The Search world is all a-twitter with the news that the Google Spam team has downgraded the search rankings for the Google Chrome group because their actions resulted in bloggers being paid to write posts that included links to Google Chrome web pages. That is in violation of the Google Quality Guidelines.
Perhaps it’s the buzz around the launch of Google Plus, but some other hot topics seem to have gone off the boil. Perhaps the most lively this year was the effect of the introduction of the Panda algorithm to grade the quality of web pages. An interesting development on this seems to have happened without too much comment as yet.
This is a guest post by Mariana Ashley
In any search engine optimization (SEO) guide, they will tell you to do keyword research, using Google Adwords. Most guides won’t give you any more detail than that. “Just type in your keywords and Adwords will give you keywords,” or something to that extent, is the general gist. In actuality, keyword research is much more complicated and requires a complete understanding of the function of your site as well as your potential readership. There are a variety of steps that go into keyword research.
Of all the topics that come up frequently in SEO discussions, duplicate content is at the head of the list. It comes up in two contexts. The first concerns all those scraper sites that are created by spammers to create backlinks and do this by stealing copy from the original, legitimate authors.
Most websites receive the greatest proportion of their visitors from search engines. Having a high ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is therefore a priority. The factors that are important in this are fairly well known by now. People with traditional websites with static web pages apply such methods, usually with a reasonable amount of success.
Blogs have now come on the scene and ‘out of the box’ they seem to do exceptionally well in keyword queries. There are two reasons for this.
This is why blog pages seem to rank very highly in keyword searches, particularly in the early days after they appear.
This has resulted in a feverish interest in having blogs. Without thinking too much about it, many have set up blogs. Software such as WordPress make it Oh So Easy. .. and surprise, surprise Google loves blog posts. This sounds like a no-brainer?
Even though the results are impressive, you can do even better. However you may need to discard some of your preconceptions. Let us explore the nature of a blog and how it performs in search engine keyword searches.
If you go to visit a typical blog, then at the blog website, say www.myblog.com, you will find displayed a long scrolling Home page with several posts, usually with the most recent post appearing at the top. In some cases, the full content of each post may be shown and in other cases you may get only a short extract with a link to read More. This link takes you to a web page that shows only the single post you are interested in. Some people prefer to arrange their blog in this way to avoid duplicating exactly the same content on two separate web pages. This would mean that the search engine might serve up either web page in a keyword search when the single post web page was really more appropriate.
The simple picture below shows what a search engine holds about any blog web page. For the Home page for example, that is displayed when you visit www.myblog.com, the search engine has the URL, www.myblog.com, the blog title, the blog meta description, the current content of the Home page and a list of back links. Back links are the URLs of other web pages that have hyperlinks pointing to this Home page.
The Google algorithm (and probably other search engine algorithms too) take into account those back links in determining the importance of this particular Home page. In the case of Google, they use the term PageRank as a measure of this importance. A large number of back links, particularly if they come from authoritative websites like the New York Times, the BBC or CNN, will mean that the Home page has a higher PageRank. As the search engine spiders (sometimes called crawlers or robots) wander around the Internet, they register all these back link URLs. Since many of them ‘point’ to the Home Page, this means that the Home page will have the highest PageRank. New single blog post web pages will have few direct links so their PageRank is usually not defined for weeks or even months.
Even though the single blog post web pages may never get direct links, they can benefit from the internal links within the website. For example that link to read More on the Home page does confer some PageRank contribution on the single blog post web page. According to what has been published by Google, a discount factor applies so that say only 85% of that PageRank contribution is applied to the single post web page. So far this is all standard ‘stuff’. Let us now begin to give some different insights on what is happening.
Note that we have signaled something different about that content on the Home page with that yellow background. Unlike a traditional website with static web pages, the content keeps changing as new blog posts are written. Either an extract or the full content of the latest blog post is added to the top of the web page and the oldest blog post is bumped off the bottom of the web page. Once two or three blog posts have been added, what the search engine is holding in its database may differ markedly from what is appearing on a visit made today. Of course if the search engine spider does recrawl the web page, then the content will be updated. However for most blogs what the search engine is storing for the Home page will be different from what is currently being displayed.
SERP is the acronym for Search Engine Results Page, which is what the search engine displays when you do a keyword query. When someone does a keyword query in a search engine, the search engine finds content in the database that matches the keywords. If both the Home page content as stored and the individual blog post web page content (if stored) would be relevant, nevertheless the Home page ranks higher so will very likely be shown first or may be the only entry shown. Although the entry was chosen as being relevant, what appears in the first line of the SERP entry is the Title of the whole blog. This is general and probably does not refer to the keywords. Moreover in developing the explanatory snippet, the search engine can only rely on the Meta Description for the whole blog, which is probably irrelevant, and on the content of the blog Home page as recorded when spidered. The combination of an irrelevant title and a somewhat fuzzy snippet in the SERP is probably unlikely to attract the click of the searcher.
If the searcher does click on the entry, the blog Home page has likely changed by now and the keywords may no longer even be in the current version. It might be thought that by going to the Cached version of the page, you may be able to see a version that includes the keywords. However even here a caution is appropriate. Search engines do not necessarily create a cached version of the web page on every spider visit. The cached version may then be from an even earlier period. In such a case, we have the somewhat anomalous situation that the cached version of the web page and the current version of the web page do not show the keywords, but the version that the search engine crawled in between the cached date and the current date did contain the keywords. This is why the blog Home page was the item shown in the keyword query SERP.
The search engine time cycles for crawling and indexing web pages on the Internet can occasionally be measured in weeks so it is not surprising that entries in SERPs can be on occasions completely irrelevant to the keyword query. Is there a way of correcting this situation? It all stems from the fact that the Home page has too much authority? Could this be reduced in some way and the resulting ‘authority’ that is freed up be spread around among other blog post pages?
In trying to ‘flatten out’ the authority profile of a blog, no obvious solutions came to mind. However a somewhat unorthodox approach seemed of interest, partially fuelled by the blogging approach that was being used for all the SMM blogs. Having been frustrated by the typical blog with a number of blog posts all featured on the Home page, for some time all the SMM blogs had featured the latest post content on the Home page. In other words, the latest post content appeared for example at http://www.staygolinks.com/. If you then clicked on the permalink that appeared in the H1 heading to the post content you would then be switched to the single post entry at http://www.staygolinks.com/latestpost.htm. This particular single post web page had only minor differences from the Home page version of this post entry.
Suddenly the light bulb came on. Why not avoid the traditional Home page entirely and immediately switch (301 redirection) to the single latest blog post web page. Details are given in the LMNHP post. LMNHP is an acronym for Look Mom No Home Page.
What this means is that while this post continues to be the latest, the http://www.staygolinks.com/latestpost.htm will be treated as the URL that applies for the blog website. Any back links, either external or internal, will be deemed to apply to that URL. Thinking again about the earlier picture of what the search engines are registering, all items are now unchanging. That means we have a Title and Meta Description that is appropriate precisely for this blog post content. The content is unchanging and is the same over the long term. The only difference is that the search engine may have been attempting to access http://www.staygolinks.com/ and is instructed by the 301 redirection to access the single post web page. You might consider that in a sense the blog has no Home page.
Note that this is the only web page that is no longer active. All the other web pages on the blog are active and unchanged. All the back links are assigned to some blog web page or other. It is uncertain how the search engines might be working with all this but so far there appear to be no surprises.
It is still early days but so far the results of keyword queries are extremely gratifying. Entries for new blog post pages are indexed and displayed rapidly. They also are appearing with high rankings and do appear with relevant titles and descriptions. This undoubtedly gives an SEO boost and also means that it is more likely that searchers will click on the item. The biggest boost comes from the fact that the single post page seems to be directly assigned the back links for the domain. For a time, this latest blog post is really working as a Home page and will only be supplanted when the next blog post is written.
Blog posts have always enjoyed an initial visibility, presumably based on some recency factor. This is now magnified by a large number of back links that are also assigned to that URL.
This approach undoubtedly results in a better (more even) distribution of PageRank among web pages. No one outside Google knows exactly how the algorithms work with PageRank at this time. The basic view is that the Home page amasses all the incoming back links to the domain. This link-juice is then distributed among the internal web pages with some discounting applying, perhaps of the order of 15%.
In this new approach those same back links that were all directed to the Home page now go in groups directly to each of the single post web pages as they are issued. It would seem that the discounting factor no longer apples since these links are now all external. It has also been assumed that external links carry more weight than internal links so this may be an additional benefit. Since Google is very guarded in whatever is said about the search algorithms, it is unlikely that these surmises can be confirmed or denied.
The results of this approach as seen in the SERPs is that better items appear that give a much clearer indication to the searchers of what they may find. The constancy of content for blog pages fits the Google mission better since it is easier to index correctly and deliver relevant results.
One pleasing bonus is revealed in the image below, which shows a search done prior to this current post being added to this blog. As might be expected, a search for the previous blog title, The Google Tango, did give that blog post as the #1 entry in the SERP. Clicking on the link took you precisely to that single post web page.
What is intriguing is that Google still shows the domain itself as the URL for that web page, even though that is not the specific hyperlink for the entry. However that is probably the most useful way of presenting information to the searcher.
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What image does that Google Tango call to mind? Perhaps it was of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin ordering three electric Tango vehicles. Brin and others have been heavy into electric cars recently. Brin is invested in Tesla, the manufacturer of the Tango, and has ordered three Tangos (all the luxury T6000 model, which cost $148,000 each).
What we had in mind was the other Tango. For those who are not into ballroom dancing, that’s the evocative South American dance with the rhythm, Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow. That seemed an appropriate description of Google’s speed of action on a variety of operations. Of course Google prides itself on delivering search results on complex keyword searches in a fraction of a second.
Google can also react fast to signals that are sent directly to it. This means that for blogs, indexing of blog posts can be very fast given that RSS news feeds provide an immediate signal when new posts have been added.
That is a process that Google finds very effective. That is why Google is pushing for a new system that will allow the Google Index to Go Real Time.
Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. The PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, could be used by Google for indexing the web instead of crawling the links. PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format whereby a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Google would ask every website to declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document.
So much for the Quick, Quick but why the Slow, Slow for Google. This is because there are some processes that operate on a much slower time cycle. Perhaps one of the most extreme is Google Maps. Google can partially blame the map database sources it uses. However there are some examples that are almost ludicrous. The biggest local example of that is hard to miss. The data for the Golden Ears Bridge across the Fraser River took almost 9 months of operations before Tele Atlas updated its map index as of March 31. Mapquest picked it up immediately. At the time of writing some 12 days later, Google Maps still has not picked this up.
The other area where Slow, Slow applies is the speed at which new web pages not included in RSS news feeds get into the Google index. In some cases, this can be measured in months. Here the enormous and explosively growing size of the Internet limits what is possible. Even if a URL to a web page is found, it may be some time before the spiders or crawlers can revisit to fully identify what is located at that URL.
In this case, Google had a choice on whether its index should be Big and/or Fast and/or Accurate. In practice given the Internet dynamics, only two of these are attainable at the same time. Google has chosen Big and Accurate and the result is as fast as they can make it, which is still very slow.
We are now promised that a new process, Google Caffeine, is being slowly rolled out. However this will probably deal with the way search results are developed rather than the way web pages are added to the index. It seems likely that we must stay satisfied with the Slow, Slow rhythm for the speed at which web pages are included in the index.
Nevertheless Google offers sufficient processes that go at the Quick, Quick pace so must of us will continue to be happy with the Google Tango.
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Hyperlinks have never really got the respect they deserve. Without them the Internet would be impossible. The word is often now shortened to link and this word is often bandied around without thinking about the mind-opening implications bound up in that hyperlink word.
The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson. The Wikipedia explanation describes what he had defined
Hyperlinks are the basic building block of hypertexts. For example, some key words in a wiki such as Wikipedia are highlighted, and provide links to explanations of those words at other pages in the same wiki.
In directed links, the area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor (or source anchor); its target (or destination anchor) is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a specific location within another page or document.
He also coined the word hypertext and the associated word hypermedia. He bemoaned the fact that the latter had not taken off and instead became what we often call interactive media.
The hyperlink concept is really very powerful. However Microsoft, as it has done with so many great ideas, did not leverage that power. It is true that files or documents in the Office Suite of programs always have the hyperlinking capability. So you will find:
Adobe also to an extent slowed down the wider use of hyperlinks since it is only recently that you can now create a PDF document with their software with active hyperlinks.
Luckily the hyperlink concept is much too powerful to be sidelined by this somewhat lukewarm support. What really caused the hyperlink concept to take off was the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. No longer would a hyperlink merely connect you with some other point in the same document. You could now connect with some online website that could be half way round the world.
The other powerful influence was that the two Google founders latched on to the notion that hyperlinks confirmed the popularity or authority of web pages. They then they used this concept within their search algorithm. Since for a given Web page they were interested in hyperlinks pointing to that web page, they used the term Backlink instead of hyperlink. If they had only stuck with the term hyperlink, then again the concept might have gained more general understanding.
The strength of hyperlinks is confirmed by what was written in 1999. As the ClueTrain Manifesto authors pointed out, almost everyone was hyperlinking and this was a movement that could not be stopped.
However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
Ten years later, the strength of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web they made possible cannot be denied. Most website owners acknowledge the mutual networking benefits they receive and include hyperlinks to other relevant sites that their visitors may wish to visit. This summer there was even a question whether the BBC had finally changed policy and was using hyperlinks to external sources. The answer is unclear but the eventual outcome will undoubtedly include external hyperlinks.
The latest word from Google points to an even greater support for the hyperlink concept. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is now encouraging webmasters to include named anchors to define sections of their webpages and tips on how to do this best. This will mean that a keyword search could actually rank most highly a hyperlink to a point within a document that is deemed to be most relevant.
As the Official Google Blog explains, the aim is to enable users to get to the information they want faster. Searchers will now find additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.
We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.
If you have such web pages, this should ensure greater visibility and higher rankings for sections of your information-packed pages, so this is something to carefully consider. As a small test, you may wish to see how these internal web page links for Therapeutic Riding Associations and for Associations for the Disabled rank in Google searches for those terms. Once indexed, they should rank highly in related searches. Those hyperlinks certainly deserve some serious respect now.
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I missed the original memo from Google, but I find Google Squared from Google Labs somewhat mind-blowing.
Their announcement in June gave the following details:
Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy (albeit tedious) for humans to do, it’s far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.
If you click on any fact, you’ll see the sources Google Squared gathered it from as well as a list of other possible values that you can investigate. So even if your square isn’t perfect at the beginning, it’s easy to work with Google Squared to get a better answer in no time. Once you’ve got a square you’re happy with, you can save it and come back to it later.
If I had seen that, I might not have grasped the full potential. However the latest news indicates that Google Squared has quality improvements and allows sorting and exporting.
At launch, your first square could include at most 30 facts or cells. With today’s update, squares display four times as much data — up to 120 facts. For example, instead of seeing only five companies and six categories, now you’ll see a table with 20 companies and up to six attributes.
The quality of the information is also better, because we’re ranking based on both relevance to your query and whether we can find high quality facts. Now we’re actively filtering out items (rows) and attributes (columns) from the initial square if we haven’t found enough accurate data. Perhaps more interesting, we built Squared to learn from edits and corrections, so as people have been improving their squares, Google Squared has gotten better for everyone.
We’ve also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. Squared will even convert units in the background to make sure the data is sorted properly. We’ve also added the ability to export data from Squared to a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file, which should make it easier to do interesting things with the data.
Google Squared is extremely useful if you want to find a list of potential company leads. Suppose you are a wine distributor and you want to develop a list of restaurants in Langley, BC. Just do a search with Google Squared for Restaurants in Langley, BC. The result is a spreadsheet of key factors for the entries including telephone numbers.
You can download this as a CSV file and open it in Excel or you can transfer it to a Google spreadsheet within Google Documents.
Try it! I think you’ll be impressed.
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Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London, England is an amusing place to visit if you like to hear empassioned debaters. They often take up extreme positions so as to attract the crowd. Ideally if a few hecklers join in with counter-positions, it all adds to the fun.
You might imagine that Speakers’ Forum was not a suitable place to discuss how best to make websites perform well on the Internet. You would be right except that the online debate often resembles that Hyde Park scene.
That image came to mind in a recent post by Jill Whalen that talked about A Fatal Flaw In SEO. Those are dramatic words and you might wonder what would elicit such a headline. It turns out that Jill was incensed by a post by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. This had included in the title equally inflammatory language with the words, Terrible SEO Advice.
Jill said that Rand’s advice could
… potentially set SEO back at least at decade, in my opinion.
In the article, he apologized to his audience of budding SEOs for having ever told them to do what’s right for their users. In fact, he called putting your users first, “utterly false and tragically misleading.”
If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go.
This is certainly soap-box rhetoric. Both have taken extreme positions. After all that’s what attracts the crowds, … and the comments, … and the backlinks, which is what SEO is all about, at least with Google.
Whichever you would label Black or White, neither is correct. The truth as usual is a shade of grey. You need a balance and should be considering both Users and the Search Engines at the same time. It’s probably 70% Jill’s advice and 30% Rand’s advice. The problem is that such a shade of grey will probably not stand out against the simple Blacks and Whites.
Equally if the best advice is somewhat more complex, some will opt for a simple approach that is supported by one of the luminaries of the SEO world. After all, that is what a Google search may indicate is the most relevant advice. The only saving grace here is that hopefully these contradictory positions will make some people realize that the true answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
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Create an Online Presence and A Linkable Brand is the advice from Loren Baker in order to help with natural link building.
Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.
That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.
The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.
A much surer approach is to create content on the website that is of interest to other humans, thus attracting unsolicited links from admirers. It is useful to have a diversity of online content. Baker has some most useful information on building out diverse links in a Link Building Evaluation Guide.
The role of blogs in all this should be emphasized. The blog structure naturally creates a number of associated web pages for any single blog post. All of these support extra internal links. Although less valuable than independent external links, they do add real link value. At the same time, the RSS news feed pings the search engines and ensures that the blog is on their (robot) radar screen. Writing well constructed blog posts is perhaps the surest way of expending effort to get more search engine visibility.
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