Does searching for your site improve its ranking?

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
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Chalky
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Does searching for your site improve its ranking?

Post by Chalky »

I don't know if I'm wasting my time, but every time I visit some of the sites I regularly monitor - such as LMH - I get there by doing a Google search for my site, and then clicking on the link from my site to the site I want to visit.

I read on another thread that "outbound" links don't affect your page ranking, but my page's visibility seems to have improved since I started doing this.

On the same topic, if you do a search for a site - yours or anyone else's - do the search criteria that you use affect the site's ranking, or is it just the fact that it has been searched for?
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evabal
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Post by evabal »

Hi Chalky:
It does not effect the ranking. If it would, you would be able to buy a program that would enter the site name to search engines in every few seconds.....
Try to get listed on some sites, even on public boards that are searchable by search engines. They would pick those info up.

Eva
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livinginitaly
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Post by livinginitaly »

I get there by doing a Google search for my site, and then clicking on the link from my site to the site I want to visit.
Funny one this, and i'm sure my reply will cause a few comments (especially if Garri is reading!), but, I do believe it does.

Google 'could' raise the 'ranking' of those sites that are displayed and 'clicked' the most. That's why it's so very important to ensure that your page title and 'description text' are 'attention grabbing'.

They do this already with Google adwords. That is, if you and I where to pay the same 'pay per click' price, yet your ad was 'clicked' more times as a percentage of times displayed ..... you're ad would feature 'higher' than mine. In fact, it would even feature higher than ads receiving fewer clicks that where paying more than you. Strange but true.

So, it's my belief that google 'do' in fact operate a similar system on there search results. It's also why I 'never' click 'back a page' after going to one of my sites from a search engine ...... that would imply that what i found wasn't relevant to my search!

Regarding outbound links, again very much open to individual interpretation, but again 'I' believe that having outbound links on your page does infact increase your sites ranking, though obviously not as much as having 'inbound' links from an authoritative site.
Last edited by livinginitaly on Fri Sep 16, 2005 1:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
mvus
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Post by mvus »

I think you are refering to search preferences that some sites use to know your preferences and tailor the results based on the sites you've visited. This doesn't affect page ranking. Outbound links don't count either.

Inbound inks work if they are relevant to your website (travel, accommodation, tourism, country etc) so putting your French villa on an Australian dress making website won't do you any favours!

Normally if you click on your own site more than once on google it shows up a different colour on the headline to show you've already visited that site
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

pja wrote:Outbound links don't count either.
Only Google knows the truth about this, but there is a feeling among SEO people that outbound links may have a small effect. The rationale is that if your site really is a useful one, it will naturally link to some related sites as part of giving your site's visitors a fuller service. Whereas a crappy site wouldn't bother, or would link to irrelevant sites as part of a link farm.

Not that I know any SEO people, but I sometimes read what they are thinking on the excellent High Rankings forum: www.highrankings.com/forum
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livinginitaly
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Post by livinginitaly »

I think you are refering to search preferences that some sites use to know your preferences and tailor the results based on the sites you've visited. This doesn't affect page ranking. Outbound links don't count either.
I just knew this would stir up a 'can of worms'.

Firstly, let me say 'again' that my post referred to my own personal views. I didn't say or even imply that they were 'fact'.

However, I was 'not' referring to any form of search engine 'preferences' or settings. I said google and I meant google.

Also, I just love the way your post reads, very consise and authoritative. Yet i'm afraid I have to beg to differ, you have posted your opinion ...... but like my post, this does not make it 'fact'.

Regarding outbound links. Here's something to read.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-frien ... inks.shtml

That's not 'fact' either because, as i'm sure you're aware, googles 'methodology' is a closely guarded and ever changing variable.

Then again, maybe you're 'privvy' to googles secrets?
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livinginitaly
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Post by livinginitaly »

Sorry PJA, I know I over-reacted there!

Thing is, I spend an awful lot of time (far too much time!) 'online' reading forums etc, and this topic crops up time and time again.

As Poalo says, we all don't know for sure. All we can do is experiment and stick with what 'seems' to work. Even then though, the search engines can change the 'formula' and what once worked, doesn't work anymore.

More reading and perhaps a little confirmation on my own 'personal' train of thought ....... from googleguy no less.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23678.htm

(edit) that's a members only page i think, here's the quote ....
seos tend to debate this pretty heavily. even among the pragmatic [read: I'll do anything to get rankings ;) ] seos, some people claim it's better to hoard PageRank and some people claim it's better to "look like a real site" and point out that real sites tend to have outlinks.
I lean more toward the latter school of thought. If seos go to extremes trying to recreate or mimic the content/linking patterns that "real, useful" sites have, before you know it--you actually end up with a real, useful site. :)

I'm mildly joking here, but the rule of thumb that I'd go with here is that visitors to your site probably want to know about useful related resources. And the higher-level principle is to make a useful site that visitors consider a good resource, want to return to, and would mention to their friends.

A quick example: I was recently reading about a program called KCeasy on Slashdot, so I checked out their website at kceasy.com. If you visit the site, notice that they have useful links to giFT (the underlying protocol) plus other various giFT clients. this is a non-commercial site that's just trying to give info on their piece of software and that gives info on other options as well. That particular site would be much less useful if the author tried to hoard PageRank or somehow keep every visitor on their own site. Instead, the links are as useful as the site itself. It's a good site; the sort of site that sticks in the mind of an interested visitor.

So that's my personal take. Bear in mind that I'm of the "build the good site, and the rankings will follow" school of philosophy. Other folks may belong to the "get rankings first, and then develop the site" school of thought. I'll step aside to let someone from the pragmatic school of SEO give their take.

Added: Here's another interesting non-commercial site: placelab.org. the idea is to offer geolocation by mapping WiFi hotspots to GPS readings, e.g. by wardriving. It's a really really neat site: there's publications, lots of info, and even a place where you can upload your wardriving logs to help the project out. But would the site be helped by adding a few additional links to describe how GPS works, how the NMEA standard allows your computer to talk to a GPS unit, maybe a link to geocaching.com, NetStumbler, or other fun tricks that you can do with GPS or WiFi? Yeah, I think that would take a really nice site and kick it up even a little more.
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Post by mvus »

Some sites with outbound links do get high rankings but the ones i've seen that do contain thousands of links to a particular industry like marketingtool.com

I wouldn't think that your average private villa website (which is what I was refering to) is going to do that, so you have to question why you'd bother.

However, if you can use outbound links to attract reciprocal inbound links from other similar category sites that would, in my opinion, be a good idea and well worth doing.
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Post by livinginitaly »

I wouldn't think that your average private villa website (which is what I was refering to) is going to do that, so you have to question why you'd bother.
Well, we bothered with tansy's site (normandybeachrental.com) because it gave potential 'renters' a more complete list of 'things to do' in the local area.

This has the 'knock on' effect of attracting reciprocal links, as you mention, but also adding extra search terms that possibly wouldn't have been included in the main site itself.

As mentioned in the Googleguy quote, "build the good site and the rankings will follow". My interpretation of a 'good site', is giving the visitor the 'best' service ... including links to other sites of interest. The aim being that they'll be returning to your site as a 'reference point'.

What's the point of having good search engine positioning, if you don't provide 'useful' content?
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Post by mvus »

When I said why bother of course I was refering to using outbound links as a means to improve a websites rankings. That's completely different to listing websites that are of genuine interest and relevant to your visitors
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

I've been wondering about the outbound links issue too.

For instance, I read somewhere that each outbound link drops your pagerank a little bit. However, if you think about it, it can't be as straightforward as that as google is nothing but outbound links so it's own pagerank would be zero!

OK, so google may well treat itself specially but there are lots of other directories and listings sites out there which have a considerable number of outbound links. Think of any listings site that you're on and chances are it has an outbound link to each place listed on it.

Also, there's the likes of regional guides on sites which will normally have a lot of outbound links. My own www.personallychosen.com/pyrenees does quite nicely with hits and pagerank yet has maybe a hundred outbound links.

Where I think you might get a negative hit would be if you just had a straight collection of outbound links with no additional text which would normally be less useful to real people. Hence, presumably, the greater importance google seems to place on your site being listed in human edited directories like dmoz.

Remember too that google try to automate everything so they won't want to, say, list visitfrance as a directory because that would imply they'd need to do that for every directory (and there must be hundreds of thousands of them around) so it needs to be able to recognise a directory as being such automatically.

There's also the not inconsiderable problem of forums like this one. If you think of all the times that you or someone else has put a website link in a post, there must be hundreds of thousands of outbound links from the forum whereas my guess is that there are proportionately many fewer inbound links.



Arnold
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Post by marcus »

Mascamps,

Common sense says you are right and I think you must be. I've been working on a new site www.southofthedordogne.com based initially on the idea in this forum quite a while ago that a site should act as a 'tourist site' for the area, with the gites etc being secondary - an idea that appeals to me.

I mostly use the site at the moment for checking how to do new things (PHP, forums, CSS, affiliates, RSS, CMSimple, affiliates etc etc as I learn about them so is a bit overcluttered before you ask me why there is a forum page etc - the superfluous bits will be chucked off in due course)

I also have ignored all good advice and have added lots of outbound links to local tourist attractions etc. without many inbound links. Time will tell but I think this must be the best approach, and so I assume that google will agree. The site is too new to have a pagerank yet.

(Paulo, can you strike the name of the site out of this entry if you think the existence of a page on the site inviting people to add their properties means it looks like I'm marketing a gite letting business in this forum)

Cheers
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paolo
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Post by paolo »

marcus wrote:Paulo, can you strike the name of the site out of this entry if you think the existence of a page on the site inviting people to add their properties means it looks like I'm marketing a gite letting business in this forum
I'll pretend I haven't seen your post.
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

Great minds think alike... I had the same idea when we bought this place as it's not in a terribly well known area and the tourist board has a truly dreadful site in english. Hence the over the top size of our Pyrenees guide and it's new home on personallychosen.com rather than in the middle of mascamps.com . We've structured our guide as a series of concentric (very rough) circles centered on our place which we've had good feedback about. So, we list everywhere within 15 minutes drive, within an hour, within two hours and within three hours.

One thing to do is to add a copyright notice on your photos. We've found that a lot of other sites have been nabbing our fullsize images and have therefore started adding copyright notices on the fullsize ones (we plan on having clickthrough from our "big thumbnail" size). Ironically the very first one we caught doing this was the Police Association in Catalonia!

The other thing that we've done is to separate out our transport section which now lives in perpignanflightsandcarhire.com (part of personallychosen.com). I do like the way you've integrated that into the southofthedordogne guide though and may do that in a later version.

I do worry a little about the "taking the eye off the ball" aspect of this. I think it could be quite easy to concentrate a bit too much on the travel guide or car rental aspects to the detriment of getting guests in the door.


Arnold
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ourinns
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Post by ourinns »

Getting even more off topic... how do you do the live property feed?

We've also moved our Living in France pages to www.personallychosen.com/livinginfrance and added /movingabroad as well. Eye well off the ball by now :)



Arnold
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