OK firstly if you just got here thinking there really is a magic stick which is going to get you to the top, then think again. If you landed here for some other reason and need a laugh, check out this mash up video of Google’s Matt Cutts telling us how to make it to Number 1………

Well it made me laugh!

I’ve received a few emails recently about buying expired domain names, now whilst this is a very valid way of getting a domain name you specifically want, the emails I’ve been getting are very misleading. And, while I’m thinking about it, where did they get my email address from anyway?

The emails

Here is an example of the emails they have been sending out:

“Time is approaching for domainx.com to become available, with a minimum amount of time left, we want to ensure you that you can receive domainx.com at a responsible price.
You still have time to express interest: (their web address goes here)

The benefits you will receive by owning this domain:
1.    Organic Placement within search engines.
2.    Generate more clients by more control over market.
3.    Better Company Branding and Name Recognition.
4.    Makes your prospective clients feel more secure.
5.    Offering more resources and information to your Target Market.”

The Problem

My issues with this email are as follows:

“The benefits you will receive by owning this domain:
1.    Organic Placement within search engines.”

Where in the search engines? Every domain, unless banned, has organic placement in search engines, it may be in position 999,999 but it has a placement there.

“2.    Generate more clients by more control over market.”

What on earth does this mean? It’s a non-statement in relation to a domain

“3.    Better Company Branding and Name Recognition.”

Well, the domain names they have been trying to sell to me have no bearing on my company name whatsoever.

“4.    Makes your prospective clients feel more secure.”

Why would any domain name, other than my company name make my clients feel more secure?

“5.    Offering more resources and information to your Target Market.”

But surely that’s nothing more than the content which is on the site, so again, the domain name has no bearing on that whatsoever, I could offer as many or few resources on this domain or the one they want to sell me.

I suppose this post is half rant, half warning to others. I’ve not given them the pleasure of clicking their links to see what price they want for them, mainly because I don’t want them anyway, but also because they undoubtedly track clicks and will start sending even more spam, but I’d say it’s a fair guess that it’s over priced.

The Solution

If you want a domain name, go to one of the registrars like 123Reg for .co.uk’s or GoDaddy and see what’s available for a few pounds (or dollars) per year, don’t get caught up in the hype of buying a worthless domain for a lot of money!

Since my last post about the Google Penguin update which was implemented on 24th April I’ve been doing a fair bit of research into what may cause a page or website to be affected by it. Whilst it’s far to early to have any conclusive answer, there does seem to be some agreement about what factors are most likely to have effected peoples sites and it seems to revolve around over optimisation of specific pages, however, it seems likely that this could drag the rest of the site down with it.

Please bear in mind that these are initial thoughts and it will take significant testing time before this can be confirmed, so bearing in mind that there could be an update before hand and that these ideas could be only partially right, please apply any site changes with extreme caution.

What caused my site to drop?

Before we talk about specifics, it does appear that Penguin is a rather over zealous spam filter. So what does that mean? Well, it doesn’t seem to be a change in the algorithm itself as Panda was, but more likely a filter which sits over the top and filters sites out.  So your page, according to the algorithm, should be ranking, but then before it’s displayed it’s filtered out by Penguin for being potential spam. I say potential, because it does seem that many legitimate sites have been affected, which is why I expect there to be a significant update to it soon.

So, what is this filter doing?

Whilst it’s far to early to be specific, it’s highly likely that things like keyword density and overuse of synonyms, use of keywords in too many obvious places such as repeated in the title tag, alt images, body text etc, or possibly too many keyword repeats in anchor texts, having too many similar pages is another likely suspect, so for those with multiple pages targeting different regions, which each have titles along the lines of “London Security Systems”, “Manchester Security Systems”, Birmingham Security Systems” etc all with very similar text on the pages, especially if there is no physical address for each are likely to be targets.

What can be done?

Before you do anything, be absolutely sure that you were hit by Penguin and not the panda update which hit in April. To do this log into your webmaster tools account and see if the impressions dropped significantly on the 24th April, if not then it was not Penguin, because this was a filter applied to pages in results, everyone who was hit, saw the drop immediately that it was implemented.

Page content

If you are sure it was, then you need to be thinking about why the pages affected could be considered as spam. If you have been playing with a specific keyword density, try reducing it for a couple of pages which were affected, or if you have used excessive synonyms lose some of these. Check the grammar on your site, remember Google is about delivering what it’s users want to find (and selling a mass of advertising) so bad grammar is another possible culprit. You could also try varying your anchor text significantly, try to make it look much more natural, try to avoid simple keywords and use links like this one to a previous post I wrote about punctuation in fact, it’s even possible that poor punctuation could be included, especially seeing as that’s often a giveaway for spun articles. Speaking of which, you should already know not to spin content, it’s a very old technique and you certainly don’t want it on your own website.

Website links

Finally links, consider a web page which is perfectly optimised, title, text, alts, the works, then a load of links all point towards it from both inside and outside of your site using the exact same keyword, that hardly looks natural does it? If those links were gained organically there would be a huge variation, so as many of us have been saying for several years now, try to write some content which actually attracts links, that’s the only way to get a really natural looking back link pattern.

There has been talk of links from blogs being devalued, I personally think this is highly unlikely for a number of reasons but mainly because there are a lot of good blogs out there which are still ranking very well. However, what is likely is that those in link networks, which have very low quality content (typically spun) or have as many tags as there are words in the content have been.

Do you have a site which has been hit by Penguin and lost a lot of traffic? If so, I would be keen to have a look and see what we can do to resolve it, just get in touch through the contact form.

There has been talk of resubmitting your site to Google once you have corrected it, I suspect that these requests will be filed away and never actioned, they said that less than 4% of websites were affected, however it seems much higher than this, so they simply don’t have the resources to manually review them all. The good news is that if this is indeed a filter, once corrections have been made, the page should pass through once more, so I doubt a re-inclusion request is required at all anyway.

2 Major Google Updates in April 2012

The latest phase of Google updates have sent shock waves through the SEO community, with many sites and probably more importantly, their clients sites losing massive volumes of traffic due to decreases in ranks, I’va already heard stories about in house SEO’s losing jobs over it and agencies losing customers.

It seems that most sites have been affected in one way or another, with some serious losers (see the graph below) many losing out on a few keyword terms, but of course this leaves everyone else who would have moved up into their place. I have a couple of clients who’s sites have benefited significantly, in one case a 227% increase in traffic!

So what’s going on?

In terms of what the updates were and when they happened:

• Parked domains Google error on 15/04/12 (not an update but it meant that many innocent sites were de-listed)
• Panda 3.5 on 19/04/12
• Panda 3.6 on 27/04/12
• Penguin on 24/04/12

The Penguins Have Come To Get You!

The internet is already full of blogs about what these updates are, so if you haven’t heard of them yet take a look at this one about the latest Panda update and this one about Penguin, plus this article from The Search Engine Round Table about which of the publicly announced updates were likely part of Penguin.

Penguin is probably the biggest update to Google since they started to include their local listings on the first page of results, although that only knocked people down a few places, Penguin is said to have knocked many sites out of the top 100 for all their targeted terms.

Quite understandably this has upset a LOT of site owners, but the most worrying conversations in the forums are from disgruntled website owners and SEO’s who have been very quick to pick up on the fact that the Penguin update has the potential to make it very easy to target competitors sites (I’m not going to say how to do it here, simply because if you haven’t worked it out, I don’t want to be the one putting ideas in your head) So, instead of working out how to recover, some are now talking about, and probably actively targeting other peoples sites.

Personally I think it’s a bit to early to be able to work out how to recover from it yet, plus typically when a major update like this is launched, Google follow it up with a second update very soon after which fixes some of the incorrect issues caused by the initial one, but only time will tell. Here is a rather scary graph which was up on the Google Webmaster Help site, theres a good discussion going on there too.

Oh and while I’m writing anyway I may as well mention that another toolbar PR update has just been done too.

As you may or may not already be aware, depending if you are in the SEO industry or not, Google have started to tell us about the changes they are making to how they rank pages. Now, don’t get too excited though, the underlying algorithm is still a closely guarded secret, although there are certain assumptions which can be made from the changes which they publicise, along with a few little nuggets, albeit usually rather ambiguous ones in the posts themselves.

50 Changes in March Alone

Anyone who tells you that Google did over 50 or 100 updates last year is right, although their estimates are somewhat out, if march is anything to go by, they will make around 600 in 2012 alone. OK most of them are not significant, but the occasional ones are. (if you want to try to make sense of them yourself here is the March list).

If however you just want someone else to read through it all and try to make some sense of it (i.e me) there is really just one, rather confusing change which could be significant, here are the two specific statements from Google:

“Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”

This to me, sounds like the use of anchor text in links has been refined, but bear with me and read the next one….

“Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”

This sounds like they are not using the anchor text as a ranking signal at all now. I suppose some close monitoring of clients websites, rapidly followed by some testing is required to make sense of this one!

I was planning on writing an article about how to increase traffic to a blog today, however I remembered a post that Rand from SEOmoz did earlier in the year, so went to find it. I did and having read it through realised there was actually very little to add to what he had already said on the subject, so decided to make this post more of a referral over to his original article which you can find here.

How do I get more visitors to my blog?

This is a pretty common question and there is no quick and easy answer, however his post lists the 21 tactics suggested for long term blog traffic, just remember that there is no quick fix or magic stick which will catapult your blog to the top of Google and thousands of daily visitors, without a fair bit of hard graft, so expect to put in the legwork. His 21 tactics are:

1. Targeting content to people who are likely to share and promote your content to others

2. Getting involved in the online communities where your audience is

3. SEO your blog and individual posts

4. Use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to promote your content

5. Using Google Analytics

6. Incorporating images and photographs

7. Keyword research

8. Linking to your own posts and other peoples (when relevant)

9. Join social sharing sites, such as Stumbleupon and Tumblr

10. Participate in guest blogging, both on your own site and other peoples

11. Make the site look good

12. Comment on other related blogs

13. Get involved with Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers

14. Set up and use RSS feeds

15. Get involved in events

16. Utilise email and signatures to promote your site

17. Use surveys

18. Add value to a popular conversation

19. Include “the best of” type posts

20. Link your web profiles to your blog

21. Copy your competitors backlinks

So there are Rand’s top 21 tips for bloggers to attract more traffic. It’s well worth a read, although it’s a very long post, and probably double if you read all the comments too, but there are more good points made in there.

People have been talking recently about the diminishing importance of links in SEO, but I for one have seen no proof of this. Granted, other metrics are undoubtedly used such as title tags, content and more recently social metrics, however, as far as SEO is concerned, backlinks still play an important role and I can’t see this changing in the foreseeable future.

Types of Links

Now, I don’t mean blog comments, in context or directories here, that’s a topic for another post altogether, but what I’m talking about are the links which bind the internet together overall, the web. These are made up of links within a website and those which point from one site to another, so both in and out of your own site. Firstly the links within your own site which guide a user to the next page, be it from a link within the copy of a page, or your main navigation, are both absolutely essential if a visitor is to stand a chance of remaining on your website for any longer than it takes then to read that page, so if for no other reason than this, everyone has (or at least should have) good internal navigation.

This leads on to the inbound and outbound links on a page, these tell users (and search engines) that the page being linked to is considered by the author of the linking page, to be a good relevant resource which is relevant to their own page and offers further detail or resources. This is the very nature of the internet and the search engines know this better than any of us.

So what about nofollow tags?

The no follow tag was introduced a few years back as a way of a site owner linking to a page without giving it a vote in the Pagerank algorithm, they still leak that small amount of Pagerank but don’t pass it to the other site. This became necessary when blog comment spam was rife (well, it still is!) and people could increase the Pagerank of a site simply by spam comments on other sites. The same goes for forum signatures and profiles, but the nofollow tag essentially gives the site owner a way of making that link worthless in the hope of only getting genuine comments and users, unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be the case, as I know myself that comment spam is still rife from the amount which is caught daily by my spam filters.

Inbound or Outbound Links?

In short both. While you need inbound links, ideally from authority sites in your niche, there is some evidence to prove (my own testing included) that linking out to other relevant and ideally authority sites also helps, such as this related one on Search Engine Watch, so try to drop the mindset of hogging all your Pagerank, it’s highly likely that the benefits of linking out to a couple of related resources from a page far outweigh the amount of PR which you will lose. In fact, when you think about it, a typical website coul have anything from 20 to hundreds of links in it’s navigation, not to mention footer links, sidebar links and those in the copy itself, so what you are passing on is minimal.

Google Search now Includes Punctuation

Google has recently started to include punctuation and symbols in it’s search results, they are including full stops, commas, the hash symbol, percent, at, the pipe symbol (the | which is commonly used in title tags. you can see a full list of the symbols included at this recent post on search engine land, quite why they have done this seems a bit of a mystery to the SEO community so far.

One thought is that it’s all to do with Google+, as if you now search for this it is listed with the + symbol included, although it does seem a bit extreme to change the way search results could be delivered for other websites, just to achieve that.

Another theory is that it has been done for developers, as they could now search for precise strings of code. I guess it will all become clear in time.

Should I submit my website to internet directories?

Before I answer this I need to be clear that there are 2 types of link directories, basically good and bad ones. They can fall into the latter category for a wide number of reasons. But in essence yes, it seems to be becoming increasingly beneficial to add sites to the good directories again. I say again, because 5+ years ago, you could push a website onto the first page of Google with nothing but web directory links (and optimised pages, of course), however this left the field open to swathes of low quality directories and services to submit to them. As a result Google seemed to give much lower importance to these type of links, so I have not really been using them for some time now.

That being said, I am regularly starting to notice good quality directories showing up in the backlinks of various websites, a quick look at the site can determine if the site is good quality or not, although the fact that it shows in a another websites backlinks is a pretty good indicator to start with. So in short, yes I am confident that submitting to good quality and relevant directories is once more a good thing.

How to decide if a directory is worth submitting to

There are a few basic things to look for in an internet directory. Firstly try to find any local ones, search for them by town and county, then if you don’t have many already, at the country level (UK in the case of all my current clients), if they are free (the town and county ones) you may as well add them anyway, remember that a new directory today could be one of the big leading ones in the future, or it could fail and vanish too!

If they want a reciprocal link I personally don’t bother, I suspect that a big page on a website linking out to all manner of sites (like the old link exchange pages of the past) could do you more harm than good.

If you have to pay for a listing, your criteria should be more selective. If you have the SEOMoz tool bar installed that will give you a good idea of the authority and trust of the directory as a whole and the specific page your link will go on and it’s free, I can’t remember what the restrictions are for the free version, as I’ve been using their paid tools for quite a while now, but I’m sure you can see trust and authority with it.

You should always see what specific page your link will go on too, as if it’s on page 10 of a load of listings, it probably won’t do you any good for either SEO or traffic (yes some directories do actually send traffic too!).

So we then need to look at the age of the directory and be sure that the pages are indexed, also that there is a relevant category, as you need to be on a nice relevant page, remember that everyone else’s website and description will affect the relevance of the page, and is the link followed or not, if not it will do you little good for site optimisation. Once you’ve done this you need to balance that up against what they are charging for a listing and decide if it’s worth paying extra for a featured listing, or even additional deep links.

Things to Avoid

Directories which no follow their links, unless you really think that they will give you a traffic boost.
Ones who link out to any old junk, such as pills and sex sites.
Mass submissions, these often use the same anchor and description of 00′s or 000′s of submissions to low quality directories, so are best avoided.

General Directories

There are an increasing number of good quality general directories out there at the moment, they may retain their quality and authority or that could change, so you need to take a bit of a gamble on those ones as they could be devalued at any point in the future, but right now they are offering good quality links too. Use the same criteria to see if they are worth adding to. Of course don’t forget DMOZ, the daddy of free directories, it’s worth adding there too, it doesn’t seem to have the same clout that it did in the past, but it’s free, so add it anyway. Just bear in mind that they are very slow in adding sites, so you could have to wait in excess of a year before you are actually listed there.

The old hyphen – or underscore _ question again

An existing client is planning a site redesign for next spring and has been asking me quite a lot of questions about the best way to change the site, she asked the old question about if hyphens or underscores are better word separators in the page name of a url. I automatically said hyphens are best for a new site, but underscores are OK if the site already uses them. Then I thought about it for a moment and said I would double check, having not looked into it for a few years, and wanted to be 100% sure that I was still offering the right advice, fortunately I found this video made this year from Googles Matt Cutts on this exact topic:

In the video he explains exactly why this is the case. Essentially Google sees an underscore and hyphen slightly differently in that a hyphen is seen as a space and therefore splits the words, so “undescore-or-hyphens” is seen as “underscore or hyphens”, whereas an underscore is essentially ignored and joins the words together so “underscore_or_hyphens” becomes “underscoreorhyphen”.

Therefore if you are creating a brand new site, I would always use the hyphen. That being said, I have a site which is probably pushing 10 years old now, it uses underscores throughout and is ranking very well, so although it must be an aspect of the ranking algorithm which Google uses to rank pages, it’s probably a very minor one.

So in the case of a site redesign you are likely to lose more by redirecting old pages with underscores, to new versions using hyphens than you would to just keep the url’s the same, especially if those pages have a lot of links pointing to them.