Google, other search page rankings

[sfatula]

I've got some oretty good page rankings using OSC, but want some to be better. Does anyone know if the major search engines, of prime interest is Google, use subdomains as part of the ranking? i.e., if I use plasmatv.mydomain.com will that page rate higher than the exact same page at www.mydomain.com?

 

It would seem a downside might be that the search engine might consider this a seperate site. Still, curious.

[skarra]

The subdomain would be seen as a separate web site and in my opinion would not be a good option. If you want to increase rankings on a certain key phrase my best advice is to add more content about that product carefully using your selected key phrases. You also need to get some links pointing at that particular page.

 

Dave

[ZAP]

Well, I don't really know anything specifc about subdomains, but...

 

I think that Google works a bit differently than it used to, precisely because small shops were getting screwed by their system. They used to use what seemed like an odd system of ranking results according to how many other sites had links to yours (on the logic that if other people link to you, that's a vote of confidence that your site has some value). But of course very few people ever link to small commercial sites (they may link to Amazon or to informational sites, but rarely to small shops), so I believe they've changed their system a bit.

 

As I understand it, they've now integrated the Open Directory Project (a human-compiled directory) into their result scoring system. This means that getting into the ODP will give you a permanant boost on Google. You can submit your site here: http://directory.google.com/

 

A link from ANY directory (Yahoo, etc.) counts more than any other link when Google scores you, so it's worth getting into them.

 

My experience with Google is that if you use their AdWords service for a while, your rankings shoot through the roof. It's actually a pretty good service and very cheap (depending on the keywords you choose), but I don't like feeling as if I paid a bribe for search results. On the other hand, it seems to work.

 

Some of the other obvious and not-so-obvious tricks:

 

* Touch your files frequently (or, even better, update them). Newer beats older. Pages that haven't been updated in a while move to the bottom of the results.

 

* Use different keywords on different pages. Duh. I know it sounds obvious, but it's amazing how many people repeat the same keywords on every page and only throw in one or two new ones specific to that page.

 

* Use keywords that DO NOT appear on your page, but that are related. The best example I know is a non-profit foundation I worked for that doesn't like to think of it's work as "charity", so they never use that word. But that word is in their mata keywords, because if someone searches for a word or phrase that is on their page plus the word "charity", they damn well want that person to find their site.

 

* Look over the text in your pages with a thesaurus. Changing some repeated words or terms to synonyms means that many new keywords. Also, mix up the way you group or combine words instead of repeating them the same way.

 

* More text content = more to index, so don't skimp on the text for the sake of design (or laziness). However, very long pages pay a penalty because the text towards the bottom is considered less important. So split very long pages up into multiple pages (with different keywords on every page).

 

* And you may as well do all the usual tricks - keywords in bold or big text, in your title bar, close to the top of the page, etc.

 

* Don't forget to create a robots.txt file.

 

* And you really need to have a sitemap page and make it the one you submit to search engines.

 

Anyway...just my 6-1/2 cents.

 

Anyone else have any other tips?

[sfatula]

Ok, but back to my question. I have noticed that on many search terms, the sites with the highest ranking have the search term in the URL. So, www.widgets.com when searching for widgets might be the top ranker.

 

So, I am wondering since I see this on 95% of the search terms I get hit on if using the subdomain might accomplish the same thing.

[wizardsandwars]

sfatula,

 

thinking along those lines, we changed several of our php scripts to include keywords. For example, we changed product_info.php to pc_game_info.php as in :

http://www.wizardsandwars.com/pc_game_info...products_id=174

 

We also added a fake parameter to the URL to include even more keywords, like this:

http://www.wizardsandwars.com/pc_game_info...n&kill_sid=true

 

Anyways, hope this give you some ideas.

 

Best of Luck.

[sfatula]

Chris, I did that as well, but it appears the sooner in the url the term appears, the higher it seems to rate. Unknown to me though is if it is in the very first part of the URL where the www normally is, will that provide a slight boost.