Will Google discount Blogroll links

Jun 26, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: seo

Google have been clear and expressed their feelings about paid links. We all know we shouldn’t do it, it’s against the webmaster guidelines, you can get penalties and even removals from the index.

I will put my hand up and say I have dabbled in buying links, if you’re talking to an SEO who says they’ve never done it then they may be fibbing (or they have only been doing SEO for a short period of time).

We all know the following:

• Buying links for PR is not allowed
• Selling links to pass PR is not allowed
• Buying links to manipulate the SERPS is not allowed
• Excessive link exchanges are not allowed

There is of course the snitch form report a paid link form by which members of the law abiding public can notify Google if they detect any paid links on a web page. Google can then take their appropriate levels of action towards the websites in question.

Besides from the awesome report a baddie form Google uses variables in their algorithm to detect paid links automatically. Webmasters often leave a trail when adding paid links, be it through code comments, stupid ad placements, link relevancy, backlink increases and trends over time – heck there’s probably a hundred more factors.

Now, to get to my point, in 2005 there were a recorded 60 million blogs worldwide so you can imagine the 2008 figure could be close to 100 million. My preferred method of blogging is Wordpress; it’s simple, easy to setup and pretty damn search engine friendly. So say 40% (my personal estimate) of all blogs worldwide are run using Wordpress, that’s 40 million blogs all with the option to use their “blogroll”.

For you that don’t know what a blogroll is, it is a widget that can be used on blog themes that displays links that you can add through the CMS. Although you can get plugins that change the link relationship to NoFollow, it’s not a popular choice. To be honest why should you change the relationship? If you like websites and think they add value to your website, bloody link to them.

I can’t help but think that there must be hundreds of millions of links all originating from blogrolls alone, a good percentage of these will be paid links, purely because it’s easy to setup and harder for Google to recognise the link, i.e. it won’t have the same characteristics as say a footer link. Unless you are building too many links, using the same kinds of anchor texts, how will Google know your links in the blogroll are genuine or paid? (site relevance must also be a factor).

How Google will react to the continued war on paid links?

My guess is they will discount all blogroll links entirely, either by looking at the website code or making a deal with the blogging software companies and making the default setup NoFollow. I know it sounds rash and perhaps this is the ramblings of a tired man coming to the end of a long hard week? Who knows…

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Past Google Page Rank Updates

Jun 17, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: Internet News, seo

I have been seeing a lot of people arguing about when certain updates have happened (more to the point page rank). So I decided to share my data with my readers to help clear up any confusion.

06/06/2007

20/10/2007

11/01/2008

29/02/2008

29/04/2008

The dates have been collected every time Google updates their page rank - data centers tend to go down a week before an update and a backlink update also occurs before a PR update.

If I was to hazard a guess I would say the 4th PR update of 2008 will happen at the end of June 2008

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10 Common SEO Mistakes

Jun 10, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: Search Engines, seo

Again I apologize for not having time to write more - The list is based on observations I commonly see on a day to day basis. If you notice your website with any of these, either bury your head in the sand or change it immediately to see better search engine rankings!

1. Using the same keyword more than twice in a Title tag - Having the same keyword listed in your heading 3 times or more will in fact reduce the relevance and strength of those keywords. Most important factor is that it’s readable to the user and is an accurate description of your page.

2. High keyword densities - Including your targeted keyword is obviously important but don’t think for one minute putting the keyword in every link on the page and in every paragraph will make your page more relevant - it won’t.

3. Not having a Valid XML Sitemap - Create one and submit it to the webmaster consoles on the major search engines.

4. URL’s not containing any keywords - Yes, I’m still seeing utterly useless URL structures. Just remember to include an accurate description of the page content in the URL.

5. Using <H1> tags more than once on a single page - There should only be one <h1> tag per page.

6. Not giving each page unique Meta data - should be relevant to each page’s content and unique - you will see benefits in doing this - trust me!

7. Using the same anchor text in all links - Unless you have been around for years, just don’t bother using the same anchor texts in your links. Make them as varied as possible, you will see see an increase in your targeted keywords if your site is optimized properly.

8. Putting analytics code at the beginning of your body content - Doing this will slow down the page content load which will effect usability. The amount of time is not large but noticeable to search engines, always put it at the end of the </body> tag.

9. Not using accurate image descriptions - Stuffing keywords in image descriptions will do nothing for you and may even harm your rankings if used excessively.

10. Not having a 301 redirect setup - It’s not hard to do and it will help with your indexing like you wouldn’t believe!

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Analytics software can harm your website

Jun 5, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: seo

All this week I have been attending Webtrends Marketing Lab training. For those od you that don’t know what webtrends is - it’s an expensive yet very comprehensive analytics package.

I know a lot of my readers probably would prefer to have Google Anlytics, which is still a very powerfull tool (and free) but webtrends is a massive program which is very customisable. With many clients it proves a more fitting solution.

Until now I hadn’t really considered there might be negative implications of adding tags to pages - well there is, so be careful.

Webtrends allows you to to add perameters to pages enabling something called “Smartview” which is essentially a site overview. However you can display paths, actions, conversions and all kinds of other data. This is achieved by adding the WT.svi parameter - when you do this you are creating a duplicate page - which obviously can have a negative impact on search results.

Something to bare in mind when setting up any analtics software!

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Big UK brand blackhat exposed

May 30, 2008 Author: Matt Ridout | Filed under: Internet News, seo

I recently came across a document which highlighted a SEO strategy for a major UK based company. Now for legal reasons I can’t mention which company it is but they are huge in the UK and their industry is insurance.

Now I work on many clients but primarily the insurance sector, which is highly competitive and very lucrative if the rankings are achieved. Most of the clients I manage SEO for have achieved top 10 positions for their keywords but there are always a handful of websites that always sit on top, no matter what.

I have of course researched my competitors thoroughly, which everyone in SEO should do, looking at their design, backlinks, content, IP locations etc. At first glance all these elements look pretty standard, not much out of the ordinary – so it was a nice treat to see how these “top dogs” have managed this.

A huge network of at least 100 websites has been created; some websites date back to 1999 so this method has been used for a long time, and has really only started working perfectly for the last 12-18 months. Each of these websites is very high quality, most of them ranking in the top 5/10 for each niche. The niches aren’t limited to one or two either, they are quite varied.

The network is made up by at least 15 different IP addresses, each providing between 4-20 websites on each, the more important websites being hosted on IP’s with the least amount of websites or even on their own.

Paid links have been commonly used on most of these websites which has added to their individual values, but here’s the sneaky part. If a new website is added to this network (which probably pays an enormous amount of $$$) then no links are bought directly, instead the related sites on the network get the links they then link to the “new site”. This means with these high quality sites only having 2-4 outgoing links, the juice is massive!

Now I know that most companies have sub departments with additional websites but this method is taking it to the next level. Literally millions of $$$ have been spent on this network but for this one particular insurance company, that price must have been recovered in a few weeks.

It’s just worth noting that even “trusted” brands that have been around for many years might not always play nice when it comes to rankings and strategies.