Site Review? We don’t need no stinkin’ site review…

I’ve heard folks indicate no matter what they do they never come up in the search engines.

A Site Review can reveal different components affecting your ranking of which you are unaware.

This is common, after all, do a search on anything (keyword of your choice), when the results come back, look at how many results have been found. Sometimes these numbers are in the millions.  You can see this, it’s usually located near the top of the results page.

So you’re looking at the top ten results and there are millions of other results, just divide those millions by 10 and you will get an idea of how many pages you have available. Ok, now how many pages are you going to go through to find what you are looking for?

These folks may in fact be indexed and living somewhere in the myriad of those thousands of pages.

Maybe the website has been penalized for some reason, or maybe the domain name has been banned! If you have been banned, be prepared to find out why, fix it, and beg for forgiveness.

Your website may be optimized well with all the right keywords, have a proper structure, and plenty of content, yet you still don’t have the ranking you’re looking for.

A Site Review should reveal if you have the proper redirects of pointer domains to your main site. What does that mean?

Well lets say you have a website with a domain name of DomainA.com. Now you also have the domain name DomainB.com and it conveniently points to DomainA.com. You might do this to work your keywords into a domain name for optimization purposes. The problem comes into play when the spiders come by and index DomainA.com and then they find DomainB.com. Suddenly you now have whats called “Duplicate Content”.

So What’s Wrong? you ask. More of my content on the web, why not?

Well think about it, the mission of search engines, “to provide the most pertinent, authoritative content to their users”. So they (the engines) go to great pains to identify important content and discard duplicate content (or severely penalize that content in the rankings).  Here you should be aware of the duplication and eliminate it. You can do this by applying the proper redirect to DomainB.com as it points to DomainA.com. The safest way is to use the HTTP status code of 301 (a permanent redirect). You can do this easily via the .htaccess file (if you don’t have access, have your developer or host do this for you).

This will eliminate the duplicate content of multiple domains issue.

If you have duplicate content, a Site Review will reveal that.

We’ve said over and over, do not copy and paste content from another website and call it your own! The search engines will find it. If a Site Review can find it, you know… well you know. Having all the proper redirects in place is not a solution to this.

Another issue may be you’ve been severely penalized by the search engines. This is a tough one as duplicate content (though a biggie) is only one of the issues for the penalty. You may have bought into one of those link exchange programs or instant blacklinks link farms. What’s wrong with that? you ask.

Well for one, it’s against the policies of Google, another thing is the links may not be relevant to your site, or you may be getting links from “Bad Neighborhoods”. Black Hat Optimization techniques like these do little for your web presence. Google says, they will not penalize you for this, but in fact, they have no idea if it is your competition doing this to you or you’re doing it to yourself. I’ve also seen others indicate Google isn’t telling the truth and I’ve seen it happen.

We’ve written about this in an article Is Buying Backlinks The Right Thing To Do?

Another item a Site Review will show, is your current ranking (assuming no bans are in place) and page rank. Page Rank is not a qualifier, but is an index based on other criterion to show the result of a compilation of items such as, the number of pages indexed, how many backlinks you have, how many referring domain links you have, are you listed and linked from .edu and .gov domains. Having many backlinks to your domain or page is an indicator to the search engines you are popular and deserve a boost! Another thing is, backlinks from pages or sites having a high Page Rank themselves is better than a bunch of links from sites with a Page Rank of zero. The .edu and .gov domains are only given to educational organizations and government entities and are assumed to be highly credible and thus have high Page Ranks.

Your Site Review will also extract the keywords as seen by the search engines, rather than those you chose. Ok Ok more double speak what do you mean?

You’re chosen keyword may be APPLES but the word apples may only appear once or twice in your content, while what the content is actually saying is, you’re talking about TREES. This knowledge is  important because…. you may need to revisit your content to re-focus your message to APPLES instead of TREES.

Well to wrap this up, the Site Review should give you the remedies to correct these problems and should be up to you how you take care of this. You can do them yourself, have your webmaster do them, or hire a company like ours to help you do this. Showing you the problems without a remedy is next to useless. The best thing that could happen is you get an “A” all clear you’re in good shape, but if you have show stopper problems, you need to know them and get them corrected.

If your search engine rankings are poor you should consider having a proper Site Review done,  whether you do the Site Review yourself, or have it done for you.

To be armed is to be forewarned! Go forth and be prosperous!