Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Google’s Local Business Center (now called Google Places) hasn’t been without it’s problems in the past, but today I did come across an interesting tactic that can probably help you get listed in multiple places in the local business results. Now I don’t condone this tactic, but perhaps by highlighting it Google will get that little bit smarter and they in turn will update things.

This morning I was looking for a T-shirt printer in Munich, and I typed in the following search query [tshirt druck] on google.de , and after position 3, I see the google places map.

Casually checking out C & D, I didn’t notice that they had the same phone number. But both results brought me to the same same website. On closer inspection we see that munich-t-shirt.com 301 redirects to stadtkopierer.de, but none the less google places lists them both.

btw. stadtkopierer I am also surprised you have 20 reviews, when your competitors have 0, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Steps to create a multiple listing

Things that will probably need to be unique :

• website URL
• email address
• business title

Things that probably don’t need to be unique :

• phone number
• location

I did notice that the two websites have different WHOIS & DNS settings, but I’m guessing that this also isn’t so necessary.

Adding your business on Google Places

To add your business to google places, simply log in to your google account and visit http://www.google.com/local/add/, here you will be guided through the process. My only tip here would be to include as much information as possible.

I’m not going to go too in-depth as to why being listed on Google places is absolutely important. But if you are selling a product and have a physical presence in a town or city, then having a listing will deliver you a great leads of customers who want your product in a specific area. (examples : wedding planner {city name}, dentist near {postcode} , gardner {town} , etc, etc.) You know that people searching for these types of things are more prepared to buy, than someone looking for general information. Test it yourself, google [tv shop] & [tv shop dublin], and see how Google treats the different visitors.

Now I’m off to do a little further testing

There has been a bit of a buzz in the SEO community this week with the announcement from Google about their new version of Google. Essentially it is still in a testing (sandbox) phase, and they have opened it up for feedback. I still have to see some real major differences, but it does show some slight changes in the algorithm.

Some quick points noted about Google Caffeine :

• Image results seem to have lower priority.
• Search results appears to be about 50% faster.
• Larger index size.
• A different sensitivity to keywords in domain names.

Caffeine Comparison Tool

As always we like comparisons to be easy, like the Google / Bing Comparison, so I chopped the tool around to do a comparison between Google and the new Google Caffeine version and it’s located at www.comparecaffeine.com .Give the tool a run and see for yourself the differences.

Right now we have a US .com and Irish .IE targeted versions, more can be added upon request. Just say the word !

Updates

Given the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to implement some changes:

• Added .CO.UK version , the tool is now available in .COM / .CO.UK / .DE & .IE versions
• Ability to see more than 10 results, now has the option to show 10/20/50/100 SERPs
• Personalised search is turned off. Result changes on the current version of Google SERPs won’t be effected by what you have clicked / searched previously.

Bing From Microsoft

Today Microsoft has relaunched Windows Live search and it is now called Bing (www.bing.com). Right now Bing looks very promising, at least for the US market, their image search and some localisation seems to be better compared with google.com. For some searches like [thai restaurant 33308] the results are very similar indeed. Bing’s image search has a nice slight zoom in featyre , and “similar images to this” option which is rather nice. They present the results rather clearer than google, and have an easier navigation system on the left hand side to drill down on queries.

For Bing.IE the results we looked at seem on a par with google.ie, i.e. as good or even better, when it comes to general queries of facts ([horse racing] for example). But when we start to ask more localised and to ask for [doctors in Cork] or [cooking courses], bing starts to show it’s weakness. I would generally expect more local search results to be returned, even without specifying “only pages from Ireland”. I’m sure that this will be improved over time, and Bing.IE’s deficiencies are not always a bad thing. Right now there are very little ads on bing.ie, so you can be sure that the results you are getting are not confusing you with paid ads. This alone would move me to check bing before google.

Compare Google & Bings Search Results

For SEOs we have thrown together a quick tool that basically compares the two search engines side by side in one frame. Check out our Google compared with Bing Tool . Here you have the option to compare the .com or the .ie version of the search engines . The query will check and display the results for both search engines so you can see the difference in their ordering of the SERPs.

Google vs. Bing

Search Results compared

Submit your site to Bing

Hat tip to Michele for the link toBing’s URL submission. If you were previously in MSN Live Search results, then your site should also be listed in Bing, but if not you should take the time to add your URL.

Is Bing the Google Killer ?

Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real Google killer, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money. I’ve read that Microsoft are planning an ad campaign in around the $100m mark, so after that I’m sure everyone will know what it is ‘to bing‘ just like they know what it is ‘to google‘.

Over the last few days I’ve noticed that on some queries on google.ie there new feature added to the SERPS. Now certain search results will result in blending in a listing of local businesses. These have already been active on google.com and google.de for sometime now, and it’s great to see their roll out in Ireland. Right now Google Business Listing are under used in a selection of queries that would lend themselves to listing actual local businesses, see this example for [doctor cork].

Business Listing

So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.

Hotels in Dublin

List your business on Google Local Business Listing

Here is a quick run down on how to  get your business listed on the google local business listings:

1. Go to the Local Business Center
2. Login with your google account
3. Select Add New Listing
4. Enter your business details and link to your website
5. Select your business categories  and add opening hours
6. Verify by phone/SMS/post

When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.

For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.

The Bad of Google Business Listing

Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]

Spam in the Business Listings

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.

Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.

There are plenty of examples of good SEO, but what about those examples where companies have clearly gone too far in the wrong direction? While doing some competitor research over the weekend I came across some obviously bad SEO, which even has the potential to get the client a google penalty. This site clearly has had someone do some onpage SEO because nested in the footer, you can see the following code :
<div class="footer-seo"> many links </div>


The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.

above the fold view

But let’s have a look at the full page view:

full page view (click to view)

There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.

These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.

Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
 

200+ links in the footer

Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.

A further SEO look

As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.

There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.

And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue

For SEO reasons you may not want to add your blog roll to every page on your website, but sadly it’s not so easy to do on WordPress. Having  the blog roll links on every page, can really zap your link juice, and overall such site wide links generally don’t help the sites you are linking to.

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.