For all of you SEO people out there, whether you are in house or work for an agency, check out this Google blog post.

Personalised (or customised) search is not new and Google have been doing this for a while now. This development mixed in with their use of Universal Search in their results means that the rules of (results tracking at least) in SEO have been changing pretty dramatically.

In essence, this post confirms a few things and also gives the searcher a chance to opt out of what Google thinks the searcher wants. However, the amount of searchers who will use this ‘escape’ button, I guess, won’t be more than 10%.

The main ways that Google have been personalising search and will be more and more are:

By Location – Basically, where your IP address is based. However, Google will also use your location information from your Google account if you are logged in.

Recent Searches – If you just typed in ‘france’ and then the next search is ‘holiday’ Google will slant the ‘holiday’ search towards ‘france’.

Web History – If you are signed in with you Google account and you have enabled Web History, then Google has a pretty good idea of the sites you like, etc. Google will also slant your search results towards this.

All of the above applied to natural search and (and particularly so) paid search.

Now, for many, many searches (and more searches from this region rather than the states), this won’t make a great deal of difference. In any case, different subsets of results, different cashes of results and different data centres have always served a slight variation of results from one person’s to another’s. However, (unless, Google changes strategy in a massive way) the trend has been set.

So, for a while now I have been using the term ‘traffic’ optimisation rather than ‘search engine’ optimisation (I am not suggesting we change the common term of reference any time soon though; life is confusing enough, right?) and this is certainly the way I have been communicating with clients.

Traffic optimisation is the whole deal. Everything that you do should try to bring targeted traffic to the site you are working on. From the comments on blogs, to relevant directory and resources entries, to content that is loved, read and linked to. If you know what you are doing then this will lead to better exposure on the search engine landscape. Ultimately, your web analytic will tell you which way the curve is going and your clients cash till (or similar metric; but remember you need to make them do this bit) will decide success. Just remember to set SMART objectives, or you are destined to fail either way.

So the next time your clients says “we are not number one anymore” or “fantastic, work we are now number one”, you probably need to do a bit more on your monthly reports to highlight what the ‘real deal’ is.

Quick scenario for you…

You have a search on your site that say… searches for your stock of hamster wheels (why I chose that example, I don’t know!). You are a good (nay great) pet store and you have hundreds. You notice the search could be a bit more helpful to your more discerning visitor if it broke things down a little more at the second level. You say to your web developer “could you tweak the search results to reorder by things like colour, size, etc.”. He says “sure, no problem” (he comes from America).

You now have a great search that shows all your hamster wheels and now you can click on the category and it will group them for you too. Great! Before you pat yourself on the back too hard, bear in mind a few things.

1. Have you now created a lot more pages that the search engines will index?
2. Will your new sorting part of the URL (e.g. ?sort=blue) be added to the new selection and create a big issues with the ranking for your www.petpetpetstore.com/product/search?=id245 page which ranks really well for “blue hamster wheel” (because you now have about 10 different URLs for the same page)?
3. Are you leaking “link juice” out to these new pages?
4. Will the search engine robots now devote enough time to crawl the important pages when they visit?
5. Have you just created a load of duplicate content?
6. Should you get out more?

Apart from number 6 (you might like hamster wheels!), you have probably done the top five. What to do? Well…

1. Get your database guy to dynamically add “noindex” to the header of all the duplicate content product page URLs.
2. Get your database guy to dynamically add “noindex, nofollow” to the header of all the duplicate content “advanced search” URLs.
3. Try to create a URL structure that lets all of the main pages still get indexed, but the advanced search ones don’t (put a # in there, that usually does the trick).
4. Exclude the duplicate content URLs from crawling in your robots.txt file.

Every scenario is different here, so do some analysis first as to what the best course of action is. I have listed above a typical approach, but each case needs to be look at separately.

Next time I will pick an example less abstract than “hamster wheels”, promise…

I, like most of us, gave up on most of my heroes as I was growing up. Don’t get me wrong, I mean there are still people I really admire and aspire to, but ‘hero’ doesn’t usually come into it these days.

So following on from this, I wouldn’t really describe Eric Ward as a ‘hero’ of mine, but in the SEO link building world he comes as close as you can get.

Eric does a regular column for Search Engine Land and today he posted this article on SEO link building.

All I can say is READ IT and learn (in my opinion) the most important aspect of great SEO link building. Remember the web is a ‘real place’ and search engines are quite ‘clever’, therefore, real and intelligent link building should always be your goal.

As this is a ‘UK’ SEM site, I thought I had better start to look at the UK SEM scene in a little more depth. So here is the first of many posts that will look at the companies in the UK that provide search engine marketing services.

The SEM industry is not unique in that what the companies are trying to provide for other people, is what you need to do for themselves too. The unique part is the intrinsically linked league table that come with the most popular search terms. Now, I am not saying that this should form the basis of the way you choose your SEM partner, but it does give you something to consider that you won’t have in many other choices you make.

So, for fun, I thought I would look at the term ‘SEO’ (although typed in lowercase) on Google (pages from the web and not in personal search). Everyone gets slightly different results, so these may not completely be what you get when you do the search, but they will be pretty close. Here are the results (and some other arbitrary pieces of information)… drum roll…

Source wise the information came from Google search results, Yahoo Explorer (not completely accurate, but a fantastic information source), The Wayback Machine and Nominet.

The reason I picked incoming links and the age of the data on the domain is that I am pretty sure these are the main factors that Google looks for to determine trust. The other main ones are the quality of links you have (the biggest factor) and whether you have been bad in the past (and present).

Some really interesting result here and not just in the companies that are showing highly.

I will delve into this in more detail next week.

Firstly, can I just state that I pretty much hate the term “link juice”; it is just that it is so damn descriptive, that you, kind of, have to use it. No matter how much the term “link fluid” cuts it from a “ooh er missus” perspective, it is still not right. And “link gel” just sounds like a new toothpaste. So “link juice” it is…

Anyway… “link juice” is the flow of link power that runs through your website and out of it. Controlling this juice is a pretty important part of SEO and search engines don’t mind you doing it (well, they don’t mind at the moment).

The ability to tell search engines what your most important pages are can be done in many ways. From priority in the XML site map to the weight of your internal linking structure, all bases should be covered to ensure your best and most important pages get all the exposure they need. This work (believe it or not some people get this wrong!) applied to both search engine robots and human visitors.

So for this post what do I man by leakage? Well, for various reasons you might (to use a technical term) “stuff up” your structure and pages inadvertently which could cause major “link juice” leakage. For example you might have a page on your site called “special offers” which has been around for years and been well used and well linked to. You decided (in a fit of pique) to now call this page “today’s offers” (a bit more punchy and “happening” you think), so you go into your CMS (content management system) and change the things you needs to. The end result is that you now have a page that in the navigation says “today’s offers”. Cool… you think. The only problem is that your CMS created a new page and now rather than having “id=654″ in the URL, it now says “id=876″. Or if it didn’t create a new page it might have been (ever so helpful) and created a new and SEO friendly URL that swapped www.mybloodyfantsticsite.co.uk/speacial-offers/ to www.mybloodyfantsticsite.co.uk/todays-offers/. The end result? Search engines have now lost your “special offers” page forever (unless the old page is still live and you have just created a “duplicate content” issue… more of that in another article).

The “special offers” page in question ranked well for about twelve really good phrases (and many long tail phrases) and had a really good incoming link profile. Now, this is not completely terminal, search engine will try to work out what happened and realise that you just swapped pages. Google will eventually work things through and minimise the damage. But that is about all. Your actions have resulted in taking something of strength down the rout of damage limitation. The “juice” is well and truly leaking through a big hole, and also THE VISITORS THAT WILL STILL BE COMING FROM SEARCH ENGINES (until it is dropped) WILL NOW (probably) GET A 404 ERROR PAGE… sorry for shouting this!

So your role as an internal SEO person or an SEO consultant is to try to teach anyone that updates the website, that you are responsible for, to understand what needs to happen to safeguard against this leakage/loss. As a part of this (and especially when you take over a new site) do your own leakage/loss checks, like:

• Do a site: command on your site in Google and check out any pages that show up high in the list but have a title and/or description that alludes to a error page/404.
• Check your server logs for the main bad links and 404s, etc.
• Check the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) for changes to the site and its structure/pages
• Ask people who have updated the site what things they have done that could of affected pages/URLs/etc.

Even though the PageRank bar in Google is not a good indicator of much these days, it really becomes a MASSIVE and noticeable thing when a page you have accessed is missing/blank, but the tool bar meter shows a healthy green link that indicates a rank of three or above (I have seen an eight before!).

What do you need to do to solve this? Well, if it is a pretty recent occurrence then I would rename the new page back to the old URL and for good measure put a 301 redirect (more of this in another post) on the new URL back to the old one.

If the change happened to much in the past for this to be a good solution, you need to 301 the old URL to the new one. You should also look at the link profile for the page (use Yahoo’s Site Explorer) and contact all the really good incoming linkers and get them to change the URL of their link. This bit is the real pain and for some links it is impossible.

What about all the other pages and 404′s that my site may be leaking from? Well, yes, these are important too, but work through these in a top down sort of way and you will solve 80-90% of the problem pretty quickly. There will be some pages (that also don’t leak much of anything) that don’t really have a current (page) equivalent on the site now and you can deal with these in a variety of different ways. My favourite option for this to give the visitor a better experience by using a custom 404 error page along the lines of “oops, sorry, but to make up for our sloppyness, here are some great pages you will find scintillating”.

If you want to really tidy things up you could always have a deeper look at what Google has indexed on your site and go through all the pages from the bottom of the list up. Here you will find some stuff that you could do a combination of:

• Submiting a “remove URL” request
• Excluding the file from robots in the robots.txt file
• Using the .htaccess file (or similar) to do some 301 redirecting
• Deleting the page from your server

Make sure you get the above “right” so that it only affects the pages you want it to i.e. don’t mess up and get important pages taken out of the index for goodness sake!

In essence, the “juice” your site has is a very important part of the SEO process. Controlling it and directing it to where it need to be should be a big part of your SEO strategy. If you work on a big and important site (and usually one with a CMS) there will be lots of leakage (I guarantee this) and if you have not looked at this issue, then you should.

There will be another post soon on better direction of “link juice” by making changes to your internal link structue. This have been called many things but the current buzz words are sculpting and creating silos.

In the “Carry On”/”Sid James” spirit that I started this post with, my advice is to stop “link juice” leakage by “putting your finger in the dyke” today! You will be glad you did!

Nice article from Danny Sullivan on this, check it out here.

In essence the thing to remember is don’t treat Google differently; that is what gets you in trouble. You can still end up getting slaped by Google doing things the “right” way, so be careful. However, if you have done everything you can to improve the experience of the visitor and not been silly (or dumb), then the penalty won’t last (you can appeal).

IP delivery or cloaking is a reasonable complex subject, so don’t go jumping in without some good advice. But most importantly it is not “evil” and Google has been reasonably consitant in modifying their definition to underline this.

Good news for all web developers who create sites in Flash as Google (and Yahoo eventually, but probably not Microsoft) are working with Adobe to make indexing Flash sites nicer and more possible.

Now, this is early days and I wouldn’t get your “how to produce “flash” Flash websites” (not a real book just yet…) any time soon, but for all you devoted Flash developers, this may start to get you out of jail when you clients ask “no one can find me”.

Google would really like to index the whole web if it could and Flash (and JavaScript) are the biggest banes of it life in this respect. Also, because of the heavy incoming link structure for some Flash sites/sections, they do indeed end up indexing some of them relatively highly, but usually with the fantastically descriptive listing of something like…

[FLASH] Loading… Play Video Play Video Replay Copy to clipboard URL …File Format: Shockwave Flash
Loading… Play Video Play Video Replay Copy to clipboard URL: 0ß0å0ü0È MUTE 0ß0å0ü0È MUTE.
www.reuters.com/resources/flash/includevideo.swf – Similar pages

As you can image, Google has never been a fan of this as it messes up the relevance for the searcher from the results pages.

So what progress have they made so far? Well if you do a search for Flash SWF files in Google (click here to try) you still don’t really get a great experience as a searcher. I think the time when parity come between text based sites and Flash based sites from an indexing perspective will be a long time coming (if ever).

So, my cut on this for the short and medium term is make sure you still only use Flash as a part of your site (nice fading images, animation, etc.) and not the whole thing. If you do, then don’t expect to be top of the rankings any time soon. This initiative will help, but it is not a green light to carry on regardless.

Now I may move on to “Flash and accessibilty”… maybe not…