Thu, 8 May 2008 08:53:22 by Matt Hopkins
There is something strangely familiar about the new live.com interface.. and a clear sign that Microsoft are starting to look at Google and see where they can emulate their success.
For me, this is definitely good news.. not enough to make me switch search engines yet.. but encouraging.
The problem with MSN / Live.com was never really with the interface. In fact, I'd say that Yahoo has a greater interface problem than any of the others. The Yahoo home page is still stuck in the late 90's search engine "portal" concept. The simplicity of Google's interface was one of its original attractions. It seems that Microsoft are finally starting to understand this.
Further improvements to the SERPs (search engine results pages) were announce Back in October by Microsoft, with better snippets, a larger index and improved spam control. All good things.
It is true the the MSN / Live.com...Read More.
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Tue, 6 May 2008 12:48:23 by Joe Bursell
Last week I blogged about spam factory websites. This week I'm still in the mood for some spam (yum yum etc.), so when my vanity search for "spam factory websites" brought this back I just had to share it:
If I had a site that allowed snippets like this I'd go berserk- it says, very clearly, that the site is spam- big style!
The original blog was about fixing micro-site SEO issues, and used some text in an example (read the SEO blog, it makes sense in context):
"Aircraft abrasives provided by ACorp.com, suppliers to the aircraft industry."
The blog mentions aircraft just twice- in that sentence alone- and clearly has very little else to do with aircraft. Looking at the cached page you see the message:
"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: spam factory websites", so it's not a direct link, but that's not the point.
The point is that link building can have serious consequences...Read More.
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Fri, 2 May 2008 14:16:40 by Joe Bursell
Web developers and search engine optimizers work with the same basic commodities- web applications and the internet. Web developers (usually) create sites that look good, deliver the right information and exceed their clients' expectations. More and more they are also attuned to the requirement that a site should be able to achieve high search visibility. This means making key components search engine friendly.
Building a 100% bespoke site is becoming a rarity- sure, design look and feel, architecture and content are pretty unique factors, but the content management system (CMS) sitting in the background, and/or the database that feeds it are frequently the same. So, your designer/developer may make you a one-off web 2.0 beauty, but chances are its management system is the same as for all their other clients.
I'm not about to beat-up on this approach, it allows scale-economies that (should) get passed on to you. It also means that your tech support (should) be ...Read More.
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Fri, 2 May 2008 13:22:34 by Kerry Dye
A colleague passed me this recent discussion on Webmaster World which discusses how a lot of SEO experts think that 3 Way link exchange can now be detected algorithmically.
3 way links were developed by the SEO industry in order to create an alternate linking strategy when two-way (or reciprocal) links were ‘devalued'. The idea was that by creating a triangular structure, the links were undetectable. The Webmaster World discussion would seem to imply that more recent thinking is that they are still found. What it highlights perhaps more is that three way links were specifically created to ‘game' the search engines, and perhaps that has made them a target for detection.
Aside from the fact that the reciprocal link is not as dead as people think, what I have seen more recently is an increase in link exchange requests that are three way, but offer a poor link in exchange for a quality one.
e.g.
Dear Webmaster
&nb...Read More.
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Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:14:00 by Kerry Dye
There is some debate
about how much Google uses the clickthough rate of the organic listings to
affect where you are listed.
However, with two recent examples for our
clients giving demonstrable results, one dramatic and one less so, I certainly
believe that the clickthrough rate is used for determining your position on a
page.
In our dramatic example, a UK based
holiday company gained a Google Local Map result attached to their listing.
Unfortunately it was not their map listing, but some random hotel in the USA. As a
result, they experienced a dramatic slide off of page 1 for the majority of
their search terms over a period of 1 to 2 weeks. As nothing else had changed,
the only explanation for this is that the US
address put UK
based searchers off clicking on their link. (Thanks Google, that error is a
pain to fix).
The second site is one that has good
organic rankings for a c...Read More.
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Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:29:29 by Matt Hopkins
Most studies show that a vast majority (something like 60%+) of all searches have what is called "local intent". This means that sometimes the searcher adds a local geographical indicator (e.g. "seo company portsmouth"). But sometimes they search with local intent without being specific about geography - e.g. it is likely that a search for "dentist" has local intent even without being specific about location.
The problem however is that the information that forms the foundation for local content searches is spread across a number of unrelated sources such as yellow pages, newspapers, local review sites, local directories and of course, search engines. Additionally, the information in a lot of these sources is either incomplete or out of date and information relating to smaller towns and villages may not exist at all.
Major search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo are aware of these issues and are investing engineerin...Read More.
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Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:39:44 by Matt Hopkins
Do you want to know if a new version of a landing or content page will out-perform the current version? Does your marketing manager think that a red "call to action" button would outperform the current blue one?
Wouldn't it be nice to have some way of testing the potential impact of changes like this before you actually replace a design or page completely?
For the past year or so, Google has had a tool called Website Optimizer that provides this sort of testing (A/B and multi-variant) but it has been available only to Adwords accounts. Last week, Google made it publicly available.
This is a truly excellent tool and I highly recommend that you try it out. You simply sign up with an existing Google account and create one of two types of "experiments":
1. A/B Testing. This is useful when you want to compare the performance of two or more content pages (e.g. landing pages). We recentl...Read More.
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Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:28:02 by Pete Handley
About 6 months ago, Searchengineland.com did a piece about how Google Image Universal Search was no longer family friendly, with an illustration of how a search for "raccoon" brought up an image of a raccoon and a dog being rather..... inappropriate?
Matt Cutts later said that the Google Image team had dealt with the issue.
Well, when searching for some clients keywords earlier this week, I think that I found an example, that is frankly worse - I searched for "office chair" on Google.com and was greeted with:
As Vertical Leap is a family friendly organisation, I have taken the decision to censor the most "offensive" part of the image in question, but you can surely see why I was so surprised by the "illustration".
I checked the other major search engines, and saw no sign of this image, so perhaps this has been optimised specifically to appear in Google.
Read More.
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Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:57:37 by Joe Bursell
As competition in search continues to grow and grow, so to do the efforts of crooks and miscreants to hijack, damage or destroy the legitimately gained rankings of their competitors. We've seen many instances of malicious link insertion and now there are increasing examples of other attacks being used to tar the reputation of targeted websites.
If you can create a scenario in which your competitors sites are seen by the search engines as hosting a bunch of spam/malicious links, your site can perform well in the void that is created. The techniques simply insert spam links into the target site. Once Google crawls that site and sees the spam it will see it is untrustworthy- once marked as spam the site may disappear altogether from the rankings.
This type of activity has been labeled "evil SEO", but that's way too simplistic a view. It is an attack, in the same way that a defacement is an attack. What is interesting is that the value of search has reach...Read More.
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Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:11:47 by Matt Hopkins
I was an IE user for a decade or more but have now been using FireFox exclusively for well over a year.
Personally, I don't like the font rendering in FireFox - when viewing a page in IE, the font smoothing makes a real impact and sites look much better... but there are enough improvements over IE for me that I can live with this issue.
FireFox has a couple of great features that are the driving force for me to have made a permanent switch in browser:
1. Error Console - this has been an invaluable feature to me for debugging issues with JavaScript.
2. Extensions - MS missed the boat with IE by trying to force their plug-in technology around ActiveX. FireFox extensions are simpler. They are small software programs that literally extend the function of FireFox. There are hundreds of them created for all sorts of reasons.. and just about all of them are free.
From an SEO point of view, there are several that are...Read More.
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