Dangerous Thinking

I encourage my clients who blog to blog often. It’s a good idea, as long as the quality doesn’t falter, of course

I’ve just failed to post for almost a whole month owing to extreme busyness. My apologies.

Let’s hope I can get properly back on stream again.

As Google tries to make its search results more relevant, we’re seeing how content, TLD (eg .com, .co.uk etc) and host location are interacting to influence natural search results.

I’m not going to give any secrets away about our clients, but we’ve seen unexpected results for a number of sites and for this blog.

Let’s concentrate on Dangerous Thinking, because I’m happy to discuss what’s happening here. I live and work in the UK, but back when dinosaurs roamed the blogosphere, I registered dangerous-thinking.com, thinking that was more desirable than dangerous-thinking.co.uk.

This blog is hosted at A Small Orange in the States, as they came very highly recommended as a host for WordPress-based blogs. I have no arguments against ASO; how they can supply such excellent support for such a small hosting fee, I’ll never know.

But Google now looks at the .com and hosting arrangements and feels that the content here is relevant to a US-based audience, and will tend to list it on Google.com, rather than Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I welcome US readers – in fact, anyone, from anywhere – here, but this blog has the ultimate purpose of attracting business to myself and Web Positioning Centre, and even our clients based abroad all have links to the UK. So I want this blog to rank well on Google.co.uk, as the UK is where our business comes from.

Now, as you may have seen on a previous post, I discovered that it is the top UK blog for ‘SEO Copywriting’, so things are obviously not as straightforward as I outlined above.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way. The reason that this blog shows up on Google.co.uk searches is that it has a lot of content from the past that talks about where I live and the area we do business in – there are a huge number of references to Sussex, as well as some to London.

I dug a bit deeper by running a report on a whole bundle of key phrases to see how Dangerous Thinking performs on Google.com, Google.co.uk (Web) and Google.co.uk (UK). While it performs adequately on Google.com, its performance on Google.co.uk was a surprise. It performs very well on ‘Web’, but does not feature in the top 50 places on ‘UK’.

I conclude that the .com domain and US hosting is ruling it out of the most focused UK searches. I’ve run two tests now, some weeks apart, with the same result. So I’m planning to move Dangerous Thinking back to the UK. I hope that I don’t lose my US traffic, but the scientist in me wants to see what happens anyway.

I wonder who can recommend a reliable, reasonably-priced UK hosting outfit that runs cPanel? I want to transfer the blog in one easy hit.

Edit, 25 September 2007: My colleague, Paul Silver just made a very valid point. There are rather a lot of Dangerous Thinkings in bold in this piece. Now, for me, that’s just house style – I use bolds much as a traditional print publication would use italics, to highlight names and titles. The search engines might just think I was trying to spam them. So I’ve taken 50% or so of the DTs out.

It’s not just Dangerous Thinking that’s doing well on Google. Web Positioning Centre is now top for ‘proven web optimization’.

which, I guess, must prove something about our approach to SEO.

The site also ranks No 1 for ‘proven web optimisation’.

We always advise our clients that reciprocal linking (”I’ll link to you, if you link to me”) is a waste of effort. Yet earlier today a friend of mine challenged that point of view by saying that Google explicitly contradicts our advice.

Off to Google to see what they say about linking these days. I found this page on Linking Schemes. Here’s the meat of what Google says you shouldn’t do:

…some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank

Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Buying or selling links

I think that’s pretty clear – by stressing excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging, Google is ruling out you basing your link campaign on link exchange or plugging into link farms or other kind of mass reciprocal link generating scheme.

And on what you should do, Google has this advice:

Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

The key sentence, in my opinion, is Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

May I blow my own trumpet a little?

I’ve just noticed that Dangerous Thinking is No 1 on Google.co.uk (Web) for SEO copywriting blog.

Can I lay claim to Dangerous Thinking being the top blog on SEO Copywriting in this country?

Actually, they’re not.

It’s a topic that has come up a few times in meetings recently, as people want to divide their sites up into sections such as http://wensleydale.cheese.com. Nice and keyword-rich, yes, but a real hamper to your organic SEO results. And a fashion in webmaster circles from a few years back.

So where’s the problem? Basically, there are two, both related to link building.

Firstly, if you use directories to build some easy links, you’ll find that many of them refuse to feature links to subdomains. So linking becomes even more time-consuming, and you’ll find yourself with a truncated list of usable directories.

And secondly, links to subdomains don’t give you full leverage on to the main domain (or any other subdomains, for that matter), so that you need more links to attain the same Organic SEO effect as links directly to the main domain (cheese.com).

So please try to avoid using subdomains if you’re interested in natural search results.

An interesting piece of research is featured over at Search Engine Land.

Elliance’s infographic on Search Engine Click-Thru Behavior (sic) indicates that 62% of search users clicked on a result on the first page of search results (positions 1-10), and just 28% of search users clicked on a result on pages 2 and 3 (positions 11-30).

To me, 62% sounds too low, and there’s little background information from Elliance. They just say:

Click Thru Statistics
Most people still prefer listings found on the first page of results, but as users become more savvy, they realize that sometimes better results can be found by looking further into the search result pages.

But what about sample size, marketplaces, geographical spread, time of year and so on?

There’s potentially a more interesting piece of research highlighted in the post at Search Engine Land. Duz’s post from August 2006 about SERPs Positions and Clickthroughs at Search Engine Optimization for Site Owners and Small Businesses suggests:

An analysis of the AOL data accidentally released last year based on approximately 20 million web queries collected from approximately 650 thousand users shows a click through rate for the first page of results of 89.68% and 4.40% for the second. (Summary from his comment at Search Engine Land)

Whichever data you choose, the story is that positions on second, third and lower pages won’t get you much traffic and little profit. You need to invest in effective SEO that will get your site on the first page for relevant, higher traffic key phrases.

Many of the Web sites we look at suffer from key word stuffing. While I mentioned key word stuffing some time ago on Dangerous Thinking, I’ve never talked in depth about the practice and why it’s undesirable.

Let’s start with why you should avoid it – simply, the search engines will penalise you by pushing your site lower down the natural search results if their algorithms identify the practice.

So what is key word stuffing? It’s using key words inappropriately on a Web page. The most common practice we see is a webmaster filling the keyword meta tag with every key phrase they think might be relevant to the site. Not good. Your key phrase meta tag should represent the page’s actual content (themes, if you like), not what you’d like to people to find your site for. Just put in the key phrases you’re optimizing on.

Stuffing key words into meta tags also means they’re making a second mistake, believing that meta tags still have a crucial role to play in SEO – they don’t, and haven’t done for many years. And, indeed, the way I tend to think of meta tags is that if you get them right, you get a small amount of leverage, but get them wrong and you’re in the poo.

Another common way to come a cropper is to use a piece of standard copy – typically, webmasters tend to put it on every page on the site – with a list of products or services, or geographical locations because they want to attract traffic from searches using these words. In practice, you can get away with this sort of thing, but you’re running I risk if you do. It also lowers the overall user experience for visitors to the site, which may really be the downside.

Google’s Matt Cutts wrote last week that we should Avoid Key Word Stuffing. It’s worth a read, although the example he cites is so extreme, you wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that, would you?

The most useful item in the post is a link to Don’t load your page with irrelevant key words. I’ll quote the advice here because Google is being very clear:

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. (My italics)

Have a look at your page content and meta tags to make sure you’re not breaking Google’s rules – and if you want a quick way to check that you don’t have too much in your meta tags (and a lot more, besides) use our SpiderTest tool.

I’ve just listed ITcopywriting.co.uk on eBay.

It’s a great one for a specialist marketing consultancy, ad agency, freelance copywriter or journalist. And, of course, it has a couple of great keywords if you’re interested in optimizing the site.

Edit: I didn’t get the asking price, but will be readvertising the domain. In the meantime, I’m open to serious offers.

Not a huge surprise following Google’s takeover of FeedBurner, but very welcome nonetheless. Google has made the full FeedBurner PRO stats package available for free to everyone.

I use FeedBurner on my blogs as well as our clients’, where I see its strengths more as a promotional tool than a stats package. Yet, of course, there are some very useful metrics that you won’t find in Google Analytics or elsewhere.

Some people have been anticipating a merging of FeedBurner stats with Google Analytics. That would be very welcome – I find I end up getting different figures from different sources, and therefore value integration – but somehow I wonder if we’ll see it.