All posts in search

A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.

One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.

Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.

I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?

In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?

panda*

After watching the SEO industry debating the Google Panda or Content Farmer update as it was initially dubbed for weeks and now that the update has hit the UK as well I decided to compile a list of the most important resources on it.

This update seems to have hit far more SEO practicioners than average webmasters, that might be one of the reasons for the popularity of the topic.

Google itself says that 12% of search results have been impacted initially while in a survey 40% of US SEO practicioners admitted they have lost traffic in the update aftermath.

Content farmers have been hit but not all of them, the content farm that was the reason for the discussion on content farms got away unscathed. Demand Media’s eHow thrives even better than before. Why? It wasn’t really a content farms update.

It was a quality update as Google itself refers to it. Thus all kinds of sites have been affected even legit sites not following the content farm business model at all. Some of them have been reinstated after a public outcry though so it seems to be a good idea to ask your PR department for help when your rankings plummeted.

Paris: small Eiffel Tower*

These days the “content is king” and “you need great content” mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough, you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.

It seems that many content creators rely on size to measure greatness, while on the Web it’s often the other way around. The faster someone can convey a message, the greater the content.

With the latest Google update aimed at so-called content farms, we’ve seen a flurry of articles focused on content quality. This is a good start, as content farm articles are often just long without offering value. Long or even big shallow content is not enough these days. Great or quality content is the key.

I’ve been guilty of producing big content instead of great content myself here on SEOptimise. Let me explain the differences between the three common types of content you encounter on the Web today:

While everybody is talking about content farms right now, most people seem to overlook the far more important change that took place recently:  Google has incorporated social search results right into the regular ones.

Until now they displayed searches by your Twitter, FriendFeed or Google Buzz friends below the regular organic results. These changes are even more profound; I can’t explain them in a few short sentences. What’s clear though is that for power users who have a Google account, there has been another important layer of personalisation added.

The rankings differ significantly when logged in and out. For instance I see shared results for the keyword [seo] on #3 and #5, while they are usually #5 and #7 behind the Google News results. Compare the two screenshots below, the logged in version comes first.

Social search is not just Google though. Google is late to the party. There have been several first generation social search engines around since 2009 or earlier, but most of them haven’t survived or only offer a poor user experience and search quality. On the other hand there are plenty of new tools out there – not necessarily search engines as we know them – that offer unmatched social search capabilities.

 

Last but not least, Bing and Blekko offer Facebook search, which Google does not. So it’s time to dig deeper into search, both from an end user and an SEO specialist perspective. Thus I have compiled one of my infamous lists: 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users.

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For most people, SEO still is either a complete unknown, magic​ or the scapegoat for almost everything that doesn’t work on the Web.​ In particular, bloggers seeking attention, publicity and links love to leverage all the ignorance and prejudice​ and launch attacks on SEO as a whole again and again.

Recently, another popular blogger, who leads one of the most important technology blogs (which uses all kinds of SEO techniques​) did it again. This time it was not the average “SEO is rubbish” attack; it was a broader “search sucks” attack where of course not search engines themselves are guilty of being broken but the scapegoat: SEO.

Recently I  bookmarked a good entry level SEO glossary of current SEO terms. A few weeks ago I complained ​about some people still using obsolete and inaccurate SEO terms such as “keyword density”.

Additionally, I missed many new or important terms on this list which I read about and often use, but many people, on the Web at least, don’t. Thus I won’t assume that everybody knows them already. Instead I want to define here 30 (new) SEO terms you have to know in 2011.

Some of them have been around for years but have been largely ignored by the SEO industry. Others are well known by SEO practicioners but completely off the radar for the general public, it seems. Last but not least there are terms from adjacent industries we now have to deal with in SEO. It’s 2011 – we have flying cars by now! – so it’s time to adopt new terminology as well.​


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Michael Martinez of SEO Theory published an article a few days ago that explains in depth how useless it is to chase Google’s algorithm. I won’t repeat what he wrote here, you can read his explanation in case you haven’t yet:

Martinez refers to reverse engineering the Google algorithm as futile and decries good old ranking factors as obsolete. I would probably not go as far as he does but nonetheless my approach is similar. I always tried not to obsess about what Google really counts and what not. I was always keen on knowing what is out there in the know but I followed my own “secret list” of ranking factors.

2011

After writing the rather humorous post on predictions for 2011 I noticed more and more trends so I finally decided to write a 30 trends for 2011 list again this year. These trends are the ones you really have to know about if you ask me. These changes take place already or are unfolding and you can’t afford to ignore them as an SEO, web design or other Web professional. So here they are:

OK, for 2009 and 2010 I had made my huge 30 Web Trends lists. Some of them turned out be true others did not. No surprise here. This year I turned a bit lazy. I won’t offer you 30 predictions for 2011 I’m quite sure about I will predict only the things I’m almost absolutely sure about. OK, maybe some of them are a bit funny or over the top but who wants business as usual?

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The UK SEO community was so inspiring during the last several days. After the sudden death of Jaamit Durrani, one of the most popular UK SEO specialists the community has proven that even a huge loss like this one can have a positive impact. The way people have come together to support Jaamit and his family and to spread the love all over the Web and in real life as well has made the virtual tubes feel a bit warmer this winter.

I’m probably not the right person to commemorate Jaamit though, others who have known him better than me already did write some powerful tributes.

Today I want to write about another case of loss many business people will face online. The loss of reputation. A by now infamous New York Times article dealing with an ecommerce vendor who even provoked bad reviews to get better rankings on Google has highlighted this topic last week. So what do these two quite different negative news have in common? People are dealing with problems or even downright tragic events and are trying to turn them around to have a positive impact in the end.

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