SEO Tools and Tricks that Help You Think like a Search Spider

SEO Tools and Tricks that Help You Think like a Search Spider

While it is impossible to know the underlying algorithms that produce the search engine results in the major engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, I often try to put myself in the spider's shoes, theoretically speaking. If you can visualize your website the way a search engine might "see" it, then you can make adjustments and tweaks that will help your site rank well.


A conversation with Google

A conversation with Google's automated crawling software (or "spider"), otherwise known as the Googlebot, might sound something like this.

You: Excuse me, Googlebot, why doesn't mysite.com rank well in Google for the keyword "help me?"

Googlebot: (raises a harried eyebrow and looks annoyed) Where shall I begin? First of all, your code is a mess. You have more lines of code than actual text and so many nested tables it makes my head spin.

Your home page has a keyword density of 24 percent, which is suspiciously high compared with the top-ranking sites in my database, all of which average about seven percent. Are you keyword stuffing? You know I don't like doorway pages!

You only have 12 backlinks going to your home page that I recognize, and six of them are from within your domain. The top ten sites have an average of 300 backlinks in my database and literally thousands of backlinks in Yahoo and MSN (not that I care about those hacks).

I've slapped you with a duplicate content penalty because I noticed that www.anysite.com has the same exact home page copy as you. Don't look so surprised - I don't care whose fault it is! On average, your site is 60 percent slower to download than every other site in my database and all your dynamic URLs are giving me a headache. Honestly, do you really need so many variables?

You don't have a site map so I can't easily crawl through the pages of your site, and all of your navigation is represented in images without meaningful ALT tags, so I don't know where I am when I click away from the home page. Your link partners are abysmal - they are not contextually relevant (which makes me suspicious) and you repeat the same exact words in the linking text, which makes me think you're doing automated link swapping. I've been here three times in the past month and your content has not been refreshed once. I can't be bothered with you and your stale, over-optimized content. I will be back to crawl you again sometime this century.

You: (sobbing)

So you've been dismissed by the Googlebot. Get yourself a pint of Rocky Road and join the club.

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