Being sick is the worst. I’ll leave it that…lol. Having a sick Web site (a Web site without valid HTML code) is not such a good thing either. However, it probably isn’t affecting your search rankings. In this post, Google Super Spam Fighter Matt Cutts confirms what many of us have believed for a long time, that Google doesn’t penalize sites for invalid code. However, that isn’t an excuse not to write valid code, lol. It just means it doesn’t have that much potential to affect your search listings.
In other search news, the Online Marketing Summit is coming soon and I will be speaking there about various SEO themes. OMS was a great conference last year and I anticipate it will be even better this year (how can San Diego in February be bad?).
Also, if anyone is wondering about the power of links in Google, they need only do a search for “3 ring binders”. The number 2 ranking site is http://www.3ringbinder.com/ . Now the reason its noteworthy is because if you look at the cache for the site, there is no content! Now obviously, if you look at the page itself, there is some actual content available to the end user and I am certainly not saying that this site doesn’t deserve its ranking. I have never used their services..lol. But Google sees NO content on their homepage. And yet they are ranked #2 for a word that should be somewhat competitive given the propensity for that word to result in sales of 3 ring binders. So, it should be noted that this also illustrates the advantages of having a keyword focused domain name. The majority of Web masters use URLs and not keyword focused text links to link to Web pages. Therefore, having your keywords in your URL automatically means that most of your links will be keyword focused, thereby giving you an advantage over your competitors who do not. This doesn’t justify changing a domain name in most cases, but it certainly adds to the merit of choosing a domain name that is keyword focused in the initial stages of a Web site.
That’s all for today. I am going home to rest.
