Odd goings on in the SERPS and various data-centres are leading to some pretty wild speculation around the forums. It all started about 2 weeks or so ago when some pretty wild fluctuations were seen in the rankings. Sites jumped up for competitive phrases, while other sites just disappeared. I have to report that my own and my client sites were those who benefited (which is always nice to report).

Then over the weekend went out the cry of ‘PageRank update’ yippee cried some with any luck I can get another step on the dumbass greenbar and charge people more for my page rank , (oops I mean ‘charge people more for high value advertising real estate and pick your own anchor text but it is nothing to do with link mongering, and of course I would never use the nofollow tag)

PR update was the order of the day. THEN things started happening, whispers in the night!

GOOGLE DON’T DIGG.COM NO MORE

No this was not an ageing hippies convention they were referring to the fact that digg.com was showing a PR ZERO on many datacentres. But digg.com is the darling of the web, say it isn’t so

Then came the rumours, has Google broken the toolbar PR?  is pr reporting the latest SEO tool to go the way of site: link: etc ? it makes sense to this old Welsh bloke that Google should disable toolbar PR as it serves no purpose. For those who don’t know let me explain.  Google has 2 sets of PR

1. Toolbar pr which is a simple snapshot value gathered periodically, and has absolutely no part in the ranking process whatsoever.

2. Server side PR. THIS is the PR value that integrates with the indexing and ranking algorithms. This value is in a constant state of flux as pages are indexed, or de-indexed during the daily cycle that is google everflux.

Google has created this monster called PageRank, and like Frankensteins monster before it, this monster has turned ugly. In the early days, people linked to sites because they were a good resource that complimented their own page/site. Then people got the PR bug, and suddenly ‘link to anything with a long green bar’ is the order of the day. Sell high pr links searchking  is en vogue and people pay big bucks for high PR links so they in turn can create more High pr Pages to sell links on, and these high PR links eventually find their ways to made for AdSense pages (another thorn in the side of the web).

 So the question remains, what exactly IS going on at Google, and is everything coming up roses at the plex (or is that just Matts house) ?

Firstly, some of you might be asking, “what is a bad neighbourhood”?
When you link to a site from your own, it is the online equivalent of recommending a business to a friend. If they turn out to give a bad service then YOU catch it in the neck from your friend, and your reputation with your friend is tarnished slightly. 

This is the same online with links. If you link to (recommend) a site, and it turns out that the site is a bad site in the eyes of the search engines, then YOU too will be seen as ‘bad by association’.

More information on Google Quality Guidelines can be found here Google Webmaster Information on Quality
OK SO now I have worried many of you, spoiled your breakfast, or sent you running to your links pages to look for bad neighbourhoods, I guess I should sort of help you identify these bad sites.
You can find a bad neighbourhood by going through the following process. 

1 . Check page rank with the Google toolbar. If this is 0 or greyed out, that is a warning sign (new sites also have this so do not listen to people who say PR0 = ban they are confusing cause and effect).

2. Run a site:www.domain.com search on them, and if they come up with 0 pages in the index then that is also a warning

3. Run a search for their company name on Google and see what is brought up.

4. Check the ownership and age of domain. (this will help distinguish potential banned, from the site simply being new, as the signs are very similar)

5. Finally run a back link check.

This is where we get to the crux of the matter as links are the key. If a couple of year old site has no pages listed and no PR, then there is reason for caution. If however the site is showing no backlinks, then it might well be a genuine case of the site being new to the web.

If however the site is a few years old, has no PR, no pages listed, yet has hundreds of backlinks, there is a fair chance that site has a penalty against it.

These are simple checks designed to help answer the question of ‘am I linking to a bad neighbourhood’?  I can not tell you how important it is that you vet your linking partners. There is a lot of false information about bad neighbourhoods, including stuff like. I don’t link to gambling sites because Google doesn’t like them. Google doesn’t care about the genre of sites, it cares about the specific practices that each site and cluster of sites uses. Sites like ‘William Hill Bookmakers’  are not banned, nor are they bad neighbourhoods, yet they ARE gambling sites. Sure gambling sex and pharmacy sites are more likely to get into bad linking practices and spamming, but if you are in the same business, then they are on topic links.
One last thing though. When linking, keep these questions in mind. Am I linking to and from the most relevant pages of the sites?. Is this link on topic? Will I get traffic from this link? I am NOT saying you have to stick to the sites where you can answer yes to all, but I AM saying that if you CAN say yes to all those questions, then you will have just given your internet marketing a big boost.

Yesterday I went shopping, while in Asda (Wallmart for you Murcans) I couldn’t find a product I was looking for, so I asked. The assistant was fine, she said ‘certainly sir follow me’. I was then led half the length of the store and taken to the exact spot where the range I was looking for was situated. She then proceeded to tell me they had threeproducts, and told me the pros and cons of each product, she asked me if I was allergic to a certain item, (I was) which left 2 options. I asked her if she had tried them, she said that she had, and that she preferred brand A. I picked them up and threw them in my basket a happy man.

 Now call me a sad man if you like, but it made me think about how online selling should reflect offline selling.

1. I needed assistance to find something, if I could not find it I would not have bought it. (bad navigation can cost a sale)

2. I requested help, and immediately found what I was looking for (a good search facility saved the day)

3. I was delivered to a selection of products (good grouping of your products in the catalogue)

4. I needed help to make my decision to buy (good copywriting information about the products)

5. I Asked for advice and was given it, even down to asking for a recommendation (cover every aspect of the product in your decription, think of any question that  might be asked, and answer it), with regard the recommend, customer comments and/or product reviews would acomplish this.

Here is a question though, and it is one that ANYONE selling online or offline should think about. WHY do I drive 12 miles to go to Asda Walmart having to physically drive past A tesco hypermarket, Tesco Extra supermarket, and a Morrisions supermarket?

I am loyal to the brand, their selection of goods is fantastic, their value for money is great, their range of products vast (although Tesco extra have a far superior range now). I STILL shop at Asda! The staff you see are great, they smile, are helpfull, knowledgable and friendly. The store is well laid out and they rarely move things around so you can’t find them. In short, it is my kind of shop!

Is your online store like this?

I was Moderating over at Highrankings earlier today, when the above question was asked. I gave the standard reply of  as many as it takes but keep it to readable chunks. I was then asked what a readable chunk is defined as!

What is a readable chunk? I would say that it is a section that covers a topic, and finishes when you are ready to move on to the next bit. One or two A4 pages is enough, but it totally depends on the subject matter as well. I mean if you asked me if a film was worth going to see and I droned on and on with a scene by scene breakdown is that too much? On the other hand, if you were to ask me the best way to rebuild a transmission, you would not be happy with ‘get some spanners, take it all apart, replace the broken bits and rebuild it’ would you

At LONG last, Google has worked out a drum that I have been banging for a long time now. You can NOT fiddle outbound links!

In his blog Matt Cutts has posted how a change to the algorithm has altered rankings and crawling dramatically, and how your outbound links can affect how your viewed. WELL HELLO GOOGLE! So you have finally woken up to start smelling the coffee

 For a long time now I and a few others have posted across forums how it is nigh on impossible to spam out bound linking. ? How so OWG I hear you ask . Well it is simple—-

 Just say you want to game the search engines by linking out, so off you go and you get some good copy written for your page, in your page you get some research done for the sites that are most relevant. It takes some time, but you figure ‘hey I WILL spam this algorithm, I WILL beat the search engine system’. Eventually your page is complete, you release it to the spiders in all its glory, decked out in quality focused content, with top quality out  bound links on it to what you consider to be the best resources on the page subject. HA! You Beat the search engines

 Or did you?

In your attempt to spam the algorithm, you have in fact created a VERY valuable page in the grand scheme of the internet. Your copy is on topic, your extensive research has created one of the best resources online for that particular subject. As realisation dawns that in fact you have NOT ‘beaten’ the algorithm, in fact it has beaten YOU, you crawl away to sulk having put on your sad face that is normally reserved for sad Sunday!

But wait, HARK, what is that noise? It is the annoying bleep bleep of your mail programme telling you you have mail. YOU have MAIL? but your a spammer ? WHO would send a spammer mail? Curious you take a look. The mail all starts off with the same sort of words, such words are alien to you…….

Hi there, I just wanted to say thanks for the information I found on your site at www. spamtheworld.com.

WHAT are these people talking about? I mean people don’t THANK ME! Are they nuts? This is a spam page designed to game the algorithm!!!

In time you get more mails, as those who sent you the original thank you emails thank you further by linking to your site so others can enjoy the site. This results in an ever increasing spiral of visitors emails, thank you’s and MORE people linking to you. WORSE than the fact they link to you is the fact that THEIR sites are relevant to yours, so they are sending more and more traffic.

But HA— YOU have the last laugh because these people that are coming to your site, buying stuff from the affiliate links you have on the subject, or clicking on the adverts you have on the site are DUMB, because they don’t realise they are being spammed, and they visit, come back and click again, many of them even link to the site they are so dumb. They just don’t realise they are being spammed.

As the cheques arrive, you sit back and laugh, thinking,  ’how good is this on topic resource building spamming is!’ You drift off to sleep deep in the thought of how you can spend many hours creating your next high quality, top notch page to fool the search engines.

——————–

The moral of this story is that it is almost impossible to spam outbound links. comments appreciated!

Name: Hugh

Site: http://www.key-stage.co.uk/

Question: What can I do to move up Google on searches like “school tours” or “school tour”?

Old Welsh Guy Says: Hi Hugh (good Welsh name) Well Firstly, and odd as it may seem, are you sure that those are the phrases you need to rank for? Here are some search stats

school trip 37.5 /day 
school trip europe 12.6 /day 
school trip abroad 12.2 /day 
event school trip visit 2.6 /day  
school trip and geography 1.7 /day  
school field trip 1.2 /day 
school residential trip 1.0 /day 
school trip organisers 0.8 /day  
school trip to france 0.7 /day 
coach company school trip 0.6 /day   
educational school trip 0.6 /day 
school trip to spain 0.6 /day  
school trip uk 0.5 /day 
school trip idea 0.5 /day 

———————

school coach tour 11.6 /day 
school tour 11.0 /day 
battlefield tour for schools 5.7 /day 
school tour to europe 4.2 /day 
history tour for schools 2.4 /day 

———————————

Keyword research is the key to getting the most from your web marketing efforts, target the wrong words, and all your efforts will come to no more than a top ranking site for a phrase no one searches for. The Above show just how many different search phrases people are searching for. Ideally you should have pages set up on your site to cover these phrases.

‘Battlefield tour for schools’ is a prime example. returns 39000 pages in google Search results

Look closer though and NONE of the sites have the phrase in their page title In Title search

And only 93 site have the words in any order in their title In Title search non phrased

A search for how many pages have the phrase in links pointing to it shows zero.

This tells us that hardly anyone is optimising for this phrase, and that getting a decent ranking for it is a possibility, this should bring in approximately 6 visits a day for this phrase alone, that is some 180 per month.

It is plain to see then that the key elements to getting good rankings are

1. accurate page titles

2. good focused page content aimed at providing information to your visitors about a particular phrase.

3. Backlinks containing the phrase you are aiming for.

Oh and this is one area that you could come up against some hard competition. Because ’schoolgirl trips’ might be a little difficult to optimise for

Name:  Peter D

Site: Another anonymous unfortunately but it is a UK site

Question: I have been told that advertising with AdWords will affect your position in the normal listings, is this true?

Answer: Oh this old chestnut Peter. Well there are those who will swear blind that their rankings have suffered since starting Google AdWords, while there are those who will also swear blind that their rankings have improved Since their AdWords campaigns Started. The thing is though you see, that those who  swear blind they have suffered, decided to use AdWords because their rankings were already suffering. While those who swear blind they have benefited from AdWords involvement, have generally been promoting their site and the time factor has started to kick in.

 Organic web marketing is rarely an instant fix, and Back links etc take time to be factored in. So using Google AdWords as a boost is the logical thing. As your organic rankings start to improve, then your AdWords ad spend can be cut back for those words.

Site: user prefers to be hidden

Question: Even though I’ve been writing articles on my blog (1 a week) the google bot doesn’t seem to be visiting very regularly to the point the the cache of my page is 3 weeks old now. I’m either writing terrible content (probably!) or there’s a problem?Do you have any advice?

——————————————

Old Welsh Guy Says:
Well Stu, great things come to those who wait, although like Diana Ross said ‘ I’m still waiting ‘.
Your blog is not very old, and from what I can see does not have many backlinks pointing to it. In a post on His Blog in March, Matt Cutts (senior Google Engineer) wrote:-

One of the classic crawling strategies that Google has used is the amount of PageRank on your pages. So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submit a sitemap), that doesn’t mean that we’ll automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply. ——> snip —–> That’s what I would recommend looking at.

The above for me sums it up. In the words of Andrea True Connection That 70’s on hit wonder ‘More More More’ . The more in this case being incoming links You should look at submitting your blog to blogfeeds, add it so your signature on any forums you visit (although judging by the content on the site I dread to think what sort of forums you hang out in LOL. Submit the RSS feed, tell the world about your blog especially those who are interested in bad hosting companies, ipods, not having number plates on your car, and 3D maps of underground Britain. (and I thought I was messed up)! Odd Eclectic mix of things on that site by the way! You are either A man after my own heart or just plain nuts! (not salted)