One of the biggest mistakes made by website owners is leaving the
titles of the website pages blank or filled with the wrong words.
The
page title of any website page is set using the HTML *TITLE* tag. Even
if you don't do the programming yourself, you can always check your
website pages and have your web designer make the changes for you.
A Review of WebPosition Gold v2.0 BETA (Part 2)
Written by Kalena Jordan
Page Generator Enhancements
1) Enhanced Meta Tag Control
2) Improved Help
3) Anti-Spam Features
4) Smarter Page Generation
5) Easier Engine Management
6) Auto-Import Keywords
I don’t use WPG’s Page Generator tool, so I don’t really have a
yardstick to use to compare versions and I’m not comfortable reviewing
a tool that I don’t use and don’t approve of. But above I’ve listed all
the new features offered within WPG v2.0’s Page Generator tool for
reference. Personally, I don’t think there is a need to auto-generate
pages designed for specific search engines. These days with the
emphasis on relevancy and link popularity, it is my experience that a
well designed search engine friendly site with lots of relevant content
and a logical directory structure will rank well across most search
engines, without the need to generate extra 'optimized' pages.
Page Critic Enhancements
1) Expanded Advice
Advice
provided in Page Critic now covers 85 search engines and directories
worldwide. WPG claim theirs is the only product in the world that
offers ranking improvement advice for so many engines - I don’t doubt
it! Not having used Page Critic for some months, I was surprised to see
the depth of advice offered in v2.0 BETA. The addition of a link
popularity check was a pleasant surprise, however I had to scroll
through pages and pages of general suggestions to get to my page
analysis scores.
While providing so much advice is admirable, it
makes you wonder if new users of the software or persons with little
experience of search engines would be able to understand all the
information provided. I also found some of the advice to be a bit
misleading. For example, when running a Page Critic check for a
particular keyword ranking on Google, the software came up with this
suggestion:
'Purchasing and setting up multiple domains can be
a great way to increase your visibility on the Web and if you
cross-link your domains, you can improve your link popularity for each
site. However, it's best if you host the cross linked domains at
separate Web hosts so that the first 3 blocks of the site's IP address
(xxx.xxx.xxx) are different. Some engines may ignore link popularity if
the IP addresses of the sites are too close together numerically.'
You
see, I just don’t agree with the assumption that purchasing multiple
domains is a good way to boost search engine rankings. In fact, if you
set up multiple domains containing the same content and search engines
discover this, many will at best, ignore the duplicate domains and at
worst, remove your site/s from their index. 'Hiding' the other domain
at a different IP address is not going to protect you from this.
Besides, unless you are providing substantially unique content on
different domains, you are doing nothing more than filling the search
engines with irrelevant spam and not adding value for the searcher.
This particular advice was provided together with a link to FirstPlace
Software’s domain store, so the attempt to boost domain sales via WPG
was not lost on me. I guess the moral here is - take the Page Critic
advice with a good pinch of salt and try not to do anything that
subverts the search engines.
2) Enhanced Link Popularity Support
As
mentioned above, Page Critic in WPG v2.0 BETA now includes the ability
to check your link popularity on any of the search engines you are
analysing for. It also provides average link popularity scores for top
ranking pages on the same engines. Detailed advice is then given on how
you can improve your link popularity score.
3) Smoother Interface
The
Page Critic interface has also been changed to make missions easier to
set up. There are fewer pop-up prompts - these have been merged with
the main interface. You now also have the option to save the mission
automatically and suppress the partial matching prompt.
4) Improved Accuracy
An
interesting enhancement to Page Critic in v2.0 BETA is the ability to
determine if top ranking pages have changed since being indexed by the
search engine. A new feature in Page Critic will try to detect page
changes between the cached version of a top ranking page and the
current actual page. If it finds a page has changed, it will be
excluded from the analysis to prevent statistical inaccuracies. I have
yet to see this feature in action, but I imagine it would greatly
increase the accuracy of Page Critic advice.
Upload Manager Enhancements
1) Built-in FTP Support
WPG
v2.0 BETA includes its own (optional) FTP program, removing the need to
load 3rd party FTP programs when uploading files. When you create your
missions, you can now select to have reports uploaded automatically,
once generated. This is a very convenient feature that helps save time
and streamline campaigns. I envisage this feature alone will save me
hours per month.
2) New Report Processing Options (Pro Version Only)
As
discussed above, the Upload Manager in WPG v2.0 BETA (Pro Version) now
allows you to remove non-ranking keywords from Concise Reports. This is
a feature I don’t really like, for reasons stated above.
Submitter Enhancements
1) More Engines
2) Better Multi-Domain Support
3) Easy URL Importing
4) Built-in Spider for Quickly Gathering URL’s
5) Customize Submission Limits
6) Full Submission Verification
7) Complete Submission History
8) Easier Directory Submissions
9) Auto-Import Keywords
10) Expanded Submission Interface
11) Add Custom Engines to the Submitter Assistant
12) Advanced Browser Emulation
Another
feature of WPG that I don’t use is the Submitter, so I won’t be
reviewing enhancements to this tool. But above I’ve listed all the new
features offered within the WPG v2.0 version of Submitter for
reference. It’s going to take a lot to convince me that submitting
sites to search engines using software is better than submitting by
hand. I’ve seen too much evidence to the contrary.
Traffic Analyzer Enhancements
1) Expanded Engine Support
The
traffic analyzer in WPG now separately tracks traffic arriving from all
the new search engines supported by WPG v2.0. This is useful in that
you can now distinguish traffic originating at regional versions of the
most popular engines (e.g. Yahoo.com.au traffic vs Yahoo.com traffic).
However technically, this is a standard feature of 3rd Party Statistics
provider Hit Links, rather than a new feature of WPG.
2) Continued Support for 1.60 Features
This one’s pretty redundant if you ask me.
Scheduler Enhancements
1) Easier Interface
Well
- here’s the thing. WPG claim that the Scheduler interface in WPG v2.0
is easier to use. But I don’t think so. Sure the tabbed layout is
consistent with other WPG features, but I don’t find the interface any
more intuitive. In fact, Scheduler v2.0 kept trying to run using an
older version of WPG. After I worked out what the problem was, I had to
keep changing the execute file in the 'Program to Run' field to WPG
v2.0 BETA. There doesn’t appear to be a way to choose a default program
to run, unless you remove older WPG versions from your system or move
them to a new folder.
2) System Tray Support
A nice
enhancement to Scheduler in v2.0 is the addition of an icon in your
system tray, meaning you can right click the icon at any time to run
Scheduler. Previously, unless you had Scheduler as a desktop shortcut,
you had to open WPG and select Scheduler when you wanted to run it.
3) New Report Log
In
WPG v2.0, a log file now records details of all scheduled events so you
can open it and see which missions completed and which did not. A 'View
Log' button has been added to Scheduler so you can see this file at any
time.
4) Scheduled Uploads Supported
WPG v2.0 now
supports scheduling of Upload Manager missions in addition to Reporter
and Submitter missions. So now you can schedule what time and what day
you want your report files uploaded to the Internet.
5) More Flexibility
In
v2.0, Scheduler includes a lot more flexibility when running missions.
Now you can choose specific dates, times and/or recurring dates via a
drop down list, such as every second Friday or quarterly. This is
useful for my clients, because some of them like to present ranking
reports at specific management meetings and often those meetings will
be held at regular intervals such as the third Wednesday of the month.
This new feature gives me the ability to run and upload their reports
to coincide with such meetings.
6) Easier Submission Handling
A
feature of Scheduler I’m not likely to use is submission handling. WPG
v2.0 allows the submission of URL’s at more defined intervals,
supposedly keeping within search engine recommended per-day submission
limits. However, one check box option I noticed and that caused me some
concern was 'Allow Repetitive Submissions'. The explanation states:
'Once all URL’s are submitted, highlight them so that they can be re-submitted on the next scheduled run'.
I’ve
got to ask - why on earth would you want to regularly resubmit a URL to
any search engine? If your site is linked to from other sites, most
search engines will find your site on their own when they crawl the
web. Once you’re listed, most search engines will regularly return and
spider your site for new content without any help from you. Other
search engines can take months to add your URL to their index, but
submitting once is enough. Depending on your site content, some search
engines won’t add you at all.
Regardless, submitting on a
regular basis is only going to annoy search engines and possibly get
your URL banned. The only reason to resubmit is if you WERE listed and
later find your listing has disappeared. Resubmitting a URL in the hope
of improving your ranking is just silly. If your page doesn’t get
ranked well the first time it gets listed in a search engine,
resubmitting the same page is not going to make it suddenly rank high!
This submission 'enhancement' to WPG raises concern because it is open
to abuse by giving people the ability to resubmit their URL’s daily.
This is an irresponsible and unnecessary addition to the software if
you ask me.
7) Handy Pop Up Calendar
The WPG v2.0
Scheduler now includes a pop-up calendar to assist the selection of
scheduled dates on which to run missions. This is particularly useful
for those of us running multiple missions per month.
8) Quickly Test Your Scheduled Events
If
you wanted to schedule a mission to run immediately in the old version
of WPG, you still had to select a future time for the mission to
commence. WPG v2.0 of Scheduler includes a 'Run Now' button that allows
you to run any scheduled missions immediately.
Well, that
completes my review of WebPosition Gold v2.0 BETA. Keep in mind that
the program is still in BETA release, so items discussed above may
change before the full version is released. All in all, I’ve found the
new version to be very impressive, with plenty of worthwhile features
justifying the cost of an upgrade (USD 74 for the Standard version and
USD 174 for the Pro) or a new purchase (USD 149 for the Standard
version and USD 349 for the Pro). However, some of the features
provided are quite powerful and open to abuse.
If you choose
to use WebPosition Gold or similar software, try to use it responsibly
by scheduling your Reporter missions sporadically, not over-submitting
your URL’s, avoiding the creation of hundreds of content-challenged
doorway pages and not running Reporter on engines known for taking an
anti-querying software stand (such as Google). Because despite the
hype, bombarding search engines is NOT going to help you achieve high
rankings.
President of FirstPlace Software, Brent Winters,
responded to my review with comments addressing some of the concerns I
raise above. You can read Brent's comments via this link:
http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/Response_to_WPG_v2.0_Review.htm
If you have additional questions about WebPosition Gold as a result
of reading this review, please visit the links below, or email
WebPosition support staff via
If you’d like to
trial the Beta version of WPG v2.0 please download it from the link
below.
More: http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=GCU-55EC (our affiliate link)
http://www.webposition.com/wpg2upgrade.htm (outline of features in v2.0)
About the Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the
first search engine optimization experts in Australia and is well known
and respected in the industry worldwide. For more of her articles on
search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit
http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com
Positioning 
