Prior to April 2011 Google’s ranking algorithms were based upon

• On Page Ranking Factors – code etc
• On Page Keyword Usage
• Domain Age / Trust
• Links – Quality, Quantity & Relevance

This has been manipulated over the years and Google has been looking for a new partner to these algorithms… Enter the Dragon!!

Sorry that should read…

Enter the Panda!

So, in 2011 Google released a filter called “Panda” named after a Google engineer called Navneet Panda.

Navneet is an expert in machine learning. The system learns by analysing information from surveys and user behavior, allowing it to make predictive choices based on human preferences.

The surveys and therefore the filter concentrated on recognising sites which are not of a high quality.

A number of things arose as measures for  high quality. One being “Thin Content” and another being “User Engagement”. For the most part, in ecommerce sites the problem is “Thin Content”.

What is Thin Content

“Thin Content” is the opposite of “quality content”. In the case of ecommerce sites quality content means unique, copy-written text. All too often ecommerce websites have very little content, badly written content or duplicate content.

Google has always checked for “duplicate content” but the system is now more intelligent and is also able to differentiate well written content and poorly written content.

The threshold for the Panda filter kicking in isn’t judged on a per page basis. Multiple pages need to apply in order for the filter to take effect. The problem is that the update then affects whole sections of sites, and often the filter takes down good quality pages with the bad.

This has hit ecommerce sites particularly hard as many websites do not write unique descriptions for every brand, category, sub category and product page.

More Products = More Sales

Historically there has been a direct relationship between the number of products available on your site and the number of sales you will receive (and this is still the case). For this reason a lot of time was spent just getting products online quickly to build as large a product catalog as possible in the shortest period of time. Often with the minimum information required, either using copied descriptions, thin descriptions or no descriptions at all.

This cannot be the case anymore and we are making the recommendation to all of our clients that they spend their time improving descriptions BEFORE adding more content.

Be Afraid – Be Very Afraid..

OK, just be a little bit afraid, but enough to do something about it.

This year we have had many ecommerce businesses contact us. Businesses which have had very good levels of traffic but have since lost that traffic. So the update so the threat is very real.

Don’t be so sure it’s not affecting you.

It’s can take a trained eye to confirm for sure that the Panda update is affecting you. It is normally the long tail, targeted traffic which are lost, while your higher volume, generic phrases may remain. As most people mainly monitor their high volume generic traffic many affected clients have been aware that their site has lost traffic but unsure where from.

Also bear in mind that if you have a newish site you may not have had the high traffic to see a drop – and therefore do not even know that the Panda filter is affecting you.

User Engagement

I won’t talk as much about this as for the most part it is the content issue effecting ecommerce sites. I will however say, focus on the visitors experience, encouraging user engagement and reducing the number and prominence of paid ads. Anywhere you can encourage engagement with videos, multiple product images, reviews, social links etc do so.

Previous ranking factors still apply

Panda does not replace links, good on page coding, domain authority and age etc. This is a simply another part of the puzzle for us to consider.

In fact, this does not change what good SEO agencies were already advising clients when considering SEO and conversion optimisation.

So what are the take homes?

Include unique, well written content on all pages. Especially:

• Home
• Category pages
• Sub category pages
• Brand pages
• Product pages

Ensure your site engages with its users.

• Do not clutter sites with ads
• Use multiple high quality images
• Video & rich media where possible
• Engage with social links
• Enable reviews

If you have any questions or comments please do post them below.

Of course if you would like us to audit your site to discover if you have been effected by the Panda update and give a strategy for bringing a site “back from the ashes”. Please get in touch.

What Ecommerce Businesses Need To Know About Googles Panda Filter in 2012 is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

If you have 16 min free you can watch the video here.. But we recommend you read our summary, analysis and recommendations about how this affects Magento Ecommerce websites specifically.

What is Pagination?

Pagination is the dealing with content which is split over several pages. This relates mainly to two types of sites, blogs and ecommerce sites. We are going to be focusing on Ecommerce websites but we will briefly explain it in both as it may help you to understand what pagination is.

Blog sites

Sometimes a particularly long article can sometimes be split up into several parts often broken up over a few days or weeks.

Ecommerce sites (This is what we are concerned about as an ecommerce agency)

By default Magento splits category pages into several pages, each with 30 pages visible. It then shows page 1 and gives links to the others: 1,2,3,4… more and a drop down menu with a “view all” option.

After researching the matter and studying the data Google has discovered that the majority of users would prefer to view the content on one page (this certainly reflects our opinions). Google would therefore prefer to show the single page version and have released this statement:

“When we detect that a paginated series also contains a veiw-all version, we’re now making a larger effort to return the view-all page in search results when appropriate.”

Magento’s current Rel Canoical Tag Formatting

Currently in Magento the canonical URL link for categories (when activated in admin configuration) will tell Google index page one and not subsequent pages or the view all. We now want the rel canonical to point to the view all instead.

Page Speed & Link Quantity

Obviously this slightly flies in the face of keeping on page links to under 100 and keeping page load time to a minimum. But I agree with the logic and we have Google’s blessing on this one so presumably the algorithms take this into account… he says optimistically :/

That said, before you implement these changes make sure that your page still loads within around 4 seconds.

How to fix this

So that’s the background and the reasoning, let’s now get down to the meat of this blog post.

Google has therefore released details of how we can make it easier for their system to understand which is the view all page and what page is what.

Configuration One: Rel=Next and Rel=Prev

In this configuration option we Label pages 1,2,3,4 etc with rel next / rel prev and with view all we do nothing. This tells Google that this is part of a series and (and this is the key bit) at 9:57 in the video Maile from Google says:

“We will send users to only one of the component pages, most likely, this will be page one “.

Now this isn’t actually what she said Google wanted to do at the beginning of the video. At the beginning Maile said that Google wanted to send users to the view all page. It’s what users wanted, and it makes sense to us.

So this option is really just telling Google to link every page in a series. It will help to avoid duplicate content issues and keyword cannibalisation perhaps avoiding issues with the Panda update. So it’s better than nothing, but it’s not quite what we were looking for.

Configuration Two: rel=Canonical

With Rel Canonical tag we can tell Google not to index all the other pages. And we can tell Google to index the view all page. This is what Maile was saying that Google wanted to do at the beginning of the video.

Final Thoughts

So with this in mind we think that the Rel Canonical Option is the better option and will be implementing it from here on in on all Magento Websites.

If you are not sure how to implement Rel=Canonical in Magento? Check out our next blog post which will detail how to set it up.

Subscribe to our RSS Feed or follow us on Facebook to receive the next post automatically.

rel=”next” / rel=”prev” rules OR rel=canonical for use in ecommerce websites and Magento SEO is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

From www.WebRankings.co.uk to www.ShoutingLoud.co.uk

So, I thought I’d document it to help out anyone that needs to rebrand but are justifiably worried about how to do it whilst retaining your traffic.

And let’s be clear, if you are not worried, you should be. Get the re-brand wrong and you could lose all of your:

• Valuable search engine rankings

and / or

• Loyal followers on social media.

So let’s get straight onto it. With part one:

Which kind of redirect to use

Over the time that your site has been live you (should) have built up lots of juicy inbound links which bring traffic AND tell the search engines how great your site is.

When people follow these links you need to inform their browser of the new page location so that people can be seamlessly “redirected” without hitting a horrible 404 error page.

This is done via redirect links and fortunately this will also inform search engines point to the new page instead.

We have a choice of two types of redirect:

302 redirects – also known as temporary redirects. These are used when you are only moving a page temporarily. The biggest difference between a 302 redirect and a 301 is that with a 302 redirect you keep the listing in Google but you won’t get all of the credit of the links on the new domain.

301 redirects – or permanent redirects. These are the redirects we want as we need all rankings to be seamlessly transferred to the new domain without splitting authority between the domains.

How to implement the 301 redirects

The simplest 301 redirect is a sitewide redirect. i.e

Redirect every page on the domain to the home page – DO NOT DO THIS

This is what most developers will do if you are not careful. What you need them to do is:

Redirect each individual URL to its exact location on the new site.  DO IT LIKE THIS

Things are going to be a lot simpler if just the domain is changing and the rest of the URLs will be remaining the same. So for instance:

www.webrankings.co.uk/website-design

Will become

www.shoutingloud.co.uk/website-design

If URLs are going to be changing completely then you will need to compile a list of new domain URLs and a list of old domain URLs for your developer to create the individual redirects. This can of course be a big job depending on the size of your site.

Search engines will find and crawl your website over time by following inbound links and they will realise due to the 301 redirect that this is the new permanent location of the website.

Change of Address (Domain) in Webmaster Tools

As an additional insurance and in the hope of aiding the transfer to happen more quickly you can notify Google directly via Webmaster Tools.

Once you’ve added and verified your new domain in Webmaster Tools Go to:

Webmaster Tools Home – Site Configuration – Change of Address

Changes to your webpage text = changes to your rankings

It’s worth considering at this point that each page which carries a ranking could risk gaining or losing ranking with any changes made to on page text  whether you are changing your domain name or not.

So, if you change the keywords used in your text, title tags and H1 tags on your page under normal circumstances you could easily lose (or gain) rankings.

So expect the same if whilst rebranding you are re-writing all of your content. If you are ranking for a particular term and you accidentally remove all instances of the term appearing on the page you are likely to lose your ranking.

Keep your old domain

Once you transfer your old domain it is important to keep your old domain to redirect and catch links, emails, and for brand protection.

Ask linking websites to edit the links

Once the search engines have re indexed your site it is a good idea where possible to ask linking websites to edit the link to the new domain.

Live example

As an example of this in action. Here is a Google screenshot  for “Website Design York”. This was taken the day after we moved the domain. You can see that Google is listing BOTH Web Rankings AND Shouting Loud. When you click Web Rankings you are of course immediately redirected to Shouting Loud.

Here around a week later you can now see that Web Rankings has been removed from the index and Shouting Loud has moved to the top of the Rankings.

So there you have it working successfully in action. If you have any questions do get in touch.

In the next post we will be discussing the issue of changing your name on facebook and twitter which unfortunately they don’t make easy. Some say impossible

Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed the article please do hit like or share.

If you have any comments please do post below.

Moving / Changing your domain name without losing SEO rankings is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

Star Performance Mind Coaching is the business of Richard Cadden, a two time world champion thai boxer turned coaching who helps clients actualise their dreams and goals; whether this be in Sport, Fitness-goals, Life-style, or Business.

Star Performance currently offer a wide range of services covering Life Coaching, Hypnosis, Timeline Therapy, Counseling, Confidence, Goal setting, Law of Attraction, Weight loss, Fitness Training.

Website Design & Build

Star Performance had an active website which did not portray the professional image which they wished to convey. It had also become dated and did not use the most modern technologies currently available.

Star Performance wanted to be able to display their suite of services simply and effectively.

They wanted to make use of multi media with galleries and making videos the central part of the website.

We also updated the logo to fit in with the new branding.

We are extremely proud and hope that you like it too. Checkout the website:

Star Mind Coaching

To monitor the SEO progress of the site check Our Porfolio our portfolio in a few months.

Client Testimonial:

“Shouting Loud has delivered with the launch of my two companies websites. The service our project manager (Charlie) has provided has been very professional yet has a distinct ‘family feel’ to it. He has responded very quickly to any requests or questions I have had, and the transition of moving from my old website provider to Shouting Loud has been seamless. Many thanks!”

Richard Cadden

Star Performance Coaching

Launching the new Star Performance Coaching Website is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

So, with great excitement and only a slight tear in the eye, we say goodbye to Web Rankings. And a massive hello to:

Shouting Loud!

We believe that the new brand identity reflects our commitment to provide the very best in creative digital marketing.

We feel it better represents the broad spectrum of work we have been undertaking in recent years.

It also represents the expertise and experience our dedicated professionals have in Creative Design.

How did we get here?

Well, as some of you may know Web Rankings was founded by me (Charlie) with a background in search and marketing.

Having left a role at Refreshed Media as Head of SEO considerable resources were invested in setting up Web Rankings with the intention of focusing on SEO, PPC & Conversion Optimisation as that was my main passion at the time.

Becoming a “Full Service Agency”

However, with each new client the SEO audit often found that with the need for changes to layout, changes to database format and changes to coding structure, due to the limitations of many clients current development teams or systems they were really in need of a new website, which then often led on to new logos and business cards etc.

Only the best will do

Never wanting to accept anything but industry leading standards we used only the very best creative designers for the website design & logo design. This was backed up by the very best developers for building website using the latest techniques and technology available.

Of course with my background in SEO and Conversion Optimisation I ensured that during the project management these services came as standard on all builds.

Grateful clients

This has led to outstanding results with every site powerfully conveying clients’ corporate identity whilst achieving high positions on Google and encouraging conversions from visitors.

We have been very lucky and very grateful to our clients for the fact that they have seen fit to recommended us to peers for website design or people have seen our work and got in touch.

Creative Digital Marketing Agency

So, because of the strength of our creative we now do as much Website Design, Logo Design, stationary and flyer design as we do SEO. We have therefore evolved into a Creative Digital Marketing Agency and we feel that Shouting Loud represents that perfectly.

We hope that you agree and that you like the look and feel of the re-brand. We’d love to hear any comments from you or of course if you have any projects you would like to talk to us about. Please do get in touch.

Shouting Loud Is Born – Creative Digital Marketing Agency is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

As usual Google was the first search engine to take search away from global listings to national listings. So a search for “Gym Equipment” shows companies selling gym equipment in your country.

Stage 2 – Queries with a location show location specific results

Then in October 2010 with Google’s Local Place Search

we saw different query types show different results page layouts. For example searching for “gym York” will use a different set of algorithms to “gym equipment”.

It would also display those results in a very different way using Google Places to show local directory listings with contact details and maps alongside traditional results.

The theory is that someone searching for “gym York” is likely to be looking for a local gym with facilities available which they can make use of.

Stage 3 – Phrases without a location show Google Local search results.

The newest feature rolled out by Google automatic local search. So that when you search for some generic terms like the word “gym” Google recognises your location and shows results as if you had searched for “Gym York”.

So, looking at the results page below it shows a fairly even split of privately owned smaller gyms alongside the national chains which have premises within your area.

Bear in mind that up to this point only national gyms like Fitness First and David Lloyd would have been listed for the term “gym” and you would then need to go through each of their websites to find out if they had a branch near you.

Note that this only works if you are logged in and or Google and recognises your location. You can also change your location if required.

Local search and mobile devices

Mobile Search is growing faster than any other search type. And research shows that people performing searches on mobile devices are even more likely to be looking for local information. So as mobile devices become more and more widely used (around half of us have mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and Androids) local search and Google Places will continue to boom.

Opportunities and the future of local search

All this clearly opens up huge opportunities for locally based businesses whether they provide Taxis, Pizza, Hair Dressing, Joinery or any locally based service. Most of the time Google have got it right and it clearly gives better results for users.

Something which makes these listings all the more valuable is the fact contact details are displayed right there on the page meaning that the chances of those listing receiving a call is far more likely.

The question is, are local hair dressers and builders etc likely to be as up to date with the workings of Google as they need to be or in a position to take on an SEO agency? Most of them are probably not.

This trend will continue in 2011 with Google rolling out further updates and improvements and businesses learning and understanding about the opportunity and looking to get involved.

So I hope after reading this you realise how big an opportunity there is at the moment for businesses to pick up localised search traffic. And perhaps how much of a threat there is to companies who depend on these national generic terms.

So, watch out for our next post… Optimising for Google Places & Local Search Listings

Google Places part 1 – Why you MUST look closer at Local Search is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

I explained why in general developers keep SEO’s in business and why you need an SEO specialist agency or an SEO specialist to be involved in your online business.

Today I’ll detail some of the most common and most destructive mistakes with a little explanation.

Clients making key decisions:

• Clients choosing which key phrases to target.
• Clients writing copy unguided.
• Clients creating the site architecture / choosing which pages to have where unguided.

These points are key to the success or failure of an SEO campaign. A combination of research and expertise should go into formulating these key strategies. Of course the client should be involved and give guidance as they are the experts in “Their” field of business. Copy for instance should be written by the client but edited and optimised by the SEO specialist.

Not strategising correctly

• Not performing detailed (or any) keyword research.
• Allowing clients to dictate targeted keywords without advising.
• Trying to optimise for very competitive keywords.
• Optimising pages for single words.
• Only optimising a page for one key phrase.
• Optimising for keywords which nobody searches for.

The basis of a successful SEO campaign is looking for phrases and search volumes, looking for opportunities by performing competitor research and then targeting a very carefully selected, profitable but achievable group of key phrases.

Not having a set SEO process.

Even if a developer knows something about SEO. Knowing SEO rules and implementing them are two entirely different matters. SEO has a huge number of deciding factors (with different algorithms effecting different sets of results). Having a process which considers them all is a big job, not just a case of implementing a few generic best practises across all sites.

Thinking you can use posts like this as a checklist for SEO

I’ve had requests from agencies for a checklist for” SEO’ing a Magento site” for instance. However without a proper strategy this will never work. It may create a search engine friendly site – but not an “Optimised” site. It takes research, thought and strategising for each and every campaign.

Implementing code which search engines don’t understand or like

• Navigation menus that are not visible to search engines such as image menus, drop down menus or flash menus.
• All flash or graphical sites.
• Showing search engines one thing and real visitors another.
• Creating duplicate content / duplicate pages.
• Burying important content deep within a site and having URLs with too many parameters.
• Leaving robots=noindex, nofollow on the site or not fixing the robots.txt file prior to going live.
• Using session ids without instructing search engines not to index the URLs.
• Designing sites completely in flash.
• Linking to multiple versions of a home page. E.g .com/index etc rather than .com.

These are the type of issues which Google is trying to fix themselves. They are getting better at navigating Ajax, flash and drop downs etc .

Also, to be fair these are issues which (some) developers are actually getting better at. However new issues and rules appear all the time which leads us on to the next point.

Not keeping up to date

• Adding Meta keywords.
• Building mini-sites or doorway pages.
• Using outdated Content Management Systems.

What is effective in SEO changes regularly, sometimes over night. Within the SEO community changes in rankings are noticed quickly and SEO’s work together to find what exactly has changed and traditionally we get to the bottom of things pretty quickly.

Conversely many developers still think that the key to SEO is adding meta keywords, building doorway pages or exchanging links with another website.

The timescale for new information to filter through to a developer compared to someone who specialises in SEO, and is active within the SEO community is of course longer, sometimes weeks or months, sometimes years.

Wasting time

• Submitting to search engines.
• Submitting your site to hundreds of directories.
• They use auto-submission tools.

Depending on if they actually believe that this will improve rankings this could even be construed as misleading you. At worst this can have a negative impact on rankings.

Bad practise / less than great optimisation

• Recycling the same content on clients websites.
• Duplicating the same title tag across whole websites.
• Using “click here” for anchor text.
• Failing to use descriptive alt attribute text on image navigation.
• Moving a site from one domain to another without the process to protect rankings.
• Not building custom 404 pages.

Things which could cause a penalty

• Hiding links to their own site.
• Hiding links to their client’s sites.

There are very specific rules about link building so it is of utmost that if you do intend to link build that you use a reputable, knowledgeable company.

Bad continuing practise

• Remove old URLs from the server without redirecting them to their closest counterpart.
• Failing to set up analytics.
• Thinking that if they remove HTML tables rankings will improve.
• Thinking that “clean code” equals SEO.
• They add all kinds of Meta tags to pages, that have no use, i.e., “revisit-after,” “robots=follow,index” etc.
• Changing URLS / moving pages without notifying search engines of the new locations.
• Using the wrong redirects at the wrong times.

So, the take home message is. The way I see it there will always be a place for SEO’s. So, make sure you have one of the best seo agencies on board.

40 SEO mistakes made by developers – keeping SEO’s in business is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts:

Google the phrase “SEO Dying” and you’ll see results every year back to 2007.

Perhaps this alone proves SEO isn’t dying. But to further prove it, as Jill Whalen said:

I love this comment, not just because it is true, and not just because it says I’ll still have a job in 2011. But because it reminds me not to get frustrated when instructing developers or looking at badly optimised sites.

So before we look at “how”, let’s look at “why” web developers keep us in business.

They don’t “Find” changes in algorithms (Google’s judging criteria)

Google is continually trying to improve the results which it provides to users.

On top of this as long as website development technology continues to evolve and develop, Google’s algorithms must continue to evolve and develop with it. When this happens, and the positions of websites in search results change. People will then want to know why their search positions have changed.

SEO’s spend a lot of time studying changes in rankings, when they find these changes, they compare the websites affected to find correlations before coming up with a hypothesis (idea) as to what change in algorithm may be causing these changes.

Either using forums or private messages they then send these ideas to other SEO’s to find out if their results match in order to prove or disprove them.

After this process, there is always a lag before these changes filter down to developers as SEO’s are often very secretive.

They don’t have a process in which SEO is strategised, implemented and then checked.

Many developers know enough to scratch the surface of search engine optimisation, but whilst they know what a Search Engine Friendly URL is and that they need to put keywords in title tags and H1 tags etc it’s amazing how often they just do not do it.

That is because there is a huge difference between knowing a few search engine optimisation rules and optimising a website for a very competitive set of search terms and often things simply do not get done.

They simply do not know enough about SEO

Not that we should expect them to. Website design is a good job in it’s own right and SEO is a specialist job. Just like you wouldn’t expect a brick layer to plumb and wire your house for you, you shouldn’t expect a website developer to do the creative website design, the SEO and the conversion optimisation.

For these basic reasons website developers continue to make the most basic errors which perhaps unknowingly jeopardise their clients SEO campaigns.

In the next post I will details some of the most common SEO mistakes which developers make and some which can be the most devastating to your campaign.

Please subscribe to be notified when part two is published.

Will SEO become a dying trade in 2011? is a post from the Web Rankings: SEO Agency Blog Recent Posts: