Google has announced a change to its page layout algorithm in a change that instantly made me think Google were being very hypocritical. The new layout will affect pages that have little content but lots of advertising above the fold when a page loads.

I instantly thought of me using my netbook, or the millions of people now using 10″ tables or smaller, the amount of times a google search has been assessed with only PPC on show and loading youtube with ridiculously large adverts across the top.

When you read into it more however, this is not what Google is gunning for, Google are penalising website that make it hard to find the content on the website, if the page loads and the content isn’t visible with a scroll or makes it hard to access content then they are dropping.

Google has said that 1% of searches are effected, initially a small percentage, but this is still a large amount of searches. Thinking more about it, it dawned on me that it’s mainly file sharing websites that use this trick. The download links are generally at the bottom of the page, they have a timer on them to use, the links are always smaller than the adverts, adverts generally dominate the top of the page.

This seems a little coincidental that on the day Megaupload is taken down by the Americans, Google directly affect the rankings of most other popular file sharing websites.

I did try to fight this idea with myself by thinking all they are going to do is improve the page layout of these websites to make it easier to download from them. I don’t think this could be the case, most of these websites will have enormous running costs which are being paid for by advertising in prominent pages on the website. If the download link becomes clear, then massive amounts of revenue will be lost on these websites and who knows if they will be able to sustain operation. I dont believe enough people would pay for the service to cover the loss in advertising revenue.

I did try to perform a few searches to screenshot for this blog post, but i couldn’t even find the websites im talking about in a search, all i got presented with at the end of the search as this.

Google Backhander to Congress?? is a post from: SEO Rocks

Using a .htaccess file it couldn’t be simpler to redirect all of your pages from one URL to another. If you are moving domains then it is imperative that you redirect all the inner pages, the relevant inner page on the new url. Providing the inner pages have not changed names then the following code should be placed into the HTaccess file.

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

301 Redirect All Pages From One Domain To Another is a post from: SEO Rocks

Firefox is updating its version numbers like i drink beer at the moment. I always keep mine up to date but on the latest update, i noticed the Status bar had gone missing, now before i go any further, i know they took the status bar out in previous versions, but the link preview part of the status bar had not been taken out.

It seemed a bit strange that they had done this but i installed a plugin to fix it. Then earlier this week, i upgraded and had a fresh install of windows put on my PC, installed the latest version of FireFox and hay presto, the link preview was back again!

Then today, someone upgraded to version 8 of Firefox and the link preview bar has gone! It seems that its not Firefox that is removing the link preview status, but some sort of error when FireFox us performing an upgrade. As far as i can see, the only way to fix the issue would be to un install FireFox completely, delete all the profiles and start fresh, a very daunting prospect for many, but keeping a profile fresh and light is a good thing as FireFox profiles can get bogged down with old plugins, bookmarks, passwords, history etc..

Why have i blogged about this? because as an SEO, seeing where links go without clicking them is a crucial part of my working day, many SEO’s will use this feature even if they don’t realise they do.

FireFox 8 Status Bar is a post from: SEO Rocks

In a recent video Matt Cuts has confirmed again that Google will be toning down the importance of keyword rich domains. In the video Matt talks about whether a webmaster should use a keyword rich domain and his response to that leans more towards using a domain that can be more brand-able instead of keyword rich.

This does not mean however, that google will not still weight keywords in domains heavily. At the moment it’s not impossible to see a blank web page ranking number one with a keyword rich domain. Proof of this is the following search term and results ibz.cc/h6ZNOB (image below for when it changes)

Caution also needs to be taken when interpreting  what matt says about using a brandable domain or a keyword rich domain. The examples he used were extremely large brands and although he makes a very good point, it may not necessarily apply to small companies trying to get a look in their online market.

What it all means is you can’t be a lazy SEO, this is nothing new though, your SEO campaign can not rely on one factor e.g. keyword rich domain, if this is all you are doing then i would put some work in now.

Turning Down The Knob is a post from: SEO Rocks

 I’ve been eating for the last 3 days, in between eating, ive been trying to get to grips with GIMP on my netbook, which im actually getting to grips with!

At the same time ive been talking to my brother about the latest Facebook changes and how cool some of the profile pages look, then it started to dawn on me the opportunities that may arise to spam Peoples profiles (i know im a little slow on this uptake!)

Perfect! I thought i would use my new-found GIMP skills to create an advert for one of my other websites and use it to spam my friends profile pages.

It was actually quite simple to do and this is how i did it:

•  You need an image 487 x 66
• Slice this image into 95px width images with a 3px gap in between.
• Upload to Facebook in an album
• Tag your target in the photos in reverse order

It really is that simple, i decided not to spam profiles of people i don’t know well, but in my example i could have spammed 5 / 6 profiles of celebrities or profiles that are extremely relevant to the blog i created the spam for.

The spam would only be temporary as it can easily be taken down, however with some carefull planning you could widen your exposure to 1000′s of extra people for as long as it sticks.

As this is an SEO blog, your probably wondering what SEO benefits this will have? the answer to that is none! It wont increase your rankings, it will annoy people if you do it to profiles of famous people, but it is exposure and it may drive a littl traffic, after all, if you do it well, people looking at the profile may not realise it is spam, in turn, if placed on the correct accounts, it could provide a nice little spike in your analytics

Christmas Spam is a post from: SEO Rocks

Jump To: Google Penalty | Filter | Duplicate Content | Hacked | Google Is Wrong!

You have a website so people can use it, for that to happen it needs to be found, to be found, you really have the best chance being in Google (other search engines do exist).

You spend months, years building up your website then one day you realise that the amount of pages Google has indexed for your site is going down. Your first reaction is to panic and shout at someone, then you might perform a google search about de indexing and why!

There are many reasons why your website may start to be de indexed, below are the most common reasons i have seen and how to fix them.

I need to say to this point that there are several levels of penalty that i refer to, I have been told that ‘google filters’ do not exist and they are simply penalties, however i disagree and below you will see my thinking as to why there is a difference.

Google Penalty

A google penalty is when google have withdrawn your website from its index. The main reasons for this is a direct breach of Google’s guidelines, serious things like, Cloaking, being part of a link farm or generally using any aggressive black hat techniques. If you have been penalised then the chances are its for something you have done and you would normally know what has happened.

How To Detect

Detecting a penalty is easy, simply do a site command and it will show you if you have received a penalty. if you wanted to check this website then simply past the code below into google.

site:seorocks.co.uk

You will see that there are lots of results, if your website is not indexed the you will see something like the following

Your search - site:www.YOURDOMAIN.co.uk -
did not match any documents.

If this is the case then the website has been removed. If this is the case then you need to correct any issues and submit a re inclusion request to google.

Filter

This is the part some SEO’s do not think exists, however in my experience it does and it shouldn’t be refered to as a penalty, although it commonly is.

A filter is when your website is indexed but the pages may not be returned as a result. You will generally notice this when you have a page that has been ranking well and all of a sudden no longer ranks.

The most common reasons for this type of problem would be keyword stuffing,  duplicate content or even over optimisation. I have seen hidden content cause a page to be filtered. Is google really going to ban your whole website because you have over optimised some of your pages? No it’s not. it will simply ‘filter’ the page so it doesn’t perform in the search results, your other pages may still do just fine.

The main reasons i have seen for what i call being filtered are generally naivety. Web masters that have attempted SEO themselves and gone a bit overboard with it, or copied their content from other websites.

How To Detect

Detecting a penalty can sometimes be a little harder, more so is detecting why you have a penalty, if you have done your own SEO and you think you have been filtered then it will be best to ask someone else to take a look, its hard to criticise your own work!

Firstly, do a site command on the page you think is filtered, if it has been penalised then there will be no results, if you have been filtered then the page will still be returned as a result.

If we use a websites homepage as the filtered page, then simply search for the url if you are not position 1 then there may be a problem. There are however a few exceptions to this rule, if you have the same domain as someone else then you may be number two e.g.  search for seorocks (this domain) you see i am number two behind seorocks.com. this is not a concern.

The other issue is if you have a keyword rich domain. If your domain was home-insurance.co.uk then you would need to search ‘home insurance’ then the chances are you wont rank number one.

If you do not rank for your own domain name then search for some content on the page. Again, you should always rank for your own content, if you don’t, again his could be a problem. If another website ranks for your content, then re write your own content, it’s a pain but its the fastest way to get back in the listings.

If you don’t rank for the content and it’s not duplicate then look at the web page, is the content you’re searching for hidden? is it in a scroller which has a small visible area, is the content stuffed with keywords?

With a filter, if you resolve any issues with the website, then the page will return to its original position, you don’t need to ask for a re inclusion request because your page hasn’t been excluded.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be an issue and over and around last Christmas, duplicate content became a problem it shouldn’t have.

Google is good at knowing who has written content, mainly on who had it cached first but i wouldn’t rely solely on that. If someone copies your content, most of the time it wont effect you but if the other person then ranks for that content then google has failed (and remember google is not perfect) Just because you wrote that content yourself 5 years ago, doesn’t mean it’s not the problem now.

Internal duplicate content can be an issue with websites, Google will simply not rank multiple pages with the same content on it. A good example of this is websites that may have 1000′s of products but the products may be very similar

for example,

you sell widgets, your website stocks 100 red widgets and each widget for sale has its own page, good thinking. But! the only difference between the widgets is the thickness, they range from 1mm to 100mm. this means that you have 100 pages and the only difference is the thickness in the description.

On top of this, you may sell the same widget but in yellow, this is another 100 pages that are identical to the red widget pages, apart form the fact the colour is different.

Google will see this as 200 pages with the same content and it simply wont rank or even index most of them.

How To Connect

Simples, copy a paragraph of content from your website and paste it into google, your website should be number one.

If internal duplicate content is your issue, make everything unique, in some rare occasions you may have to look at the way your website works / displays products and change it.

If you have a situation such as the widget example, then instead of having a different widget for each size and colour then you have one widget page, an on that page you can select the colour and size.

Hacked

Your website could be hacked and this would generally cause a filter, the main reason pages get filtered after a hack is because of the hidden content the hack puts on the page, generally 100′s of hidden links that google sees and you don’t, the hack may even use cloaking techniques which would make it hard for you to detect.

How To Detect

View your source code, if there are lots of hidden links in the code then you may have been hacked, these are generally Viagra or porn related links.

If the hacker has been a little more clever, then they may be cloaking, in Firefox, use the user agent switcher plugin to view the page as googlebot, you may find your presented with a different looking website. Do a site command and look at the title and descriptions of your page, if they are wrong and promote a different website then this is a good signal. A good example of this can be seen on my blog post about the Krispy Kreme Hack

Google Is Incorrect With Its Data

As ive said previously, Google is not perfect, the information it gives is good, but not always correct. If you have a good SEO then they will be able to explain why google is wrong and give you evidence to back up what they are saying.

A recent example of this could be a blog, ive seen an example of when a blog has had 1000′s of posts, over a period of time, this count in google kept reducing from almost 2000 indexed to only a few hundred.

How To Detect

its hard to detect if google is displaying wrong data and unless you have data to back up what you think then you cant be sure the data from google is incorrect.

In my example, google displayed very few pages when doing a site command but when we looked into the analytics the traffic going to the blog continued to rise, if you have a blog and 60% of the pages got de indexed then the chances are the traffic to your blog would decrease as well. Again, you need to be sure of the information you are looking at and ensure you understand what google is reporting on.

Why Would Google De-Index my pages? is a post from: SEO Rocks

A few days ago i showed people that Wayne Rooney was close to leaving Manchester united through the magic of Trends.

I said that Rooney will leave the club when he becomes bigger than the club, after all no player is bigger than Manchester United.

After i wrote the blog post, it was announced that Rooney was to leave Manchester United. Today is the 22nd and it has now been announced that Wayne Rooney will stay at Manchester United. I didn’t believe believe sky news, or BBC news, or the statement on the clubs website, i had to go and check with old faithful for my confirmation, and yes it was correct, Rooney had in fact announced he is leaving and then perform a U turn and it was confirmed by Google trends. It was confirmed by the chart showing Rooney becoming bigger than united but today he came back now which coincides with him not leaving.

Google Trends Predicts Rooney Outcome is a post from: SEO Rocks

This morning i have been seeing some strange looking search results in Google.fr, They made me think back to Patrick Alofts blog post about site previews in the search results.

This seems to be something similar except it doesn’t seem to work!! I am using Firefox, this is only appearing on Google.FR, i have not updated or installed any plugins since yesterday when i last viewed Google.FR, I DO have JavaScript enabled and i am NOT logged in.

Hovering over a search result adds a blue border around the result and there seems to be a magnifying glass icon, These results are slightly different from the reports on Blogstorm, however, Google is deffinately testing something again.

When i click on the magnifying glass nothing happens, i have checked i have got JavaScrip turned on which it is.

The screenshots are not as impressive as seeing the full site preview but something is being tested on Google.fr today

Possible Google Page Preview Testing is a post from: SEO Rocks

With the guardian finding it suitable yesterday to publish 14 different news articles online about Rooney it made me wonder weather Rooney was actually bigger, and more important than God, after a moment i decided that maybe wrong!

A lot of the articles are basically evolving around Rooney and Alex Ferguson who is known for bringing down the axe on greedy money grabbing w**r*s and people who generally cross him. One thing i like about united is that no player is bigger than the club. But is Rooney bigger than Ferguson? is Ferguson and Rooney as a tag team bigger than the club?

There is only one way to find this out and that is to ask Google, People may remember Google predicting Obama becoming president so surly it cant be wrong?

Google trends is the answer to any question based on popularity, to prove this as fact i ran a very simple query.

Daddy or chips?

As you can see below, Daddy wins and apart from the blip daddy has always been more popular than chips. (probably financially driven but still a fact)

Now proof has been shown that Google Trends tells the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth its time for the big reveal.

Is Wayne Rooney bigger than Alex Ferguson, or Manchester United?

As we can see, Rooney has always been a notch above Alex Ferguson but not by far, this will corrolate to youth, if we remove the amount of searches made by Rooney himself then it will be even more even. In all this time it has been clear that nobody is bigger than the club.

However, over the last few days Rooney has started to climb, he has almost become bigger than the club which as we know is not aloud, Being so much bigger than the boss will rustle feathers.

If no player can be bigger than the club then once the blue line crosses the orange line, Rooney will definitely be leaving the club, if it happens before January then Rooney will leave in the January transfer window. If the blue line stays below the orange line, then Rooney will stay.

Personally i hope the lines never cross.

Rooney V Ferguson V MUFC is a post from: SEO Rocks

There seems to be a bug that is spreading round twitter like wild fire! within the 30 seconds it has taken me to write this, a twitter search for ‘onmouseover’ has returned over 30K results!!

If you are receiving status updates that look like this

Then its because the person has hovered over a JavaScript link which has re tweeted and changed the font size to something extremely large so all you see is black! The code from one tweet i found was style=”font-size:999999999999px”

It seems to be harmless what is currently going round, though i did get an error about Direct Messaging someone so it obviously tried to direct message from my account.

The issue with this now could be security, so far it seems harmless, tomorrow it may be a different piece of javascript which looks to be doing the same thing but is in fact doing something different.

Dave Naylor blogged about this last year and yet it is still a problem.

The new twitter does not seem to be effected by this problem so hopefully in the next few weeks we will be banished of the problem.

In the mean time i would recommend using tweetdeck!

P.S by the end of me writing this, the search had 127,000 new search results, that is a lot if the JavaScript being spread was malicious.

Twitter On Mouse over is a post from: SEO Rocks