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.
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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 effected 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.
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June 19th, 2008
You know how you get some people who just take to blogging? I was not one of them people. I started blogging for all of the wrong reasons. It was very much a case of keeping up with the Joneses. Many of my competitors were getting blogs and I thought that I should have one.
If you look at the 1st few posts on this blog you will see that I blatantly did not know what I was doing. I would say that I started to enjoy it and get the hang of it around Christmas time. IMO the Mixx review getting linked to by TechCrunch was a complete fluke.
Over the last couple of weeks a lot of the hard work that I have put in seems to have really started to pay off.
About two weeks ago, Lee Odden from Top Rank Blog added this blog to his big list of search marketing blogs and yesterday Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog.com made me an official SOB.
Other blogging achievements include:
- Around 150 RSS subscribers
- Linked to by most of the major search blogs
- Technorati top 25K
- Over 100 unique visitors per day (without the main site)
- Good SE authority - most of the posts rank well
Over the next 6 months I would like to achieve the following:
- 400 RSS subscribers
- Technorati top 10k
- 200+ unique visitors per day
I would also like to start making some money doing this. If I can get this blog (including the rest of the site) making over £1,000 per month off advertising I can cut down on doing SEO a bit and focus on doing more blogs. I will start looking at monetization strategies this week.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
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June 16th, 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.
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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
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