Google has changed and revamped their Advertising Professional area. The new area will have a lot more features and I guess is part of Google’s way of actualising their theory on more emphasis on development and training to compensate for the withdrawal of ‘Best Practise Funding’ at the beginning on this year. Mmmm. Still, check it out.

One thing though. Why have Google ‘nofollowed’ the company link from the qualified company/professional profile pages? It wasn’t a nofollow before. Surely with the spend criteria and exams, etc. they can vouch for this link. Was it being abused? If so it wouldn’t have been hard to do a hand check now would it? Or put some rules around the destination of the link?

As a follow on from my last post, here is a link to Matt Cutt’s follow up on the somewhat strange and regionally challenged UK SERPs.

There is also a theory that this is a legacy thing from the Vince update. I am not so sure. I think Google just underestimated the difficulty in matching the .coms, .nets, etc. to generic queries (and some not so generic ones too… unbelievably) based upon region. However, I think the thought process from what Vince was trying to achieve has played a part.

Looks like they are now taking this a bit more seriously though, so normal service should be resumed soon(ish). I guess all you search marketers with affected sites and actual companies this is affecting will just have to sit on your hands until then! Frustrating eh?

There has been lots of talk recently about the UK search results and how they have been starting to show more results from outside of the UK region. Well, here is a partial answer to this from Matt Cutts.

I think that Matt got the wrong end of this question and answered it in a different way than it was possibly posed. I think what many people have been saying is “why are we getting lots of results that include companies who are outside of my region and can’t supply the thing that I have been searching for where I am?”. There are still a few of these knocking around (some have been fixed).

I think the answer here is in what Matt said in that they worked on a changed that expanded the search results to include more (relevant) .coms. Whilst doing this they obviously got the filter somewhat wrong in the first iteration.

As we know the only truly universal top level domain is .com, this means that even though .coms should be associated with America, it is just as likely that the company concerned will be based in another region. Google’s problem is that because of the universal nature of .coms they sit outside of its desired way or delivering regionally based results.

There are many factors that Google looks at for regional based results for generic keywords. To improve their delivery in this respect they have had to add another level of analysis to the algorithm to supplement their long standing geographical determiners (hosting location, top level domain, usage, contact information on site, ownership details, webmaster preference, etc.). This is because it is still possible that the best and most relevant site for your query will not show well in your region because it is a .com and it is hosted in the US for instance.

These changes to improve regional searching for generic keywords seems to have skewed the results and I guess they have had to reappraise their initial approach.

In essence, Google makes hundreds of algorithm tweaks ever year, some go way below the radar and some are a bit more overt. This one obviously fits into the latter category.

Lastly, do you think Google sometimes gets it wrong? Yep, they do. But hey it is their search engine. Also, (could be a very long time coming, if ever) until Microhoo get their act together, when Google do get it wrong, we just have to sit and wait for them to make it all better again…

Very eloquent title, eh?

Still, now I have got your attention, are they? Just a little bit stupid? Or redundant? Or boring?

Not going to go massively indepth here (it’s in the training course!), but I have just been doing some analysis for a new client and part of this was checking out the competition. Now I can understand if you have never paid any attention to your page titles (it is quite nice to walk into a project and know that you can make a big change that is totally under your control); but when you see some of the actually ‘optimised’ titles that have been put together, well… why bother and what logic are you using?

Here is a random list of things I have come accross this morning.

1. Title that are so unattractive that nobody would ever click on (you wouldn’t do this in your PPC, would you?)
2. Two word titles for a company’s home page (that that all you do?)
3. Fifty word titles on a company’s home page (no need to list ALL you do)
4. Company name on every title (that old chestnut)
5. Using the ‘|’ (pipe) to separate keyphrases (ugly, over used and because you need to use two spaces uses more characters than just a comma)
6. Site-wide titles (yes, they still do exist!)

There are lots more, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.

Your page title is a powerful thing. Use it well and it will improve your on-site SEO by a bigger percentage than almost any other element. However, always remember this is what will be the clickable link when you get listed. If you get to the top three you will get traffic anyway, but anything lower than that and your title will make the difference.