However, there is still a geo problem in the Google UK SERPs which is more noticable on the longer tail queries (as you might expect). Higher authority domains that don’t target the UK, still manage to overcome the geo filtering and outrank UK targeted websites with more relevant content which from a user experience perspective is simply put, poor.

As SEOs we find ourselves running search queries a lot for clients, but my experience today was as a normal user wanting to buy a product. I am after a Diesel man bag to replace the one I managed to break recently. Hence, I searched for ‘Diesel messenger bags’ -

So lets look at the results that Google.co.uk gave me (without personalisation) -

1. Ebay.co.uk – Ok, cool. But I want to buy brand new and don’t fancy browsing Ebay to look through reputable dealers.
2. About.com – Not really after a content farm.
3. Zappos.com – Doesn’t deliver to the UK!
4. Ebay.com – US Ebay site. I just decided not to buy from the UK site so…
5. Bizrate.com – Don’t really want to buy from a shopping comparison site but I’ll take a look. Oh wait there, it’s the US version anyway.
6. Nextag.com – Same as above.
7. Shopstyle.com – It has handbags in the url and is the US shop…
8. Askmen.com – A blog post, no help as I want to buy, buy, buy!
9. Shopping.Yahoo.com – Diesel handbags for the US market. Great.
10. Rushfaster.com.au – An Aussie site. Got to have an .com.au ranking in the top 10 of Google UK SERPS these days.
11. Ebay.co.uk – Oh FFS, Ebay and their bloody subdomains.
12. About.com – The content farm AGAIN….!!
13. Purseblog.com – AHHH another blog.
14. Thebaglady.tv – At least this snippet is telling me I can buy them at ASOS but its just a product review with aff link!
15. Nextag.com – Seriously, again?
16. Amazon.co.uk – WA-HEY! Finally a UK site that sells Diesel messenger bags! Oh, it’s out of stock though.

Now at this point you feel like shooting yourself in the face right?

Try and refrain from doing that and run the search again. This time, click on the PPC results. I found what I was looking for with the 1st click. The Adwords team must be loving the revenue right now.

There has been a fair amount of movement for the search query ‘search engine optimisation‘ in the Google UK SERPs recently. I’ll let you perform your own analysis and work out what’s going on if you haven’t already.

But what can we learn from the state of the results?

1) The power of exact match domains – searchengineoptimisation.org has been ranking consistently in 3rd. searchengineoptimization.co.uk the US spelling is 2nd page. The only real question here, is why Click Consult are not utilising searchengineoptimisation.co.uk which is parked.

2) Link networks, link buying, sponsoring website themes (for wordpress etc) and utilising your own clients to rank for SEO all still work.

3) Hiding links (from users) using CSS is difficult for the search engines to discover.

4) There is still far to much weight placed on anchor text and it makes the SERPS easy to manipulate.

5) SEO hasn’t moved on as far as many believe.

Anyway, I don’t normally call out sites for link buying, but I thought this might be a fun one as it’s a search engine. Yahoo seem to be text link advertising on http://www.iagora.com/. From the sites advertising page -

Advertisers on iAgora range from travel sites (i.e. Yahoo Travel) to recruiters who are looking for candidates with international profiles (ie Cisco, P&G), international universities (ie EBS, RBS, ESC Reims) or telecommunications companies (ie Phonevalley).

Now obviously we all know, that when advertising, particularly when you use a keyword rich anchor text like ‘flights’ a link condom should be used.

Surely Yahoo are not paying for a toolbar PR7 link for SEO purposes? :-)  (Yes these links will pass PR and anchor text even with the onClick event).

I particularly like the bingo advert above it which makes it look even more spammy.

Simply checking the UK agencies ranking for ‘SEO’ (as an example) it’s very easy to spot that some of them are using their own clients as a link network to rank for that very term. I am not going to call anyone out or make examples of anyone, they know who they are.

Presumably by doing it they think its fine, so perhaps I can give examples.

Historically web design and development agencies have always left a signature in the form of a hyperlink on client’s sites often in the footer to show who produced the site. This for me is not a problem at all, but is it right for search marketing agencies often acting merely as consultants to do the same?

Do any other types of consultant do this? No. What benefit is this to the client? None. Does it do them any harm? Mmm.

Is It Ethical?

While I am sure most clients are aware of the ‘SEO’ hyperlinks, I know for a fact that some clients are either not aware, or do not fully understand the implications of having the link.

I have also seen cases where the links are hidden extremely well, or hidden completely in a few cases which obviously makes this a little darker as it goes against the search engines guidelines.

Perhaps these clients have been given code to insert on their site as part of their SEO service (a scrolling text box…) with the keyword rich anchor & hyperlink included, perhaps it’s a requirement of the contract or even incentivised as an option for reduced fees, or they have been told that linking out to reputable sources will ‘help them rank’.

I also know some of these agencies hard sell their SEO services off the back of their ranking for the said term to justify to potential clients why they should work with them over the competition. Obviously ranking for ‘SEO’ by using their clients as a link network does not say anything about their actual skills as an SEO agency, but they often pass it off that it does.

There are definitely varying levels of ethicality in this, I believe some agencies are very open about it while some are less so and I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular. But it does make you think, if some are willing to use their own clients as a link network for no benefit to the client, what does it say about them?

In an industry that is so often criticised for lacking credibility & transparency, does this not simply support these assumptions?

Perhaps some view this as simply a form of advertising similar to web design agency signatures, a clever technique to outrank the competition that is no more than any other type of ‘partner’ (if reciprocal) or supplier link or the incentivised links at least could be seen as no more than a form of paid links you see everyday.

Perhaps some would argue that despite all the criticisms above and questionable ethical nature, if it helps them rank for their desired term it’s clearly worth it in the long-term regardless.

My personal opinion is that everyone involved owe it to their own industry to keep standards as high as possible and in particular for their own clients.

Using your own clients as a link network for your own benefit no matter how you pass it off, to me, is taking advantage of your position. It is of no benefit to the client and it sends out the wrong message about our industry. I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone work with an agency that uses this technique regardless of how good they might actually be in reality.

I noticed this quite sometime back when Google started crawling and indexing new blog pages within minutes and ranking this content very quickly in their search results.

Crawling and indexing content so quickly was developed to support their query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm which enables Google to show hot new content almost immediately for the freshest and most up to date search results.

However what I noticed is that while blog pages can be indexed and ranking within minutes, a couple of days later the blog post is nowhere to be seen anymore. It disappears. The page is still in Googles cache, but when you either search for the url or the exact page title the post will no longer come back under search.

So I performed a little test with my last post to highlight this phenomenon.

• 17th March – The ‘Linkfromdomain Command – Much underused‘ post was written and published. It was subsequently crawled and indexed that day and showing in the SERPs for url and blog post title searches.
• 18th March – Page still showing in SERPs when searching for url and blog post title.
• 19th March – Page still showing in SERPs when searching for url and blog post title.

• 20th March – Page cannot be found in SERPs when searching for url or blog post title. The page is still in Google cache though.
• 21st March – Page cannot be found in SERPs when searching for url or blog post title.
• 22nd March – Page cannot be found in SERPs when searching for url or blog post title.

• 23rd March – Page can now be found again in the SERPs when searching for url and blog post title.

The results above show the page was showing in the SERPs for around 3 days before disappearing for around 3 days. Looking at the crawling behaviour of Googlebot it visited the page on the 17th 4 times, before visiting again on the 18th and has since not returned.

So Why Is This Happening?

From my experience this is certainly not this blog alone where this happens although it’s hard to say for certain whether this happens to every blog. Is it something to do with domain authority or links? I have seen content both trusted and new sites with both few and lots of links fall inline with this behaviour. I have seen this on at least half a dozen other sites for example. Does this happen with news articles which are crawled and indexed quickly in the same way? Possibly.

My theory is that Google either takes time to migrate the minty fresh index content into their usual index or after the initial bump in the QDF algo Google takes time to re-evaulate & intergrate the page into their usual algorithm before showing it in the SERPS again. I would be interested to hear Matts comments.

Is This Important?

It’s frustrating to have content disappear from the results obviously as you can lose traffic. But especially if you want to take advantage of Googles QDF algo or have content in Googles index at a certain date, you need to strategically time your publishing of posts with this in mind. Or you could find that the planned content you wanted to rank will not show just when you need it!

1) Check Your Outbound Links – You can’t always control who links to you, but you can control who you link out to which means it’s a fantastic indicator of trust to the search engines. We have seen time and time again when sites start linking out to poor neighbourhoods or spam (hacked sites or the DP network as extreme examples) your rankings die. So use the linkfromdomain command to see if you are linking out to anything you shouldn’t be.

You can use the excellent free Xenu link sleuth for this but with the linkfromdomain query you can add the usual spam queries to the end to narrow your search down.

For example for this blog with viagra. They all seem fine, although Yahoo still has some of it’s old hacked pages in the cache.

If you want to find out exactly what page you are linking to the site from use this command on Yahoo.

2) Identify Authority Hubs – Ok, so we believe that Googles trust algo was built around an initial hand picking of ‘tier 1′ authoritative trusted sites initially. The more links you receive from sites like these and the ‘closer’ you are to these sites, the more authority and trust you will have in the search engines eyes. It can be extremely difficult to get links from these sites, so identify who they link out to and get links there.

For example, the BBC. Then you can narrow your query down, for example if you wanted to find out who the BBC links out to with content around ‘flowers‘.

3) A little Naughty – How about as a way to find old domains with established pagerank / links? Using the BBC as an example again, how about expired domains or domains for sale which you can look to pick up. But obviously you can identify the authority sites in your niche or sector and analyse those sites.

So are you still using linkfromdomain?

Google have since this morning stopped this from working, but the basis was to check pagerank on the domain of your choice with hyves as the subdomain.

You will now get one of three different results for the pagerank of this non-existent subdomain -> PR7, PR4 and PR0.

PR7 means that the domain is perfectly fine
PR4 means that the domain got penalized by google
PR0 means that the domain got banned in Google

Sounds crazy right?  Well I was pretty skeptical until I tried it on a number of domains that I know that do and don’t have Google penalties. I know some have mentioned a few discrepancies, but all those I checked supported the conclusion above entirely. Weird.

To add a little more fuel to the fire, I thought I would run a mass pagerank check on subdomains of a number of directories. Now, we know Google started penalising low quality directories a while back, removed directories from their recommended guidelines and then put them back in again.

So before Google took away the ability to use the hyves trick I quickly scanned a load of directories on the old strongest directories list by Aviva. Old I know, but I wanted something to mass test. The results are as below.

Directories Not Penalised (Pr7)

Page Strength 10

http://www.dmoz.org

http://dir.yahoo.com

Page Strength 9.5

http://www.business.com

Page Strength 8.5

http://www.botw.org

http://bubl.ac.uk

Page Strength 8

Directory.v7n.com

Page Strength 7.5

http://www.ezilon.com

Page Strength 7

http://www.familyfriendlysites.com

http://www.goguides.com

Page Strength 6.5

http://www.bloggeries.com

http://www.dirjournal.com

http://www.elib.org

http://www.gimpsy.com

http://www.joeant.com

http://www.maxlinks.org

http://www.skaffe.com

http://www.tygo.com/dir

Page Strength 6

http://www.allinfodir.com

http://blogannounce.info

http://www.cascandra.com

http://www.dmegs.com

http://www.incrawler.com

http://www.kahuki.com

http://www.onlinewide.com

http://www.prolinkdirectory.com

http://www.rakcha.com

http://www.top5jamaica.com

http://www.ventedoy.com

http://www.webahead.net

Page Strength 5.5

http://www.anthonyparsons.com

http://www.blazemp.com/dir

http://www.ebusiness-directory.com

http://www.enquira.com

http://www.global-weblinks.com

http://www.linkwith.us

http://www.nzpages.co.nz

http://www.pegasusdirectory.com

http://www.seoma.net

http://www.web1directory.com

http://www.webotopia.org

http://www.zorg-directory.com

Page Strength 5

http://www.123kidzarea.com

http://www.alikedirectory.com

http://www.gbguide.com

http://www.homesalez.com/directory

http://www.linkspub.com

http://www.massivelinks.com/

http://www.postdotcom.com

http://www.qoobe.org

http://www.umdum.com

http://www.web10.ws

Directories Penalised (Pr4)

Page Strength 7

http://www.avivadirectory.com

http://www.romow.com

Page Strength 6.5

http://www.2yi.net

http://www.index-it.net

http://www.mygreencorner.com

http://www.relmaxtop.com

http://www.webworldindex.com

Page Strength 6

http://www.allydirectory.com

http://www.busybits.com

http://www.browse8.com

http://www.domaining.in

http://www.ebjuris.com

http://www.gii.in

http://www.sevenseek.com

http://www.site-sift.com

http://www.szab.net

http://www.uksmallbusinessdirectory.co.uk

http://www.wowdirectory.com

Page Strength 5.5

http://9ug.com

http://www.abilogic.com

http://www.apahcinc.org

http://ask-dir.com

http://www.authoritydirectory.com

http://blogaboutmysite.com/directory

http://blogtagstic.com

http://www.cannylink.com

http://www.dirwizard.com

http://www.emillie.net

http://www.e-topic.com/directory

http://www.idk.in

http://www.kwikgoblin.com

http://www.linkopedia.com

http://www.linksjuice.com

http://www.makeasearch.com

http://www.map100.com

http://www.nobledirectory.com

http://www.photarium.com

http://www.qango.com

http://www.vxbox.com

Page Strength 5

http://www.alivedirectory.com

http://www.businessseek.biz

http://www.ensuredirectory.com

http://www.ewebpages.org

http://www.excellentguide.com

http://www.fullofsearch.com

http://www.linkcentre.com

http://www.maxdirectory.eu

Directories Banned (Pr0)

http://www.uncoverthenet.com

So What Can We Takeaway From This Data?

First of all, it’s worth noting I haven’t had a chance to go through all the above and verify the results. Or that all the sites are working, what their current Pr is or whether they actually have a hyves subdomain etc. :)

But at a top level view, I think there is a clear difference in quality between the sets of directories which supports the hyves theory. There are a few low quality directories in the ‘not penalised’ group, but perhaps these simply got through the net.

If my memory serves me correctly uncoverthenet.com was banned from Google completely quite sometime ago and it still seems to be the case based on the above results. Their full domain is also a Pr0 and not showing for their own name.

Obviously don’t take this data at face value – I am not saying you should go and submit your site to any of the non penalised directories, far from it. Directory submissions are very low value these days, this was purely for analysis before Google took it away.

Key Points From Hyves -

• It’s pretty easy to spot a site that has been penalised already. So this data didn’t really tell me much more than you could already work out yourself from a quick analysis.
• There was not a lot of consistency on sites penalised – Some sites selling links but not others, some sites involved with text link ads but not others, some on the DP network, but not others etc. Again, like we already know!
• Another point to remember is that SOME of the pagerank penalisations were toolbar only at a superficial level and links from these sites may still have value.

Anything I missed?

Google were obviously equally unhappy with the search results as I was last night. In my opinion they were as poor as they have been in the last few years. A lot of big, big sites homepages went missing from the search results completely and much for the worse. I put this down to a bad data push rather than an algo change, but its hard to say. It certainly wasn’t obvious link buyers or sellers (or network schemes) who were targeted in the industries I know, it was far more random and unpredictable. In some cases non secure (http) versions of homepages were replaced with secure (https) versions even when the secure version had zero internal/external links. Strange behaviour indeed.

I actually managed to catch a screen shot of the ‘PPC blog‘ SERPS early yesterday evening. Considering this site ranks no.1 in Google UK for this term (has done since its creation) with sitelinks, it was quite strange to see it drop all of a sudden to 5th place. Not only that, as you can see there were 3 results on the 1st page, 2 of which were indented and strangely one being the homepage.

I could theorise as to what Google were attempting to do if this was an update, but I really don’t need to. This site is as white hat as it comes, all editorial links with zero link purchases/selling or exchanges and just good old fashioned unique content. So if this site ranks badly in the SERP’s, Google is quite probably going in the wrong direction. In my opinion of course :)

More seriously, there were multi million pound businesses just dropping out of the search results completely in some verticals I monitor. Not just one or two, but a number of big players in each industry. Is this a sign of things to come? No, as the changes were rolled back. But there is something obviously brewing.

Anyway, NME is first for music news (apparently) but it also seems their forums have been totally nuked by spam. The main forum boards has a nice toolbar PR of 6.

All forums are subject to a little spam but what gets me is the location based forums have had this problem from at least July (I got bored of going back) so it seems nobody at NME is really paying attention.

Forums are a great for the stickyness of your site – building relationships with visitors and having a captured qualified audience for the commerical side. This forum should really be huge in the current climate.

So why have NME left it to rot exactly?

Although a very rough kind of test, I wanted to see whether using keywords within the url only would be enough to pull back the page by itself under search. Second, I wanted to see whether Google is treating underscores as word separators as suggested they might some time ago.

Hyphens (dashes) In URL – /test-ljkdldlk-hdhdhdjqe/

• Searching for the two words with a space (“ljkdldlk hdhdhdjqe”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (“ljkdldlk” or “hdhdhdjqe“) brings back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a space (“ljkdldlkhdhdhdjqe“) did not bring back the page

Underscores In URL – /test-lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues/

• Searching for two words with a underscore (“lhdldkjjgjk_lkhjhnues”) brings back the page
• Searching for one of the words individually (“lhdldkjjgjk” or “lkhjhnues“) or together with a space did not bring back the page
• Searching for the two unique keywords together without a underscore “lhdldkjjgjklkhjhnues” did not bring back the page.

Conclusion

First of all, it looks as though hyphens and underscores are still treated very differently by Google. Currently underscores are still not being treated as word separators from these tests. The results match Matt Cutts comments from back in August 2005 on how Google would return the pages under search.

By no means do I think this was the best test in the world, but it does suggest that Google do give some weight to keyword use in urls, no matter how minor the weight might be.

Sometimes its good to analyse these things in context aswell – We know already that Google and Live seem to completely ignore the use of meta keywords (Yahoo and ASK give them some weight), while keywords used within a meta description alone are not enough for Google to retrieve the page under search (only with the use of anchor text aswell). So this gives us some idea of the weight keywords in a url may have.