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Mar 25th

Long Tail Keywords = New SERP’s Results (Google)

written by: Lee Johnson

So you woke up and noticed that Google results pages now have slightly changed in terms of looks. Any idea what’s different?

Let me explain; Google has introduced two new additions to the way the SERP results work and display. Google explained that it said would “help guide users more effectively to the information they need.” (It sounds like a winner, but will it return better results?)

So what are the changes?

1. Search refinements

Google is trying to understand what you’re looking for when you search, not just the words you type. So if you type “Paula Abdul Idol,” for instance, Google will understand that you’re looking for information about the “American Idol” judge, not people who idolize Paula Abdul. (If you want a geekier search term, check out the image below on the search for: “principles of physics.”) At the bottom of the page (and sometimes at the top, Google says), it will give you terms related to the “principles of physics” or what ever search term that was typed in.

principles-of-physics

This should help people find related pages and make it easier for us all to find what we are looking for. The related searches will also give us ideas of what to search for. Looking at this on an SEO point of view this will help when looking for associated phrases that can be used for a new or existing webpage.

2. Snippets

The other change to Google’s SERP’s is “”snippets. Google says, when you enter a query longer than three words, it will give you snippets with longer lines that show you more of the words you typed into the search, showing those lines in bold (bigger description area, see image below for an example). The query “spice market review shrimp starter dessert,” Google says, will show you snippets that include a review of Spice Market, with segments talking about shrimp starters and desserts, with the relevant words in bold.

snippets

“We’re constantly looking for ways to get you to the Web page you want as quickly as possible,” said the post on Google’s blog, by Ori Allen, the founder of Orion who is now technical lead for the search quality team, and Ken Wilder, the snippets team leader.

What remains to be seen is if these improvements will alter user behavior, either by keeping people on Google longer or by changing the way they enter search terms. If they don’t like the bold and snippets, maybe they’ll enter search terms that are shorter than three words. If they like the snippets, Sterling said, they could enter increasingly specific searches, knowing that the words they’re looking for will show up in the results and potentially save them time.

In conclusion

I will be doing lots of research into these changes as it may be a huge change in possible search behavior or is it just a ploy to get searchers to stay on the serps for longer for paid ads viewing. Clicks on PPC listings means more coppers in the pocket. Time will tell…

Let me know what you think and why you think Google has changed things.

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Posted in Google, Search Engine Watch | No Comments »

Mar 17th

Nofollow or no follow ? That is the question

written by: Lee Johnson

So the nofollow attribute has been around for a long time now but there are many who think that it has devalued the net and especially Google. Well here are two questions regarding the nofollow attribute that Matt Cutts answers on a new video.

Getting the most from PageRank & your Link Juice

The next thing that needs to be discussed concerning the internal linking is the fact that your pages could have a PageRank. This is something that needs to be considered & carefully thought about when making your site work for you. It is possible to make you PageRank stick to a page or somewhat be watered down to leave a page to help another. This is sometimes called Link Juice.

This takes some explaining so please be patient. You should be looking for your products/services pages that are important to you and the business to get the best PageRank possible. Some pages will not be so important like you Terms & conditions, Privacy Policy and Contact page or the About the company page. You can include a No Follow Tag so that Google will not allow the PageRank to disperse from the page to a non important product/service page.

How do you add a nofollow rule to a link?

Lets take a look at how to implement this on internal links to non important pages.

Wrong:

<a href=”/contact.html” title=”contact us”>Contact</a>

Right:

<a href=”/contact.html” title=”contact us” rel”nofollow”>Contact</a>

Imagine this is on a product/services page, you do not want the PageRank (Link Juice) to be diluted as PageRank is an important determining factor to be ranked well on Google’s SERPs This needs to be done on all pages that are products & services. These are the pages that make you business money, so you want Google to look at them as highly as possible.

Finally:

One article that could be worth looking into more and I will be doing some testing is at: SEOROUNDTABLE, it discusses a new tweak to the above article. Interesting concept.

Other article that is worth a read: The definitive nofollow attribute rules from Google

Let me know your thoughts on the nofollow and no follow rule as it really does intrigue me…

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Posted in Google, Video Articles | No Comments »

Mar 16th

Back to Google Adwords Basics the Video

written by: Lee Johnson

This is a very interesting article I found today about Google Adwords. I have dabbled into it before on several sites but this is a great way to learn (video). If you are quite new or just want an easy way to learn how the understand the auctions; this is a must watch. Its only 9 min’s of your life but will help you save more money than the time taken to watch it.

Looking to sign up a Google adwords account ? http://services.google.com/tutorial/awsignup/awsignup.html
Let me know your thoughts and what you do to get the most from Google adwords. I love to hear what people think…..

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Posted in Adsense, Google, Video Articles | No Comments »

Feb 26th

The History of Search Engine Rankings

written by: Lee Johnson

The speed and ease with which fast search engine rankings can be achieved has changed considerably over the years. As the search engines have updated and altered their algorithms achieving fast search engine rankings have become more and more complex.

When search engines first arrived on the web SEO’s were able to achieve fast rankings fairly easy. They filled a page with keywords, submitted it to the search engines and within hours the page had achieved fast rankings. This is due to the way the initial search engines rated the quality of a web page. The keywords Meta tag was used heavily to determine positions and SEO’s learned that they needed to fill this Meta tag to the brim with keywords and the fast rankings would follow!

Search engines realised that it was too easy for SEO’s and webmasters to abuse their ranking procedures so they altered the way the way their software worked and fast rankings became near impossible. With the arrival of Google, and the advent of AdSense, un-scrupulous Webmasters and SEO started to create spam domains which would appear in the search engine rankings over night and attract a huge amount of traffic which went nowhere other than through adverts which made the webmaster plenty of quick cash.

Google’s Ranking Procedure

Because of this increasing abuse of the search engine rankings and the way they work Google and the other search engines decided to change the way they list new sites. And so the “Sandbox” theory emerged. The theory behind “Google Sandbox” was that all new domains were placed in a quarantine area before they were trusted enough to be let into the main index, therefore making it impossible for Webmasters to make some quick cash from these instantly ranking poor sites.

Achieving Fast Rankings and Permanent Rankings for your Website

Achieving fast rankings for a site is not as easy as getting your new blog post or article listed. This is because of the level of trust that Google gives to a new domain. To achieve fast rankings for a new domain you need to create the illusion that the domain is trusted. When creating a brand new site on a brand new domain there are several methods which you can employ to increase the chances of your site being listed.

Trusted Links

The first step to fast rankings for new site is to establish some strong inbound links from trusted sites, preferably with high page rank. This does two things, it makes your site look like it is “here to stay” and it also provides the search engines with plenty of in-roads to your site. If you can establish links from sites that are already enjoying high rankings for your keywords then you further improve your chances of your own site ranking well.

Google Webmaster Tools

Another key to fast rankings is Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). Once you have finished your new site and established some trusted links you should sign up for a GWT account. As part of this service you can add an xml sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file which contains the URLs of each and every page within your site and they make it very easy for those pages to achieve high rankings. It is kind of like a list of directions for the search engine to follow to find each of your pages. Once you have verified your site in GWT and uploaded your sitemap Google will then head straight to your new domain, cache all the pages and rank them accordingly.

Fast Rankings and Permanent Rankings for your Blog

All of the above methods will also work when trying to achieve fast rankings for your blog and new blog posts.Many blog platforms are now fitted with pinging services. This means that when the webmaster updates or adds a new post to there blog a message is sent to blog update services and search engines requesting a visit from their spiders and, providing you haven’t been abusing the function, they will usually oblige. It is possible to see pages in high rankings within minutes using this method.

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Posted in Search Engine Watch | No Comments »

Feb 26th

The definitive nofollow attribute rules from Google

written by: Lee Johnson

I have long been a little hazy with regard to the nofollow attribute. Google has at last explained what they do when they see a nofollow and why was created. I have done several tests and some has been inconclusive but here below is Googles take it it. (keep in mind that other search engines may consider the nofollow rule differently).

From Google Webmaster Guidelines:

What is nofollow and why was it created?

“Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

Originally, the nofollow attribute appeared in the page-level meta tag, and instructed search engines not to follow (i.e., crawl) any outgoing links on the page. For example:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

Before nofollow was used on individual links, preventing robots from following individual links on a page required a great deal of effort (for example, redirecting the link to a URL blocked in robots.txt). That’s why the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute was created. This gives webmasters more granular control: instead of telling search engines and bots not to follow any links on the page, it lets you easily instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. For example:

<a href=”signin.php” rel=”nofollow”>sign in</a>

How does Google handle nofollow links?

We don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it’s important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

What are Google’s policies of nofollow usage?

Here are some cases in which you might want to consider using nofollow:

Untrusted content:

If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web. In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed. If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.

Paid links:

A site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. In order to prevent paid links from influencing search results and negatively impacting users, we urge webmasters use nofollow on such links. Search engine guidelines require machine-readable disclosure of paid links in the same way that consumers online and offline appreciate disclosure of paid relationships (for example, a full-page newspaper ad may be headed by the word “Advertisement”). More information on Google’s stance on paid links.

Crawl prioritisation:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.

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Posted in Google | No Comments »