@bignameseocompany.com

No-one get’s unsolicited mail from these guys.

@owndomain.com

Fair chance you actually know something about websites.

Quite probably mention the fact that you are based in India as a selling point.

You know how to “maximise brand effectiveness by leveraging the Web 2.0 Socioshpere” and hope your clients will be too embarrassed to admit they don’t have a clue what you are talking about.

@hyphenated-domain-with-seo-in-it.com

You have a directory submission script you paid $79.99 for and are willing to use to “boost” your clients’ rankings.

Guest book entries & blog comments for just $1 each.

@gmail.com

Won’t actuall say it, but you’re rather hope the client will think your having a Gmail account means that you either work at, or have some kind of insider knowledge of Google.

Client has never heard of anyone you have done work for before.

@yahoo.com

Similar to Gmail, but you also hope the client doesn’t realise no-one’s searching with Yahoo! any more.

@hotmail.com

You use Hotmail because then no-one can trace back your IP to your bedroom office.

I get dozens of these, through my own sites, and even more at work. The best ones have lines like:

“We’ve noticed your website is not ranking for it’s most important keyphrases” When it is!

“Your website is not appearing in the major search engines” Oh really? How did you find it then.

Some are even brave enough to include a url to their own websites. Oddly, none of them ever seem to rank for any word or phrase on their homepage. I wonder why.

Normally I’d join the conversation on there and pop in a comment or two, but in this instance I want to save myself the flames as I know there’s a high likelyhood lots of people will disagree.

First up, when the topic of facted search comes up, Matt firstly tries to suggest it’s a bad thing that users don’t “get”. Personally I love faceted search – and I think most users do too. I think what Matt really means here is that GoogleBot has some trouble with it. For all it’s cleverness, GoogleBot simply cannot mimick human behaviour that well, so a site using a navigation system like this presents it with a problem. How can it tell which content is good, if it doesn’t understand how to get to it?

For instance, if you and I were to arrive on a site with a good facted system (I’ve always liked the way dabs.com implemented theirs) and assuming we’re going to try and find a new laptop, we’d click the laptop category link, then use the facteted search to drill right down to get a list of the products that have the features that are important to us. GoogleBot’s problem is that it doesn’t arrive on a site with a view to finding something specific – it arrives at a site with a view to finding as much as it can.

When Matt is told by the interviewer about a site that has great faceted search that users love, he’s got nowhere to go. He absolutely can’t speak against anything that users say they like because (and quite right too) Google’s mantra has always been headed up by “build sites for users, not for search engines”. So he simply says “absolutely” in response to the statement “It’s actually a good user experience…resulted in much better revenue per visitor which is a good signal”.

The trouble is, the interviewer has also mentioned that this website with facteted search, has seen it’s rankings drop alongside it’s conversions increasing.

My problem here (if it’s not clear already) is that this idea of building sites for visitors and not for search engines sounds like it’s breaking down. Google is now such a huge source of traffic in percentage terms for almost every website it’s becoming the victim of it’s own success. If you make a site and only think about users, you’re unlikely to have any users because no-one will find you. If you build it for a search engine everyone will find you, but they’ll also leave just as quickly.

I was looking into facted search for a site, and have decided to abandon it having read what I’ve read this weekend. It’s going to be simple category structures going no further than 2 levels simply because I have to find a balance between what will work for a user, and what will work to get traffic – a website is worthless unless you have users and search engines interested.

Turns out the PS3 (the old fat one, not the new slim) had a “Millenium Bug” style fault. It thought/thinks that 2010 is a leap year, so the consoles date & time for 1st March 2010 actually set to 29th Febuary 2010. So far so boring, but that caused a major problem. Once the PS3 was switched on and went online it did what it apparently always does and checkes it’s own clock against the clock on the PlayStation Network. Now since 29th Febuary 2010 doesn’t actually exist, the PS3 throws a panic and sets it’s date back a few years. The result of that…the connection to the Playstation Network fails. And some games will not operate as the DRM checks go potty when they realise you’re trying to play a game that hasn’t even been written yet. Presumably Sony don’t want you playing games from the future eh?

The official Sony blog were awash wish outraged gamers who couldn’t use their PS3′s, but Sony did say the problem “should” correct itself once the PS3′s internal clock had rolled over to 1st March 2010 (ie a date that exists). It did for me – just past midnight the PS3 started up perfectly and connected to the PSN, and there didn’t appear to be any damage (like lost game saves).

I couldn’t believe how angry some people were about this. Sure. it’s not exactly something you would expect, but sometimes these kinds of things do happen. I’m certainly not angry about it – the PS3 is such an awesome piece of hardware. If you think the grass is greener on the other side, just see how many results you get for “Broken XBox” on a Google search – their hardware is nowhere near as robust.

The other thing I thought was great was how Google responded to this. Just by Googling “Playstation Network” the top result was a news entry letting me know what had happened. I was watching TV and neither SKY nor the BBC seemed to be reporting it, but were doing the usual reporting about the same news items they’d been talking about all day long.

First up, see the ratings here.

Look over on the right – out of 283 ratings, 280 are from ShopZilla.co.uk. Maybe that’s the only place they list where you can leave a review? No, they also list on Dooyoo.co.uk, yet have not received a single review from that source. They also have Google Checkout as an option, but do not appear to have received a single review from that source either.  Google does also list three reviews from Reviewcentre.com. Oddly there are actually 9 reviews for this merchant on Reviewcentre – 4 out of those 9 are 1 out of 5 ratings though. Run that through a calculator and you’ll see that compared to the average rating of over 90% through ShopZilla, on Reviewcentre this merchant scores closer to 55%.

Now look through those ratings taking note of when they were posted. Spot a pattern? One review a day. Almost as if someone has this as a little “job” to do each morning at 9am before they have their first cup of coffee. It’s certainly not what I would call a natural pattern.

ShopZilla claim they have filtering technology in place to prevent abuse of their system, but it doesn’t look to me like it’s working particularly well. I thought maybe I should ask them what they thought about it, but have yet to receive either a reply or an acknowledgement that they got the message (I used the contact form on their site to be sure they did).

Now, I’m open to correction on this, but I can only see this as:

1) A deliberate attempt to mislead the consumer on the part of the merchant.

2) A shockingly bad moderation system in place at ShopZilla.

3) A “we’re not really concerned” attitude from Google Shopping. Trusting another online resource simply because they are “one of the big boys”.

Obviously I’ve chosen just one example. Unfortunately within a few clicks it’s easy enough to find another, and another. There are doubtless many more. Contrast them with the reviews for this well known merchant who clearly is not manipulating their reviews (if they are they haven’t got the hang of how many out of five is best).

Conclusion: Out there somewhere, I would guess someone is doing this as a “service”. For a scant 50p per day you too can probably get a seller review profile just like this. ShopZilla’s assurance that they stop abuse using IP address filtering clearly is ridiculous since spoofing an IP is so easy to do. That’s assuming they are even actually doing it.

I’m forced to ask myself who really benefits from a review system that’s dishonest. It’s certainly not hurting Google. They get to serve their ADs and as we all know that’s the core business – don’t feed me “do no evil” as a company motto! It’s not hurting ShopZilla – someones posting content onto their system for free day in, day out which in turn makes them appear to be on the side of the consumer by showing all these “impartial” reviews. Clearly if the system is being abused in this way, the merchants are doing it, so they must be benefitting or why bother?

Bottom line: unless a review system can prove it only shows reviews from people who ACTUALLY MADE A PURCHASE it’s not woth the web page it’s published on. Be careful out there.

On the other hand, how about being deliberately deceptive, and actually publishing the fact that you are for the world to see? Now they probably aren’t alone of course, but since I’ve spotted it may as well name and shame:

chainreactioncycles{dot}com (can’t put a link – keep reading….)

They have an alluring “Exchange links with us!” page. There’s a load of gumpf about how echanging links with them will benefit your site. They’ll even pop your link on their homepage for a day or so. Sounds great! But wait….what’s that in the header of your “Partner Links” page. Some appears to have mistakenly added an extra meta tag:

<meta name=”robots” content=”NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW” />

Hmmmm – it’s also mistakenly been pasted into the headers of all the other link pages – the ones listing the 800 or so gullible webmasters who fell for this. I just love the way the noindex and nofollow are in all caps to – maybe they are really hoping that’ll make sure Google knows how little these guys think of their llink partners.

On the off chance you don’t know what this meta tag means:

NOINDEX – they are telling the search engines NOT include these pages in their results.

NOFOLLOW – they are telling the search engines they do not vouch for the quality of the sites they are linking to. That’s a bit rich since their “exchange links page” states they check your site to see that it meets their guidlines – I mean, are they doing that or not, and if so, why the nofollow?

They do, it seems, put their newest “partners” on the homepage, but they seem to habve missed out the NOINDEX meta tag. Not to worry, they found a solution to that by cloaking the link with redirects. Fiendishly inventive.

Honestly, this whole “hoard your PageRank” and ongoing battle to trick other webmasters in to thinking they are getting something when they are not is really cheesing me off. The blame has to lie at Google’s feet as they started this whole nofollow nonesense. The initial idea was sound enough – the tag should be used for UGC and I agree with that. I don’t, however agree that it should become a tool for webmasters to manipulate their ranking in the search engines and I’m pretty sure it’s intention was to try and put a stop to that anyway. The most laughable example of course is Wikipedia “nofollowing” the links to their sources. Shame on you Google.

Footnote: chainreactioncycles may well be, in all other ways, a reputable company selling quality kit to lots of satisfied customers. I have no experience with which to comment on that though.

Got this one when trying to get into the forums on mysql.com

Working on a new Drupal site at the moment, unfortunately today while trying to access the Drupal site itself I got this one:

This is what a Drupal site does when it’s having problems. Trouble is, that link to the handbook isn’t a lot of use when the handbook is on the site that isn’t operating

This one isn’t useless, but I found it amusing – reach it by following the link on the Wikipedia page all about the Woemns World Cup:

Note the reference “no longer contains relevant information”. Nice one FIFA, like anyone ever watched the womens world cup eh?

Ran the keyword “taekwondo” through it, then sorted the results by global search volume. Top of the list (of course) was “Taekwondo” with over 3 million monthly searches. Obviously taekwondo.com, taekwondo.net and taekwondo.org have all been taken up long since. It does surprise me they don’t actually have sites on them, and are just cyber squats. Presumably the owners are waiting to make a fortune selling them.

Next on the list – “Taekwondo Olympics” with 110,000 global searches. Then at number 5 “Olympic Taekwondo” with 49,500 global searches. I know I’m going to have to go for a two word domain, and this looks like the number one keyphrase. Time to visit my registrar.

Bingo – managed to get a domain I really like – http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/ . Quite surprised it was available (checked Alexa and it’s never been registered so no issues with it being used for bad purposes in the past either). Perfect! No dashes or underscores, just two totally relevant keywords with a “reputable” domain extension (I don’t like URLs with special characters or numbers and suspect Google doesn’t either). Anyone who’s tried to register a domain knows just how tricky it is to find any good ones. I was only interested in getting a .com, a .net or a .org. Didn’t want any of the “lesser” extensions such as .biz, .info or .me. As the site is really suitable for an international audience, I wasn’t keen on .co.uk, but would have accepted one of those if the name was good enough.

Next step: copy all the content from the old subdomain over to the new FQDN (still on the same server). Since the site uses Blogger for the blog I had to republish that after changing the publishing settings within Blogger. Then write a 301 redirect into the .htaccess file within the old sub domains root by entering this line into it:

redirect 301 / http://www.olympictaekwondo.org/

Publish the .htaccess file on the old sub domain and bingo, any clicks to the old sub domain now get automatically redirected to the new domain. This will include any links on other sites, links in people’s favourites and, of course, most importantly and links in SERPs.

Prior to doing this, I double checked what the Google PageRank was for my pages – Homepage a 3, Blog page a 3 and all content pages a 2. The “About” & “Contact” pages had no PageRank which I kind of think is good of Google as these aren’t pages I expect to rank in SERPs. Individual Blog entries had a mixtures of 0,1 and 2 PR.

I did a little reading up, and it seemed the consensus was that when using a 301 redirect I could reasonably expect Google to start showing the new URL in search results, in the same position as the old pages in about two weeks. It should also reassign” the PR from the old to the new in about that time frame.

The 301 was put in place on July 10th 2009. I’ll amend this post when I have a proven timeframe for the SERPs positions and PR of the new domain matching the old.

***Footnote***

Google’s webmaster guidlines recommend using the “change of address” feature in Webmaster Tools to advise Google of a moved domain. Sounds good, but unfortunately it doesn’t help in this case. They do not give an option to move a subdomain, only a FQDN.

***Update 1***

On July 15th (just five days after implementing the 301) I have PR0 on most pages, notably the homepage and blog homepage. Some of the internal pages seem to have regained their PR2 value already. Google Webmaster tools refuses to make any statements about the PR of the sites’ pages, so presumably at this stage it is still all still ironging itself out.

***Update2***

July 20th – all the PR2′s that appeared have moved down to PR0. Webmaster tools now states 100% of pages have “low” pagerank. Interestingly, this, by default, means no page that’s been crawled is “not yet assigned”. Keyword rankings appear unaffected. Rapidly closing on the supposed 2 week period at this stage.

***Update3***

July 22nd – the new domain shows up in SERPs where the old one used to. Still zero pagerank across entire site. Keyword rankings still appear unaffected, although the site is starting to rank for “Olympic Taekwondo” (about number 15 on Google.co.uk and number 17 on Google.com).

***Update4***

July 25th – no change, and we’re now over the supposed two week period.

***Not exactly an update***

I just read this article by Danny Sullivan on 301′d pages/websites and their backlinks, and now I’m wondering if Google is going to pass the weight of all the backlinks the site had where it was before. Danny’s article kind of suggests that a moved site may well lose all the link juice it previously enjoyed as Google may not count the links to the old domain as still relevant. If that’s the case it’s a tad worrying as I had a LOT of backlinks, and from good places too. A lot of them were, in fact, what I would deem “the perfect link” in that:

1. MOST IMPORTANTLY – I didn’t ask for them.

2. They were from sites on topic with mine.

3. A lot of them were deep links to my site’s content with perfect anchor text.

If I’ve really lost all that link juice, yikes.

However, having just switched to using Analytics, I had a quick look at it this morning, then a look at Adsense. Adsense is recording more than double the number of page impressions that Analytics is. Luckily, within your Adsense account there’s a list of the sites that are attempting to display your ADs. Guess what? They are all Google pages, so this is people viewing my page in Google’s cache rather than actually visiting my site.

The answer to this is simple – add google.com to your allowed sites list. It also make sense to add your “local” Google, so I added all the English language Googles I could think of.

Looking at Analytics, the bounce rate for that keyphrase is 100%, and gradually Google is dropping my position for it accordingly.

It’s always seemed logical for me that Google’s algorithm should pay close attention to bounce rate to help it guage the relevance of it’s results, but this is the first time I’ve actually been able to see it actually working in a real scenario. Hopefully they’ll drop me altogether for that keyphrase as it’s dragging my total bounce rate up – most pages on the site, when they are reached through an appropriate keyphrase have bounce rates beneath 40% which is much more like it.

“Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

I love the elegance, simplicity and yet huge capacity for failing in this. Google is saying we should really KNOW whether what we are doing is ethical, and perhaps most of us do. It’s not possible, however, to accurately measure your own standards of ethics next to Google’s of course!