Are You Optimising for Optimization? Google Spells Drive SEOs Crazy

Category Google | 21 comments »

Last week, Google caused quite an uproar in the SEO community when it decided to tweak its engine’s spelling. In fact, several big SEO bloggers made mention about Google’s spelling and the Americanizing of search results.

(Tracy)

Now, as a copywriter, these results were almost as good as sending me a bouquet of flowers. Almost. I love mysteries, I switch between UK, US, Canadian, and Australian spellings frequently, and combining them with search just made the phenomenon that much more fun.

So, after a pretty heavy-duty chat with some smart people and a bit of digging, I’ve come up with some interesting explanations. (It’s my understanding that Google has changed its mind on some of these, but I thought it was worth a look regardless.)

Optimizing for Optimisation

The initial word pair to cause a ruckus was ‘search engine optimisation‘, which brings up ‘search engine optimization‘ results. Hmmm! Knowing full well that Google is moving towards producing more relevant and local results, this was completely puzzling.

I initially thought the switch was due to Adwords revenue. I mean, there’s bound to be more people including ‘optimization’ in their PPC campaigns than ‘optimisation’ right? And more competition means the CPC would be higher right?

Well, after a short discussion with a few SEOs including David Harry, I took off the tin foil and discovered it was pretty easy to see why. Google Trends and Insights both show Britons are searching for ‘optimization’ more frequently and UK SEOs are targeting the ‘z’ when optimizing their sites, so Google is giving people what they want.

Don’t Forget About the User

Malcolm Coles dug up a number of other good examples. He noticed that, when searching for ‘whether’, ‘weather’ results were shown with the definition of ‘whether’ in #1 and BBC weather being second. I don’t know about you, but this looks right to me as a user, an SEO, and as a writer. Here’s why:

If I were searching for ‘whether’ without any additional words in the query, chances are I would be looking for what part of speech it is, what synonyms are available, how it’s used and other word mechanics. Otherwise, what would the intent be?

In Malcolm’s screen cap, you can clearly see the first result (Dictionary.com’s definition) would satisfy this need nicely. If I wasn’t looking for the word’s mechanics and had meant to look for ‘weather’, this need is satisfied with the BBC weather result in second place. I have the same opinion of ’stationary vs stationery’ and ‘license vs. licence’ and think the spelling causes confusion among regular users more than some people think.

Could A Combination of Signals Trigger Different Results?

(Alexbrn)

The results Malcolm got for ‘colouring vs coloring’ were quite fascinating. Google Insights and Google Trends both show UK users search for ‘colouring’ more than ‘coloring’, but they also show the u-less form is gaining slightly in popularity while the ‘u’ form of the word is decreasing.

When I did a search for ‘colouring’ and ‘coloring’ through .co.uk, I noticed only the ‘u’ page was affected, and in fact, 6/10 results were optimized for the ‘u’ form or both. I’m sure this will vary for everyone, but still, we can see the results are mixed.

This leaves me with user data. I know my son is a huge fan of Disney, Pixar, and other popular cartoon-like movies, so I can’t see UK children being much different. I wonder if a higher number of clicks on some of that content have something to do with it? I’d say so.

Lastly, we know Google is starting to recognize relative terms. After all, some pages I’ve optimized for ‘copywriting’ on my site rank better for ‘copywriter’ and vice versa. In the end, if I were searching for ‘coloring’, or ‘colouring’ for that matter, what exactly would I be looking for? And don’t the results satisfy that request? Not saying the big G is perfect, but it doesn’t seem to be as horrible as some would like to think.

What Does This Mean?

After looking at the various SERPs, I can’t help but think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this very soon. And, if SEOs want to compete, they may want to include these ideas in the planning of their future optimization projects. I also think SEOs will need to spend more time considering the user and what they might be doing rather than focusing on numbers alone (this is not to say that some don’t already do so).

As much as I will likely get roasted for this, I have to say that I think these changes are a good thing for the user and will force webmasters and SEOs to put a lot more thought into the sites they work on. That’s never a bad thing.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Google hijackers from crackers; check your HTACCESS

Category Google, Industry | 55 comments »

When’s the last time you looked inside your website’s HTACCESS file? It really should become a part of your monthly (ack, weekly? daily?) audit routines. There could be gremlins at play you see…

Ok, here’s the gig, one day a mate comes along as asks me, “You mind Googling Twitter?” and I told him to mind his manners as I didn’t go for that kind of thing. Anyway, obliging him, the mighty Google was consulted and from what I could see, the oracle of the ‘Plex was behaving as normal.

Upon pressing for details as to what exactly he is seeing he sends me this;

As you can see the top results are for an Anti-virus website… NOT for Twitter

Being the curious type, I inquired with a few other folks to see what they were seeing. Sure enough, we were all seeing the proper set of results. Fair enough, it sounds like the hull has been compromised and he’s taking on water.

As we backtracked it seems there was a search result that had a peculiar behavior earlier that day. Upon clicking the top result in Google his AV software had done the jig, (although it may have been the Trojan mimicking to gain access).  I went over to the website in question – and nothing.

I then searched the website in Google and clicked on the listing – voila! Sure enough you we’re redirected and a pop-up prompted to do a ‘security scan’ cough cough. This behavior ONLY happened when accessing the site via Google.

 

The HTACCESS Gremlins

What could this be one wondered. Certainly the mighty Goog’ has not fallen pray to wrong doers have they? After all they say they’ve done it before;

 

Naw, that couldn’t be it.

Initial suspicions leaned towards the site being hacked, but the site administrator was as confused as a link baiter on truth serum, no hacks could be found. To be on the safe side, a few of those in the know, information retrievers, were consulted and one specializing in rarefied AIR (adversarial information retrieval) had the answer. Check the HTACCESS file; which was an enlightening journey.

You see kind reader, they had gone in and were redirecting ONLY the traffic from Google which then prompted and had caused the computer to be infected. Then, on subsequent searches they were intercepting it and sending back their own (modified) Google results. The sneaky little buggars.

 

Make it a part of your site audits

You can just imagine the reputation problems that could come from this not to mention its potential for sabotage. While this may not seem like the domain of the SEO, having low search engagement and possibly infecting visitors is sure to have negative effects ultimately. No matter how you look at it, from hacking to put nasty (outbound links) on competitor sites to redirecting incoming SERP requests, this is something SEOs need be aware of.

In the modern world of SEO, close ties with the security and system administrators is key. Everyone needs to be aware of the potential for such attacks and be vigilant. A lot of time and money (into search campaigns) could easily be washed away and replaced with a reputation management problem.

What to watch for - This type of attack is often found when you are using a CMS or WordPress type installation that requires the htaccess to be writable (such as SEF URL creation). To guard against it, be sure to chmod your hataccess so the at it’s not writable until you need to publish something new – then make it writable, create pages and then set it back again.

 

…. Something to consider…

 

Popularity: 71% [?]

The Magic Google ranking machine

Category General, Google | 17 comments »

a.k.a – Do your ears hang low

I received and email this morning that is just too good to pass up – pass up talking about that is. I don’t know about you, but I am forever getting emails offering to ‘rank my site in Google’; which is funny because they come in on my SEO Blog and SEO Company email addresses, ( instant DUH Magazine subscription there) … One has to imagine they are blind spamming since who in their right minds would try and sell ME search optimization services, right?

But for the sake of ensuring that you, my fine readers, are educated… I figured we’d have a look. Here’s the email;

“Is your Site Optimized with the Google latest methodology called LSI to Rank High??? Does your Site Rank Low??? Do you have less traffic on your site??? An end to all these question. We provide a complete solution for your Online Business need. We bring Traffic to Your Site and rank You Top with our LSI based Google’s Algorithm at affordable rates Our Steps and the Activities to Rank You Smart Keywords Research – Competition Analysis – LSI Check – Optimized Content Creation – Keywords Optimization – Back Link Creation/Link Building – Submission to Search Engines and Directories – Submission to Article Directories Please reply for the best quote for your website link and we will guarantee to Rank You 1st to 10th position in Google ranking.”

Beyond the horrid grammar and sales copy, the thing that jumped out madly at me was the bit about “Google latest methodology called LSI”. My friends, if you EVER get emails from SEOs using this little catch phrase… you know you’re in the wrong place. Actually if you’re considering hiring an SEO, ask them about LSI…. If they in any way infer that it is part of the Google process…. BAM… file them away.

You see, this is what I call the LSI Bandwagon effect (read that post for more). While search engine obviously use semantic technologies, there is no evidence Google is using that one and SEOs that state otherwise are doing nothing more than mythology regurgitation.

For more – Dr. E. Garcia – SVD and LSI Tutorial 5: LSI Keyword Research and Co-Occurrence Theory – SEO’s and their exhaustive search myths

Submit this!!

Another golden turd that I hate seeing offered by any search optimizer service “Submission to Search Engines and Directories” – while I am still mildly partial to using directory submissions, (quality over quantity, right?) the whole submit to search engines is bad ju ju.

Sure, it’s great for noob webmasters when they first come on the scene, but considering that indexation is greatly reliant on links, the link building portion of the program will naturally take care of this. While it cannot hurt to submit to search engines, it will not ensure any meaningful rankings.. so professional SEOs should not be offering this service.

All of this made me think of a tune…

(Sung to; Do your ears hang low…you know “Do your ears hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow?”)

Oh Does your Site Rank Low??? Got no traffic on your site???
Do you want it right now? We can get it over-night….

We can make the magic happen with our latest Google weapon
Oh does your site… does your site…rank…low

Look before you leap

And so my friends please do be careful out there. What if they had a slick presentation, more polished and refined? How would one know? You ultimately need to learn the essentials of SEO to even hire one. Back in the 80’s there were far more complaints about home renovators than there is today. Why is that? In no small measure the explosion of home renovation television shows and home videos quickly delivered a higher level of education to home owners than ever before.

This is turn help to weed out the less than reputable contractors as they had a hard time even finding work.

In this way, business owners need to learn at least the fundamentals of SEO before trying to hire one. While there are many articles out there on what to ask and how to go about hiring an SEO, knowledge building is perhaps the best place to start.

Until next time… play safe….

Popularity: 67% [?]

Google Hacks for Dorks and SEO prowlers

Category Google, Tools/Resources | 21 comments »

Google Hacks… or more aptly Google Dorks are a handy tool for anyone that not only enjoys SEO, but searching in general. Originally termed as such by the hacker/cracker community – you can get lot’s of interesting information. They call ‘em dorks because if you’re leaving information open to the search engines that shouldn’t be… then yer a dork!

And I figure if Google is allowed to read certain files and feels like serving related data back to me…then great! There should be no reason for me not to play with them and entertain you, titillate and hopefully even educate. Oh, and yea… we’ll get to some SEO stuff too…but later.

Google Advanced Operators

As any good search geek knows, the advanced operators are a great way to mine for a variety of data. You know the ones, site: link: intitle: and the rest of the family. But let’s look at how they got that name of ‘dorks’ just to get the idea… of some dorky info floating around at Google.

Let’s have some fun with a few shall we? First let’s go looking for some sensitive data via Robots.txt. Now I am not going to show you any dirty laundry you cheeky monkey, but if one spent enough time (and there are those that do) often sensitive info is thought to be invisible by webmasters with this little command; the Disallow

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt

or even…

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" "private" filetype:txt

Which can always be fun for an evenings reading…. Obviously you can play with keywords and get inventive. But that’s not really a dork since robots files are publicly available… ok so let’s move along…

 

Getting Sensitive

"not for public release" –
This is an oldie but a goodie and one can certainly play with it as well by looking closer at some .edu – .gov or .mil TLDs as well. For example;

"not for public release" inurl:edu

Or how about;

"not for distribution" confidential filetype:pdf

This will tighten it up to only showing PDFs which I find to be ever so much more helpful. And let’s say for fun we’re in the travel sector looking for some good tidbits for link bait of other general business intelligence we add our KW too the mix;

"not for distribution" confidential, travel, filetype:pdf

You get the idea here…. all I can say is that one can start to apply the concepts behind these hacks to find all kinds of interesting reading material. And if you’re a reporter…well, I am sure your nose is tingling at the moment.

 

Robots.txt (aka business intelligence)

Let’s say we’re working the ‘florida’ market and wanted to see what other sites in the space are up to we could use;

"robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt …or even better – (inurl:"robot.txt" | inurl:"robots.txt" ) intext:disallow filetype:txt and "robots.txt" "Disallow:" filetype:txt inurl:florida

What any of that information is.. or how it can be used, I leave to your imagination – I’m just sayin’…

 

AW Stats (aka Keyword Research)

Sticking with our Florida theme, now go looking for some stats from .edu domains with ‘florida’ related…
florida intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics"

Maybe we’re only interested in some .edu domains?
florida intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics" inurl:.edu

Or maybe we want to see what keyphrases are being used to find .edu sites; 
keyphrases intitle:"statistics of" "advanced web statistics" inurl:.edu

Webalizer; and of course we can also do the same with Webalizer (or other popular program)
intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer" 

and the ‘florida’ niche with these
intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer" inurl:florida

or….

florida intitle:"Usage Statistics for" "Generated by Webalizer"

You could even search images – inurl:/webalizer/ intitle:usage statistics + hosting

You get the idea… play with it to find more goodies. If these dorks want to leave me research data to mine for KWs and so forth…what am I to do? I merely asked Google questions and went for a random walk.

 

And what can you use it for?

I say there is no end to the information both educational and entertaining out there thanks to the dorks and Google. Some of the more interesting uses I have found are;

• KW research
• Link Building
• Content creation
• Competitive intelligence
• Nefarious things (for you A types)

And I am being tame with the examples… so one wonders, are we dorks?

During the research and many hours playing around I have found the deeper darker side and what I have posted here merely scratches the surface as far as nefarious ways to use them. Giving pause, the consideration of ranting about Google’s (and other search engines) enabling of this misses the fact we are dorks. Through laziness or lack of foresight we often leave things in public as much as leaving our open laptop unaccompanied in the park in summer. Don’t be a dork

I like to use them to find things like lists of directories and other reports to see what others are up to; directory filetype:xls inurl:SEO OR report filetype:xls inurl:SEO – that time looking for XLS files…

Link Builders dream…

Maybe you’re a happy little link builder that is looking for some nice spots to drop your legitimate/spammy links. Let’s try this;

add-links, last-updated 2000  inurl:.edu

Using advanced search operators such as we did with the Yahoo Site Explorer is another great way to track down opportunities for the fastidious link builder. First off let’s use the ‘linkdomain’ operator

linkdomain:huomah.com site:.com "SEO Blog" 

1. linkdomain: – searches for links to Huomah.com
2. Site; – tells it to look for results from ‘.com’ extensions.
3. “SEO Blog” searches the KWs on the page (or hopefully in the anchor text)

 

That’s the basics to give you the idea… now we’ll step it up some.

We’re looking for target pages where there is a link to the site (my blog again) and has the target term we’re after. This is by no means full-proof and does require some leg work, but it will make the targeting of relevant themes in your linking somewhat easier.

We can also do the same for .edu or .gov websites, which are perceived to be more valuable as trusted sources of search engines – we’d do so as such;

1. linkdomain:example.com site:.edu "keyword"
2. linkdomain:example.com site:.gov " keyword"

…. Play with them… always some goodies to be found. We’re getting warmer….

Now let’s look at another route, which is to look at the linking sites and associated page titles. Considering the theme of the page is important to the value of the link, pages with related keywords in the page title are of interest to us. So for the keyword SEO (researching my blog as a competitor) I could do something like this;

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:SEO

And when we have multiple terms such as; ‘search engine optimization’ we would use quotations;

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com intitle:"search engine optimization"

Once more, we can also use Inurl: which looks for the keyword(s) in the url from linking pages; another reasonably strong ranking signal.

linkdomain:huomah.com -huomah.com inurl:"search engine optimization"

I advise playing around to find other angles which these can be used. This is a great method ( allintitle: and allinurl: for Google – whose link data sucks)

Don’t be a Dork

There are as many ways to utilize them as the imagination will allow. Advanced search operators are one of the greatest tools for the SEO practitioner; and hackers alike. Understanding not only how to use them, but how to protect against them (from a hackers viewpoint) is huge. If you want to learn more there is some further reading below;

Google HACKS – more reading

the Google Hacking DataBase – I Hack Stuff
Google Hacking Not Fun For You – WebPro News
Advanced operators reference guide – Google Guide
Advanced search operators – Van SEO Design
The ultimate guide to advanced operators – Hybrid SEM

And even a Video for you;

Google Hacks 2.0 – Click here for the most popular videos

Popularity: 100% [?]

When’s the next Google PR update?

Category General, Google | 44 comments »

No seriously… stop laughing… get the hell back up from the floor…. This isn’t funny.

Ok, so we all know that it’s oft updated, mere representation of the floating point internal and lives a love-hate relationship with link sellers (and builders) the world over. We know the direct correlation of ToolBar PR (TBPR) and rankings is minimal at best. So yer a genius.. pleasure to meet you.

You see I get alerts on a ton of things each day in the ‘ol inbox;

1. Google Alerts for Buzz tracking
2. G-Alerts for Google Dorks
3. Forum thread replies
4. Social Median news
5. New goodies on social media sites
6. Google Webmaster Help

And it was that last one that had me going this morning. One gets used to seeing it on many SEO boards out there….usually noobs – or link merchants. But this fine morning I noticed it (asking about PR updates) twice on the Google boards…ha ha ha ha a ha… and why is that so funny? Because Google surely understands there are few reasons to get excited about TBPR beyond links. It’s like yelling “Hey I am a link fixated search manipulator – Look at me!!”

Yes, I understand some peeps still just get an emotional response to new (higher) TBPR… but not nearly as many these days as there are those wanting to somehow capitalize on the little green bar (LGB). I dearly hope none of these peeps are putting URLs in their profiles if ya know what I mean…

In one of the FAQ’s on the Webmaster Help boards has this;

“I have a lot of new links pointing to my site, but my site’s Toolbar PageRank has not changed in months.

Don’t worry . We actually recalculate PageRank quite frequently, but only push Toolbar PageRank updates occasionally. This is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is but one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. ”

And while that is a great answer, anyone asking about links and TBPR on a Google Board should be drawn and quartered. I don’t care if it is an innocent question… it’s akin to asking the cops where the best fields are to grow your pot. Sure, they would know… but uh…

It’s everywhere sadly

You merely have to step inside the front door at forums such as Digital Point(less) to find a slew of “When’s the next update” or other related and equally useless TBPR discussions… which usually incorrectly talk about PR… when most don’t grasp the difference.

So to all you nutters that simply can’t stop talking about TBPR… do yourself a favour and don’t go asking Google… That’s a lifetime subscription to DUH magazine

Popularity: 35% [?]