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Getting pages corrected and reindexed in Google
We’ve all done it. You upload a new page or new content to your site and there is a mistake in it. The headline includes a terrible typo, or you missed a zero of the promotional price banner. In the past, all you could do was wait for Google to respider and then reindex the page. Depending on the the site and how deep into it the page was, it could take some time. All very difficult.
Google’s Webmaster Tools has now added a natty new tool feature overcomes this. You’ll find it under ‘Diganostics’ and then ‘Fetch as Googlebot’.
Fetch as Googlebot has been around for a while. It allows you to ask Googlebot to come and spider a page. Enter the URL, click fetch and the page will be listed. Simply click ‘success’ when the page has been spidered and you will see the code that Google has read. The tool was initially intended to allow webmasters to check to see if their sites had been hacked, but it is also useful as it shows the header status code (showing any redirects etc) and the download time, an increasingly important factor used to determine rankings.
The new feature is that you can now submit the page to Google meaning that the new page or content beats the queue for getting spidered.
You can go further and ask Google to respider and reindex all the pages that the corrected page links to you.
There is a limit on the use of Fetch as Googlebot. Matts Cutts in his video on this says you have 50 fetches per week and 10 linked pages submissions. But I have a WMT account with about 30 domains on it and that is allowing me 500 fetches, but across all the domains of course. I am still limited to 10 linked page submissions though.
This tool has been around for about six months, but if you missed it’s very useful to know about for when next drama happens.
Google’s Matt Cutts describes the process in more detail
Posted in 
SEO and competitive analysis
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Tags: The power of content in online marketing
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Researching your link profile
I was presenting a course on how to optimise on page content last week in Eastleigh and the subject of link profiles came up – not surprisingly perhaps in any SEO presentation.
The tool I recommend is Majestic SEO’s site explorer. It offers quite a lot for free – all you need to do is register – and if you want to look at more sites or go into greater depth then subscriptions start at £9.99 per month.
Wordtracker also provides an excellent tool called Linkbuilder. This is more expensive and its interface is easier to use and analyses the links a bit more for you – but the data is taken from Majestic SEO, Wordtracker then make it a little more accessible.
Exclude competitors from clicking on your Adwords
Excluding competitors from seeing and then clicking on Adwords is a valuable way of targeting your Adwords budget. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Analytics fast access mode – or no access mode?
Fast access mode in Google Analytics is causing data to disappear, at least for small sites Read the rest of this entry »
How to exclude internal traffic
To exclude internal traffic from your Google Analytics data
You need administrator access to configure your account to exclude internal traffic. If you can’t find the screens referred to, it probably means you have only ‘user’ access. You will have to contact the person who set up the GA account and either ask them to exclude the internal traffic or to give you Administrator access.
Click on ‘Analytics settings’ (top left) to open up the following screen. Click on ‘Add new profile’ (top right)
Tick the box ‘Add new profile for an existing domain’. You need to give the profile a name, I suggest ‘exclude internal’
Your new profile will now appear in the Analytics Settings window. Click ‘Edit profile.
and scroll down to ‘Filters applied to profile’ and click ‘Add filter’
In the ‘Filter type’ drop down, select ‘Exclude’ ‘traffic from the IP addresses’ ‘that are equal to’
You need to know your IP address. There are lots of website out there that will tell you, one such is http://whatismyipaddress.com/. The site will automatically detect your IP, and will present it as ‘IP information’. It will take the form of a number with four groups of digits each separated by a full stop.
Simply copy these four sets of digits in the four boxes, give the filter a name (Me or web agency etc) and your are done.
Profiles and Best Practice
You could of course simply add the filter to your existing, default profile but it is far better – and safer – to leave one profile completely untouched. This means that if you either make a mistake or for some reason want the data excluded by the filter, all data is still available.
Profiles are ways of analysing a sub set of data, so once a filter is configured, it will mean that for that within that profile, some data is excluded. This may be because you have used an exclude filter as here, or it may be that you have a used an include filter, which will have the effect of excluding everything not included by the include filter.
SEO – always traffic never just rankings!
The challenge is that 60% people use the key word ‘watches’ to search on and this is the main focus for optimisation. Currently listed on page three using this term, the objective for this brief is to move the listing to page 2 – Please quote based on meeting this objective.
This was the request I received last week from a new prospective client, the site offers watches, but specifically aimed at the sports market. It threw up some interesting issues because, quite simply, it is not a brief I am prepared to take on! On the other hand, I find it extremely difficult to say no, especially when this is a prestigious site and one with plenty of SEO potential.
My problem is that SEO should be all about attracting qualified traffic to a site, not about chasing rankings. The two are not entirely unrelated of course, but neither are they synonymous. So this was the approach I took…………
Many thanks for inviting me to provide a quote to meet the above objective. However I would like to suggest a slightly different approach as in my experience better results are obtained by focussing on developing organic search engine visibility across as wide a range of keywords as possible, rather than concentrating all resources on one, or a very few, generic keywords. In other words, focus on generating high quality relevant traffic, rather than focusing on rankings.
The rationale behind this approach is as follows:
- The keywords (phrases) that people use in search engines are incredibly varied, and the best converting keyword are generally the most specific – the so called long tail search. So a search for ‘watches for deep sea diving’ is much more likely to result in a sale than one for ‘watches’ where the searcher may just be looking to see what is available compared with the first searcher who is likely to be ready to buy once he finds exactly what he is looking for.
- Google (and all the other engines) use the number of visitors to a site as one of the 200 or so parameters used to determine which sites rank where. So in order to rank on page 1 for sunglasses, it will be necessary to have a very active site – this excludes PPC activity – and the only way of doing this is to have good rankings but good rankings only develop with traffic. The solution to this conundrum is to develop a wide range of rankings for long tail keywords. This will bring in high quality traffic likely to convert and in doing so help to develop rankings for the more competitive, generic terms such as ‘watches’
- Google can and does change its algorithm without notice and certainly without any explanation. The wider the range of good rankings a site has, the less vulnerable it is to changes in these algorithms. This also means that it is not possible to guarantee results in the organic listings. Payment on results is an option, though it tends not to be as straightforward as it at first may seem.
- Targeting long tail keywords is the best use of of SEO resources.
I then continued the quote in the normal way with an outline of expected outcomes, and details of initial and ongoing work that I felt the site needed.
The moral of this story? A large part of SEO is about educating the client and that can begin well before you even start working for them.
And yes, the client came back very quickly, could see the sense behind my approach and we are currently discussing how we can go forward.
Alt text and image title text, their impact on SEO
Alt text and title images, they are often available in CMSs but what are they and how do they help with image and page optimisation Read the rest of this entry »
cookies and Google Analytics
Privacy issues have long been the subject of debate where the web is concerned and a lot of hinges on the way they are used – and abused.
I have a lot of sympathy with the privacy campaigners but I also realise that the way that websites have developed means that increasingly sites need to use cookies to function properly, and most importantly in a way that visitors both want and expect.
The BBC website has published a very interesting article on forthcoming European legislation that will require a website to gain ‘explicit consent’ from visitors before collecting information using cookies. Cookies used in shopping baskets will be exempt – a message asking if your customer on an ecommerce site if you can collect information about what he wants to buy would be just plain silly.
The aim of the legislation is I believe to curtail the use of ad tracking software and any kind of nefarious use of cookies. Very few of us would have any issue with the the latter and there is a possible to good argument for the former. But like a lot of modern legislation, it sounds as though it is not well crafted.
Presumably every time you do a search on Google and then click through to a site, the site will seek your permission to use a GA tracking cookie. Now that might be OK once or twice – but every time you do a search on Google………..!
And of course if you visit a site and say no you do not want it to collect cookie information, then the site cannot use a cookie to remember your preference which means the next time you access it, you will be asked again. I can just imagine the laptop being thrown out of the window as your favourite holiday site asks for the 1000th time whether it can set a cookie, I’ve told you that a 1000 times already.
Oh dear, back to my bandwagon. All legislators should be required to take extensive courses in both history (so they stop making the same mistakes) and technology (so they understand what they are doing).
There is also the question of enforcement. Who will enforce it? Will the resources be available to enforce anything other information collection for fraud, scams and other blatantly criminal purposes. This type of regulation also comes into conflict with the international nature of the web. Will a US site being accessed in the Europe take any notice of this latest bit of Brussels beaurocracy.
In short, a good idea poorly thought out and poorly crafted.