Category: SEO News

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

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.

Image Credit: earth from space

A couple of weeks ago Barry reported that Google’s country specific weights may be getting stronger. Some changes have been made and one thing is obvious, UK sites have had their rankings reduced on Google.com for many commercial phrases.

One thing that seems to have gone unnoticed is that around the same time the Google webmaster central set geographic tool began to work.

Webmasters who’s sites are hosted outside the of the UK can now have their sites rank properly on Google UK (including pages from the UK), simply by changing the geographic target via Google webmaster tools.

I know of at least one site that this is working properly for, the site is hosted in the US and it has been set up so that the UK sub directory of the site now shows up on pages from the UK.

If webmasters with international sites leverage this properly it could have a huge impact on the amount of traffic they receive. Certain sites that spring to mind are ones like Dmoz and BOTW.org, these sites could now have their UK sub directories show up and rank properly on UK only Google.

Also this is not just a UK thing, webmasters can now have the relevant sub-directories/domains of their international sites show up on country specific searches worldwide. Can you imagine how much more traffic that would mean for Dmoz if this was set up correctly?

To make this work you need to have a general top level domain like a .com, .net or a .org, with the sub directories of your site specifically targeting individual countries, you then need to claim the different sections as separate sites and set the relevant geographic target for each one.

This is supposed to take about 2-3 months to kick in, but it could take much longer depending on the size of the site and the amount of links and PageRank etc.

The tool is still not perfect but this is a large step in the right direction. Congratulations to the webmaster central team and thanks to Richard for some good info.

If you have trackbacks enabled on your blog you have most probably had to deal with trackback spam at some point.

Most of the time I just delete the spam trackbacks and move on, but this morning I received one from what appeared to be a very legitimate web design company.

Surely these guys are not blackhats I am thinking, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

The email I sent to the web design company:

“Hi,

My blog was just spammed by someone pointing a text link to your URL – using trackback spam:

https://www.seoco.co.uk/blog/2008/01/03/
the-magic-seo-beans/#comment-1023

I wouldn’t normally contact the people who spam me but you look like a genuine company so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Trackback spamming is against the search engine guidelines and it is a very fast way to get your site banned from Google.

If you know nothing about this, then let me know and I will see if I can find out some more info for you. If you are paying a company to do this for you, drop them and drop them fast. If you are using some software to do this, stop using it.

Plenty of people who are a lot less forgiving then me would just forward this straight on to Google’s webspam team.

Best Regards

David Eaves”

The web design company’ response:

“Dear David,

I would like to thank you for taking the time to email me and bringing this to my attention.

I have started using a search engine company who I will be getting rid of as I received a similar email to the one you sent yesterday.

May I ask what your company charges for SEO services, we would like to do well for the phrase ‘Web Design’

Kind Regards,

Colin”

So as it turns out I may be getting an SEO or link building contract, thanks to trackback spam.

I was checking up on my competition yesterday on Google, as I do pretty regularly, and I came across a website, ranked in the #12 position for the phrase ‘SEO’. Because I had never seen the site before it aroused my curiosity and I began doing a bit of investigating.

I checked the back-links and the site had around 20,000 going to the homepage, which is a healthy amount, but when I started checking the sites that were linking to it I could not find any links on the pages, almost as if the sites linking to it were cloaked. I continued my investigation, Googled the URL and came across this really funny thread started by a Mr David McSweeney. Now, make sure that you don’t have any drinks near your keyboard for this. The thread is basically a copy of a discussion that David had with one of the companies sales girls. It is possibly one of the funniest SEO sales pitches I have ever heard and being a former employee of Iomart, I have heard a lot.

Sales Girl – “A couple of years ago we identified the magic 4 points which google uses to rank sites. We approached google about this and they said to us”

Google – “Oh, you are right. There is nothing we can do about this for 15-20 years and we’ll let you away with it, as long as you only do it for one company for each key phrase.”

Sales Girl – “Because of this magic formula we can guarantee you a top 10 position for the keyphrase ‘straighteners’ on the main google index.”

David – “I am assuming what you are offering is a link building service? Not really that impressive, considering that we are already 22nd for the keyword ‘straighteners’ and there are only 176,000 results. Surely a few good quality links would get us up there?”

Sales Girl – “No, we do things that you have never even heard of. Only we can guarantee you this ranking.”

David – “I targeted the keyphrase ‘hair products’, which has 2,860,000 results (276,000 with the quotes) and we are 6th in the Google index. I did not employ the use of any magic beans or potions for this ranking.”

Sales Girl – “No, only ourselves and 4 other companies in the world know how to manipulate the rankings.”

David – “Manipulate? So what you are doing is black hat then? Google don’t allow anyone to manipulate their rankings.”

Sales Girl – “Yes, but they told us they couldn’t do anything about it and as long as we don’t saturate the market, it’s OK.”

David – “But surely if you told them what you do, the first thing they would do is make sure Mr Cutts and his web spam team gets right on to it to fix the problem?”

Sales Girl – “No, they won’t have the technology for 15/20 years.”

You have got to give her 10/10 for effort, but the company’s magic formula appears to be using hundreds, if not thousands of cloaked sites for links. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with this and I do not have any problem with black hat SEO, just so long as the clients know what they are getting into and the risks involved. This however does not seem to be the case.

Around 3 hours after I started my investigation the site completely disappeared from Google for the phrase ‘SEO’ (you will have to take my word for it that is was there), however it is still rocking Yahoo! and in position 5.

I may have some of my facts wrong about the link building techniques that this company is using, but I am pretty sure that they are well outside of the search engine guidelines. Perhaps one of you blackhats could let me know if I am right.

Kevin has just tagged me in the following post: 5 wishs for Google AdWords Editor, the meme was originally started here: If there was an SEO Genie my one wish would be by Kelvin Shuffle and now I have got to wish for something SEO related.

So here goes, I wish that the Google sandbox/no trust period or whatever you want to call it was less harsh. I understand why it is there and all, it is just that it seems to be taking longer and longer for sites to come out. I know the older a site is the more trust it will have and the higher it will be able to rank but there is definitely a fair bit of feeling like you are banging your head against a brick wall before you even see anything.

Using traditional link building techniques I would say it takes 8 months before you get any real results, I know that if you linkbait on a regular basis you can see results much sooner but this isn’t always possible. I think that 4-5 months would be a lot more reasonable.

I would like to know what the following people would wish for: Nowsourcing, aimClear, Sebastian and OnReact.

When I first started this blog a couple of people warned me about the duplicate content issues with WordPress. I sort of put it on the backburner because I was busy and then just never got around to doing it. I was checking my rankings the other day for certain phrases related to some of the recent blog posts that I have done and half of them are getting duped out by either the category pages or the archive pages due to them pages having more PageRank. Also the fact that this blog does not get posted on too often has probably been a factor.

The easiest way to fix this issue would be to add the more tag to my posts so that you would have to click onto a post to see the entire article, but I tried that and I did not like it, I didn’t know where to put the tag and when I tested it, it looked funny.

Here are the two main things that I have done to this blog to try and solve the duplicate content issues without sacrificing functionality:

Replaced the old WordPress archives with a new handmade monthly archive. The new archive simply offers links to the posts that I have done for each month. This means that searchers can find the posts for each month, extra PageRank gets passed passed to the posts because they are not a million miles from the blog homepage and that there should be no archive duplicate content.

Nofollowed all of the links to the category pages. I really wanted to keep the category pages because I think they are useful so I decided that nofollow was the best road to go down. I couldn’t find any plugin for this so I just did it by hand. This should eventually cause the category pages to disappear from the search engines so that they will just be there for my visitors.

Hopefully once the search engines pick up on these things all of my posts will start to rank properly.

There are a few other things that I have done as well, three of them have nothing to do with SEO but may help my traffic:

Validated the homepage; this will almost definitely not have any impact on my rankings but there where about 50 errors and it is better to be safe then sorry. I have still not been able to completely validate the posts but I am sure I will get my head around it eventually.

Nofollowed the links to all of the subscribe buttons and the feed. This may mean I have a bit more PageRank for the posts, it was basically a waste of link juice.

Added a MyBlogLog widget; mainly because it will be nice to see who some of the people are who are visiting my blog. Please feel free to join my community.

Added a subscribe to the feed link to the bottom of every post. I got this idea off Patrick who I consider to be an expert blogger.

Added a button showing how many subscribers I have. Hopefully people will feel sorry for me and subscribe out of pity.

Google has indexed the wrong version of the homepage for 3 different client websites in the last 3 months, it is my fault really because I should have taken care of things before it happened. In all 3 cases the clients homepage rankings on Google almost completely disappeared (scary stuff). Here is some information on how I handled each situation.

The 1st one was really easy, the clients regular homepage www.domain.com had been de-indexed and replaced by www.domain.com/home. I set up a 301 redirect using htaccess from www.domain.com/home to www.domain.com to try and fix it. Because this particular site had navigation to both versions of the homepage, Google recognized the redirect within a couple of days and the client re-gained their rankings.

The 2nd one took me about two weeks to sort out, again Google de-indexed the clients regular homepage www.domain.com and replaced it with a different version, this time it was www.domain.com/index.html. This particular site had no navigation to the other version and there were no external links to it either (how Google picked it up I don’t know). I set up a 301 redirect using htaccess just like I did last time thinking it would be sorted in a couple of days. It wasn’t sorted in a couple of days, in fact nearly two weeks had gone by and it still wasn’t fixed and the client was understandably starting to get a little anxious. I then realised that Google just wasn’t going to recognize the redirect unless I placed a link to the version that was redirecting. Fortunately I have a directory at my disposal that gets re-cached by Google every other day so I added a temporary entry linking to the version that was redirecting (www.domain.com/index.html). Within less then 48 hours Google picked up the directory listing, recognized the redirect and once again the client got their rankings back. If I had been a bit more on the ball this one could have been sorted out a lot quicker.

The 3rd one was also a bit of a nightmare, this time Google had de-indexed www.domain.com and replaced it with domain.com without the www. I thought no problem I will just set up a redirect with htaccess like I had done the previous times. But the client had Windows hosting and htaccess was not supported, so I tried to set one up using the internet services manager but every time I went into the file properties to set it up it said (This server does not support file changing permissions). Neither me or the client could work out how to fix it, the web hosting company was totally useless and changing web hosts would have been a big job. I registered the site with Google Webmaster Central, created an XML sitemap and set the preferred domain to www.domain.com. Fortunately this did the trick and within a couple of days Google re-indexed the right version of the homepage and the client re-gained their rankings.

If this has happened or happens to you, get the 301 set up and if necessary build some links to the redirect so that Google recognizes it.

To prevent this happening in the 1st place, make sure that the versions of your homepage that you don’t want are 301’d to the one you want i.e. if you want www.domain.com 301 all non www. URLs to all www. ones and 301 www.domain.com/home to www.domain.com. If you have this set up you will have no problems. If you are having problems setting this up contact your web host, hopefully they will be more helpful then the one that I dealt with, if they are not consider getting a new host like my client has now done.

Here are some useful links:

WebConfs.com – How to create Redirects

Bob Mutch on Redirects

Google Webmaster Central (Get yourself registered)

I think that sometimes Alexa gets a bum rep. and all too often I hear people coming out with things like:

Alexa is useless
Alexa is easy to manipulate
Alexa is biased
Alexa sucks

In days gone by I would have to agree with most of these statements but recently I am finding that I am using the tool more and more often.

With Internet explorer browsers the Alexa toolbar would slow you down quite a lot, not to mention take up valuable screen space and many people would be put off installing it because lots of anti-virus programmes saw it as spyware.

More and more people are switching to Firefox browsers all of the time and more and more people are installing the hassle free search status extension that feeds data to Alexa. I believe that this is making the data that they provide more accurate and less easy to manipulate every day.

Also the Alexa information is now updated daily and is just one day behind so on Sunday you can see Fridays statistics which I think is pretty impressive. iI days gone by it was not updated for long periods of time.

Finally the Alexa site used to be really slow and is still not the fastest website in the world but it is certainly much faster then it was 6 months ago.

So to all of you Alexa haters out there, get off their case I think they are doing a pretty good job.

Visit Alexa’s Homepage – Alexa.com

Recently I have found that Google have been penalizing sites for using various link building and SEO techniques that in day’s gone by have worked a charm. The obvious thing that comes to mind is paid links, Google have certainly had a big crackdown on paid links and many sites that have been buying them have dropped significantly in the rankings, however this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as I am concerned because many other sites that have not bought paid links have also been penalized (including some of the sites I have been working on). I have been studying the sites that have dropped and they seem to be the ones that have been worked on very recently, they also seem to be the ones with lot’s of anchor text links using a particular search phrase.

In days gone by when I have been building links to a site I would get as many as possible exact match search phrase text links linking to a particular site. The more links I got using a particular search phrase the higher the site would rank for that phrase.

Now the sites that have dropped have just been penalized on the one phrase that has been targeted and overdone, all of the other positions have stayed the same and what I have noticed is that the sites have only dropped to the position they were in prior to the new SEO links being built. Google have been very clever, they have set up the algorithm so that it would be very difficult for you to hurt one of your competitors rankings.

It is still very early days and I am trying to work out whether the sites that have been hit with ranking penalties have simply had the links sandboxed (devalued for a certain period of time) or just penalized altogether, so that something would have to be done about the search phrase text links in order to get the sites to rank high again. I am running a couple of experiments where we are not removing the links to the penalized sites but changing the anchor text to something more natural like the company name for instance, un-SEOin the link profile if you will. I am not doing anything too hasty I am just taking it one link at a time, monitoring the effect and building fresh links at the same time just using the company name as anchor text.

I haven’t noticed anybody else talking about this in detail yet, but I certainly feel that I will not be the only SEO who has been hit by this. I will post more of my thoughts about Google ranking penalties in the future.

Update: I am pleased to report that the experiments have gone really well and all of the sites bar one are back on track.