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- Outdated Information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.
Google has always done very well by having a clean and uncluttered homepage. The usability aspects of this are made even more obvious when you compare results from a competitive search query such as “mobile phones” across both Yahoo and Google.
As you can see from the screenshots Yahoo only manages to fit 2 natural listings before the fold on my 22 inch monitor whereas Google has 6 results showing. This is why Google will always be most peoples favourite search engine and also why you don’t want to be outside the top 2 results on Yahoo.
More and more people are turning to popular search engines like Google to find their favourite websites. The fact is that it’s often quicker to load up Google and search for ebay rather than to type ebay.com into your browser.
This behaviour leads to a very high search volume for the top few queries. 5% of queries in 2007 were for just 9 terms. Navigational search has seen a 30% increase since 2005.
Let’s look at the top search terms for Google and Yahoo:
Top 10 search terms sending traffic to Google:
- google
- google.com
- www.google.com
- gmail
- google homepage
- google search
- google maps
- www.gmail.com
Top 5 search terms sending traffic to Yahoo:
- yahoo
- yahoo mail
- yahoo.com
- yahoomail
- www.yahoo.com
Search engines are fast replacing the DNS servers as the method people use to find a website when they know the domain. That’s why it is very important to make sure you rank first when somebody searches for www.yoursite.com or www.yoursite.com/tv if you are carrying out a TV advertising campaign. The last thing you want is somebody else taking all your traffic.
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is using a clever tactic to achieve top rankings in Google for hot, up and coming, search phrases. Basically the editors at Mahalo are creating results pages about news stories in the hope that the pages will rank highly in Google for phrases related to the story.
Since the stories are brand new there is little competition for the keywords and no doubt the Mahalo pages are ranking very well.
In essence Mahalo is just doing the same job as Techmeme and Google News but uses editors instead. This isn’t a bad thing but I’m pretty sure Google won’t want these pages being ranked highly, auto generated or not.
The key issue is that Mahalo doesn’t bring anything extra to the party, all the information is on external pages. The list of useful links is that Google is supposed to be giving with it’s search results. The last thing Google wants to be is a list of links that points to other lists of links.
Wikipedia gets a lot of Google love because they have content and the editors there even try to encourage people not to link to a site but to rewrite the content and post it in the Wiki article.
The Guardian newspaper have today written an article titled Is Google a Grinch or a good guy?, which asks many UK SEO’s (myself included) for their views on the recent Google paid link debate.
In my opinion the Google AdWords landing page quality score and PageRank paid link updates were definitely necessary and will only help to improve the relevancy and quality of both organic and sponsored Google listings. But perhaps the timing of the updates are questionable, the Google AdWords change in particular caused many advertisers a major loss in profits just before the Christmas period with many campaigns unable to stay cost-effective due to large increases in minimum bids.
The major issue I feel is that while Google have the right to prevent MFA (Made For AdSense) websites and paid listing directories from clearly profiting through their algorithm and PageRank indicator, they also catch some of the people who are not intentionally doing so. The roll-out of these changes takes time to perfect and in many cases the more selective paid “review” directories will be penalised initially, as could AdWords advertisers using Google AdSense as a secondary source of income, and with Christmas around the corner it’s probably not the best time of the year to be facing these sort of problems.
I’d be interested in hearing comments from anyone else regarding these issues, should Google consider it’s timing of updates more carefully? Can the short-term issues affecting websites within Google’s guidelines be prevented in the first place? If they delay necessary improvements will this harm the algorithm? Is there actually a good time to apply these updates anyway?
