A really interesting read from Bizreport
“and” and “or” in search strings produces different results.
…
“Traditional search engine optimization methods may have worked to increase website traffic in 2005 or 2006, but users’ search habits are changing and marketers may need to change how they target the market through search.”
Imagine if you have a good quality website (in the view of the search engines).
What would happen if you put something on the website which the search engines may not like, say an ‘ebook’.
An ebook is usually written by someone, then sold per copy money on websites and ebay.
An ebook will contain either information or advice, or could be a story.
The ebook business is worth a lot of money, but if you are like me, you’ll think they are annoying as information contained within ebooks is usually freely available if you know where to search.
So what would happen if you posted a link to an ebook on a site with a good level of Google Juice? Would the juice level go down?
An interesting discussion is happening here. Go have alook.
Not posted here for a while, but this is interesting…
http://www.sda-asia.com/sda/news/psecom,id,9986,srn,4,nodeid,1,_language,Singapore.html
Spammers are everywhere. They really annoy me.
Watch out for one of the latest crazes spammers are up to.
Now they are leaving spam comments on blogs saying things along the line of “I like your site, it is good, I have bookmarked it”. This generic comment might seem genuine but when looking at the associated link to the comment it could be pointing at a mobile phone ringtone site, or a casino site, or something else.
Link spamming. Crafty, and not good.
Trackback linking is also a nightmare for bloggers.
Trackbacking enables bloggers to see which sites are pointing at specific webpages within blogs. Each post within a blog with trackbacking enabled will list all the sites pointing at it. Now imagine what would happen if spammers simply pointed their pages at your blog entries? Your blog entries would unknowingly point back at spammers websites, those pointing at you.
Not good.
As I’ve expressed earlier here at GoogeJuice….Spamming simply does not work and search engines are building technology to counteract those that spam against us.
Check out what Matt Cutts has to say about it all here.
Search Engines spot spammers, pouring unrelated links onto pages of the Internet, mainly though blogs.
Search Engines learn what links on pages are unrelated to content. I’m sure of that.
Because there are vast amounts of information on any and every subject now available on the Internet, simply indexing of content by search engines was the job of the past. Search engines need to get down to the nitty gritty, grading everything.
As searchers we are all hungry to be given the most useful information in relation to the search string we use on a search engine. Being faced with unrelated content, or spam pages causes us annoyance and frustration.
Spammers are nasty people, basically they are attempting to do two things:
1) Get a ‘free link’ or ‘links’ through blog comments back to their page and hope a visitor will click.
2) Improve their ‘Google Juice’ by having lots of sites pointing at their sites.
Search engines validate each and every page on a site and grade how ‘useful’ searchers find it. Search Engines also look at the links contained on each page and their validity to take the searcher to more related content.
The overall site containing the graded pages also gets a grade of its own. A big job. So when people say ‘my website has a Google PageRank of 4′ it might have, but the page rank for each of the pages within the site will vary on their relevance to each and every subject they discuss.
The most common rule of ranking is to grade each ’site’ based on its popularity, which is considered by the number of other sites on the Internet that link to it.
To add to the mix are these spammers, who try and get as many unsolicited links to their sites by volume posting on blogs and in comment boxes all over the web.
Spammers think that by commenting on blogs where possible they can raise the amount of links back to their website for specific ‘keywords’. I’m constantly challenged to remove spam comments linking to everything from Viagra sellers to Casino’s.
What spammers don’t think about is that if my blog about cats is linking (because of the spammer) to a casino website Google and rivals will consider the link ‘unrelated’ to the cat related article, discounting the validity of the link. If someone links from my cat blog to another cat related article (through a comment) Google and friends will consider this more relevant and of more use to its searchers.
So I guess what I’m saying is if I’ve written a blog article about cats and then linked it all over the web to related cat pages and then a spammer comes along and comments linking my cat article to a casino, pine tree seller, fish finger wholesaler and a breast enlargement discount special deal …. don’t they think Google and friends wont notice?
Spammers should attack gambling blogs if they want to link to their gambling site, they should spam cat blogs if they want to link to their pet food site. Most of all, spammers should get lost, because their links do.
In a nutshell, Google Juice is all very complicated really, if you want to talk about this more I might be online, check on the top right hand side of this page.
A really easy thing to do, using Google.
In the search box, type in the following:
link:www.ultralab.net
That will show you all the pages from around the world that have links to Ultralab, my employer.
Simply replace the www.ultralab.net with your own URL in the search box.
Some of the 454 links will be from within the www.ultralab.net site, linking back to itself.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters is a very important site to go and visit if you want to hear it all straight from the horses mouth.
A quote from a linked page within the site explains the PageRank a bit better…
“Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query”.
http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
So explore what Google has to say as you build your site.
Find out and predict future Google Page Rank
The above link might be an interesting tool. The page will check 10 website urls at once to determine the exisiting Page Ranks, along with a prediction for future rankings.
One of the best features is that it tells you how many ‘backlinks’ are pointing at your site.
Doing a search for my employers website: www.ultralab.net (don’t include the http://) shows 5815 links to that website from other sites. Ultralab has a Page Rank of 6.
A search for Ultralab’s parent Univiersity website: www.anglia.ac.uk shows 8850 links to that website from other sites. Anglia Ruskin University has a Page Rank of 7.
And a search for my work weblog: matt.ultralab.net returns 411 links from others and maintains a Page Rank status of 4.
Because matt.ultralab.net is a seperate website compared to www.ultralab.net sub domains of Ultralab.net (including matt.ultralab.net) do not retain the same Page Rank figure as the main www.ultralab.net site. So we learn here that subdomains have their own levels of Google Juice.
The above searches also show that the more links to a site, the higher the Page Rank status.
I think implementing the code for this tool will have done something very smart for this website, they have given websites another reason to link to mine, directing web users at the Page Rank tool which could be considered a useful resource. In providing a useful page with ‘link to me currency’ the generaged ‘backlinks’ to the main site have increased and the Page Rank for this site.
This experiment has raised yet another question:
Would it be a benefit to have something other webmasters will point their websites at in order to increase backlinks and improve Google Juice?
I think so.
Find out and predict future Google Page Rank
Google ranks pages. Each page is ranked out of 10.
I find the easiest way to find out the exact page rank for a website is with the Firefox web browser.
Click the following banner and start the download before reading on, don’t worry, its safe and free:
What about the other main television stations around the UK?
If I’m new, with a brand new site I am almost certainly listed with a reputation of zero by the search engines.
Over a period of months and years my sites reputation might increase, depending on how ‘valuable’ as ‘information currency’ my ‘content’ actually is. The result of that increase would be a higher return in search term results on search engine pages.
I have some questions:
When I move a website to a new hosting server with a new IP address will the search engines note the move and think that the site might have changed hands? Will my reputation within search results be affected?
What about a domain name? What impact will that have on my ranking if I change the domain name along with the name of the site? Content would still be the same, so will the ranking stay the same? Will my search result credibility transfer too? How would I tell the search engines I’ve moved the site somewhere else?
Will the search engines follow the search redirect and understand what has happened? Will I have to start all over again?
If I buy a web domain of somebody else and create a new website on that domain will I retain the old sites search reputation?
When I buy a domain most companies will offer me 1, 2, 5 or 10 years at the point of purchase for the said domain name. If I buy 10 years, I usually get a dramatic reduction in cost in comparison of actually renewing the name every year at the annual charge.
So if I buy a domain name for ten years surely I’m committing to my content being around for a long time? Therefore would the search engines consider that commitment in their page ranking for my pages?
The word on the street is that long term commitment to domains is taken into consideration when working out where a website should be listed in a search result for keywords, so maybe we should buy domains for the maximum period they are available?
What do you think?
On Monday 13th September 2004 I wrote on my professional blog (matt.ultralab.net) about winning on the ‘Premium Bonds’. Here is the entry.
On Tuesday 25 April 2006 the Premium Bond blog entry had been read 1373 times and commented on once by somebody called Bob Balser who suggests purchasing block numbers of bonds increase chances of winning.
Anyway, what I’m really interested in understanding is why my entry simply titled ‘Premium Bonds, I won’ has attracted so many readers.
I explored the site statistics for this past seven days (18 - 25 April 2006) and have extracted the following sample example, which I’ve numbered in red the entries I am researching further:
Each line above represents a hit on the ‘Premium Bonds, I won’ page, each hit has a date and time stamp. I’m interested in the hits that have come from search engine results.
The following explains what each of the above image links (referenced in red) represent:
Link 1: Google.co.uk Search: premium bond syndicate
My page returned as a search result: Google Page 1, 2nd Result
Link 2: Google.com Search: PREMIUM BONDS FORUM
My page returned as a search result: Google Page 4, 2nd Result
Link 3: Google.co.uk Search: looking for lists of premium bond winners
My page returned as a search result: Google Page 1, 6th Result
Link 4: Google.co.uk Search: premium bonds my i won
My page returned as a search result: Google Page 1, 2nd Result
Link 5: Google.co.uk Search: premium bonds
My page returned as a search result: Interesting, I’ll explain in a minute
Link 6: Spam bot (I think?)
Link 7: Google.co.uk Search: premium bonds worthwhile investment
My page returned as a search result: Google Page 1, 5th Result
Link 5 proved the most interesting, and works positive against a theory I think about Google.
I think the following:
A Google searcher will enter a search looking for specific information or answers on Google. Google will return in it search results what it considers are links which will provide the right information. It is up to the searcher to click the suggested links (the top link being the one Google considers most relevant) which they think will answer their question or provide the relevant information required, Google provides short summaries to help support this decision making process.
If a searcher types in keywords and then chooses a search result Google provided which was not a ‘top link’ Google understands that link to be more relevant to the requested search string.
So, this would help explain why when I clicked link 5….
Link 5: Google.co.uk Search: premium bonds
…and was taken to the following Google search result page, which happened to be a page 6 for the ‘premium bonds’ search:
Notice how there is no link listed there through to my blog entry on Premium Bonds.
How can this be?
On page 5, a link to the entry is listed, I’ve highlighted it in a yellow box:
So what has happened? Why was the search result not showing on Page 6 like the Drupal blog statistics showed it should?
I believe it once did.
Look at this later search result (in red) five days later:
The search was for exactly the same words ‘premium bonds’ and it links to the 5th search page results for Google.co.uk
So that solves the mystery, the Premium Bond blog entry improved in search power from Google.co.uk’s page six for ‘Premium Bonds’ to page five in a period of five days.
So here I conclude that by visitors digging deep into Google search results and clicking lowly listed links, they help pages improve in their search returns.
Every time I explore ideas, both mine and others on how Google works I’m left with more questions. Today I’m left with…
Why has my blog entry on Premium Bonds returned in searches for ’syndicate’ and ‘forum’ search strings? Surely Google is giving out the wrong results here?
What about searchers who change their mind while searching? For example, say you were searching for a ‘Premium Bond Syndicate’ and was faced with a Google search result for ‘Premium Bonds, I won’? Would you click the link out of curiosity, and at the same time confuse Google to think that ‘Premium Bonds, I won’ is a good search result for the ‘Premium Bond Syndicate’ search string?
Or has this investigation been a waste of time? Maybe my search improvement for ‘Premium Bonds’ results was simply due to falling search results for other pages? Why did those pages fall?
Lots of questions, no rock solid answer….
Ideas? Thoughts? Opinions?
I wonder if Google and the other search engines track what searchers actually click and how long they visit a page? Don’t knock me, its a good question.
I think that search engines aim to put at the top of their search results pages what they considers most valuable in content relevant information as the top search results. They use the experience of previous searchers to define page credibility for search results.
What do I mean?
When we search for information on a search engine we are presented with a list of search results.
We’ve all been in the position where we find the ‘top result’ in the search results is not what we are actually looking for, so what what do we do? We click ‘back’ and click another result.
Now, do the search engines notice we’ve returned so quickly and clicked something else?
Do search engines therefore consider the search result we disregarded less valuable as a return for the search string we used to find it? Does that search result get a negative point, and return lower in the table for future search results? What if other searchers find that result valuable?
Complicated? It should be, it helps us find what we are actually looking for.
What do you think?
Back in 2004 I began some research into how visitors find Matthew’s Blog (my personal weblog) which is currently (April 2006) hit by visitors at an average of 1 visit every 30 seconds to the various ‘blog entries’ via links from search engine results, mostly Google.
I undertook an experiment exploring the records provided by the Drupal (the free community software which hosts the blog).
I worked through the Drupal statistics records for 20 December 2004 and stripped out the code for the last 400 searches which had arrived at the blog via search engine results.
The actual search strings can be reviewed here: Search Results for 20 December 2004. Click some of them to understand how people search for information, they might not do it how you do it.
Since I undertook that research, I’ve changed the way I write blog entries.
From the 400 reviewed hits the majority came from Google, this is no surprise really considering Google is central to 95% of internet searchers online lives.
It demonstrates strongly that the likes of Yahoo! and A9 really have their work cut out within the search engine business and the only real way they can compete in this market is to produce better search results for users.
UK television watchers will also recognise regular advertisment from….Ask Jeeves (now rebranded as ‘Ask’). In the experiment, Ask brought me no visitors from its search results.
Out of 400 web searches 374 were Google’s. NTL World produced 10 results, NTL World’s search power is provided by Google! (and is full of adverts hindering the search a bit).
AOL? 13 results were from AOL search users.
From exploring the search results and understanding how searchers find blog entries I conclude the following:
Consider carefully the title of your blog entries. Key words produces links in search results where users are being specific about what they want to know about.
For example, if you are writing your opinion as a movie review blog entry about ‘The Terminal’ movie use relevant search words into the title.
So, instead of writing a blog entry and simply calling it …
‘The Terminal’
Consider:
‘The Terminal Film/Movie Review (starring Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta Jones)’
I believe that if someone searches on a search engine for ‘Terminal Catherine Zeta Jones’ the chances of the published blog entry returning in the search results is much higher.
The more keywords the searcher uses in their search, the more chances you have in returning as a search result if those keywords are part of your blog entry title. Get it? Confused? I hope so, its not easy.
Not only is it important to have good explanation key words in blog entry titles, but it is also essential if you want visitors to click the link through to your blog entry. Users will scan Google’s search results and click the one they find most relevant.
Here is another example:
I have a blog entry about the ‘Titanic’. Here it is.
If you search on Google for ‘Titanic’ a link through to my page will not return on the first page of Googles search responses. Why? Because hundreds of other people have better pages than I have about the ‘Titanic’ and most of those pages will have more ‘Google Juice’ than I do.
However, if you search on Google more specifically for ‘Titanic 1912′ a link to my page is at the bottom of Googles first page of search results (highlighted in yellow). Bingo, I’ve returned on the first page of a Google Search Results page. Lets have a look:
‘Titanic 1912′ remains a popular search and my statistics show it is a popular search string on search engines resulting in hundreds of hits to my Titanic page. The article was written on Sunday 19th of December 2004 and by Tuesday 25th April 2006 it had been read by 1871 people of which five people left a comment.
Advice: Don’t aim for the general searchers looking for ‘Titanic’, you wont get them. Aim for the more specific searchers, who use more than one keyword, such as ‘Titanic 1912′.
So, look at the above image again. Why do you think visitors clicking the search result on Google to read my blog when it is listed at the bottom of the search page, rather than the top? It could be:
Any of the above could be true, I like to think it is the third point.
I will be undertaking a similar 400 hits experiment soon to research if the decisions I made in 2004 have had a positive effect eighteen months on, I suspect they have.
Don’t forget to leave your comments below….
I’ve written what I think Google Juice is about.
In a nutshell, websites are currency, valuable search currency.
The author of this site has been exploring Google Juice for a few years on his own blog and this website has evolved after many requests from visitors.
If your website has a good level of ‘Google Juice’ (or as Google call it: PageRank) you’ll be exposed to the right audiences you are attempting to target, either through a blog, webpage or corporate site.
Google ranks pages out of 10. My current weblog (http://matt.ultralab.net) has a rank of 5, at one time it was 6 and I’m still trying to understand why it dropped.
Googlejuice.co.uk is a free site and attempts to assist web developers understand what they need to do in order to achieve good levels of ‘Google Juice’ in order to achieve exposure to the right audiences without purchasing advertising space.
This website has nothing to do with the Google Corporation or her search rivals. This website exists to try and understand what makes Google, Yahoo, MSN (etc etc) tick.
I believe there are some simple rules to achieving search engine success and I’ll build them into entries on the site over time, but before I do that I’ll start with the most simple rule for success: Good Google Juice does not happen over night, it takes years of careful experimentation and dedication.
This website will attempt to explore how Google Juice is manufactured and how to get websites to the top of search rankings without paying a penny.