I’m not going to name names, as I have nothing against the business and they are reasonably good at what they do… However, in the bullshit stakes this is a total howler! I’m going to pick out a few phrases and elaborate on them with a bit of comment, just for fun!

xxx.com is now available on computers…

Ground-breaking progress! Well done guys!

..ultimate website, in three languages, Spanish, English and German it is truly an international site

Last time I looked I thought there were a few more languages than that. Truly international – I don’t think so…

Google rates it within the top million site of the world of the billions currently online

I may have missed something somewhere, but I’m not aware Google publish such a list. Chances are they got these figures from one of the two different listings they have on Alexa.com, where indeed they are listed at 619,017  on the most favourable of the two. Which I will quote from….

There are 619,016 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than xxx.com, and the site has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Las Palmas (#504). About 90% of visits to this site are bounces (one pageview only)
Alexa.com

They go on to claim…

By linking with xxx.com you will automatically be at the top of the search engines

What for? Your own business name? Easily done for free… If they are talking about their site coming up in searches for “Lanzarote”, no, it’s not true. They are midway down page two – www.discoverlanzarote.com is, and has been for as long as I’ve been looking at it, number one in google.co.uk.

They claim an average stay onine of 7 minutes (cherry picked from the other of the two entries on Alexa – which incidentally ranked them at neared 2 million). The one I looked at stated….

…and the time spent in a typical visit to xxx.com is approximately three minutes, with two minutes spent on each pageview.
Alexa.com

Which, if the bounce rate of 90% is to believed makes their traffic pretty much worthless.

My personal favourite though is the strapline…!

The most visited site on the Canary Islands

A couple of points here…

1. There’s no way of knowing
2. If the Alexa figures are what they are using as evidence of their popularity bear in mind that discoverlanzarote.com is ranked at 6,726 as opposed to their 619,017. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist does it? There are MANY busier sites.

As I said, bear them no ill-will, nothing against them, for the most part it’s a very professional company. However, it’s a perfect example – as I have discussed before on here – just how some people get carried away with web statistics! Absolute twaddle – marketing bullshit!

Related posts:

1. What is Google Page Rank
2. Is my site banned by Google?
3. How to get more hits…

For the purposes of this article, we shall concentrate on Google – after all, it is the biggest!

We are very proud to say that we have NEVER had a site banned by Google. Not any of ours, nor any of our clients. However, a couple of years ago we did buy a domain that had been registered by someone else (who no longer lives on the Island) and found out very quickly that they must have broken some criteria laid down by Google had resulted in the domain being banned. This banned domain was Lanzarote Business

Getting a site unbanned by Google is not particularly easy. First of all, Google won’t tell you why a specific site has been banned. However, it does give you some ways to ensure that a site doesn’t get banned in the first place, so going through these step by step can help you to check that you are following best procedures, then leaving you to approach Google and ask for reconsideration.

So how do I know if my site is banned by Google?

There are a couple of ways to try.  Start by going to Google and typing in site: followed by your domain name, minus the www. For example:

site:lanzarotewebdesign.com

If it gives you search results… then all’s well, and your site is not banned. If it returns no search results, then it is not listed in their archives. If this is the case, then do a search for “Google banned checker tool” – there are plenty of free ones out there – and here is a link to just one of them: Google Banned Checker Tool

What could have caused it?

Getting a site banned by Google isn’t that common really – so you must have done something pretty bad if that has happened. There are a number of reasons why Google may have banned your website, and here are just three of them:

• Using Black Hat SEO techniques
• Linking to”bad” sites, such as gambling, pronographic or link farms
• Duplicate content. Copying another website’s content can definitely harm you, which is one of the reasons we take plagiarism very seriously indeed.

How can I fix it?

The best way is to open a Google Webmaster Tools account. It is free, and only takes a couple of minutes. Then you submit your website, validate it by placing a small piece of code in your website, and you can start using the tools that Google has provided. There is a tool in there that can resubmit your site to Google, and offer it for reconsideration.

The offending site that we had was looked at in less than a week, and is already commanding many useful search terms… all on page one of Google results. We simply proved to Google that we were new owners, and that the site was full of useful content – and Bob’s your auntie’s husband.

Summary
Don’t risk getting your site banned, by urilising bad practice – and do certainly be careful who you get to build your website!

Related posts:

1. What is Google Page Rank
2. Fake Google Adsense payments…
3. Lanzarote Google searches

It’s a nice little system for generating a bit of extra income from your website.

As opposed to AdSense, Adbeans the monthly value of the ads for your website based on a number of criteria, and then sell the space on your behalf. All you need to do is add a bit of code – or if you are using blog software it can usually be added with a download. We had a few problems on one of our sites – but their support was fantastic! The ads are easily made to fit your site content – if you look to the bottom of the left column you can see the ads that appear on this site.

You decide how many ads to show and on what pages – and you can also veto any specific ads if you feel they are not right for your site. Not that we have needed to – the ads assigned to our account appear to have been well selected.

Let´s be honest the AdBeans website isn’t great – it sort of looks a bit unfinished – but the emphasis is on functinality rather than promotion. But take our word for it – their system works fine once you are registered and is bringing us a nice little side income.

Your not going to make a fortune using them – but it is guaranteed income rather than pay per click. The big difference is AdBeans is not their just, or maybe in some cases not at all for the click through. It is their to support the SEO activities of their clients – it’s about creating quality inbound links.

It is certainly worth signing up to AdBeans to see what it can do for you.

Interested in finding out about other affiliate programs? Take a look at the affiliate marketing category.

Related posts:

1. Fake Google Adsense payments…
2. Google AdSense – how closely targetted is it?
3. Affiliate link for Spanish websites

The two are very different animals however, and do not always match each other. For example – you may have a Google Page Rank of 4 or 5 (it goes 0 to 10 – with 10 being the highest) but you still do not come up at the number one spot for their chosen search term in Google results.

Google says that Google Page rank is determined by a high number of factors… but are reticent about listing them all. One of the most deciding factors however, is the number of backlinks from external websites referring to a particular page. The rank is always allocated to a page, rather than the whole website… so you will usually have a higher page rank on your home page, than to an internal page – this is usually because people will usually point to your home page when referencing your website.

Recently our guide to moving to Lanzarote achieved a Google Page rank of 4. This tells us that Google views the site as beneficial to readers, because there are so many links pointing towards it.

Our nightlife website Canary Nightlife has a page rank of 3. However, some of its internal pages also rank well… such as the Island pages and town pages inside the website.

So how do you raise your page rank? The first place to start is by getting lots of people to link to your website – or to a particular page. You can do this by a variety of methods… such as reciprocal linking, article writing, posting on message boards and much more. Ensure that your content is engaging, and of interest to lots of different people. You might think that you have written a masterpiece – but if nobody else shares your interest… then it’s not a lot of use. Aim to get your link listed on pages that already have a good rank themselves, as their “vote” is respected more highly by Google.

Be wary of websites that email you for a reciprocal link – claiming that they have a high page rank… but then shove your link onto a page on their site that isn’t even acknowledged by Google. This doesn’t help you – and only benefits them.

One thing to always remember though – is that content is vital for the health of your website. Keep it current… keep it fresh… keep it relevant… keep it updated!

To check the Google Page Rank of your own website – either install the Google Toolbar direct from Google… or you can enter your site address into this tool below.

Both options are free of course.

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Results Page
2. Is my site banned by Google?
3. Using Google Alerts

Only yesterday we had three instances of this…

1. A short excerpt of text from our Lanzarote Nightlife website had been taken, altered very slightly and re-used. We contacted the people in question who dealt with the matter professionally and quickly and of course apologized. It seems that a former member of staff had originally copied our text, there is no way they could have known this. So – hats off to their response… No need to name names – we were happy with the response.

2. Far more maliciously, some idiots who have set up a WordPress blog, and recently spammed our Canary Nightlife forum with a link to their own forum with a total of 3 member – yes I did say 3 – took several pages word for word from our website and cut and pasted it onto their very amateurish looking blog. To say we were not happy is an understatement. It was clear from these people´s previous actions in spamming our forum there would be no reasoning with them.So, we approached WordPress directly with our complaint. Then we posted this comment to their blog….

In addition to spamming our forum recently. It now seems that your Playa Blanca and Puerto del Carmen page content has been either lifted from our pages directly or copied from articles we have published on Ezinearticles.com – and breached their terms by not providing acknowledgements to the author and our website.

Your actions have been reported to WordPress, and we are currently in the process of reporting you to Google in order to get your site blacklisted for stolen content. We are also reporting your actions to Ezinearticles.com and we will be discussing this with our legal representative in Las Palmas at the earliest possible opportunity.

In addition to being unprofessional, lazy and ill mannered, to steal text in this manner is not only a breach of the terms and conditions of the sites involved – including WordPress – it is a breach of international copyright law as outlined under the Berne Convention.

May I suggest you remove our text immediately or we will no no option other than to pursue any means available to us to have it removed. You have been warned.

We got a fantastic response from WordPress – within an hour – who duly investigated and removed the posts in question pretty much immediately (it was a clear breach of their terms and conditions). They also assure us that the user has been instructed to contact them following an investigation – it’ll be interesting to see if they get banned. In summary – very annoyed with the morons – very impressed with WordPress. Obviously we won’t name names with these people either – we wouldn’t want to give them a link!

3. In digging around – whilst in this mood – we found several reproductions of articles written by Elle and posted to EzineArticles.com. These are very similar to our site text – but with a few words changed (duplicate content will penalize your own site with Google) – the terms of use for these articles are that if you wish to reproduce them on your own site you must include the footer and links specified by the author as an acknowledgement. The articles we found weren’t just on silly little website as in number 2 – some of them were on very well known and well respected websites! We will in due course report their misuse to EzineArticles – as we know from experience they take this kind of content theft very seriously.

The bottom line is – if you spend time writing original content why should other benefit from you work! Our advice to anyone with a website is ALWAYS include a Copyright notice, and ALWAYS act on what you find…

Related posts:

1. More copyright theft…
2. Plagiarism and Copyright on the Internet
3. Plagiarism in Lanzarote

The following relates to searches on Google through the month of November 2008.

Playa Blanca Lanzarote – 27,100
Costa Teguise Lanzarote – 14,800
Puerto del Carmen Lanzarote 12,100

Related posts:

1. What is Google Page Rank
2. Is my site banned by Google?
3. Using Google Alerts

There are a number of things you can do to help your website rank highly. But be aware that even if you cross all your t’s and dot all your i’s… you may still not get there if the keywords you are competing for are very common or are part of a saturated market. Everybody wants to be in the number one position… but take a moment and look at your competition. How many other villas are there in Lanzarote, let alone the world? How many other pool cleaners are there? How many other Estate Agents? Bars? Builders? You getting the idea yet?

So you need to look at other differing key words that people may search for you with. If you have a unique company name, then great! But of course people need to know that name first in order to search for you don’t they? This is where other forms of marketing come in.

But this does not mean that you shouldn’t use best practices when designing, maintaining or promoting your site. If you honestly feel that you can not put any extra work into your site once you’ve put it live, then don’t expect to suddenly appear on page one of Google, and to stay there forever, it just doesn’t work like that. But… if you work at optimising your website continuously, you may yet get some brilliant results without spending a huge fortune on different forms of advertising.

Some important factors in helping your site succeed in the SERPs…

Do your research – Firstly you (or your web design company) must perform keyword research to determine what keywords and keyword phrases you are going to design your business around, as this will lay the groundwork for all of the meta data, text and links your site will contain. A decent web design company will do this for you automatically.

As we have already discussed, if you are using only generic keywords, you will have little or no chance to rank highly in the search engines. The key here is to target words and phrases that are more unique and have a bit more substance to them. For example, if you are selling holiday accomodation, you’ll have a better chance of success if you design your site around “luxury holiday villas” or if they are in a particular area, use descriptive elements such as “luxury holiday villas in Lanzarote” or “the finest holiday villas in Playa Blanca”. The longer the keyword phrase and more descriptive, the better chance you’ll have to grab that organic traffic. Designing your site around keywords is the most important element.

Content
It is extremely important to have fresh, unique content. And make sure that each of your pages follows that uniqueness too (which your web designer should see is reflected in the meta data on the page). The Google spiders steam in and try to read as much as they can on your pages – but if they see repetition, or things simply don’t make sense… then they’ll scurry off to another website.

Keep it new!
Search engines love to read new things. So adding, and enhancing your website as often as you possibly can will bring those spiders hurrying back more often for a good old read. If we could all add a new page to our websites every day, with fresh new text, linking it to other pages within our site… those spiders would permanently set up camp – as they do in places such as YouTube, Facebook, and PhotoBucket. The greater number of unique pages you get indexed in the search engines the better. This does of course all take time – and time is precious.

Link-it-baby-link-it!
We’ve already skimmed across the tip of the subject of links elsewhere on this site – but we cannot stress the importance of these enough. This is probably the best way to get those spiders coming-a-hunting. The more inbound links you can get the better… But keep them relevant. Don’t fall into the same trap that others do with pages and pages of completely unrelated links. Aim to achieve at least 1 new RELEVANT link to your site per day – and you’ll be rolling.

Related posts:

1. Content and Relevant Linking
2. R – Z
3. What is Google Page Rank

As with most things, if there’s a faster or easier way of achieving something… then people will want to try it – that’s what Black Hat SEO is. I’ll happily microwave scrambled eggs rather than take the time in the saucepan, and then have that joy of scraping off cooked egg! But this Black Hat methodology goes back to when Search Engines were a lot less sophisticated than they are today.

Black Hat SEO is Search Engine Optimisation using methods that can whizz you up the rankings in the short term… but that risk you being blacklisted by Search Engines in the longer term. We at Gandy-Draper choose not to use these methods on our clients’ websites.

Building a site with Black Hat
A website that is built around blackhat methods will be generated from an expansive keyword list, and may use cloaking and re-directs to show something different to Search Engines that a human user would not be able to see.

Promoting a site with Black Hat
This would include forum spamming, blog spamming, mass social bookmarking, social networking exploitation and masses of RSS submissions.

Hidden Content
For example, it used to be common practise to place white text onto a white background, filling it with content that a normal person wouldn’t see, but that Search Engines could pick up.

Link Farming.
Unfortunately we still see this all too often. Link farming is when a website has oodles and oodles of irrelevant links – sometimes reaching into many many pages. The site owner has heard “links are good” and thinks that by getting hundreds or even thousands onto his site without regard for relevancy that this can help. That really is naive, but don’t take our word for it – Google has its own views here too.

Meta Keyword Stuffing.
This is when the website has its key words literally stuffed over and over again into its headers. It’s overkill for search engines, and has been basically ignored since the late ’90s.

Doorway Pages.
These are pages that are specifically built to target a number of phrases, which when clicked upon, send you in a different direction – which they know by viewing your IP address. These are also known as Gateway pages, Portal pages and Entry pages.

Scraping
This is a site (also known as “Made for Adsense” site) which continuously scrapes results from Search Engines in order to drive traffic to its own pages. These sites are generally either chock-full of advertising, or of redirects to other websites.

Buying Expired Domains
It is common knowledge that Search Engines prefer more established sites, than brand new ones. So people buy recently expired sites… and pop their content on… hoping to be taken more seriously. Unfortunately for these people – Google automatically resets its cache when a domain expires.

So what’s the upshot then?
With most of this, it’s the scale upon which it’s done rather than what is actually being carried out that makes it blackhat. Many site owners will comment in a forum, post their link on MySpace or Facebook, or on a blog in order to get their backlink – but it’s when it is done without providing quality information, that it is considered spamming or blackhat. This risks you being banned or blacklisted from these sites.

Anyway… We’d rather not take the risks with our own sites, and any of our clients. We would however encourage all Black Hat Experts to carry on – after all… it teaches Google the newer tricks… and make sure that those with quality content and well designed sites will get the recognition they deserve. The Black Hatters can take the gamble, and we’ll stay within the safety net.

Related posts:

1. Content and Relevant Linking
2. Is my site banned by Google?
3. What is Google Page Rank

We’re obviously not going to list all the things that we, as webmasters, do to help push websites up to that number one page in Google search results – that wouldn’t please our bank manager really now, would it?

But we will happily share just a couple of the things that you can do from the comfort of your own computer.

Content
Think of a search engine as a human being. It wants to know that when it clicks onto your page, that it’s questions will be answered.  Open up a Google window, and carry out a search for anything you like. The majority of results on that page will take you to websites that accurately answer that question.  That’s how it should be. The content on your website should be relevant to what your site visitors are looking for. The more relevant, informative and fulfilling to your site visitors, the better.

Keep it fresh, keep it accurate, keep it updated. The search engines send their “spiders” into your site to have a look around. If each time they arrive, they see that you have added something new, then they’ll keep coming back. If however, you haven’t changed a thing in quite a while… then they’ll visit less often.

Relevant Linking
There are different kinds of links. Internal Links, which are links on your website that point to other areas within your website. Inbound Links, that other people put on their websites that point to yours. These are very important, because each inbound link is considered a “vote of confidence” by Search Engines. Outbound Links are links on your site, that point to other people. These too, are important, because the Search Engines want to know that you are providing a valuable resource, yet still pointing people to answers they may be looking for. Reciprocal Links, are when you and another website do a “swap”.

Always keep your links relevant. It used to be considered acceptable to list as many reciprocal links as you can possibly cram onto your site, regardless of content, or to submit your site to “Link Farms”. Google is starting to penalise sites that have done this. For example, would you find it useful to find a link about Plumbers in Essex if you were searching for a luxury holiday villa in Lanzarote? Of course you wouldn’t – and neither does Google.

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Results Page
2. What is Google Page Rank
3. L – Q