SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing News & Tips

Over the last couple of weeks many people have noticed several ranking changes in Google.co.uk. Reports so far suggest that the Google algorithm is currently favouring .co.uk domains over .com and other top-level domains.

Is this a positive change?
Recently Google have appeared to be moving away from heavily relying on TLD information and trusting a wider range of factors in order to assess a website’s geographical location, so the algorthim update seems quite surprising. In my opinion the new rankings would reduce the relevancy of Google UK listings as many high-quality, non .co.uk domains may be replaced by weaker .co.uk websites.

We’ll be keeping an eye on how this progresses as the flucations in Google UK probably haven’t finished just yet. I’d expect to see this even out a bit more during July, but it does go to show you can’t always predict what Google’s going to do next!

Last week Google launched Google Trends for Websites, I haven’t experimented with this too much yet but it looks like a great tool to compare website traffic.

Anyway, I’ve just done a quick search on SEOptimise and was surprised to see the Google Trends result appearing at #4:

As far as I’m aware there are no inbound links pointing to this page (other than the nofollowed one I just created above) so I’m unsure why this has even been indexed let alone ranking well.

Looking deeper and we’re not the only ones, websites such as Bruce Clay, Keyword Discovery and High Rankings have also been indexed along with 2,720 others, with Google Trends ranking well for searches such as bruceclay.com and highrankings.com.

The authority and strength of the Google.com domain means they are likely to rank well for most of the brand names indexed, just ask Rob Kerry! So it will be interesting to hear if this is a mistake by Google or if they actually intended on indexing the website URL’s, not sure if they need the extra traffic though!

Update: David Eaves also noticed the same thing happening, with a few more examples on his blog.

During the last few weeks website localisation and internationalisation seem to be a hot topic around the blogosphere.

Domain management for multinational websites is a very important SEO factor to consider, this ensures you maximise the amount of referred local search traffic whilst applying the most effective strategy overall. There are several different approaches which can be taken to manage country-specific content, I’ve taken a look at how many big brands combat this issue below.

Country Specific TLD - Amazon

Amazon are a great example of how to manage domain internationalisation issues by using a country-specific top-level domain (TLD) for the UK website. This separates content for UK (www.amazon.co.uk) and US (www.amazon.com) audiences, while still maintaining excellent rankings across Google global and UK search engines. This is carefully structured to ensure that there are no major duplicate content issues which may harm Amazon’s rankings.

Subdomain - Yahoo!

Yahoo! take a different approach by using the subdomain uk.yahoo.com which is recognised as a UK website. Using a subdomain is a method which may be more suitable for smaller websites. This is because they may not be powerful enough to use multiple TLD’s, benefiting from consolidating all inbound links into a single domain strategy. This shouldn’t be an issue if you’re the size of Yahoo though!

Subfolder - Microsoft

Microsoft used to miss out on a large percentage of Google UK traffic due to their domain strategy, this is because they use a .com hosted in the US which meant they weren’t being indexed for UK filter queries. The hosting hasn’t actually changed but other factors seem to have been triggered which means they are now indexed for a pages from the UK Google search. A possible reason could be because www.microsoft.co.uk redirects to the /en/gb/ subfolder which may have triggered a locational filter in the algorithm, Microsoft may have also set themselves a UK geographical location for the subsite URL in Google Webmaster Central. While this method has worked well, for the average website I would recommend having at least one of either a UK server location or a .co.uk domain to ensure indexing in Google UK (UK filter search).

.com TLD, Hosted in Target Country - Tesco

Tesco are slightly different to the above sites, being that they are only targeting the UK as opposed to multiple countries. However, because they use a .com TLD Tesco need to ensure Google are aware this is a UK based website and this is achieved by having their web hosting geographically located in the UK. Tesco are also in a position where they could easily add additional locational sections of the website in the future by using a subdomain, subfolder or country-specific TLD.

All of the Above! - IMDB

IMDB seem to take several of these approaches, by using imdb.com for main website in addition to www.imdb.co.uk and the subdomain’s uk.imdb.com and us.imdb.com. This is an extreme over-usage of unnecessary extra subsites and also confuses the search engines by creating a duplicate content issue. The ideal approach here would be to scrap the subdomain’s entirely, either using the .co.uk containing content with a UK focus, or host the domain in the UK and manage all content underneath the same version on imdb.com.

None of the Above - Apple

As noticed by Duncan Morris, instead of applying an SEO strategy to target Google “pages from the UK” search traffic, Apple have instead ignored this and must spend thousands of pounds bidding for it’s brand and product keywords on Google AdWords instead. They’ve also let someone else pick-up apple.co.uk instead of paying the £2.99 registration fee!

Overall
There is no “one-fits all” internationalisation strategy suitable for all websites, the selected approach will depend largely upon the main target audience. However, there are certain things you can look to avoid to ensure you’re not reducing the strength of your website with duplicate content or missing out on potential traffic in countries which are important to your business.

I’ve just noticed this morning that Yahoo! Site Explorer now allows you to filter indexed pages and inbound links by subdomain. Screenshots below.

Show Inlinks expect from this subdomain:

Show pages from: All Subdomains:

This looks like a useful report for websites which use multiple subdomains, enabling the option to remove internal subdomain links while still counting all other links from the same domain.

Having a quick look through Alexa’s top 100 UK websites, I was surprised by how many of these have forgotten to buy the .co.uk top-level domain version.

Here’s the main ones I noticed:

apple.co.uk
facebook.co.uk
myspace.co.uk
wikipedia.co.uk
blogger.co.uk
flickr.co.uk
wordpress.co.uk
digg.co.uk
reddit.co.uk
stumbleupon.co.uk
about.co.uk
download.co.uk

As they are all very popular, well-known websites the volume of brand queries are likely to be very high, many via “Pages from the UK” searches on Google.co.uk where most of these websites won’t be listed because they don’t use the .co.uk TLD and are hosted in the states. Still they could always try and buy the domains back, it might cost a little more than the original registration cost though!

For most bloggers writing is a hobby and crafting the next blog post is more of a labour of love than a part time job. However, over the last couple of years blogging has taken off and the number of people who describe themselves as full time “bloggers” has increased dramatically.

A recent survey on ProBlogger.net, the leading resource for people who want to learn about blogging, found that 15% of the 1614 respondents earned more than £750 during October from their blogs. Amazingly nearly 100 readers earned over £7500 for the month, not bad for what probably started as a part time hobby.

The key to starting a successful blog is to love the topic you write about, churning out daily posts about a subject you know nothing about and don’t have a passion for is a recipe for disaster.

Although blogging for money has the potential to become a full time career most people use it as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. In some cases popular blogs have been acquired by the mainstream media leaving the owner with a tidy lump sum. In other cases companies are so impressed by the abilities of a certain writer they offer them a job doing what they love.

In 2006 Tom Whitwell was a humble music blogger running a niche publication called Music Thing. Suddenly, thanks to Google Adsense, Tom was making money from the blog and no doubt thinking of ways to turn a modest income into a full time career.

“I’ll never forget my first cheque from Google. An envelope arrived with the familiar multicoloured logo, posted from 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View. Inside was a cheque for $130.87 (£65). A few months earlier I’d pasted a few lines of code into my little music gear blog and some small ads appeared. Now, miraculously, I was being paid.”

In the end Tom used the blog to land a top job with The Times but still runs his personal blog in his spare time.

Making money blogging isn’t an automatic passport to riches, indeed a statistic famously quoted around the blogosphere is that most blogs have only one reader. However with a bit of imagination and a lot of passion bloggers are increasingly using their blogs not just to make a living in their spare time but to land a dream job to boot.

According to Patrick Altoft the key to attracting the attention of a potential employer is to be popular:

“Blogging is like a popularity contest, the top bloggers all write about what the other top bloggers are saying and to newcomers the industry can seem impossible to break into. However with a little imagination and a lot of passion anybody can create a moderately successful blog. Employers take a risk when they hire somebody and have to trust the words on a CV and the candidates performance during their interview as good indicators of long term ability. If you have demonstrated your ability by blogging consistently for months or even years with a loyal following of readers it makes the decision to employ you much less of a risk.”

While employing bloggers isn’t going to revolutionise the recruitment industry overnight in the UK it’s well worth considering that in the future the candidate that beats you to a top job might not have a better degree than you, he just might have more people reading his 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.