Just in case anyone had any lingering doubts that Google uses the meta keywords tag in web pages, they categorically state they don’t here.

You might also be interested in this explanation of how Google handles duplicate content and why it’s not so much a penalty, as a simple outcome of the per-search algorithm, courtesy of Google’s Greg Grothaus.

I noted on SearchEngineLand that Google has introduced an Internet Statistics landing page, particularly focused on the UK: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/

There are stats on various topics, almost all internet/media/technology related, although there are some macro-economic stats available.

A variety of sources have been used and you can even submit your own stats. Interesting stuff!

Just a quick link: the SEOMoz 2009 Ranking Factors report has been published and it’s no surprise to see that external link anchor text, title tags and link popularity are seen as the most important factors by a reasonable concensus of SEO experts.

Go and have a read here.

A client of mine forwarded an email (let’s be honest, spam) he received from an SEO company in the north-west last week. I thought I’d write about it here, but I’m not going to name names because frankly I can’t be bothered getting hassle from talking to a company who uses these tactics.

The email is quite long, but I shall give you an overview of my main areas of concern (which of course made me quite angry at the time, as it is effectively questioning my services to the client):

1. “Your website is probably underperforming in the major search engines… I struggled to find you in the first couple of pages of Google…”The email doesn’t state what search terms the sales chap was using. So, um, exactly how does he define “underperforming”? The site is in the top 10 (mostly the top 2) for all the target phrases I agreed with the client, based on solid keyword research and the client’s target market. Very misleading, but to the uninitiated, it sounds very serious.
2. “I ran a back-link check on your site… Your website has 2 back-links, meaning it’s not very popular.”
   Riiiiight, exactly what did the sales idiot use to get this information? I’m guessing Google’s link: command, which has been broken for longer than I can remember. The only way to know what links to your site Google knows about is to use Webmaster Tools, which this guy can’t have had access to. After that, it’s Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which reports 204 links to the site in question. Way to go, salesboy… You’re scaring my client and wasting my time as I explain the real situation to them. Thanks.
3. “Right now, your site has only 6 pages indexed by Google, which is quite low. This can be down to many reasons which our service can help resolve.”
   Um, yeah, the main reason is there are only six pages on the website, genius! Now, I agree that more content will generally help with SEO, but for this particular client it isn’t necessary (see above point about being in the top 10 for all target phrases).

As you can tell, I’m not very impressed with this “research” and these guys are frightening people and causing trouble for other reputable SEOs as a result. The email states that they’re prepared to enter into a 12-month contract at £175 per month to promote five phrases, so basically they want £2100 a year to SEO five phrases for your site. I’ll leave you to decide if that’s good value or not, considering they don’t appear to be able to do even basic SEO research properly.

As a result of the MyDeco experience (see earlier post), we found that the site in question wasn’t recording campaign tracking (although obviously we can see referring websites). In case you’re not aware of Campaign Tracking, there’s a guide here.

MyDeco are keen for retailers to use campaign tracking to ensure more accurate results with a better quality of data. This is usually done by appending “?partner=mydeco” to the end of any link to the retailer, so that it shows up in their logfiles. If you’re using Google Analytics, this won’t do, as Google wants campaign tracking to be done in its own UTM format (see the guide linked above).

So, we tried this with the site in question, which is hosted on a Microsoft IIS server and written in ASP .NET (.aspx). This had the effect of causing an error – the pages really didn’t like having a query string put on the end of the URL, which is what putting a “?” means. So, we needed a way to get Analytics to accept an alternative character to replace the “?” and thereby stop the website from throwing errors.

The solution, after some searching, was to use the anchor signifier “#” instead of “?”, which the website is happy to accept. However, you can’t just make campaign URLs with “#” instead of “?”, because by default Analytics won’t know what it means. You need to add this line of code to your Analytics tracking code (the code inserted into every page of your website when you set up Analytics):

pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);

This line of code should be inserted as follows: Find the Google Analytics code in your webpage and add it like this:

var pageTracker._gat._getTracker(’UA-xxxxxx-x’);
pageTracker._setAllowAnchor(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
 

I found this tip courtesy of Digital Notions, so hat-tip to them.

If you want to see how your site will fair in Google’s next major update, have a look here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com

Google announced today its intention to re-engineer some of its workings, particularly how fast it indexes content, in an effort to improve its real-time search results, an area where it senses the market is moving and sites such as Twitter might steal a march.

Note that this sandbox preview version of Google is missing many of the niceties we’ve come to love in the last couple of years, as Matt Cutts says in the blog post, but if you notice any issues, they want your feedback using the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom – just put Caffeine somewhere in the text.

Google have added an Advanced Segment item for Event Tracking, so you can compare the behaviour of visits with an event to any other segment you choose. You can read about it and see a video here.

This reminds me to remind you – if you have any events on your website, whether it’s a document for download, a video to watch or anything else, make sure you add the event tracking code to it so you can see what’s happening in Analytics. Have a read of the two links in the blog post I’ve linked to above: Implementing Event Tracking and Event Tracking Best Practices, which will tell you how to do it.

I had a click report from My Deco sent to me by a client on Friday, asking for my comments. MyDeco is a comparison shopping engine in the home interiors vertical market; they work on a combination of affiliate comission (CPA) and pay per click (CPC) to generate their revenue, so retailers pay for clicks through to their website and a percentage commission if a sale is made.

This particular client has been very disappointed by MyDeco’s performance, with no sales being generated and a very small number of visitor referrals. So it was something of a surprise to see the click report claiming hundreds of visits with a resultant bill of three figures, when Google Analytics reported visits barely into double figures from MyDeco in the same period.

The accompanying email from MyDeco claimed “We have excluded Google, Yahoo and other known bots in line with industry standards, as well as repeat/multiple clicks from the same IP (double clicks)… We would also like to point out that some CPC retailers have experienced differences between their Google analytics reports and the volume of clicks in the attached reports.  This is due to the inherent limitations of Google analytics software, to identify trends rather than 100% accurate datasets.” Well, I think Google might have something to say about that, but it becomes pretty clear why they’re making excuses when you open the report.

Inherent “limitations” of Analytics accetped, do you really think that it is so limited that it would fail to report 97% of all visitors from MyDeco!? Seriously, you think Analytics is likely to be that wrong? I can’t see it.

But then we come to the real crux of the matter. The report provided, by default, opens to show clicks listed per day for the period. If you expand each day, it tells you the time of each click and the product that was clicked on. I found several instances where there were five clicks from the same product within a minute of each other. The charge was 36p per click every time. What do you think the chances of five different people clicking on exactly the same product within the space of a minute are, taking into account that we are talking about a three month period with less than 300 clicks in total? They must be the same person each time. So what happened to excluding “repeat/multiple clicks from the same IP”?

This kind of rubbish is disgraceful and gives CPC a bad name. How many retailers would just open the report, look at the number of clicks and pay the invoice? If you’re a MyDeco retailer, I urge you to examine your click reports in detail and see if it tallies with your Analytics and log files. In this case, the discrepancy is huge and the cause is quite clear – complete failure of the MyDeco click cleaning software to do its job, very much in MyDeco’s favour.

I know many of you reading this are doing so because you have met me at an eBusiness Programme event. These events (workshops, breakfast briefings, conferences and of course the grants programme as well) are funded by EMDA, the East Midlands Development Agency.

For various reasons, not least central government clawing money back to cover the ever-increasing national debt, the programme has had its funding cut and as a result the last workshops will be this August, unless the powers that be can be persuaded otherwise. Fellow trainer Sue Hallam has created a simple petition to get as many businesses supporting the programme as possible, which you can add your name to here: eBusiness Programme Funding Petition.

Please do give this your support – I’ve heard comments along the lines of “best training I’ve ever had” and “best thing Business Link have done” so many times, it would be a crying shame to see this programme end prematurely, especially when it’s a resource unique to our region!

Some chatter in the ranks about Google changing the way it treats NoFollow links, in order to combat PageRank manipulation through PageRank sculpting (i.e. applying NoFollows to links on your pages to prevent them “leaking” PageRank and hence retaining more “power”).

Full explanation in this article from WebProNews.