According to w3.org, 303s basically mean “see other”. The redirecting URL shouldn’t be cached and it generally indicates that the content is held elsewhere. Importantly though, it says this:

“Many pre-HTTP/1.1 user agents do not understand the 303 status”.

SEOs generally know to use a 301 for the vast majority of redirects, but if you ever get a web dev or a design team that wants to use a 303, there’s now a good example of why it should be avoided here:







A search for “Wimbledon” in Google currently shows a blank .com also ranking, just as a 302 often would. This implies that a 303 redirect won’t pass on link value to the main site, like a 301 would, and can cause the redirecting URL to also be listed in the SERPs.

For some reason, the Wimbledon.com URL 301 redirects most users to the correct Wimbledon.org domain, but will show search engines a 303. You can switch your user agent to Googlebot and check.

Yahoo and Bing treat 303s the same way:

Yahoo also doesn’t appear to see the .com redirect properly. And neither does Bing:

So, in summary – 303 redirects don’t appear to work properly to search engines. If you want your permanent redirects to be counted by the search engines, avoid them and use 301 redirect instead.

303 Redirects & SEO 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?

Check out a search for bigmouthmedia – for me, the second result is Superbreak.com. Bigmouthmedia isn’t mentioned anywhere on Superbreak.com. Digging a bit deeper, I found out that Superbreak is (or was) a client of bigmouth. Ordinarily I wouldn’t announce who is a client for who, but I don’t think bigmouth or Superbreak will mind because bigmouth announced it themselves with press releases (apparantly they’re doing a very good job).

Interestingly though, if you search for other SEO companies you can start to, sometimes, find sites that may well be their clients.

I’ve not examined this too much, but it’s definitely interesting how Bing works. It’s possible that it’s got a very, very strong reliance on backlink anchor text (so if you’ve got just the one backlink with “bigmouthmedia” as the anchor text, you can rank even if the term doesn’t appear anywhere on your site).

Another interesting possibility is that Bing might look at sites that are often both linked to at the same time, and may use this to determine if they’re related. If that’s what they’re doing then, with a bit more polish, that may just work.

(Flickr image from Brajeshwar)

Does Bing Rely Too Heavily On Backlinks? is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

Flagfox – Puts a tiny flag in the browser address bar to show which country the site is hosted in.

Live HTTP Headers – Runs through the headers that are sent to your browser.

Firebug – I love Firebug so very much. Once it’s installed, hit F12 and it’ll bring up the Firebug menu. Then you can hit “inspect”, select any element on the page and adjust it. I think it’s mostly useful for coding, but it’s got loads of uses.

SEO For Firefox – Comes with loads of awesome features like adjusting the search results to show more information about sites that are ranked, but I use it mainly because it highlights NoFollows.

User Agent Switcher – Lets you see pages as if Googlebot was your user agent, as well as loads of other user agents. If you want to add Googlebot as a possible user agent, open up the User Agent Switcher options menu, go to User Agents and select “Add”. Put the title as Googlebot, and then put the user agent as: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html).

Web Developer Toolbar – Lets you disable JavaScript, CSS, images and meta redirects. Does loads of other stuff too, like displaying ALT text on images.

SEO Quake – Shows Page Rank toolbar data, instant access to Yahoo linkdomain data and Google site: command data. If you’re going to use this in an office full of SEOs, all of them using SEO Quake, try not to have it auto-load data whenever you query Google, it tends to get your office IP captcha’d for a few days. I speak from experience.

SEOMoz Toolbar – Display Moz Rank & Moz Trust from their Linkscape tool, as well as Page Rank. You need to be an SEOMoz member and you need to be logged in to use it.

(Flickr image from flod)

Firefox SEO Plugins That Make Your Life Easier is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?

I can’t explain it better than Mozilla can, so I’ve included their video below (the full article is here) – but in summary, it lets you hit ctrl+space (you can change the shortcut to suit your own style) and it gives you a command line. From there you can start typing what you want to happen, things like “email this to mike”. If Mike is a contact in your Gmail address, then it’ll know who you’re talking about. If you’ve selected, say, a piece of text, it’ll then know to open your Gmail, fill the recipient address as Mike’s email address and then fill the message body with the text that you’ve selected.

There’s loads of things you can do with it, and you can create your own commands easily. Check out the video for more detail:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The fact that you can make your own commands is one of the coolest things about it. To start installing Ubiquity commands, open up Ubiquity (ctrl+space by default), then type command-editor. From there you can cut and paste the codes below to get what you’re after. If you’re looking for some useful Ubiquity commands for SEO then check this on out:

Yahoo Linkdomain:

E.g. linkdomain sharkseo.com - finds the number of backlinks to a domain

makeSearchCommand({
name: "linkdomain",
url: "http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/search?p=http%3A%2F%2F{QUERY}
&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s",
icon: "http://uk.yahoo.com/favicon.ico",
description: "Searches Yahoo Site Explorer to find the links to a domain."
});

MSN Linkfromdomain:

E.g. linkfromdomain sharkseo.com – find the domains a site links out to

makeSearchCommand({
name: "linkfromdomain",
url: "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=linkfromdomain%3A{QUERY}",
icon: "http://www.live.com/favicon.ico",
description: "Searches Live for all links from a domain."
});

Whois:

E.g. whois sharkseo.com – find the Whois details of a domain

makeSearchCommand({
name: "whois",
url: "http://whois.domaintools.com/{QUERY}",
icon: "http://whois.domaintools.com/favicon.ico",
description: "Does a whois lookup on a domain name."
});

Google Site Command:

E.g. site sharkseo.com – The equivalent of a Google site:sharkseo.com command

makeSearchCommand({
name: "site",
url: "http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3A{QUERY}",
icon: "http://www.google.com/favicon.ico",
description: "Searches Google for a domain using a a site: command"
});

Google Trends (With Preview):

E.g. trends keyword – This was very minorly adapted from a command I found from Pratham Kumar.

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name: "trends",
icon: "http://www.google.co.uk/favicon.ico",
author: {name: "Pratham Kumar", email: "pratham@pratham.name"},
description: "Google Trends.",
homepage: "http://pratham.name/",
takes: {"query": noun_arb_text},
preview: function (html, q) {
var params = {q: q.text};
html.innerHTML = 'Google Trends for '+q.text+'';
html.innerHTML = '
';
},
execute: function (q) {
var url = "http://www.google.co.uk/trends?q="+q.text;
Utils.openUrlInBrowser (url);
}
});

Google Website Trends:
E.g. trendsdomain sharkseo.com – Searches Google website trends

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "trendsdomain",
  url: "http://trends.google.com/websites?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://www.google.com/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches Google Website Trends for a domain."
});

Search Twitter:
E.g. searchtwitter keyword – Searches Twitter timelines for your keyword

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "searchtwitter",
  url: "http://search.twitter.com/search?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://www.twitter.com/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches Twitter."
});

Search Backtweets

E.g. backtweets sharkseo.com – Searches Backtweets for any links to a domain name

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "backtweets",
  url: "http://backtweets.com/search?q={QUERY}",
  icon: "http://backtweets/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches Backtweets for a domain."
});

Compete.com Data
E.g. compete sharkseo.com – Searches Compete for domain data

makeSearchCommand({
  name: "compete",
  url: "http://siteanalytics.compete.com/{QUERY}/",
  icon: "http://www.compete.com/favicon.ico",
  description: "Searches Compete.com for a domain name."

});

There’s a stupid amount of extra Ubiquity commands that can be made, especially with SEO in mind. If you’ve got any ideas for what could work, let others know in the comments and someone might be able to code it up.

Ubiquity For SEO is a post from: Shark SEO. Have you played The Search Game?