A UK SEO

If you fancy reading some more about SEO head over to Just Search Labs run by Just Search the company I work for.

I’ve contributed a few posts but there’s posts about programming as well as SEO.

Argghhh. I hate it when websites change the location of navigation and account links you use. There used to be a my account link top right on all Google pages which took you to a page showing all your Google products gamil, WMT’s Analytics… a quick way to get to your products…. it’s now gone

But if your on an iGoogle page it’s still there?

About time I got round to getting the Google Analytics Individual Qualification Certificate. The test is pretty easy providing you read / watch all the video’s over at the Google analytic conversion university which is a must for anyone wanting to use Google Analytics.

What else is there to do on a Bank Holiday Monday when it’s raining!

Something I’ve read this morning on the icrossing blog is that Google Insight tool is now showing predictions on some search terms. By looking at previous years movement the next year’s traffic level is predicted. For example SEO.

Obviously it’s not going to be able to predict trends that pop out of nowhere e.g. Susan Boyle. Google have also stuck a disclaimer to treat the data as a estimate and not a prediction.

Although it’s been a little quiet recently on the whole UK SERPS issue Matt Cutts did get round to answering the question on why so many foreign sites are popping up in the UK search results. First of all it’s great that there is this platform to get a question to someone at Google but Matt’s missed the point in answering the question.

So basically, Google will now consider more .com sites in the UK SERP’s, but ones that are relevant to UK users for example .com websites based in the UK or promoting UK companies e.g. tesco.com (which ranked before all of this anyway). This isn’t the problem, the issues we are seeing are .com’s ranking when then are American or Australian companies or to the extent using a au.com domain. Maybe Google isn’t able to determine what is a UK based .com ??

An example of this was from a non related blog from Dom the Hodge who had used a screenshot of a UK SERP for the search conference lanyards. Ranking in at number 3 and 4 you’ll find two .com.au sites.

www.freshpromotions.com.au/lanyards/conference-lanyards.html
www.lanyardsandmore.com.au/

It’s up for interpretation but I don’t think that two Australian sites are relevant to a search for conference lanyards. If the search was for “Australian cooking techniques” then maybe it is relevant to show Australian sites ??

Matt eneded the video saying that if there are problems in the results then people should get in touch….. looks like i’ll be “getting in touch often” unless they do make a change.

Big news yesterday was the news that Google will be having a bit of a rejig with some ‘parts under the hood’ and for the first time they’ll released a test version of the search engine for webmaster’s and SEO’s to play about with.

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ allows you to search the new index which does have some slight alterations to the rankings. They are looking for feedback on the results given out before they go live which is an excellent idea to improve the overall results being given. For example Dave Naylor pointed out a problem with a 301′d result in the serp for SEO.

I’ve noticed that my result on my football blog “Blackpool FC” which is currently at 7 have moved down to 21 in the results with many bigger brand sites appearing in the rankings with inner page rankings e.g. amazon, wikipedia, facebook, youtube, eurosport, bbc.

One thing that are still in the results are domains / inner pages that 302 to another page. This isn’t something new as Matt Cutts showed with his experiment when he changed domain a few months ago and Google ranked the temporary domain.

In my example this inner page is ranking 2nd page for Blackpool FC.

It 302’s to a different domain.

This is very common throughout the UK serps allowing webmasters to get 100’s of domains ranking with only one website. It will be interesting to see if this is something that changes considering the very public related experiment by Matt Cutts.

Multiple XML sitemaps can be used to help detect how the indexing of the site is progressing or if there are any problems. For example if you have 20,000 pages in the site and only 15,000 are indexed it’s hard to find out which 5,000 pages are not indexed by the search engine.

Google Webmaster Tools feeds back on this information saying how many pages have been indexed from each XML sitemap, best of all you can submit multiple sitemaps to the search engines.

Breaking the sitemap down can pinpoint which sections of your site are not getting indexed. So lets break that 20,000 pages down.

So we can see that the main problem is with the products section not getting indexed with only 44% of pages indexed. This now means you can start to find out the reasons why your product pages are not being indexed.

That then opens a new can of worms as it might be due to duplicate content, poor coding, internal linking, server issues etc. The good point is that you now know what area is the problem.

To link the XML sitemaps together you should have one sitemap called sitemapindex.xml that links to the other sitemaps using the xml protocol. Submit all the sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools and list all the sitemaps in the robots.txt. E.g.

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemapindex.xml
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/categories.xml
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sub-categories.xml
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/prodcuts.xml
Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/blog.xml

So if you think your site has an indexing problem then split your site down logically into different XML sitemaps. It’s not going to solve your problem but will point you in the right direction.

Matt Cutts has opened up a new vote for Video’s to answer and guavarian from guava has asked a question about the current problems with the UK Search Engine Results.

Currently the vote is 28 yes and 4 no. Head over to the question and get voting! While you are there vote for any other questions that you might find helpful the questions are answered on you tube on the Google Webmaster’s Help Channel

As we know ever the biggest sites have duplicate content and SEO problems (See the BBC duplicate content post). I’ve come across another site site with a duplicate content problem today, Facebook.

With the recent change to get a URL with your name in it also seems that my profile can also appear on another domain.

http://www.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

and

http://en-gb.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

At the moment the en-gb.facebook URL isn’t indexed in Google but there are other people’s profiles indexed. Twitter also have a duplicate content issue with indexing on the secure https server.

Wonder if they’ll start to 301 to the other? I’ve seen a number of Google results with both URL’s listed.

If you’re an avid reader of any UK SEO blogs you should have noticed posts about the recent shift with foreign (predominantly American) sites, outranking many UK sites on certain search terms. The problem has been seen under a wide selection of search phrases from many SEO companies / individuals in the UK. There have also been some indicated of the problem reserved with UK sites ranking well in Australia search results.

So what have we seen?

- 1st / 2nd page can seem unaffected with no movement at all.
- Around 10-30 sites rank from the 2nd / 3rd page thus pushing rankings 2 to 3 pages down.
- Domains are .com and hosting in foreign country or have a country specific TLD e.g. ww.domain.be

What should you do?

- Continue to add relevant unique content to your site be that news or a blog
- Continue to build links to the site, don’t increase this rate rapidly.
- Read SEO blogs to track the changes.
- Clean up any errors showing on Google Webmaster Tools, doesn’t have any effect just something to take your mind of the problem.
- Don’t panic and sit this problem out, Google should* reverse this problem.
* Nothing is guaranteed but with so much talk about this problem in the UK Google has to rectify this problem.

The issue seen by many UK SEO companies is that when Google makes a change such as the one seen you can’t really do much to rectify it. Clients will be annoyed about this stance but you can only sit it out and wait for the Search Engine to update, explain the issue to clients and keep them up to date. Most importantly you can’t really complain about Google, for all we know they could shut down tomorrow and there is nothing we can do about it!

An Idea

I do have one idea that could help thanks to Bing. Collective pressure from UK SEO companies on Google to either publically acknowledge the problem or get a fix in place. The only way this could succeed is by getting the issue in the public domain, on the BBC, ITV, Sky News etc. This then forces Google into doing something to prevent losing users to Bing, which is actually succeeding in being decent alternative to Google for UK public.

If you want to read up more on this or need proof to see that this isn’t an isolated case then here are 11 articles on the problem.

Google American Results Conspiracy – Fresh Egg

US websites ranking in Google.co.uk an example commercial laundry equipment – A UK SEO

Google uk mixing in us based queries – SEOptimise

Big Geo Problems Still Exist in Google UK Serps – PPC Blog

Google UK Serps Com On Down – North South Media

Have you noticed Googles shift from UK to US? – Argo IBC

The mystery of the UK SERPS – updated – Search Cow Boys

Will the Real Google Search Results Please Stand Up – SEO Design Solutions

Is Google’s Geo Targeting Off In Web Search? – Search Engine Round Table

UK Ranking Problems – UK Business Forums

Poor State of UK search today – Andrew Girdwood – Big Mouth Media

If you have any more, add them into a comment below and I’ll add them to the above list. Do you think collective pressure would get a responce from Google?