Google Kills SEO Ranking Analysis Tools

Anyone in SEO worth their pay may have, this week, noticed that Google has been changing the code used to display their search results. Unfortunately these changes, and repeated tweaks to the SERPS code over the past few days, have had the knock on effect of wiping out a good portion of the web-based search ranking analysis tools, as well as some locally run ranking software.

SEOBook are one of the first to report that they have recently updated their online rank checking tools SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker and according to Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com “Both should work as of now, and if any more SERP changes happen we will try to update the extensions as soon as possible.”

The changes however do beg the question. Are the SEO community, and their tools, responsible for so many requests on Google’s servers that they need to take action or are we looking at a simple backend HTML layout update?

The very act of querying Google with automated software is wrong, and according to Google’s webmaster guidelines…

“The sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.”

So, was it a simple backend update that caused a blip or a deliberate attempt to slow down the SEO community. Lets hear your thoughts?

Add comment August 24th, 2008 at 12:24am E-Gain

Google Insights for Search : Marketing statistics for all

I have been playing around recently with Google Insights for Search, a brand new search data analysis tool for search marketing specialists.

Just like Google Trends, this new Google search marketing tool offers seasonal and historical trends with search volume shown distributed across regions and cities. Google Insights for Search however goes even further by allowing you to narrow search data to specific categories, location subregions and even user specified date ranges.

Once your search parameters are defined Google Insights for Search not only presents you with historical trend data and regional interest statistics but, in a similar manner to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, also offers you the top search terms related to your query and a list of the hottest related rising searches.

As wonderful as this search marketing tool is, I do however have to question the validity of the representation of the data. For example: A search for the term ‘Gifts’ with the filters of United Kingdom / All Subregions / Last 12 Months / All Categories produces the following demographics.

Compare this to the same search on Google Trends and the data starts to get a little confusing.

As you can see from the Google Insights for Search results it appears that the Isle of Man may be a market worth exploring for our particular term. For those who are not familiar with the Isle of Man - it is an island nestled between England and Ireland with a population of around 75,000 people. Approx 1/100th of the population of London.

But wait a minute? Google Trends is highlighting Scotland as a popular search market for our term! Both tools, by default use the broad matched version of a keyword so where does the difference in statistics lie?

All-in-all a wonderful search marketing tool, which is still in Beta, so possibly the results may be distorted at this time.

Add comment August 7th, 2008 at 02:04pm E-Gain

SEO and the importance of 503

Today I arrived at work to find one of our, externally hosted, clients plummeting down the SERPS for terms that they would normally rank very highly for. As we always employ an ethical approach to our SEO campaigns I was a little bewildered by this sudden drop in rankings and decided to investigate. After a brief search through the Google results, there was the answer in the returned search listings.

Could not connect to database

This was the description on the returned results for our client’s website.

It would seem that when the site was last crawled the database was down and the client’s developer had returned the afore mentioned error message with a 200 OK header. So instead of our nicely optimised pages the search engines found zero relevant content and a server response header that said ‘Yeah sure! This is fine, this is what we want you to see’.

So what should we really be doing if a database connection fails?

We should be looking to our SEO friendly 503 (Service Temporarily Unavalable) header to let the search engines�know that there is a problem and to come back later. For details of implementing the 503 header there’s an excellent tutorial at http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/503-service-temporarily-unavailable.html

Dont get caught out. Check your SEO procedure for handling failed database connections and make sure you use the 503 header.

Add comment July 14th, 2008 at 02:29pm John Hill

Ignoring The Basics In The Rush To Embrace Web 2.0

With the immense hype surrounding web 2.0 are many companies ignoring the basic principles of creating websites?

More often than not, the web agency or web designer is at fault by trying to create something which is impressive to look at and, in an effort to embrace the web 2.0 ethos, has features that probably only 1% of site visitors will use. This can often result in having a badly designed website that is difficult to navigate and probably results in your customers moving on to the next website.

Lots of websites which use customisable features fall into this category where over 90% of the users will never use these ‘great’ features available to them. The development time for the extra features are often relected in higher costs for the client - resulting in very little ROI, if any. 

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen held a presentation on this, highlighting some of the facts about our headlong rush towards Web 2.0. He warned that the desire to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served.

E-Gain like many other web agencies use good practices include making a site easy to use, integrate good search tools where necessary, use jargon free text, usability testing and consideration to the design even before the first line of code is written.

Always ask yourself if you really need those extra features built into your website, and will the majority of your website visitors use or benefit from it?

Add comment June 24th, 2008 at 11:53am E-Gain

Websites Continue to Take a Larger Share of the Retail Pie

With the credit crunch biting hard, economic slowdown and falling retail sales it is encouraging to read today that online retail continues to grow, with this years online retail spend expecting to grow by 32% compared to offline retail sales which expect to see a minimal growth of 1.2% according to the European and UK internet consultancy group Verdict Research.

Online retail is currently worth around £20bn, an estimated 7% of overall retail spend and by 2012 Verdict forecast that this figure will rise to 14% or around £45bn.

With shoppers increasingly turning to the internet as an effective means of seeking out bargains and low-priced products, will an online retail presence become the difference between commercial success or failure? And will online apathy lead to a retail sales disaster?

1 comment June 19th, 2008 at 04:01pm E-Gain

SEO and TLD’s

THere is an interesting post over at Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty regarding ‘How Much Is a Top Level Domain SEO Worth?’

A wide range of comments have been received and it is interesting to read other peoples perspectives on domain usage from an SEO perspective, particularly with the American (primarily .com etc) vs other parts of the world (.com & localised domain usage).

Domain usage is an often under-used part of SEO, particularly the usage of localised vs global domains, and I would recommmend that any up and coming SEO spends some time understanding the nuances of domain usage from an SEO perspective.

To read Anns full post, click here

Add comment June 8th, 2008 at 07:32am SEO UK

Search Engine Usage stats by country

I recently had to do a load of search engine usage research for a potential new client opportunity. Such information seems hard to come by, so for others in the same predicament I have added these to the blog in the hope that other marketeers, may be able to utilise this in some form.
Google as predicted has pretty much market dominance across the ten countries profiled, however the surprising statistic was that Yahoo came below both MSN and Yandex in terms of percentage (as a total/number of countries - it should also be added that Yandex only appears in one country - however it accounts for 45% of internet searches). Visually this could be represented as follows:

Total usage for profiled countries:

Google: 73%
Yahoo: 4%
MSN: 5%
Yandex: 5%

These figures were obtained as below from the following data, for the following countries, UK, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Bulgaria and Russia:

Add comment June 3rd, 2008 at 03:56pm SEO UK

People who have shaped search marketing…Your views?

This year has been a bumper year for search, particularly SEO. In particular as we have mentioned a number of times before some of the people who have shaped the search marketing industry, so further to this E-Gain are asking for your feedback as to who has shaped search as we know it whether the UK search engine marketing industry or the US search marketing industry - we’re not fussy in that respect.

So feel free to give us some feedback. Whether you think its the usual suspects ie Danny Sullivan, Ralph Wilson or even Matt Cutts, or perhaps some of the new kids on the block (so to speak) such as Rand Fishkin, Jon Myers, Vanessa Fox or Andrew Girdwood. Or perhaps one from left field, maybe Lisa Dietliefsen or Kevin Lee. The floor is yours…

2 comments June 1st, 2008 at 01:29pm SEO UK

Paid Links and Shadow domains - Surveying the new SEO landscape

There has been a lot of movement over the last year in terms of clampdown on unscrupulous SEO tactics, as Google continue to strive for greater relevancy within their search index. The biggest of these has been the clampdown on paid linkage, and directories and something that affected a large number of SEO tactics and campaigns, as well as campaign planning.

However taking a step back now that the dust has settled - what is the current scenario. Sure new facets of optimisation are starting to take shape (such as blended/universal search), and many search engine optimisation specialists are starting to have to think like marketeers rather than SEO’s, something which has been good for the industry, and as the industry continues to evolve will hopefully continue to produce more and more broad thinking online marketeers.

However following on from the paid links (which people like Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia in particular activately campaigned on behalf), a new trend which in my opinion rivals that of paid linkage (well in my opinion is more devious and off less value than targetted paid links), has started to become much more widespread in its use. It has been noticeable the amount of Search Engine Optimisation companies now starting to employ ‘doorway sites’ or ’satellite sites’ more aggressively as part of their online marketing strategies. In particular I can name two organisations based around Burnley, Lancashire alone (and that isn’t a huge geographic location) that actively engage in such tactics. I would suggest on a UK basis there could possibly be hundreds if not thousands more employing this technique. Many of these sites have only one major plus on the side - relevancy (and I use that term loosely) but are however of very little use, and often merely filter people through to the primary site.

Used well and strategically as part of a campaign, there is no issue with the use of microsites, however a thought pattern develops in my brain, that if you (ie Google) are going to penalise sites for artificially affecting the algorithm via the purchase of linkage, then surely trying to artificially affect the algorithm by developing hundreds of throwaway sites is against T&C’s as well, in fact quoting from Googles own Q&A page, surely the above practise would fall under shadow domains or at the very least doorway pages.

“There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

• owns shadow domains
• puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
• offers to sell keywords in the address bar
• doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear in search results
• guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
• operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
• gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
• has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google”

Therefore I have to ask, why do you continue to reward such activity Google?

Surely it is not that hard to track - a simple DNS or Whois lookup would sort some of the wheat from the chaff, and more sophisticated algorithmic calculations would probably take care of the rest?

It would be interesting to gauge other peoples thoughts in the industry on this one. Pretty sure there is going to be a broad difference in opinion…

However nothing should be taken away from some major advances though that I believe have been made over the last year. It is very noticeable now how many more organisations understand SEO and its commercial benefits. It has to said, that there are a a number of people that have played a key part in laying the foundations but I do believe that SEO has to a certain extent started to move away from the ‘Dark Art’ perception and one can only hope this continues across the digital marketing landscape.

Add comment May 30th, 2008 at 04:50pm SEO UK

Hitting your head against a brick wall - Is your site optimised

I have read a number of very good articles recently, not least Michael Gray aka GreyWolfs post “Does you site have a squeezy top”. I’m pleased someone as high profile as Michael has tackled this issue, as I think all too often conversion and usability are lost in the quest for keyword density, internal linkage and other on-page factors.

As Michael mentions in his post, most websites are built around a core function, whether that be completing a purchase, downloading a thought leadership piece or merely signing up for further information. It is therefore unfortunate that many website conversion funnels therefore suffer, in order to appease egos, wild theories or a desperate quest for user information with little regard of target audience or the product in question.

I recently watched a presentation by Omniture regarding conversion funneling and multivariate testing, two key areas when it comes to maximising any online advertising whether search or display. This can take many forms, however the main ones tend to be

• Landing Page Optimisation
• Creative Optimisation
• Flow and Form Optimisation - one of the more important here I think)
• Segment Optimisation
• Optimise with the general public in mind

However moving on from this, when optimising your conversion funnel, you really need to do your homework.

• Make your conversion mechanism fit for purpose- I was involved recently in a campaign, where we had little control over the landing area for the campaign. The product centered round a very niche offering, and something whilst fairly close to a mainstream service, did not directly relate to it, and indeed, the type of people who would buy this product/service differed significantly. Added to this the product was not one you would directly type into Google. It is therefore essential that any conversion mechanism whether primary site or microsite is fit for purpose, and provides your customers with the details they need in order to make a decision and complete the sale. As you may have guessed, this initial was not the case, something that came back to bite them quite significantly (we did raise this with them), however it did highlight the requirement to provide potential customers with information, such as coverage, usage, and cost, as well as comparisons with similar products
• Don’t ask for too much information - THe amount of sites you go to where you have to sign up, and are subsequently asked for everything bar your National Insurance/Social Security number (and sometimes even that) - just to get something like a whitepaper is astounding, and fortunately one of the easiest to fix. At one of my first jobs at Tiny.com (sorry), this was something we addressed quite well, turning what was originally a lengthy sales process, to something that was much more streamlined and had the customers requirements at heart, rather than the marketing department. As a result, sales increased by over 300%.

  My rule of thumb for this however is, the more valuable/desirable the product/service/information - the more likely you are to be able to ask for more information. Using the information above, the desire is to complete that computer sale as quickly as possible, however something like a Key bit of research may carry considerably more business value, and as a result you may get away with a greater volume of customer information requirements. Ask for too much - and you will scare people away, ask for too little, and you may not be able to close the deal. Getting the balance right takes time and effort.

• Profile and Monitor - Like everything else - getting your site optimised from a conversion perspective takes time, effort and sometimes money. However I would suggest in many cases, this is money well spent, and will provide you with a streamlined, effective solution, that will return that cost over and over and over again.

  Get the tools in place, whether they be

  • Analytics - Such as Google Analytics, Clicktracks, WebTrends etc
  • Behavioural Analysis - such as BunnyFoot or other eye tracking software
  • User/Focus Groups - Speak to people  - at the end of the day surely its better getting it straight from the horses mouth.

I would suggest you take some time to read Michael’s article, and spend sometime researching the area round conversion. Myself and John Hill here at E-Gain have spent a lot of time over the last couple of years (and yes our website is not testament to this - Cobblers shoes and all that) and much of this changes, as behaviour and technologies improve. However at the end of the day, you are aiming at the majority of the time at people, and its worth remembering that.

Add comment May 28th, 2008 at 07:00pm SEO UK