'SEO' Category

• SEO Ranking Insights From Troubleshooting Web Site Problems

  I look forward to phone calls from companies with an organic ranking problem. Sometimes these companies have a strange set of conditions that would be impossible to ask a client to reproduce, because it would damage traffic to their site. However, fixing existing problems can yield insights into how fast Google does things, and what [...]

  August 11th, 2010

• SEO: Close Reading Of Search Results

  Looking closely at Google’s search results can be informative – at least, if you take some inductive leaps, and apply knowledge learned in other activities. Take a look at the graphic, showing these early April 2010 search results for Matt Cutts’ web site. Notice that the same articles appear several times, wIth slightly different URLs? [...]

  May 17th, 2010

• Non-news: Malformed URLs don’t pass Anchor Text.

  I’ve started another burst of postings about web server log file analysis and what it tells search engine optimisers about search engine spiders. Web spider behaviour often lies behind issues that I find on other blogs. For example, Dave Naylor has a couple of recent articles that are interesting. A good one to read is [...]

  April 9th, 2010

• Googlebot and Search Visitors

  I’ve been interested in the behaviour of Googlebot, the robot that Google uses to crawl the web, for years. It’s a topic that seems largely unaddressed by search engine optimisers, yet the behaviour of Googlebot should be extremely important. After all, uncrawled sites tend to have problems with ranking many pages – the best you [...]

  April 8th, 2010

• Blog Spammers Target Blogs

  Hardly news, but people who spam blogs, use search to look for them. So is there anything that can be done to reduce the attractiveness of a blog to spam? Have a look at this recent sample of keywords that lead to this blog, taken from Google Analytics. Spot anything?

  Yup, a large fraction of the [...]

  April 8th, 2010

• SEO: Click Through Rate and Bounce Rate

  I’m going to take issue with Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. I think his most recent White Board Friday video is just plain wrong. Normally, I have a lot of respect for what SEOmoz does, but I think the advice and implications are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong.
  How Does Google Rank Results
  I don’t know all [...]

  March 26th, 2010

• iLab Presentation from 2010-02-25

  Click on the icon at lower right of the slide below, to get a full-screen view. Only 30 or so slides, not 280!

  These are the slides we used (well, uploaded to “280slides.com“, and slightly edited for that service) for the presentation last Thursday. The slides wouldn’t upload (from Keynote, via a PowerPoint export) to Google [...]

  March 2nd, 2010

• Duplicate Content, And Blog Spammers

  Around half the people I talk to, about Search Engine Optimisation, are terrified of duplicate content on their own websites. But 80% or more of the spam that I see, is massively duplicated. Why do real site owners, with valuable content but multiple paths to it, fear duplicate penalties from Google, but spammers who endlessly [...]

  February 28th, 2010

• Google Hates Me, I’m Being Penalised. Or Not.

  Great story from a Google staffer about how his site started to disappear from rankings. I’ve seen clients lose *huge* chunks of traffic for very similar reasons. Sometimes the reason you don’t show isn’t for the obvious search engine optimisation reasons or that you’ve lost Google’s love. Sometimes there’s a simple technological explanation…

  February 25th, 2010

• Google Product Search, Ciao, Foundem and the right to make a buck in search results

  The Telegraph gives some details about the cases being brought against Google in Europe, about product search results. Who’s complaining, and about what, makes for some interesting speculation.
  Let’s have a look at what Google Product Search is, and does, first… so we’ve got some context.
  Google Product Search
  It’s free. Anyone can sign up, and feed products. [...]

  February 24th, 2010