Out-of-date content is a major issue for both search engines and users. If the creator of the content chooses not to explicitly state when the content was created, how can a search engine or user ensure that the content is still valid?

Query Deserves Freshness was a major leap forward in ensuring that for trending topics (topics that have a burst of activity), a mixture of fresh and authority content was shown. Here Google takes a risk in saying that we are willing to make X% of the top ten results available for the latest content rather than relying on the algorithm to order results.

Google Caffeine was a major infrastructure update aimed at allowing Google to improve all areas of their search functionality including breadth and speed of indexation. Suddenly it became common place for new content (especially on blogs etc.) to be indexed within seconds.

The new freshness update, announced officially by Google on 3 November, takes QDF to a whole new level, in effect switching QDF on permanently for a range of queries.

This makes a whole lot of sense in that a vast amount of search queries are directly targeted towards the most up-to-date results. “Jamie Oliver Book”, “Leeds United Result”, “Olympics” etc. all have an unstated intent to find the latest information, and these are the queries that Google is targeting with the freshness update.

Although Google originally stated that the update will affect 35% of searches, they later clarified this to be in-line with how it expressed the impact of past updates. So six to ten per cent of searches will be noticeably affected by the update. When you consider the kind of searches this is meant to target, it makes more sense.

How will this affect sites?

The vast majority of commercial sites will be unaffected as their primary goal is not to provide time critical information. A search for “beds” or “accident claims” will remain static as there is no noticeable benefit from having fresher results over authoritative.

Information providers such as the press, blogs and niche / fan sites will be affected as they sit firmly within the domain of this update.

How can sites benefit from this update?

For sites affected, this update is a double-edged sword. Long term rankings will be easier to achieve through good content without the need for a massively trusted parent domain. That being said, fresh content will rank and provide traffic but this will diminish over time as fresher content appears.

To gain any kind of benefit you have to timestamp your content. In an ideal world every piece of content should have a date on it but this is never going to be the case. Google understands this so will be likely looking at three key areas:

1. Date Created – a web server passes details of the document you have requested along with the actual document. One of these details is the creation date, another is the last modified date. Ensure these are correct (you server may be set to 1990 without you knowing it) via checking your header information.

2. XML Sitemap – keep your XML sitemap up-to-date but not only by including new pages. Also ensure that the last-modified field is used whenever a page is updated.

3. RSS – Google own Feedburner. This means they have had access to a massive quantity of RSS data for a long long time. It therefore goes without saying that at some level this update was born out of the analysis of RSS data. Ensure that any form of time critical content is presented via RSS, be it blog content or news.

This leads back to a particular gripe of mine when sites have “blogs” that are not actually blogs as they don’t use any standard blogging software and therefore can’t be recognised easily as a blog. Solutions such as WordPress automatically handle pinging and RSS which all assists with the Freshness update.

So in a nutshell, ensure you produce an RSS feed, an updated XML sitemap and your server is time-stamping correctly. Then keep on producing great content that positions you as a thought leader and authority in your particular niche.

Good luck! - @SEOMalc

At present, a lot of articles are a little more than speculation, so I have chosen to put together a quick post to highlight the facts within the bloat to ensure the subject lives on and everyone knows the cold facts. The more we talk about Google Plus for Business, the more Google knows we want them.

First things first

Google Plus Business Pages doesn’t exist yet! You cannot and should not try and create a business presence at the moment. In fact, Google is actively removing business style accounts.

Some sites such as Mashable and SEOmoz have already created presences by customising a personal account to look like a business. This goes against the current Google usage restrictions which are tailored towards real people. So Google contacted these people and removed their business style presences.

There may be evidence to show that Google is using key companies and educational institutions as a testing ground. When you set up your education and work statuses, you are presented with some initial options to choose from. This could however just as easily be a database of institutions, their details and logos.

Along with Google actively removing non-personal accounts, they have said that they will not be making an effort to migrate any business style accounts to real business accounts when they launch.

When will Google allow business to use Google Plus?

The only date that has been alluded to at the moment is Q3 2011 so on that note, Google Plus Business Pages should be imminent. Google has already acknowledged the general desire for business presences but remind us that Google Plus is still in very early development in the grand scale of things.

Conclusion

Google Plus profiles will be usable by businesses at some point sooner rather than later. Although you can’t actually set them up at the minute, their impending existence should lead to discussions regarding who will set them up. Who will maintain the presence? How will we interact?

Many companies have already asked similar questions regarding Twitter and Facebook, even employing staff specifically to handle these channels. If you haven’t already then maybe now would be a good time to get the ball rolling. Google Plus is the most likely social data source to be implemented as a ranking factor in the future. Data capture is the fundamental reason for its very existence.

With social becoming more and more popular as a simple means of communication and users demand more interaction from brands, a defined social communication strategy is a must.

You can also read more about this in my other post here.

-@SEOMalc

The Rise of The Brand

You don’t have to look far to see evidence that brands are doing well in natural search. If we look at the top ten results for “Car Insurance” in Google.co.uk we see:

All ten  natural results are brand as are five (maybe six) of the eight suggested searches.

If we look at a few more competitive search terms we can clearly see brands doing well.

Search Term – Car Insurance
Brands in Top 10 – 10
Brands in Related Searches – 5 (Maybe 6)

Search Term – Mortgages
Brands in Top 10 – 9 + Motley Fool
Brands in Related Searches – 3

Search Term – Loans
Brands in Top 10 – 8
Brands in Related Searches – 2

Search Term – Beds
Brands in Top 10 – 7 (Removed Local)
Brands in Related Searches – 2

I could go on all day but since I always get told off for writing a thesis rather than a blog post, I won’t. I will therefore assume that you agree with me that brands are now heavily entrenched within SERPs.

So why? What’s changed? Why are brands now everywhere?

Ever since the Google Vince update (thought of by many as a brand update), Google has been tweaking their algorithm in an attempt to put more emphasis on trust and influence over PageRank^TM and other link metrics. This trend has followed through Caffeine, Panda and all of the smaller unnamed (and often unnoticed) tweaks in between.

In addition to Google’s move, brands themselves have finally started to take more notice of the online environment and SEO; the sleeping giants are starting to awaken.

Identifying Online Brands

Search engine algorithms don’t watch TV. They don’t walk around shopping centres, read papers or get exposed to the onslaught of in-your-face advertising brands push out to us every day. They can however use the results of all of this to understand how search engine users interact with a brand in an attempt to model what a brand looks like from a domain and data point of view. Some things that may well be used to do this are:

• Brand Name Traffic

Does the brand associated with the domain get searched for in its own right? This is what we sometimes call “type-in traffic.”

• Brand + Keyword Traffic

Does the brand associated with the domain get searched for in conjunction with keywords within the topical niche?

• Brand Links

Do people link to the domain using the brand name?

• Brand Mentions

Is the mentioned (linked to or not) in all the right places?!

• Click Through Rates

When listed in SERPs, does the brand listing act like a black hole generating a disproportional click through rate compared to other listings in the same position?

The Exact Match Domain (EMD) Issue

One of the main issues with Google trying to change anything within its algorithm is the effect it has on other areas that were outside of the target for the change.

Let us presume that Google is in fact using brand keyword volumes, links and mentions as strong signals of a brand. On the understanding that the starting point of an identity is the domain name, exact match domains suddenly gain a lot of brand signals that they may not actually deserve.

Let’s use a fictitious example of http://www.cheap-widgets.whatever

The domain and therefore perceived brand is cheap-widgets. The term cheap widgets is searched for a lot. The cheap-widgets.whatever domain has loads of links pointing to it using the perceived brand name of cheap widgets. The term cheap widgets gets mentioned a lot on other sites.

This bi-product of Google tweaking in favour of brands is likely to be next on Google’s hit list and I have previously spoken (prayed for) an EMD update.

How To Generate An Online Brand

Based on the above (which may or may not be exactly correct), how can we take a website and turn it into a powerful online brand?

• Brand Name / Brand + Keyword Traffic

You need to get your name out there, get people talking about and searching for you; this fundamentally comes down to community engagement and more traditional marketing.

Interact with your community, promote your own opinions, sponsor events, publish authority press releases, generate thought provoking opinionated content and be sure to promote your brand within everything you do.

It also goes without saying that you should leverage your offline media assets such as TV and traditional advertising if you can by promoting your online presence within them.

• Brand Mentions

A strong offline brand generally already has the necessary press coverage but failing this, you need to create a splash within your industry. Create original quality content and be persistent when pitching it to authorities within your industry and the press.

• Brand Links

Nothing special here. Simply build brand anchor text links.

• Click Through Rates

You should already be using USPs and strong messaging to enrich your SERPs listings. If you are not, then hopefully this will inspire you to. Although you can’t recreate the exact effects of a well-known brand, you can go some way toward inflating your click through rate via crafting a solid SERP listing.

Conclusions

Brands are here to stay and rather than moaning about them, you need to step up in an attempt to join them.

Goals need to be set higher than ranking for particular terms. SEO can no longer be an activity that is outsourced and forgotten about. Clients need to make internal resources and knowledge available, and agencies need to be creative in the ways they promote the brand and help the client reach brand status.

Your ultimate goal needs to be to create a branded site capable of ranking for anything rather than four terms you have defined as high value.

Author Background

A large part of my role at Epiphany is to analyse data and draw logical conclusions from it. Although I can’t go in to detail, the data is there to back all of the above up. Also, you can sometimes see brand results being injected in to Google SERPs for short periods of time which is presumably Google testing for the black hole effect.

Yes, turning some of the above into reality is very difficult. I know, we have been doing it for years. It is however the only way to future-proof your online strategy.

-@SEOMalc

While Buzz wasn’t a bad initial attempt, the reception was lukewarm and since the Twitter deal ended earlier this month, Google still has a massive social hole to fill. Welcome Google+ (Plus).

Launched as an invite-only beta test on 28 June (five days before the Twitter deal ended), Google+ offers all of the Buzz functionality and a whole lot more. Circles allow you to put your friends into groups, allowing you to focus who you are sharing too. Sparks allow you to follow topics of interest and engage with them directly. Hangouts and Huddles allow you to easily set up instant meetings and collaborations. Google Profiles are fully integrated into Google+ as is the Google +1 recommendation system.

All in all Google+ is a solid offering which does address some of the shortcomings of Twitter and Facebook; this is reflected in the fact that in just over two weeks,  Google+ is reported to have amassed 10 million users. While still small in terms of Twitter (300 million users) and Facebook (750 million users), you have to remember this is still an invite-only beta. Google+ is going to be big.

If this alone is not enough of a reason to take Google+ seriously, you have to remember Google’s desire to use social data to complement it’s ageing PageRank formula. Previously we could see Facebook and Twitter data having a minor correlation to rankings but this seems to have been toned down recently leaving no doubt that Google have set their sights on  Google+ and Google +1 providing all the social data they need.

With Google set to launch a test of business profiles for Google+ shortly and Google +1 integration on the rise. Now is the time for business to start expanding their social strategies to incorporate Google+. Get Google +1 buttons on your site and get ready to move quickly when business profiles launch.

On a different note, 16 June saw the latest iteration of Google Panda go live. Panda 2.2 has gone some way toward addressing the previously seen problems with Google identifying the original author of a piece of content. The fix for Google Panda remains the same (improve the quality of your site throughout), but at least it should be more straight forward with Panda 2.2.

Any questions or comments? - @SEOMalc

“Can I change the page titles?”

“Erm…. No!”

SEO isn’t a dark art. Yes some strategies and techniques must stay behind closed doors for paying customers, but there is still a core part of SEO that is well documented and can be done by anyone with a basic understanding of the web and more importantly a CMS that will let them.

Neither SEO or CMS’s are a new thing. They have both been around for a long time and should in theory go hand in hand. Many proprietary CMS systems incorporate basic SEO functionality but even in 2011 it is surprising just how many CMS systems, usually based around the reselling of WordPress (Yes you can!), Joomla, Umbraco or similar, don’t.

So with the aim of educating both web developers and their potential clients, let’s have a look at the SEO fundamentals that should be offered as a minimum by every CMS and how they can be added if not already present.

SEO Friendly CMS Fundamental

As a bare minimum, a CMS system that is “SEO Friendly” should allow you to:

• Create bespoke page titles of any length for each page.
• Create bespoke page descriptions of any length for each page.
• Create both of the above without it having an effect on either the page URLs or the main H1 or content title element. Seriously why on Earth would I want the URL, the page title and the main heading to be linked.
• Allow you to use human readable URLs.
• Allow you to edit these human readable URLs.
• Allow you to implement 301 and 302 redirects should you need to.
• Allow you to rename the page (in terms of its name within the CMS system), again without any effect on anything else.

If you are really lucky you may even find one that also:

• Allows you to specify a Canonical tag on each page.
• Allows you to add no follow elements to links.
• Allows you to add bespoke Javascript events.

Don’t have all of these in the CMS you are selling? Don’t have all of these in the CMS you have just purchased? Well, here’s some ideas of where you may get help via plug-ins, advice or similar.

WordPress SEO

There is a name for WordPress-related SEO and that name is Yoast. You will not meet anyone more passionate about WordPress than Joost de Valk and he has produced the ultimate in SEO plug-ins for WordPress, aptly called his “WordPress SEO Plugin.” It’s free, easy to install and does all of the above that aren’t already handled by WordPress.

Yoast.com also contains a large number of other plug-ins to aid with tracking, social integration etc. as well as a load of advice articles making it your first port of call for all things WordPress (especially if WordPress.org hurts your head). He also talks about general issues and other systems such as Magento.

Joomla SEO

Like WordPress, Joomla is also plug-in/module/extension-based. Again the latest versions of Joomla (1.5 and 1.6) go some way to appeasing some of the basic SEO requirements such as human readable URLs and URL rewriting via .htaccess, but there is still room for improvement and extensions to provide that improvement for you.

Although I can’t give specifics with regard to Joomla, having not found a solution that stands out so far from the pack like Yoast above, there are extensions to do everything. You will need to watch out for:

• Compatibility issues with Joomla 1.6
• Compatibility issues with other extensions
• Paid versus free

But the Joomla community is very strong and helpful so it doesn’t take long to get the answers you need.

The Joomla official site can be found at – http://www.joomla.org/

The Extension Library can be found at – http://extensions.joomla.org/

The Community can be engaged at – http://forum.joomla.org/

There is also a pretty some pretty good advice to be found at – http://www.joomlaseo.net/

Umbraco

Until recently I was a pure PHP / Apache man with a bit of a chip on my shoulder about .NET technology. Well, all this changed when I was introduced to Umbraco.

Umbraco is an excellent example of a useable and customisable CMS. Like most CMS systems Umbraco does have a number of extensions or projects available to expand its functionality. Generally though the template and back end system for Umbraco is so flexible that you can easily get it to do exactly what you require just by overriding the core functionality.

By default Umbraco (annoyingly) links the Page URL, Title and CMS Page Name, but unlike most other CMS’s, it is amazingly easy to change. You do this by modifying the master template to use your own data and adding the ability to add this data to every page via the CMS.

So by default Umbraco set the <title> tag using:

<title><UMBRACO_GETITEM field=”pageName”/></title>

This can simple be rewritten to use an XSLT macro which basically says “If there is a custom title element specified, use it or fall back to the default.”

The master template line would look something like:

<title><umbraco:Macro Alias=”PageTitle” runat=”server”></umbraco:Macro></title>

And the main part of the XSLT macro would be something like:

<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test=”string-length($currentPage/metaTitle) &gt; 0″>
<xsl:value-of select=”$currentPage/metaTitle”/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test=”string-length($currentPage/pageHeading) &gt; 0″>
<xsl:value-of select=”$currentPage/pageHeading”/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select=”$currentPage/@nodeName”/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Yes the above looks complicated but it really isn’t. You can do the same for almost any element, making Umbraco a coders paradise which should then be reflected to the customer.

For more details on Umbraco visit – http://umbraco.com/

And for more details on projects / extensions visit – http://our.umbraco.org/projects

Like all of the systems featured, the Umbraco platform has a fantastic community which can be engaged at – http://our.umbraco.org/forum

Right I’m stopping there. I am far too passionate about this kind of stuff and could easily ramble on for hours including Websphere, Sharepoint……. but I’m not going to.

If you have anything you would like to ask that I haven’t covered, please feel free to drop a comment and I will get back to you. I’m always up for a bit of problem solving and helpful advice.

Good luck out there.

Malcolm Slade

SEO Project Manager

@seomalc

For a few days now we have been seeing ranking fluctuations beyond the everyday EveryFlux effect across certain sectors and data centres.

This has now been officially validated as Google Panda hitting the UK. In a post yesterday, Google’s Webmaster Central channel posted – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html letting us know that the English language roll out of Panda is now complete along with some “new user feedback signals.”

We (like hopefully everyone else) have had a look at the direct impact of Panda on all our clients and I am happy to say…. there hasn’t really been any! I have however noticed a few non-clients get a bit of a kicking.

But if you read my earlier Panda post – http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/blog/panda-farming-for-beginners-demystifying-the-google-panda-farmer-update/ you would probably be expecting that anyway.

One thing worth noting is that Panda doesn’t seem to have been a “flick the switch” kind of role out as many people seem to think. I’m pretty certain that it may even have started as far back as Friday 8^th April.

For now, it is business as usual. Keep creating good creative content. Link build way outside of that box and embrace the Panda.

Regards

Malc

@seomalc

Let’s Demystify Google Panda Farming

For a while now, more and more dubious results have been starting to appear within Google’s SERPs. It seemed as though every algorithm update that Google applied to improve the results in the head also dragged up more poor quality content into the mid and long tail. This combined with the overall increase in length of search query used by Google users meant that more and more people were being exposed to less than ideal content.

The main purveyors of this less-than-ideal content are known as Content Farms. These sites scrape trend and search volume data, and produce content around subjects deemed valuable enough to warrant the five minutes it takes them to produce the content. As you can imagine, in most cases this five-minute content is stock, poor quality or incomplete.

This of course isn’t much of a problem for the Content Farms. Their main purpose is usually to drive people to Google Adsense or similar advertising, rather than to become your favourite destination for helpful advice and information on a particular subject. For users though, Google has let them down and not fulfilled its main goal of providing the best content for a particular search. Bad Google!

So in February 2011, Google launched the Panda update (although we in the industry were calling it the Farmer update as it was aimed at Content Farms), with the aim of addressing this rise in low quality content within its results.

The Effects of the Panda Update

The main impact of the Google Panda / Farmer update is the removal of rankings for content that is deemed ‘thin.’ By ‘thin,’ we mean content that is either incomplete, offers no added value or is simply a duplicate of other content already present on the Web.

It is pretty easy for Google to make an assumption on whether a particular piece of content is thin based on document classification, duplicate content filtering and user behaviour. These three are known to be the main areas that Google is looking into with comments like:

“As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

From Google’s Matt Cutts – Google search and search engine spam

So if you yourself are running a content driven site and not putting any effort into the content you create, then you could be at risk when the Panda hits the UK.

As a knock-on effect from Panda, you may also see a drop in rankings if a substantial part of your historic link-building has been around weak content creation. While article submission can be a great way of generating an initial buzz or indexing, it should be just that. If your existing rankings are based on huge amounts of content being pushed out to article sites on a regular basis, you may be about to lose a large portion of your back-link profile (if you haven’t already), as these sites feel the impact of the Panda update.

What Can You Do to Protect Yourself from Pandas?

The first thing you need to consider when preparing your site against the Panda update is “what is the purpose and condition of my content?”  If your content is stock (as is the case with many e-commerce sites), or just a quick rewrite of content found on every other site in your niche, you may be in trouble. If you have taken the time to think of ways to make your content unique and useful for your users, you should be fine.

As we at Epiphany have said for a long time, “Content is a benefit for SEO but should not be created for that purpose alone.” You need to consider how users will perceive the content and actually want them to read it. Your content should reflect your brand and stand out; Five minutes rarely makes great content.

On top of this, if your back-links all come from links embedded in articles you have scattered across the Web, you may be in for some tough times ahead if those links were having any benefit in the first place. I have already alluded to our stance on article submissions, but to reiterate, article submissions have a purpose but it isn’t to get great links or develop a solid brand link profile. If you are using it for this then erm… good luck.

To Conclude

The Google Panda / Farmer update is a positive thing and should help people get into the correct mindset about content creation. The update is not aimed at legitimate sites, and any sites that have been impacted unfairly have been reviewed and the issues resolved by recent tweaks. To sum the whole thing up in a single qwerky paragraph:

“Pandas only eat Bamboo, so as long as your website isn’t made of Bamboo you will be fine. At Epiphany we help you make your site a monolith of Granite that is impervious to Pandas (and apparently Bacteria), therefore our clients need not fear the Google Panda update!”

About Think Visibility

Think Visibility is the brain child of one Dominic (@thehodge) Hodgson and began in March 2009. The main idea of Think Visibility is to get a group of like-minded people together to discuss a range of subjects from SEO to travelling around the world via Twitter.

What makes Think Visibility different?

While my title might be a bit extreme, it does give a general idea of how Think Visibility is run and the general atmosphere. Think Vis (I’m already bored of typing it in full) is a single day event held at the Alea Casino in Leeds. This choice of location lends itself to a very relaxed atmosphere rather than the more corporate feel of your SES and SMXs.

This relaxed atmosphere combined with bacon butties for breakfast, more pic-n-mix than I have ever seen in my life, rubber ducks, lunchtime entertainment and a bar that opens while the conference is on, makes Think Vis the ultimate place to chat with some really interesting people like Dixon Jones, Stephen Pavlovich, Paul Madden, Becky Naylor (and I guess Dave) and Ben Elton (sorry Jason).

Another thing that makes Think Vis different is the speakers, who seem a lot more relaxed than at most conferences I have attended. Topics are more casually explained using interesting analogies and enjoyable stories rather than graphs and stats.

So on to the speakers and topics…

Speakers and Topics

Several great posts (which I have listed below) have already been written about the speakers and their topics, so I am solely going to add my spin on things that I attended rather than go over old ground.

The first speaker of the day for me was Peter Cooper (a passionate Ruby developer, author and entrepreneur). The first thing to say about Peter is he looks absolutely nothing like his photo. The second thing is he has really thought about how geeks can promote themselves.  His presentation,“Self Promotion for Geeks: Let’s Look at Attracting and Audience For Our Projects,” made for a very light hearted and interest talk with some interesting takeaways.

Following on from Peter was Stephen Pavlovich, taking a fresh spin on conversion rate optimisation under the subject “Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost Your Conversion Rate.” I really enjoyed Stephen’s talk because a) he looked like my favourite comedian and b) he made some really deep points about what conversion rate optimisation should be addressing beyond the colour of buttons etc. I have even ordered “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Ciadini” off of the back of Stephen’s recommendation.

Next came lunch and a chance for me to embarrass myself taking part in “Play Your SERPs Right.” Here we (two other contestants and I) had to answer several higher and lower questions based on where certain sites ranked for certain terms. To cut a long sour story of betrayal short, I WAS ROBBED!

After lunch I found out what performance marketing was via “Performance Marketing? It’s a Piece of Cake – Getting the ingredients right for success” by Tina Judic. I will be honest my brain hasn’t recovered from watching a Victoria Sponge being made live on stage. I was also disappointed that a Bluebird A La Carte Kitchen wasn’t used to cook the sponge layers.

Next was Dixon Jones talking about Majestic SEO. Now I have had a lot of experience with Majestic SEO and seen Dixon speak several times, so I was a bit worried that the talk would be a sales pitch. Well, it wasn’t. Dixon was great and although I personally didn’t learn anything new, it was a great talk and lots of people did.

My last talk of the day (I will explain why in a moment) was Gary Taylor talking about his experiences of buying domains and trying to up-sell/make money from them in “One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result.” While the topic was very well geared toward the main core of attendees, I didn’t really get much from it and felt like the over emphasis on exact match domains wasn’t backed up with any reasoning as to why they work (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI).

The next speaker was Dave Naylor doing a site clinic. I did genuinely want to attend this (honest Dave) but I got talking to Pete Young, Dixon Jones and Jason Duke (as is the way with Think Vis) and time just flew by.

On to the after party

Right I’m not going to say much about the after party here as here is not the place. I may post something on my own blog later. What I will say is we sponsored the after party which meant some free drinks, a poker and roulette table, blackjack (not the same as Pontoon as I found out), and lots more fun.

Loads of people attended, the beer flowed and everybody had a great time long into the next morning.

To conclude

Think Visibility is awesome. Everyone from Epiphany who attended had a great time, learned something and met loads of new friends. What more can you honestly ask from a conference.

Once again I take my hat off to Dom for creating something so slick while keeping it rooted in the North.

By the way, did I mention I ate 20 Creme Eggs on the Friday?

Malcolm (@SEOmalc) Slade

Other Think Vis Posts

http://blog.pushon.co.uk/think-visibility/think-visibility-live-blogging-march-2011/

http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/sinkvis/

http://www.stateofsearch.com/think-visibility-5-march-2011-the-one-with-the-panda-pick-n-mix/

Within marketing we have a tendency to consider TV as a bit of a dying medium and the general public in me rarely pays any attention to adverts that aren’t a movie trailer or have attractive ladies in them (Nicole? Papa?). If you had asked me three weeks ago to name my favourite and most memorable advert I would have gone with the Carling Black Label advert from the 1980’s which spans three adverts. You know, the one with the cowboys? Oh you were two years old in the 80’s! Let’s move on…

The 2011 Super Bowl took place in February and although I didn’t personally watch it, more than 111,000,000 Americans did. Bar the upcoming royal wedding this will no doubt be the most watched event on TV during 2011, and because of this, the advertisement slots were very sought after (if a little expensive). The usual suspects were in there such as movie teasers for the new X-men movie, Super 8, Thor and many others. Big consumer brands were also present such as Doritos and Pepsi. While watching the various movie trailers, I came across an interesting looking advert by Volkswagen containing a mini Darth Vader and I discovered my new favourite advert ever.

What makes this advert so great?

There are several adverts out at the moment that are snigger worthy but nothing more. My colleague Tom wrote an interesting post about the Yell Day V Lately ad which you can read here. I was around when J R Hartley hit the screens and until then I probably didn’t know what the Yellow Pages was. I now know Yell has an App but to be honest I don’t care as we have Google.

The Volkswagen advert on the other hand ticks a lot of boxes for me and other Thirty-Something males. I like Star Wars, I used to drive around in Golf GTI’s and the likes, and I now have a family (no more Golf GTI’s). All of these traits are directly represented in the VW advert. It’s got a small boy (it must be a boy) in a Darth Vader costume, it features a pretty middle of the road family, the young boy displays nearly identical traits to every 4-year-old I have ever met, and in true car advert style the featured VW Passat is top spec. So for me it ticks all the right boxes as an advert but…

When I talk about this advert I say things like “Have you seen the advert with the mini Darth Vader?” or similar. I rarely consider the brand. Indeed when you watch the advert the whole brand side of things is minimal. You see the car at the end for a few seconds and it is a main part of the crescendo, but until the VW logo appears at the very end you have no idea it has anything to do with Volkswagen. This lack of brand focus is both a plus and a massive negative. From a plus point we are not getting VW thrust down our necks like most car adverts and are left alone to marvel at the content. However, on a negative side…

Where does this advert fail?

As a tool for driving awareness for the new VW Passat, the advert kind of fails. I am left knowing nothing about the car other than it has remote central locking and comes in grey. On top of this, has anyone ever seen the advert airing on UK TV other than those select few who watched the Super Bowl?

The team at Hitwise did some analysis on traffic trends after the Super Bowl. The research is here, but the main point is that the advert did more for Darth Vader than it did for Volkswagen. This is further confirmed by Google Insights.

Here we can see that there was a spike in Volkswagen related searches, but man alive Darth Vader.com must have made a mint (followed by darth-vader.com, darthvader.net, freedarthvader.biz… you get the thread. Rant over).

When we look at the UK nothing really happened.

Let’s face it nobody saw it. On TV anyway.

What if it wasn’t about Passat awareness?

As an experiment for social media and viral marketing this has been a major success, at marketing the Youtube video… hmmm…

Even though nobody I know watched the Super Bowl (maybe Nicole did but she is American), everybody I know has seen this advert. As of the 16th of February, in the knowledge the commercial was uploaded to Youtube on the 2nd and aired on the 8th, the Youtube video has had more than 30,000,000 views and generated over 23,000 comments. Yahoo Site Explorer (not dead yet) has recorded more than 43,000 links to the Youtube video. Facebook walls all over the world are riddled with the video as are Twitter feeds.

Again Youtube must be loving it but Volkswagen….

To conclude

While I don’t want Volkswagen to fall into the typical car advert rut of going fast down a windy road blah blah blah, lessons need to be learnt. You can have a happy balance between product placement and cool ideas that drives product interest, social engagement and ultimately sales. Take Blendtec. There sales have gone through the roof off of the “Will it blend?” marketing. You’re having fun while all the time learning just how awesome a Blendtec blender is. Whether this winning formula can be used for larger products such as cars, well smarter people than me can work that out, but in the case of generating Volkswagen awareness, it didn’t.

I have added the blooper / making of real that Volkwagen added on the 8th below. More absolute awesomeness. I close with a salute to Volkwagen for making such an amazing advert.

Search on the Move

The mobile boom has been looming for many years but with mobile platforms now boasting HD screens, dual core processors and usable touch screen technology, 2011 looks to be the year mobile really takes off.

Mobile browsing on a phone or a tablet is a completely different experience from using a traditional PC. A mobile tailored website needs to embrace this, presenting the same core information in a mobile appropriate format.

From a search point of view, Google Mobile seems to play to a slightly different set of rules to the normal Google search engine. This is something we have been paying a lot of attention to at Epiphany in conjunction with small screen rendering and usability issues to ensure our mobile clients are making the most of the small screen.

Getting Social

One of the main reasons Google implemented Caffeine in 2010 was to gain the ability to index more of the web faster. It doesn’t take much to work out that this is all about indexing the social web in as close to real time as possible. Twitter data already appears within real time listings but more interestingly Bing and Google have both mentioned that they are using social data as a ranking factor for natural search.

Social media can generate natural back-links, brand mentions and positive sentiment which can all be beneficial to your SEO efforts, but more importantly, well crafted social engagement through authoritative and creative content can also generate users and sales.

Successful social media engagement has to be planned, maintained and should not be limited to Twitter and Facebook. At Epiphany we have seen the value in empowering our clients and allowing them to engage their users in a wide variety of fashions from answering questions on Twitter to guest blogging and beyond. In short, if you wish to be considered a brand, getting social is a must in 2011.

Getting Local

Every day more and more searches are resulting in some form of personalisation based on location. While the technology in use by the search engines may be currently flawed with plenty of incorrect listings and inaccurate assumptions as to users locations, the sheer visibility of Google Places listings means they are a must for any search strategy for a brand with physical locations.

While getting your business listed is a must, there are a number of other key considerations that affect the success of your local listings. At Epiphany we have been analysing these throughout 2010 helping our clients achieve great success within both the classic 7 or 10 pack local listings and the newer more fragmented local results.

Getting Noticed in SERPs Listings

1^st place is a great place to be but in many cases it isn’t cost effective to achieve. Many statistics show that 1^st place receives considerably more clicks than 2^nd and so on but this isn’t always the case.
On a page where all 10 results contain the same Keyword | Keyword | Keyword | Brand title lines and generic stock descriptions, a lot can be gained by breaking convention.

Anything you can do to make your listing stand out is a must, especially with Google Preview and Google Instant now making it much easier for users to vet results prior to clicking a listing.

By being creative with titles, descriptions and the use of micro formats we have seen (and continue to see) great click through rate results from natural search – way beyond expectations based on historic click through rate data.

Webpage Coding ++

Clean code has always been important for numerous reasons including site speed. Current technologies such as AJAX allow sites to look amazing while keeping code to a minimum. HTML 5 looks to be taking this even further allowing detailed mark-up, clean layout and a broad range of new toys for web developers to mess with.

We have been playing with HTML 5 for a while now but browser support during 2010 was very limited. 2011 on the other hand will see HTML 5 becoming the norm and we may finally see an end to table layouts and Flash.

To Conclude

The sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed that none of the above is new. Even HTML 5 was around in 2010. But, have you actually considered any of it or have you simply dismissed it as a fad? 2011 is the year search gets serious. No more quick wins or cookie cutter strategies. Broaden your mind, broaden your strategy and reap your rewards.

Oh and be sure to read my colleagues posts on PPC for 2011 and Website Optimisation.

One more subtle Google change with just as much potential impact as any of the above has been relatively overshadowed by the above. At the start of last November we (the SEO department at Epiphany) started to notice that SERPs listings were changing. SERPs listings previously dominated by homepages saw a large number of ranking pages replaced by internal pages from the same site. Rankings didn’t necessarily change, but the page being ranked did.

As an example, prior to the update Insure and Go ranked 4^th for “Travel Insurance” with http://www.insureandgo.com as the ranking page. Since the 4^th of November, Insure and Go have retained the 4^th place ranking but the listed page has changed to http://www.insureandgo.com/travel-insurance/travelhome.html.

This trend seems to have happened across all verticals and even to the extent where in some instances the internal page that was rankings has been replaced by another internal page.

So what has happened?

Well it seems that Google has made an update to its algorithm for selecting which page of a domain should rank. Previously pages would rank solely on their link equity. We have all seen plenty of pages ranking that provide no information on the particular subject or a one liner about the particular subject along with one liners about 30 others.

I’m speculating here, but now it seems as though Google looks to see what domain should rank for a given term based on its overall weight for that term. It then looks at all of the pages of that domain individually to work out which page it should list based on relevance with relevance seemingly being based on on-page factors such as textual content.

The reason I have come to this conclusion is that from all the data I have crunched (hence the delay in this post), there seems to be no reasoning as to why a certain page now ranks in place of the other, apart from the fact that the newly ranking page nearly always has it’s on-page elements more directly targeted to the phrase. Links don’t seem to matter as plenty of pages rank with little to no link equity themselves. Their parent domains though have a reason to rank based on links.

Why would this happen?

Whenever I notice anything like this I always like to think why would Google do this (and remember I am speculating here)? Well traditional legacy SEO frequently involved powering up (not sure if that’s the right term) a sites homepage as this was deemed the most powerful page from the get go. From this we ended up with SERPs full of homepages that when you clicked through you were only just beginning your journey to find the information you actually required. So with Google’s desire to give users the information they require as quickly as possible, it makes perfect sense that they would want to shortcut the journey and provide the information directly from the SERPs.

If this is happening, what do we need to do to benefit from it?

Well obviously you need to ensure you monitor the pages that are being listed. If you have been creating pages solely to add content to your site and you haven’t given your pages much thought beyond this you may need to ensure you provide all of the necessary calls to action etc. to turn these pages into conversion drivers. Apart from this (taking for granted you are being intelligent with you SEO) you shouldn’t really need to change anything. Your overall efforts should put your domain in good light and Google should do the rest for the best (maybe a bit optimistic).

Conclusions

Something has changed and all the data I have looked at points toward what I have documented above. As to whether this change will last, well we never really know. It may be that Google is heavily monitoring the situation and might change things based on click through and bounce rates. Some sites have indeed been fluctuating between old pages and new. For now the best advice I can give is to ensure your on-page SEO efforts extend beyond your homepage, but surely you knew that anyway!

So without further ado, I offer my Top 5 (5 being a special number for me) tips for ecommerce SEO success. 1. Human readable structured URLs.

In the past I have hacked together workarounds using static pages or 302 redirects but in the end nothing comes close in terms of sustainability, to good clean human readable URLs with minimal parameters. They get indexed better, they add context and they are so much easier to control.

So if your potential new ecommerce system can’t spit out URLs in the form /category/sub-category/product or similar consider looking elsewhere.

2. Content.

If you want your site to be a success you are going to need to put some time and thought into content. A page with 30 product images and 30 prices just doesn’t cut it anymore. Nor does a page only containing the same stock product description and image as every other competitor.

Brand pages need some form of introductory content as do category and sub-category pages. Product pages need to sell the product through reviews, enhanced features and related products. And the golden nugget…. THIS MUST ALL BE BESPOKE.

Getting a piece of stock copy from a brand representative and sticking that on your page isn’t going to help. Get it rewritten, be creative, spin it to be more about the brand at your store, just don’t take shortcuts.

For inspiration on how to do this well at product level, look no further than http://www.amazon.co.uk. Amazon’s product pages tell users everything they could ever want to know about a product and the search engines love it.

3. Page Titles and Descriptions.

It can’t be stressed enough just how important these 2 things are if you want to succeed in natural search. At the end of the day being number 1 doesn’t guarantee a click, it simply puts you in the best possible position to get the click. If you search listing (advert) alienates the searcher then chances are your competition is getting the click even if they rank below you.

Page titles need to be well written and bespoke. Yes this is stock SEO advice but for ecommerce sites it can be a complete nightmare to achieve. “Our ecommerce platform allows us to enter bespoke titles for all our pages”, really and what army are you planning on employing to write titles for your 40,000 products? “Our ecommerce platform pulls key information from the database to create page titles dynamically”, a good start but likely to lead to a lot to garbage titles and titles the same as competitors.

The best solution? A hybrid. Auto population is a great way to get bespoke titles in for a start. Let’s face it nobody wants to wait 4 months to launch while you craft nice titles for every page. Even here though you need to be creative and if your ecommerce platform allows you to specify what elements are pulled in or you can hack around this functionality all the better.

Once auto populated, start crafting. Begin with your homepage and main categories (really you should have done these before launch). With titles, keywords need to be in there but think about how you can stand out from the crowd. Move through your site as you get time from categories to sub categories to best selling products to most profitable products and beyond.

Descriptions may not hold any value for the Google algorithm but they can and do impact click through rates. Think about your sales message. Are you the leading stockist? Do you stock products only found on your site? Do you have a price promise? Do you offer free delivery? USPs USPs USPs. Oh and if the price is stable, consider getting the price in there, you may be surprised at how much more traffic you get from your top 3 listing.

4. One URL to rule them all.

You content should only be reachable via a single URL. Another piece of stock SEO advice that is a nightmare on ecommerce sites. Filtering options, navigation options, tracking, products in multiple categories and more can all lead to multiple URLs all having the same content.

Yes we have the rel=”canonical” tag to play with (if your ecommerce site allows it) but ideally it shouldn’t even be needed if you plan from the offset.

If your products feature in multiple categories, make their URLs more generic such as /belstaff-mens-pathfinder-jacket-tan rather than /mens/jackets/belstaff/pathfinder-tan and /belstaff/pathfinder-tan.

Code your filtering using AJAX so you don’t generate new URLs or page loads. Do you really need to rank for “black men’s shoes under £30”?

5. Discount / Promo Codes

Not really something that needs fixing but more something that needs to be there from the offset. Having a little box that allows you to gain a discount is a god send when it comes to real creative out of the box link building. You can run competitions, offer discounts to elite groups and more all through having the ability to apply promos online. Links like these do not grow on trees.

So, there is my top 5. Feel free to comment on any of the above or add any tips, advice or experiences. Happy SEOing.

So, how will Google Instant affect SEO?

The first and most obvious impact for SEO is that yet again (this seems to be a consistent trend with Google UI updates) the above the fold screen real estate allocated to natural search results has taken a hit meaning natural search listing are even less prominent visually.

In the comparison above you can see quite clearly that while the Google Instant functionality is active, an additional natural listing is lost while PPC real estate volume remains the same.

Another impact is likely to be a traffic shift from the long tail towards the mid tail and head especially in instances where you or competitors are ranking for the shorter term. Within Google Instant the decision as to what search results to load is driven by the Google Suggest results. As you type, the results shown will always relate to the first listing in the Google Suggest box. So in cases where you there is a strong head or mid tail term at the start of your long tail term, ranking for it has become even more important to gain early exposure during the Google Instant enhanced search experience.

So as an example, LASIK is a strong term that appears at the start of the term LASIK eye surgery. Ranking naturally in the top 3 or 4 for LASIK will now draw traffic away from LASIK eye surgery as the user is being exposed to the information they want earlier in the Google Instant enhanced search experience. Not so bad if it is you who have just gained a ranking for LASIK as you are in effect just moving some of your traffic from LASIK eye surgery to LASIK and gained traffic from your new ranking term. But, if a competitor suddenly gains the LASIK ranking your traffic for LASIK eye surgery is likely to drop as a knock on effect.

When you think about this more, it is likely to be disastrous for businesses that rely on a long tail niche especially where brands or big players have a presence outside of the long tail. If a user is exposed to a competitor before they have even finished typing the long tail term then chances are they won’t bother completing the term and therefore will miss out on being exposed to your number 1 listing for it.

On top of this, the terms that appear within the suggestion box are now even more important targets. Searcher behaviour has already changed once due to the inclusion of Google Suggest. Google Instant takes this even further due to the ease in which you can flick between queries using the up and down arrows on your keyboard and see instance results. This could easily impact the long tail again and could potentially go so far as to reduce the overall range of keywords that users use, especially in cases where viable sites can be found in the top 4 listings early within the Google Instant enhanced search experience or within the top 4 listings for the terms presented by Google Suggest (which change frequently).

Google Instant could also have a major impact on click distribution by position with less users inclined to scroll favouring simply continuing to type until they are presented with what they are looking for. This will make getting those top 4 rankings even more important. The battle between scrolling or clicking page 2 and typing another word will be even more heated with more users likely to choose delving into the long tail in cases where they haven’t received the results they wanted earlier in the search process.

So what can be done to benefit from Google Instant?

Well the first thing to do is to ensure your target keywords include those found within Google Suggest while of course remembering that these may change over time so keep reviewing.

You should also look at how the Google Instant enhanced search experience plays out for all of your keywords and potentially amend your focus accordingly.

Finally you need to take your SEO seriously. In some situations even ranking 5th for a particular term is going to be useless. Top spots are going to be even more important and your efforts and budgets need to reflect this to stay ahead of the game.

At Epiphany we are already reviewing keyword targets, monitoring Google Suggest changes and plotting potential Google Instant paths to identify opportunities to get our clients in front of their potential visitors quicker than ever. The term Google Instant has been heard (and typed) all over the office and will continue to be a major part of the SEO and PPC teams lives for the foreseeable future, as we begin to see the impact on search volumes and click through rates.

For a look at how Google Instant will affect PPC, check out this post by my colleague Peter Gould of the Epiphany PPC team.

The Basic Syntax

Your instructions within your robots.txt come in blocks. Each block starts with a declaration of the particular robot or robots it will apply to via their user agent (all nice robots should declare themselves via a user agent so you can handle them appropriately). So the start of a block would look like;

User-agent: Googlebot the Google robot
User-agent: msnbot the Live and Bing robot
User-agent: * all robots (or at least all of them that obey)

After your user agent line come your actions to be followed. These need to come directly below with no blank lines. There can be as many as you like as long as each is on a new line. So with instructions your block might look like;

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /supersecretfolder/
Disallow: /worlddominationplans/
Disallow: /poemsaboutunicorns/

Comments can be added into your robots.txt file by starting them with a hash (#) e.g.

# This is a comment.

Folder, filenames etc. are case sensitive as it should be… sorry rant over.

Instructions are handled in order which can lead to unexpected behaviour. For instance;

User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /supersecretfolder/

Would not prevent msnbot from looking in the folder as you have already given it the key to the city in your first block.

More Advanced Usage

Noindex

Disallowing a folder or file doesn’t necessarily keep it out of the index. It simply prevents the search engine robots from grabbing the content and adding it to their index. If somebody links to your content its location will still appear in the search engine index and relevance will be gleamed from the anchor text etc. The snippet will simply be the URL only with no other information.

To prevent your folder or file from being indexed completely you need to use the Noindex directive although this is only obeyed by Google.

User-agent: Googlebot
Noindex: /supersecretfolder/

Allow

If you have a large amount of content you don’t want crawled but somewhere in there, there is a piece you do want crawled, you can use the Allow directive. This directive supported by Google and Yahoo means you can override part of a previous disallow statement e.g.

Disallow: /poemsaboutunicorns/ blocks everything in that folder
Allow: /poemsaboutunicorns/notwrittenbyme/ opens up the child folder

This is a whole lot easier than writing individual lines for each of the child folders.

Pattern Matching

One of the most useful things you can do within your robots.txt file is pattern match. Let’s say you have a large number of pages indexed with random variables attached, all of which are creating duplicates of your homepage and you lack the ability to apply 301s etc.

You can apply a disallow statement that uses pattern matching to say “if it’s got a variable tagged on the end, don’t crawl it”. So let’s say we find a load of duplicates with the variable affid= tagged on.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?affid=*

Would handle them all. You can also go further and block a particular file extension or even any URL which uses a variable.

Disallow: /*.cfm$ blocks all cfm extension pages
Disallow: /*?* blocks all pages that use a variable

This can be very powerful but remember that by disallowing, you are in effect causing the pages to be ignored so no links inside will be followed and any link juice flowing to the pages will meet a dead-end.

Handling HTTPs

If you have the issue of all your pages being indexed under both HTTPs and HTTP protocols you can tackle the issue using robots.txt with a little help from URL rewriting.

First you need to set up 2 robots.txt files, one that handles your HTTP pages, named robots.txt and another that handles your HTTPs pages names robots2.txt. Maybe;

User-agent: *
Disallow:

—–

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Noindex: /

You then set up a rule in your URL rewriting to say if the request is form robots.txt using the HTTPs protocol, serve the robots2.txt file. Something like;

RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^/robots\.txt$ /robots2.txt [NC]

Sitemaps

Although I would always recommend linking to your XML sitemap from your HTML sitemap, you should also specify your XML sitemap location within your robots.txt file. The format is simply a clean line containing Sitemap: the location e.g.

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

So, that’s robots.txt. You can find out a lot more at http://www.robotstxt.org and if you know any tricks I have missed, please don’t hesitate to let me know via a comment.

The main goal of a press release is to promote your business to your potential customers and influencers in your industry. By influencers we mean bloggers, journalists and industry experts. Your potential customers and influencers are always on the lookout for breaking news and the latest information in their areas of interest. By producing topical, newsworthy content in the form of press releases and distributing them appropriately, you are providing what they want and achieving your goal of getting your brand in front of them.

The success of press releases depends on 2 key areas and a bit of luck. The first of these is the content of your press releases. Although people like to read news about their favourite subjects they hate to be misled, aren’t interested in blatant advertising and don’t have the time for content that has no substance.

Press releases can be about anything as long as it is newsworthy. Information about your company such as the appointment of a new employee, addition of a new product line, event, an award you have received, can make for viable press releases and have the potential to create interest around your brand.

However, the best performing press releases are those that create interest in a subject or topic through research, opinion or a new angle. This kind of press release can create a real buzz around your brand leading to citations and links from valuable sources such as peers and industry journalists. By writing this kind of press releases you are going beyond simply getting your brand out there and moving towards becoming known as an authority in your area – something every brand should aspire towards.

The second key area is distribution. For maximum success you need to do everything you can to get your press release in front of your target audience use. Sure, some people may read the press release buried within your website, but most will have other methods of accessing and filtering the large amount of information presented to them on a continual basis.

While direct approaches such as emails to key journalists still have merit, online channels offer additional benefits in terms of exposure and SEO. Some of these are;

• The major online distribution channels have a good chance of getting your press release into Google or Yahoo news, which can be a great source of additional exposure both to people directly reading the news channels and to people viewing search results pages that contain news listings.

• Online versions of your press release are also likely to trigger Google Alerts making them more likely to be seen by journalists, bloggers or anyone monitoring terms used in your release.

• Many of the online distribution services allow hyperlinks to be placed within press releases. This can be a great way of gaining links from sites that republish your press release.

• Even in situations where your press release is republished without your links, you are still gaining key online brand citations which are building your brand awareness.

There are of course, considerations to take into account regarding ensuring maximum SEO benefit, maximum readability and creating a press release that journalists want to use. While I’m not going to detail these within this post as this isn’t a post about how to write press releases. I will point you towards a resource I often refer to which is sourced from actual journalists (the people you ideally want to get your press release read by) – How to: write the perfect press release for journalists. There are some great tips in here and things to consider when writing your press releases.

All in all, press releases are an invaluable part of an SEO campaign. They generate back-links from sources otherwise out of reach, get your brand in front of your target audience and if your press release hits the spot, can create a real buzz around your brand as well as some powerful back-links and mentions, which can have a dramatic effect on your search rankings!

Again, we have taken some time out to test various aspects with the following results.

The Google Caffeine IP Tested

Firstly, if you are unsure as to what Google Caffeine is, I would advise looking at one of our early Caffeine related post;

Get ready for some caffeine – November 2009
Google Introduce Caffeine: The Google GTi – August 2009

Pretty much as soon as the Google Caffeine sandbox was closed, people started speculating about various data centres being the first to show Caffeine results. After reviewing many such claims, we found that eventually one data centre did seem to be showing Google Caffeine results, some of the time. This was then later confirmed by Matt Cutts of Google.

The IP address was 209.85.225.103 and it could be accessed via http://209.85.225.103/search?hl=en&gl=uk&q=seo+leeds where the query variable (q) could be set to your search query (with +s to replace spaces of course).

The Tests

We carried out three tests around Caffeine. Firstly, as Caffeine has always been documented as likely to affect the speed in which results are returned and the size of the returned data set for a result, we looked at those two variables. As Caffeine is likely to affect index sizes, it may also have some impact on rankings due to more pages of your site being found or more pages containing a link to your site being found on other sites etc. So we looked at ranking variance for the third test.

The tests were kept simple and carried out using IE8 on a base unit that connected to the internet via a UK IP address that had never been used to search for any of these terms before. In fact, prior to being set up for this test, the box had never even connected to the internet before.

Test 1 – Size of Returned Results Sets

We generated a list of 100 search terms, ranging from head terms such as ‘mortgages’ to long tail terms such as ‘government grants for energy research’. Each search was carried out using http://www.google.co.uk and the Google Caffeine IP above. The size of the returned dataset as shown by the ‘of about’ line (Results 1-10 of about 10,200…) was recorded for both and the percentage difference between Caffeine and Google.co.uk was calculated for each.

As I said, nothing too complicated.

When the Google Caffeine sandbox first went live, initial tests carried out by others showed that the data sets returned by Google Caffeine were much larger than those returned by normal Google.

When we carried out our own testing nearer to the end of the sandbox’s existence, this difference was almost unnoticeable, with the average difference being that Google Caffeine returned 4% more results (a 4% bigger data set).

The latest set of tests using the live Google Caffeine IP were even more unexpected, with most searches bringing back considerably smaller data sets through Google Caffeine (as can be seen from the above graph). On average, Google Caffeine returned 13% fewer results. In some instances, the data set returned was nearly 70% smaller.

Test 2 – Speed of Returned Results

At the same time as testing the size of the returned results sets, we also recorded the time taken to receive those results and display the first page, as shown by the time quoted after the data set size.

It’s important to remember for this test that several things could have an impact, not least the fact that we had to refresh the result until it showed Caffeine results. Google is also already pretty fast at returning results, so rather than worry about how much faster Caffeine was or the average speed difference etc., we kept this test really simple and based it on wins.

This is the first time that we can make any real conclusions about speed, as the sandbox environment wasn’t a true representation of Google to compare like-for-like. Even now, the result has to be taken with a pinch of salt and certainly wasn’t conclusive, but on average (52% of the time), Google Caffeine was faster.

But then, if it is passing back smaller results sets, it should be quicker, shouldn’t it?! However, it could also be said that if Caffeine is indexing more and therefore has a large index to work with to construct the data set to be returned from, it should actually be slower.

Test 3 – Ranking Changes

For our final test, we looked at how rankings differ for 145 terms that relate to our clients. We took the clients ranking position now for the particular term and compared it with where Google Caffeine ranks them for the same term.

Just to clarify, a positive number equates to Google Caffeine ranking the client lower than normal Google, while a negative number means the ranking was better on Caffeine.

As can be seen from the graph above, the range of ranking changes was limited, with the majority showing improvement. Some did slip, but none suffered any major impact from Caffeine.

Of course, we are not aiming to draw any conclusions from this particular experiment. We are, however, sleeping better.

Conclusions

Google Caffeine does seem to be returning smaller sets of results most of the time, which could be due to an improvement in relevance. If Google Caffeine is drawing from a larger index, then it is definitely faster at working out the data set to return. All along, we have expected ranking changes to be minimal, and the latest tests seem to confirm this.

In general, Google Caffeine looks to be a success so far.

We are expecting the full roll-out of Google Caffeine around February, and will probably carry out another round of testing a few weeks after, when things have settled.

Until then, get your fill of decaff. Caffeine is coming.

Well, the public testing is now officially over and Caffeine has been placed behind closed doors prior to launch, meaning it’s time to review what we learnt and what we can expect from Caffeine in 2010.

Visiting the Caffeine URL (www2.sandbox.google.com) now get you forwarded to http://www.google.com/errors/caffeine/unavailable.html which displays the above message.

Soon?

The statement that caused some panic was of course “Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center”. As anyone who has been in online marketing for a while will tell you, historically major Google updates can cause significant fluctuations in traffic while they settle into place. Not something you want to be experiencing over the holiday period where online purchases go through the roof (fingers crossed).

Luckily Google’s Matt Cutts pre-empted this concern and stated;

“Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

Full post by Matt. We all breathe a sigh of relief.

So we can expect Caffeine to be rolled out onto a single data center shortly and hopefully the location of that data center will be made public. Google’s uses many data centers so impacts from any negative side effects or positives are likely to be minimal until late January 2010 where we expect to see further expansion.

I will add the location of the data center (IP address) to the post once it is known.

What to Expect

The current architecture that underpins Google is around 10 years old and is updated in sporadic chunks to improve the performance of various elements and add new functionality. As with most complex systems, there comes a time when it is necessary to completely rework what you have to create an even stronger platform for further growth and development. This is Google Caffeine.

At this stage, Caffeine is not a full-blown algorithm update although there has been a lot of speculation regarding things that may have changed. Caffeine is in fact documented as a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine. Google’s Official Blog Post.

With regard to Search, this new infrastructure is designed to speed up the rate in which Google can index the billions upon billions of web pages, files, movies and pictures available to it while also increasing the amount of items indexed and the rate at which results are returned. A larger index allows returned results to be more comprehensive and accurate while quicker indexing allows results to be kept fresh and up to date.

Of course a larger index is going to have an impact on a large number of sites. If Google suddenly crawls your site and finds 10,000 extra pages that it had previously ignored, things will change. Likewise if Google suddenly finds a number of ignored pages on other sites that link through to you, things will change. What if Google suddenly finds 3 resources that are better than yours? Things will change.

Test Results

We carried out testing at various stages of the 3 month period where the sandbox was available to gain an insight into things to come. Two things worth mentioning are that we had to use various methods to get comparable results (US proxying, modifying URLs etc.) and the Caffeine sandbox results are slimmed down (no PPC etc.) so currently conclusions have to be taken with a pinch of salt until we can get our hands on the real deal.

Index Size
At the start of testing, the Caffeine index was noticeably bigger than the current Google index. Although we never saw results close to the 7 fold increase seen by the guys at Mashable we did see a noticeable size difference in the amount if results returned. Over the 3 months, the Caffeine index grew slightly but the distance between Caffeine and the current Google index actually shrunk. The number of results returned by Google.com today for Dog is 345,000,000. A lot closer to the 359,000,000 seen by Mashable on Caffeine.

Result Speed
Like others, we saw an increase in speed. This could be explained by the fact that the results set didn’t feature PPC, sitelinks etc. But like the index size, the gap seemed to close which can again be seen from the above example.

Result Accuracy
We didn’t notice any drop in poor quality results worthy of note, not for want of trying and in general, results were very similar across the board. There was a time where social media sites seemed to be getting a boost for certain queries but this again seems to now be reflected in the main index as well.

Conclusion

We are not expecting the initial launch of Caffeine to have a major impact, as at the close of the public sandbox, results were very similar to current results. That being said we have learnt to never take anything for granted. What will be more interesting are the subsequent updates that take place on the back of the Caffeine rollout. Real time, trust, links and content are all still very much at the top of Google’s mind and Caffeine looks set to give them the foundation to delve further into these issues.

Exciting times ahead but for now keep adding worthwhile content, keep engaging and growing your community and keep the links coming.

We would be very interested to hear from anyone else who looked at the Caffeine sandbox closer to the end of its availability and look forward to the day when an IP address is confirmed.

There have been many rumours flying around recently regarding the development of real time search but now, during the opening days of the 2009 Web 2.0 summit, both Microsoft and Google have opened up.

Firstly, Qi Lu (President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division) confirmed rumours that Microsoft had struck a deal with both Twitter and Facebook to use Tweets and status updates within Bing.

Bing’s new Twitter functionality is available at http://www.bing.com/twitter (US only I’m afraid) and shows a tag cloud of the current most popular topics along with the ability to search Twitter which returns the most recent Tweets around your search as well as details of popular links that are being passed around.

This was closely followed by Google’s Marrisa Mayer (Vice President of Search Products and User Experience) announcing that Google will be launching its product, incorporating Tweets directly into Google SERPs within the next few months.

Obviously, comparisons can’t be made until both products are live (no doubt in beta), but things are certainly hotting up regarding real time. I, along with many, wait with baited breath to see both how Google will incorporate real time into its sometimes already cluttered results pages, and also how users will take to this new information on both search engines.

This is, of course, a false mock up. More information from Google can be found at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/rt-google-tweets-and-updates-and-search.html

So it’s time to take a critic look and gauge whether this new campaign is going to hit the mark.

What are the specifics of the current campaign?

The campaign has been developed by WPP owned Ogilvy and is the first global campaign carried out by Yahoo. Funded for the next 15 months the campaign will cost $100m (roughly £60m) and will span traditional media and online channels expected to run until late 2010.

The aim of the campaign is to remind people about Yahoo and hopefully get those of us who have fallen away to take another look at what they have to offer. Ultimately it’s all about getting more people using Yahoo as a hub for online activity so that Yahoo can increase their stake in online display advertising – something that is central to the company since the recent search deal with Microsoft.

Is the campaign likely to achieve its goals?

Exposure-wise there is no avoiding the new campaign. I personally see 5 billboards on my way home from work (4.8 miles) and must have seen the TV advertisement at least 20 times during the hours of the day that I am allowed to choose the channel.

Generally, the campaign has received a cold response with press understandably comparing it against the recent Microsoft campaign to promote Bing, and consumers in the main not understanding the message due to the lack of content and failure to explain the available functionality. The Microsoft campaign of course, was all about promoting the launch of its new Bing search technology, while the Yahoo campaign isn’t really trying to promote anything new in favour of trying to remind people that ‘we are here and we have this great functionality’.

As a whole the campaign is certainly creating a buzz although it doesn’t seem to be very positive. As to whether it will inspire people to give Yahoo another try, the general consensus is no. The chances of such a vague campaign inspiring first time Yahoo users to switch from Microsoft or Google offerings is very slim due to the lack of a definitive message other than ‘the Internet has a new owner and it’s Y!ou’.

Digital research centre OMD recently commented that across its tracked client base (including Royal Mail, easyJet and Peugeot) there has been a consistent increase in ad impressions on the Yahoo network since the launch of the new campaign which implies a rise in traffic to Yahoo but goes on to say that click-through-rates have decreased by roughly 8.4%. Of course the new campaign is still in its infancy and the latest ads are very likely the tip of the iceberg. Only time will tell if this $100m campaign was of value to the Yahoo brand once the initial buzz dies down but initial indicators don’t look good.

We look forward to seeing how the next phase of the campaign will play out and ultimately, the impact it has on Yahoo.

The latest bi-annual report from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) shows that UK online ad spend has risen 4.9% in the first half of 2009 up to £1.75 billon and equates to 23.5% of total UK ad spend. Television advertising now consumes 21.9% of UK ad spend, press display consumes 18.5% and direct mail 11.5%.

This was of course, an inevitable event although few would have predicted that it would occur during a time of recession. The return on investment and measurability of online channels has driven budgets from traditional mediums to their online counterparts with budgets moving from conventional classified ads to online classifieds and a rise on budgets allocated to PPC advertising channels (£1.06 billion) such as Google AdWords.

This report puts the UK as a world leader in terms of market share for online advertising with growth expected to continue through 2010 and 11. Television on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline in spend but with the new product placement rules and a possible end to the recession it is difficult to predict what 2010 has in store.

If you have logged into your Google Webmaster Tools account recently, you may have noticed a new item under Site configuration -> Settings. Welcome to Parameter Handling.

The new Parameter Handling feature of Google Webmaster Tools lets you potentially take control of how Google handles the indexing of pages within your site that contain parameters. Google’s own ‘Learn more’ text gives more info.

So what can you do with the new Parameter Handling functionality?

As Google state, you can create up to 15 rules (that they don’t guarantee to use) on how parameters found within your URLs should be handled. You simply add the parameter name and select Don’t Ignore or Ignore.

So if we used a variable to reorder the elements on a page which means that /page.html and page.html?order=1 are basically the same page with the content reordered, we might want to say ‘Hey Google, save yourself some hassle and us some bandwidth. Ignore pages with the order variable attached.’

And to do this you would simply add order select Ignore and click Save.

What benefit will using Parameter Handling have?

Well it may have none (see the Google ‘Learn more’ text) but what Google are trying to achieve is more efficient crawling. More efficient crawling means that the robots will have more resource to crawl more of your site rather than wasting time on duplicated pages.

How does using this feature compare to the canonical meta tag or 301 redirects?

Well one important thing to remember is that this only applies to Google. Yahoo have supplied similar functionality for a while (which of course may disappear) while Bing haven’t. The canonical meta tag on the other hand should work across all 3 (but seems to be a bit flaky at the moment on Yahoo and Bing). Another benefit of the canonical tag is that it handles all cases in 1 go. No matter what variables get added to the end, the same rule is triggered.

The canonical tag however, doesn’t aid crawling as the page still needs to be crawled and analysed to find the tag in the first place.

Compared to 301 redirects, using this functionality can in some cases be a better choice. Consider a random unavoidable tracking variable. This variable creates the URL /page.html?source=aff123. Now traditionally we might have set up a 301redirect to handle this. 301 redirects have the advantage of passing some link power but they can be hard or sometimes impossible to implement. They can also sometimes play havoc with tracking.

Other things worth a mention

Well the first interesting thing that I noticed was that Google list all of the individual parameters that they have found on any of the URLs for your site they have crawled. In the case of the site I was looking at they found the variables i, referrer, loc, ftype and a few others.

Now you should really know what parameters are being used within your site but there are always going to be times when you don’t and this is a good piece of insight.

One important item to mention (and this applies to 301 redirect, the canonical tag and a whole lot more) is the need to use the functionality correctly. Although this functionality gives a lifeline to people who are non-technical or don’t want to get the techies involved, it can very likely bite you if you set it up incorrectly – so be careful.

And to close, the real solution to all this is to apply various techniques to handle every eventuality. Handle requests for pages with variables at the server via a 301 to the human readable URL. Avoid using old style URLs in your internal navigation. Use the canonical tag and this new functionality in the knowledge that it may be ignored. But don’t just leave it to fate.

Good luck.

SEOMalc.

About Think Visibility

Think Visibility September 2009 (the second Think Visibility conference) hosted and organised by Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson, brought together 200+ attendees and 13 speakers (not including the panel) to discuss and learn about a broad range of subjects from Universal Search to Corporate Blogging.

The Speakers and Talks

The first speaker of the day was Joost de Valk discussing WordPress SEO. Now a few of us had heard Joost speak before on the subject of WordPress SEO and we were all familiar with his blog over at Yoast.com, so we were slightly worried that he might cover old ground. The amazing thing was that Joost had anticipated this himself and addressed this issue at the start of his presentation. He then went on to cover some pretty exciting stuff including optimising images, distributing page elements to get the most out of progressive rendering, caching and a whole lot more.

The next speaker was Julian Sambles from the Telegraph talking about the challenges he faced in bringing online to the forefront of the Telegraph. This subject could have been very dry and corporate but Julian did a fantastic job of bringing the subject to life and gave a great commentary on what, when you think about it, must have been a really difficult job. One thing he highlighted was the need to consider how much time people actually have to do what you need of them with regard to SEO and give them options based on this or a priority list so they can do as much as they can in the time they have.

The final speaker before lunch was Judith Lewis talking about Universal Search. Judith did a fantastic job of stressing the importance of universal search and gave some great ideas for getting the most out of video content, news, images, Google Base and Google Local listings. Oh and Judith gave out chocolate which always goes down well at conferences!

The lunch break saw the unveiling of a mystery and very entertaining panel consisting of Chris Garrett, Al Carlton, Kieran Donoghue and Pa.. Dom with Tim Nash as the host. After witnessing someone nearly being decapitated by a flying t-shirt, the main room was split into 3 separate rooms and we dispersed.

The first of the 3 split sessions saw;

Elaine Forth and her husband give a very honest and informative talk on how they had gone from being the owners of a simple parenting website (http://www.allkids.co.uk) with a whole load of good content, through the affiliate channel and ended up running a business that is looking to turn over £1 million this year.

Fiona Thomson talk about how the F-Pattern is pretty out of date and backed this up with several examples of data from eye tracking studies from major brand sites such as House of Fraser.

And Paul Robinson discussed advanced user analysis techniques and how available data could be used to drive recommendations, cross selling opportunities and user adaptive websites.

The second of the split sessions saw;

Tim Nash talk about Links. Not link building, not analytics but methods of evaluating links and his experiences while researching this subject. Tim’s was one of the more technical talks with discussion around page segmentation techniques and how someone might create various tools. Tim showed and discussed an image from a segmentation tool he had created (the only slide of his with any colour on it) and explained how page segmentation could be used to create a link footprint for a site and could potentially be used by search engines to further granulate the value of links based on their position on a page.

Chris Clarkson’s talk on his trials and tribulations during his affiliate journey; this was a great session telling not only the highs of being an affiliate but also how bad things can get.

And Tom Smith gave an interesting and entertaining presentation (with amusing doodle slides) on where social media websites may be going wrong and how to overcome the mistakes to turn a website into a success.

Tom’s theory on succeeding in social media was to promote ‘selfish media’ first. Promote the benefits and rewards of the user and the social aspects of the website will naturally promote themselves, providing a thriving website. The core of his presentation revolved around explaining several methods of identifying where website interactions were “making you do things you didn’t know you wanted to do” and included methods of improving these interactions by mapping “process beads”(a flow chart of knock on effects of an initial action).

The last of the split sessions, prior to the 3 rooms becoming 1 again saw;

Karyn Fleeting talk about Corporate Blogging. Karyn gave some good advice on what corporate blogs are often missing, the need to breathe life into corporate blogs via a face and humour and the need to assemble processes for handling the issues that sometimes arise such as negative comments, legal issues etc.

Zoe Piper talking about how to win on the content network, in which she provided tips on how to get the most out of the content network aided by cats.
And Rob Manuel provided an insight into his experiences from running what he calls his personal hell, Sickopedia.

With the rooms opened back up the final talk of the day (if you don’t count drunken rants during Drink Visibility) was from Yahoo’s Artur Ortega on the impact of accessibility on the modern office. It was interesting to see how research into disability had lead to so many of the tools and systems we now take for granted and also just how much Bell Laboratories played a part in it all.

Think Visibility as a whole

Think Visibility September 2009 was a success. Dom ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson and his team pulled off a blinding conference, managing to keep it intimate and fun. The only real issue I heard about all day was the printer breaking which slowed down the lanyard production at the start of the day.

The food at the lunch interval was very nice although I would have liked to have known what was in the sandwiches mainly because some of them were amazing and I have it in my head I was eating tuna, mayo and sweet chilli. I would also like to know what was in the Firebox boxes that the lunchtime panel walked out with (looking very shifty). Oh and there is a rumour (probably started by one of my guys) that the cookie area had a sign saying 1 each. If this is true, I’m truly sorry for depriving 4 people of their cookies which incidentally, were cracking.

The next Think Visibility conference will be in March 2010. Hopefully we will see you there.

Why on Earth would I want to keep my pages out of Search Engines?

Yes I know we spend most of our time looking to get more pages into the Search Engines but there are times when we absolutely don’t want a page to be indexed. Sensitive information may be present on a page, the page may be some kind of super secret test, it may be a dev version of an existing page, it may be an unavoidable duplicate of another page or the page may simply be unworthy of indexing such as a page that has the same content as the previous page but in a different order or a login page.

So for whatever reason you decide you don’t want a particular page to feature in a Search Engine, here are a few techniques to aid you in achieving your goal.

Don’t link to it

Yep, not very technical this one. Search engines traditionally discover pages from links on pages they already know about or from other methods of being told about the existence of a page such as an XML sitemap.

So if you don’t link to the page, nobody else links to the page and you make no reference to the page in your XML sitemap Search Engines should never find it.

The problem here is can you guarantee that nobody else will link to it?

Link to it via complex Javascript

Back in the day you could happily link to a page using a simple Javascript link such as;

<a onclick="window.location=‘http://www.site.com/secretpage.html" href="#" ></a> safe in the knowledge that it would be ignored. Now though, Search Engines are able to read Javascript to an extent and pull out URLs so http://www.site.com/secretpage.html would make an appearance in the Search Engines indexes.

Now you need to be a bit more techie with your Javascript so the URL is less obvious such as having a function that assembles a link from an array of characters then sends the user on.

The problem here of course is the reliance on Javascript. How important are the users that don’t have access to Javascript to you? Also, will your technique stand the test of time as Search Engines become even more invasive in their quest for knowledge?

The no-follow tag

No follow doesn’t mean no index. Even if you add rel=nofollow to every link pointing to a page chances are it will still get indexed. No follow is more of a “don’t send any value via this link” message.

Robots.txt

Adding a robots.txt file to the root of your site will allow you to have some level of control over which pages you don’t want Search Engines to index.

By grouping all of you pages into a folder you are able to advise robots that you don’t want them to index anything in that folder.

/secrets/page1
/secrets/page2
/secrets/page3

Could all be handled via adding the lines;
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secrets

The good thing about robots.txt is that it is normally easy to implement via FTP access and Notepad. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t always work. It should work but on some rare occasions Search Engines just seem to ignore it.

For more information on robots.txt visit http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html

Robots meta tag

As discussed above the robots.txt is limited to folders. To apply the same effect to a page you will need to apply a meta tag into the head of the page as below;

or

This tag basically tells robots (Google / Bing / Yahoo) to not index this page but still follow the links for discovery or don’t depending on which version you use.

For more information on the robots meta tag visit http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

Canonicalisation tag

In instances where duplication is the issue, the canonical tag can be used in the head of the page to specify the preferred version. An example might be;

http://www.page.html

http://www.page.html?order=2

http://www.page.html?order=3

All 3 pages have the same information just in a different order. Here you only really want one of these pages to be indexed (or I would anyway) so I can use the canonical tag to say “hey, this page is really just that page so don’t bother with it and look at that page instead” a bit like a 301 redirect but not.

The syntax for this is;

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.page.html “ />

For more info on the canonical tag visit http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/” target=”_blank”>http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/ He even has a video.

Log-ins, forms and other techie solutions

One technical way of keeping a page out of Search Engines is to hide it behind a form element or set your web server to request a login. Search Engines do probe forms in an attempt to get to the information beyond but they don’t go as far as to hack logins etc.

Another techie solution would be to identify Search Engine Robots and disallow them via a header response. This does however rely on your ability to identify the robots and may not stand the test of time.

Possibly the best solutions…

Solutions fit situations with some being overkill for certain situations and with others providing not enough of a guarantee.

For keeping normal web pages out of the index the easiest solution is the use of robots.txt and the robots meta tag. You can also add Javascript linking into the mix if you wish.

For handling unavoidable duplication you can use the canonical tag and you can dynamically add the robots meta tag as required. Using the previous example you could have a piece of code in the head that says;

if (isset($_GET[‘order’]))
{
echo “<meta name=\”robots\” content=\”noindex\”, \”nofollow\” />”;
}


For handling secure information, dev pages and secrets you should really be putting this content behind a log-in either within the site or via the web server as this will stop Search Engines from knowing about it rather relying on them taking the appropriate action.

As always, if you have any other techniques worth a mention or would like to comment on anything I have written then please do.

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

With details of the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo now well and truly publicised (I even saw a piece in The Sun where a page 3 model was discussing what she liked about Bing), it is time to take a look at exactly what this means for the future of UK search, Yahoo and Bing.

29th July 2009 saw confirmation of a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that will result in Microsoft taking ownership of Yahoo’s search activities for the next 10 years. Unlike past attempts to strike a deal with Yahoo from Microsoft and Google, this deal will see no upfront payments to Yahoo in favour of a revenue share model, instead Yahoo will receive 88% of the revenue from ad sales from its own sites for the first 5 years. Although still vulnerable to government regulators (a fate that ended the previous attempt at a Google / Yahoo partnership) the deal looks likely to stick and will have an impact across both businesses and search as a whole.

What’s in it for Yahoo?

Well, on top of the 88% revenue from ad sales on Yahoo properties, Yahoo will also benefit from not having to spend a penny (cent) on developing its own search technology. Initial figures being suggested are an income of $500 million per year and a $200 million per year saving in costs. Moving forward Yahoo will focus on the sale of billboard style advertising (banners, skyscrapers etc.) on the Web as well as developing its search properties to build upon the 550 million or so people that visit them each month.

What’s in it for Microsoft?

Well, firstly it does seem that Microsoft have the sweet end of the stick but they also have the responsibility and risk. By 2012 (or earlier) search across all Yahoo properties will go through Bing, in effect doubling market share in the UK from 4% to 8% and more than trebling market share in the US from 8% to 28%. While this may not seem like a major event given that Google has nearly 90% market share in UK search and 65% in the US, it does create a definitive rival, as it will allow Microsoft to focus their efforts without having to worry about Yahoo.

Paid search will run through Microsoft adCentre although it will no doubt be a huge operation to migrate Yahoo campaigns across.

What’s in it for UK Search?

If we look beyond UK search for a second in favour of the more impressive US figures, it can be seen that Bing is about to become a big player in search. 28% in the US market is a huge foothold from which to further chip away at Google and with the acquisition of the Yahoo search team, Microsoft have a plethora of resource, data and ideas available to further enhance Bing. Future enhancement of Bing combined with the release of Windows 7 (probably with Bing as the default search provider) and the huge marketing budget in excess of $100 million solely aimed at promoting Bing, will no doubt play in Microsoft’s favour putting the ball squarely in their hands. If they make a successful play and truly innovate as they promise, then a rise in market share in the US and the UK is on the cards. If however they fumble, which nobody outside of Google would like to see, then we all know who will be there to pick up the pieces.

For now, nothing changes, but by 2012 Microsoft will achieve a level of exposure in both UK and US search that can’t be ignored, even by people who currently consider Bing, adCentre and Yahoo just not worth the effort.

From competition comes innovation and the coming years in search should be very exciting indeed.

The cold hard truth is that migrating a site is a risk even if it’s simply to a new host. Best case, you take a hit in rankings and traffic for a short period of time, followed by a return and improvement in both. Worst case, your site loses all its traffic and never recovers. As with any risk it needs to be managed effectively and monitored. Here at Epiphany we use a simple 3 stage process to manage most site migrations consisting of data gathering and analysis, the actual migration implementation and the monitoring process or the final result.

Before we get into the details of each stage, it is important to understand roughly what happens when you migrate to a new site with new URLs. So…

What happens if I just replace my old site with a new site with new URLs?

If you simply upload your new site to the server in place of the old then the following is likely to happen (assuming that the old site had some value);

1. Search engines will revisit all the pages of the old site that they have in their indexes and receive 404 errors where the page no longer exists. Over a period of time (usually up to 3 months depending on the strength of incoming links and the index rate of the page) the pages will be removed from the search indexes.
2. In the interim period while the pages are still in the index but 404, users arriving on the site from a listing for any of the missing pages will also receive a 404 and if not handled correctly will likely return to the SERPs page from where they came.
3. Search engines will begin to devalue the links pointing to the pages that now 404 in effect losing all of the links as they no longer point to valid pages. Rankings and traffic may fall away dramatically at this point.
4. Search engines will index the new site pages over time and rankings will start to return but due to the loss of many of the page links, they are likely to fall short of the pre migration rankings.

So, hopefully you can see the importance of a structured migration if you wish to avoid any major impact on your rankings and / or traffic.

Stage 1 – Data Gathering and Analysis

The first stage of the process involves ascertaining the strengths of the current site and exactly what you don’t want to lose. To ascertain what you already have, you need to make a list of each page of your site and document certain attributes. Basic things to consider are the Toolbar PageRank of the page, the number of in-bound links to the page from other sites, the amount of visitors using the page as a landing page, whether the page ranks for any of your major traffic driving terms and whether it is indexed.

This information can be gathered from Google Analytics, a bit of searching and Webmaster Tools. The result should be something similar to:

As you can see, I have added 2 additional columns entitled “Keeper” and “Action”. Here you record whether the page has enough value to warrant any action and what the action should be. The metrics for gauging whether a page is a keeper or not is relative to the site. If the site only has 20 pages then it is a relatively small operation to handle all 20 in the best possible fashion. If however the site is 100,000 pages plus, you are going to need to filter your list to make the best use of your resources. If none of your blog articles are indexed then why bother setting up redirects to your new blog section etc.

From the table above, I have chosen to keep all of the pages in the top section as they receive a considerable amount of traffic, they are indexed, they rank for important terms and they all have links pointing to them from other sites. In an ideal world any URL marked as a keeper would simply be replicated in the structure of the new site as individual URLs can (be said to) have history. There are, however, instances where this is impossible such as a radical re-categorisation or a major overhaul of the site structure, here you either need to 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL or 301 redirect the old URL to the most appropriate page on the new site. The key here is to 301 as the power of the old URL will, in time, pass to the new – as will visitors still using the old URL.

The lower part of the table shows pages that have less value in terms of search. Here the 2 print pages have little to no value as they have no incoming links, no PageRank and no traffic. These can be left to 404 within the new site. It is also arguable that the privacy, contact and delivery pages could be left to 404 but chances are they have a direct counterpart in the new site making redirection simple.

As mentioned, you will have to come up with your own metric for disguarding pages but generally if it isn’t indexed it can be canned, if it has no traffic it can be canned and if it has no incoming links, no PageRank and holds no important rankings it can be canned. The main purpose of this exercise is to identify all the definite keepers.

Armed with this list of keepers we can move on to stage 2.

Stage 2 – Migration Implementation

As mentioned previously the best option is to have the equivalent page on the new site on the same URL as the old. This of course is rarely possible on changes that are anything more than a simple re-skin.

So for every keeper page on the list we need to find either the equivalent on the new site or the most appropriate landing page should there be no equivalent.

We then need to implement a 301 redirect to handle each of keeper pages so that any request for them is correctly forwarded via a 301 Permanent Redirect to the desired page on the new site.

Next we need to ensure the pages on the new site that we are redirecting to contain the necessary information to maintain any rankings. In the case of like for like pages e.g. /cakes/cheesecakes.php on the old site and /our-range/cakes/cheese.php both of which contain the details of the available cheesecakes, this is as simple as ensuring the Meta Title () is ported from the old to the new or is very similar and the actual textual content is identical or similar.

In instances where there is no like for like page e.g. /cakes/cheesecakes.php on the old site which talks about the cheesecake range and /our-range/cakes.php on the new site which talks about all the different cakes available it is necessary to ensure target terms are included in the Meta Title of the new page and within the copy for example by having a paragraph that talks solely about cheesecakes.

Next we need to ensure we have implemented an appropriate 404 page that firstly passed a 404 Page Not Found response and secondly provides useful navigation and content to persuade at least some visitors to remain on the site and have a go at finding the content they were expecting.

Then we need to create 2 XML sitemaps. One of these should simply contain all of the new URLs within the site. The second of these should contain all the new URLs and all of the old URLs of the keeper pages. We then resubmit the second of these sitemaps to the search engines to speed up the rate in which the search engines re-index the old URLs and find the 301 redirects.

Finally, if you are moving to a new domain you can now tell Google all about it through the Webmaster Tools console as illustrated below:

This should (why do I feel the need to add a disclaimer here) speed up the process of Google replacing the old site with the new, although at this time, I haven’t yet tested it as it only went live a week ago.

One other thing you can do is contact the owners of the sites that are now linking to pages that were not on the keeper list and try to get them to modify their link to point to a more appropriate page that actually renders.

Having taken all this action you may be thinking what happens now. So…

What happens now I have replaced my old site with a new site with new URLs but implemented a proper plan for the migration?

What should now happen is:

1. The search engines attempt to re-index the pages they already have in their indexes and are told via 301 redirects that the page has permanently moved to a new location. They then update their indexes replacing the old pages with the new.
2. Any visitors who have bookmarked old pages will simply be shown the new page as will any visitors who arrived via a listing for an old page while the search engine indexes are still updating.
3. The power of the links pointing to the old pages deemed keepers is passed through the 301 redirect and attributed to the new page (Google seems to handle this well while Bing and Yahoo are less reliable).
4. Rankings, users and traffic are minimally affected by the whole process.

On to stage 3.

Stage 3 – Monitoring

If you follow the advice above there should be no unforeseen problems but it is still wise to monitor the process just in case.

At the start of the process you should run a site: or similar on Google, Bing and Yahoo to record the number of pages that each search engine has from the old site in its index. You should also record your search rankings for all of your major traffic driving terms along with details of the pages that are actually ranking for them on the old site.

Once the new site is live you should review this information every 2 days along with your Google Webmaster Tools account to ensure any issues are addressed as they arise. You should also make a record of the actual number of pages within your new site to see how well it is getting indexed.

What you should see in a healthy migration is:

A fall in the number of indexed pages from the old site in each of the search engine indexes; A rise in the number of indexed pages from the new site in each of the search engine indexes; A slight dip in rankings and traffic followed by a recovery; Ranking pages should switch from old URLs to new as per the 301 redirects rather than different pages all together.

Things to look out for are rankings that simply disappear (you may not have taken this ranking into consideration and should do so ASAP); a falling old page count without a rise in the number of new pages indexed (you may have created spidering problems in your new site or copied an inappropriate robots.txt file over from the development server); and/or a large number of 404 errors reported within your Webmaster Tools account.

Unless your site is considered very important in the grand scale of things by the search engines (PR 7+ although even this doesn’t guarantee importance) it can take up to 3 months for things to settle down and bed in. Search engines have to revisit your pages, update their indexes and redistribute power based on your new structure. All these things take time especially on large sites with deep structures or sites with mediocre value.

Other Advise

This mainly covers the migration of a site to another with different URLs. The same principles can be applied to changes of domains although if the site remains the same it is simply a case of 301 redirecting everything to the new domain with no need to leave anything 404ing. The main issue here is the difference between the old and the new domains with regard to age, history etc. Generally if an aged domain is better than a new one and if the old domain has had similarly themed content on it before then it’s a winner.

One thing that I hear more often than I should is we can’t keep the old URLs because we have changed the underlying technology, this, in the majority of cases, is actually we can’t do that as we can’t be bothered, we didn’t understand the request or we don’t actually understand web servers etc. It doesn’t matter if your site uses ASP, PHP, Coldfusion or just plain HTML, your web server should still be able to be set up to use .goat, .extension or even no dots at all.

When moving host it can be a little tricky to foresee any potential issues. As a rule we recommend hosting in the target country especially if you are not using a TLD specific to the country. There are a number of other things that you can do to aid with targeting a specific country but they go beyond the boundaries of this post. Oh and make sure you know exactly where the server your site is sat on is hosted. I know of many UK sites that rank very well in Google.de but get no UK traffic. I would tell you the host in question but I’m sure you can all put 1 and 1 together to get the answer. Also you could but up a random site on both hosts and monitor load times to ensure the hosts perform appropriately (more important with small hosting outfits and cheap hosting etc.).

Why did we create 2 XML sitemaps?

Oh yeah! Once you are confident that the old pages have disappeared from the search engine indexes you can switch over to the smaller sitemap which will completely cut the cord. I wouldn’t recommend dropping the 301 redirects though as although search engines have updated their data, chances are your link partners haven’t, neither have your users.

Good luck, take your time and don’t panic.

Malcolm Slade

Five things really matter when it comes to links. The power passed by the links from the host page to the destination, the trust of the host domain, the anchor text used, the relevance of the host page compared to the destination page and the overall spread of links into the site.

The power passed by the host page to the destination can be gauged in its simplest form by finding the PageRank of the page and counting the number of internal and external links on that page. Dividing the PageRank by the number of links will give you a very basic metric of how much value is in each link. PageRank 0 pages can be a problem here but as a general rule, I would consider the fact that the page is indexed in Google (if it is) enough to upgrade it to a 1.

The trust of the host domain is a little harder to ascertain and requires a bit of common sense. Key considerations should be taken into account – does the host domain have many powerful links pointing to it? Does it have a high PageRank? Does it rank for important keywords in your industry? Do you trust it as an authority in the particular industry?

Anchor text has always been an important part of linking. Generally, a link will pass power into the site and in doing so strengthen all terms targeted within the sites copy and architecture. A link with targeted anchor text will pass the same power but will directly reinforce the power on that particular term.

The relevancy of the host page to the destination site is fairly easy to gauge. Basically, if the page discusses something that relates to the page of your site and most of the page is relevant, this will improve your link optimisation.

The overall spread of links into the site refers to variety of destination landing pages and the variety of anchor text. Not something you can easily see but with a bit of effort you can grasp where your links are pointing and the overall mix of anchors used. Firstly you will need a list of the host pages that have links pointing to your site. This information can be found by using Google Webmaster Tools under the Link -> ‘Pages with External Links’ navigation as shown below, or by using Yahoo Site Explorer to see the links that Yahoo deems to point to your site.

Now you need to review each link and list the anchor it uses, the PageRank of the host page, the number of links on the host page and the destination page. There are free tools available that can do some of this work for you such as Bulk PageRank Checkers, with a bit of programming knowledge you can even code something to extract this data automatically. In the end you should have is a spreadsheet with a list of URLs, anchors, PRs, Page links, relevancy, destination pages and any other metric you deem relevant.

With this information we can now look to optimise our links.

Ideally, what you want is a spread of links into your site weighted towards the homepage and main landing pages that you aim to rank with. On top of this you need a spread of anchors to ensure your backlink profile conforms to some sort of normality. As an example, a page talking about mortgages might have anchors including mortgages, mortgage, UK mortgages, mortgage loans, click here, your URL, your company name. This anchor spread (no pun intended) should be subjective to your main terms for the particular pages but should not be exclusive. A site with 100% of its links using one anchor pointing to the same page is doomed to be seen as unnatural by search engines and likely to incur penalties or filtering.

To optimise your existing link profile you need to look at how to improve each link. You may find a link that sits on a poor page; a pleasant email to the site owner with recommending a more appropriate page might be enough to get this moved. Upgrading a listing within a strong directory might elevate your link from a page buried in the category to the PageRank 4 root of that category. You may have a relationship with certain sites through sponsorship, a shared passion for a subject or sheer friendship. This can be leveraged to allow you to control the anchor text used and the page your link sits on.

Of course, you won’t be able to optimise every single link. There will be plenty you have no control over or have less value than the effort of optimising them (hence the need to form metrics to gauge where to stop). This exercise is definitely worthwhile and should certainly form part of your link strategy. You can achieve outstanding results just by being creative with your existing links, having the time to analyse what could be improved upon and having the nerve to ask for change.

I’m afraid there is no holy grail for link optimisation or even link building but I hope this has given you some insight into the value of reviewing your existing links as part of your ongoing link building campaign. To further push this home I will provide a couple of examples of my own past successes. Names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I had a client whose site was awful. It was built on an archaic platform with zero flexibility and had an inability to implement even the simplest SEO recommendation. The site domain was very old and had enough links etc. to gain a PageRank of 6. Results for any term not targeted towards the homepage seemed impossible.

So I took some time to analyse their existing backlinks. This was a long process as they had a lot but the task was ultimately rewarding. Eventually I found a single link from an article on the Telegraph website. When looking at the link I discovered that the client had several banners on the page and on further investigation, I found that the client had banners through a whole section of the Telegraph website. I queried this with the client who then challenged this himself and found that he sponsored a section of the Telegraph site, allowing him to have banners in return for business insight, opinion and regular content. After a few conversations with the client and the telegraph I was able to replace one of the skyscraper banners with a stylised block of service descriptions and links through to the client’s site. There were five in total covering the five main service areas (and keywords) for the client’s site. Within two weeks of putting this new block in place, the client ranked on the first page of Google for all five of the used anchors and several other variants.

Upon analysing a different client’s backlinks, I found that they had a large number of links from a number of sites all using their brand logo as the anchor. Armed with a list and a visual mock of how I would prefer these sites to link I approached the client to discuss my strategy. They informed me that to sell their product line the other sites were supposed to link to them using the logo but they had no way of auditing this. We concluded that a push to enforce this rule and to implement the new linking style that I devised was the way forward. Over the following months we contacted every supplier and talked them through the changes, helping were necessary with code, implementation etc. The result was not only an increased number of links (a large number of sites were simply not linking to the client) but also top 3 rankings for the phrases used as anchors, oh and a very happy client.

So, if you carry out this exercise and gain nothing from it then I am sorry, if nothing else you now have a better understanding of your backlink profile. But for those who find an opportunity within their existing links I am glad to have brought this to your attention.

Best of luck

At heart, I am a code monkey. I love to code. Some of my strongest memories of my childhood revolve around sitting with my Grandfather, inputting reams and reams of code into a BBC Model B and spending the following month debugging it. So when Google finally released its Analytics API as a public beta (cough) I immediately started considering what I could do with it and how.

Now to clarify, this isn’t a technical post and I won’t discuss my actions or intentions. At the moment, I have had little more than a play around – so sorry! I plan to do a basic guide style post in the future, which will be much more technical (if it hasn’t already been exhausted by then), but for now I will just review the history, potential and some of the stuff that’s already happening.

Background

Since its launch as a free analytics package in 2005, Google Analytics has become immensely popular. It has its limitations much like any other analytics package but through recent developments including the switch from urchin.js to ga.js and the addition of custom filtering it has become a pretty solid platform – a platform that provides access to a hell of a lot of information and varying ways of viewing it.

In a way, one of the positives with Google Analytics is, in turn, a flaw. By providing access to such an abundance of data, reports, filtering options etc. it has become inoperative to some and even clunky to navigate at times.

About a year ago, Google first announced its API as a private beta project open to a select few. It has now come into the light as a public beta project (God only knows if it will ever come out of beta) with similar limitations to most other APIs, such as a maximum of 10,000 requests by a given web property (presumably IP address) and 100 requests within a 10 second period. Whether these limitations will be eased in the future as other popular applications arise I don’t know, but at the moment, it isn’t stopping people being extremely creative and investigating the true potential.

What does this all mean?

Basically, by producing an API, Google have provided access to all the information present within Google Analytics without the need to use the standard Google Analytics interface. This means the data can be viewed in even more ways and reduced to the essential information. Your imagination is the limit well, apart from the request limits, coding restrictions…..

Potential uses

At launch, Google provided interfaces for Javascript and Java. Already several very clever people have expanded this via user contributed libraries for Python, PHP, .NET and more. Most languages have graph plotting extensions and bolt-ons such as JPGraph for PHP by now. So in theory, you create an application that authenticates itself with Google Analytics, requests data, manipulates the returned data and visualises it in a graph, a chart, or any other appropriate fashion.

I may want a box on my website detailing where my latest visitors come from, which of my blog posts are the most popular, what words people use to visit my site etc. Some noted applications already developed are;

• http://www.analyticsmarket.com/mobileapps/mobile-ga/android – An app for easy access to Google Analytics via Android.
• http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html – An Adobe Air based desktop app for quick and easy access.
• http://labs.nypl.org/2009/04/29/visualizing-search-data-whats-the-right-amount-of-visibility/ – The New York Library are looking at how to visualise their search data as tag clouds.

There is also a list containing some of these and more at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataGallery.html.

As you can see some people have already put considerable time into their ideas and I would expect this to continue with some really revolutionary stuff coming soon from reskins to complete outside of the box utilities.

I know I can’t wait to put some time aside to mash something together using JPGraph or similar with PHP to see what I get.

Malcolm Slade

Resources

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataDeveloperGuide.html – The official documentation area.
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/google-analytics-api-and-php/ – The stuff I have been reading regarding using PHP.
http://www.aditus.nu/jpgraph/, http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php, http://graphpite.sourceforge.net/ – some of the popular graph creation tools one of which I will very likely be using.

As of yesterday morning, they seem to be popping up all over the place based on IP address, as can be seen in this example for the search “casino”.

So what does this mean?

Well, even more of the natural listing space is now taken up by non traditional listing making places near the bottom of the first page even less attractive. Local businesses featured within Google Local Business should get a nice boost in traffic while businesses outside of the area are likely to see a drop off especially if they rank below the local search box.

Do I like it?

Well to be honest no. I’m a bit of a purest and would prefer to see some form of opt-in for local results where a location isn’t specified as Google is kind of taking for granted the fact I am not willing to travel etc.

What should we do?

Well getting you self into Google Local is a good start. Beyond this I wouldn’t worry too much at the moment as this may simply be a brief experiment that will never see mainstream daylight.

My location is wrong!

Well luckily Google have provided a helpful link to modify your location as let’s face it, the science of matching users to locations via their IP addresses is flawed.

What searches does this affect?

Well without spending too much time researching (sorry, I’m a busy guy), it seems that only service style searches are affected e.g. “Pubs”, “Cinemas”, “Web Design” etc. Product style searches seem to have remained the same e.g. “Mortgages”, “Blue Widgets”*

Let’s see how this one turns out!

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

*Wouldn’t it be funny if “Blue Widgets” had some local results. Well I thought so.

In an ideal world, you would create a website, furnish it with some well-written thought-provoking content and whizz your way to the top of the rankings due to the influx of people finding your content and linking to it. Your site is a success, your company makes loads of money and your boss gives you a promotion. Your life rocks!

In the real world, you spend absolutely ages trying to write something thought-provoking about mortgages and end up with a typical mortgage guide, you put your new site live, your work colleagues, scrapers and spammers are the only people to visit and you try desperately to pitch the exercise as a success to your boss who then makes you redundant as part of a new cost-cutting exercise brought on by the fact no mortgages are being taken out through the website. Your life fails to rock!

The fact is we don’t live in an ideal world. Search engines only use content as part of their ranking algorithm. Other sites are already at the top of search results and are gaining momentum because of this. Some subjects are already written to death.

If we were able to remove all links from the web, press the reset button on all search indices and get all the seed sites to review every site on the web and link to the best (as a starting point for spidering etc.), then there is a chance that the crème de la crème would rise to the top naturally.

Or if we switched our focus away from the currently popular search engines to a new (currently fictitious) search engine that solely used text as its ranking factor and was ungameable. Then the best written, most appropriate content would rise to the top naturally.

Oh what a world…

Are you saying “Content is pointless”?

God, no! Please don’t be that guy. As an SEO consultant, I spend far too much of my time trying to convince site owners to actually add content to their new site design alongside the rounded corners, nice logo and picture of a woman with a headset on. Tell visitors what you do, tell them about your services, tell them about your products, maybe even let them tell you and each other. Oh and tell them where they land, not on some page five clicks away.

Content is a very important ranking factor. If written correctly, it tells the search engines what your site is about, and adds to stickiness and visitor confidence. Alongside good architecture, structure, external links and promotion, it will put you in good stead to rank within search. I have no doubt that all other things being the same, a well written piece of structured copy featuring the correct keywords will rank higher than a wishy-washy sentence or two. But when are all other things the same? Even if they are, they never say the same for long.

What I am trying to say is “Content is King!” is not enough. I have however found a way of explaining content which actually allows “Content is King!” to still be used as long as it backed up with the rest of the explanation.

Here comes the science bit!

So content is king if you think in terms of chess. I will endeavour to explain.

• In chess, you need a king to play and if you lose your king you lose the game. You need some form of content to rank in search. If you lose your content (you have no site), you can’t rank.
• If you only have a king, you can only get a non-loss outcome from a game of chess by forcing a draw. This is very hard to do. In search you can only get rankings with content alone in very niche subjects and long-tail terms.
• You can only win a game of chess with a king and some other pieces.** Content, and the use of other ranking factors will get you rankings. Good links are definitely a queen, the title tag is maybe a rook and so on. Notice I haven’t used pawns in my analogy as pawns are pretty darn powerful and can be upgraded. Try marrying that back to a ranking factor.

My memories of various Jakob Nielsen articles are screaming at me, saying I am about to lose you now as you have read enough, so I will conclude. Content is only part of the solution and the term “Content is King!”, stands in the context of chess but not in the context of a monarchy. In terms of a monarchy, links are king as from experience you can make any old crap rank if you point the correct links at it.

I hope this blog post helps at least one person understand the role of content better and I bid you adieu.

Malcolm Slade / SEOMalc

* I didn’t really create a baseball field, and the cats that do frequent my herb garden certainly don’t play baseball.
** Easier with a queen, even easier with a full side, pretty darn hard with just one pawn.

Ideally a site should only render under a single domain to avoid any problems with duplicate content. Although Google claims this is no longer an issue, evidence shows otherwise with pages from many domains being indexed with the www and without. For some this causes no real problems, for others it can cause a complete nightmare with duplicate content causing major pages to disappear and rankings vanishing over night.

In either case with the fix being relatively simple (especially if you own the server / have admin access / use a competant web host) there is no excuse.

So to cover this topic I will define two hypothetical problems and document how to solve them.

Situation 1

I have a site running on IIS 6 that suffers from canonicalisation.

Problem 1

My site renders as http://www.mysite.com and http://mysite.com. I want it to only render with the www extension and handle anyone using the non-www properly rather than showing them a 404 page.

Solution 1

Open IIS Manager and create a new site profile for the non-www version of the site. The IP address and port should be the same, as should the home directory. Set the host header (which should be www.mypoorlysite.com for the main site) to mypoorlysite.com avoiding the www. Now complete the process and select finish.

Open the properties of the newly created non-www site profile. Select the [Home Directory] tab. Select [A redirection to a URL]. In the [Redirect to:] field enter the full URL of the final domain i.e. http://www.mypoorlysite.com.

Finally tick the box labelled [A permanent redirection for this resource], which switches it from a 302 to a 301 redirect.

Click apply and that it. If all is correct, http://mypoorlysite.com should now 301 redirect to http://www.mypoorlysite.com.

Situation 2

I have a site that has several domains pointing to it all of which suffer from canonicalisation. I’m running on IIS 6 and have set up a separate Website through this for each all pointing to the same folder.

Problem 2

My site renders for each of the domains and also for the non-www version of each of the domains. Here the problem goes beyond the www / non-www issue mentioned above as several domains are also in use i.e. www.mysite1.com, www.mysite2.com, www.mysite3.com etc.

I want everything to redirect correctly to www.mysite1.com including the non-www versions.

Solution 2

Firstly implement the solution 1 for www.mysite1.com. With this in place visit the properties of each of the other domains. Select the [Home Directory] tab. Select [A redirection to a URL]. In the [Redirect to:] field enter http://www.mysite1.com.

Finally tick the box labelled [A permanent redirection for this resource], which switches it from a 302 to a 301 redirect.

Click apply and that it. If all is correct, the www and non-www versions of the domain you are redirecting should now 301 redirect to http://www.mysite1.com.

Useful Tools

Google Webmaster Tools – Here you can set your preferred choice as to whether Google should use the www or non-www version of your site. Sounds OK put personally I would rather sort that myself.

Redirect Checker – A handy tool for checking your redirect is a 301.