Search Engine Workshops UK

Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Sitelinks are the links sometimes shown below the title, description and address of the top ranking site for a particular search. They were first introduced in 2006 but seem to be here to stay. They are very rarely shown except for the top result, and not always then, and according to Google?s Webmaster Tools Help,

are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Google assures us that sitelinks are always generated automatically. They are alwaysnice to have – they do more than anything to make a listing stand out from the rest, as well as appearing authoritative.

Sitelinks appear when a site is deemed to be an authority site for the keyword being searched. This means they are most commonly found in searches for brand names, as in the Heathrow example shown above. They are most likely to be found for the brand name itself but increasingly Google is delivering them for terms including the brand name.  So whereas a while ago Google would only show site links for a search on ‘Heathrow’ or ‘Heathrow airport’ (both of which appear in the domain name), now Google is also showing sitelinks for terms such as ‘Heathrow flights’ as well.

The key to getting sitelinks to appear under a search results lies with having a good number of external links coming into the site using the same anchor text as the search term for which the sitelinks appear. The search term appearing in the domain name is also  important. Lots of sites link to the Heathrow Airport site using the anchor text ‘heathrow’, and the word appears in the domain name (www.heathrowairport.com ) so Google sees this an authority site for the search term ‘heathrow’. The same behaviour is shown if a search is done for ‘heathrow airport’. Again www.heathrowairport.com is the top result and sitelinks are again shown below it. Again there are a high number of sites linking to it using the anchor text ‘heathrow airport’ and the term appears in the domain name.

Sitelinks and menu structure

There is one other requirement that a site needs to meet before sitelinks can be displayed even for its brand name and that is Google must be able to create site links from the internal linking structure of the site. Google says that

Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

This suggests to me that Google monitors the links that visitors to the site choose most frequently and use these as the sitelinks. With the Heathrow example, the sitelinks closely follow the navigation menu along the top of the page – and very nicely built it is too with real text but attractively designed and well laid out. Try searching for ‘coca cola’ and www.coca-cola.co.uk comes up as number 1 not surprisingly, but there are no sitelinks. There are plenty of other sites linking to the Coca Cola site and the search term appears in the domain name.

Blocking sitelinks

One final point – you can see what sitelinks Google is showing for your site by logging into Google’s Webmaster Tools. You will also find the option to block a sitelink if for some reason you don’t want it to appear. This happened on one of my client?s site recently. His site has developed a sitelink for the term ‘hire’ when he is a manufacturer. We have a page about hire simply to say that the company does not hire out equipment but supplies hire companies. I have therefore blocked the ‘hire’ sitelink to try and limit the traffic the site gets looking to hire equipment.

Sitelinks are quite difficult to optimise for and it is probably not worth trying.  If you are building a site with good content with a good search engine friendly navigational structure, they will come quite naturally.

I have always advocated the use of XML (Google) sitemaps so was very interested in an article on their possible dangers – How sitemaps can kill your business.

If anyone has had a similar experience, please let me know and I’ll publish them as a comment.

(I am always publish useful comments but you need to email them in – to training@searchengineworkshops.co.uk – and I will upload them.  Excessive spamming meant the comments feature was turned off.)

Does is matter whether you choose to call your site

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk

or

http://searchengineworkshops.co.uk

The short answer is no – Google and the other search engines have no preference.  But the important thing is that you decide which to use, stick to it and then use a 301 to redirect the other version to the chosen version.

So if I decide to call myself

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk

then I must put a 301 redirect on

http://searchengineworkshops.co.uk

to redirect it to the www version.

Historically it mattered that the www was there but for many years now it has been redundant so it really is a matter of choice which you use.  On the plus side for the www campaigners is that generally it’s what visitors expect to see and are more likely to use the www in any link they make to your site (though the 301 should pass all the link juice on if you are using the non www domain name).

For the non www campaigners, it means typing four fewer characters that don’t do anything.

The only thing that matters is that you are consistent and use a 301 redirect.

I do have one client who uses the non www domain name for their internal use and uses a robots.txt file to exclude it from the search engines.  This is a perfectly good way of dealing with the problem albeit an unusual one.

For more information, there is a very good post written by canonicalseo

Trailing slashes in SEO

A separate but related issue is the use of trailing slashes.  Many sites are now built without page extensions, so instead of

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/in-house-training.html

the URL is built as

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/in-house-training

except that Google can pick up

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/in-house-training

as separate pages

http://www.searchengineworkshops.co.uk/in-house-training/

which all gets very messy.

An interesting follow up to my previous post about Google adding a new third column is that there have been quite a lot of reports of organic traffic dropping off although rankings haven’t dropped.  An example is the article at the Hobo site which reports a drop in traffic of nearly 90% for a particular keyword when the ranking for it had remained at no 1.

I have also noticed a similar effect.  Organic traffic for many of my clients has dropped in the last few weeks but with no apparent loss in rankings.   Hobo’s theory is that Google’s new layout is driving organic listings further down the page and so getting more clicks for its other types of listing, video, shopping, news etc.

I am also concerned that the way Google has moved the UK only results from the initial search is worrying.  This option is now only available once a search has been completed.  Some of the other changes I can see some benefit in, at least for the user.   Dropping UK only search to me is not a good idea, for either my clients or the user.

This is a particular issue with long tail search terms where Google is increasingly penetrating the search space with more and more local listings for example.

It’s good to know I am not alone in suffering drops in organic traffic even if there is nothing I can do about other than further encourage clients to embrace Universal media.

If you would like to add a comment to this post, please email it direct via the Atracks contact page.

Google has slimmed down its logo in the last couple of days, no shadow effect any more just the simple text.  It also seems to have dropped the TM symbol which is interesting.

But that is not all, Google has made a couple 0f other changes.

Universal search has been around for a while (different media returned in main search results – news, video etc as well as web pages).

Now Google has developed this idea by adding a third column on the left of the SERPS offering different options.  Click the icon and the options highlight what Google now delivers – news from last 24 hours, images – the timeline option is fun.

Looks to me like a modest but significant development.  Google may be way up there high above the competition but it can’t be accused of complacency.

If you would like to add a comment to this post,  please contact Atracks via the contact form.

From as early as next week (beg March 2010), Yahoo! will start closing down its search engine operations and import its results from Bing, the new name Microsoft gave its engine last year.

This comes as a result of final clearance from the authorities in the States to allow the ‘search agreement’ between Yahoo! and Bing.

The result as far as the users of search are concerned is that there will now be only two major players, Google and Bing.  There are still two minor players, Ask and  Hakia though they are lagging far behind the other two.

Is this good news or bad?

If you believe that total domination by Google of the search space is not desirable, then a strengthened Bing could be argued to be in a better position to challenge Google’s dominance.  On the other hand, one of the biggest players has gone the way of the famous names of the 90s that Yahoo! itself subsumed, Alta Vista, Inktomi and AlltheWEb.

As always, we live in interesting times.

Link building is vital to develop good rankings – we all know it but do we really have a good strategy in place for continually developing a good link profile.  I know it is something that sometimes takes a back seat with me when other things seem more urgent – even if they are not so important.

Wordtracker have recently posted a very useful article on the

62 steps to the definitive link building campaign

I do take issue with their Step 59, in which the article suggests buying paid links in the form of PPC adverts.  I cannot see how this could help with natural listings, but apart from that, everything they say makes a lot of sense and gives the whole process some structure.

There is a tendency for websites to get ever more complicated driven by better functionality, better design etc, but this is often at the expense of the site’s search engine friendliness. So have you looked at your site through Google’s eyes recently?

Googlebot (Google’s spider that visits your site and collects all the information on it that Google needs to match a page with a search query), is a simple fellow and can’t cope with images and other fancy stuff.

A quick and easy way of getting a good idea of what Googlebot sees is to

Turn off images

Turn off JavaScript

Turn of CSS

Disable Flash

then see what your page looks like.

Using Firefox

To turn off images and JavaScript

Go to

Tools → Options → Content → untick Load Images Automatically and Enable JavaScript boxes.

To disable CSS

Go to

View → Page Style and tick No Style.

Now just refresh the page.

Using Internet Explorer

I tried to do the same thing using Internet Explorer and my advice is to download Firefox if you haven’t already, it will be quicker. But if you really do want to try the same thing in IE, then

To turn off images

Go to

Tools → Internet Options → Advanced, then scroll down to MultiMedia and untick Show Pictures

To disable JavaScript

Go to

Tools → Internet Options → Security → Custom Level, scroll down to scripting and click disable javaScript.

Now restart IE.

Microsoft removed the ability to disable CSS in version 5 so the only way is to edit the registry files – not recommended!! – just use Firefox.

Using Firefox

To disable Flash

Disabling Flash is rather different. You can download a Firefox extension, FlashBlock.

This will then show a place holder wherever there is a Flash element on the page which, when clicked, will enable the Flash element and the page will then appear as the designer intended. FlashBlock is intended to block Flash generated ads and once downloaded you will need to click the place holder every time you load a page that contains a Flash element. This can be annoying when using Google Analytics, for example, since GA relies heavily on Flash.

Now what does your web page look like?

With images, javaScript and CSS turned off and Flash disabled, then what does your page look like?

If you can’t make head nor tail of the page, then probably Google can’t either, and if you can’t follow the links then you have real problems, because neither can Google and linking, including internal linking is key to search ranking success!

Also bear in mind that Google looks at a page by directly reading the code and not through a browser, so even disabled images, javaScript, CSS and Flash only gives a indication of what Googlebot sees – but it can be quite revealing though.

It seems Google has been experimenting with a different style of listing.  Instead of displaying a listing as

www.atracks.co.uk/training/wa-training.html

there have been results appearings as

www.atracks.co.uk > training > wa-training.html

but only of course if your website uses breadcrumbs.

This is great news because it means that instead of just a single link to the page that has achieved the ranking, the listing includes links to all the breadcrumbed pages as well.

Google is certainly talking about page speed and download times.  There is even a little video that Google has recorded, http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/index.html

I still like the page page download time tool I referred to in an earlier post, but Google’s interest over the past summer in download times is perhaps best not ignored!