A friend of mine asked an interesting question the other day…

Have you ever come across any information stating that Google may increase a certain listing if it all of the sudden starts to receive a lot of clicks? I’m working on a search reputation management thing for a client. He had a negative result from an old article ranking on the second page, and since we have been working on it over the past few weeks the result has slowly increased to the number 2 position. Could this be because we have been clicking on the link a lot? Thanks a ton!

The famous Google March 2005 patent talks about measuring clickthroughs in organic. I have never seen anyone prove that Google is actually doing this, but seems they’d be crazy not to take it into account at some level. Instead of trudging through the patent application itself, I recommend reading this SEOMOZ article that breaks down each component and explains it well. Researching and understanding the patent stuff back in 2005 really helped me see the direction that Google was going in and probably helped me avoid making some mistakes that could have hurt me in the long term.

So, I’d say yes it is possible, but I doubt anyone will ever be able to game Google by clicking their own results. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that an old dead result could come to life if it suddenly got clicks vs. a top result for a competitive keyword. But, then again, who knows, it’s just a patent application.  It would be very interesting to try and test this. Find a bunch of old articles from the same site that appear in search results. Use one set as a control and give the others a sudden bunch of clickthroughs from many different IP addresses. See if it has any effect.

Dear Webmaster
I would like to take the time to thank you for your free templates. I downloaded the gaming template and it is so cool it is going to help my game site. I have just one question for you. Can you please tell me how I code the search box so my vistors can find my games by searching my site or were I can find a code for it?
Thank you,
Ron

PS as soon as I get the template uploaded on my site I will send you a link to it.

Hi Ron,

Thanks very much for the kind remarks about the template. I hope template serves you well.

The search box is there in case you have an existing database you can connect to. How the search box is coded would depend on the type of database installed on your web server. There are also search services hosted offsite that can return results from your website. The easiest thing to do to make your site searchable is to create a Google Custom Search Engine with Google Co-op.

You can even see your search stats with a Google CSE.

I use Google Custom Search on Clickfire at the top right of every page. You can even use it with Google AdSense if you have an account. Let me know how it works, if you try it.

Thanks again,

Emory

Wayne asks…

Hi, I just downloaded your Metty software from Snapfiles. Tried to use it with a Xhtml file, but it seems not to like the closing tag — it adds a double quote character to the end.

I appreciate the feedback. I probably need to publicize this more, but I made a special online version that will take care of the XHTML issues. I recommend using this version. If you want to try it, feel free to take a look here:

http://www.clickfire.com/tools/searchengine/mettyonline_meta_tag_generator.php

For everyone who doesn’t know what Wayne and I are talking about, I will catch you up. A long, long time ago in a development environment far, far away, I authored a software program that allowed users to type text into the fields to quickly generate a whole bunch of meta tags. I called it “Metty Meta Tag Maker.” Search engines used meta tags more for ranking back then, so there was lots more demand for the program.

Enter XHTML. Since XHTML rules require that non-container tags end with a closing slash and appear in lowercase, Metty had to be upgraded. The upgraded online version now outputs meta tags in compliance with XHTML rules.

If you’re a SEO or have done much search engine optimization, you probably know that today, search engines like Google still use the title tag as a very important criterion in determining rankings. The keyword meta tag is still used to a minor degree by some, but not Google. The description meta tag still appear in search engine results but as far as I know, they are not used in ranking algorithms, but are important as they serve as the call to action to generate the click throughs to your web page.

Anonymous Webmaster asks…

Several of the Google AdSense ads on our site are showing a “page not found” error within the ad space. I have checked from multiple locations and still see the errors. Our ads are not showing in all cases. Can you advise as to how I can correct?

This error had been puzzling me until recently when I saw the problem on one of my own sites and had to do some debugging. The answer starts with Google AdSense Alternative Ads, which provides a way to display your own ads if Google cannot display an ad on your page:

Alternate ads allow you to utilize your ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to your page. By default, Google shows public service ads (PSAs) if no targeted ads are available.

To display an altnernate ad, users are instructed to specify a URL pointing to their alternate ad resource, which looks this way inside the AdSense code:

google_alternate_ad_url = http://www.example.com/docs/alternatead.html;

A further advanced feature allows webmasters to collapse their ad if there are no targeted ads available so that it takes up no page space. This URL is given as an example:

http://www.example.com/scripts/google_adsense_script.html

I discovered that in my haste, I had copied the example above and replaced “example.com” with my own site name. That should work, right? Nooo… because I left the directory “/scripts/” in the path  which made it point to a dead file instead of “google_adsense_script.html,” which lay in my root directory. 

To answer the original question, if you are seeing the ”page not found error” inside your AdSense units, it is likely caused by an invalid alternative ads path. Make sure your alternate ads URL path is pointing to the correct file location.

Remember that the page not found error only appears when Google cannot display an ad. It is difficult to test your fix because most of the time Google displays ads. If it displays an ad, it’s not looking for the alternative ad path and therefore not showing the error. ¿Comprende?  Read more of this post »

As asked by Jules Letona…

Hello,

Great site! My name is Jules, I’m 23 yrs old. It would be great to become a webmaster my self. I have a very small hat per every responsibility you mention on Becoming a Webmaster Part 2. However, I have a basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. I was wondering in this day and age, is it necessary to learn the coding? I don’t know if I should continue to focus on HTML, JavaScript, DHTML, yadda etc, etc. or simply just focus on some type of code editor that will do all the coding for me.

Thank you for your time.

Jules,

Thanks for the kind remarks :)

You bring up a great question and an issue that I have struggled with along my webmaster journey. At one point in time, I felt sure that I was going to be spending a lot of my time writing code from scratch to develop new and exciting web applications to make the world a better place. As my webmaster skills progressed, it soon became clear that there were a lot of other developers out there who were better, faster and enjoyed solving coding problems more than I.

After learning a few things about myself, that I was more wired for right-brained creativity than left-brained analytics, I pursued other webmasterly skills that interested me. For one thing, I enjoyed writing so I researched and wrote a lot of content. I published the content on Clickfire and began watching my server logs to see what people were searching for and how they were arriving on my pages. It wasn’t long before I realized through tweaking the pages and links, I could influence the types and numbers of visitors arriving at my site from search engines. Many years later, I found myself doing SEO for large corporations.

So, my answer is to be guided by what really inspires you. Maybe the aspect of webmastering that excites you is not writing code but doing graphics, servers, domains, blogging or just a zeal to make money online. Dive into something and see where it takes you. You don’t have to learn all the coding languages out there. I do think that it is important to have a firm grasp of HTML. Editors are just fine as long as you are paying attention to the code. Knowing HTML will serve you well in whatever direction you take.

Let me know how things develop for you!

Best of luck,

Emory Rowland

How often do I have to submit search engines?– asked by B.C.

These days, you only want to submit your site to the search engines once. Actually, you don’t even have to do that because search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live will find your site if other sites link to it. Their crawlers will meander around the Internet following links until they eventually discover your site. Once they do, your site doesn’t disappear from the indexes, but stays at least as long as links from elsewhere are pointing to your site. I’m always amazed to see search engine marketing firms that charge customers a fee for monthly submissions, as if Google would forget they indexed a site.

I received a letter from a domain registrar that said my domain name will expire soon and I have to pay a renewal fee of $40 by a certain date. What do I need to do? –Originally appeared in the Clickfire Spark Newsletter

Nothing. The letter you received is an attempt to get you to transfer your registration of your domain to a different company that charges a very high price for domain registrations. I’ve received these pseudo invoices from companies I’ve never heard of. This practice is very deceptive. Some unsuspecting site owners won’t realize that this is not the company they originally registered with and will pay without much thought. The reason scammers can do this is that your name and address appear on the public “who is” registration record, which is sort of like a property deed for domains. Anyone can view the official domain record of a web site at the Whois Source or any number of other who is database sites. They know who you are and when your domain expires so they try and scare you into renewing. Only later will you realize that you actually switched your domain registration to a different company. It reminds me of the way that some long distance companies used to switch service without permission.

As I get questions about all sorts of webmaster related topics, I’d like to share my answers with you.

Do I have to put meta tags on each page? –asked by B.C.

Search engines have come a long way since the days of meta tags. It’s not necessary to put meta tags on all (or any) of your pages to improve search engine rankings. Meta tags were used a great deal in the early days of search engines, but now, search engine algorithms are more sophisticated in determining which sites should rank high. Now, Google, Yahoo and other search engines place more weight on criteria like on page text and inbound links. Search engines no longer have to rely on hidden tags inserted in HTML pages to determine what pages are about and what their importance should to searchers. Many webmasters like myself still habitually include meta tags on each page (it’s hard to stop once you’ve started). It’s a good habit but don’t expect a great rankings boost.