City News Local
In this test we will be testing a couple of interesting things, along with the theory of can a new, ugly website, (one we will create with plenty of backlinks) out perform the beautiful webwsite of an international SEO firm? Sound interesting???1. I'll be creating an ugly webpage and get it to the front page of Google using only backlinks. I'm curious as to how Google will do the ranking. Ugly website with beautiful backlinks OR beautiful website with ugly (few) backlinks.
2. I'll initially create two webpage of identical content.
One webpage name will use hyphens "-",
The other will use underscores "_"
City-News-Local-Las-Vegas.html
City_News_Local_Las_Vegas.html
Curious to see which one Google will pick up first??
Remember, they have the exact same content, keywords, description,....
3. Who will Google give a higher ranking to:
A) The actual company named City News Local?
B) My backlinked ugly swan with hyphens?
C) My backlinked ugly swan with underscores?
And off I go to create my ugly webpages.
05/31/2012 at 10:40am PST
The ugly swans are now cruzing around in the Google lake. Time to get to work backlinking. I'm hoping to catch our website when it's initially indexed by Google. Here's why.
Typically, when Google initially places a website, it places them high in their rankings. A few days later it may not even be in the top 100. A few days after that it may be #20, then #80, then 30, then 70..... This "Google Dance" does eventually stop.
If I catch the website when Google initially indexes it, and support that high ranking with good quality backlinks, from good quality sites, from related sites, and with the correct anchor text, I'm hoping to ride the wave of that initial high ranking Google gives us and keep it there. No need to do the Google dance for longer than neccessary.
Here are the two NEW webpages. I'll be indexing / pinging them at the same time. Curious to see which one Google favors. Webpage names with hyphens "-" or underscores "_". Or will it even make a difference??
http://www.computer-repair-las-vegas.mobi/City-News-Local-Las-Vegas.html
http://www.computer-repair-las-vegas.mobi/City_News_Local_Las_Vegas.html
05/31/2012 at 3:30am PST
We have have both pages submitted to over 60 of the major search engines. Made a few changes to the TITLE and KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION on each website. Both are still identical except the "-" vs. "_" in the webpage name. And we have begun doing our magic on both these pages. I'm really curious to see which one Google picks up first, and which one will receive the higher ranking.
City-News-Local-Las-Vegas
City_News_Local_Las_Vegas
Once Google has decided on which one it likes best, we will be deleting the other one to avoid confusion. We will continue to build backlinks to the remaining page and working our SEO magic till it ranks higher than the actual SEO's website. This will be challenging. And remember, we are doing this with backlinks only for our new City News Local website. Hope this SEO company does not get mad when our ugly website out performs their search engine optimized website.
06/01/2012 at 10:30pm PST
Since our last past we have made made changes to both of the pages. Added to the content of the webpage and modified some keywords, title, description.... And "YES", we still use keywords to help guide Google in it's decision making. Don't get me wrong, I've seen some #1 ranking websites with no keywords at all. Personally, I've found it helpful to give Google some hints when it comes to new webpages, keywords, description and stuff like that.
When using Keywords for SEO, the thing to remember is less is better. Sure, you can cram 200+ characters into the Description HTML tag and the Keyword HTML tag and cover every frickin possible keyword combination under the sun. We do not recommend doing this. Be focused with your keywords and Google will focus on you. It's that simple. Keep your Title 60 characters or less. Each webpage should have a different Title. Description should like real english is spoken - not like a bunch of crammed together keywords. Carefully place your primary keyword in beginning of the description. Place secondary keywords thru out the description. Just make sure the darn thing reads like your would speak. Very important!
Did everyone get those 4 pearls of SEO wisdom in the last paragraph?
If not, read it again. Just that information alone I've seen people pay $200 for SEO seminars that covered those 4 basic concepts. And here I am giving it to you for FREE ! ! !
Bottom line regarding all these changes we made on the two websites, they are idential, (except their names of course):
City-News-Local-Las-Vegas
City_News_Local_Las_Vegas
As of this posting, neither of the websites are on the first page or two of Google, so therefore in my eyes they don't exist yet. Again, we have done no linking, backlinking, update sitemap file, or manual indexing of this webpage on purpose to see just how quickly Google will pick them up AND which one it favors in regards to SEO and using hyphens "-" in the name versus using underscores "_" in the name.
If anyone notices the City-News-Local-Las-Vegas webpage OR the City_News_Local_Las_Vegas webpage show up on the front page of Google, let the rest of us know. I'll keep an eye on it, but it's real important to see which one of them shows up FIRST.
Martini Time.....
06/02/2012 at 12:30am PST
Why does a martini taste sooo good after a good days work? OK - Neither of these pages are on the first 3 pages of Google, so therefore they do not exist. Let me know if either of these pages show up somewhere on Google for the following phrases:
City News Local
City News Local Las Vegas
City News Local Reviews
City News Local Reviews Las Vegas
Bartender - I need another...
06/02/2012 at 6:30am PST
Was looking around on the Internet for some recent tests on using Hyphens vs. Underscore in a webpage name and it's effect on SEO and page rank. Found several tests, but none recent ones. The ones I saw were from 2 - 3 years ago, and we all know there have been tons of changes since then. Below is a recent article and what Google had to say about it:
The short answer is that you should use a hyphen for your SEO URLs.
Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, but does not treat an underscore that way.
Google treats and underscore as a word joiner — so red_sneakers is the same as redsneakers to Google. This has been confirmed directly by Google themselves, including the fact that using dashes over underscores will have a (minor) ranking benefit
Since I just found this article, I have not had time to research it so don't quote me on it. I still want to continue with experiment and see which one of our webpages does better. The one with the hyphens City-News-Local-Las-Vegas or the one with the underscores City_News_Local_Las_Vegas (Trust me. The underscores are there....) Let's get some up-to-date results, compare it with other's research, then form our own conclusions.
Wonder how much longer it will be before Google finds and indexes our two identical websites:
City-News-Local and City_News_Local
06/02/2012 at 6:30am PST
We have decided to make a simle change to each of the websites. At the very bottom of the two webpages there used to be a link with the anchor text "City News Local". We changed it.
On our hyphenated name webpage, the bottom of the page is still a link, but we changed the anchor text to "City-News-Local", and added this as an HTML Keyword.
On our underscored name webpage, the bottom of the page is still a link, but we changed the anchor text to "City_News_Local", and added this as an HTML Keyword.
It will be interesting to see if Google still favors hyphens in names over underscores...
06/02/2012 at 11:00am PST
Keeping a close on the Internet right now for either one of the webpages. Should happen pretty soon. Once Google notices these webpages and indexes them, we will need to move quckly. The webpage that receives the lower initial ranking will be the one we delete. It will be very important to delete the webpage with the lower ranking quickly before Google realizes they are duplicates. Google will heavily penalize your webpage if it believes it is a duplicate or "SPAM" website. We want to avoid this.
So now we wait till the music starts to play and the do the "Google Dance" again....
06/03/2012 at 8:00pm PST
Thought Google would pick up the sites by now. Especially since we added City-News-Local and City_News_Local as a Keyword (to their respective sites), added it to the body of the webpage, and PINGed them with my favorite pinging sites.
Thinking about it.... It's only been 26 hours since these changes were added & pinged. Guess Google needs a little more time. But hey, thats' what we are doing this experiment for. How long does it take Google to pick up a new webpage on an existing website, and how quickly does Google pick up changes does to the webpage.
City-News-Local I think this will be first
City_News_Local This one second
City News Local Reviews This one will be much harder to rank for
Those will probably be the search phrases Google "Learns" about our website first. Again, we are just waiting on that to happen.
Since the pages were created on 5/31/2012 at 3:30am PST, that makes our twin baby websites only 3 days, 16.5 hours old. So it's safe to say it take Google at least 4 days to find and index and new webpage on an existing website (without manually indexing).
Keep an eye out for City-News-Local and City_News_Local. They will be the first search phrases that show up, since they are more unique than the others.
Marco......... Polo.....
Marco......... Polo......
06/05/2012 at 6:00am PST
Got to thinking about it and that last step we did was not necessary. Playiong around with the "-" vs. "_" will be a fun test for another day, but not now. The test is to see how quickly Google picks up a new webpage on an existing website. So we have removed all the "-" and "_" stuff we previously did.
We also made some changes to some of H1, H2, H3.... tags. Some people say they have no influence on SEO. I say they do. Yea... This is "Old School" and I've seen it work. This would make another great test to run. Will do that in the future. We also ran the sites thru one of my favorite SEO checkers. It covers the basics, Title, Description, Keywords, Keyword Density...... Both sites came out looking good.
So we are still waiting to see when City-News-Local or City_News_Local will be found and indexed by Google. Since the pages were created on 5/31/2012 at 3:30am PST, our newborn webpages are still less than 5 days old.
I've been told that Google re-indexes itself late Tuesday night / Early Wednesday morning. Can anyone out there confirm this? If this is true, hopefully we will see our new webpage(s) appear tomorrow morning. Again, don't know if this is true or not. Would love feedback.
Once Google indexes the webpages, we will be deleting the one with the lower ranking. We don't want the two sites to be flagged as duplicate / spam pages. Then we can see if we have been training Google properly as to our keywords: City News Local, City News Local Las Vegas, City News Local Reviews, and City News Local Las Vegas Reviews. It's been delecate teaching Google the last phrase. Had to make sure Google realized it was City News Local IN Las Vegas that was getting the reviews - NOT reviews OF Las Vegas IN City News Local. Big difference!
It's soooo hard for this SEO guerilla to just sit here and wait for Google to find them. When with just a few clicks of a mouse I could have them appear tomorrow. I believe last time I tested this, it took me 4 hours to get Google to index and rank a new website. But again, not the point of this test.
OK Google. When will you find City-News-Local? When will you find City_News_Local?
Marco.....
Polo....
06/05/2012 at 7:00am PST
SIDE NOTE: We started a generic ad campaign on this blog. With all these links within the blog, they are passing valuable PR "juice" to our webpages - And we like and want that. But with this many damn links, we don't want to bleed it dry - So we need to feed it a lot! And that's what the new campaign is doing. It's blogging, and social networking, and doing a lot of other stuff to gather up PR juice from around the web, send it to this blog, which in turn feeds are webpages.... A simple method taught by fisherman: "If you want to catch more fish, use a bigger net, or use more of them."
I'll check on our search phrases and rankings, then post an update after this SEO guerilla gets some more coffee. Below are the search phrases we are focusing on:
06/05/2012 at 7:15am PST
Did I really just give away more of our magic tricks for getting on the front page of Google in my 6am post? I really have to stop doing that. If I give all our magic tricks away, everybody will know how to dominate Google.
06/12/2012 at 8:15pm PST
We have been training Google for the past week on our keywords: City News Local, City News Local Las Vegas, City News Local Reviews, and City News Local Las Vegas Reviews. And things have been going very well. We are seeing our blogs and other social networks appear on the front page for a while then do the Google Dance and move off the front page. This is great! To have the individual blogs showing up on the front page of Google - This means they are getting plenty of initial PR juice and passing it on to our primary website: City News Local Las Vegas
Still have not seen either of the websites pop up in the top 50 yet. Keep in mind - we are going against a well established, national company, that specializes in Google Top Placement. This will take some time.
If I can get our new website to rank higher than their website - I will call this experiment a success.
SEO guerilla signing off for the night.....
06/13/2012 at 4:45pm PST
YES - I just checked and City-News-Local-Las-Vegas is #28 for "City News Local Las Vegas"
I wonder where City_News_Local_Las_Vegas is???
I just looked and it is NOT in the top 100. So as we expected, Google favors "-" over "_" because it treats them differently. (see post on 06/02/2012 at 6:30am PST).
We will now be deleting the "_" version of the webpage so Google does not penalize us for duplicate "Spam" pages. I'll also be going thru this blog and removing all active links to it also. Don't want our Blog to be flagged for having to many broken links.
Done - All of the links have been removed. I also removed several of the City-News-Local-Las-Vegas links. Had too many of them. Now we can really focus on the search phrases below:
City News Local
City News Local Las Vegas
City News Local Reviews
City News Local Reviews Las Vegas
07/09/2012 at 9:45pm PST
WOW - Have been sick and in the hospital for a while and have neglected our project here. I'm curious to see where our search phrases rank in my absence.
#3 City News Local
#3 City News Local Las Vegas (the City News Local website is #2)
#1 City News Local Reviews
#1 City News Local Reviews Las Vegas
Not to shabby given my absence. I'm very pleased with the two #1 spots. that's called GOOGLE DOMINATION! ! !
Time to go work on the remaining two search phrases that are not #1. Time for this SEO guerilla to slip back into the night....
