SEO Rocks

Google has announced a change to its page layout algorithm in a change that instantly made me think Google were being very hypocritical. The new layout will affect pages that have little content but lots of advertising above the fold when a page loads.

I instantly thought of me using my netbook, or the millions of people now using 10″ tables or smaller, the amount of times a google search has been assessed with only PPC on show and loading youtube with ridiculously large adverts across the top.

When you read into it more however, this is not what Google is gunning for, Google are penalising website that make it hard to find the content on the website, if the page loads and the content isn’t visible with a scroll or makes it hard to access content then they are dropping.

Google has said that 1% of searches are effected, initially a small percentage, but this is still a large amount of searches. Thinking more about it, it dawned on me that it’s mainly file sharing websites that use this trick. The download links are generally at the bottom of the page, they have a timer on them to use, the links are always smaller than the adverts, adverts generally dominate the top of the page.

This seems a little coincidental that on the day Megaupload is taken down by the Americans, Google directly affect the rankings of most other popular file sharing websites.

I did try to fight this idea with myself by thinking all they are going to do is improve the page layout of these websites to make it easier to download from them. I don’t think this could be the case, most of these websites will have enormous running costs which are being paid for by advertising in prominent pages on the website. If the download link becomes clear, then massive amounts of revenue will be lost on these websites and who knows if they will be able to sustain operation. I dont believe enough people would pay for the service to cover the loss in advertising revenue.

I did try to perform a few searches to screenshot for this blog post, but i couldn’t even find the websites im talking about in a search, all i got presented with at the end of the search as this.

In a recent video Matt Cuts has confirmed again that Google will be toning down the importance of keyword rich domains. In the video Matt talks about whether a webmaster should use a keyword rich domain and his response to that leans more towards using a domain that can be more brand-able instead of keyword rich.

This does not mean however, that google will not still weight keywords in domains heavily. At the moment it’s not impossible to see a blank web page ranking number one with a keyword rich domain. Proof of this is the following search term and results ibz.cc/h6ZNOB (image below for when it changes)

Caution also needs to be taken when interpreting  what matt says about using a brandable domain or a keyword rich domain. The examples he used were extremely large brands and although he makes a very good point, it may not necessarily apply to small companies trying to get a look in their online market.

What it all means is you can’t be a lazy SEO, this is nothing new though, your SEO campaign can not rely on one factor e.g. keyword rich domain, if this is all you are doing then i would put some work in now.

Jump To: Google Penalty | Filter | Duplicate Content | Hacked | Google Is Wrong!

You have a website so people can use it, for that to happen it needs to be found, to be found, you really have the best chance being in Google (other search engines do exist).

You spend months, years building up your website then one day you realise that the amount of pages Google has indexed for your site is going down. Your first reaction is to panic and shout at someone, then you might perform a google search about de indexing and why!

There are many reasons why your website may start to be de indexed, below are the most common reasons i have seen and how to fix them.

I need to say to this point that there are several levels of penalty that i refer to, I have been told that ‘google filters’ do not exist and they are simply penalties, however i disagree and below you will see my thinking as to why there is a difference.

Google Penalty

A google penalty is when google have withdrawn your website from its index. The main reasons for this is a direct breach of Google’s guidelines, serious things like, Cloaking, being part of a link farm or generally using any aggressive black hat techniques. If you have been penalised then the chances are its for something you have done and you would normally know what has happened.

How To Detect

Detecting a penalty is easy, simply do a site command and it will show you if you have received a penalty. if you wanted to check this website then simply past the code below into google.

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A few days ago i showed people that Wayne Rooney was close to leaving Manchester united through the magic of Trends.

I said that Rooney will leave the club when he becomes bigger than the club, after all no player is bigger than Manchester United.

After i wrote the blog post, it was announced that Rooney was to leave Manchester United. Today is the 22nd and it has now been announced that Wayne Rooney will stay at Manchester United. I didn’t believe believe sky news, or BBC news, or the statement on the clubs website, i had to go and check with old faithful for my confirmation, and yes it was correct, Rooney had in fact announced he is leaving and then perform a U turn and it was confirmed by Google trends. It was confirmed by the chart showing Rooney becoming bigger than united but today he came back now which coincides with him not leaving.

This morning i have been seeing some strange looking search results in Google.fr, They made me think back to Patrick Alofts blog post about site previews in the search results.

This seems to be something similar except it doesn’t seem to work!! I am using Firefox, this is only appearing on Google.FR, i have not updated or installed any plugins since yesterday when i last viewed Google.FR, I DO have JavaScript enabled and i am NOT logged in.

Hovering over a search result adds a blue border around the result and there seems to be a magnifying glass icon, These results are slightly different from the reports on Blogstorm, however, Google is deffinately testing something again.

When i click on the magnifying glass nothing happens, i have checked i have got JavaScrip turned on which it is.

The screenshots are not as impressive as seeing the full site preview but something is being tested on Google.fr today

With the guardian finding it suitable yesterday to publish 14 different news articles online about Rooney it made me wonder weather Rooney was actually bigger, and more important than God, after a moment i decided that maybe wrong!

A lot of the articles are basically evolving around Rooney and Alex Ferguson who is known for bringing down the axe on greedy money grabbing w**r*s and people who generally cross him. One thing i like about united is that no player is bigger than the club. But is Rooney bigger than Ferguson? is Ferguson and Rooney as a tag team bigger than the club?

There is only one way to find this out and that is to ask Google, People may remember Google predicting Obama becoming president so surly it cant be wrong?

Google trends is the answer to any question based on popularity, to prove this as fact i ran a very simple query.

Daddy or chips?

As you can see below, Daddy wins and apart from the blip daddy has always been more popular than chips. (probably financially driven but still a fact)

Now proof has been shown that Google Trends tells the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth its time for the big reveal.

Is Wayne Rooney bigger than Alex Ferguson, or Manchester United?

As we can see, Rooney has always been a notch above Alex Ferguson but not by far, this will corrolate to youth, if we remove the amount of searches made by Rooney himself then it will be even more even. In all this time it has been clear that nobody is bigger than the club.

However, over the last few days Rooney has started to climb, he has almost become bigger than the club which as we know is not aloud, Being so much bigger than the boss will rustle feathers.

If no player can be bigger than the club then once the blue line crosses the orange line, Rooney will definitely be leaving the club, if it happens before January then Rooney will leave in the January transfer window. If the blue line stays below the orange line, then Rooney will stay.

Personally i hope the lines never cross.

I was reading Peter young’s blog post earlier about google getting its own geo targeting wrong and returning what looked like a polish site link in a UK result.

Earlier this morning i noticed google using a different URL when you view a cached page. Webcache.Googleusercontent.Com. After reading around the subject a little i saw that its been around since about May this year. It doesn’t seem to be anything more than a text representation of the IP address Google uses when you click the cache button on a search result.

While i was having a look round i noticed something else you wouldn’t expect to see on Google. Google has indexed over 60k queries for this domain.Most of them seem to have been blocked as the site does have the standard 1 mile long Google robots.txt file, however there are still some results that have been properly cached.

Im sure on the grand scale of things its not going to harm them. It is another example of Google not being perfect

People have been talking about it since before Christmas but today, Google have announced that the Caffeine update is now live.

In a blog post they have explained that the new index will provide 50% fresher results. This is because they have changed the way their index runs. In the past it has worked on layers, the main layer representing the bigger index updates that needed the whole web to be indexed, this meant that there was a lag between being indexed and the changes making an effect.

The new index allows Google to index and then immediately rank the content it is finding. This update has been in place for a while as i have noticed in the last few weeks the speed at which content is being indexed and made available for search. My example is only blogs being cached which happens quite fast anyway but with a few tests im sure the same will apply for other types of website.

So what does this mean? Well if Google now has 50% fresher pages in its index i would recommend keeping your pages fresh! It has always been part of my work to try to ensure pages are kept fresh in a website. The blog that you have on the back of your website could not be more important than ever.

Keep blogging, be current, controversial or just plain boring, it’s really up to you, just ensure that you are blogging and that your content is unique. Add a news feed to your website, its something i have recommended for a long time updating your blog will update your homepage, only a small snippet and keep blogging regular enough so the same snippet doesn’t spend to long on the page.

If you are an E commerce website, then categorise your blog posts the same as your shops categories. This way you will be able to take a category specific feed and place relevant news snippets on category pages keeping these fresh as well.

Everyone has heard of Bling Bling, it now seems Google are trying Bing Bing. I have turned on my PC this morning to find that you can now add background images to Google!

Its nothing serious, but it makes a nice change to the plain white screen you see. May be search is getting like British politics and merging into one!Swedish House Mafia anyone :)

Google in the last couple of weeks has introduced personalised search for all of its users. In the past personalised search has been a feature that only worked when a user was logged in.

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