The idea was simple: When you search in Google for “Romanians are…”(in english, romanian and other languages), the suggestions were not so flattering (in fact they are not for most countries which in itself is a mirror of the racism that’s on all of us). In order to change that, an advertising agency created a campaign to motivate people to mass search for more positive terms.

The results:

This can be considered a harmless and moral cause, but the same were many other Google Bombs that were removed by Google.

Is it fair to game (in public) the autosuggestion results?

What if KFC tried to game his autosuggestion from “KFC is bad” to “KFC is healthy”?

On the other side, the autosuggestions, in many cases of “natural search” (questions/affirmations), are simply idiotic.

Most likely this is because only idiotic people use natural language searches.

What happened in fact:

• the sequence “[CompanyName] Logo” was extracted from the alt tag of the logo
• page titles all over the site were the same
• page titles were very large and the [CompanyName] was used as a suffix

The recommandations that fixed the issue in a few days were:

Incoming search terms:

• google chrome show wrong page
• imto
• razvan antonescu seo
• seo google is showing wrong title serps
• title in serps
• title wrong in google
• web page title showing the address isntead of the name
• why has google index the wrong page title for certain keywords
• wrong title in google
• wrong title seo google

Among the reasons you would want to do that:

• Increase the volume of unique content
• Increase the pageviews (if you are using a CPM advertising solution this would almost double your income)
• Decrease the bouncerate on your website (call me paranoid but I bet the Google uses that as a quality factor in organic ranking).

Among the biggest issues with this, is how you handle comments. Basically you have to choose from 4 options:

• Have the same comments on all the newly created pages (for wordpress i think this is the only available solution)
• Have each part have its own comments (there is no plugin as far as i know for wordpress but in this case you can simply create a new post for each part and link them after you are done)
• Have the comments separated from the content (similar to a forum, where the article title is the name of the thread)

Here are the main steps from the WW forum:

1. Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description.
2. Every internal page then has its own unique title and header tag h1. These are based on the first SUB-head for that section of the article. This means more keyword research and writing of subheads than would normally be the case. If the article is considered as a whole, then an h2 tag would seem more accurate semantically. But Google looks at the semantic structure one URL at a time, not for the overall multi-URL article. Most pages also include internal subheads, and these are style as h2
3. On each internal page, there is also a “pre-head” that does use the article title from page 1 in a small font. This pre-head does not use a header tag of any kind, just a CSS style. This pre-head article title is at the top as a navigation cue for the user.
4. An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral “2.” or “3.”
5. Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article.
6. Every page of the article links to every other page at the top and the bottom. None of this anemic “Back | Next” junk. There’s a complete page choice shown on everywhere – 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6| 7 – and there is also a centered link at the end of each page: Next: Linked title of the next page goes here
7. The linked numbers that are used as on-page navigation also include a title attribute that matches the title tag of the target page. I’m still not sure what a title attribute does for Google exactly, if anything, but the tool tip that it generates is a major aid for the reader of a long article.
8. Those navigation numbers are very clearly coded to show which page is active. And the nav number for the active page is NOT linked. We don’t want the user to click and end up right where they started, and we don’t want to “waste” a link that has no real function.
9. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tags are also included in the section h2

Incoming search terms:

• seo pagination
• inurl:/login php?register= bestseller lists by year
• pagenation in seo
• pagination increase seo
• php pagination seo urls
• Pico – Alphabet Black:
• unique titles pagination seo

Every year, when the summer starts and traffic on the internet decreases, Google does a random shuffle of its main index. As usual in this cases webmasters panic a lot (especially those in the gray area of the SEO color spectrum) and start filling the forums:  “Google has kicked me out what do I do know“. The answer is always the same: “Clean up your shady SEO fill a re inclusion report and pray“.

Through this, Google gets a lot of new spamming techniques in the summer, adjusts the algorithm and then:

• Before the winter shopping season shuffles back to the old pre summer index
• Hits hard the sites that match criteria reported during the summer

Crazy enough for you? Well if the answer is yes check out this thread :

Has anyone seen a change, from Friday, MayDay affected pages?
Some of my sites have recovered traffic

those who were hit on june 2, were major gainers on october 22
those who were unaffected on june 2, lost everything on october 22

Well? Who’s crazy now?

• they want to make SEO unpredictable & unreliable (which ultimately means less resources are spent on SEO & the results are overall less manipulated)
• they want to force businesses (who just stocked up on inventory) to enter the AdWords game in a big way

Oh well, he has quite nailed it. From what I’ve seen and heard at IMTO 2010, this has already happen in Romania and more and more ex SEOs are joining the PPC battlefield.

This is somehow good for the ones that stay in the game, but in the long term it might turn into a fail for Google. I’m seeing on my clients more and more projects that not they are not optimized but they are a complete disaster from a search engine point of view.

In the end, only time will tell if this was a winning strategy.

SEO Planning @ IMTO 2010 (Foto by http://www.mariussescu.ro/ )

Some time ago I was invited by Ciprian Gavriliu to give a presentation on SEO planning at the IMTO 2010 conference in Iasi. Below you will find the support that I used.
SEO Planning
 

An interesting coincidence is that on the day I held my presentation, Vladimir has also posted a nice post on his blog on the same topic along with a case study.

P.S. Details about the topics discussed you can find here (in romanian) and also a photo gallery.

New dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools

Google has confirmed with a post on their official webmaster blog the changes that users have been seeing for the past week.

Changes are for:

• Search queries
• Better Parameter Handling
• Messages

The most important being the better statistics for search queries and the possibility to view the data for each one separately

Incoming search terms:

• razvan antonescu sitelinks

1. More from: [AccountName]: Videos from the same account
2. Related videos: Videos with similar characteristics (name tags and so on)

Unless you are a YT partner, the “More from” is going to be collapsed. This means that there is a high probability that any user viewing your video will leave to see an item from “Related videos” element

If you want to keep the user within your account, tag all your videos with a unique tag sequence. For example you can have the same repeating sequence of tags (3-4) and after that add the unique tags for the videos. Doing this will cause the “Related Videos” to show videos also from your account.

• Upside: once a user gets to one of your videos, the chances that he will see other videos from you are higher
• Downside: you are giving up on traffic generated by videos from other accounts

Incoming search terms:

• youtube related videos
• youtube related videos trick

2. For some reasons, one of my websites has received a set of penalties on Google’s July update. Instead of  submitting a re inclusion request (I wasn’t really with anything on the dark side), I completely changed the URL structure to something that I see now more appropriate. I rebuilt the XML sitemap and resubmitted it. While I wasn’t expecting any second day miracles, I wanted that the associated Custom Search Engine to show the correct results. Event though they say that they process in a max of 24h any new sitemaps, now after 30h I’m still seeing the old results

UPDATE: Just immediately after this post, crawling was resumed and the blog started ranking for same high traffic keywords. In short, if you have an old site/blog that doesn’t receive traffic due to lack of updates, don’t worry. Google will be right back at you once you start adding content

So, moving to the subject. Google recently announced that their Sitelinks feature from the SERPs has doubled the number of items from 4 to 8. Even though this has been announced only 7th december, I’ve seen it active for over a month.

Why Sitelinks are important? Well, take it this way. If you are #1 for a query, a user has 9(NINE!) access points to your website. Nine access points that are above the fold. You really couldn’t ask for more.

If you look at what Google says about Sitelinks, you’ll see that they are pretty vague and mysterious about it and they give you no hints on how you can control them.

Here are a few hints based on my experience:

• Sitelinks appear only when a query shows your main page as #1. I haven’t seen any examples for secondary pages, but it also applies for the first page of a subdomain. Usually any query can trigger sitelinks, but I’ve seen a few examples where it doesn’t.
  • TIP: Start again optimizing your main page for high traffic keywords
• Sitelinks are available for Google.com and in very few cases for international domains.
  • TIP: plan your optimization with the .com in mind and the rest will follow
• Sitelinks appear for old domains in general. My site where I’ve observed them is 2 years old
  • TIP: if you are #1 and you don’t have sitelinks, don’t pannic. They will appear in time
• Sitelinks appear for high volume of content.
  • TIP: My site has ~3000 pages. If you have very few pages, start creating content.
• Sitelinks are in fact, pages that have the most internal links (in your site). That’s why you will usually see sitelinks that mirror a website menu (menu links are on all pages).
  • TIP: This is valuable information about how Sitelinks are created. Try to determine what are the most important 8 pages within your website (beside the homepage) and get to work. Use nofollow on site wide links that are not important and link those 8 pages from every page. For those 8 links try using the following in any combination: title attribute, strong/em tag, h1,2,3.
• Sitelinks labels. It seems that those are extracted from the text of the links and not from the title or other content on the page.
  • TIP: Pay attention on how you are linking your target pages and keep the same text all over the site. For maximum effect, try using a maximum of 2 words.
• Even though you cannot control directly what sitelinks you have, you can remove unwaanted ones.
  • TIP: In order to do that, you need to have a Google Webmaster Account and your site authenticated. If you already have Sitelinks for your site, you’ll find them there and you can block those that are innacurate. It takes ~7days for the changes to propagate in the SERPs. Note that once you remove a link, it will not be automatically replaced with another. For my website I have removed 2 links that weren’t appropriate and now I have only 6. Perhaps in time Google will add another 2.
• Google Operating System mentions another factor: traffic data. Basically this implies that Google uses data gathered trough Google Toolbar (or other analytics means like Google Analytics or Google Adsense) to determine what are your most visited pages. Looking at my Sitelinks and at my top 50 pages I cannot say that this is 100% correct. Only 2 out of 8 pages could have been turned into sitelinks through this. Even if this is true, it looks that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you receive from Google but your general traffic for a specific page:
  • TIP: In order to control the traffic for a specific page, here are a few things that you can do.
    • Design your layout in such way that your target pages receive the most traffic
    • Use social tools (digg, del.icio.us,stumble upon) to dirrect traffic to your most important 8 pages.

Well this is all. Hope you find this useful in your SEO efforts. If your lucky enough to have sitelinks, start optimizing those pages for the best conversion, and if you don’t have them right now, I hope that this guide will help you.

See you on the second part to learn why being #1 is not so important and what you can do to make it important