Matt Cutts has given a very useful interview with Eric Enge, which rounds up a lot of information architecture and technical architecture issues.

There’s nothing really new here, but it’s good to get all this info into one place and to see it confirmed by Matt.

Topics covered:

• crawl budget/indexation cap – the use of Pagerank and host load to control crawl depth and frequency
• the effect of duplicate content on Pagerank
• session IDs and affiliate IDs in links/URLs
• faceted navigation – good to see Matt confirming that the advice I gave at SES London, and will be giving next week at SMX Munich, is all correct.
• Different ideas for use of the rel=canonical tag
• 301 redirects and how they differ from 302 redirects
• Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) ignore parameters
• Pagerank Sculpting and its effectiveness in the modern world
• Javascript, IFRAME and PDF handling
• Paid links and nofollow

Overall, the article strongly reinforces the fact that a successful site architecture is essential to SEO success.

No tags

Google’s John Mueller has published a good article on working with multi-regional web sites. He confirms that country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) are the best way to host multi-regional content. He also clears up some of the myths surrounding duplicate content on multi-regional domains, which is most welcome.

John doesn’t mention that the same thinking applies even if you are targeting a single country. A ccTLD is the best way to indicate the location of your target market to search engines – and to that market itself, of course.

A URL gives you at least five places to target a country: domain (ccTLD), subdomain (de.domain.com), directory(www.domain.com/de/), path parameters (www.domain.com/;domain=de) and query parameters(www.domain.com/?domain=de). However, there are lots more axes for the content to be split along:

• Category – Web, Enterprise, Social, Real Time
• Context – Intranet, Library, Personal
• Topic – Health, Travel, Jobs, etc.
• Vertical – Finance, Education, Government, etc.
• Platform – Desktop, Mobile, Television, Kiosk
• Format – Text, Image, Audio, Video, Map

(Note: the above is slightly modified from a table provided by Search Patterns, an excellent read)

Given this number of ways of organising content, and the fact that the location and language of your target audience are major considerations (worthy of a major axis), in all but the most trivial cases a ccTLD is the obvious choice for geo-targeting. It’s good to see official written confirmation of this from Google.

No tags

Microsoft launched their new Bing ad on television last night.

My first impressions were that the ad is too negative. It doesn’t show what Bing can do for you. It’s at risk of associating Bing with information overload and distressed searchers. I’m also not convinced the phrase “decision engine” is a good one – too techie, too nebulous. Who’s making the decisions – me, or Bing?

Compare it with Google’s Superbowl ad:

This has its own potential problems – I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to use no voiceover whatsoever on a TV ad running in a £60,000 per second timeslot – but in general it’s a much more upbeat ad showing someone achieving something – lots of things – using Google Search.

In Microsoft’s position, I think I’d accept the fact that lots of people use Google and get good results lots of the time, and show that Bing is an alternative that often succeeds when Google fails. I’d challenge the notion that Google always delivers the right result, every time, and that if Google doesn’t deliver it it can’t be on the Web. I’d get people to try Bing – that’s all you can ask of the ad. An idea would be to use something based on the famous “Pepsi Challenge”, but bring it right up to date.

Having seen the interview with Ashley Highfield, I’m looking forward to more ads in the series. It would be great to see Bing achieve the double digit market share that he desires, but I think this was a bad start to the campaign.

No tags

It’s SilverDisc’s 17th Birthday today, so here’s a free gift of an idea for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to consider.

Here at SilverDisc we’re often having to install and test new conversion tracking code for our PPC clients. Usually this involves searching for one of our client’s keywords on each search engine, clicking on it (thus incurring cost for the client) then going through the client’s site, making a test purchase and, later, checking that all the analytics has worked.

A cool feature that the search engines could add to improve efficiency would be a dummy campaign/ad-group/keyword that was automatically created by the engine itself within the PPC account specifically to test conversion tracking.

The keyword could be assigned by the engine itself, and could be very long, cryptic and unique to each client account, e.g. g54fr89fdcdjasdoe84.

• Searching for this keyword would always trigger the client’s ad
• Clicking this ad would not incur any real charges (although it may simulate a charge). Alternatively, a very low charge could be applied, e.g. £0.01.
• Conversion tracking could work much faster for this one keyword, e.g. near-real-time, to allow better, faster testing

This would save loads of time within agencies and mean that client accounts were up and running sooner, making more money for both clients and search engines.

No tags

I see that Matt Cutts of Google is calling for link spam reports.

I’m still very troubled by this paid links issue after all these years!

I agree it’s Google’s right to penalise or promote any page/site in its natural listings, which represent Google’s subjective opinion of relevancy.

However, the idea that all paid links are bad/”evil” is wrong in so many ways:

• Paid links pre-date Google.
• There is no machine-readable standard for labelling a paid link. I’ll repeat that – there is no machine-readable standard for labelling a paid link.
• Labelling paid links fails the “Does this makes sense in the absence of search engines?” ethical test. The answer may well be “Yes”. (Where the answer is “No”, I agree paid links are spam).
• Labelling paid links fails the “Would I do this if search engines did not exist?” test. In fact, you have to know that Google exists, and that they mind about paid links, in order to label those paid links in the non-standard way that Google asks you to label them. This is perhaps my biggest beef with Google’s approach to paid links – they actually violate one of Google’s published Webmaster principles.
• What does “paid” mean anyway? An actual exchange of cash? If you look at the top results for any hugely commercial field, say “car insurance”, it’s hard to believe that there is no commercial influence in the results! When all that a company does is commercial, then every link (positive or negative) to that company’s site is commercial in nature.

I understand that a market in paid links arose because of Google’s algorithm.

However, the irony is that in responding to that market by asking all publishers to label paid links in a non-standard way, Google violated its own principles. It started to ask publishers to adapt what they published to suit Google (because Google existed), and called them spammers if they didn’t. That’s the wrong way around. It’s the spammers that do stuff purely because Google exists!

No tags