SearchRocket - Leeds SEO Agency

Wikipedia Is King of Google, Now More Than Ever

james — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:53:16 +0000

Over at Cre8asite Forums (via Search Engine Roundtable), there’s has been discussion about whether or not Wikipedia has increased in prominence in Google.

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.

Some interesting facts about Google

james — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:49:33 +0000

Courtesy of State of Search.

No Place Like The Homepage?

james — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 14:48:44 +0000

It’s tempting to think of the home page as the one entry point to a website. In reality, Google will land visitors anywhere it sees fit.

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.

In the case of a content-driven site such as a blog or magazine, make sure that navigational aid pages are sufficiently optimised. Many people do not consider category, tag and author pages to have value and may even block them from being indexed, but they serve a purpose to a certain type of visitor because they collect related information together.

The points above for e-commerce sites all still apply to content-driven sites but make sure the the rel=”canonical” tag is used on index pages so that the full articles benefit from their inclusion in the site navigational aids.

PageRank has not gone away, still not dead

james — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 12:29:58 +0000

Last night at about 3:45am BST Google made a change to the toolbar PageRank service which caused 3rd party checkers to stop working.

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

But, it isn’t completely useless because PageRank does still:

Have a correlation to ranking overall, when you look at enough data
Give a reasonable impression of whether a site has been stable for some period of time
Give a rough idea of the number of indexed inbound links a site has pointing to it

This means that it’s worth a glance when considering whether to obtain a link on a particular site, but not much else. It may be worth giving some consideration to when you’re buying established sites, since it does correlate to rankings in a broad sense.

From an analysis of around 330,000 URLs, the distribution of different PageRanks to 1st page position looks like this:

The first thing that’s obvious is that sites with no PageRank at all have no problems taking the top spot. This may come as a surprise to some, but it doesn’t account for the variations in longevity of a particular ranking. It’s likely that sites with no PR won’t stick around too long, so while they may comprise a significant proportion of the top place it’s unlikely that they’re going to be the same set of sites holding the same position for long periods.

Because the graph above shows such a high proportion of the sites to have no PR, it’s also helpful to look at the upper section alone, with the “no PR” sites taken out:

Here, we can clearly see a correlation between higher PR sites holding higher positions in the results. As you go down the first page, the likelihood of a site being a lower PR increases, whereas at the top there is a much higher change of it being at least a PR3. The tipping point seems to be around a PR2 which remains more or less constant all the way down the results, with PR3 and upwards getting a clear benefit.

Before anyone lays into me with the correlation vs causation argument, yes this is correlation but if I were buying links on a site or looking to buy an aged site, I’d be stupid to not pay any attention to the PR.

Moving your website

james — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:23:18 +0000

Very often, the need to move a website from one hosting company to another can arise. This process can be full of traps for the unwary and the risk of significant downtime or having your site disappear from the search results is very real.

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.

In some cases, your existing agency may not be able to give you the files because the site has been built on a proprietary content management system. If this is the case, you’ll need to discuss with them how you can get your content back out. We may be able to help with this, and have done so for so some of our customers.

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.

Promote your website

james — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:33:26 +0000

Get more visitors and more sales through your website.

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

Web strategy and auditing

james — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:34:38 +0000

Even if you have an in-house web team, you may be missing out of valuable sales. We can help with:

Conversion optimisation
Link building
Performance monitoring
Site usability

Outsourced SEO for designers

james — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:43:15 +0000

Why build websites that nobody sees?

Whether you’re a freelance designer or a digital agency, we can fulfil all your clients’ SEO requirements and provide fully re-branded reports, client tools and more.

Web intelligence

james — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:41:51 +0000

For an SEO, having the right tools for the job makes all the difference.

Our in-house development team works hard to create exclusive tools to help go the extra mile.