The nofollow tag seems to create a bit of confusion among developers, so I thought I would clarify my understanding of the tag and would welcome a discussion.

I have a very easy way of deciding these things for the company I work for – anything that comes through the advertising department should get nofollowed, and anything through the editorial department should be followed. I should point out that I am currently working for a magazine publisher.

The rule of thumb I work to is that if a link has been paid for, the nofollow tag should be applied. Any naturally occuring link within the website content should be left alone.

When the link metric was first introduced as a ranking factor it was seen that a link was a in essence a ‘vote’ for the recipient website. This was easy to manipulate by buying links.
Google combated this by penalising sites that were obviously selling links and followed that through to penalise the websites listed on them.

A natural website linking pattern would should links that are both followed and nofollowed.

There was a thinking that nofollowed links were useless as no ‘link juice’ was passed to the recipient website, but I have always subscribed to the theory that a good link is worth having regardless of the nofollow tag, and it seems I may finally have the proof!
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ranking-signals-hiding-beneath-the-surface
Randfish, a well known and respected blogger in the SEO field has stated that he believes that nofollowed links from trusted sources will have an impact on your linking profile.

The bottom line is that as long as you are targetting good links, it doesn’t matter if they are nofollowed – a nofollowed link from a trusted website is a good thing to have!

I was asked to help out on a website which has dramatically lost rankings since changing from a non-www domain version to the www version – the same domain, I should stress.

The .htaccess file had been setup correctly but as the dramatic drop in traffic happened 2 days after the redirect happened, it had to be the culprit.

Something that stood out, in the Google listings was that the homepage of the domain was still being listed as the non-www version despite other pages now showing up as the www version.

After some careful analysis of the website it transpired that the CMS used absolute links for all internal linking and all of those links were using the non-www version of the domain.
This essentially would be a confusion for Google as the .htaccess file was telling it to use www links, while the website itself was using non-www – in essence, creating an infinite loop.

With this now fixed I am waiting to see how the big G reacts and if this simple yet essential attention to detail is going to get the traffic back to the site.

The moral of this is that you shouldn’t mess around with domains unless it is really necessary – and you know exactly what is required!

We’ve all encountered that page…the annoying standard “The page you are looking for cannot be found…”, but you don’t want your visitors to find those pages on your site do you?

As hard as you might try, if you have a big website or have changed the url structure, or even removed content, can you be sure your visitors are not seeing that annoying, and frankly useless, page?

Why not create a custom 404 page? Style it in the same manner as your website, and quite often having a funny tagline on the page  amuses users, but most importantly, they have remained on your website despite not finding the content they wanted.
Now is your chance to re-engage those users by offering them the content you think they may have been looking for.

There is a second reason to customise your 404 pages – and that is for the friendly spiders that visit your website!
If a spider follow an internal link on your website and comes to a standard 404 page, it will end it’s crawl as there is nowhere for it to continue onto. Having a 404 page that has your site menu and/or links to different content will give the spider somewhere else to go!

Of course, you need to ensure that the page returns a 404 and not 200 status, and you should remember to noindex the page, or block it with your robots.txt file!

This week, Google launched their instant search.
That is to say that Google starts showing results as soon as you start typing, and refines the results as you type more.

Organic Search
My fear for organic search is that if your site is not shown above the visible screen fold, people will continue to refine their search rather than scroll. In other words, people will prefer to click/type rather than scroll. It means that it’s going to get harder to get organic traffic.
This is going to take a little bit of research!

Paid Search
This is a clever ploy by Google as it will likely mean that there will be an increase in people using shorter tail phrases in their adwords accounts which will push the cost per click up. Hey presto, Google makes more money.
Google has also stated that an advert has to be shown for 3 seconds for that advert to be counted as an impression. At least Google has thought about that aspect.

At present, to my knowledge, instant search is only available on the actual Google search page. Typing your query directly into the url bar, or using a toolbar search box will act normally, until you get the results and refine the query on the results page.

There have been some major changes to Google over the last few months.
Firstly, there was the so-called Mayday update (funnily enough at the beginning of May!) which has totally changed long tail search – and not for the better. Secondly, at the beginning of June, the Caffeine rollout was finally completed.
Now, if we take Matt Cutts at his word then the caffeine update was a change in the infrastructure so shouldn’t have any impact on SERPS.

However, a personal site of mine was getting a lot of traffic through long tail search, and the Mayday update didn’t affect the site in the slightest. In fact, I saw a steady increase in traffic. On June 4th my traffic took a massive hit.

I use the website php.net to refresh my knowledge of various php functions from time to time, and I have noticed that when searching for a phrase such as “php strstr function”, the php.net site is not showing up within the first 50 results of the SERPS. There is a subdomain of pear.php.net showing up in the 2nd and 3rd spots but the standard site is not.

The www.php.net version of the site still has over 80,000 pages indexed so it’s not a case that someone’s accidentally blocked Googlebot from visiting the site.
This leads me to believe that whether this has been caused by Mayday or Caffeine, Google has an error in their algorithm. For a site as well respected as php.net to be nowhere in the SERPs is clearly wrong.

I will therefore be holding off making any changes to my own site in the hope that Google fix this very quickly.

It seems like Bing isn’t ready to do battle with Google just yet.

Bing seem to be going down the route of providing information to the user without taking them to external websites.
For example, if you were to search for “audi a3 spec”, Bing would actually show you the Audi A3 spec and just provide a link to the website it got the information from.
Obviously, this works well for the user for something that is black and white, but not when you are searching for opinions.

This is a great feature for users, but not for website owners. A lot of websites generate income from placing adverts on their site. Bing potentially removes the need for the user to visit an external website if the information is shown within Bing. Less visitors to a website means less money for website owners, and less money for website owners may mean less websites. Less websites may mean we are just left with the dross – made for adsense sites and such like.

Does this mean that Microsoft will be concentrating on getting people to pay for advertising rather than concetrating on organic search?

I applaude Microsoft for trying to find a different angle for search (although the concept is not that different from the Wolfram Alpha search engine) but I don’t think that alienating the very people that are providing the content (for free) is going to work well as a business model.

It is a well known fact that the search engine optimisation industry has a somewhat poor reputation – sometimes this is justified, but mostly it is not. I along with many other SEO professionals offer a service which is based on doing a lot of research and reading to ensure we have as many facts about improving website positions as possible.

It can get a little irksome therefore when someone takes on an SEO job without knowing what they should be doing. Yes, this will harm the SEO industry.

Many people who dabble in websites think they know what is needed to boost a website to the dizzy heights of position 1 in Google…then fail because they just do not have the required knowledge. Even worse, they can harm their website profile.
Many people will know that backlinks are an important factor for ranking in Google so they may well go out and buy links without understanding the profile of the website they have just got a link from.
Many people will have heard of keyword density and will overuse the keywords they want to rank for.
Many people will still cloak content because they don’t understand the implications of what they are doing.

Ten years ago it was easy. Choose your keywords and use them in your title and meta tags. Job done. There were far less websites on the internet as well.

Over the last few years, the number of websites being created has got to epic proportions – just look at the number of results when you perform a search! Google have had to refine the way they rank websites to try to ensure they can pick the most relevent out of the 8 million results that have beem returned. That means that there are many factors at play for ranking a website, and things are constantly evolving.
Someone who performs SEO day in and day out will obviously have a much better understanding of what works for ranking well and what doesn’t, than Joe Bloggs who does his SEO when he has a spare five minutes.

If you are serious about getting good rankings for the right keywords for your website and you don’t have the time to learn in more than just basic SEO, you really should consider an SEO professional or agency to help you. Don’t expect them to tell you their secrets because there is no manual – every website is different.

Remember, just because you bought a book on SEO last week, it was written at least a year ago – one year is a long time in SEO!
To really understand SEO takes a lot time and patience – anyone can do it if they are willing to put in the time.

Firstly, apologies for the lack of blog posts lately, but hopefully I will be able to sustain more entries in the future!

Today I would like to talk about the fact that Google seem to be becoming the thing they seemed to despise in the beginning, when they famously used the slogan “Don’t be evil”.

This blog post at SEOmoz shows how Google are increasingly using personalised search to give you what it considers are results more relevant to you. Now, I suppose on the face of it, it sounds like a good idea right? Who wouldn’t want to see 10 listings all relevant to the search you’ve just made?
But the truth of the matter is that personalised search results can limit your view of the web. If Google is constantly trying to second guess what you want to see returned, we are not seeing true search listings.

Signing out of your account appears to not help, and presumably, Google is now tracking IP addresses and matching them to Google accounts and that’s how they can show personalised results when logged out of your Google account.

Personally Google, I want to see the 10 best results that match the phrase I have typed in – not results based on what I’ve typed in and combine it with my search history. I find it commendable that you want to make the internet easier to use, but I would prefer to have the choice of viewing standard or personalised results.

Hits on your website are not everything.

I worked for a company where the goal I was given was a measurement of unique visitors per day but I disagreed with the goal.

I understand the reasoning – more hits means more potential customers right? Not necessarily. Targeted traffic is much better as those visitors are more likely to be interested in your product.

If you are a new business starting out, my advice is to concentrate on the longer tail keywords as you need to use your website to either provide sales or leads. Concentrating your time on targeting generic keywords may mean a lot of time is spent on promoting your website to an audience who are not likely to buy anything from you.

Let’s take an example of a ficticious used car dealer in Essex. Would the phrase “used cars” be worth chasing? Granted it will be a massive search term, but if someone in Cornwall was looking for a used car, are they going to drive all the way to Essex just because it tops the search engine? It would be very unlikely.
So, optimise for the longer tail phrases such as “used cars in Essex”, “used cars in Colchester”, “used cars in Chelmsford”, “used ford essex”.
Think about your customers and how they will search, and based on that information you should choose your keyphrases.

A used car dealer that get’s hits to their website from all over the UK loses a massive chunk of their visitors because they are not close enough to the car dealer in Essex. Therefore the number of website hits is misleading because they will not be able to convert a lot of those visitors to customers, and by ignoring the longtail phrases that are more likely to convert to customers, the used car dealer can be losing out on potential customers.

So, in summary, it is important to understand where your website hits are coming from and whether that traffic can be proffitable to you. If it isn’t, it’s time to consider if you are targeting the right keyphrases.

How do you decide what keywords you want to target? Do you even consider whether those phrases are used by your customers to find you?

As an example, I did some work for a caravan company selling new and used caravans. When I started, the phrase preowned caravan was all over the website as it was felt that it gave a better impression than used caravan. Traffic immediately rose when I changed the phrase to used caravan as people tend to use used rather than preowned.

Who is your customer?

The first thing to consider is who your customer base is. If you are a B2B company then your customers are more likely to use the same industry terminology that you do, while if you are a B2C company, your customers are more likely to use simple search terms and possibly even slang words.

What are your search terms?

The next thing you need to do is to create a list of the search terms you want to target and then use one of the many tools available to check which terms will generate the most traffic, and more importantly, the most targeted traffic. Once you know what terms you are targeting, you can write your content to reflect that.

By not researching your keywords, you could end up targeting phrases that are barely searched and so bring very little traffic. You also run the risk of losing focus when writing your content.