Master Site Manager SEO Tracking Software

Why Don’t Your Stats Match What I See In the Search Engines?

SEOSoftware — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:13:58 +0000

Most of the time the problem is simply how you’re looking up your stats versus how Master Site Manager look them up.

For example we look up your site in the format:

“http://www.yourdomain.com”

Remember, you want to compare apples to apples here, so it’s very important to put both the “http://” AND the “www” in your domain so that you are looking up your site the same way we do.

If you play around with it and do your searches in Yahoo for example, you’ll see the effects using the “http” and the “www” when searching vs., not using them. The differences are really quite dramatic.

We’ve done a lot of testing and found this format to be the most accurate.

But What If Your SEO Results Still Don’t Match Ours?

There are few other things that could be contributing to this.

Sometimes the results you’ll see are different based on geography and from what data center your ISP is getting its results from especially if you’re located outside of the United States (all of our look up servers are located in the U.S.)

Other times it might be that we looked up the results a few days ago and they’ve changed.

An easy thing to do is just press the “Update Stats” button in your control panel. Then see if this doesn’t fix the problem. 9 times out of 10 it will.

If your results are still not matching up, use the support contact form and let us know about it.

It’s something we can take a look and get fixed for you.

I Forgot My Master Site Manager Login Password – Now What?

SEOSoftware — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:07:33 +0000

If you’ve forgotten your MasterSiteManager.com account login password, not to worry. You can still log into the site.

Just go to the log-in page and click on the “Forgot Password” link and your password will be emailed to you.

Outbound Link Tracking is Here!

SEO Stats Tracking — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:29:59 +0000

Think you know how many “Outbound links” your site has? Maybe not!

Knowing EXACTLY how many outbound links your site has isn’t just about SEO, and funneling page rank anymore.

When hackers break into your site they are far more likely to hide links on home page to game the search engines than do much of anything else like messing with your homepage, planting a Trojan or crashing your server/site.

If you’re not constantly checking the HTML code of your home page you will have no idea that you’re a victim of link spam.

To make matters worse if you don’t catch it soon enough, there is a VERY GOOD possibility that Google will ban you from their search results for linking into hundreds of “Bad Neighborhoods”.

Sure you can fix it (if you find it that is) and reapply for readmission into Google, but what a huge pain and waste of time.

The good news is hackers are pretty greedy and if they’ve taken the time to break into your site, they usually don’t just post 1 or 2 links – they post hundreds!

But now (in addition to all the other great stuff it does) Master Site Manager tracks the number of outbound links coming from each of your sites – and in effect, giving you an ‘early warning” that you’ve been hacked!

For example, if you see the number of outbound links on your site jump to 200 or 300, check your site ASAP - it’s likely that a hacker has managed to get in and plant links to his porno / casino / sex drugs web sites.

Here’s an example how bad the problem is with blogs like wordpress:

http://searchenginetigers.com/2008/11/upgrade-wordpress-or-sell-viagra-the-choice-is-yours.html

The second reason we added “Outbound link tracking” to Master Site Manager is as an assistance tool for building your own link network.

If you have a site with a high number of outbound links on it you need to remember that each of these links will have less power than if it had only 3 or 4 outbound links.

You may want to work at lowering the number of outbound links on the site (or at least your home pages) so that its links to your “money” site have more power in them.

Now there is nothing else you need do in order to add “Outbound Link Tracking your account. Master Site Manager will automatically track this for you just like it does for all your other SEO Tracking Stats.

Getting Ranked 1st in Google

SEOSoftware — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:22:50 +0000

One of the things I hear a lot from business owners online who’ve spent a LOT of money on web designers and SEO companies is this:

“Why isn’t my site the first result on Google or any other search engine?”

Well, the answer is simple, and not one that they really want to hear.

The fact is that it is extremely difficult to be the first result on Google or any other search engine.

This article should help first get your site indexed and listed on a search engine.

There are thousands of search engines out there, but only a small fraction of them are likely to send you more than a couple hundred of visitors each month.

Instead of submitting your site to as many search engines as possible, please focus your energy on the top four.

Google
Yahoo
Bing
Ask

Though honestly, Google is KING. Combine ALL the other traffic you get from Yahoo, Bing and Ask, and it still won’t equal what you get from Google.

Having said that, once you have narrowed down your focus, SOME SEO “experts” will tell you to submit your site to your chosen search engines.

Don’t. Because it’s the SLOWEST way to get your site indexed. In fact, Google even has a little penalty that smack you with if you submit directly.

You are FAR better off just buying a text link from a high profile site for a month or two. You’ll get indexed faster and the results are much more likely to stick.

But if your web master “insists” on submitting your site directly to the search engines, here are some tips:

1: Do NOT spam the search engines. Once you submit your site to a search engine, don’t submit it again the next day — they got your submission.If you continue to bother them with “hey look at my site” submissions, you risk having your site banned and have it never get a listing at all. Some times it will take up to 2 – 8 weeks for your site to get fully indexed and listed properly.

2: Be patient! For the most part, you do not need to re-submit your site over and over again. If you make some major changes or additions to your site, there is no harm in re-submitting it 3 months later, but not every week.

Now “old school” advice is to add what’s called a “revist tag” to your pages, but it’s a waste of time. If you’re getting backlinks to your site (and you should) the search engine spiders or bots will revisit your site automatically – often coming by several times a day at first.

Doing so helps the engine determine the frequency at which you post new content. The more often you post, the more often they will revist.

Hopefully, you have planned your website launch and previously optimized your site for search engines. If you have not done this, you should still have some time to do this.

“Optimizing” for search engines – search engine optimization – means having the right things in the right places so that spidering programs (also known as “robots”) get the information and impressions about your site that you want them to get. Make sure you have the right metatags, keywords and the right content on each page.

Adding a trailing slash to requested URLs

SEO Stats Tracking — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:01:56 +0000

Here’s the problem:

Some search engines remove the trailing slash from urls that look like directories – e.g. Yahoo does it for example.

However, you might find that this could result into duplicated content problems when the same page content is accessible under different urls.

And clearly you don’t want that.

But if you’re using Apache on your web server, there’s a simple solution.

Let’s have a look at an example: enarion.net/google/ is indexed in Yahoo as enarion.net/google – which would result in two urls with the same content.

Solution:

The solution is to create a .htaccess rewrite rule that adds the trailing slashes to these urls. Example – redirect all urls that do not have a trailing slash to urls with a trailing slash:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

Explanation of the add trailing slash .htaccess rewrite rule:

The first line tells Apache that this is code for the rewrite engine of the mod_rewrite module of Apache. The 2nd line sets the current directory as page root. But the interesting part is:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

makes sure that existing files will not get a slash added. You shouldn’t do the same with directories since this would exlude the rewrite behaviour for existing directories. The line

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !example.php

exludes a sample url that should not be rewritten. This is just an example. If you do not have a file or url that should not be rewritten, remove this line. The condition:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

and finally fires when a url does not contain a trailing slash.

Now we need to redirect the urls without the trailing slash: pre> RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1/ [L,R=301] does the 301 redirect to the url, with the trailing slash appended.

You should replace domain.com with your url. Make sure that you stick with the right domain name; if unsure, have a look at this article.

Pretty cool, eh?

This article was referenced with gratitude from enarion.net.

Migrating domain content using .htaccess:

SEO Stats Tracking Software — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:55:15 +0000

Ok here’s the problem:

You have an old website that can be found under olddomain.com and you have a new website that is accessible under newdomain.com.

Copying the content of the old website to the new website is the first step – but what comes after that?

Doing a “301 moved permanently” redirect from the old domain to the new domain – offers several advantages, and it’s not tough to do.

Users will automatically be redirected to the new domain – you do not have to inform them.
Search engines will be redirected to the new domain and all related information will be moved to the new domain (but this might take some time).
Google’s PageRank ™ will be transfered to the new domain, as well as other internal information that is being used to set the position of pages in the search engine result pages (serp’s) – like TrustRank .

So here the solution:

Create a 301 redirect for all http requests that are going to the old domain.

Example 1 – Redirect from olddomain.com to www.newdomain.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This is useful when you use www.newdomain.com as your new domain name (see also this article about redirecting www and non-www domains). If not – use the code of example 2.

Example 2 – Redirect from olddomain.com to newdomain.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

See, told you it was easy

Setting up a URL redirect/rewrite using the .htaccess file?

Master Site Manager — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:52:46 +0000

.htaccess Redirect/Rewrite Tutorial

There are several reasons that you’d use a 301 redirect on your web site. Maybe you renamed / deleted a page, or post.

Typically by default – depending on how your web host has their servers set up – your web site can be accessed with both www.domain.com and domain.com.

This is NOT good… Why?

What this means is that when Google comes along to spider / index your site – it “sees” TWO identical copies of the site. Opps!

And because Google penalizes ON-SITE duplicate content, you should restrict the access to either www.domain.com or domain.com. In other words, you need to decide right now if you want your site to be know on the web as www.yoursite.com OR yoursite.com.

You can’t do both…. well you can, but Google won’t show your site the love that it deserves if you do.

Some links may be outside of your website scope and/or the search engines may have already indexed your website under both addresses. If that’s the case, there’s not a lot you can do about it, but setting a 301 redirect up will help.

So the question is “How do I redirect all links for www.domain.com to domain.com ?”

Simply create a server side 301 redirect up in your .htaccess file. It’s not as hard as it sounds.

*** BEFORE making any changes, though I do recommend taking your EXISTING .htaccess file and archiving it so you have a back up in case you break something…

Create a 301 redirect forcing all http requests to use either www.domain.com or domain.com:

* Example 1 – Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com:

Simply add this code to the top of your current .htaccess file. Be sure to substitute your domain name in the code.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

* Example 2 – Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Ok, let’s look at what this does with this explanation of this .htaccess 301 redirect:

Let’s have a look at the example 1 – Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com. The first line tells apache to start the rewrite module. The next line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]

specifies that the next rule only fires when the http host (that means the domain of the queried url) is not (- specified with the “!”) www.domain.com.

The $ means that the host ends with www.domain.com – and the result is that all pages from www.domain.com will trigger the following rewrite rule. Combined with the inversive “!” is the result every host that is not www.domain.com will be redirected to this domain.

The [NC] specifies that the http host is case insensitive. The escapes the “.” – because this is a special character (normally, the dot (.) means that one character is unspecified).

The final line describes the action that should be executed:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The ^(.*)$ is a little magic trick. Can you remember the meaning of the dot? If not, this can be any character(but only one). So .* means that you can have a lot of characters, not only one. This is what we need because ^(.*)$ contains the requested url, without the domain.

The next part http://www.domain.com/$1 describes the target of the rewrite rule. This is our “final” used domain name, where $1 contains the content of the (.*).

The next part is also important, since it does the 301 redirect for us automatically: [L,R=301]. L means this is the last rule in this run. After this rewrite the webserver will return a result. The R=301 means that the webserver returns a 301 moved permanently to the requesting browser or search engine.

I know this may seem pretty daunting to some who feel it’s too techniucal but it will pay off big time for you in the SERPs. If you don’t know how to do this or feel uncomfortable doing it, hire someone. It really is a “must do” for any site looking to secure top rankings.

Special Limited Time Offer – For Bloggers Only!

Master Site Manager — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:29:37 +0000

If you are a blogger or an Internet journalist, we’ve got a very special deal for you!

Just write an article about MasterSiteManager.com and we will give you our SEO Silver package free – Honest!

BUT THIS IS A LIMITED TIME OFFER…..

To qualify for a free SEO Tracking account, blogs / sites need to meet the following conditions:

The content of the article must be original and written as a review.
The article should contain at least 500 words, with a “do follow” link pointing to www.MasterSiteManager.com plus a screenshot of our software or homepage.
The website/blog should be industry related to MasterSiteManager.com’s target market (SEO, Internet Marketing, IT etc).
Once you post your article, you need to use at least one of the content sharing services, like Digg.com, Sphinn, Reddit, or StumbleUpon, to share your comments and opinions about MasterSiteManager.com

When you’ve finished just tell us where the link of your article is so we can confirm your eligibility and we will send you your free license!

To download the MasterSiteManager logo and promotional screen shots please go to our Press Center page.

SEO Tracking Is a Waste of Time

SEO Stats Tracking — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:23:38 +0000

Lot’s of times people get confused as to the real value behind our online SEO tracking service.

They say things to themselves like:

“I already use a bunch of SEO tools and software now” or “I can get all the same tools you provide for free at this web site over here, …etc...”

If that sounds like you, I totally get it. I really do. But consider for a moment that you might be missing the “forest for the trees” as they say.

I say this because believe it or not, Master Site Manager really has nothing to do with SEO – per say.

Excuse me? Ok, Don now you’re just talking crazy!

No, seriously it’s true. Stay with me for a moment…

You have to “grasp” this concept right away or you won’t realize the real value inherent in using MasterSiteManager.com, and you waste HOURS every month doing what you’ve always done when it comes to search engine rank checking and monitoring.

MasterSiteManager.com provides many tools to help get your site ranking higher in the search engines, HOWEVER the REAL function of our software is to SAVE YOU TIME.

Look, if you’re like most people doing SEO, you’re spending lot’s of time bouncing between software programs & web sites just to get all the tracking stats you need.

I personally know SEVERAL high profile professional SEO’s who literally spend two hours a day gathering and tracking this stuff!

Well, I should say that they “used to spend two hours a day… Not anymore”

But now you don’t have to use a bunch of different software programs and or web sites to get the SEO stats you need because everything you need is right here in your MasterSiteManager.com control panel.

And that’s the beauty of Master Site Manager.com. ALL your external stats are at your finger tips – making it super easy to see INSTANTLY exactly how well your site(s) are doing.

I know, I know, it sounds like a commercial, but in a way it is. Because instead of spending hours collecting your back link totals, keyword rankings and all the other data you need, use Master Site Manager and get the info you want “at a glance!”

Regardless if you just want to get a “10,000″ foot overview of your stats, or you want to drill down and get specifics – its all there for you.

Take a moment and think about how much time you’ll save doing it this way instead of the way you used to do it.

What’s that going to mean to you and your business, or your clients?

So log in and add your site(s) to your account right now.

It only takes a few minutes to save hours.

You can log into your account here:

http://www.mastersitemanager.com

Till next time,

Don Schnure
Master Site Manager.Com
http://www.twitter.com/MSMSEO

Google Mandates Personalized Search… Scary…

Master Site Manager — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:44:02 +0000

Google Extends Personalized Search and Adds Real-Time Results:

Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in.

This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.

“For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes,” Google explains in a blog post on the subject. “Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.”

What Does This Mean for Natural SEO?

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

“Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them,” comments Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, which offers SEO services. “I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried.”

My guess is that all of the same best practices for search engine optimization will apply. What you may have to pay greater focus to is your target audience.

On the other hand, personalized search could play to the strengths of the horizontal content approach. Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Network and Publisher of WebProNews has an interesting take on the matter. “There is going to be the same number of searches and the same number of clicks to content,” he says. “So basically, personalization in search will just be dividing up the traffic pie more.”

“This could make people think more about the long tail instead of just focusing on their top key words that they would like to rank for,” he adds. “It could also make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords.”

Could personalized search directly contribute to an increase in revenue for Google itself? You bet!

The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.

“This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser,” Google says. “It’s completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You’ll know when we customize results because a ‘View customizations’ link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.”

If you’re worried about privacy, settle down, because Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click “web history” in the top right corner of a search results page, then click “disable customizations.” You can also just clear your browser’s cookies.

On a related note, Google is also rolling out the inclusion of real-time search results on regular search results pages for some queries. These results draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources.

This means you have yet another opportunity for visibility, but it also presents a new challenge, as with any other universal search element, it may push organic listings down on the page. Are you glad to finally see some real-time search make its way to Google?

About the Author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237