Lately, we've been seeing a lot of chatter on forums about the age of domains and links. No, we're not talking about the Age of Domains and Links - that time is already upon us (we call it "The Internet")! Instead, note those lowercases - we are talking about the birthdays of domains and links and whether or not age affects a site's rankings or the power of a link. A lot of people think that, like a sagely seaman that acquires wisdom and whiskers as his years trickle away on the sea, domains and links gain value as they age. Sure, age maybe possibly could play a small part, but as Rand will show you in the following video, we're nearly 100% sure it's generally not something you should worry about.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we are talking about the age of site and the age of links. You might have seen, I've been seeing a lot lately, there's sort of a trend of forum threads popping up, questions popping up, people sort of asking and almost dealing with this idea out in the ecosphere of SEO that an older link, an older domain, and a link that's been around longer all necessarily provide more value. They are better for rankings, are better from a search engine perspective. They get crawled more often, these kinds of things.
I would question this. I would strongly question this. It's not just because Matt Cutts sort of had a video where he talked about this. Someone asked him a question on this topic and he said like, "No, I wouldn't worry about that. It's buried 38 lines down in some patent from 2002, but that doesn't mean it's a ranking factor for us." I've heard him and other Googlers on stage at conferences be even more forceful than he was in that video in saying that, "We can't promise that it's not a factor, but if it is a factor, it's super tiny. It's a really small thing. We're using it primarily in conjunction with other things to try and see what's going on." So I wanted to try and address these critical questions about the age of a site and old links and the age of links.
First off, does the age of your site matter? Now, this is purely from an SEO perspective, in terms of if I have exactly the same effects going on, the same number of links pointing from the same places pointing to the same pages with exactly the same content. But one of those sites was produced in 2008, and one was made in 2000. Is that going to substantively change rankings? The answer is almost certainly not. Almost certainly not.
Now, the thing that you're going to say and that I hear a lot of criticism about when this myth is debunked or when Google says no that's not the case, is people have this idea like, "Well, wait. I look. I go through a set of search results. I see these top ten results. It's '04, '03, 1998. These are old, old links. So, how can you tell me that oldness doesn't matter? That domain age doesn't matter?" The reason is I think what you are observing is correlation not causation. It tends to be the case that people who registered those early domains in a lot of those sectors, they did a lot of things right. They got great domain names. They often got exact match domain names, sometimes short domain names. They've built brands. They've had a longer time to build those brands, which means more people are aware of them, more people know about them, link to them, and reference them. They've been in the media and the press. They get included in directories and lists and linked to by big and important people. The amount of time that a business has been around necessarily impacts all of these reference and citation types of impacts. For that reason, you're going to see that a lot of these earlier sites look like they perform better.
But I would actually say that if you produced a site today and could accomplish all the things that a site that is ten years old has done, you would actually outrank them. The reason is because you've earned those links, that reputation, and that brand faster, and therefore your acceleration rate is much greater.
When people look at something like a Twitter, they say, "Wow. Twitter is this amazing company. In the last four years, they've grown to 120 million users." But they don't compare it against something like eBay which has many hundred millions of more users, but they do it in the context of the time that they've been around and what they've been able to accomplish in that time frame. So I think this is a matter of correlation and not causation. I'd be careful about ascribing pure value or thinking like, "Oh, I'll never be able to outrank those guys because their site was made before mine." Don't worry about that.
The second thing is, what about registration length? Google did issue this patent, the same one that I think Matt Cutts was referencing in his video, where they said, "We might look at how long a domain is registered because it tends to be the case that spammers and domainers and affiliates and people who we think might be manipulating our search results, they often will register the domain for the shortest possible amount of time." There was even, for a while, this idea on domain tasting where you could get a domain for 30 days or something and then give it back. Therefore people who are registering for a year or two years, we might frown upon them compared to the people who registered for five years or ten years. So, there was this rush in the SEO community like, "Oh shoot! Let me go and register my domain for a really long time."
Again, I'm going to call mostly myth on this one. Yes, it could be the case that in conjunction with lots of other signals they go, "Wow, we see this signal that looks like spam and this signal that looks like it's manipulation. It looks like they're getting these shoddy links. Their domain is only registered for a year. They're on dot cc domain or a dot info domain." They can look at metrics like that, and if they pattern match those against spam, maybe it would hurt you, but I really wouldn't worry about this. If registering for five years or ten years is tough on your budget and you want to save that money for something else, go for it. I wouldn't sweat it. If you have the budget though, I probably would register for a longer period of time. Not necessarily for the SEO reasons, but for the reason that you might forget about it next year, and it is really a pain to have to go back and register if you've forgotten or you're on a trip when it expires and you didn't check your e-mail. It's a nightmare. Or they get your e-mail wrong or something. That's problematic. So for that reason, longer domain registration might help.
Third question, big one. Do old links or links from old pages or old sites boost rankings more than new links? There are two ideas inherent in here. One is that here are pages from different time frames. One is from 2000, 2004, 2008, today. One idea is that oh, this link is more powerful because it's on a domain or on a page that's been around for a very long time. The second idea is oh, it is not because it's on a page that has been around a long time, it's because the link itself has been there a long time and that as links age they grow in power. I don't know, like some sort of wizened Jedi over the years. The force grows stronger within him or her.
I wouldn't actually dispute both of those ideas. At least, I would dispute the idea that those are the reasons why they get more powerful. Yes, it is probably the case, again like we talked about, that a lot of the time if a link has been around a long time on a page that's been around a very long time, it's an important page and an important site. A lot of the Web decays. We were looking at decay on the Web in our Linkscape index, and a full 80% of the URLs that we requested and got data for, link data, we found 200 response codes, we found content on those pages, within about a year, between 12 and 18 months, that content's gone. If you think about the fact that there is this huge billions of page index for the World Wide Web but only about 20% year-over-year is really surviving. Yeah, you can kind of understand. Hey, those are the important pages. They keep getting links. They keep getting references. They're clearly still in business. People still think they are important enough to point to. Those might be the reasons that those older links are passing more value. Not just because they're old or because they've been there a long time.
As a corollary to this question, a lot of people worry about and ask about, "Oh, no, what if my link disappears? What if I take down a page and put it back up, or one of my link partners has that page 404 for a few days, or repoints it somewhere and my link is not on the new version and then it reappears. Will I lose that aging process?" Like a fine wine it will suddenly be like somebody popped the cork and put it back in and now it's exposed to the oxygen and won't taste as good? No. No, no, no. I can't tell you how much I would not sweat this. Even if you are sure that I am wrong about this stuff, believe me that this is not going on. It is not the case that if your link was created in 2001 or was on a page from 2001 and then in 2004 for about a year it disappeared, it probably hurt you during that year that it disappeared. When it came back in 2005, for the last six years, it's not like oh, that's so much worse than if it had only been there that one year. You could apply this to days or weeks or months as well. So I would not be stressing about these kinds of things.
What I would be worrying about in terms of links is where does the link come from? Is it a great site? If it is a great site, it is relevant to your audience, it has a lot of traffic, it is sending you good traffic, it has good anchor text, it's pointing to the right pages, and the domain that it comes from is a strong one, the page that it comes from is well linked to, great. Don't stress about putting this age stuff in here. I would bet that if we did a ranking correlation, we would probably see exactly the pattern that a lot of SEOs see, which is old domains appear to rank better than newer ones. But I would disagree that if we were able to put that in the ranking model, which we'll try this year at the ranking factors, put in the ranking model that you would see any measure of causation coming out of that. I think this is something where it is perception only.
All right. With that, I just want to tell you about one more thing. Next Friday is a very exciting day for us. It is Friday January 21st at 10:00 Pacific, that's 1:00 p.m. Eastern time or 6:00 p.m. out in London Greenwich Mean Time, we're going to have our first ever live Whiteboard Friday. That means that I'll be here in front of this and you can watch me live. You can Tweet at me and I'll be answering Tweets directly off our account. That should be tons of fun. I hope you'll join us live. Just go to the blog right around or just before 10:00 a.m. Pacific time. You can join in. We will also be recording it, so you can watch it afterwards if you happen to miss it or you are busy at that time.
Thanks so much. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition, a live edition, of Whiteboard Friday.
Since we’re at the beginning of the year, it’s a good time to remind everyone about backups. Whether you are running one blog or several blogs, backups are important. The best backup solutions are those that backup all of your files, back them up regularly, and work automatically. In this post I’ll show you how I do it.
The first thing you want to do is backup your database since that’s where most of your important data is kept. Fortunately there’s a quick and easy solution to this problem: the WordPress Database Backup Plugin.You tell it when to backup, how often to backup, what tables to backup, and where to email the backup. It takes care of the rest. I use a “secret” gmail account, since it’s free and has lots of storage.
WP Database Backups
There are two other folders you want to backup. The first is your theme folder to make sure you have a backup copy of any customizations you may have made. The second is your uploads directory so that, if you need to change hosts or if things get deleted, you have copies of all the images. This way, your blog doesn’t have a bunch of broken files.
You need to be able to automate an FTP job. If you’re a skilled programmer, there are lots of ways to skin this cat. If your programming lacks some mojo, there are options: for Windows, use Syncback SE; for Mac, use AASync. Set up a scheduled job (one for each folder) and create a copy on your hard drive. I like to use my file server instead of my desktop so I don’t have to worry about leaving it on.
Backup WordPress via FTP
Lastly, to bring things full circle, if you have lots of data or critical data, it’s important to have an offsite backup. I move all of my files to my file server every night. I have Carbonite running on that server so everything has an offsite backup. Lastly, just to make sure things are functioning, set a once a moth reminder for yourself to check that your backups are running. Sometimes things break and the time to know about it is before the crisis. A once-a-month check is easy enough to do and give you a lot more peace of mind.
This week, an historic referendum took place in Sudan and West Wing Week takes you there. Watch a preview of "Dispatches from Sudan" and join General Scott Gration, President Obama's Special Envoy to Sudan for a unique look at the vote that could result in the world's newest nation.
10:00 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing
10:30 AM: The President meets with senior advisors
11:15 AM: The President meets with President Zardari of Pakistan
1:00 PM: Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will be joined by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon for an off-camera briefing to preview the state visit of President Hu of China
3:00 PM: The President and the Vice President attend Ambassador Holbrooke’s funeral service, the President will deliver remarks (audio only)
Do you measure keyword temperature to improve your SEO? You don’t? Well what about keyword density? Also there are other exotic metrics to fool you into believing you do something for your site’s SEO. Sounds weird? Then read on. The story starts like this:
In recent days I’ve been haunted by the ghastly specters of the past.
In several cases I’ve had to do with metrics long gone or which weren’t ever meaningful in the first place. There seems to be a need for simplistic metrics that can make complex issues appear straightforward and clear.
Such metrics are
Keyword Density
In the nineties of the last century some first generation search engines were easily tricked by repeating keywords on a page. So the more you repeated a keyword the higher you ranked. It may have worked back then and in some cases even later but it was always a SEO trick never a best practice for a legit business. Still the term keyword density appeared. It signified the number of keyword mentions in a text. Your keyword mentioned 10 times in a text with 100 words equaled a keyword density of 10%.
Google hasn’t counted keywords on page, instead it relied on links to a site or page to determine its worth. Thus the first generation search engines disappeared. Keyword density stayed with us though. to this day some people offer keyword density tools and advice on the best keyword density. It’s all nonsense. You’re better off measuring keyword temperature, really, at least it won’t affect your SEO. A keyword density beyond the common sense median will hurt your site. You will be treated as a spammer.
Google (Toolbar) PageRank
Until 2007 it was still quite common to obsess about the Google (Toolbar) PageRank aka the little green bar in your Google Toolbar. It was never an accurate representation of your actual PageRank and only in the early days was there a real correlation between TPR and actual rankings in Google but it was a good thing to brag about. Also people used it to sell links, the higher the TBR the higher the price for a paid link.
Sometime in early 2008 Google ended this madness by manually adjusting the TPR of link vendors. From then on nobody serious about SEO really cared for the little green bar. Still just recently a client of mine called me out that a blog of mine was a failure beacuse (it has a ranking of 0). He meant PageRank of course and he didn’t even consider that it was on a new domain and thus couldn’t display toolbar PageRank yet. Toolbar PageRank is not a metric you use in SEO. It hasn’t been used for years. In case you don’t know that or accept that I can’t really help you. You can buy some high PageRank links from a text link broker or from a spammer and then you might get more TBR. Your site might get banned in the process as well. Again you are better off measuring something else, for instance page radiation.
Google Backlinks
It has been said and written countless of times: Google doesn’t show an accurate number of backlinks with its “link:” operator. To say it’s inaccurate is like saying that an elephant is not as tiny as an ant. There is a huge difference between the real number and the few links Google shows you.
Just compare it to the number of links Google Webmaster Tools shows instead. for the client who complained that has only 9 backlinks in Google the number in GWT was something like 270k (thousand) links. There is a small difference don’t you think? So measuring SEO success by the Google backlinks number is as accurate as counting Matt Cutt’s hair to determine it. Especially when he’s.
Number of Links
OK, the number of links as offered by Google Webmaster Tools must be it then! Isn’t it? Nope. The sheer number of links says as much about your SEO success as the number of sex partners about your love life. One link from an authority site might by worth as much as 100k from scraper and other low quality sites. You don’t measure SEO efforts be the number of links. Each link has, depending on its anchor text, topical relevance, position on the page and a plethora of other factors, a wort of it’s own.
You can’t compare a Rolls Royce with a Tata Nano. Even in case you count 100 of them with one RR. Ultimately links are just a means or a tool to accomplish a task or even a series of tasks like getting attention, traffic, conversions and/or sales. So you have to determine lots of factors having impact on link quality and report them, don’t you? In case you get paid by the link or have to measure your link building efforts you might try this approach. Still, showing of quality or authority links doesn’t prove that you have doe your SEO properly. You might as well measure link anxiety to find out how afraid you are of losing each one of them. Counting or measuring links for reporting purposes is the road to excess not success. Measuring the quality of your sex partners doesn’t mean a healthy relationship either.
Number of Keywords
The more keywords you optimize for the better! Don’t you think? Still many potential clients approach me with huge keywords lists, often directly from Adwords. Then after a few hours of market and keyword research I come up with just a few, sometimes as few as three they have to go after and focus on. They are often not the most prominent ones like cars, SEO or hotel but the rather keyword phrases, combinations like [used cars uk], [local SEO services] or [hotel munich]. In the past often disappointment would set in: “What? Just a bunch of keywords? Not even the big cool ones among them? You must be a very bad SEO if you target just a few low level keywords at once.” Market and keyword research is not the process of compiling huge lists of keywords though. It’s the process of finding out the keyphrases that you can reach within a reasonable time frame on a realistic budget. You want to find the few “money keywords” that will bring the revenue.
You’re after the few terms where you can compete within your industry or area. Also you can’t compete for everything at the same time. Your business has just one home page and one description. You can’t keyword stuff it unless you want to scare off your potential customers. A few years ago some SEOs would just automatically generate pages for each of your keywords and redirect searchers to the home page. Were these guys the good SEOs? No, they failed. I’ve seen client sites dropped from the index for such “SEO tricks”. So it’s not the number of keywords you optimize for, it’s the choice of keywords. Treat your keywords like friends, better a few good ones than hundreds of fake ones you don’t really care for or even know. Instead of measuring the number of keywords you could also count the number of times you have to pee as a SEO metric.
I hope by now you understand what I tried to express. There are no simple SEO metrics. Even the metrics we still use or use more and more these days are always a compound of several aspects of SEO, web design, usability, pricing, product and service quality etc.
bounce rates
conversions
ROI
depend on numerous factors:
The industry
the time of year
general market trends
the economy
the geographic location.
Don’t blame SEO for everything.
Also don’t forget that you can’t measure everything: You can’t measure your image, trust, or brand loyalty. You can try to. You can’t depend on these metrics though. You have to think for yourself and not let simplified numbers decide for you. Keyword temperature is a great metric don’t you think?
Netflix tests everything. They're very proud that they A/B test interactions, offerings, pricing, everything. It's almost enough to get you to believe that rigorous testing is the key to success.
Except they didn't test the model of renting DVDs by mail for a monthly fee.
And they didn't test the model of having an innovative corporate culture.
And they didn't test the idea of betting the company on a switch to online delivery.
The three biggest assets of the company weren't tested, because they couldn't be.
Sure, go ahead and test what's testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable.
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