For many months now, webmasters have been responding to signals from Google that page speed would soon become a ranking factor. Very recently, Google confirmed that for a limited set of queries, Google.com (US) results are influenced by page load times (around 1% of queries). Although you shouldn’t panic about this announcement, it may be wise to be prepared for a wider implementation of the change across Google’s search results.
Thing is, if you haven’t been optimising your site performance for improved speed until now, you may have missed a trick (or a conversion, email registration, repeat visit or some other valuable metric). Read the full post...
Regardless of the size of your website or the revenue it drives, launching a freshly redesigned site can be a difficult and nerve-wracking time for site owners and their SEO Consultants alike. Here are some of my tips for handling a site migration well.
Define and communicate your keyword strategy
They say be prepared or be prepared to fail, and your preparation for migration should start early. Keyword strategy is an oft-overlooked part of migration planning and can sometimes be left until your site is going live. Your keyword research methodology is critical to designing a strategy that will enhance and not decimate your search traffic during the transition to live process. Read the full post...
In July 2009, I used some data extracted from Linkscape to attempt to find patterns in ranking position and general domain / URL trust metrics after the Vince update hit the UK SERPS. Though the analysis couldn’t have taken into account the fact that Google since confirmed they use click through (satisfaction rate) based data in some, higher volume search results, it did show some patterns in ranking position in comparison to relative trust levels using the Linkscape numbers.
Read the full post...
Today, we have an excellent guest post from Paddy Moogan. Paddy has worked online for about 5 years now, the last 2 have been as an Online Campaign Manager for Pin Digital, an Agency who are based in Warwickshire. He manages and runs SEO and PPC campaigns for a number of large Ecommerce clients as well as B2B websites in the UK. Paddy often talks about his experiences in SEO on his blog as well as talking about his other passion in life, travelling. Over to you, Paddy!
Photo by stevendepolo Read the full post...
Today we’ve been spending some time thinking about and implementing the X-Robots-Tag, a lesser known Robots Exclusion Protocol for “noarchive”, “noindex”, “nofollow”, and “nosnippet” supported by Google, Yahoo and Bing. Why lesser known? The X-Robots-Tag likes to hide in your server header responses rather than in the <head> element of a web page. Rather handy in some cases, and I’m about to tell you why.
Photo by: maxkiesler
It seemed pretty relevant to write a blog post about the subject of REP, since Danny at Search Engine Land took a look at ACAP vs Robots.txt very recently – an article that in my mind, provides an excellent framework for understanding exactly what’s included in Robots Exclusion Protocol while providing an insight into how some news content providers feel about their content being handled by search engines. Read the full post...
Since talking to Dave at A4UExpo about using noarchive in your meta header, I’ve been interested in understanding if implementing an instruction to remove the cache link using the “noarchive” tag has any impact on your search engine traffic and rankings.
Photo by: acka47
As Dave puts it:
So the only reason I can see why I should leave the Google Cached link is so that other people can see what my website looks like in Googles eyes and why would I do that ? Read the full post...
Photo by: Macinate
Have you ever felt screwed because someone on the internet owns your beloved domain name? I can honestly say that I can sleep a little better tonight, since I acquired SEOgadget.com, the .com brethren of my beloved UK TLD, SEOgadget.co.uk.
How to buy a domain through using domain brokerage
I used SEDO, but there are a number of other recommended domain brokers to choose from. In the past, I’ve worked with services from Godaddy and Snapnames.com. I’d love to write about them all, but I only bought one domain this time so here’s how it worked with SEDO. Read the full post...
Photo by stevendepolo
Some of my UK SEO friends have been known to argue that irrelevant links have long been detected and discounted by search engines, making related links an important part of your link building strategy. Do you really need large numbers of “relevant” links to get a site to rank for your top keyword?
No. As long you’ve built links on reasonably trusted, authoritative domains, and you’ve thrown in some (sometimes over) optimised anchor text for good measure, you can still rank. That’s not to say relevance plays an important role, but not as much as one as I had been hoping for. Read the full post...
