Google SERP Back Button Error

And the text reads:

An error occurred. This page will be reloaded shortly. Or press the “reload” button now to reload it immediately.

Yep, a piece of useless trivia, but it’s been bugging me for ages to know what the message said. Now to figure out if it’s just me seeing a disproportionate number of these messages or is it more widespread?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: What Google SERP Reload Error Messages Say

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Bing Ireland Homepage in Chrome Browser

But try searching for something using either “Show all” or “Only from Ireland”. Here’s what happens to me:

Bing Ireland redirects to UK

I get redirected onto what looks like UK results. Seems to be a Chrome-specific bug, and it behaves as expected in FF. Interesting all the same, and hopefully Bing will fix this.

bing.com resized window

Hadn’t noticed before, but while on bing.com homepage try resizing the window. Really neat the way they resize the main image area.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Bing.ie Doesn’t Do Google Chrome

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If you have received a letter from the “good” people at Waldberg & Hirsch Global Collections here’s a what you should do:

1. DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

Yep, you heard me right. Sit back, relax, don’t worry one bit, and get on with running your business. And feel safe that nothing more will come of this. Why? Because this company, and the people behind it, rely on fear in order to make their corrupt living. Don’t be afraid, and don’t even acknowledge these people. Simply ignore them at every turn, and soon they will have no more victims to prey on.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Waldberg&Hirsch Global Collections – More Scams To Simply Ignore

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Well if you’re here in Ireland then there’s probably a less than 1 in 10 chance you did. I reckon Google likely has a market share approaching 90% of executed searches on our small island.

Yahoo!’s low market share was in large part due to the fact that the world’s second best known search engine long ago decided that Ireland was better tied to the UK – ‘Yahoo! Uk & Ireland’.

No more it appears, and better still – Assisted Search is now available for Ireland:

Yahoo! Ireland with Assisted Search

That’s yahoo.com from an Irish IP. We also seem to have ie.yahoo.com so we can say goodbye to Yahoo! UK & Ireland.

By the way – Assisted Search is a neat feature that gives you some suggestions and related search queries. You can access it from a drop down below the query box. Try it out – Y! nearly always have the nicest UI features, and haven’t let us down with this interface.

Hopefully it wont take long for Yahoo! central to update their International Page:

Yahoo! International Sites

Still showing Yahoo! UK & Ireland but when you click through you’re on the UK property which no longer lets you filter ‘results from Ireland’

Great news IMO.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Yahoo! Comes to Ireland (properly)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The things search engine reps mention…

If you were at SES London, you might have heard one or two little nuggets that seemed inconsequential at first, but were probably more important than you realise.

I was lurking toward the back of the room at the Linking Strategies Session when (I think) Tom Alby from Ask made a comment about hubs and authorities. He said that the difference between a link farm and a hub is that at least one or two authority sites would be linking back to the hub.

Hmmm… so there I was thinking about that for a second. If one or two authority sites link back to a link farm, hey presto, you’ve got a hub! I’ll be honest – I couldn’t hold back the snigger, and I wasn’t alone.

From the last row in the room, I swear I could just about hear the penny drop in Greg Boser’s head as he sat next to the Ask guy. I’m pretty sure he was trying very hard to hold back the laugh (he didn’t succeed :grin:).

Very funny moment, and probably one of those little nuggets the search reps wish they hadn’t dropped.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: SES London – When is a Link Farm NOT a Link Farm?

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So what’s the big deal?

Well apparently mobile search is going to be big, very big. And the top cellular operators want to make sure that they get their slice of the cake. This to me sounds like more of the ‘walled garden’ school of thinking, which in my view is absolutely the wrong direction. I don’t think consumers want to be limited when it comes to Internet use. I think they want technology that enables them to access all the cool services they use daily on their PCs and laptops.

Unfortunately the mobile operators have never been overly interested in what the consumer wants. They care about one thing and one thing only – revenue. And consumers, by their nature, tend to act in ways that are not always compatible with the revenue generating desires of the operators.

At best this is short-termism

Obviously I’m into search. And I do think that mobile is the next frontier that will catapult search, and the Internet in general, forward. But to be frank, the mobile operators are always going to be fighting from a defensive position. They don’t want us to access data on our own terms because they think they could make more money by accessing it on theirs. And therein lies the Achilles heal. Sooner or later the operators wont be able to defend their position and the flood gates will open.

But could they replicate Google?

I think you only have to read through Bill Slawski’s blog to see that the major search engines have been patenting their IP like no one’s business these last few years. The operators will likely pour a couple of hundred million into something which will fail after a year or two. The Telegraph article speculates that this might be posturing, and the operators may negotiate a deal for a larger revenue share with the major search engines.

Part of me hopes this is the case, that we wont have higher walls in the garden, but a bigger part of me hopes they try to build their own search engine and fail miserably.

As an aside, I’ve always wondered does anyone actually like the mobile operators?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Mobile Opperators To Launch Search Engine – Sounds Like More Walled Gardens To Me

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Now I’ll try to explain that in English

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you get into the local listings?

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

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

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

Hang on a second. What the hell is OneBox

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

or perhaps ticker symbols:

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

From Google’s help pages:

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

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

Who cares? I’m in Ireland…

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

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

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

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

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

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Overture, the free keyword tool from Yahoo!, is either dead or dying

Most people will be familiar with Overture’s keyword tool which has been returning free keyword estimates for many years. Now the old adage the you get what you pay for still holds true, and most professionals have long since moved to paid services.

But apparently the Overture tool isn’t too well cared for by its owners, as Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal finds out from John Slade, Global Product Management with Yahoo Search Marketing:

First, I’d like to clarify that Yahoo! Search Marketing’s public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today… the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the sheer volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear…

The same Yahoo! representative is then quoted as saying:

… the public tool continues to be available but my advice to our advertisers is to use the protected keyword research tool.

which bascially confirms something we all knew a long time ago – the Overture keyword tool pretty much sucks.

One man’s risk is another man’s opportunity

And lo and behold, hot on the tracks of the rumours about the demise of Overture’s tool comes an announcement via Aaron Wall that Wordtracker has introduced a new free version of Wordtracker that returns up yo 100 keywords.

The Wordtracker tool can be found at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/.

Want a little bit more?

I use a number of keyword tools, both free and paid. To be honest there’s no fail safe method to generate 100% accurate keyword lists, but by using a combination of tools you can come up with pretty decent ones.

As I wrote previously, I’m using NicheBot (that’s an affiliate link) which has some great features for generating and processing keyword lists. Recently I’ve also added another professional tool to the armoury which I’m really liking a lot (I’ll post about that later).

If anyone knows of other tools that fly a little below the radar I’d love to hear about them.

[UPDATE - Now Trillian is offering a free keyword tool - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html]

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Overture Keyword Tool Dead, but Wordtracker Saves The Day (and now Trillain jumps on board)

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

What was Google Bombing?

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

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

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

But could this change affect your rankings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Judging by the photos Apple will release an ultra sleek device (no surprise). And of course, Apple are renowned for nailing fantastic technology interfaces. Keeping it simple with absolutely functional interfaces is the cornerstone of Apples design.

But could this herald the long-postponed ‘Mobile Internet Era’?

Read/Write Web is talking up the UI, which, without a stylus, should be interesting. (When I heard about pinching gestures I thought about this great video of a multi-touch interface.)

The out-of-the-box partnership with both Google and Yahoo! shows a quite serious posture to target the Internet user – the free push-email from Yahoo! must be of concern to Blackberry? And the iPhone will also include some pretty comprehensive connectivity options to keep you on-line.

But it’s Apple’s ability to take a product and push it into the mainstream, both physically and mentally, that offers the greatest chance that the iPhone will be the tipping-point for mobile Internet. If Apple manages to achieve the same success for the iPhone as the iPod I think Mobile Internet will finally become a mainstream reality. (Notice the slide on Read/Write showing 10m units and 1% market share in 2008. Bear in mind iPod has 80%+ share…)

When mobile devices become the prevalent access points for the Internet (there’s a lot more mobile phones than computers) we are going to have a sea-change in search (hello localisation), and websites will need to get clever about publishing content for mobile (hi xHTML, device-optimised content).

Now, I just wonder how Irish businesses/websites will be positioned for the Mobile Internet?

Not unrelated, but if you want to eliminate you mobile roaming charges try Roam4Free, an international sim that lets you roam for free.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Apple iPhone the Tipping-Point for Mobile Internet?

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Selling links can hurt your website’s health

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

Perhaps of particular note:

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

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

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

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

Adam Lasnik on Duplicate Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using images in the vicinity of your AdSense blocks

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

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

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

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

More debate to come methinks…

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

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Well today Google announced some new features of Google Apps.

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

Funnily enough the service is actually through GoDaddy

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

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What is RSS?

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSS Readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making your feed icon appear in the address bar

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

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

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

RSS features and uses

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

Search engines and RSS

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

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

So does RSS matter?

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

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

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

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

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

From Multilingual-Search.

Perfect

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

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Fascinating report from McAfee SiteAdvisor on the possible dangers of clicking on search results served by the top search engines.

Possibly the oddest finding for me was this:

8% of sponsored results are rated red or yellow – almost three times the percentage of red and yellow sites found in organic results. Notably, scam sites are found at a much greater frequency in sponsored results.

I would have thought that the major Search Engines would be far more vigilant about their sponsored listings?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: How Safe are Search Results?

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

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

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

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Alexa collects statistics on general Internet usage from the browsing habits of millions of Alexa toolbar users. This data is then presented on the Alexa website.

Can you trust Alexa?

There’s are one or two problems though – Alexa is too easy to game, and the toolbar users are very often extremely biased both geographically and technically (heavily US tech users).

But, without prejudice to these issues, Alexa does have some nice features. For instance you can compare traffic data from a number of sites over long periods of time.

Strange what you run into

Recently while searching for some info on a particular Irish Property site I noticed a SERP entry for www.alexaholic.com:

This page had been set up by a visitor to alexaholic.com who entered the following five Irish property websites:

1. www.myhome.ie (blue line)
2. www.daft.ie (red line)
3. www.funda.ie (green line)
4. www.sellityourself.ie (brown line)
5. www.privateseller.ie (cyan line)

So what? I hear you ask

Of course just about anybody could have gone over to alexaholic.com and set up this comparison (the site is public and free). But what really caught my eye was the trends of some of the sites.

Now before I go on let me explain that I studied economics at TCD for 4 years, and had a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) interest in the stock markets. In particular I had an interest in charting and technical analysis.

Trends

Not withstanding the Alexa bias, the following trends are quite interesting:

• November an December are bad months for the property websites;
• Until Q4 2005 both myhome.ie and daft.ie were joint leaders for website reach;
• December 2005 saw myhome.ie visits plunge, while Daft.ie failed to set a new low for the year;
• Since 2005 the paths have diverged significantly for the two large property sites;
• Daft.ie Internet reach appears to have become more volatile but a clear up trend is in place (higher highs, higher lows);
• Myhome.ie conversely has entered a very clearly defined down trend – their reach is falling.

The €50m website

Myhome.ie was bought by the Irish Times last July for a reported €50m. Although no accuracy can be attributed to the Alexa data, over large sample sizes the trends reported may be representative of the actual actual figures.

If so the Irish Times may have quite a job on their hands catching up with Daft.ie.

Funda

Toward the recent area of the chart you might notice a blip in the green line. This is the data for Funda.ie which launched with the Dublin Coastal Development back in September.

The chart shows the uphill struggle Funda will have to compete with the big boys of Irish on-line property.

A pinch of salt

Of course you can’t trust Alexa data. But the charts still give some food for thought and give some indication of the competitive environment facing websites in the Irish property niche.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Irish Property Sites Keeping an Eye on Each Other?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tinfoil hats ready

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

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

Just too many coincidences?

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

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

Some questions for Google

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

I would really like to know the following:

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

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

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

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Well, not to dally about too much, the archive search facility is a tad bit broken. I’m not quite sure what the problem is. First I thought that perhaps each word of the search query was being truncated. But then I noticed some search words coming back with different spellings.

Here’s what I searched for and the returned query:

• searched for ‘ireland house’ – matched ‘ireland: 423756, hous: 101978′
• searched for ‘ireland house prices’ – matched ‘ireland: 423756, hous: 101978, price: 102252′
• searched for ‘irish property prices’ – matched ‘irish: 715996, properti: 164708, price: 102252′
• searched for ‘house price inflation’ – matched ‘hous: 101978, price: 102252, inflat: 13885′
• searched for ‘minister cowen’ – matched ‘minist: 134897, cowen: 5678′
• searched for ‘the irish times’ – matched ‘irish: 715990, time: 703415′
• searched for ‘mystery guest’ – matched ‘mysteri: 6967, guest: 10148′
• searched for ‘cavity’ – matched ‘caviti: 271′

I tried those last two to see if the results were correct. ‘mysteri’ would match with ‘mysterious’ but the search yielded pages without an occurrence of ‘mysterious’. While a search for ‘cavity’ returned results.

It appears, therefore, that the search is based on the correct phrase, but the results page is displaying the wrong search query.

As I mentioned, I thought that perhaps queries were split along word boundaries and then mistakenly truncated, but the appearance of i’s instead of y’s threw this theory. And then of course not all words seemed to suffer the chop.

Perhaps someone can see an obvious cause of this that I cant?

Oh, and there are absolutely no prizes for guessing how bad the mark-up in there is

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Ireland.com Search Feature Broken

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

Just take ‘em out

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

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

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

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

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

Ulterior motives?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’m looking now and it seems to be far better than Google’s poor attempt (outside of major cities).

Here’s the link.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Quick Fluffy Link :-)

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Patents can reveal a lot

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

Patent watching

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

Firefox search.suggest

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

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

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

Microsoft Live sniffing around Google searches?

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

The Microsoft Patent

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

Privacy Ramifications

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

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

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

It did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Google again…

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

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

Adwords

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

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

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

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

You see I clicked on an ad for

Presentation Skills
Natural, effective and interesting presentations at all levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Search Engine Marketing

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

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

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

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

Search Engine Optimisation

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

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

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

Why SEO is more important than SEM

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

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

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

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

SEO is a sustainable long-term promotional strategy

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

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

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

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It appears that liberal bloggers in the US are preparing to Google Bomb a number of well known Republican politicians. By linking to unflattering news reports using the politician’s name in the anchor text the bloggers hope to manipulate search engine SERPs for searches on that politician.

Google bombing is not new, but this is perhaps the first time that the tactic has been used by mainstream politics to damage their opponents.

Previously Google bombing was regarded as an ‘activist’ activity (e.g. telecoms poodle), but now that it has hit the mainstream I wonder how long until commercial interests use this tactic in an effort to damage the reputation of their competitors?

I also wonder if Google might start to consider ways to block the bomb in the future?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Bombing An Election – Search As A Political Weapon

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As the web continues to change and evolve, our algorithms change right along with it. Recently, as a result of one of those algorithmic changes, we’ve modified our webmaster guidelines. Previously, these stated:

Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

However, we’ve recently removed that technical guideline, and now index URL’s that contain that parameter.

So you don’t need to worry about id parameters in the URL any longer, with the following caveat:

….dynamic URL’s with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice

This is great news for any site owner that has experienced issues associated with Google mistaking their URL query strings for session id’s.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Google Change Their Webmaster Guidelines

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It’s amazing what the slip of a keypad touch can do:

Here’s the search that found this little gem (and the image above links to the actual post [FIXED NOW] – they deserve a bit of link-love because TBH I’m still laughing).

Even the spellcheck in FireFox 2.0 (which I got earlier to test out) wouldn’t have saved them from that

I really want to let them know put part of me just says no! No prizes for guessing which part is winning

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Sometimes A Spell Checker Wont Save You :-)

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In ‘13 Deadly Google Sins‘ I looked at a few of the most serious issues that can affect a website’s ability to rank well in Google.

Now it’s time to look at 10 ways to make Google love your site and feed it with all those fantastic visitors:

1. Getting Indexed

   If you want to get into Google’s index in short-time you need to get as many authoritative links pointing at your site as possible. Forget about using the Google submission tool, just find some links from regularly crawled sites (sites that frequently update their content are usually crawled more frequently). With the right links pointing at your site you can get indexed in a week or less, so go beg, borrow or steal to get those links.

2. Give Some Friendly Directions

   When you need to find your way you look at a map. Sitemaps are just as useful to spiders as real maps are to humans. In fact, sitemaps are also incredibly useful for your human visitors so consider creating both a html and an xml sitemap – the former for humans (and spiders!) and the latter for Google Sitemaps.

3. Don’t Stress Out the Googlebot

   Where possible use well formed, semantically correct mark-up. I make sure that my pages validate over on validator.w3.org (well, I let the HTMLtidy plug-in take care of this).

   I also spend a fair bit of time on the page title, the header elements, the text body and the internal link anchors. I try to ensure that keywords are consistent across these four page elements. This helps Google to identify what your page is about.

   BTW the page title is quite an important variable used by Google when applying SERP positioning so make sure to get the correct keywords into each and every unique page title.

4. Avoid overuse of Flash

   Search Engines have always had problems with Flash. For this reason Flash-based websites are notoriously difficult to rank well in Google.

   If you must keep that cool looking Flash site you should consider offering a text-based alternative (not just for the SE’s, but also from a usability perspective). Failing that, you could try utilising the <noembed> or <noframe> elements to incorporate as much text into your pages as possible. If absolutely all else fails your last hope is probably the ‘Google Bomb‘.

   While I’m on the subject, try to avoid using Flash for navigation – bear in mind that some people don’t have Flash installed and others (like me) block Flash from their browser.

5. Create Unique Compelling Content

   Google loves unique content. But more importantly so do humans, and the best advice is to create your content for human visitors first and foremost.

   Great content attracts attention and people show their interest by linking to your content. Every time someone links to you Google counts this as a vote for your content – the more votes the higher your SERP ranking. Oh, and just for the record, the converse of this also holds – Google hates copied content just as much as it loves unique content so don’t expect much love if you scrap other sites.

6. Better Links = Higher SERPs

   The most important trick to getting those all important #1 positions from Google is to get great links pointing at your unique content. (Having a 10 year old domain doesn’t hurt also, but that’s another story.)

   This is probably the trickiest part of getting Google’s love – if people cant find you how can they possibly link to you? Well my advice is to go for the low-hanging fruit first. Human edited web directories offer a great way to get some easy links.

   If you have a bit more time you could also try some writing some quality articles related to your niche and submit these to the top article directories.

   A quick note about link anchors:

   If I can control just one single factor when looking for Google love then it would have to be the anchor text used in the backlinks pointing at my content.

   *Note*: Quite a few people have asked me what are the best anchors to use. I recommend you check out Wordze if you need to find the best keyword anchors.

   IMO Google applies quite a serious bias to the anchor text used in your backlinks when determining the most appropriate SERP position (and if you want to see what the difference is between #1 and #2 or #1 and #10 then take a look at this).

   Some link tools and other info

   Most Search Engines allow the use of the link: operator to display the backlinks a website has. Generally I use Yahoo.com to check backlinks quickly, but be warned that the Google link: command NEVER displays anything other than a sample of your backlinks.

   MSN have just recently released the LinkFromDomain: operator which shows you all the outbound links from a website (handy to check where a site is linking to).

7. Tell Google Where You Are

   Google offers country-specific searches on all its search properties. If you want to appear in any particular ‘pages from [your country here]‘ search you must fulfil one of the following conditions:

   1. your site must be physically hosted in the targeted country (and the server IP must resolve to that country); and/or
   2. your domain must use the ccTLD of the targeted country.

   So if you want to target the ‘pages from Ireland’ search your website must be either hosted on a server located in Ireland (use this to test) or your domain must be a .ie ccTLD.

8. Remember the ‘Long-Tail’

   Google indexes pages not websites so each page can target different keywords that apply to the niche you are targeting. The more possible ways people have of finding your site then the more potential visitors your site will receive from Google.

   You should make use of keyword estimators (again, Wordze is a great tool for this, but bear in mind that no keyword tool is flawless) to ensure that your pages and copy contain the keywords people actually search for. There are many free keyword tools that you can try.

   You should also familiarise yourself with the advanced operators available from most of the major search engines. ‘inanchor:’, ‘allinanchor:’, ‘intitle:’ and ‘allintitle:’ are extremely useful for determining how competitive particular search phrases are, and these operators should form part of any serious keyword analysis.

   It’s worth mentioning that the rapid growth of local search (e.g. appending place names onto queries) means that targeting particular locations is becoming more important. I personally see far more referrals come for localised search queries than from country-only filtered searches. (Note – I work on optimising Irish websites so this observation should be taken in that particular context.)

9. Learn just 1 important Apache module

   If you want to really be best friends with Google then I suggest you learn 1 fairly easy Apache module:

   mod_rewrite allows you to turn those ugly dynamic URLs into their pretty SEO-friendly static-looking counterparts.

   mod_rewrite also allows you to redirect the non-www to your www website URL (or vice-verse). This issue, known as the canonical URL, is one of the most common causes of problems within Google’s index.

   I also suggest getting familiar HTTP header codes, and in particular the 301 redirect which might someday save your relationship with Google.

10. Play by the book

    If you try to game Google chances are you’re going to fail. Unless you are extremely well versed and experienced in
    black-hat techniques any attempt to ‘con’ Google is likely to have very serious consequences for your site.

    I recommend you become familiar with the Google webmaster guidelines, and very carefully research any grey areas before you implement any semi-shady changes to your property. Wrong-doings usual result in either a penalty or an outright ban depending on the severity of the misdeed.

    If in doubt I would check out Google Webmaster Group – you never know it might be me who answers your question :grin:.

If you have any questions or comments on this post why not leave them below. I try to answer any questions people leave, so feel free if you want my opinion on anything.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: 10 Steps to Getting Into Google And Staying There – The Ultimate Quick Guide to Google SEO

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Here’s a list of my top 13 sins (in no particular order) that will see your advances spurned by Google:

1. Flash-only sites

   No matter what people tell you, getting any sort of decent ranking for Flash-based websites is always going to be far tougher than for the HTML-based equivalent. Flash may look great and often offer a great user experience, but from a Search Engine point of view Flash is a death-trap.

2. Canonical URL issue

   It’s quite well documented that Google sees the non-www and www version of any website as different pages. If your site is accessible via both www and non-www URL you may have some indexing and supplemental issues with Google (to test this type your website address into your browser using first the www.yoursite.com and then yoursite.com and see if either redirects to the other). You can find an entire post about this over on Matt Cutts’ blog.

3. Zero backlinks

   I am yet to see Google index any site that has no backlinks from an external website. While Google may crawl your site (e.g. if you use Google’s submission tool), your site must have at least one backlink to get any pages indexed. The higher the quality of any backlinks the quicker your site will be indexed. (Oh, and just a quick mention that Google’s link: operator only displays a sample of the backlinks your site has. If you want a more complete listing head over to Yahoo SiteExplorer.)

4. Nothing or little to index

   By their nature Search Engines love text. They really love text. Text contained in images cannot be indexed by Google so that beautiful page you just created in Photoshop and uploaded to your webserver as an image file won’t get much lovin’ from Google tonight. Similarly, if your pages contain little text you shouldn’t expect Google to attach much importance to them. (Flash sites also come under this heading but are so notoriously difficult to rank that they deserved their very own listing :))

5. Duplicate content

   Google has a thing for original content. It just eats it up. On the other hand it particularly likes spitting out content which the filters think has been ripped off. So when you copy someone else’s website word-for-word Google isn’t going to think you’re too clever. Duplicate content issues can also occur when pages on your site are accessible via more than one URL (the canonical URL issue in #2 above can also come into play here).

6. Where’s your server? What’s your ccTLD?

   If you are thinking about what TLD domain to use and where to host your website consider this: a site hosted in the US with a .com TLD will not show up in the ‘pages from Ireland’ index. Only sites which Google deems Irish will appear in the Irish search index.

7. Linking to ‘bad neighbourhoods’

   Google tries very hard not to penalise sites based on where their backlinks come from (which makes sense). They do however come down hard on sites that link out to bad neighbours. What constitutes a bad neighbour? Well you can be pretty sure that if you link to adult sites, drugs (pharma) sites or gambling sites that Google isn’t going to look favourably on you.

8. Dead-end objects

   Have you ever clicked on a link to be taken to page with no links? Doesn’t make for a good user experience and search engine spiders aren’t too hot on these pages either. Spiders like to be able to move from one page to another via links. When there are no links on a page the spider is likely to head off elsewhere. So be friendly to the Googlebot and give him as much direction as you can.

9. Cloaking/doorway pages

   Now this is a really big no-no. If there’s one thing Google dislikes it’s when a website displays one version for human visitors and another for the Googlebot. Commonly referred to as a black-hat technique, cloaking is becoming far less prevalent. Do you remember what happened to BMW?

10. Artificial link networks

    When your site goes from having a handful of backlinks to having several thousand overnight you can be quite sure your site is going to be flagged by Google’s quality algo. Google is constantly on the lookout for link networks and rapidly devalues links found to be less than genuine.

11. Hidden text

    Another big no-no is hidden text. As with cloaking, Google likes to see exactly what your human visitors see. If you hide text via CSS or otherwise on your pages you risk the wrath of a Google ban. (If you want to quickly check a page for hidden text press CTRL+a to highlight all text. FireFox users can click CTRL+Shift+s do disable external style sheets.)

12. Build it and they will come

    Well no they wont actually. If your content has no link popularity then don’t expect to come top of the SERPs for anything other than the most off-beat search queries. The most important variable required to achieve good rankings for any page in Google is the link swarm pointing at that content (note: this is my opinion and relates to all but the least competitive search terms). This variable is measured across both the quality and quantity axes – the right links are far more powerful than a mulitude of ‘wrong’ links.

13. Session id’s in your qury string

    Google explicitly states that having any variable in your URL that could be mistaken for a session ID is likely to cause problems for the Googlebot. If your URLs use anything that looks like

    www.mydomain.com/index.php?id=234523353

    you might want to consider revising your page names.

The above list is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to Google indexing problems, but I hope it covers some of the issues that I see recurring fairly often on many webmaster forums and the Google Webmaster Group. (I post under the nickname RedCardinal on quite a few forums and the Webmaster Group.)

In my next post I will be looking at the steps you can take to get the most love from Google.

P.S. If you are looking for Google’s webmaster guidelines they can be found here.

P.P.S If you have any items you would like to add to this list why not leave a comment below

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: 13 Deadly Google Sins – Is Your Website Committing Any of These?

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Paid and Organic Search – Impact of Ad Copy on Click Through Rates (Post 2 of 3)

The post makes for interesting reading – the findings are sure to apply in many other contexts also.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Click Through Rates Can Soar With The Correct Copy

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If you are involved with SEO you probably know that keyword rich domain names receive a certain bais in search results. If you are targeting the search phrase ‘blue widget’ then having the domain name ‘bluewidget.tld’ (replace’.tld’ with your favoured TLD) will get you a boost in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So just how much bang for your buck can a well targeted domain name give you?

Well as a case in point take a look a the this search. Currently the #1 ranking site is www.powerwashingireland.com (this site has nothing to do with me):

Now my gut feeling is that this site will shortly disappear. Looking at the whois data tells me the following:

Creation date: 22 Sep 2006 10:05:18

while looking at the backlinks:

1 to 1 of 1
URL: www.turnkeyrevolution.com
ANCHOR: Power Washing Ireland

What is interesting is that Google gives this site top ranking. A site with a young keyword-rich domain name (should have very low trust) and just one targeted text link got to #1 for this search phrase (also #1 for allinanchor: with and without quotes).

Why do I think this site will shortly disappear? Well Google is notorious for giving a short-term boost to new sites and quickly relegating those sites to the sandbox for certain search phrases.

I’m going to keep an eye on this particular site – it should be a very good test subject showing how Google treats keyword-rich domain names.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Keyword-Rich Domain Names

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Searching Google Trends for the term ‘search engine optimisation‘ returns an interesting result:

Interestingly, while news coverage seems to have increased, the search volume for ‘search engine optimisation’ has been steadily decreasing.

Bad press perhaps?

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: SEO getting bad press?

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The major search engines have long offered the link: command for finding data on a site’s backlinks. Unfortunately this command has been ‘broken’ on Google, and I tend to ignore MSN, not because the site: command is pants but because of the poor SERPs. This leaves me with Yahoo.

At the beginning of August Yahoo updated Yahoo Site Explorer and introduced some features that I find myself using more and more every day.

When you use the site: command you are presented with a fairly comprehensive list of the backlinks to your site (when compared with a number of other online tools offering this service Yahoo appears to present the most comprehensive list). You also have the option of either page (‘link:’) or domain (‘linkdomain:’) backlink analysis:

But what’s really nice is the ability to explore the backlinks of any site linking to yours by using the ‘Explore URL’ option displayed as you rollover each row:

There is an option to add sites to your Yahoo account, but to date I have not heard of any benefit in doing so – the features are available whether you add your site to your account or not judging by some of the posts on the Site Explorer Forum.

If you are running any link-building campaigns and need a decent backlink checker I would recommend giving it a try. Oh, and if do try it out I’d love to hear your feedback on Site Explorer.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Yahoo Site Explorer – checking your backlinks

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You just got to love those sponsored listings that guarantee positions in 5 days or less for $399. I wonder how they would get on optimising my nice new hotel site for the keyphrase ‘hotels’!

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Why does Yahoo rank #1 for ‘seo ireland’ on Google?

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The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. While we all knew the importance of the top 3 positions in the Google SERPs, this analysis further reinforces that fact:

SERP Click Through Rate of Top 10 SERP Positions

Interestingly, the #1 SERP position recieves 42.3% of all clickthroughs. The #2 position only accounts for 11.92% of all clickthroughs – almost 72% less clickthroughs than the top position in the SERPs. Attaining the #1 position for your keywords/phrases results in nearly 4 times more traffic than that of your nearest rival – now that’s a serious difference in both traffic and potential revenue.

A #3 placement in the SERPs results in a 8.44% clickthrough rate, almost 30% less than the #2 and over 80% less than the top position on the first results page.

As we move down the page the rate of decline in clickthrough also falls. Notice that a #10 position in the SERPs receives slightly more clickthroughs than #9. This is most probably related to users glancing at the final listing as they scroll to the page navigation:

Image showing the SERP Click Through Rates of #11, #20, #21, #31, #41

Moving off the first SERP the rate of decline in clickthrough picks up considerably. The clickthrough rate for listings with #11 rank dropped to 0.66%. That’s an almost 80% decline in clickthroughs from the #10 SERP position and shows that being on the first SERP page results in far greater SE traffic than lower listings.

Google SERP Click Through Rates – The Raw Numbers

Click Through Rates of Google SERPs based on AOL-data.tgz

Here’s the same table in image format:

SERP Click Through Rates of Google SERPs based on AOL-data.tgz

The volume of clickthroughs for lower SERPs is so trivial that for all but the highest volume search terms these positions will generally yield little or no benefit to site owners (obviously some niches will prove to be exceptional).

The main message from the AOL data is that page 1 SERP is where the real action lies and #1 positions reign supreme.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: SERP Click Through Rate of Google Search Results – AOL-data.tgz – Want to Know How Many Clicks The #1 Google Position Gets?

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AOL Search Database (currently under heavy load)

and (IMO) a more superior site:

DontDelete (new domain so you may have to access via 63.212.167.185)

I am currently indexing the entire dataset myself (2.1GB of search goodness) and hope to bring you some Irish related queries from the data in the next day or two.

[UPDATE]

Michael Duz has created this tool for calculating the increase in traffic from higher SERP positions which you might find handy.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: On-line Tools for Searching the AOL Data

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According to this post AOL released, and very, very promptly removed, the entire search records of 500,000 users collected over a three month period.

Apart from the obvious privacy concerns (most likely the reason for the removal), this data represents a unique opportunity to research the what people search for and the iterative approach they take within their searches. You can see the initial search patterns people use and how they refine those search patterns to find the results they want.

Interesting also because, to the best of my knowledge, AOL search repackages Google’s Search so in essence this is really Google data (Google also recently announced its intention to release 30GB of word/phrase data).

From the ReadMe.txt :

This collection consists of ~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over three months.

The data set includes {AnonID, Query, QueryTime, ItemRank, ClickURL}.
AnonID – an anonymous user ID number.
Query – the query issued by the user, case shifted with
most punctuation removed.
QueryTime – the time at which the query was submitted for search.
ItemRank – if the user clicked on a search result, the rank of the
item on which they clicked is listed.
ClickURL – if the user clicked on a search result, the domain portion of
the URL in the clicked result is listed.

Each line in the data represents one of two types of events:
1. A query that was NOT followed by the user clicking on a result item.
2. A click through on an item in the result list returned from a query.

Normalized queries:
36,389,567 lines of data
21,011,340 instances of new queries (w/ or w/o click-through)
7,887,022 requests for “next page” of results
19,442,629 user click-through events
16,946,938 queries w/o user click-through
10,154,742 unique (normalized) queries
657,426 unique user ID’s

And this being the wonderful Internet, the 439MB compressed file is still floating around with the filename AOL-data.tgz. Here are some mirrors I know of:

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?…BB5BE

http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….01.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….02.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….03.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….04.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….05.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….06.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….07.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….08.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….09.txt.gz
http://rapidshare.de/files/2848….10.txt.gz

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: AOL Release (and quickly remove) Search Records of 0.5m Users

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The Sitemaps UI seems to have been cleaned up quite a bit and my first impressions are that it is somewhat easier to navigate and problems/errors are far better highlighted now.

So far I have only found one new feature – ‘Preferred Domain’. This feature allows you to display either www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com in Google’s index:

[Update] I have just noticed that if you click on the ‘Preferred domain’ link the navigation bar gives you a new option ‘Crawl rate’. At the moment this option is only available from that particular page (to me anyway) and is giving a 404 Not Found error. I expect this option will allow you to tell Google to ease off your site if the Googlebot is too aggressive when crawling your site.

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

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1. Session 9: All about datacenters has some info about variations across datacenters;
2. Session 10: Lightning Round! some other bits ‘n pieces regarding how Google scores HTML tags, in particular bold tag verses strong and i tag versus em.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Yet more Video Blogs from Matt Cutts

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And some discussion about algorithms, updates and how Google PageRank is constantly updating (as opposed to Toolbar Pagerank which is updated only every so often): Session 8: Google Terminology

Again one or two interesting tidbits.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: More Matt Cutts Video Blogs

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You should check out the clickthrough heatmap for Google (Figure 5: The Golden Triangle – Eye Tracking on Google Results (Hotchkiss 2005)) which shows the importance of the top 3 positions in Google SERPs.

The synopsis contains some other good reference material also.

If you are interested in the original Hamburg University study (not a bad read if you have the time and interest) you can view it here.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Excellent Academic Study of Clickstreams

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There’s nothing too exciting here, but if you are doing your own SEO and want to learn a little about how Google crawls and indexes your site He gives some good information and tips.

You can find the videos here:

qualities of a good site
some SEO myths
Optimize for Search Engines or for Users
Session 4
Session 5
Session 6: All about Supplemental Results

If you’re interested in Google (and I think you should be if you optimise for the Irish market) then you might gain one or two good insights from his comments.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: Matt Cutts Video Blog

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As personal privacy concerns create growing alarm about the freedom of the Internet, the Ixquick metasearch engine (www.ixquick.com) has taken a pioneering step: starting today, Ixquick will permanently delete all personal search details gleaned from its users from the log files.

This may be a welcome development for searchers but doesn’t bode well for SE techniques such as geo-targeting results.

Services such as IXQuicl also make SEO and SEM more difficult, again because (I presume) the SE’s cannot geo-track the searcher:

Ixquick’s Meta Search feature enables the user to simultaneously search 12 of the best search engines. However, Ixquick does not share the user’s personal data with these individual search engines in any circumstances.

I sent IXQuick some feedback requesting info on what data is stripped from the request and geo-targeting is handled.

If this type of meta search engine really takes off I think it will make SEO and SEM that bit more difficult.

Have thoughts on this post? Head over and leave a comment on the blog: IXQuick.com Private Meta Search – a good thing for SEO?

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