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?

For me, Link Bait real ideas are the ones that show some creativity. The economic issue is always there and probably is much easier to write a controversial post insulting someone to spark an argument or invent a story altogether, but what I enjoy as an Internet user, and I really link to, it is useful and funny stuff, most of the times in the shape of a video, software or funny web application.

So from that point of view there you have my favourite Link Bait attempts of all time:

• Compare the Meerkat . The Link Bait spin-off site par excellence. Alexander and his compare the meerkat site has reaped the benefits of a TV campaign too but it quickly went so viral that the spoof site has the same PageRank than Compare the Market but with 11 years less of existence. Fantastic, humorous, funny and effective…as well as useless. But that is not the point.
• Will it Blend. Video related link bait also in a additional site. There is a dilemma whether the subject or your link bait should be hosted in the main site or in a standalone microsite. Succesful attempts seem to point to the latter like these series of videos from Blendtec trying to use their blending machines to destroy all sorts of stuff. This started as a Youtube channel and has evolved to a microsite.
• Doodlebox. This is a great online tool, funny as hell and on topic. Hotels.com has created this online tool so you can scribble around with uploaded pictures and mess around with your friends facial hair or vision impairment levels . Appealing to the primary school student that is within all of us , Doodlebox is a funny way to spend a few minutes and share your “art” with your mates. Flash applications are not the most SEO friendly thing in the world but who cares when the result is so cool. We will have to see how that evolves in terms of links but it is certainly worth sharing.

My contribution is quite cool

• Twitter Grader. When you combine and up and rising start-up in every body’s mouths and a tool that rates “popularity” online the results in terms of buzz and links are bound to come. I am particularly fond of anything that Hubspot do as I find them to be a bunch of cool guys doing the marketing that makes me want to learn more about (as opposed to the kind of marketing that is based on deceiving people). I am not a marketer per se, I am an web developer in background and a SEO for trade, but tools like this make me more accepting of the idea of marketing.

What are your favourite Link bait examples?

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

The erroneous way to approach Social Media services, advocated by some other agencies, it is the pay per profile, pay per automatic tools to be present in social networks or per tweets/Facebook friends/Linkedin contacts, etc. This approach is the equivalent of blog comment spam or automated link requests and goes against the intrinsic nature of social media which is based in engaging in the conversation.

In my opinion, the way to monetise the use of social media as an agency service for marketing departments is through education. You don’t give a fish to a hungry man you teach him how to fish. The marketeers are always going to know more about their target audience than any search agency, they know their products upside down and they can relate to their customer’s needs and enquiries promptly and accurately, unlike any third party agent.

Most of people are already engaged in social media whether the CEOs approve it or not. We all have Facebook profiles or twitter accounts or we use youtube and upload videos. It is the way it is and banning it would be useless. On the flip side, that means that every company has already the potential to leverage social media as a tool to generate leads, improve customer services and cut costs accordingly and apply insight gathered from their customer base to product development. They just have to capitalise on their workforce, find an agency/trainer who can educate them in the use of social media outlets for corporate purposes whilst keeping it fun and personal.

Additionally, a corporation is nothing but the sum of its employees and the sum of the personal reputations would enhance corporate reputation. It is a win-win situation.

At the International Search Summit next week, I will speak about the balance between personal and corporate reputation, how to capitalise on your social media savvy workforce and why social media gurus can just be snake oil salesman; a successful social media strategy will only be successful if stems from the corporate core and the company most valued assets, their people.

Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

Multilingual Link Analysis Best Practice

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Resources

• Url of the page where the link is placed or to be place
• List of keywords that the site is targeting
• Google Toolbar to check page rank
• Several online tools that might help you in the analysis.

Steps (for each document / page )

1. Page Inspection
   
   • Title metatag (title of the page) . Review if the keywords are related to the site subject matter
   • Text surrounding the link. Search engines use a lot of semantic technology in their algorithm. That means that they are able to understand the relationship between themed keywords. That means that if the text surrounding the link has a little to do with the theme of the page linked that link will have less impact than conversely. Take a thorough look at the text around the link to spot semantic relationships
   • Check number of links on the page. The more links placed in a page the more diluted the page rank (the mark that Google gives to any page, it is easily checkable with Google Toolbar) will be.
   • Check the themes of the links. A page full of travel links will provide with better value to a travel site that an inventory of links of random topics (travel, gambling, sports, etc)
   • Link Location: is important. Ideal case scenario:
     • links headings, followed by relevant text.
     • links right at the start of paragraphs.
     • inks on a new line after the relevant paragraph.

Read the linking page content attentively.

Realistically speaking is difficult to force people to link to your page in these locations. Normally, links at the top of the page will me more prominent than at the bottom.

2. Anchor text Analysis

Anchor Text is the “Linked Text” Anchor text is the blue text that you click on, the actual words used to follow a hyperlink to another webpage.

Anchor text of the inbound link is one of the most concise assessments another page can use to determine your page theme. Anchor Text is still the single most important factor after title page. Ensure that the anchor text of the link contains keywords relevant for the page linked and that are present either in the destination title page or the copy of the page. For multilingual sites this is even more important since the language used to link to specific pages will help determine the geographic location of the linked content. It is very helpful when several languages are used under the same domain in different folders or subdomains.

Example:

Link in a page: luxury holidays in Spain

Title of the destination page: Luxury Holidays

3. Page Analysis
   • Links pointing to the page. It can be measured by page rank of the page showed in the Google Toolbar. Internal pages tend to have low page rank 0 or 1 but that doesn’t mean the link is not giving value. Obviously, the higher, the better
   • Links pointing to the whole site. Page rank 4 or 5 for commercial sites should be ok.
   • Domain listing in Dmoz. Dmoz is the most reputable directory on the web. Links from Dmoz carry a huge importance. A site with a link from Dmoz will give more linking value.

The relative importance and visibility of a webpage can be measured by several factors. A link in a page with good indicators will carry more value.

Tips & Warnings

• Gambling or porn sites linking to the client’s site might harm it
• Any link, regardless of the quality requisites stated, gives some value. Exception showed in the previous point.
• Links are difficult to get. Don’t discard a link just because it is not perfect, it might give the client’s traffic.

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.

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