Ask Kalena

I’m interested in knowing whether search engines index deep content such as pdf’s. We have several pdf’s available for download across a few of our sites. Roughly speaking, what level of weight/importance is given to deep content vs on-site surface content? And is it worthwhile re-visiting all of our pdf’s and optimising the text content they contain?

Thanks,
Brendan

Hi Brendan

Yes, most search engines index PDFs. In fact, after HTML files, PDFs are the most popular file format on the web.

In terms of deep content – most search engines only dig down a certain number of folders when indexing a site for the first time. They generally come back to dig deeper, but may not index all the files on your site. For this reason, you should place all your most important content in the top 2 or 3 levels (e.g. not buried too many sub-folders deep).

Provided you have included all your pages and files in your XML sitemap and submitted that to Google and other engines, your most important content should get indexed regularly.

Regarding optimising PDFs, yes, I would recommend you do this. Here’s a terrific article from SEOmoz that should give you some tips for doing this.

Kalena

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Kalena,

I am a former student and I have a good question: Suppose I have a landing page for ‘pick a keyword’? Obviously I want the customer to land on this page but this page does not have any pagerank yet. The homepage however does have pagerank and the search results in showing the homepage. How do I get the landing page to out rank the homepage for the specific term?

Respectfully, Cliff

Hi Cliff,

This question really comes back to the fundamentals of SEO, so provides a good opportunity to review some of the basics.

Often a websites Home Page will outrank it’s other, more targeted pages, even though they have more content relevant to the search query, but why is this the case? The answer is usually quite simple, and it mostly comes down to backlinks.  More often than not a websites home page has significantly more links to it from external sites, than other pages on the site.  Search engines treat backlinks as “votes of confidence” and use anchor text associated with those links as a strong signal about what the site is about.

So, to answer you question – How do I get a landing page to out rank my homepage? – get back to the basics :

1. Ensure that the contents of the landing page is highly relevant to and includes plenty of mentions of your targeted keywords
2. Optimise Page Title, description, H tags for your keyword
3. Establish links to the landing page (not your sites home page), from related third party sites with you keyword phrases as anchor text.

Hope that helps…

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO Consulting (Brisbane, Australia)

Hello Kalena

I have a couple of questions about my WordPress site.

I have signed up for a Google AdSense and Google Analytics account but I am confused as to where to place the tracking codes.

Can you help me at all?

Thanks
Sarah

Hi Sarah

I recommend you review Google’s own instructions for adding the Google Analytics code.

If you’re adding the code to a WordPress site, you need to add it to the header.php file from within WordPress. You go to the *Editor* area under Administration from your WordPress dashboard. Then you copy and paste the code into the header.php page, just before the closing </head> tag.

Google also provides instructions for adding the AdSense code. However, if you want to put AdSense on your WordPress site and you’re not confident editing code, you’re probably better off installing an AdSense plugin that will help you to add AdSense ads to your pages without messing around with code hacking.

Hope this helps

Kalena

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Hi Kalena,

This is Pratik from India. I am working here as an SEO and dealing with a lot of overseas clients from SEO perspective. Here, I have got a query while working on a website. I have found that my website is receiving traffic from different countries which is not the actual target to get the leads converted; my main target is United States only, so the additional traffic will be of no use. Therefore, I am wondering of blocking other countries visitors to visit my website and redirect them on a simple page. The question is what disadvantages you see on blocking the traffic from other countries? Will this effect on SEO in anyway? Will I be able to rank well on Google as I am doing today? I am more concerned on SEO results because my website is ranking well for more than 500 keywords in top 10. Could you please let me know comments on the same? Looking forward to your feedback!

Thanks,
Pratik

Hi Pratik,

Unless there is a VERY good reason, I would be very, very cautious about blocking any sort of access to your site.

Just because traffic may be coming from a source that is not your specific target market, does not necessarily mean that it will not result in a lead.  A US resident may be on holidays or working abroad (there may be a lot of potential leads in US Military personnel posted abroad for instance), or may have outsourced research to an overseas service (much like what you are apparently offering for SEO).

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the importance of links…Although backlinks from websites local to your target market are likely to be of better value than those from other countries, it is probable that you could generate some very good, relevant links from other countries.  If they were unable to access the site, clearly you would be missing out on backlinks.

Perhaps the most important reason why you may not want to block other countries though is related to search crawlers. Search engines, won’t necessarily crawl your site from the country where your target market is located.  If you block access to other countries there is a very real chance that it will limit the ability of search engines to crawl (and therefore index and rank) your site.

Traffic, even if is not coming from your target market, is rarely a bad thing as you never know what might lead to sales, leads, enquiries or links, unless you have a specific need to keep your site hidden from specific users, you should not be limiting access.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Brisbane)

Hi Kalena

I’ve contacted you because I feel frustrated. Until last night my site was listed within the second page results in google with the key words “learn Spanish free”. Thanks to the SEO course at SEC and my work , I was proud to see results like this. However for some strange reason this morning (UK time) I am nowhere to be seen with this key words. I have checked other search engines (yahoo, bing) and I am listed there (3rd and 2nd pages). Would you be able to tell if I have done anything to upset google? And if I have what?

Furthermore, I have checked all key phrases that have brought me visits before and I am nowhere to be seen within google index. (I used to appear on the first page with these key phrases). The only time I am in google listing is when I search the words “Spanish aid” ( the name of my domain) or the full URL of my web pages. I am also appear in google listing with the  word “Spanish colours” under Images. I find this extremely weird as it seem that google has penalised me for something I don’t know of. As I said on my previous email I was progressing and I was happy that I was learning an seeing positive result, now it seems that I have taken a big step back. I hope you can give my an explanation as at the moment I am banging my head against the wall.
Thanks a lot for your help

Thank you
Luis

Hi Luis

Fluctuations in your Google rankings are completely normal. Sometimes, they’ll make a slight tweak to their ranking algorithm which can result in other sites ranking above yours and/or lowering your previous ranking for certain keywords. But this doesn’t mean you’re suffering a penalty.

See some previous blog posts about this, particularly:

Why is my CMS based website only ranking for the home page

Why does my website not rank high on search engines?

Your site is still in the Google index and you rank #1 for your brand name so you haven’t been penalized. I could see nothing wrong with your content that would trigger any alarm bells with Google.

However, the big problem with your site is the low Google Toolbar PageRank score (1/10) reflecting the very low number of incoming links pointing to your site. Has your PR score always been 1/10? If it has recently dropped from a 2 or something, that might partially explain the ranking drop. While a higher PageRank score is not a pre-requisite to high rankings, it can be a key indicator of your site’s link popularity, which in turn has a strong influence on your ultimate keyword positions in Google.

The more links you have pointing to your site from related sites and using relevant keywords in the anchor text of the link the better you should rank for those keywords. The best thing you can do for your site right now is to build links pointing to it and to add new content. That will gradually improve your PageRank score and your link popularity – then the rankings will follow.

If you’re still worried, you can take the steps outlined in these posts:

How do I fix ranking penalties?

Why doesn’t Google index my entire site?

Kalena

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