ranking

robwatts — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:23:02 +0000

I’m looking for people who would be prepared to participate in a ranking experiment, with the specific aim of determining whether blog power can unshackle domains that have sat with ranking restraints over a prolonged period of time.

The minus 31 penalty is the phenomenum whereby a site doesn’t rank for its site name, url and cannot rank for any keywords before page 4 or position 31 in the Google SERPs. Sites affected by this cannot rank for their target keywords however obscure. Unless it has no competition whatsoever, sites affected by this just cannot rank, not even for a complete unique title string.

There are various accounts from people afected by it. Some have recounted that they were told by Google that they had no penalty and to gain more ‘quality’ links. Others are of the view that its a manually applied filter, whereas some believe that its purely algorithmic. I myself have a site affected by this too, so know the frustration associated with this thing.I’d like to test to see if blog power really can shift a site out from such a malaise.

The more participants the better, but it would be cool to have say 50 bloggers prepared to put a site wide link in their blog rolls or footers.

Of course, participants will be expected to stay quiet about it too, else those pesky sharky search engineers who surf these waters will see what we are up to and the game will be up. So if you want to play, ideally you will have a blog or a series of blogs across different IP’s and ranges. You’d be expected not to blog about it, even after the event, at least not specifically.

Proposed methodology

Its very simple really. Links in numbers from different domains with different authorties, with different keyword anchor text.

Each participant will get a 2 or 3 kw string to place in their blog roll, or footer or sidebar, linking to a particular page on a particular domain. The domain to be used will be clean in the sense of it won’t be porn or pills or anything decidely iffy.

I’d aim to start this once I get 50 responses and run it over a 12 week period, gradually introducing links week by week. Some people will need to run the links for the duration, others for shorter periods.

Hopefully, participants will come from a range of platforms and blogs. This will mean that links will be varied and not too samey with the added bonus of coming from multiple unique IP addresses.

I have a domain in mind we can use, but am up for suggestions from others if they have a similarly affected domain.

What do you get out of it?

Well, at the start of the test, I’ll get the current ranking figures for the targetted keywords and phrases for the page to be targetted. During the weeks of the test, I’ll be doing weekly monitoring and recording the results.

All participants will get access to a private post which will detail specifics relative to bot activity, ranking metrics and other interesting stuff built up over the weeks as the test progresses.

If you are in the business of getting websites ranked for your clients, this could offer very useful and valuable insights.

If you are interested, then send me an email with ‘blogpower’ in the subject line to watts_rob@hotmail.com. You would be expected to declare that you don’t work for any search engines and wouldn’t disclose participation to any other party either. If you can do this then, well, great – I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers

ranking

robwatts — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 11:31:57 +0000

John Andrews posted today about MFA (made for adsense ) sites appearing in #1 place positions in competitive SERPS (search engine results pages)

One of his commenters remarked

A lot of our customers are small, local area businesses that serve their niche market very well, but the top SERPs are dominated by directory knockoffs like the one you mention above, often by national websites with huge PR but no real quality Maine-based services or content… Just oodles of keywords and links to sites which they extort a huge amount of money from to list.

If you follow this stuff with any level of intensity then you may have noticed a thing or two. This got me thinking about the current state of SERPs today and how frankly, nothing very much (the inception of local aside) has changed that much at all. Directories still cut it over and above singular business entities.

The search engines will say that they want to give their users the most relevant pages/sites for their queries. They tell us that this is determined via use of their algorithm. Their algo we are told looks at all manner of signals and is then given a score for a KW (keyword) or KP (key phrase) query and outputted in the SERP.

A local business providing legal services in Islington for example, would argue that they are pretty relevant to a query for the KP ‘Solicitors Islington’. The problem is though, so do the other 100 + other providers operating within the same locality.

How can the search engine best determine the relevance of any number of 100+ providers within the area? The short answer is it cannot. So, it takes a mix and match approach and returns (in the case of Google) 3 local businesses, and a mix of other sites that its algo decided might be relevant to the query at hand. Not an ideal way of handling things, but a way nonetheless.

In the Google example below , right at the very top it shows , 3 local listings with a prominent link to a number of other business drawn from the Thomson Local Directory. Below these are a number of other links to other websites. Position #1 a solicitors practice in Islington, positions #2,3,4,5,6,7 and 9 directory type sites, with 8 and 10 being 2 other Solicitor firms.

I refreshed the Google SERP for this KP a number of times and noticed that the businesses returned as local choices did not change. This might be rotated daily or weekly (I don’t know) but assuming it doesn’t (I’ll check tomorrow) then from the perspective of the Solicitor touting for business in Islington that didn’t ever appear in these local offerings, its a pretty poor show.

Of course, Google or any search engine for that matter isn’t obligated to return any of them – its a decision of their choosing entirely, they are after all, a capital generating enterprise in the business of making money.

Its clear to me that the business providers themselves appear to be the losers whilst the real winners it seems are the directory providers. These are often designed to attract adsense clicks from the unsavvy, they benefit 2 fold. They get to charge an inclusion fee to their advertisers and also receive a payment for a % of any adsense clicks they might generate too. It’s a familiar model and can be seen amongst all manner of competitive KW sectors. Travel, Money, Health Care, Law, – you name it, and you’ll find a directory listing amongst the returned results, for the directory owners it seems like a very good thing indeed.

The search engines seem to like this model too, as a best fits solution to a problem. After all, how do you objectively or fairly rank 1 , 2 or 3 hundred providers of a service operating in the same area? There are after all only 10 default spots to be had. Who is there to say who is best, most efficient, competitive etc. A relevancy algo doesn’t thats for sure.

Could this be addressed in any way?

Perhaps, with the right will of course why not.

For the search engines that run paid advertising programs, they could use the data held to determine which websites were targeting which keywords and then in some way integrate these on some kind of rotational level in their SERPs. For the business wanting to get customers to their sites, this would at least add some kind of perception of fairness and perhaps level the playing field somewhat as opposed to the current state which uses a mix of SEO’ed type data generated via link pop, on page and other relatively easy to manipulate metrics.

For those who might shout, hell what about us, we don’t use adwords why shouldn’t we be able to rank? Simple answer of course is that search engines are businesses with no obligation to include or rank anybody. Its their free SERPS which give them their user base, it is the platform on which they’ve built their advertising model around which paradoxically makes my whole suggestion null and void! As to take such a route undermines the whole concept of paid search and algorithmic ‘free’ search results as being a separate unrelated thing. The moment either of these lines are crossed then the whole house of cards implodes.

Anyways, getting back to ranking websites and getting a business in front of eyeballs, it seems that for now, the message is loud and clear. Get your business into local search directories. If you are really lucky then you might just get returned in those juicy little local spots as shown, and if you don’t quite make it there, then there are always a number of other directories with search engine result spots on page one to fall back on.

One things for sure. If you are starting from scratch and expect your nice new shiny website to start ranking for keywords and phrases that matter, then…well, it just isn’t going to happen.

Most directories suck and could do a whole lot better

ranking

robwatts — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:05:21 +0000

If you’ve ever launched a new website, especially since 2005, then you’ll know that it can take quite some time to be found for your target kw’s and phrases within the search engines.This is a little look at Google and how it treats new domains and how trust and authority are bestowed from parent domains to subdomains and how it can be an effective strategy in kick starting a new campaign, without excessive reliance on PPC campaigns.
I launched a new subdomain on the 1st January 2007. It fitted in with one of my new years resolutions of blog regularly.

I wrote a few posts about various odds and sods as and when they occured to me. I gave them logical titles and didn’t give too much thought to any SEO’d page content and structure strategy. It was a WordPress subdomain in the form of robwatts.wordpress.com.

As I said previously I wasn’t sure if I was really going to get into this blogging lark so rather than go out and purchase a domain, upload scripts, create a database, configure it, start getting links etc, only to find after a week or so my interest had waned, I decided to go with a free wordpress subdomain. Signed up with WP, chose a theme and started to blog, easy peasy lovely jubbly.
A few days later I found I was getting referals for various kw’s from Google. Wow, I thought, slick and quick. I was pretty surprised at the almost instant level of authority. Take the query pay to blog. The subdomain ranked virtually overnight, there it is right at the bottom, position number 10 in my abridged jpg.

I haven’t looked at any other big authorities with similar setups but I’d suspect to see the same behaviour. Sub domains it seems, do carry authority and trust from the parent.

Ok, its not a competitive term either, 156,000,000 reported results 49,000 allintitle results, a measley 13 allinurl results and not even sure if its reliable or worth mentioning but, 11 allinanchor: results. The point is though, it sails on through the usual ranking restrictions applied to newly purchased domains, and ranks for a 3 word phrase, virtually overnight.

Here is another, a 3 word phrase in a post about celebrity big brother that I found in my wordpress control panel search engine referals, someone was searching for the curious phrase ‘dirk fuckin benedict’ in this case Google decided to rank it in 1st position.

In some respects I am reminded of the Google of old. There was a day in ancient search engine history when Google did actually give new pages and domains a little boost for a short while before they settled down into a slot come the next dance or update. People spoke in terms of receiving a visit from ‘Freshbot’.People, newbs especially were invariably pleased to see rankings for their kw’s pretty quick. Only to watch them plummet or settle into a less respectable position some time after.

Google 2k7 is not like that though; its a lot tougher to break through. However, with that said, I am surprised that it would bestow such trust, so early, especially for content that is for all intents and purposes an unknown quantity. What with splogs especially, it seems a sure fire way of allowing dubious content into the index, relatively quickly.

Take my yackyack.co.uk domain. Brand new, no authority, no history, no trust, very very few reported IBL’s or citations at all. Its a new domain, plain and simple, I don’t expect it to rank, at all not for a while, and guess what? It doesn’t either. Its spidered infrequently, without too much depth and as of today has about 7 pages in the Google database. The only difference between this and my blogs former home is the WordPress connection.

Take the wordpress trust and authority scores away and the blog doesn’t rank for a thing. Yet, the content is virtually the same, same titles, same content, slightly different layout and structure.

Could it be a case of duplicate content on the new (this) domain being discounted? Possibly but I think unlikely, the sample is just too small, yet regardless of that, it still doesn’t explain away why a.) the newer content ranks and b) why the subdomain ranked in such a relatively short time. All signals point to the subdomain having the ability for instant ranking juice.

Moral of the story; get those subs off of the bench, they might just be able to help your 1st team play to their best.