Tagging Techniques To Track Indexing and Ranking Performance

When ever we (you and me buddy) are talking about indexing and ranking I think it's important to think of your website in chunks or sections. If you have a blog you have category pages, top level pages, and posts. If I have an affiliate site you may have low level item pages, state pages, category pages and top level pages. Make sure you place these sections of your site into seperate /folders/. This is really important and you'll see why in a minute.

The Goal of Indexing

The goal is to get the combination of pages in the main index that make you the most money. It's that simple. It's not the most pages, it's the most $$$. If pages in the /folder-x/ make 5 times the money pages in /folder-y/ do, I'll take /folder-x/ pages in the main index even if I lose more /folder-y/ pages. You need to use your analytics package to determine this. In Google Analytics you can sort your content by $index, and filter by /folders/. The /folder/ filtering will help you view landing pages. You can also create another top level Google Analytics account where you put a second, different script on each one of your site sections. You'll have to do some digging, but you can figure it out.

Random String Tagging

This tagging method we'll cover below measures more than just whether or not a page is indexed, but also measures raw ranking performance against other pages. There isn't any reliable way to test whether a page is in the main or supplemental index, but this method can show which pages are ranking ahead of others, and ranking is what counts.

Random string tagging involves the generation of random strings of text in the footer of your pages that can be used to perform interesting queries and gain valuable information about your site. This could be a string like J84HIF84J. You need to generate 2 different sets of strings:

1. Site Wide String - This is a string that is the same on every page and is meant to test all pages against each other.
2. Section String - This is a string that is the same on every page in a section of the site and is meant and test pages within a section against each other.

Once these strings are indexed you can gain some great information.

If my section string is 987834H54, I can use:

site:websterjorgsenen.com/state-pages/ 987834H54 or the string without the site:query to see which state pages on my site are indexed and which ones have the most raw ranking power.

Now lets say you want to test you category pages against your state pages to see which has the most raw ranking power. You could use the OR command with two of your section strings:

query: (987834H5 OR 28H549U5J)

You can also add the site: query. These are just a few examples. There are an endless number of queries you can run to gain insight into how authority is being distributed within your site. In each of these queries, pages appearing towards the bottom are likely in the supplemental index. If you see important pages that appear to be outranked by less important pages, corrective action is needed.

Correcting Indexing and Ranking Performance Issues

Let's say that you run the last query mentioned and see that your category pages are dominating your state pages. You don't like this because your state pages convert inbound visits at a much higher rate. In this case you can try linking to the state pages more or the category pages less. For example, all of your item or low level pages could link back to the state that they reference. On a large site, this significantly alters indexing and raw ranking power. You could also put a Narrow By State block on your category pages. This would channel more authority from your category pages to your state pages.

However, if you are linking to a section of your site heavily and it still takes a back seat to other pages with less internal link equity your problem may not be linking. In many cases, category and state pages seem to hang back despite receiving lots of internal links. This is because they often only contain lists of stuff and are easy to over-optimize. These pages could be getting filtered. You may need to beef up the value of your category and state pages beyond just simple lists with additional content, and valuable information.

Of course, all of this depends on having any link equity to begin with. If you don't have much for backlinks, you've wasted your time reading this (except for the /folders/ part of course; get that right from the start). Go build something great and start telling people about it. This stuff only has a significant impact on sites with a lot of pages and decent amount of authority.