Your SEO is shit

So here I am bedridden (I blame this manflu killer flu that’s been doing the rounds). After getting a few hours kip in the morning, I switched on the TV and came across the ‘Change4life’ advert.

This ad is designed to get families to change their lifestyles so that they can eat better, move more, live longer, blah blah blah. Anyway, at the end of the ad was an unusual call-to-action (I think Orange have used it in the past). I was instructed to ‘search for change4life’ (or google ‘change4life’ as most people will do).

Ok so I do that and get the following SERP:

Now as you know, people are a lot more ‘SERP savvy’ these days and trust organic listings more than sponsored listings. Hence why PPC and SEO must work together in the SERP’ so you would think that the Change4life site would have secured first place in the organic listings. WRONG! Even though there is an NHS article about the Change4life campaign in first position, the intended site that they want us to go to is in second position and we all know the importance of securing first position, oh dear. You may argue that they have some sort of coverage with the article in first position but you have to navigate way below the fold (after muchos content) for the actual link to the intended site.

Moving on. A lot of people will also search for the obvious variant ‘change for life’. I did this, and got the following:

Once again, PPC is all good but look, there’s no sign of any organic listings. WTF! Surely, getting some sort of organic exposure for an obvious search-term variant is vital? Granted, it doesn’t happen overnight but why not use another URL to promote? One that doesn’t have any obvious variants.

Does all this really matter? Well, I certainly have no reason to use this site so a no for me. However, this campaign is funded by taxpayer’s money so yes it does matter.

Is all our hard-earned taxpayer’s money going straight to Adwords? If so, what a flipping waste. If they sorted out their SEO and maybe invested in a decent URL, there wouldn’t be the need to invest in PPC. Instead, this money could be invested in something far more useful OR are people ignoring the sponsored ads, clicking on the first result in the organic listings and finding it’s irrelevant? If so, it seems as though we won’t eat better, move more and live longer after all.

Ok rant over and back to bed.

PPC-001

This is how not to ask for SEO (Requires sound for full SEO effect)

So 2008 is in it’s dying hours. We started the year in bouyant mood based on the back of round-robin snowballing bank loans for money that only existed as IOUs. Though we wouldn’t find out how much the banks had screwed us over until later on in the year. Everyone was happy (apart from some sweaty bankers hidden in the back rooms of Canary Wharf guarding their deep dark secret).

So, 2008 on average, you were great. Any old idiot could knock up a website and somehow make some money on it. Sarah Beeny may (or may not) have said something which resonates into all corners of the current economy, ‘Gone now are the days when any old imbecile could buy a property that needed nothing doing to it, completely fuck it up and sell it for a 50% profit’. This cuts to the core of the economic re-adjustments that’s going on into the start of 2009.

Any old idiot could buy a URL completely make a mess of it and somehow mostly be ok.

Any old idiot could start a curtain design consultancy and somehow make money.

It’s all based on money that never existed.

Come 2009 any Business will be looking at it’s assets and trying to wring every last ounce of value out of it. There’s no such thing as an over-performing website, all websites, whatever they do, could do better – we’re seeing this with the now aggressive stance Google is taking to it’s primary products, and Google is the most successful website in the world.

There are some disciplines which should flourish in the next year, SEO should be one of them as part of a CRM/PPC push trying to increase engagement and ROI on websites – and not before time. Without trying we’ve found and highlighted some terrible sites and tried to show why they’re cruddy on the few postings we’ve made so far on here.

If ever there was a time to sort the good SEOs from the shit ones, 2009 feels like it will be it.

Happy & Prosperous New Year to you, it will be neither prosperous nor happy – Good Luck

SEO-001

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