Julia”

So what is the best way about signposting links from images? Actually writing that the picture is a link next to it or can you add a tag to the HTML or something?

The important thing to remember here is that when running SEM campaigns you should be doing the best thing by the user. In other words, giving users a clear indication of where they will be going to when they click on an external link on your site. Whether you do that via a logo or a text link should be determined by how well each option will integrate with your site, and how clearly they show a user where they will be going to.

The same goes for dealing with search engine spiders. Ultimately what search engines are trying to do when they spider your site is replicate human behaviour as closely as possible so that they can draw up an accurate impression of the relevance and user experience of a given page for a given query. I wouldn’t recommend putting in place too many ‘tricks’ purely for the benefit of spiders, as search engines tend to find them and clamp down on them pretty quickly in my experience. In summary, be clear to both the user and the search engine and you won’t go far wrong.

Chris

Does this mean that using rover.ebay links is better than say mysite.com / shop.php ? id = itemnr ? The visitor knows where he/she is going, but does the SE spider knows? Let’s say you have 20 listings on one page, thats 40 rover links (one for the pic, one for title/link). Thats a lot.

Because maybe in the future Google or other SEs will ‘punish’ sites with lots of rover links with a poor pagerank? We don’t know.

” In more extreme cases, some publishers have found that search engines have barred them from buying traffic to their websites until the quality of their sites has been improved sufficiently to comply with these guidelines.”

Yes, this happened to me. I improved my website extremely, but without success. Though in the SERPs I’ve gained significantly better results since my improvements. Strange! Why does Google ban me from AdWords, but does my website have a improved rank?

So my question is: Is it a good idea to get rid of ‘ebay’ in the source code, use logo’s etc. to let the visitor know that he’s going to eBay, but ‘trick’ the spider? Or is it the opposite? Rover.ebay visible in source code?

“Clearly signpost when links or images on your website will take users to another site” means that you should let your users know that if they click on a link they will be redirected to another site. Search Engines are likely to rate the quality of your site very poor if you trick users into clicking on a link without them expecting to go to another site.

Julia

what does it mean to signpost a link?

thanks much for the post