SEOsean.com Blog

Use YouTube Search Stories Creator for Backlinks

If you have not heard yet YouTube release a new feature where you can create your own search story videos right just like the ones they have in the Google ads. The look really professional which got me thinking. Someone savvy enough could come up with some great videos that would get people to link back to them and all they have to do is you this simple video creator.

The video creator only takes a few minutes to create a video and it even adds in the music for you. Although you do have to come up with at least 6 keywords you want your story to include. I wish you could choose less but I guess that’s mandatory.

So how can you use this to get links back to your website? Well, first come up with a unique idea for a search. My personal favorites are Zombie apocalypse, Cookie Monster’s Search Story, Worth It. You can check out more on the search video creation page.

Anyways here is my search story video:

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | No Comments »

Google Can’t Add! New Webmaster Tools Impressions Data Doesn’t Add Up

At first I was very excited about the new Webmaster Tools impression data released this past week. It seemed very promising. As any website owner I’m sure you would love to know how many impressions (how many times) your site shows up in the search results for a given keyword/search term. And as a SEO services provider it sounded like a dream come true.

Although it would seem like this would be simple to get the data correct and you would think Google would make sure its telling you the correct data at risk of being called out on it, but I think someone at the Googleplex has got a stuck down 7 key on their adding machine.

Surprisingly or not so surprisingly, the data just does not add up with the data you find in the Adwords Keyword Tool. I ran a little study on a few websites of mine and others before coming to this conclusion. I wish it were not so but the data speaks for itself.

Here are my findings from my personal running log website. A great site by the way, if you’re looking for a free easy way to track running workouts.

Some notes on how I conducted this study:
My website remained in on the first page of Google during the entire past 30 days from which the data was gathered by Google’s Webmaster Tools. I also did not show up on any other search page during this time - just on page 1 of Google. So my results in theory should be very accurate. Then when using the Adwords Tool I made sure the Search Match was set to Exact and I used the Global Monthly Search Volume.

Now I went into this knowing that the search volume from the Adwords Tool is an average from the past several months so I take that into account when I look at the data from each. But even if you’re thinking with that the data just does not add up. I can see if the data was close then there would not be much for alarm but the data is not even close - it’s off by 100s.

So my next logical thing to do was check out another website’s data on this. I figured well let’s do someone with a more higher volume keyword that way we can also see my results are just an oddity or something.

I chose to use the data Aaron Wall from SEObook.com posted on his site when he reviewed this new Webmaster Tools impression data. Granted I don’t have access to his account I could see his 3 top keywords and their impressions data from his image that he posted on his website. But we also have to take into account (which was different than my website), his website is getting impressions on more than just the 1st page of Google (thus some duplicate impressions). So his impression results should be just a little higher than the Adwords Tool data.

Here are his results:

As you can see again the data is just completely off. The Webmaster Tools data just does not come close to the Adwords Tool data. It’s off by many 1000s.

So what’s my conclusion…? Well I think that the webmaster tools data is more accurate than the Adwords data - or so it seems. I mean it would seem to reason it would be easier for Google to display more accurate data for your website impressions rather than make some calculations based on searches - such as the Adwords data. But I think I might be wrong again! Possibly neither data could be accurate.

I decided to take this study one more step further. Let’s look at my clickthrough data on Webmaster Tools verse my Google Analytics data. Now in theory these should be the same - the number of clickthroughs are the same as the number of unique visits from that keyword in my Anlaytics data.

Here is what I found:

Shocking! That data does not match up again. So now do I really trust Google Analytics or is it just that the Webmaster Tools data is just plan wrong. I choose to trust my Google Anlaytics data since I have test it in the past verse other visitor tracking software and they seemed to match up.

So that means the Webmaster Tools data is just plan wrong but what do we do? I don’t know that there is much we can do, possibly inform Matt Cutts or submit a post on the Google Help forum but I don’t know how much Good that will do. I image we will only get a response back saying …yes it’s no accurate… Well we know that, so all we can do really is move on and use the data with a grain of salt.

The data is still useful. It’s just like the old green bars in the Adwords tool before it gave you search volume numbers. You can use the data to give you a general measure of how well that keyword does against your percent clickthrough rate. Knowing that actually can help you make better decisions on which keywords you should focus more time on optimizing your website for. Aaron Wall was also kind enough to point this out too using his own data. Thank you Aaron.

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | 6 Comments »

Google And Twitter Spam Disaster

Google recently released it’s personalized search with the inclusion of Twitter tweets. It seems Google has made another milestone in search technology… but wait a minute, one thing Google might have missed is that this could be a recipe for spam disaster.

As Rae Hoffman of Outspoken Media points out in a recent blog post, it can be quite easy for someone to spam the results. “The most obvious thing was the ability to real time spam Google’s results.” Just posting a tweet about certain topics and your on the first page of Google!

The scary part in all this is that there seems to be no sort of spam filter to stop someone from having their tweet show up in the search results. In fact I ran my own test to see if I could post something that would show up. I searched Google for SEO and posted a few things in twitter. You’ll see I quickly dominated the twitter results with my tweets! FYI, my twitter name is @gallagherdesign

Although after running these tests I did find a possible spam filter. It seems there is a time limit between tweets that one must wait or Google won’t show your tweet. Also I noticed sometimes Google would only show 1 or 2 of my tweets and seemed to block the rest. Maybe there is hope yet!

Now back to the topic in general… What does this all mean for brands? Well image someone doesn’t like your brand or they are a competitor. They could just sit at their computer or hire someone to tweet all day about how bad your brand is. And what could you do to stop them and what they say from showing up in the search engines? Of course they could always naturally optimize a web page and do the same.

So what about Google’s brand? I noticed there are no Twitter results showing up in the search results when you search the keyword “Google“. Or at least when I searched I found none. In addition it looks like a lot of brands I checked out don’t have twitter results showing up on the first search results page but rather you have to go into the options and click the “latest” link to see them.

Maybe with time Google will also add a Webmaster Tool where you can opt in or out of allowing these types of results to show up for your brand - probably would only be for big brands though like Nike or Walmart. It would be smart for them to add something like that.

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | 3 Comments »

Twitter Tweets in Google Search Results

Google just announced (10/21/09) that they will include relevant real-time Twitter tweets in their search results! Goggle states that in their quest for providing real-time search results they have decided to include tweets in their results.

How this effects search results:
Apparently only those search results that can be aided by a real-time observation will show related tweets. Google gives an example of searching for snow conditions at your favorite ski resort. So I would image the Google team will come up with an algorithm that will recognize specific searches and then display the tweets. But what I’m interested in finding out is where these are going to be displayed. Are they going to be at the top of the search results or are they going to be near the bottom or on the side some where? I guess we will have to wait and see.

When will we start to see tweets in the results:
According to Google the upcoming months it should be releasing tweets in their search results. Google states “…we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months.”

How this effects SEO:
Depending on how and where tweets are displayed in the search results this can have a significant impact in search and SEO. If tweets are displayed in a highly visible search users might be more inclined to read or click on the tweet rather than a real search result. We will have to see a study on this but it will certainly diminish the number of clicks on natural and pay-per-click listings.

So this could impact organic SEO in a negative way. But at the same time it could also help. Users will then be able to simply tweet about a topic they want to rank for and *chirp* their on the first page of Google for a competitive keyword. Then make that even better by adding a link in your tweet back to your site and you then have an effective traffic source.

Hear it from the horse:
To read exactly what Google says about the subject, please review their recent blog post announcing the Twitter and Google partnership: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

Don’t forget, follow us on twitter @gallagherdesign

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | 1 Comment »

You Can Benefit From Being Content Scraped

If you own a website, especially a blog or make post frequently to your site that could be content scraped I sure you can see how frustrating it could be when your hard work gets scraped off your site onto someone else’s. Even though it’s frustrating and doesn’t seem right to let people do that, I’ve still been deciding whether or not you could actually be harmed by being content scraped.

Up until recently I was up in arms over the debate. Could you really be harmed by duplicate content on another site and would that site show up higher than you in the search results? Well those where good questions and I’d seen answers and good argument for both sides, some people saying yes some saying no.

So I sought out a definitive answer to the question. I found that for my own blogs and websites letting people scrap my content has not posed a problem. All of my sites are showing up higher in the search results than the content scraping sites. Then I also looked at the fact that I’m don’t seem to be getting any sort of penalty form Google on this, so looks all good from here.

But the question still remained as this study was only done on a few websites. So I decided to come to the conclusion that the answer to the question might be different for each site. I’d have to test each site I work on and determine if it’s a positive or negative thing for that site. Although to my surprise, today I came across a video by Matt Cutts that can put some, if not all, of this question to rest.

In the above video Matt Cutts confirms that having people scrap your content can actually be beneficial to your site. How..? Links (it’s all about the links), if you have links in the content that someone scraped and those links are linking back to your from the content scraper site then that would count as a link back to your site. So that also means that you should not be getting some sort of penalty for the duplicate content.

Pretty interesting, see I was not sure if Google would count these as link because in most cases it’s a version of your content linking back to your content. But apparently Google gives you some credit for this. Which I actually do see in my link results within my Webmaster Central Account.

So I’d suggest letting people scrap your content but make sure you include links back to your website in your content and that the links have the full website address. You also might do the same with your images in your posts.

Now I guess the only questions remaining are:

1. Is this always true for every site. I’ve heard other webmasters talk about how their site shows up below some content scraper. So I guess you need to make sure you have at least some PageRank and TrustRank, then this should not be an issue.
2. There is still the issue that some people might visit the content scrapers site and not your site for what ever reason. Then if you are making revenue off ads or some other conversion you are losing out. In that case you might still not want people to scrap your content.

What are your thoughts? Let us know by commenting.
P.S. I know if your scrapping our content

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | 2 Comments »

Twitter Issues - Not Working!

This is just a quick post about Twitter issues I seam to be having. It does not seam to be allowing me to login to the home page but I can from other pages using the same exact username/password. But anyways at least I got around that hurdle finally.

Although now I don’t seem to be able to post anything new on Twitter. I’m just getting the loading image when I click the update button on my Twitter home page after typing a message. I’ve even left the page open for a good hour or two and still no working!

So I then came back again and it’s still not working! Ahrrrrrrr, I hate when this kind of stuff happens. I’m not that big of a deal but I’d like to at least update my Twitter page with some of the new posts we’re making on our blog here.

I’ll try again latter and hopefully they will have the issue resolved. I’m guessing it has something to do with the browser through as I’m able to update using a twitter iPhone app. Plus I just saw this posted message on the Twitter status site: Problems with updating from Firefox 3.5. Only issue is I’m not using that version of Firefox but I did just update my version so maybe it has something to do with that.

Again hopefully they will get this issue fixed quickly!

Posted in General, On Page Optimization, SEO Tools | No Comments »

Video on Domain Trust and Domain Authority

I recently stumbled onto a great video on Domain Trust and Domain Authority. In the past I’ve been skeptical of some of the ideas and thinking behind what Rand Fish from SEOmoz has said but I agree with him on this understanding of Domain Trust and Domain Authority.

His video (posted below) outlines exactly what Domain Trust and Authority are and how to use them to benefit your site. So what are these things?

Domain Trust - Is the trust search engines put into your website’s domain. If you have a higher domain trust then you site including all pages in your site get this same trust placed on it because it’s all the same domain.

Domain Authority - This is the authority placed on your site’s domain name by search engines. Again this authority effects all pages of the same domain.

Rand outlines the calculation of each of these with the following points, which I agree are some of the important points that make up Domain Trust and Domain Authority.

Domain Trust

1. Who links to you?
2. Who do you link to?
3. Registration info (domain name registration info)
4. User data signals (data from internet users through various sources like browser, analytics, etc…)

Domain Authority

1. Link juice/PageRank
2. Diversity of link sources
3. Temporal analysis (time or how quickly/slowly links are built)
4. Distribution analysis (distribution of links to the pages within your site)

Share your comments and think on Domain Trust and Authority below by posting a comment!

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Definitions for Twitter Terms

After starting my own Twitter account recently for our company (check us out: @gallagherdesign) and hearing other people ask what different things meant in regards to the “Twitter language” I decided I should write a post to help define that language. Also I’m going to be updating this post as new words get introduced into the Twitter community.

• Twitter - is a free micro-blogging website, or in other words a free social networking site, that offers users the ability to post short messages (usually only 140 characters in length) on their personal page which then can be viewed by anyone.
• Tweet - is the name given to the short updates you can post on your twitter account/page.
• Hashtag - is a tag made of a keyword or term starting with the hash character and is used to indicate a category or topic for a tweet/post on twitter. To use the hashtag you type the hash character and then the keyword/term with no spaces.
  Example: #seosean
• RT - means to repeat a tweet or message from someone else. The tweet/post usually contains the username of the person the message is from so as to give them credit for it.
  Example: RT @gallagherdesign Twitter language defined: http://www.seosean.com
  
• OH - means you are posting something you overheard and is not your original thought.
• @ - the @ symbol disgnates a tweet/post at the user’s username directly followed by the symbol.
  Example: @gallagherdesign I love your site!

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Are URL Shorteners Bad For SEO?

Well the quick and dirty answer is yes and no! Actually the answer depends wholly on the type of URL shortener and the way it’s redirected to your website.

For example if you’re URL is redirected using 302 redirection then you’re not likely to be getting all the link juice that you could from any links pointing to your short URL. But on the other hand if it’s a 301 redirect you’re more likely to get all those dofollow links pointing to your short URL counted to the page URL it’s short for. For more info on how 301 redirect effects anchor text check out our post on How To Create A SEO Friendly Redirect.

So any URL shortner that does not do a 301 redirect to your website is not going to be likely that it will pass any link juice on to your full URL page. The other thing to watch out with on many of the URL shortener services out there is that they 301 redirect to something else that 302 redirects to your site. I’ve noticed a few services do this, such as the su.pr even though it’s in beta right now.

One way to check and make sure the URL shortener is actually doing a 301 redirect to your site is to read the headers sent to the browser and see what messages are being passed to them about the redirection. The easiest way to do this is with a tool I’ve found called Check Server Headers Tool. Make sure to look over how it’s redirecting on your own site too. Since some of us have our sites setup to 301 redirect from non www domain address to a one with it, if you use a non www when creating the shorter URL you can have too many 301 redirects to get to your page.

For example:
You have the URL http://www.seosean.com/blog/are-forum-links-any-good
and you want to shorten this URL.

Now I make a short URL http://seosean.com/akes
(I made this with a script I wrote to create and manage short URLs).

Now the short URL may redirect to a www version of my site and then redirect to the page. This can cause problems as Google seems to only follow so many redirects. And if there was an added step in there that made it redirect to some URL shortener service’s domain then to your web page that would be 3 redirections.

The other thing many people have a question on is, do I get credit for the anchor text from the short URL? Answer is yes you do - at least most of the time (that’s basically the water down version of what Matt Cutts said about that).

And on the other side of that I also usually get questions about whether the keywords in the short URL’s count towards the redirected to page? I image you would not get credit for this. Since you’re redirecting your telling the world that the old address is no longer valid and the new one is so I image all things with the old address are discarded and only the new one is counted. So you should only get credit for the keywords in the end URL (the one you redirected to).

Posted in Links & Link Building | No Comments »

Google SERPS With More Padding & Small Logo!

Over the past days or so Google users have been reporting seeing a different design for Google’s search result pages. Upon initially checking into this myself I didn’t see any difference. Then later today I started to get the different Google designed search pages too.

The design has a smaller logo for Google next to the search box at the top of the page. And there seems to be extra padding on the left hand side and right hand side for everything except the navigation links at the very top of the page.

I for one don’t like the new design, I actually liked the older one. My guess is the are changing it either as an A/B testing to see which preforms better or they found some users could not see the text on the very left or right hand side of the screen due to their browser and computer monitor (I’ve had this issue before with older monitors, were you can’t see about 5px of the very left and right hand sides of the screen).

Additionally I’ve noticed a few other changes to Google’s search. They recently rolled out with a search suggest that’s embedded in the search boxes at the top and bottom of your SERPs. I know they had this a while back but they took it away and now seem to have brought it back but with different font styling (font is bold for the text you didn’t type in to help you recognize it).

Although all and all this does not seem to effect rankings directly in the search engine, at least so far from my observations. But I’m sure that the search suggest will have an effect on the types of keywords that are searched for. For example I was searching for an item the other day on Google and then click one of the search suggestions just because I was interested in it. Although I still went back and searched for the original thing I was looking for, this type of thing could deter users from one search and making another instead.

Posted in Google, Yahoo, MSN | 2 Comments »