Go Green, the Natural Step and Sustainability
Filed Under Green, SEO, Search Engines, Sustainability | Leave a Comment
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Going Green doesn’t always equal Sustainability
I attended the Natural Step open house in Portland, Oregon last night.
It was a great standing room only affair with beer and wine in ample supplies and food to die for. As I weaved my way patiently through their new digs I could hear discussions of what sustainability was, what it meant to everyone’s business and why they were interested in going green. There was a slide show playing a loop on the East wall of the office giving tribute to sponsors and giving some of the latest local sustainability news.
Definition for Sustainability
Scientists agree that our current unsustainable path comes from four basic root causes directly related to human activity. In a sustainable society, nature is not subject to systematically increasing:
- concentrations of substances extracted from the Earth’s crust
- concentrations of substances produced by society
- degradation by physical means
- people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine there capacity to meet their needs
As I made my way back to the North end of the office where most of the people seemed to congregate I realized why. The marvelous food was laid out there in all it’s spectacular glory. Crave catering was offering grilled beef skewers and artichoke cups. The artichoke cups were just incredible, they were the perfect combination of spices and texture. You can visit Crave Catering online at Portland-Catering.com. The other food offering was by Artemis Foods. Artemis had quite a display the delicacy that caught my eye was there beautiful truffles. I almost missed the tiny URL in their literature, they are at ArtemisFoods.com.
the Natural Step
When I got home from the soiree I decided to visit the Natural Step website to find out more information about them. Since there URL is very prominent on their literature I figured I was in for a treat. Their home page was impressive at the least. Beautiful lay out, the colors are very attractive, and the navigation looked clean and simple. I clicked on the top level “OUR SOLUTIONS” and was hit in the face with a 404.
OK, I decided to use one of the drop down links I chose “+ Solutions for Business” I knew this would take me to a page. Guess what it did!
It took me to a page alright but a page with no information. And why would I want to share it?
Don’t make these mistakes with your site. Make sure if it is a link it will actually go to a real page and not an error page and make sure if you have a page at the end of a link it actually has information on it.
It is OK to launch your site before it is complete (by definition a website is never complete it is always growing) just don’t make your visitors pay in advance for your lack of content. The search engines don’t like this either. We don’t want either our people visitors or the search engines spiders disappointed with us. It could be fatal for our internet sustainability even if we are going green.
Late,
Gary Pool
Link Building : PageRank Still Equals PageRank : Google
Filed Under Google, SEO, Search Engines | Leave a Comment
Links from .edu or .gov Domains Are They The SEO Holy Grail?
Link Building
Link building is a very integral part of search engine optimization, and there are always many questions surrounding the best kinds of links. Most experts would say that highly relevant links from authority sites are the cream of the crop. But when those links are so hard to achieve, are there other types of links you could try to get?
Try searching for “edu text links” on Google and you’ll see ads from companies that promise to place links to your website on .edu web domains that are generally owned by US universities. The same is true for .gov domains as that are the official websites of US government.
One popular belief in the SEO community is that a link from a .edu or .gov domain carries a lot of link juice with the search engines. If any of these ‘trusted’ sites link to your site, your search rankings get a boost.
In a recent Google Webmaster Chat transcript this belief was debunked by Matt Cutts and John Mueller.
Questions and answers from the third online Webmaster Chat from October 22, 2008
TylerDee, TX: Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?
Matt Cutts: This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.
JohnMu: We generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.
So it’s the site’s PageRank that counts and has much less to do with the top level domain of the site. This all means that your site may derive more Google link juice from an old blog hosted on blogspot or blogger than from any .edu University web page freshly launched.
Links for Sale on an University .edu Site
Stanford University’s site daily.stanford.edu initially had a Google PageRank of 9 but it was penalized by Google for selling links. They continue the practice of selling links and therefore the Google PageRank of the daily.stanford.edu site has plummeted to 4.
If you want to buy a link on that page, you will definitely get a backlink from the stanford.edu domain but it may not be as effective as you would like it be since the page itself has little Google juice to give away.
Still looking to score those coveted .edu links?
Back in 2007 Joe Whyte posted an article titled “Amazing technique to get FREE .edu backlinks that is 100% ethical“. If you want that .edu link to your site Joe’s solution is pretty simple and straight forward. “So why do people like .gov and .edu links? As martinibuster says, they tend to be in good neighborhoods (versus other sites, for example).”
Late,
Gary Pool
