Your SEO is shit

In August 2006, AOL fucked up massively, they released click through data of their Search Engine users. Well, not all of them just 20 million web queries from 650,000 AOL users made over the course of three months. You can get the torrent on Mininova if you want a look: http://www.mininova.org/tor/388815

There were pretty much no surprises. People search for shit, they don’t conceive anything they type might be stored or that they are tracked as an individually identifiable user so they drop their guard. ho hum.

Anyway, the interesting thing to know is that AOL search is a white label of Google. AOL add a shitload of crud to the SERP which makes it ugly and the algorithm used is a bit ‘safer’ than the live Google algorithm but generally, AOL Search is Google.

Because the SERP click through metrics were released we can work out which ranking gets which traffic, this is really useful. It’s improbable that Google would ever release this kind of information. AOL shouldn’t have done and people got sacked for doing it… but hey, their loss.

AOL Ranking Click Through graph

So we can see that the first ranking on a SERP, according to the harvested dataset gets clicked on by 42.3% of the people who see it, second place gets 11.92% etc.

Some things to know and think about:

• Who’s clicking on the PPC Adverts? Anyone?
• AOL SERPs pages are maxo pimpo compared go Google, the fold is in a completely different place
• Other stuff I can’t be bothered to type

SEO-001

Quick Post

I heard B&Q the major purveyor of fine quality tools and materials for builders, trade, plumbers for all your household needs was thinking of selling www.diy.com – which of course is madness (even though it’s worth a mint).

They’d easily make more money than the URL is worth, even in this economic climate, if they made the site useful in any way at all.

There’s so many half cocked attempts at plugging content in there (it’s actually got some good DIY guides if you can be arsed to hunt around for a couple of hours to try and find them). and theyre pimping it so hard with great big offer gif’s that the site is unusable.

The search and navigation is fatally broken.

Here’s a challenge – go to the B&Q website at www.diy.com and try to find out if they sell a bathroom wall light with a shaving plug.

It’s fun for all the family. It’s like a Pirate Treasure Hunt – ARRRRRRRRR

SEO-001

So most people should know that jsut about anything electrical (fridges, freezers, blu-ray players, flat screen tv’s DAMN must stop slapping in keyphrases! ) sold on the high street in the UK is done through a DSG retailer. I’m talking Currys, PC World – who were and then werent and then were again) , Dixons…

Some of you might have had the misfortune to try and use their weirdy site, which has far too many problems to list here.

Anyway, so, you’ve got a calamitous CMS system, it happens to us all, what do you do. I tell you what you do, you try and bolt some ‘save-yer-ass’ SEO onto it that’s what. Behold:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=en-GB&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_en-GB&q=inurl%3awww.currys.co.uk+inurl%3aseo

For example:

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/234260

Automatically I’d be thinking I’d be looking at some kind of doorway sub-site, but it’s all so mashed up and broken that it’s of no use at all. I don’t really know what it’s trying to do.

Anyone who remember the SEO/Google ‘Tolerance Years’ will shudder that an SEO is flagging his SEO work by using SEO as a directory point.

ho hum

SEO-001

Merry Christmas.

Hopefully this means an end to the ’Buy a Steam Cleaner for you Dad as a Christmas present, it’s what they always wanted. It makes a perfect present, and comes in a lovely big box which looks great when wrapped up.’ bollocks on the Shopping channels.

I had a look at the QVC site in passing, look at this disaster:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.V25685.desc.Karcher-1500-PSI-Pressure-Washer-w-Dirtblasterand-VPS-Wand

Homepage duplication:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/

Dead Directory:
http://www.qvc.com/qic/

 Logo links to:

http://www.qvc.com/?rewrite=no&cm_re=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO&cm_sp=MH-_-LOGO-_-LOGO

ooh look:

http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.item.Kiss-My-Arse

returns a 200, so if it’s linked to, it’ll get indexed

sheesh, what a mess, and thats just the start of it – there’s loads more like how they’re (mis)handling internationalisation and stuff, but Meh! I’ve got a turkey to cook

SEO-001

We’ve had a lovely question in from KrustyPrick who asks:

‘Who are you?’

As has already been stated, we’re a small but hard working group of SEOs who’ve been in the business for quite a few years who would rather go un-named. To be honest, even if you were told our names they probably wouldn’t ring any bells.

This is because we’re far too busy actually doing it and bringing in enormous quantities of traffic for our employers or clients. We don’t really have time for this silly site but it came out of a drunken evening of shaking our heads about the amount of dis-information and people eating out on free dinners off the back of pedalling duff information.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE

So we’re doing it – rather than haemorrhage with rage about bullshit nonsense we see daily, we’re cathartically putting our annoyances here – we don’t mean any harm, we’re just pissed off with it all – so rather than seething in silence, we’ll find stuff, and try to carefully explain why it’s shit.

Happy?

SEO-001

We’ve called the Boffins to try and help decode this, but they were no help.

What’s going on here is indecipherable:

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/advantge-of-breadcrumbs-in-seo-229028.html

what the hell is he saying?

Q: Are Breadcrumbs important?

A: I think they are very important if you don’t have content on page. If you have a lot of content, the importance decreases.

For example http://wiki.answers.com is using it. This technique imho is some gray seo technique, if it doesn’t bring any value to the visitor. It’s a sort of keyword stuffing and when people will exploit it too much google will develop algorithms to detect and devalue it.

I would say that location attribute are the best from seo perspective, but I think it depends on the website structure you have and on what seo weight you want each type of page to have.

seriously, this is pretty much entirely nonsensical.

Our non-shit answer:

Breadcrumbs are important for Users and for SEO. Make sure you don’t do anything stupid with something like javascript generating the breadcrumb from the browser history or anything, it needs to be staticly rendered in HTML where you can control what’s in it.

SEO-001

So, we’ve had a lovely question come in from Jill Wailin, she asks:

‘If you’re so good at SEO why have you got hyphens and stop words in your URL?’

Ok, so first of all lets explore why she’s asking us this question.

Most SEOs might consider that hyphens in a URL are a Bad Thing because there’s been indication from some Search Engines that too may hyphens are a sign that the site isn’t really very good.

Some SEOs might consider that having Stop Words in the URL are bad because they .. oh dear… ‘dilute the keyphrase density’ of the URL, gosh, such poncy language. All theyre suggesting is that if you want to rank for a particular term you should use it in your domain.

Nonsense on both counts

Choosing a domain name is immensely important, but there’s actually very little SEO in the decision. The hyphens / keyphrase arguments are completely moot and is easily disprovable with many examples.

Choosing a domain name

So, http://www.your-seo-is-shit.com would be a terrible domain name if you were targeting it at normal people, or having to explain it over the telephone ‘the hyphen is at the top right of the keyboard, yes that’s it, no you don’t need to press shift, yes, yes it’s just like a minus sign’ or were expecting less able users to have to enter it. We’re not, and we dont care. We also don’t really give a shit about the length of the domain we’re using. There are lots of reasons to try and use the shortest domain as you can, and that’s all fine.

But not a lot of this is an SEO decision, may be it falls more into branding and usability? Luckily, the good SEOs these days are able to advise on both branding and usability as well as SEO.

A big thing to watch is to make sure you’re only running one version of your site. Some people run two without even knowing it, this is called, guugh, the canonical problem, which mostly jsut means your site is available on the www and non-www version. It’s easy to fix with a bit of redirecty stuff, just pick either the non-www or the www and redirect one to the other. Go check your site now, type in http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com and see what happens – getting your content delivered on both? That’s not great.

Yes, by conventional thinking, our domain name might be shit but:

• It made us laugh
• It’s fairly memorable
• We don’t care what anyone thinks
• The audience we’re aiming at isn’t a conventional audience
• The structure of any URL has little to no ranking factor

Do you REALLY think a couple of hyphens in a domain name is gonna stop Google indexing a site?

It’s not 1998 anymore. Grow up.

SEO-001

So you might start taking this site to pieces and finding things wrong with our site at Your SEO is Shit.

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage

Recently, I was listening to an interview of an SEO, where the question was:

“What’s the first thing, as an SEO, you do when your SEOing a site”

Amazingly the answer given, by this celebrity SEO was:

‘The first thing I do as an SEO is keyphrase research”

Ok, lets examine why this is shit.

Set the scene

So imagine you’ve got a website, it’s doing ok, your happy. You feel it could be doing better but aren’t really entirely sure how, why or what. Then you hear of this thing called ‘SOE’ or something. Who knows.

You call the recruitment agency and say ‘Get me one of these ESO people for my website’

After spending a few weeks (during which time the traffic on your site has stayed static) interviewing a right bunch of weirdos you pick the least weird of them all and offer them a job, may be give them a couple of months probation just for safety.

So they work their months notice and turn up on day 1, you find them a desk and a computer (which they say is rubbish) and leave them to do their thing.

What happens. Nothing that’s what. You ask your new SEO employee ‘ok, show me what you’ve done’, and they give you a great big spreadsheet of numbers and words and things. Doesn’t mean a thing to you but it looks clever, maybe it means something, here and there a word catches your eye, it looks like a product you sell, and then there’s numbers next to it… don’t know what the numbers are but it looks clever.

Your new expensive employee looks at you gleefully and says ‘It’s a Keyphrase Research report’.

You look at your traffic graph, it’s flat.

Your SEO is making no difference, if you discount the fact that the ‘Phrase Densikey’ thing might be clever. Nothing.

Here’s the non-bullshit answer.

The first thing an SEO should do when they start working on a site is make sure that Metrics are correctly implemented. Is all the traffic being counted? Is where the traffic coming from being correctly measured. If you don’t have this, any SEO work you do will always be open to ambiguity. As an SEO you can sometimes get instant traffic upkicks (and impress your new employer) immediately just by auditing metric implementation.

Beware the bull shitters – Keyphrase reports come later in the SEO cycle when you’re pushing for the last nth percentages, not at the start when you can get great traffic increases from the simple understandable actions.

After this is done, the SEO should go and have a cup of tea with the Boss and tell him how you mended his metrics and what they’regoing to do next and that SEO is not really wierd, and although the machine he gave the SEO isn’t as good as the one you’ve got at home you’re sure he’ll buy the SEO something blistering once you treble his conversions (so sometimes next week).

What to do second … coming soon

SEO-001

I’m not going to name names.  We all know who the celebrity SEOs are.

I’ve been working in the SEO industry for over a decade and never once have I posted in a forum, written a blog post about SEO or spoken in public about what I do.

The reason: the best SEOs in the industry operate in stealth mode.

I realise the irony that I’m now posting a blog entry about this, but I’m using the alias SEO-003 to prove that I’m not doing it for my own personal gain.

It has become a necessity for me to vent about the industry I work in to prevent me from suffering a stroke or other debilitating mental breakdown.

While the true SEOs toil away and perfect their craft, the celebrity SEOs perfect their public brand as a façade for their lack of knowledge.

If you are a true SEO, run silent, run deep (unless you need to blog under an alias to prevent yourself from suffering a brain haemorrhage).

More rants to follow.

SEO-003