamed Drupal was re-directing to a 404 Page not found page.

So with a real stroke of bad luck, Google finally decides to re-index my page some time last night when the home page was indicating a 404 Page not found, so what does Google do? It throws the site completely out of the index, no more first page results, in fact no more appearance on any page, even an info search. Aarrrrgg, I could spit fire right now!

So I have now updated the Drupal home page to point to the newly named page “free-tv-downloads” instead of “home”. How long it will take for Google to index the site again, well that is one of the SEO mysteries, but hopefully, when it does it will have better text in the SERP and perhaps a higher ranking.

Got to stay positive and beleive that Good things come out of expensive life lessons. Hopefully my next post will be saying that we are back on the First page.
Scorp

Hubs and Lenses

Started my link building strategy today. First thing to do is get some pages on some high profile sites like www.squidoo.com and www.hugpages.com.

Check out the Download TV Free Squidoo page at: 
http://www.squidoo.com/download-tv-free

 

Check out the Download TV Free HubPage at:
http://hubpages.com/hub/download-tv-free 

 

Over the next few weeks I will be focusing more on the content on the Lens rather than the Hug page. This is just until I am sure the Hub page will stay published. I have been burnt before by Hupages having spent time building my Hub only to later receive a mail from them indicating that because it was too commercially driven they have shut it down.

So, there are just a few sites in my Network so far but the linking architecture is very particular. I am in the process of putting together a diagram which will visually show how everything links up.

That and more in my next post.
Scorp

New Download TV Free Blog and New Rankings

I have now setup the free download tv free blog at http://downloadtvfree.wordpress.com/ If you read this blog often you will know that I have a strong preference for using wordpress blogs, they get indexed real fast as Google just can’t get enough of their structure.

I am suing mainly re-written content from the Google Alerts that I have setup for the download TV free keyword phrase to populate this new blog. Already I have seen the ranking go up.

#4 for keyword Broad phrase: download tv free

As you can see from the posts from the past few days, the ranking has gone from #10 to #4, unfortunately Google still has the default Drupal content indexed, this was a stupid mistake but hey, you live and learn, and hopefully the site will be re-indexed this week.

I have a stupidly busy day today, so probably won’t to much more work on this SEO project, so will post further updates tomorrow.

Scorp