SEO The Game

After the news of Michael Jackson’s untimely death. It has surprised me people are so quick to cash in on the event. Google trends hasn’t quite caught up with this yet looking earlier this morning for Michael Jackson searches there was no spike on the 30-day chart. Tomorrow maybe we will see the spike.

However there is already a web-site which has many jokes that are specifically about his death with Adsense advertising in place (http://www.deadmichaeljacksonjokes.com/). I am not a fan of his but it is still quite distasteful.

Update. On Monday, 29th, the Google trends dwaft the previous data with is not surprising.

Following on from the revelations that nofollow will  no longer work for sculpting PageRank, there is a post on Matt Cutts’ blog explaining the issue. It is not the information that it will no longer work that is surprising, more the revelation that it has been this way for more than a year!

….when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

One of the nightmares for any website owner is to find that their site has been removed from Google’s search results or they have been heavily penalised. When this happens it means that they have most likely strayed from the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The method for reinclusion is the same as it has always been, fix your site to make sure that it complies with the Google’s guidelines. However, now you will receive an email notification saying that they will review your website.

Subject: We’ve processed your reconsideration request for [example.com]

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: [example.com].

We’ve now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don’t find any problems, we’ll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn’t appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

This is might not seem significant change to their policy, but before you did not receive anything. You had to hope for the best. At least this is an acknowledgement that they will actually look at your site and review it.

Have you ever  typed an innocent search result only to click on a result in Google to be alerted ‘Warning this site may harm your computer.’? Obviously not wishing to harm my computer I avoided the site and went on with my search.

These type of attacks can cause great harm to your website’s reputation as people are unlikely to ignore the stern warning. Often site owners are bemused as to why this is happening.  What is causing their sites to behave in this way and as the webmaster what can you do to remove the warnings from the search results?

In the majority of cases the warning results because hackers have injected code into your own html. This is usually in the form of an iframe, or a web-page within a web-page. To avoid detection, the iframe is made to have a size of 1 px, and is then set to be invisible using CSS.

It is believed that the code can be added to the site because there is a  virus or worm on your computer which steals your username and password for your website. It will then add the code similar to this to your index.php, index.htm, files.

<iframe src='http://url/' width='1' height='1' style='visibility: hidden;'></iframe>

If a hacker can access your site and insert code in this way it makes the damage that can be done open-ended from Black-hat SEO, to stealing information or installing Malware.

You won’t be able to see this website but it is now linked with yours.  The code can be removed and uploaded but this may only be temporary solution.

What else can you do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?

• The first thing to do is to remove the virus using a virus checker. When it is removed update your computer with the latest security updates.

• These hacks often occur on blogs and other content management systems so you should always keep  it updated if possible or secure your blog using methods discussed previously.

• Ensure your files have the correct permissions, 644 permissions where it would not disrupt the software operation.
• When you computer is free of viruses, worms and malware,  change all site-related passwords (FTP, Control Panel, etc.)
• If necessary, contact your host to investigate the issue.
• If you haven’t already got one, get a Google Webmaster Tools account. This will alert you to the number and type of links on your website. Request a review via Google’s Webmaster Tools when you believe your site is clean.

Playing with Bing still. One of the things we use Google for is to find the pages from a single web site. In Google we can use the site:example.com query modifier to return the pages that have been indexed by Google for the domain example.com.
Live did not have this functionality but Bing appears to have the site: command.

Important news from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Web Spam, who said at a question and answer session at SMX Advanced conference yesterday that PageRank sculpting was no longer an effective technique. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, PageRank sculpting is the process of using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on your least important page links, such as the terms and conditions, privacy policy and registration pages. These pages have a purpose when the visitor is at the site but they unlikely to be the reason a visitor come to the site.

Using the nofollow attribute on the links to these pages, the intention was to effectively remove these links from the link-graph. In the previous months, this technique was valid and even commented upon by Matt Cutts saying that it was okay to do this.

Now the rules of the game have changed.The total number of links will be counted but no-follow links will not pass PageRank. If you have 10 links on a page, and the PR for that page is 1 then , each page will get 1/10 th of the page rank. Even if two of these link happen to be no-followed. Prior to the anouncement, each of the followed links would have received 1/8 th of the PR.

How does this affect the SEO process? Probably not that much. In previous talks Matt Cutts said described PageRank sculpting as being a secondary effect. i.e. you would have to have some PageRank in the first place before you can sculpt it. For most people this is not going to change the rankings of their site too much. However, the announcement has annoyed many SEO because they have been advising their clients to add no-follow links to their websites.

Obviously, Google and Bing are competing search engines. I am still trying with Bing and so far  it has been all good. Fast and accurate results. I just though it would be fun to have a look to see what the search engines have to say about each other.

Firstly in Google trends we can see the interest in Bing.

Quite a lot of interest. How about a search for Bing in Google?

This returns

These results are showing that Google does not have much interest in Bing the search engine. Only a few results, much preferring to directly my search to Bing Crosby  or second guessing that I mean bingo. Where is the query deserved freshness that should put more than one result in the listing for Bing? I suspect a manual tweak of the algorithmic knobs for this query.

Bing is much fairer in this respect. It recognises that Google is a search engine. It would be churlish of them not to do so.  (They even allow you to perform a search using Google.)

You may have seen that Microsoft has re-branded its live search as Bing.com. My first impressions on the name and the design are pretty good. It has a crisp fresh design and  looks a lot better than the tired MSN, Hotmail design which quite frankly after such a long time was just annoying. Bing is a better name. To me it is an onomatopoeia; the sound of an answer found.

Depending on which country you access Bing in you will see a different background  and it seems that we also get a different background every day.

While the look and feel is important, it is not as important as the results that get returned. How good is it at searching for things?

Typing in a random a query such as ‘central heating radiators‘ returns a good collection of results. They have adopted to show sponsored results along the top and the right-hand sidebar.

There is also a summary of the content that activates when the mouse pointer is rolled over the right hand  side of the search results page. I would have liked to have seen a screen shot of the site along with the summary of the text content but it is quite useful. This does mean that people will be able to see some of the content of a site before visiting it and this could circumvent people needing to visit a site if they find what they are looking for on the preview.

Images- the image search is pretty good with a layout and an automatic larger preview image coming into the fore when the mouse is hovered over the image.

Video search  is particularly nice to use as the preview results begin to play when the mouse is hovered over them, allowing you to see exactly what happens before deciding to watch it at its native resolution.

The verdict on Bing as a search engine is very good even though it is from Microsoft. This time they have actually created something which is a joy to use. Is it better than Google? It just might be. It does deserve to win a larger proportion of the search market. I will certainly give it an extended trial to see how it fares as my everyday search engine.

Darwin went on Galapagos tours to see the effects of evolution on finches on its many islands. SEO is a battle for survival. Search engines are the environment for the results and search engine optimisation specialists create websites that adapt to the search environment exploiting every niche. If your website appears in a good position there is a good chance that your company can generate enough revenue to keep on in business. Websites that don’t have to find other ways to compete.
If the environment changes then your website must adapt to survive. We are seeing the demise of black-hat SEO because the search environment has changed. Search engine are getting better at finding sites that use inappropriate optimisation techniques such as link-farms, content theft. Black-hat SEO has to find more extreme techniques to work making it something that many sites would not find acceptable.

Such techniques are also more vulnerable to collapsing due to changes in the search engine’s algorithms. If you are interested in long-term survival then it is  better to look at ethical SEO and grow your site into maturity. Trust factors are more important in the overall strategy and these can be built only over time.

Just a quick note to say that there seems to have been a toolbar PageRank update. The last update occurred on the 1st April and they usually occur once every three months, so this update is unexpected. Usual caveats apply, it doesn’t mean anything it is just a bit of fun.