Today I presented at Internet World about “Advanced SEO for ecommerce sites”.
The slides are below, any questions feel free to drop me a line.
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?
Via money.co.uk
There are a few posts out at the moment discussing whether SEO is a viable marketing strategy for startups.
We’ve had the chance to work with some great startups and seen the important part that SEO has played in their growth but I don’t think investing heavily in SEO is the right strategy for everybody.
For me there are two levels to SEO. The first is doing the on-site aspects and basic keyword research/link-building which every startup simply has to do in order to be visible on the web. This is virtually zero cost so everybody needs to do it.
The second is the higher level SEO involving a decent agency or perhaps a strong in-house team. This typically costs anywhere from £50k/year upwards if you want to compete for decent keywords and factoring agency fees as well as developer time to implement changes. Read more →
The system behind Demand Media is an automated topic suggestion tool which finds keywords & topics and compares them to metrics such as search volume, competitiveness and likely profitability of running ads on the pages. Topics that reach a certain threshold of profitability are queued in the system and writers choose and publish content accordingly.
In view of the negative view Google has of content farms it might surprise you to hear that Google has applied for a patent doing much the same thing. Google has been working killing content farms for over 12 months and it’s worth revisiting a patent released in Feb 2010 now that we have seen the initial effects of the Panda algorithm.
The patent basically covers a system for identifying search queries which have low quality content and then asking either publishers or the people searching for that topic to create some better content themselves. The system takes into account the volume of searches when looking at the quality of the content so for bigger keywords the content would need to be better in order for Google to not need to suggest somebody else writes something.
There are loads of potential ways Google could implement this sort of system:
Rather than explain all this myself, below are some key quotes and diagrams from the patent, I’ve highlighted the important bits.
RT @randfish: Correlation between link metrics and higher rankings quantified: http://t.co/OMtSmh6B via the @openalgorithms project
@patrickaltoft / about 3 hours agoCheck out this presentation : SMX London - Tools for Pulling Rank http://t.co/yHKGoCE6 via @ipullrank
@patrickaltoft / about 9 hours ago@AnthonyHaniff DMCA directly from your lawyers to their host
@patrickaltoft / about 15 hours agoAlso they spend $30m on Facebook marketing outside ads !
@patrickaltoft / about 1 days ago
