Search Engines and Meta Tags

Every few days I see a new thread posted on the various webmaster forums I frequent asking how important meta tags are to search engines. Here is a quote from Matt Cutt’s interview with John Battelle’s Searchblog.

We’ve seen the whole tagging idea in Web 1.0 when they were called meta tags, and some people abused them so badly with deceptive words that to this day, most search engine give little or no scoring weight to keywords in meta tags. You can read the rest of the article at John Battelle’s Searchblog

I must have ADD

One of the sites I have been anxiously waiting for Google to index finally made it in this weekend. It is pretty nice to finally show up. So how am I gonna celebrate? I am gonna rip it down and start over. Isn’t that the norm?

I have noticed something else during the indexing progress. I have some of my sites on their own IP and some of them are on shared hosting from bluehost.com. I have been really pleased with Bluehost and think it is a great value, but I have noticed it takes longer for Google to find new websites. The other sites have shown up very quickly compared to the ones of a bargain hosting company.

Phantom Traffic

One of my affiliate landing pages has a content landing page for an online service that allows you to watch cameras inside a realty TV show house. I was sending traffic to the site when suddenly the traffic went through the roof.  My conversions picked up and I couldn’t figure out why because my PPC were at the same level they had been.  Then I check Google Analytics and saw a ton of content referrals.  I searched for the keywords but gave up looking for my page after going 20 pages deep in Google. I still have no real idea how all the traffic found the page, but I am certainly happy about it. It has been an experience I want to duplicate and compare to the small niche market.  You can definitely make money with traffic and next we try to make money with small niche highly targeted traffic.