Government Site Links, Value & How to Guide

[SteveYoung]

We have a unique opportunity to put a banner ad on the home page of our local school system. They are running a program similar to underwriting with PBS. We signed up for the next year to sponsor the site. In order to get the most "Google Juice" out of this how should I set up the link to our page. The ads are animated gif's you can see them here if you need to HERE (http://www.londonderrynh.net/?page_id=25) some will work within the underwriting guidelines, some will need minor edits (think mellow).

What would be the best code to provide them with calling the ad and providing us the best bang for our buck with search engines?
Could we use a cgi script to rotate the ads? The one we use is sfe banner control 3.0 recommended here years ago.
Would the use of that script be a penalty or a loss of the help a governmental site linking to us brings.

Am I off base and none of this matters, just let me know.

Thanks everyone for your kind help.
Steve

[Andilinks]

I don't think banner ads pass along much if any "Google juice" because that would be counter to their original aim of ranking links as citations. If paid links passed PageRank then the richest websites would rank the highest and Google wouldn't even be getting a piece of this action.

A few months ago there was a big discussion (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/) about discounting hidden paid links, I can't imagine they would pass along much PageRank to banners.

I don't think you're off base, but you're probably right that it matters very little.

Andi

[Wassercrats]

I saw Whitehat SEO tips for Bloggers (http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers#more-1100) a few days ago. Matt Cutts mentioned paid links and/or link exchanges and I think he said that Google will penalize you for them unless you make them link to a script on your website that redirects them to the external website.

He also said a couple of unrelated interesting things. Google compares www/non-www versions of webpages to decide whether they're the same, but he still recommends using htaccess to redirect to one or the other. He says this slightly less than half way through the video. It took a long time to load, so I don't want to look for the exact time.

Near the end he says that meta keywords, descriptions, etc. count (not his exact words), but he deemphasizes it and says to put keywords in the body.

[SteveYoung]

Thanks,
Andi and George helped me with a similar question about "making links work for you" some time ago, the question was on text links. The thread is HERE (http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=21614&highlight=onthestep) the related conversation on about 7-10-06

I read somewhere once that having a link from a government home page helped in the ranking. Now that I can get one, if I make it a animated gif, I fear it will be invisible to the Search Engines. If I gave it "alt text" would that help? I wonder if I set up a set of code that had both the gif and a text link under it, would that help?

I do not think anyone will know this is a paid link. I am going to send them a check and they will ad the code I give them to their home page. How would the search engines tell if it was paid or not? ... ... now that I have read the story Andi linked to, I see, someone would be able to "report me". I am not sure that would happen since, I will be the only paid outbound link on the page, it is not like it is a link farm.

I will go through the video on a lonely night Wassercrats, thanks for the link. I can tell you content is everything. We set up this "Micro-Market" Online News site in March of this year. We have 350 articles, company directory's, community links. Any search for Londonderry "anything" results with us at least on the first page. We use wordpress with a sitemap plugin, and I am sure that helps. Even so, I am convinced Content Counts!

So much so that in our real (read makes money) imaging business I am setting up a Application Guide in a wordpress format. I figure if I can write one application a day about our trade, that will be in the search engines and we will get traffic I can route to our online store.

Thanks again all, this is a great place to come to get help, a FQ exclusive IMO

P.S. I have always struggled with the www thing, I see this when on a system with pagerank enabled. They will both have different ranks, I am sure if I could figure out how to fix it that would help ranking. To further complicate it we have many sites set up with .com and .org, even .net as iro's.

[Wassercrats]

That video is transcribed here (http://www.bodyabcs.com/bwp/2007/08/matt-cutts-2007-seo-wordpress-talk-at-wordcamp-transcript/). Here's the part about selling links:So in general if you want to sell links make sure that they don’t effect search engines. There are tons of ways to do that. You can do a link through a url that re-directs and then robot that text out, you can use java script, you can use the no follow tag, we don’t care how you do it. But if you’re selling links or selling page rank that directly effects search engines, then you’re in some sense kind of diluting the pool and it makes it harder for other people to be found for the words they’re trying to show up for if you’re selling those words to somebody else. So selling links, buying links is against our guidelines and we do take action against that.Here's part of the www discussion:audience member:I just wondered if you’re going to make that distinction between the www and the not and so forth couldn’t you just do a text sum and actually assume they are the same I mean does

Matt: That that’s what we do yeah but the kiss rule- keep it simple for search engines right? Search engines usually get that right but sometimes they mess it up. So for example, suppose you have some rotating code that shows a different banner ad, a different template over here or something like that, the page, if we fetch the page and then fetch the www version and they are just slightly different- sometimes that can cause degenerate stuff. So its better to take care of it on your side so there is no confusion whatsoever.
Here's the meta tag discussion:audience member:right so I heard you say when you index a blog my question is: do you look at anything else on the blogother than like tag lines, tag for the feeds or is there some type of meta tag key word?

Matt: Yeah we look at the entire content of the page now one thing we don’t rely on as much is the meta description tag. meta tags are not really seen by users that much so we tend not to give them a lot of weight but we do look at categories, sidebars,navigation things on the side all of that all of that stuff the whole content of the page .so all the tags definitely yeah if you look at my blog. uh I will often have uhh I

audience member: do they have the same weight to the search engines?

Matt:It sort of depends navigation or boiler plate we might not count it quite as much, O.K. my blog has crashed. But in general we will count the entire content of your page pretty well. What I advise you to do is use the keywords in the content somewhere in the post, that’s really what you want to rank for that’s a good question

[Andilinks]

I see, someone would be able to "report me". I am not sure that would happen...No, in this case probably not. But the point I was making is that Google in general tends to discount paid links and they tend to be very good at making these distinctions, that's how they became Google. Slick SEO's sometimes get ahead of them, embarrasingly so at times, but this won't last. Time is on G's side.

Yes, it's true that government sites have a greater influence on ranking but the difference here is the tld dot gov. If a govenment has a dot com or dot net site it's not really a government site from that perspective.

Well, this seems to contradict my earlier point that Google is very good at discriminating--true enough, but only Google knows the true weighting for sure. Anyone outside of Google who claims to "know" is extrapolating based on incomplete experience at best or just blowing smoke at worst.

There has never been a company all about information as secretive as Google, umm, well maybe the CIA. Matt seems to be an exception here but I can't imagine he could do what he does if he weren't in line with company policy. It is in Google's interest to interact with SEO's but in the end the SEO is an anti-Google, that's the nature of the relationship. The SEO's entire purpose in life is to profit by gaming the algorithm. I'm not saying they're (all) crooks it's just that there are contradictory goals and Google remains the power-player.

[Wassercrats]

Two days ago I was researching whether any government websites are hosted by private web hosting services and I found some art oriented state website that was. I saw the domain server listed in the whois information and the end looked like a web address, so I went there thinking it may be the web host. I got a directory with several spammy looking homepages (real estate and stuff). Not only would Google not know it's a government website without a .gov TLD but they might actually penalize you for being linked from a bad-neighborhood server.

...I just found the directory mentioned above: http://emji.net/

[Wassercrats]

they might actually penalize you for being linked from a bad-neighborhood server.Actually, I heard they don't penalize for that, but you certainly wouldn't get the benefit of being linked from a government website.

[SteveYoung]

This government site is a .org so it may not be considered "government" they do have a page rank of 5, that may help (our page rank is 2, IMO not bad for 5 months).

The reality is our site is a "Micro-Market" only of interest to the 25,000 in our town and possibly those nearby. We have no Chamber of Commerce so we think it fills that hole. Someone asked during our beta test period (still ongoing) what our long term goal was. Simply, to have people stumble upon the site and say "That is where I want to live!"

So with that, I guess the importance is the people that go to the School District page will find us by the link. That is what we want anyways, the ranking, is secondary, and may (or may not) come. Sounds a lot like what Google is looking for based on the reading materials you all provided.

Build a useful site and it will have good search engine juice.

[Andilinks]

Build a useful site and it will have good search engine juice.That is absolutely the ideal and I believe that one day it will be true enough that you'll be able to build a useful site and be confident that people will come.

But like all ideals it has it's limits, else there would be no job description: search engine optimizer. People are working tirelessly to steal the ideal, just another stinky human trait.

[Wassercrats]

Here's (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736) something more official.Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

[georgeek]

Contrary to popular belief Google does not confer any kind of special status to the .gov TLD.

It is true that Government sites tend to be linked to a lot and therefore are more likely to be an authoritative site. Links from authoritative sites are of course better than links from non-authoritative sites. However you would not want a .gov link from pages like this one (http://www.co.adams.wi.gov/default.asp?id=0&ACT=7&page=137) for example :)

Also contrary to popular belief Google is not opposed to paid links per-se. Google does however ignore links for PageRank calculations which it believes are paid for and the rel=”nofollow” attribute is not present. Google is able to detect obvious paid links but is unable to detect those resulting from discreet transactions with no discernable footprint.

Steve - The best course of action for you as far as SEO is concerned would be to persuade the School District to give your site a few paragraphs of editorial with an in-line text link embedded somewhere in the middle.

- George