Two years ago AOL leaked some search engine positioning statistics showing the percentage of clicks received by each search result on a page.

The data showed

That compromised data gave us the following break-down of the percentage of clicks received by each of the top 11 search results:

This shows the extreme value of the number one position and that approximately 50% of the page clicks were going to the ppc activity.

 This can be used to develop a business model for serps investment or ppc activity.

Squidoo participation can bring great benefits for very little outlay have you claimed your opportunity yet?

For those that do not know Squidoo is a communal website which allows you to

• develop your own web page on any topic
• incorporate affiliate and Ebay / Amazon links
• keep the profits or share them with a Squidoo charity

Perhaps the greatest opportunity flows from the excellent search engine rankings enjoyed by the Squidoo site and some of the main pages. Whilst Page Rank is not everything, the home page of the Squidoo site is a PR6. Where else can you put your own web pages into a PR6 site?

Many fast moving Internet Marketers have been claiming their land in the web real estate rush. The land grab is really a url grab … as the pages you develop are on the Squidoo main domain and hence a page url can only be used once and will have one ‘owner’.

Some examples we have seen of developing Squidoo lenses as they are termed are: -

1. A lens focusing on boilers and explaining the different types of boiler available, combi boilers, regular and system types and links to the best selling boilers currently

2. A full coverage of the British Gas Homecare product range covering boiler maintenance and repair, central heating system maintenance, plumbing, drains and electrical care.

If you have any aspirations to become an Internet Marketer you need to develop your online real estate and Squidoo is a free first step you should consider. The site is easy to use and has guides to help the first timer together with a friendly, growing community.

The recent big daddy Google update could have a consequence for Google that the search team had not foreseen as I discuss below.

One major change in emphasis in the Google algorithms is the focus on inboulnd links, IBLs.  A site will not be fully indexed or crawled unless it has an acceptable number of topic relevant IBLs.

Reflecting on the impact of the recent implementation you have to wonder whether the Google team have fully considered the long term impact of the changes they have introduced.

The increased emphasis on IBL’s to get indexed must create a barrier to new sites getting indexed and hence this reduces their visibility for a considerable period of time. Lack of visibility will impact their ability to naturally acquire IBL’s and enter the search engine index.

Does this mean that over a number of months Google’s index will become stale with fewer new entrants, with little new content other than that flowing from the established sites in the index, will it become a club for established sites?

If it does then it becomes a closed shop with closed ears to new sites that can often bring radical new content into the index,  content that is very interesting to the people who search for information.

Secondly for those sites currently in the index ….. are their IBL’s being impacted by sites with few IBL’s dropping out? As sites drop out do their outbound links cease to count and hence do some other sites loose IBL’s as a consequence?

If this is true, each iteration of the process sees established sites loose IBL’s and some will ultimately fall below the IBL volume criteria and they drop out of the index.  This will create a nervous set of web masters with only sites like BBC or CNN immune from this impact.

For these reasons I do not consider that the recent changes can be sustainable in the long term and Google must have a rethink, or we will learn that this was a stopgap change to address some short term problems with a more considered set of changes to come.

If it is not a stopgap measure we will reflect on this moment, a time when a new giant and icon of the new Internet age tripped itself up, became middle aged and gradually sunk into decline whilst its senior executives spend their share option monies.

I raised this question in Matt Cutts blog but he is on holiday and has not responded. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/#comment-32926

Googles latest algorithm and infrastructure updates, known as Big Daddy, have been causing waves on the Internet and complete confusion as to what the changes mean.

Matt Cutts, a senior Google search engineer, has now clarified all in an article on his blog.  It is very long and has resulted in a great deal of response comment. To save you reading it I can summarise the main points here.

The Big Daddy update is complete.

Google is intentionally crawling more pages from a site than they will index.

Make your site functionally correct before emphasising link building. Check – are all of my pages reachable with a text browser from a root page without going through exotic code. Try having a site map on your site. After you’re site is crawlable, then work on the HOOK (content) that makes your site interesting/useful and attracts links.

Make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.

Links are now very, very important.

Reciprocal links are declining in value.  The quality and relevance of inbound links is more important.

Affiliate Out Bound Links are not helping crawling and indexing. There is some speculation that an abundance of affiliate OBLs is now having a negative effect on rankings.

The best way to gather links is to offer services or information that attract visitors and links on your own. Things like blogs are a great way to attract links.

The supplemental index is a back fill for the main index, used when insufficient relevant entries exist in the main index.

The supplemental results are typically refreshed less often than the main results

If your site does not have many inbound links it may not make it into the main index, it certainly will be crawled less and could exist only in the supplemental index.

The message is very clear.  Sites must try harder to develop quality inbound links.

Prepare for the future and develop an effective and targeted link building program now or face the prospect of living without Google search traffic.

There is no doubt that Google is having some considerable problems despite the silence and lack of information flowing out of its headquarters.

Read the online forums and news articles. Whilst there has always been a strand of comment to the effect that – my site is not fully indexed, it must be a Google problem, there is a common theme flowing from industry sources which suggests that all is not well.

Long established sites loose 30% of their indexed pages.

Authoratitive sites loose 25% of their inbound links and their Link Popularity falls away.

The site enquiry returns a different number of pages daily for the indexed pages total in large sites.

New sites take weeks to be indexed but googlebot visits them every day.

Old pages turn up in the supplementary index cache, sometimes the pages are 12 to 18 months old.

The stockmarket is littered with major brands that did not survive. You are only as good as the service you offer and Google is very close to a tipping point when users switch to alternative search engines to get better quality results.

Once this happens market share declines, this has an impact on forecast advertising revenue and, as a public stock, the share price gets hammered. Low share price equates to low funds available for investment and the future is gone.

I hope the mega brains at Google get a handle on the current situation quickly as the service and quality of search results used to be excellent.

In the meantime it is hard to feel too much sympathy when you reflect on the thousands of much smaller businesses who are having a rough time because Google has messed up the indexing of their sites and visitor volumes have fallen away.

When running Link Popularity reviews for clients I often see blogger sites appearing in the links to competitors sites.

The parent site has a page rank of 9 although the blog sites it spawns have lower rank with pages starting at 0 like every other site.

I wondered whether this was a valuable Search Engine Optimisation tactic or an opportunity that could not be followed through. Whilst it is easy to open a blogger blog all the usual site M.I. is missing. You do not know when googlebot visits and what pages are being crawled.

The only way to answer the question is to experiment and observe so the account was opened last week.

The site is up and running and called Selected internet sites to give some element of respectability.

If you were wondering what the purpose of this article was I will tell you. This site gets crawled regularly by googlebot so this article contains a link to the Selected internet sites to send it to the blogger account and force it to index the site.

After that I will start experimenting with links from the blogger account to other sites I own to check the value of the link popularity.

SEO (search engine optimization) has been a growing topic on the Internet for a while and many articles have been written about it. I agree SEO is important but with all the the focus on the external search engines and optimizing a site to attract visitors we can tend to forget what happens to the visitors when they get to your site.
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The three main search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo allocate different importance to various elements of your site and web page. This is driven by their different algorithms which they constantly refine as they seek to bring the most relevant search results to you and compete with each other.

One result of this is Read the rest of this entry »

The forums are awash with comments concerning the status and impact of the Google Big Daddy update. Whilst Google is pursuing this to improve their infrastructure and the returned search results the implementation seems to be having an adverse impact on many online businesses.

Search results have become random. Some sites Read the rest of this entry »

Mambo is a good open source content management system and is used by many webmasters. The package itself tries to support seo, search engine optimisation, efforts and it is able to produce search engine friendly url’s.

Unfortunately there is a hidden problem which many people may not be aware of.
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