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.

Tags: ppc search engine

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.

Tags: squidoo, internet, marketer

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

Tags: inbound links, search engine, google

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.

Tags: link popularity, google, big daddy, matt cutts, seo

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.

Tags: Google, search engine, googlebot

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.

Tags: link popularity, page rank, blogger

Some visitors will hit the page on your site which meets their needs at first visit, some will not. What then happens when they start to explore your site. It is at this point that the navigation, information architecture and the search capabilities of the site come into play.

There is no point attracting a visitor only for them to leave in frustration because they cannot find what they need.

Use the search facility yourself, does it work, can you find links to the most valuable products and services you have?

Many times, a web developer has built a site and the search functionality gradually falls into decay as it is not self-maintaining. Does the search engine need re indexing regularly. How does it cope with empty searches, a helpful message or just a nothing found message.

As a final resort you could always consider putting Google search capabilities within the site. If your site is being crawled regularly then the search will fully cover your pages. There is a risk that the customer uses this search capability to search the web if you cannot meet their needs but that is best for the customer, and you could earn some Adsense commission on the back of it.

Tags: search engines, google, search, seo

One result of this is that you will struggle to successfully optimise your site to achieve top rankings in all of these search engines at the same time.

At this point it is worth a moments reflection on the most important part of your business, the customer, and to note that the site should meet their needs not just a search engine.

The consensus from my discussions within the industry is that the relative weightings they currently seem to attach to three of the main components of your site and page are as the table below.

1. Site url and title contains the keyword

MSN 10 Google 5 Yahoo 1

2. Relevancy of the content to the search phrase

MSN 9 Google 9 Yahoo 9

3. Links inward and anchor text used

MSN 5 Google 9 Yahoo 7

Please do not focus on these ratios for too long. A week is a long time in the search engine world and algorithms change over time. Also, as stated earlier, you need to place a large focus on the customer and the customer experience on your site.

Optimising a site, search engine optimisation, for the search engines may deliver traffic to you but a poor customer experience for the visitors will not produce any significant revenue for you.

Tags: Google, MSN, search engine, Yahoo

Search results have become random. Some sites disappear from the index and then reappear. Results from Google search engines around the world are different for the same enquiry. Sometimes sites loose hundreds of pages from the index overnight and they have not yet returned.

Whilst this is a poor service and Google should have done better the issue highlights a very basic business principle. Do not put your business at risk be having too large a percentage of your business flowing from one business partner.

Last week Marks and Spencer suppliers in the UK found the same issue had impacted them when they were asked to cut their costs by 20 percent to improve Marks and Spencer margins. Did the company consider the impact on its suppliers, I doubt that it was a major consideration.

On the Internet there are several search engines and MSN and Yahoo should not be overlooked. These engines are investing to improve their performance and are a valuable source of visitors.

Increasing site visibility by linking with other sites enhancing your Link Popularity , increasing the exposure of your url in your advertising communications and online marketing through email, PPC and banner campaigns are all opportunities that should be actively explored.

If you depend too much on Google search results you may regret your decision with the next Google infrastructure or algorithm change.

Tags: Yahoo, MSN, bigdaddy, search engines, Google

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

One of the article layout options relates to the display of some helpful icons to print, create a pdf or to email the article being read. This appears to be a very user friendly option and designed to enhance the user experience on the site.

When you look behind the code a problem appears.

I have a mambo website and noticed googlebot indexing some strange looking urls when reviewing my weblogs. Further investigation revealed that it was following the printer, pdf and email links to find additional pages.

This creates two issues: -

1. The new urls are not search engine friendly but more importantly …

2. The page content is the same as the original page and hence can lead to a duplicate content penalty by Google. This could reduce the ranking of your pages or possibly lead to them being left out of the index altogether.

What is the solution?

1. The rapid solution is to turn off these features in the mambo configuration options.

2. The more complex but better option is to exclude googlebot from indexing these urls by use of the robots.txt file

3. Insert a meta tag in the header of the duplicate page such as < meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

When you have done this one further problem will remain. When the search engine returns and tries to find these urls they will not be found. In these circumstances most mambo installations will not produce a page not found 404 error but will show the site home page. Nice for the customer experience but again flagging duplicate content to the search engine.

Now I need to sit down and write an article on how to properly produce a 404 error response.

Tags: content management, mambo, search engine, seo

This is obviously a significant advantage for a webmaster running a search engine optimiation program on their site. Information direct from Google on how the site has been crawled and where the problems are.

Unfortunately for you to access the full information Google needs to verify that you are the operator of the site and this is not always easy although there is a simple solution.

Sometimes you will receive a message “We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (OK) in the header.

This configuration presents a security risk for site verification and therefore, we can’t verify your site. If your web server is configured to return a status of 200 in the header of 404 pages, and we enabled you to verify your site with this configuration, others would be able to take advantage of this and verify your site as well. This would allow others to see your site statistics. To ensure that no one can take advantage of this configuration to view statistics to sites they don’t own, we only verify sites that return a status of 404 in the header of 404 pages. Please modify your web server configuration to return a status of 404 in the header of 404 pages. Note that we do a HEAD request (and not a GET request) when we check for this. Once your web server is configured correctly, try to verify the site again. If your web server is configured this way and you receive this error, click Check Status again and we’ll recheck your configuration.”

I have read many complex solutions suggested to overcome this problem, many involving changing code in the website or changing the way the server handles errors whereas there could be a simpler way.

Google is looking for the following response from your server

1. It can find the file it asked you to store in your site

2. It gets a 404 error when it searches for a file which does not exist

Often sites are set up to gracefully handle requests for pages that do not exist with a custom error page. and this handicaps the verification process I am assuming that if this is the situation for your site you have tried to disable this 404 error page for a while whilst you verify the site.

So to move to the solution….

Verification takes two seconds so why not take out the redirection rules on your site for two seconds?

Please note – Only try this if you are comfortable working in your root directory

1. log into Google Sitemaps and navigate to the verification page for your site

2. Check that your site has the file Google has asked you to save in the right directory

3. Rename your .htaccess file to .myhtaccess

4. Immediately press the verify button on the sitemaps account

5. It will then confirm verification is successful

6. Rename your .myhtaccess file to .htaccess

7. Check your site works ok

8. Sit down to watch the TV and relax

This seems a more simple solution that rewriting php code in your site.

Tags: google sitemaps, verify sitemaps, sitemaps verification, google sitemaps verification problem, sitemaps, search engine optimisation, seo

Further to this the sitemaps can be updated and keep Google aware of all the pages in the site and, most importantly, when changes are made to specified pages to help improve the efficiency of the Google visits to the site and subsequent indexing.  The goal is to improve your search engine optimisation activities.

In the last few years Google has loved Blogs as they have used the ping mechanism to advise external services and indexes when an update has been made to the site. In this way Google can ensure that it visits a Blog when there is new content and not waste a visit when there is nothing new. When your search activities are carried out on the scale of Google’s wasted visits cost money.

Sitemaps help to enable a similar method of working for more traditional web sites and might lead to Google prefering sites which post sitemaps in its new service rather than ‘not cooperate’

Tags: google sitemaps, webmaster, submit, siteurls, visibility, website pages,

You now need to direct the bot to the pages in your main web site with your best keyword rich content to ensure that they are indexed. Make sure that the code is clean and your pages are ready for indexing.

If you are in that position create a within page link from your blog article to the page you want indexed. An example is below, note that the link is not just a url but has anchor text describing the target page to increase the relevance of the page. Please ensure the article is meaningful and adds value to the Internet, we do not want to create meaningless spam. p>

In my core site I have a section on search engine optimisation, this section has good articles on the use of keywords and titles to create optimised pages. I recommend you visit.

That is it for now, sit back and observe.

This is one of a series of four articles:

Fishing for Google part 1

Fishing for Google part 2

Fishing for Google part 3

Fishing for Google part 4

Tags: regular, engine, visits, pages, keyword, indexed, position, create article, anchor

So how do you go about validating your site html code?

Well fortunately there are several web sites which will do this for you.

Check out http://validator.w3.org/ and be prepared for some surprises.

Is your code correct or does your developer need to do some rework?

Tags: xhtml, compliant, syntax, correct, ranking, validating, validator

Search engines feed on keywords and clean html code. They dislike flash graphics and broken links.

Customers will create value for you with clear calls to action, crisp marketing messages and a compelling proposition which they can access.

So how do we achieve the balance …. or do we need to.

This discussion could generate many threads but one concept I will offer now is don’t – don’t try to make your site cater for these diverse requirements.

Optimise your site for the customer and their needs, optimise it to get your marketing message across.

Employ separate finely tuned landing pages for inclusion within the search engines with links through to your main site.

Have an experiment and come back and comment on your success or not.

Tags: optimise, engines, viewing, customers, keywords, broken links