Bit of a strange one today, we usually talk about how to get Google to notice more of our content, not about blocking them from getting at it.

However, there are times when we want Google to stay away from our pages and not crawl or index the content on them, in this post I want to explore a few ways to do this, and the problems they can present.

No Index

The problem with no indexing pages is that it doesn’t prevent Google from crawling them, this means Google are spending time crawling parts of your site that you never want in the index! Not only is this a waste of Google’s time, it also uses up your crawl equity.

For those who don’t know much about crawl equity here is a good read, basically crawl equity is a term that refers to the depth at which Google will crawl your website. Every site has a crawl limit, probably based on incoming links and the authority they pass. If Google is spending bandwith crawling pages that you don’t want indexing they could potentially be missing out on pages that are more user focussed or content rich.

On top of all this Google may ignore, or in their words, miss the noindex tag anyway.

This can be a big problem, so how do we deal with thousands of pages we don’t want indexing?

Robots.txt

This is the preferred way to block pages from Google, stop them from crawling and therefore save your crawl equity for more useful pages.

However, after a recent post by Google it seems as though they may still index these pages anyway! Google has hinted at this before but Matt Cutts wrote the following:

Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else’s site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won’t have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use meta tags.)

OK, we use robots.txt but Google follow a link, find the URL, add the title tag based on the anchor text/URL and index the page anyway! The last thing you want to see in the SERP’s are pages from your site with nothing but an ugly title and URL.

So what Google are saying is that they don’t want you to block them from crawling anything, they want to see it all. No index it but let them see everything.

Now you may ask yourself, is crawl equity really an issue? Well, maybe not for small websites, but I have worked with multiple big sites that have struggled to get areas indexed because of all the dynamic URL’s Google is having to crawl. Once we began to robots.txt these pages, the useful parts of the site began to get indexed.

So What Can We Do?

What do we do then? Block the pages knowing Google may index them anyway?

There is no definitive answer from Google but here is my advice for what it’s worth

> If you want to block a handful of pages, simply no index them

> If you have a large area of the site that has no need to be indexed, then:

1. Block it using robots.txt

2. Use URL Parameters in the Site Configuration section of Webmaster Tools

Parameter blocking allows you to block Google from crawling certain areas of your site, and is a strong indication that you don’t want them indexed. If these pages are on multiple levels, try placing them all under one file and blocking it, however you will need to be careful not to block any useful pages.

Now Google still could find and index some of these pages but using this method will cover all your bases.

Before we get into this, Happy New Year! I hope it’s a prosperous one for all.

I wanted to start the New Year off talking about image search, mainly because I think it’s a massively underused method for driving search traffic. In the last year I have had the privilege of working on a few image focussed SEO campaigns and the results I’v seen are unreal.

How unreal?? 50 – 500,000 visits per month in 6 months? Oh yes.

Of course there is a major caveat to image search and that is some industries are particularly difficult, if not impossible to optimise for, however the ones that aren’t hold major riches.

So let’s begin by going over some basic optimisation advice, and then we can delve into a bit of strategy.

The Rules to Image Optimisation

Text, Text, Text

Yup, just like on page SEO your text must be optimised. Where?

> The file name
> Alt attribute
> Image Title
> Page Title
> Text around the image

You have probably read the above many times before so I am not going to bore you with the details, however there is one word of warning, don’t just stuff random keywords into these areas, not good.

Try and be as descriptive as possible and specific to the image, not just in your alt attribute but in every part of the page that matters.

Stick With JPG

Out of all the testing we did our JPG images always performed the best, this is probably due to the fact they are the most common and can be read by all browsers. Plus you can easily compress them reducing load time on image heavy pages.

We try and stick to between 1KB and 60KB for all our images, anything over 70KB tends to take too long to load and never performs as well.

First Past the Post! The Freshness Boost!

It has been mentioned a couple of times over the last couple of years, but in my opinion this is massive.

Even if you have a fairly new website you can still benefit from publishing fresh unique images, and you can rank not only on image search but within global search as well.

Make your images fresh, make them as unique as possible, and push them out on a fresh article, fully optimised and Bam! You’re onto a winner. You could also consider using tools like Google Trends to take advantage of search spikes, works very well.

Amount of Images on a Page

SEO’s in the past have advised against having too many images on a page, however in the last 12 months I have found the complete opposite, consistently the pages with the most images on have outperformed the ones with one or two on, massively outperformed.

Keep your images as clean as possible, reducing file sizes and if you’re using WordPress, super cache and lazy load are perfect plugins.

So my opinion, more is better.

A Quick Case Study

Now I am can’t give you the full details due to client confidentiality, however I can display the potential in terms of search traffic.

After taking advantage of some celebrity booms towards the end of last year we managed the following through image search alone on a fashion website;

[image of traffic spike]

This website only launched at the end of 2010, barely had 20 links and yet was capable of driving over 1 million visitors in 4 months, result!

Think of an Angle

Unless your aim is to drive up the amount you can charge for ads, you’re going to have to seriously consider the type of traffic you target.

Here are a few examples:

Clothing

I worked on a project with a clothes retailer, one of the first things we did was to roam the web for celebrities that were wearing their clothes or clothes that we’re similar. We would then Photoshop the images enough to make them unique and then publish them on the blog, fully optimised.

Result > Tons of search traffic for fashion tips around a particular celebrity, conversion rate? Around 0.3% not great but the traffic was easy to get.

Cosmetics

At the end of 2010 I worked with a cosmetics website, they had some great beauty and hair products but their image search was zero.

So, first things first, get the blog set up, begin writing tons of tips (with images) about hair and makeup techniques. You’d be surprised how much search there is in this area, obviously not as much as the celebrity space but enough to make a material difference to the online performance of this business.

Result > Drove an additional 10,000 visitors per month through image search, increased Twitter and Facebook following by over 1000% and continue to benefit the business in terms of conversions and revenue.

Don’t Forget The Links!

Think about it, if you are pushing out fresh, interesting content that is ranking highly in global and image search, the natural consequence is a lot of people finding your content and hey presto! Linking back to it.

Seriously, ranking highly on Google with interesting fresh content is one of the best link building techniques there is, in the last 12 months using these exact same techniques I have managed to secure links on sites like The Daily Mail, TMZ, The Huffington Post and even CNN!

If you are in an industry that lends itself to image search then you absolutely have to execute this, if you are a news website pumping out fresh material you need to seriously consider the value of image search. Over the course of 2011, out of 3 websites I worked with, we drove over 3 million unique visitors via image search, it’s a channel that needs giving a little more respect in my opinion.

First of all let me confess the term ‘fresh rank’ has been stolen from fellow SEO blogger Justin Briggs, I am going to refer to one of his excellent posts throughout the rest of this one.

You will no doubt know about Google’s new QDF upgrade, an algorithm tweak designed to get you to ‘fresh’ content quicker, rather than bringing up old static results.

You can see an example of it here;

They’re not site links but links to fresh content on the BBC for the search term ‘football’.

Google has stated that this affects around 35% of search queries, don’t get that mixed up with searches. Now that is all well and good but from my point of view I want to know a few key points;

1) How does Google decide what is fresh?

2) Is the link graph involved when deciding ‘freshness’?

3) How do links from these ‘fresh’ pages influence rankings for the taget website?

I wrote a really short post a few months ago based on fresh links vs text links vs links placed in old content. The results clarified that links in fresh content had a more significant impact on rankings.

However, I feel the need to delve more into this, as I think this strategy is one of the most important link building tasks you can undertake and will help you cement long term core rankings.

How Does Google Determine Freshness?

Justin wrote a great post on this on his blog and if you really want to delve into this you should definitely go take a read, I just want to touch on some of his points and then try to understand how we can use it for link building purposes.

Document Discovery

I think it is safe to assume that the discovery of a document through Googles crawl for the first time is enough to indicate freshness. There is a little bit of debate around this, but nothing that affects the take aways too much, does Google count it as fresh when it is first crawled, first linked to, first mentioned in a social capacity, first indexed…? No one really knows and the truth is it is probably a mixture of all those factors.

Proportion of Change

Is a document fresh if it hasn’t been discovered before, or is it if a document has significantly changed since the last crawl? Do Google give the content a score on a sliding scale?

This is important to know, if the freshness of a document determines the power of a link from that document then we need to know what this scale is, Google is never going to give anything away, I doubt a new FreshRank toolbar is going to emerge, however we can test this through our link building efforts.

Fresh Rank

This brings us nicely onto ‘fresh rank’ a term I am fully attributing to Justin. In the paper Systems and Methods for Determining Document Freshness, it describes a method of passing a freshness score between pages.

So just like PageRank is passed between pages so is FreshRank, so whether or not your landing page is ‘fresh’ will depend not only on the changing content on the page but also by the freshness of pages linking in, hence we have some kind of freshness score.

Is Freshness More Influential Than PageRank

I use the term PageRank very loosely and only to describe the authority of a domain or page based on the quality and quantity of links it has pointing to it.

We all know how PageRank travels around the web and through our sites, its long been the currency of the web, the more links a site or pages a site has pointing to it, the more value a link from it will pass.

Now before I go into this any further, let me first declare this has not been tested or researched in any way, my opinion is based on working with an SEO department that manually builds over 5,000 unique links every month.

The PageRank Model

Value is passed from page to page based on popularity.

FreshRank Model

I am a firm believer that the above model is already in place and has been for sometime and that Google use a combination of FreshRank and PageRank to determine the ranking of a given page.

No one knows the exact calculation but it could be that a link from a fresher PR1 page is worth as much as a static PR6, maybe that is overselling it a bit but certainly getting multiple fresh links every month can be just as effective as acquiring 1 high PR link a month. I guess the ideal is to combine the two.

I’ve worked with many sites over the years and the best way to impact rankings is by creating a fresh link profile. The ultimate combination would be creating a fresh link from a high PageRank (authority) domain, combining high PageRank with a FreshRank strategy, is a sure way of dominating your industry SERP.

Diminishing Value

The one problem with a ‘fresh’ link building strategy is that it is likely to diminish in value over time, therefore efforts have to be ongoing.

PageRank flowing through a link is going to be more consistent than Fresh Rank flow, a document rarely consistently acquires a large quantity of links naturally, however once a document has a certain amount of PageRank it generally keeps it, that is of course as long as the links remain live and and the PageRank isn’t pushed through multiple 301′s.

As you can see from the above model links are carrying PageRank and FreshRank, however what about 6 months later;

Overtime the freshness of the linking documents will diminish, no doubt everytime Google crawls them it will give them a new score. If only we could build lots of links that are from fresh, high domain authority pages that are going to be continually linked to for the rest of their existance

Overall Thoughts

I have seriously thought about researching this in more depth, but from the results we see on a daily basis it is pretty much a given. SEO strategies that involve the consistent development of links from fresh pages will almost always achieve higher rankings than those that don’t.

Only Google will know exactly how this works and one day they may be willing to shed a little more light on it but that won’t stop me and more SEO’s implementing it.

Would be great to hear some debate on this or examples of tests/research.

OK, I’m going to cover some basics here but time and time again I get asked about monitoring indexation levels and what factors affect them.

There are quite a few misconceptions in this area and a lot of people rely on the wrong set of data, they also rely on old techniques to improve this, so let’s have a go at discussing some of the main areas.

HTML & XML Sitemaps

What does a sitemap really do? My opinion? Absolutely nothing in terms of getting a site indexed. It’s an auditing tool to monitor and test the architecture of your website, it doesn’t matter how many sitemaps you have, if the structure of your site is poor you’re going to have low indexation levels.

This is especially true of XML sitemaps; however what about HTML site maps?

Again in my opinion HTML site maps are over rated and used to cover up poor navigation, or used in the hope that they will create a magical ‘thumbs up’ signal to Google. The truth is most HTML site maps are not user friendly and consist of a pile of links, spread out over many pages, especially if you have a large site. With Panda hitting websites hard the last thing I would want on my site is a load of pages filled with html links tipping me over the low quality threshold.

The only time HTML site maps are effective in my opinion is if they are genuinely helping users navigate their way through a site and should include descriptive text as well as links to the various areas of the site, however if you own a website with 100,000 product pages the last thing you want to do is create a site linking to them all. The way your site is structured should help users and Google find all those products easily and effectively.

So to round up, yes use an xml sitemap to audit your site; don’t create a HTML site map unless it is user friendly and in place to help those users find their way to important parts of your site.

Try using multiple XML sitemaps to monitor the performance of different areas of your site.

Performing a Site Search

We’ve all done it and still probably do it, however this is a really inaccurate way of monitoring how many pages are actually indexed on your website. You can do one search and a search a minute later that fetches a different result.

However, if you know there are roughly 500,000 pages on your site, then doing a quick search can give you a very broad understanding of how well you are being indexed.

So go easy using the site: operator

Using Analytics

This is the best way of understanding not only how well your website is indexed but also the quality of those pages, it’s been spoken of many times before but let’s go over it again.

Login to google analytics, go into traffic sources and select google / organic, then select a secondary dimension of ‘landing page’, this will show you how many pages Google sent traffic to over a certain period of time, monitoring this figure every month gives you a really good indication of the indexation levels of your website, I would use and monitor this figure over anything else.

So there we have a few ways of monitoring but how do we get more of our site indexed?

Flat Architecture

Sorry to go back to basics but want to cover it for a sense of completeness.

First thing, don’t get confused with getting your site crawled and getting it indexed; these are two completely separate things. Once Google finds out your site exists I have no doubt it will crawl your whole site at some point, however in my experience getting good amounts of your site indexed comes down to one factor and that is trust.

Having a flat architecture is all about creating the shortest route possible to the pages on your site, how many clicks are your major pages away from the top level?

(image from SEOmoz)

It’s simple really, the closer a page is to the top level the more trusted it is going to be and therefore has more chance of being indexed.

It all comes down to links

It’s easy to get a page ranked by building lots of anchor text rich links to a page, however if you have done this before you will also have realised it has very little impact on the overall trust of a website.

I speak with clients about this a lot, we point out an overall increase in traffic and indexation levels and the client will say ‘but you we’re trying to rank us for X not the other keywords that drove traffic, this was just natural growth that would have occurred anyway’.

Trusted, quality links will affect the overall organic traffic to a website and are absolutely essential for seeing a continual growth in organic traffic.

Yes by all means build optimised links to your site and go after rankings but you have to incorporate a strategy for getting links from the best sites in your industry, the most trusted sites, without them your website will never perform to its full potential.

The above are the main factors but site speed and quality of content since Panda are having more and more of an effect on the indexation of a website. Check the speed and make any necessary changes to rectify speed issues, also check for duplicate or pages with low quality content.

Remember Panda is a ‘threshold’ based algorithm, removing as many low quality pages from your site as possible will could be all it takes to sort out Panda issues.

As ever would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

Those of you who keep on top of the Google Webmaster blog will have no doubt read about their recent pagination fix, or at least their advice on how to deal with it and become more Google friendly.

What is pagination

For those of you who aren’t sure what pagination is, in layman terms it’s a list of web data more commonly seen on e-commerce sites to display multiple products, like here, however it can be used for many different reasons including:

Forums

Most forums have tons of replies to threads, from a user point of view you want to break these up (pagination), however Google would prefer all these replies or comments to be on the same page.

Blogs

Most blogs list a certain number of posts on the home page and then use pagination to allow the user to flick through historic posts, again it saves having a page 10 feet long, but Google don’t like having to trail through all the paginated pages.

E-commerce

Most e-commerce sites make use of pagination on product pages, if you have 900 products in a particular category, you hardly want to list them all on one page? So you use pagination to make it more user friendly, however Google is only ever going to crawl so much of the pagination.

Why is it an issue?

OK, we all understand what it is and why it is used, however what you may not realise is that it can cause huge issues from an SEO perspective. Think about it, if one of your category/tread/blog pages has 25 pages of pagination for Google to crawl through how far do you think they are going to crawl? Well, probably all the way, however why would Google index pages that are 25 clicks away from the top level?

This is the issue, helping Google understand that these paginated pages are important, insomuch that they contain valuable content and links, in effect they are the same page.

The noindex and canonical mistakes

Historically pagination has never been dealt with very well, in particularly the use of the rel=canonical tag is a big no no… Webmasters would use the canonical to link all the paginated pages back to the first page of the pagination, basically telling Google this is the only page that holds any importance. So what about all the content/links on the paginated pages, do you not want these indexing and following?

Using the rel=canonical to sort this is not the way and will mean a large quantity of your site does not get indexed.

Some webmasters also opt to no index everything but the first paginated page to avoid duplicate content issues, however it has the same sort of problems in that Google will not index all the pages linked to within the pagination.

So we want Google to index all the links and content in the paginated section of the site but Google don’t want to index every page to get this done, Google have now offered a little advice on the subject.

Googles solution to pagination woe!

Recently Google have come up with some recommendations around pagination and I just want to spend a little bit of time looking at them and how we implement them.

Rel=next / Rel=prev

Much like the rel=canonical we can use the rel=next and rel=prev to let Google know about pagination elements on your site and to indicate relationships between the pages. So to page 1 in the pagination you would add the rel=next + the next URL, all other pages in the pagination will need to implement next and prev along with the previous and subsequent URL (read more here Google Pagination)

Adding these tags in has a couple of effects:

A) It let’s Google know that all the content and links can be attributed to the first page and not spread out along 25 pages

B) Helps Google to understand what the most useful page is, where to send users and ultimately which pages to index.

The View all Solution

According to Google having a view all page that clumps all your pagination together is a better user experience, not so sure personally but lets trust them on this occasion. However, apparently there is another reason to implement your view all page and that’s because this is really what Google wants to index. So the recommendation is as follows;

a) Use the next/prev tags to indicate the relationship between paginated pages
b) Create a view all page as this is what Google really wants to index

I would also recommend using the rel=canonical on the first page in the pagination and pointing it to the view all page, this will prevent you confusing Google and getting mixed results across all your pagination.

How Can it Affect Quality Signals?

Google have stated that they will carry on trying to index pagination and deliver the best result to searchers regardless of the above advice. However, my feelings are that you need to follow the above advice in order to increase the quality of your site structure. We all know that Panda was rolled out to squash sites with low quality content, however from the examples I have seen this doesn’t just relate to the actual text but also relates to how pages/content is structured.

Pagination is popular among e-commerce websites, so is having duplicate product descriptions that are being used across the web. In order to stay out of trouble you need to provide Google with as much information as possible and take on any little bits of advice that are thrown your way, make use of micro formats, get listed in Google places and implement the above pagination advice, I personally think reacting to these changes is a sign that your website is genuine and therefore puts you out of harms way.

If you run an ecommerce site you will have no doubt been frustrated with Google in the past due to the small amount of data it’s been able to provide concerning your conversion funnel. Many will have turned to coremetrics or omniture, however Google have pulled their finger out and changed their attribution model and are giving much more data.

Google multi-channel funnels is a game changer in my opinion, I just want to flick through a few features but you can read more about it here and here

If you have ecommerce set up you will need to navigate to the new analytics view and click in the ‘my conversions’ drop down, select multi funnels and you’re on your way to analytics heaven.

Which Channel is assisting??

Most analytics systems credit conversions based on the first or last click within a session.

First click = PPC > Organic > PPC > Referral > Conversion (PPC Conversion)

Last click = Organic > PPC > Referral > Organic > Conversion (Organic Conversion)

So that’s how it usually works but what if you had the ability to see every player in this chain, every channel that was assisting in pushing conversions to your site? This is what Multi Channel Funnels does;

This pretty chart shows which channels assisted more often.

You can also break this down into source/medium, the chart above shows Google organic produces 8390 conversions from the last click, however it assists in another 6027! Just using the last click is seriously undervaluing the traffic.

But hey what about the first click, how did the visitor first find the site?

Again Google organic has 8849 last click conversions but 9724 on the first click!

Popular Conversion Paths

Again this is broken down nicely:

You can also see time lag between first interaction and conversion as well as path length in terms of clicks.

It’s all absolutely priceless and in terms of us SEO’s whether in house or in an agency it is a massive help in terms of proving the power of Google organic traffic.

Every ecommerce site I have looked at so far shows Google organic traffic is anywhere between 75% – 125% undervalued!

Happy days Seriously you need to read about this.

First of all let me apologise for the lack of activity on here recently, life is pretty busy at the moment and despite having lots to say the blog has had to take a back seat, however over the last month a lot has happened in the world of search, therefore lots to talk about.

One thing we have been noticing recently is how effective hubs are at generating rankings for core keywords, hubs have always been used to increase relevance but very recently they seem to have been given a little more weight.

What Do I Mean By a Hub?

At one point in the not so distant past if you wanted to rank you would create a well optimised landing page and link build to it. Depending on how competitive the term was you could probably get a top 5 ranking within a few month.

A hub is creating the landing page but also creating 5 – 10 relevant pages linked to from the landing page all using variations of the main term. Creating hubs on your site needs to be a priority at the moment as sites that do it are benefiting from higher rankings and more traffic.

E.g.

If you wanted to target the keyword ‘dog clippers’ fly over to the Google keyword tool and see what kind of hubs you can create:

In terms of structure it might look something like this;

You can create multiple hubs on your domain targeting any areas relevant to your niche.

Where to Target Links

Around a year ago when you only had one landing page you would have built links into the one page with variations of the keywords, however I personally feel the best way to link build is by targeting all pages within the hub with the most relevant anchor text to that particular page.

How Could This Work On An E Commerce Site?

E Commerce sites tend to have thousands of products under one category, do they really need to link build to thousands of pages?

Of course not, it wouldn’t be scalable, however you could break some of your main categories into sub categories and link build that way, just how I have set out above.

Creating more variation in your on page optimisation as well as the anchor text will produce better results across the full keyword range and assist in increasing relevant traffic.

We’ve known since 2009 that Google fully supports the cross domain rel=canonical and more recently it has transpired that the canonical may be faster and more effective than a 301, the traditional way for SEO’s to point the right link juice at the right places.

Seriously, there are a number of ways this can be used to boost SEO efforts and deliver the right signals to the right pages.

Getting Social Signals To Boring Pages

If you run an ecommerce site selling ‘dog leads’ you are likely going to struggle to get any social attention, however now Twitter and Facebook links are part of the algo, and from what we are seeing a pretty significant factor, you really want to be leveraging this to boost your rankings, so what do you do?

Well, start by making sure you have a blog with all the usual social buttons, write a post, something catchy with lot’s of images, ’5 most expensive dog leads’… maybe.

Push this around your social power accounts, share it on Twitter, Facebook, Stumble etc…… Now this post has plenty of social POW, all helping it rank

But hold on, the page we really want to rank higher is our ‘Premium Leads’ range

So…. We simply use the canonical tag to pass on all that lovely social juice! The User get’s the quirky content but Google credits your premium range.

Now this could be considered a little bit ‘grey hat’ but you could put things in place to minimise any risk, ‘This post was written on the back of research by our Premium Leads department’… I think you know what I am getting at.

Building Links Before Products Hit

My fellow SEO and colleague at Branded3 gave a great presentation on getting the most out of SEO specifically for Ecommerce sites, part of the presentation focussed on building links to blog posts targeting products that you know are coming to the market place but not yet released.

When it comes to new product releases Google seem to have a ‘first past the post’ rule, if you get the best page up and linked to the quickest then you win in the long run.

So you optimise and link to the blog posts months before it is launched and then 301 once the actual product page is live! Geniuous and works well, trust me.

However the user loses that smashing post on the blog, well they do if you 301 but if the canonical works better, hey presto!

Manipulation

Of course this leaves the door wide open to manipulation and there are many who would consider the above, grey if not black hat, however the fact remains it works well and Google allow it, at least for now.

SEO’s have been buying canonical links for ages, however with this recent research you can bet it is going to become more and more common. Are Google going to start punishing sites that buy canonical links

So it’s been around a month since Panda hit the UK and even though there has been plenty of commentary around it I think it’s a good idea to go through some findings, I have seen the analytics of over 20 hit websites now and even though there is no clear answer yet there a few interesting trends.

Brand Protection

Out of all the websites I have seen hit 95% of them were ranking for terms which had firm commercial intent, from product terms to travel destinations, household appliances to well known services. Tech blogs are a perfect example of this, a lot of the tech blogs out there were hit badly, ranking for tech product terms pulling huge quantities of traffic away from the main retailers and manufactures, only for panda to roll out and systematically destroy traffic.

Google have confirmed 16% of search queries have been impacted, my guess is at least 95% of them relate to commercially driven terms.

Which Sites Are Ranking & What Are They Doing?

If you have been hit you need to ask yourself, generally what type of search queries have I lost traffic on? Then search 10 – 15 of those queries, what type of sites are they? What type of security do they have? Do they use a lot of ads?

Richard Baxter did a great analysis of site quality factors a few days ago, go through these and decide what the ranking sites are doing right, then try and do the same.

Sheer Quantity of Content

We noticed a couple of sites that had very thin pages, some with no more than 50 words, before Panda these sites were pulling in thousands every day, after panda this was almost wiped out.

If you run a site with lot’s of thin content, think about bulking that content out now to dodge the next update.

Increasing Content Authority With External Links

I have always been a fan of linking out to authority sites, relevant to the content you are writing, content farms rarely link out, and when they do it is normally in an author box.

If you have pages of very dry content try adding in links to some authorities on the subject, this not only shows Google your a worthwhile hub but it also shows that the content is there to help navigate users to the most relevant information on the web rather than just attracting traffic to click on your ads.

The aim of all this is to add value to your content;

- Adding Video
- Images
- authority links
- reducing ads
- Increasing quantity
- Decreasing duplication

All these areas need to be looked at if you are to pull your website out of Panda.

A lot of webmasters have begun to no index large parts of their site due to the quality of the pages, I personally wouldn’t recommend this as Google never likes to see diminishing sites, instead rework that content make it better rather than covering it up.

There is no guarantee any of this will work but you can either try it or hope Google will eventually manually reinstate you.

You will have all seen and heard me mention the fact that Google now seems to be choosing which page of your site to rank based on internal links & on page factors, rather than relying solely on external links and the anchor text used.

This all happened at the end of last Summer and seems to be rolling  out for more and more search queries, a classic example of what this has done can be seen when you search for any major phrase;

Most of these internal pages that are now ranking were home pages last year and when you break down the link profile I can almost guarantee you the vast majority of links targeting the keyword in question link back to the homepage.

Why Are Google Doing This

There hasn’t been that much commentary on it, however we can only presume Google are looking to show the most relevant page on a domain, regardless of where links point to externally. The reasons for this aren’t clear but it obviously has something to do with search quality, why send a visitor to a home page when there is a perfectly optimised internal page?

Now this is all well and good but where do you build links to then? Logic says you build links to the most relevant page, however what you think is the most relevant page and what Google does could be 2 entirely separate things.

Sure you may have an internal page optimised for coat hangers but your homepage has your special offers on along with other related products.

How Are Google Doing This

After a few different tests it became clear that Google are using internal anchor text to decide which pages relate to which keywords, just like external links an exact match anchor text will give more weight than some other random variation.

I trialled this on SEO wizz just over a month ago, linking to an internal page with ‘search engine optimisation’, I matched the URL string exactly;

/search-engine-optimisation

However, just doing this wasn’t enough to override the authority of the homepage and because of this the homepage still ranked and came up first when perfroming a site: search + keyword.

Then I created a site wide internal anchor text ‘search engine optimisation’ pointing to the page, within 24 hrs this was now the most relevant page and was ranking in exactly the same position as the homepage, it had literally been switched.

Just to cover all my bases I removed the keyword from the URL and the Title tag of the internal page, yet it still ranked while ever I had the internal anchor text in place.

How To Handle It

If your homepage has been replaced by an internal page you may not need to do anything, you may even see conversion rates go up.

However, if you really want your homepage to be the master page for your target keyword you have 2 options;

1 – Change your internal anchor text to take the focus off the internal page

2 – If you can 301 redirect that page back to the home page

If you need to keep the internal anchor text the way it is then you could try adding a site wide link to the home page using the anchor text, however this can be a little tricky, best way to do it is my adding the text to the alt attribute of your logo or brand image.

Failing this you will just have to optimise the internal page both for search engines and conversions.

But What About Link Building?

The truth is it doesn’t really matter, Google seems to be looking at domains collectively, both internal and external anchor text is being used to decide where a domain should rank not where a page should.

Yes, it’s still good practice to link build to the most relevant page, however it may also be a good to include some anchor text to the home page and any other relevant pages for that keyword.

Use site: search modifier to discover the most relevant pages of your site for the target keyword, target at least 80% of links at the most relevant and spread the others amongst the next 3 or 4.

The main thing to remember now is that you are making your domain synonomous with a keyword not just a page.