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.

Microsoft has proudly announced the addition of something that looks very similar to Google sitelinks to their search results.

In fact if I was Google I would be digging out the patent they have that shows how these results are generated and thinking hard about whether to challenge how Microsoft is doing this.

One commenter put it quite well after the announcement:

After GoCompare suffered a Google penalty (which was recently lifted) one might expect the car insurance industry in the UK to pay attention and stop buying links.

This doesn’t yet seem to be the case with Kwik Fit apparently suffering a minus 50 penalty after aggressively trying to rank their kwik-fit-insurance.com domain. Another site called BestDealInsurance have also been hit while there are no doubt a few more sites with lower profiles that have also been hit.

Is this a sign of things to come?

Google has been enforcing foreign legislation on people from the UK for some time now and they are losing money because of it.

Here in the UK gambling is a perfectly legitimate pastime with proper regulations and yet Google won’t let people advertise on Adwords for gambling related terms.

Why?

How can banning advertisers for things like “online casino” make any difference? The only thing hurting here is Google’s ad revenue. If they want to be responsible and stop people gambling then surely they should remove the organic listings too.

If I can walk down the high street and place a bet then why won’t Google let me do this by clicking on their adverts?

News that Google is to sell Performics comes as no suprise and is welcomed by pretty much everybody.

However the rumour that Google might be about to buy Expedia (owners of TripAdvisor) is slightly more worrying. The problem is that TripAdvisor and Expedia get a HUGE amount of traffic from Google and there is bound to be a conflict of interest either real or perceived if Google owns these properties.

Imagine if TripAdvisor was to start getting higher search rankings, what would their competitors say? It wouldn’t do any good for Google and it certainly wouldn’t be good for the search industry as a whole. Most people are not aware of how Google works and it wouldn’t take much for the rumour that “site x ranks highly because Google owns it” to spread round.

Personally I think that Google owning any sites that rely on search traffic is a mistake.

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.

Anyone who spends as much time on search engines as I do will have noticed that Google is sporting a black background today in an attempt to persuade people to turn off their lights for an hour tonight and cut down their household emissions.

The search engine often highlights important events such as World Aids Day but it is unusual for it to change its trademark appearance so completely even for just 24 hours.

It will be an interesting study in just how powerful Google has become if it helps motivate people to undertake such a gesture this evening. To shamelessly use someone else’s catchphrase: With great power comes great responsibility.

A recent survey conducted by Superbrands revealed that the engine is Britons’ favourite online brand, beating even the BBC – a broadcaster globally regarded for its editorial policy.

Google’s informal motto is widely known to be ‘Don’t be evil’. As its influence and importance to the modern world expands, that could become an increasingly pertinent phrase.