News & Media

Q: How often should you submit your website to Google? How long does it typically take for Google to index your site after you submit? Is there any way to reduce the time? A: That’s easy: never. There’s no need for it. If other sites link to your site, then Googlebot will find you on […]

Q: Explain what alt tags are and their significance, please. A: An image alt tag is the text that appears in a small box when you hover your cursor over an image. Alt tags should convey the key information from the image that the user would not receive if she had image loading turned off […]

Q: Our site is a coupon site, password protected. Does this mean the search engines cannot get to the thousands of pages behind the password protection? A: That’s correct. If you want those pages in Google’s index, then you’ll need to allow Googlebot access to the pages without requiring log-in or cookies. The way to […]

Q: How many keywords should be in the anchor text of a link? A: There is no hard and fast rule. Personally, I like to keep link text relatively succinct and tightly focused on just one keyword or key phrase. The longer the link text, the more diluted the overall message conveyed to Google in […]

Q: Are the links that are returned in a backlink check (using the link: command) ranked any way? A: Not that I can tell. They are certainly not organized in order of PageRank score, which would have been nice. However, there’s a great free tool from SEO Chat at https://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-search that will sort and display […]

Q: How often is PageRank updated? A: There is a distinction between PageRank scores that are updated visibly to us outsiders through the Google Toolbar and PageRank scores that are used within Google’s ranking algorithm. Lately Google has been very spotty with its updating of the PageRank scores on the Toolbar server. In fact, it’s […]