The following are questions sent in by readers of the StepForth
Weekly SEO Newsletter and The
SEO Blog. If you have a question
you would like to submit please email
me.
1. Question: Does a domain name play a part in SEO?
From: anonymous
Ross: Yes it can help but only marginally. If your domain name
includes the primary keyphrase that you want rankings for it
will help boost the perceived relevance of your website. I generally
consider keywords in a domain to be a 1-5% advantage in the
rankings war. The simple fact is that before keyword domains
really help rankings your site must be well optimized. Theoretically
if you were head to head with your competitor and both sites
were equal in optimization and online popularity but only site
#2 had keywords in their domain they would get a better ranking.
In short, domains play a role in rankings under only the most
competitive of terms where every percentage of advantage is
a welcome edge.
2. Question: How important are unique IP's?
From: Paul C.
We have various travel sites, each with unique IP but as
they are hosted in the same place they have the same C block.
We
are thinking of switching hosting company, due to excess
downtime recently, and wonder whether it is worth looking
again for unique
IP’s. Or whether from an SEO viewpoint a shared IP
is OK.
Ross: Great question but a tough one because
a lot of what I know about the negative affects of shared
IP’s is circumstantial
because it is so difficult to prove that such penalties exist.
If you want to be extremely cautious then unique IP’s
are a safe way to go because you do not have to worry about
sharing an IP with a potential spammer. In my experience,
however, a shared IP is no problem at all unless your sites
are using
duplicate content or are grossly interlinked with each other.
As an after thought I would like to note that if you broke
your travel sites into subdomains then you would not have to
worry about this issue because all of your sites would have
to use the same IP. For example your main site might be www.theworld.com
and your subdomains could be france.theworld.com, italy.theworld.com,
canada.theworld.com, etc. This is a very effective method of
separating a large site into smaller, more manageable sites
and I highly recommend it.
3. Question: How to remove blacklisting by Yahoo?
From: Paul C.
Our websites are linked to each other, as most cover different
destinations in Latin America. For more than a year we lost
all our Yahoo positions, although retain reasonable Google positions.
When we contacted Yahoo, they confirmed we had been blacklisted
and sent a standard email indicating the range of sins we could
be engaged in (cloaking, link farm, invisible text, keyword
spamming etc). Of these, the only one we do use is the linking
to our various related sites. There is strong commercial logic
for this and we don't think this should be a case for blacklisting.
But how to change Yahoo's mind? Try Express submission? Set
up a new site on a completely different server and without links?
Or some other way?
Ross: Unfortunately changing a search engine
company’s
mind is a pointless task left up to those with a lot of
time and money on their hands. There is, however, a page within
Yahoo
that might provide you with a means to contact Yahoo and
have them review
the status of your URL. I don’t honestly know
how much this will help but may give you a venue to ask
a question or make your case.
In cases where we have had to fix the past errors of new
clients that resulted in blacklisting all that it took was
to remove
the offending content and wait for re-indexing or resubmit
the site. In this line of thinking I would recommend toning
down
the interlinking between your websites and resubmitting
them to Yahoo. It is possible that you only ‘just’ triggered
the blacklist alert at Yahoo and that this will bring you
below the alert threshold.
A Final Thought
Search engines rarely penalize for no plausible reason. Before
you take further steps I strongly recommend having a qualified
SEO review your website for offending code. It is always possible
that you are missing something offensive that could be easily
remedied and get you back into the best of both worlds; top
rankings in Google and Yahoo.
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