Taking a site down entirely might be done for any of the following reasons:

• The site has been hacked/defaced and you need to repair/limit the damage
• There is a major upgrade in progress that can’t be done “hot”
• A hardware/software issue is under investigation and regular user load is hampering investigations

Admittedly these are all rather dire situations, but they do arise from time to time.

The worst possible thing to do would be to serve 404 errors. This would make search engine spiders think the content had been removed and would cause them to de-index it. Nearly as bad would be serving a maintenance page with a 200 status code. This would cause your maintenance page to be indexed in place of your content.

The correct thing to do is to serve a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable response. This will correctly inform the search engines that something is amiss, but that normal service will be resumed shortly.

There is, however, an important exception.

You must continue to serve your robots.txt file as normal, if possible. If Google receives a 503 reply when requesting robots.txt, it will assume that the site is having serious difficulties, is possibly overloaded, or has disappeared entirely. This will cause GoogleBot to take a much longer break from indexing the site.

Fortunately, this isn’t a difficult result to obtain. If you’re running Apache, the following .htaccess snippet should do the trick for you:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^robots.txt - [L]
RewriteRule .* - [R=503,L]

This simply instructs Apache to serve robots.txt as normal, and return 503 for everything else. If you want a prettier error page, you could make use of Apache’s ErrorDocument directive as follows:

ErrorDocument 503 /sorry-we-are-broken.html

If you include image or CSS assets in the page, you’ll need to make sure you whitelist them with a RewriteCond directive in the redirection code above.

This weekend I attended the 7th Think Visibility conference in our home-town of Leeds. ThinkVis has gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the less serious SEO conferences and has a real fun feel. There’s no aggressive business “networking” and none of the speakers are aloof and unapproachable. Better still, the speakers are encouraged to be a more inventive in their presentations. Tired re-hashes of talks given at previous conferences aren’t accepted at ThinkVis.

Proceedings began on Friday night with a pre-party at the Hilton DoubleTree. Old and new Twitter friends were met, beer was drunk courtesy of the folk at Web Hosting Buzz, and from the atmosphere it was clear that the main conference event tomorrow would be a good one. I bailed out later than I’d planned at about 12:30am and headed home for some sleep.

After bacon butties and plenty of tea, the morning started with an excellent talk on eCommerce SEO by Barry Adams. Barry took us through some good keyword strategy advice such as checking for things you didn’t know you ranked for and examining what people are typing into the on-site search. Faceted navigation was discussed along with some useful implementation recommendations. He then covered some nice conversion optimisation tricks and tweaks as well as some traditional, and not so traditional link building techniques.

After a break, I went and listened to Jon Quinton’s link building talk. Whilst it centred heavily on spreadsheet based techniques (and I really hate spreadsheets) it was very a useful session and provided some good inspiration for features in the suite of tools we’re working on here (so stay tuned!).

Lunch was followed by a Weakest Link style quiz in which the contestants tried to win money to put behind the bar for the after party. Unfortunately they only managed to win £12, so Dom kindly adjusted it by a couple of orders of magnitude.

After lunch, Anna Lewis gave a great round up of some useful techniques to get some more insightful data out of Google Analytics. This was great and a reminder that GA is something I need to spend more time on. It’s such a powerful tool, but overwhelming for many people.

James Carson’s talk on how nothing is really “dead” (apart from Steve Jobs) was a good reminder of how keeping a broad repertoire of techniques and focusing on quality are important, and Pierre Far from Google gave a really good overview of how Google’s crawl works and engaged in a lengthy and useful Q and A session. He wouldn’t talk about the “magic” bit though!

After food with @carolynlyn, I was surprised to find the bouncy castle full of balls was a perfect chill-out area for a bit of post-dinner digestion and chat. After failing miserably to play a single decent hand in the poker tournament, I moved with the party to the sky bar at the DoubleTree and I lasted until about 2am (I think!).

Nursing bad heads the next morning, 16 of us headed over to PPIK for some karting fun. After a 10 minutes fastest lap qualifier, we went head to head in a 40 minute “iron man” race. Perhaps I’m too much of a courteous driver, but at least I made it into the top 10!

All in all, a brilliant event. Many thanks to Dom and the team for putting in so much hard work, and to Majestic SEO for organising the karting trip.

All pictures © sk8geek

This new-found ability makes it tempting to exploit wage differences in other countries in the belief that you’ll get more for your money when instructing an SEO agency. Certainly, proposals from offshore SEO agencies are plentiful and it’s likely that the are many good agencies out there, but employing an offshore agency is a big risk and the outcome campaign may not meet your expectations, even if the price was keen. The object of any marketing campaign is to make money, not to spend as little as possible.

Being something of a local hotbed of SEO, Leeds is home to a wide range of digital marketing agencies of all shapes and sizes. We’re a Leeds SEO agency based near the city centre and regularly meet with clients to discuss progress and make sure the campaign is going to plan. SEO is a dynamic process and it’s essential to maintain an involvement with our clients’ day to day operations so that we’re aware of things like upcoming product launches, industry events and other marketing activities.

Here are a few points to consider if you’re still tempted to offshore your SEO:

1) No face to face contact - We meet with our clients regularly and find that far more can be achieved with an hour in a meeting room and some whiteboards than could be managed with a telephone conference. Humans are a very interactive species, and facial cues and body language can easily give away the fact that somebody may not be fully grasping the discussion. Likewise, lots of nods and smiles can indicate to you that you need not elaborate further, and can progress the discussion onto other things.

2) Lack of accountability - Agreeing and assigning deliverables is much easier done face to face, and the additional engagement of being in the same room with people brings a greater sense of responsibility. Once you have to rely on impersonal communication methods, such as instant messaging or email, there’s a tendency to let responsibilities slide. Working with offshore agencies can pose a greater risk because standard dispute resolution avenues may be unavailable to you in the event that the agency is not based in the UK.

3) Lack of understanding of regional customs - Many of the products we buy are deeply related to our culture. From tastes in clothing to preferred types of cars, we differ greatly to citizens of other countries. Working with an SEO agency in the same country as your target market guarantees that they will have a greater understanding of your audience because they will share many of the same influences and preferences.

4) Dialects in writing - We never, ever, outsource copy writing to offshore authors. Whilst there are many competent English speakers all over the world, able to write with perfect grammar and spelling, we find that copy written by a native English speaker residing in the UK will always be more engaging that even the best offshore copy writers. There’s more to writing the spelling and grammar. Depending on the purpose of the piece, references to popular culture and use of the vernacular will enhance the writing and hold the attention of the reader far better than prose which includes references to unfamiliar events and people.

5) Different work ethic - There are many hard working offshore agencies, but there are more unwritten rules of engagement than you might appreciate at first. An obvious example of this is the predisposition of different cultures to haggling. In some cultures it’s simply taboo, in others it’s expected. Likewise in business, things may be taken for granted and assumed by one party, leaving the other at a loss to understand where the working relationship has failed.

If you’re still considering offshoring your online marketing, it pays to investigate the potential partner carefully. Ask for details of previous campaigns they have conducted in your own country and make absolutely certain that references are obtained. An unsuccessful campaign doesn’t just consume your budget, it’s also an opportunity loss.

Barry Schwartz asks:

So is Wikipedia stronger today in the Google results than it was 6 months ago?

The answer is a resounding “Yes!”, by a huge amount.

We’re in the fortunate position here to have a serious amount of historical ranking data at our disposal, and we checked 13827 different search terms on Google UK for Wikipedia’s ranking six months ago compared to today. In short, out of 13827 searches, Wikipedia ranks in the top 100 for 11813 of the searches today compared to 7777 of the searches six months ago.

The distribution of rankings in the full 100 results is shown here:

Click to enlarge

The red bars are the present results and the blue bars show the results from the 5th of June 2011.

The main difference appears to be in the first three pages, so just that portion of the graph is shown below:

Click to enlarge

The difference is rather striking, isn’t it?

The search terms analysed are naturally going to skew the results, but in this case we think the skew will actually hide the extent of the problem, because the terms were originally pulled from e-commerce meta keywords tags. This means that they will be biased towards retail searches such as cheap lcd tv or florist in manchester, which Wikipedia has no business ranking for, rather than “academic” searches such as photosynthesis.

Wikipedia clearly has an enormous advantage here, and it’s something that Google really should be doing more about. There is evidence of Google adjusting the ranking for Wikipedia though, since it rarely ranks well for searches which include the words buy or cheap, although there are exceptions such as buy bow tie for which Wikipedia ranks 4th and cheap interest credit cards which Wikipedia ranks 5th for.

Conspiracy theorists may like to note that Sergey Brin recently donated $500,000 to Wikipedia.

Courtesy of State of Search.

It’s an obvious behaviour to take advantage of but many sites don’t do so properly and lose valuable sales as a result of neglecting deeper pages which would be of greater interest to the visitor.

What is a landing page?

Any “deep” page which consistently ranks well for a particular search can be considered a landing page.

They can equally be for broad terms such as “children’s clothing” or long-tail terms such as “panasonic TX-L37U3B TV”.

Artificial landing pages

It can be tempting to created dedicated landing pages for your target search terms. This isn’t generally a good idea because dedicated landing pages tend to sit outside of the site architecture and rely more on external factors to gain their position. When they don’t rank as well as expected, it’s common to find desperate techniques such as keyword stuffing and scraped content to try and boost the ranking.

Single-purpose landing pages also tend to suffer from duplicated content issues, particularly when they are generated by a script. Often only a handful of words are changed and the content remains the same. We’ve previously seen this where a business has multiple showrooms and has attempted to rank en-mass for location specific terms. A collection of duplicated pages differing only in the name of the city was the result, and it just didn’t work.

Artificial landing pages tend to suffer from an astronomical bounce rate because they lack substance and rely too much on the visitor taking the initiative to click further into the site.

Work with what you already have

If you examine your site structure, it’s likely that there is already a page which would be the most suitable place to land a particular keyword. For long tail terms, individual product pages are likely to be a good bet, or for broader searches category or sub-category pages are a likely candidate.

You need to examine why a particular pre-existing deep page isn’t ranking. For e-commerce, consider the following:

• Can it be reached by following a series of plain HTML links from the homepage? Is it a reasonable number of steps?
• Do the page title and header tags closely match the particular product or category? Make sure the keywords are at the front and not pushed out of the way by useless wording such as “Viewing all products in category X”.
• Does the meta description (used for the snippet) give the searcher a good idea of what they will find?
• Make sure internal link anchor text is suitable
• Make sure you external links to your deep pages with suitable anchor text
• Ensure that product descriptions are unique. Group variants of products if you need to, with a drop-down to select the variant.
• Make sure that category descriptions are of sufficient length and include the right keywords.

It was a trivial change to the API URL, but some it ignited yet another round of “hooray, pagerank is useless and has gone away” tweets and a little bit of panic amongst those who still have some (maybe too much) faith in it.

Let’s get some things straight though.

PageRank does not:

• Tell you anything about how a site will rank for a given search term
• Provide anything like an up to date assessment of the quality of a URL
• Prove that one site is “better” than another

In this post we’ll try to guide you through the process and help you avoid disaster.

Do you really need to move the site?

This is an important but not necessarily obvious question. If the site is being hosted on your behalf by a digital agency or designer and you want to move it away from them, perhaps the simplest answer is to see if you can just take over the hosting account.

This will ensure that there is no disruption to the site and you’ll just pay the hosting costs from that point onwards.

The domain vs the hosting

It’s important to realise that the domain registration is different from the hosting arrangements.

You could think of the domain name as the plot of land, while the website is the house built on it.

Your domain name must be in your own or your company’s name. Some web designers will register the domain name on your behalf using their own details and technically they own the domain. Use one of the many free WHOIS tools to determine the ownership of the domain and approach your existing service provider if it’s incorrect.

You will need to be in control of the domain in order to make the necessary changes to move the hosting elsewhere.

Again, it may be possible to get the domain moved to a separate billing account at the hosting company. Some unscrupulous agencies will levy unreasonable administration fees for this trivial change. Don’t be tricked into paying a large invoice intended to put you off the idea of moving away.

Gather everything you need

To successfully migrate a site, you will need to make sure that:

• Your new hosting is the right technology. You should move from like to like, Windows to Windows, Linux to Linux. If you need a database, make sure you order one.
• The website files. These are typically obtained using FTP and should be uploaded to the new host.
• A database backup. For sites which use a database, you’ll need to ensure that you have a recent backup of the database or your site will not work.

Preparation is everything

To make sure the transition is as seamless as possible, you should change the TTL value of the DNS records to a low value such as 5 minutes.

This will ensure that the transition from the old to the new hosting isn’t affected by outdated DNS recording hanging around.

Once the transition is complete you can change the TTL back up to something more reasonable like 24 hours.

After the migration

As soon as the site has been migrated, make sure the old hosting is disabled or your site may appear to work unpredictably. It is better to have the old hosting respond with an “out of order” message so that visitors are prevented from interacting with a website that will ultimately be destroyed. This is especially important if the site has a shop or a forum.

The “out of order” message should return a 503 Temporarily Unavailable message so that search engines are correctly informed. If you just remove the files, search engines may assume the site has gone for good and remove the pages from their index.

We can make your site work harder for you and jump-start your business. Contact us to find our how we can help.

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• Conversion optimisation
• Link building
• Performance monitoring
• Site usability

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