Page title tags

Page title tags offer one of the easiest opportunities for small businesses to improve their website’s performance in the search engines and yet countless numbers of small businesses – and even some bigger ones – neglect this vital piece of the SEO jigsaw. Having said they’re easy, there’s a real art to designing the ideal tags for your web pages.

It’s so important that it probably should have been the first post I published on this blog. There’s plenty of material out there on the web but this is “my take on title tags” and provides a free resource that I can point some local businesses to when they contact me for advice.

I have often seen a website achieve page 1 rankings or improve its existing page 1 rankings by doing nothing more than optimising title tags. That won’t usually be the case for the most competitive keywords but for many businesses it’s a great way to make some progress.

I take into consideration all the factors in this article each and every time I prepare a page title tag for a client. I have experimented ad nauseam and found the most painstaking attention to detail was always worth the effort in terms of improved rankings, improved click-through rate or some other factor.

What Is A Page Title Tag?

It’s a snippet of code that appears in the head section of a website page.

Please note, you can click on all the images in this post to see the full size version of the images.

Example of page title tag code

What Is It Used For?

Its primary purpose is to provide search engines with important information about the subject matter, theme or topic of that particular website page. If the tag is well optimised, it can help the page rank more highly in the search results for user search queries that match or nearly match the terms in the title tag.

Semantics

Let’s get this out of the way. Although it’s most commonly referred to as the page title tag, many point out that the correct terminology is really page title element. It doesn’t matter. We’re all referring to the same thing.

The Answer Is ‘It Depends’

The answer to most questions I get asked about SEO begins with ‘It depends’. It depends on context. What’s right for one website page in one sector, geography or other set of circumstances may not be right for others. The same is true for title tags which should be optimised dependent on context. However, there are some principles of best practice that apply universally.

Where Does It Show Up?

Apart from being visible in the page code and browser tab, the content of the title tag is used by search engines in various ways and can appear in different places in the search results so it’s important to bear all these in mind when designing your tags because they are highly visible.

The content of the tag almost always appears as the first line of the summary of the page that appears in the search results (see image below). When expanded site links are shown in Google, many page title tags may appear at once. They are therefore very high profile and should be well optimised to ensure the best information is presented to the viewer and that they create the most professional impression of your business. This is not the time to forget to use your spellchecker. There are a few exceptions when Google does not use the page title tag as the first line of the summary in the search results but those occasions are rare and beyond the scope of this article.

Example of page title tags appearing in expanded site links

In The Back Link Anchor Text

Other websites may create hyperlinks to one or more of your web pages. These are known as ‘back links’, ‘inbound links’ or just ‘in links’. Sometimes they will link using your page title tag as the anchor text (anchor text is the clickable text that you see in the link). If you have your main keywords in the page title tag and those same keywords therefore end up in the anchor text of some of your back links, then you score twice since targeted keywords occurring in back link anchor text can help your page rank better for those keywords.

The Google ‘Site Command’

If you enter ‘site:www.anyoldwebsite.com’ (substitute your own choice of website name) into your Google search box, you’ll see a list of summaries for all the pages that Google has in its search index for that website. The first line of each of those summaries is the page title tag of each page so you can get a quick feel for how well optimised the page title tags are generally throughout your site.

Example of page titles using google site command

Does It Have Any Other Uses?

At the same time as serving its primary purpose of providing information to the search engines about the topic of the page, the tag can be used to help meet one or more secondary objectives. It’s important to know what these are so that you can decide whether to try and meet one or more of these at the same time when designing your tags. The tag is highly visible so it’s an opportunity to get various kinds of message across.

Secondary Objectives

1. Improved click-through rate (CTR)
2. Branding
3. Corporate message or other message
4. Improved rankings

Improved Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Improved click-through rate can be achieved in various ways by making sure your message is appealing, invokes curiosity or entices the surfer in some other way. You may decide to include a call-to-action (CTA) in your title tag. If you’re less concerned about rankings for specific keywords and more concerned with trying to encourage users to take a particular action, then including a CTA can be effective. You can usually incorporate a CTA as well as your main keyword target. For example ‘Buy the best digital cameras online here’ includes the main keyword target embedded within a CTA. There’s a bit of a trade-off. There’s a limit of about 60 or 70 characters that can be effectively used in a title tag so including a CTA reduces the amount of space remaining for other characters which could be additional keyword targets or other wording.

Example of page title tags used to meet several secondary objectives

Branding

Some big brands may not be concerned with using their website as a means of direct lead generation but may be more concerned with brand exposure. See the example below which uses the tag to convey to the user that they are viewing the website of Apple in the UK. They don’t use the home page title tag to try and rank that page for terms like iPad, iPod or iPhone. But they do include those keywords in the tags of other pages within the website dedicated to those products. The home page tag has been reserved for the brand name and location.

Example of page title tag used for brand

Corporate Message or Other Message

The tag might be used for a corporate message which doesn’t include keywords or a CTA and could be a message about corporate values or some other message.

Compromise
It’s important to remember that search engine traffic depends on many more factors than just appearing high up on page 1 of Google. The result in 5th place may end up getting more clicks i.e. enjoying a higher click-through rate (CTR) than the result in 4th place if the former has a more appealing or eye catching message in its title tag.

Improved Rankings

The following section contains most of the factors that I take into consideration when optimising title tags.

Display Limit in Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)

Currently, Google usually displays up to 70 characters in its SERP. This does change sometimes, so it’s safest to stick to 65 or less if you want to be sure your tag won’t be truncated like the one shown in the example below.

Example of page title tag being truncated

Use Excel to Lighten Your Workload

Whenever you’re doing something a large number of times it makes sense to find the best methodology that works for you and then stick to that every time. I use Microsoft Excel to make the work easy, to provide automatic character counts and to record ‘before’ and ‘after’ tags as an audit trail for client work. This also allows me or the client to review proposed changes before implementation if required.

Example of page title tag character count in Excel

Indexation

It’s worth pointing out that just because some characters in a long title tag might not be displayed in the search results, they are usually still being crawled and indexed by Google. So keywords near the end of a long title tag may still have an impact on rankings but that impact is likely to be small. Keywords appearing early on in the tag are likely to be given more weight than other keywords. It’s best to avoid having an excessively long title tag solely for the purpose of being able to accommodate more and more keywords.

Priority of Keywords in The Title Tag

Generally, the earlier in the tag that the keyword appears, the more weight it is likely to be given by Google in determining rankings so try to include your most important keywords at the beginning.

Keyword Matching

Exact Match
Your title tag is likely to be most effective in obtaining a good ranking for your target keyword if the tag contains an exact match for that keyword. For example, if you want to rank highly for the search phrase ‘blue widgets’ then try to include the exact term ‘blue widgets’ in your tag.

Broad Match
If your tag does not contain an exact match, a partial match can still help. So, taking the above example of ‘blue widgets’, if your title tag was ‘Widgets – Buy Blue, Red & Green Widgets Online’, the exact term ‘blue widgets’ does not appear anywhere in the title tag but this web page may still rank highly on a search for ‘blue widgets’ depending on all the other factors such as the words included in the content on the page, in the back links etc.

Proximity Score
In an exact match, the keywords are right next to each other and in the right order but in a broad match the same words might be present and in the right order but separated by other words, punctuation or other characters. In the above example, although the words ‘widgets’ and ‘blue’ are not adjacent or in the right order, they are very close, separated only by the ‘buy’ and some punctuation. So, their proximity score is high. If the two words were further apart, they would have a lower proximity score and might therefore be treated by Google as less relevant for a search on ‘blue widgets’. If you can’t get all your target keywords in your title tag as an exact match, then try to get high proximity scores by placing the words as close together as possible.

Order of Keywords
If you can’t include all the words in your targeted key phrases in the right order, it may be worth including them in reverse order. If you have ‘widgets blue’ in your tag, that is still a match to somebody searching on ‘blue widgets’. It may only be a reverse match and not an exact match but it has a maximum proximity score and is still highly relevant. And occasionally some surfers will actually type the words into their search box in reverse order so occasionally ‘widgets blue’ in your title tag might still be an exact match for the search query.

Repetition of Keywords
It doesn’t help to repeat keywords in the tag just for the sake of it. However, sometimes a keyword might occur at the beginning of the tag and again within a phrase which adds further value or information. So, ‘Blue Widgets, Blue Widgets, Blue Widgets’ is likely to be counter-productive but ‘Blue Widgets, Buy Cheap Blue Widgets Online Here’ might work well.

Close Variations
Sometimes you might be able to incorporate both the singular and plural version of your main keyword target in your tag. For example ‘Blue Widgets, The Cheapest Blue Widget Supplier in Town’ contains ‘widget’ and ‘widgets’.

Other close variations could be synonyms such as ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ as in the Pixmania example above.

Other variations might be different cases of the word. For example you might want to rank for ‘glaziers’ as well as ‘glazing’ as well as ‘glass merchants’. In the example below, the tag incorporates the variations ‘emergency glazing‘ (as an exact match for 1 keyword target), ‘emergency glass’ (as a broad match with high proximity score) and ‘repair’ and ‘replacement’ as close variations.

Example of page title tag incorporating variations and synonyms

The Challenge With Long Business Names

If you want to maximise the exposure of your company name by including it in the title tag, that can present a conflict. If your business name is very long, there may not be much room left for other words. A short business name is more easily incorporated without compromising the other objectives you might be trying to meet with your title tags.

However, if your business name also has your main keyword targets in it, then you might be able to kill two birds with one stone. In the example below, it has been possible to include the business name without compromising one of the obvious keyword targets because one is contained within the other. It has also been possible to incorporate keyword target sub-phrases within larger keyword target phrases e.g. incorporating the sub-phrase ‘glass supplier‘ within ‘wholesale glass supplier’. Both are useful targets so, by nesting them together, you can target both within one phrase.

Example of page title tag with nested keyword targets

Punctuation – Vertical Bars | Commas, Dashes – or What?

Different websites use different forms of punctuation to separate the words in their tags. This choice may affect click-through rate more than rankings. Having punctuation does affect rankings. For example ‘SEO, services’ will be treated as different from ‘SEO services’. The choice between different forms of punctuation may be largely one of personal preference.

Ambiguity of Keywords

This is really more about choice of keyword targeting than title tags but it’s worth bearing in mind the idiosyncrasies that can arise from ambiguity. If you are a furniture supplier who is targeting ‘conference tables’ in your title tag, you need to be aware that you will be competing with all the sites about the conference tables in football. Your title tag might be better used to target ‘meeting tables’ or ‘conference room tables’.

Special Cases – The Home Page

The home page is a special case. There may be a natural choice of keyword target such as an umbrella term that encompasses the overall business but which is not already targeted on other pages within the website. If there isn’t, sometimes you see a home page targeting a series of keywords which are already targeted on other pages but for which the home page might rank even more highly than the inner page dedicated to the topic. This choice of how to use the home page title tag for targeting will depend on the particular circumstances of each business.

10 Common Mistakes

1. Identical title tag on all pages (containing the same target keywords).
2. Same title tag on all pages (containing just the business name).
3. Different title tags on all pages but still targeting the same core keyword in all of them.
4. Tags too long and containing too many keywords.
5. Keywords repeated excessively.
6. Poor punctuation.
7. Inconsistent casing.
8. Title tag is inconsistent with the content on the page.
9. No title tags at all – ‘untitled documents’.
10. Spelling mistakes due to lack of care and attention to detail.

My Top 10 Tips For Optimising Title Tags

1. Decide on what objectives you’re trying to meet before starting to design your tags.
2. Choose the keywords very carefully so that you include as few as you have to. Each one will carry more weight than keywords in a title tag containing, say, 20 keywords.
3. Make sure your tags are consistent with the theme of that page i.e. the content on the page. If they’re not consistent with each other, then either the title tag, or the content on the page, should be changed.
4. Use Excel to make the job of drafting and reviewing offline easy, prior to implementation.
5. Take all the relevant circumstances of your own business into account. What’s right for one business is not necessarily right for another.
6. Keep a record of rankings immediately before and about 14 days after any changes to title tags so that you can try to establish cause and effect i.e. did your changes help to improve things?
7. If you don’t have an eye for detail, you likely won’t spot some important differences between a good tag and a bad one so it might be better to get someone else to check your work or possibly even do them for you.
8. Don’t hurry them. It’s worth spending as long as it takes to get the best versions.
9. See what your competition is doing to help generate ideas but don’t blindly copy. Another business may be very successful in spite of its title tags not because of them.
10. Every page should ideally have a unique title tag. If you have many pages with the same tag, you won’t be penalised but you’ll be missing opportunities to get the other pages to rank for additional, different terms.

Related reading:
Meta Description Tags – Your Free Ad Copy
Meta Keyword Tags Are Irrelevant – The Final Word
Home Page Title Tag Can Be A Dead Giveaway

I hope you found the above helpful and/or interesting. Please feel free to leave your own tips or other considered comments below, using your real name.

If you would like help with your SEO, you can find all our contact details here or alternatively you can get an overview of our SEO & PPC services on our home page.

Addendum 1

Less than an hour after I made this post live, it was ranking on page 1 of Google for terms closely related to the subject matter of this post.

As you can see from the image below which is a screenshot of the results for a search on ‘guide to page title tags’, this page came up number 2 in Google, behind my good friends at SEOMoz.

Guide to page title tags search results screenshot

The search was made using Firefox private browsing so was not a set of results influenced by my own search history. I also set the search location to Glasgow to see whether my 2nd place was just local or nationwide.

The exact search term that was used i.e. ‘guide to page title tags’ does not appear in the title tag of this page/post and it did not appear anywhere on this page when the search was carried out.

There is a reverse broad match in the title tag because it includes the words ‘page title tags … guide’ so the words in the search term are there but (a) in the wrong order and (b) not adjacent (because the word ‘detailed’ separates them).

Interestingly though, this addendum now includes the exact phrase ‘guide to page title tags’ a handful of times so it will be interesting to see if this page moves into the number 1 position for that exact search term. If it does, I’ll update this post with another addendum!

Blogging about SEO is fascinating, eh?

Addendum 2

OK, now it’s a couple of hours since I published this post and I decided to look at Google’s image search results.

The main featured image at the top of this blog post ranks number 6 in Google’s image search for ‘page title tags’ and one of my older posts has an image that ranks number 1 for the same search term.

Page title tags image search results in google uk

I’m planning on following up this post soon with another about optimisation of images and how images can draw even more traffic. If you think you might be interested in reading that as soon as I publish it, then the best way is to subscribe for updates using the orange RSS feed button in the footer of this page. It’s easy – just click on it and Google will lead you through the RSS subscription process. I do it for hundreds of sites to make sure I’m updated without having to remember to visit those sites.

Your Domain Can Be Burnt By An SEO Company

Is Your SEO Company Safe?

Last month SEO agency iAcquire, in the U.S., was banned by Google for breaking its rules about link building.

This post is aimed at non-SEOs so, for you folk, Google’s ban of iAcquire means that (at the time of writing this) you can no longer find iAcquire’s website in Google. That’s enough to sink any business without a trace in a very short space of time. No presence in Google means your supply of website visitors (and their wallets) is choked off.

That’s a terrifying thought for any business owner.

In the same month, thousands of companies saw their website traffic plummet in the wake of Google’s Penguin update, which targeted manipulative and spammy link building practices like those which led to iAcquire’s ban.

Is the Damage Permanent?

Some companies have already successfully recovered from having their website traffic decimated by the Penguin Update. These companies have been successful in getting spammy back links removed from the websites that are linking to them. But for others, it won’t be so easy. Companies, or their SEO agencies, that have been acquiring spammy links from diverse sources for years, may not find it possible to get sufficient numbers of those links removed in order to recover.

You see, your domain’s back link profile is a bit like a tattoo on the back of your hand. You had better be sure you want them for life because they’re not so easy to remove.

In fact, Google’s advice was that some businesses will be better starting again i.e. transferring their website to a new domain.

Thoughts of lawsuits flying around spring to mind but there is likely to be little recourse against SEO agencies that have damaged their clients’ businesses. In such a complex area, proving cause and effect i.e. pinning down those responsible is almost impossible which probably places remedies out of reach. Also, of course there is no shortage of clients who were well aware or even encouraged the practices that led to their own demise so it is not only SEO companies that are to blame.

How Can I Undertake a DIY Evaluation of an SEO Company?

In this post, I’ll explain one fast, cheap and easy way that you can put any SEO company under the microscope to see if it has a natural back link profile or an overtly manipulated one. If it has a highly engineered back link profile, then it will almost certainly be using the same techniques for its clients so you could be at risk by choosing this agency. If it doesn’t, then you would need to carry out the same exercise for one or two of its clients to make sure that it isn’t protecting itself by practising sound link building techniques but not extending the same courtesy to its clients.

It’s back link profile does of course provide only so many clues about its methods but they are critical clues. They are more useful for eliminating SEO companies from your shortlist than for anything else.

Back Link Tools

There are quite a few tools on the market that you can use to explore the back links of any domain. I’m not going to provide a list of all of these or recommend any as being better than any of the others.

For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll be using Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. You can get a free 30 day trial and then decide whether to buy a Pro subscription for $99 per month. There is an extensive set of tools available and more.

The above sounds very promotional but I will not benefit in any way from referring you to SEOMoz. The details are provided solely for the purpose of enabling you to carry out your own tests. Also, it may sound expensive but no commitment is required and the cost is really nothing compared with the cost of making a mistake by choosing the wrong SEO company.

3 Examples of Domains With Natural Back Link Anchor Text

One of the link building tactics that was targeted by Google’s Penguin Update was the aggressive over-optimisation of anchor text. Those companies that tried to boost their rankings by excessively engineering their back links to include their target keywords set themselves up for a big Google slap.

To escape penalties like these, it is essential to have a natural link profile and that means you should have back links with anchor text that is varied. Not only should it be varied but a good proportion should contain your business name and/or your domain name because these are what would tend to be used by most people naturally.

The 3 examples below show link anchor text profiles that are all credible and might have occurred had nobody ever heard of SEO.

You can click on the images to get larger ones.

Example 1: distilled.net

Natural back link anchor text example 1: distilled.net

Example 2: seerinteractive.com

Natural back link anchor text example 2: seerinteractive.com

Example 3: adjuice.co.uk

Natural back link anchor text example 3: adjuice.co.uk

3 Examples of Domains With Artificial Back Link Anchor Text

Look at the difference between the last 3 examples and the next 3 examples.

Example 1 (anonymised)

Artificial back link anchor text example 1

Example 2 (anonymised)

Artificial back link anchor text example 2

Example 3 (anonymised)

Artificial back link anchor text example 3

Limitations of This Test

The above is a very limited and very specific test to carry out but for non-SEOs trying to get to grips with how to evaluate and shortlist SEO companies, this tool provides much more analysis than described above.

However, the test does have some shortcomings.

1. The back link data is not real-time and is only updated every few months. That said, if there is enough history in the back link profile, that won’t matter too much.
2. The back link data does not include all back links. The web is a big place to crawl so no tool has 100% of the links in its database. However, the most influential i.e. the ones that count should be included within the reports.
3. Lack of history. Nothing can be done in the case of new domains where there is no back link history to analyse. But that’s exactly why you must check the age of the domain. If a domain has been ‘burned’, then the business may have been forced to transfer its website to a new domain. In the case of an SEO company using a new domain, that should sound the alarm bells.

Domain Checks

Look up the domain using the www.who.is free domain check service. If the domain is new and the business is not, then you should find out why the business has started hosting its website on a new domain. There aren’t many good reasons for changing domains.

When you’re entrusting your website marketing to a third party, make sure you choose an SEO company that won’t burn your domain.

Related reading:
Google’s Penguin Update? Get Real!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – Advice From Google About SEO and Choosing an SEO Service Provider.
About SEO Companies
Questions to Ask An SEO Specialist

Let The Spiders Crawl Your Site

Hidden Road Blocks

Ever wondered why your website doesn’t seem to be attracting any visits or as many as you expect? You might be amazed at how many hidden pitfalls could be lurking in your website’s code that could put the kibosh on your plans to dominate the world.

This is a post for small and medium sized businesses to highlight some of the risks of not having an SEO audit carried out on your website, domain, backlinks and server set up.

I’ve encountered 3 road blocks recently which turned out to be very easy to circumnavigate. However, if they had not been seen in the first place, then they would probably have permanently impaired the performance of some aspects of each website’s performance.

SEO can be perceived by people outside the industry as being about little more than keywords and back links. But in reality the breadth and scope of the subject is mind-boggling and that’s why it has such enormous potential and also why it’s so much fun.

Example 1: Crawler Access Inadvertently Denied By Robots File

When we reviewed Bytes website recently, we found that the robots.txt file was preventing spiders from crawling one whole section of the site. This was no fault of anybody in particular and arose due to a peculiar coincidence between the choice of name of a subdirectory within the site and an existing command in the robots file.

This means that, as far as the search engines were concerned, that subdirectory and all the pages and all the content within it, simply did not exist because the crawlers (aka spiders or robots) had been prevented from accessing the code.

Simply renaming the subdirectory (and of course setting up 301 redirects from the old addresses to the new ones) cured the problem instantly. Within a day or two, pages like these were appearing on page 1 of Google (google.co.uk) for obvious search terms.

http://www.bytes.co.uk/info/licensing-updates/microsoft-price-increases-from-1st-july-2012/

http://www.bytes.co.uk/info/licensing-updates/microsoft-price-changes/

The nature of the content on the pages is time sensitive so sorting it out brought benefits, in the form of hundreds of visitors, that would otherwise have been lost.

Note:
If you or your customers have an inventory of Microsoft licenses, Microsoft confirmed last week that volume licensing prices would rise from 1 July 2012 by between 1.7 per cent and 25.9 per cent for the UK private sector.

If you’ve been caught napping, 25% is not to be sniffed at, so you should not delay any further if you don’t want to miss the deadline. Talk to the UK’s leading microsoft licensing experts as soon as you can.

Example 2: Crawler Access Blocked By Java Script Menu

In this example, the main navigation menu for The Wholesale Glass Company website was encoded using Java script. Some of the code rested in a subfolder blocked by the Robots.txt file.

However, there was an HTML sitemap which was crawlable and therefore helped to ensure that all the pages and the content on them were indexed, so what’s the big deal?

The problem was that each of the most important pages on the site, the product pages like this one about acoustic glass, had only one internal link to them which was the link from the sitemap. Some less important pages had links from every other page on the site in the header of those pages. The number of internal links pointing at a page is one signal Google uses to interpret the importance of that page relative to other pages on the site. Therefore the non-crawlable internal links were contributing to the most important pages rankng less well than they should have done.

Replacing the code for the main navigation menu was a simple matter and rankings for the product pages improved in less than a week by typically 20 to 40 places.

Example 3: 301 Redirect Set Up Incorrectly

This one is embarrassing but I like to be open!

When carrying out a few experiments (see my earlier post on Google’s Venice update), I deleted this page:

http://www.adjuice.co.uk/seo-camberley/

and replaced it with a new page with largely modified content here:

http://www.adjuice.co.uk/camberley-seo/

Following the Venice Update, the first page above started ranking at number 5 on searches for “SEO” and “SEO Services” to a searcher in this locality. I wanted to try and determine what factors might be at play and wondered if deleting the page would result in the home page ranking in the same position as the deleted page had. After all, the site has the Camberley address on every page and on many third party sources like our Google Place Page, so why shouldn’t another page still be highly relevant?

Weirdly enough, the home page did but only if I set my location to one of the neighbouring towns, for example Guildford. If I set my location to be Camberley, the home page did not appear. I still haven’t worked that one out.

Next step was to create the new page, highly optimised for Camberley. This didn’t work. That is until I discovered, on checking 2 days ago, that I had not correctly set up the 301 redirect from the old deleted page to the new page!

I corrected this and within a few hours, the new page re-appeared at number 5 on a search for “SEO” (see image below) and also at number 5 on a search for “SEO services”. No pages of the site ranked in the top 30 previously for just “SEO” (I have never targeted that term). The home page previously was ranking on page 1 (at number 10) for “SEO services” but, hey, I’ll take another 5 places if they’re up for grabs for free!

Rankings for other search terms like “SEO companies” did not trigger the new page to rank in place of the home page which I found slightly surprising.

Click on image for full size version.

Localised organic search results for SEO

This discovery nicely rounded off the experiment in the aftermath of Google Venice. Whilst it is not possible to be certain it does look like a couple of key factors to ranking higher in the localised organic search results are to have (1) a page with content that is highly relevant to the search query and (2) for the searcher to be in reasonably close physical proximity to the location implied by various characteristics of the page, including content.

One might argue that the business address of Camberley is a major contributory factor to the Camberley page ranking well but this does not apply to two other pages on the site that rank equally well in the same circumstances for searchers based in Berkshire and Hampshire. This may mean that sites with large numbers of doorway pages can still be effective using these tactics but I suspect (no proof here) that since the Panda Updates, they would probably need wholly unique content on every page.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic now, so back to the plot.

The real message from the above three examples is that if you haven’t had an SEO audit carried out, you may never know what you’ve been missing! All 3 were easy to fix and all 3 fixes should generate more visits.

Related articles:
After I had started writing this post, this one dropped into my inbox and is a good write up on SEO audits if you want to learn more.

How to Perform the World’s Greatest SEO Audit by Steve Webb on the SEOMoz blog.

Please feel free to kick off a discussion below. You can find all our contact details here or more about our SEO on our home page.

Come back soon for our next post or, better still, why not subscribe using the RSS button in the footer to get automatic notification of all future updates?

Penguin Targeting Spam & Krill For Breakfast

Google’s Penguin Update

If you haven’t heard of Google’s Penguin Update, you must have either been stuck in a crevasse for weeks or have no connections with the SEO industry.

Before you waddle back to your igloo, skim what follows to see if anything ruffles your feathers, picques your interest or even pricks your conscience!

The Penguin update has had business owners and the SEO industry in a flap throughout May as waves of businesses have reported their website visitor numbers being decimated by Google’s latest algorithmic update which specifically targets spam in the form of spammy link building tactics. It’s an ongoing clean-up process i.e. not a one-off exercise so if you are thus far unaffected that, in itself, is no guarantee of safety.

This topic has been covered comprehensively by others and I doubt I could improve on some of the fantastic material I’ve read but no SEO blog could be complete without a few Penguin mentions. So this post encapsulates, in the form of tips and a reading list, some of the highlights of the 50 or so articles I’ve read on this subject over the last few weeks.

In short, the update has, at the centre of its target, overly aggressive, manipulative link building practices for example links created by article spinning, spammy blog commenting or automated processes. Specifically businesses that have ended up with unnatural link profiles, for one reason or another, have also been targeted. An example of an unnatural link profile could be where an unnaturally high proportion of links to a website use link text (anchor text) which is an exact match for the business’s main keyword targets (money keywords). So if an extraordinarily high proportion of the links on other websites that link to this website looked like this, say, “SEO Companies” instead of this “www.adjuice.co.uk” or this “AdJuice” then we would be more at risk of a Penguin slap because Google might consider these links as unnatural (i.e. manipulated solely for the purpose of trying to rank higher for the keyword in the link).

Our Tips For Penguin-Proof, Authentic SEO

1. Keep It Real (Or Get Real)!

You can’t outswim a Penguin so get out of the water and back onto dry land. Build your SEO on something solid. Be authentic. That means there should be some justifiable purpose, over and above just improving rankings, for each and every aspect of your SEO activity.

2. Don’t Knee-Jerk

If you got buried by an ice fall, then thrashing around is likely to get you buried deeper. The chances are you didn’t spot the warning signs or understand the risks so it’s better to take some time to reflect and really understand the components of your recovery plan before you try and execute it.

3. Practice Balanced SEO

Diversify. It’s only natural to spend more time on the areas where you feel more comfortable or where you may have developed an expertise but if you spend all your time blogging then maybe it’s time to front up to social media or some other aspects you’ve been neglecting. This approach means you’re not placing all your eggs in one basket and will make your SEO investment less risky by making it more resilient against all future algorithmic updates.

4. Add Value

When surrounded by the ice-floes that are your SEO program, it’s easy to forget why we’re in business in the first place. That’s to add value in some way, shape or form. If you keep that ultimate objective in your sights, in the calm water beyond the bow wave, your SEO is more likely to be sailing in a safer direction as a natural consequence of taking a long-sighted view.

5. Get Real

Be authentic. I’ve already said that but I can say it again. It’s my blog.

Our Top 10 Favourite Reads Covering The Penguin Update

(Listed in order of date of publication.)

1. Another Step To Rewarding High Quality Sites – Matt Cutts of Google heralds the next attack on spam.
2. Google Launches “Penguin Update”; Targeting Webspam In Search Results – Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land describes the Penguin update.
3. Google Penguin Update: 5 Types of Link Issues Harming Some Affected Websites – Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Watch details some of the kinds of links that can give Penguins indigestion.
4. Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice – Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land offers some hope.
5. Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo – Dr Pete of SEOMoz provides extensive advice on how to do zoo-keeping calmly.
6. Anti-Penguin Link Building Plan – Jason A’Cidre of Kaiser The Sage with an epic post on link profile health checks and healthy link building.
7. Two Weeks In, Google Talks Penguin Update, Ways To Recover & Negative SEO – Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land with some scary advice from Google (like “Start Again”).
8. 3 Hard Lessons to Learn From Penguin: Be Relevant, Be Balanced, Keep it Real – Guillaume Bouchard of NVI on Search Engine Watch.
9. How WPMU.org Recovered From The Penguin Update – Ross Hudgens of Full Beaker Inc on the SEOMoz Blog with an authentic case study of recovering from a Penguin slap.
10. Recovering from an Over Optimization Penalty – A True Story – Nick Eubanks of Factor Media on the SEOmoz blog with another authentic case study of recovering from a Penguin slap.

Please feel free to kick off a discussion below. You can find all our contact details here or more about authentic SEO on our home page.

Come back soon for our next post or, better still, why not subscribe using the RSS button in the footer to get automatic notification of all future updates?

Google's Venice Update Rocks the Gondola

Whilst scrambling to complete my final preparations for a client meeting at 10:00 am yesterday morning (what ever did happen to those days when I could get to my former company’s office in Oslo, Norway before 10:00 am?), I did a few test searches and saw some interesting results that would seem to be related to the Google Venice update. This is a follow up to my previous post Google’s Venice Update Rocks The Gondola.

Here are three examples closely connected with our own County of Surrey and our two closest neighbours – Hampshire and Berkshire.

Example 1.

With cookies and search history cleared, I changed my set location to Basingstoke (Hampshire). You can see where to do that in the screenshots below.

A search on the broad term “SEO” returned our “Hampshire” page in position five, only Wikipedia and three bigger agencies above us.

A Search for SEO when location is set to Basingstoke

[By the way, I hate sites that have tonnes of "SEO landing pages", one for every combination of service plus town and/or county. But we do have three at the moment. I can walk from our office in Surrey across the border into Hampshire and then into Berkshire and back to the office all in my lunch break so I'm not beating myself up too much for having a separate page optimised for Berkshire, Hampshire and our home town, Camberley, each of which has wholly unique content.]

Anyway, it’s our Hampshire page showing and that is a change from my previous post. I also tested the same search term with location set to Southampton (a bit further away) and found we did not rank on page one. In the previous post, it was only our Camberley page that was ranking on page 1 for “SEO” i.e. a small town with a population of about 30,000. Now it is pages optimised for County level searches that are ranking. The population of Hampshire is 2 million in very round figures and 1 million for each of Berkshire and Surrey, very roughly, so to rank on page 1 in those locations for very competitive terms is potentially very attractive because of the population numbers.

Might proximity and a clearly geo-targeted page be the dominant factors? There is little else to associate our business with Hampshire. We do have some minor associations with “Hampshire” but the most obvious factor is probably proximity.

Example 2.

This example is very similar to the first. Our Berkshire page ranked sixth for a search on “SEO” when the location was set to Maidenhead. However, when I set the location to Reading, also in Berkshire but a closer and bigger town, we didn’t rank on page one. Why? Other factors must be coming into play which I haven’t detected (yet).

A Search for SEO when location is set to Maidenhead

Example 3.

This example is a bit more tricky.

At the date of my last post, we had a page at adjuice.co.uk/seo-camberley/ which I have since deleted. It was that page that was ranking fifth on a search for “SEO”. On deleting it, I set up a 301 redirect to the home page and submitted a URL exclusion request (which took effect) in Google Webmaster Tools.

In the comments of my last post, I stated that I expected to lose the ranking of that page. Obviously the page that was deleted could not rank but I expected no other page to rank either. That did turn out to be the case in the days shortly afterwards but, today, our home page is ranking sixth for “SEO” with location set to nearby Guildford.

A Search for SEO when location is set to Guildford

So why is the home page now ranking 5th to nearby searchers when it wasn’t a few days ago? Is this due to testing by Google, fine tuning or the other changes I have made to our site in the last few days?

After I deleted our page adjuice.co.uk/seo-camberley/, I created an improved version of that page at a (similar but) new address adjuice.co.uk/camberley-seo/ .

This page has not yet appeared in Google’s search index. But could it still have been an influencing factor in our home page ranking in the “localised organic results” (a phrase coined by Nifty Marketing)? It will be interesting to see whether the new page at /camberley-seo/ will replace our home page at number five in a few days’ time in the “localised organic results” on a search for “SEO”!

What Implications Might The Venice Update Have?

In all three of the above examples, AdJuice has new page one rankings in the localised organic results for very competitive broad search terms like “SEO”.

The pages that have those rankings seem to be very relevant (closely related) to the searcher not only by virtue of the relevance between the search term and on page SEO factors but also by the physical proximity that appears to be suggested by the combination of the searcher’s location (as perceived by Google) and the locations attributed to the ranking page, whether that might be office location, on page optimisation or a mixture of both.

It does not seem necessary to have an office address or physical presence in the same Town or County as the searcher but it does seem to be necessary to be physically close. When we set our ‘searching location’ to be more than 30 or 40 miles from our office, we no longer appeared on page one.

The Venice update may therefore diminish the value of huge numbers of “service + town” landing pages where the searcher is not in close proximity to the physical presence suggested by the pages in question.

However, the use of SEO landing pages that are optimised for locations wthin close proximity of the searcher might just have become an even more effective tactic!

Is the gondola still rocking or will the waters calm this week?

Google's Venice Update Rocks the Gondola

Yesterday, I picked up a post in Search Engine Land by Matt McGee about 40 Google search quality updates in February 2012, also announced in the official Google search blog.

At number 26 in Google’s list of 40 items, is an update dubbed “the Venice update” and Google’s summary announcement on their blog is as follows.

“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

The very next time I logged into Google Analytics, I saw some of the effects of that update had already started to manifest themselves in our search results.

I noticed a visit arising from the term “SEO”. Being a broad, general term, I have never bothered to try and target it and AdJuice does not rank particularly highly for that query. So I carried out a few searches myself and have shown two of the results below.

You can click on these images to get bigger pictures.

New google search results for "SEO" after the Venice update

New google search results for "SEO services" after the Venice update

I was amazed to see that a minor page on our site, dedicated to Camberley, was ranking today at number 5 in the main results on a search for “SEO” (by the way, it was number 5 and not number 4 as I’ve incorrectly annotated the screenshot). We also appeared at number 5 on a search for “SEO services”, a term for which we usually appear on page 2 nationally. You can see from the lefthandmost column of the second screenshot that my location was set to Camberley. Prior to the Venice update, our Camberley specific page really only appeared on page 1 when a searcher specified Camberley in their search query. That’s all changed.

With local results being intermingled with national results rank tracking becomes a big issue, as Linda Buquet explains (see first related link below).

Interestingly, our Camberley page did not appear for other very closely related searches like “SEO specialists”, “SEO agencies” or “SEO companies” although other pages of our site rank well nationally for those terms.

Opportunities For Businesses Operating in Local Markets

The Venice update, at first sight, would therefore appear to offer some great opportunities for local businesses to appear on page 1 in the main results to customers who are searching within their locality. Up until now, the focus for local businesses has very much been on Google Place Page Results, Google Maps and the blended local business results introduced in the UK in 2010.

This change suggests that a shift towards optimising for appearances in the main organic results may have become commercially viable again for some small businesses.

Not only does it now look like local businesses will be able to appear on page 1 for major terms but if they have their Google authorship sorted out, then they are also likely to have their result accompanied by their photo, as in my first example above. That’s a big opportunity.

More places in the main organic search results for small businesses must mean fewer places for the big brands / big budgets that dominate some of the most competitive search terms on a national level. Will they have to recoup their lost leads by upping their AdWords budgets or will we see an increase in the proliferation of “service” + “town” pages?

Venice Update Experiment

The page that appeared in the above searches was this one http://www.adjuice.co.uk/seo-camberley/ . Today I deleted this page, set up a 301 redirect to the home page and submitted a URL exclusion request in Google Webmaster Tools for the deleted page.

The page was really a legacy page which served as a landing page for hyper-local searches in our home town. Unlike many “service” + “town” landing pages, it did actually have 100% unique content but it was not providing any real user value so I did not want it suddenly appearing on page 1 for major search terms. No, I’m not mad. It was a crummy page.

It will therefore be interesting to see whether the deletion of the above page will cost us the rankings in the screenshots or whether our home page will now appear instead. If it’s the former, then I won’t be disappointed but if it’s the latter, then so much the better. Will I have removed the vital signals (a highly specific location-based page) in order to appear in these positions or were they not necessary in the first place?

I’ll watch out over the next few days and update this post (in the comments below) as soon as I have the answer!

Please see comments below for updates. I intend on continuing this experiment by making further changes over the next few days as soon as I can find time. Pop back or subscribe.

Related posts:
Google Venice Update – New Ranking Opportunities for Local SEO – Local SEO Blog
The Google Venice Update – Another Nail in the IYP Coffin? – Local SEO Guide
Google Venice update showing locally targeted organic results – Blogstorm
Google Venice Update – Big Changes Based On Locality – PPC Blog

Please feel free to kick off our discussion below or visit our home page for an overview of our services.

Silver Bangles

Duplicate Content Case Study

In this article, I’ll explain how to make profit from thin air by eliminating duplicate content from your website. No, this is not some shady ‘get-rich-quick scheme’ full of hollow promises. This is a real example of how the identification, diagnosis and elimination of duplicate content became the biggest single contributory factor in achieving an increase of 145% in the number of website visitors from free search (aka organic search or natural search) for one of our clients. Just to be clear, an increase of 145% means that the number of visitors was 2.45 times the number of visitors in the same period in the previous year. We followed Google’s guidelines on this topic.

The Benefits of Eliminating Duplicate Content

The graph below shows the number of organic visits in the period January 2010 to December 2011 inclusive.
You can click on the image to see a bigger picture.

Increase in number of organic visits

AdJuice was engaged by Cavendish French towards the end of March 2011. Cavendish French specialise in a wide range of handcrafted silver jewellery, including stone set silver jewellery with contemporary, classic and vintage inspired collections. We started addressing the issue of duplicate content in May 2011 and the effects started to show almost immediately. Since the benefit really only started to be felt in the second half of the year, we have calculated the 145% increase by comparing the number of visits in the period 1st July to 31st December 2011 with the number of visits in the same 6 months of 2010. If you compare the whole of 2011 with the whole of 2010, the increase is still 70%. What might that growth have been but for the dire economic circumstances we face?

Content May Be King But More is Not Always Better

Sounds like a contradiction, I know. In the world of SEO, content is king. As a rough rule of thumb, more content brings more visitors to your website. Where this does not apply is where the content does not the meet the requirements of being useful, unique and relevant. So more content of a duplicate nature not only brings no incremental benefit but may adversely impact the performance of your site as a whole. In the past, it was just the duplicates that got ignored by Google. Since Google’s ‘Panda Update’ in 2011, duplicate content and other content with low utility value may also impair the performance of the good content (in search marketing terms).

It has never been more important therefore to attend to these kinds of issues. Fortunately Google provides lots of guidance on this problem to help website owners to get the best performance from their sites.

In the summer of 2011, our review led to the elimination of 90% of the pages that google.co.uk had in its index for www.cavendishfrench.com. The number of pages of their website indexed by Google was reduced from over 22,000 to just over 2,000. You can see the number of pages in Google’s index for any website by entering “site:www.anywebsite.com” into Google’s search box. Thanks go to Cavendish French for trusting our recommendations and also permission to publish this.

So, What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content comes in many different forms. To the layman, it may suggest that a web page has been copied i.e. the content on the page has been copied and reproduced on another page of another website or another page of the same website. These cases may be legal, illegal, plagiarised, etc.

Ironically, there are vast numbers of cases where website performance is being adversely impacted by duplicate content issues but nobody has knowingly copied anything. Duplicate content exists for a whole variety of technical reasons and I can’t cover them all here. The scope of this article extends only to the circumstances that directly impacted this project. For those that are interested to read up on all the forms of duplicate content that can exist and how to address them, I have included a couple of links at the bottom of this article to excellent resources.

URL Issues

The most common instances of duplicate content in this project related to URL issues. These problems arise where exactly the same or substantially the same content can be accessed in different ways and found at different URL addresses. This problem is very common with online shopping sites.

To get specific, when browsing on the Cavendish French site, the shopper has the option to display 12 products on a page, 20 products on a page or 40 products on page. So, when you arrive on the ‘silver bangles’ page, this is the URL (page address) you first see in your browser address.

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles

The default is set to display 12 products on the above page. If you then choose to display 20 or 40 items per page, the URL addresses change to these, respectively.

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles?limit=20

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles?limit=40

And if you change back to display 12 products, the page URL is not back where you started but is this one.

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles?limit=12

So there are 4 page URLs (so far) for ‘silver bangles’. These are all perfectly valid options for the shopper so there is no fault with the design from a usability point of view or UX (user experience). The problem is that, as far as search engines are concerned, these are all technically different pages but with the same content and may therefore be considered copies or duplicates of each other. The task the search engines face is how to decide which one of these pages to show for a search on ‘silver bangles’.

Read on because it gets more interesting.

The shopper also has the option of sorting the products into descending order of price or ascending order of price (this is the default). Sorting the default page into descending order of price creates this additional URL.

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles_desc

And for 20, 40 and (back again to the default of) 12 items per page, these URLs.

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles_desc?limit=20

http://www.cavendishfrench.com/jewellery/silver-bangles_desc?limit=12

You can start to see how the number of technically different page addresses, for essentially the same product, is beginning to escalate. In addition to being able to select the number of items on each page and the price order in which they are sorted, the shopper can also select which page they want to view i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. These options create yet more URLs.

These options can all be combined with each other so the number of URLs compounds. The 100 bangles that currently exist could therefore be displayed as follows.

100 products displayed 12 per page = 9 pages or
100 products displayed 20 per page = 5 pages or
100 products displayed 40 per page = 3 pages.

That makes 9 + 5 + 3 = 17 page addresses so far. All of these could be sorted into descending or ascending price order so the number of pages increases to 17 x 2 = 34. I’ve ignored other combinations involving the default page addresses because I think that’s enough to illustrate the point! One page existing in 34 different forms, each with a different page address, but all displaying what could be considered to be essentially the same content.

Rel=Canonical

There are a number of different approaches to dealing with duplicate content depending on the exact circumstances. We opted to make use of the “rel=canonical” link attribute. This means, firstly making a decision about which page address, out of all possible alternatives, is the ‘preferred’ or ‘canonical’ version of the page address.

Once that decision had been made, then we had to include a small code snippet into the head section of all the relevant pages (i.e. all 34 pages above and any other duplicates that may exist for ‘silver bangles’).

This is not interpreted by Google as a command but rather a request or a signal that we wish this page address to be treated as the primary or canonical version and that all other similar pages are effectively copies and should therefore be subordinated to this one.

The page of this blog post you are reading has a rel=canonical link in the code.

Now Google and the other search engines know which page we intend to be shown and this is what happened. The effects of this are several. It increases the conversion rate of this product category by increasing the chances that the visitor is shown the best page i.e. the one that we have chosen. It concentrates the link equity of the site by focusing it on fewer pages. That means better rankings.

Better rankings coupled with better conversion rates means more profit. Out of thin air.

There is sound logic behind why this outcome is reasonable and plausible. Google’s primary aim is to provide the best user experience by returning the most relevant and useful results as fast as possible to surfers. Those website owners that help Google to achieve this by setting up their websites in accordance with Google’s guidelines are bound to fare better.

De-indexation of Other Low Value Pages

Whilst we were at it, we also endeavoured to de-index some other categories of pages which added no value by being in Google’s index. Some of these pages were de-indexed using the straightforward ‘meta noindex’ command. For others, we used URL parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools for a ‘belt and braces’ approach and this angle dealt with de-indexing another 6,000 odd pages.

Where is The Proof?

In the strictest sense, there is no absolute proof that it was the elimination of the duplicates in the index that led directly to the improved website performance. However, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming in terms of timing. Although there was some of the other usual on site work going on (meta tags etc.) these were not extensive so I’m not in any doubt about cause and effect.

Resources

Google Webmaster Tools on Canonicalisation. Advice on this subject straight from the horse’s mouth.
Duplicate Content in a Post Panda World. The ‘go to’ article on all aspects of duplicate content.

Did you find this post useful or have you had any similar epxerience? If so, please feel free to add your comment below, help others find this post by using the social sharing buttons below or subscribe for future updates using the RSS Posts feed at the top of the page.

Don’t forget to visit our home page for an overview of our SEO services or contact us for more information about how we can help you get your products and services seen by more people.

Do Not Copy

Before I start, the image on the left of a copyright symbol is, itself, subject to copyright rules. Yup, I paid a couple of quid to use it here.

The other day I stumbled across an example of another SEO service provider that had copied my content and published it on their website as though it were their own. They shall remain nameless. However, anybody who knows anything about SEO can find out if they want to from the images below! There are lots of free and paid tools, like plagiarism checkers, and other techniques you can use to try and detect instances where your content has been reproduced without your permission. But the way I found this one was rather unusual and made me laugh. I was looking through a list of all AdJuice’s back links using one of my favourite link checking tools and came across one that caught my eye. I visited the linking website to see where and why they had included a link to this website. It turned out that they had copied the majority of my 100% original (but no longer unique!) content on our page describing our organic SEO services and simply published it as their own. The funny thing was that they had not removed the link from within my content to our other page about SEO specialists!

Hey you guys and anybody else out there that might copy content straight from this website, please leave all the links in! We at least get some credit that way for spending all those long hours creating our own 100% original content! One of the golden rules on the internet for using other people’s content for your own purposes is that you should retain all existing links in the content and/or add your own link to the original source so that all visitors, humans and search engines, can readily identify the original author.

Plagiarism – Example 1 (click image for bigger picture)

This is the one where no attempt has been made by the plagiarist to disguise the copying of my content. I don’t really understand why anyone would prefer to copy my content rather than create their own. It’s not as though it’s a masterpiece or some kind of authoritative document. It’s not that difficult to create your own either. Although that does pre-suppose you have a good grasp of the subject you’re writing about. Mmmm … now there’s a thought. I guess it might be nothing more than laziness on the part of some. Or possibly an inability to write. But if that’s the case, they shouldn’t be meddling with SEO because SEO is not for the lazy and not for the illiterate. And there are big issues about trust on the internet so it’s best to play by the rules or not play at all if you want to be taken seriously

Plagiarism example 1 screenshot

Plagiarism – Example 2 (click image for bigger picture)

In this example, the publisher has made a weak attempt to disguise this content as their own. They have substituted a few synonyms, changed some of the headings, changed the order of the headings and so on but the original source is unmistakeable since there are some whole sentences that are an exact match for mine, including punctuation.

Plagiarism example 2 screenshot

Ways to Detect Plagiarism

There are probably many techniques but here are four good ones.

1. Plagiarism checkers

There are a variety of paid and free plagiarism checkers, the best known of which is probably Copyscape. However, when I entered the url of our organic SEO services page, Copyscape couldn’t find any copies. I then tried this free plagiarism checker and it came up with a couple of cases. If copyright protection is high on your agenda, then I guess you would need to review a few thoroughly. I don’t have enough experience of them to recommend any. I found the one I used in this list of plagiarism checkers on Sarah Lam’s blog.

2. Check your back links

If the back links in your content have been preserved i.e. still contain links to your website / original content, then you may trace the copies via your back links. Depending on whether you allow your content to be reproduced, you might be happy with these kinds of copies or still left snarling.

3. Google search

Just copy a reasonably long string of text from your content and paste it into Google’s search box. The text you copy only needs to be sufficiently long for you to be pretty sure that it should be unique on the internet. Firstly, try searching with the text in quotes “like this”. If there are any other instances of that text in Google’s index, you’ll find them in the search results. These results will only show cases where there is one or more exact matches for your search query so this is the quickest and surest way of finding exact copies. This would have revealed the case in my first example above. It may not have revealed the second example. That would depend on whether I had selected a piece of text that had been left untouched in the copied version or whether it had been altered. Then try repeating the search without any quotes. This may provide instances that are not revealed in the first test but it may also produce lots of other web pages that do not include copies of your content so sifting through them might be fruitful or pointless. You won’t find out until you carry out the search.

Be aware that Google will sometimes not display all the results where there are many web pages with the same content so you need to know how to spot this and also how to get all the results displayed. You’ll the idea from the two screenshots below which you can click on to get bigger images.

In this example, I copied and pasted into Google’s search box a string of text from item 5. under the “Core SEO Services” section on our main page about “Organic SEO Services”.

Google search results showing only most relevant results

Google search results showing all copies

Doooohhhh! I said they would remain nameless but I’ve just gone and let the cat out of the bag. Well I reckoned, since you’ve taken the trouble to read this far, then I owe it to you to satisfy your curiosity! Remember if you go check these sites out, they may have changed their content by the time you get there. Or should have.

4. Plant a trap in your content

I would not have known about this method had I not, some time ago, stumbled across and remembered Ian Lurie’s humorous blog post “Stop Plagiarism in 3 Easy Steps”. Ian shows you how to have a bit of sport and turn those snarls into sniggers.

What Constitutes Plagiarised Content?

We all gain inspiration from the talents and work of others so how close to the original does a copy have to be in order to be labelled as a copy or plagiarised version? I don’t know the answer to that. In the case of an exact copy of all or part of your text, then it’s straightforward. But if the plagiarist goes to great trouble to modify your content, does it ever become their own? How far do they need to modify it in order to establish a claim as the original author? I’d need to consult a lawyer to get an answer on legal rights but for my own purposes, if I read it and recognise it immediately as an exact copy or even weakly disguised derivative of my content, then it is a plagiarised copy.

Why Does it Matter?

It may matter to you. It may not. In the two examples above, it is unlikely to have a detrimental financial impact on AdJuice so the consequences are not severe and amount to little more than irritation. However, if I invest time and effort in creating something, then that is a real investment so why should somebody else use it for free without my permission? If I were asked then, in most cases, I would agree to my content being reproduced elsewhere, provided that there is a link from within that content back to this website. If my content is copied and stripped of its links, then that reflects really badly on the plagiarist. I would far rather spend my time creating the next piece than looking over my shoulder to see who ripped off the last.

Other Ways to Protect Your Content

1. Link to your content from other web pages and sources

The more you can establish links from other sites to your content, the more you are likely to establish your content as the original source, for search engine purposes, over and above copies of it.

2. Google Authorship

Implement Google’s advice on authorship to increase the chances of being crediting as the originator. This may also mean that details such as your photo could appear in Google’s search results alongside the summary of your content.

Need help or advice about content creation and marketing to increase the chances of your content being found at the top of Google? If so, then please get in touch using any of the options on our contact page. Alternatively, please visit our home page for an overview of our SEO services.

Is this the longest meta keywords tag ever?

Click On This Image

Click on this image, which I’ve edited to do my best to anonymise it, to see the big picture of the longest meta keywords tag I have seen to date.

It is 2,843 characters long. No, newbies, I did NOT count them – thanks to Microsoft Excel’s @Len function. Yes, two thousand, eight hundred and forty-three characters long. That’s nearly 4 times as long as the 735 characters I recommended (in point 6.) here to guarantee that you win the race to the bottom of the search engine results.

So, how long should meta keywords tags be?

0. Yes, zero characters, probably.

That’s mainly because, as far as Google is concerned, meta keywords tags are irrelevant in deciding which websites to show in their results.

It is conceivable that there may be some very minor (at best) benefits of having the keywords tag present but, if you do use it, use it sparingly and make it meaningful.

I just hope this meta keywords tag wasn’t created by an SEO consultant!

Have you seen a meta keywords tag even longer than this? If so, leave details in your comment below. We’ll check it, before removing any references to the website in question, and publish only the character count in your edited comment.

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SEO Cold Call

There’s a lot of buzz (or steam coming out of ears) in the SEO blogosphere about cold calling and unsolicited emails from SEO companies.

Even some of the biggest names in SEO get approached by complete SEO rookies offering to get them to the top of Google. Some of them make ridiculous claims such as being “former Google employees” or “SEO specialists for Google”.

I get emails and calls every week. However annoying it is though, there is one thing I’ve had to come to terms with.

It works.

It must do. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many cold callers. Or would there?

Despite the fact that being pestered by pushy telesales staff from call centres drives most of us up the wall, some people must be buying what’s being offered by these cold callers.

Even if only one in every thousand calls results in an order, that’s enough to make it worthwhile for some. Regardless of whether they deliver on their promise. Regardless of reputation (you can just mutate and operate under a new alias next month). Regardless of any consideration except for just generating some income.

But does the fact that it clearly works for some, legitimise it?

At one extreme, an unsolicited email from one SEO company to another SEO company, which has somehow found its way onto an email marketing list, is just dumbass spam.

But what if you have spent several days carefully researching a handful of targets and decided to make a tailored, considered approach to businesses that you know would benefit from your services?

Maybe there is a case for cold calling. Maybe it’s just the indiscriminate, pushy mass marketing techniques of call centres that gives traditional outbound marketing a bad name.

Should those selling SEO services – which is inbound marketing – perhaps practice what they preach and win their business using solely inbound marketing techniques?

Is cold calling, in itself, prima facie evidence that the caller must be an SEO butthead?

What do you think? No, don’t call! Comment below!

Here are some recent, sometimes hilarious, comments I’ve stumbled upon from well known SEO bloggers.

Ian Lurie – SEO butthead detection in 5 easy steps
Andrew Shotland – Local SEO bullshitters please stop calling me
David Naylor – Is cold calling still a viable option?

Feel free to give full expression to your feelings below!