JavaRanch stewardship and SEO

[paul wheaton]

kev grant wrote:
Toolbar PR is nothing much to do with ranking any more. real PR (which we cant see or measure) very definitely is.

So, are you saying that we might have "real PR" of 7 but toolbar PR of 5?

Why would the two be so different?

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:So each month there are

68 million searches for java (we're #31)
6.1 million for jsp (we're not in the first 100)
1.5 million for applet (we're not in the first 100)
1.5 million for servlet(we're #71)
823,000 for how to java
673,000 for java tutorial
673,000 for tomcat (we're not in the first 100)
450,000 for java programming (we're #47)
246,000 for scjp (we're #4 and #5)
246,000 for applets
201,000 for servlets (we're #54)
74,000 for java certification (we're #16)
60,500 for learn java (we're #61)
40,500 for learning java (we're #35)
12,100 for java forums (we're #5)
6,600 for java community (we're #18)

so it seems like a great title would be "java jsp java applet servlet how to tutorial" - right?

Then we need to find a path between that and what we have now, right?

lol yes, something like that. ok firstly flick the button on the adwords tool from "broad" match to "exact"

thats much closer to the actual figures, but probably still 5 - 10 times higher that you can expect to see traffic from.

so now we're showing 4,090,000 for java? ..if we were #1, we could expect to see approx 40% of the traffic for that search, but I promise you the traffic wouldn't be 40% of 4,090,000 = 1,600,360. ..more like 1/5 to 1/10 of that.

so anyway you need to optimize the upper level (home) for "Java" and then if you want to write articles, you know what to write about now..

then optimize each article subpage for its own term "JSP" etc (and related sub terms) and link to the page from the homepage, using the anchor text "JSP" etc.

in essence its really that easy.

[paul wheaton]

kev grant wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:

i think i saw this in action on the forum? but if so, you need to switch the nofollow off. in fact personally I would switch it off full stop. if a link deserves to be there at all, it deserves to be live IMO.

I think the java links don't have no follow.

no, if we're talking about the same ones, they show pink in my browser?

If you scroll to the very bottom, there is a line that says "visit our java home page!" - is that java pink for you?

Look at your first post in this thread. See the word java? Is that pink for you?

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:

kev grant wrote:
Toolbar PR is nothing much to do with ranking any more. real PR (which we cant see or measure) very definitely is.

So, are you saying that we might have "real PR" of 7 but toolbar PR of 5?

Why would the two be so different?

nobody really knows, its all guesses, speculation, hunches. you have to remember PR is a logarithmic function, the best guess is base 6.

so PR5 x 6 = PR6, PR6 x 6 = PR7 etc.

so a high 5, and a low 6 might perform very similarly with all else the same. in practice a well optimized PR3 can often outperform an unoptimized PR6 for the same terms.

but the relevance signals are a lot more complicated than straight PR anyway these days, and bearing in mind the seeming "misinformation campaign" with the toolbar, for several years now, it's only real use is a very rough approximation of site or SERP strength.

[paul wheaton]

twitter and facebook and the like: well, you are changing my mind a bit about this one. I have one more whammy to throw at you. The thing I read fairly recently mentioned that google is updating their algorithms to be "more hip" to compete better with bing and some of the other new search engines. And so if something is twittered a lot, they figure it has more value. So google was bypassing the nofollow stuff to harvest those twitter links.

A bunch of hooey?

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:

kev grant wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:

i think i saw this in action on the forum? but if so, you need to switch the nofollow off. in fact personally I would switch it off full stop. if a link deserves to be there at all, it deserves to be live IMO.

I think the java links don't have no follow.

no, if we're talking about the same ones, they show pink in my browser?

If you scroll to the very bottom, there is a line that says "visit our java home page!" - is that java pink for you?

no, but that's the second link (at least) to home isnt it? the first is Javaranch at the top?

Google only count the first link http://www.seo-scientist.com/first-link-counted-rebunked.html so anything after that is likely a waste of link equity. in general we try never to link twice from any one page to any other page if possible. there are specific exceptions but thats the general principle. less links leaving - more juice down each one.

paul wheaton wrote:Look at your first post in this thread. See the word java? Is that pink for you?

? not seeing one there?

[paul wheaton]

kev grant wrote:
nobody really knows, its all guesses, speculation, hunches. you have to remember PR is a logarithmic function, the best guess is base 6.

so PR5 x 6 = PR6, PR6 x 6 = PR7 etc.

Wow! I used to think it was base 18. Not sure why.

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:twitter and facebook and the like: well, you are changing my mind a bit about this one. I have one more whammy to throw at you. The thing I read fairly recently mentioned that google is updating their algorithms to be "more hip" to compete better with bing and some of the other new search engines. And so if something is twittered a lot, they figure it has more value. So google was bypassing the nofollow stuff to harvest those twitter links.

A bunch of hooey?

well maybe Paul, but the point is that nobody but Google would actually know this, and they havent said this I dont think have they?

I mean if you read it on an official Google blog, then there *might* be some truth in it, but G are not forthcoming about their algo in any way.

there is all sorts of speculation by all sorts of people about what might be happening, ultimately you have to decide for yourself, by what might be reasonable assumptions, but specifically by testing and observations.

people were saying the same about the "Vince" update, brand mentions etc a year or more ago, but I personally haven't seen any signs of it.

[paul wheaton]

kev grant wrote:

no, but that's the second link (at least) to home isnt it? the first is Javaranch at the top?

Google only count the first link http://www.seo-scientist.com/first-link-counted-rebunked.html so anything after that is likely a waste of link equity. in general we try never to link twice from any one page to any other page if possible. there are specific exceptions but thats the general principle. less links leaving - more juice down each one.

Yowch. Okay, that's one that we're seriously messing up.

Currently, it says JavaRanch, but that's really two links "Java" and "Ranch". It was our feeble attempt to have java be the anchor text.

So, what if we change it back to "JavaRanch" as just one link and take out the rest?

It seems like anchor text is really important - and getting onto page 1 of a search for java seems like a primary goal.

What would you suggest?

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:

kev grant wrote:
nobody really knows, its all guesses, speculation, hunches. you have to remember PR is a logarithmic function, the best guess is base 6.

so PR5 x 6 = PR6, PR6 x 6 = PR7 etc.

Wow! I used to think it was base 18. Not sure why.

i thought it was base 3, it was Tedster in webmasterworld I linked you to earlier who told me the consensus amongst "those who if anyone had any idea, really should know" had agreed that 6 was quite likely..

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:

kev grant wrote:

no, but that's the second link (at least) to home isnt it? the first is Javaranch at the top?

Google only count the first link http://www.seo-scientist.com/first-link-counted-rebunked.html so anything after that is likely a waste of link equity. in general we try never to link twice from any one page to any other page if possible. there are specific exceptions but thats the general principle. less links leaving - more juice down each one.

Yowch. Okay, that's one that we're seriously messing up.

Currently, it says JavaRanch, but that's really two links "Java" and "Ranch". It was our feeble attempt to have java be the anchor text.

So, what if we change it back to "JavaRanch" as just one link and take out the rest?

It seems like anchor text is really important - and getting onto page 1 of a search for java seems like a primary goal.

What would you suggest?

ok, i havent actually looked at it properly and its 2am here now, so I'll get back to it tomo with some suggestions if that's ok?

[paul wheaton]

That sounds swell. Thanks Kev.

[kev grant]

ok cool, night all.

[paul wheaton]

paul wheaton wrote:1) Jeanne has modified the software so that we can fiddle with the URL a bit. I plan on going through and tinkering with the section and forum URL stuff in a few days. Mostly to make the URL's shorter.

Done.

[paul wheaton]

1.5 million for servlet(we're #71)

I would think that our servlet forum would do a lot better than #71.

The title is "servlets". 21,000 threads reference it with the anchor text of "servlets". It has a pagerank of 4.

[paul wheaton]

I have this feeling that we're not going to hear from kev for a few days because he has to de-mal his web site again.

In the meantime, I think he said something really powerful that is of huge interest to me. I'm going to lay out what is in my head so others can either confirm it or point out where my logic is flawed.

If you make two links to a URL, the destination gains pagerank exactly the same as if you made one link. And the source page loses page rank as if you made two different links.

Therefore, it is wise to simplify your pages to have precisely one link.

Very clean an efficient. I like it.

[kev grant]

hola amigos. no, no definitely new hacks or altered files Paul, I think maybe it was the last version still in your browser cache that triggered the AV again? the site's definitely still clean and untouched since the restore yesterday am.

re the linking thing, its not an absolute rule, but it's a "nice to have" - a general principle to be followed if you can.

a couple of years ago we were seeing big improvements by nofollowing duplicates to funnel the remaining PR down the live links, thats actually what that post you originally found on my site was about, the fact that Goog have stopped passing extra PR down the remaining live links, nofollow now "evaporates" PR, hence my recommendation you remove them all from the site.

some people also think Goog devalues navigation links and that body text links carry more weight, and there does also seem to be some truth to that as well in some cases.

I personally build sites with the sharpest keyword nav possible, and then treat the content as a separate "sub-site" and link from the content in the pages to other pages using in effect a separate linking strategy to funnel equity from home to your main landing / ranking pages.

with regards to your thought

If you make two links to a URL, the destination gains pagerank exactly the same as if you made one link. And the source page loses page rank as if you made two different links.

thats not strictly accurate. the source page doesn't lose PR, pages dont lose PR however many links leave them, but you do weaken the remaining links leaving the page, by using duplicates that arent counted.

obviously the strength of a link is the amount of power the page has, divided by the amount of links leaving the page. less links leaving = stronger links leaving.

if you havent thought about this before I'd advise you to go to http://www.linkdiagnosis.com, install the FF plugin and have a look at a few sites inbound link profiles.

[paul wheaton]

So if the primary mission is to improve our standing with "Java" to the javaranch home page, what do you suggest?

I'll go follow this new link (hoping that something scary doesn't pop up).

[paul wheaton]

Based on the things that you are saying .... which, btw, makes a lot of stuff that I've read in the past make more sense now .... combined with some of that stuff I've read in the past, I now have the following thought:

Having links to healthy, reputable sites makes google think that we are healthy and reputable. True?

So if we have links to 1000 sites and all of those links have a nofollow, google thinks we're dopes.

If we have links to 1000 sites and 100 of those are to bad sites, then google things we're iffy.

If we have links to 1000 sites where 500 are follow and good and decent, and the rest are nofollow, then google things we're damn cool.

Am I getting warmer?

[paul wheaton]

I logged out and pulled up a thread.

Between the header and the footer I could see 47 links. And a whole bunch in each post too.

So if we have 500,000 threads and they each have, say, 100 links to ... stuff. Including five to the home page. And if we changed that so it was more like 30 links and only 1 to the home page, then google will like our home page a whole lot more?

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:So if the primary mission is to improve our standing with "Java" to the javaranch home page, what do you suggest?

I'll go follow this new link (hoping that something scary doesn't pop up).

Paul, in the nicest possible way I suggest you drop this attitude or the free (but very expensive if I were consulting for you) advice will stop flowing.

I have been hacked exactly twice in 5 years, both in the last 8 days. its not fun, it was extremely f***king irritating, and your forums visits there at the exact time, were a) initially suspicious, and b) just plain unfortunate.

for that I apologise, however I have no affiliation of any possible type with linkdiagnosis or and am freely sharing time and knowledge & the best tools, with no possible gains for myself here.

maybe you didnt mean it to sound like it did, but if you did..

[paul wheaton]

dropping.

I went to the site and, like you said, it wanted me to install some stuff. I'm postponing installing stuff for a bit as my system is pretty taxed and I need to try and close a lot of windows.

[kev grant]

ok no worries.

& there arent really any other tools available that show linkstrength without installing something, either Firefox add ons or PC programs, but am sure you can appreciate linkstrength is a factor of how many links you divide the pagestrength by. heres a screenshot of it on coderanch, see how the strongest link is a PR 3, but has less links leaving the page?

not that you need to really look at links in detail anyway, especially on Javaranch, you have more than enough to there.

with regards to ranking first page for "Java" even with your site's trusted status, that is still a massive mountain to climb, due to the strength of the competition. if someone came to me for a quote for that it would be north of 200k for a new site.

I would suggest the usual strategy of slowly picking off the sub categories java + forums, certification and the other stuff youve mentioned first and work your way up to the big push for "Java" because there are some truly mighty sites on the first page for that.

re this

So if we have 500,000 threads and they each have, say, 100 links to ... stuff. Including five to the home page. And if we changed that so it was more like 30 links and only 1 to the home page, then google will like our home page a whole lot more?

short answer, yes.

[paul wheaton]

That makes sense!

And I like the idea of a cleaner page too.

I think that links to our home page should have the anchor text of "JavaRanch" - that just seems what is good from a human perspective. Of course, from an SEO perspective, the anchor text should read "java jsp java servlet applet" - and I'm not gonna do that. "Java" is in "JavaRanch" - will that be good enough? Should we seriously consider "Java Ranch" instead?

Currently, on the "java" search, we are hovering around #21 to #24. I'm not saying I want to be #1 - that would be nuts. I'm saying that it just seems like we should be #9 or #10. And since we currently are not, then that is proof that I've been a poor site steward.

[kev grant]

paul wheaton wrote:That makes sense!

And I like the idea of a cleaner page too.

I think that links to our home page should have the anchor text of "JavaRanch" - that just seems what is good from a human perspective. Of course, from an SEO perspective, the anchor text should read "java jsp java servlet applet" and I'm not gonna do that.

"Java" is in "JavaRanch" - will that be good enough? Should we seriously consider "Java Ranch" instead?

i dont know exactly where you got your SEO perspective from.. let me re-phrase that for you..

Of course, from an Spammer perspective, the anchor text should read "java jsp java servlet applet"

there, now its correct ;) .JavaRanch will be fine. Java Ranch possibly (maybe) slightly better.

paul wheaton wrote:
Currently, on the "java" search, we are hovering around #21 to #24. I'm not saying I want to be #1 - that would be nuts. I'm saying that it just seems like we should be #9 or #10. And since we currently are not, then that is proof that I've been a poor site steward.

again I'd have to disagree, that will not "just happen" you would have to have been thinking about it and trying very hard for a long while, and you have other priorities.

that first page is authority sites wall to wall, its not like any of the other java forums have wound up there either is it?

[paul wheaton]

again I'd have to disagree, that will not "just happen" you would have to have been thinking about it and trying very hard for a long while, and you have other priorities.

Well, very hard was covered. And very wrong.

#10 is the "java java java" site - with a tilde in the url. Does it seem reasonable to be ahead of that one?


So, from the earlier list,

1) done

2) pagerank concerns and getting links: I think we should still explore getting links. This plus the other changes will probably mend the pagerank.

3) Google thinks we have half the pages we really do: We should probably ignore this one. Google probably has them all. Wait .... what if we do a test and find some old thread with some unique phrases and search for it? It's probably at least worth verifying. ??

4) forum top 10 list: i think we should do this

5) clean up html: seems wise from many angles and it might help seo

6) old journal articles to the campfire + seo: still a good idea

7) make social network buttons more enticing: I think this is still a go

8) thread merge: still good

9) thread split: still good

10) image SEO: still worth doing

11) pick our 20 best pages and pimp them for SEO

12) encourage the use of quirk

13) Encourage the use of stumbleupon, reddit, digg, etc.

14a) auto link key phrases to the FAQ
14b) every FAQ page should link to a thread in the forum

15) find the big java key phrases (we have a start in this thread) and compose articles to fit those

16) DMOZ: yes

17) canonical links on our static pages: hell yeah

18) meta tags: yes

19 and 20 are less direct but still, yes.

And now for the new stuff:

21) whittle down the total number of links leaving a page

22) pop the nofollow off of links to trusted sites

23) thread titles on the forums could use some work (i need to start a new thread)


(re-reading all of your posts in this thread)

24) download the link tool (or a link tool)

----


it does seem that the things we should start with are 21, 22 and 23.

I'll start a new thread about the titles.

[kev grant]

hola amigos, que pasa?

am I right in thinking this is up one or more places since my link to it cached?

http://www.google.com/search?q=java+forum&hl=en&pws=0&gl=US&sa=N

[paul wheaton]

I've been watching it and it has been bumping up and down a bit.

We have started to take out some nofollow stuff and we have started to streamline the number of links we make. So far, our overall traffic is down a bit. But I think that comes from my fiddling with the urls.

[kev grant]

Goog is still every volatile, like mid-update rollout almost. am beginning to wonder if its ever going to settle, or this is just the new reality.

and if youre altering urls, Im assuming the old is 301 redirected to the new?

if not, it definitely has to be.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

kev grant wrote:and if youre altering urls, Im assuming the old is 301 redirected to the new?

Yes. We have a "canonical URL" on each page. If you get to the page using anything but the canonical, it 301's you to the proper page. Paul changed the canonical URLs. The old URLs 301 redirect you to the new ones.

[paul wheaton]

Kev,

The staff have made a lot of changes with a strong focus on your suggestions.

21) a lot of focus went to this for a thread view page when people are not currently logged in. I think we dropped the over number of links by a factor of 8.

22) Now functioning.

23) I started a thread, but it didn't go anywhere. Do you have any suggestions for titles on our thread view?

[Pushkar Choudhary]

paul wheaton wrote:It seems to me that if a person goes to google and types in "java" then JavaRanch should appear on page 1. We're on page 4. This tells me that something is wrong.

This seems to be improving. Just checked it. Searched for "java" on Google and found JavaRanch at the end of page 2. Seems like we're slowly but surely getting to page 1 and to hopefully number 1 for a Google search on "java".

Well done everyone! Keep doing the good work!

[paul wheaton]

Attached is a graph showing the last 11 or 12 weeks of traffic to the forums from google.

As you can see, we were on a bit of a downward path even before we started tinkering.

About 90% of the traffic that JavaRanch gets is from google. So this slipping is indicitive of how I should have been working harder on SEO stuff for a long time.

The JavaRanch staff have been working extra hard the last couple of weeks on making all sorts of modifications to JForum, the wiki and the static pages to improve SEO. We've had some long discussions speculating about what is best for people as well as SEO.

In the end 70% of all SEO is made of links to JavaRanch. It is the votes of all of the other websites that determines which content is ranked well in searches. Please show your appreciation for all sites you think are good, by adding a few links here and there.

Thanks!

And now we sit back and watch the stats to see if these efforts help.

[kev grant]

hey all.

with regards to the slow decline, if it wasn't preceded by changes to the site your end, then it's much more likely to be a sign of the ongoing Google system and algo changes for the last 5 months or so. have you dug into the stats to see if there's any obvious big keywords that have dropped away? is the overall amount of keywords declining etc?

there are many possible scenarios analytics might help you identify.

and yes, more links will never hurt either.

[paul wheaton]

To find out if keywords have dropped for us, is there a report for that in GA? Or do we go and take a look at what keywords were hot three months ago and then compare to what keywords are hot now?

[kev grant]

yes you can do all of that in GA, dig into traffic sources / keywords and set the dates to compare a more recent period with a better period prior to that.

you havent even looked in there properly have you? Paul, it will blow you away what you can see in GA when you look ;)

[paul wheaton]

kev grant wrote:

you havent even looked in there properly have you? Paul, it will blow you away what you can see in GA when you look ;)

I look there every day. In fact, it's this steady decline that got me worried enough that I figured I should do something.

I poke out around a bit. I find some things of interest, but most of it is pretty damn boring. I must not have figured out the exciting stuff yet. Is there a web page somewhere that spells things out for clods like me?

[kev grant]

no, i meant inside it not the dashboard ;)

what I would normally do at this point with a client is a Skype call, where you share your screen with me whilst inside your Google panel, and I talk you through where to go / what to do. or actually with clients Im normally logged in and they see my screen.

but you should be able to pull a report showing the top 500 kws performance over a certain period, compared to a previous period very easily.

on the left, click traffic sources, then keywords, and then set the dates box upper right. that'll show you the top ten, then at the bottom of the page in the dropdown select 500 kws. you can then see the percentages up / down for every kw, and the overview will also show you how many kws total this period and previous.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

kev grant wrote:on the left, click traffic sources, then keywords, and then set the dates box upper right. that'll show you the top ten, then at the bottom of the page in the dropdown select 500 kws. you can then see the percentages up / down for every kw, and the overview will also show you how many kws total this period and previous.

Wow. That is so cool!

[kev grant]

heh, yes it is, isnt it.

you should see what it looks like hooked up to a big ecommerce site with the ppc campaigns integrated and all the goals and income configured.

it's really quite something.