The Google ‘sting’
The experiment by Google was simple – to see if Bing was copying their search results. To do this they injected false results into nonsense queries – queries that no user would normally entered. Then they set up a handful of new machines running Internet Explorer 8, opted in to the recommend sites feature and started running the nonsense queries and clicking on the injected results.

What happened?
Well obviously, this only makes news because the expected happened. A few years later when these same engineers entered the nonsense queries into Bing, these injected search results appeared top of the Bing results. These sites had been carefully chosen to have no relationship to the results, so somehow the results were copied.

How are they copied?
Well obviously, Bing cannot “test” Google for all possible search results and steal the top result. So they are monitoring traffic and this has been admitted. They are watching the search queries that people are entering and what sites they are then visiting and how long they are staying on these pages.

In fact Bing are using ‘opt in’ data to monitor search engine traffic and it appears that if you are opted in to the tool bar in Internet Explorer, then Bing is watching your searches and what sites you are visiting.

And what about Google?
I have long since suspected that Google does the same sort of trick and this is the only reason why the PageRank Toolbar is still half maintained and why they provide Feedburner and Analytics for free. What better way is there for a search engine to provide accurate results to its visitors than by promoting those results that previous visitors have found most useful?

Is this a way to ‘fake’ results?
Of course, finding that traffic is certainly part of the results means that people can now attack the results method to see if they can promote their own websites. However, whilst this might be possible for low traffic queries, the effort required for high volume traffic is much more.

If your preferred search term already has just 100 searches every day, then to make a statistical difference to the search engines you would need a good number of machines and each one used for the relevant term every day. However, I’m sure the search engines are also watching for machines producing just a few search terms, which are repeated, so do not try it!

However, I can see a future where instead of link spamming, people are paid to run search results every day. The next best thing I suppose is traffic from relevant themed pages. So bloggers be ready – if you have genuine readers and can provide clicks from your blog, then people might be even more willing to pay for posts on your blog. It might have the same effect.

                          

There are exceptions. For certain niches Google will not dominate the market as much as when the site targets the general public. But, aside from such technical sites, Google is the site to target.

A report earlier this year suggested that for UK traffic Google served around 88% of searches, leaving Yahoo and Bing at 3.9% and 3.3% respectively. Not much really!

The USA did not show as much dominance, with the figures being around the order of 64%, 15% and 10% respectively.

What does this mean for us?
In short, if you can quickly get listed on the big three search engines, then for UK traffic you are getting a 95% exposure and for the USA almost 90%. And getting listed in these search engines quickly has nothing to do with going to their add url form. You can do, but that takes too long!

Instead, you just need to get some quality links from other websites. Easy enough if you own a website that has these search engines on it at least once per week, even easier if you run a blog that has the search engines coming to visit. But, what if you don’t?

Finding good links and fast
This is important, but forget links directories. They don’t cut the mustard and will leave you wanting.

Instead, just look for a few ‘dofollow’ blogs within your website’s niche. Leave a few comments that add value to one of the recent posts and include your URL in the relevant field. Do this a few times and the main search engines will soon pick up on the links and be over to visit your website and hopefully, list you quickly.

Then the real work of link building etc really begins!

                          

Actually, it is a very difficult thing to do, if not impossible. With a lot of marketing practices there is an immediate effect along with possibly a long term effect, that can be difficult to measure, but Search Engine Optimisation is all about investing in the long term.

Generally, if you invest some of your valuable marketing budget on SEO today, then it could be many weeks before you start to see your site creeping up through the search engines. And it is only once your site gets into the top few places that you will see any return on that investment.

However, there are also likely to be knock on effects. You might optimise for one term and this helps your position on longer tail keywords. How would you know when the orders arrive if they are because of the search engine work?

In short, SEO is all about faith. Faith that if you get to the top then you should see results. However, if you are sensible that is not enough! You need to make sure that you do your homework first to make sure that you are selecting the keywords that will generate you some income.

But, unless you are a new business, then it really is difficult to work out just what your return has been. However, we can also look at getting the best from your SEO. I’ll come to that another time!

                          

There are several crucial things that you really do need to know when you are designing a website and you want it to be pulling in the search engine visitors. Some people take this to the extreme and create code that is just basically a load of spam, which I cannot recommend, but there are a few consideration that will keep it on track and potentially make it a better site.

Selecting keywords – Do not get carried away by attempting to optimise a single page for loads of search engine terms. Just concentrate on one or two phrases per page.

Meta Data – You have the title, description and keywords meta tags and some people go overboard by stuffing every conceivable keyword into these lists. Don’t! The title and description are probably what search engine visitors will see first about your site so instead concentrate more on writing them meaningfully and naturally and including your key phrases once within each. But make it read well!

Emphasis – Read around and people will tell you to use plenty of bold, underlined and italic text plus h1, h2 and h3 to display your keywords. Don’t! Again, make it natural and it will read better for the visitor. Use bold, headings etc to highlight for your readers, not the search engines.

The page content – If you haven’t guessed already, the best page content for the search engines is actually whatever is the best page content for your readers. Google near enough ignores your page content although Yahoo and Bing do put some weight on Titles and Descriptions.

Navigation – Now we are talking! You want the search engines to be able to crawl your website and find all of your pages, so make sure that your navigation is not hidden behind clever flash animations or javascript routines. If you want to use image links do so as search engines should follow them (this is the only time the image’s alt attribute is actually read), but it is also a good idea to repeat the links in the page footer as text links. This is not only good to make sure that search engines can follow the links, but also it increases your website accessibility.

Use CSS style sheets – Avoid laying your page out using tables! A table should be used to layout data and nested tables should be avoided at all costs. Instead, code your website in CSS, which is a lot lighter in code and actually easier to maintain. If you then move the CSS out of the page into a stylesheet this also reduces the amount of code on the page, increasing the text to content ratio. It is also better (again) for your website accessibility.

In short, to make your website the best it can be for the search engines, then avoid the spammy techniques such as alt attributes that went out a couple of years ago and design a website for maximum accessibility. Keep the content clean and the best for your readers and you should be onto a winner with the search engines.

                          

Take this email that I have received today (click the picture to enlarge it). It is obviously driven from some spam crawler that reservationhotels.org are using to trawl through websites and pick up email addresses.

It then adds a link to the website, along with the title taken from the home page, to a links page. Wow, so I am on links page 3005. I don’t know why but I did actually look at this page (for once). It is full of junk!

Even on just this page there are 301 redirects, Japanese character websites, German aquarist, French baby, fertility, hairdressing opportunities and loads more totally unrelated websites. Further down the page is full of other websites that can’t be found, but the crawler has still added them to the page.

But, the owners of this PR3 website are quite safe in making these junk lists of what amount to Free For All directories. Why? Well looking at the site, there is nowhere that lists to any of these links pages, so search engines will never find them. Even if they do discover 1 links page that only links to the main site, not to any of the other junk pages.

So exchanging links with these guys would be a waste of time. You would get no benefit back. What though, if they did run their link exchanging honestly and gave a link back?

Well, this page and some other randomly guessed pages all display 20 links. So the traditional Google Page Rank algorithm (as first registered, we expect it has since changed), implies that this would donate to us ((PR * 0.85) / 20). In other words, 1 20th of 85% of that page’s page rank. And that is for on topic pages.

Ignoring the spammy nature of the page, that means that we would need about 24 links like this just to get the equivalent page rank for our site. Given that it is 1 of thousands of such pages, it is never likely to rise even to PR0, so that isn’t much good.

So how many would be needed to get to PR0? It is usually a factor of about 6 per level you jump up. So around 150 links off such links pages might provide a PR0, 900 links to get a PR1 and 5,500 to get a PR2.

But, in the words of the quiz show, we don’t want to give you that much! These are off topic links from an irrelevant site. The page is not a categorised directory, merely a random assortment of Free For All links. So that effect is watered down, by how much we do not know! It could be a whole PR penalty, meaning 5,500 such rubbish links give you a PR1, or even a PR0.

So don’t waste the time it takes me to hit the delete button. I don’t bother with these links. If you want links then use a proper method of earning them on pages that have a Page Rank and are accessible to search engines.

And as for the last paragraph of the email: “If your didn’t [sic] send mail to us with your site link where placed our link in 7 days,we will remove your link!” – please do so. I have no wish to be associated with such junk methods.

                          

I have recently been carrying out several experiments with link building to see what the results are. I am part way through the entire trial, which aims to find out if too loads of links might equally destroy the good work. But I am noticing several interesting results.

For my testing I picked on a new website of my own that included a claim phrase from a paid to post system. This claim sentence is a random group of words that is just found on web-sites trying to become members of the system, so it is highly unlikely that anyone else on the internet is running any SEO on it.

My website, at the outset of the test, was 35th in the Google search results for this claim sentence and nowhere to be found on Bing or Yahoo. I used the sentence as the anchor text for a link to the post page from a PR3 website that I also control.

Give it a week and Google has been all more than the PR3 website. Funnily, this website is suddenly 12th on the results. At first, the site moved up from 35th to 15th and then 10th, finally stepping above my PR3 website.

So through a single link on a PR3 page, my site jumped 2 full pages for this totally uncontested phrase on Google. It hadn’t moved a single place until the day I saw that the PR3 website had been revisited by Google. So, the just explanation for the jump of 25 positions is this new found link to it.

But, it is also interesting to note Bing and Yahoo. Neither had the post page listed in the search results prior to the link going live. Yahoo did quite quickly list the PR3 web site with the list on it for the search terms, which was quite promising, but it took a few more days until it also listed the post, down on the bottom of page 4.

The interesting difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo is the number of results each return. Bing and Yahoo return 30 – 40 results on this search yet exactly the same search on Google returns nigh on 800 current results.

It appears that Google is being less fussy around what pages it caches and lists in the search engines. And when looking at how numerous pages of the site that Yahoo has indexed, they are almost all category and archive pages. There is only one post page listed in the archives – the one in this trial.

So, it looks as even if because of one PR3 page pointing to the post, Google has promoted the site from 35th to 10th and Yahoo has taken an interest in the page and also cached it and listed it well. Bing even though, is merely being slow (it hasn’t visited the PR3 page for some time).

Therefore, incoming links are undeniably the lifeblood of a website. They do move you up the results and make search engines take notice of the pages. Next, I’ll test whether a site wide link destroys the position or aids it!

                          

Are You There?
You can ‘ping’ plenty of things, not just a blog. Loads of years ago, before blogs took off, we would ping computers remotely and if we got an answer back, then we believed they were up and running. You can even do this yourself from your machine, perhaps across your network to other computers.

And that is principally what a ping is – one machine seeing if another computer is responding.

How Does This Help?
But this does not exactly help our websites. The ping service evolves a bit from merely a basic communication saying “I’m here, are you there?”. If you ping a site service, rather than merely them answering that they are there, it is taken as an sign from the site sending the ping that they want some attention.

The website receiving the message will reply back that it has received your communication, typically with a “success” communication. Of course, to respond they need to now what website sent the request, so as well as “Are you there?”, your message has included your web site address as the sender.

Getting Clever With The Process
This is the clever part. The recipient strips the communication apart and stores your web site address for processing. It takes the ping as an indication that you want them to visit you, typically because you have generated new content that you want them to take a look at.

Identify new content, Quickly
So, at a later point in time, maybe instantly, probably later that day – it is entirely up to the service what they do – their robot is sent to visit your homepage to see what is fresh. It is a flag to various systems that you have updated your web site.

And this is why we use pings. It enables us to tell a variety of other web-sites that we have new matter and that they should come over and see it. On a good day, I’ve seen Google come calling quite quickly after the post has been published, thanks to the ping, and then the post listed and the new page cached on Google within a couple of hours.

The Future Is Pinging
This is the way that search engines like Google are moving. They want to be able to grab fresh matter as soon as it is made public and by pinging them they are able to do that. So it helps them to do what they want – get new matter and quick – and helps us do what we want – get our new content onto the search engines.

A Little communication Goes A Long Way
So, pinging just basically shouts over to various vital web-sites that we now have an update on our own site and we want them to come and visit it. And by sending this little message, we are hoping to increase our search engine exposure.

                          

Well actually, removing the nofollow link from a blog comment is not as daft as it sounds. Yes, it is opening up to all kinds of spam, but that is why we must check these comments manually.

What are the advantages to not nofollowing?
The immediately obvious advantages are to the people that are leaving comments. Suddenly they get two benefits to leaving comments on related posts.

First, anyone else reading that post might read the comment and if they are interested, click on the link to go to their blog. This in itself is a great boost and I have seen traffic arriving on my websites through these links.

But secondly, because the nofollow is removed, there is also a tiny search engine benefit. If there are not too many comments per page and the page has any sort of Page Rank, then that is being shared amongst those commenting. As long as all spam comments are manually removed then the list of comments should represent just good, honest readers.

Yes, some of these are commenting just for the sake of the link, but as long as the comment passes the manual checks, this is fine with me. If they add to the conversation, tell me how they happened upon the post or whatever then there is some positive reason for their comment and I am happy to give them the benefit.

And this is where the benefit to the site owner comes in. By making the comments more valuable to site owners whilst being particular as to which are accepted, suddenly more people are coming over to the blog, reading the posts and then making useful comments.

See the big advantage? More readers! And where do these readers come from? Well there are plenty of lists of “dofollow” blogs to get included in. Once I have tidied this site a little, I’ll ask a few such as Nickoo to add me to their Do Follow List. Then people looking to place relevant comments will find the site.

The disadvantages.
As my mum would say, every silver lining has a cloud!

Yes, there are some disadvantages. Get well known and the amount of spam comments arriving on the blog could be huge. But that is why you have to be strict and delete (before they are published / approved) every spam comment. Leave only those in place that are suitable, add to the post and are useful.

Close comments on older posts to prevent too many spam bots getting hold of your site and make sure that Akismet is running to protect you from the worst of it all.

Is there a search engine risk?
Some people worry that having comments without nofollow will reduce your own Page Rank. I do not believe that to be true. Why?

Well in my research the formula for inheriting Page Rank always looks at external and internal pages separately. It counts the number of external sites linked per page and shares the Page Rank there and probably then does the same for internal pages.

Plus, if monitored and checked, then this is what search engines want to see. Conversations taking place on a topic. So why punish this?

Feel free to browse the site and leave a suitable comment on any post and if you also believe in nofollowing, let me know so I can visit your site!

                          

I have already written about how I believe that outbound links on a page can boost its influence on the search engines. I noticed the effects that outbound links had on a low ranking website compared to another that I run, without the outbound links, but with huge amounts of SEO work and a respectable page rank, not just on the home page but also on the inner pages.

So, what reason might there be for the search engines to boost your position just because you point to another page, maybe on your own website, with the search terms in the anchor text?

It sounds crazy, but it is a conclusion that I have come back to a few times looking at several websites covering different niches over a couple of years. It does seem to work.

Looking at search engines, they exist by providing their visitors quality results. You find the results you want on a search engine and so use it again and again. They have to provide quality answer.

Say then, you are searching for Acme Widgets. You want to find out how to make one and search ‘how to make an Acme widget’. What results should the search engines show you?

What the search engine does not know is what level you are interested in the information at. Are you wanting to make one for yourself, or do you want to discover how they are made because you are interested in the process. The results have to cover this answer for all people.

It is the same with many searches. If you search for ‘search engine optimise a website‘, do you want a step by step set of results, or someone that can tell you what is needed and do it for you?

In both of these situations, if you are sent to a page that gives you the high level overview, maybe a video of the manufacture or an SEO experts page, then the basic level query is answered. If that website then links to the full details, say the step by step instructions, then you can dig deeper to find a fuller answer.

It has been accepted before that search engines like to send visitors to a page with the high level answer from where they can then dig deeper to a more complete answer. So, how do the search engines know that your page can provide the further details?

Well, the page itself must have an overview of the search terms and there must be a link to more information. If this link contains the search terms on a page about those search terms, then it is likely that the target page provides further details about the subject.

And that is what makes me think that an outbound link on a website page might hold some weight at least with the search engines. Maybe not a lot, but enough to tip the balance. Whether the link need to be on another site or whether it can safely be the same site, I am still working out!

                          

Now, I do not know if this applies to just when the link points to pages on your own site or any outbound links, but time and time again I see before me the evidence that this could just be the case.

Last night I was comparing 2 of my own websites. The first, with Page Rank 3 and lots of SEO work against the second, Page Rank 0 and ignored. They are both directories, feeding from the same cottages database, listing the same cottages in the same towns etc. The differences to the title and description tags are tiny, and anyway, I doubt these elements hold much weight. Not enough that rent [town name] against [town name] rent is going to explain the differences I am seeing.

But the fact of the matter is that the lower page rank site gets 4 times the traffic of the other site. When we are submitting articles for the higher ranking site, its traffic increases. But, as soon as we stop, it drops back to the 25% mark.

Each page is ever so slightly different with a small thesaurus applied to the text, but not that much different. In essence, the sites are the same.

So why does the newer, lower Page Rank, totally ignored site get 4 times the traffic of the site that I have lavished many hours on trying to increase its traffic.

At this point I looked at the traffic stats just to see where visitors were finding the sites. The lower traffic site had a few searches for odd terms. The search engines obviously picking up cottage names and descriptions from deep within the site. So they are trawling the site well (some inner pages have Page Ranks of 2).

For the poorer cousin with a lot of traffic, the main search results were [town name] rent and so on. The sort of searches that are more abundant, produce more traffic and are more competitive.

So, although there is a lack of search engine optimisation and Page Ranking, it is doing better in the search results. For this reason I started to look at the town pages of both site to see where and how often the word rent was mentioned and also the same for the particular town.

Basically, looking at the town name, the sites were near enough the same. OK, one site has “rent” before the town name and the other after it, but the search engine results showed both versions anyway – if anything, more favoured the way they were shown in the lower ranking site.

There was only one instance of the words rent and the town name on the higher traffic site that the lower traffic site did not use. And that was in the breadcrumbs!

The higher traffic site offers links to the higher level pages and the current page through the breadcrumbs, the lower traffic site just relied on the main navigation to cover it.

So, there is an obvious change and an equally obvious conclusion. The difference in traffic is because one site has an outbound link containing the search terms. Why would this be? That is for another time?

                          

The new ride opening in Morey’s Piers in Wildwood is creating a bit of a buzz on the internet! Codenamed 5292010 – (look carefully – the opening date) the excitement is building.

There is a Twitter feed and a Facebook page to be amongst the first to find out what exactly is going on and to know more about when Morey’s Piers New Ride Ignis Fatuus takes its first riders what the ride is all about.

Sounds intriguing! I bet a lot of people are going to be following the Twitter and Facebook pages between now and then!

                          

MirrorFootball has introduced a brand new app for iPhone users that will give them access to a wealth of soccer information, right at their fingertips.

The service, which has a one-off fee of just £1.19, brings the Mirror’s specialist football service to the handset of an iPhone user.

The user can choose their favourite Premier League team to bookmark as their homepage, and the Mirror will be providing lots of exclusive news and articles, from writers such as Mark Lawrenson, Stan Collymore, Robbie Savage, Oliver Holt and Martin Lipton.

The Mirror already uses a team of reporters to file live from matches and press releases, joining in with football debates on blogs and Twitter. This shows their commitment to the social networking media.

And the iPhone continues this by allowing users to forward articles they enjoy to their friends or to Tweet the articles directly from their phone or just to simply publish them to the Facebook page to share information that way.

Features will include videos of press conferences and interviews, live scores and league tables, 24/7 breaking news for Premiership Teams and the chance to comment on the latest big stories.

Click on either image of the iPhone to see enlargements.

                          

That article was actually part one of a series. And as though Google was trying to prove a point, a point which was in agreement with what I was writing, within 15 minutes of hitting the publish button in WordPress the Google bot had visited the brand new post and cached the site.

That, I believe, is thanks to a little plugin that is embedded in my blog. I found a fantastic plugin that automatically sends an update to my Twitter account whenever I publish a post to my blog.  A fantastic find! It is one of many similar plugins available, but it did exactly what I wanted. Nothing more, nothing less.

It was amazing that this new blog, which previously I had struggled to get posts listed on Google, was suddenly having its posts listed in no time. And it is not the only one. A second blog is also reacting equally quickly using the same technique.

This does not mean that this little pluggin is the super golden bullet that will get every post listed on Google in 15 minutes. Far from it. I also installed it into a third blog, without the same success. But this is not a sign of failure. In fact, it is a sign that the system is working in a way that I expect it to and hopefully I am following how they are working.

How to best use Twitter for publicising blogs is probably far more than the space remaining here. In fact that subject in itself is probably a couple of sessions and I’ll work through it over a couple of days in my own blog, if you are interested to follow it.

But the results of the speedy way that the blog posts have suddenly started appearing on these two blogs shows that there are benefits to be had by using Twitter in conjunction with a blog. It’s not just a matter of setting up a blog and a Twitter account and having done with it, there is a little bit of work to be done on both. But it is easy.

The thing is, if you are a website owner and want to generate more traffic to your website, then these are techniques you can use without any technical knowledge. Whether you control the design of your website or whether you have paid someone like me to design and run it for you, using these techniques you can generate more interest in your products or posts and hopefully more sales through this added traffic.

This is what these social networking techniques are about, in my opinion. They are not about paying a fortune to get traffic. They are about generating an interest in you that will arrive at your website ready to buy from you. It is something anyone can do!

                          

I was only asked to start building this website on Thursday afternoon, so it was a bit of a mad rush. The URL was registered later that afternoon, the first pages put up during the afternoon and the majority of the site built as the text arrived on Monday.

And as you can see from the screen print (click on it to expand it), it may only be Wednesday morning now, but it is 5th on Google when searched for by name.

OK, you would expect that, but this time 6 days ago I’d never even heard of the company. We’ve got the site built and listed in Google in that time. Over the next couple of weeks I’m hoping that it might just climb above one or both of those directories that are currently in top spot. Plus, with a change to the pages that I have just put in place having seen the search engine results, the listing should stand out as the business’ own website and the changes should help raise it up the listings.

So hopefully we have done the trick. Quite an ask, but a new website from scratch and 7 out of its 11 pages listed in Google. Who says new sites can’t get onto Google quickly? They can – if you know what you are doing.

                          

I have experienced the MSN search engine, or Bing as it now is called, being a little slower to update. But I was sure that Google would be listing the site on time, it has worked so many times in the past. Usually there is a Google visit Thursday or Friday night to Janric, which is followed by a visit to the new site over the weekend and a listing appears Monday night, as if by magic.

A couple of times I have seen this delayed, by up to a week. Usually when a large page rank update is just around the corner. Maybe it is a sign. Or maybe it is just Google being Google and going at a different rate to what I have seen it do in the past. I suppose there is no reason why it has to go to the same schedule forever. There is not a contract there that says it has to!

So now I wait. No joyous email that the site is on Google and everyone who hears the local radio station’s advert calendar and Callow’s advert today and then searches for them on Google will in fact find a business directory listing, not the new website we have worked so hard to get live. Every page of it is there and ready to go. Just no search engines register that it exists and they are not sending visitors to out lovely new site.

Shame. Maybe tomorrow.

                          

I was told that just a home page with a banner across it saying website coming this week was enough, so not really that much work?

No problem! I’ll easy do it…

Until I asked why Tuesday. The simple answer was because that’s when the customer’s advert is being played all day on the local radio station and they want to include the website address in the advert.

That through a whole load of different problems into the equation. Suddenly we’re not just talking about a little over 2 working days or 4 elapsed days to get a home page up. Everyone else, being print designers, had missed a vital element.

An awful lot of people when given a website address will not type it straight into the address bar, they will type it into Google or their favourite search engines and use that to look for it. I’ve had no end of trouble passing sample websites to people for them to look at and then realising that they cannot find the website. I can tell them to type it into the address bar, but they keep insisting on searching Google. It can take a lot of convincing.

It is quite understandable. Many people know enough to get around the internet, but not everything. And in some ways searching for the website on a search engine can be an extra security. If the website is known to be dangerous, the search engine might flag it.

But this doesn’t help when you only have 4 and a bit days to get a website live. You have to appreciate that a lot of the people hearing the advert are going to search for the website’s name, or even the business name, instead of typing it.

So we’re on count down. Can we go from zero to hero, or at least listed on major search engines, in a few days? It is possible and I’ve done it before. First plan was to get the domain name registered and a home page published. In fact, we managed about half the site yesterday.

Next step was to get the site linked in to from a couple of other websites. My own website and one of the others I do website design for were used. Quick and easy to do them. Now it is a waiting game.

Hopefully, Google will trot along tonight and see the link to the new site and over the weekend will also visit the new site.  If we’re very lucky, this will be just in time for Google to update it’s index on Monday night and the new site should appear on Tuesday morning.

Just in time… All we need now is the remainder of the text.