A quick one that (if I get the time) I will expand upon and do some research on, etc.

I was running a ‘site:’ query in Google a moment ago and accidentally pressed the return key after I had typed in ‘site’. Try typing in ‘site’ into Google (I was using google.co.uk ‘the web’) yourself.

As you will see (well, for most of you I guess) the ‘Banksy’ site comes up as number one with some other sites like the ‘Keane’ and ‘Franz Ferdinand’ also appearing in the top 10. Now this is obviously because of the anchor text of the links coming into the site, but why these sites? Each site is popular in it’s own right, but I really can’t think of why the anchor text would naturally include the word ‘site’ to take them to such a high position for this word above many others sites.

Anyone got any ideas?

The link profile for these sites (particularly the Banksy one) is too deep to meaningfully go through. Also, the term ‘site’ is too generic to use many of the other ways that this result could be distilled.

So, I think I will pick some lower placed results and see if I can see a pattern.

All of the ‘top of the head’ stuff like ‘official site’, ‘web site (two words)’, etc. doesn’t really explain anything about these results for these sites (i.e. there are many other sites that out rank them for these terms).

One to ponder… I don’t think it is a Google glitch and these must I be some basis for it. But, why that anchor text particularly for those sites?

This update was named after the guy who worked on it. So ‘Vince’ it is…

Anyway, ‘Vince’ is a tweak to Google’s results that affects some pretty big terms like ‘mortgage’, ‘loan’, etc. The update seems to favour bigger brands and has pushed some of these sites further up the rankings.

The upshot is that in most regions you will now get delivered a set of results that will act as more of a roll call of all the ‘top of the head’ companies you can think of related to that particular keyword.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts about the change where for the first time ever he looks (very very slightly) sheepish.

Is this good? Well, certainly this isn’t good if you run a well positioned site that is about these subjects. So, if you run a comparison site, etc. in these areas you will probably already know if this has affected your traffic.

From what Matt has said this update is probably looking at the overall weight and trust of a site (and the big brands have spent enough marketing pounds to win here) and the theme of the site. This now looks like it will win for these keywords over anchor text based SEO work. Is this fair? Probably not.

I think the missing element here is ‘quality’. What I mean is that just because you go to a big brand site, it doesn’t mean that you are going to get what you want as a web viewer. I guess Google are working on the basis that if you type in the word ‘mortgage’ you probably want a mortgage and they are looking to deliver results like a phone directory would. Where as if you type ‘mortgage research’ you are browsing and want to see the full gamut of web pages that might help you.

Let’s see how this one develops. I think Google are (slightly) playing with fire here.

P.S. can you imagine the smile on the faces of the SEO companies who are looking after the major brands that have got the ranking jump? Claim that glory now boys and girls! Don’t let anyone tell you that it was just a Google update!

Apart from being wonderfully creative with your title, and two lines of ad copy, the display URL is the only other place available to tweak your AdWords adverts in your favour.

As we all know ‘deep level’ split testing your adverts is a key element to maximising your results, and playing your keywords in the best way. What I mean by ‘deep level’ is looking at the whole picture with each advert and related keyword being looked at with all factors that affects your ROI. You don’t need me to tell you that, unless you are doing purely an awareness exercise or gathering data, wasted clicks are in the main – wasted money.

However, lets say that you have all of your key metrics (landing pages, keywords, ROI, PPC, ad position, etc.)under control and your campaign is running well; the display URL is a nice place to play with.

Don’t get me wrong you can mess up here, but in my experience, as long as your not stupid, you can play a little bit with this line and really only affect your click through rate. Hey (you ask), don’t you just affect your click through rate with all the other lines? Well, yes you do, but you also affect the dead clicks, the wasted clicks, etc. much, much more. Whereas the display URL (with all of its constraints) is just a pure let’s see if I can tweak my click through rate and get more of the good stuff (if your AdWords campaign is giving you ‘good stuff’ in the first place… yep, I obviously swallowed the thesaurus today… ‘good stuff’… I ask you…).

With Google rules of destination domain having to match display domain, you have three choices when it come to the display URL, which are:

1. Buy a keyword rich domain name and use this instead of your main site (not always an option)
2. Use words in the sub directory (e.g. after the last /)
3. Use words in the sub domain (e.g. before the first . or 2nd/3rd/etc. as well if you go deeper)
4. Various character and capitalisation things that you can do

So you can play with the above to see if some different combinations give your adverts a bit or an edge on all of those around you. The key here is the ‘all of those around you’ bit. If everyone is stuffing the display URL with keywords, then it may be better to go down the ‘neutral’ route and just display your naked URL (does anyone do that anymore?).

As said, in my opinion, this is a good ‘play’ area within any form of PPC that uses this structure and can help you to tweak that extra few percent of click through rate in your favour.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about using the tag ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ on both internal and external links.

The best answer I can come up with is to look at the Google explanation here. They say that they don’t follow ‘nofollow’ links and not just not pass on PageRank (there are rumours that this is not strictly true, but I am happy to believe it is true enough).

With this in mind, the new ‘rel=”canonical”‘ header tag can help with allowing Google to spider as much of your site as it can (within reason, they won’t stay for as long as you want them to), but not leave PageRank juice all over the place (messy…).

As mentioned before, even your ‘noindex’ pages still carry PageRank and even though they will be passing a lot of this out they will still retain a bit. So the new tag really helps with large product sites with various results pages and various ways of ordering those results. Basically, you can now get the products pages spidered without dropping page rank on all of the search results pages. You still have to be a tad clever though with your dynamic URL insert into the ‘canonical’ tag.

Also, as mentioned in the Google post even though they don’t follow ‘nofollow’ you can still put these pages in the search engine sitemap if you want Google to find and index them. This answers the PageRank sculpting question with regards to ‘legals’, ‘privacy policy’, ect. pages which you don’t want to hoard PageRank but you still want Google to know you have them.

Here is a really interesting post from the official Google blog.

It goes into some detail about some of the user testing and eye tracking Google are doing. The post looks at some of the differences that have occured since Google introduced universal search into its search results.

Also, if you look at the search results heatmap you can see how important the top two entries are in Google’s search results. Also, you can definately understand why Google puts more and more sponsored results above the search results as well as to the right. It must be ever so tempting for them to lessen their quality guidelines to allow more and more ads to make their way to this sweetest of spots.

Lastly, if you don’t already, this is a good time to branch out into picture and video search engine optimisation. You are missing a big win here and youe definately are if any of the search terms you would like to be listed for have an inherant visual element (just like ‘how to tie a tie’).

P.S. if you want to do some of your own (not eye but mouse pointer) heatmaps and user tracking, visit ClickTale. They have a fantastic tool that allows you to see a Flash movie of how your visitors have interacted with your site (what they click on, how long them spend on the page, where their mouse goes, etc.). The entry version is free and I would highly recommend having a look.

Here is a good post from the Google Webmaster Blog about open redirects and how redirects as a parameter in your URLs can harm your Google ranking.

As we know Google has to (and it can’t stop) indexing or at least assessing all it sees. It (as well as all the other search robots) trawls the web in search of pages, links, sites, etc. In doing this it follows all the routes it can (or rather, is ethically allowed to).

This means that if it is OK for it to do so (i.e. it can gain access and is allowed) it will seek and find many (many) different ways to find those all important web pages that keeps it ahead of the competition and up to date. This means that proxy servers and indeed server logs can be open to these information hungry creatures (OK, I hung on for as long as I could before I personalised a search robot, sorry…).

So, taking this into account if you are a victim of someone using your URL as a cloak to get people to click on a link on the web or an email link e.g. www.yoursite.com/go.php?url=www.badsite.com. Then don’t be surprised if Google finds this (and as mentioned it can be just because someone has clicked on the link from an e-mail and it is now stored on a proxy servers, etc. not just because the spammer has set up a web page with ‘click here’) and then indexes this URL. If it does and ‘www.badsite.com’ (great name isn’t it) is… well a ‘bad site’ with porn, malware, SEO black hat, whatever, etc… then unfortunately Google will probably take your site out of its index because of this. This is because you are and your site is (unwittingly) providing a bad URL to Google and this needs to be eradicated. If you are registered at Google Webmaster Central you will get a message telling you what they have done and some instruction on what to do next. If not you will probably be confused as to why your site has been dropped (best bet is to look at your server logs and see which pages on your site have been accessed or use the ‘site:www.yoursite.com’ command on Google with some date perameters added to filter for newly indexed pages).

Anyways, have a read of the article here and see if your site could be at risk.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently… happy New Year to you all.

I am not one for resolutions but I think a good one would be to spend a bit more time posting articles, etc. I have been somewhat slack, but also busy. Not a good excuse though I know.

Anyway, here is a really well put together video from Matt Cutts about blights to your webiste, etc. and how they can affect the trust of your site and its health in general. He covers things like link spam, people putting doorway pages on your site and malware infections (sounds nasty doesn’t it!).

All good advice, quiet educational and presented in a really good way (as usual from Matt).

Here it is.

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.

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.

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…

Good post from Matt Cutts regarding the updating of many elements of the Google definitions and documentation on subjects like:

• Doorway pages
• SPAM reporting
• Robots.txt
• And some more!

It is worth taking a look at the full post at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/improved-seo-documentation-galore/ and also checking out the new reference documents.

P.S. does anyone really do doorway pages anymore? I guess so, maybe, from a long tail keyword perspective? Seems like a lot of work to create somthing that will (probably) just go into (what was) the Supplemental Results…

IP delivery is a technique where a website/server looks at who a visitor is or where they are located from an IP address perspective. Once this is known (not always completely accurate, but god enough), the site/server can serve a page/site that will be catered for that visitor.

Sounds simple? Well, give or take a bit of server side programming it is. The main part of the process is taking the time and effort to create the individual content for the groups of users you are targeting. This work mainly fits into two categories, namely, specific regional information for that visitor (contact details, in country taxes, etc.) or translating words into a specific language. Google, for example, does this all the time when you type in one of its URLs (try typing in www.google.com from an UK IP address for instance and see where you end up, for an extra part of the test try setting you language in Google to French… see what I mean?).

So, what is the connection between this and SEO? Well, if you treat Google as a specific user, then you can also serve specific information to them by recognising the IP addresses of their robots. This (in a Google ‘rules” sort of way) is called cloaking. The ‘black hat’ version of this technique is where you deliver different content to fool search engines into indexing you for something ‘they’ see, but when a visitor gets to the actual page you get something completely different. The level of ‘completely different’ will define what side you stay of the ‘rules’. Think carefully before you do any of this kind of stuff for this purpose, even if you are doing it with the best of intentions.

The real area where you can learn here is if you have a multiple country and multiple language website. From a usability perspective it is really desirable to serve relevant content based upon who your visitor is. Many (many, many, many) large companies have attempted this (and still do) and get this completely wrong from a search engine perspective. Bad IP delivery will only confuse search engines and their robots. Conversely good regional IP delivery will enhance your search engine presence in the regions you target and operate in. Also, if you still bring everyone in to the same domain you will not be diluting your power with many different regional sites, but still serving relevant content to each visitor. However, there are pluses and minuses for each approach, you need to find one that is right for you and you objectives.

If you are someone responsible for a multiple country/language website or still don’t know which side of the ‘rules’ you come down on from an IP delivery perspective. Here is a good video from Google Webmaster Central. It is worth a watch.

In essence, look at what Google want and are doing with IP delivery and you won’t go far wrong. There are other benefits that you can incorporate from a SEO perspective, but more of those in a future post.

Thought I had better make the first proper post something deep and meaningful… not saying this is, but here goes…

Black hat, white hat… what does it all mean? Also, who makes the rules? Well, that one is easy, Google does. Even though I am quite sure that the good people of Google never meant to be portrayed as the police, that it what they have become. Why? Well, power (usually) brings responsibility and Google are the most powerful force in the most well used information retrieval system ever created. So, they make the rules and they get to say what is black (hat) and white (hat). This is altogether fine in the main (someone has to make the rules I guess).

So what are the rules? Well, you all know them really. You just decide if you want to play by them. Just in case you are unsure of the rules, here is my cut:

1. Produce fantastic websites that people will like, use, love and share.

2. Make the website friendly to search engines remembering that (sorry guys) they are glorified databases (I don’t mean that to sound harsh… I like search engines).

3. Market your site like no tomorrow, but don’t use tactics that your mother would not be proud of you using.

4. Make the biggest effort possible to continually improve your site and make it better, more usable, more commercial, etc. and use analytics (and user feedback) to do this.

Give or take the things I have omitted (forgotten), that is it really. The hard bit? Well, in the bad (good?) old days when you could SPAM your way to the top of the search engines, all it took was a little knowledge and a little effort. The main part about the rules of today is that Google makes you work hard, be cleaver, etc. and the good bit about that is that most people won’t bother. The sensible people who don’t bother just get someone great to do it for them. However, great people cost a lot of money and they are in short supply.

Can you still bend the rules? Yes, sure you can. Will it last? No. Search engine marketing is inherently a long term strategy. Think short term and be prepared to get short term results (if that it what you are aiming for then this may still be for you).

In essence, Google (sorry Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc. for not mentioning you too, you will be mentioned in the future, you just don’t set the rules, sorry) protects two main things, namely, the quality of its product so it can continue to make money and our ability to use search engines to enrich our lives, save us time. etc. (the two are completely linked).

Where does it leave all of us who want to have fantastic exposure on search engines? Quite simply (and boringly), THINK!, work hard, work smart and set your objective realistically. Most importantly, remember that Google (and Yahoo, and MSN, and Ask, et al) are (just) intelligent databases; people are people are people. The rules are really made by all of us, Google just set them.