Dancing

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/

Instead of redirecting hundreds or thousands of pages all at once, move your site folder by folder. Doing so will allow you to make sure everything is working properly before you get too committed to the process, and to roll things back if there’s problems.

Google Webmaster Advice:

For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (Do this through .htaccess)

You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URL’s

Webmaster tools is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want it to have.

Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we re-crawl our site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your sites pages.

Clarify Single Objective
Your landing page should have a single objective. This means presenting a single message to the searcher so they do not get confused on what you are trying to present to them. Attacking a single message with each landing page makes it easier to keep the message direct, on point and short.

Short and to the Point
Be direct. Keeping the message short and to the point will keep the user from getting distracted. The landing page should be “scanable” which mean a user should be able to scan the page and understand what you are selling without having to read very much.

Ad Copy to Match Landing Page Message
This is the job of your Online Marketing Team. We will create ad copy to match the text on the landing page once a specific landing page has been created. It is important to say the same thing in the ad that is on the landing page so that the search see a consistent message.

Keyword Specific
The objective of the landing page will help drive what type of keywords you should be bidding on. Having the keywords you are bidding actually on the landing page improves your quality score within Google which in turn will help your ads rank higher for less cost per click.

Clear Call to Action
“Subscribe” and other descriptive buttons tell your readers what to do once they land on the page. This is probably one of the most important factors of landing pages. If a searcher is confused on what to do next it will be hard to capture that searcher.

Limited Links to Go Elsewhere
Having limited links on your landing page gives the searcher very few options on what they can do once they get to your page. By having an abbreviated navigation you still give the searcher a couple of options but not the massive amount of links that is in a normal navigation.

The number of companies advertising on the top three search engines increased considerably in Q1. Both January and February saw strong growth in the overall number of search engine advertisers, followed by modest growth in March. This represents the first significant sign of expansion in advertiser activity since last May. Most of this was due to a large increase in the number of active Google advertisers.

The trends in advertiser share which persisted throughout the latter half of 2007 largely reversed themselves in Q108. The biggest gainer this quarter was Google, who increased their advertiser share from 72.7% to 77.0%. Yahoo ended a long winning streak with its first decline in seven months, dropping from 34.5% to 30.1%. MSN held its ground, increasing slightly from 11.1% to 11.4%.

Despite this short-term shift in fortunes, Google lost ground to its two major competitors over the trailing twelve months. We estimate that MSN has increased its year-over-year advertiser base by 11%, Yahoo by 5%, and Google by only 4%.

While suggestive, our advertiser counts are estimates only and should be interpreted in light of other data. These figures represent the net effect of both new advertisers and advertisers lost through attrition.

Charts:
1. Share of Advertisers by Search Engine
2. Monthly Change in Advertiser Count
3. Relative Advertiser Count vs. 12 Months Ago

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
In other words, a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.
Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The scale for PageRank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale and roughly based upon quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the page providing the link.

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant.

For example, if a webmaster has a website about how to rescue orphaned kittens, and received a backlink from another website about kittens, then that would be more relevant in a search engine’s assessment than say a link from a site about car racing. The more relevant the site is that is linking back to your website, the better the quality of the backlink.

Search engines want websites to have a level playing field, and look for natural links built slowly over time. While it is fairly easy to manipulate links on a web page to try to achieve a higher ranking, it is a lot harder to influence a search engine with external backlinks from other websites. This is also a reason why backlinks factor in so highly into a search engine’s algorithm.

Lately, however, a search engine’s criteria for quality inbound links has gotten even tougher, thanks to unscrupulous webmasters trying to achieve these inbound links by deceptive or sneaky techniques, such as with hidden links, or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide inbound links to websites. These pages are called link farms, and they are not only disregarded by search engines, but linking to a link farm could get your site banned entirely.