Bots or Spiders – Search engine bots, or spiders, use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ pages and documents. Estimates say that search engines have crawled between 8-10 billion pages of the approximately 20 billion pages that exist on the World Wide Web today.

Links are a method of identifying the popularity and/or importance of a specific website. Using link analysis search engines analyze both the source page and the destination. Link data provides information on different affiliations between websites as well as contextual data about the website – which websites are linked to that site etc.

Search engines will also denote greater value to links coming from stronger websites, aka websites that are known to be reliable and popular. This is why using a link farm to promote your website is probably a waste of time and getting a link from the Wikipedia website for example, will create a much greater splash for your ranking. How do you know which websites are more powerful than others? Take a look at the website’s page-rank. So what is a page rank?

Page Rank – This is an explanation of the PageRank as it appears in Google’s technological overview page:

“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.”

Google considers links as votes. When you link your website to another, you are saying that their content is interesting and relevant and you are also helping define the type of relevancy by providing more information through hyperlinks or anchor text links.

Anchor Text Links – search engines will use the anchor text as additional data helping them determine the content of the destination page. If I wrote an article on free Flash templates and used the term as a link to Wix, as I just did, what I am actually telling search engines is that the term “free Flash websites” is relevant to the Wix website. Therefore, Wix deals with free Flash templates.

Search engines are also known to consider the text surrounding the link and allocate greater importance to this text than the rest of the texts on your website. This gives links that are part of a paragraph greater importance than links in a footer or sidebar.

Another factor that is part of the search engine’s considerations is the subject matter of the destination page. If you create an anchor link with the words ‘free Flash templates’ and this link leads to a page that discusses free Flash templates in its content, the link will probably receive greater value.

You can get information on links through the search engines and the most reliable source is Yahoo! Here are a few commands that will give you information on links:

1. Linkdomain:url.com
   This command will give you results that display all the pages linked to any web page hosted at the url.com domain.
2. Link:http://www.url.com/page.html
   This command shows those pages that are linked directly to the page specified in the URL.
3. Linkdomain:url.com word
   This search command will display all the pages that include the term specified in the “word” that are linked to pages hosted at the specified URL. Use this command to find topical pages linking the URL.
4. Linkdomain:url.com -term
   Use the “– “ symbol to exclude pages containing the term after the “-”  from the search.
5. Linkdomain:url.com -site:url.com
   In addition to the “-“symbol, you can also remove specific sites from the results. This may be especially useful if a large site links to the destination website on every page, and you only want to see links that don’t include that site.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Iframes and 301 Redirect

As part of our grand plan to lead you through the various aspects of optimizing your new Wix website we noticed some of you have showed an interest in various aspects of domain forwarding and iframe. Our support team received lots of questions on why their new Flash website isn’t listed in Google and other search engines and when we checked we discovered several cases in which iframes were being used. For this reason, we decided to explain iframes and shed some light on the issue.

Iframes Yes or No

Iframes (or inline frames) allow you to display content from one domain, under a different domain. For example, you’ve built a free website with Wix all about photography and you have another new domain called photography.com. You want all the content you’ve uploaded onto the Wix website to appear under your new ‘photography’ domain. What you do is, you add an iframe into the source of your photography domain and place your Wix website into the iframe. None of the content will appear in your photography domain. Your new domain will appear to have zero content, no fresh content, no links, no updates, nothing. You can add the basic Meta tags, such as title, description and keywords into your photography domain, but that will be the only thing the search engine crawler will see, and as you can read in our previous blog post 7 Super Tips to Getting Google to Crawl Your Site Faster, where there is no content there is no crawler, no indexing and no ranking. Content is Google’s king, bread and butter. In fact, if you visit Google SEO sites you’ll discover that they strongly advise against using frames and iframes in general, as it places you in quite a disadvantage.

Redirecting 301 & Domain Forwarding

The 301 redirect code is an HTTP status code used for redirection. The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to a new location, specified by the ‘location’ header that follows (in the source). What this means is, that the old URL is obsolete and that the crawler should replace any references to the old URL with the newly indicated URL.

What will actually happen is that as you load the web page in the browser you will automatically be redirected to the new location specified in the ‘location’ header. This is a permanent redirect, so when you press the back button, your browser won’t send you back to the original page. Using the 301 redirect also tells search engines that all link equities from the original URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, this also means that the new page will inherit the rankings from the original page.

Let’s take a look and see what happens to your ‘photography’ domain in this case. In practice, your ‘photography’ domain is considered the ‘original’ domain, because that’s where you’re sending your visitors. As they attempt to visit your ‘photography’ site, they are automatically redirected to your Wix Flash website. This means that your Wix website will continue to gain strength, as all the content and links are ascribed to it now, and the original URL, (using the example of the ‘photography’ URL) will lose its ranking.

Summary

After taking a quick glance at the ways in which you have been using iframes and the redirect option for your Flash website, it appears that they are usually used to create an individual domain name.

By using the iframe you lose your page ranking and undermine every optimization effort you’ve made.
By using the 301 domain forwarding you are strengthening the Wix URL instead of your new URL.

Getting your own domain name with Wix is cheap, starting from about $5 a month. Is it really worth the hassle, the trouble and the loss of your page ranking?