[ic] Meta Tags

Mon Oct 30 23:41:43 EST 2006

Jon wrote:
>>>> In the past these pages have had a ridiculously high google PR compared
>>>> with the rest of the site. However with the last google  pagerank update
>>>> we have penalized for these. To see what I mean visit my new site
>>>> www.theyoungjerk.com
>>>>
>>>> Only the categories Protein and Creatine have a page rank. Careful
>>>> inspection revealed that those were the only two categories with a small
>>>> list.
>>>>
>>>> In all fairness our objective was not spamming, but rather representing
>>>> what was on the page.
>>>>
>>>> Rather than abandoning our technique, I have responded by formatting the
>>>> lists, so that they are truncated to the officially accepted lengths.
>>>> Anyone who has downloaded and used these innovations need only download
>>>> this page:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.goldissue.com/images/foundation/toplevel.html
>>>>
>>>> (ie the part that goes at the top of the page.html), and open in a linux
>>>> text editor.
>>>>
>>>> If you want to use notepad, I have found that you can save to c: and
>>>> uses dos edit to open and save once. Then the file will display better
>>>> in notepad.
>>>>
>>>> The only change I have made is to add a perl function which formats the
>>>> list.
>>>>
>>>> Although it has been an embarrassment, and cost a client and my own site
>>>> some traffic, we have responded by refining the method, and shall inform
>>>> you of the results in a couple of months.
>>>>
>>>> My previous post was this (which needs to be revised once we know where
>>>> this is heading).
>>>>
>>>> http://www.goldissue.com/search-engine-friendly.html
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Frank Reitzenstein
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> http://www.goldissue.com Ecommerce Consulting
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> interchange-users mailing list
>>>> interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
>>>> http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>     Frank some may state and/or argue this isn't necessarily appropriate
>>> topic
>>> for an IC technical list but I say it is some what because with out traffic
>>> a site is for not and there are technical approaches that may be unique to
>>> IC.
>>> Now with that probably behind us or at least off my chest :)... on to SE
>>> stuff.
>>>
>>>     My primary site has recently moved from PR 4 to PR 6 and I should be
>>> happy
>>> but my traffic and sales are down. Point on that don't necessarily mix
>>> traffic with PR.
>>>
>>>     If my memory is correct I recall a post you made some time ago relative
>>> to meta
>>> tags (e.g. image alt) and whenever I read something I take at look at my
>>> site to see what I may
>>> have over looked and saw my product image alts were not product specific and
>>> knowing
>>> IC I could and did make the alts product specific and given the time frame
>>> and your
>>> post today I'm wondering if that indeed killed my SE results; perhaps I'm
>>> being penalized
>>> a bit. Thoughts anyone ??  In the case of the young jerk site those pages
>>> with out PR are
>>> simply not in google's cache hence PR 0 which to me implies they have been
>>> dropped or
>>> perhaps google is still cycling through the different server's cache. This
>>> has been happening
>>> recently as I saw my site bounce between PR 4 and 6 and now appears to be
>>> settled at PR6.
>>>
>>>     Are you thinking that excessive alt tags have killed your PR and/or SE
>>> results ? I wouldn't
>>> mind hearing what you've discovered working with a number of sites sooner
>>> rather then
>>> waiting the 2 months for the formal dissertation :)
>>>
>>> Jon
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> interchange-users mailing list
>>> interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
>>> http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> Hello Jon,
>>
>> I don't have any thoughts on that. Allow me to clarify what I meant:
>>
>> <title>Allergy Cholesterol Skin Formulas Lip Enhancement Quit</title>
>> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
>> <meta name="description" content="Allergy,Cholesterol,Skin Formulas,Lip
>> Enhancement,Quit Smoking,Bone & Joint Support,Teeth & Gums,Healthy
>> Living,Pet Health,Anti-Aging,Detox,Sleep Aids,Beauty Creams,Digestive
>> Aids,Liver">
>> <meta name="keywords" content="Allergy,Cholesterol,Skin Formulas,Lip
>> Enhancement,Quit Smoking,Bone & Joint Support,Teeth & Gums,Healthy
>> Living,Pet Health,Anti-Aging,Detox,Sleep Aids,Beauty Creams,Digestive
>> Aids,Liver Support,Respiratory,Stress Formulas,Urinary Function,Brain
>> Support,Heart Health,PMS/Menopause Support,Sexual Support,Vision
>> Support,Immune Support,Prostate Support,Body Care,Headache">
>> <meta name="rating" content="General">
>> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
>> <meta NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="14 days">
>> <meta name="classification" content="Retail">
>> <meta NAME="distribution" CONTENT="Global">
>>
>> These are created automatically from the search list. This is a
>> sanitized version created by my recent modifications. Previously I was
>> simply dumping the entire list into all 3  tags in the header (title
>> description  & keywords). This was after some research, when I probably
>> quite rightly concluded that google only scooped up how much it wanted
>> from each tag without penalty.
>>
>> However further study revealed that this year google started grabbing
>> the excess from the title, and shoving it into the description. In any
>> case they appear to have changed something. Therefore I am now careful
>> to follow the rules as we understand them (each tag is truncated to the
>> recommended length).
>>
>> Considering my fanaticism in this regard, I have often been slack
>> regarding image alt tags, which I assume you are talking about. I am
>> happy  to discuss this more, except as you say this may not be the
>> correct forum.
>>
>> I am interested in your comment to the effect that an increase in PR
>> resulted in less traffic and sales. This happened at
>> www.fremantlehealthfoods.com However I believe there is no
>> contradiction, because what happened is that numerous pages like
>>
>> http://www.fremantlehealthfoods.com/shop/fremantlehealthfoods/scan/fi=groups/sp=toplevel/st=db/tf=name/co=yes/sf=sel/se=1/op=eq/tf=groups.html
>>
>> lost their high PR due to what I have described above. The only search
>> pages which kept their PR had a full list in the title, description and
>> keywords in the header (without excess). Chris' "about us" page also
>> lost its PR
>>
>> http://www.fremantlehealthfoods.com/shop/fremantlehealthfoods/aboutus.html
>>
>> I just noticed that the meta tags in the header are very incomplete. I
>> was wondering if in spite of your increased site PR, maybe a lot of
>> other pages were dropped as in our case?
>>
>> Certainly I seem to have evidence that in the last PR update, google
>> have shown preference to those pages which have good content in the
>> title, description and keywords, and appeared to penalize too much and
>> too little.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Frank.
>>
>> --
>> http://www.goldissue.com Ecommerce Consulting
>> _______________________________________________
>> interchange-users mailing list
>> interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
>> http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
>>     
>
>     I did some digging...  Yes, about the time I lost traffic/sales I did just prior
> to that lose some pages in google as seen via link:www.domain.com.
> Also the pages that do show via site:www.domain.com, excluding the
> 'omitted results', are almost 100% my fly pages which do have relevant
> and page/product unique description and keywords meta tags. My category type pages
> individually have unique keyword tags but they all have the same description
> tag which is more site then category page related. I think google has penalized
> my category pages since they all have the same description tags because I
> can see just one of them via site:www.domain.com. I do think you're on the
> right track here.
>
>     One question I have is does anyone think that google would have a problem with
> the description and keyword tags being virtually identical as Frank has in his example
> above ?  And would anyone agree or disagree with my assertion that my repeating
> description tag is having a negative affect on my SE results before I make some IC
> code changes to make my description tags category page unique. Unless I get
> a strong opinion on that I'll like change just a few at a time.
>
>     I hope no one is too upset our usage of the IC list to discuss SE related items.
>
> Jon
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> interchange-users mailing list
> interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
> http://www.icdevgroup.org/mailman/listinfo/interchange-users
>
>   
John please consider in your decision the evidence that

http://www.theyoungjerk.com/Creatine/

http://www.theyoungjerk.com/Protein/

were the only two pages left with a PR across both www.theyoungjerk.com
and www.fremantlehealthfoods.com

They too had identical keywords, description and title tags,
strengthened by the fact that they mirrored the page content exactly. (
I learnt this technique from a SEO guy years ago - but things have
changed only slightly.)

Incidentally it is a new site which has never previously had a listing.
Note that the reason these two pages were listed by google appears to be
that the list was shorter.

Of course my recent changes posted at
http://www.goldissue.com/search-engine-friendly.html have addressed that
issue by truncating all tags their correct length.

Jon, there is nothing stopping you from randomizing the results of my
three perl functions on this page:

http://www.goldissue.com/images/foundation/toplevel.html

To display every second keyword, sort them alphabetically or use a random function - just to assure that all three look different.

{Repeating Jon, if anyone objects to this discussion, please tell us to buzz off. However as this a technical modification with a proven ability to inpact on site performance please don't! :)}

It's spring down under and the weather is glorious. Hope you guys aren't suffering too much,

Regards,

Frank,
-- 
http://www.goldissue.com Ecommerce Consulting