Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

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.

The traffic data in this example has been removed on purpose, but general information used with permission from client.

One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.

example of a Google penalty

The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic.   Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:

Jan 1st to Mar 10

We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.

Our actions against the penalty

The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.

Google on Reconsidering Request

Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”

Further reading

Here are two good posts about the google penalties from SEOmoz.ORG and SearchEngineLand.com and are well worth a read.

For my clients I tend to check on a monthly basis, who we link to, and what links those websites in turn link to. It’s not enough to make sure that the websites are live, rather one would need to check visually what is being display on these websites and where the links go to.   Also it is important to monitor if sites are being dropped (i.e. failed to be renewed, and subsequently registered by someone else) or if they have recently changed hands. Being anyway associated with dubious domains has the potential to damage your SERPs (the so called “bad neighbourhood” effect). Often when these sites are bought or picked from the dropped list, the old version of the website will remain (or re-appear, scraped from somewhere like google cache or archive.org) and then over a period of time these dubious links will creep in. This all sounds like a bit of work, but in the end it can avoid damage to your online reputuation. It’s not enough just to have a google alert, which emails you whenever someone mentions your website/brand, online reputation management should start at home, on your website. Have a look at your older out going links to make sure that they still work and they still link to the website you intended to.

Just today there was a high profile case of the British Home Office linking to a Japanese porn site  on BBC News.

Richard Hearne from RedCardinal is offering some free consultation again.  A while back he offered some tips to the short list of the Irish Blog awards , and now he is offering to help some Irish online businesses, to analyse and optimise at their conversion performance. He’s also offering the help of two great Irish developers, namely James Larkin and  Jason Roe, for the programming and graphic parts of the tests. All he asks for in return is that he can use your data in case study. Overall the package is worth €3,000, and has the potential to make your business more profitable in the long run.

If you have an online shop, or sell items online and you want to increase your sales rates, then this will probably be right up your street. Right now Richard is only offering this to 5 Irish companies, so be quick.