SEO Challenge who is right – Bagi or Temi

Bagi and Temi are active members of UK Webmaster Forums, both are quite experienced webmasters, Bagi leans more towards search engine optimisation (SEO) aspects of webmastering more than Temi. In addition to running a directory called Directory of SEO Links, Bagi was the runner up in a Hungarian SEO competition in 2006.

Temi is a webmaster with many years of experience, he run many websites including his personal blogs and offers SEO consultation services to small businesses in UK. He claims to always achieve page one raking for his clients.

Bagi and Temi seem to disagree about whether hyphens make any difference to SERPs or how highly a site ranks for a particular keyword. Here is a personal statement from Bagi and Temi on this matter:

Personal Statement from Bagi
If you have a given website with a certain content having a related keyword rich domain name with hyphens you will achieve better rankings with same efforts.

Temi’s Personal Statement
I do not believe hyphen, dashes or underscore affect how highly your site is listed on SERPs nor give you any advantages over a site or contents with no dashes, underscore or hyphen in its domain name or urls of other parts of the site.

Quest to test Bagi and Temi’s position empirically
To find out which of the two guys is right, a small test was designed as follows:

• two domains names registered, one with hyphen, one without
• Domain name has no relevance what so ever with the contents of the site
• Domain names hosted on the same IP address, same time
• There will be no outgoing links from the sites
• The page size on both domain will be the same
• Same bolding tags and other formatting in the two sites will be kept the same.
• Avoid putting same contents on both pages to avoid duplicate contents penalty
• The same number of links from the same source will point to both sites

The test was designed with suggestions from OWG and DKs . You can follow the discussions about this test at UK Webmaster Forums

I am currently writing an SEO booklet for newbies. To ensure all the fact and claims made in the booklet which is titled ” SEO In a Nutshell ” a few SEO experiments has been conducted, old threads in UK Webmaster World forum with relevance to the page I am working on were dug out for reference. On such thread was a thread on writing the perfect meta tags.

One UK WW member who seem to missed ‘the perfect meta tags’ thread when it was originally created many months maybe even as far back as one year ago was Miha Jepan. Coincidentally, he was writing a blog about what should be in and what should not be in a meta tags. This prompted him to create an experiment where he tries to find out the part or parts of a meta tag Google uses to rank a site. I will not go into the experiment in this post, I think its better that you read Mihai Jepan’s finding directly from his contribution to the ‘perfect meta tags’ thread which can be found here.

Link baiting can be one of the most powerful forms of marketing on the internet, not only does it drive highly interested and targeted traffic to your website, but it also has endless potential in terms of Search Engine Optimization. Matt Cutts (Google) once said that Link Baiting was anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention”.
Link baiting is just one of the many forms of marketing online which has become a popular and important tool for many webmasters. It allows your links or information to be spread around the internet by other people, thus creating huge numbers of links and driving traffic to your website. In terms of SEO, Link Baiting can give you a huge advantage over your competitors by creating vast numbers of good quality inbound links.
There are so many different types of Link Baiting that it can be used effectively by almost any website. With a good news story that is genuinely interesting you can garner yourself and your website huge amounts of attention. Your article can spread like wildfire on social bookmarking sites like Digg whilst your links will be posted on a number of sites.
Informational products or articles are also extremely effective with link baiting strategies, if you can create genuinely valuable information for the reader your information will spread around the internet and often the links gained from the article will be from authority sites and highly ranked directories.
Creating a website that is controversial, funny, or just interesting, can be an extremely easy thing to do, and also offers you a creative outlet which can provide you with great enjoyment. If you have an existing site, highlight the best content and use it to bring visitors to your website. By spreading your most valuable or interesting information around, your links will soon spread rapidly around the internet.
One of the best examples of Link Baiting you will see comes from the blog of Shoemoney (an extremely popular online marketer). He wrote a post about George Bush entitled” George Bush – Great President Or Greatest President Ever?” in which he showed great admiration towards the president.
All he did was link to George Bush’s Wikipedia page, but can you imagine how many hits that page received just from Shoemoney’s link baiting? He made an extremely controversial post which a number of people feel very passionate about, and then put an external link in the article. He could have put any link at all and probably made money just from this simple piece of link baiting.
If you have a website on a particular topic, try to make sure that if any news comes up relating to your topic, your site is one of the first to show it. By doing this you will probably rank well in Google for that particular news story.
From then on if someone wants to include news on their site, they will probably end up linking to you after following the Google trail.

You can discuss this articles and any other article that catches your fancy at UK Webmaster World SEO forum

This article was written by Old Welsh Guy Owner of Umbrella Consultancy, an Internet Marketing Consultancy based in the UK

How can a deep page have a higher PR than the home page? Simple, it is ALL about link structure. Link structure (i prefer navigation structure as a phrase when talking about within a site). so lets go to the top.

First off, understand that a page can vote (not transfer, as it votes and keeps PR) a page can vote, up to 85% of the value of its own Page rank (PR). This value is divided between the outbound links it has.

So page ‘A’ is a pr4 page with 10 outbound links (assuming they are all internal links to the site because PR travels more freely within a domain than it does across the web). so 10 links divided by pr4 X 0.85 = a link value of 0.34Pr per link. Ok so there we have it.

It links to every page on the site, as do all the others. so in a flat navigation structure like this, every page on the site will have the same PR (in theory).

BUT, lets say that there is a page on the site that has a fantastic bit of content that many many people link to. This site will ALWAYS be AT LEAST 015% higher in PR than the rest of the site, as it can only vote 85% of its own PR out. Normally most people will link to the home page, but not always.

Ok Another way to manipulate PR, and it is called daisychaning.

Page A
Page B
Page C
Page D

Page a is a pr4 It has one link on it to page B which has one link on it to page C which has one link on it to page D.

Every page in the site links to page a, b, c & d. They however only link to each other in daisy chain mode.

So page a will pass ALL its available vote to page B (this will not be = to .85 however as other dampening factors will kick in due to the small amount of outbound links. But lets assume it passes say 10% This makes Page b PR$ +.10 of A = PR 4.4 this then passes 10% on to c making which passes on 10% onto d and so on, with the PR compunding along the daisy chain.

The other way to do it (which is better although a waste of time as PR is a load of balls anyhow). is to have

page a linking to B, C, D, E, F, G & H
b linking to c,d,e,f,g,h,
c linkng to d,e,f,g,h,
and so on.

This will allow more PR to flow out of the early pages, and along the daisy chain.

I hope this has explained it better although somehow I doubt it