Best Anchor Text - Week 5

I'll continue the look at trying to find out just what is the best anchor text for use within a link by reviewing what has happened to both sites after 5 weeks. To see what else has happened, have a look at the Best Anchor Text Experiment.

In both cases I've been lazy over Christmas and both were last posted to 14 days ago, with 9 posts in total.

Site 1 - Home page cached 3 days ago and archives 12 & 30 days ago. 8 posts are cached: 1, 3, 5, 2 X 8, 2 X 14 & 18 days ago.

Site 2 - Home page & December archive cached 2 days ago, no November archive still. 7 posts are cached: 2 X 3, 7, 11, 2 X 13 & 16 days ago.

There does seem to be a slight favouring of the first site, but not to the extent that I expected.

Automated Link Exchange Sites

Which automated link exchange sites do you use? For some of my sites, and many of my customers' sites, I use LinkMachine.

For example, CompareMortgageRates and FinanceHunt both use it to good effect.

What I like about it is it is easy to install and use afterwards. I installed it onto a new customer's site yesterday and timed the process. Including setting up a new email address (so he can keep his link exchange emails separate from his business emails), installing and setting up link machine and linking to the new pages from the existing pages, I had the entire process completed in 15 minutes.

He now just needs to check who is requesting link exchanges each month and check they are still linking back. If he upgrade to the full paid version then a lot of this is done automatically.

Best of all, the basic version if free - so he now has his link building automated and it's not cost us any cash.

If you are looking at installing an automated link exchange onto your website, then LinkMachine might be a good place for you to start.

Week 11 Results

Once this hits 3 months I'll stop posting results weekly, but I'll keep an eye on results, maybe recording the first Saturday of each month. Determined to find out what could be affecting my CompareMortgageRates.co.uk website!

Site 1 - Home page 42 days ago and 1 archive 4 days ago (no archives were listed last week). Now 8 posts (up from 7) - 4, 6 X 9 and 33 days.

Site 2 - Home page 10 days and archives 4 & 9 days ago. Posts 3 X 2, 2 X 3, 3 X 4, 2 X 6, 2 X 7, 10 & 15 days.

Site 3 - Home page 7 days ago and archives both 2 days ago. Posts 2 X 3, 2 X 4, 3 X 5, 5 X 6 and 7 days ago.

As I've noticed with other sites, there's been a lot of Google activity this last week. Maybe just taking advantage of Christmas and the internet being a bit quieter? Or maybe preparing for a refresh of the database? Results will change shortly if so.

Sites 2 & 3 do seem to be getting closer on the results, there aren't the marked results of previous weeks. So maybe I'm proving that target=_blank doesn't make any difference. There's a very slight difference, but if anything, it could be slightly in site 3's favour, which does use target=_blank.

The other complication is that I didn't prevent site feeds of any of the sites, so there are now sites out there linking to these sites by using the feeds. So that is watering down the effects of the experiment, hence a reason for letting it drop slowly.

Flash Web Design

Flash Web Design - friend or foe?

I did deal with this a while back, but it's one of those items that gets brought up time and time again. And I'm in the middle of redesigning my own website and looking to see if a little flash animation could fit in there.

But what about Flash Web Design - is it good or bad? Personally I see nothing wrong with a small animation here and there on a website. It can give the site a bit more interest and Flash Web Design can help to draw attention to certain areas - latest news and offers.

What I don't think is such a good idea is Flash Web Design for the entire site. At the very least you are dubbling your work - you should first create the non-flash site then recreate it all as flash. Then both sites need to be kept up to date.

Why this way? Well, if you create the flash web site first then the html version, you can create a website that is dependent on flash features that cannot be converted to HTML. It is then inaccessible to certain people and search engines.

There's nothing wrong with using the clever features within Flash Web Design to brighten up a site or create short cuts, but if there isn't a similar HTML version available, you are penalising yourself as the search engines and some visitors won't be able to see the entire site.

Listen to What You Preach...

Have you ever made a suggestion to a customer about the layout of their own site and then realised that you yourself should probably do the same?

One site that's about to go live has plenty of text on each page, so I've suggested to the customer that she includes a line or two at the top of each page to summarise what that page is about - telling the reader what they are about to read. It means the reader doesn't have to continue with the page if it's not relevant to them and they know the information they want is on that page if it's relevant.

A few minutes ago I was skimming through the new version of my own website and realised there are quite a few pages with plenty of text that just get straight into it. Now I've got to go through the new version and add a line or two (in a clearly different font) to the top of each page to introduce the page - for example "Below are details of our web design services available to local customers" etc (Webdesign Southport page).

Don't just talk about it - lead through example!

It Took It's Time

The site that I mentioned a couple of days ago that hadn't been cached by Google was finally visited on Monday. Coincidence - or power of a link from a blog?

I have noticed how quickly new sites are picked up that I mention on these pages, compared to those that don't get a mention.

At elast my customer should be happy now, although might be asking why I dodn't mention it in th eblog earlier - probably because I had no reason to!

Best Anchor Text - Week 4

A quick followup to the Best Anchor Text Experiment.

Site 1's home page was cached 4 days ago and the archives 7 & 23 days ago. It's the current archive that's been cached this week. The 9 posts are all cached - 4, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10, 11, 11 & 13 days ago.

Site 2's home page was cached 7 days ago and December archive 6 days ago, November archive is missing. All of the posts are cached - 4, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 & 21 days ago, plus 1 not reporting the status (Google problem?).

Both pretty similar at the moment, but it's next week's results in which I though some differences might start to appear.

Google's Christmas Card List

I've made it onto Google's Christmas Card list for the first time, thanks to the success of the site CompareMortgageRates. At least it's that site that's driven most of the Google Adsense revenue for me over the past year.

Just a shame that in October the site dropped in ranking and I've struggled to move it off pages 5 - 7 of the main keyword since then. CompareMortgageRates seems to bounce around between these pages every day.

A card might not be the most exciting thing to receive, but it's nice to be recognised (even if part of the millions) by getting one. Maybe I'll recover the site soon enough and be seeing another Google Christmas card next year - it's something to aim for! And I think being on Google's Christmas Card list is something to be proud of!

Week 10 Results

A late followup on the SEO experiment.

Site 1 - the home page was last cached 35 days ago and the 2 archive pages that were cached have now vanished. The number of posts cached is up from 2 to 7 - 2 X 2, 10, 2 X 12, 13 & 26 days ago.

Site 2 - home page cached 13 days ago with archives cached 2, 5 and 13 days ago. Posts were last cached 3 X 3, 3 X 4, 2 X 5, 2 X 6, 7, 2 X 8 and 14 days ago.

Site 3 - home page cached 4 days ago and archives 2 X 3 and 5 days ago. Posts were cached 3 X 3, 3 X 4, 5, 6, 7, 2 X 8, 12, 14 and 15 days ago.

Half of the posts on site 1 are cached, all on sites 2 & 3 are cached, but there's very little difference between sites 2 & 3 at the moment, except maybe a bit more recent caching on site 2. Not really a significant difference.

Are You Website Changes Not Being Cached?

It can happen quite often. New website is published, taking down the 'in progress' sign, and you look at the Google cache of your site a week later, 2 weeks later, a month later....

But you are disappointed. The cache is still not the new site - it's still saying the site is under construction and all that hard work is going to waste!

This happens quite a lot. A customer registers their URL then comes to us some time later for a site. We publish the site and a month later we're still trying hard to get Google to visit. The owner of Empowering Confidence asked me why this is the case today, and this is her situation.

Basically, search engines visit your site when they first discover it. They come back a short while later and go over it again. If all they find is an 'In Progress' sign and no changes, then they will leave it longer before they next visit. And then longer, then longer, then longer as with every visit they find a site with little text and no changes.

They just lose interest in you. That's what has happened to Empowering Confidence and Google hasn't visited for almost 2 months, so now I have to persuade Google to visit the site. And that's not easy. It's far easier for me to work with a brand new URL than an existing one!

So what can you do if you desperately want to protect your preferred URL but aren't ready to build a site? Well, for a start, save yourself the hosting fees and just go for the email package. Why put up an 'in progress' sign? Is that going to get you more customers than no site? If you really do want to put up an in progress sign, then use the robots.txt file to ban all search engines from your site. As soon as the site goes live that file can be changed and then search engines will be all over it.

Sometimes You Don't Serve Yourself

I've spoken to a few people recently about my own Webdesign Site. It's a style that I was pleased with, 4 years ago, but doesn't really match the type of sites we're producing now.

I want it to make use of stock pictures and more graphics. But it's just a clean written, fast loading page. It doesn't really sell us. Potential customers could see the site and decide that it's not a selling point and not get as far as our portfolio.

What do I do? Well, obviously I've been intending to update it for 6 months, maybe more. But there just aren't the hours in the day. It's left to sit there and do us no favours, as with a few other of our own sites. I look after the customers, offer long standing customers refreshes of their sites when they are looking dated. But do I do the same for myself?

I suppose the answer is if the work is rolling in then why worry? But what happens when it dries up - then I'll regret not having worked on it.

Loads of work is waiting to be done and all of it for end of tomorrow. Maybe over Christmas I'll get a few hours to improve my own sites.

100 Posts

This post marks the 100 post benchmark. The blog started on 23rd August and to be honest I never expected to really keep up the posting, definitely not daily. Maybe weekly, but not most days!

The blog was originally going to be mainly about my own web design, but over time it's settled down more into thoughts and documenting little experiments and what I see happening with search results. So recently I started a new blog, again trying to get back to the original theme of documenting my Web Design Portfolio. That one is more self indulgence and memories of sites gone by. And some of them really shouldn't have been allowed to be published - they look dreadful!

Just a short post today - everyone wants work doing before Christmas, so not got long to get through it all. Need to get on with earning some pennies!

Description Tags

Do you use automated link building software on your sites - such as Link Machine?

I've successfully used this for a while now for my own and customers' sites and am very pleased with it. But I've noticed that sometimes the directories get good PRs - in the best case every page PR4 - whilst sometimes the pages aren't ranked at all.

I've also noticed a change of page rank in my own webdesign site. For years now, all of the main pages have been PR4. But in the last update many internal pages dropped to PR3, with 2 dropping PR altogether. I expect that the 2 that dropped totally have at least in part cause the others to loose PR.

What have these in common? Well I was going through my own site making some changes when I noticed that the two pages in question accidentally shared meta descriptions. Neither page has been SEOd - price lists etc, so I've never noticed before.

Then I remembered that the links directory pages all take one template page for each site. So within each links directory, all of the meta descriptions must be the same. So I started to look.

And then I discovered that my links directories in which all pages have a PR have the description meta tag missing. The others either are on a low PR site or all of the pages have the same meta description.

You can imagine how quickly that meta tag was removed from my site CompareMortgageRates.co.uk. It will take a while to see anything - especially as the site has currently lost PR. But it's an interesting theory.

The Best Anchor Text - Week 3

It's Monday so time to catch up on the experiment to find the Best Anchor Text before I post to them later today.

Site 1 has 6 pages cached. The home page (12 days ago), 2 archives (14 & 16 days) and 3 posts (12, 16 & 17 days). Like site 2, the home page is also in the supplemental results, from 14 days ago (I accidentally linked to them using www and not using that).

Site 2 has 9 pages cached. The home page (12 days), 2 archives (13 & 16 days) and 6posts (2, 2, 5, 6, 12, 17). The repeat of the home page is about the same as site 1.

From these results, site 2 would seem to be doing much better, but this is only a snapshot and does not reflect what has happened in the previous weeks. This is exactly what happened in the Target="_blank" experiment in weeks 3 & 4 - so I expect that the Christmas Eve results could be the same as today, but by the New Year it could all have changed.

Keep reading.

Variety Is The Key To Good Anchor Text

Continuing my look at how one site with a handful of links beats 489,000 other pages to reach the top of Google. Is it a matter of the anchor text is important, or is it more a case of the site that the link is on is important?

Most SEO experts will tell you how the link page should look. The page should be categorised and relevant to the site they are linking to. It should not contain off topic links. I even had one expert email me telling me to change my links page! My software not only put the link onto the chosen page, but also ran a featured list on the main links page. She wasn't happy being on that page with non-relevant links.

She should have been happy that for her one link I gave her 2 back. But she worried that other links were irrellevant. When I studied the few links that Google reports for the top performing site, I expected to see related sites. One or two were related, but the vast majority have nothing at all to do with the subject.

So if it's not relevance and the pages weren't high performing page ranked pages, then I can only assume that the on site SEO was great and the few links were powerful.

So now my own link building strategy is heading towards not hundreds of links using the same keyword text, but a few good links using different text. I can try!

Week 9 Results

There's been a lot of changes this week in the number of pages cached for each site. Seems as though Google has done a slight refresh.

Site 1 - home page cached 28 days ago and 2 archive pages cached 6 days ago and 2 posts cached 5 days ago (one being posted that day).

Site 2 - home page cached 14 days ago and 2 archives, again cached 6 days ago. 11 posts cached 4 X 5, 6, 2 X 7, 2 X 8 and 2 X 21. Most of these are within the last week, considering cached pages don't appear immediately.

Site 3 - the home page is the only one to have been cached in the last 'week' - 8 days ago and again 2 archives done 6 days ago. 10 posts were cached 2 X 5, 3 X 6, 7, 2 X 14 and 2 X 17.

It's interesting that all archives were cached 6 days ago. Sites 1 & 2 have Novermber & December archives and these are listed above the home page. But site 3 has Novermber archive listed above and the October archive listed well down the listing.

Average days since last cached on the posts is 9 and 10 days for sites 2 & 3, which I don't really think is significant. But site 2 has 9 cached in the last week against only 6 for site 3. Given each has 14 posts, in both cases that is quite low, especially on site 2 (43% cached against 65%).

There is a difference showing, whether it is significant I think only a few more weeks / months will tell.

JustGoMedia - Esther Wakeman

A lot of the traffic onto this site at the moment is looking for JustGoMedia and Esther Wakeman. I was contacted by her at the end of October and mentioned it here as she suggested their services could be useful for one of my sites.

At the time the JustGoMedia products seemed quite good and I signed up for it and put it onto my home page. I was a little disappointed with the click through rates and payment rates (JustGoMedia 52 clicks for 1451 displays - a little over 3.5% and £16.55 from those 52 clicks gave less than 32 ppc). Google policies prohibt me from reporting their figures, but these figures are not comparable. I even tried replacing the Google adverts with JustGoMedia's to see if the placement helped. But I found very little change.

Then Pat posted a comment having experienced JustGoMedia and when I checked my account it had also stopped reporting. For a week there were no impressions reported, even though I had seen the adverts in that time. We had both had our Yahoo adverts switched off because of low traffic levels, but JustGoMedia hadn't bothered to tell us. It would have been nice to be given a little bit of warning - I was planning to trial the adverts across the entire site, rather than just a single page. But I just can't understand the adverts being switched off and not being told.

If you have experienced JustGoMedia, whether the experience is googd or bad, please post a comment. If you would rather the comment not be made public let me know and I'll not approve it. But I would be interested to know what other people's experiences are of JustGoMedia.

What's The Best Anchor Text

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was reviewing the links in to a site that was getting top position on google. My interest in the site is that it is a direct competitor to one of my customers. I won't mention either site, for fear of upsetting the SEO team that did all of the hard work on the competitor!

When you see a site top of Google for many popular search terms, especially differing terms that don't bring up the home page, you would probably expect to see a site with hundreds of links in. But this site only had 19 links in, showing that it's not the site with the most links in that wins, but the site with the Best Anchor Text.

That's where I left off yesterday - what's the best anchor text? So I looked at the site's 19 links - and 11 of them were from the site itself, with 9 as supplemental results!

So what was so special about this site's links that it was able to beat 489,000 pages of results to take top spot in Google? Were all pages linking in with super rich anchor links?

Actually no. Some listed loads of brands, one or two the main keyword and the rest were the site name, with other bits added. Overall, it appears that Google considers the best anchor text> to be not the ideal keywords, but random words. After all, this must be more 'natural'.

The alternative answer is - was is the sites themselves that gave extra weighting. I'll look at that tomorrow...

What Anchor Text Is Best

Yesterday I looked at What Links Are Best - today, What Anchor Text Is Best?

The two go hand in hand. Pick a good link and good anchor text and you have a match made in heaven. A link that's sure to earn you grace and favour and move you up the search engine rankings. If it's a really good link, it will appear on Google when you check for back links, and looking at some really popular sites and some don't have that many links showing.

But others have huge numbers of back links showing, and don't necessarily perform well. It's not all about quantity - it's about quantity. So what should the anchor text include?

Traditionally it's been stuffed with the target keywords. But I think that if Google hasn't already started to ignore them, then it soon will do. I was with a customer yesterday and looking at his competitor's site, which recently dropped out of favour. The top site for a search term he's competing on has 19 links in, his site had 300+ links in. Yet it's the 19 links site that does best.

His competitor won't / can't divulge his link building strategy. He leaves it to an SEO company and they won't say what they are doing so that others can't copy. Sounds a get out to me. But why has the site with 19 links in listed so highly?

Simple, it has got better anchor text. I also happened to notice they have exchanged links with one of my (unrelated) sites. So I've started looking through their links to see how they link back - and I was very (pleasantly) surprised. More tomorrow when I've checked the rest of the links.

What Are The Best Type Of Links?

If you ran a finance website and I approached you offering you a link out of my PR4 mortgages website (no strings, just a free link) then what sort of link would you want? A couple of keywords? You site name? 'Click Here'?

Nearly everyone would go for the the first option, the rest opting instead for their site name. But is that the correct answer? If you are arranging links, then the answer should be whatever is the best type of link.

What is the best link? We only need to look at a few well known websites that have made Google Page Rank 10 or 9 and then think about their linking structure. These have got tons of links in with the anchor text 'click here'. It's sheer volume of links that Google recognises that has worked for them, not keyword stuffed links. OK, these sites now do well for 'click here', but it's not really a main keyword.

Let's look at this the other way around. If the link is using high performing keywords, is it most likely that the link is a "natural link", a result of a links swap or someone optimising their site using internal linking. On the whole, I'd say links swap, optimisation then natural links (including internal non-optimised links).

So what does a keyword stuffed link tell us. Probably that there's a good chance that link has been created to fool search engines. If Google's long term aim is to detect and ignore these SEO links, then what's it going to go? Probably, if not already, it will start to ignore popular keywords in links and gradually include more keywords in that list until it gets the right results.

So just what are the best type of links? Natural links of course - I decide to link to you because I want to. And when that happens I include in the link's anchor text something relevant to that page, not necessarily to your site.

Anchor Text - Week 2

Time to catch up with the happenings of the Anchor Text Experiment. Just what is the best anchor text to use in a link? Your favourite keywords; your site name or just something random?

Site 1 uses just Click Here. It currently has 6 pages listed on Google, so with 5 posts, 2 archives and a home page, that's 2 pages missing. The home page was last cached 7 days ago; the November archive 9 days ago and the December archive 7 days ago. The three cached posts were picked up 9, 9 and 10 days ago. Given it takes a day or two to go from cached to listed, these can all be considered to be in the last week.

Site 2 uses keyword links such as Compare Mortgages. This site, although treated identically to the first, has only the home page (cached 7 days ago) and 1 of the early posts (cached 10 days ago) listed on Google. Within the omitted results, there are also the November archive (cached 9 days ago) and a copy of the home page (cached 5 days ago).

Interestingly, I noticed that one time I linked to the sites using www., the other times I've missed that. That's what's caused the home page to be listed twice on the second site. But early results do seem to show that the first site is performing significantly better.

Playing With Links

Overnight a lot more pages have appeared in the Google listings for two of the blogs in the target="_blank". Interesting to note that the site 2 is quicker at getting from cached to listed than site 3, but has less pages listed. I expect that over the week it will catch up, and maybe overtake. Site 1 remains at only the home page.

But this is showing how important links are to search engines. Over on the other experiment, with anchor text, although it is a lot newer and I'll be reporting on only the 2nd week tomorrow, the expected results are starting to show through. This contradicts what people are currently saying, but does agree with my theory about the most recent Google changes.

This is quite fascinating to me. It could mean that Google is working towards the death of the links directory, which would not be a surprise. The sites that list well will be those with a lot of natural links in, not those that SEO 'experts' have spammed lots of link directories for (and I won't miss those emails...). That's heading towards what Google would probably like to see, but it could also spell the end of the internet entrepreneur creating his own small site and getting to the top of the rankings. Only the big companies with massive exposure will get the natural links in still.

I suppose it reflects what is happening on the high street. The big players get all of the customers, the small players are being pushed away. It will be a shame if the internet becomes dominated by just the big sites.

Week 8 Results

Definite movements on the experiments this week - a lot to learn about what types of links work best overall.

Site 1, with no links, has had the 2 posts and the archive page dropped. It's home page has still not been cached again - now 7 weeks since that page was cached. Even though it still continues to receive new posts and pings.

Site 2 seems to have lost it's home page cache but gained an archive page, just 2 days ago. There's a chanve that since there's only 1 post newer than the archive, the duplicate content filter has dropped the index. Need to post more often to all 3 sites! As for the posts, they were cached 3, 10, 13, 14 and 4X 15 days ago.

Site 3, using target="_blank" in it's links in, now shows more pages cached than last week, and more than the other 2 sites put together. That does seem to be the pattern for this site - does things well, but then the drop off. We'll see. For the record, home page (listed 2nd???) cached 9 days ago; November archive (top of the search list) 6 days; October archive 6 days and the posts 2, 6, 6, 10, 5 X 11.

Quite interesting that 5 pages were cached 11 days ago, but weren't showing cached then when I looked last Saturday. Usually caches show within around 2 days, but these took over 4 days to appear.

Checking what link are shown into the sites, and site 2 does show up as having more. Very strange, given that all links are next to each other!

With these results, looking at this week only, I'd have to say that the 2nd type of links look better, but I've learnt from experience on this experiment that things don't stand still for long.

Keep watching.

Why Am I So Interested In Anchor Text???

What is my interest in Keywords in Anchor Text?

Well, for a start as a web designer I want the best for my customers. I also run a few sites for myself and have noticed strange effects – mainly around site that have used keywords in the anchor text. As you will see from the list of links on the right, they were probably fairly validly used.

But I noticed that the page rank didn't filter down as well to these pages and the same happened on some customer sites, but not on others. The only common theme was how popular the anchor text would be in search engines.

Now in the past we have been told that anchor text is a great way of increasing a site's optimisation for a particular key word. And people used this to great effect with Google bombing, so something had to be done.

It wouldn't be beyond reason to expect Google to now say there's a threshold. Only X% of link's anchor texts should contain keywords. In the case of my secured loans pages, that's pretty harsh, so sense would dictate that maybe that's not what would happen. Or maybe it's something under development.

Whatever it was, my mortgages site fell from number 1 spot on it's preferred keyword to hovering between pages 5 and 7 on Google. And I'm still looking for the reason and trying to get it back up there!

Anchor Text Experiment – Week 1

For the observant, you might have noticed that the first post in this series did indeed include links to the two blogs, as did Monday's post. So therefore, the experiment is already 10 days old…

I stated that I expected to see the blogs dropping in and out of the search results over the first week. If the links are equal, given that both blogs are being posted to and pinging at the same time, then there should be little difference.

So what happened?

7 days after the first posts & links in the first site had the home page cached (7 days ago), all 3 posts cached (one 3 days ago, the others only 2 days ago) and the archive page (2 days ago). The second site had the home page (7 days), the archive page (2 days), but only the most recent of the 3 posts (3 days) cached.

Already we are seeing a difference. Both sites had their home pages cached on the first day. Google has obviously picked up the most recent posts after their ping (cached times were 20 minutes after posts) and from this or the home page picked up the archive page the following day. But only on the first site has it returned to pick up the other posts. Time will tell whether this is significant.

But here's a quick experiment. Does click here or compare mortgages get the pages cached quicker? Both pages were added just a couple of hours ago to a section of the website that isn't cached. We'll have to see!

Still Not Convinced???

Am I still unable to convince you that using keywords as anchor text could be harming your links?

I maintain 2 very similar golf sites for customers. Very similar indeed. Both take a product feed from the same merchant and use it to create a list of brands that merchant sells and a list of product categories for that merchant, linking to the individual items.

Both sites are and have been for a while page rank 3. Both list all products & categories on the home page and the structure of the 2 sites is very similar. What, apart from the style, is different about the sites?

Basically, the second site uses truncated descriptions and includes the item name & price of the item in the anchor text (as opposed to just the item name). Also, the first site appends the word 'Golf' after every brand name. Given that the product list is probably a lot of keywords (Golf Clubs, Golf Bags etc) and we now have 'adidas golf', 'nike golf' etc, most of the anchor texts in the first site could be said to be keyword related.

Guess which site has recently been getting the most commissions from search engine visitors – the second site, the one with the less important keywords in the search terms.

Anchor Text Experiment – Expected Results

What Am I expecting to see happen over the next 6 to 8 weeks? Based on the SEO Experiment and it's control and well linked sites, here's what might happen.

The first week will be hit and miss as the sites drop in and out of the listings and Google decided what to do with them.

After 2 weeks, if Google is following the links then the pages should be starting to be cached. Maybe not all, but some.

After 3 to 4 weeks I'd expect the sites to be cached regardless, but only a couple of pages cached would show little interest – not following links, but plenty of cached pages would indicate links are being followed.

After 5 to 6 weeks we should start seeing difference in caching. Exactly when depends on how and when Google updates its internal page ranks. But if the links are good we might be seeing weekly caches. If the links are partly ignored then less often. And if links are totally ignored then very infrequent caching and very few pages cached.

Keyword Anchor Text Experiment

OK, so I've got the target=_blank experiment ongoing. So why not start another similar process – the anchor text experiment?

Same idea again, but I'll not set up a control site – I'll just refer to what happened during the first experiment for that. This time I'll just have 2 blogs. Both will be posted to every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (forgive me if I miss Boxing Day!!!) using short (circa 100 word) posts of my own thoughts. To keep it simple I'll just use each blog to talk about different financial terms – sort of build a couple of financial glossary blog sites.

The first one I link to with a non-descript and harmless anchor text. Click Here. Seems harmless and unlikely to give any ranking credibility!

The second one I'm linking to with a good strong financial, similar to ones I would use in link building a commercial site. Mortgage Rates. This is a popular keyword that I have previously ranked number one for, but unfortunately dropped off the top page. Hence my interest in the matter…

Now, in theory site 2 should have the better keywords and get a better chance of ranking. But if my theory is right, Google might totally ignore the second link and the site will appear as if it is unlinked.

Week 7 Results

Just as I was starting to think that the whole SEO Experiment was doomed to failure, it does appear to be showing significant results.

The first site, the one without any links in, still has the home page (cached 42 days ago), an archive page (42 days) and 2 posts (43 & 42 days). So, as expected, it's not showing as popular with Google.

The second site has a new page, indexed only this morning. It's index cache is 9 days old and now has 8 posts cached (4 caches 9 days old, 1 is 8 days old, 2 are 7 days old and the newest 4 days).

The third site, using target="_blank" in all of it's links in, is interesting. The index cached is 9 days old, then there's also an archive page (5 days) and 6 posts (5, 11, 2X 7, 29, & 31 days old).

Given the page that appeared overnight was cached 4 days ago, I suppose then that anything under 11 days since the last cache can be counted as "this week" (it takes google time from reading the site to adding the information to the indexes). Interestingly, a page from site 3 has also been updated overnight - showing as 5 days since the last cache. So maybe another sign of site popularity is the time it takes from visiting the page to being in the results (this blog typically takes 2 to 3 days). Something else to keep an eye on!

If you had the choice of which search engine behaviour out of the 3 listed above you wanted for your website, no doubt you would choose (2). Interesting that the site in which all inbound links use target="_blank" has such different results.

Keep watching.

Google Page Rank

Let's stop for a moment and before I charge headlong into another experiment and see exactly what Google Page Rank is.

In short, it is a measure of how popular your page / site is according to Google's latest ranking. That little Google Page Rank bar at the top of your screen is seen as a measure of success (or failure) as it turns from grey to green. Maybe too much weight is put on it's exact value by well meaning people. But Google is a major search engine, it makes this value known to the world and like it or not, it's a measure that's here to stay.

A grey barred google page rank used to mean a banned site or very new page. But now it is all too frequent and basically means an unpopular page. A Google Page Rank of 0, 1 or 2 means a fairly unimportant (or very new) site / page and it's unlikely that the page will be read by Google very often – so changes might only be picked up once per month.

A Google Page Rank 3 or 4 is about the average, but recent updates have seen a lot of falls, so 3 might be more frequent that it used to be and 4 harder to come by. At this level Google will be visiting weekly.

Page Rank 5 is good, rare and seems hard to maintain for an average site. You need to have some good links in – probably a one way link or two from a quality authority site. For example accommodation sites can get this through being listed in good accommodation directories.

Page rank 6 and above is reserved for quality sites with trusted links in and here we are getting into the realm of daily visits from Google to collect changes.

Did The Last Page Rank Update Show Such Signs?

What have people commented about the last Google Page Rank update? Basically, people say that directories and sites selling paid links have been hit, dropping a Page Rank value of 1 or more (1 in terms of tool bar, not actual value).

Given the amount of this that has happened, how? Webmasters are saying that Google has had people manually reporting sites and finding sites linked to from popular sources. But a manual process would imply processing of exceptions in the ranking algorithm – i.e. a list of sites that sell links and have to be dealt with differently.

But with my experience in the industry I know what a pain exceptions are in code. Just 1 exception makes the code harder to read, harder to maintain, far more difficult to test and every time you change the code every exception has to be retested. So surely they couldn't have done that?

So a better use of time would to have been examining the sites that are reported as selling links and seeing what they all have in common. Remember by list from a couple of days back? What do the paid for links, the link exchanges and the gateway pages all have in common? They use keywords a lot in the anchor text.

So it would be fair to say that it's more than possible. Let's find out next week.

Would Google Just Ignore Links With Keywords?

In yesterday's post I explained why I think Google would ignore links with keywords in them. I'm not saying that the algorithm is as simple as that nor that it would stop there.

Say a page is full of links that Google decides are full of keywords and it flags as potential spam to ignore. What's the next obvious step? Well if too many of the links on the page are keyword related, then why not flag the entire page as potentially spam? After all, it could indicate it is likely to be a list of gateway pages or a links directory.

What when a lot of pages in a site are then flagged as potentially dangerous? If too many are flagged as dangerous then why not punish the site – drop the page rank of the site. It's using bad practices, so the page rank is dropped to prevent its bad practices going any further.

Am I convincing you yet? I'm not saying that it definitely happens, but it could be one of many indicators that add weight in on equation. Maybe there are certain levels of tolerance and only once you receive too many flags are you punished. But it needs looking at further.

Why Would Google Ignore Keyword Links?

Quite simple – it could be seen as a sign of link building for SEO – which Google does not approve of. Consider the following scenarios.

1 – You are writing a blog about your exploits and one day someone take pictures and posts them on local website. You thank them and link to the pictures, probably with the text 'read more here' or 'see pictures here' or even 'click here'. Not exactly high SEO links.

2 – You exchange links with another site. You are trying to improve your rankings for a particular keyword, what anchor text do you use?

3 – Pay for a blogger to link to your site. Again you are trying to improve your search rankings. What anchor text do you use?

4 – You are adding some gateway pages to you site, for particular pages. What anchor text do you use to link to the new pages?

Only 1 of the 4 linking methods above is approved by Google. It's also the same one in which you are unlikely to use high value keywords in the anchor text. Still think it is unlikely that Google would ignore those links?

Does Anchor Text Affect Page Rank?

I've been waffling on enough about my sites that I've looked at in which links don't seem to be followed because they use strong keywords in anchor text. But, is there any truth in it?

It's long been recognised that this technique can be used to increase search engine ranking. Search on "click here" (with or without quotes!) and you will find the first result is an adobe page, without either word on it. So it is apparent that anchor text does play a huge part in Google's algorithm.

So if a site had thousands of links for an important keyword then it would seem logical that the site would be top for that search. But, is that natural results or spamming?

Click here does appear in an astonishing number of searches – but mostly within phrases. It's not a high power keyword. And in all likelihood, most 'natural' links don't use a high proportion of keywords. So it would see possible that it could be used as a flag. So I will investigate the issue further.

So could there be a difference between linking to a site with Click Here and Mortgage Rates - other than what SEO experts currently tell us?

Week 6 Results

Forgot to follow up from the Week 5 Results yesterday!

Site 1 no change – same pages cached and not cached since 14/10 and 20/10 (home page).

Site 2, again the same pages remain cached, but they have been cached this week - 4 on Saturday 17th, 1 on the 18th and 2 on the 19th with the home page also cached on the 20th.

Site 3, also had it's home page cached on the 17th, the archive has not been cached since the 10th but we now have 6 article pages (1 more than last week) cached. But only one of the posts previously cached on the 5th has been visited again – on the 19th – the same day as the new post.

All sites have the most recent posts missing, but it is interesting to note that site 2 is starting to look more popular. All cached pages have been revisited this week – usually indicative of PR3 or 4, whereas site 2 has pages not cached for over 3 weeks, normally indicative of a low PR (pr2 or less).

Keep watching – next week back to normal.

Make Your Last Post of the Month A Good One

Or at least the first paragraph. Why?

It's something that has only just struck me. Look at what pages search engines have cached for your blog. Assuming the most important pages (to search engines) list first, then which pages list first?

Usually the home page then all pages that link off that – which are usually the archive pages.

When Google shows these archive pages, where does it take the text from? If you haven't got a long introduction then it's usually from the first paragraph of the top post – or put it another way, the first paragraph of the last post of the month.

So if there are keywords you are trying to improve your blog on, make sure that your last post of the month includes these well and that they appear in the first paragraph.

There's another flash of inspiration for you!

Sometimes Sites Just Flash By…

Amid the chaos of building and rebuilding other sites I was working on Bee Bees. It was one of those sites that quite quickly comes together from the instructions provided and is then shown to the customer.

At the same time an admin system was put in to let the customer update and maintain stock information, but this passed without note as it was all done very quickly and easily. There was little of note about it.

Then suddenly I was asked to publish the site – it's all finished and approved, get it in. I had to take a step back and then review the site. Everything had gone through so quickly and quietly that I'd hardly noticed the site being built and there it was ready to go live.

A good review and there were a few details missing, so maybe it's not quite finished. But once the text is over from the customer it's done and dusted.

Another happy customer and no complaints from me!

Why Does Google Display Page Rank?

Why does Google periodically make available its page rank? And why does it seem to coincide with major changes?

Page rank is being constantly updated. If you assume that pages are always displayed in an order based on page rank (and other factors of relevance) then by displaying all pages in a site (using site:) then all pages should be shown in page rank order.

To test this, I need to view a site immediately after a page rank export – but this assumes that page rank hasn't been exported from an old version… But it would be a good indicator.

So try it now on your site – do all pages appear in PR order – a few weeks after the recent changes. Probably not. This would imply that Page Rank has been updated since – but not exported. And this is what is supposed to happen – the export just gives us an idea of what is going on, not the actual hard values that are used.

So why? It generates far more traffic to Google in looking up the values for every page you open. It means they need a copy of the PR database for the public view (given they are not making actual values public). They need to maintain and update this system.

First and most obvious is that our browsing behaviour is reported to Google. It can track which pages are in use and popular in sites. But when popular sites drop from results, this isn't a major factor.

So what else can they be achieving? And is it me, or do they always export after major changes to the listings? Are they making the data available so that the real world then sees what's going on, have a guess at what took place and start to complain at what we see as unfair results within this – sites missed and sites unfairly hit?

That would then give them chance to refine their algorithms and make corrections. And it would be far easier than have a team of people sitting their trying to monitor millions of sites and the resultant changes!

Google Following Image Links

I mentioned a few days ago that a new site had been fully spidered quite quickly even though all links were anchored with images.

I also mentioned this in yesterday's post and said 'with no apparent search engine benefit'.

Well from what I have just been reading, it seems that maybe I'm wrong. There's a theory about that I've only just heard of (maybe I'm way behind the times here) about image alt texts.

It says that on the whole, Google now ignores alt text for images. The once powerful and almost guaranteed method for good search engine placement is now totally ignored (demonstrating evolution of search engines – why could they now now ignore anchor texts???). It's not quite that simple, but that's basically it.

With apparently one exception. If the image is being used as an anchor for a link then the alt text is read and used. It could even be that the link is only followed if there is some alt text in the link – it's being used the same way as anchor text used to be there.

Just wanted to clarify a couple of points and record what I've been reading!

Could Google Punish Some Links?

Would it be fair of Google to penalise links that make heavy use of keywords in the anchor text, as I suggested that it might be yesterday?

Outright no. I have a page about "Secured Loans" on my CompareMortgageRates.co.uk web site (yes, notice site name for safety!). Given secured loans is a keywords would I then be expected to change the anchor text to something strange (links as shown on the right)?

Overall, probably yes. It's a technique employed in links directories (which Google frowns upon), links sellers, spammers etc. It probably would catch more people that Google target than it would hit who should escape.

So it is something they could have tried. Just a pity that my mortgage site talks so much about secured loans, unsecured loans, mortgage calculators and other keyword specific anchor texts.

As I mentioned when I discussed Starz graphic links are being followed – and in this case followed well. Yes with no apparent SEO benefit because there isn't the chance to stuff the link full of keywords. In this site's case, every graphic link has been followed and all pages on the site are of equal page rank.

Google does evolve. Maybe this is part of the next evolution. Maybe they've tried to knock out the target sites and are now watching the drama unfold and seeing which other sites have been unfairly hit so that they can further refine the criteria and get closer to "perfection". After all, why else would Google make publicly available it's page rank? That must cost Google a lot of time, effort and cash. What do they get from it?

Google Punished Paid Advertising?

It's been talked about that the October Google update hit sites selling links. But how?

Well there is a page on Google to report such sites. But could Google have really checked every one of these reported sites and included it in a bad list? Highly unlikely. This would be a lot of processing of exceptions, which I'm sure Google would prefer to avoid.

Instead they have probably done what they have done in the past when they found spam sites etc. They've studied the pages and decided what these guys are always doing that other pages don't always do. More to the point – what patterns do the links show that natural links don't show?

Well paid advertising links, especially in blogs, will be written into an advertorial. There will be an agreed number of links from the post to the advertiser. All of the links will be live – no redirects, no 'rel="nofollow"' tags etc. And if these links are for best SEO, then the link text will frequently include keywords.

Notice that last one, we're back to keywords in anchor text. Now, if what I talked about last week about my theory that Google ignores keywords in anchor text, then maybe I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Also badly hit were massive link directories. Google is known to punish link farms. And don't most link directories also use keywords in the anchor text?

If this is what is happening is this fair? I'll take a look at that later in the week.

October Google Page Rank Update

A lot is being talked about the latest (October 2007) Google Update. Basically it appears that directories and sites selling links for Page Rank purposes have been penalised.

A lot of people are complaining that it's a major hit on their sites and I've heard of PR6 sites becoming PR3 – and I thought a drop or 1 was bad! It would appear that Google has targeted these sites selling links because links = "popularity" = increase page rank.

But some observers have pointed to sites that have been included that don't sell links and some that do sell links that haven't been included. On close investigation, some of those not selling have been found to use other popularity practices that are frowned upon.

So what could be happening? Well yes, fair enough if Google increases sites' Page Ranks by counting links in and people try to cheat this system them they are in their right to change their own internal ranking system. I agree with that – a lot of people don't. But how has Google identified sites selling links and hit so many so well? I'll take a look later this week!

Week 5 Results

After the end of Week 4 I have stopped monitoring the results daily. It was becoming just too obsessive!

Now rather than looking at pages cached, I'm trying to watch frequency of caching. It is known that popular sites are cached daily, unpopular sites less often and in my experience this can go to monthly or worse...

So site 1 - with no links - no displays 4 pages cached. Internal pages were last cached 14th October (2 articles & 1 archive) and the home page almost a week later on the 20th, sometime after that day's post. The most recent 2 posts haven't yet been picked up.

Site 2 - normal links - has 8 pages, all cached from the 2nd to 4th November. The home page is there, but the most recent post is missing. 7 of 9 posts cached.

Site 3 - target="_blank" links - home page cached on the 9th with 5 out of 9 posts cached on 31st October, 2nd November, 4th November (2 posts) and 9th November. Plus the October archive on 10th November.

It will be interesting to see in a couple of days whether site 2 has been fully cached again this weekend. It is getting a lot more consistency in its caching.

And Now I Really Am Confused!

I recently published MishkaOnline - a fashion website. This site uses CSS / javascript drop down menus throughout the site, so a week or two after publishing the site I wanted to check whether Google had successfully cached all of the pages that were listed through the drop down menus.

For those that haven't experienced the joys of coding CSS drop down menus (and my first 2 websites using these arrived on the same day!), basically you code the menu structure and then hide the rows using CSS. Not exactly what CSS was meant for, but it is a neat way and I'm assured fairly accessible.

In theory, Google should ignore the CSS that hide the menu structure and then just see all of the links. So I looked at Google to see what pages were cached. Apart from noticing that my descriptions were not as well written as they should be (now changed!!!) I was surprised at what pages were cached. For a start, the site map page, which I'd not linked into from any other pages, appeared. This site has already undergone "a bit" of a revamp, so possibly I had it linked in on the first version and removed later.

Apart from there not being many of the pages cached yet (I suppose it is only 2 weeks old) Google has started caching pages for the second time. This is apparent because of the restyling! But I suppose maybe Google has just started it's 2nd trawl and is only just taking in the pages a couple of clicks off the home page.

Improving Page Rank With Links

So is Google Ignoring Links With Keywords? I think it could be. It's certainly a way for it to get out a monster it (and other search engines) have created.

A while back there was keyword bombing where people teamed up and used inappropriate anchor texts on links to popular websites for a bit of fun. Google acted against these links individually. But if they realise there is abuse of the system, why not ban it all together?

It's an obvious move. People outside of Google work out how to falsely optimise sites, so Google changes the algorithm. It has happened before – alt text used to be a guaranteed way to the top, as did the title text.

It is known that many directory sites have suffered a drop in page rank – namely those selling one way links. One way links are known to really improve page rank and Google could have stopped this industry by reducing the page rank of the directory sites abusing their page rank. Including keywords in the anchor text was another way of optimising pages / sites and is often used in directories. If you are paying to improve your page rank then you want the best – so you get your keyword / phrases in the anchor text.

So why should Google not be able to work out that stuffing anchor texts full of keywords is (a) typical of directories and (b) a sign of cheating? Reduce the power of links using keyword phrases for anchor texts and drop the page rank of sites that do that a lot and you penalise the directories from 2 sides at once.

You also penalise innocent sites. Those that maybe are legitimately using these keyword phrases – possibly accidentally.

Maybe the percentage of such links should be taken into account. Maybe one day it will. But if you are link building to improve your page rank, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Have at least some of the links using your site name or description – not just your favourite keywords.

Starz Ceilings on DIY SOS

I was reviewing a site that went live a few weeks before the last Page Rank update - Starz Ceilings. He's already 'Starred' on these pages (sorry – couldn't resist!).

The guy's products are about to be featured on the TV this weekend – something like Starz Ceilings on DIY SOS. So we're just giving the site a once over. I noticed that the home page had gone in at Page Rank 1, not bad given the site was only 4 weeks old at the time of the latest Page Rank export. What was interesting to note was that the rest of the site was also Page Rank 1. Usually for a new site I expect the internal pages to be 1 ranking lower than the home page, increasing only as the home page rank increases.

If that was not puzzling enough, then the fact that every link uses graphics makes it even more puzzling. Traditional theorists have always said that links using images don't allow search engines to spider the site. The theory is that search engines derive no information about the pages through the link and don't follow them.

But if these pages are all cached and all equal page ranked, then Google is visiting the pages and liking the links. The fact that Google can derive nothing from the anchor text isn't hindering the work – if anything the result is better.

I only noticed this after yesterday's post. But it does make me wonder more is Google Ignoring Links With Keywords?

Consider for yourself the sites I've shown. Those with graphics instead of text do well, so do those not using keywords in the anchor text. Those using keywords are being dropped…

Google's Page Rank

More about my confusion with Google's Page Rank.

Looking at the links in the paragraphs at the bottom of the mortgage site one paragraph has a lot of popular keyword phrases. These pages are grey barred. The other paragraph doesn't intentionally have a lot of popular keyword phrases, but some probably are well searched on. Those that could be well searched on are grey barred, the rest are Google Page Rank 1.

Seems to be a big coincidence? I looked at a couple of other sites or my own that are also struggling and were once quite good. Both have been Google Page Rank 4 until recently. There's my Mobile Phone Site and the Holiday Cottages Site. Until recently both had good home page Page Ranks, but the 2nd level pages weren't page ranked. Both use (legitimately) keywords / keyword phrases in the anchor links.

So I surmise that maybe rather than it being the length of the paragraph that the link is in maybe Google is starting to ignore links that use strong keywords in the anchor text. Not necessarily always, but probably in coalition with other factors. For example, maybe if one or two links on the page use high density keywords but then there are a few more that don't then you are OK. Looks like my sites are triggering the factors and I'm suffering!

£1 to Children In Need

UK Domains are offering to donate £1 to Children in Need (takes place this Friday) when certain domains are registered or renewed.

For every .com, org and .net domain that is renewed or registered for the first time with them befire the end fi Friday will qualify for a donation.

Google Page Rank

I mentioned yesterday about my confusion with Google's Page Rank. I left the post a little open at the end as it was dragging on a bit.

What I noticed through my new Promotional Items website was that all but 1 of the second level of pages was cached with a Google Page Rank 2. The missing one was cached, but grey barred (there are now more pages like this – they have been added recently).

It's been confounding me as to why that one link page didn't have a page rank. The page has existed as long as the rest and there's never been a problem with its links. So what is different about it?

I tried something different when I set up the navigation on this site. I actually reduced the amount of optimisation for 2 reasons. First, it looks better, but also just in case Google thought it too much. So I purposely did not include whole keyword phrases in every anchor text. This worked fine, except for one link in which it still came out as a popular keyword phrase.

You can no doubt guess which link this was!

And guess how I have been optimising the mortgage site – that's right, by using keyword phrases in the anchor text. Of all of the links that appear on every page only 1 isn't a popular keyword phrase (and most are actually the most valid descriptions of the page – I'm not spamming). And that page is the only other Google Page Rank 2 page on the site.

A bit more investigation is needed here!!!

And Still Page Rank Confounds Me!!!

I was looking through my Compare Mortgage Rates site yesterday to see which pages were cached on Google and which had a page rank.

Most of the pages are cached, but with a grey bar. Which is strange - I always thought grey bar meant not cached on Google???

The home page and one other hold a very disappointing PR2 (was 5 a few updates ago). 14 pages are page rank 1, even though these are only linked to from the 2 PR2 pages. There's also a PR0 page that has not been touched or linked to for about 2 years!

The strange thing is that the main pages - those that are linked to from every other page on the website, are all grey barred (but cached). Whether my hosts have had some regular problem around the time of the page rank update that I was not aware of seems an unlikely explanation. More likely is the positioning of the links on the page.

I've realised that the links on every page to the main pages form a nice neat column. But those that Google seems to be following are a paragraph. The one PR2 internal page is not only in the column of links but also included in the text.

I've noticed on other sites using a similar layout that the home page is PR4, but the internal pages are not page ranked.

I'm starting to wonder if Google is trying to detect link exchanges by using some algorithm along the lines of if the link is on a line of it's own delimited by <br> then ignore it.

A lot of link exchanges would be detected this way and it would throw weight into proper links within text. And looking at various sites that link to a well performing site, not one is using the line break. But it means that internal links structures in a vertical format are penalised.

It's also interesting to note that the one links scheme that I notice always does very well allows the link to be placed mid paragraph.

It wouldn't fully explain all of the strange results I'm seeing, and another new site of mine (Promotional Gifts) seems to go against the theory. It has a very similar row of links, it's home page is PR3 and all but one of the 2nd level pages are PR2. Only 1 2nd level page is grey barred. Something else stands out about that link. But that's enough for today...

Your comments and observations are welcome. Please post a comment!

Week 4 results for target="_blank" experiment

I mentioned in the week 3 results of by SEO Experiment that something strange happened on day 21. I didn't want to say what had happened to see if a pattern formed, and it certainly did.

First, it's interesting to note that although both blogs that are linked to have links on the same places, Google is reporting that blog 2 has 7 links, blog 3 only has 6 links. It seems that 1 of the links was missed by Google.

So, we might expect site 1, with no links, to be least popular, site 2 with most links to be most popular and site 3, with almost the same number of links to have almost the same popularity. But do search engines ever do what we expect?

Well on Yahoo, site 1 is ignored - it isn't getting the pings. But sites 2 & 3 are similar. But then I never questioned whether it took note of the target="_blank" statement.

On Google, here's the latest days' results for number of pages cached...

Day 20 - Site 1 still has 3 pages cached, site 2 8 pages but site 3 suddenly takes the lead with 9.

Days 21 & 22 were the same as day 20.

Day 23 and site 2 lost a page.

Day 24 and site 1 increases to 4 pages, 2 drops to 7 and 3 drops to 8. Interesting to note that site 2 was mostly cached end of October, site 3 beginning of November.

Day 25 and sites 2 & 3 both lose another page.

Day 26 no change.

Day 27 (today) and site 2 has dropped to 2 pages.

I can't explain why the site with no links has 4 pages cached, the site with most links has just 2 pages and the one in the middle has 7 pages and that's the only one to have been cached recently.

So as far as Google is concerned, the site with no links is doing better than the one with most links. It could be that because of the better links site 2 was cached and dealt with earlier and is showing a pattern the other 2 sites will show but 8 - 10 days or more further behind. I'll keep watching...

One Way Link Building

Yesterday I talked about one way link building. Can I just point out that for the forums I was not suggesting spamming! All that I meant was that if you already actively take part in forums then change your signature to include your main (relevant) website address if you haven't already done so. Please don't go posting just to link to your sites - these places are far too clever for that and detect this almost instantly.

Right, now I've got that out of the way, how can you get loads of links from blogs? The obvious answer would be to post comments on blogs, but most blogs (sensibly) use the rel="nofollow" tag to prevent this. And I agree with this.

What I have noticed recently is schemes that allow bloggers to be paid for mentioning and linking to other websites. And this is what I think the guy I was looking at was doing with his website. It's obviously a great way to get one way links, but never having tried it I cannot say whether or not it brings much success.

To be able to be paid to blog you must have a blog of 90 days old. Unfortunately, this blog is just under that, so I can't sign up and find out what it's all about for a couple of weeks.

Be assured when this blog hits 90 days old I will be doing so and telling more about it!

The New Link Building

So just what was this guy doing in yesterday's post that the millionaires and big sites had missed out on? How can a shoe string budget site so well trample sites with thousands, even tens of thousands in marketing budgets? What can we learn for our own sites, like my Compare Mortgage Rates site?

The answer was remarkably simple. I looked through the first couple of pages of links to his site as reported by Google to see what he was doing. I figured that if Google lists these links first, they are the most important links. What I noticed was that there were loads of links to his site from 2 main sources. Neither of them link exchanges:

1) From internet forums. He was posting in discussions, sometimes related sometimes not and in his signature linked directly to his home page.

2) There were lots of blogs (just like this one) pointing to him.

The forums seems easy to do - sign up, make sufficient posts and survive the trial period then continue to post and include your URL in the signature. Start with one or two, as you get the hang of it join more.

The blogs aren't so easy. There were too many for them all to be his doing so what I suspect he's doing there is paying people to mention and link to his site in their posts. As look would have it, I'd already started to investigate this before I saw his links, so I recognised what he was doing.

I've started investigating one such scheme, I'll let you know more tomorrow.

Google Is Getting Cleverer...

Yesterday I was talking with a customer about link building and general search engine optimisation.

We were looking at various sites, including my Compare Mortgage Rates site and working out why that had dropped. Looking through Google, it's 550+ links that I've checked are still in place are reported as only 8 links. This massive drop is now been blamed for the site's massive drop.

We then went on to look at my customer's other site and his competitors. He named the top site traffic wise (out of his research) and it was a big name I recognised, using affiliate links, ppc and a huge warehouse setup. But the surprise was the second placed site. This was a guy he knows who runs the business from a spare bedroom with stock in a friend's barn. He wasn't a rich man when he set up in business, just very clever at what he does. He's beating the next best sites we looked at by miles - and these are millionaires happy to throw their pounds into marketing their sites.

When we started to look at how he was getting his site to the top of the listings - the tricks he was using. It didn't take us long to see that he was using techniques that I'd heard about before, just maybe not invested enough time in trying them out.

But, on the whole, he wasn't wholesale link building. We looked at another site I maintain (for a customer) and of his 600+ links only 12 show on Google. Less than 4%. Seems that Google is getting good at detecting link building and just ignoring it.

So in a day or so I'll at what this guy was doing and what we can all learn from him. And I don't think the answer is spamming people for link building. Gone are the days of Ms Yeager & co sending me masses of emails telling me they've just visited my site and how good it looks....

Flash Web Design

I talked yesterday about including flash in web sites and I'm all for it - in moderation. But is there ever a time when a complete flash web design is called for, or at least can be justified?

I suppose that if you aren't in need of search engine traffic finding your site, your users are happy to wait whilst it loads and you need a lot of graphical displays then yes, flash web design is useful.

But what about people without flash, or accessibility. Again, I suppose there's times when these may be overlooked - I can't think of an example, but there's bound to be someone to argue the case. But aside from that you should consider a non flash site alongside the flash site. This means that you are producing twice the work.

In this case, would it not be better to have some of the site as standard HTML and just link into flash elements as required?

That's my reasoning behind one of the sites I'm currently working on - when more material comes through. It needs to look spectacular, but be search engine friendly. So most of the pages are HTML, but the products go to flash web design instead. It's not an e-commerce site, just showing off the products. So this combination works great.

But I'm not convinced there is a reason for building a totally flash web site.

To Flash or Not To Flash???

Should you include flash on a website or not? That's a big decision and opinion varies a lot. Some people are horrified at the thought of having flash on their website, others consider it essential.

I think it's like chocolate and wine. Both of these we are told are good for you - in moderation. Have too much and you'll make yourself ill. Abstain and you are missing out on the feel good factor and a few beneficial properties.

The same goes for flash. If you build an entire site in flash the search engines won't be interested. But if you include a little snippet or two, in small files, then the effect can be worth the effort.

There is the danger that this is rapidly take to the extreme. One customer saw that I'd put in a small flash animation and insisted that the size was increased and the number of frames doubled - then was horrified when my prediction of a slow to open page came true.

Everything in moderation - including flash!

Week 3 Results

Time for a recap of the latest results on the SEO Experiment.

Recap: The Second Week ended with the first site - that with absolutely no links, not cached. Site 2 - with normal links, had 8 + pages cached and several pages with PR0 whilst site 3 - linked using target="_blank" had only the home page cached. In that case the home page had a PR0 and the rest were grey barred.

This week: A week of changes!
Day 15 - site 3 was also cached with one of my own blogs (the majority are syndicated articles).

Day 16 - Site 2 lost a page - down to just 7 pages cached, whilst site 3 was up to 5 pages. At this point I thought things were balancing out...

Day 17 - Site 1 appeared again, with it's home page cached; site 2 was back to 8 pages and 3 had 5 pages. I also added new posts across all 3 blogs - all posts similar themes but different writing. Monitoring when these posts appear, but (2) and (3) did show on Google an hour later as being updated.

Day 18 - Was the same as 17.

Day 19 - Site 2 also had an archive page, but this was identified as duplicate content. Site 3 is up to 6 pages cached.

Day 20 - Something strange has happened. I'll leave this until next week when I've had time to watch what else follows....

Basically, after 19 days:
Site 1 - no links - just the home page is appearing.
Site 2 - links - all posts of over a week old appearing (cached about a week ago).
Site 3 - links, but target="_blank" - home and a couple of posts appearing.

There is, at the moment, a difference between the 3 sites. Site 1 is being cached - because of the pings. 2 & 3 are showing a lot more search engine interest, with 2 slightly more interest and better page ranks.

At the moment, it does look like for a new site the target="_blank" does affect the link. Not completely like other ways of blocking the link. But from the results to day 19, I'd much rather be in site 2's position.

Customers Are Sent To Try Us

Sometimes it seems that customers are sent to try us out! Yesterday I had just finished publishing a new website and was in the process of handing it over when the question came - could we change the background colour of the links.

And change the colour of another part of the screen.

And move the links to another part of the screen.

And change the entire menu structure of the website.

And change all of the graphics on the home page.

And change the text in some buttons.

You get the idea. The back end of the site stays the same but the entire website look and feel is to be changed. How we managed to get so far through the project without him raising these issues I just don't know. We were passing latest samples of the site to the customer a couple of times per day and small changes were coming back, but how it becomes an entire restyle the day it's published, I just don't know!

It's back to the drawing board for that site. It will go live again in a few weeks!

When Sites Get Dropped

Have you ever suffered pages, even an entire site, dropping from Google?

At the beginning of October I wrote about a site that totally vanished from Google and I suspected Duplicate Content Filters.

The background - I'd published a one page website for a customer and then about 60 to 75% of the page content was duplicated onto a local business directory. A short time later, the new site vanished from Google. I checked links in, did some links building etc, but week after week I couldn't get the site listed again.

It was then that I discovered the directory listing. The text on the listing was changed, which didn't take too long, then it was left for time to take it's course.

A couple of weeks later and Google had cached the new version of the directory page and magically, the new site had reappeared in the listings.

This teaches us 2 important lessons:

1 - don't copy someone else's text - make sure your text is original, no matter what it takes.

2 - if you are creating a listing somewhere - use new text! You might be doing more harm than good if the directory is older than your website.

October Roundup

October seemed to be one of those months when I just don't stop, but have very little to show for it. Hardly any new sites went live during October, but hopefully that's because there are loads to do over the next couple of weeks.

The first goes live later today and another customer is desperate to be live within 10 days and others are just finalising sites. Looks like November could be a very busy month for publishing!

My site that's dropped down the rankings is still hovering between 5th & 7th pages, 8 days later. Customers who have experienced the same I managed to recover in a week - so why not my own site! It's infuriating. There's no obvious reason for it to have dropped mid week. Just one of those things, I suppose.

Adsense Alternative

Update 14/12/07 - read the latest about my experience with JustGoMedia Here.

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I was phoned a couple of days ago by a lady called Esther from JustGoMedia, asking if I would be interested in displaying their Yahoo adds on my Mortgages site. Quite badly timed since this site has just taken a nose dive in the search engine ratings, but aside from that I was interested in her offer.

What they offer is not contextual advertising so as long as it doesn't look the same as the Google adverts, they are happy for the same page to run both adverts. What their system does instead is to allow the web designer to specify a keyword.

There are restrictions in place to safeguard the system, which is good. But this does mean the potential for more accurate targeting. I agreed to give it a go.

I replaced the current Google adverts with the Yahoo ones yesterday. Results were a touch disappointing, but then Google has been poor the last week so it's not a fair time to compare. I found the click through rate seemed lower than Google is normally, but the earnings per click higher.

A lot of this could be that I'd unfairly only spent the time putting their advert onto the home page of the site and never bothered to track what happens with Google on that page. The Google CTR was also down yesterday.

Hopefully, with time I can get the site back up the search listings and then trial the schemes properly! Watch this space.

Web Site Design

Web Site Design and what looks good, is very much a personal preference. I very early on learnt that text that is too big looks unprofessional. Obviously, there are cases when an entire site should be built in a very large font, but on the whole, that's not required.

Yet sometimes something unexpected happens when you are designing a web site. One currently about to be published looked good, but the customer asked for all text sizes to be increased by 50%. Using 18pt and 24pt arial fonts across a whole site lost the look and feel of the web design that we had put ages into designing.

In another case we designed a web site in pastel colours. Lot's of nice curling areas on the screen etc and it all fitted into the web site nicely. Just what the customer had asked for, we thought. Then we were passed the current logo and told to colour match with shades of brown. The customer was delighted with the final web site, but I have to say that the design wasn't one I was too impressed with when it was finished.

I'm not saying that as web site designers our tastes are perfect. But what we pass to you in the first attempt may look good to us, but it depends on your tastes what looks good to you. More importantly though, what sort of design will look good to those visiting your web site?

Sites Dropped From Google

The saga of why the Mortgage Rates site so suddenly dropped from Google continues, but may be getting closer to a resolution.

Yesterday, I searched Google for half a paragraph of text from the home page and was surprised to find 18 results. All very similar to my own site. Even more surprising, my site wasn't there - not until I clicked the 'show similar sites' link.

Right above my site was a directory listing that linked back to my site. The text it had used to describe my site basically consisted of 50% of my home page. I've already described my problems when the content of a web site was duplicated by a directory.

Looking at the page, it was cached in Google, but grey barred. Thanks to the weekend's PR export and my look at the Latest Page Rank Update on Saturday, I was able to conclude that the page had first been cached in the previous 8 days - my site was dropped 5 days ago.

So that's who I'm blaming (for now) for my site's fall from grace and the loss of a large part of our daily income. The reaction here was that we demand that the listing is removed or changed, but that assumes there are contact details on the site; that the person will actually respond; they will respond quickly and Google will pick up the changes ASAP. If the page is favoured above our own page, it's likely that it's new but long term Google will put weight on that page and having a link out of it will be a benefit.

My solution was to reword our entire home page, take the chance to tidy a few pieces up and just make it look different from the other 18 I've found. Then wait for Google to come visiting and hope we are back where we were.

Second Week's Results

Time for a follow-up of the First Week's Results on my Backlink Experiment.

The results last week ended with all of the blogs falling from Google's cache, and this was still the same on day 7. I blamed this on duplicate content so on day 7 I added some posts of my own input and linked to these from that day's entry on this blog. Amazingly, the home page blog 2 (normal links) appeared on Google's cache later on day 8. Probably as a result of linking out from here.

Day 9 still had just the home page of blog 2 cached.

Day 10 had my own posts and the home pages cached on blogs 2 & 3, plus on blog 2 another (random???) page.

Day 11 - sorry, too ill to be bothered looking!

Day 12 - this is where a difference was first noticed. Site 2 had the home pages and all posts cached. Site 3 was down to the home page, site 1 nothing.

Day 13 - seemed to be a bit of a blip as site 2 lost a few pages from the cache.

Day 14 - the missing pages are back - as day 12.

Also, it is interesting to note (as per yesterday's post) that Google has updated page rank this weekend. Here's the results of that (again!).

Site 1 - grey barred throughout.
Site 2 - pr0 on all pages over 7 days old.
Site 3 - pr0 on home page, grey barred all other pages.

So, it would appear that in terms of Google Page Rank and Google's caching, that adding target="_blank" to a link has a major detrimental effect. So far, it appears that because all of the links use this on site 3, Google has taken little interest in pages beyond the home page. Yet with site 2, which doesn't use that but does link to from exactly the same pages, Google is caching every page, ranking every page it could and I've even seen on that the count of hours since the last update to the home page.

If you are accepting links with target="_blank" in them, your are accepting a lesser quality linkback!

Google Page Rank

It's quite interesting (for me) that Google's Page Rank has updated today - after a gap of almost 6 months. What makes this update interesting, apart from the fact that I've had a few sites suffer go down, is that because of this blog, it's the first time that I've had new pages added daily that I can use to see how Google has tracked the page ranks.

And I record this as much out of interest and to compare to in the future as I do for a study into Google Page Rank. If you notice anything from my results or learn anything, don't keep it to yourself - post a comment!

First,the blog home page has gone straight in at Page Rank 3. Excellent! Only 2 sites link to it - my own and brit blog.

None of the pages added to this blog in the last 7 days have a Google Page Rank - all are grey bared. Pretty much to be expected.

All pages added in the previous days (3/10 to 20/10) have a Google page rank of 0. This means that Google has taken into account all pages it new about up to and including 7 days ago.

Pages prior to from 2/10 and earlier have a page rank of 1. This must mean that Google has given them some credit for existing some time back. Maybe it indicates that the previous actual update of Page Rank happened around this time - the toolbar page rank is just what is exported on an adhoc basis. This would mean that either the 2 to 3 weeks means the pages have counted as aged more, or (and I prefer this theory) that Google is updating Page Rank about every 2 to 3 weeks.

Lastly, for some reason the August posts are grey bared. This is probably because the blog was just starting up and were quickly archived, before Google had a real chance to take an interest in the pages.

It's also interesting to note that 2 of the experimental blogs are now page rank 0 (as opposed to grey barred).

These are (of course) those 2 that are linked to. The one with the 'clean' links is PR0 on home page and pages up to 20/10 (1 unexplained exception). The one with target="_blank" is PR0 on the home page, grey bared on the rest.

But another similar (and slightly older) test blog remains grey bared, even with links from 1 site that aren't using the target function. Another blog, again with 2 sites linking to it, starts with a PR0 (it's brand new - links from the last week or so.). Looks like there's a big difference to explain there...

I'm sure this is one post I'll be referring to in the future - to compare how page ranks change!

Google Drops Websites

The reason my Mortgage Rate Comparison website so suddenly dropped from first listing to page 5 then 7 has still not been explained, but it has begun to slowly crawl up the 7th page. Analyzing the site, the statistics and recent changes and there are just too many possible causes and explanations.

Working on the theory that Google will visit approximately once per week (visits to the home page were 6 days apart) then any changes I make could take a week before they are recorded. Typically, I've noticed that after Google has visited a page it's 2 days before you see the cache change.

But it remains a very worrying time when a website drops so suddenly. It's long been a worry of mine that it would happen with this website, but there's just not been the time and effort available to develop a new site to share the load. Other sites that I've got in place for other schemes have been neglected recently due to pressures of work and left to rot, whilst the Mortgage Rates site has been given the attention it needed.

It's a hard lesson learnt - don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Just one site generating a huge percentage of income through search engine optimisation is a disaster waiting to happen.