Pod1 Blog

Google announces the 12-pack sitelink update

Since Google announced the 12-pack sitelinks update most enthusiasts happily accepted the update. The change was promising  more clarity, quality and visibility towards trusted websites.

Here is how it got introduced:

When you’re searching, you often have a specific task in mind, like figuring out which exhibits are showing at a nearby museum. Despite this narrow goal, people often start with a broad query.

It turns out that sitelinks are quite useful because they can help predict which sections of the site you want to visit. Even if you didn’t specify your task in the query, sitelinks help you quickly navigate to the most relevant part of the site, which is particularly handy for large and complex websites.

Very useful on Branded terms

So if I am to search for ICA I will get the following result:

Which is very useful for me, as I was actually looking for the films ICA is showing and the sitelinks do include the films of the ICA.

What about non-Brand, generic keywords and queries?

Since its launch many SEO consultants expressed their worries on whether Google will keep this on Brand terms and questions rose on what will happen if we start seeing sitelinks on generic terms.

Sitelinks are also offered on Generic search results

This morning, on my twitter stream, I noticed this post from Artur Jach.

First time I’ve seen new Google sitelinks for a non-brand keyword search

And here we are…. Search Google UK for coaches and notice that nationalexpress is getting the benefit of 6 sitelinks and ruling the 1st page of results.

Similar results appear if we try to search for trains and tube

It is official. Sitelinks aim to offer clarity, quality and visibility towards trusted websites on any keyword those trusted websites seem to be experts on and not only on their Branded terms.

I am very curious to see if Google will offer sitelinks to hotmail for the keyword email as hotmail seems to be the leading authority on that keyword!

Pagination and SEO

Everyone who has been involved in web development, has faced the chalenge of pagination.
In plain english “Pagination is the process of dividing information (content) into discrete pages”.

In SEO terms, pagination is duplicate content. Search engines do take duplication of content generated by pagination very seriously and attempt to show only a single URL that contain any random piece of content.
According to SEOmoz :
“When pagination is implemented improperly, it can cause duplicate content problems, both for individual articles and the landing pages that allow browsing access to them.”

Best practices until today

Until now there was a set of rules which we had to follow for avoiding “the wrath of Google”

• Try to include links to as many pages of the pagination structure as possible. Remember though, Google does not like morte than 100 links per page
• Show newer content at the top of the results list. This will help sculpturing the Page Rank of your new pages
• Deep link to relevant categories & subcategories. The architecture of internal links and information flow throughout the site forces search engines to notice your smaller categories.
• Link back to the top results from each of the paginated URLs. This practice shows to search engines that categorus and subcategories, are not ‘orphan’ pages but have a legitimate parent

The above rules are collective knowledge shared between SEO consultants and are not based on any web standards or W3C Recommendations. This was making pagination one of the trickiest problems of  SEO.

rel=”next”. A new W3C recommendation

New HTML elements named rel=”next” and rel=”previous” have been introduced allowing  web developers to indicate the relationship between component URL in a paginated series.

The relationship between component URLs in a series can now be indicated to Google through rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.

The rel=”next” and rel=”previous” HTML code is inserted on the header of the page.
So your first paginated page would include code similar to:

<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2/>

And the second page would include code similar to:

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />

And so on…

But will search engines read this code?

Similar to the rel=”canonical” , Google announced through their Webmaster Central blog that it will read and respect the rel=”next” and rel=”previous” elements. Here is what they say:

Now, if you choose to include rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup on the component pages within a series, you’re giving Google a strong hint that you’d like us to:

Consolidate indexing properties, such as links, from the component pages/URLs to the series as a whole (i.e., links should not remain dispersed between page-1.html, page-2.html, etc., but be grouped with the sequence).

Send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series.

All webmasters, revise your clients pagination solution and ensure the rel=”next” and rel=”previous” elements are being used. Google will “reward” you for helping them into indexing your website right.

Speed up the web

Just a few days ago Google and OpenDNS teams to speed up the web by better routing of the web traffic. This action did have significant results on mainly US based users and to work on its full potentials ISPs will need to adapt the new standard they introduced.

In the meanwhile improve the web experience

The lets make the web faster team of Google cannot wait for ISPs to adapt. It is continuing releasing applications and services which will instantly improve the web experience, although the web itself might still be slow!

“Yet Another Caching Solution” many might say. Instant pages is pre-loading pages on your browser which are available for instant viewing.
Well, not quite…. “Yet another solution with a touch of AI” is what I would say.

Knowing the user behaviour it will not pre-load every search result. Only those pages a user is likely to click will be pre-loaded. Here is how Google announced Instant Pages:

We introduce Instant Pages, a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster–in some cases even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we’re very confident about which result is the best answer for your search.

Available on Chrome

You can try this interesting caching solution by downloading the latest development version of chrome, or you can wait until the new version.

Firefox responds?

The firefox community will need to respond as they did on the release of Instant Search with the 3 Firefox Addons That Let You Search Faster Than Google Instant. For now Firefox just becomes slower, but we should expect a response very soon.

What Instant Pages mean for you?

Webmasters and administrators should follow closely this new tool as often Google will preload content from their website and a spike on traffic will be noticed.
Knowing that loading speed still affects rankings, make sure those preload requests will not slow down your hosting speed!

Once again a 4+minutes video from our favourite Matt Cutts.
The question this time was:

Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?
How About how many redirects I can chain together?

First free tip is: Try to deep link on the most relevant page of the new site. Do not just redirect to the home page. This is bad for both Search Engines and User Experience, as they are both looking for a specific page and not for your home page. You will be impressed on the ‘influence’ this will have on your bounce rate percentage.

On the number of redirects you can compile from site1 to site2, the answer is: There is no limit on the number of redirects you can compile. Feel free to be as precise on your 301s as you like. Google will not punish you! On the contrary both Google crawlers and human visitors will appreciate this extra effort of yours

And last is the tricky part. Although there is no limit on the number of redirects, there is a limit on the number of hops/chains we can build until we reach the final URL which resolves and returns an HTTP  200 result. Search engine crawlers are likely to stop following the redirects after 3 hops and will certainly not follow any hops after the sixth. Keep in mind, that even if due to luck or due to high reputation of your website, crawlers do decide to follow the long 6 chain of redirects you have, the latency will be so high, that your pages SEO value will be decreased and as a result your page will not rank as expected.
The wget tool can help you into counting the number of hops/chains until you reach your final destination. Those familiar with Linux/Cygwin can use it straight ahead by typing “wget www.yoururl.com/yourpath –delete-after“. Windows users can download the wget tool here

And some Matt Cutts infographics: 4.1% of Matt Cutts videos are over 4 minutes and Matt wears a yellow t-shirt on 8.1% of his videos, see more Matt Cutts Infographics here and the full article from Google webmasters blog

After months of waiting and years of guesswork , the transition from Yahoo’s organic search to Microsoft’s Bing is finally over. Yahoo has announced that it is ready to transition its European organic search results to Microsoft as a part of the Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance.

Yahoo said that the transition does not involve paid search results but websites which rely on organic searches for visitors should take some precautions.

Here is the email announcing that the UK organic results will be powered by Bing from 3rd August.

Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s armoury to help speed up the web.

1. You sign up and provide Google  with your serving and reference domains.
2. You send traffic to Page Speed Service by pointing your DNS CNAME entry to ghs.google.com.

Google serves requests received for your serving domain by fetching content from your reference domain and rewriting it.   Check it out here...

The list of related searches usually appears at the bottom of SERPs but some significant changes have been seen in Google.com results recently. Now, Google Related Searches appears on the top and looks more organised, refined and user friendly.

Here are some suggestions for online retailers to make these changes  fall in your favour:

1)      Have a dedicated section for Brands on your website and create a separate page for each brand so that you can optimise that page for brand related searches like “Chanel Sunglasses”.

2)      Take top keywords from internal search results and create static pages for those to target more specific searches like “Polarised Sunglasses”.

3)      Get your product listed on comparison shopping engines like Shopping.com, Nexttag, Amazon, Pricegrabber, Ebay etc.

Google started supporting microformats sometime back in 2009, which are defined as  attaching semantics to HTML tags to extract more meaningful information from traditional markup tags. SEO’s didn’t pay much attention to the microformats back then but time is changing rapidly and the use of microformats is more important now.

Why is it important?

Rich snippets, that’s why.

Google now supports a number of snippets and the number keeps growing. Here is the list.

Using rich snippets you can choose how your product listing appears in the search result, with its current price, reviews etc. or just like a normal web page listing??

You can use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to see if Google’s parsers can extract the data that you have marked up.

Once you have marked up content on the relevant pages across your site and confirmed that the marked up content can be extracted successfully by Google, sign up on the “Interested in Rich Snippets” form.

Note: Currently, review sites and social networking/people profile sites are eligible. But Rich snippets from new sites will be enabled automatically from this list over time.

Google is in the process of rolling out it’s new +1 button globally it will come to google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr first then will roll out to all other Google search sites shortly after that.

It also announced a list of new websites which will feature the button including The Telegraph, NME, Last.fm, The Independent and Marieclaire.co.uk. Additionally publishers who want to add the Google +1 button to their own website just need to visit Google Webmaster Central for the code.

This is only one part of what Google describes as it’s Google + Project, the video below describes it in more detail (in a somewhat overly sentimental way).

A revolutionary take on mobile search – one search box, with the power of a thousand apps. For more information visit the web site at www.DoAT.com or follow @DoAT on Twitter.

(NB this is currently only available in the US).