What is a good redirect vs. a bad redirect, change your webpage or website without losing Google juice - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 26

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO Podcast. Hi, and thanks for joining our SEO Podcast. That's an SEO Podcast by eWebStyle. I am the owner of eWebStyle. And your name is? And my name is Chris Burris. Just call me Owner. That's how I go to meetings. Hi, I'm Owner. Like in a contract, in a legal contract. From here on, known as Owner. And you will be client. And since there's three of you, we'll client A, B, and C. Excellent. You may have noticed, or probably not if you're listening to the podcast, we went in and we changed the title of the podcast. That was an incredibly interesting story. Because I had attempted to change the title of the podcast. You did change it. Yeah, I did change it. That's right. I did change the title of the podcast at least a month and a half ago. And it wasn't updating. It was happening on iTunes. And so I'm Googling. I'm like, why isn't it updating? This is ridiculous. I can't understand it. Maybe my thought process was that maybe iTunes captures the title and the image. And then that stays constant. But they do allow you to upload the episode. But I was like, okay, so if that's true, then there has to be some way to change it. And even if I have to delete my podcast, I want to rename my podcast. Now, you may be thinking, Unknown Secrets of SEO, that's just such an amazing name. Why would you want to change it? Owner. Owner guy. And the reason was, and we talked about this in a previous podcast, so go back and check that out, that I was sitting down with a friend of mine who has Apple TV, and he's a sales manager for a large oil and gas company here in Houston. And he said he wouldn't search for SEO, which we kind of know, you know, that's what we use here in the industry. He would search for things like internet marketing or maybe search marketing

or something along those lines. So I added the word internet marketing in front of Unknown Secrets of SEO, which is in fact an SEO trick. SEO, yeah. You've got to like that. I do like that. So you can go check that out now in iTunes. We show up on page two. And I was doing a little research, you know, like if you do podcast in iTunes and then search internet marketing, you actually come up like the first, of the first nine that I looked at, like six of them haven't been updated since 08. Oh, man. And I'm like, well, you know, you would think that that should be part of the search criteria that, you know, iTunes uses. Okay. There should be some significant value to any podcast that, you know, has a new episode from the last month. I feel like there should be some optimization of, of their internal, maybe iTunes, the internal site of their database of podcasts. Yeah. Like they should, they should optimize. I guess it, I almost feel like any site with a search feature should have like some sort of internal optimization. And, and, and specifically because of the nature of a podcast, it should be, you know, related to the fact that a new podcast has been added and that's, you know, I don't know. I don't understand why that, that is not happening. And, and, uh, it doesn't matter. We're on the second page and I think we're going to be moving up, uh, just because we're awesome. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. The owner agrees. Yeah. All right. So that's a topic for today. A little bit, uh, about what we talked about last time. We talked about caffeine. I think that was a, actually it was the last podcast, really interesting discussion on, on things that are happening in the news. We had, uh, we talked about, um, being who, yeah, the being Yahoo or, uh, deal or ordeal or whatever you want to call it. Ordeal. Yeah. Ordeal for the people involved. Um, and

then the, the, kind of the history and how, uh, Microsoft is getting screwed. So go back and listen to that podcast because you know you're intrigued now. How did Microsoft get, uh, or how does, how does the owner think that Microsoft got screwed? Um, we talked about caffeine, which is a new release, um, for Google. It, uh, caffeine apparently mostly covers indexing. You want to know some more details about that? Go back and listen to our previous podcast. This is podcast 26. 26. Can you believe it? Wow. We're past the quarter century. It's our silver anniversary or gold or I don't know. You didn't buy me anything yet. I'm sorry. Um, and last podcast was a naked podcast. I was not, I'm not, I'm not getting naked this podcast either. Either. Are you going to make clear? Just put that out there. And this podcast, you know, there's no nudity in this podcast. Oh man. And the reason there's no nudity in this podcast is because a naked man commandeered a high school school bus. Yes. Why would he do that? Where was this? Now get there. I don't, I don't know. I was looking at the news and I don't know enough details. I just don't. It's bizarre. So imagine this, like the kids get in the bus. You'd think he'd like come at the last minute and come in the door. Yeah. He goes in a window. How do you? So, so then I'm thinking he must've gone in clothes on and then taken out. No, there's no mention of that in the article. He went through a bus. Can you imagine going through a bus window naked? Like that, it just doesn't seem easy. Yeah. It seems like that would take some time. Yeah. So why is anybody still on the bus? Like I'd be gone if a dude's trying to break in the bus naked. Well, no, the bus is driving, right? And I don't know how, maybe he's, maybe he was all greased up and he just like popped right

in. Yes. This is bizarre. Is it Spider-Man? Naked Spider-Man. I mean, I would, how do you do that? Like, first of all, why would he do that? Exactly. I'm going to jump through that window right there. Yeah. Naked. What are you doing on the street naked? And then you decide you need to get in that school bus. Anyway, so, so the school bus driver is apparently terrified and leaves the, the driving station and maybe the naked man driving for a little bit and then he stops driving. So now the bus is moving. There's no one driving. Oh my gosh. So one of the high school kids grabs the wheel or something and then a confrontation occurs with naked Spider-Man and boom, they hit something. And then a crowd of people detained the man while all the kids are using the emergency. Remember that? Remember the drill we used to do, like the emergency escape? So now you know why you need it. It's not a fire. It's when naked Spider-Man comes onto your bus. Nothing ever happened that cool at my school. That's an excuse. I wouldn't, I'd be like, mama can't go to school. Yeah. There's a naked guy. I'm afraid of the naked man. Oh man. That's an interesting news story. I didn't know that. Yeah, so this is not a naked podcast. The last one was, this one will not be a naked podcast. So what's on the topic? So last time you had a task you were assigned to do and I know you promptly took care of that immediately this morning. I did. It took me seven days to get that done. I did a search for flights on Bing. Bing is touting that it's a decision. Yeah, it's a decision engine and I looked at Google and I think I just typed in, yeah, I did. I typed in flights to Houston on both Bing, Yahoo, and Google. And what I liked about Bing, here's really where Bing stands out. Bing will actually give you ticket prices to Houston

and then tell you, okay, you buy now or you buy now because this ticket price is about to increase or wait because ticket prices are decreasing, they should be lower within by next month. So I like that a lot. So they have, I feel like Bing has the cornering the market on flights or making, help you make decisions on flights and shopping. You can shop for certain products but, and they will give you pricing but not all of them. Like I did shop for mattresses and I got some local pricing which is really cool. I didn't even put it in Houston. I just put shop for mattress and then, but I did. Big brother there, you know, right, because, oh yeah, it's my computer, it's watching me. Your computer knows you're in Houston and is telling everyone. The shop feature I didn't feel like works as well because when you did shop for iPod, nothing came up. Well, to be honest, I started with shopping for iPod and that didn't work and then you said shop, I think you repeated it three times and then I got it on the fourth time and it still didn't work though. Shopping, shop. It still didn't come up. So I feel like they could, with shopping there's so many variables that you could type in to, you know, so I feel like they could kind of tighten that up. Like shop for escort. Don't ask me where that came from. News here in Houston recently. So are you looking for a Ford or you're just looking for some fun? We should email Bing and be like, why is there no shop feature for escorts? Why can't I get comparison pricing? Come on. We won't comment on kicking the tires, will we? Oh man. So what was your general conclusion from this in-depth research that you did? Google is still king. Yeah? Pretty much. I mean, Bing has some really cool features, but Google is still, and the Google, the Bing Yahoo, the Bing who thing. Bing who? Yeah.

It's awesome, but Google is still owning the lion's share of the search market. What do you think, so would you, if you're going to look for pricing of, you know, anything in general, like anything you want to buy, or specifically tickets, would you be going to Bing instead of Google, or are you going to go to like, like where do you go when you look for tickets? I would still go to Google. Well, if I'd go, I'd go to a ticket, you know, like Expedia or, yeah, or one of those kind of places, I still, even with this, I still don't go to, I was looking for a hotel in New Orleans, still didn't go to Bing. Where'd you go? I went to, I went to hotwire.com, free plug for Hotwire. Yeah, there it is. Send me a check. They'll send you something. Yeah, so I, I mean, it was, it was cool. Especially if you're going to New Orleans. Yeah. You'll get something. It's, it's a cool feature, but, you know, I personally, I just, I, it's not cool enough to make me switch. What, are you going to go check the dykes out in New Orleans, or? Yeah. Man, I'm not even going to comment on that one. All right. My mind went a whole other direction. That's the long end for the French Quarter. Bourbon Street at the end. Don't, don't turn right. All right. Let's, let's get into this. So that's, so basically you're saying you're only going to use Google and, you know, it's a neat, really neat feature and you'll never use it. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Which means, you know, there's a small percentage out there who will, so we've got to keep our eyes open on that, you know, Bing and Bing Yahoo and Bing who, they're all the same now. So, you know, it, it does impact us in the way that, you know, we used to focus on Google, we continue to focus on Google and then Yahoo and Bing were, you know, kind of certainly

secondary. Well, now that they're all one or they're going to become one, then it gives a lot more, it does give a lot more importance to that particular search engine. So it's not just Google and the other two, it's now Google and the other one, which is a heavier hitter. So that's going to impact how we do things around here. Probably not tomorrow, since it's Saturday. And probably not Monday, it's right away. But, you know, in the coming months, that's going to be something that we'll be keeping an eye on and anybody in search engine optimization will. And we always say SEO is changing, it's constantly changing and evolving, and which is why we do this podcast, we can give new tips, tricks, and stuff like that. So you need to be aware of this as a website owner. Hey, things are changing, this is going to affect, you know, this could possibly affect my search engine placement, the amount of traffic I'm getting. So it's important to stay on top of that kind of stuff. Exactly. And, or if you don't want to, call us and we will. And apparently, according to Fox News, if you're doing any sort of search engine optimization or anything, you're going to be friendless. Why would I lose all my friends for being an SEO? Are you asking me? I don't have any friends. Well, I work here, I don't have any friends, but I'm an SEO. It's an interesting article, and actually we came across the article because a kind of counterpoint article was written by a guy named Danny Sullivan. And he's on search engine land, and it's a really nice article. There is, you know, there's a line in a Fox article, and it says, you know, top online marketing jobs that will leave you, actually, to leave you friendless. And one of them is search engine optimization. So apparently Fox News believes that search engine optimization is going to leave you friendless. And it is a scam. I feel like kind of what I

was saying is SEO is scamming. Yeah. Yeah. But what they're really saying is that, you know, they're frustrated with the results that get on top, and then, you know, they say that search engine optimizer is considered the same as scamming a search engine. And they wrote all of these, it wasn't actually that much. It was just the fact that, you know, you're going to lose your job, I mean, your friends, because of search engine optimization. And it's really, the real interesting part of the article is when Danny Sullivan goes into the details of how Fox News has actually search engine optimized the article. Look, there's meta information in this article. I'm like, okay, that didn't just pop up there on its own. Yeah. The authors of the article are not actually going in and typing in meta tags, meta tag descriptions, unless they're thinking in terms of SEO, or unless they've been instructed by their SEO department to do those kinds of things. So, not only, you know, they probably have a, you know, submit an article to Fox News, you work there, and make sure you put in the article, make sure you put a description, make sure you put keywords, et cetera. The other thing is, is they actually have a robot.txt file. So, for all of you out there, that's a very important file for search engine optimization. It tells the search engines where to go, where not to go. So, sometimes it tells them when to go, how often to go, and it is specifically a text file for search engines. There's no other reason to have a robot text file other than you're being focused on search engines. And they don't just, a robot text file doesn't just pop up on its own. Someone actually has to put that there. Yeah. Someone, some SEO knowledgeable person says, I'm going to put this robot.txt file. Or even in a bigger sense, there's a company policy, there's an SEO guy whose job it is is to put that in place. What's interesting

is that some guy probably walks over and says, hey, I want you to optimize this article. Hands it to his SEO guy. And doesn't know what happened. Yeah, and the SEO guy goes, oh great, what's your article about? Oh, it's about how SEO sucks. How SEO, how you are going to be friendless, my friend. And you're even going to lose me because you're an optimizer. I mean, Fox News, man, I think they probably should have thought a little bit before they put that up. SEO is not scamming. And I think they have a good point. There are people out there doing, you know, spamming and doing things that they, search engines don't like and people don't want to see. It does happen. It happens in any industry. But, you know, I don't want to be generalized as SEO being a scam. SEO is the future. Yes. Yeah. Danny Sullivan makes a good point that Google actually endorses and recommends that either people do, do search engine optimization themselves or they work with good companies. Can you think of an example of a good company? Oh, wait. The one, dang it, I had it, but I lost it. Was that, eWebStyle. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I've heard they're good. I tattooed on my forearm. I don't remember that. I like forearm because forehead you only see in the mirror, right? And then you've got to do it backwards and, you know, tattoo artists, you just can't trust them these days. He also points out that Fox News is generating sitemap files, also only good for search engine optimization. And like a good, you know, there's no search engine optimization guy who would spend any time on any single page without giving recommendations. And his recommendation is that Fox News is actually selling ads and they need to make sure that they're blocking the links for those ads. Otherwise, they'll be deemed as a scammer or that they're spamming Google. Effectively, that Google, you know, has a strict policy against it. They don't want you selling

ads and there's ways that you can mitigate those. So if you have those ads, you don't want to pass your credit on to other people. You want to block that. So I think it would be great if they banned Fox News for a day just for writing that article. The whole website? Everything. Everybody. Even people work there. Banned their personal websites. Can we do that tomorrow? Because I've already visited today. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, tomorrow. Monday. Monday? Yeah. Okay, we'll ban it Monday. All right, good. So that's it. We're going to ban this on Monday. By the time you hear this, it doesn't matter. It's still a Friday. Ban it next Monday. Don't visit Fox News. Period. So this actually brings up some interesting things. I like to bring up articles, especially kind of high profile, specifically here in Texas. We have Kay Bailey Hutchinson. She's a senator. And apparently her website got banned from Google. Yes, it did. So for all those out there who are thinking about using black hat techniques, who may or may not know what black hat techniques are, those are techniques that are specifically for Bowdoin by Google. There's a whole lot of them. We cover those in our podcast, so make sure that you go back and listen to our podcast. Some of them are hidden text, keyword stuffing. There's a whole slew of them that you don't want to be using. If you're doing it yourself and you don't know what black hat techniques are, contact us. We can double check that you're not using any black hat techniques. And if you think you're above the Google, above the Google, then Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a senator, was banned from Google. Her website, anyway. There's no way for her to, all right. So she was banned from Google because of some black hat techniques that she was using on our website. And, of course, it's an interesting, you know, actually it's a really long article. Who wrote this article? Vanessa Fox. She did a great job of going

in, actually, and going well and beyond. It really was a really, really good article. It was extremely thorough. And when I printed it, I printed all the comments, which is all this wasted paper. I feel bad for the trees. What's interesting is you look at the front of her website and it's, you know, it's actually very succinct, very simple. You know, a picture of her, a video, how many people I've joined, and a small little bit of text. What's the site? What's the domain? Oh, you want me to standbykay.com. Everybody take a look at that and you'll see it. K-A-Y. Yeah, and you'll see if the website still looks the same or if they've made any changes. What specifically were they doing? Which black hat technique were they doing to get banned? So, it would kind of be a combination of two things, which is one of them would be keyword stuffing. Okay. And the other would be hidden text. Okay. So, they had, because now the website is up and is on Google and everything, they were using CSS, which is style sheets, and the CSSs were actually putting images and things over this big collection of text. And it was really a big block. You know, we're talking like tons of words. I don't know what the word count in it is, but it was large, and it's a very nice article. You guys can go look it up. Let's see, the way we found it was Kay Bailey banned, I think, in Google, because I don't have the specific article here. But the text was hidden. Lots of text was hidden, and that's why it was actually specifically banned by Google from the Google website. And it's kind of interesting, because some of the words that were in the hidden text were, you know, some of them made sense, and some of them were things like, Texas BBQ Pit, Texas Smokehouse. Why would they optimize their website for Texas BBQ? Yeah. I mean, I guess they want Kay Bailey to come up

for everything related to Texas. But what about... And this is, I mean, this is classic, not what Google wants, right? The last thing Google wants is somebody to go to their search engine, type in, I don't know why anyone would type this in, but type in Texas BBQ Pit, Texas Smokehouse, which is pretty long, lengthy, specific, and have a political website come up. That's a classic example of what Google doesn't want, but what I don't want. I don't want, I want BBQ Smokehouse. I don't want Kay Bailey Hutchinson. And that's why Google doesn't want it, because if people are pulling up, the next one is chicken fried steak recipe. If I type in chicken fried steak recipe, and up comes Kay Bailey Hutchinson's, you know, political website, I'm not happy as a searcher. Yeah. And if I'm not happy as a searcher, I'm using another search engine, and then Google, and... And Google loses its, I guess, its credibility, because their search results start to suck. So, those are things that will specifically get you banned on Google, so... Don't do it. Don't do it. And the one I really liked, actually, was, why do we have knees? Oh, my gosh. When I read that, I was like, come on. Why would you optimize for that search query? Why do we have knees? And that's actually in her hidden text. Why do we have knees? What, um... So, if you're thinking about, you're really trying to go after a broader market, you're thinking about doing something like this. If you want to optimize for your entire state, this is a classic example. Think twice before you do that. Well, don't think twice before you do it. Just pick up the phone and call us, and have us help you do it, yeah. Think twice, because you don't want to do it wrong, right? And you don't want to, you know, the last thing that you want to do is get your website banned, because that's a royal opinion in the keister. And you don't have

the influence that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson has in order to get her website on. I think even in this article it talked about Google did take action, and then they actually tried to contact the site. Believe me, if you're a little podunk site, and you've gotten banned, Google's probably not trying to contact you and let you know that they penalized your website. Exactly, yeah. And they said, I think in the article, they said, oh, we don't plan to make any changes. I think I read that in the article. And then towards the end of the article it says, as of 2.30 today all those changes were. All those things were gone. All those things were gone, and the website was up. Yeah, it happens pretty quickly. Don't want to make Google mad. Yeah. No, because, you know, that's the life bread of a lot of what we do. One other thing that she pointed out was there were some redirects. There were some other pages that she has, like maybe texans4k.com, something along those lines. And texans4k.com and standbyk.com, they are redirects of each other. Yeah, and I think they were using, we used to use this a long time ago, you know, before search engines and the value or the penalty that's associated with this. And that would be, and this was actually as we were getting into the web design and development, and didn't really realize that there was a server setting. See, what happens when you type in a website like kbaileyhudgeson.com, it goes to a server somewhere. And you'll notice, if you typed in kbaileyhudgeson.com slash donate.asp, if there were a page, or donate.html, if there's a page called donate.html, then the server that you're requesting that information from will show you the donate.html page. But if you just type in kbaileyhudgeson.com, there's no specific page reference. So it's up to the server to decide which page to show you. Okay. Right? And typically servers are set up to show you default.html, default.htm, potentially index.html, index.htm. And so in our case,

we did all of our work, and typically still do all of our work in .asp. So, you know, before we understood how to take care of it on the server side, we would just put what's called an HTTP equivalent refresh into default.html. Now, what would happen is, then the server would give the browser that just requested our page the default.html page, and then that page, with that refresh request, would tell the browser, hey, actually go grab this page. Go grab, not the one that he originally was looking for, redirect them to another one. Exactly. So that's a classic redirect that Google doesn't like. And that's something I learned this week, the hard way. And, you know, I'm still always learning. I did not know that, that a redirect was a bad thing. Yep. So that was, I'm so happy that I learned that. There is a, there is actually a good redirect, and that good redirect is a 301 redirect. And this is, this is pretty useful. So say, say you're moving K. Bailey Hutchinson to kbh.com, right? Because it's nice and short, everyone can remember it and everything. But, you know, there's lots of articles by MSN, there's articles by the reputable Fox News, there are articles by, you know, any sort of news source that you can think of that are actually pointing to K. Bailey Hutchinson. If you just drop out K. Bailey Hutchinson and put KBH, then all of that kind of Google weight that you have going to K. Bailey Hutchinson gets lost. Gets lost. Google has a way for you to transfer that weight, that value, and it's called a 301 redirect. And we do that whenever we move pages. It's even applicable when you move pages internal to your website. So you're moving them, you know, from one folder to another folder for organizational purposes or whatever it may be. When you move that file, you do a 301 redirect to the new location. And that's pretty straightforward. If you guys need any help on that, you can

Google it because that's an easy way to get some information. Or you can actually just write to us and I can give you some details on how to do that. Just let me know what you're using. Are you using, you know, HTML or using ASP or using PHP? What is it that you're using for that? So if you, I'd say everyone go check if your website has a redirect on it. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that most people, if they have a redirect, don't know that they have one. And a buddy of mine, I looked at his website yesterday. He had one, had no idea. It was a brand new website that was built probably about six months ago. But his homepage was a redirect. It's onsiteunlimitedwellness.com. You type that in, it redirects you to onsiteunlimitedwellness.com forward slash, it's like onsiteunlimitedhome. Home is his page. And that's something that's going to affect his search engine placement. So everybody go check that. Go check and see if you have a redirect. So do you know the solution for him? Yes. You can do a 301. Yes. That's one thing. What you do want to do, though, is you want to, what you want to do, you either change the struct, because the reason that happened the way you just described is the home.html page is, you know, anytime anybody hits the home button on his website, it goes to that page. So then the programmer has just said, okay, if I redirect anyone going to the root directory to that page, then they're in the website, et cetera. You need to swap out, and you can do this two ways. You need to put the content that is in his home page in his default or index.html page instead of doing a redirect. And then you need to do a 301 from the home page to the default page. To the default page. Okay. And the reason you want that is because, I mean, actually what you should do is get rid

of the home page, and that becomes your default page, so any link in your website points to the default page. But if you're going to leave that home page there, you do a 301, redirect to that home page, and then any sort of credibility in the website is kept. And remember we talked about, you know, you need to optimize your on-site linking. You can always increase the value to a certain point. We did the internal link. I do remember that. And that was pretty early on, so go back and listen to our early podcast, that you can actually negatively affect the maximum search engine credit that you can get for a particular page with improper linking. There's only a maximum that you can reach, so there's nothing beyond that. But if you're not linking properly, then you can actually detract or hurt from your results. So go back and listen to that podcast. We haven't talked today yet. Remember to follow us on Twitter. The reason you follow us on Twitter is we let you know when the new podcasts are up. We let you know with websites that we're working on and when we're working on them, and so that you can check them before and after them. And we're working on adding, you know, more interesting and exciting information to that. Send us an analysis request. Yeah, we have an analysis request for free for a limited time. This is go to our website, go to web design, or go to search engine optimization, and there is a request for analysis. You can either call us or there is a link to a form, so you can submit the form, send it in. We're about to add some text to that so that if you submit that form, we can use your website, mention your website on our podcast. Some people, most people probably like that. Our policy is without that kind of permission, we don't. So some of our previous podcasts, we talked about other websites but didn't mention their names. So

we're going to change that policy because we realize that it's not that easy to follow our podcast without being able to see the website. Without being able to see the website that we're actually doing the analysis on. So we will definitely do that, start that. And send us emails. Send us emails. Podcast at e-webstyle.com. Follow us on Twitter. That's twitter.com slash e-webstyle. And I think that's it. This was a great podcast. That was exciting. And we're two minutes over. And we're still not naked. Yes. It's good. Two extra minutes for free. All right. Excellent. Thank you guys for listening. Check back with us next time. Until then, bye-bye for now.