Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

If you or your business use twitter or facebook, and you want to track how many people click on your URL on your profile, you may find this little post of help. Basically you create a redirect in your .htaccess file that sends them to your page with a little extra Google Analytics tracking code added in. This post is similar to how you can track QR code uses which I blogged about before.

Tracking with Google Analytics and HTACCESS

What we do is we use a different URL, like blackdog.ie/t/ & blackdog.ie/fb/ for our twitter and facebook profiles. Then we redirect this via a line on our htaccess file to push it to the home page while adding the extra tracking code for Google Analytics to know where these visitors came from.

RewriteEngine on

redirect 301 /t http://www.blackdog.ie/?utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=profile+blackdog&utm_source=twitter


Note : don’t forget to change your own domain name from our one & make sure this appears all on one line in your .htaccess file.

Custom Campaigns

This will add a custom campaign, which can be viewed under: Traffic Sources >> Sources >> Campaigns.

Google Analytics Social Tracking

Google Analytics does track social referrals, but these include other people posting links to your site, not just people viewing your profile and coming that way. To see your social media visitors on Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources >> Social >> Overview

Here is a typical thing you will see here

You can drill down further to see where exactly these sources are coming from.

So you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring a SEO company, the next question is how to you measure their effectiveness ? Has the onsite and offsite changes they’ve done had any impact ? It’s natural to want to see what the return on your investment is, and it’s important that you understand what the numbers really mean.

Often companies will tell you are ranking for X number of new keywords, which in itself tells you nothing. These words are useless unless they are driving traffic (and converting) to your site. The actual improvement can be hard to see unless you specifically look at organic traffic in your statistical package.

In Google Analytics you can filter just for organic traffic, so paid, direct type-in and referral traffic isn’t counted. It’s a little hidden in the control panel, so to help you we’ve outlined the steps : Go to

Traffic Sources

>>> Sources
>>>>> Search
>>>>>>> Overview

This would be the first step. Then you need to compare it against a base level. Here we’ve compared the current month to the previous month.

Your Organic Traffic

Here we see that the number of organic traffic is up by over 70%. The next stage is to check to see how many keywords are delivering traffic to us. Generally it’s better to be ranking for more keywords.

How many keywords do I rank for ?

If you unclick compare to past in the dates field and select Organic under Overview on the left hand side menu.

At the bottom of the right of the table (highlighted in green) you will see the number of keywords that brought you traffic for that period of time.

Technically this shows you only the keywords that drive traffic to you. And a good starting point would be to look at where you are ranking for these to see if you can move up a further 1 or 2 places. In our case there are over 2000 different unique keywords delivering traffic so this should be a good starting point to work on in the next few months. You will also find that once you focus on these keywords, you will also start to get traffic from even more keywords, so it’s a cycle that will never end !

A sudden drop in the number of keywords you rank for is a good indicator of a google penalty being applied.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !

The question “How do you know if your website has been hit by a penalty ?” has been asked of me quite often, and even more so in the past few months with the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates. Google has been handing out penalties, or is refining their algorithms constantly, it’s just that in the more recent times more and more sites seem to be effect by them. We even wrote about one case we looked at back in 2009. And even back in 2007 there was the roll outs that tackled paid links, see wolf-howl.com. So these aren’t anything new per se.

Example of a penalty

Basically what happens, is that your website will notice a significant drop in traffic, see the example around the end of May of this year. Note that I am only looking at the Organic Search Traffic graph, I’ve excluded the statistics for type-in, PPC, referral traffic as sometimes these can hide or blur the effect.

Over night the search traffic dropped dramatically, and this can be confirmed by clicking on individual keywords in your Google Analytics Reports, and seeing that the number of visitors coming for the top keywords had completely fallen off. These changes happened at once for more than a few keywords. Rankings for these keywords were averaging between position #2 and #7, and after this date they dropped off to the 2nd or 3rd pages of results.

Reasons for Google could penalise your site

There could be multiple reasons for your penalty, and it can be a bit of a tricky tasks to identify them. If you’ve done anything shady like buying links, buying Google plus votes or Facebook likes then it’s likely that Google has noticed this. The best start is go back to basics and check everything, from issues in your Google Webmaster Console to reading Google’s starter guide Search Engine Optimisation.

And even once everything is looked at it could be possible that your competitors in the market have just blown you out of the water. Generally if this is the case the drops are more gradual, unless you are heavily depending on one keyword to deliver you a high percentage of your traffic.

SEO takes time

It’s not always the case that you can fix a penalty in such a quick manner, as in the example above, here’s one we are currently looking at.

Thanks

A big thanks goes to my clients for allowing me to share these graphs, you guys rock !

What happens to your rankings when your website goes off-line ? Do you loose your rankings for ever ? How long is too long for being off line ? Will Google and the other search engines put you back to square one, once you are back online ? Read some surprising answers to these questions below.

Our Dropped Ranking Test

Here is a screenshot of our ranking test. The site was offline from September 2011 through to December 2012. On January 1st we re-enabled the site, and started to add some more content, and ping’d Google that the site was back. The traffic slowly came back, over 2 months, and then it started to increase significantly. During this time the site returned a 404 header code for all pages on the site. For this test we purposely didn’t send a 302 header code saying that the site temporarily was down.

The result, was that the site was dropped from the index completely, this took about 4 weeks, all the indexed pages were no longer being shown.

This keyword is one of the more competitive keywords the site ranks for, and it results in over 16% of total traffic to the site. It was comforting to see that being offline for over 3 months wasn’t a factor in the rankings. Which makes sense to us. If the site is available, and it ranks, then being down for a while shouldn’t change the ranking factor of the site. There wasn’t significant changes in the competitors sites during this time. So when the site was back, with the exact same content and URLs, it make sense that it should rank once more.

It can happen that your sitemap.xml or your robots.txt file finds it’s way into the index. Just do the following query site:yourdomain.com filetype:xml to see what XML files you have listed from your domain. Here is an example of some files indexed for the domain court.us.

It’s probably not what you really want, as basically it’s just trash in the SERPs. To fix this, and remove it from the SERPs,  you can simply add some extra details to your .htaccess file which will send the the proper X-Robots-Tag.

For your .htaccess file

<FilesMatch "sitemap\.xml">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "robots\.txt">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>
This method can also be used to remove all word documents or similar from the index.

<FilesMatch "\.doc$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "index, noarchive, nosnippet" </Files>

 
To check your MIME type
http://redbot.org/ is a handy tool to check out the MIME headers, cache control and FileTypes. Their code is opensource so you can run a version on your server.
Thanks
Thanks to some people like Carlo Zottmann , JohnMu,  & Paul Cawley for giving me some pointers on this.  
			

Later on this year, Google plans to roll out their Street View system across Germany (see below for the cities they are targeting), but it’s been hit with a number of privacy concerns. At an event I was at a few weeks ago, Wieland Holfelder, Google’s Engineering Director in Munich, said that Google sees that Germany is their privacy capital of the world. And because of this, one of their teams in Munich is focused on this topic of privacy. He said if they can make the Germans happy, their policies should be okay almost everywhere else.

Street View Privacy

Besides the issue with the WIFI networks, people have been requesting that their should have a way to “opt-out” of this service. Currently Google blurs out faces & number plates of cars, but in Germany people have the right to request that the image of their house can be removed. Right now this is a storm in a tea cup for the German regional Information Commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar. Some{DE} newspapers {DE} are reporting that there are over 10,000 requests already to remove information, and it’s expected that this number will continue to grow.

I must admit, I think that these people are forgetting how the internet works. This type of information is not just available from Google. Here are a series of videos from a Düsseldorf letting agency, which show houses and other details of locations through the city. People fail to realise there isn’t much you can do from stopping someone taking a picture of your house, and putting it on a service like Panoramio, here is an example of a house close to my office. And the bigger question, is this something you should be able to request ? Is this an invasion of privacy (either morally or legally) to have a picture of your house on the internet without your permission ? All that Google is doing is making this information easy to use, and filling in the many holes in what other services offer. While I realise that Germany’s privacy laws on photography of people are stringent, I really don’t understand why this could extend to an image of your house.

There are other issues that I wonder about, like if you live in an apartment building, and one person requests your building removed, but the other 11 tenants are perfectly happy with the image being included. In the end, my fear is that it will just render this service unusable in Germany.

Google Video on Street View Privacy

Here is a video from Google’s Street View page in German that talks about data privacy {DE}, from their microsite about this topic.

Street View German Cities

The cities list of cities that google plans to roll out streetview in, via google blog {DE} :
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.