Traditionally Google would index, and cache, your website based upon the number of links and the resulting PageRank of your webpages. Pages with more links and/or PageRank would be reindexed and cahced more frequently than pages with less links and/or PageRank.

It is possible to make changes to your website to help Google cache your website more often.

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Is IndexTools better than Google Analytics?

You bet. I’m a strong believer in Omniture (it’s fab & when you plugin in some modules it rocks your online marketing world - if you havent seen Test& Target you’re in for a treat). Over at Search Engine Watch they described the free IndexTools like getting 80% of Omniture but free. To me is this is true the difference we could all be seeing from our free analytics package could be vast.

When can you sign up for your Free IndexTools?

Ah the difficult question - and the truth is I have no idea. All the ‘buzz‘ seems to be about it happening. At present I can find no information on timescales.

If you know any more about release dates for the free IndexTools or have some comments to make let us know in the comments below. I am sure we’ll be talking more the free analytics war that’s building in the nesr future.

If anyone has a spare Woopra invite they could send us we’d be really grateful. If you could drop us a comment below if you’re able to help and I’ll email you back as soon as I get it.

Google Data Center tools on the web

McDar has traditioanlly been the palce to go and check out results. It allows you to check by IP block for results. I like the way the results are outputted but you can only check about 6 DC on one screen.

Bill just sent me a link to a new DC checking tool - they need to do some work on the output of the results as they scroll down for about half a mile. But you get loads of differing DC checked at the on time.

If anyone knows of any other tools that do this job stick them in the comments below and I’ll have a squizz.

The second rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

The third rule of fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

Are you a member of Fight Club?

So you want to make money online. Well it’s like being in Fight Club. You spend all day looking for things that are going to make you money. Niches here, niches there, you test, you refine and you start making money. The one thing is you dont tell anyone how you actually did it.

Every so often someone will break ranks and start telling everyone online how they used exactly the same tactics as you did to start making some money and everyone is doing it and all of a sudden that whole chapter of Fight Club needs to be closed down and replaced with a new, stronger Fight Club.

Remember the first rule of Internet Marketing fight club is that you must not talk about fight club.

I love Google analytics: its free, simple to install and can be up and running in minutes and tracking almost instantly. However these kind of little glitches that I find that drive me up the wall. surely the piece of code that extracts the query is almost the same as that used for the noraml search queries.

While trying to develop a solution I thought the bestplace to have a look would be through the blogosphere and start hacking through some blogs to ‘borrow’ a solution that someone else has came up with for this. Some of the solutions for tracking image search traffic through Google analytics look complicated - probably as my JavaScript skills are minimal.

The best solution looks to be that advocated by Joost DeValk. I’m away to test this out and see how it works. If anyone knows of a better way to do this can you let me know. Thanks is advance.

One of the things that I’d heard could be affecting your natural search performance is whether these great links you’ve been out link baiting, link spamming or have been growing organically to your web sites is whether they created a link profile that was seen as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. I’ve seen unnatural link profiles referred to as ‘artifical’. I prefer unnatural as you could develop an unnatural link profile without doing anything on purpose - artifical indicates to me, at least, that you’ve been actively going out of your way to get links.

Having a natural link profile is what every website apparently needs to consistently rank well for all of its appropriate search terms. Unnatural link patterns are suppossed to damge your search engine positions, at least in the short term.

I’ve been thinking about this ideas for a while and it seems logical. Unnatural linking = Spamming = penalty in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Before I could go and test out this I had to define were natural and unnatural link profiles.

What is a ‘natural link’ profile?

A natural link profile is one that grows organically with no, or little, interference.

I believe that natural link prfoiles would have five defining components:

1. Links likely to grow at a consistent rate
2. The majority of links are on pages, within sites, on a related themes
3. These pages would be unlikely to have high PageRank
4. Links would often be within fresh content
5. Links would often be in non-duplicate content

I know these rules are subjective but I felt they could be used as a way to use a system of trigger level penalties: when your link profile displays an unnatural level of any of these the penalty starts to interact with your rankings.

• Links could grow dramatically to your domain - but these links could be natural if they were to a page about a hot topic. So there would be a trigger point inside the search engine algorithm to give leeway for this.
• It is likely that not all links would be on topic, nor should they ever be - human variation in language etc would determine that some links would be seen as ‘off topic’ by a search engine. Espescially when you have a brand name that means nothing in itsel: I was thinking about Diageo or something similar.
• Having exclusively links from high PageRank pages may indicate that you are operating within a hot topic again, or you could be spamming. The natural distribution curve for your website will be different from other websites but there may be points in time when your natural distribution changes drastically in terms of PageRank.

What is an ‘unnatural link’ profile?

If a natural link profile conforms to the rules above, but doesn’t need to obey all five at the same time. An unnatural link profile would be one where the rules of natural linking were broken often enough to trigger the filter(s).

This would be reasonably simple for a search engine to use as you could use threshhold trigger points within an algorithm to indicate when a website went from having a natural to an unnatural link proflile and vice versa, with various stages inbetween.

Testing Natural and Unnatural Link profiles

Base line test involved:

1. Five domains
2. All had been spidered for more than three months
3. No keywords in the domain names
4. All were .co.ukdomain extensions
5. All hosted on the same server

I’ll be putting the test results in our next post. If you have any thoughts in advance of our publishing the results please let us know.

1.  Keep checking in @ Blog Security: They’ve been doing some great work on keeping the community updated on security exploits with WordPress. Subscribe to their RSS feed - it’s well worth it. They even have stuff on WordPress Mu updates - which is fab.
2. Matt Cutts posted about toughening your WordPress blog: the bit about using empty index files can be hughely important as I’ve seen requests for this file going up quite a bit on some blogs lately from some strange IP addresses.
3.  There are also ten tips over at noupe.com. Some don’t always work (I have some Plesk and some CPanel servers which exhibit different behaviours when trying some of these out.)

Hope that helps all you WordPress addicts get a WordPress installation thats a better, and safer, than ever before.

If you know any other tips/tricks/etc that I could be using drop em a comment.

Some of the applications I’ve seen online seem to build them for you - but they dont really offer us the flexibility we’re looking for.

If anyone knows of any good Facebook tutorials, guides or walkthroughs drop us a comment below.