According to w3.org, 303s basically mean “see other”. The redirecting URL shouldn’t be cached and it generally indicates that the content is held elsewhere. Importantly though, it says this:

“Many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303 status”.

SEOs generally know to use a 301 for the vast majority of redirects, but if you ever get a web dev or a design team that wants to use a 303, there’s now a good example of why it should be avoided here:







A search for “Wimbledon” in Google currently shows a blank .com also ranking, just as a 302 often would. This implies that a 303 redirect won’t pass on link value to the main site, like a 301 would, and can cause the redirecting URL to also be listed in the SERPs.

For some reason, the Wimbledon.com URL 301 redirects most users to the correct Wimbledon.org domain, but will show search engines a 303. You can switch your user agent to Googlebot and check.

Yahoo and Bing treat 303s the same way:

Yahoo also doesn’t appear to see the .com redirect properly. And neither does Bing:

So, in summary – 303 redirects don’t appear to work properly to search engines. If you want your permanent redirects to be counted by the search engines, avoid them and use 301 redirect instead.

303 Redirects & SEO is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

It’s kind of hard to prove that they actually do that in search results when the tilde isn’t there though – you can get a bit of a better idea that they’re doing it when it produces incorrect search results though.

At the moment, if you search Google for Nintendo Entertainment System Data you get electionstudies.org ranking in first and second place.

The reason is because Google has associated the query “Nintendo Entertainment System data” with the term “NES”, which it has then matched up with the American National Election Studies site, because of it also thinks that that is related to the term “NES”. It’s kind of true, both terms are related to “NES” – they’re just not related to each other which is why the search result doesn’t work.

You can see the same effect with the search Game Boy Advance Association which brings up other sites that are related to the acronym “GBA”, including the Girls Basketball Association and the Gay Business Association.

There’s a great example of the same thing when you search for British Home Stores society, bringing back completely unrelated results like the British Horse Society, the British Hypertension Society and the Belgian Hematological Society.

Of course, all of these terms are unlikely to be searched very often, I’m not suggesting that Google’s search results are broken because of it – it’s just interesting to see how Google connects different keywords from time to time. Basically, what’s happening (it would seem) is that Google is connecting together two terms that aren’t really related, usually acronyms, because they’re all connected to one main term. That sounds a bit complex when it isn’t really – so I’ll explain what I mean with a crudely drawn image. The term “Nintendo Entertainment System” is correctly connected to “NES”. “National Election Studies” is correctly connected also to the keyword “NES”, but it looks like Google has connected the terms “Nintendo Entertainment System” to “National Election Studies” incorrectly because of that.

While it’s obviously not worked on the results mentioned in this post, it’s probably produced better results overall – and it’s interesting to see that Bing and Yahoo don’t return results like this when you search for these terms. Maybe they’re not connecting terms together like Google is?

Flickr image from DizDau.

Is Google Connecting The Wrong Keywords? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

It looks like Google is starting to roll out updates to the Google UK design now. The US redesign has been seen here and there in the wild, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it for Google.co.uk. The new design (for US results at least) makes local listings more important, as they fill up more of the screen – you can read more about Google’s new design here.

New Google Design For UK is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

In the comments he mentioned that this was mostly likely because of how merchant and affiliate links have worked in the past. Matt Cutts recently mentioned that Google will try to prevent affiliate links from passing link value, in most cases. Is Dave right? Does anchor text not flow through some 301s, and is that because Google’s trying to stop merchants from benefiting from affiliate links?

Flickr Image from Dan Coulter & Sprantaclaus

Testing Out 301 Redirects is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

There’s two main kinds of duplicate content, and it can affect sites in different ways. On-site duplicate content occurs when pages are repeated across one domain. Off-site duplicate content happens when a site’s content is repeated across other domains – ITN.co.uk frequently has their content distributed across orange.co.uk, msn.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk for example.

On-Site Duplicate Content

Firstly, there’s on-site duplicate content – where you have the exact same page repeated across two or more URLs. An example might be having an article on your main (real) URL, and then having the same article on a printer friendly page. It happens very easily, if you display the full post on the homepage in Wordpress, for example, then you run the risk of having that page appear in full on the homepage, on the tag pages, in the category pages and finally on the (real) post page itself. This doesn’t tend to cause major problems unless one of the duplicate pages starts getting all of the links – so if the printer friendly version of the page was the one that was heavily linked to, you may find that ranking in the search results instead of your real article. The unseen downside is that if that printer friendly page gets a few links, but not enough to rank in place of your real article, those links to the duplicate page will still be less likely to help your real article rank.

You can reclaim those lost links, and ensure that your real article is the one that ranks, by using either 301 redirects to redirect duplicate pages to the real version or by using canonical tags (which are slightly more useful in the case of printer friendly pages).

Off-Site Duplicate Content

It’s less common to have content that’s duplicated across a number of different sites, but it still happens. Sites that syndicate out their content, article directory sites and press release sites all have this issue – the exact same article may appear on PRWeb.com and a whole load of other sites that have chosen to pick up that press release.

In either case, you’re not going to get a penalty – it happens naturally.

If you have an article on your site – the same article that appears on a number of other different sites, and somebody searches for it, then Google is only going to try and display one result that leads to that article. If you wrote that article, then you should be the one to get that traffic – but it doesn’t always work that way. Google usually tries to display the site that first wrote the content, but sometimes just displays whichever site is most authoritative.

Google works out the originator of the article by looking at who links back. If Site A writes the content and it gets picked up by Sites B, C and D – if B, C and D are all linking back to A then it’s a clear signal to Google that they should rank site A, and that the remaining sites should be filtered out. A massive problem arises, though, when the remaining sites don’t link back to that article page – especially if the sites that pick up that article have more authority than the originator.

Where does ITN fit in?

ITN.co.uk often create articles and then syndicate them out to other large sites at the same time as publishing them themselves. Because the large sites often don’t link back properly, Google has a hard time working out who the content really belongs to. This article on astronauts carrying out a space walk was originally written by ITN, but was syndicated out to a load of different sites too, including to Yahoo. Even though ITN wrote the story, because they launched at the same time as Yahoo (and a number of other sites including MSN) then Google isn’t always sure which site is the originator. As a result, it’s easy for Google to filter out the wrong site – currently a search on a snippet of text from that article for me shows that ITN is filtered out, while Yahoo ranks.

How can ITN get their search traffic back?

If I was ITN, I’d look at getting an agreement in place with Yahoo, MSN and the like so that all of the articles syndicated out included a link at the bottom that included the article headline linking back to the source, e.g. “Astronauts carry out space walk is an article from ITN News“. While this doesn’t guarantee they won’t be filtered out for duplicate content, it should strongly help their chances – Google will usually look at who everyone links to to determine which site originally produced the content. If they wanted to take it a step further (and this may not even be possible with a topic as sensitive as news), they could launch their content, send out a ping to help the article get indexed, and then a few minutes later release the article to Yahoo, MSN and the other big news sites.

ITN’s best chance of getting their search traffic back is to make sure that they include links back to the article when they syndicate out the content. It’s not guaranteed to work, nothing in SEO is, but the worst case scenario is that they pick up a lot of massively authoritative links.

ITN & The Problem With Duplicate Content is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Tracking Site Searches

Google Analytics by default doesn’t automatically track what people are searching for using the search function of your own site (if you have your own search box). Being able to track the search terms people use is massively helpful for blogs (you get to see what content people were hoping to get) and for e-commerce sites (you get to see what products are in high demand).

To enable it, click “Edit” on the main dashboard screen to look at the profile’s settings. Click “Edit” again in the top-right hand corner – under the Site Search section, select “Do Track Site Search” and enter “s” (without the quotes) if you’re using Wordpress. If you’re not – you’ll have to enter the URL parameter that your site’s search uses (for example, if your search URL is http://domain.com/?search=hello then you’ll need to enter “search” without the quotes).

Once Google Analytics has tracked site searches you should be able to find what your visitors are searching for under “Content” and “Site Search”.

Creating Custom Reports

The regular Google Analytics dashboards give you standard metrics out of the box, for example under the “Visitors” tab you’re shown Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Percentage of New Visits as the default – all good metrics if that’s what you’re after. Using custom reports, you can create your own tailor made reports that give you access to a whole load more.

Click “Custom Reporting” and then “Manage Custom Reports”. Click “create new custom report” in the top right and then you can drag and drop your metrics and dimensions. As an example, a report that I like for quite a few of my sites includes Visits, % New Visits, Bounce Rate and Goal Conversion Rate (more on this later) as my four main metrics and uses Keyword as the dimension.

Give it a name and click “Save Report”. Once you’ve created the report it’s also quite interesting to play around with it – click “edit” and play around with the metrics and dimensions on the left hand side.

Creating Goals

You don’t just have to be an e-commerce site to be able to have specified goals or conversions. There’s loads of goals that you may want out of a blog and you can set Google Analytics up to report on these. My main goals could be in the form of browsers, readers and RSS signups so I have three main conversions set up for this site.

To set up goals, first go to the Overview section (the page you see as soon as you log in). Click “Edit” next to your site, then click “Add Goal” in the Goals section.

To track my RSS Subscribers, I’ve gone a bit basic and only actually tracked people that have landed on my RSS feed page (although Feedburner will show me the real number of subscribers). Name the goal (I’ve used “RSS Subscribers”), use “URL Destination” as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details select Head Match for match type, and /feeds as the Goal URL (although you should use your appropriate RSS feeds page – you should subscribe to mine here).

To track readers (the people that actually read my blog posts, instead of just arrive, skim read a bit, get bored with me rambling and leave) I’ve used time on site as a goal metric. In this case I’m looking for people that have spent at least 4 minutes on my site. Follow the same steps as the RSS Subscribers goal, but then use “Time on Site” as the Goal Type and under Goal Details use Condition “Greater Than” and change the time to 4 minutes. You can also give it a goal value, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

You could be a bit more strict and up that 4 minute count to 5 or 6 (or if you tend to write particularly lengthy blog posts) but I wouldn’t really recommend it. The last goal I use is “browsers”, which I’m tracking as people that look at more than 3 pages when they visit. To track it, use Pages/Visit as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details, change Pages Visited to greater than 3.

Using Advanced Segments

The ability to create advanced segments is easily one of the most useful features of Google Analytics as it lets you segment and then track the behaviour of loads of different groups and traffic sources. It’s an unbelievably awesome feature and it’s amazing how much you can find out about your visitors in such a short space of time.

To set them up, click on “Advanced Segments”, click “Create new custom segment” and then you can add your dimensions and metrics. As a useful example, if you want to track the behaviour of branded versus non-branded organic search traffic, search for Medium and use that as the dimension – set the condition to Matches Exactly and select Organic.

Add an “And” statement, search for “Keyword” and use that as the dimension – change the condition to “Contains” and add your brand name in the “Value” section (for example, I’d use “Shark”). Name the segment as Branded Organic and click save.

You can find loads more help on advanced segments at Avinash Kaushik’s blog (his blog is definitely worth reading and his latest book worth buying – not an affiliate link).

There are loads of segments that you might be interested in creating – organic visits that include your brand term, visits that include the word “guide” or “help” or “tips”, visits that include the word “buy” or “rent” or “order”, visits from Digg, Facebook or Reddit for example. You can segment pretty much anything you can think of, and with enough traffic you can usually get some pretty interesting insights out of them. I particularly like the idea of segmenting visits from social sites to see how conversions, time on site, bounce rates and other metrics like that compare against organic or paid search traffic, or display traffic. Very useful stuff.

Once you’ve created your segment you can click “test segment” to see some nice, instant data. It’s always nice to play around with advanced segments so if you’ve got a spare half-hour, it’s worth segmenting your traffic as much as you’d like and looking at the results.

Comparing Segments

Finally, if you want to easily compare segments against others piranha biscuit, on one of your main graphs (like your traffic graph), click the “advanced segments” option in the top right-hand corner and select the advanced segments that you’d like to compare.

You’ll instantly get some site usage data underneath the graph too which can compare metrics like bounce rate and average time on site. In the example I’ve used here (which is for a different site of mine), I’m able to dig deeper into the data to find out interesting things – organic traffic has a much lower bounce rate and has a higher browser rate, with organic traffic looking at twice the number of pages per visit than referral traffic. Playing around with your own segments, and working out which segments have lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates is interesting and can give you some new and unexpected insights into how different people interact with your site.

Getting More From Google Analytics is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

This page on Google is actually indexable, because their robots.txt doesn’t appear to be set up quite right. Get that page indexed and, in theory, you should be able to get links directly from Google.

I’m not sure if these links are passing juice (and in truth, if the page isn’t linked to internally then it’s debatable how much juice can be passed) but I haven’t yet found any reason for why juice would be blocked. No nofollow, it’s crawlable and able to be indexed. Bizarre, eh?

Don’t expect this to last too long, by the way

Flickr image from Stevacek

Getting Links From Google is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Malcolm Coles recently brought this point home in his excellent Econsultancy post about the Mirror’s 3am site making a bit of a hash of their SEO. Malcolm also mentioned an earlier article from paidcontent.co.uk which had an interesting quote from one of the developers on the 3am site:

“We want this site to perform well over a period of time. Not live or die by how many times we can write Britney Spears or Michael Jackson into the metadata”.

And that’s a problem – if that’s genuinely what a lot of web developers think us SEOs do, then it doesn’t look good on us. If they think that our jobs involve shoving the keywords into the meta data and then hoping it works then it’s no wonder that there’s an “SEO sucks” drama post every other week.

And in truth, part of this problem is because of the sheer amount of misinformation out there (check out some of the biggest SEO myths as proof). Have a look at this terrible, terrible SEO article from About.com. Some of the bad advice it gives is “don’t make small changes to your content”, “duplicate content is for spammers and could get you banned” and my personal favourite “don’t link to and from the same site repeatedly – this is known as link spamming”. (Sorry Malcolm).

SEO isn’t about stuffing your pages with keywords and it’s not about worrying about linking to the same sites often or deliberately not making changes to your content. We know this – it comes naturally to us as SEOs, but it’s surprising to see that other people do believe it.

SEO mainly comes down to 3 things – making your site accessible to search engines as well as users, making sure the content is relevant and then making your site as popular as it can be. Most non-SEOs don’t know about the importance of that last point.

Flickr image from Phillustration

What SEO Isn’t is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?