This question may seem like a no-brainer, but actually, the answer is not necessarily yes in all circumstances. If any of the following examples apply to you’re website, you may not be in need of an search engine optimization campaign right now:
- You have a website that you really don’t want strangers to find, such as a training tool for your employees, a classroom tool for your students or some sort of communications platform/blog which is intended for employee’s or family members only.
- You already have a website which is ranking well, and you’re fully satisfied with your sales, website conversions, and incoming inquiries, and you don’t want to rock the boat.
- You’re in a big hurry—say, you’ll go out of business without a major upswing in revenue in the next couple of months. This is not to say that SEO can’t help you, but good SEO takes time. You may need to focus your energies elsewhere right now.
- Your site is going to be completely rebuilt or redesigned in the next couple of months. If that’s the case, be sure to incorporate SEO tactics from the outset. Anybody can have a go at SEO, and i would always encourage you to do some research and try the SEO for your site yourself, but if you really don’t have the time, and want your new website in expert hands, consider hiring an SEO agency to work with your web designer from the outset.
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Previously I thought that a search box only appeared when a domain was enough of an authority to get sitelinks.
Legal and General is being given a site search box without having sitelinks, I can’t see any other examples of this happening though.
Rumour has it that Google is going to team up with Digg to punish people who continually submit their sites to Digg just to get a PR boost.
A lot of people think the rumour is false but it is interesting nonetheless. Links from Digg are not editorially given - it’s pretty much just a free for all - so there is no reason for Google to count them.
The only time a link should count is when it hits the front page. Perhaps Digg should be nofollowing all the other links?
Remember that the aim of Digg isn’t to get links from Digg, it’s to get links from Digg readers websites.
Most of you might have seen the Google Quality Rater Guidelines by now, I’ve read them and the content is quite worrying for a number of reasons.
The main problem is that the document is written to cater for editors who don’t know much about the web. It explains spam, PPC and thin affiliate sites in a few paragraphs and then expects the editor to have the knowledge to play with peoples livelihoods.
Obviously we don’t know how much Google validates the information given in these spam reports but it worries me that so much power is being given to people who don’t understand what a thin affiliate site is before they read the document.
What the document doesn’t do is explain that while one page might be thin the rest of the site is packed full of useful information. How can you judge that?
Cruise.co.uk have bought the most expensive ’s’ in the world, by splashing out over half a million pounds for cruises.co.uk. This is obviously a very quick way of buying your way to top search rankings, but I’m not so sure if it’s the most cost effective!
So how do you price a domain with #1 Google rankings?
Looking at the current Google.co.uk search rankings; cruise.co.uk rank #1 for cruise and #9 for cruises, with cruises.co.uk at #1. Neither are listed in Google.com’s top 10. (Continue Reading…)
Apparently Google.com is using a stronger geo targeting filter this week causing some people to gain much more traffic and some people to lose a lot.
In the UK Google.com has a 15% market share compared to the 75% market share that Google.co.uk has so it could be quite a big issue for some UK websites. Personally I’m not seeing much of a change looking from here in the UK but looking on a US proxy there do seem to be less .co.uk sites ranking well.
Today we are faced with the news that Digg has millions more registered users despite the fact that being Dugg doesn’t send any more traffic than in the past. Perhaps most of these accounts are fake accounts or the accounts of people who get banned every month? (Continue Reading…)
This is something that has puzzled me for years. With all the noise Google makes about stopping spam and cracking down on paid links why are they still letting people use what is arguably one of the spammiest link networks on the web to rank so well?
I’m talking about the Digital Point Coop which doesn’t rank for it’s own name on Google but which boasts search terms such as mobile phones, loans, credit cards, mortgages and many more as ones where it’s users have top rankings.
Some people even have 24 million links mostly from the Coop and Google does nothing about it.
Why?
Is it because they can’t? Or are we supposed to believe these 24 million links have already been devalued?
How hard is it to remove all the sites that use the Digital Point tracking gif from the index?
Ten years ago usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote an article detailing the 10 mistakes in web design. Re-visiting that article today it’s amazing how little has changed.
- Using Frames
- Gratuitous Use of Bleeding-Edge Technology
- Scrolling Text, Marquees, and Constantly Running Animations
- Complex URLs
- Orphan Pages
- Long Scrolling Pages
- Lack of Navigation Support
- Non-Standard Link Colors
- Outdated Information
- Overly Long Download Times
How many of these is your website breaking? I know most sites break at least a few of them.
Don’t forget that these were written before people like me had ever even used the web and before Google was invented. Google had to decide how to rank sites and signals such as url usability and frames were no doubt on their mind when they were looking at how to spider websites.
When Google brought out the minus 6 penalty webmasters didn’t seem to worry quite as much as when the minus 30 penalty came out. After all being at number 6 isn’t too bad.
However we now see that sometimes you can remove the minus 6 penalty although even Aaron Wall doesn’t seem 100% sure how he managed it.
The key with any penalty is not to panic. Sit down and try to find other people with the same issue and discuss possible solutions between you. Some sites might have the penalty for different reasons than others.
Once you decide to make some changes document exactly what you did and give the site at least a few weeks to settle down before you expect results. Removing the effects of a ranking filter can be tricky and it is often important to get an outside consultant to give you a fresh look on a project.
