Ranking 7th in Google.co.uk for Davide Corradi

My good friend Davide Corradi dared me to rank for his name without using any of the typical on-page optimisation techniques we are all aware of.  His reason to do this, was his surprise when in my previous post, Google ranking factors distribution graph,  I stated that on page optimisation factors accounted only for a 15% of rankings.

How did I do this? Well, it just took me one hour. My friend Davide is a great SEO, but all the web properties and social profiles where his name appears in, lack a good number of different domains linking to these properties with right anchor text. My challenge was to make the test page to rank for “Davide Corradi” without using the word in any of the highly scoring areas that all SEOs know about: title, headings, alt tags, bolded and italic words, etc. After creating the page, which took me literally 1 minutes, since it hasn’t got any content, I linked to it from the home page of my blog, and added this page to the blogroll to get an additional sitewide link with right anchor text. Internal linking is not enough to rank for a keyword that has nothing to do with your topical theme, but it is a good start to tell Google that this page was going to be important in the site architecture.

After this, I decided to fit a few links with “Davide Corradi” as the text link, in the first paragraph of other web properties that I created for a previous test. These web properties have no PageRank and almost nof links to them, they have nothing to do with the topics associated with  “Davide Corradi” (pizza, pasta, rock music, and bad dancing : ) , but I knew that as long as they were cached, it should be enough.

Additionally, I got a couple of links from two more established pages, nothing too high in terms of PageRank, but with enough authority to give it a bit of a push.

I did a couple of things more that didn’t work. Like creating a keyword rich blog pointing to that page. However, this blog hasn’t been cached, so It has no impact on this result at the moment.

In all fairness, we have to be just with Davide because there are a number of things that make this test flawed:

• “Oscar Carreras” is a much more competitive key phrase than “Davide Corradi”. A previous president of the chamber of commerce in Argentina is called “Oscar Carreras”, and there are more results competing for that query
• My blog is older than Davide’s and has more link equity than his. Authority factors of the page being inherited from the domain, were a big part of my ranking distribution factors post, as part of the query independent link metrics bit within the graph. That kind of proves my hypothesis, but being right doesn’t make the test juster.
• The problem with on-page optimisation is that is a one-off activity, and you can tweak it as much as you want or increasing the keyword density or even trying some semantic techniques (synonyms, related keywords, etc), but in the end there is not much else you can do. Off-page optimisation is a never ending process and even hitting the first place doesn’t make you stop. Your competitors will keep getting links and overtake you if you stop

In conclusion, this was an interesting test, and I wonder if I could get the page to rank first for “Davide Corradi” if I keep working on it. I didn’t use any of the numerous tools in the link builder tool belt, such as directories submissions, article syndication or even requesting links. If this page hadn’t been in my blog, I could have gone more “black hat” on it and use a few shady link generation techniques. That would have made it rank first very quickly but it would have probably be banned straight away. I also wonder if removing the only instance of the key phrase “Davide Corrradi”, only words in the cited page other than the boilerplate ,would make any difference; and if only with the power of the links, with no keyword match within the copy, the page could also rank for the query, the same way that Google did for “caffeine” in the past.  I could have also exposed the page to social media outlets like Twitter or Facebook to see if the social graph algorithms had some impact on rankings, as I hinted in my previous post too, and as my friend Davide did, but I didn’t think that could strictly be considered off-page techniques, so I ruled it out.

A few takeaways:

• Local domains don’t matter. My blog is hosted in the US and has a geographically neutral TLD (.org). The rankings are the same for Google.co.uk or Google.com .
• Google Caffeine infrastructure update is amazing. My page was created last night, around 22. Around 11 AM today it was already ranking 11. It took it around 20 hours to reach the seventh position. This couldn’t be happening if Google hadn’t computed the links I created so quickly. This was the competitive advantage of Mr Corradi, he only needed Google to index his page in order to rank, for me it was essential that Google would index the rest of the pages and calculate the value of the links and pass them on to the page relevance score for the query “Davide Corradi”. We, SEOs, have little excuses now and can’t tell our clients/stakeholders that it will take a few months for our changes to be seen and computed by Google.  Nowadays, the big G crawls the web every day.
• Anchor text is essential. My links wouldn’t pass any authority metrics test. They are coming from PR0 pages with very little inbound links to them.

I wonder if Mr Corradi will buy me a beer now. : )

There has been lots of articles around the topic, explaining how this algo update would work and what impact it would have on SERPs, but what does all this mean for us as SEOs?

For starters, we shouldn’t panic; personalization is likely going to only have an impact on rearranging top 10 results. In the post on Google Blog where the announcement was made, the example the engineers were giving was mainly based on CTRs (Click through rates) on a host(computer) level. Talking about it in simple terms, if your favourite hotel aggregator appears fourth for the query “hotels” and you keep clicking on that result disregarding the first three, during the next session is likely that Google will rearrange the results to show your apparently favourite site in the first spot.

So far, so good, if you were not in the top 5 for your selected query, personalization will have very little impact. You have a lot of work to do and the usual SEO work will need to be done to get to that privileged position.

If you are in the top 5 positions then things start to get interesting. Firstly, brand awareness will have a significant impact on CTRs. If your brand is well known, people will be more likely to click on your result and therefore the cookie hosted in the user computer will track those clicks and apply that data in the future. Marketing channels that seemed bound to die could be very useful to improve brand awareness and therefore CTR. There has been a lot of debate about the impact of display on branded and unbranded search, and ways to improve brand recognition, Social Media, display advertising, offline, etc, might now have more impact on results that they ever did.

Is that fair? Probably, not. Not only big brands have already been benefited by the Vince algorithm , but also they have deeper pockets and can engage in all these channels and reach more people. Not trying to be cynical here, but Google changes on the way they lay out paid ads or the way they consistently shrug off doubtful link profiles for big brands, makes me think that the companies that spend the most on Paid Search will benefit from more reach and more impact. I don’t imply that Google in particular, and search engines in general, will be purposefully biasing results towards big brands, but the algorithmic changes benefit big brands more on the whole.

I am getting off the point though. What I believe is going to be important now, is CTRs on organic results. In the past, when personalization wasn’t kicking in, search engines couldn’t use that data for the algorithm because it could have been easily spammable by click bots, but narrowing the dataset down on a host level (data tracked by the cookie), CTR suddenly gets at the top of your priorities.

This means that SEOs are going to need to work much more on how they present the results snippets to the audience. Titles and descriptions will need to become more compelling and stand out some way. Big brands might not want to experiment with it (at the end of the day, people tend to click more on their results) but not so big brands might try to play with ways to encourage clicking. I wouldn’t rule out SEOs testing the use of capitals in title tags, or special characters not seen too often (^ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ § ¬ ° ± º ø þ) or more marketing copy like copy using words like offers, deals, free, etc. I don’t think this will make results more relevant, it will probably make snippets very spammy like, but again SEOs don’t make the rules, Search Engines do. Additionally, these new ways to write titles will take up useful real estate from the 68 characters blue link and will make obligatory to target only one primary keyword per title. Additionally, link building with rich anchor text will be even more important because keyword prominence and playing with phrase based optimization will become more difficult in a more reduced title tag space.

So to sum up, these are my takeaways on SEO for personalized search:

• Ranking within the top 5 will be key in order to take advantage of personalization triggers. SEOs will have to work harder & quicker.
• Vince algorithm will work in favour of big brands that will have already a competitive edge
• CTR on organic results will be crucial. Factors such as brand awareness, multi-channel reach (display, social media, paid search, off-line), and snippet multi-variate testing will have to be taken into account.
• Link building will become even more important. Firstly to get into the first top results and secondly to make up for the lack of content based SEO techniques.

What do you think?

We have to admit it was a difficult query : )

Video results tend to dominate in Universal Search results according to Comscore, and video optimisation is a great opportunity to be able to leverage all your digital assets and get people to know more about your site, from different channels. But how Google decides whether or not to include universal search results for a particular query?

Danny Sullivan wrote an interesting article back in the day when Universal Search was in its first year of active performance. According to him, what Google does is to compare rankings and relevance among different vertical before producing the SERP. That means that Google will only add a video to the results page if it is more relevant than a text page. Considering that Google is actually unable to determine what is in the video, it is very unlikely that your video will outrank a HTML page.

So what is the point then? Interesting question. There is only as much as you can do to optimise a video. In Youtube you can ensure that you fit the keywords in the title, write a keyword rich description, use a descriptive filename and relevant tags…but that is all you can do really. How can you compete with a fully formed HTML page with hundreds of words related to the main term?

Take this video for instance. It is trying to rank for the keyword prison hotels, the text is catchy and descriptive and the description keyword rich. It is hardly a very competitive keyword, although funnily enough the search volume is of almost 3600 people searching for that specific term monthly.

So far, so good. The video ranks first in Youtube and Google video after a week  of being uploaded for the before mentioned keyword. That tells us that the optimisation work paid off. But is there any chance of being ranked in the main index results?

There are only 900 pages properly optimised for prison hotels, and aside the first 5 results, the rest is highly less relevant for the query than the aforementioned video. Some of them are results talking about hotels in the proximity of a prison but not former prisons that are hotels, which is the information searched by the user.

Reality here is, that despite being a great way to use your digital assets for additional reach, videos are only likely to rank for very long tail/low volume keywords or queries with the word “video” in it.  We know that video attracts the user and engage them longer than text results. We know that, so far, the number of videos in the index is minimal in comparison with text. There are windows of opportunity there for clever marketers, but our ignorance about the algorithm and a, in my opinion, flawed approach of Google when it comes down to ranking blending results, makes it only a nice to have SEO strategy rather than a must have.

What do you think?

Oscar Carreras speaks about Social Media Optimisation in the International Search Summit.

As we all should know the most relevant meta tags for search engines are the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag. Although the value of this last one is bar to none for Google, other search engines might take it into account to determine relevancy for specific queries so it is always a good idea to include it, with the only  reservation of not spamming the hell out of it and focus on a few relevant keywords per page.

There are different best practices for international search engines than for Google. Some of them recommend a specific maximum title and description tag length, whereas others give you additional recommendations:

• Yandex.  Yandex ignores meta tags Revisit-After & Content. It is best practice not to use more than 25 words in the title tag and the maximum characters recommended for Meta Description are 200. For meta keywords & meta description tags  we should use only words that can be found in the body of the document. Like for Google, the most relevant HTML mark up tags are: keywords in <title>, (headings <h1> – <h6>), image signs (alt) and text of the document
• Baidu. Since one Chinese character accounts for 2 Latin letters the meta description characters maximum is half Google limit. Baidu explicitly recommends to restrain the count to  100 characters tops. The same character restriction is applicable for the other tags.
• For Yahoo Japan the recommended meta description tag length seems to be 150 characters.

Optimising for International Search Engines has different rules than optimising for Google. Although information retrieval science is based on very solid concepts, different algorithms and linguistic factors come into place when it comes down to different search engines. Be sure that you are aware of these differences before planning to expand your business in other country markets online.

]]> http://europeanseo.org/multilingual-seo/metatags-best-practice-yandex-baidu-and-yahoo-japan/feed/ 0 http://europeanseo.org/multilingual-seo/guerrilla-marketing-going-too-far/ http://europeanseo.org/multilingual-seo/guerrilla-marketing-going-too-far/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:47:31 +0000 oskarokupa http://europeanseo.org/?p=139 One of  the most notorious showman in TV in Spain, going by the nickname, “El Gran Wyoming”, member of the TV channel, La Sexta, has proved to be an expert in spreading shocking-but-false information to increase the audience.  This week, the “El Gran Wyoming” has been in the eye of the hurricane after a video of him bullying a journalist trainee hit Youtube and stirred a huge controversy among his detractors.

Interestingly enough, a rival digital TV channel, renowned right wing biased broadcaster Intereconomia, featured that video live in one of the TV shows most critical with the cited comedian . Intereconomia presenter was ferocious in his criticism against the showman, accusing of being a bully and “lefty fascist”. Inevitably, many suspected that the video was a ploy but the gullible Intereconomia took the bait without verifying the facts. As expected, on Monday, in effect, “El Gran Wyoming” TV show “El Intermedio” confirmed that everything was a trap to mock and condemn the lack of journalistic ethics of his media rival.

The strategy certainly worked and “El Intermedio” got its best TV audience of the year with 1,549,000 viewers, a 7.9% ’share’.  The program scored its best ratings, thanks to the false video, which  has sparked a debate about whether anything goes on television without getting the facts right. Additionally, the journalistic community has discussed if  certain ‘journalistic practices’ are just a way to settle personal grievances or to gain audiences.

Either way, the truth is that Viral video is one of the most effective practises in order to do what is being called “Guerrilla Marketing”. A very little investment can reap huge benefits and big media corporations like main TV channels are not alien to make use of this word of mouth tools in order to get great results.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

As in any new more advanced SEO disciplines that are catching on, lots of dilettante practitioners try to capitalise on the popularity of the new concepts. That is the candid version of the story. The more harsh and probably honest version is that plenty of snake oil salesmen and scammers are starting to target the multilingual arena.

There are several signs to try to spot when it comes down to separating the wheat from the chaff in the international search field. Those are some of the most conspicuous :

1. Translation companies doing website localisation and SEO. Nothing again translation companies. They have their market and they work very well for legal documents, business translation and the like. However, translating is not localising.  In order to localise a website in other language you need to be a native speaker first and an Internet marketer second. More than translating, localising is creative copywriting, requires keyword research abilities and on-page SEO expertise. It is the similar issue that a few years ago happened with webdesign companies trying to get on the SEO wagon. It didn’t work very well.
2. Empty promises. “We promise High SERP rankings”. One of this translation companies offering Multilingual SEO approached us recently asking us for help. Obviously they didn’t have the know-how to do things by themselves so they were pursuing a partnership. When we mentioned the limitations of any SEO work they turned around in a rage mentioning the sentence above. Anyone who has been in this industry for a while knows that you can’t guarantee rankings.With personalized search more and more ingrained in search engines algorithms and increasing competition for generic terms, SEO is a different discipline now that it was 2 years ago. Vacuous promises are not only deceiving but irresponsible. Funnily enough, this particular company’s site was being outranked by one of our clients for the main keywords targeted by them on the main page, keywords that were not even our main goal for our client. It is clear that some companys come “talk the talk” but can they “walk the walk”?
3. Lack of basic insight about the international markets. There is a company in the US that has been lately strongly focusing on promoting their multilingual search services.  The on-page overoptimisation of multilingual seo related key phrases is sometimes hard to digest on their blog posts. However, keyword stuffing is not their main problem.  Stating things like that consumers speak English in Spain but shop in Spanish is gross ignorance and makes me feel embarrased for them.
   As a Spanish native myself, I can guarantee that very little people speak English even within business environments, as anybody going to Spain for holidays can certify, and although we claim to be fluent in our CVs very few people has basic conversational English skills. This kind of misleading information coming from an allegedly expert in the subject matter can harm more than ignorance when it comes down to targeting international markets.
4. Lack of basic International SEO knowledge. A SEO company offering multilingual services in the UK, that recently got a major deal with a big american company to provide their services in different languages, mentioned in its corporative blog, not too long ago, that to have a local domain name and local IP address in order to list on local search engines wasn’t important. Vanessa Fox, previous Google Engineer, explains very clearly how search engines determine location relevant search results, putting at the top of her list country specific local domains. This is something that is consensual belief for all the experts in International search engines matters, which leaves this firm in a very bad place.
5. “We will submit your site to thousands of local search engines”. That is a classic. Not much to mention about that. Run for the hills if that is part of the promotional materials of a multilingual search marketing company.
6. One thousand links and SEO for £100/100€. Multilingual search marketing is difficult. It requires not only general market expertise but also linguistic abilities and insight on search engines and platforms that go beyond Google and Yahoo. If companies in the US charge £750/h for just consultancy add all this additional expertise to the equation. Anyone who claim to be able to optimise and manage multilingual campaigns online for those prices are just going to take your money and run.
7. Local offices worldwide. That is a tough one. Although not being necessarily a bad thing, having to synchronise people from different locations, working cultures, timetables, time zones, different command of the English language, etc is a challenging endeavour.
   Additionally, in order to be able to combine and integrate efforts from different agencies across the world the companies need to make an additional investment if the results are meant to be cohesive enough for the project brand. Having a multilingual, multidisciplinar team under the same roof that can bounce ideas and add different insights is a much more cost effective approach.

There are no standards in the SEO industry and when we dig into more specialised search marketing disciplines the needs for knowing exactly what is value for money is essential if you don’t want to end in the hands of industry hustlers.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras

Spanish Internet users search to learn more about product and services (80 %). Internet penetration in Spain has grown to the 52%, overtaking countries such as Latvia, Lithuania. Slovakia or Czech Republic, in order to reach the 17th position in Europe according to Fundación Orange. The annual report that displays data from 2007 also highlight that, although ecommerce is growing in Spain, is still far behind from the European average of 23% of the population purchasing goods online. The report sets the Spanish figure on 13% in 2007.

1. Main Spanish Search Engines. Google is the number one property in search. There is not updated official data coming from the AIMC about Search Engines Share Market but the Foundation Orange seems to give a prominent first position to Google.es (95 to 97%), followed by MSN that grew to reach the second position with a meagre 3% and Yahoo plummeting with marginal percentages.
2. Website analytics in Spain. Google analytics is the tool more utilized, with a staggering share market of 75%. 50% of all companies don’t use any web analytics tool, they don’t have anyone dedicated to Web Analytics and only the few companies that use a paid analytics tool hire anyone to manage it.Source: SegundaEncuesta del Estado de la Analitica Web en España.
3. Biggest sites for social media in Spain (social networking, social bookmarking, news sites, etc) Youtube seems to be the social media site most visited by the Spaniards with 40% of the Internet population using it on a regular basis. However, Spanish users don´t generate as much content as other European users, with a little 7% of the content present in Youtube. That opens a window of opportunity to clever marketers to get much more visibility with viral video campaigns given the lack of competition. Having said that Spain is ahead of de Germany, France and Italy in terms of video generation and consumption. Podcast download, participation in Social networks such as Facebook, Myspace, Neurona, Linkedin or Tuenti, or blogs creation, are also activities carried out by Spanish users with a 20% of the total Internet audience, only behind the UK. Myspace seems to have the biggest social network share market with 34% but it is followed closely by facebook, hi.com and sonico.com. Tuenti.com a Spanish specific social media network has got a big buzz lately, despite being around since 2006 and now has more visitors than facebook and possesses a very high level of participation. You can see from Google Trends the popularity of the site in terms of traffic:
   Google Trends for Websites: tuenti.com, facebook.com, hi5.com, sonico.com Spanish equivalent of Digg, social news site, is Meneame.net , very popular.
4. Search algorithmic differences in Spanish for the main Search Engines. Since Google has such a huge share market in Spain I will talk about the algorithmic differences with Google.com and Google.es, but I believe this could be extrapolated to any country specific Google domain.It has been largely debated that TrustRank has less impact in country specific Google versions than in Google.com. That means that newly created sites would have more probabilities to rank well in country specific Googles than in Google.com. Keyword rich domains seem to have a bigger impact on international versions of Google than in Google.com.Obviously, country specific local domains (.es) are prioritized in SERPs from Google country specific version in detriment of .com.Spam filters work much worse in other languages Google versions than in Google. You can get away with more dodgy stuff internationally, not that I would recommend it.I think Google is increasingly investing on mastering the nuances of different languages so its algorithm can serve the best results to a wider international non english speaker audience. However, I think that stemming algorithms, and I also have the experience to prove this, of course, don’t work so well in romanic languages. As a result, I believe that exact phrase match within content might have more weight in country specific Googles than in .com.

Conclusions:

• Internet penetration in  Spain is rapidly increasing. A 250% since 2001.
• Ecommerce is still in its infancy in Spain. Factors such as lack of trust or reliance on more traditional channels can be argued although a big increase is likely to occur.
• Social media is the fastest growing sector and the figures are above more internet developed countries like Germany, France or Italy only behind UK.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras