A UK SEO

We know that Google have recently be playing around with the Search Engine Results page removing the My account link top right and moving the setting links.

This morning a colleague of mine noticed that the font size had changed on Google and the box looked a bit bigger. This was shown on Google

Compared too

Looks like Channel 4 has a little duplication problem at the moment on their IP address http://83.98.28.10/. It’s resulting in double listing with the domain and the IP ranking for some queries which we know Google doesn’t like.

In total around 8,000 pages of 6,390,000 pages of Channel 4′s site have this problem which I’m sure isn’t having a massive negative effect in the grand scheme of things.

All that’s needed is a 301 re-direct from the IP address to the domain. On apache servers this can be done with something along the lines of

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =999.999.999.999
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I noticed at the start of the month that Google had moved about some of the links on the results pages, it hadn’t gone unnoticed as Pete Young at holisticsearch also spotted the changes.

It seems that the My Account button had now come back under the Setting link as “Google Account Setting”

Google were playing around all this weekend, at one point all the search options had gone.

Although a little change it shows that people do pick it up as it’s a button that’s used often. It reminds me of the time all my door knobs at my house were changes to open the other way, took some time to get used to!

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.