Today I thought i would mention the case of the curiously disappearing pages in google. I am now getting regular enquiries from people who are concerned about their site losing page saturation in the might G.  No indexed page = no traffic of course, which in turn = no money. 

having worked with a few sites who have suffered this, I have  found that the main issues contributing to it were

 Weak pages.
By this I mean that the pages were pretty much duplicated with only a small element changing on each page. This is especially a problem with E com sites as the header, nav footer all stay the same. Visible content might look a little different but when you look at the code, you see that in hundreds of lines, maybe only 4 or 5 are unique.

 Poor navigation/site structure
In this case I noticed that the actual site hierarchy was poorly designed. There was no clear structure for the search engines to apply weight to.

 Poor linking structure
here I saw poor linking, in as much as most pages were linked to each other from most other pages.  this only served to water down PageRank (link juice) to a point where the pages were all seen as unimportant (again related to poor structure/architecture

Too many links
This was a common theme as many carts have pop out or drop down option selections, which look innocent enough, but on further investigation can be seen to be causing problems . It is possible to have hundreds of links per page, and this isn’t good.,

While a flat file structure is OK for a small site, a clear linking and hierarchy MUST be evident in a large site. This allows Google to apply it’s weight to each page, its trust to each page, pro-rata.

Poor PageRank
Poor linking leads to poor PR spread, and that is not good in the eyes of Google. Despite what many say, actual PR matters to Google, it matters for many things, and gauging the value of a page is one of them.

 All the above serve only to confuse the search engines as to the importance of pages within your site. Each site has a page saturation level, it is worked out by the two main elements in the google algorithm (yes there are really only 2 when it is all boiled down)

1. Importance – this is a measure of value in the eyes of google and is pretty much page rank

2. Relevance this is a textual value.

 The above are further split in to the 250 or more sub elements that make up the algorithm, but when all said and done, it is those 2 that matter.

 With most of a shopping carts pages being near duplicate content, and the page cross linking structure being higgledy piggldy at best, how is Google supposed to know what is important or relevant? Put simply, they can’t.

The result of this is that wile a site may be showing some 1500 or so pages indexed, when you get to between 200-300 pages, the cached versions stop showing. So the reality is even worse. No cache in the main index, yet often times a cache when you visit the individual page?

While Google announced the scrapping of the infamous supplementary index, it appears that just like in the case of Mark Twain (Samuel Langorne Clemens, rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Finally, I will say this. If you read the Google webmaster technical advice pages, it tells you not to make the errors above that contribute to page dropping.

It seems that Google have become victims of their own success of late, in that they feel they need to do things because they can!

When Google started, it had a simple interface, you typed what you wanted, and you got a nice simple set of results. We then had the google directory, and then came Froogle, image search and many other ‘alternative’ methods of searching (which is fine).

Of late though the Search Results Page of Google looks like something a party goer threw up after a drinking session of the ‘most colourful cocktails’ section of the menu at the office party!

IT IS A MESSS, and this mess just got messier. With (what I would refer to as) their new Consolidated Realtime Additional Presentation Fomat (C.R.A.P. for short)

At the top we have  PGA tour, below that we have news result, then below that we have a bunch of what can only be described as CRAP!

LMAO that Gatorade dropped tiger woods

“RT XXXXX Gatorade first sponsor to drop tiger woods”

“You know what? I also had an affair with tiger woods, THERE”

There is a scroll down box that is filled with ‘real time’ search results. You know what? If I wanted to read pathetic childish crap, then i would subscribe to pathetic childish Twitter accounts, I really don’t need to get it shoved at me from Google.

What Google HAVE managed to achieve in a single stroke is to attract MORE spammers to the twitter service that is already full to the brim of spammers!

Imagine what would happen if the ‘hot topic’ was a product, we would get mountains of results, tweets, news, more news, shopping feeds etc and what we REALLY want is below the fold.

Sorry Google but this for me is a step too far. I know it is panto season, and I know that you were going to perform Mother Goose, but I understand that it had to be cancelled as someone in product development killed the Goose that was laying the golden eggs!

Anyone who has been around the web for a while will have seen the rise in Web2.0 style sites with user generated content. This concept is a superb arrangement for all parties as the site owner gets free content, and the writer gets a platform to air their views. Everything in the garden is rosy, until the big old spammer arrives with his dirty tricks.

If it wasn’t for Akismet and my manual editing of comments here on this blog, many of my readers would have bigger appendages ‘down below’ shiny new watches(shiny for a while), a cupboard full of triangular blue pills, and would be corresponding with a 5’4 blonde beauty from Russia who is really 44 years of age and called Malcolm and living in Hull. Oh and they would also be planning on moving to Russia to live with Malcolm (AKA the blonde beauty) as soon as they get their money from the Nigerian dead oil minister deal and their Internet Lottery winnings (best £5000 they ever spent).

OK back to the real world. Google have just published a beginners post dealing with spam, but as ever there are a couple of Easter eggs in the content. Read the rest of this entry »

So there you have it, I am not a hamburger, I am a high quality translator! Or at least Google is now.

Announced on their blog is a new high speed ‘translate as you type service, along with some other changes to the google translate service.

The service actually had 3 services introduced (more in the above link), although I have to ask, how many people actually use it? Other than to learn how to swear at people in their own language

So the great new Google search engine update trial is over, and we can look forward to getting shiny new results that bounce better than a bouncy thing (for a while anyhow)

Announced by Google on their Sandbox which has been up for a number of months now.

Thank you!

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Matt Cutts has said that it is unlikely to roll out completely before Christmas, but can we be sure? us Uk’ers have had more to be concerned about than anyone, as we have yet to see ‘proper’ UK based results from caffeine, due to the complicated algorithm that controls geo locating.

No doubt, sometime soon, business and webmaster forums will be chock a block with new threads about ‘my site has gone’!

All in  a days work I guess, but not so nice for those who suffer not being teachers pet any longer through seemingly no fault of their own.

Close on the heels of the Google announcement that the keywords meta dat is no longer used in the rankign algortithm, Yahoo! have come out and said pretty mucht he same. This is something us seasoned webmarketers have been saying for a long time, but despite this, there are ‘SEO’s ‘ out there who are still pedalling KW meta optimisation.

 The admission came at an Ask The Search Engines session at SMX East in New York this week. When asked about Support for the meta keywords tag, moderator Danny Sullivan stated that only Yahoo provided support of the tag, which prompted  Cris Pierry, (Senior Director of Search at Yahoo), to announce that support actually had been ended unannounced “several” months ago.

So there you have it the tag is dead, so move along please…. nothing to see here !

This is something that is coming up more and more often these days. In fact this blog comes up highly for some of those phrases since I published the Google adwords telephone numbers in may 2008. One thing to note here is that now you need to have your adwords account ref (top right of the screen inside adwords) to get through. Methinks they are filtering who they speak to and who has to go the long route!

Anyhow, if you need help, then try the telephone path, if not, here is a real good place to start for adwords help in some areas there will be a yellow ‘chat box’ on the screen,  if it is there, then use it.

Next is the long route path adwords support page or go to this form select whatever your query is about, scroll down to the bottom and select ‘email adwords support.

People in the UK can email adwords-uk@google.com

I am sure that I am not the only SEO who’s inbox and PM box on forums has been full of ‘My site has gone from the rankings’ type messages during the last few weeks. This is always the case when Google ‘stir their secret sauce’.  This latest incarnation appears of have had far more wide ranging impact that they might have envisaged, Possibly this is the only problem with having such a wide ranging interconnected algorthim.

One of the big changes has been the ‘slackening’ or perhaps lowering of the bar on non UK specific domains appearing in the UK SERPS. Read the rest of this entry »

Question:
I recently changed hosts, and at the same time I moved the store from domain.com/store to the root domain.com/ Sales have disappeared and I am getting loads of 404 errors, what can I do? this is an absolute nightmare for me and the business.

Answer:
Sadly you have made an all too common error in assuming that it is OK to simply move your site around without it having an affect.  The search engines know all the URLs on your site, and expect them to be there. People will have bookmarked pages to come back later and buy from you. Now they are all getting 404 errors. The spiders feel unloved, and worse, potential buyers think you have gone bust. Read the rest of this entry »