A UK SEO

There was a lot of press recently about the release of SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool in the last few months. That’s seem to have died down now an I’ve had the chance to use the tool at work and found it very useful.

It’s great for finding links that your competitor have that you should have as well. Of course you can use something like Yahoo Site Explorer but Linkscape enables you to grab the cream of the links quickly. The ones that are do follow and maybe based in the UK.

It’s help me to find a reason why a site has been penalised. It identified a site that had 10,000 links from only 52 domains, with around 8,000 using the same anchor text. It stood out as unusual and proved the theory about how the site had been penalised.

I’ve also used it to find duplicate sites from clients as all the site were from the same IP.

I do think that it will become essential piece for my day to day work. It is a tad expensive to sign up for if you are an individual so if you work for a company try to get your company to sign up for pro membership!

Remember even the best have technical problems with websites as we can see from the BBC.

I was looking over some paid links today from a company that you can buy links from. The company uses a combination of their own sites and contacting site owners offering them money for placing links on their sites.

Here’s the stupid bit, 5 different sites had placed the link in a div called “{companyname}-paid-links”. So why go to all the effort of setting up the links and then make them traceable to Google. They may as well stick a big arrow on the page saying “yup Google paid links over here”. Once they get the name of the div all Google’s spam team need to do is search sites for div’s called “{companyname}-paid-links”.

It’s same as using hidden text and calling the div “hiddencontent”.

The moral of the story if your going to do paid links, which might not be the option anyway then don’t make it easy for Google to pick up on them, place them in articles, if you have a network of site host them separately and use different names when registering the domains!

Most SEO companies use search rankings to check the performance of campaigns. Most SEO companies will also agree that it’s really bad way to calculate the performance of a campaign but it’s what clients will generally want. Universal search, personalised results, results from different data centers and fluctuations in the results will give you random results at times making ranking reports a nightmare.

A mix of ranking reports and traffic reports should do the trick. This way you give the client want they want while getting the data over that you know is important. If you have a client with a brand new site and your going for difficult key phrases it means that you might see no results in the first 6 ish month.

Producing ranking report for 6 months when you know no results are going to come can really frustrate clients. There’s nothing worse then blank reports. So it might be a better approach to not have any rankings report sent out to the client.

Advise the client that this is normal procedure and that it take around 6 months for new sites to start ranking in the top 100 of Google listings, then when the results start to come through get the reports out the client.

All the news at the moment is about tonights election in American but I’ve seen a much more exciting piece of news, Wordpress 2.7 is on it’s way and with it they are making a massive change to the admin section!

The main visable change is the layout of the back end. Navigation now moves the left side bar and the top will become a breadcrumb navigation with a search box. On the writing pages the media uploader moves to the right side, as does the tags and categories. From the screenshot releases in the wireframe PDF it certainly looks good and far more organised.

There are other neat feature, like the ability to search, download and install plugins from the admin. Navigation expands / collapses in two directions, automatic upgrade of the blog, sticky post etc etc.

A release date was set for the 10th of Novemeber but this will be missed. Instead a Beta 1 version has been released and a final version will most likely come later in the month.

If you need to 301 re-direct one page to another in Wordpress Blog you can start playing around with the .htaccess file adding in re-directs or you could use Redirection a Wordpress plugin.

A simple install as ever with Wordpress plugins, the re-directs are all managed in the manage section of the Wordpress back end. Just add in the old URL and the new URL and your done.

There are further options to re-direct to a 404 page, to a random post, import from csv etc. So head over to the Wordpress plugin page to download Redirection.

So they BBC has made a slight change to their external linking. Before the links opened in the same window and passed page rank. They have now changed to in the same window but via two 302 re-directs this means the page rank will not be passed on. E.g.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/relintlink/UKFS+News+v3/ext/-/http://www.aukseo.co.uk

Which uses this script

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://www.aukseo.co.uk

So that’s not great news for the sites that have links from the BBC. A site that I work with are lucky enough to have a link from the BBC it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the search rankings.

If you have a commercial site you want to be included in the Best of the Web Directory. It’s a good link to have and you’ll also get traffic from the listing too. Recently I’ve noticed submissions being rejected or live listing being placed ‘on hold’ by BOTW due to sites being down, but the sites are not down.

It makes sense, no site wants broken links so they get the check the response code of the sites listed for 404 errors. If the site is down BOTW contact the webmaster to ask why the site has been down and place the listing on hold.

But when going to the webmaster and checking server logs of the effected sites there has been no problems. What has happened is a broken image in the home page, or a missing image being referenced in a stylesheet. They return a 404 in the page load, even though the page loads up ok which confuses the checker that BOTW are using.

This cause a hell of confusion with hosting company’s saying the sites have had no downtime, BOTW saying that their checks says the site is down and so on.

So the lesson of the story is check that you have no missing images on you site before submitting to BOTW, to check use Live HTTP headers and look for 404 response codes.

Dead Set is a five part TV series running on E4 this week. It follows the Big Brother house in the middle of a zombie outbreak in the United Kingdom. Ok, whats this to do with SEO?

At the end of the show there were no credits which is rather strange for a TV show. Instead a URL is listed on the screen – www.deadsetcredits.com it was on for all of one second. So if you didn’t catch the URL your going to search in Google for “dead set credits”, “dead set end credits”, but the Dead Set website doesn’t appear at all in the listings.

If your going to advertise online make sure your website ranks for the URL your going to display on the TV and all the variations, without the www’s just the domain, with spaces, without spaces etc. So why doesn’t the Dead Set Credits site rank?

To start www.deadsetcredits.com 301 re-directs to www.e4.com/deadset/credits.html so Google’s not going to index the page. Google has yet to index www.e4.com/deadset/credits.html but when it does they they should start to rank well inheriting the strength of www.e4.com.

But… Google might have a problem with that page. It’s a flash page with the credits scrolling up the page. If you check the source.

<div id="flashcontent">
<h1>Dead Set - E4.com</h1>
The official website of Charlie Brooker's E4 horror series <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" class="getflash">Get Flash Player 9 to View Deadset</a>
<a href="index2.html" class="htmlversion">html version</a>
<a href="http://www.e4.com" class="gotoe4">e4</a>
</div>

and that H1 is styled up

#flashcontent h1 {
text-indent: -1000000px;
}

So technically the text is hidden (placing the H1 far to the left of the screen), as that text doesn’t appear in the flash file that’s being played it’s breaking Google’s guidelines. If you have a flash file on your site you can place ”hidden” text in the page providing the text is the same as the text in the flash file (you should also do this using the noscript tag and not css styling).

Anyway I fully recommend watching Charlie Brookers Dead Set, I’m a fan of zombie movies and Charlie Brooker, a truly great combination!

Something that I’ve only done on this site today is setting up Google Analytics Site Search for this blog. Wordpress has a search function as default. Some themes don’t include the search boxes which is crazy when you see how many people use the search function.

Click edit next to the analytics account you want to add site search.

On the profile settings page click edit in the first box called “Main Website Profile Information”.

Tick “Do Track Site Search” and then add in just “s” as the Query Parameter.

Click save and then your off. Do some test searches, then check that it’s working in 24 hours by going to the reports – Content – Site Search.