Blog about SEO & Social Media
Posts tagged SEO
Google May Day Update Affects Long Tail Search Queries
Jun 3rd
Welcome back. Thanks for visiting!
A new algorithmic change has been implemented by Google, affectionately know as the May Day update as it happened around 1st May 2010. Matt Cutts explains that the change is not temporary and the update is looking to improve the quality of the SERP’s that is effecting long tail terms opposed to the head of searches.
Cutts explains that this update is independent to Google Caffeine which is preceding at pace. The update is assessing which sites are the best match for long tail queries. No human involvement in this update and it is purely algorithmic.
Is your SEO affected?
Think about your site, do you have a high quality site, good content and make sure that your site can be viewed as an authority for the search query so not matching off topic queries.
Watch the full video below:
Google Product Search – Testing Links again?
Apr 3rd
Has anyone noticed that the product results in Google have been showing images and not directly linkg through to the site?
A post from the Head of SEO at Latitude, Andy Heaps posted back in December about how Latitude joke about Google’s money making levers – “if profits are down or shareholders unhappy they pick a money generating lever and pull it” highlighted this, and now seems that the same is going on again.
Only today have Google displayed both links and none in their product listings here is the latest of my searches:
Google Products - No links
So does this mean that Google are “pulling the levers” again or trying to improve the users exprerience?
Canonical URL – A possible solution to duplicate content
Feb 13th
Duplicate Content Issues
The 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, have just announced a new tag that can tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page.
The issue websites have is duplicate content, the same content is indexed under different URL’s. This is an issue SEO’s have been trying to solve for a long time.
New canonical URL tag
To help solve this problem, the 3 major engines have declared that it will recognise a new HTML tag, which, if inserted into your web page, will allow you to specify which URL you want to be the “official”, URL for the content.
The tag needs to be inserted into the HEAD section of your web page:
HTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html">
XHTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html" />
This code needs to be placed in the HEAD section not in the BODY section.
Google will now count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL.
In summary, may be to early to tell if this will help webmasters as it was only announced on the 12th February 2009, but in my opinion this is handing back a little bit of control to the webmaster instead of letting the search engine’s figure out the correct URL.
Disclaimer: The tag is aonly a suggestion to the search engine. It will probably be used 99% of the time, but they have the right to handle things their way.
Canonical URL plugin for WordPress users now available from Joost de Valk.
How to track your SEO rankings with Google Analytics
Jan 8th
One of my favourite SEO and WordPress blogs is by Joost de Valk, and on the 5th january ’09 a brilliant guest post by Andre Scholten explains how a Google Analytics filter can enable you to track your Google rankings.
So here is the post:
Track SEO rankings?
Well, you can’t specifically track the exact position of the keyword that was clicked like you can do with AdWords. But it is possible to determine the page he was on. A ranking tool can tell you over and over again that a certain keyword is around position 15 in Google while Google Analytics claims he is on page 1 (position 1 to 10). This effect can come from ‘personalized search’ or ‘local results’ that can influence the Google rankings dramatically. People see other results than you see with your ranking tools. And therefore you need Google Analytics to do the real ranking.
Setup the filter
To get the rankings in your Google Analytics reports you have to create a new filter:
The title of the filter contains a 3, that’s because filter 1 and 2 take care of filtering out everything else than Google Organic traffic. So yes: you also have to create a new profile to apply these filters on to be sure you don’t screw up your main profile.
This filter only works for Google. if you want it to work for Yahoo and Live Search also, make sure you change the filters 1 and 2 so they accept Organic from all three of them. Then setup the filter like this:
The ranking results
After a while the “User Defined” report will look like this (ignore the language):
What you see are not the actual rankings, but the number of the first result of the page the keyword was on. So when you see 20, it means the keyword was on the third page, and a 50 means the sixth page. (Yahoo and Live Search will report 21 and 51 in stead of 20 and 50).
When you don’t see a number but only “(page: ): it means the keyword was on the first page. So perhaps it is better to change “page:” to “minimal position;”, I leave that up to you.
If you want to filter the list of keywords on keywords with at least a page 2 position you can use “\(page: \d{2,3}\)” in the filter field below the list. The \d stands for digits, and the 2,3 for the amount of digits you’re looking for.
Enjoy.
The credit for the post is found on Joost’s blog.
Welcome
Dec 14th
Welcome to my new blog.
You will be able to read about my thoughts on SEO (search engine optimisation), social media and all things internet related.
Enjoy!
