Rand Returns...
“All the mistakes we have made”
Biggest mistakes that seomoz has made in their advice and in their own practice. Here are the relevant takings from todays WhiteBoard Friday!
1) Reciprocal links
Rand, back in the day, used to dabble in greyer areas of SEO. His first mistake mentions the tactic of offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via the robots.txt file using nofollow. This tactic did not really work and he ended up having to do a lot of word to get in the good graces of webmasters once again.
2) Buying links for clients.
Back in 2005 Rand was buying links for clients. Matt Cuts came out at that time to say Google were moving against paid links.
Matt called Rand and said: “Dude, I can see you are doing these paid links, I want to let you know that they are not being counted and actually they may hurt you.”
Since those days , google has grown exponentially against the buying of links and now it is considered a very bad practice. More importantly we can no longer guarantee that these links are providing value. Instead of spending the money on links, invest it in becoming more creative with your clients account.
3) H1 tags with keywords.
The realisation, after testing thoroughly through the use of formal machine learning correlation tests, that having a H1 on a page is no more valuable than having the keyword at the top of the text in large or bold font. Shock horror, the hours spent convincing a client to implement this...
4) Don’t use XML sitemaps??
Rand is mortified that he used to advise people not to use XML sitemaps. Rand’s reasoning behind this (having an XML sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) was sound but proved to be not as important as the advantage of using them. XML sitemaps do such a great job of getting content indexed. He knows so many people who have used them and seen great results and jump in traffic particularly for long tail, now he strongly recommends them.
5) Redirect Linkscape to open site explorer.
On realisation that OSE is a lot better interface than Linkscape, SEOmoz decided to 301 redirect all the old reports to OSE. Unfortunately this resulted in a loss of significant traffic to the site due to the fact that Rel=canonical was never implemented. Unfortunately a lot of the damage was already done.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Friday, July 16, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Google Me, Google You...
According to rumors, Google is attempting a social network Google Me .
Google researchers are exploring social networking and have released a 200 slide presentation developed by a google staffer on research findings on the fundamental problems associated with the way social networks are currently developed. I presume they are looking for holes in current technologies in order to implement something that could take off.
The main problem pinpointed here is the nature of our social groups. For example - We each have on average 4-5 groups of friends. In each of these groups there are between 2 & 10 people. These groups do not tend to interchange with one another. This is an essential limitation of current social networks, that all of your friends sit in one bulk and treated in the same manner, this is not the way that we interact in real social networks.
These findings show that in order to improve our interaction online, these groups need to be easily segmented in our communications.
Google researchers are exploring social networking and have released a 200 slide presentation developed by a google staffer on research findings on the fundamental problems associated with the way social networks are currently developed. I presume they are looking for holes in current technologies in order to implement something that could take off.
The main problem pinpointed here is the nature of our social groups. For example - We each have on average 4-5 groups of friends. In each of these groups there are between 2 & 10 people. These groups do not tend to interchange with one another. This is an essential limitation of current social networks, that all of your friends sit in one bulk and treated in the same manner, this is not the way that we interact in real social networks.
These findings show that in order to improve our interaction online, these groups need to be easily segmented in our communications.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Whiteboard Friday
Our new boy – Danny Dover presents this Whiteboard Friday. Here is a detailed run through on site speed and its increasing importance on the interwebs and how it will affect our clients. We have all read about site speed, the difference here is a simple yet detailed technical run through that I found interesting and should help you advise your clients clearly should the conversation arise...
7 ways to speed up your site:
Synopsis:
Google have implemented site speed as part of their algorithm in order to improve people’s experiences online and also to make more money on the side (a faster internet means more opportunity to show more ads, stream more movies.) behind this implementation to the algorithm they have been doing other things on the side to increase site speed.
There are 2 main ways to increase site speed, 1)make the amount of ones and zeros in files smaller and 2)making the files closer to the person requesting it.
Google has its own motivation to Increase the speed of the internet. And have been attempting to do this; not just with the algorithm update but in other ways as well:
Google have been making the following effort to increase the speed of the internet service:
• They have been trying to make ad on’s to HTTP in order to make it faster.
• Make a public DNS system in order to speed it up (the system that converts domain names into IP addresses)
• They are also making an effort to spread fibre optic cables directly from data centres to homes, bypassing ISP’s (telecoms companies shaking in their boots)
The icing on the cake was their implementation of site speed into the infamous algorithm that dominates web usage today...
Top 7 ways to speed up site
• Gzip – enable this on your site. compression that reduced the no. Of 1’s and 0’s enabling quicker transfer over the internet.(if you really want to know – it compresses the site first before it reads it – sends it to the desired location – at which point the file is decompressed to its original state and displayed in its entirety)
• Minify Javascript & CSS (not the same as mummify) – this refers to the process of removing tabs and spaces and marks in your files that are unnecessary for a computer. Again this removes the 0’s and 1’s that really aren’t necessary for computers As spaces and linebreaks are only for us humans but ad bulk to file sizes. (for example check source code on google homepage they have done this with their HTML. Please note that this is helpful Google considering how many page views they get – however minimising HTML is not recommended for anyone else – unless you are huge. Not even bing do this) Minimising Javascript & CSS is advised.
• Use a CDN – some companies can offer you servers that are located all over the world , allowing you to be closer to the person requesting the file, thereby delivering the page faster
• Optimise your images – save as different format
photos – use jpeg’s(algorithm developed for high intensity photos)
graphics – logos and navigation use png files
• Use external javascript and CSS. When your browser is downloading something from a desired URL (e.g. example.com) – it can only make a certain amount of download requests at any one time from example.com. If you locate your external files on another domain e.g. assets.example.com it can download from both at the same time – sounds quicker to me!!
• Avoid using excess redirects – they are important but every single time you use one you are increasing the amount of requests that go between you and the user.
• Use fewer files – less graphics. Do this by using CSS sprites. This method uses one big image that has all of your pictures in one file – the client only downloads the image once and the script tells them what part of the file you want to show at a certain time. Dig.com uses this.
7 ways to speed up your site:
Synopsis:
Google have implemented site speed as part of their algorithm in order to improve people’s experiences online and also to make more money on the side (a faster internet means more opportunity to show more ads, stream more movies.) behind this implementation to the algorithm they have been doing other things on the side to increase site speed.
There are 2 main ways to increase site speed, 1)make the amount of ones and zeros in files smaller and 2)making the files closer to the person requesting it.
Google has its own motivation to Increase the speed of the internet. And have been attempting to do this; not just with the algorithm update but in other ways as well:
Google have been making the following effort to increase the speed of the internet service:
• They have been trying to make ad on’s to HTTP in order to make it faster.
• Make a public DNS system in order to speed it up (the system that converts domain names into IP addresses)
• They are also making an effort to spread fibre optic cables directly from data centres to homes, bypassing ISP’s (telecoms companies shaking in their boots)
The icing on the cake was their implementation of site speed into the infamous algorithm that dominates web usage today...
Top 7 ways to speed up site
• Gzip – enable this on your site. compression that reduced the no. Of 1’s and 0’s enabling quicker transfer over the internet.(if you really want to know – it compresses the site first before it reads it – sends it to the desired location – at which point the file is decompressed to its original state and displayed in its entirety)
• Minify Javascript & CSS (not the same as mummify) – this refers to the process of removing tabs and spaces and marks in your files that are unnecessary for a computer. Again this removes the 0’s and 1’s that really aren’t necessary for computers As spaces and linebreaks are only for us humans but ad bulk to file sizes. (for example check source code on google homepage they have done this with their HTML. Please note that this is helpful Google considering how many page views they get – however minimising HTML is not recommended for anyone else – unless you are huge. Not even bing do this) Minimising Javascript & CSS is advised.
• Use a CDN – some companies can offer you servers that are located all over the world , allowing you to be closer to the person requesting the file, thereby delivering the page faster
• Optimise your images – save as different format
photos – use jpeg’s(algorithm developed for high intensity photos)
graphics – logos and navigation use png files
• Use external javascript and CSS. When your browser is downloading something from a desired URL (e.g. example.com) – it can only make a certain amount of download requests at any one time from example.com. If you locate your external files on another domain e.g. assets.example.com it can download from both at the same time – sounds quicker to me!!
• Avoid using excess redirects – they are important but every single time you use one you are increasing the amount of requests that go between you and the user.
• Use fewer files – less graphics. Do this by using CSS sprites. This method uses one big image that has all of your pictures in one file – the client only downloads the image once and the script tells them what part of the file you want to show at a certain time. Dig.com uses this.
Dominoes pulls results for Foursquare
Foursquare has been chattered about consistently in social media circles of late.
Dominoes was one of the biggest brands to be an early adopter for Foursquare and has shown impressive results in the first half of 2010.
Domino’s Pizza has increased online sales to account for 32.7% of sales compared to 26.2% in 2009, with the company announcing profits of £17.5m for the period up until 27th June, up from £13.6m in 2009.
Chris Moore, chief executive officer of Domino’s Pizza, said the increase came from innovative marketing over the past year, including its tie up with location based mobile service Foursquare.
Of course these results are not from Foursquare alone but a well mixed online effort to increase sales:
“Our main Facebook site has in excess of 36,000 fans and there are numerous fans of individual store sites too. In addition, we have led the way with social media initiatives such as affiliate marketing, our superfans programme and the development of a link up with Foursquare, the location-based social media site,”
For any of you unfamiliar with the Dominoes Foursquare story: http://mashable.com/2010/05/26/dominos-uk-foursquare-special/
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