Fri, 26 Jun 2009 by Joe Bursell
Micheal Gray does appear to like a bit of controversy, and who can blame him, it gets him traffic and builds awareness- I’m doing it right now. He recently blogged about how you can invalidate a Wikipedia article in order to effect some shunting in the SERPs if they outrank your page for a target keyword.
If you find yourself competing with Wikipedia it can be the bane of your SEO life, I know. My point about the “how to invalidate Wikipedia articles” post is that... Read More.
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by Kerry Dye
Since the relaunch of their Webmaster Tools interface, there have been a few rumblings about it, and it seems that Google is listening as they have asked for product ideas for future improvements.
This is slightly unexpected, not because Google doesn’t listen, but because the new redesign is based on survey results from users.
In fact Pete has previously posted on what he would like to see in Webmaster Tools (some of which they have already added).
None of the current questions deal wit... Read More.
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Tue, 23 Jun 2009 by Emily Mace
I mentioned in my blog yesterday that some sites in Google webmaster Tools are showing that their sitemaps are “Pending” and not showing any data. Well Google have posted to their help forum about this subject.
Google’s response is that this is normal and that the data will be updated once the sitemap has been downloaded again. They reassure us that this is nothing to be concerned about and that the information from the sitemap will be updated as soon as the sit... Read More.
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Mon, 22 Jun 2009 by Emily Mace
Google announced on Thursday last week that they had made some changes to Sitemap.xml files and how they handle them. Google is now able to handle 50,000 child sitemaps, this offers you the ability to create a lot more sitemaps for your site if you need them.
As Google’s maximum sitemap size is 50,000 entries or 10mb file size. This means if your site is larger than this 50,000 pages it is necessary to have a sitemap index page which references each sitemap.xml file you hav... Read More.
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Fri, 19 Jun 2009 by Kerry Dye
The last couple of days I've noticed that Google has been changing the way that it displays long URLs on the organic search engine results pages (SERP) on Google UK and .com.
So for a keyword that is in the end of the URL, instead of the beginning they are displaying:
www.domainname.com/.../your-keywords-are-here
instead of the full URL
www.domainname.com/some-directory/your-keywords-are-here
It is most visible for longer phrases, where there are more likely to be results with lon... Read More.
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Thu, 18 Jun 2009 by Kerry Dye
Google has just announced that you can now use your Analytics Goals in Adwords.
Ostensibly, the reasoning as this opens up the Goals that you use in Analytics to analysis in Conversion Optimizer . My guess is that Conversion Optimizer is quite an underused tool and this is another way to plug it for Google. It is a great tool, and a lot of sites could do with the help it could give, but it is rarely used.
However, what is more interesting to me (partly because we’ve been talking about co... Read More.
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Wed, 17 Jun 2009 by David Thomas
Many speculations and mutterings were heard toward the latter part of 2008 about the push into online marketing due to the oncoming recession, for many businesses from large blue chips to smaller SME's. The talk of recession set the jungle drums booming last year but 6 months in what have we seen?
Firstly yes! Spends across many platforms have risen in 2009 suggesting that many companies are in fact realising that older much more stayed platforms of reaching the global market are not proving to... Read More.
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by Emily Mace
In May Google announced a redesign to their Webmaster Tools, but when the first announcement was made the new interface was not available as the default for users visiting the tools, only as a “try the new look Google Webmaster Tools” link once you had signed in. The new Google Webmaster Tools now appear to be the default when logging in.
This is a useful development for webmaster as it provides a slightly easier interface for users, making it a little clearer what you can ... Read More.
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by Matt Hopkins
It seems that many consumers don't understand what a web browser is... or know the difference between a browser and a search engine.
Take a look at this video compiled by a Google research intern who asked people on the streets of New York.
I believe that this is not atypical of the majority of consumer internet users. The search engine is the internet to many people and the reason why Google has become so powerful - and the reason why Search Engine Optimisation (or per... Read More.
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Thu, 11 Jun 2009 by Pete Handley
As has been reported over at SearchCowBoys, there are at the moment some mysterious Google UK results on lots of different phrases at the moment. At the moment there are a large amount of US based websites appearing in listings on Google UK.
This is something that I had noticed on various SEO terms, but whilst I have been doing some keyword research for a client I have found lots of other examples.
One of the worst of these examples that I found was a search on Google UK was for "family ho... Read More.
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Wed, 10 Jun 2009 by Joe Bursell
We are getting more and more enquiries and questions surrounding social media, but what is more interesting is the way they are asked e.g. "I want more social media activity, how can you do that for us?". The assumption is that it is worth doing.
It is clear that social media is important, but what isn't so clear is why it is important to commercial sites and outfits. My point here is that Twitter, Facebook et al are ubiquitous- company pages and accounts are growing like weeds, but to w... Read More.
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by Pete Handley
McAfee have recently released a study into some of the most "dangerous" search terms used on the web.
McAfee looked across 5 different search engines, Google, Live (now Bing), Yahoo, Ask and AOL, looking at the first 5 pages of results on all of these for organic and paid listings and cross referenced these pages with tools that their SiteAdvisor tool flagged as dangerous, and the study reports that it looked at more than 400,000 URLs.
Dangerous is defined here as flagged by McAfee's site... Read More.
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by Emily Mace
Bing is now live as the primary search engine from Microsoft. If you go to MSN or Live both of these sites now rediredct to Bing.
Google Analytics is now showing Bing as a search engine in its stats, so when you look at your traffic sources you will be able to see Bing in the results. When Bing was first launched the only place to see Bing as a traffic source to your site was under referring sites, so this is a good update for webmasters to monitor traffic on the site. This wi... Read More.
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Tue, 09 Jun 2009 by Emily Mace
Beam me up Scotty?
We’ve all done it – you know the name of the company you want to visit but you can’t remember their URL – is it .co.uk or .com? When this happens we all do the same thing – visit Google and type in the company name and click on the first result in the SERPs, as this will more than likely be the company you are looking for. Teleporting helps users, who are aware of your brand or company name, search for you directly without ha... Read More.
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by Joe Bursell
I've been looking under some SEO rocks and found the neglected sandbox topic. This search was prompted by a question I was asked, along the lines of "will our new site end up in Google's sandbox?". With Google sandboxing I'm sceptical- at least about the factors that may cause it, at most that it is a useful term.
Anytime there is a substantial change to a site Google will necessarily re-evaluate that site.
More often than not this does have a negative impact on rankings- as a credibility... Read More.
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Mon, 08 Jun 2009 by Kerry Dye
Google Analytics actually has a large number of features that are not enabled by default, that you can use to customise the information you get.
A favourite of our PPC team is the one to expand the PPC information in Analytics, so that it gives you the real keyword and not just the matched term.
Here are two that are useful for the organic SEO specialists:
1. Create a regional list of search engines
All Google Analytics data is lumped together under a single search engine name, so if you ... Read More.
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Fri, 05 Jun 2009 by Kerry Dye
At the current SMX Advanced conference (it’s in Seattle) Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan held a session called You&A which takes audience questions.
I first read a transcript of this in the aimClear blog called Is What’s Good for Google Good for SEO? (Kudos to them for the good coverage of the session).
The big bombshell in this is the fact that Cutts replied to a question about the fact that Google no longer appear to support Page Rank sculpting.
Here’s a simple explanation o... Read More.
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by Joe Bursell
I was recently asked the difference between how Google handles Urchin Tracking Module (utm) tagged URLs and other, nonsensical URL strings e.g. why are URLs like www.site.com/thingy?thing1&dullID9283 no use for SEO, but it's OK to have a Google tagged URL such as www.site.com/thingy?utm_source=value1&utm_medium=value2&utm_campaign=value3.
It's not a new topic but it reminded me that there isn't much explanation out there, so here goes...
Here's how spiders handle things... Read More.
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Tue, 02 Jun 2009 by Joe Bursell
Here's a thing- why is it OK to publish a PR piece on your site as well as submitting it to PR sites, but it's not OK to publish article content that you've submitted to article sites?
They appear to be so similar as to be almost the same thing, so why would the search engines potentially penalise you for one and not the other? One key distinction is their intent.
Here are the main factors:
PR is clearly self promotion- everyone knows this so when you choose to publish on a... Read More.
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by Emily Mace
We’ve discussed previously how important a blog is and how it can help with the search engine optimisation of your site, and how regular posts are important to ensure that the site is seen by search engines as being regularly updated.
What happens if you get writers block? It happens to us all from time to time but there are a few tips to help you get around this.
The first tip is something we’ve talked about before, which is creating blog topics based on some of the long tail k... Read More.
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