It’s kind of hard to prove that they actually do that in search results when the tilde isn’t there though – you can get a bit of a better idea that they’re doing it when it produces incorrect search results though.

At the moment, if you search Google for Nintendo Entertainment System Data you get electionstudies.org ranking in first and second place.

The reason is because Google has associated the query “Nintendo Entertainment System data” with the term “NES”, which it has then matched up with the American National Election Studies site, because of it also thinks that that is related to the term “NES”. It’s kind of true, both terms are related to “NES” – they’re just not related to each other which is why the search result doesn’t work.

You can see the same effect with the search Game Boy Advance Association which brings up other sites that are related to the acronym “GBA”, including the Girls Basketball Association and the Gay Business Association.

There’s a great example of the same thing when you search for British Home Stores society, bringing back completely unrelated results like the British Horse Society, the British Hypertension Society and the Belgian Hematological Society.

Of course, all of these terms are unlikely to be searched very often, I’m not suggesting that Google’s search results are broken because of it – it’s just interesting to see how Google connects different keywords from time to time. Basically, what’s happening (it would seem) is that Google is connecting together two terms that aren’t really related, usually acronyms, because they’re all connected to one main term. That sounds a bit complex when it isn’t really – so I’ll explain what I mean with a crudely drawn image. The term “Nintendo Entertainment System” is correctly connected to “NES”. “National Election Studies” is correctly connected also to the keyword “NES”, but it looks like Google has connected the terms “Nintendo Entertainment System” to “National Election Studies” incorrectly because of that.

While it’s obviously not worked on the results mentioned in this post, it’s probably produced better results overall – and it’s interesting to see that Bing and Yahoo don’t return results like this when you search for these terms. Maybe they’re not connecting terms together like Google is?

Flickr image from DizDau.

Is Google Connecting The Wrong Keywords? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

There’s two main kinds of duplicate content, and it can affect sites in different ways. On-site duplicate content occurs when pages are repeated across one domain. Off-site duplicate content happens when a site’s content is repeated across other domains – ITN.co.uk frequently has their content distributed across orange.co.uk, msn.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk for example.

On-Site Duplicate Content

Firstly, there’s on-site duplicate content – where you have the exact same page repeated across two or more URLs. An example might be having an article on your main (real) URL, and then having the same article on a printer friendly page. It happens very easily, if you display the full post on the homepage in Wordpress, for example, then you run the risk of having that page appear in full on the homepage, on the tag pages, in the category pages and finally on the (real) post page itself. This doesn’t tend to cause major problems unless one of the duplicate pages starts getting all of the links – so if the printer friendly version of the page was the one that was heavily linked to, you may find that ranking in the search results instead of your real article. The unseen downside is that if that printer friendly page gets a few links, but not enough to rank in place of your real article, those links to the duplicate page will still be less likely to help your real article rank.

You can reclaim those lost links, and ensure that your real article is the one that ranks, by using either 301 redirects to redirect duplicate pages to the real version or by using canonical tags (which are slightly more useful in the case of printer friendly pages).

Off-Site Duplicate Content

It’s less common to have content that’s duplicated across a number of different sites, but it still happens. Sites that syndicate out their content, article directory sites and press release sites all have this issue – the exact same article may appear on PRWeb.com and a whole load of other sites that have chosen to pick up that press release.

In either case, you’re not going to get a penalty – it happens naturally.

If you have an article on your site – the same article that appears on a number of other different sites, and somebody searches for it, then Google is only going to try and display one result that leads to that article. If you wrote that article, then you should be the one to get that traffic – but it doesn’t always work that way. Google usually tries to display the site that first wrote the content, but sometimes just displays whichever site is most authoritative.

Google works out the originator of the article by looking at who links back. If Site A writes the content and it gets picked up by Sites B, C and D – if B, C and D are all linking back to A then it’s a clear signal to Google that they should rank site A, and that the remaining sites should be filtered out. A massive problem arises, though, when the remaining sites don’t link back to that article page – especially if the sites that pick up that article have more authority than the originator.

Where does ITN fit in?

ITN.co.uk often create articles and then syndicate them out to other large sites at the same time as publishing them themselves. Because the large sites often don’t link back properly, Google has a hard time working out who the content really belongs to. This article on astronauts carrying out a space walk was originally written by ITN, but was syndicated out to a load of different sites too, including to Yahoo. Even though ITN wrote the story, because they launched at the same time as Yahoo (and a number of other sites including MSN) then Google isn’t always sure which site is the originator. As a result, it’s easy for Google to filter out the wrong site – currently a search on a snippet of text from that article for me shows that ITN is filtered out, while Yahoo ranks.

How can ITN get their search traffic back?

If I was ITN, I’d look at getting an agreement in place with Yahoo, MSN and the like so that all of the articles syndicated out included a link at the bottom that included the article headline linking back to the source, e.g. “Astronauts carry out space walk is an article from ITN News“. While this doesn’t guarantee they won’t be filtered out for duplicate content, it should strongly help their chances – Google will usually look at who everyone links to to determine which site originally produced the content. If they wanted to take it a step further (and this may not even be possible with a topic as sensitive as news), they could launch their content, send out a ping to help the article get indexed, and then a few minutes later release the article to Yahoo, MSN and the other big news sites.

ITN’s best chance of getting their search traffic back is to make sure that they include links back to the article when they syndicate out the content. It’s not guaranteed to work, nothing in SEO is, but the worst case scenario is that they pick up a lot of massively authoritative links.

ITN & The Problem With Duplicate Content is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Tracking Site Searches

Google Analytics by default doesn’t automatically track what people are searching for using the search function of your own site (if you have your own search box). Being able to track the search terms people use is massively helpful for blogs (you get to see what content people were hoping to get) and for e-commerce sites (you get to see what products are in high demand).

To enable it, click “Edit” on the main dashboard screen to look at the profile’s settings. Click “Edit” again in the top-right hand corner – under the Site Search section, select “Do Track Site Search” and enter “s” (without the quotes) if you’re using Wordpress. If you’re not – you’ll have to enter the URL parameter that your site’s search uses (for example, if your search URL is http://domain.com/?search=hello then you’ll need to enter “search” without the quotes).

Once Google Analytics has tracked site searches you should be able to find what your visitors are searching for under “Content” and “Site Search”.

Creating Custom Reports

The regular Google Analytics dashboards give you standard metrics out of the box, for example under the “Visitors” tab you’re shown Visits, Absolute Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Average Pageviews, Time on Site, Bounce Rate and Percentage of New Visits as the default – all good metrics if that’s what you’re after. Using custom reports, you can create your own tailor made reports that give you access to a whole load more.

Click “Custom Reporting” and then “Manage Custom Reports”. Click “create new custom report” in the top right and then you can drag and drop your metrics and dimensions. As an example, a report that I like for quite a few of my sites includes Visits, % New Visits, Bounce Rate and Goal Conversion Rate (more on this later) as my four main metrics and uses Keyword as the dimension.

Give it a name and click “Save Report”. Once you’ve created the report it’s also quite interesting to play around with it – click “edit” and play around with the metrics and dimensions on the left hand side.

Creating Goals

You don’t just have to be an e-commerce site to be able to have specified goals or conversions. There’s loads of goals that you may want out of a blog and you can set Google Analytics up to report on these. My main goals could be in the form of browsers, readers and RSS signups so I have three main conversions set up for this site.

To set up goals, first go to the Overview section (the page you see as soon as you log in). Click “Edit” next to your site, then click “Add Goal” in the Goals section.

To track my RSS Subscribers, I’ve gone a bit basic and only actually tracked people that have landed on my RSS feed page (although Feedburner will show me the real number of subscribers). Name the goal (I’ve used “RSS Subscribers”), use “URL Destination” as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details select Head Match for match type, and /feeds as the Goal URL (although you should use your appropriate RSS feeds page – you should subscribe to mine here).

To track readers (the people that actually read my blog posts, instead of just arrive, skim read a bit, get bored with me rambling and leave) I’ve used time on site as a goal metric. In this case I’m looking for people that have spent at least 4 minutes on my site. Follow the same steps as the RSS Subscribers goal, but then use “Time on Site” as the Goal Type and under Goal Details use Condition “Greater Than” and change the time to 4 minutes. You can also give it a goal value, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat.

You could be a bit more strict and up that 4 minute count to 5 or 6 (or if you tend to write particularly lengthy blog posts) but I wouldn’t really recommend it. The last goal I use is “browsers”, which I’m tracking as people that look at more than 3 pages when they visit. To track it, use Pages/Visit as the Goal Type. Under Goal Details, change Pages Visited to greater than 3.

Using Advanced Segments

The ability to create advanced segments is easily one of the most useful features of Google Analytics as it lets you segment and then track the behaviour of loads of different groups and traffic sources. It’s an unbelievably awesome feature and it’s amazing how much you can find out about your visitors in such a short space of time.

To set them up, click on “Advanced Segments”, click “Create new custom segment” and then you can add your dimensions and metrics. As a useful example, if you want to track the behaviour of branded versus non-branded organic search traffic, search for Medium and use that as the dimension – set the condition to Matches Exactly and select Organic.

Add an “And” statement, search for “Keyword” and use that as the dimension – change the condition to “Contains” and add your brand name in the “Value” section (for example, I’d use “Shark”). Name the segment as Branded Organic and click save.

You can find loads more help on advanced segments at Avinash Kaushik’s blog (his blog is definitely worth reading and his latest book worth buying – not an affiliate link).

There are loads of segments that you might be interested in creating – organic visits that include your brand term, visits that include the word “guide” or “help” or “tips”, visits that include the word “buy” or “rent” or “order”, visits from Digg, Facebook or Reddit for example. You can segment pretty much anything you can think of, and with enough traffic you can usually get some pretty interesting insights out of them. I particularly like the idea of segmenting visits from social sites to see how conversions, time on site, bounce rates and other metrics like that compare against organic or paid search traffic, or display traffic. Very useful stuff.

Once you’ve created your segment you can click “test segment” to see some nice, instant data. It’s always nice to play around with advanced segments so if you’ve got a spare half-hour, it’s worth segmenting your traffic as much as you’d like and looking at the results.

Comparing Segments

Finally, if you want to easily compare segments against others piranha biscuit, on one of your main graphs (like your traffic graph), click the “advanced segments” option in the top right-hand corner and select the advanced segments that you’d like to compare.

You’ll instantly get some site usage data underneath the graph too which can compare metrics like bounce rate and average time on site. In the example I’ve used here (which is for a different site of mine), I’m able to dig deeper into the data to find out interesting things – organic traffic has a much lower bounce rate and has a higher browser rate, with organic traffic looking at twice the number of pages per visit than referral traffic. Playing around with your own segments, and working out which segments have lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates is interesting and can give you some new and unexpected insights into how different people interact with your site.

Getting More From Google Analytics is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Malcolm Coles recently brought this point home in his excellent Econsultancy post about the Mirror’s 3am site making a bit of a hash of their SEO. Malcolm also mentioned an earlier article from paidcontent.co.uk which had an interesting quote from one of the developers on the 3am site:

“We want this site to perform well over a period of time. Not live or die by how many times we can write Britney Spears or Michael Jackson into the metadata”.

And that’s a problem – if that’s genuinely what a lot of web developers think us SEOs do, then it doesn’t look good on us. If they think that our jobs involve shoving the keywords into the meta data and then hoping it works then it’s no wonder that there’s an “SEO sucks” drama post every other week.

And in truth, part of this problem is because of the sheer amount of misinformation out there (check out some of the biggest SEO myths as proof). Have a look at this terrible, terrible SEO article from About.com. Some of the bad advice it gives is “don’t make small changes to your content”, “duplicate content is for spammers and could get you banned” and my personal favourite “don’t link to and from the same site repeatedly – this is known as link spamming”. (Sorry Malcolm).

SEO isn’t about stuffing your pages with keywords and it’s not about worrying about linking to the same sites often or deliberately not making changes to your content. We know this – it comes naturally to us as SEOs, but it’s surprising to see that other people do believe it.

SEO mainly comes down to 3 things – making your site accessible to search engines as well as users, making sure the content is relevant and then making your site as popular as it can be. Most non-SEOs don’t know about the importance of that last point.

Flickr image from Phillustration

What SEO Isn’t is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

This idea fits in exactly with what Chewy from Google recently mentioned, where he suggested that users refining a query generally indicates that they’re not happy with what they’ve seen, and Google sees that as a failure. As Richard Baxter has pointed out before, Google might also want to make sure that they get it right the first time because each query refinement will cost them in bandwidth. Getting the query right means that their cost per query goes down. When you scale that to something the size of Google, that could potentially be an enormous saving.

Lastly, the Vince update appears to have been rolled out across search terms that have a very high search volume (like “car insurance”, “loans” etc), but I’m going to guess that Vince mainly applies to terms that are searched for a lot, but that also have a huge percentage of those queries that then get refined. Another reason that Google might do that is because they have no idea what to show people when they search for something as generic as “loans”. I wouldn’t know what to return to people either – are they looking for a loan? Looking for advice on taking out a loan? Do they want to lend money? Do they want a definition on a loan? Statistics on loans? Google isn’t sure either, so a benefit of Vince is that they can let users dictate what they want to see. If vastly more people want to see Money Supermarket and Tesco Finance instead of Wikipedia’s loans page – why not display them instead?

The interesting thing about Vince is that it looks like the related searches show the refined queries – so if people search for “car tax” after they search for “car insurance” – that’ll be shown in the related search. Last year the related searches only displayed semantically related terms (like if you’d put those terms into the Adwords Keyword tool). Now it doesn’t. Check it out:

Awesome.

Flickr image from Marc Shackman

Vince & The Related Searches is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

The results look terrible, a search for “tennis courts for rent” at the moment from the UK shows just one UK result. The first result is for The French Chamber of Commerce in Singapore. It’s an unbearably irrelevant result, basically.

But Google knows about it, and they’ve decided not to change it. Whatever algorithmic change they’ve made, they decided not to roll back. Personally, I think Google is experimenting with international informational queries. Basically, if the query looks like a “buying” search term (like “buy playstation” or “buy xbox online”) then it will try to show local pages, because users generally want to buy things from inside their country. If, however, Google thinks it’s an informational query (like “playstation specs” or “fix broken xbox”) then it doesn’t really need to show you sites that are based in your country – as long as it’s in the searched for language, it might be more useful to users to show them the best information, even if that means it’s from Australia, America, New Zealand or South Africa. To test this, you can try comparing UK results for buying searches, compared to informational searches. Comparing “buy playstation 3″ with “playstation 3 specs”, for example shows this:

“Buy playstation 3″ has mainly UK results, with only one US result is pretty much what you’d expect. When you look at the informational query though, “playstation 3 specs” has more US results than it does UK (I’ve listed Wikipedia as both US and UK, because it’s the subdomain that’s geotargeted to the UK, although it’s a US site hosted in the US).

Granted, it looks like Google has overshot it from looking at a lot of the UK results, and it’s especially noticeable when it’s a buying query that Google treats as an informational query. Search terms like “rent” and “order” seem to throw it out, and it doesn’t necessarily recognise them as buying terms when they usually are. Granglestownes.

What Does This Mean For Other Countries?

If Google can get it right in the UK, and users seem happier with the results (and that’s a big if), it’s likely that Google will roll this out across the US and other versions of Google. If they do, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t more refined and possibly toned down a bit. Even so, the implication is absolutely massive – if your sites are more informational than they are retail, then you’ll have even stronger competition from sites based in other countries. You’ll potentially see new .co.uk and .com.au competitors (as well as others), and competition for those top 10 results will get even fiercer. You may well lose ranking and traffic.

On the other hand though, if you have an authority site and are already well established in your niche, then you may be able to pick up more traffic from other non-local versions of Google. Either way, if Google do refine and roll this out, then it can affect (zombiesharkmonkey) everyone’s search results massively (monkeyzombieshark) – not just the UK.

It’s important to note as well that this is just what I think, I’m not 100% sure that this is what Google is testing. We won’t be sure until Matt Cutts gets around to answering the video questions, so make sure you vote – because it won’t necessarily just affect the UK.

flickr image from jcolman

Crahhblahh

What The US Can Learn From Google’s UK Results is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

The RT @tweetmeme is pretty unneccessary. Tweetmeme are taking your content and attaching their brand name to it instead. This makes me sad.

The styling of the button annoys me because it doesn’t always fit into your theme. Sometimes you want your page to look how you want it to look, rather than have buttons tacked onto it, looking all green and out-of-place.

And the URL shortener is bad. If Google treats bit.ly in the same way as it treats TinyURL, then any links that get passed around because of @tweetmeme won’t give you any link juice. This is pretty much a crime.

But Here’s How To Fix All That

You can create your own URL shortener, exclusive to your blog. Easily, if you’re running Wordpress at least. You’ll be able to have URLs that look like http://sharkseo.com/go/154. Check out the Twitter icon at the top of this post , see where that links to if you hit it.

For Wordpress, create a folder within the root of your domain. Name it “go”, or something equally short. Then make a .htaccess file and include the following code:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ([0-9]+) /index.php?p=$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteRule (.*) / [R=301,L]

The easiest way to make that a .htaccess file is to post that code into notepad, save it as a .txt and then upload it to the “go” folder on your server. Then rename it to .htaccess. Windows sometimes has a bit of a tantrum if you try to change it on your machine locally.

This code basically says “Whenever the URL /go/ is accessed, and the file specified is numbered, add that to index.php?p=. If it’s not a number, go to the homepage.

Put that .htaccess file in your new /go folder.

To test that your 301s are working, open your Wordpress admin panel, go to Manage > Posts and then hover over one of your posts. You should see in the small link-to box a post number.

An earlier examples of linkbait post, for example, is number 190. Try going to http://www.yourdomain.com/go/190 (or whichever number of you found). It should redirect you to the relevant post (like here). That redirect is a 301, by the way, so all the link juice will be passed to the right page when people link to that URL. Hat tip to planetmike.com for revealing this simple but awesome tip.

Next, you’ll want to create and style your own Twitter button so that, when it retweets, it retweets your Twitter name instead of @techmeme. The good news is, you can use any image or text to retweet, it’s just a link to Twitter.

To do this, go into your theme editor in Wordpress, open up the single.php (or whichever file you’re using for your single post theme), find the button that you want to be your Twitter button, and add an a href code around it to make it a link to Twitter. Here’s the code for the link:

<a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @yourname <?php the_title(); ?> – <?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?>/go/<?php echo $post->ID ?>”></a>

The @yourname you obviously change to whatever your Twitter username is. The <?php the_title(); ?> is simply the title of the blog post. The <?php echo get_option(‘home’); ?> is the root domain of your blog, followed by the /go/ which is your new, personalised 301ing URL shortener. The <?php echo $post->ID?> is the number of your post, so it’ll complete the URL shortened link. That will give a result, for my previous TinyURL page, as a link that looks like http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @SharkSEO TinyURL Doesn’t Pass Value – http://sharkseo.com/go/154.

And there you have it, you get to keep your brand name instead of passing out Techmeme’s. If people want to follow you from retweets, it’s easier for them. More importantly, instead of risking losing your well deserved link authority, you’ll get it all going straight to your blog. Enjoy, and don’t forget to retweet this post

(Flickr image from jenteach123)

Reclaim Your Twitter Links is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz)

I don’t know about top one, but top 3 (for the completely uninitiated) are:

1. Meta Keywords are still useful (they’re definitely not). See Meta Keywords Tag 101.
2. Keyword Density is a factor in rankings (it’s definitely not). See Keyword Usage.
3. Submitting your site to search engines is a critical part of SEO. It hasn’t been since the 1990’s, but like meta keywords, this one just won’t die.

For those who are generally smart about SEO, the ones I find most persistent are:

Click-through rate is a major part of search engine rankings. The engines have said publicly that CTR is a very noisy and un-useful signal, and not something they’d rely on.
2. The search engines penalize you if you do active/obvious SEO (they don’t). The engines themselves promote SEO best practices, and Google’s gone as far as to endorse and promote SEO events, a guide and an SEO toolset.
3. Participating in PPC campaigns (and spending more) will help you rank better in the engines (it doesn’t). The engines have very real Chinese walls between their business divisions and never let paid campaign spending affect organic rankings directly.

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SEOMoz, a Seattle based SEO company.

Danny Sullivan (Calafia & Search Engine Land)

It’s not quite a myth, but I’d say one of the biggest problems SEOs struggle with is that it is all about rankings and traffic, rather than conversions. It’s easy to keep focusing on trying to work the extremes to bring in more visitors when the time might be better spent on ensuring you’re doing better to convert your existing visitors. If you want a real myth, though, it’s that the meta keywords tag matters. It makes so little difference. Only Yahoo takes any real look at it, and even there, it’s virtually useless. Yet still, some newbie SEOs still focus on it.

Danny Sullivan heads up Internet Consulting firm Calafia and is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land.

Dave Naylor (Bronco & DavidNaylor.co.uk)

Wow so many to choose from..

“£500 one off SEO fix and your website is good forever” – SEO and search engines move forward all the time, so should you website.

“Nothing that a competitor can’t do to harm you” – There are people that make a living destroying other peoples websites

“Link Bait won’t get you penalised” – Maybe not today

Dave Naylor is a UK SEO, he runs the web design and SEO agency Bronco.

Aaron Wall (SEOBook)

The biggest SEO myth is probably that of “quality content,” especially for new webmasters creating new sites. Some believe markets are won and lost based exclusively on quality of content and quality of service, but advertisers spend $100’s of billions advertising each year to influence consumers. As search incorporates more usage data that advertising keeps seeping its way into influencing the “organic” search results. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that the web is fast becoming a cesspool and that brands are the solution. It is hard to create a brand without an ad budget. And most markets have cliques and are dominated by nepotism and little white lies. If you want to gain marketshare you have to be a push marketer until you are near the top and have momentum pushing you along. Re-invest heavily until you run out of things to invest in.

Aaron Wall offers SEO training and is the author of SEOBook.

Patrick Altoft (Blogstorm, Branded3)

The biggest is the duplicate content penalty. People think that just because you publish the same content as somebody else you are going to get some kind of penalty, not the case at all.

Patrick Altoft writes the popular Blogstorm SEO Blog and is Director of Search for Branded3.

Michael Gray (Graywolf)

The biggest myth of SEO is that everyone is treated equally by the search engines. Small, nimble, and aggressive publishers were able to build web properties extremely quickly, and as a result they were able to pollute Google with nonsense and garbage websites. As a result Google has made it more difficult to obtain the required trust for popular and commercial keywords. This higher trust prerequisite made it much harder for people to pollute Google with garbage. However smaller business, mom & pop shops, or people who don’t have the resources to compete with big brands have become collateral damage in Google’s war on spam. The irony of the whole situation is Google is responsible for much of the spam web pollution which is
monetized with Google’s adsense product.

Michael Gray is an SEO Consultant who can always be relied on to create (sharklarking) controversy.

Big thanks to the guys that contributed, and if you know of a myth in SEO  feel free to share it in the comments.

(Flickr image from Der_Flo ☮)

What’s The Biggest SEO Myth? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?