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 currently 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.

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 SEO monitoring software 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://www.backup-technology.com/hundreds-of-uk-government-school-university-websites-hacked/

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.

“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 “revisit tag” to your pages, but it’s a waste of time. If you’re getting back links 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 revisit.

Hopefully, you have planned your website launch and previously optimized your site for search engines. If you have not done this yet, 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 meta tags, keywords and the right content on each page.

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.

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.

1. Users will automatically be redirected to the new domain – you do not have to inform them.
2. 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).
3. 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

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