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I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way ;)
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
poke.gif

There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
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swirt said:
There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it.
Even when the story was being told, it was clear (to me, at least) it didn't really have anything to do with Caffeine - it happened more than a year ago. But that was not made a clear by the speaker.
swirt said:
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
Now, that information and the rest of your post is not something that was taken into consideration during the workshop discussion. We have only added the most recent blog post as a feed - mostly because I don't want to throw off the whole homepage and make it look like the blog. I don't think that looks very attractive, in general. Thanks for sharing, and we'll take that all into consideration, too.
It's no wonder there's so much confusion about this topic among innkeepers about what to do with websites and social media.
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Amen to that! If there is one thing I have learned here, it is that there is no one thing that works best for everyone. The most confusing thing is trying to figure out what will work best for me! I hadn't thought about a blog feed possibly acting in a negative way for SEO, but I can see how that could happen now. Good information to discuss.
 
I will say one of my bug bears is being told "you must do this that and the other " to be high up but no one sits down and says this is how you do it or I'll help or this is what is behind the jargon etc
 
Let's go back to the websites overseas. Sorry and no offence just hashing this out here...but they have always been at least 5 years behind the USA and we mention this and they get ticked off, instead of listening and looking at the websites in the USA and being ahead of the curve.
Most of the B&B sites in Europe are not eye candy, they are little logos all over the place trying to raise their page rank. Finding information is a bear! They annoy people.
They will argue that this is what the guests want in Europe, which is contrary to what any guest wants, they want a nice clean page with clear neat photos to look at the B&B and what is on offer, and easy to navigate for more information or booking online.
And btw if you have giant in your face photos on the home page or headers and treat me like a blind idiot stuffing them into my face, again I will close the browser after saying "I wanna puke" to quote that article again.
Large photos are nice - GIANT PHOTOS ARE ABSURD..
Don't know where this outburst comes from, are you planning a trip to Europe and viewing lots and lots of bad european websites? I apologize on behalf of my fellow european B&B owners that we are such backward people... And I agree with you that a lot of trends occur in Europe between 1 to 20 years versus USA, however sometimes the trend never comes and sometimes the USA follows ( ..). Regarding website design I agree we are following the USA and it makes sense to be ahead of the curve, one of the things I love about this forum! But you cannot be to far ahead, It is not so much what the guest wants, it is more what the guest is used to. It is like wearing the 2015 fashion in 2011. You should come over to europe and become a better way to design a website campaigner!
 
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop. Obviously alot was taken out of context. Thank you Muirford for putting things said in the right context. The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help. FaceBook, Twitter, Digg etc.used every other day or so keeps your name out there and is picked up by Google. It's helped me and many others stay on that first page in a very competitive area. Catlady, its possible that your clients are not in an area where there are a lot of bed and breakfasts and at this point they don't need to do this..
andonreidinn said:
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker...
Come on, here we go again. We are just DISCUSSING people!
Nobody is "pouncing" on anyone else. Can't we just DISCUSS for cryin' out loud? Since when can others not voice their opinion? Both Swirt and Catlady are in the business of designing websites. Neither one is saying they are the absolute authority.
I for one continue to read their opinions with great interest. Let it go.
RIki
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This is a discussion, that is what we are doing. Opinions are fine I read this forum and PAII and enjoy it, but at least get the facts right. That's all.
 
Let's go back to the websites overseas. Sorry and no offence just hashing this out here...but they have always been at least 5 years behind the USA and we mention this and they get ticked off, instead of listening and looking at the websites in the USA and being ahead of the curve.
Most of the B&B sites in Europe are not eye candy, they are little logos all over the place trying to raise their page rank. Finding information is a bear! They annoy people.
They will argue that this is what the guests want in Europe, which is contrary to what any guest wants, they want a nice clean page with clear neat photos to look at the B&B and what is on offer, and easy to navigate for more information or booking online.
And btw if you have giant in your face photos on the home page or headers and treat me like a blind idiot stuffing them into my face, again I will close the browser after saying "I wanna puke" to quote that article again.
Large photos are nice - GIANT PHOTOS ARE ABSURD..
Don't know where this outburst comes from, are you planning a trip to Europe and viewing lots and lots of bad european websites? I apologize on behalf of my fellow european B&B owners that we are such backward people... And I agree with you that a lot of trends occur in Europe between 1 to 20 years versus USA, however sometimes the trend never comes and sometimes the USA follows ( ..). Regarding website design I agree we are following the USA and it makes sense to be ahead of the curve, one of the things I love about this forum! But you cannot be to far ahead, It is not so much what the guest wants, it is more what the guest is used to. It is like wearing the 2015 fashion in 2011. You should come over to europe and become a better way to design a website campaigner!
.
I will be there in less than 4 months!!! My cousin told my DH we are going to King Ludwigs Castle. and in doing my research about other things I discovered the difference between Holland and The Netherlands - until then, I did not know they are different areas. See, I am better educated already!
 
Let's go back to the websites overseas. Sorry and no offence just hashing this out here...but they have always been at least 5 years behind the USA and we mention this and they get ticked off, instead of listening and looking at the websites in the USA and being ahead of the curve.
Most of the B&B sites in Europe are not eye candy, they are little logos all over the place trying to raise their page rank. Finding information is a bear! They annoy people.
They will argue that this is what the guests want in Europe, which is contrary to what any guest wants, they want a nice clean page with clear neat photos to look at the B&B and what is on offer, and easy to navigate for more information or booking online.
And btw if you have giant in your face photos on the home page or headers and treat me like a blind idiot stuffing them into my face, again I will close the browser after saying "I wanna puke" to quote that article again.
Large photos are nice - GIANT PHOTOS ARE ABSURD..
Don't know where this outburst comes from, are you planning a trip to Europe and viewing lots and lots of bad european websites? I apologize on behalf of my fellow european B&B owners that we are such backward people... And I agree with you that a lot of trends occur in Europe between 1 to 20 years versus USA, however sometimes the trend never comes and sometimes the USA follows ( ..). Regarding website design I agree we are following the USA and it makes sense to be ahead of the curve, one of the things I love about this forum! But you cannot be to far ahead, It is not so much what the guest wants, it is more what the guest is used to. It is like wearing the 2015 fashion in 2011. You should come over to europe and become a better way to design a website campaigner!
.
I will be there in less than 4 months!!! My cousin told my DH we are going to King Ludwigs Castle. and in doing my research about other things I discovered the difference between Holland and The Netherlands - until then, I did not know they are different areas. See, I am better educated already!
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gillumhouse said:
I will be there in less than 4 months!!! My cousin told my DH we are going to King Ludwigs Castle. and in doing my research about other things I discovered the difference between Holland and The Netherlands - until then, I did not know they are different areas. See, I am better educated already!
Since you'll be in the area, make sure you make a stop at Wieskirche It's an amazing church in "podunk" not too far from the castles,
 
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop. Obviously alot was taken out of context. Thank you Muirford for putting things said in the right context. The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help. FaceBook, Twitter, Digg etc.used every other day or so keeps your name out there and is picked up by Google. It's helped me and many others stay on that first page in a very competitive area. Catlady, its possible that your clients are not in an area where there are a lot of bed and breakfasts and at this point they don't need to do this..
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop.
I mentioned neither a speaker nor a workshop. I didn't pounce on anyone. My post was addressing the calls and emails I am getting from people who are all whipped up about what they are hearing or reading and are planning to do some possibly foolish things based on what they are hearing. There is no requirement that says I can only address misinformation if I am present when it is issued.
Home page freshness is overhyped. You cite it as the reason for your successful placement. The number one inn for your major search phrase has nothing fresh on it. It was last indexed 10 days ago. #2 is covered in fresh stuff and was indexed 7 days ago. #3 indexed 10 days ago. #4 was indexed 7 days ago. Yours is # 5, it was last indexed 7 days ago. #17 (page 2) was indexed 10 days ago. # 26 (page 3) indexed 10 days ago. THe number one and two listings for your major search are both directories with NO fresh content on the pages. They were both last indexed 10 days ago. There is no point updating a home page, for Google's benefit, every day that google is only checking on once a week or less. Yes google can and does learn to look for pages more frequently updated, the more you update the more frequently it may re-index it. But generally there are very few home pages in our niche that get indexed more frequently than once a week. Most importantly, it still has almost no bearing on your position in the search engine results.
Again I have to stress that home page freshness for potential guests sake may be important, but freshness for google's sake alone is misdirected energies and may cause more harm than good. Google or any other search engine does not factor freshness heavilly because it is a meaningless signal. Some of the worst spam sites in the world are up to the minute fresh, while some of the most trusted "authority" sites are months or years old. Generally it is not in a search engine's best interest to create search criteria that has search results that bounce around like ping pong balls as they would if Freshness was a heavily weighted criteria.
If the presenters at whatever workshop you attended gave you this same info, then you are right, the people contacting me must be taking it all out of context.
 
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop. Obviously alot was taken out of context. Thank you Muirford for putting things said in the right context. The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help. FaceBook, Twitter, Digg etc.used every other day or so keeps your name out there and is picked up by Google. It's helped me and many others stay on that first page in a very competitive area. Catlady, its possible that your clients are not in an area where there are a lot of bed and breakfasts and at this point they don't need to do this..
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop.
I mentioned neither a speaker nor a workshop. I didn't pounce on anyone. My post was addressing the calls and emails I am getting from people who are all whipped up about what they are hearing or reading and are planning to do some possibly foolish things based on what they are hearing. There is no requirement that says I can only address misinformation if I am present when it is issued.
Home page freshness is overhyped. You cite it as the reason for your successful placement. The number one inn for your major search phrase has nothing fresh on it. It was last indexed 10 days ago. #2 is covered in fresh stuff and was indexed 7 days ago. #3 indexed 10 days ago. #4 was indexed 7 days ago. Yours is # 5, it was last indexed 7 days ago. #17 (page 2) was indexed 10 days ago. # 26 (page 3) indexed 10 days ago. THe number one and two listings for your major search are both directories with NO fresh content on the pages. They were both last indexed 10 days ago. There is no point updating a home page, for Google's benefit, every day that google is only checking on once a week or less. Yes google can and does learn to look for pages more frequently updated, the more you update the more frequently it may re-index it. But generally there are very few home pages in our niche that get indexed more frequently than once a week. Most importantly, it still has almost no bearing on your position in the search engine results.
Again I have to stress that home page freshness for potential guests sake may be important, but freshness for google's sake alone is misdirected energies and may cause more harm than good. Google or any other search engine does not factor freshness heavilly because it is a meaningless signal. Some of the worst spam sites in the world are up to the minute fresh, while some of the most trusted "authority" sites are months or years old. Generally it is not in a search engine's best interest to create search criteria that has search results that bounce around like ping pong balls as they would if Freshness was a heavily weighted criteria.
If the presenters at whatever workshop you attended gave you this same info, then you are right, the people contacting me must be taking it all out of context.
.
"Home page freshness is overhyped. You cite it as the reason for your successful placement."
I appreciate the work you did to find my Google placement and cache. But please don't misquote me. I stated
"The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help."
Home freshness is not "the reason". As stated above it is the combination of all of those things. All I can say is the effort I have put forth on my website this past year with all the things my hosting company has taught me how to do has us at a 20% increase in revenue over last year and up 10% occupancy. Bottom line...that's what counts.
 
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop. Obviously alot was taken out of context. Thank you Muirford for putting things said in the right context. The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help. FaceBook, Twitter, Digg etc.used every other day or so keeps your name out there and is picked up by Google. It's helped me and many others stay on that first page in a very competitive area. Catlady, its possible that your clients are not in an area where there are a lot of bed and breakfasts and at this point they don't need to do this..
It's very upsetting to hear Swirt and Catlady pounce on a speaker and neither one of them were present at the workshop.
I mentioned neither a speaker nor a workshop. I didn't pounce on anyone. My post was addressing the calls and emails I am getting from people who are all whipped up about what they are hearing or reading and are planning to do some possibly foolish things based on what they are hearing. There is no requirement that says I can only address misinformation if I am present when it is issued.
Home page freshness is overhyped. You cite it as the reason for your successful placement. The number one inn for your major search phrase has nothing fresh on it. It was last indexed 10 days ago. #2 is covered in fresh stuff and was indexed 7 days ago. #3 indexed 10 days ago. #4 was indexed 7 days ago. Yours is # 5, it was last indexed 7 days ago. #17 (page 2) was indexed 10 days ago. # 26 (page 3) indexed 10 days ago. THe number one and two listings for your major search are both directories with NO fresh content on the pages. They were both last indexed 10 days ago. There is no point updating a home page, for Google's benefit, every day that google is only checking on once a week or less. Yes google can and does learn to look for pages more frequently updated, the more you update the more frequently it may re-index it. But generally there are very few home pages in our niche that get indexed more frequently than once a week. Most importantly, it still has almost no bearing on your position in the search engine results.
Again I have to stress that home page freshness for potential guests sake may be important, but freshness for google's sake alone is misdirected energies and may cause more harm than good. Google or any other search engine does not factor freshness heavilly because it is a meaningless signal. Some of the worst spam sites in the world are up to the minute fresh, while some of the most trusted "authority" sites are months or years old. Generally it is not in a search engine's best interest to create search criteria that has search results that bounce around like ping pong balls as they would if Freshness was a heavily weighted criteria.
If the presenters at whatever workshop you attended gave you this same info, then you are right, the people contacting me must be taking it all out of context.
.
"Home page freshness is overhyped. You cite it as the reason for your successful placement."
I appreciate the work you did to find my Google placement and cache. But please don't misquote me. I stated
"The point getting across is that It's not just one thing for Google placement it's everything put together. Freshness, obtaining quality in-bound links, blog feed, blogging with SEO, done once a week DOES help."
Home freshness is not "the reason". As stated above it is the combination of all of those things. All I can say is the effort I have put forth on my website this past year with all the things my hosting company has taught me how to do has us at a 20% increase in revenue over last year and up 10% occupancy. Bottom line...that's what counts.
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You are right, please forgive me for misquoting you. You were saying it was A rather than the reason. That is an important distinction I should have been clearer on. I am saying that home page freshness is such an insignificant reason that it does not belong with the other items in your list.
I have always described search engine issues as being a matter of getting all your ducks in a row. I am just trying to keep hype from overemphasizing a small duck and in the process creating other problems.
 
I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way ;)
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
poke.gif

There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
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I chased back to this thread, which I read but didn't understand. You said:
There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep).
Which leads me to believe you are talking about blog feeds? Then you say:
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
Feed? Blog feed? Sorry, I'm still confused. I get that it may not help SEO, and probably will hurt it? So, no teaser to entice them to read the blog. Just the ol' click here to read our blog would be best?
 
I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way ;)
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
poke.gif

There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
.
I chased back to this thread, which I read but didn't understand. You said:
There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep).
Which leads me to believe you are talking about blog feeds? Then you say:
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
Feed? Blog feed? Sorry, I'm still confused. I get that it may not help SEO, and probably will hurt it? So, no teaser to entice them to read the blog. Just the ol' click here to read our blog would be best?
.
Blog feed and feed are the same thing.
The first issue you quoted relates to the idea that for whatever pagerank (link love) a page has is divided up equally and passed on to however many links are on the page. So if your homepage has 5 main navigational links to the rest of your site, then that pagerank is divided 5 ways and passed on to those pages. IF you add a blog feed that adds 10 separate links to 10 blog posts at the bottom of your page, then that pagerank now gets split 15 ways instead of 5. And some passing blog post about rainbow seen or a bird observed or something else that is cute but not a huge web traffic draw is now getting the same portion of the pagerank that you link to Local attractions ( a much bigger traffic draw) is getting.
An analogy I use is think of the main sub-pages of your site as YOUR kids. Any additional links on your home page are distant cousins. Any outgoing links on your home page are neighbor kids. The more neighbor kids and cousins you have sitting at your dinner table with a fixed amount of food (link love), the more your own children go hungry.
So, if you are going to invite 3, 5 or 10 (depending on how many blog posts you want showing in the feed) cousins to the table, they had better be primo blog posts, not whimsical flights of fancy that many blog posts seem to be (speaking of B&B blog posts in general, not anything specific to you). Using a no follow tag would also be an option to consider. It is essentially like inviting the cousins to the table, but they have to bring their own food because they aren't allowed to eat from yours.
 
I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way ;)
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
poke.gif

There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
.
I chased back to this thread, which I read but didn't understand. You said:
There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep).
Which leads me to believe you are talking about blog feeds? Then you say:
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
Feed? Blog feed? Sorry, I'm still confused. I get that it may not help SEO, and probably will hurt it? So, no teaser to entice them to read the blog. Just the ol' click here to read our blog would be best?
.
Blog feed and feed are the same thing.
The first issue you quoted relates to the idea that for whatever pagerank (link love) a page has is divided up equally and passed on to however many links are on the page. So if your homepage has 5 main navigational links to the rest of your site, then that pagerank is divided 5 ways and passed on to those pages. IF you add a blog feed that adds 10 separate links to 10 blog posts at the bottom of your page, then that pagerank now gets split 15 ways instead of 5. And some passing blog post about rainbow seen or a bird observed or something else that is cute but not a huge web traffic draw is now getting the same portion of the pagerank that you link to Local attractions ( a much bigger traffic draw) is getting.
An analogy I use is think of the main sub-pages of your site as YOUR kids. Any additional links on your home page are distant cousins. Any outgoing links on your home page are neighbor kids. The more neighbor kids and cousins you have sitting at your dinner table with a fixed amount of food (link love), the more your own children go hungry.
So, if you are going to invite 3, 5 or 10 (depending on how many blog posts you want showing in the feed) cousins to the table, they had better be primo blog posts, not whimsical flights of fancy that many blog posts seem to be (speaking of B&B blog posts in general, not anything specific to you). Using a no follow tag would also be an option to consider. It is essentially like inviting the cousins to the table, but they have to bring their own food because they aren't allowed to eat from yours.
.
Thanks for the simple explanations. It does help me conceptualize this "link juice" stuff a little better.
 
I believe I have been in one of the workshops that may have led to that conclusion - in defense of the company, she didn't exactly say 'post every day and you'll be #1 on google.' This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up), and they recommend blogging once a week. But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks. Which is why I think that whole mishegos evolved into your posting. Unless there's been more said since then.
But thanks for clarifying all of that - the details were not particularly clear during the workshop. We recently did add a blog feed (with the first lines of the post showing on the website) to our home page to get more traffic to the blog, which we hope to write with a better eye towards SEO (although that still is very hard for me). I did a special countdown to V-day on shopping in our town with a daily blog post, but boy I am looking forward to going back to once a week after Saturday. The daily one is too much for me. I am not nearly as creative as I would have hoped..
Thanks Jeanne, that context helps a bit. The responses that follow are not directed at you, just having a general bit of fun with the overal concepts and try to illustrate a few points along the way ;)
But there was a story told about someone who TYPED the daily weather on his homepage for about six months and shot up in the google ranks.
Cute anecdote. Here is another one. Two months ago my carpal tunnel started flairing up in my right hand, so I switched to brushing my teeth with my left hand. After 2 months, my site moved up two places in google. This must be proof that Google rewards left handed tooth brushers.
poke.gif

There is so much info missing from the weather typing story that it is absurd to leap to attributing the jump to it. How old was the site? What other changes had been made? How long ago prior were other changes made? What off-site marketing had been changed during that 6 months and the 6 months prior? What are the answers to these exact same questions for the other sites that fell during this one site's rise? (If one site goes up 2 positions, 2 others must have fallen)
The general point is you can't assume a causal relationship here. It may be that the site rose simply because 2 other sites had changes to them that were bad: They fell, which gave the impression that the other jumped. Those 2 that fell could have been content changes or simply some inbound links disappeared. It may be that an inbound link that was created 9 months ago has finally aged enough to start carrying some weight. It may be that Google finally got around to indexing the inn's listing on a deep page in a major directory. It may have been that some blogger said, "hey look at this guy typing the weather everyday by hand" and provided a link.
I've used this analogy before. Many people think of the inner workings of google like a wrapped Christmas present. Simply shake it a bit, poke it, prod it, make changes and by careful observation and listening, you can guess at what it is. The reality is that as you poke it and prod it, it makes no noise, then you get discouraged and put it back on the shelf. Three months later it makes a "crumple", at 6 months it "skronks" and at 9 months it "snorks". Was it the poke that caused the skronk or did the pro cause it? AND what caused the silence? What caused the four sounds you never heard because you weren't there listening every single minute?
This was mostly in a discussion about adding your blog feed to your homepage in such a way that google looks at it as fresh content (meaning not just as a feed but having the text show up)
From the point of getting people to tune into a blog, this may have some merit. However, from the point of view of SEO and having it appear as content and not a seconary source feed, I would argue that it is a crap shoot. I would caution that sometime it may help, an some times it may not. I' even go so far as to say most of the time it will not.
The reason I say this is that even if you are writing your blog titles with SEO in mind, they are going to be titles that are not your main target phrase(s) for your home page. They are going to be fringe target phrases (long tail) will not be stong enough to influence your home page position for major searches. It is entirely possible that including them on your home page is more likely to muddy up the content focus than it is to make it more clear.
I've seen a lot of innkeeper blogs. Most are not so great from an SEO point of view. Some are fantastic. Ballparking it, I would say that for every fantastic blog there are 9 horrible ones (again from an SEO point of view). If I recommende to all 10 innkeepers that they should feed their blog to their home page, only one might see an increase. Others may see a drop. The odds are not in favor of an increase. There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep). Remember, all the pagerank that a homepage has gets distribute equally among the links on the page. If you have 5 links on your home page (essentially your main navigation) then each page gets a 5th of the pagerank attributed to the home page. If you add 10 blog links to that, then each page only gets 1/15th of it. A site ought to be structured to feed the strongest pages, which you do by not spreading it too thin.
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
.
I chased back to this thread, which I read but didn't understand. You said:
There is also the issue of disrupting up the distribution of pagerank by adding 10 deep links on your home page (assuming the blog feed goes 10 posts deep).
Which leads me to believe you are talking about blog feeds? Then you say:
If it were me, and I wanted my blog posts to appear on my home page for guest and potential guest reasons, then I would want them set up as a feed, so that google did not attribute the content to the page.
Feed? Blog feed? Sorry, I'm still confused. I get that it may not help SEO, and probably will hurt it? So, no teaser to entice them to read the blog. Just the ol' click here to read our blog would be best?
.
Blog feed and feed are the same thing.
The first issue you quoted relates to the idea that for whatever pagerank (link love) a page has is divided up equally and passed on to however many links are on the page. So if your homepage has 5 main navigational links to the rest of your site, then that pagerank is divided 5 ways and passed on to those pages. IF you add a blog feed that adds 10 separate links to 10 blog posts at the bottom of your page, then that pagerank now gets split 15 ways instead of 5. And some passing blog post about rainbow seen or a bird observed or something else that is cute but not a huge web traffic draw is now getting the same portion of the pagerank that you link to Local attractions ( a much bigger traffic draw) is getting.
An analogy I use is think of the main sub-pages of your site as YOUR kids. Any additional links on your home page are distant cousins. Any outgoing links on your home page are neighbor kids. The more neighbor kids and cousins you have sitting at your dinner table with a fixed amount of food (link love), the more your own children go hungry.
So, if you are going to invite 3, 5 or 10 (depending on how many blog posts you want showing in the feed) cousins to the table, they had better be primo blog posts, not whimsical flights of fancy that many blog posts seem to be (speaking of B&B blog posts in general, not anything specific to you). Using a no follow tag would also be an option to consider. It is essentially like inviting the cousins to the table, but they have to bring their own food because they aren't allowed to eat from yours.
.
Thanks, I understand this a bit more. This little nut has moved away from the oak tree. I will speak to my new web designer about this. I don't know what I would be doing without your help.
 
tangential question, Swirt, what is your opinion on page type .php instead of .html on ranking?
 
tangential question, Swirt, what is your opinion on page type .php instead of .html on ranking?.
Tom said:
tangential question, Swirt, what is your opinion on page type .php instead of .html on ranking?
Absolutely no difference whatsoever. htm, html, php, asp ..... all are just endings to tell the server what to do with the page before sending it out. That aspect makes no difference to the end user, and no difference to a search engine.
Now, if the comparison is friendly URL (mysite,com/reservations) vs nasty URL (mysite,com/index.php?n=243) yes, friendly URLs make a difference to both search engines and end users.
 
tangential question, Swirt, what is your opinion on page type .php instead of .html on ranking?.
Tom said:
tangential question, Swirt, what is your opinion on page type .php instead of .html on ranking?
Absolutely no difference whatsoever. htm, html, php, asp ..... all are just endings to tell the server what to do with the page before sending it out. That aspect makes no difference to the end user, and no difference to a search engine.
Now, if the comparison is friendly URL (mysite,com/reservations) vs nasty URL (mysite,com/index.php?n=243) yes, friendly URLs make a difference to both search engines and end users.
.
a php page can provide fresh content to every new access by random reading from a SQL table. I did this with photos on another project and it seems to get Images' attention.
 
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