Long time reader of your newsletter. I recently joined your memebership site, want to be in front, as you release more great tested content.

I am living proof that in my niche your “jiggling the web” works. I use it for long tail geo targeted keywords, as suggested, and I dominate the first page of Google.

Now I am going to come into this decade and focus on Social Media in lieu of SEO.

Thanks again for all the great content.

Mark

I am truly sorry to hear of your wifes illness. I hope that she makes a speedy recovery and that everything gets better for you quickly over the next few months..

All our best wishes for the future

Mark Vass and family.

Randy

The supplemental index enhances the main index when no quality results can be found. So the 40 pages are still in Google, and they can be found, just not in the main index.

I just did this and found 23 of my pages missing in AOL. However, of those supposedly 23 missing or in the supplemental index as it were, I did a search using a unique text snippet and the page was found in Google.

Am I missing something here?

Ken McCarthy is one of those unsung heroes. He was an early innovator and still today with his System Seminars continues to break new ground.

Sure there is always new techniques and tactics, he sticks to principles. It’s always about bringing value to the patron.

Duncan

So to that end isn’t it worth checking out whether pages get indexed or if the links are nofollow too?

I also appreciate that less is more but having clients actually to satisfy, getting about from one site to the next and posting links is really time consuming. I’ve tried Onlywire but it’s a bit flaky.

Does anyone have a tool or even a streamlined strategy to share?

Regards

Thanks for this. Like you, I’ve become confident enough not to let the CRAP grind me down. But man, it took a while.

One of the things I had to learn was that failure is necessary. When I do something that doesn’t work, I need to smile BIG – that’s something else I can let go of and get on to something works.

Years ago, I owned a photo agency that was successful for 5 years. Unfortunately, I owned it for another 8 months beyond the success. It took me several years to get over the feeling of failure.

Ironically, I used a photographer’s contract that began with:

Rule #1: I do not deal with *ssholes!

I broke that rule about 3 years in and that’s when it started going downhill. Lesson learned.

Thanks for the reminder.

David

I’ve shown sites to people that were heavily sculpted using javascript. I’ve shown sites using nofollow just on the legal/business pages ala Andy’s description above. And I’ve shown more simplified “silo” sites.

All of these models can work for organic SEO.

One thing to consider is the homepage and whether you really want to juice the link strength of the homepage at the expense of the other pages in the site.

An ecommerce store is an excellent example of this. In a classic ecommerce store you have the homepage, category pages, and the product pages “hanging off” of the individual category pages.

What happens with the default “pyramid” site structure is that the homepage and the category pages are linked from every page on the site. This is the standard navigation structure you see on almost EVERY site…

But the impact here is that the category pages and the homepage are getting the bulk of the link juice.

Is this what you really want?

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes no. It depends on the niche/market and the keywords you are targeting.

If I am building a fitness equipment site and my homepage is targeted at “fitness equipment” do I really want to rank for that term or do I want to rank for the dozens of specific product pages and review pages?

Well, we’d like to rank for everything but if you’re trying to get the biggest bang for your buck you want to rank for the lower tier pages – the product and presell pages – before worrying about ranking for “treadmill” (a category page) or “fitness equipment” (the homepage and the niche focus).

But the real value was (and is) moving link strength around and focusing it on the pages that need it.

Dynamic Linking and Revenge have all the diagrams and the explanation of this but the short of it is that with most websites the homepage and “category” pages get too much link strength passed to them at the expense of the product/offer pages. This is true of everything from Wordpress blogs to hand built HTML sites.

I don’t want to be stuck with expensive hproprietary software, as it’s happened too many times in the past. Stick to open source and open standards I say.

I can see charging for upgrades. I have no beef about that. But when I’m charged a yearly membership and there’s no mention of it on the sales page, that’s what bugs me, and why I won’t be renewing next year.

Thanks for the heads up on the templates. It’s ok if you defend Semiologic. There’s nothing “wrong” with it, but I’m still going to let my membership go. To me it’s not worth the steep yearly fee.