Recently Google has been getting a lot of flack for the quality of the SERPs in the UK.

This included a post by Dave Naylor regarding the results that were shown for “Tennis Court Hire”.

At the time of Dave’s post the top 6 posts were showing Australian sites, however at the moment these sites have dropped but they are still on the first page.

This made me wonder how much better Bing and Yahoo was, and in Bing’s case it is quite disappointing.

So 5 out of the top 10 results are currently Australian sites, with the top 2 being Australian, making the Bing results just as bad if not worse than Google’s

Finishing on a more promising note I tried out Yahoo with the following results:

At least Yahoo managed to show some more appropriate results with all of them being UK based.

Big Mouth Media appear to be having a few issues as of late. A few days ago Site Visibility reported about some ranking issues that may indicate a penalty that has been applied to the BMM homepage which caused the homepage to be completely de-indexed.

However in BMMs defence it appears that it is less likely to be a penalty and more likely to be a screw up with a server misconfiguration leading to them 301 or 302 hijacking themselves with the domain g-maps.com.

Unfortunately the bad news doesn’t seem to end there, not only have they lost some very important rankings but it appears that a search for their brand name is showing some less than desirable results.

While the results are not returning negative comments from clients it can’t be helping with client confidence or acquiring new clients with multiple domains ranking for Big Mouth Media all documenting a screw up.

BMM are generally regarded as whiter than white so I am sure once they are back the negative results will soon filter out.

Recently I have been going through some of the tools on SEOmoz to see if there is anything new I have been missing out on, and I came across 2 little gems.

These have probably been available to the public for a while I just haven’t used them but under their Labs tools there is:

• Top Pages: Powered By Linkscape
• Backlink Analysis: Powered By Linkscape

I have used Linkscape since its release and it is an excellent tool, unfortunately you have a limited number of credits per month so you need to be cautious about using it excessively.

The above tools do not use any credits and I have found they provide some excellent data for an initial diagnostic on a site if for example your are doing an SEO Competition Report.

The top pages tool does exactly what it says on the tin and identifies the top pages of a domain based on its links. I find this is useful as quite often in the past for an initial diagnosis I look at the links to the homepages or the domain as a whole and then maybe check out some of the obvious strong pages. With this tool you can identify the strongest pages within a few seconds.

If we take Tesco.com for an example:

Here we can see which pages are the strongest and presumably have been optimised the most for. You can then use each of the above URLs in the Backlink Analysis tool where you will get both anchor text and backlink data:

There are also plenty of other tools out there that offer similar functionality. The Link Harvester tool on SEOBook is still one of my favourites but I find the above tools the best at identifying the strongest pages with deep links.

The BBC tech show Click bought a botnet to show how at risk we are for cyber crimes. The botnet consists of 22,000 hijacked PCs around the world and was purchased over the net through a chat room.

The Click team will show how effective spamming can be done with a botnet already of that small size. 

After 2 hours of running their experiment the test email addresses used started filling up with thousands of junk emails.

Click also went on to test out a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on a backup site owned by security company Prevx.

Click then ordered its slave PCs to bombard its target site with requests for access to make it inaccessible. Click managed to overload the site with just 60 PCs

Click reported that Computers from the US and the UK go for about $350 to $400 (£254-£290) for 1,000 because they’ve got much more financial details, like online banking passwords and credit cards details.

What would be interesting is how popular this is or could become in the SEO world. We have already seen the term Anti or Negative SEO thrown about, and some say it is becoming increasingly popular as normal SEO becomes increasingly harder.

Being able to buy 1,000 computers for less than £300 that can carry out a DDoS attack sounds like a reasonably affordable investment for the unscrupulous people out there.

Obviously it would look a little suspicious if you targeted  multiple websites that you compete with but it quite possibly would be cheaper and just as effective as trying to link spam a competitor.

Obviously you would like to think people would not sink this low but this is unfortunately not the case with some “Craphat SEOs” even hacking into  school websites to inject porn links.

Over the last few months I have been noticing quite a lot of websites that make some fundamental errors. One of the ones that keep cropping up is failing to make a website resolve on the non www.  version.

I just went to blackpool.gov.uk to try and pay our rates bill and was greeted with an opendns error.

I don’t know about most people but I never type in a URL starting with www. and I am assuming this would be cause for significant confusion for the average person that does not know about these things.

Granted a lot of sites that suffer these issues are for companies/organisations that are not relying on the search engines for success but it is still a basic error that will probably be causing confusion.

I just checked the other sites blackpool.gov.uk links out to and quite a few of them suffer from the same issues including:

• blackpoolunlimited.com
• reblackpool.com
• visitblackpool.com

Please sort it out!

One of the common issues we, and SEOs in general, face when proposing work to potential clients and also for existing clients is that they want results immediately or in the case of existing clients they become impatient and want to know why a site is ranking after X months.

It is an understandable problem, if you have just paid for a brand new website you may of paid thousands of pounds and you want to be getting a return on your investment as fast as possible.

Let’s say we have just developed a website called dolphin-mobiles.co.uk selling Mobile Phones. Luckily we decided to take SEO into account when developing the site and we have an excellent site with keyword rich titles, unique descriptions, proper use of headers, and a text link based navigation that avoids duplicate content.

Then surely it is a realistic expectation to rank for “Mobile Phones” right?

Granted the term Mobile Phones is quite hard to rank for no matter what, but I couldn’t think of an example off the top of my head for a medium competitive term. However let’s say yes it is a realistic expectation, now the problem is why doesn’t that site rank for the term in 3-6 months?

If we look some of the top ranking sites for Mobile Phones we have o2, onestopphoneshop, directphoneshop, dialaphone and mobiles.co.uk.

Onestopphoneshop.co.uk currently has 90,620 external links pointing to the domain so surely if I got 90,621 links pointing to dolphin-mobiles.co.uk we would rank for “Mobile Phones” yeah?

No unfortunately not. Apart from the fact that not all links are born equal (10 good links might be better than 1000 spammy links) Google looks at other factors beyond what links you gain and how optimised your site it.

One of the main things Google is trying to avoid is web spam. A common feature of spammy websites is new domains and websites that have been live for a very short period of time. This therefore means Google likes older domains and websites that have been around for a long time.

If we look at onestopphoneshop.co.uk it was registered in 1998 and has an internet archive dating back to 1999 with the earliest archive being a site selling mobile phones. Therefore it is safe to assume this site will not be spam and deserves to rank higher than my brand new domain with no history.

The other factor that needs to be taken into account is the age of the back links themselves. Google is going to be mighty suspicious if my brand new website suddenly gets 90,621 links over 3 months so therefore it won’t rank the site for the chosen key term.

It is hard to identify the age of the links to onestopphoneshop.co.uk but if they have been acquiring keyword rich links from 1998 and these links have remained in place then it is clear to Google that this site but be about Mobile Phones and therefore deserve to rank for it.

The simplest analogy would be someone applying for a £150,000 a year job when s/he only has 6 months experience. Yes in theory the individual may have the skills to do the job but are you going to trust s/he is telling the truth? Someone with 10 years experience in a well known company would (in theory) a much safer option as s/he has a proven track record.

Obviously we are not suggesting it will take 10 years to get a site ranking however if you have a new website and new domain and want to compete in a competitive market it takes time, you need to prove to Google you deserve that position.

One of the main driving forces behind this issue is SEO companies claiming to achieve rankings in days, weeks or a few months. Yes it is feasible that you will get some long tail rankings in this time I am confident it wouldn’t take me that long to rank for “Cheap Nokia E90 Communicator Smartphone” however what benefit will that ever for a website?

SEO is a long term investment, with long term results. It takes time and money but in the end if it is done properly it will have a better return on investment than pay per click or traditional marketing techniques.

Why SEO takes time and effort

Some further reading:

SEO Is Not a One-Time Fix by Chris Boggs. Recommends that enterprise level contracts should be 3 years minimum

Search Engine Ranking Factors by SEOMoz. A guide of rankings factors including sections about the age of document, age of site, historical performance of the site, and age of links.

Link Value Factors by Wiep. Another excellent guide this time focussing on the factors involved in determining the value of a link. This also references age of the link and age of the domain.

Unrealistic SEO Expectations by Dolphin Promotions. Why ranking for highly competitive terms when you are not directly in that market can be unrealistic, and why focussing on increasing conversions is much more profitable

URL canonicalization is a common technique employed by SEOs to resolve duplicate content issues associated with having the same page display for multiple versions of the URL.
The main issues occur when a websites homepage resolves on up to 4 different URLs such as

example.com/
www.example.com/
example.com/index.php
www.example.com/index.php

The problem shows 4 different URLs to the search engines which can dilute the effectiveness of links and also potentially cause a duplicate content issue.
The aim of URL canonicalization is to redirect the different URLs into 1 standard URL. For most cases this would be www.example.com/.

This is all relatively common knowledge for SEOs and many applications such as Wordpress have it built in. If you use PHP/Apache then canonicalization is a relatively simple process using .htaccess where you will find plenty of guides.

Unfortunately not everyone uses PHP/Apache.  If you use ASP/ASP.net or god forbid PHP on IIS then things become a little more complex. Actually 301 redirects on IIS are quite easy but for this you need access to the IIS server, and for most people this is not possible.
If you need to do URL canonicalization in ASP or ASP.Net then you need to add some code to the top of each page (or call it in with an include)

For ASP

<%

Dim domain_name, theurl, query_string, http_path,temp_num

'Get domain that the page is on

domain_name = lcase(request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST"))

'Check if URL is the www version

if left(domain_name, 3) <> "www" Then

http_path = request.ServerVariables("PATH_INFO")

' If other index page is used, such as index.asp

'the numbers in the right and len statement need to be changed, as well

'as the IF statment to indicate the index page.

If right(http_path, 12) = "/default.asp" Then

temp_num = len(http_path)-11

http_path = left(http_path,temp_num)

End If

' Sets the new URL settings with correct page

query_string = request.ServerVariables("query_string")

theurl = "http://www." & domain_name & http_path

'This section passes on the query string variables

if len(query_string) > 0 Then

theurl = theurl & "?" & query_string

end if

' Send 301 response and new location

Response.Clear

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"

Response.AddHeader "Location", theurl

Response.Flush

Response.End

end if

%>

For ASP.Net you need to use (via:x2line)

protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)

{

 HttpApplication app = sender as HttpApplication;

 string domainName = "example.com";

 if (app != null)

 {

 string host = app.Request.Url.Host.ToLower();

 string requestUrl = app.Request.Url.PathAndQuery;

 if (String.Equals(host, domainName))

 {

 Uri newURL = new Uri(app.Request.Url.Scheme +

 "://www." +

 domainName +

 requestUrl);

 app.Context.Response.RedirectLocation = newURL.ToString();

 app.Context.Response.StatusCode = 301;

 app.Context.Response.End();

 }

 }

}

It is worth noting that in the ASP example there is a small issue. The redirect doesn’t actually work for www.example.com/index.php to www.example.com as the value for “request.ServerVariables(“PATH_INFO”)” is the same for www.example.com/default.asp and www.example.com/ so trying to re-direct them will cause a to many re-directions error.

If there are any other guides to URL canonicalization guides for non standard scenarios (Such as Zeus Server!) feel free to post a link.

One of the biggest problems we face as an SEO company is a client having unrealistic expectations about what SEO can achieve. There are a lot of cases where it feels like clients seem to think SEOs have a direct line to Google and when they pay for work done we will get on the phone to Eric and Sergey and inform them we want X site ranking in X position.

As much as we wish this was true it is unfortunately not the case. The reality of the situation is Google is trying to provide the most relevant results for specific searches and in theory as an SEO company we aim to try and make a website selling “Blue Widgets” be as relevant as possible for the term “Blue Widgets”.

Unfortunately it is not always as simple as just making the site relevant for “Blue Widgets” there are quite frequently a LOT of other  website targeting the same term, so we need to somehow make this site more relevant that everyone else. This is then quite frequently accompanied by a client not being satisfied with ranking for “Blue Widgets” but they want to rank for “Widgets”. This can make things considerably more difficult.

If we take a more realistic example, let’s say we sell SIP Voip Phones, it would be a realistic expectation to be able to rank for SIP Voip Phones. Seeing as that is what we specialise in, then someone searching for SIP Voip Phones or SIP phones may find us in the top ten of Google and they will be content with the fact a relevant result.

However if the person searches for VOIP Phones and we rank in the top ten then does the site really deserve to be there? There are all sorts of VOIP Phones out there and I am assuming that the average person searching for VOIP Phones is more likely searching for a traditional VOIP phone or a SKYPE Phone, therefore having a site specialising in SIP Voip Phones ranking in the top ten of Google is NOT a relevant result.

This problem is them amplified if we wanted to rank for “Phones”. Yes we sell phones, but it is just not relevant at all to rank for that term, there are hundreds of types of phone, and SIP phones are a very specific niche so why would Google want our site ranking for phones? And the answer is they don’t want the site to rank for this term, and this is exactly what they are trying to stop.

Obviously this doesn’t mean we wouldn’t target “VOIP Phones” (we might not bother with just “Phones” though) but in reality it could be very difficult to rank for this term, and to some extent you end up playing a cat and mouse game with Google.  If there is a technique that improves rankings and SEO Company will likely use it (obviously) however at some point if Google feels people are using a technique to manipulate the search engines they will likely devalue the technique. This has happened with dozens of techniques over the years including directory submissions, mass article syndication, reciprocal links, selling links, along with various on site techniques such as having a high keyword density.

A more realistic and profitable approach is to spend less time obsessing about ranking for unrealistic terms and more time concentrating on improving sales, and specifically improving the conversions from search engine traffic to a certified lead or sale.

While getting the example site that sells SIP Voip Phones ranking for Phones may generate a lot of traffic is it likely that this traffic will really convert into a sale? Ok, yes a small percentage might, it would be more fruitful to spend time trying to improve the people searching for “SIP phones” into sales than it is spending time getting the site ranking for “phones”.

Well seeing as I have Live Writer working ok I thought I’d try out the Insert Map function and inform you all where our lovely offices are based!

So yes you will be able to find us at

Dolphin Promotions Ltd
Unit 6
Metropolitan Business Park
Metropolitan Drive
Blackpool
Lancashire
United Kingdom
FY3 9LT

Tel: 0845 869 58 50

Fax: 0870 471 49 93