SEO Dave wrote:
> On 29 Apr 2005 15:37:53 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:
>
>>> It is the most obvious way though and is why the vast majority of
>>> sites with a lot of pages have a large menu.
>>
>>vast majority: can you provide us with statistics, or did you think it
>>sounded cool to make a point this way?
>
> Do you really think I'm going to waste my time trying to justify this?
> This is a newsgroup not a scientific journal, if I meant it as a
> statistic I'd have included a reference.
Then don't make up things like "vast majority". This is a technical
newsgroup, if you make such claims, I, and probably more people are
curious how you came up with such things. But ok, you just made it up
then to "get a point".
> Hover over the top menu and count the links. Way over 40, so the CNN
> site supports what I said. You should have dug a little deeper before
> using CNN as an example. http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/ < 40
http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/ < 40
http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/ < 40
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/ < 40
And your point is?
> So have you ever dealt with an ecommerce site like the above? Have you
> ever dealt with an ecommerce site at all?
Yes and yes. Your point is?
> No, as above. Assuming you aren't playing your games again you've not
> fully understood what I've posted in this thread.
Yeah, Dave, that's it, games or I am stupid, or both Dave. Whatever
makes you happy.
>>You are clever enough to see that the latter is "dead" :-)
>
> Dead in the sense of no search engine traffic or dead in the sense of
> you not marketing it anymore?
Both. Are you now going to dig around for counter proof of the latter?
I haven't done serious anything about that site for over a year or so,
can't remember. It had a PR of 6, so I decided to keep it, sometimes I
can make someone happy with a PR6 link. I removed some of the links to
it, because I had better use for it.
>>I never talked about click here, there are several more reasons why
>>that is a bad one :-D.
>
> Never said you did use click here, it's just one more example of very
> poor use of anchor text.
Agreed. Same for "read more...", etc.
> Unless you are after the click here SERP of
> course.
:-D.
>>castleamber.com, although you probably wouldn't call it a menu, since
>>I was experimenting at that time with providing links in the content
>>(from UI point of view).
>
> That's a small site (67 pages indexed in Google) and so very easy to
> create without any menu. Done any with a large site (at least 500
> pages)?
johnbokma.com has currently 267 pages.
> index.php?Operation=CustomerReviews&ItemId=1932219 005&ReviewPage=2
>
> The problem is the & in CustomerReviews&ItemId
>
> Do you know of a solution?
Yes, I already gave it even some time ago the first time this problem
popped up.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#entities
the second "Note". Moreover 5.3.2. explains how to represent the &
>>It did in the past, I haven't looked into it recently. The number of
>>spam messages I have got on that seo addy can be counted on two hands,
>>and I think most of those were sent to info@ sales@ e.d.
>
> Interesting. I'm using javascripted email addresses and also not
> getting any direct email spam, like you just getting the info@ type
> spam that's from the whois info or guessed.
The @ has a major advantage, it works for people who do not have
JavaScript :-D. On the other hand, it's way easier to decode. But
somehow people who write spam harvest bots are barely able to program.
>>I do get hits for email/contact john bokma, so to me it *is* related.
>>With home I agree, but if you look another time at my pages you see
>>that I took care of that. Remember, it's a personal page.
>
> I was looking at your search engine optimization site, though
> castleamber.com also uses the anchor text home on it's own! You should
> know from this NG that's very poor use of anchor text.
I know, I never got to the point of linking the unicorn image back to /.
At the moment most Perl customers land on my personal page, and click to
castleamber.com. Both my personal page and my castleamber page are
scheduled to be redesigned for over 6 months :-D.
> The anchor text of your sites in general isn't optimized
You are looking at the wrong sites. I think my anchor text at
johnbokma.com is optimized here and there ;-)
> You are the 7th domain found for the search "freelance software
> development" and not in the top 100 for "software development" if
> instead of the above setup you have one link to home with anchor text-
> "Castle Amber - freelance software development" you might do better.
As you know, I focus more on perl programmer:
http://www.google.com/search?q=perl%20programmer
> Thanks to a PR7 home page :-) You should know off site factors are far
> more important than onsite so if you have the links (which you do) you
> can be absolutely rubbish at SEO and do well anyway. If you have the
> links and good onsite SEO as well you do even better.
I think we both agree that if I was absolutely rubbish at SEO I would
not even come close to 1000 visitors on my johnbokma.com site. I have
links, because people were able to find me in the first place.
>>You mean adding relevant links *to* the menu "free" pages. Yeah, ok,
>>that's an open door :-D. I still don't see the point though, you said
>>a bit up: you get no penalty for links with anchor text that is not
>>relevant to your target.
>
> Actually I said you don't benefit. You can add a "Welcome to my Home
> Page" as a H1 header, it won't result in a penalty, but you've just
> wasted an opportunity. Same concept with irrelevant anchor text.
Yup, I understand that. So having an additional home link on your page
doesn't harm. Or do you think that if you link 10 times to home with
different anchor text it's counted 10 times?
>>Moreover, this would mean you have to make
>>several menu.htm files or you have some kind of "general" menu.htm,
>>and the related menu entries on the page.
>
> Yes. Didn't say it was easy.
Oh, it is easy, that can be automated (a large part of internal linking
on my site is handled automatically).
> I suppose it depends how badly you want targeted traffic. I know this
> works better than a general all purpose menu on every page. I also
> know it's not the only solution and as it was framed had major
> drawbacks.
As I already said several times, my site already goes to fast. I wonder
when I have to pay extra for traffic :-D. My new design has more
graphics. With going to 3500 visitors a day, a few kb extra does count..
>>But I think we both agree that in many cases frames are a bad idea.
>
> Of course, I can't think of a good reason to use frames.
I can think of just a few, but that's in general.
> Like I said I
> can easily do the same with a CSS design (or table I suppose) and a
> single iFrame without the inherent problems of framed sites (will
> validate as well :-)).
Frames do validate, if you know what you are doing (right doctype for
example).
> Amazon's setup isn't too bad. If you click on the "Apparel &
> Accessories" link for example you get a new menu with related items,
> click on the "Women" link and another related menu pops up. It's not
> perfect since the anchor text doesn't help every page (realistically
> impossible to do), but it's far better than 40, 50 whatever number of
> static menu links on every page of the site, so I'd be happy with that
> type of menu for a site of that size.
Me too. I guess it was not clear that with small menu I mean a context
related menu, not a small menu that's exactly the same on each page.
--
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