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 the following 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-supoose 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.

Please visit our home page for an overview of how we might be able to help you with your SEO or contact us for a discussion by telephone or using our web contact form.

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!

V2-SEO.com Licence Plate

Look, this is just a bit of fun O.K? Alright, there is an ulterior motive which I’ll explain at the end of this post.

This is my car. Click on the image and you can read the domain address V2-SEO.com at the bottom of my licence plate. I hope so anyway because I washed it yesterday afternoon specially.

I’ve always believed a vehicle is one of the best ways of advertising your business, especially if you’re a business with local customers. People in your area get to see it and even get to see who’s getting in and out of the car and may be able to gauge whether you’re somebody they might feel comfortable working with. Just look at these two examples of terrific, eye catching sign written vans belonging to a builder near me.

Marble Construction Vans

I mean obviously it could get silly and believe me I have seen silly sign writing on vans on a stellar scale.

SEO Company Surrey VAN

But I’ve never been able seriously to consider having my ageing but beloved Merc sign written. Just wouldn’t be right, would it? But it occurred to me that the licence plate might be a more subtle opportunity of acquiring a vanity registration number at the same time as advertising your business. Trouble with the word “AdJuice” is that it does not conform to any of the formats allowed by the DVLC.

So, I thought if I can’t have a plate for “AdJuice”, what about a plate incorporating the acronym “SEO”? That’s great because it’s short. I checked and there were a few available. I liked V2 SEO because of the association with a rocket (world war II V2 rocket weapons). Yeah, that’s got some SEO branding potential. Lots of SEO agencies use rockets to create an association between their SEO services and a rocket-like ascent to the top of Google’s search results pages. I see rockets everywhere in the SEO-related search results.

Plus I could match the plate with a domain name. Not any old domain name but a short, keyword domain. Lots of things to consider when trying to decide whether to go for a keyword domain name or brand domain name but I needed to set up a blog so decided I could probably use one of the V2 domains for that or something else sometime.

I checked the domain availability – with and without a ‘dash’ and the .co.uk and .com and some others. V2SEO.com was already registered, so I bought it from some East European guy. What the heck. I learnt the hard way that you should always secure the .com before deciding on a business name because, despite conceiving of the name AdJuice myself, I found later that somebody in the U.S. had had the same idea and already registered www.adjuice.com. It wasn’t being used so I went ahead anyway. Who knows, maybe AdJuice in the U.S. will go bust again and it might become available.

So, I secured V2SEO.com, then registered the other domains, then changed the plate on my car. I was careful to include the actual domain address – v2-seo.com – as a small logo at the bottom of the licence plate underneath the numbers. I did all that in 2009.

I had a logo designed. Cute, eh? And in late 2009, I set up the V2 SEO blog and published 3 or 4 posts in the first half of 2010.

V2 SEO Logo

V1 SEO

At some stage in 2010, I came across a business directory site called UK Small Business Directory and submitted AdJuice for inclusion as a free listing. Anyway, I checked the same directory again a few months later and guess what I stumbled across? A page within the site announcing www.v1seo.co.uk and explaining how the owner of the site, Terry Simmonds, had also had the idea of using V1 SEO as a number plate and a domain name! Here are Terry’s comments about how he conceived the idea for V1 SEO.

What an amazing coincidence! Great minds clearly think alike!

Here are the details of a couple of the V2 SEO domain registrations.

V2 SEO / V1 SEO Domain Registrations

Anyway, towards the end of 2010, I realised I really needed to replace AdJuice’s website. It was my 2nd site, better than the 1st but a long way short of where I needed it to be. I was also aware that to get the best out of business blogging for SEO purposes and also other purposes, the blog should ideally be integrated into your business website i.e hosted on the same domain name as your business. I knew this would be a cinch using a WordPress framework. It was a toss-up between the Genesis and Thesis frameworks and I opted for the former and set up a new website for AdJuice over the 2010 Christmas break.

With a blog on www.adjuice.co.uk, the blog on V2-SEO.com no longer had much purpose so I took the site down. For the time being anyway.

B1 SEO

And I’ve recently noticed another, similar domain name in the search results.

Yup, Web Page One Solutions is hosting on www.b1seo.co.uk. Lee Davies registered his domain on 12th March 2009 so looks like he beat me and Terry to it! He also registered his car under “B1 SEO“!

Just think. Google’s search results for a search on “SEO” might soon look something like this!

1. A1SEO.co.uk
2. B1SEO.co.uk
3. C1SEO.co.uk
4. D1SEO.co.uk
5. E1SEO.co.uk
6.
7.
8.
9. V1SEO.co.uk
10. V2SEO.co.uk

You get the point!

Market Appeal

Just to round things off, take a look at this one for another amazing coincidence! Click on the image to get a bigger one.

AdJuice SEO Services And Market Appeal logos

Anthony Sharot at www.marketappeal.co.uk had exactly the same idea as AdJuice for an icon in his logo. O.K. the colours are slightly different but the similarity is unmistakeable. I designed ours in September 2007, when I incorporated the company.

The AdJuice icon is a letter ‘A’ with an arrow between its legs instead of the cross bar. That’s because AdJuice starts with an ‘A’. Market Appeal obviously starts with an ‘M’ so maybe the choice of ‘A’ is to match Anthony’s personal name rather than business name.

Ulterior Motive

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, there is an ulterior motive for this post apart from fun.

This page should soon rank number 1 in google.co.uk for a search on [V2 SEO]!

I was going to set up another blog on V2-SEO.com, maybe an affiliate site, set up all that premium commentluv stuff, build loads of traffic and earn referral commissions. But I just don’t have the time.

So, I’ve optimised this post for “V2 SEO” and re-directed my V2-SEO.com domain to this page such that anybody who might google [V2 SEO] or [V2-SEO.com], will almost certainly see this page at number 1 in google.co.uk so I’ll still leverage the free PR from my plate. I don’t think it will be long before SEO is recognised as an everyday term so I don’t think the idea of using the term SEO in your licence plate is such a whacky one!

Good old Google Analytics tells me that people have already reached the AdJuice website by googling “V2 SEO”.

One more thing that brought another grin to my face after changing the plate was when the neighbours remarked “like your new car”! I held my silence for a few seconds … should I, shouldn’t I? Nah … I had to tell them it wasn’t a new car! The plate was an indulgence but much less so than a new car!

Please visit our home page for an overview of our SEO services or contact us for more information.

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Screenshot of Google Toolbar PageRank - AdJuice Home Page

It’s hardly surprising that a metric like Google’s infamous PageRank is so widely mistaken for a key determinant of how well a website page ranks (how high up it appears) in the search engine results pages (“SERPs”).

But it is a naive mistake to assume that a higher PageRank score necessarily leads to better rankings. And, to make matters worse, it is a mistake propagated by many within the SEO industry.

The words “PageRank” and “rankings” are so similar that any novice could be forgiven for thinking they mean one and the same thing. After all, Google achieved its meteoric success and left the competition behind largely on the back of its ground breaking PageRank algorithm which scores (nearly) every page on the web and enabled better results to be delivered to surfers.

What is PageRank?

Google assigns every page on the web a numerical PageRank score and this is a measure of how important Google rates the web page. There are two different forms of PageRank that are quoted. The first one is a quasi real-time calculation continuously updated day in day out by Google. We never see these figures. The second one is a score from 0 to 10 reported in Google’s toolbar which can be downloaded free from Google. This second form of PageRank is called “Toolbar PageRank” or “TBPR”. Many other service providers offer tools which show TBPR and usually display them as a green bar like the one shown in the image at the top of this post (which you can click on to see a larger image).

TBPR is updated irregularly and unpredictably and intervals between updates can be anywhere from days to many months. It’s important to realise that TBPR lags behind real-time PageRank and is therefore always out of date (except when you are viewing a web page that has just had its TBPR updated, of course).

So, Why Doesn’t High PageRank Mean Better Rankings?

So if PageRank is a measure of importance, surely the more important pages must be shown higher up in the SERPs? Nothing could be further from the truth! There are many other factors taken into account. So many in fact that PageRank plays a relatively minor role in determining rankings.

In a recent post over at SEOMoz (see link below), Rand Fishkin stated that on average there is a correlation of around 11% or 12% between the PageRank of web pages and the positions they actually appear in the results for any given search term. In other words, if you enter a search query and then record the PageRank (which means Toolbar PageRank) of every web page in the top 100 results, say, you will not necessarily find that the pages at the top have a higher TBPR than the pages at the bottom.

I carried out a test myself. I didn’t need to validate Rand’s conclusion but I didn’t have access to his data and couldn’t resist seeing it for myself. I tested the top 100 results in google.co.uk for a search on SEO companies. Guess what? The result came in at 11.9%, right on target. To tell the ‘whole truth’, I did 3 tests in all and the other 2 came in at 25.6% (for a search on SEO services) and 4.8% (for a search on population statistics).

Relevance is known to be an extremely important factor in determining rankings. Relevance is an assessment of how closely any web page ‘relates’ to the user’s search query. Relevance takes into account many factors including the content or words on the web page and a whole host of other things like the characteristics of the back links to the web page. This is why an important page which is less relevant to the search query might not rank above a page with a much lower PageRank score but which is more relevant.

What is Google’s PageRank Good For?

If Google’s PageRank cannot be used to understand why web pages rank where they do or used to improve rankings, then what is Google PageRank good for?

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz explains some of the uses of PageRank in detail and there is no point in simply repeating them here so if you are interested to read more then why not read his post “What is Google’s PageRank Good For?”. It is well worth a visit to see some legitimate and practical uses of PageRank and to witness some popular myths debunked.

The low correlation between PageRank and actual rank is so counter-intuitive that it takes an authority like SEOmoz to bang the drum before many people can accept it. Mind you, in such a competitive world, even an 11% correlation may be too significant to disregard entirely.

[And who would not be influenced by the prospect of a back link from a PR9 domain? Despite having gone to some trouble to explain the irrelevance of PageRank, I was still pleased to see our home page go from a 3 to 4 in Google's November PageRank update, a few weeks after this post was first published. ]

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A search for many brand names will now show 12 expanded site links beneath the main results as in the one shown below for Marks & Spencer. Previously, much smaller site links were shown. The number one site in a search like this one now occupies the lion’s share of the visible part of your screen with other results being pushed further down.

M&S expanded site links

This makes a lot of sense because if you know exactly which site you are searching for, why not show as much as possible about the pages and content of that site directly in the search results screen? Why give much prominence to other sites at all?

This means that many directory sites and some other sites are effectively relegated and occupy a smaller proportion of the total space on page 1.

For expanded site links to appear, your site must be the unquestionable result to show. I did see expanded site links for www.adjuice.co.uk on Tuesday but they disappeared shortly afterwards, presumably because of the other business in the U.S. trading under the same name. Humbug.

Also, on testing 20 or 30 search queries, I was unable to spot the reasons why some other sites did not appear with expanded site links when they seemed to be obvious candidates.

One implication of the new expanded site links is that it is even more important to make sure you have entered meaningful text in your meta description tags and page title tags because these now have much higher prominence. Mind you, it is only the first part of the meta description tag that appears so you should always try to get the main message in your meta description tags across in the first few words of the tag, as M&S have done. (Note to self:”must check all clients’ tags are showing the best results!”).

Another implication is to review which site links are appearing because you can control, to some extent, which ones are shown. If you have site links appearing for pages that you do not wish to promote as much, then you can block these site links in your Google Webmaster Tools Account.

There are some other issues where Google does not appear to have got it quite right yet and is interpreting exact match keyword domain names as brand names. This is sometimes the case but not always, as pointed out by Dave Oremland in his comment on Andrew Shotland’s post Google SuperSize SiteLinks = SuperSize SEO Buzz Kill.

Another one that might be questioned is that a search (using google.co.uk) on “DIY” returns B&Q (www.diy.com) with expanded site links. This is not really a brand search (although B&Q might try and argue that they and DIY are one and the same thing!) but presumably the expanded site links are shown because B&Q is such an authority on DIY. Is this what the surfer wants to see?

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CLEAN website home page

New Websites and Website Upgrades

Ok, so your new website is finished and has been launched, so now it’s time to think about SEO, right? After all, SEO is just about (a) including your keywords on your website pages and (b) acquiring back links to improve your rankings and generate referrals. If you need to add a few more keywords on the page, you can come back to that later. And you don’t need to worry about building back links yet. Plenty of time for that later too. Let’s concentrate on getting the website finished before thinking about when to start SEO. We can even save a bit more money that way!

If your new website is finished and you think this is the best time to start SEO, you may already have missed out on the most important aspects of SEO and be faced with re-work. Or accepting second best.

Doing SEO the right way, means ‘baking it in’ to your website at the design stage.

Google’s recommendation about the best time to hire an SEO is detailed here in their webmaster guidelines on how to create Google-friendly sites which includes the following extract:

“If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.”

Many aspects of website design can have a significant impact on its performance in the search engines. Anything from content architecture (how your subject matter is organised between and within pages), navigation structure, spiderability and internal linking strategy may make or break its effectiveness. SEO should be considered as integral part not only of your overall marketing strategy but also your web design strategy.

CLEAN + Website Design + SEO + Copywriting

When CLEAN (www.cleanservices.co.uk) launched their new website a couple of months back it was after a team effort from the outset between CLEAN, their design consultants (www.in2orbit.co.uk), their copywriter (www.copyandconcept.co.uk) and AdJuice. CLEAN are the UK’s leading privately owned laundry group and were granted the Royal Warrant in 2006. Operating from four major linen and workwear cleaning and processing plants, they provide laundry services for hotels, restaurants etc. and workwear services for kitchens, the food processing industry, cleanrooms etc.

Since the new website went live it has attained a greater number (and wider scope) of top 3 rankings in Google and attracted a significantly higher number of visitors. Conversion rate is of course the most important indicator of successful SEO and time will tell whether the combination of website design, copywriting and other SEO factors will fill the coffers.

Why Did Planning SEO From the Start Make a Difference?

1. Switching the main focus of the site to the services provided rather than the sectors served enabled faster communication about what CLEAN are offering and, by the same token, what CLEAN’s target audience are looking for. This means ranking first and foremost for their services and secondly the sectors they are targeting – not the other way round.
2. Simplification of the website and navigation structure, including friendlier urls makes it dead simple for humans and bots (search engine spiders) to find meaningful content about CLEAN’s services.
3. Reducing the number of pages. Hold on, I thought “more content = better”? Not always. More content is usually better so long as it is unique, relevant and about a tightly focussed theme. On the old site quite a few pages had been created with genuine intent to address different market sectors but many of those pages had similar content. By re-organising and rationalising the content down to the pages that really mattered, the site’s link equity is not now being unnecessarily diluted by extraneous pages.
4. Deciding upon keyword targets for each page before the content for the page was finalised so the content could be carefully crafted by the copywriter with those keywords in mind.
5. Optimising content, images and internal linking based on pre-agreed keyword targets.
6. Optimising meta data including page title tags and meta description tags well in advance of publication of the new site.
7. Preparing and agreeing 301 redirects from every page of the old site to the most relevant page of the new site (crucial). I’ve recently witnessed a large, high authority, sector-leading site (PageRank of the home page is 7), lose its rankings, and presumably tonnes of traffic, after a website re-design. Permanent 301 redirects have clearly not been set up between the old site to the new site. As has been said by many SEO’s, it’s the web developers that keep the SEO’s in business! I hasten to add that this is not a client of ours. But perhaps they should be!

There are many more differences between the old and new website which have been key factors in its improved performance but the above may be the most influential factors. Most of the credit for the improvements goes to CLEAN, in2orbit design and Copy and Concept for being on top of most of the important things but we believe having us there at the start of the re-design will make a difference in the long run that will far outweigh the cost of SEO.

If you would like further information about when to start SEO, please contact us for a friendly no obligation discussion.

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Bad Links (image courtesy of www.famousbloggers.net)

Can bad links hurt your rankings?

It has long been debated whether poor quality or spammy links could actually damage a website’s rankings in Google.

I read yesterday that over the last few months, Google has been sending out emails to website owners warning them about artificial or unnatural looking links. I’ve seen examples online today of two almost identical emails from Google to the webmasters in question. They both warn about contravening Google’s guidelines but one email warned about links on the website in question which links out to other websites and the other warned about back links or inbound links. Just to clarify for the benefit of any non-SEO’s, back links or inbound links refer to links on other websites which when clicked take the reader to your website.

Google’s email about back links

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

Links intended to manipulate rankings

Since links to and from other websites are a key determinant in how highly your website ranks, link building has been one of the most abused aspects of website promotion. A huge industry has evolved to allow marketers to buy and sell links designed to manipulate rankings. Links bought and sold for the sole purpose of manipulating rankings are in contravention of Google’s guidelines and Google is constantly looking for new ways to combat link spam to preserve the integrity and quality of its search results. Defining a paid link in itself is not easy for example many business directories require payment for your business to be reviewed and accepted but these are not what is meant by paid links.

The toughest nut for Google to crack has been the issue of spammy back links and the reason for that is because website owners are not in control of who points links to their website. If Google penalised your website because of its back links then your competitors could sink you in a trice by pointing a tonne of bad links at your site and pretty much every website would follow yours down into the abyss.

Google’s approach to this in the past seems to have centred around devaluing low quality links so that they become ineffective by being neutralised. However, so long as there has been no real risk of a penalty and a chance that some of these links hold some benefit for ranking purposes, no matter how small, there remains an incentive to acquire them and this sometimes happens on a vast scale (thousands or even hundreds of thousands).

Penalties for bad links

In some cases I read, the site owners claim they have been penalised so it may be the case that these emails are associated with a penalty which will be reconsidered by Google only if the site owner can demonstrate good reasons. Given this ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach, I can only assume that Google has developed some pretty robust techniques for identifying back link profiles which are not only artificial but which also provide strong signals about ‘owner responsibility’.

When asked in the past whether it is possible for a competitor to damage your rankings, Google’s response has ranged from “almost impossible” to “probably possible”. Google has stated that it is almost impossible to sway their opinion (this is all ‘algorithmic opinion’ of course) of a site by pointing bad links at it. That may be enough comfort for businesses that have had websites for a long time. However, new sites may not be so immune from such attacks because they have not had time to establish authority and trust. Indeed, I have read accounts from more than one person claiming that they have succeeded in getting a new site penalised by pointing spammy links at it.

Should you be worried about bad back links?

Our view is that this is not something for most established businesses to feel worried about unless, of course, they are actively infringing Google’s Guidelines. Businesses using SEO companies might ask their providers for a report on their back links or better still for instructions on how they can check their back links for themselves.

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[Since I first published this post, I received a reply from Stuart Pollington at Smart-Traffic.co.uk explaining how he believes this anomaly arose. Since my post allowed for the possibility of inferring that a penalty may have been applied by Google, I feel it would be unfair to do anything other than to publish Stuart's reply in full so I have reproduced it further down this page.]

I noticed today that Smart-Traffic.co.uk, who have long claimed to be the UK’s number 1 SEO company and number 1 SEO specialist, are not appearing in their usual place in Google’s results pages for many of the most important search queries in the SEO sector.

For as long as I can remember, Smart-Traffic.co.uk have appeared on page 1 for the following terms:
SEO specialists
SEO companies
SEO services

Today they are nowhere to be seen (see screenshots below).

A Google site search (type “site:www.smart-traffic.co.uk” into Google) shows that Google has excluded Smart-Traffic’s home page from its page one results (see first screenshot below). The home page usually appears at the top when performing a Google site search and its absence usually indicates that something is wrong.

Is this an anomaly of some kind or could this be a penalty from Google?

If you know, please drop me a line using my contact form.

Here is the full, unedited reply from Stuart Pollington at Smart-Traffic.co.uk, received after this post was first published.

“Hi Ewan,

Stuart Pollington
Head of SEO &
Technical Operations”

Please click on any of the images below to get a full size picture.

Smart-Traffic Site Search Results

SEO specialists - google search results

SEO services - google search results

SEO companies - google search results

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