Google Analytics has been adding loads of new features recently and in the last few days the Intelligence feature has finally been made live.

This new feature allows you to see an overview of the major events happening on any particular day before segmenting the data to drill down further.

You can also create alerts to warn you if your search traffic for a particular keyword drops by more than a certain percentage compared to the previous day or the same day last week.

It doesn’t seem to be able to match against average daily search traffic which would be far better and without real time reporting I’m not sure how useful this is but it’s a start. You could also use the alerts feature to monitor Digg traffic spikes but again the data isn’t real time so it’s not that useful.

Creating a custom alert:

Screenshot of the main Intelligence feature:

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Playing with Google Analytics Intelligence

Google has announced this morning that for certain queries they will be showing site hierarchies in the search results rather than URL’s string. On first inspection I don’t like the system because in all the examples Google has provided the keyword rich product URL is removed and replaced with a more generic category level keyword.

For example this nice URL “/spidersapien/” (in bold)

gets replaced with a less clickable “Toys & Games > Robots”

On the plus side the categories in the hierarchy are links through to the category pages on the site but this isn’t clear when you look at them which could lead to confusion.

Here is how the links are generated:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

What do you think? Will this hurt click through rates?

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Google replaces URLs with breadcrumb links in search results

In a video interview for Web Pro News Matt Cutts has given a clear hint that page load speed will be a part of Googles algorithm next year. Page speed is already part of the AdWords quality score algorithm but until now it’s not directly been part of the main search algorithm.

We’ve always seen the effects of very slow hosting with poor crawl rates and a lack of deep indexing but Google has traditionally not been giving a boost to faster sites.

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Video available below, the page speed part is 2 minutes 35 seconds in.

More WebProNews Videos

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Page load speed may be in Google 2010 algorithm

Over the last 6 months Google has been striding forwards with using click data for natural search and over the weekend we had confirmation that it’s being used for Google News stories as well. This makes total sense but it’s nice to hear it officially.

Josh Cohen is the Senior Business Product Manager for Google News and he was recently interviewed by Eric Enge about various Google News issues including the row with people like Rupert Murdoch.

The whole interview is a must read but the ranking section is copied below:

Eric Enge: Are there other things that go into ranking news stories?

Josh Cohen: For article ranking there are a number of signals that we are trying to use: is it original content, is it timely, is it relevant, is this a local story, and there is a local source reporting original content on it? That is again, not always relevant to every single story, but it is something else we will look for. Other questions we ask are, is it novel, or is it just a rehash of an article that was out there before, a story that somebody else broke, you just happen to publish it later. These are things that we look for, hard to do, but increasingly something that we are trying to include in our rankings.

Then, there are also source-specific signals that we try to use. This is where volume comes in: what is the volume of publication of original content in a given category? The example that I would like to use is, looking at the business category, you have got the Wall Street Journal, or Bloomberg, or Reuters, all of whom, any given day, are publishing probably hundreds of original stories in business. By itself, that is a decent signal that this is a quality source in that category.

You can compare that then with their volume of publication of original content in the sports category, you are probably not going to see a whole lot, if any, of original publication there.

I would say another really important signal for us in recent quarters has been the user behavior. Their behavior has become a really helpful signal for us in trying to determine that same trusted quality of a given source. So in a given cluster, the first link will get the most clicks, the second gets less clicks, and the third, the fourth, and so on, keep getting fewer and fewer clicks. But, if you look at a user who comes in, and instead of clicking on that first link which is what they were “supposed to do,” and instead let’s say they click on the fourth link; that is a very strong signal about both the source that they clicked on and also the three sources above it that they didn’t click on, even though they were “supposed to” click on that.

Over time, as you aggregate that information, normalize it for different click positions, you can look at this section-by-section to get a sense of what users feel are the best sources in given categories. Again, sticking with the business example, if I have got some random source as the #1 link in Google News, and Reuters in the #3 link, somebody may come to that and say “Wait a second, this is a business story, I want to see what Reuters has to say, I am clicking on that link in the third spot.”

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How Google News uses click data for rankings

Despite the IIS SEO Toolkit product being launched months ago it’s not really got the attention it deserves, I wasn’t even aware of it until the A4u forum last month.

The toolkit was developed by Microsoft and runs in a very similar way to the automated tools that the MSN team uses to continually audit their millions of content pages so it’s an ideal way to test large scale websites and also carry out pre-flight SEO testing on development sites.

Thanks to some major issues with the search engine friendliness of content management systems that use asp and .NET a lot of SEO consultants hate working with Microsoft technologies but things are getting better with easier URL re-writing and now an automated SEO auditing system.

As you can see from the screenshot below even Blogstorm has a few errors to fix, 47,811 to be exact.

Here is the product information, go give it a try and let me know if you have more errors than me.

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes the Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module, which let you perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for managing your Robots and Sitemaps.

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Audit your site with the IIS SEO Toolkit

Although I’m a big fan of Wordpress & Interspire for smaller projects we use EPiServer a fair bit for enterprise level site builds. Licenses don’t come cheap (it’s in the £10k+ range) but for large scale sites it’s one of the more robust content management systems available.

We’re in the middle of a fairly major site build using EPiServer at the moment and I spotted a new SEO plugin which only launched 2 weeks ago. This plugin doesn’t actually optimise the page and site structure like the Wordpress All in One SEO Plugin – it goes much further that and does proactive things like auditing copy & title tags during the publication process, monitoring rankings and displaying popular search keywords within the CMS.

The system is ideal for companies with a lot of people creating and editing content. They would need some level of initial SEO training to ensure they don’t get carried away with features such as the keyword density tool but overall it should be a very scalable way of optimising content at the publication stage. Giving access to basic keyword analytics within the interface is something that every CMS should offer.

Here is a neat description from the detailed users guide (pdf):

EPiServer SEO, fully integrated with EPiServer CMS at both site and page level, empowers your Web team in the long-term as well as in making SEO an integrated and simplified part of the daily activities of your team – as they publish/add new content, as they quality assure or evaluate existing Web site, as they train and coach colleagues and, last but not least, as they develop or revise Web sites or templates, EPiServer SEO includes easy to understand and use SEO and findability analysis tools, prioritized work lists, SEO best practice guidance, goal setting, bench marking and SEO performance reporting.

Features

My favourite feature is the automated auditing tool during the content publication process. Authors simply need to provide some keywords that are related to the article and the system checks that elements such as titles, h1 tags and body content contain those keywords and gives helpful messages explaining how to improve things.

The system would be better if it integrated with something like Wordtracker or the AdWords keyword tool to automatically find & suggest related keywords based on the body text and search volumes but perhaps that will be added later.

The system also shows warnings about the length of title and meta description tags, something that all CMS’s should do.

The link report section works by finding links that have sent traffic in the past 30 days rather than using an external data source. It also uses PageRank as a metric to show how important a link is which is totally useless and will really confuse people using the system. The vast majority of (natural) new links are added from blog posts and news articles and all of those will be PageRank 0 because they are brand new pages. They stay PR 0 until Google does and update in a few months time. It would be far better for the system to look at something like the overall domain mozRank using the SEOmoz API.

Another feature which I’m not sure about is the keyword density analysis for articles. It’s OK for the system to look at keyword density but to the untrained operator it’s going to cause problems especially when it actually highlights in red articles where the density is too low.

The system also allows users to set up and define KIP’s such as top rankings for a keyword, traffic over a 30 day period and PageRank which is just about the worst KPI I can imagine.

One of the more useful features is pre-flight testing and continual automated auditing for errors and issues. Results are show in an “Alerts” tab so users can log in and fix errors on a regular basis.

Finally there is a section for monitoring rankings which is great in principle but appears to have a few big flaws. First of all it is giving data on the number of search results for a particular keyword in Google to judge competition which is a bit misleading – far better to show perhaps search volume for the keyword as well as an “intitle:” query if they really want to show competition.

It’s not clear if you can configure the search engines where rankings are checked but that is a major requirement for me – at present search engines included will normally be Google.com, Yahoo.com, Msn/Bing.com as well as the country specific Google version if the domain is a top level country domain which wouldn’t be very good if I wanted to check google.co.uk for my .com domains.

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Enterprise SEO with the new EPiServer SEO plugin

On Monday I spotted a strange issue with Blogstorm that was causing the blog to be displayed 4 inches down the page. I suspected it was a browser issue or some kind of hack but the source code was totally clean and it was displaying the same in multiple browsers which was strange.

After some investigation by one of our developers yesterday it turned out that the JavaScript file which powers the tab section on the right hand side of the blog had been hacked and an iframe inserted in the header. Luckily the iframe source was giving a 404 error otherwise my blog would probably have been flagged as a malware site and started redirecting all visitors to somewhere else.

We are still not sure how the hacker got into the blog but I am very careful to only use popular plugins and always update all plugins and Wordpress as soon as new versions come out.

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Hacked

We already know that Rupert Murdoch is planning to launch a paid content strategy sometime next year but in a recent Sky News interview he went one step further and said that they would be blocking Google from indexing content from their websites.

Some papers might do well by charging for content but surely charging for content and blocking Google is a step too far. How would people find the content to buy in the first place without search engines?

Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

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News Corporation plans to remove sites from Google

Yesterday Google added an Advanced Filters tool to the content reports allowing users to filter using a number of different parameters. The tool even supports regular expressions.

The filter can be seen at the bottom of the keyword or content reports and allows you to drill down into the information in a much more intuitive way than the previous filtering options allowed, mainly because it’s no longer hidden away in another section.

Below is an example where I drilled down into a keywords report to find all keywords containing the word “car” with an per visit value greater than £8 and a conversion rate higher than 20%.

A top tip is to add a few different keyword sets using the | operator to mean OR. For example “cats|dogs|mice” would match all 3 keywords. If you’ve got a favourite filter post it in the comments.

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Google Analytics adds advanced filters in content reports

Google Local has a different algorithm to the main Google search engine and requires different optimisation methods. The main ranking factors for Google Local include elements such as citations and customer reviews as well as the usual link factors and the expected address and geographical factors.

There has been a lot of talk recently about using tracking numbers for businesses and the concerns are quite valid. If you have 2 phone numbers listed in different places then it’s the same as having 2 domain names showing the same website but a lot harder to fix. Some companies have a geographical number, an 0845 number and several tracking numbers all listed in various places which makes it very hard for Google to accurately measure citations.

Given the vast number of small businesses without a website (~50-55%), or weakly-optimized one (probably an additional 40%), Google Maps and the other local search engines need indicators of relevance and authority that are not based primarily on links. User reviews on major portals like Yelp or Citysearch are obviously key indicators, as is the information that businesses tell the engines directly at the respective Local Business Centers.

But citations are also a critical component of any Local SEO strategy—recall that Local Search Ranking Factors contributors placed them as the #2 most important factor for ranking this year.

What’s a citation? Essentially, just a mention of your business information (your name + address, your name + phone number, or both) somewhere out there on the web—even if it doesn’t contain a link—remember that most businesses don’t have anything to link to!  The bottom line is that search engines’ ability to tie a particular phone number to a particular business gives them increased confidence in that business’s information, especially if that information matches what the business owner has entered into the Local Business Center—so they’re more likely to rank it.

Phone numbers may even be seen as a stronger confidence indicator than addresses, as Chris Silver Smith stated eloquently in his interview with Eric Enge last month:
“The phone number has in the past typically been considered something that doesn’t vary as much as some of the other information from all the different business sources.”

The best method we’ve found to fix the issue of multiple numbers is to find all the old phone numbers in existence and search for them on Google before contacting all the directories and websites listing them to correct the data. Time consuming but totally worthwhile.

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Dealing with multiple phone numbers in Google Local