Advanced SEO Course

I’ll be instructing an Advanced SEO Course for the Digital Marketing Institute this coming week, on Wednesday and Thursday 7-8 of July. The course is the first of its kind here in Ireland (to the best of my knowledge, but I’ll be very happy to be corrected), in that it will cover advanced SEO and is targeted at established SEO folk. It will take place in the Radisson BLU, Golden Lane, Dublin 8.

What Will We Cover?

I’m working on the content, but I’ll likely focus on advanced on-site SEO, with some time set aside to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation. My co-instructor John Ring will take the reigns for the first morning, and I’ll be instructing for the first afternoon and all of the second day (I hope I wont bore the attendess to death mind…).

Small Group, Lots of Interaction

I expect the group to be no more than 8-10 students, so we should get tonnes of interaction, and be able to take time out to address issues and questions that the students have. With a small group like this you can never know where things might lead, but my overall focus will be on sending attendees away with knowledge they can apply to their own sites which will generate tangible returns.

Places Still Available

I haven’t checked-in in a few days, but there were still a couple of places available. I realise the course is not cheap, but I’m working on delivering value for the price. If you’re interested please call the DMI at 01 271 1888. You can also contact them via their website.

Finally

Given that I’ve written on my blog for the first time in many months, I’d like to keep going. If there are any topics of interest to you I’d love to hear from about them. I’ve been toying with writing a very in-depth post about geotargeting and localisation, as this is one area I’ve been working a lot, and there seems to be a vacuum online when it comes to finding reliable info about this topic. Anyhows, any and all ideas are welcome.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Advanced SEO Course in Dublin this coming July 7-8

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Irish Travel Agent Websites

Good CRM and Customer Reviews Should be Friends

Looking through many of the Irish travel sites I visited the first thing that struck me was the lack of any customer reviews. Reviews are a great way to internally measure business success, and are increasingly being used by buyers to help select destinations. Just look at the popularity of Tripadvisor.

So where does CRM enter the equation. When a customer returns from a holiday how many operators/agents follow up to ask the customer if they enjoyed the trip? Soliciting feedback is a great way to build relationships and continuously improve your business offering. Feedback can also be a great safety valve to identify issues early. Soliciting feedback can also reinforce the belief that the business cares about its customers.

I know that I’d appreciate a quick email follow-up from any travel agent asking me was I happy after consuming their service (and by service I include the consumption of the trip or holiday). Amazon has been successfully following up with every single purchase for as long as I’ve been a customer.

Feedback loops, including online reviews, can easily integrate with CRM systems. Integration can be loose or tight, but the point I hope I’m making is that travel sites could and should think beyond the sale. I recently installed a widget-based review system on an ecommerce site in about 5 minutes flat (excluding QA). While tight CRM integration could add a large overhead, Irish travel sites could offer user reviews without massive investment. (For reference: the review system was LouderVoice for Business)

OPPOTUNITY 1: Travel sites that embrace user reviews, UGC and feedback mechanisms will nurture stronger customer relationships and offer superior user experience to new visitors.

Top Rankings Still Doing Good Business?

I think everyone realises that the travel niche is suffering acutely from out current economic woes. But I imagine high ranking sites are faring better than others. The trends are clear – migration to online channels is only increasing as people search out higher value propositions to offset economic woes.

So I was really quite surprised by how the Irish travel sites were competing in the organic results. Being blunt (many people have told me I’d never make the diplomatic corps) what struck me was the lack of serious SEO. And this struck a particular cord, reminding me of an important lesson – in SEO everything is relative.

You Don’t Have to Beat Best Practice, You Just Need To Beat The Other Guys

I work with a fairly diverse set of clients, most of whom operate in more competitive niches. So I’m used to working on projects that require significant resources (and budget) to see returns. But looking at the online travel niche here in Ireland I’ve concluded that the lack of sophistication is far more prominent than significant competitive forces in the SEPRs.

One of the sites I noticed doing very well for many short-tail travel phrases was gohop.ie. I was interested to see how they achieved their success, and from what I could see this is down to article submissions. Generally I’d consider article submission to be low-level link building, but to GoHop’s credit they rank, and in reality the means are far less important than the ends.

Article Submissions – low level, but effective

OPPOTUNITY 2: SERPs are wide open to a more sophisticated SEO campaign, and I think even a newcomer who embraces high quality content and user interaction can quickly become the online organic leader.

Website Architecture Isn’t Brain Surgery

When designing a good website architecture for both users and search engines it’s important to promote your most important pages. That means building a navigation which tells users, both human and machine, what’s important. Your site-wide navigation tells users more than most other mechanisms, and I have to say that I’m really disappointed to see that one of Ireland’s leading travel agents have commissioned a new website which breaks many of the most basic architecture rules. No names, but it’s also terrible (but unsurprising TBH) to see large agencies churning out such poor websites, and doubly so given that said agency also tout their SEO services on their site. I always wince when I see things like:

<a href="javascript:__doPostBack([...]'')">[... ]</a>

or internal links with 490 character target urls. Things like that aren’t stupid, they’re incompetent.

OPPOTUNITY 3: Non-branded travel-related search terms wont be “owned” by brands as long as they pay huge sums to developers who don’t understand organic search. Small niche players can dominate SERPs while the large brands continue to haemorrhage cash to offline branded advertising.

Cycles Come, Cycles Go…

While current conditions are exceptionally bad for the travel industry, opportunities abound for the group of survivors that compete in the next up cycle. Embracing UGC and interactive feedback loops will increasingly differentiate market leaders from “also-rans”, while user-centric design and content will reduce new prospect acquisition costs and increase customer loyalty.

In my opinion there’s massive upside potential in this online niche, and I hope that the guys from the ITAA course will go on to dominate the online space in times to come. Lastly, thanks to last week’s students for all the great discussions and ideas.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Travel Websites Leaving Money On The Table

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So yesterday I was delighted to receive 2 comments on my recent Google Local 7 Pack post. So what’s so odd about that? I’m generally very lucky that people do comment on my posts, but these comments were different:

Richard and everyone else,

Anyone have any ideas how this happened????

http://screencast.com/t/vLQFNIJn

Thanks,

Becky

and:

This might be the answer to my previous question. Do you think this is how it happened?

http://screencast.com/t/uh0iS5eOr

Thanks so much for your thoughts,

Becky

Becky had gone to the trouble of recording her comments as video, and think about this for a moment – how much more fidelity was added to Becky’s question and subsequent answer by using video:

And now Becky’s own response:

It really made my day, firstly becasue I was flattered that anyone would go to so much trouble, but secondly because it opened my eyes to the future – people will be leaving video comments on blogs just as they leave text comments today.

So How Might Google Use Phone Numbers?

Actually the issue Becky raises is very interesting in its own right – there’s a bionic over on the Google Webmaster Support Group called Phil Payne, and one of Phil’s favourite tricks is to look up phone numbers to see where else they’re published (gives some insight into businesses running multiple websites). I had never before considered the impact of phone numbers on local listings, and I think it’s entirely plausible that Becky’s hypothesis above is actually quite correct.

So thanks so much Becky for leaving those video comments – really made my day, and hopefully will help other users out in the future!

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Can Video Comments Explain Why Phone Numbers Matter in Local Search

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Both John and I had a great time talking with Ralph, and while we really only touched on basic high level issues I think the discussion is useful for any SME considering Organic Search as a marketing channel.

You can listen to the Podcast by visiting this page: Enterprise Ireland SEO Podcast.

If you do listen I’d love to hear any feedback you have, both good and bad.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Enterprise Ireland Podcast on SEO Search Engine Optimisation

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This is why I’ve tried to tell people that rel=”canonical” is simply a bandaid, and the best solution is prevention not cure – publish content on one, and only one, URL.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Interesting Case Study: rel=canonical Google Fail

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Google Local 7 Pack Result Set

I wrote about the various Google local display types in my post How To Rank in Google Local, and I also looked at the result for [pizza dublin] at that time. Interesting to see that Apache have lost their #1 position to an inner page on Four Stars website. Funny, but that SERP is so diverse and full of inner pages that I’m surprised some of the pizza companies aren’t using SEO (if they are they probably should find a real SEO…).

Will be interesting to see if this new 7 Pack stays, and if this heralds the end of the 10 Pack.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Introduces Local 7 Pack, 10 Pack Dead?

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Extended snippets beneath related forum sitelinks

This looks like it’s related to extended snippets which Google introduced back in March this year (see post on Extended Snippets). The search query consisted of 6 words, and the main results displayed extended snippets. Quite interesting, and I’m sure click-through rates are quite useful when you get these sitelinks (and the extended screen real estate).

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Publishing Extended Snippets on Related Forum Post Sitelinks

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Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues Video

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This new variation shows 4 sitelinks, together with post date, and most interestingly appears for results other than the #1 position:

4 Sitelinks from related forum posts with post dates for #3 ranked result

The above SERP showed an authoritative local OneBox (learn about local OneBox in my Google Local rankings post), followed by a site at #1 and again indented at #2, and then a thread from www.boards.ie holding #3. This is where it gets interesting – you can clearly see the 4 sitelinks containing links to other related threads with a date. The date is odd, and in some cases predates the original post date as per the forum.

Interesting all the same, and seems like Google are expanding the sitelinks program at this time.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: More Sitelink Variations from Google, #3 with Internal Related Forum Threads

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We may choose to replace titles which are repeated on a number of pages or which otherwise appear to be suboptimal – that’s probably what’s happening here. To resolve that, it would be a good idea to make sure that the titles are unique, compelling and relevant to every page and that the important parts are visible in the first part of the title text. You can get some help with finding duplicated titles in Webmaster Tools under Diagnostics / HTML suggestions.

Source

So if your site has the same title on every page (which happens a lot here in Ireland), Google may choose to override these titles with other more relevant titles. How they generate these is unclear, but what is clear is the need to control your own titles by ensuring they aren’t duplicates. After all, titles are one of the strongest signals you can give to Google.

There are a number of other times Google will change your title, but you’ll have to wait for the official announcement to find out about these I’m afraid. Keep your eyes peeled to the official Google Webmaster blog for the full skinny on this change.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Why Are My Page Titles Different In Google?

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Like many bloggers I get hit with lot’s of comment spam. You know the stuff you can buy for $10 from India.

Occasionally I get this crap from “commenters” trying to promote SEO companies, like the comment spam I received promoting thehoustonseo.com who apparently offer Houston Search Engine Optimization and SEO Houston services. Obviously I cant say that thehoustonseo.com, or their agents, actually left the comment spam, and I’ll leave readers to decide for themselves.

Here’s a comment I received:

Author : Guaranteed Houston SEO (IP: 59.95.172.82 , 59.95.172.82)
E-mail : annuity3@googlemail.co
URL : http://www.thehoustonseo.com/guaranteedhoustonseo.html
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=59.95.172.82
Comment:
Awesome Information about SEO! I liked this blog and do not have any reason for post my comment here.

So I wandered over to the Houston Search Engine Optimization website being promoted and sent them a message via their contact form letting them know how I felt about this comment spam. Contrary to the reply from the form I didn’t receive a response within 2 business days. Not that I was expecting it… but leave it at that methinks.

And then I get this:

Author : Houston search engine optimization (IP: 59.95.163.7 , 59.95.163.7)
E-mail : annuity3@googlemail.com
URL : http://www.thehoustonseo.com
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=59.95.163.7
Comment:
These information are remarkable and looking so informative and helpful to me as concern to SEO business.

So to anyone considering the Houston Search Engine Optimization services on offer from the various Houston SEOs maybe you want to think twice about whether they’ll do your site more harm than good.

The real shame of this is that Google will likely start ignoring blog comments altogether (if they haven’t already done so as I predicted) as more and more spammers muck up the blog segment of the web.

So again if you’re looking for Houston Search Engine Optimization take care that the the Houston SEO you choose does not use comment spam (like the comments above that were left to promote thehoustonseo.com) and other blackhat techniques to promote your site. Spamming for SEO is not a good long-term strategy.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Houston Search Engine Optimization Spammers Promoting thehoustonseo.com

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[gocompare] google.com
[gocompare] google.co.uk
[gocompare] google.ie

Looks like they no longer rank for their own brand. Still indexed though.
I’d feel guilty for outing them if it wasn’t for the way they tried to get free dodgy links from my clients…

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

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If you have received a questionnaire please return this by Friday April 17. I’m available to answer any questions people have – just leave a comment below or contact me via the site.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Free CRO Offer – Only 3 Days Remaining

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Interesting some of the rates experienced SEOs can command in-house in the US. An interesting point made:

While employers know that they are asking for a lot, they are not always willing to compensate adequately for their requirements.”“They’ll say ‘I need a seven-year experienced SEO person that does a list of 15 things, and I have $40 grand to spend’…That’s the biggest area where I see a disconnect,” Bodem says.

Some of the rates I’ve seen offered here in Ireland are even more pathetic. Thankfully I have no need to work in-house, but if I did I’d be on a lain to the US right away.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Interesting Look at How To Recruit Top SEOs In-house

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Big Thank You to All Attendees

I just want to say thanks to all the attendees who made both sessions so interesting and varied – we had questions, discussions and bant all mixed in. It’s obvious to me that there are a lot of hungry marketers out there looking to deliver the best online user experience possible, while growing their organisations’ web-based revenues. There’s absolutely no better time to do so than now, as there is no other platform delivering the ROI of web.

Really well done to you all. You made my day incredibly interesting, and I hope you all took something positive from our discussions over the two 3 hour sessions. I know I did. So thanks you all for that.

Thanks also, and well done, to Stephen and Anthony for making it all happen.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Website Architecture – Digital Marketing Institute

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81.3% of those surveyed use search engines every day
80.26% said that they use Google, and 11.75% Yahoo!

73.03% use Google.ie, and only 15.35% use Google.com. 11.61% weren’t sure.

61.02% of those using Google.ie are mainly searching using the web function and 38.98% mainly search pages from Ireland.

78.35% of people either clicking on the top 5 results or the results on the first page; which for most people is up to 10.

29.14% of those surveyed said that they click on sponsored links “almost every time” or “quite often”.

25.70% said that they found sponsored listings “somewhat” or “very” trustworthy, while 33.92% said that they don’t trust them at all or not that much.

Sample size was 500. Full stats will be released at Search Marketing World 2009.

I’m moderating the International SEO panel, and sitting on the Duplicate Content Panel. If you’re coming along please say hello! If not why not? There are some tickets still available – see the site for details.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Interesting New Statistics on Irish Search Engine Usage

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When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page.

I’ve always considered snippets to be important – they act as a draw, and a good snippet with a strong CTA can often improve click-through from the SERPs.

This change has only been announced today, but you can bet this was thoroughly tested and resulted in an improved user experience. Google is generally a master at iterative improvement to web UIs.

How Will This Affect Site Owners?

I think an impact that maybe hasn’t been considered is the impact on click-through rates. This change is bound to impact where click placement occurs. Here’s a scaled SERP image with fold mark at 700px:

Old Google SERP with 2 Line Snippet (gotta love the MISSING TITLE)

Now here’s a similar SERP with extended snippets:

New Google SERP with 4 Line Snippet

So the impact is an extension of the page height, and an increase in the top offset of each SERP listing.

Top 3 Consolidate Even More Clicks

The interesting issue is that we’re going from 4 to 3 organic listings above the fold based on average screen heights of 700px. I’ve run some random queries, while this change doesn’t affect every query over 3 words, it does affect quite a few of the tiny sample I tried.

There’s obviously some informational threshold below which the extended snippet isn’t displayed, so while it may not impact lots of searches it is going to change the display of some.

Will Extended Snippets Mix With Adwords?

I haven’t found any search that uses extended snippets on competitive Adwords SERPs. But if the extended snippets are used alongside masthead Adwords blocks we could easily end up with just one or maybe two organic listings above the fold. I’m doubting we’ll see this, but given that I recently saw a SERP screenshot with 8 paid listings and only 3 organic listings above the fold. That was based on 2 line snippets. 4 line snippets for a similar SERP could reduce that to 2 organic listings to 8 paid ads. Horrible thought for me personally…

End Of Meta Descriptions?

Well obviously the META Description will still be very important, but from what I can see the extended snippets come from body content. Google has been using body content where it makes better sense for a long time. But you could still use well crafted META Descriptions to improve the chances they’d be used as snippets for you key search terms. That’s now a little more difficult to control. At least for the longer tail of search…

Definitely worth keeping an eye on anyway.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Extended Snippets in Google’s SERPs – Even More Clicks for Top 3?

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I’ve used BOTW previously to list client sites. It’s one of those directories that probably has some trust left, so links there are likely of some value. Irish sites aren’t likely to get much traffic, but given how BOTW seem to have annexed Ireland as part of the UK I doubt you’d get any traffic:

BOTW.org.uk - BOTW UK & Ireland

BOTW seem to have gone the Yahoo! route of bundling Ireland with the UK, but for me the problem is adding an Irish directory on UK ccTLD. Let’s face it – the listings is unlikely to get you much traffic, so SEO benefit is important. Getting a link from UK ccTLD is not likely to provide quite as much support to Irish rankings as the same link from the parent botw.org gTLD. I realise there are other factors at play, but from an SEO perspective that’s what would strike me.

Is Canada part of the USA?

That always pisses off Canadians.

Check out the page title for botw.org.uk: “BOTW UK Directory – Ireland”

To me that reads like a parent-child relationship, as in Ireland is a child category under the “BOTW UK Directory”. Not the best way to handle Irish websites or webmasters I think.

So will I be renewing or buying listings in the new BOTW UK Directory? Well given that the listings has even less value (IMO) to humans – who’s going to use a “UK Directory” to find information about Ireland? – and the fact that links may have less value now – links from UK ccTLD probably have slightly less value everything else held constant – I doubt I will.

But it’s always a shame when you see this happen, especially since they gave Irish publishers no choice but to move onto the UK Directory and the .org.uk domain… Not to mention no option to lsit in the main botw.org directory:

BOTW.org .ie domain submission

It’s probably been like this for yonks (shows how often I visit their site…), but this is still an epic fail for BOTW.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: BOTW Ireland Part Of UK

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Be Careful of Robots META Tag

You can include a META tag with your HTML that contains instructions for Search Engine Crawlers. It looks like this:

<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="ROBOTS" />

Here’s what happens when you include the above instruction in visual terms:

Vodafone.ie Homepage with NoFollow links Highlighted in Pink

Not only is the page de-indexed, but also all links on the page are set to NoFollow – they cease to exist in the eyes of the Search Engines. The Robots META is like the big brother of the rel attribute on HTML elements. While rel applies only to the element it is an attribute of, the Robots META is applied to the entire page it appears on. Therefore it’s far more blunt than rel, and also far more powerful.

In fact the META tag I block-quoted above is the actual Robots META tag from www.vodafone.ie (I wrote previously about Vodafone.ie homepage here). I first noticed this last Thursday, and all images etc. were taken last Saturday Feb 7 by the way.

How Google Reacts to Robots=”noindex,nofollow”

Here’s the outcome once Google sees this tag on your pages:

Google Search Result for [vodafone.ie]

You can clearly see that WWW is no longer in the results, except for some search results pages (which Google doesn’t want sites to include BTW) which appear to be sitting on a GSA (probably the reason they don’t have the same Robots META).

Moral Of The Story?

Be extremely careful with the Robots META tag. You should occasionally check your site, especially your homepage, to ensure nothing has gone awry. You should also check your analytics regularly, I would say at least daily for large corporate sites that run e-commerce modules, as you’ll likely see issues such as this instantly.

How did I notice this?

Well I login to GA each morning and spend about 30-40 minutes digging through the stats for redcardinal.ie and all other client sites I have access to. When you’re traffic jumps 2.5x over the past few days it tends to make you dig a little deeper. I imagine the guys in Vodafone’s mobile email dept might also be wondering why Google is sending them so much traffic.

[Sidenote: Interesting to see Vodafone.ie are using Woopra rather than GA now.]

How To Avoid This?

You can easily avoid this issue, and some of the solutions are quite simple:

• Build some sanity-checking into your CMS. Make it alert you when the Robots tag contains “noidex”.
• Utilise a diagnosis product, such as Maximine, to alert you when it finds this META tag.
• Build a simple manual SEO-checkpoint into your QA process. You could simply use a plugin to highlight NoFollow (as I have) which would instantly show the issue during QA.
• Check your Search Engine referral logs daily to watch for spikes (negative and positive).
• Check your Google Webmaster Console for data and stats. In particular Statistics->Crawl Stats contains some very useful info for both marketing and network engineering folk. (NB: make sure you set up accounts for all relevant domains and subdomains.)
• Create a Google Alert for “site:[mydomain.tld]” and add it to your feed reader. (I haven’t tested this yet.)

I’d love to hear if you have any other ideas for checking that your site is indexed by Google, or if you know of any service offering this ability? Oh, and is anyone else using Woopra – any feedback to offer?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Vodafone.ie – Problems With Robots META Tag

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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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Here are my slides sans all the custom animations:

Website Architecture & SEO, Fitzwilliam Institute, Dublin Dec 10 2008

Thanks to all the students for giving me such an easy time!

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Fitzwilliam Institute Lecture – December 10 2008

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Hi, we looked into this, and the blog in question was ranking lower in
our search results because of an algorithmic error that has now been
fixed; the site’s drop in our search results had nothing to do with
the views expressed on the site. Essentially, our search algorithm saw
a large area on the blog that was due to an IFRAME included from
another site and that looked spammy to our automatic classifier. I
believe that this bug has been fixed now. We also added additional
safety checks to the relevant system that would escalate to an
engineer if this site had the same issue in the future.
The site should be ranking higher in Google within 24 hours according
to the people that I talked to. Thanks for mentioning the site on this
discussion group to give us feedback–I appreciate it.
Matt Cutts
Google Software Engineer

The emphasis added is mine, but the comment “our search algorithm saw
a large area on the blog that was due to an IFRAME” raises some serious questions. Does Google crawl <IFRAME> content? Can IFRAME content affect how your site ranks?

The above was a very generous response from Matt Cutts on the Google Webmaster Groups. The thread is here. (OT – more evidence that Mr Cutts is one of the nicest people on the web, if in fact it was needed.)

The site in question, atlasshrugs.com [runs through a 302 redirect to a loverly 262 request, 4MB page that took 1.55minutes to load on a 8Mb line...] employs some <IFRAME> elements for advertising. I’m not sure what might have triggered the spammy signal. But it’s all very interesting, especially if you’re interested in avoiding Google’s spam filters.

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

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Even in 2008 there are still some ‘Online Marketing’ firms who offer the fantastic service known as search engine registration:

This is slightly reminiscent of Omniserve’s Google Rapid Inclusion ‘process’, but at £500STG this latest one sure aint cheap.

To anyone who might be seriously interested in search engine registration I suggest you take a look at Free Search Engine Rapid Inclusion Service.

Oh, and in case anyone (God knows who still reads any of my tripe…) is interested – this might be related to a certain Bord Failte Web Check Thread post I published a few days ago.

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

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One comment I found interesting was Jeff Dean’s mention of text size as something they record.

There are two other videos in the same Google Technology RoundTable series, both well worth a watch:

Human Language Technology

I think we’re soon going to have the ability to view any document in any language, and by ‘soon’ I mean months not years, judging from this video:

Map Reduce

Map Reduce is Google’s distributed computation infrastructure. It’s interesting if you’ve wondered how Google does what it does:

Well done Google on releasing such great material.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Video: Google Talks Search Infrastructure & Search Quality

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But back to calling at I see it. I’m not completely bereft of all tact, but my mother always noted that I had a certain ‘sledge-hammer diplomacy’ which might from time-to-time get me into trouble. I know also that a golden rule of business is not to ‘poo-poo’ on the competition. Unfortunately the world of SEO is highly prone to suppliers making claims and setting expectations that they all too-often fail to live up to. So sometimes I shout out when I see something I don’t quite agree with.

To add some context to what will likely have you nodding your head in agreement here’s the details of a now-deleted ‘Web Check’ thread from Enterprise Ireland’s Email News list:

Hi,

One of my customers has just been throught the “web check” process
sponsored by Failte Ireland.

I must say that I found the resulting report very superficial and (in my
opinion) lacking a basic understanding of SEO.

I’d be interested in hearing the experience of any other web
professionals whose clients have availed of this service?

Al

Haven’t talked to anyone yet who has done one, but from a search on the web
there’s a few forums complaining about it.

Who’s reviewing the sites?

Tom
www.2bscene.ie

It would be interesting to see if the people doing the reviewing were
actually web professionals with a track record in SEO/web development.

Regards…jmcc
–
**********************************************************
John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@whoisireland.com
MC2 * web: http://www.whoisireland.com/
22 Viewmount * web: http://www.hosterstats.com
Waterford * Domain Registration Statistics and
Ireland * Historical DNS Database covering
IE * over 210 million active/deleted domains.
**********************************************************

> Haven’t talked to anyone yet who has done one, but from a search on the
web
> there’s a few forums complaining about it

—

Links please?

Rgds

Richard (Red Cardinal one)

> It would be interesting to see if the people doing the reviewing were
> actually web professionals with a track record in SEO/web development.

—

You will understand that I cannot name my customer or the individual
responsible for the “web check”.

However the web page of the company involved has a Google PR of only 2
and while they say they do website development there are no links to
previous work on their site. Nor is there any mention of SEO work.

In fact some of the suggestions they made would be guaranteed to lower
Google PR.

I think if companies are going to be employed by Failte Ireland to do
this kind of “Web Check” then we are entitled to know how qualified
they are for the task.

Al

> It would be interesting to see if the people doing the reviewing were
> actually web professionals with a track record in SEO/web development.

—

http://www.tmm.ie/

Clients’ SEO is mediocre at best imho and there’s a curious lack of feedback
forms. I wouldn’t rate them for auditing.

Regards
Richard Wilson

This is the URL of another company providing the “web check ” service

http://www.key-business-solutions.ie/index.htm

>>>This is the URL of another company providing the “web check ” service

>>>http://www.key-business-solutions.ie/index.htm

—

Folks

This is an example of blatant plugging by a company – if you are going to
recommend yourselves as a supplier of a service, then come right out and say
it.

Anthony
Online-Marketing.ie (suppliers of Web Check and Digital Marketing Audit and
Online Marketing Overhauls, etc, etc ,etc !!!)

Are there multiple web check schemes in existence? The link below gives
details of one contract award I remember seeing but I get the impression
there may have been multiple phases.

http://www.etenders.gov.ie/search/show/Search_View.aspx?id=AUG105910&ln=EN

I’m not sure if I am allowed to republish who won the contracts but if
anyone is interested you can easily setup a login and look for yourself.

Keith

————————————
Keith Shirley

Shercom Ltd
Ballinacarrig, Carlow, Ireland
Mobile: +353 87 9112027
Tel&Fax:+353 59 9131715

E-Mail: K.Shirley@Shercom.com
Web: http://www.Shercom.com
Blog: http://www.keithshirley.ie/blog

Keith,

If you click on the “Full Notice Text” tab the list of successful suppliers
runs to five (it was awarded on a regional basis).

Anthony, with all due respect to www.key-business-solutions.ie, I don’t
think posting a link to a website of that cailbre in this forum would do
them any good whatsoever.

(“Our designs employ the most up to date technologies in the market place” /
their Business Partners section runs to the heady heights of…. three small
local businesses… etc )

Very interesting to see the companies who won the contracts.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but their websites do not seem to
indicate significant web development or SEO experience?

Al

No surprise there.

I have seen the exact same thing with the County Enterprise Boards.

A recent ‘expert’ seminar on Search Engine Optimisation was presented
by someone whose site appears at around 120 for the term ‘Search
Engine Optimisation’ in Google!

I’m sure they managed to pick up some business from it though…

You really would expect the organisers to do a simple credential
check, but then maybe they don’t have the knowledge or skills…

Francis
————————
www.Croan.ie
eBusiness Consulting & Design
Croan House
Dunamaggan
Co. Kilkenny

ph: 056 776 6868
m : 087 236 8555

>>>You really would expect the organisers to do a simple credential
check, but then maybe they don’t have the knowledge or skills…

—

I guess it’s down to inside knowledge. The EI eBusiness Unit did a workshop
last year in Dublin at Croke Park on SEO (and in some others parts of the
country I think?) which was excellent.

High calibre speakers who quite clearly knew exactly what they were talking
about. I was actually surprised at how good it was. I guess the challenge is
how you make that kind of expert view filter down to the county level?

P.A.

>>>I guess it’s down to inside knowledge. The EI eBusiness Unit did a
workshop
last year in Dublin at Croke Park on SEO (and in some others parts of the
country I think?) which was excellent.

>>>High calibre speakers who quite clearly knew exactly what they were
talking
about. I was actually surprised at how good it was. I guess the challenge is
how you make that kind of expert view filter down to the county level?

—

They are also running another workshop on the same topic again later this
month in the Clarion Hotel in Lucan. The panel is somewhat similar to that
of last year.

http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/emarketing (link was working yesterday but
not when I just tried it now so perhaps try later)

Trevor – Searchcreations
www.searchcreations.com

Was that the very ad-hoc session where the presenters just opened the
session to the floor and answered the questions of the attendees?

It was like a break-out session in one of the smaller rooms?

Or am I thinking of a different EI event in Crokers last year?

> They are also running another workshop on the same topic again later this
> month in the Clarion Hotel in Lucan. The panel is somewhat similar to that
> of last year.
>
> http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/emarketing (link was working yesterday but
> not when I just tried it now so perhaps try later)

Only problem is that none of those speakers has a background in search.
Very difficult to leave search out of the mix these days given the
role Google plays in our lives.

Then again, maybe the panel is more about online strategy than the
tactics you should employ…

Rgds
Richard

>>>Was that the very ad-hoc session where the presenters just opened the
session to the floor and answered the questions of the attendees? It was
like a break-out session in one of the smaller rooms? Or am I thinking of a
different EI event in Crokers last year?

—

It was a little bit more structured with specific presentations in the
morning, followed by a Q and A session which was used for a podcast. There
were also break-out sessions in the afternoon so yes on both accounts except
the ad-hoc part.

>>>Only problem is that none of those speakers has a background in search.
Very difficult to leave search out of the mix these days given the
role Google plays in our lives.

>>>Then again, maybe the panel is more about online strategy than the
tactics you should employ…

—

Are we moving down the same path with these bodies of checking your sources
before engaging as 3 of the 4 speakers claim search related services on
their own websites, so if your experience is different are we back to blind
leading blind?

Rgds,
Trevor

>>>Are we moving down the same path with these bodies of checking your
sources
before engaging as 3 of the 4 speakers claim search related services on
their own websites, so if your experience is different are we back to blind
leading blind?

—

Sorry Trevor,

Am I the only one who’s struggling to work out what you’re saying? Maybe you
could re-phrase you comment so it’s a bit clearer?

P.A.

>>>Only problem is that none of those speakers has a background in search.
Very difficult to leave search out of the mix these days given the
role Google plays in our lives.

—

**Moderator Note: The comment about the forthcoming Enterprise Ireland
seminar, that nobody has a search background speaking at the conference, is
not accurate and should be clarified.

John Coburn of PraxisNow runs a search business and has considerable depth
of experience in executing campaigns and training businesses on SEO and SEM.

AMAS also has experience of search, though mainly in the context of
strategic online marketing work.

A full profile of all the speakers can be found here:

http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/eMarketing/Speaker+Profiles.htm

For information on all aspects of the event visit:

http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/eMarketing/default.htm

> **Moderator Note: The comment about the forthcoming Enterprise Ireland
> seminar, that nobody has a search background speaking at the conference,
is
> not accurate and should be clarified.
>
> John Coburn of PraxisNow runs a search business and has considerable depth
> of experience in executing campaigns and training businesses on SEO and
SEM.
>
> AMAS also has experience of search, though mainly in the context of
> strategic online marketing work.
>
> A full profile of all the speakers can be found here:
>
> http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/eMarketing/Speaker+Profiles.htm
>
> For information on all aspects of the event visit:
>
> http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/eMarketing/default.htm

—

I made that comment.

I’d be surprised if praxisnow are pitching themselves as an seo
company. The Coburns have been very involved in internet marketing
training, but the last time I met them I didn’t get the impression
they were positioning themselves as SEOs.

As for Amas – you’ve just stated that they are not in the search
space. If you don’t implement you surely cannot be an expert?

I think I’m pretty qualified to speak my mind on this I believe.

Richard
Red Cardinal

Just as an addendum to my last comment – I think the speakers will be
great for a general ‘doing business online’ event, I just take
exception to the fact that every event these days puts SEO in the
agenda (because it’s “hot”), but then tend not to bring in speakers
who actually work in that field.

No disrespect to the Coburns or PraxisNow, but I really hadn’t
considered them to be SEO experts.

Richard
Red Cardinal

> I guess it’s down to inside knowledge. The EI eBusiness Unit did a
workshop
> last year in Dublin at Croke Park on SEO (and in some others parts of the
> country I think?) which was excellent.

Without further details it was probably just the usual chosen few
preaching to those vaguely familiar with the field. The problem with SEO
is that any muppet can usually claim to be an expert in the field and
many do. Some of the funniest adverts in the SEO field are for people
who are, apparently, capable of reverse-engineering search engine
algorithms. Ironically many SEO people have no background in algorithmic
research and would not know what to do with a search engine algorithm if
handed one.

> High calibre speakers who quite clearly knew exactly what they were
talking
> about. I was actually surprised at how good it was. I guess the challenge
is
> how you make that kind of expert view filter down to the county level?

The county level? Forgive me but that does make you sound like some
technology journalist who hasn’t a clue beyond click and drool press
releases. Dublin is not the centre of the internet. For all us “county”
people, it is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. To us,
Dublin is merely a data centre.

It is my experience that most of the speakers at these events are there
solely to promote their own services and the level of expertise can vary
considerably. It is all too easy for these people to sound impressive
but the only true test is to judge them on the results of their work.

That crucial disconnect is the problem. To those unfamiliar with the
field, anyone with more of a clue than themselves can sound like an
expert. And in the voodoo world of SEO, the risk is even greater.

Regards…jmcc
–
**********************************************************
John McCormac * e-mail: jmcc@whoisireland.com
MC2 * web: http://www.whoisireland.com/
22 Viewmount * web: http://www.hosterstats.com
Waterford * Domain Registration Statistics and
Ireland * Historical DNS Database covering
IE * over 210 million active/deleted domains.
**********************************************************

Now at this stage I could be accused of stirring things up a little in that thread, but when I checked the link given by Trevor I saw the following:

It struck me that “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): improving your search engine ranking.” would require a speaker with a background in SEO. So I made my comment to that effect. I didn’t disparage any of the speakers. In fact I even sent a message stating that I thought they were excellent speakers for a general event. I hope that John Coburn of PraxisNow hasn’t taken offense at any of my comments – but if so please accept my apology John.

But back to the thread… Now what happened next is one of those terrible, terrible moments that I’m sure has hit each and every one of us, and this is the head-nodding bit I mentioned earlier – sending an email to the wrong place. The following was emailed to the entire list and posted on the Lyris website:

Subject Line: [ebusiness_discussion] Web check — no further posts

Hi Aileen

From a philosophical perspective I would prefer to allow participants to the
list be as free (within the limits set out) as possible to air their
comments, views, ideas, opinion, advice, etcetera, wherever pertinent to
matters of eBusiness.

Richard is airing his opinion and putting his name to it. I would tend to
agree (personally) that his position seems somewhat one-sided and
opinionated, making the argument that he’s qualified on the basis of his own
expertise. Whilst this is arguably true, he’s obviously lacking tact to
pursue this further but that’s hardly a reason to censor him.

However, in light of your concerns and more recent posts as yet unreleased
which are, despite our best efforts, veering toward personal attacks, I’m
going to kill the whole thread. The very worst that can happen is it will
carry on its own merry way on the Open list amongst the same names and usual
suspects.

Best

Ralph

Now in full fairness to Ralph he immediately sent me a mail apologising for the above message, which he had not meant for general distribution.

But what happens next is most bizarre…

The EI Lyris website is blocked with a 403, and when the site returns the entire Web Check thread, together with the new thread containing Ralph’s email, have been deleted. No explanation, no ‘how’s your uncle’, no nada.

So what I read from this is that one Aileen O’Toole – MD, AMAS took umbridge to my comments and sought to have something done. All via back channels. I don’t think that the thread disappeared as a result of Aileen’s intervention, but I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that rather than delete the single message that went out in error the mods delete the entire thread.

I think that will be my last contribution to EI’s mailing list.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Bord Failte Web Check Thread on Enterprise Ireland Lyris Mailing List

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Could They Make It Any More Difficult?

The first thing I noticed when irishtimes.com went live was that www.irish-times.com was a mirror. It was even showing up in the SERP for [irish times], and you could clearly see the dupe content issues from the pages listed. Thankfully that domain has now been properly redirected.

But perhaps more worrying is the fact that Google is still returning Ireland.com in the #1 position for [irish times]:

Image of Google results for [irish times]

Am I surprised? Well not really given the gratuitous use of META refreshes and 302 redirects on Ireland.com. As I mentioned in my previous post, a request for http://www.ireland.com results in:

http://www.ireland.com/

<html><br/>
<head><meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=index.jsp”></meta></head><br/>
<body></body><br/>
</html>

http://www.ireland.com/index.jsp

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:04:11 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store
Expires: 0
Location: http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive

http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:04:13 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store
Expires: 0
Location: http://www.ireland.com/home/landing.ie?pid=0
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/illegal

The only surprise is that Google has gotten as far as it has. The snippet displayed for ireland.com appears to be the META Description, but that title certainly isn’t from the page (very often a good sign that Google knows the page is there, but cannot crawl it). And why might Google still believe that ireland.com is the Irish Times? Well? At a guess I’d say it’s anchor text related (I don’t think the old ireland.com homepage had that page title). If you check the Google Directory you can see that the DMOZ anchor is in fact ‘Irish Times’, so I’m sure that’s a factor here. Again I’m guessing, but I imagine those refreshes and redirects are seen as temporary, and Google remains to be convinced that ireland.com is not the Irish Times. This is probably a good example where requesting a change to DMOZ would be a wise step. Fixing the canonical URL issue would also be advisable given the issues I’ll look at in a short bit.

The Plot Thickens…

Whenever I think Google is confused about a page I always check the cached version. Here’s Google’s cache of ireland.com:

Images of Google’s cache of www.ireland.com

The initial links are hidden page anchors for accessibility usage. That’s fair game, and it’s perfectly acceptable to hide those links for visual browsers. But the next links contained in h1′s?

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of using text alternatives when text content is image-based. I often add in a text node containing the text portrayed in the image and hide that node away. Google doesn’t mind this as long as the text content is representative of what’s in the image. But I think it’s rather risky for a site like ireland.com to add hidden text to their page that is not also rendered in one form or another on the page. Here’s the mark-up:

<h1 class="magic">
<a title="Return to the homepage" href="/home/landing.ie" class="home-logo"><span>Homepage</span></a>
<a href="/home/landing.ie"><span>Information for Ireland or abroad, travel, entertainment listings, sports news, games, puzzles, recipes, TV listings and more</span></a>
</h1>

The ‘Homepage’ link might pass a manual review, but I doubt the “Information for Ireland or abroad, travel, entertainment listings, sports news, games, puzzles, recipes, TV listings and more” would. It’s no where on the page, and basically hidden text. No idea why they have it there TBH, but I think it’s a little risky personally.

More Horrible Redirects

I always wonder where some of the URI constructions come from these days. You can always tell when no one from the SEO side is consulted when you see URLs like:
http://ireland.com/home/Looking_for_cheap_flights_Try_our_Find_it_fast/maxiview.ie?mx_ext_UNCLASSIFIED_uuid=/travelnow/landing.ie?afs=false
That URL comes from the Most Read list on the homepage:

Most Read items on Ireland.com

Perhaps worse still is the server response after clicking on one of those URLs:

http://ireland.com/home/Looking_for_cheap_flights_Try_our_Find_it_fast/maxiview.ie?mx_ext_UNCLASSIFIED_uuid=/travelnow/landing.ie?afs=false

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:05:26 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: No-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Location: http://ireland.com/home/travelnow/landing.ie?afs=false
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive

Which of course doesn’t resolve to content, but instead:

http://ireland.com/home/travelnow/landing.ie?afs=false

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:05:28 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Powered-By: Servlet 2.4; JBoss-4.2.2.GA (build: SVNTag=JBoss_4_2_2_GA date=200710221139)/Tomcat-5.5
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-store
Expires: 0
Location: http://ireland.com/home/travelnow/landing.ie?pid=64&afs=false
Content-Language: en-GB
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 www.ireland.com
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/illegal

Really, enough already – either NOFOLLOW those links, or use the correct URLs…

What Else Don’t I like?

I could spend a long time going through what is undoubtedly a very large site. I did take a look at what Google has indexed, and how Google appears to be dealing with new content. I always knew that dealing with Google would be a serious task for such a large site. But I’m not convinced of whatever redirect-strategy they are using. I found some very odd migration of old content to the new irishtimes.com site, complete with the old theme. I’m also seeing jsessionid variables indexed by Google – http://www.ireland.com/goingout/Bruce_Springsteen_[ ...]jsessionid=3FF79D689D230AA75EAD8956CE97DA9A?[ ...]affiliatewindow.com_uuid=23106443_irretailaffiliat.

Conclusion

While this post started out as another look at irishtimes.com, it quickly became apparent that its predecessor has quite a few SEO flaws. I’ve looked at a few above, and I could go on, but I think the pattern is clear – SEO seems to have taken a back seat when it came to ireland.com. Large site SEO is more about crawlability and internal navigation, and very often good internal linking and architecture let’s you push around site authority and pick off less competitive and long-tail keywords very effectively.

I think ireland.com is a great example of why baking in SEO at the design and development stage of any large site is essential.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Times Where Art Thou?

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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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Leverage Your Site Network

If you own more than one website it often makes sense to interlink your sites. You can share some traffic. You can also share some link juice and pass some relevance and/or theming signals. And with this in mind I’m going to take a (belated) look at Conor O’Neal’s site. [I'm a bit ashamed to say there are still a few sites I haven't gotten around to from my Blog Award review offer.]

But not his Argolon.com blog. Instead, and I hope he doesn’t mind, I’m going to write up a review of his LouderVoice site.

The Review Enabler

Conor is the creator of LouderVoice a Web2.0 Review platform that let’s users quickly and easily create and find user reviews.

I’ve really left this far too long, and given that we’re now on the verge of a new year in which I’m hoping to move into the split testing and multivariate testing world I’m going to split this post into two sections:

1. SEO Considerations, and
2. Messaging/Marketing Considerations.

1. SEO considerations

Loudervoice is a great example of building an application on WordPress. But WordPress generally needs a lot of tweaking to get things working smoothly from an SEO perspective.

Update: Conor let me know that Loudervoice is built on Turbogears. My bad. But the advice below still holds.

The main areas of concern I see are Duplicate Content and Pagerank Distribution.

Duplicate Content

If your site contains a large number of generic objects – in Conor’s case reviews – and you offer functionality which requires login, then very often you’re going to end up with vast amounts of duplicate content and Pagerank leakage.

Here’s the test review I created many moons ago:

Loudervoice review of Red Cardinal

On each Loudervoice review page there are a number of functions available:

Review functions – and major duplicate content

Like many membership sites, you must be logged in to use many functions. So you’re redirected to a login page when you click any of those links. The rating function actually contains 5 different unique URLs, so all in all there are 7 different URLs there that all land you on a login page. Why does this matter? Well, Google cant login, so for every review you end up 7 duplicate login pages all with unique URLs. Multiply that by each review… you get where I’m going.

Possible solutions are to block these URLs using robots.txt and/or NOFOLLOW the links. I’d do both personally, but due to the Pagerank distribution (more later) I’d definitely go for the NOFOLLOW in this instance.

Other things to watch for are URLs that sort/order different lists. For instance, when you look at a tag page you have the option to sort reviews by rating and date. These too can lead to dupe content issues, and you have to carefully consider how to address such issues.

IA and Site Architecture

I haven’t spoken to Conor about the goal of the site. I’m not sure if the priority is to get traffic to the Loudervoice site, but given the prominence of the search box I assume so. This is where architecture and Pagerank distribution can be so important in order to squeeze as much Search Engine traffic as possible.

In my view sites like this have to push as much link juice down to the primary pages – in this case either the review pages themselves, or the tag page those reviews belong to.

The more I look around the more I like the architecture. Actually, more correctly, the more I like the potential for a really good architecture. It’s just perfect for an internal linking strategy based on a slightly modified ‘Third Level Push’ (for a great run-down on this topic see Halfdeck’s post). The basic premise of third level push is that you push Pagerank down to your post pages and out on that tier, but not back up to either the adjacent category pages or the homepage. You do this by funnelling Pagerank.

Here’s what I’d do to spread the link love:

• On all tag pages I’d NOFOLLOW the tags in the right-hand column.
• I’d also NOFOLLOW the louderminis tags IF the tweets carry a link back to the tag page. I’d have to do a lot more investigation before doing this however.
• I’d do the same with the tags on the people pages.
• I’d NOFOLLOW all utility links (homepage, terms, about us etc.) and the login link on tag and people pages.
• I’d muck about with the links that are published on people’s blogs for rating each review. Could I get targeted anchor text into those links?
• Some cursory investigation shows that people tend to search for ‘[item] review’ or ‘[item] reviews’ rather than ‘review [item]‘. I’d think about that when it comes to page titles and some internal text.
• I’d also try to give some subtle hints to reviewers to use just the product name in the review title. Then automatically append ‘review’ to that.
• The homepage may need some serious surgery. Apart from the messaging (more in a minute) I think it’s important to have a well defined permanent path for spiders to take.

This last point might need some elaboration. I think that a good trick here might be to list the top tags rather than all tags up to ‘kitchen’. Then the related tags on each of the top tags pages will funnel Pagerank out. And adding the NOFOLLOWs as per above should mean that Pagerank channels directly to the review pages. Again some thought will hav to be put into this to ensure you don’t end up filling the less popular tags.

I have another wee suggestion regarding tags – give reviewers an auto-suggest as they type tags. Reason being that the more people use the same tags the more links will point at those tag pages, and from benefits will cascade down to the related review pages. (I’ve only used the system once many moons ago and cant remember how things work, so this might not be feasible.)

Final idea from the SEO perspective – add a robots.txt and exclude all that dupe content I mentioned earlier. You also need to NOFOLLOW many of those links, because as we recently found out even pages excluded via robotos.txt can accumulate Pagerank. Robots.txt is also a great way to funnel bots – the addition of a HTML sitemap might also help in this regard.

Messaging and Marketing Considerations

Okay, first off I think Loudervoice has to lose the Adsense. I know there is no other source of direct revenue, but nothing puts me off than such in your face Adsense blocks.

Second thing that strikes me is that I haven’t really a clue what the product is. The homepage needs to spell this out to me in about 2-5 seconds or I’m gone. Currently it’s just far too busy in my view. Content goes below the fold, and most worryingly the primary call-to-action is located below the fold. (I’d be interested to see the bounce rate on the homepage.)

Analysis of Loudervoice homepage

Now since I’m moving into conversion optimisation in just a few days it makes perfect sense to suggest that Conor redesigns his homepage completely and runs some split testing to see what difference this could make.

Personally I’d look at removing at least 60-70% of the copy and replacing with strong imagery. I’d pay a lot of attention to the call button. Also the header and sub heads. And I’d remove/relegate the post-it image and the tags from the right hand column.

But I wouldn’t rely too much on gut feelings here – I’d put everything to the test and let your visitors decide what works best. Afterall, they’re the reason the site is there.

Final Thoughts

I think Loudervoice is a great idea. I’d like to see the architecture come along and perhaps see more community features (which I didn’t discuss, but alerts and subscriptions come to mind). But perhaps most importantly I think the messaging could be greatly improved. Maybe the homepage shouldn’t try to explain in detail what Loudervoice is – get people to sign up and find out for themselves. Just an idea.

As a final parting gift, and to apologise for the loo..ong delay in getting to your site Conor, I’d be happy to help you set up the tests if you get someone to redesign a few homepage variations for you.

If anyone actually reads down to here I’d love to hear your views – leave a comment below.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Importance Of Architecture and Messaging – Argolon.com

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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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Well entertainment.ie have just launched a new site design, and I have to say it’s quite a revelation compared to its predecessor:

entertainment.ie homepage redesign

Here’s the old homepage which I pulled from Google’s cache:

entertainment.ie homepage old

There are some great improvements there. Clean design, and so many engagements points. I for one think it’s quite cool. Even the noise of dynamic imagery and flash is not so distracting a to ruin the user experience. Certainly a step in the right direction.

There’s always a but…

The big issue is that Google seems to be caching the old homepage:

This is G o o g l e’s cache of http://entertainment.ie/ as retrieved on 22 Sep 2007 06:54:44 GMT.

Why is Google not updating it’s cache since then? Normally news sites will have there homepage cache updated daily. Not so apparently for entertainment.ie.

More bad news…

It appears that whoever was managing the migration forgot about what happens when you change your site structure without considering your users and the search engines. All the old paths appear to land you on a plum 404 page.

I give it about 5-7 days before search engine traffic all but disappears for entertainment.ie – October wont be seeing 2.5m page impressions methinks. And nor will November if this is handled correctly. I wonder how much traffic to the site is SE referrals?

Downright ugly…

Take a close look in the footer of the new site:

entertainment.ie footer link

Very opaque link to ‘Event List‘. Now who could that be for? (Warning – Prepare to have your browser go berserk if you follow that link.)

All I know is whatever the intent there it wont work. That particular implementation is very misguided.

Well done on the new design though.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: entertainment.ie – Exploring the Pitflls of Site Redesigns

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Welcome ripe.ie. I’d love to say that I look forward to competing with you. Not that I’m terribly worried about your competing offering, but what really worries me is that yet another complete cowboy is claiming to be an SEO.

And as for that number #1 ranking for ‘dresses ireland’… Well given that the domain www.dresses.ie is an exact match for the query, and therefore ranking due to the likelihood that Google views the query as navigational, I don’t think it would last against a little competitive link building. Perhaps the owners of dresses.ie should ask ripe what other terms they rank for? How about ‘dresses Ireland’ or ‘fashion Ireland’? They’re obviously targeting those terms given the homepage title.

So what has ripe.ie done for their €1,950.00 + VAT? Well what would you pay for a link from ripe.ie? How does €325 + VAT per link sound? Because from what I can see that’s about all ripe.ie did for their fee: dressess.ie backlinks from Yahoo!

Ken – I’m even more frustrated now than you with this.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Dresses Ireland

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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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Hi,

I came across your site ( http://www.redcardinal.ie ) whilst searching for potential link partners for a client site I am currently promoting (http://www.accessdisplays.co.uk). My client’s site is thematically relevant to your own without being competitive.

I would be more than happy to offer you a quality one-way link from our site (http://www.manageme.in/resources.html)in return for a one-way link from your site to my client’s site (from a page with a minimum pagerank of 2+). This linking arrangement avoids reciprocal linking which Google has devalued, giving instead a more valuable one-way link.

My client details are as follows:-

URL: http://www.accessdisplays.co.uk
Title (clickable part of link): Display Stands
Description: Custom exhibition display stands and pop-up displays from AccessDisplays Ltd. We offer a complete exhibition stand design and build service.

Please contact me when you have added a link to my client and I will link back on (Link Back URL) within 48 hours.

I look forward to hear from you.

Kind regards
Rachael

“My client’s site is thematically relevant to your own without being competitive” – yeah sure…

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: With SEO, Quality Really Does Matter…

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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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What is Flash Replacement?

Flash is undoubtedly a far more aesthetically pleasing medium than plain text rendered in the browser. Although recent browsers from both Apple and Microsoft have introduced anti-aliased text fonts, most Internet users are still using non-aliased viewers. And this is where Flash can appreciably improve the suer experience.

Flash replacement involves substituting plain text output with Flash-based textual content which uses anti-aliased fonts. (Anti-aliasing, for anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, basically means removing jagged edges from text.)

There is a number of techniques available for Flash replacement, sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) and SWFobject being perhaps the best known.

sIFR

sIFR involves the use of JavaScript to detect and read the text content of any particular DOM element (any piece of text on a web page for example) and sending that text to a small Flash module which returns the content in Flash format.

The process is seamless and the user gets to view your headings and selected text in a nice anti-aliased Flash font.

SWFObject

On the other hand, SWFObject simply replaces any text node with a pre-compiled Flash movie. The text contained within the text node is superfluous and has no direct relationship with the Flash rendered. It is this technique that I came across recently when checking a site for an enquirer.

The connection with SEO Ethics

Yesterday I wrote about SEO Ethics and how I feel that companies who promote competing websites are far more likely to cross into what in my opinion is unethical territory.

I came across the specific situation discussed in that post from a enquiry made on this site. I was asked to perform a quick analysis of a site (which will remain nameless). The site in question made heavy use of Flash. The site also used FlashObject (a prior incarnation of SWFObject). Here’s what I found on the site:

1. The website was built in both plain HTML and Flash, and used FlashObject to replace large chunks (virtually all) of the text content with Flash movies;
2. With Javascript disables the homepage rendered correctly in plain HTML and all content appeared to be both accessible and usable;
3. However, on inner pages it quickly became apparent that large text nodes were rendered with visibility:hidden and these pages were both unusable and displaying quote different content to users with and without Flash

Here’s the exact CSS class applied to the main content:

.content {
left:0px;
padding-left:2px;
padding-right:2px;
position:absolute;
top:0px;
visibility:hidden;
z-index:1;
}

So what’s wrong with that?

When I first came across this implementation I immediately emailed back the enquirer and asked that they contact the developer (who is a large well-known Irish web co). After a few days I contacted the enquirer again to find out how the developer responded. I’m not going to quote this, but you’ll have to trust me that the following accurately reflects the response given:

Following up on your concerns that the your website has hidden text, please be assured that your website is fully accessible to the Search Engines.

If you turn off JavaScript in your browser, the secondary pages of your website are returned.

The search engines Spiders view the html code of your website.

All areas of your site that use Flash do so with “Flash Replacement Text”, which is 100% search engine friendly.

I would also like to show you how you can see all of the pages that Google has indexed. Type site:www.yoursite.com into the Google search bar you will see that every page of your website is indexed.

I hope that this helps to reassure you that your website is search engine friendly.

I want to deal with some of the items mentioned above to clarify exactly what the Search Engines are seeing, and what the official views are on certain implementations being used.

‘your website is fully accessible to the Search Engines’

This is indeed true. There is no bar on Search Engines accessing and crawling the pages in question. It is also true that the search engines (and in this particular case I’m referring to Google, which represents c.90% of Irish search traffic) have been known to check your CSS files to look for anything untoward.

visibility:hidden is a very strong signal of spam. That property is used to hide content within the browser view. Here are the Google guidelines on hidden text:

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, including:

• Using white text on a white background
• Including text behind an image
• Using CSS to hide text
• Setting the font size to 0

[... ]
If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

In my opinion having text hidden in the version served to Google constitutes hidden text as defined in the guidelines and opens the offending site to the possibility of penalty or ban.

‘”Flash Replacement Text” put in place, which is 100% search engine friendly’

This is where the distinctions blur, and opinions diverge. There is a lot of current discussion on this topic over on Google Groups at the moment (see here and here).

Berghausen (a Google employee) has stated:

The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot. However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster’s intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text means webspam–e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords are more likely to indicate webspam.

I bring this up because, although your method is hiding text behind a very pretty Flash animation, you are still presenting the same content to both the user and the search engine, and offering it through different media.

On the face of it it would appear that Flash replacement shouldn’t be an issue. On the face of it…

Google’s Dan Crow (head of Crawl) recently attended a SEMNE group event on the subject of ‘Getting Into Google’. Apparently he was very frank on a number of issues, one of which was Flash replacement. SherwoodSEO attended the event and reported the following:

• sIFR (scalable Inman Flash Replacement) – sIFR is a JavaScript that allows web designer to customize the headlines displayed on their pages. Headline text rendered in HTML can look blocky and unrefined – sIFR paints-over that HTML with a Flash-based equivalent. This gives the headline a smooth, refined look, while still preserving the indexable text that Google needs to process the page. Dan said that sIFR was OK, as long as it was used in moderation. He said that extensive use of sIFR could contribute negative points to your website’s overall score. Yes, that’s a bit vague, but “vague” is not as bad as…
• SWFObject – SWFObject is a more elaborate JavaScript designed to swap-out an entire section of Flash with its HTML equivalent. Think of the Flash section of a webpage as being painted on a window shade. SWFObject decides if you have Flash installed (i.e. you are a web surfer) or not (i.e. you are a search engine.) If you don’t have Flash, the window shade rolls-up, and an HTML text equivalent is displayed on-screen. Dan pulled no punches on SWFObject: he characterized it as “dangerous.” He said that Google takes great pains to avoid penalizing sites that use technical tricks for legitimate reasons, but this was one trick that he could not guarantee as being immune from being penalized.

Now when the head of Google Crawl says that a particular technique is “dangerous” and cannot “guarantee as being immune form being penalized” I sit up and take note. Dan Crow is in charge of Google’s entire fleet of Googlebots. In my opinion his comments carry considerable weight.

If using SWFObject has been classified as “dangerous”, what might happen when you use this implementation AND use visibility:hidden for the text replaced by the Flash? Well in my opinion this implementation wont improve your standing with Google.

‘Google has indexed every page of your website’

Google bans sites every day. I regularly contribute over on Google’s Webmaster Help Group and see cases of banned sites every other day. Often threads are started by webmasters whose sites have performed well for months and years. Then suddenly, without any change to their site, dropped form the index.

My point is that indexation does not guarantee that your page hasn’t broken the guidelines. A penalty can be applied at any time. And when it does it hurts.

My overall thoughts on this?

I spent quite some time both analysing and researching the issues at hand (time that could and should have been applied elsewhere). Given that the developer of the site also happens to be the supplier of SEM services referred to in my SEO Ethics post, I cant say with any certainty that their responses to this situation were genuine. If so, then it displays ignorance/incompetence at best. If not, then I think their ethics must be called into question.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Using Text Replacement with Flash – Dangerous?

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The enquiries I receive

Sometimes the most interesting outcomes come from the business enquiries that aren’t really business enquiries. This post came about because I received an enquiry from someone asking me to look a their website. I get a lot of these requests – some genuine, some competitor intelligence, and some where a site owner is not 100% that their current SEO provider is applying best practice techniques. In the latter case, site owners most often are looking for third party validation of their current SEO strategy to sooth any fears they have. More about this in a second.

Specialisation is good… most of the time

My academic background comes from the economics discipline. Economic theory generally recommends that specialisation is a good thing. Indeed, I would say that SEO is quite a specialised area. But what about SEO companies that focus in the main part on just one particular niche? Does this create more problems than it solves?

The case of the [city] widget

The following case came about from email communication with someone who contacted me to check their site. It quickly became apparent that their enquiry fell into the third category I mentioned above – validating a current SEO campaign/strategy.

In order to maintain confidence I wont be naming names, and I’m only going to say that consumption of the product or service offered by the enquirer is geographically dependant. There is a large number of suppliers of what I’m going to refer to as “[city] widgets”, and the niche is highly competitive. Very often ‘[city1] widget’ is not a substitue for ‘[city2] widget’, although some substitution may occur where the user is location elastic.

The specialised SEO company

After looking over the website in question I found, what in my opinion, could be very dangerous utilisation of a particular technique (I’ll be writing about that shortly). So I made my opinion known to the enquirer and asked them to contact their SEO provider and seek some further clarification.

Follow-up correspondence contained some interesting information from the SEO about the technique used and why it was ‘perfectly safe’, but, more relevant to this post, why the SEO provider was initially chosen by the enquirer to promote their site.

It turns out that the SEO company is question are very much a ‘Sectoral-based’ SEO provider. That is, they are very active in one particular niche.

Why would you choose one SEO provider to promote your ‘[city] widget’ over another?

It’s more than common to use track record when selecting a supplier for a good or service. Proven track record is often a very good indication of future performance. In this particular case track record was indeed a strong criterion. I paraphrase:

seen as they represent our three main competitors, and those competitor sites all rank on page #1 for “[city] widget”, our site should do so also by the end of the year

For me that opens a real can of worms.

Is it ethical to represent competing sites?

In this case it appears that the SEO company in question represents lot of sites selling [city] widgets. They also happen to market software that enables the purchase of ‘[city] widgets’ which I’m sure is a very strong supporting factor. And, in fairness, the competitor sites mentioned do rank well for ‘ widgets [city]‘ (the order there represents the more likely search query).

So what’s the big issue? Well, in cases where [city] is different there really is no conflict. But in the case of representing multiple sites from the same [city], can one SEO company ethically represent multiple direct competitors? I’m sure arguments can be made for and against, but I take issue with one provider promoting multiple competing sites. Why?

Well there are only 10 spots available on page #1 of the SERPs. And we know very well that the real action is in the top 3 spots. So how does a provider representing 4 websites all targeting that same honey-pot phrase “widgets [city]” do so ethically? A number of questions arise:

1. Are all clients aware that their SEO provider is also promoting their direct competition? Are NDA’s involved?
2. Will each client site be promoted equally? If so, how?
3. Is the SEO company being paid a performance-related bonus/retainer? If so, is it similar for each client site? If so, could the provider profit by rotating resources to make each site rank highest for a short period of time?
4. Is the same internal individual responsible for actually working on each of the competing client sites? If so is data from any of the client sites being used in the promotion of competing sites?
5. If the SEO company has multiple employees, and client sites are assigned to different team members/teams what steps are taken to ‘wall’ information?
6. Most importantly for me, are client expectations being properly set? Is each client aware of how much traffic each position in the SERPs will receive? Are newer clients of the competing group aware that they may never attain number #1 position as older clients may have an ageing benefit both on- and off-site?

Those are just a few questions that come to my mind when a single SEO provider is promoting multiple competing websites. I’m not saying that promoting multiple competitors has to be unethical, but I do have the view that doing so opens up a whole new set of issues that make it wholly more likely to end up being unethical.

The can of worms gets even ‘wormier’

So I’ve stated my view that providing SEO for competing websites can be unethical. But there is another dimension to this can of worms that really grinds my gears – PPC. Let’s imagine that the SEO provider is a full service SEM company.

What happens when, as with many websites in this niche, PPC is used to promote the sites in question? And now consider what if the same provider of SEO also manages the PPC campaigns for the competing sites?

PPC is a very different beast in general to SEO. For a start PPC usually is managed under a % fee structure – the management firm usually gets a % of the total spend.

Now I’m no PPC expert, but I do know that PPC uses a modified auction system. Bidders can set their maximum bid, and all other things being equal, the highest bidder has their ad display above all others.

Let’s pause for a second and add back into the mix the fact that PPC management companies generally receive a % payment based on total spend. Now suppose that the same company is managing 4 separate accounts, all targeting a similar set of keywords, and all demanding results.

Personally I would be more than a little anxious that it might be very easy to manipulate the spend of all 4 accounts for reasons not entirely in the clients best interests.

We’re sorry, but the maximum bid keeps increasing…

For instance, it could become advantageous to have clients bidding directly against each other in a bidding match where there is only one winner – the management company (although the PPC engine wont ever be on the losing side either).

I can picture explanations being sent to clients explaining that the maximum bid is increasing incrementally, and that in order to attain better results a higher spend is required.

Higher spend = higher management fee.

I think you can quickly see that conflicts of interest could become all the more problematic.

Am I generalising?

The above of course is simply my own opinion. Again, I must state that the above case doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEM company in question is acting unethically. But in my view when one company promotes multiple competing sites there is an over-riding need for clients to have oversight which requires knowledge of the ‘bigger picture’, and for the provider to be absolutely transparent in order to maintain ethical standards.

Just my view. What do you think?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: The Ethics of Sectoral-Based SEO Services

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I noticed this before, but a new thread on CreativeIreland is rehashing the topic. While normal business etiquette would say that you should not bash your competition, in this case (and any other cases where I believe ‘SEO’ companies are hurting the industry here in Ireland) I’m quite happy to name and shame. Here’s what Google has to say about this particular practice:

If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?

Source

I wouldn’t mind, but Continuum certainly don’t look like fly-by-night types. I don’t know anyone over there, but judging by their client list they appear to be at the higher corporate end of the market.

But if your SEO provider uses this type of technique on their site wouldn’t you be just a little insecure about your own?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Continuum Using Hidden Links

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I think that in virtually every review or article I’ve published on my blog about SEO I’ve mentioned a few of the things not to do. You know, the things like 10 basic steps to SEO and things to avoid in SEO.

I can sort of hear the echo when I say don’t use META refresh to redirect your root page to your homepage if the two differ Just a few days ago I mentioned this problem in my post about Search Engine spiderability.

Hello Independent.ie

The Irish Independent is one of those most venerable of Irish institutions. Just recently they launched a new website and migrated from their old home unison.ie over to the more obvious independent.ie.

So what clever dev/designer/SEO put this there?

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>
<div style="text-align:center">
<a style="color:#E3001B " href="http://www.independent.ie/index.jsp">Independent.ie</a>

<script language=JavaScript type=text/javascript>
var trans;
trans = "nogo";

var ord=Math.random()*10000000000000000;
document.write('<script language="JavaScript" src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/acc.independent.ie/_default;rurl=http://www.independent.ie/index.jsp;sz=1x1;ord=' + ord + '?" type="text/javascript"></scr' + 'ipt>');
</script>
<noscript>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url="http://www.independent.ie/index.jsp">
<a href="http://www.independent.ie/index.jsp">Please click here if you are not redirected to Independent.ie</a>
</noscript>
<script language=JavaScript type=text/javascript>
if (trans == "nogo"){
document.write('<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; url=http://www.independent.ie/index.jsp">');
}
</script>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Apologies if you are the individual responsible, but that’s a really daft way to refresh the page. You really should acquaint yourself with the 301 redirect header. Thankfully Google and the other Search Engines are likely to enter the Independent site through many multiple URLs, but I doubt they’re liking that META/JS redirect too much.

Google not indexing today’s pages?

Curiously, none of the pages from the Independent crawled today by Google are cached. I certainly can’t see a NOARCHIVE in the header, and pages indexed prior to today are cached correctly.

Nothing else is obviously stopping the caching of the pages. Over at Yahoo! the pages from today are cached fine. Both Google and Yahoo! are indexing the homepage at the root in spite of that nasty META refresh. I imagine the fact that the redirect is to index.jsp may be playing into this.

I suppose it might be a ‘SERP burp’. Anybody have any thoughts?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Even The Big Guys Can Get It Wrong

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The most needy review to date

I’ve been (slowly) working my way through some blog SEO posts to help those folk who took up my offer of some free consulting. Today I’m looking at a site that really will benefit from some basic SEO tips. In fact, I think this is definitely the site most needy of help I’ve looked at to date (although the SEO for Blogspot folk are fighting hard for that particular crown).

Basic Seo starts with letting the bots in

Search engines rely on bots (or ‘spiders’) to crawl the Internet and collect the information you publish on your websites. These bots are basically slimmed down web browsers whose modus-operandi is extremely simple – crawl content, find links, save content, follow links, crawl content, find links…. That’s there one and only job. Ok, they do a few other things while they’re at it, but that gives the basic gist of what the bots do.

Bots don’t like Javascript

So the we’ve learned that search engine bots are slimmed down web browsers. One of the things they don’t do is Javascript. So here’s the first rule of spiderability:

1. Don’t use Javascript to create navigational components.

Use good old plain HTML. That’s what it’s for so make use of it.

META refresh gives a strong spam signal

A few years back spammers started to use META refreshes to spam the search engines. META refresh is a small piece of code that is inserted into the <head> element of a HTML document. It basically tells your browsers to go to a new location after a predetermined number of seconds. Spammers used this because the bots didn’t actually enforce the rule when they found it – they simply crawled the content on the page and returned that to the search engine for indexing. The spammer could simply place nice search engine friendly text on the initial page which would rank nicely and as soon as a human visitor came along and visited this page they would be instantly redirected to the spammers real page. The search engines didn’t like this. So the second rule is very simple:

2. Don’t use META refresh when the proper and upstanding thing to do is issue the correct header response.

Every page includes a HTTP header detailing the manifest of the page. This header includes a HTTP response code that tells the browser what to do with the page. The well known 301 redirect is simply a code that is passed as a header response that tells the browser (accessing agent) that the location of the resource requested has changed permanently, and to go to the new location. It is fairly trivial to send header responses – on Apache based systems redirects are relatively easy to set up using the .htaccess file with mod_rewrite.

Some Irish language lessons

So perhaps it would be appropriate to introduce the site that I’m looking at today: siopaeile.com. ‘Shiopa eile’ is Irish for ‘another shop’ and the blog in question is the brainchild of Paul O Mahony.

Siopa Eile Shopping Blog

I think the most interesting thing (from my point of view) about siopaeile.com is that it is not indexed in Google. Siopaeile.com is therefore getting zero traffic from Google. Given that Google is often the number #1 referrer for many websites, Paul is really starting with a blank page. So here’s the advice I would give to Paul in order to better optimise his site.

The SEO tips

The siopaeile.com blog can be found in a subdirectory called ‘blog’. Currently the root index page contains a nasty META refresh into that directory. Here’s what the root page returns:

<html>
<meta HTTP-EQUIV=”REFRESH” content=”0; url=http://siopaeile.com/blog/”>
<p>
Please wait as you get redirected to <a href=”http://siop[... ]“>http://siopaeile.com/blog</a>.
</p>
</html>

[NB - edits my own]

Now I would say that as a matter of urgency this needs to be change:

Tip no. #1:

If nothing will be published in the root directory then move the entire blog up into the level. In general deeper means less important, so the closer to the root the more important the content appears to the search engines. I would normally say that all pages should be redirected after the move, but in this case nothing is indexed. Any inbound links should be redirected to their new homes though.

Moving the blog into the root may require some higgery-pokkery in WordPress, but I think it would be well worth it.

If it is not possible to move the blog into the root directory then I would suggest removing the META refresh and adding a 301 redirect into the .htaccess file.

The .htaccess file can be found in the root directory. You can use an FTP program (such as the free FileZilla) to grab this file and re-upload once you’ve finished editing. Here’s the code that needs to be included:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^siopaeile\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/$ http://siopaeile.com/$1 [R=301]
# that redirects www.siopaeile.com/ to siopaeile.com/
# and www.siopaeile.com/blog/ to siopaeile.com/blog/
# but wouldn’t redirect www.siopaeile.com/ to siopaeile.com/blog/
# so fall through to redirect root to /blog/
RewriteRule ^/$ http://siopaeile.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
# that redirects root / to siopaeile.com/blog/
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

BIG FAT WARNINGI know enough to get around .htacess and mod_rewrite, but I always tell folk to test the code very well. For me personally mod_rewrite is one of the most difficult aspects of my job, and very often I have to experiment to get the code right. Get it wrong and your sever is likely going to bang out 500 errors to beat the band.

So why no indexing in Google?

I have to be honest here. I first started writing this post some time ago. I even emailed Paul to ask him about the META refresh (he probably thinks I’m either quite mad or incredibly useless for taking this long to actually write about his site…).

When I first looked at his backlinks in Yahoo! there seemed to be none (but take it from me – never, ever put your entire faith into Yahoo’s SiteExplorer tool). That would normally explain the issue – Google wont index a site unless it finds at least one external link to that site. That external link must be FOLLOWed (i.e. without a rel="nofollow" attribute), and it may be the case that unless the link originates on a semi-trusted site it will be ignored.

Well Yahoo! is reporting quite a few links now. The few links that I checked were from Paul commenting on other people’s blogs. Commenting and interacting with others is a great way to get attention and traffic. But you will not get any Search Engine benefits if the link you acquire from other sites is NOFOLLOWed. Unfortunately for Paul this was the case on the pages I checked.

Tip #2:

Paul needs good text-rich anchored FOLLOWed links (like shopping blog), preferably from on-theme websites (unlike mine).

Use the tools Google gives you

Google has been far and away the most progressive Search Engine in terms of informing webmasters about their sites status. The Webmaster Console can give valuable data to a webmaster enabling you to diagnose all sorts of issues. In Paul’s case the console will likely not yield much information (Google appears to be completely oblivious to his site). The console may give up one useful piece of info in instances where your site is not appearing in Google – Penalty notification.

If your site is under any penalty you will be notified within the console. That’s pretty cool because if you inadvertently broke the guidelines (and got caught :mrgreen:) this tool not only informs you, but it also allows you to file a re-inclusion request after you’ve fixed up the offending material.

Tip #3:

Make use of Google Webmaster Console to appraise your site condition and diagnose any issues with crawlabilty and HTTP errors.

Just a quick note: I’m not suggesting that Paul’s site is under a penalty. My gut tells me it’s a spiderability and link issue.

So any other tips?

Well I would strongly suggest reading some of my previous posts in this ‘series’. Many contain tips that can be followed on any site:

1. Getting you site out of supplemental index (Krishna De)
2. Page titles and SEO (First Partners)
3. SEO for Blogspot (Blogger) sites (multiple sites)
4. SEO for photoblogs (McAwilliams)
5. Corporate Blogging SEO (Bubble Brosthers)
6. PageRank Flow, Comment Feeds in Supplementals, NoFollow & robots.txt (BifSniff)

Apart from the above, there are many other tweaks that Paul can make. I would certainly include post titles (they seem to be missing from the homepage) along with links straight through to the actual post. I would also consider NOFOLLOWing all the links to the social media site and Technorati tags. I noticed a few other actionable items, but the first and foremost priority is letting the search engine bots into the site and getting the pages properly indexed. Hope that helps Paul.

To the others who are still on my list

I have to admit when I made my offer I sort of knew it was a little risky. I thought I’d spend a short amount of time on each site and zip through the reviews. I’m finding that I’m actually spending multiple hours on each site, and being just a mere one-man-show means that I often have to drop the review mid-sentence to work with clients (and I haven’t been short of work thankfully). But I do promise that everyone will get a review. So here are the blogging heavy-hitters that still await their reviews:

1. http://www.argolon.com/
2. http://blog.roam4free.ie/
3. http://www.mneylon.com/blog
4. http://www.headrambles.com
5. http://www.mediangler.com

Slow but steady progress (emphasis on the slow – sorry guys)

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Spiderability is the First Step to Search Engine Nirvana

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Further Digging

This was really beginning to hurt me so I decided to grab my raw access logs and look to see what was going on:

66.249.65.97 – - [23/Jun/2007:02:59:52 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 302 5 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

66.249.65.97 – - [23/Jun/2007:02:59:55 -0400] “GET /wp-mobile.php HTTP/1.1″ 404 20530 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

What’s happening there is Googlebot is requesting my homepage, getting a 302 redirect for /wp-mobile.php, and then a 404 not found for that file. In my stupidity I didn’t copy across the file in question as per the installation instructions (although I’m not sure why the plugin doesn’t simply redirect to the plugin folder?).

So you can see how Google was getting those 404 errors. But my stupidity aside, there is a very nasty flaw in Ruadhan O’Donoghue’s plugin: mobile content is served to search engine robots.

If you serve excerpts for each post on your homepage then you really want the Search Engine bots to see that content. Granted, my own cock-up added to my issues by serving 404′s to the bots, but I think the plugin will need some modification to ensure that regular web-crwalers aren’t getting the minimal content that mobile devices get. For actual post pages this isn’t really an issue, but for the homepage this plugin could really affect your rankings – I for one need to ensure that my homepage is served correctly to the bots.

Here’s a few requests from my log:

74.6.69.105 – - [23/Jun/2007:03:05:04 -0400] “GET /statistics/02-03-2007/social-media-marketing/ HTTP/1.0″ 302 0 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”
74.6.69.105 – - [23/Jun/2007:03:05:24 -0400] “GET /wp-mobile.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 20492 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

72.30.216.101 – - [23/Jun/2007:03:10:34 -0400] “GET /contact HTTP/1.0″ 302 0 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”
72.30.216.101 – - [23/Jun/2007:03:10:35 -0400] “GET /wp-mobile.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 20495 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)”

66.249.65.97 – - [23/Jun/2007:02:59:52 -0400] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 302 5 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”
66.249.65.97 – - [23/Jun/2007:02:59:55 -0400] “GET /wp-mobile.php HTTP/1.1″ 404 20530 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

It appears that MSNbot isn’t affected by this, but both Googlebot and Yahoo!Slurp are served up the mobile equivalent of your blog.

The plugin is taking over the parsing for all those user agents as they accept mobile content. But the fly in the ointment is that the content served up by Ruadhan’s plugin is extremely paired down: the homepage simply includes links to your last 10 posts. I’d say this could spell the kiss of death for your search engine rankings (even if you manage to copy the files across *doh*).

I’ve left a comment on the plugin page over on the .mobi blog, and trackbacked to Michele’s post where I first saw this plugin. Hopefully Ruadhan can come up with a workaround for this issue, as I’m quite sure a mobile plugin will be very useful given that mobile devices are going to appear more and more in your logs going forward.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: WordPress Mobile Plugin with WURFL Killed my Rankings

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Well, yesterday the above happened to me. I was making a few changes to try to make WordPress a little lees hungry.

Not sure what happened, I decided to login to Google Webmaster Console. And there was the answer:

It’s incredible just how quickly Google has removed results that may not be useful due to resources not being available. In this case my rankings should return fairly quickely after Google re-crawls my site.

If you haven’t already signed up for Google Webmaster Console I strongly advice you do so – it can save you a tonne of hassle.

PS – thanks to Paul at eirjobs for letting me know about the errors my site was spitting out.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Sudden Visitor and Rankings Drop – When Your Site Falls Out Of The Sky

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Please Note: While the following analysis relates to bifsniff.com many of the suggestions made are highly relevant to any website.

Bifsniff.com – formerly the cartoon guys

I had the fortune to meet Frank a few months back when he came along the the inaugural ShareIT event in Cork. Frank has also been kind enough to let me know every time WordPress has decided to rewrite my .htaccess file (which is more times than I care to mention – damn WP).

Page Navigation

1. Fist port of call – the Canonical URL
2. Comment Feeds in the Supplemental Bin
3. Why pages go supplemental
4. Controlling search engine access to your site
5. Don’t channel PageRank to useless pages
6. Having unique page titles and descriptions

First port of call – the Canonical URL

The very first thing I check when I go to a site is whether or not it resolves via a canonical URL. This all sounds very technical, but in fact it’s a very simple test:

1. In your browser address bar type your website address WITHOUT the www.
2. Now do the same thing again, except this time with the www.

*IF* your site appeared for both addresses *AND* the address bar didn’t change for either to the other (i.e. you typed www.[mysite].[myTLD] and the address automatically change to [mysite].[myTLD] without the www.) then you are effectively publishing the same site two times. This is known as the “Canonical URL” issue.

You see if Google can access your site via both www. and non-www. addresses it sees these as two different sites. Google does a pretty good job of filtering out one or the other from its results, but where this can hurt you is your backlink profile. Say lots of people have linked to your site and those links point at both the non-www. and www. addresses more or less evenly. Well under this situation you are effectively diluting the link love by splitting it between two sites. Now if you go and set up a really simple redirect from non-www. to www. (or vice-versa) you’ll effectively double the link love in this example. his could have an effect on how your site ranks overall.

Now if Frank is reading this he’s probably saying ‘tell me something I don’t know’. That’s because Frank has mastered this a long time ago. Try typing www.bifsniff.com into your browser. Now take a look at the address bar – no www. there now is there?

Comment Feeds in the Supplemental Bin

Frank mentioned that he had a lot of pages in the supplemental index. In particular the comment feeds seemed to get supped. This is quite regular in fact. The comment feed is generally only linked to from within a post itself, and rarely will you have external links pointing at your comment feed URL.

Curiously this issue has been the focus of quite a bit of disucusion (overview here, some more here) in the SEO field recently.

Before we go any further let’s take a step back and look at the problem faced by bifsniff.com. First we need to take a snapshot of the pages indexed in both Google’s main and supplemental indices. The following advanced operator commands will help us:

1. Total indexed pages:
   site:bifsniff.com
2. Pages in supplemental index:
   *** -RCredCardinalIE site:bifsniff.com

Query 1 gives us the total number of pages indexed (2,060), query 2 the number of pages in the supplemental index (1,180), and the difference between the two (880) the number of pages in the primary index. The comment feeds are of low value and deservedly end up in the supplemental index. This is quite normal, and generally wont hurt your site. An argument can be made, however, for trying to reduce the number of pages indexed in order to ensure that Google gets your most important pages into the primary index.

Another Step Back – Why Pages go Supplemental

To better understand why you want to control what pages get indexed you need to know why pages go supplemental. There have been many rumours and myths about this topic. However recently Google has come out and said on a number of occasions that there is only one reason why a page will end up in the suppelmental index – Lack of PageRank

Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.

Source: Adam Lasnik comment here

…the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank.

If a page doesn’t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.

Source: Matt Cutts Google Hell post

PageRank is passed from one resource (page) to another via links. A collection of pages that forms a any website will therefore have a calculable amount of pagerank to share between those pages. Let’s take a very simple example to show this.

So let’s say that your site has ’6′ PageRank units to share amongst its pages. All external links point at the homepage only (rarely the case, although the homepage regularly has the highest PageRank). Here’s how the site might look:

The homepage (‘Home’) links to 3 sub-category pages (‘SubCat1′, ‘SubCat2′, ‘SubCat3′). So each of these sub pages receives 2 PageRank units (i.e. 6/3) from the homepage. In turn each of these sub-category pages links all other sub-category pages, 2 inner pages, and back to the homepage (this is a classic ‘silo’ architecture).

• the homepage funnels PgaeRank to 3 sub-category pages
• each sub-category page funnels PageRank to 2 other sub-category pages, two inner pages, and back to the homepage
• each inner page funnels PageRank to 1 other inner page and back to its parent sub-category page

There are many reciprocal relationships within this very small example, and calculating the actual PageRank in and out of any page can become very complex as the number of pages and links on each page increases (I’m not even going to try).

What should be obvious though is the fact that reducing the number of pages which share the initial PageRank should increase the PageRank shared by the smaller page set. That in turn may result in some additional pages coming out of the supplemental index and into the primary index.

In bifsniff’s case they have too many pages and either not enough PageRank to support all those pages or PageRank is not being filtered optimally to support each page.

Controlling search engine access to your site

One trick here is to specifically exclude pages that you don’t want indexed. In the case of WordPress feeds you can use this useful plugin written by Joost DeValk. The plugin ads a NoIndex tag to your feeds so they will be followed but wont get indexed.

In terms of the comments feeds that end up in the supps, well it would be as well to just add a NOFOLLOW to the links. This will take a bit of digging into your code as the link text is generated within /wp-includes/fedds.php:

92. function comments_rss_link($link_text = 'Comments RSS', $commentsrssfilename = '') {
93. $url = comments_rss($commentsrssfilename);
94. echo "<a href='$url'>$link_text</a>";
95. }

Line 94. needs to be changed to:

echo "<a href='$url' rel='nofollow'>$link_text</a>";

That should place the required “NOFOLLOW” value into the rel attribute. Those feeds should then no longer be indexed in Google. By changing this code (rather than using Joost’s plugin) you get the benefit of retaining your main feeds indexation while keeping those pesky comment feeds out of the index.

Don’t channel PageRank to useless pages

When I performed the site: operator commend in Google i got the following results:

Here’s the ‘Secret Page’:

That page has a PageRank of 4 and no external links according to Yahoo!. The same goes for the Authors Login page.

I would NOFOLLOW those links (this might require some hard coding hackery) and exclude those pages within my robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret/
Disallow: /private-authors-area/

Any other pages that are not adding to the user experience could also be removed in similar fashion.

Having unique page titles and descriptions

I noticed that bifsniff uses an identical META description throughout the site. I think it is always better to make the page META as unique as possible for each page. There are two benefits here:

1. search engines generally use the META description as the snippet, so you should view your META as a call-to-action;
2. unique META data *may* assist you when a page is at the margin of being duplicate content.

If you use WordPress there are a number of plugins available that allow you to add unique META descriptions and keywords to each page and post.

Conclusion

Well hopefully there’s quite a bit for Frank to go with there. There was a few other other items that I came across (linking to archives) but I think this post is quite long enough.

Hopefully this post will explain to people how search engines see each site in aggregate and how Google in particular decides which pages to include in the primary and supplementary index.

If you have any questions, or any of the above technical issues need de-mystifying please do leave me a comment below and I’ll try to better explain. (Glances at Aide from www.simplythebest.ie)

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: PageRank Flow, Comment Feeds in Supplementals, NoFollow & robots.txt – bifsniff.com

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The Webmaster Console contains a ‘Links’ tab that *should* give details of the external ad internal links Google sees for your site. It’s a handy tool, even more so seen as Google has long since bastardised the link: operator in normal search.

While Google has said that the console may nor return all results it has data on, I find it really difficult to understand why a page which is linked prominently from the homepage of the site in question (and one with the highest TBPR) doesn’t appear in the console?

Lesson to be learnt: Don’t rely on the Webmaster Console for 100% of your link data.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Webmaster Links Tool – Don’t Rely On It 100%

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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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KrishnaDe.com

I have to say I have always admired Krishna’s website. It is just well polished from the get-go. The homepage just speaks ‘professionalism’ to me:

If I were to find any fault it would be with the footer – I can’t easily discern between text and links. But that would just be nit-picking.

More than meets the eye

It was only when I sent in a spider that the true size of Krishna’s site became apparent. I knew that her blog has been on-line for a number of years and so expected the blog to be quite extensive. But I hadn’t expected this:

Crawler 1: 2,306 internal pages
Crawler 2: 2,604 pages (some external)

A look at Google’s index shows that Krishna’s site has a high number of pages in the supplemental index:

Pages Indexed: 1,330
Pages Supplemental: 964

That’s a particularly high proportion of supplemental:indexed pages, and to me this is the most pressing issue for Krishna.

A robots eye view

Here’s Krishna’s robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /_mm/
Disallow: /_notes/
Disallow: /_baks/
Disallow: /MMWIP/
Disallow: /audio-for/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /onlinebrand/

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.csi

When I look at some of the files that have made their way into the supplemental index I can see immediately that many should not be indexed in the first place.

HOLD PRESS – I’ve just noticed that Krishna’s site has been hacked:

Those links at the top of the page shouldn’t be there. That’s taken from Google’s cached version of the page. Here’s the original page. This type of hacking is normally carried out by altering the .htaccess file to cloak your pages for GoogleBot. Normal users are shown the second page, while Google sees the page with the links.

I’ve seen this hack a lot recently. The best medicine is to make sure that your software is up-to-date. There have been issues with WordPress, and that’s why the WordPress guys are very much on the ball with updates. You have to carefully check your server to see what else has been left around. The first file I would check is .htaccess, although in this case I have a feeling there may be a bit more going on.

I cant tell for sure if Krishna has fixed this. This hack might be a bit more elaborate than normal user agent sniffing. When I access the page as GoogleBot I get the clean version so the hack has either been treated, or is using a IP delivery or reverse-lookup to only cloak for the real GoogleBot. I sent Krishna a mail as soon as I found this so hopefully she already knows about it and had it patched.

Back to work…

There’s not a lot I can do while I wait to hear back from Krishna. So I’m going to go ahead with what I think Krishna should do to fix the supplemental issues.

The crawler found 2,306 resources in Krishna’s site. it also found about 100 cases of duplicate content covering about 250 pages (the homepage was accessible via 4 URLs). Most of the duplicate content came from the trailing slash problem. Krishna can solve most of this by installing a small WordPress Plugin called Permalink Redirect.

Next step, Krishna needs to update that robots.txt file. I would add in the following to stop Google crawling certain areas of the site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /_mm/
Disallow: /_notes/
Disallow: /_baks/
Disallow: /MMWIP/
Disallow: /audio-for/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /onlinebrand/
Disallow: /learningzone/
Disallow: /blog/wp-content/plugins/
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.csi

Soemwhere in Krishna’s blog she has linked to her plug-in directory. The result is that Google has indexed a tonne of files from her WordPress Plug-in directory. This has two effects:

1. increases the site size, and therefore the Pagerank needed to carry each page;
2. decreases the Pagerank passed to each page as there are more internal links than needed.

So not only should Krishna remove the links to those pages, she should also make sure that the bots no longer crawl resources that shouldn’t be in the index. The two most obvious offenders I could see for low-value filler content were Learning Zone (/learningzone/) and the plug-in directory (/blog/wp-content/plugins/). So I’ve disallowed the bots from those areas.

Calendars can drive bots batty

I’ve found that dynamic calendars are very often the worst culprits for driving search engine bots around the twist. And Krishna’s site hasn’t let me down. Within the LearningZone there is a dynamic calendar. This is just one more reason to keep the bots out of there.

Permalinks

I notice that the crawler came back with a large chunk of default WordPress page URLs. These are the URLs that look like www.mysite.com/?p=1234. Krishna must have changed over to the more SE-friendly permalink structure, but not changed all her internal links.

Although there could be quite some work involved, I think it would be useful to fix this issue. I saw some duplicate content issues due to the use of both default and permalink structures. If you are interested in the duplicate content URLs here’s the full report:

krishna-de-dupes.txt

Other thoughts

My eyes are getting a bit weary now, but there are just a couple of other thoughts on Krishna’s blog.

Internal linking can be a great way to help your pages rank well. For a start you can control the anchor text used, and anchors are what give relevancy to the linked material. Google loves anchors, so don’t use ‘click here’ or ‘look at this’ where you could use great descriptive anchors for your links.

I looked through some of Krishna’s posts and the thing that struck me was the lack of links. A great way to keep posts out of the supplemental index AND boost your internal traffic is to cross link in your posts. If you discussed something previously which is related to your current post then link to it. And use good descriptive anchor text in your links. It’s amazing how just one or two good internal links can see pages jump out of the supplemental index.

I hope Krishna has fixed this up

It’s such a pain in the rear when hackers get into your site. And it goes to show that you can never be too careful with the security of your website. Hopefully Krishna either has this sorted or soon will.

And if you want to see a great example of a blog that shows you what on-line marketing is I would strongly advise that you head over to Krishna De’s website.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: How To Get Your Site Out Of The Supplemental Index -Krishna De

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Search engines discover content using their bots (or ‘crawlers’), and determine relevancy (and by extension ranking) using advanced algorithms.

Discovery

The golden rule of SEO is that search engines cant rank a page they don’t know about. This is what makes discovery is so important. The most natural way for a search engine to discover a new resource is by crawling a link pointing at that content. So to get any new resource crawled quickly you should get a few links from other sites that are crawled regularly. (The major search engines have a sitemap initiative, but remember that without a solitary link Google will not index your content regardless of sitemap).

Relevancy

Getting your page crawled is less than half the battle. Now comes the hard part – ranking well. The second factor that determines whether your page ranks well is relevancy. Relevancy is determined by search engine algorithms which decide the order to display results to searchers. A number of on-site and off-site factors are incorporated into the relevancy determination which I’ll look at in a moment. (Trust could be also be dropped into the mix here, but I’m assuming that away for the moment).

How can you guide the search engines?

Webmasters actually have the greatest say in signalling for both discovery and relevancy. I use the term signalling because that’s really what SEO is all about – sending the right signal to the search engines.

To explain more about signals I’m going to have a look at another of the Irish Blog Award nominee sites which availed of the free site review offer.

First Partners

I met Paul Browne at the Irish Blog Awards a few weeks back. Paul writes regularly on his technology-themed First Partners blog:

Back to relevancy

The page title is probably one of the most important on-page elements used by search engines to determine the relevancy of your web pages. By and large you should target 1-3 keyword phrases, and bear in mind that most searches are around 3 words in length.

In the case of Paul’s blog homepage I notice that he is using dynamic titles which include the title of the most recent post. This in my view is a mistake – the homepage page title is about as sacred as it gets, and you don’t want it changing every day or so. I think Paul should concentrate on the main focus of his blog, whatever niche that might be, and use that in his blog homepage title.

The canonical URL problem (again)

I’m probably beginning to sound like a broken record. The canonical URL problem is a condition where your site or page is accessible by typing either of the following into your browser:

www.mysite.com

or

mysite.com

(notice this second case drops the www)

If you can reach your page via either URL AND the URL in the address bar does not change your site is suffering from the canonical URL problem.

In Paul’s case his site is accessible via both the www and non-www URLs. To fix this problem you need to redirect one URL to the other with a 301 redirect.

Don’t use 302 redirects for your homepage

When checking Paul’s blog I noticed that the FirstPartners.net homepage had a Toolbar PR0. This is odd given that the blog has PageRank 5. Then I noticed that the root page is redirecting to firstpartners.ie/rp/:

http://www.firstpartners.net/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.firstpartners.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,[... ]png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en,en-us;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: __utma=67859462.28111[... ]__utmc=67859462

HTTP/1.x 302 Found
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:35:35 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
Location: http://www.firstpartners.net/rp/
Content-Length: 304
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
X-Pad: avoid browser bug

If the homepage is going to stay there then I suggest changing that to a 301 redirect. The most probable reason why the temporary homepage is currently PageRank 0 is that it has few if any backlinks. The backlinks Paul has accumulated point at www.firstpartners.net rather than www.firstpartners.net/rp/, and Google doesn’t realise that /rp/ is now the homepage. No 301 = No transferral of links and trust

And some advice for the blog?

I had a few ideas when I looked at Paul’s blog. I found that the page weight was a little too beefy, with the blog homepage weighing in at 800KB+ on one occasion last week. I also thought that Paul could cut the number of posts published per page to a more manageable number. And I even considered whether NOFOLLOWing some of the internal links (e.g. the cloud) might help.

But I can safely scrap all that advice for one simple suggestion: give each and every blog post a unique META description.

When I looked at all the pages in the supplemental index it was instantly apparent that Paul wasn’t using META descriptions:

You can see that Google is picking up boilerplate content for every snippet. I’d be willing to bet that at least some of the 265 pages in supplemental will pop out if they have a unique description META.

I did spend a short amount of time looking at the backlink profile for the blog and the majority of links use the anchor “Paul Browne – Technology in plain English”. I reckon Paul probably ranks well for his name (he had a thread about his on-line doppleganger but I couldn’t find it). I think some diversification of the link anchor could pay off – non-diverse backlink anchors may actually raise a flag that could damage your site.

So find that niche and push it in your titles and anchors. In Paul’s case that niche should be highly relevant to his company’s products and services. I’ll leave the idea generation to Paul.

So to recap my advice

1. Fix the blog homepage title
2. Sort the canonical URL
3. Change the root page 302 redirect
4. Assign unique META descriptions to each blog post

Previous posts in this series:

Seo for Blogspot (Blogger) blogs: Helping The Blogspot Bloggers – A Tough Test To SEO Blogspot
PhotoBlog SEO: SEO For Thin Content Sites – Making A P h o t o B l o g More Visible
Corporate Blogging SEO: Putting Some Fizz Into Bubble Brothers – Beware Of Corporate Blogspot Blogs

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Are You Confusing Search Engine Bots?

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Search Marketing World 2007

Ireland’s first conference dedicated to Search Marketing hit our shores on Wednesday March 21 in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The highlight for me was meeting some of the Irish guys who have become on-line friends over the past 12 months. To Dave, Jason, Stephen and Alastair – the pleasure was mine.

Prosperity gave out a great little USB flash-drive to each attendee – great idea guys. It was nice that one of the first faces to greet me on arrival was Gary from Prosperity. I met Gary late last year, and he’s one of the most amiable people I’ve met on my travels. If you need a media-focused recruitment agency give prosperity a call.

The conference itself was very well organised. I wont go into detail on the sessions as I bobbed and weaved quite a bit. Both Jason and Dave have excellent write-ups on the sessions they attended and their overall thoughts of the conference. The sessions that stood out for me personally were the “Search Facts and Figures in Ireland” session in the morning and the “Ad Agencies and Search” session that closed out the day.

I do think it was a shame that not even one session was set aside for advanced material (‘Advanced Track’ – for who??), but I suppose the organisers were somewhat precluded from straying from very entry-level subject matter given the small and nascent Search market here in Ireland.

It was also nice to meet and chat with Danny Sullivan. It is quite true what they say about Danny – he’s a really nice guy who absolutely blows you away with his knowledge and understanding of the search world.

Well done Martin, and perhaps next year you’ll find a small room to run some advanced sessions for the professional SEOs out here.

ShareIT Cork – Business Advisory

Now this was just hands-down a fantastic idea. Damien organised a free one-day training conference for start-ups and small companies. Damien pulled together some fantastic speakers (can’t speak for yours truly) and I found that everything discussed would benefit my own business. This for me is a great indicator that both speakers and content were absolutely top-notch.

I have to admit that I probably warbled on a bit (Damien almost fell asleep when I was talking LOL), but I suppose SEO can be a difficult subject to squeeze into a one hour talk (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it). My presentation will be getting some substantial tweaking next time it is called upon.

It was great to meet up with everyone there on the day, and in particular Krishna, who is a fantastic speaker, and Laurence of IQcontent who I chatted with extensively for the second time in a week. After we managed to miss the next train afterwards Laurence and I grabbed a bite to eat, and then chatted for most of the train journey home. I can re-affirm what Dave said.

Perhaps biggest thanks are due to Damien who once again displayed his enormous propensity for helping others. Very, very well done Damien. I’m sure you slept like a rock after sitting through my presentation.

To all the attendees – I’ll get all the links and presentation material zipped up and make it available either here or through Damien.

Keep an eye on the Business Advisory site for the next event happening near you. I’d personally be happy to pay to attend and event like this, so the fact that it is completely free makes it a complete no-brainer. Well done again Damien.

Some other bits and bobs

Well done also to Dave Davis who now becomes the second Irish SEO blogger to join the illustrious ranks of the WebProNews network. This now means that selected posts from both my blog and Dave’s will be syndicated across the iEntry network. It might not sound like much but take a look at the list of bloggers and you’ll appreciate the significance of this. Dave’s name should be joining the list sometime next week.

Well done Dave.

I’ve Been Stalked!

But in the nice way. I was approached by a Dublin college to lecture a course in Internet Marketing. Unfortunately prior commitments meant I was unavailable to lecture the course in question. It was a shame as I believe there is desperate need for a course that takes a contemporary look at Internet marketing and offers hands-on instruction in achieving marketing goals via the Internet. To my knowledge nothing along these lines is currently being offered in Ireland.

A very big hat-tip to John Coburn for referring me to the institution in question.

Will I be leaving the Irish SEO scene?

And finally, a very well known global Internet Marketing Firm has approached me with a view to joining them in London. While extremely flattered, I’m just having too much fun working for myself here in Ireland. But it’s really nice to know that my work is starting to get noticed on a higher stage.

So the bad news is that I won’t be leaving the Irish SEO scene just yet.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Search Marketing World 2007, ShareIT Cork, and A Few Other Pieces of Irish SEO News

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A prime example of this is Unison.ie. When searching for current Irish news it usually ranks fairly high on Google, however all the pages require you register first before you view them. The registration gives no advantage to people like me who just want to a quick look at the latest news. I suspect that I’m not alone and that lots of people will just go back and look for another site.

Unison’s simple user agent checking makes it very easy to get in unmolested though. The User Agent Switcher Plugin for Firefox allows you to easily set exactly what user agent you want your browser to appear as. The GoogleBot isn’t in the list of Useragents available, but it is easily added. Switch to GoogleBot as your useragent, and magically you will have full access to the Unison site.

Now I always knew that they ran a subscription wall on the site, but I hadn’t realised that they were picked up by Google news. There’s been a huge amount of interest in media sites cloaking recently (see here for more). My feeling is that Unison would want to clean this up pretty quick or risk having a lot of egg on their face. As Niall mentions:

I know that Unison will probably close this hole within a few days

Could take quite a bit of work to change the way they present their pages. I suppose they could just set their cloaking routine to let everyone through. But will they?

Nice find Niall.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Unison.ie Cloaking – Will They Be Banned From Google?

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Thankfully the ‘Facts and Figures’ session at Search Marketing World 2007 included a survey conducted by Amarach Consulting on behalf of the conference organisers.

The survey consisted of:

• a telephone survey of 1,000 adults aged 18 and over in March 2007, nationally representative sample.
• online interviews (in March) with 95 marketers on the Research Now panel, split:
  - 54 advertisers (client side) &
  - 41 agencies (mainly above the line/thru the line).

Gerard O’Neill very kindly forwarded his slides to me, some of which are discussed below.

Navigation

1. Internet Usage in Ireland
2. Average Hours On-line Per Week
3. Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites
4. Pattern of Usage of Search Results
5. Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’
6. Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months
7. Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend
8. Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising
9. Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing
10. Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending

Internet Usage in Ireland

Internet Usage in Ireland – % of each age group using internet from any location
Segment	%
18-24	74
25-34	74
35-44	53
45-54	44
55-64	43
65+	16
TOTAL	53

Average Hours On-line Per Week

Taking Time: Average Hours Online Per Week
Segment	Hours
18-24	8.4
25-34	5.8
35-44	5.5
45-54	4.2
55-64	3.8
65+	3.4
TOTAL	5.8

Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites

Frequency of Use of Search Engine Websites
Segment	% Use Search Every Day
18-24	67
25-34	51
35-44	37
45-54	39
55-64	30
65+	35

Pattern of Usage of Search Results

Pattern of Usage of Search Results
Use	%
It depends	43
Mainly click on one or more of the top 5 links presented by the search site	32
Mainly click on one or more of the links down all of the first page of links presented by the search site	15
Mainly click on one or more links throughout the first few pages presented by the search site	10

Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’

Frequency of Clicking on ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Sponsored Results’
Click on sponsored link every time + quite often	%
Very rarely when you do a search	48
Never	34
Quite often when you do a search	15
Almost every time you do a search	3

Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months

Online Advertising & Marketing: Trend in spending in past 12 Months
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increased	59	78
Remained the same	30	12
Decreased	6	7
Remained at zero	6	2

Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend

Share of Search Engine Marketing in total online spend
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
A growing share	43	34
A static share	16	20
A declining share	4	7
Don’t use SEM	37	39

Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising

Effectiveness of SEM versus Other Online Advertising
Trend	% Advertisers
More effective	59
As effective	34
Less effective	6

Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing

Expected Trend in Total Spending on Online Advertising & Marketing
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increase	59	73
Remain the same	31	24
Decrease	6	0
Remain at zero	4	2

Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending

Expected Trend in Share of SEM in Total Online Spending
Trend	% Advertisers	% Agencies
Increase	48	60
Remain the same	42	28
Decrease	2	5
Remain at zero	8	8

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Search Engine Usage in Ireland – The Facts & Figures, Statistical Analysis March 2007

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