Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘SEO Research’ Category

On July 1st 2009 Google’s new algorithm kicked in much to the confusion of webmasters around the world.   Some even compared it to the now infamous Big Daddy Algo change back in 2006.  In this post I’ll summarise the different factors that could have changed and analyse their impact on rankings.

1) Internal Links and the “Nofollow” attribute.

Internal links are any links found within a website such as navigational links, breadcrumb trails and contextual links.  Internal links have always been used by Google to determine the importance of all pages within a site.  Internal links also played a major  role in funnelling pagerank throughout a site and using the “nofollow” attribute, savvy webmasters were even able to tell Google which pages to channel pagerank to and which pages not.

On July 1st, this is officially no longer the case. Google’s has made the nofollow attribute redundant (for pagerank sculpting at least) by allowing pagerank to flow to internal pages with nofollow links. 

2) External Links

Following on from  the point above, prior to July 1st webmasters rarely linked to external websites for fear that these links would leak much needed pagerank to external sites.  When they did link to external sites, they added a nofollow.  Again, July 1st saw a change in this and it now seems that linking to external sites has risen up the agenda for Google.  Google now looks more favourably upon sites that link to relevant authoritative sites and rewards them for this.

3) Link Popularity vs Authority

Last but not least, link popularity.  Google has always valued link popularity (the amount and relevancy of links pointing to a site) however with the July 1st algo change, it seems that Google has decreased the importance of the quantity of links and is now focusing soley on quality.  Examples of non-quality links include forum links, social links and blog comment  links.

In a nutshell, Google is now increasing the importance it places on editorial links from authoritative sources such as major online publications, newspapers and niche bloggers, very much how it is in the offline world.

In summary, Google’s July 1st algo change has decreased the importance of traditional onsite SEO and is placing much more focus on external factors.

In a move hardly surprising to SEOs Google has officially announced two new “improvements” in its search results;  “longer search result  descriptions” (snippets)  and “an expanded list of useful related searches”.

Longer Description Snippet  

If you conduct a search for wolverine movie review you’ll notice that the description snippet under the blue title tag contains two lines and cuts off at around 150 characters. 

If you amend the search to include Hugh Jackman, you’ll notice that the description snippet has increased to 3 lines to provide users with more info from the page within the snippet.

Expanded related searches

The example Google gives for this is a search for the keyword principles of physics. The related links at the bottom of the results include angular momentum and big bang, all semantically related to the keyword physics.

These improvements by Google are meant to provide users with a better search experience in finding what their looking for but how will that affect click through rates? 

The general consensus is that it would decrease them as users will eventually be able to find what they’re looking for without actually going to the site!

QDF is a term used to describe the thought process behind Google’s results for certain search queries’ ”deserving” of fresh and regularly updated content.

QDF is Google’s way of ensuring that its users get the most up to date results for certain search queries such as a breaking news event, a major new product launch a topic that always seems to be in the news or a famous celebrity who’s recently been in the news.

In all the QDF results above, Google has tailored its algorithm to serve not only traditional search results but also News, Video, images, and more recently, in the Gaza example, Twitter search results! 

In one of his weekly White Board Fridays, Rand Fishkin described QDF in Layman’s terms and gave a great example of how to leverage it for SEO for a brand new product launch (the launch of Dell Adamo is the example he gives).  Enjoy!

vimeo Direkt

This debate was first kicked off by Aaron Wall and has been floating around in webamaster forums for a while now.  The debate still lingers on with no absolute answer. 

In response to this question, Matt Cutts, Google spokesman says…

“Inside of Google, we don’t really think about brands, we think about words such as trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality.”

“If somebody comes to google and types X we want to return high quality information about X. Sometimes that’s a brand search sometimes that’s an informational search somethimes its navigational sometimes it’s transactional.”

“Yes Google has made a change in our rankings. It’s one of 3(00) or 400 changes we make every year.  I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change.  We refere to it as the Vince change (the person who’s working on it within the Googleplex.”

Watch the Matt Cutts clip for more on Google’s official position about favouring Brands in the natural search results…  

YouTube Direkt

Google announced the release of Google insights for Search which provides more insight into  search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches.

The tool also allows for comparison of search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges.

This is a great tool to use to give an added dimension to your keyword research!