Search Engine Workshops UK

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

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.

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.

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!

There are lots of rumours circulating at the moment that Google is increasingly using page load time as an important parameter in its ranking algorithm.  That is bad news for those over-engineered sites full of flash, bells and whistles.  But good news for the more simple sites that aim to deliver a simple message, clearly and concisely.

But how quickly do pages load?  Website Optimization offer a free web page analyser tool that will measure download times.  It also provides a record of different object types,

• HTML
• HTML images
• CSS images
• Total Images
• javaScript
• CSS
• Multimedia
• Other

For example, the Atracks homepage scores pretty well on most things except for javaScript.

but for another site, page load times probably are pulling down its rankings!

The download times may only be a guide, but not everyone is using fast broadband.  A quick look at your stats will show the number who are using some kind of mobile device, which will inevitably have a much slower connection.

Website Optimizer goes on to highlight which areas of the page being analysed are likely to be causing problems.  For examples, for my javaScript excesses, it suggests I

Consider optimizing your JavaScript for size, combining them, and using HTTP compression where appropriate for any scripts placed in the HEAD of your documents. You can substitute CSS menus for JavaScript-based menus to minimize or even eliminate the use of JavaScript.

This is certainly a useful tool.  Not only does it indicate areas that search engines may be struggling with there are big usability issues around download times.  Search engine spiders may not be patient enough to wait for a wiz bang page to download, but human visitors are expecting ever faster page loads.  Even if they can find you, your visitor may well be gone and off to your competitor’s site if he has to hang about waiting.

It isn’t an accident that Google has the cleanest, fastest page home page around!

Google is testing out a big new idea – Google Social Search – and it could have big implications for how it ranks pages in its search listings. Google Social search was announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at the end of October, it’s still under development, but even just its existence gives a clear indication of how Google’s mind is working.

In essence, Google is planning to offer content from the searcher’s social network in addition to its normal listings. So if I have published content on Twitter or a blog on, say, a basketball match that I have watched and someone in my social circle searches for something on basketball, then my content will appear at the bottom of the page under the heading “Results from people in your social circle.” Of course, you will need to be signed into your Google account to see this feature.

Apart from the privacy implications (!!) it does show how important Google thinks social networking is. That might not be exactly news but Social Search does take it to a new level.

Google first has to determine who is in your social circle. It is planning to do this by looking at places like

• FriendFeed
• Feeds you are following in Google Reader
• Gmail contacts
• Youtube
• Picassa
• Sites you have listed in your Google Profile
• Twitter

and any other social networking sites that you are subscribed to and on which you are connected to friends.

Google will go one degree of connection further, so will include content posted by friends of your friends.

Whether or not Social Search proves popular is not really what is important. What is perhaps more interesting is that it shows Google is increasingly tracking your social profile – and knowing Google, it would be very surprising if this information does not end up being used in its rankings algorithm.

So it strongly suggests that you – or more importantly from an SEO point of view – your website needs, more than ever, to work on developing a good social profile. Put another way. Google looks like it is developing a system whereby connections could become as important as links. For company websites, that translates into how many people read your blog or have your RSS feed in their Google Reader or follow your Tweets.

Of course Google is keen to assure us all that only content that we have proactively put in the public domain will be used, but even so the whole idea is pretty scary.

Matt Cutts, the human face of Google search has put out a video explaining exactly how Google will be trawling our social networks to work out our social circles. He also reassures us all that, as always, Google is doing this to “improve your search experience”. And yes that really is a direct quote from the video.

Video can be a very useful tool in promoting both your website and your products and services.  But like everything, they don’t ‘just get found’, they have to be optimised so that anyone looking for what you are offering finds your video and not your competitors.

In general the same rules apply to promoting videos as to promoting any other sort of file format but there are a few differences, after all, there is no readable content within the video so Google and YouTube have less to work with and tags are therefore even more important.

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Google looks at a web page via the source code, not through a browser.  This means that sometimes we see a very different page from the ones that the search engine spiders do.  Of course, we too can look at the source code but unless you are extremely well versed in working with HTML code then a rather more insightful method is to turn off images, javaScript and Flash.  This will show in a way that is meaningful to us, something of Google world.

For details of how to turn of images, javaScript and Flash, see our article on How to your web page through Google’s eyes.