Google has recently been fixing the issues with the new soft 404 errors showing now in Google Webmaster Tools.

This issue has really concerned me because Google was clearly using soft-404s behind the scenes for a long time. Providing this data to webmasters resulted in many claiming Google was soft-404ing pages that should not be 404ed. Finally Google has addressed the issue, but it is still concerning.

There is no penalty for soft-404s according to Google who said:

To be clear: Google will not penalize your site for having soft-404 pages. Having soft-404 pages makes it harder for us to recognize new and updated content on your site, but it does not mean that we would see you site as being any less valuable in the search results . There’s no need to rush and do something drastic here. Yes, it would be great if it could be cleaned up (that’s why we have started reporting these things), but in general, it’s not critical.

I never imagined that there was a “penalty” but one issue is that if Google misclassifies a page of yours as a soft-404, then by definition, Google won’t include that page in their index or at least, not rank it well. Ok so it’s not a penalty, it is just an issue with the page.

Whether or not it is a penalty still leaves you with poor Google search results for your pages classified as soft-404s.

This week myself and a colleague Julie Cheung looked into what effect domain age had on search engine rankings. A summary of our findings and a link to the blog we posted on the Just Search site is below:

The age of a domain is believed by some to be an important factor in rankings, while others dismiss it as either having a relatively minor role, or not important at all. We decided to undertake a simple study of several randomly chosen keywords to see whether or not there is a visible difference in domain age in the search results.

We found that where competing sites were evenly matched across a variety of factors, domain age did come into account. On a larger scale investigation we would expect this to be proved true.

There are several facts to consider. The website age along with the domain age will be Google’s deciding factor of a site’s authority in the rankings. It is important to remember that domain age is only one of over 200 ranking signals in Google’s ranking algorithm, so it is important to ensure too much emphasis is not placed on this sole ranking factor.

Read the rest of the article here on Just Search’s SEO Blog.

This article is courtesy of www.seo-news.com

Long tail keyword research tools are essential for small web businesses. You must put together collections of micro niches, each identified by a long tail keyword. You need to do long tail keyword research to find those niches of low competition keywords.

You need to find a large number of keywords, the number of searches for them per day or month, and the amount of competition for the keywords. The competition, at minimum, consists of all those web pages containing the keyword. More detailed information would include the number of pages optimized for the keyword. You can get all this information for free on the web, from Google; although, there is software available that automates the process for you.

You can use the Google keyword selector tool as a long tail keyword generator. It suggests a large number of keywords with low search volume but low competition.

When you type in a keyword into the Google keyword selector tool, it suggests related keywords and gives you a downloadable spreadsheet of their search frequencies and AdWords competition.

Sort by declining numbers of searches and delete those keywords with too few. They are not worth optimizing pages for. What’s too few searches? That is up to you, but I have heard people say they set the limit somewhere between 200 and 300 searches per month (7 to 10 per day).

If you wish, you can reserve those keywords with too few searches to sprinkle into ezine articles. Keywords with low competition may bring the article to page one of a search engine’s results.

Next you use the Google search page. It is not usually thought of as a long tail keywords tool, but you use it for two competition searches. Do a Google search for the keyword in quotes to find the number of pages containing those keywords as a phrase, that is, adjacent to each other. The first page of the results gives an estimate of the number of pages containing the phrase. Do not search without quotes — that counts all pages containing all the words in the keyword phrase even if they are not close on the page.

Remove the keywords that are on too many pages from your list. Various people give the cut off at more than 30,000 other pages, give or take. Your pages will be lost in the crowd if you try to compete for them.

The next step of long tail keyword research is to find the number of pages optimized for the keyword, and you can find the number of pages optimized for a keyword by a Google search. A page is optimized for a keyword if

(1) the keyword is embedded in the URL of the page, for example in the domain name or in the page name,

(2) the keyword is in the page title, or

(3) the keyword is in the anchor text of one or more links pointing to the page.

You can tell Google to filter for pages with these optimizations by specifying, for example, inurl:”keyword” to select only pages with the keyword in the URL. (You can find more information on advanced Google query operators at Google Help Center). Delete the keywords with too much competition of this kind. What is too much competition? Again, it is a matter of taste, but the boundary may be somewhere between 50 and 300. (I’m relying on the opinion of James Jones who suggested these limits.)

Pages optimized in all three ways are serious competition. Not only do those optimizations tell search engines that the page is relevant to the keyword, but they indicate that someone is consciously trying to compete for the keyword.

If you are intending to sell products or services to the people searching with these keywords, you may want to check the estimates of their “online commercial intention” (OCI). You can get those estimates at Microsoft adCenter Labs. It will give you a fraction between zero — the search seems to have NO commercial intent — and one — the search does seem to have a commercial intent. The numeric value indicates a kind of confidence level, not a fraction of searches that have the intent. In experiments, the non-commercial keywords averaged about a 0.2 value, and the commercial keywords averaged about 0.83. Fractions near 0.5 had a high rate of incorrect classifications. If you intend to sell, you can cut off those keywords with an OCI less than 0.6 or 0.7. There are, however, questions about the methodology and assumptions used in the construction of this tool.

You can do long tail keyword research for free by using the Google keyword selector tool, a Google search, and optionally the MSN online commercial intention page.

Most of us in the SEO industry know by now that Google tends to typically use the title tag of the page as the blue, clickable link in the search results. This is what we believe to be true and it most cases it is used properly. This can change however based on a query or other factors. If you are missing a title tag in your page source it is interesting to know what Google will use.

Renowned Googler, Prathap Reddy said in a webmaster forums thread:

Google uses the title of the document from file properties as title of the search results. If no title is found, the first found large font is used as title for the document, with some exceptions.

This seems like a reasonable explanation and in most cases, if your pages are optimised well this will mean that your heading 1 (H1) tag will be the clickable “title”. On most of the websites that I work on this heading tag is usually my most important keyphrase anyway, which of course would be the first thing mentioned in my title tag. I have also noticed on some occasions that Google can use the anchor text that links to a page as the page title when nothing else is available.

So if you have a dynamic website that somehow doesn’t use titles as standards, if the rest of your onpage elements are spot on then you shouldn’t have any trouble.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has confirmation from Googler, Jonathan Simon, that the “page not found” errors found in Google Webmaster Tools won’t necessarily hurt your Google rankings. Good news for everyone and Jonathan basically explained that if someone is linking to a page that is not found, there is not much you can do to prevent that from happening:

Since you can’t control who links to your site these Not Found errors won’t negatively impact your site’s ability to rank in the search results. It sounds like you’ve got a reasonable workaround with the .htaccess redirect you mentioned. I’d just keep an eye on the Not Found errors in Webmaster Tools and add redirects when it’s necessary.

SERound table recommend the following:

It is important to track not found errors in both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to make sure to redirect the page when applicable, so that traffic is not lost. And it is almost always a good idea to make sure you have a useful and pretty custom 404 page for those reasons.