var ua = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
if(ua.indexOf('google web preview') == -1){
showContent();// whatever content you want to hide from Preview Bot
}


The above wont run showCntent() to Google’s PreviewBot. Why might you want to do this? Well I like to run surveys on some sites to gather qualitative feedback. I tend to use 4QSurvey.com for this (free, easy to set up, and gives great insight). The last thing you want is PreviewBot showing your website with the lightbox questionnaire, so it’s easy to block out. This is the code I use to load 4QSurvey asynchornously:


<script type="text/javascript">
(function(){
var UA = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
if(UA.indexOf('google web preview') == -1){
var survey=document.createElement('script');
survey.src = "http://4qinvite.4q.iperceptions.com/1.aspx?sdfc=[your code]&lID=1&loc=4Q-WEB2";
survey.type = 'text/javascript';
survey.async = true;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(survey, s);
}
})();
</script>


The above will not block loading, and ensure PreviewBot doesn’t show a site preview with pop-up. To learn more about PreviewBot see Google’s Web Preview docs. The UA used for PreviewBot is “Google Web Preview (Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13)”.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: How To Easily Hide Client-side Content from Google Web/Mobile Preview Bot

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Haven’t figured out what big changes there are yet, but there are definitely differences.

Try appending &gl=ie on the URLs to see what Irish results might look like.

Source

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: New Google Search Infrastructure in Public BETA

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Sending automated queries to Google?

I suppose it’s a whole lot more useful than the old “your computer may be infected” screen, but I wonder if maybe this uses a new detection method? I’m sitting in an airport lounge using wifi, and I’m not sending any automated requests.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Never Seen This Before

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1. Google ignores all the low-hanging fruit, and easy-to-get links are rendered useless
2. Directories et. al. (low-hanging-fruit) hear final death knell
3. Content REALLY becomes King, as valuable links will only point at valuable content
4. Google goes on to dominate even more of the search space
5. Personalised search still doesn’t gain traction
6. SERP ranking shuffles dynamically between searches – chasing ranking becomes even more futile
7. Social Media – links gained from social media users become more powerful as the “low-hanging-fruit” crap gets filtered out
8. The people who really get this social stuff \glances here\ will be in even more demand
9. Good creative folk – copy writers etc. – will see an increase in demand when the penny drops
10. More small businesses turn to SEO as chronic costs of PPC sets in
11. More businesses of all sizes get burnt by ‘SEO’s, you know… the ones who haven’t got a clue, but promise you the Earth… for a few hundred €
12. SEO goes into mortal decline as search engines (all called Google…) make it more and more difficult to game the results
13. The survivors online will have a deep understanding of multi-channel marketing, and beating customer expectations at every turn – it’s all about the marketing mix…
14. Irish businesses, especially in lead-gen, turn more and more to conversion optimisation and testing
15. An Irish web agency starts offering testing as a core product/service (and not like every web designer now offers ‘SEO’)
16. One or more Irish web startups will come up with something that gains serious traction in ’09
17. RedCardinal.ie releases some interesting tools [unfair insider knowledge ;)]
18. RedCardinal.ie turns off the server for good [more unfair insider knowledge...]

2008 Was a Weird Year

2008 was a weird year – I’ve seen/learnt more than in any previous year, yet I’ve not been blogging much about it. I could probably write as book about what I’ve observed/done in 2008 – some really fantastic things.

And I’ve been speaking to a few people about that point recently. So my New Year’s resolution is to try blogging a lot more in 2009.

At least until I flip the switch that is :O

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: My New Year’s Predictions :)

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[car oil cooler]

If you aren’t familiar with Google Book results, they are actually not really part of the organic results, but instead injected into the SERP as part of Google’s Universal Search. But I think this is a pretty good example of Universal Search working really badly.

Of course the sceptical folk out there might also mention that each Book Search result pushes another organic result off the page, and potentially forces one more site into paying to appear in Adwords…

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Spamming Their Own Index

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Google Geographic Target Tool

What is Geo Targeting within Google Webmaster Tools?

Released with little fanfare in late 2007, the Geotargeting tool has the potential to change the way companies plan their multi-country SEO strategies. I briefly mentioned the Geo Targeting tool previously, but from the official release:

Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.

So whereas before you had to either use ccTLD or server IP location to inform Google of your preferred country level index, now both of these requirements have become redundant.

WebProNews Video sheds light on goals of tool…

If you watch Mike McDonald’s video interview with Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts at the PubCon there’s an interesting discussion about the Geo Targeting tool. Here’s the two most relevant lines:

VF:…and a lot of sites have been really wanting this, especially global brands who aren’t able to have a separate domain or a separately hosted site in each country, you know they’ve just got one site that maybe they em, have you know -en, -de, -es, whatever. So now they can go in an specify each of those for their individual countries…
MC:Yeah, we definitely hear, especially big sites that have lots of presence in different countries, but all on one domain – it’s a huge help, because there really wasn’t a solution for that before and now they have a good alternative.

But they neglected to mention one very important issue with the new Geo Targeting tool.

Not Just Beta… Broken Beta

At PubCon Google hosted a ‘Meet The Engineers’ event. I managed to track down not one, not two, but three individuals who work directly on Google Webmaster Tools. I mentioned the bug reports I’ve left on the Google Groups, and mentioned that the tool didn’t seem to be functioning as promoted.

The response? Depending on who I spoke to the tool was either ‘slightly’ broken or ‘really’ broken. And I think this fact is borne out by the complete lack of chatter from people who’ve successfully benefited from the Geo Targeting tool. Of course no official proclamation on this from Google as of yet.

I fully believe that this tool will become fully operational, and when it does it will have profound affects on many organic niches, most especially so in Google’s country level search properties.

How To Use

I’m pretty sure that this tool will become immensely important. I’m going to put together a small tutorial that explains both who can use the Geo Targeting function (it’s not available to everyone), and how to use the tool to best effect on your site. If you’re interested in this tutorial you can sign up to my feed and be alerted as soon as it’s published.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Webmaster Tools Geo Targeting – Great Idea, But…

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Google News Ireland adds HSE to entertainment section

If anything those stories would have better relevance if they were swapped over IMO.

I suppose there’s a certain irony in this categorisation (you wont get this unless you’re Irish or have had the fortune of interacting with the Irish Health System). But it just goes to show that algos have a long way to go before they can really ‘get it’.

Anyone else seen any queer results in Google’s Irish News aggregator?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google News Finds HSE ‘Entertaining’

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But this little tidbit is worthy of breaking the hiatus – Local Business Center is now available for Ireland:

Google Local Business Center Ireland

Earlier this year I wrote wondering when Google Local Listings might finally arrive in Ireland. Well yesterday I noticed Ireland in the drop-down, so went through the registration process. 2 minutes work and an SMS validation gateway at the end for real simplicity:

Google Local Business Center Ireland SMS Validation

This along with the recent updates to geo-targeting abilities in Google Webmaster Console for non cTLD domains, it looks strongly like we’ll be getting much more blended results in Google.ie results pages.

If you have a business which serves a set geographic area (e.g. restaurants) you should go over and create your local business profile ASAP.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Local Business Center Now Includes Ireland

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Some of the sites I’m working on (and have access to substantial data) have been awarded PR5 with little or no backlinks pointing at them.

In fact one site has inner pages with PR5 but, and here’s the big but, there are no external links pointing at those pages AND all internal links pointing at those same pages are NOFOLLOWED Figure that one!

If this isn’t a monumental cock up, then I’m 100% confident that Google is lying about the true value of a certain small green bar.

Turn the bloody thing off…

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Pagerank Export FUD

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BEWARE: **NSFW**

Curious thing is that Google seems to have been well and truly spammed with that number #1. Hidden text galore and some cute uses of JS to obfuscate text.

Yahoo!doesn’t even show a single link pointing at that page.

Nice SERP Google.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Sluts – Spammers Knock Mulley Off Number #1

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21 of the top 40 results for that query are from Ebay. Seriously, are there no other Irish results for that phrase?

Source: http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&q=car+gps&meta=cr%3DcountryIE&num=40 ‘car gps’

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Ebay.ie Swamping Google.ie ‘pages from Ireland’?

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Yesterday I posted Using Text Replacement with Flash – Dangerous? at around 9:42AM.

I got an alert from Google at 11:34:

Google Blogs Alert for: link: www.redcardinal.ie

Using Text Replacement with Flash – Dangerous?
By Richard Hearne
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, …
Red Cardinal – http://www.redcardinal.ie

While the page isn’t cached (neither is my ethics post from yesterday), a search for the exact title on Google just produced the following:

The result is for my homepage rather than the post itself, but the interesting point is that there is no cache link below that entry. Checking the cached copy of the page shows a copy from August 6.

Clearly in this case the cache is not representative of Google’s index. I think Bill Slawski’s recent patent post and the patent covered itself might be timely reading material. There are interesting mentions of how Google might partition the databases and store page elements.

Not easy reading, but might be of interest to a few.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Index and Cache Diverging?

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For me Blogging has been quite a life experience. Seriously. I’ve met so many people both on-line and off. I’ve partaken in some of the most fantastic conversations with some of the cleverest Internet people in Ireland and beyond.

Blogging for business?

Blogging is the life-blood of my business. I have never advertised, and this blog is the genesis of most of my leads. If you were to ask me what the one most successful outcome of business blogging has been it would be this:

My blog has created a brand recognition of both my name, and that of my company, within my defined target market which would be hard to achieve via any other medium.

The cost of all this? My time and 1 WordPress install (thank you WordPress).

To my clients who have kept food on my table

Of course without clients I wouldn’t still be here. So to everyone who approached me and those who commissioned my services over the past year – it has been a pleasure working with you. This next year is going to be even better.

Biggest thank you goes to you

Lastly, just to say that the very best part of the last year in my mind is the many comments people have left here. To all of you – my sincerest thanks. It’s your comments that have made this the most fun by far. Please keep it up.

Some of my personal favourite moments

1. Golden Spiders – Are These Really Ireland’s Best Websites? – My alternative review of the Golden Spiders. If you want to know how this all started out check out the comments on this post about W3C (I think there were more comments there than on any other post).

2. eGovernment Accessibility Analysis – That got me on the radio a few times A big thank you to Mr. Lost Luggage for helping me out with that post.

3. Click Through Rate of Google Search Results – If you were to ask me what is the single most useful SEO post here I’d have to say this one. ROI analysis and prediction is the toughest part of SEO. This post gives you some data that Google would never ever have released without the slip by AOL.

4. How NOT to steal someone’s CSS design – One of Ireland’s finest web designers served up some doctored CSS to a thief. One of the funnier moments (and there were a few).

5. Helping out some bloggers – Spiderability is the First Step to Search Engine Nirvana (Siopaeile.com), Getting you site out of supplemental index (Krishna De), Page titles and SEO (First Partners), SEO for Blogspot (Blogger) sites (multiple sites), SEO for photoblogs (McAwilliams), Corporate Blogging SEO (Bubble Brosthers), PageRank Flow, Comment Feeds in Supplementals, NoFollow & robots.txt (BifSniff). I think there’s actually some great tips in there, even if I do say so myself.

6. 13 Deadly Google Sins – I wrote this post as a honeypot article. It worked. Now if only the biggest design houses in Ireland would read it and then pin it to each monitor. Every day I am shocked anew by some of the monumental cock-ups I’m asked to look at. And they’re just the newly released websites…

Finally, a big apology to anyone who I pissed off along my journey. There are many of you I’m sure. But hopefully I’ve helped a few folk along the way also.

Oh, and one last apology. To those waiting for their free review. Hand on heart you’ll have them as soon as I find a small window of opportunity.

Again, Thank You.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Happy Birthday Red Cardinal

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It’s s a handy little tool that lets you filter Google queries for relevant counties. Why would you want to do this? Well, if you need to see search results as they appear in a particular country or want to see what countries PPC ads are targeting.

Great tool, and great to see some Irish tools coming onto the horizon.

Well done Dave.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Global

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Referrer Watch

I *might*, on very odd occasions, be known to watch my referrers [you know you're addicted when you watch this stuff...]. Here’s a curious one I got:

http://www.google.com/search?as_rights=(cc_[ ...])&q=letting+agent+courses+ireland

The bit I edited out ([ ...]) read:

as_rights=(cc_publicdomain%7Ccc_attribute%7Ccc_sharealike%7Ccc_noncommercial%7Ccc_nonderived)

That is basically an advanced filter that displays content based on usage rights – in this case a query for ‘letting agent courses ireland’ on pages which are free to use and share even commercially. Basically someone who is looking for content to re-publish. Of course there is no guarantee that they will give attribution.

Well it’s another search modifier for Joost to add to his list of Google URL parameter cheatsheet

While I’m on about referrers. I get some priceless search queries but this one gave me a good laugh today: ‘seo cock blog david naylor‘. I wonder has this anything to do with Dave Naylor’s new design?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Search Modifiers

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But Where’s Google?

What many people wont realise is that the ‘Google’ in ‘Google Webmaster Help Group’ relates more to the platform the group is on than the participation of Google within the group. What keeps the group going is a small group of hardcore volunteers who provide support to webmasters in despair. Yep, that’s right, Google rarely if ever helps individuals out at all. It’s all down to the fantastic efforts of the following individuals:

• Boris Johnston – Theatre news and scripts (profile
• Cass-Hacks – Powerful XHTML DHTML presentation and accessibility tools (profile)
• Christina – Accessible design and development (profile)
• Dockarl – BlixKrieg WordPress Theme profile
• JHL – JHL web design (profile)
• JohnMu – Search Engine Tools (he’s gotta have multiple clones ) (profile)
• Webado – Web Hosting and Design Canada (profile)
• Phil Payne – Website rescue, redesign and maintenance (and validation guru) (profile)
• Sebastian – Links, Links, Links… (profile)

(If anyone would like a new anchor do let me know [\glances at JHL\])

The unsung heros

Those folk listed above have done trojan work to keep the group running and helped countless numbers of webmasters. I think Google owes you all a great service.

If you have issues with Google I strongly recommend posting over on the Group – if you’re lucky one of the folk above might just come along and offer their expert assistance.

To anyone I’ve left out my apologies in advance

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Need Help with Google?

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Time to go check your links boys and girls.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Webmaster Console Updates Backlink Data

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Google shifts up a gear

Google launched Gears recently. Gears enables the off-line storage of on-line data. This means that web-based apps can now take a cache of data and store it locally.

The main reason I installed Gears (it runs as a browser extension with a local DB server) was so that I can read some of the feed backlog that’s been building lately. After installing Gears Greader now gives me a new option up in the utility navigation:

That small arrow within a green oval is the selector for on-line / off-line reading. Clicking it begins the magic that is Gears:

Funnily, Greader doesn’t give you the total number of unread posts when online – you simply get the more than 100 reference:

But in Gears off-line mode it does – I have 1,347 unread posts in my reader:

And when you go back on-line just click the toggle button to re-sync back up and (hopefully) reduce that unread count:

If you’re new to RSS and syndicated content my Really Simple Guide to RSS might be worth reading.

Initial views

This is really fantastic in my view. The ability to access on-line data when offline has always been the holy grail. While others have also managed to implement similar functionality (dojo comes to mind), when Google cracks this the likelihood of mass take up increases exponentially.

Gears is certainly helping me get through all those unread posts (believe me the number was far higher), but my one quip is that the posts don’t list in chronological order. It appears as though feeds are clumped together in offline mode. I’m sure it’s just a wrinkle and something that will iron itself out as Google improves the product iteratively over time.

I wonder what Google’s spam-fighting supremo will report from his Gears use on the flight to SMX. [Wish I was going to that....]

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Offline RSS Reading – Google Gears & Greader

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For many years webmasters and SEOs have indulged in buying links to boost the rankings of their sites in Google’s SERPs. This practice became especially prevalent as Google increased the link relevance in their ranking algorithm.

Google strikes back

On Saturday Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam (and generally all-round nice guy), posted about Google’s intention to go after paid links that don’t disclose their paid status to both visitors AND search engine bots. In the post Matt gave information on how users could report paid links that are not following Google’s guidelines:

- Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you’ll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.
- Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word “paidlink” (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

This data will be used to “start testing out some new techniques we’ve got“.

And what does the SEO world think?

The response in the webmaster/SEO world has been fairly predictable – virtually everyone is up in arms. For a great mash-up see here, more good commentary here.

There seem to be a lot of people who think this will be openly abused:

The call for submissions of paid links is also fraught with problems, most obviously that of competitors sabotaging each other by buying ads for them and reporting them to Google, and secondly of just how Google expects to be able to detect paid links without access to a webmaster’s bank account.

Now if you know Google you will be aware that they really hate human intervention. Algorithmic solutions scale far better than human solutions, and it’s commonly known that Google cant apply the HR to many areas that need them.

Is this valid?

I think that Google is going to roll out something that simply turns off the juice from any link that appears to be a paid link. So if I go out and spend my hard earned money buying links to point my competitor, and then report that competitor for link buying, all that will happen is those links will no longer pass any juice. Will the competitor’s ranking drop? No. Because they will still have all the link juice that got them their rankings in the first place. Google are going to tackle the supply side rather than the demand side IMO.

As for the request to report link buying activities, well that’s really some more smoke and mirrors. Google is after the link buyers so that they can ferret out the link sellers. And if you used Google’s spam reporting feature you’ll know that those reports do not result in micro-level changes to the index. Reported sites are not (generally) removed. Instead Google uses the reports to tweak their algorithm to pick up such sites on a later run.

It’s all about scale with Google

Google doesn’t like human intervention. Plain and simple. Google prefers automation. So I think that the reports will simply be used to test and tweak whatever automated techniques Google is about to unleash.

So will I be able to sabotage my competitors with this feature? I seriously doubt it. Time will tell.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Reporting Paid Links To Google – Mountain Or Molehill?

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Below each listing is a link to ‘Note This’. Clicking on the link opens an AJAX based dialogue in the foot of your window:

The idea seems to be to allow users to save clips as you surf. After adding a site to my Notebook I can then review and search for content through an AJAX interface:

It seems that the product might not yet be ready for the big-time. I noticed that the notes I added from the SERPs did not include a hyperlink. Clicking on ‘javascript:void(0);’ opened a new window but without content.

Google also has a Firefox Plug-in available, and judging from the screen shots on the download page the title of each note should act as the link to that content:

I wonder will Notepad become the latest play in Google’s ranking algorithm?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Note This Feature in Google Search

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Me: Hello, Richard Hearne
Other Guy: Is that Google?
Me: Em, er, no
Other Guy: Right…well this is the number
Me: (laughing) No I’m sorry, this isn’t Google
Me: Can I ask you where you found the number?
Other Guy: It says it on the Internet
Me: Where?
Other Guy: Well I looked it up on Google and this was the number
Me: Right, I see…. (laughing more now as I look at the results)

We had a chat anyhow about Adwords and the like. Funny isn’t it how people have so much faith in Google results?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Phone Number

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Clicking on the Plus Box icon gives you a preview of the content:

Of course the chances that this is widely known are high – it may be that I just wasn’t looking hard enough previously. Actually, now that I think of it, I installed a Beta version so this might be a new feature of GD5.

Now if it would just index my e-mail….

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Desktop Introduces Plus Box Previews

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An extract of the story:

Isabel Aguilera, Chief of a main directorate of Google in Spain and Portugal, have confirmed to Noticias.com that the company is working, “among others”, in the development of a movable telephone. “A part of the time of our engineers we have dedicated it to the investigation of a movable telephone to accede to information”, has made specific Eyrie to this vestibule.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Acknowledge The Widely Rumoured Google Phone?

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Over the weekend Damien mentioned:

Another survey from Hitwise shows that online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is the third-most popular destination that Google sends its users to.

Just last week I read this on Bill Tancer’s Hitswise blog

The growth rate for Wikipedia.org over the last two years was over 680%.

As of last week, Wikipedia.org was the #1 external domain visited from the Google main search page (after images.google.com).

So apparently Wikipedia’s traffic from Google is still growing. Now on first read this might seem like a fantastic position to be in, but my take is that any business that is overly reliant on a single supplier (who cannot be easily replaced) is in a very, very precarious position.

With the flick of a switch over at the Googleplex Wikipedia’s traffic could be impacted with an absolute killer-blow. Given Google’s absolute dominance in the search space, such referrals cannot easily be replaced from another source, and Wikipedia may well be a sitting duck.

Compounding this is the belief that Google is applying additional weight to Wikipedia’s domain over and above what would normally be expected.

This all beggars the question ‘why?’.

What does Google plan for Wikipedia?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Is Google Holding A Gun To Wikipedia’s Head?

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Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Coolest Secret Places on Earth in 9 Minutes Flat

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The Meet The Crawlers session included reps from the big 4 search engines (Ask is now as big as Live by many counts).

During the QandA one of the subjects discussed was the supplemental index and Dan Crow of Google made a curious statement. I paraphrase, but basically Google is working on a ‘Psuedo Pagerank’ algorithm that will compute pagerank for pages that do not receive ‘regular’ pagerank.

Dan mentioned that ‘Pseudo Pagerank’ would be an ‘in-site’ pagerank which was computed purely from the on-site factors. He also said that this new algorithm was not yet live.

To give some further context on this, Dan was commenting on how Google decides what to index, and how this ‘pseudo pagerank’ might be used as a proxy for regular pagerank. In essence, pages that were previously overlooked or supped may in future make it into the primary index.

Perhaps this is well known, but I personally hadn’t heard anything about ‘Psuedo Pagerank’ until Dan Crowe made reference to it in that session.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: SES London – Google Working on ‘Pseudo-Pagerank’

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User Agent sniffing is a process of discovering the User Agent (browser in most cases) of the client visiting your page. Historically designers and developers used UA snifing to determine what hacks they would implement to ensure consistency across browsers and platforms.

UA sniffing is also used for many so-called ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques. You sniff for Google’s UA, which is unique, or the IP addresses of Google’s spiders and serve up a ‘special’ version of your page for the GoogleBot. In search engine terms this is known as ‘cloaking’, and is possibly the worst offence you can commit. (If you get caught :mrgreen:)

When User Agent Sniffing Goes Wrong

In this Blind People Can’t Eat Chcolate I alluded to some issues with the new Lily O’Briens Chcoolate website.

Well screen readers weren’t the only user agent that had difficulties with the new website:

That’s what the server was returning to the GoogleBot UA. Absolutely one of the worst cases of arsing up UA sniffing I have ever seen.

Thankfully they seem to have fixed the issue. (Hello Magico :grin:)

Can A Short-lived Mistake Cost Dearly?

I’m not sure how long the site was returning that response to GoogleBot. It was a site-wide result so if it does get picked up it will likely be site-wide. Michele already alluded to the changed page URLs, but if they were very unlucky, and GoogleBot tried to crawl the site while the server was parsing that crappy message, the site may find all of their pages quickly entering supplemental hell.

I hope they weren’t this unlucky – getting out of the supps can be a nightmare of horrible proportions.

Oh, and a hat-tip to eagle-eyed David Doran

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: When User Agent Sniffing Goes Horribly Wrong

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Now, while this might not sound like a big deal to most, Google is now moving further toward engaging with the web community in general, and webmasters in particular.

Of course it will also be interesting to see what happens when the SEOs start asking difficult questions. I imagine we might see the odd comment from Michael Gray which should make for some interesting reading.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Webmaster Blog Open For User Comments

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I don’t know what’s creepier – that someone visited my site searching for ‘whore‘, or the fact that they went as far as the 47th page before dropping in:

Perhaps it was just my magnetic page title and META description

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Thinks I’m A Whore, Searcher Agrees, From Page 47!

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How about the clever use of (presumably) ASCII in the third ad:

What are the bets that third ad gets a higher CTR than the two above?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Using ASCII to Cheat Adwords – Which Of These Ads Grabs Your Attention?

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With Google rolling out so man updates in recent weeks it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if GA gets a tune-up. And considering Microsoft is rumoured to be entering this space with its own offering…

And is it just me, or is Google Reader grabbing feeds far quicker than before? The latency issues normally associated with Reader seem to be far less noticeable. My blog posts seem to find there way in there after a couple of minutes as opposed to multiple hours previously.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Is Google Analytics Updating Intra-Day?

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Google publishes extensive link data

People have been complaining for years that the link: operator doesn’t work. It still doesn’t work, but you can now log into your Google Webmaster Console and get a very full and wholesome report on your backlink profile. This goes far beyond anything else that’s currently available, and it’s fascinating to see the number of links to some of my inner pages. I had seen some figures from Y! but I’m surprised to see over 4,500 links to inner pages of my site.

I won’t bother explaining this any further as Danny Sullivan has created what I imagine will become a reference piece on the subject over on Search Engine Land.

The only catch

The data is only available to site owners who validate their sites within the console. So you won’t be able to view backlink profiles to other sites unless you’ve validated those sites in your console.

But leaving that aside, this is a very welcome move by Google, and all the more reason to sign up for the Webmaster Console (previously Sitemaps) program.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Gives Back Link Data, But Not Publicly

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Clicking on the ‘empty’ categories also returns empty pages:

and:

Strange…

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google News Acting Weird?

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Now I’ll try to explain that in English

Let’s say that you are looking for a trades person of some description to come and fix an electrical appliance. You might head over to Google and search for ‘[trade] [location]‘ (replace with the relevant info).

Well now when Google ‘senses’ that you are looking for location-specific information they provide a nice map and some listings of local service providers:

[Edit: or let's say you're looking for a hairdresser in Harrogate :mrgreen:]

Now this currently does not work for Irish searches (we’re not important enough :(), and I doubt it’s going to appear any time soon.

According to Barry Schwartz over at SEL the US version also includes a rating system indicated by stars next to the listings, but I couldn’t see this from where I am located.

So how do you get into the local listings?

Well currently listing a local business on Google Maps is only possible in the following countries:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Canada
• Spain
• Germany
• France
• China
• Japan

Users must validate there address with a PIN which is snail-mailed to that address. Once you’ve validated your site it has a chance to be returned in the Local Search results that now appear in OneBox.

Hang on a second. What the hell is OneBox

OneBox is an inserted ‘box’ of relevant info that Google decides to insert above the organic search results. You’ve probably come across OneBox if you’ve ever searched for weather related phrases:

or perhaps ticker symbols:

You can see that these results are not organic listings per-se.

From Google’s help pages:

OneBox results
Google’s search technology finds many sources of specialized information. Those that are most relevant to your search are included at the top of your search results. Typical onebox results include news, stock quotes, weather and local websites related to your search.

(Hat tip to Bill Slawski at SEL for finding that.)

Who cares? I’m in Ireland…

Well chances are that this technology will be rolled out across more markets in the coming months/years. The biggest impact will be on websites targeting local search phrases. I see a lot of localised searches here in Ireland (e.g. ‘[search phrase] dublin’ or ‘[search phrase] ireland’).

If local search is rolled out in Ireland you might find that your coveted number #1 rank in Google for ‘estate agent ballsbridge’ suddenly becomes a number 4 or 5 spot after that big eye-catching map and those very relevant local listings.

Marry those local listings with a ratings system (which plugs into the social aspects of search) and it might turn out that few people bother to scroll any further down the page beyond the local results that appear in the OneBox.

Of course one person’s threat is another person’s opportunity. Worth keeping in mind I think.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: What is Google’s OneBox, and Will Local Search Ever Land in Ireland?

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Automated competitive analysis ‘radar’

First a word about keeping tabs on your competitive landscape. For many, many years I’ve been receiving e-mail alerts from www.googlealerts.com. GoogleAlerts is a service that allows you to automatically track Google results for your targeted search phrases. You receive automated e-mails if a new site enters the competitive SERPs for your phrases.

A new site comes onto my radar for ‘seo ireland’

The search phrase ‘seo ireland’ is one I set up in GoogleAlerts a long time ago. The phrase itself doesn’t generate much decent traffic at all, but seems to be targeted by most newcomers to the field. (Funny, but the longer I watch my stats, the more convinced I am that search traffic is not quality traffic for my line of work. Buzz and word-of-mouth are far better signals.)

www.activate.ie

Yesterday I got an alert that a new site had appeared at rank #20 for ‘seo ireland’. The site is www.actvate.ie. I decided to take a peek at who they were and what they were up to.

Under construction, but still high PR?

The first thing that got my attention was the fact that a thin-content ‘under construction’ site had a toolbar PR of 5. So a quick look at the WHOIS:

% Rights restricted by copyright; http://www.domainregistry.ie/copyright.html
% Do not remove this notice

domain: activate.ie
descr: Martina Skelly
descr: Sole Trader
descr: REGISTERED BUSINESS NAME
admin-c: ACS958-IEDR
tech-c: AAM456-IEDR
renewal: 07-December-2006
status: Active - LOCKED
nserver: NS.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
nserver: NS2.BLACKNIGHTSOLUTIONS.COM
source: IEDR

person: Martina Skelly
nic-hdl: ACS958-IEDR
source: IEDR

person: Blacknight.ie Hostmaster
nic-hdl: AAM456-IEDR
source: IEDR

Hmm… I’m not a domain expert. But even for me that doesn’t provide much to go on. In fact it looks like this is an old domain that looks set to be dropped.

Before I go any further a word about domain age and trust. Domain age is a very strong variable in Google’s ‘trustrank’ algo. In many competitive niches the top spots are virtually insurmountable as a result of the aged domains that reside there. So much so that Google has been accused of forfeiting relevancy in an effort to tackle the spam that has entered their index on so many occasions.

On the Internet time travel is possible

Did you know you can look at the historical contents of a website? You can look back and see what the site owner published over time. And that’s exactly what I did next.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://activate.ie gives me snapshots of the content that resided on this site over time. I can see results going back to November 2001. So this domain is well aged. But the next bit is interesting. From the Archive snapshot for November 2003:

ACTIVATE is a year long EU funded research project which started in July 2001 and based in Ireland. More in Project Description. This project is being tested by libraries in Cork and Clare who are creating local history websites linked to a portal. These can be viewed through the Irish Local Studies Portal link. To create a similar network click here.

So the domain not only has age, but it has provenance – a former EU funded research project. Unless they did something really nasty this domain probably has oodles of trust over at Google.

A little bit more digging…

So I mentioned that I’m no domaining expert (I know enough to get me by ). But I know someone whois (excuse the double pun). John McCormac was probably at this stuff when I was just a mere twinkle (ok, I’m not that young any more… *sigh*). And John was able to give me the following:

activate | 2001-09-24 00:00:00 | NEW |
activate | 2004-11-25 00:00:00 | DEL |
activate | 2004-12-09 00:00:00 | NEW |
activate | 2006-11-16 00:00:00 | DEL |
activate | 2006-12-07 00:00:00 | NEW |

The 20010924 whois is:
domain: activate.ie
descr: An Chomairle Leabharlanna
descr: Statutory Body
descr: Discretionary Name
admin-c: Annette Kelly
tech-c: Register. ie Hostmaster
zone-c: Register. ie Hostmaster
nserver: knox.host.ie
nserver: quark.host.ie
source: IEDR

Sweet. The domain was originally owned by a statutory body. It rarely gets any better.

So who is Martina Skelly?

It can be quite humorous running vanity checks on your own name. You’d be surprised just how much info there is on-line. After searching for “Martina Skelly” (with the quotes) found a couple of references.

The most likely candidate is a Martina Skelly who works for Digino, an Irish Internet marketing agency. I see a lot of Adwords ads for Digino targeting SEM type phrases – Digino is one of the better established SM agencies here in Ireland.

Conclusion

Regardless of the owner, the domain itself has given quite an advantage to the current website by way of its history and providence. By picking up a domain that previously hosted such a well trusted website, Activate.ie can now compete for Search Engine traffic that a new domain could take a number of years to acquire.

It might be time to cosy up with Mr McCormac to see if his vast databases can throw up other potential .IE domain gems.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: .IE Domain Name Strategies – Using Aged & Trusted Domains to Establish Your Website

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Yes, Comreg is still ranking #1 for searches on the phrase ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ (and if you don’t believe me try linking to it yourself :mrgreen:).

I noticed James Corbett linking to my story and lamenting the loss of the ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ bomb (as it turns James is a wee bit premature). It got me to thinking as to how Google might be filtering these ‘attacks’?

Is relevancy the key to the Bomb Filter?

There is a tad bit of discussion going on (see the commentary on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog – one for your reader also) and it has got me thinking how the filter might actual kick in.

First off I wouldn’t know an algorithm if it licked me in the face. But here’s my best guess at what Google might be doing to filter out the Bombs.

Google constantly crawls the web looking for new content and new hyperlinks. As the volume of same-anchor hyperlinks pointing at any one object increases a threshold may be reached which triggers a flag.

I would imagine that relevancy checks are then carried out on both the target object and originating objects to see if:

1. the originating object (the page publishing the link) is relevant to the target;
2. the originating object is relevant to other originating objects;
3. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the originating object;
4. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the originating website;
5. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the target object;
6. the anchor used has relevancy with respect to the target website.

In situations where enough originating objects fail the above tests Google may then filter the target object from search results on the target anchor text.

But I do find it interesting that the ‘Telecoms Poodle‘ is still live and well.

Why might this be? Well firstly, the anchor contains the word ‘telecoms’ which is highly relevant for the target. ‘Telecoms’ is probably also relevant for many of the sites that bombed ComReg (many of the bloggers involved are commenting on the Broadband problems we have here in Ireland). I imagine also that the relatively small size of Ireland’s blogging community makes many of the originating sites relevant to each other (quite a small close-knit circle involved in the bomb).

If I am right it might still be possible to bomb phrases – the key would be to link using semi-relevant anchors, and publish those anchors on sites that share high relevance with the target site and each other.

Of course all the above is simply me speculating. The chances I’m completely wrong? I imagine quite high.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Google Bomb That Got Away – Ireland’s Telecoms Poodle is Alive And Well (and living in Lower Abbey Street)

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The most famous ‘Google Bomb’ was for ‘miserable failure‘, which previously pointed at the White House bio page of George Bush. Searches on that query now produce results pointing at references to ‘Google Bombing’.

What was Google Bombing?

Google Bombing was the practice of extremely heavy and concerted linking campaigns using a particular anchor phrase. In the case of George Bush, links were created using the anchor text ‘miserable failure’:

<a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/biography.html">miserable failure</a>

Previously Google apparently considered both the anchor text and volume of links as a proxy for authority for a particular search phrase. This no longer happens.

But could this change affect your rankings?

Although we cannot be sure whether these algorithm changes have a threshold before they kick in (I’m sure it’s not so simple), it is worth considering the implications for regular link building efforts. The change seems to filter results – I couldn’t find Mr. Bush’s bio ranked at all for the phrase ‘miserable failure’.

Now Google is known for employing the brightest minds on the planet, and it’s very likely that the changes will not affect any sites other than those that previously ranked well after ‘Google Bombing’ campaigns. That said, Google has been known to make the odd mistake here and there.

If your back link profile is heavily skewed toward one or two anchor text phrases you could see your rankings affected by these changes. I imagine sites that target unrelated or semi-unrelated search phrases would be more at risk.

Varying you anchor text has always been a pre-requisite…..

Professional link builders and SEOs should already know to create a varied anchor text profile for their clients. But in cases where a large proportion of any particular backlink profile target an anchor phrase for which a site is not well trusted you might run foul of this tweak.

It might be timely to watch some of the highly optimised niches to see if any other sites are affected by this.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Say Goodbye to ‘Google Bombing’ & Hello to ‘Take Care with Your Anchor Text’

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Those Awards, a ‘Best Site’, and some META tag fun optimisation

I swore that I wouldn’t mention those awards again (see, I kept my word :mrgreen:), but this post has led to a rather large amount of traffic.

It appears that many people are hitting Red Cardinal off searches for “moviestar”. Here’s a quick screen shot of the Google results for that term:

(You’ll have to take my word for it when I say that my post ranked #2 for that search for a long time. I’m now at #5. Oh, and while I’m at it, I’ve no idea why www.beingthere.com/ is returned at the current #2? And one more thing, does anyone else find that ‘Movistar’ suggested listings in the middle useful?)

Here’s a larger image of my blog post listing on that page:

When I wrote that post I was a little angry at said awards. So I gave the post a META description of “moviestar.ie is NOT the Best Website Launched in 2006″. And boy have I got some traffic from people searching for “moviestar”.

Meta Tag Optimization alive & well

First off, Meta Description tags have little or no ranking benefit. What content you stick in that tag wont make your site rank any higher (well, for Google anyway). But that tag can be hugely powerful for websites that do rank well. That’s because Google generally uses your META Description for the snippet underneath your page URL in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

When you think about your META description tags, you should think of them in terms of getting click throughs, not ranking.

As people searched for “moviestar” many saw my snippet. That snippet aroused curiosity and served as a good call-to-action. And people did act – by clicking and visiting my post.

So next time you’re creating your unique META descriptions for each page (did I mention that unique descriptions on each page reduces the chance of duplicate content filters hitting your site?) you should think about searchers. And you should think about your descriptions as headlines – the more attractive your headline the more likely you will receive that click over a less interesting or off-topic snippet.

People still believe in Meta Tag Optimization

Just as a parting note, I took a quick look in my favourite keyword tool to see what people search for. And they are still searching on phrases related to meta tag optimisation:

[Update] The actual search query is actually “moviestar.ie” (without quotes) – yes, you’d be absolutely surprised at the number of people who search for a domain name.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Who Said META Tag Optimization Was Dead?

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Selling links can hurt your website’s health

Last Friday a Googler by the name of Stephanie, who is based in Dublin no less, made a posting on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog concerning the official Google stance on paid links, and in particular link sales. (Strangely, the author’s name has been subsequently changed to – I recall there being a full name on the post initially and it was French I believe?)

Perhaps of particular note:

We have more people working on Google’s link-weighting for quality control and to correct issues we find. So nowadays, undermining the PageRank algorithm is likely to result in the loss of the ability of link-selling sites to pass on reputation via links to other sites.

There have been rumours that Google has a team of covert link buyers who identify link-selling sites (I’m not sure this isn’t fairly obvious though?).

So if you do sell links you might be at risk of being blacklisted within the pagerank algorithm.

[As an aside, can't wait for WP2.1 and the auto save feature - I wrote a post about this on Friday only to see it disappear in front of my eyes when FF made an uncharacteristic history-1 manoeuvre :(]

Adam Lasnik on Duplicate Content

An issue that seems to pop up again and again is duplicate content. Canonical URL has been referenced a number of times by the likes of Matt Cutts, and now Adam Lasnik has written an official post on the Webmaster Blog:

We recognize that there are many nuances and a bit of confusion on the topic, so we’d like to help set the record straight.

Adam discusses what exactly duplicate content is and isn’t, and then offers some advice on how to avoid the issues that are usually associated with the problem.

The usual remedies are advised along with one or two nerve-soothers:

1. use robots.txt to block access to dupe content;
2. use proper 301 redirects;
3. ensure internal linking is consistent;
4. ccTLD for country specific content;
5. advice for syndicated content;
6. preferred domain from Webmaster Console;
7. keep boilerplate content to a minimum;
8. avoid thin-content pages;
9. CMS issues;
10. Scrapper sites.

It’s a good read to get the official Google line on duplicate content.

Using images in the vicinity of your AdSense blocks

This actually seems to be a policy shift by Google. The use of images close to ad blocks had been found to increase the CTR on publishing sites. Although publishers previously had to clearly separate ad and image blocks, it appears that Google no longer wants to see images near to ad blocks:

We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads.

The posting also gives some visual examples of what’s now outside the guidelines, and one of the images included a clear border between the images and the adblock.

The actual guideline seems somewhat fuzzy to me, and it is not clear just what is and what isn’t viable within TOS. The examples given and the wording of the post require some implicit assumptions – it appears that having 4 images aligned with a four ad block is unacceptable, but how about having three images?

More debate to come methinks…

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Link Sellers, Duplicate Content & AdSense Guidelines – Google Pronouncements

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Well today Google announced some new features of Google Apps.

You can now register your domain name as part of the service. The cost is $10 per year with free private registration. Regardless of your feelings about privacy and Google seeing your WHOIS info, that price is still cheaper than GoDaddy who charge $4.95 per year for privacy on top of $8.95 for a .com registration.

Funnily enough the service is actually through GoDaddy

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google now Selling Domains

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What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication is a format for publishing web pages and other content.

In essence RSS is very similar to the content you would find on any website, with a few differences. RSS does not include any styling information that would give the ‘page’ a custom design or layout. If you can imagine reading this page without the header up top, the sidebar on the right or anything else that is superfluous to the viewing this story.

An RSS ‘feed’ can also contain more than one ‘page’ in a single file. That’s the real beauty of RSS – you can look at many stories or pages from a website without leaving the RSS ‘page’ or feed.

But perhaps the biggest difference between RSS and a regular web page is the ability to aggregate or combine multiple RSS ‘feeds’ (published RSS files are often referred to as a ‘feeds’) in your ‘reader’. A ‘reader’ is a program used to read and display the ‘feeds’ or RSS pages. Here’s what mine looks like:

I read the feeds from over 100 websites just about most days. Now if I was to visit all those sites it might take me 3 or 4 hours, but my reader shows me the feeds fom all those sites on one page. I can view the website name, the title and a snippet of each item. When I click on a story title I can read the content of that ‘page’:

Using my reader to aggregate thee feeds I can keep track of many, many blogs and websites.

RSS Readers

I use Google Reader. It’s free and rather than sit on my computer it sits on the Internet so I can access my feeds from any computer with Internet access.

The main web browsers and email clients now incorporate RSS features also. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera allow you to track and read feeds right in your browser.

So how can you tell if a site publishes a feed?

When you visit a website you might see the following icon appear in your address bar:

That icon has been adopted by all the major browsers for the purpose of depicting RSS feeds. It is available for download at Feed Icons. Older feed icons might look like this:

You can see that orange is the predominant colour used to depict RSS.

Making your feed icon appear in the address bar

Since most of the major browsers now support RSS it is a good idea to notify the browser that you have a feed so that the RSS icon appears in the address bar. To make your feed visible to agents you should include something similar to the following META in the head section of your page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.site.tld/path/to/rss2.0/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="http://www.site.tld/path/to/rss0.92/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://www.site.tld/path/to/atom0.3/feed/" />

This auto discovery technique is also used by most readers and blog aggregators so it is a good idea to include it.

RSS features and uses

RSS can be used for many purposes. E-commerce stores can publish their products via RSS. Employment sites often offer customised search feeds so users can keep tabs on particular job-type vacancies. Many large sites offer multiple feeds so you can track only the information of interest to you.

Search engines and RSS

Search engines love RSS. They just devour feeds because they are very machine readable. Feeds also contain something search engines love: TEXT. And lots of it.

Very often my feed will rank well for specific search phrases and my site might have 2 or 3 pages ranking on the first SERP (Search Engine Result Page) – the post, my homepage and my feed . When multiple results from my site appear on a results page the probability of receiving a referral increase dramatically.

So does RSS matter?

RSS is here. It has not reached the tipping-point just yet, but the integration of RSS into the major browsers during 2006 means that RSS should become more and more mainstream over time.

And just as I finish this what appears in my reader?

the latest research done by Japan.Internet.com and goo Research shows that RSS’s bringing more accesses to the sites.

Q1: Do you visit more sites due to RSS feeds?
- More, 34.6%
- Hasn’t changed, 59.5%
- Less, 5.8%

Q2: Do you visit sites you read on RSS feeds?
- Always, 23.5%
- Sometimes, 58.1%

From Multilingual-Search.

Perfect

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Really Simple Guide to RSS

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You can now search the US patent corpus using the the interface used for Google Book Search (worth a look itself just to see the progress of web-based UI’s).

I’m sure Bill Slawski over at SEO by the Sea will be interested in this.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Search for US Patents

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Going back a couple of months now, but you may recall a small fuss over Damien Mulley’s Thinkhouse PR post disappearing from Google’s SERPs.

Although the page was re-indexed, Google were never forthcoming about what caused the issue to occur:

Hey, I like a good conspiracy as much as the next guy (big X-Files fan… well, of the early years at least), but I must respectfully note that there’s no nefarious banning that’s gone on here.

While it may be seen as unfortunate timing, some pages of mulley.net are currently not shown in our search results due purely to algorithmic factors… nothing manual or otherwise intentional about it.

It’s quite possible that this may change as we continue to update our algorithms regularly.

Regards,
Adam, on behalf of the Search Quality Team at Google.

P.S. — Ironically, with the online attention you’ve received about this issue, your pages may automatically end getting crawled more frequently or deeply, resulting in more of your pages being shown in our search results… so I humbly recommend a bit of patience.
Source: Adam Lasnik comment on www.mulley.net

Tinfoil hats ready

Now call me paranoid, and perhaps on that occasion it was just coincidence, but I find it very curious that my post about moviestar.ie was crawled, indexed and ranked #3 for a Google search on ‘moviestar.ie’, but very shortly after was completely de-indexed from Google (site:, cache:).

In case you’re wondering if I’ve gone completely batty moviestar.ie are a client of Thinkhouse PR.

Just too many coincidences?

My site is actively crawled and indexed by Google. Every page is indexed. Except one.

I am purely white-hat. My site complies with all Google guidelines. Their are no bad links either into or out of the absent page in question.

Some questions for Google

Perhaps I’m just a crackpot… but I’m not buying this as a coincidence.

I would really like to know the following:

1. Do any Dublin-based Googlers have the ability to remove pages from the index?
2. Under what circumstances would an indexed page be de-indexed?
3. Does Google have any relationship with Thinkhouse PR?

I will be posting this over at the Google Webmasters Group in the hope that Adam Lasnik might answer some of my questions.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: What’s Up with Google and Thinkhouse PR?

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Microsoft Live! has a notoriously poor reputation. People think their search results pretty much suck (try finding a SERP without a blogspot entry), and their algorithm is easy enough to game. But for me, the strangest thing is the extreme measures Live! takes in order to ‘fix’ problems. Here’s a good example.

Just take ‘em out

A recent discussion on Search Engine Watch brought a new Microsoft Live! policy to the attention of webmasters. An email received by a poster from the Live! spam team contained the following:

Your site is acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content. Techniques which attempt to acquire unrelated spam links in order to increase ranking are considered spam and your site has been excluded from our index as results.

Now, to be honest, I’m in agreement with Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal and applaud this measure. In theory it’s a proactive step by Microsoft Lives! to clean up their SERPs.

What worries me is the practical side of things. I just wonder if we are going to see collateral damage from this move.

Now before I go any further, I will hold my hand up and say that I don’t normally give a toot about MSN (or Live! as it’s now known). Yes, I still believe that Google executes somewhere between 80 and 90% of all Irish searches. But I do know that certain groups still regularly find their way onto Live! pages (picture all those office workers typing search queries into the address bar of IE :mrgreen:).

Ulterior motives?

Of course the Live! bans may be a defence against the MFA sites which Google is actively banning from their index. In what some believe to be a very cynical move, Google has been banning MFA sites but not disabling their Adsense accounts.

So while Google would prefer not to have their index polluted with MFA sites, they are quite happy to make money from these parasites polluting the indices of their competitors.

So I wonder if perhaps some of the new tactics over at Live! are more of a defensive measure to counteract the competitive postures of it’s biggest competitor?

But what about the gaping hoe in Live!s algorithm?

Well a very recently discovered bug in the way Live! handles duplicate content has opened up a real can of worms. It appears to be rather easy to remove pages from the Live! index simply by linking to the target page in a particular way. This came about because whereas Google just ignores the duplicate, Live! bans both the original and the duplicate (another example of extremes).

I wont link to the above tactic as I don’t feel that would be helpful at all (and it’s apparently so easy to abuse that I think it’s immoral to publish).

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: More problems for MSN Live!

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On any given day, Google may be testing a couple of new tweaks of its algorithms – the formulas that decide where web pages appear in the listings. Norvig said the company may divert 0.1% of its traffic through a trial version of its search engine to see if users like the results.

Now 0.1% of its traffic may sound inconsequential, but when you execute over 91m searches per day in the US alone (source: searchenginewatch.com) that amounts to 91,000 searches using modified technology.

This would also account for some of the strange appearances with Google’s SERPs (screenshot of request is there). While the Google Adwords quality feedback system has been known about for some time (click on an AdWords link from Google SERPs, go back to the SERPs and you may see a ‘Was this link useful?’ request), this new system seems to solicit similar user feedback for organic listings. (Here’s a short but interesting side discussion about tainted feedback responses WebMasterWorld.com.)

This is an obvious attempt by Google to weed out the countless spam sites that have plagued their index for quite some time now. Of course, the effectiveness of getting your users to do your work for you must be questioned, and I very much doubt we will see this functionality rolled out to a wider audience (getting prepared to eat hat now that I have said that ).

(You can find some other interesting discussions about Spam over on the Google Webmaster Group.)

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google’s Head of Research on SERP Split Testing

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Patents can reveal a lot

It is important to follow the technical aspect of search engines. There is undoubtedly one person who is the authority on both today’s technology and the technology the search engines are currently building to serve us tomorrow. He is Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea.

Patent watching

SEObytheSEA specialises in patent watching. Yesterday I saw Bill Slawski’s post about Microsoft snooping Google search history. It’s quite interesting from a number of perspectives. But first a little background on what’s going on.

Firefox search.suggest

It appears that Firefox has a little known service called search suggest. Search suggest is controlled via the browser.search.suggest.enabled parameter and basically allows third party access to the search history of your search bar.

So whenever you use the built in search bar of Firefox the search query is added to your history so that suggestions can be made based on your prior behaviour.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Apparently Firefox allows third party search plug-ins access to your history so that they too can offer suggestions based on your previous searches. But whereas you might presume that one search engine wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, have access to searches executed on another, well, you’d be wrong.

Microsoft Live sniffing around Google searches?

Apparently Microsoft Live suggested some of Bill’s previous Google queries. Bill then saw that his search history was being sent to Microsoft Live via the browser.search.suggest feature of Firefox. That feature transports your history via a JSON encoded file when this feature is turned on.

The Microsoft Patent

Of course SEObytheSEA is renowned for its coverage of search engine patents. Low and behold, haven’t Microsoft a patent (published November 16) entitled ‘System and method for automatic generation of suggested inline search terms’.

Privacy Ramifications

The default setting of browser.search.suggest.enabled is TRUE in the latest version of Firefox (2.0). (This can be changed via about:config.)

This means that if you are using the built in search bar, a search engine can see your query history regardless of whether it executed those queries. From the SEO by the SEA post:

I performed a search in Windows Live for a term that I don’t believe I ever searched for before on a search engine. I then went to Google Suggest, and started typing in the first couple of letters of the that word to see if it would suggest my Windows Live search term.

It did.

While most people understand that additional toolbars (e.g. Google Toolbar) commonly track your behaviour, it may not be apparent that your search history is made available via this relatively unknown feature of Firefox 2.0.

Of course it’s not as if the major search engines aren’t already collecting enough data on us….

[Some concerned viewers might be interested in CustomizeGoogle plugin for Firefox.]

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Does Google Know Your MSN & Y! Searches?

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The first, ‘Major Search Engines Unite to Support a Common Mechanism for Website Submission‘, relates to a joint initiative by Google, Yahoo! and MSN to support the Sitemaps 0.90 protocol.

What does this mean for site owners? Well if your familiar with Google sitemaps, you’ll know that getting crawled, and ultimately indexed, can be assisted by submitting a sitemap to Google.

Now that same sitemap will be accepted by all 3 major search engines, so there will be no need to generate proprietary sitemaps for each.

The second piece of news relates to the expansion of Google ads for mobile. Google Ads for mobile (beta service trialled in the US, UK, Japan and Germany) will be extended to France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, China, Ireland, India and Australia. So soon we’ll be getting Google Ads on our mobiles here in Ireland.

Personally, I think that in a couple of years it’s all going to be mobile, and that particular space is where you need to be looking in terms of strategic Internet marketing. I hope to look deeper into the mobile space in future posts.

Is anybody using Google Mobile Search? And if so, how do you find the service?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Search Engines Group-Hug Sitemaps & Mobile Ads come to Ireland

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Google again…

Now we all know Google. Google has changed the way we interact on a daily basis. We use their Search Engine more than any other. They supply us with lots of great free services. And they act as the ad broker of choice on the Internet.

While some people may find it curious that I don’t block Google ads (it’s relatively easy to do you know), the main reason for not doing so is to see what’s being advertised and to whom.

Adwords

Adwords is a great way for any site to get noticed. The system is cheap, reliable and trust-worthy. However, Adwords only leads the horse to the water. That’s all you’re paying for.

So what happens when the horse doesn’t drink? Google gets paid and you’re out of pocket. So how often do you check to see what keywords are performing? Not just on clickthroughs, but on conversions? If you don’t check these things your practically throwing away your money. Let me explain by going back to John.

I was reading John’s post and noticed the ad block after his post:

It got me curious. What were they offering and why target John’s site? So as a curious individual I clicked on the ad:

You see I clicked on an ad for

Presentation Skills
Natural, effective and interesting presentations at all levels

I liked the strong copy and was interested in how it related to John’s site. And here’s the big problem. The landing page I hit makes no reference that I can see to ‘Presentation Skills’. In fact, at an Internet glance it seems like the site in question is in the call/contact centre business. There’s no relevance.

When I click on an ad for ‘Presentation Skills’ (assuming that it’s going to be advice or products) and land on your site you have about 5 seconds of my time to give me what I’m looking for.

After those 5 seconds have elapsed I’m back with John again.

And that’s why landing page theme is the most important factor for conversion. You can have the best copy and design in the world, but if it’s off-theme you’ve just lost a prospect.

(As an aside: It seems to me that there could be quite a market for SEM (Adwords etc.) optimisers here in Ireland. For more on this subject see this discussion.)

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Are Your Adwords Campaigns Leaking?

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According to UK-based NetCraft there are now over 100m websites hosted on the planet:

Previous milestones in the survey were reached in April 1997 (1 million sites), February 2000 (10 million), September 2000 (20 million), July 2001 (30 million), April 2003 (40 million), May 2004 (50 million), March 2005 (60 million), August 2005 (70 million). April 2006 (80 million ) and August 2006 (90 million).

Apparently the rate of growth has accelerated considerably in the past year with over 27 million new sites since January. That far outpaces the equivalent figure for the whole of last year – 17 million new sites.

Of course the real significance here is that more content makes things harder to find, and when things are harder to find on-line most people turn to the search engines.

With so many sites out there competing getting found has never been so important.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: 100m Reasons Why We Can’t Live Without Search

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Today there are multiple ways to get noticed on-line. For the vast majority of Internet users Search is predominant route taken to your website.

When it comes to marketing for Search Engines there are two techniques available to you:

1. SEM Search Engine Marketing (e.g. Adwords, YPN); and
2. SEO Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Marketing

The phrase Search Engine Marketing may not be well known to most, but I’m pretty sure that just about everybody who has gone on-line in the past few years has seen SEM in practice. When you use a Search Engine you are presented with a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) for your particular search phrase or word. Here’s an example of a Google search screen (with the SEM paid results highlighted):

Most people are very familiar with this image. To the right of the search results is a narrow column with a number of stacked text adverts. If you look carefully you can just about make out the ‘Sponsored Links’ title at the top of that column.

These adverts are displayed after an auction process – publishers pay Google (‘paid search’) to display their ad in this space, with the highest bidder receiving the highest placement.

Every time someone clicks on those sponsored links Google receives a payment form the publisher of that ad.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO, on the other hand, refers to techniques used to achieve a higher ranking in Google’s main (‘organic’ or ‘natural’) results:

Google receives no payment for placement in these results. A website’s ranking is determined automatically by search engine algorithms. The higher your rankings the greater the traffic you receive relative to competitor sites.

Search engine optimisation is all about understanding the algorithms employed by the major search engines and optimising those factors that algorithmically enhance your website’s rankings.

Why SEO is more important than SEM

In a nutshell, SEM is a quick fix. The day you stop paying for those ads you will lose all new traffic.

Worse still, the day your competitors decide to bid 5c or 10c more for your keywords you will find that your ad has dropped off the first results page. You might be able to control the cost per click but you cannot control the cost of absolute traffic.

SEO can take time. SEO can be expensive. But when you do attain high organic listings your site cannot be toppled by a mere incremental bid.

Those trusted top organic positions are just that – trusted, and people see the paid listings for what they are – paid.

SEO is a sustainable long-term promotional strategy

SEM is great for the short-term promotion of a website. It gives your site that initial hit that can result in visitors and revenue. But at a cost.

In the long term sustainable high profit strategies convert into higher profit and lower acquisition costs. Those strategies are built around high organic placements and that’s why SEO is more important than SEM.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Why SEO Is More Important Than SEM

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