I have been really busy working this week so I haven’t had chance to do a proper post. There are a few things I want to talk about though:
Advertising
I am now running adsense on the site. Sorry about that. I just like the idea of getting free money, even if it is not a lot. I think if you want your ads to show up on this site you can select it with Google adwords or something, but I am not 100% sure. Other then that I am open to offers, I will sell a banner on the frontpage of this site if the money is right. No text links or anything though - I know it sucks.
According to Google Analytics this site has had 20,833 mainly very highly targeted visitors in the last 30 days. Although admittedly this Watch-Movies.net SEO review has accounted for about 5,000 of those.
Please drop me a mail, if you are interested in advertising on this site.
The Times Got Their PageRank Back
I 1st noticed this yesterday, it is nice to see some good has come out of the authority sites with a PageRank penalty post.
Directory Listings
I have started to make a UK SEO directory and a web designers directory.
The SEO one is already quite comprehensive - I have listed most of the better whitehat-ish UK companies that I know about in there. Please feel free to drop me a mail if you would like a listing, but I am very strict. You wont here back from me either way, if I think your site is the real deal it will be listed.
The web design one I just need listings for - I know different people like different things. I do however have some standards, if your own website has 120+ coding errors on the homepage it does not look good. People like me have to clean up these messes and it is not my idea of a cool Friday night. An error or two here and there I don’t mind and I would probably not reject you purely on bad code, especially if you have good graphic design skills or something. But take note, it is part of the quality score - a bit like Google’s algo. Just send me a mail if you want me to check out your UK web design site.
Buy Linkbait Online
Visit our linkbait services page to buy a piece of linkbait online for £999 through Google Checkout. It says we will take a week to make it, but the truth is we have quality writers just waiting to write some linkbait for your site right now - we will probably have it done in 3 days. We have dropped the price to £999 to try and bring in some sales. Visit the page for details of what you get with the service. We have been consistently getting good results for some time now. For most medium to large sized sites it is well worth it, I had my doubts, but I have seen the benefit now. It takes time, but when well optimised sites start to build authority they can fly.
Awesome Links
I never end up linking to any of the stuff I want to link to, so here are 10 really cool blog posts from this last week - not just SEO.
I will try to get a couple of more substantial posts out next week.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
July 24th, 2008
This article has been published with Mr Fishkin of SEO Moz’s permission.
I was just reading Ciarans article about those scum bags, The Guardian, who I used to like:
Why Doesn’t The Guardian Like SEO?
I noticed Ciarans badge, saying that he is one of the judges for the SEOmoz web 2.0 awards, and for some reason I decided to check out if the awards page was doing any better, or worst on Google. It ranked between 8th and 12th on web 2.0 for a long time. But I could not find the page anywhere, and even when I typed in web 2.0 awards the page was nowhere to be seen.
I am not 100% sure why the page is not ranking, but it looks and feels like the page has been penalised or duped out. Why might Google have penalised the page? The only thing I can think of is that it might be something to do with them giving out badges to the winners that link to the awards page - this may have tripped some sort of filter.
The awards are highly successful and have generated many thousands of links back. The badges that the winners have on their sites can be found here:
If the page is properly penalised, it is a particularly harsh move by Google if you ask me. I mean people have ran awards and given out badges to the winners for years. I think this sort of marketing ads value to the web and I do not think it should be thrown in with pay day loan, text link widgetbait etc.
Also worth knowing: I am fairly sure that the awards page had a Google PageRank 7/10 not too long ago. For me it is showing up as a gray bar.
Update: SEOmoz have been in touch with Google and found out why the page has stopped ranking. In the following post Jane Copland explains what happened:
Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don’t End URLs in .0
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 12th, 2008
Watch-movies.net is without doubt the leader in online movies. The Alexa ranking for the site is in the top 300 and according to Compete, the site is getting around one million visitors per day. Why is the site doing so well? Because of good search optimisation.
In my opinion Watch-Movies.net is a very well optimised site, and whoever created it must be a genius. It is easy to see why the site dominates its niche so well, it is by no means a looker but it is incredibly easy to use.
The Rating System
One of the many things that sets it apart from the competition is the rating system in place. I am not too sure weather the site is using Drupal, Wordpress or something else, but it is fantastic. Users can view ratings for or rate any of the following:
- The movies
- The copies of the movies
- The comments on the movies (well, you can report them if they are bad anyway)
It sounds simple, but no other online movie site that I have seen offers ratings for all of these different things, I would imagine that they really do help the users a lot.
One Page For Each Movie
Another major thing that sets this site apart is the fact that there is only ever one page for a movie. Again this sounds simple, but if you look at all of the competition, many have multiple pages for each movie. Finding the right movie is often a nightmare. With Watch-Movies.net you have all of the copies for each movie on a single page, and then of course you have the ratings, so the users know which is going to be the best copy to visit.
Searching The Site
Searching for the movie you are looking for could not be simpler - if you know what you want type it into the search box and it will bring it up. If you do not know what you are looking for, you can browse movies by any of the following:
- Release date
- Movie type
- Best ratings in new release
Also, featured movies are shown throughout the site, and when you are browsing individual movie pages related movies are shown on the right hand side.
The User Comments
Finally the comments are managed incredibly well for a site of that size, there are no swear words and the users seem to be surprisingly friendly.
The site does do well on Google, if you search for watch before or after many of the movie titles you will see the site coming up. However a website of this quality deserves to be ranked far higher. If you search for a movie title on its own, the site will not usually make the top few pages. If I were Google, this is what I would have the top 5 looking like for movie titles. Like Michael Gray I believe that the official movie site should be ranked no.1.
- Official movie site
- IMDB listing
- Wikipedia I suppose
- Somewhere to buy it, Amazon or something
- Watch-movies.net page
Movie fans would probably never have to venture outside of the top 5 results. Instead you have review after review, with the odd place where you can buy it for more money than Amazon, or whatever whoever is at #4 is charging.
Never the less, the Watch-movies.net site is a brilliant piece of work and I would imagine that using the site is absolute bliss. I am sure that sooner or later the site will start getting the credit it deserves. I challenge anyone to find me a movie fan who wouldn’t want this site to come up in the top 5 - MPAA employees don’t count.
Watch-Movies.net includes everything you need for watching a movie, including different versions and copies, on one single dedicated page for that movie. And then of course you have user ratings, so you can instantly see weather or not the film is any good and which is going to be the best copy to visit.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 11th, 2008
A little while ago I read the following thread over at SEOmoz:
Results of Google Experimentation - Only the First Anchor Text Counts
This made me panic a bit, because it would have meant that the footer link I had on this blog was not helping my homepage rank. I think someone mentioned in the discussion that even if the 1st link was nofollowed, it would still be the only one that counted. This would have meant that I was supposed to be completely shafting myself.
I got rid of the 1st links to the homepage altogether hoping to see a rise in Google for my main phrase, but I did not. I did however rise over 60 places, within less then a week or so on MSN/Live search.
I wanted to know for sure with Google, so when I 1st changed over my design less then a week ago, I made it so that every post in this blog linked to the about us page, with my name as the anchor text. I have just checked today and it is ranking 4th on Google UK, just behind my Yahoo! post.
- The 1st anchor text always says about
- There is very little on-page for it, other then the links in these posts
- There are other pages with far more David Eaves links (external ones)
- There are no external links to that page using that anchor text
My conclusion: Google does not only look at the 1st link to a page for anchor text, MSN/Live search does and I am not too sure about Yahoo!
Good advice and practice from SEOmoz anyway though, if only for MSN. Why take a chance on it? Make sure that you have your good anchor text in the 1st links to your pages.
Update: Seeing how VanDeMar seems to be the one who started this whole thing off, here is a link to his original post:
You May Be Screwing Yourself With Hyperlinked Headers
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 2nd, 2008
I have been working hard over the last week or so, on the new design for this site. I have still got a long way to go, but I certainly feel like things are starting to fall into place.
I have changed a lot of the URLs on the main site and as you would expect everything is going fine with Google. Yahoo! seems to be very slowly getting there and I have no doubt sent a kiss goodbye to many of my MSN/Live search rankings for quite sometime.
The new logo is what I like best about this new design, if you look carefully at the blue design, that is actually a little SEO, with an arrow pointing upwards at the top. When the designer James was showing it to me, he was like;
“the abstract design contains the letters S,E and O and the arrow pointing upwards represents your clients rankings going to the top.”
I just loved it instantly and I was like:
“you had me at S”
I am not too sure about this font and one or two people have commented that it is a little small, I will probably be changing it in the next couple of weeks. I am going to get this hacked up, broken thing looking like a blog as well.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 1st, 2008
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