Some of you might remember the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin we released way back in February 2008. This plugin was neglected for a while but we’ve now rebuilt the entire thing and re-released it with a few very nice improvements.
The plugin shows a chart of all the visits by Google & other major search engines to your site for any time period you want and also shows crawl information for specific pages. We’ve added the ability to see number of pages crawled per day as well as number of crawls.
Any feedback please leave either in the comments or on the WordPress site.
This patent covers methods which could solve one of Googles biggest problems – the fact that older pages with lots of links are outranking newer & more relevant pages which have fewer links just because they are new.
As long as Google relies on traditional links they are always going to struggle to be up to date and relevant.
The patent details how documents could be ranked based on factors such as:
Number of visits
Frequency of visits over a recent time period
Nature of the visit
Country of the visitor
It’s quite clear that a document that is getting lots of attention and visits from users in the UK should rank higher in the UK search results than a document that is getting very little attention.
Methods and apparatus consistent with the invention employ usage information to aid in organizing documents. Based purely on raw visit frequency, the documents may be organized into the following order: 610 (40 visits), 620 (30 visits), and 630 (4 visits). If these raw visit frequency numbers are refined to filter automated agents and to assign double weight to visits from Germany, the documents may be organized in the following order: 620 (effectively 40 visits, since the 10 from Germany count double), 610 (effectively 25 visits after filtering the 15 visits from automated agents), and 630 (effectively 4 visits).
It’s interesting that this patent has surfaced a the same time as we see Google+ getting wider adoption and also as we learn that Google is timestamping every single click from Google+ in order to track both the frequency and count of all outbound clicks.
Most of you will have heard the story about how the FBI has shut down several of the largest online poker websites as part of a money laundering investigation. This is clearly big news as these sites are no longer able to trade until this investigation is complete.
The actual story is very very complicated and beyond the scope of this article for me to explain but the result is very interesting from an SEO perspective. A search for “online poker” in Google.com shows the first 3 results are to dead sites – there is no way that the Google algorithm will allow them to stay at the top for very long. When a site has some downtime or a temporary change that renders it “unoptimised” then Google normally keeps the rankings for a week or so. I’m expecting these sites to disappear over the next few days.
Since the Panda / Farmer update hit the UK earlier this week most people with a website have been monitoring visitor numbers very closely for changes. A lot of people were well prepared for the update having seen their US traffic drop on 25th February but it’s still a big shock to lose 50% of your non-brand SEO traffic overnight.
Rank tracking companies such as Sistrix and Search Metrics have performed some analysis of rankings with the big losers aggregated in league tables on their blogs. This data is a bit misleading as so much of the drop was in the long tail and rankings don’t do a very good job of monitoring trends for the extreme long tail. Read more →
Late last night Google rolled out the Panda / Farmer update in the UK and confirmed the update on their official blog.
The latest update goes further than the original with 14% of queries now affected rather than 12%. They are also taking user data for blocked sites into account which wasn’t directly the case before.
We are seeing big changes for a lot of “how to” queries that we track. Ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com are losing quite a lot of ground but are still ranking in the top 10 for a lot of queries. Interestingly Blogspot blogs and answers.google.com seem to be doing very well from this update, perhaps they are deemed higher quality than other user generated sites?
There is very little data to analyse so far but I will post again over the next few days.
The Panda Farmer update has not hit the UK yet but when it does the effect it will have on everyday websites could be huge. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk.
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.
Today we came across an interesting example of how to decorate search results to maximise CTR. This example is perhaps a bit extreme but it shows great innovation and will no doubt have a big impact on the number of people who click on the link.
The use of the word “recommended” is particularly clever.
If you have any other examples please post them in the comments.
Google has been explaining today that sites hit by the Panda update are likely to be hit on all pages on the site, even if some pages are good quality. They are also telling site owners that the way to get out of the update is to remove any low quality content.
To have a copywriter check through thousands or millions of pages is a time consuming task and even then it’s hard to know whether the changes you make are to the right pages.
The way we are recommending people check their pages is to use the bounce rate and time on site metrics from Google Analytics landing page report.
In Google Analytics go to Traffic Souces > Google Organic > and view by landing page. Then add “&limit=100000″ to the URL so you can download all the data.
Finally click the CSV download and you will get a spreadsheet showing all the metrics for your pages including bounce rate, time on site and traffic for each page.
Next you need to set your CMS to autmatically add the noindex tag or temporarily delete (and redirect to category level) the worst performing pages on your site, 10% at a time, until the traffic picks up or you realise that you have too much low quality content and have to think of another plan. Don’t delete pages that are still getting lots of search traffic, just get rid of pages with high bounce rate, low time on site and very little search traffic, or a big drop in search traffic recently.
This is perhaps the most audacious thing Google has done but it seems they have bought the financial comparison site Beatthatquote.com for £37.7m
Update: within 24 hours of the acquisition beatthatquote.com no longer ranks on Google when you search for “beatthatquote”. Still no announcement from Google on the matter.
BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK.
Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products. We think we can offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings.
We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com’s expertise in UK financial products with Google’s technology, we’ll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products. We plan to keep working with our current partners and look forward to working with new ones, too.
I have no idea how Google can hope to get this past regulators. This is going to cause a lot of controversy.
Good news of course for the company involved!
If Google was going to do a product search style comparison engine they might cut out the middlemen and aggregate deals directly from big financial institutions. However with this move they are buying one of the middlemen sites. Perhaps Beatthatquote.com had some good software and Google wanted that? Will be interesting to see how finance & insurance price comparison sites like Go Compare and Money Supermarket fare over the next couple of years once Google does something in this space.
My personal opinion is that Google should steer well clear of doing things like this. If they want to build their own services such as shopping or financial comparisons I can understand but surely any site they own has to be removed from the index in a sector like this?
