Three days has passed since the Awardings Night of SEO Philippine’s Ituloy Angsulong keyword ranking contest. I would have gone ahead and (excitedly) blogged about everything that happened, only I was left drained–physically, mentally, emotionally, you got it–and no matter how happy I am with what this site has achieved, heaviness has simply overruled self-fulfillment. (Now this sounds familiar.)

(Personal) lessons learned: (1) We ought to give our best wherever, whenever, but we can never really expect people to recognize, much more, to appreciate. (2) It’s a competitive world out there. You can never really know who to trust. Coz sometimes, the ones who befriend you are the ones who will stab you at the back. (3) Then again, at the end of the day, there still remains a few people who believes in what you can do. Ultimately, they are the ones that matter.

So hey, I’ve recharged, and I’m back to my giddy and perky and pink-y self. (Gah.) Congratulations to those who made it to the top, to all the participants, to the sponsors, to the organizers, and to The Man behind this contest.

But most of all, I’d like to congratulate Ms. Janette Toral and Ada Lajara for waving the women’s flag high up all throughout the race, and making it to finish line in flying colors. It was lovely meeting you both.

Navigate to Miss Toral’s blog to see some of the participants’ post-Ituloy Angsulong contest documentations. Read more »

As a finale to this three-month pursuit, I’m leaving you with words of wisdom from Calvin and Hobbes.

Yeahh. WHO DO YA??! :P

Tonight, SEO Girl Power will shine the brightest. No, we may not take home the grandest of prizes, but we shall be there, up front and center, scattering fairy dusts and blotches of pink all over Metrowalk. Hehe.

I can still see major major changes in Yahoo SERPS up to now. Looks like some people are still doing last minute linkbuildings! ENOUGH PEOPLE! It’s three hours to PARTEEEEHH! And everyone will be winners in their own rights, definitely. See ya there! :)

I’m not about to give you tips on how to take your pages out of Google’s Supplemental Results, but here’s an alternative you might want to consider doing, as it has become effective for me.

One of the sites I’m working on has got 98% of it’s subpages in Supplemental, the reasons being:

1. There’s very high percentage of similarity (around 80%) among its pages (template and content wise).
2. Pages lack unique and fresh content, and there’s not much internal activity going on (i.e. no updates) in a long while.
3. No external backlinks directing to its inner pages.

I had to choose between two action plans: (1) Work on taking the pages out of the Supplemental Results; or (2) Disregard those old URLs and create fresh ones. We all know that it’s not really impossible to battle on with the Supplemental Results trap. Actually, for a while, this Ituloy Angsulong site’s pages are in Supp, in which case, internal links and revised meta tags did the trick. I don’t think it works that easily for all sites, though, specially the ones which are not updated regularly. So, for experimental purposes, I chose #2.

By doing this, however, you should be ready to let go of all those backlinks collected in the past. (In my case, I had to lose some to gain more.) Here’s what I did:

1. I revised the URLs of the subpages (i.e. www.domain.com/subpage.html became www.domain.com/sub-page.html).
2. Since most of these URLs are still visible at Yahoo and MSN, I redirected the old URLs to the new ones by applying 301 Redirect.
3. Added new content to its subpages, and, having considered the percentage of template similarity, I proportioned the content’s wordcount to the template in such a way that the similarity would go down to at least 30%.
4. Applied the usual on-page optimization: improved the meta tags, utilized H1/H2/H3 tags, keyword-rich content, keyword-rich anchor texts (internal links), sitemap, etc.
5. Linkbuild.

In less than 2 weeks time, all the new pages were already crawled, and are now ranking for specific trophy keywords, plus, traffic was tripled too (ahh the greatest reward of em all).

Gah. Tonight’s the awardings night, and yet, I’m thinking about Supplemental Results. Such a loser. :P