Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Over the last few days I’ve seen that google is starting to decrease the space where they display sitelinks. Previously sitelinks were displayed for some search phrases, for the first SERP result. They could have up to 4 extra lines, and 8 inner links to other pages on the top result. As you can imagine that having sitelinks for a top keyword would really increase your relative CTR, because of having more options to inner pages and the fact that you have more real esate on google.

Here is an example of the older view, for the keyword “Recruit Ireland”

But now on certain phrases (perhaps more general queries) these site links are compressed on one line.

Site Links Jobs

In this climate the keyword “jobs” is highly sought after, but it’s also possible that it is just too general of a keyword to merit expanded sitelinks. 

upon searching for “jobs.ie” you will get the full expanded version of their sitelinks.

Site Link Cars

And here is a further example for a highlight competitive keywords “cars”, on google.ie.

It will be interesting to see how traffic is effected by this recent change by google. It could mean that there will be a higher CTR through to your homepage, as sitelinks are not always shown up so prevalent. For those of you in positions other than first, I would expect that by making sure your keyword description that little bit more appealing you will be able to benefit from this change.

Sitelink Tip

Did you know that you can control your website’s sitelinks on the google webmaster console ? Here you can remove links that you don’t want to appear in your sitelinks.

I’ve decided to take part in the Tuesday Push when I can. A lot of the other people write reviews, but instead I am going to look at the companies’ websites from a SEO & Usability point of view. So here is the first look at Dine To Read. They are a book club with a difference, they meet up, have dinner and discuss a book.

So generally when I look at the website the first thing I do is I check out the source to see what engine it runs on. And I am happy to see that Dine To Read has the latest version of wordpress (2.7.1). Looking further into the website there is an easy to use navigation bar at the top, and links throughout the website have a nice structure (using the permalinks feature on wordpress), and they offer all the relevant information, such as a privacy policy, contact form, etc. One change I would make to the contact form is to also have a physical address available on that page also.  It’s also good to see that they are hosted in Ireland (with Blacknight).

There error page returs the right HTTP status code (namely a 404). But I would offer more infomation than:

The page you have requested does not exist. You might be able to find what you’re looking for from our home page.

Rather I would suggest they include a search bar (wordpress has an easy search function) and include links to some of their more popular parts of the website.

Getting back to the topic of search, this is something that is missing on their pages. Having a method where people can search through your site (especially if it is a dynamic site that changes often) is very important. This can be both good for existing users who remember a certain helpful page, say on the forum, but can’t find it anymore, as well as for new visitors so they can find what they want fast. 

The titles of the pages should be improved. Title text helps users aswell as search engines. By tweaking your title text to make it more attractive.  The main page for example “Dine to Read – A book club with a difference” really doesn’t use the title tag to it’s full effect. One thing with wordpress is that it lists the name of the website before the title of the page. This means that every single title will have Dine to Read at the start. Generally you will try  to have the keywords you want indexed at the start of title. An example of what would be better wouuld be ::

• Irish book club with a difference – Dine to Read
• Book club that discusses books over dinner – Dine to Read – A book club with a difference
• etc

There is a great plugin call All in One SEO pack  which will help you change titles of the pages, and it will also allow you to specify META keywords and META description tags on a per post/page basis. The META description is something that is used when displaying your search result, and when optimised (along with title tags) it can greatly increase you click through ratio in the SERPs. This would help pages in the News section to rank higher.

This will also help avoid content showing up multiple times. WordPress is particularly bad at having more than one place where you can see the content of blog post.  For example you can see the post about World Book Day : here, here, here and here, and if you had categories you would be able to see it in more places ! These should have the noindex attribute to them, and this plugin will make sure of that for you. This would be another reason why the news section pages are not really being indexed by google right now.

So wrapping up my 45 minute analysis , I would say that over all dinetoread.ie , is a solild site, but it there are still a few tweaks that can make it more sound. 

Other things that are missing that could be added easily:

• a robots.txt file, currently this displays the main page and could cause problems. It doesn’t even give a 404 code, it says what is displayed on your robots.txt is an actual page. 
• a sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines what pages on your website are more important than others, and should effect the order of such queries. Currently the forums are figuring higher than the main page for example. 

*note : as this is a new site, there are not many inlinks, and therefore not easy to analyse this part of the website.

Last week, Fran from MadeInHollywood was looking for some ideas on what to blog about. Being the ever generous person he offered to send some samples of what they make (they make foam cut outs) in return for some ideas on  what readers of their blog would like to see.  Today I picked up the foam letters, which look really nice. Thanks Fran !

MadeInHollywood has worked with some interesting clients like Arnotts and An Bord Gáis

Because of the fact that I am never 100% happy with my testing results, I decided to run a new test on some new domains. Last year I posted about the fact that it is pretty easy to get your domain in googles index, but now recently I have seen some changes. For the sake of clarity I will label them domain A and domain B.
Details on Domain A :

• a previously  registered .COM domain
• has google analytics code on the page
• has google adsense on the page
• only one page, this page in the google  index.
• plain HTML site
• no previous versions of the site listed on www.archive.org
• registered in January 2009
• sitemap not submitted to google

Details on Domain B

• a new .IE domain
• doesn’t have  google analytics installed
• doesn’t have google adsense installed.
• multiple pages, 3 in the google index
• wordpress based site
• registered in January 2009
• sitemap not submitted to google

Because domain A is a dropped domain, it is likely that thare are some  links to this site. These could be from websites that list dropping domain names, or links to the domain before it dropped. In the past I have seen that google has discounted these, and often won’t list them completely.  Google is very good at cleaning the slate for domains when they drop.  

In the past getting a dropped domain to be indexed, was harder than getting a new domain to be indexed.  Buying old domains, and recycling links was something Blackhat SEOs did in the past, and as expected Google has gotten a smarter over time.  So I was suprised when I saw that the site:domainA.com operator on google was showing this domain

And for domain B with zero links, and hasn’t been submitted to search engines, it is indeed baffling why it would start to be listed in the SERPS.

Yahoo & Google Listing Differences

When I compare what yahoo and google lists for these domains, there is also a big difference. Yahoo doesn’t have any listings for either domain, and for all intensive purposes, it doesn’t exist in their eyes, and on the other hand Google is fully aware of these sites, and is listing Domain B for certain keywords. This would lead me to the conclusion that it is something on google’s side, and the only obvious advantage for Google  is that I have browsed both sites with Google’s internet browser Google Chrome . After a bit of searching I wasn’t able to find any mention that Gogole Chrome can get your domain listed, but I do know that from their privacy terms it is possible that what you type into the browser is sent back to them. Google Chrome Privacy Info

“When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.”

So this might be yet another way to make sure that your domain gets indexed by google.

One of my pet peaves with WordPress is that you can’t specify all the attributes to links in your blog roll. While it’s possible to add some of the unpopular XFN relationship data to inform people about your relationship to the link, like ::

• if you met the person you are linking to
• it’s a link to a friend or family member
• if you happen to have a crush the person
• or it’s another website you own

While these are nice, they don’t normally serve much purpose for me. The XFN relationships that are of interest me are ::

• rel=”nofollow” : for limiting the flow of pagerank
• rel=”external”  : XHTML compliant version of target=”_blank”

So here is a quick tutorial as to how you can add these attributes to your current version of WordPress (done for version 2.7).  
 

How to add nofollow to WordPress Blog links

Warning:As with all editing of files, you should keep a backup of them before you start to change them. Believe me, it will save some headaches along the way. 

Adding the nofollow and external attributes is quick, easy and painless, here are the 3 steps.

1. open file /wp-admin/edit-link-form.php
2. Go to line line 193 / 194 and find
   <tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('identity') ?> </th> 
3. Above  that add
   <tr>
<th scope="row"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </th>
<td><fieldset><legend class="hidden"> <?php _e('seo') ?> </legend>
<label for="external">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="external" id="external" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'external'); ?> />
<?php _e('external') ?></label>
<label for="nofollow">
<input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="seo" value="nofollow" id="nofollow" <?php xfn_check('seo', 'nofollow'); ?> />
<?php _e('nofollow') ?></label>
</fieldset></td>
</tr> 

Once you have this,  go to Links on the side bar, and now you can change existing links or add new links with these attributes.  There will now be an extra line in the Link Relationship section of your Links page.

Why use rel=”nofollow”

This is used when you don’t particularly want to endorse a link you are linking too.  Normally a link to another page from your website, is seen as a vote for that page. And each page only has a certain ammount of voting power. If you use the rel=”nofollow” no virtual vote will be passed to the link tartget. For more info have a check for “PageRank”.

Example of controlling votes via rel=”nofollow”. If in your blog roll you have 10 links, but 2 of them are to well know services, you can choose to disable your vote to them, and to increase the effectiveness of a link to those other pages.

Why use rel=”external”

In XHTML Strict the link attribute target is not supported.  Previoulys target was used as a link attribute to open new pages, break out of frames, by using target=”_blank” , target=”_parent” etc.  Now in XHTML you need to use rel=”external”  to inform the browser that this should be a new  

Next time at BlackDog

Next week I will be discussing on how to edit your wordpress template, to just have your blog roll on your main page of your blog.

Yesterday Damien’s SEO contest came to an end and google has been very nice to my entry  mybluejumper.com . The basic rules of  the competition were to:

• rank highest for the term [geansai gorm] on google.ie
• domain name had to be new
• .IE domains were not allowed
• no keywords allowed in the domain name

And here are the results:

Hats off to the other guys who but in some great efforts. I counted around 15 entries, all though I am not sure if some of them were created by the same person.

A longer post will be following in a few days hopefully. Where I will be outlining some approaches I took to things (obviously some things I won’t be discussing). As I am a great fan of stats, here are some:

• Overall I had unique visitors 788 to the website.
• The resulted in almost 6, 000 page views.
• The busiest day (besides December 1st) was November 16th where 73 visitors came and looked at my entry.
• 531 people visited via the keyword “geansai gorm”
• strangest keywords were “photosesion dublin” and “gigs in kerry”
• google delivered 601 visitors
• windows live gave 40 visitors
• yahoo sent 20 visitors
• 2 people came via MSN search
• 17 blog posts were created
• google indexed 36 individual pages.
• 232MB of bandwidth was used by visitors
• 7MB of bandwidth was used by googlebot

Daily search positions of the entries can be seen here.
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