Gift Focus - Nov/Dec 2018 (Issue 110)

Search engines like Google use several different ranking factors to determine where to place pages in search results. These ranking factors can number into the hundreds (in Google’s case), but roughly speaking, these ranking factors come into three main areas: on-site factors, off-site factors and hosting environment. Traditionally, the biggest influence in rankings for Google has been the off-site factors, including links coming into a target website from other websites. These external links have been the core of Google’s ranking algorithm since Larry Page (one of Google’s two founders) proposed the use of external link signals in 1996. The resulting PageRank algorithm, named after Page, is still at the core of the Google search engine, and there’s no reason to think that external links are going to be replaced anytime soon. So external links are important. This creates a potential problem for those wishing to get a brand-new website, but also an opportunity for those looking to recover from past mistakes. Lost links? If you’ve ever been in the unfortunate situation where you’ve got a new website and then immediately lost search engine rankings or website traffic, then the following information could be of some real use. When moving from one website technology to another, it’s a fair bet that page URLs on your website will change. For instance, if your old website had URLs of the form http://www. site.com/page.html and your new website had URLs of the form https://www.site.com/ page/ you would have to put in a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If you don’t put redirects in place, then search engines won’t know where to find the new pages and your website will lose search engine rankings and all of the websites linking to http://www.site.com/page.html will historical link reclamation David Fairhurst explains all about how to claim back what is rightfully yours giftfocus 93 retail technology