We’ve been analysing quite few sites by looking at their Google Organic non-brand traffic from the US via the Custom Report below (click here to use) and there are some very worrying signs.

The image below is via SEObooks Panda preparation post – we have seen much bigger drops using the method above for certain sites.

What we have been doing is taking all the search traffic from the before and after the update (which was on 24th Feb) and looking to see which keywords and pages have dropped the most. To do this you need to download the data for the 4 weeks before and then compare to the 4 weeks after using the magic of vlookup in Excel. This gives you a view on your biggest problem pages. Images via SEO agencies.

One interesting thing we found is that the update is definitely not sitewide – there are a number of sites we looked at where the update had only hit pages of a certain type. For example ecommerce sites where the category pages were fine but product pages were hit hard.

Since this algorithm is US only we can easily compare the results before and after – simply search for the keyword on google.com and then add the &gl=us paramter to the end – click here and then here to see an example for “how to paint a wine glass”. Note that to get a fair test you need to use queries where Google is unlikely to favour UK sites.

Problems for ecommerce sites

So the first line of this post mentioned ecommerce sites. This update is going to cause major issues for anybody that has a large site with product descriptions that are duplicated across lots of other sites. If you have a few of these it’s not an issue to rewrite them but a lot of big ecommerce sites have 10,000+ products and to rewrite those is going to be a major headache.

When the update hit the US bloggers and the press were mainly quite pleased about the update as nobody likes the idea of content farms ranking. When the update hits the UK, where there are very few content farms, a lot of legitimate ecommerce sites are going to suddenly find themselves labelled as a content farm with 50% of Google Organic traffic disappearing overnight.

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Panda Update: Ecommerce sites at risk & an Analytics report to show how it’s hitting your US traffic today

We assume that when you “favourite” a site by clicking on the star it gives that site a boost in your personalised results but what isn’t clear is whether it gives the site a boost for every search user.

I would like to do an experiment and need your help in doing this so if you could follow the steps below that would be fantastic.

• Make sure you are logged in to your Google account
• Search for “search engine optimisation” on Google.co.uk
• Click the star on the right hand site of the result for Blogstorm (shown in the screenshot below)

I will report back on the results in a week or so.

Thanks for your help.

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Please help my experiment to see if Google Starred Results affect rankings

My name is Tim Grice and I am the new Search Strategist at Branded3, there is a chance you may have heard of me before or come across my blog SEO wizz, it has had the odd mention here and there

I am a real search addict, starting around 4-5 years ago when Adwords was first taking off, going through the affiliate marketing phrase, losing lots of money, losing lots of Adsense accounts (also having some success ) and well here I am.

I have been working freelance for the last 18 months slowly building a client base and expanding my portfolio with excellent results working with clients in the UK and US.

I got to a point where either I invested to take it to the next level or I looked to take my skills to a new company and more prestigious clients, Branded3 are local to me and after meeting with Vin and Patrick the choice was an easy one.

As I said I am passionate about search and am hoping to add a real bang to the online marketing team here at Branded3, hopefully I’ll have a few opportunities to fire some posts out here on blogstorm but if not you can catch me at SEOwizz.

Bye for now.

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Tim Grice Joins Branded3

After some investigation by one of our developers yesterday it turned out that the JavaScript file which powers the tab section on the right hand side of the blog had been hacked and an iframe inserted in the header. Luckily the iframe source was giving a 404 error otherwise my blog would probably have been flagged as a malware site and started redirecting all visitors to somewhere else.

We are still not sure how the hacker got into the blog but I am very careful to only use popular plugins and always update all plugins and WordPress as soon as new versions come out.

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Hacked

Microsoft has a system called Windows Live Sync but it only works if both computers are online in much the same way as the excellent Log Me In does. I tried Dropbox but it gives you a new folder that you can drag content into when you want to sync it up rather than just syncing all the folders you want.

This week I finall found the solution – Syncplicity. The basic service is totally free and gives you 2GB of online data storage (you can get 3GB if you sign up using this link).

When you install the application you simply select the folders you want to share and it automatically synchronises them with the Syncplicity servers and your other computers. The files are also available by logging in to the website so you can get them from a public PC as well.

I won’t go as far as to recommend this product for backing up your important business data, we recommend Backup Technology for that, but if you want an easy (and free) way to sync between 2 computers you really can’t go far wrong.

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Online File & Folder Sync Between Windows XP/Vista PC’s With Syncplicity

@ducedoon pointed out that it might be because of a new addition to WordPress 2.8 which rather than sending pings when a post is published sends them once per hour in a batch process!

In an attempt to reduce the numbers of outbound pings a new undocumented ”feature” was introduced in WordPress 2.8 (this change is not mentioned in the WP 2.8 release notes).

Instead of notifing ping services every time a post is published or edited, pings are now sent once every hour, at the most. Every time a new post is published, WordPress checks if there is a ping batch queued to be sent within the next hour. If so, the ping is added to that batch. If there is nothing in the queue, a ping is sheduled to be sent after 3600 seconds (one hour).

Apparently this will be fixed in WordPress 2.8.3, until then don’t expect fast indexing or speedy distribution of your RSS feed.

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Indexing slow? Blame WordPress 2.8

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Finally joined FriendFeed

In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.

The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link. See below for a screenshot of how the new system looks:

You will notice the “More comments by” link at the bottom of the comment – this leads to your personal profile page with a live link to your website and other social network profile pages. To see an example check out Zoe Piper’s profile.

Once you have registered using the registration form you have access to a profile page which allows you to edit your details at any time.

The registration form allows you to add your Twitter & Facebook details – the rest of your information can be added once you log in. We use Gravatars to power the photos next to the comments – Gravatar is a free system and you can sign up here.

Why we are changing

The main reason behind this change is to encourage conversation – we want intelligent comments from regular readers and the best way to do this is to create a feeling of community behind the site.

My feeling is that if you read and comment on a blog on a regular basis then registering once is actually easier than typing your details every time you want to leave a comment.

In addition we are very aware of the fact that a blog post with hundreds of incoming links and hundreds of nofollow blog comments could be a very inefficient PageRank black hole and forcing users to register is likely to dramatically improve the signal to noise ratio of comments here on Blogstorm.

We won’t be going down the route of letting people leave dofollow comments despite the fact we offer live links from profile pages. It only needs one bad link to slip through the net and a popular blog post could be given a ranking penalty and that isn’t a risk we want to take.

Please try the system out – your feedback is appreciated.

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Cool new comment system on Blogstorm

I have a hunch that giving my credit card details to them would be a bad idea.

Richard.liu (Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited) wrote:
Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword

2 Apr. 2009

Blog storm companies omain name & Internet keyword
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited which is the domain name
register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is
apply ing to register “blogstorm” as their domain name and Internet keyword
on 1 Apr. 2009.Since after our investigation we found that this word has been
in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark,
so we inform you in no time. If you consider these domain names and internet
keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering
them first, contact us soon. Thanks for your co-operation and support.

Kind Regards,

Richard Liu
Tel:+ 852-31757931(ext.8021)
Fax: +852-31757932
Email: richard.liu@hknetwork.hk.cn
Website: www.hknsc.hk

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Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited Scam

Ars Technica reports on the rather strange case.

A tiny startup that was threatened by a massive law firm over nothing more than a humble hyperlink has been forced to settle and change its linking policies, handing Goliath the win in this gratuitous trademark case. Under the agreement, real estate startup BlockShopper can no longer include hyperlinks anywhere on its website to Jones Day, a massive Chicago law firm, except explicitly on URL text. Essentially, “jonesday.com” is okay, but not “blah blah blah”.

I’m thinking of changing the name of Blogstorm to “SEO” and then threatening legal action against any sites that refuse to change the anchor text of my links.

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Sued for linking with keywords