Search Engine News - PPC & SEO Blog

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

Are Wikipedia’s ranking fair?
There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this!

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?

It’s not a secret that many people find popup ads annoying and they certainly aren’t anyway near as popular as they used to be two or three years ago, mainly because of this and the ability to be able to block them easily. But do popup window ads have a negative impact towards search engine rankings in Google?

The facts suggest that Google are clearly against popups and are likely to favour a clean website with no popups as opposed to a similar website which automatically forces popup ads. The reasons being:

• The Google Toolbar has it’s own popup blocker built-in.
• Google AdWords landing pages which contain popup pages are disapproved.
• Google loves quality content. If a webpage contains great content surrounded by lots of ads then some of the focus is going to be taken away from the actual copy. If a webpage forces a popup window ad to open then Google will be aware of this and are likely to consider the impact this has to users visiting the page.
• The relevancy of the ad is also likely to have a strong influence over whether this is a negative factor.
• Landing page load speed is important as both an SEO factor and now in Google AdWords too, so having large ads or popups which may slow down the loading time of a page could certainly be a factor to consider.

But despite this we can only assume that they take a similar stance towards organic rankings, how large a factor this is towards having a negative SEO effect is unclear. The information available about it’s influence towards rankings is limited mostly to forum post opinions who seem to agree it’s a safe bet to avoid popup windows wherever possible, but there are many questions which are still unanswered. For example, are all types of popups treated equally? I would expect a hyperlink popup to be fine as it’s triggered by a user action rather than being forced, but are exit traffic popups any different from an SEO perspective to an on-page load opening popup? Are popups considered more acceptable in certain niches and less of an SEO problem? Do Yahoo! or Windows Live view popups any differently? Is it possible to get around this by using search engine friendly code?

I’d be interested in hearing of any evidence of where rankings have changed as a result of removing or adding popups.

An excellent post from Rand Fishkin today about the reliance on domain authority for spam in Google highlighted a great tip to find the most important domains within a TLD.

To find a list of what is possibly the top 100 authoritative .co.uk domains in Google just perform the following query:
www site:.co.uk

This obviously isn’t entirely accurate, for example amywinehouse.co.uk and thequeenmovie.co.uk have reasonably low link reputations and are listed above sites like barclays.co.uk and ebay.co.uk, but it does give a nice indication of the strength of domains in Google and their ability to rank.

Update: This post has been removed because we have been politely asked to delete references to any examples being displayed.

A couple of weeks ago I reported that Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland launched in beta, today I noticed that they have also rolled out a country specific Yahoo! Site Explorer for a wider range of countries.

So far I’ve noticed this for Germany, Australia, Spain, France and Italy. Looking at the results returned for inbound links these are returning different counts and appear to be heavily weighted towards inbound links from each specific country.

Following on from my original example which looked at links for www.bbc.co.uk, here are the results for the same search on Yahoo! Site Explorer Germany:

Yahoo!7 Site Explorer Australia shows a different set of results, many of which are from .au domains as opposed to .de from the German search or .it from the Italian results etc…

These results can certainly be useful if you are looking to find country specific links which may be influencing competitor rankings in google.com.au for example.

Over the last 24 hours Alexa has updated it’s ranking algorithm in a move to make traffic stats more accurate, they have also reduced the date range to a maximum of 9 months.

The official Alexa announcement states that “Your ranking wasn’t wrong before, but it was different.”, there’s a few people who will probably disagree with this but the new rankings do appear to be a big improvement. This now takes into account that users viewing a technical website are more likely to have installed the Alexa toolbar. For example SEOmoz, used to have a top 1000 Alexa traffic rank, while this is clearly a hugely popular website in the search industry the new rank of 9,197 is far more reflective of where the site stands in terms of traffic over the whole internet.

Other SEO websites seem to have seen similar drops, SEOptimise going from 55,000 down to 142,648, while I’ve noticed client websites with high levels of traffic and previously low Alexa ranks now take large jumps. The actual traffic levels are obviously still the same but now Alexa may have more credibility in terms of trusting a websites estimated traffic.

Google AdWords have today added a new feature which allows advertisers to name and view different conversion types.

This looks like it could become very useful to clearly differentiate between leads, registration signups, sales etc. For more information here’s the Google Help page.

The big talking point over the last week has been about Google’s decision to allow trademark bidding in the UK.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about whether allowing trademark bidding is a good or bad idea, I understand why Google would want to keep a good relationship with advertisers by preventing competitors bidding for their brand, like they did with Marks and Spencers in February. But from the perspective of an online retailer like Argos who previously had to sell products without being able to use trademarked terms such as iPod or Sony in their ad copy the new rule does make sense. Just imagine how difficult it would be to avoid using these terms in offline print advertising!

But despite what anyone else thinks it is Google’s policy, so whether advertisers and brands agree with this or not they will need consider the implications this has upon themselves or risk losing sales and traffic. The decision now lies with advertisers as to whether they choose to bid upon their competitors, but what can you do to protect your own brand?

SEO
You obviously should be ranking #1 organically for your brand name, but if in addition you can build the strength of your site so that it displays Google Sitelinks this is going to take up more valuable on-page real estate and distract users from clicking competitor ads.

Online Reputation Management
Online reputation management is possibly even more important now, if you can the control the top 10 natural listings with interesting content about your brand you can potentially reduce the clickthrough rates to competitors ads.

Bid for your own brand
If you didn’t previously bid on your own brand you probably should be now. As soon as you notice competitor ads appearing it’s important users find the brand they are looking for, clearly labelling the ad text as “Official Website” should also help to increase the CTR of your ad.

Set your own affiliate brand bidding rules
Affiliate websites generally don’t pay out on brand search referrals, this is because the likelihood of this leading to a sale is much higher. They now face the dilemma about how to deal with brand bidding on Google AdWords themselves, for example gadget website iwoot have taken an early step to announce they won’t payout on brand traffic.

Bid on your competitors
Many brands will take the stance “if their bidding on us, we’re going to bid on them!”. With the new rules there’s no reason you can’t do this, but perhaps if no-one is bidding on your brand you should be careful about who you annoy before bidding on popular brands as it may backfire.

So are you planning ahead for the trademark policy update? Are there any other strategies I’ve missed which can help a brand protect themselves or take advantage of the rule change?

Robin Goad from Hitwise posted an excellent report today looking at the search engine market share in the UK.

What I found interesting is that the “Pages from the UK” search option accounts for 13.6% of Google traffic. When you consider that in the UK www.google.co.uk has a 73.74% market share of UK searches (www.google.com has 13.77%) then 13.6% is a very significant number of searches!

Many UK websites are also more likely to convert into sales and leads from referred UK-based traffic so it’s essential you’re listed and ranking well for relevant searches to maximise your exposure from Google UK.

Below I’ve listed 5 important steps to consider towards localising a UK website:
1) Get Indexed: The first step is making sure your site is indexed for “pages from the UK” searches, in order to achieve this a domain name should either use a .co.uk TLD or be hosted in the UK.
2) Set location: Set your geographic target to the UK in Google Webmaster Central. You can even set individual locations for sub-domains or sub-folders if you have a uk.domain.com or domain.com/uk international website.
3) List address information: Ensure your address details are listed on your website, using this in the contact page and footer will help to show Google your physical location and may also boost rankings for “[keyword] in [town/city/county/UK]“.
4) Sign-up for Google Maps: Adding your business to Google Maps is unlikely to improve your rankings but it can’t do any harm and can get you listed for local searches on Google UK and Google Maps business searches.
5) UK link building: Building UK specific inbound links can also help to improve the relevancy of your website for Google UK searches.

I noticed today that Yahoo! have launched Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland in beta. There seems to be no official announcement (or any other information on the web about this yet!) so I would guess it’s been released in the last couple of days.

Here are the results for an external inbound link search for www.bbc.co.uk:
Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland: 1,575,969
Yahoo! Site Explorer: 11,400,000

The reason for the fewer number of links on Yahoo! Site Explorer UK & Ireland seems to be because this is very UK focused, some non-UK links are listed but this mainly contains inbound links from .co.uk and UK hosted .com’s. These also seem to be ordered with strong UK and Irish links at the top of the page:

This could become very useful for UK-based competitor backlink analysis!