Razvan Antonescu » SEO Consulting

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Updates to rich snippets

Razvan Antonescu — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 05:15:03 +0000

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/updates-to-rich-snippets.html

More details regarding implementation here

Incoming search terms:

88007006564 ru

SEO accidents: wrong title in SERPS

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 13:48:15 +0000

A few days ago had a talk with a client that had an unexplainable issue: while googling for his company name, the google result has showing instead of the homepagethe sequence: “[CompanyName] Logo”.

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:

Use unique titles on all the pages of the website
Use smaller page titles (up to 70 characters)
On the homepage use the company name as a prefix instead of a suffix and on all the others keep it as it was
Try a force reindexing of the website using the Fetch as Googlebot option from the webmaster tools

Incoming search terms:

Article pagination for SEO

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 16:58:57 +0000

On Webmaster World there is a pretty good thread showing a step by step guide on how to implement pagination for long articles (over 500-700 words) for SEO purposes. 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:

Page 1 naturally enough uses the overall title of the article for both its title tag and header, and has a unique meta-description.

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

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.

An additional navigation cue is that the unique page titles each begin with the numeral “2.” or “3.”

Each internal page also has a unique meta description, one that summarizes that page specifically, rather than summarizing the overall article.

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

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.

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.

rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link tags are also included in the section h2

Incoming search terms:

How Google plays with webmasters

Razvan Antonescu — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:36:45 +0000

Last year, watching data from a few sites I came with a theory: 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?

Google playing with SEOs

Razvan Antonescu — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 12:20:34 +0000

Aaron has a new post on SEO Book, about the current algorithmic change made by Google in order to prepare for the upcoming shopping season. In the article he says:

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

Razvan Antonescu — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:41:23 +0000

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 data in Google Webmaster Tools

Razvan Antonescu — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 05:47:13 +0000

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

YouTube Related Videos Trick

Razvan Antonescu — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:55:46 +0000

Each youtube video gets on the right side 2 sets of recommandations:

More from: [AccountName]: Videos from the same account
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