Image above: search result on google for searchengineland.com
Have any of you started to notice the new Google trend URL page results showing up in the SERPs? Here are a few examples:
It is only a few days since Google launched the Google trends for websites and already Google is often ranking in the top 10 with the Google trend URL pages that are indexed.
IMO: this is not a bad thing: for most URLs the pages really do offer good information. The information provided on the Google trend pages is far more useful then the information provided by many of the other competing URL sites, you know aboutus.org etc.
Also IMO: I am guessing this is a mistake on Google’s part and that they will robots.txt out the Google trend pages.
Update: Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise has noticed exactly the same thing, click on the link below to visit his post:
Google Trends indexing website URL’s & ranking for brand queries
Update:As I suspected they would do, Google have robots.txt out the pages now. I guess it is a good job I am here to keep my eye on these things for them.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 24th, 2008
Up until about 2-3 months ago I was only aware of two real Google penalties. The outright ban, where a site will be completely removed from the Google index and the minus 40-60 penalty.
About 2-3 months ago I started talking to a local company about helping them with their SEO. It looked like they wanted to do something and they were just thinking things over. Next the guy called me up and said that all of his Google rankings had disappeared and that the only thing his site was coming up for was the name. The site came up no.1 for his two word company name and no.1 for the domain. However all of the other positions the site had with the homepage, albeit not good ones had disappeared. Even when I tried searching for some unique text off the homepage in quotes it did not come up. So I asked the guy a couple of questions, you know – have you made any changes recently that could have caused this to happen? etc. The guy said that the only thing he could think of was that he had placed a load of area names on the bottom of the homepage in tiny text so that no body could see. I said “bingo, that is why the site is penalised, you put hidden text on”. He got rid of the hidden text, I told him what to say to Google on the reinstatement request and his site was back to where it was previously within a week.
Again about 2-3 months ago I started to work on this new site and I came up with a temporary solution to get some link juice into the category pages. This was totally my fault and looking back it was really bad and stupid. This is the only time I have ever got a client penalised by any search engine. The site had about 130 categories and I placed an SEO friendly drop down menu on the homepage and the rest of the pages to the 130 categories. I saw some progress with the rankings initially, but around a week later the site got hit with the exact same penalty, this time it was not just the homepage that got hit, it was all of the pages where I had placed the drop down menu. It was ranking for the company name with and without Ltd, the domain and that was it. I was scared as hell, I had to tell this guy that I had got his site penalised. I spoke to the owner about it and he was so cool you have no idea, it is a good job I choose my clients carefully. Now technically I had done nothing wrong, but it looked seriously spammy – I showed it to a friend and he said “no wonder you got penalised, you’ve got hidden text, hidden links and keyword stuffing” (not technically right, but that is what it looked like). I am still waiting for the developers to finish the new site on this one. Once the site is finished I will ask the owner to send a reinstatement request, hopefully Google will forgive me for being so aggressive.
Weather this is a new penalty or not I do not know. It is different to the minus penalty because when pages are hit they do not show up anywhere, no matter what. It is different to the outright ban because affected sites stay in the index and rank for their own names. Have any of you ever seen a penalty like this? It can definitely be applied for hidden text, it could possibly be applied for hidden links or keyword stuffing.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2008
Image Credit: google bot
So it’s been nearly two weeks since I re-launched this site and Google has still yet to pick the two new services pages. About a year or so ago the Googlebot would have picked those pages up in a couple of days easily.
The blog is getting crawled fine and I am sure that this post will be indexed within a couple of hours of me posting. It just seems to be regular web-pages that are getting neglected by Google. This could possibly be because the Googlebot is paying too much attention to blogs etc. in my opinion.
It is not just this site’s regular web-pages that do not get crawled as fast any more. I work on many websites and generally Google does not seem to be picking stuff up as fast.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 7th, 2008
I am pleased to report that this morning when I attempted to go to http://www.yahoo.com I was redirected to the UK version http://uk.yahoo.com.
It was just the other week when I was complaining about this not working properly and I think Brian mentioned it in his Yahoo! rant somewhere.
I have got a couple of clients who rank fairly well on the UK Yahoo! for some pretty decent phrases who up until now have only been getting a couple of hundred uniques a week from it. It will be interesting to see if this improves things. I know for a fact that Yahoo.com can send some good traffic, it is just the UK version that up until now has never really sent any.
I do not know if this is working in other countries or not yet, it could just be UK IP addresses that are getting redirected.
Update: Flyerguy over at Webmaster World has confirmed that German IP addresses that visit Yahoo.com are now being redirected to http://de.yahoo.com. It looks like the changes could have been made worldwide.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 15th, 2008
O.K. I am going to pick on The Times because it is funny. On Sunday they published an article entitled Searching to get to the top of Google.
Most of the article is O.K. and it is nice to see SEO getting mentioned in a major newspaper, however some of their facts are a little off.
On the 3rd page of the article it says the following:
“As well as using appropriate vocabulary, a website also needs to be well-networked to gain traction. Links to esteemed websites such as the BBC or a national newspaper act as advocates for its content, boosting its ranking with Google.”
There is a common miss-conception that linking to authoritative websites can boost a website’s rankings in the search engines and I have spoken to many people who have thought this before. This is of course not true, linking to a website can improve it’s rankings, linking out from one cannot.
This has got to be great linkbait for the BBC and the all of the National newspapers, I can just see all the Sunday Times readers going out and linking them now. Who knows, maybe they made the mistake on purpose.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
May 6th, 2008
