9 replies to this topic

[DannyS]

Hello Folks

I'm just easing myself back into a bit of SEO after more than a year out; (I fell off a ladder pulling LAN cable )

What do you think have been the biggest changes in SEO over the last year or even post-Jagger? Just scratching the surface it does seem that the search engines are harder to game and content really is the all important factor.

How about Google Maps and Base, do they have a major place to play in SEO?

I'm still building shopping cart sites with Oscommerce but have added Joomla CMS sites to my output and really enjoying this open source community. I have started reading 'Profesional Search Engine Optimization with PHP by Jaimie Sirovich & Cristian Darie' and it looks interesting.

Danny - Still living in Bangkok

[bragadocchio]

Hi DannyS,

Good to see that you are up and about.

The last 18 months have been pretty exciting. There have been a lot of changes, but it's all really interesting stuff, and the opportunities to try different things are growing rather than shrinking.

Social media has really started to grow tremendously, and a lot more conversations are happening in more visible ways, on the Web.

Things like Google Base and Maps are more important, and the other vertical search databases that have been integrated into search results through universal search may mean more work, but they also mean more opportunities to reach out to specific audiences

I'm enjoying going through Profesional Search Engine Optimization with PHP, too.

[bwelford]

Welcome back, DannyS.

I think the biggest thing over the last 18 months may well be happening now. There's quite a flurry of discussion here and there that Links are broken as an authority measure. The argument is that the big guys can just create a flood of legitimate websites to ensure only their websites are featured in the Top Ten for their important keywords.

It makes a lot of sense but removes the underpinning of PageRank as giving Google a technological advantage in terms of relevance. This may make it more of a level playing-field for Yahoo!, MSN/Live and ASK.

[folex]

Welcome back, DannyS.

I think the biggest thing over the last 18 months may well be happening now. There's quite a flurry of discussion here and there that Links are broken as an authority measure. The argument is that the big guys can just create a flood of legitimate websites to ensure only their websites are featured in the Top Ten for their important keywords.

It makes a lot of sense but removes the underpinning of PageRank as giving Google a technological advantage in terms of relevance. This may make it more of a level playing-field for Yahoo!, MSN/Live and ASK.

Slightly off topic, but, Bwelford, that has been an issue for me for quite a while. You see posts on forums saying, how come this site is number one, but there is no on page optimisation for the targeted keyword. Usually the answer is, links and the anchor word. See, if a website does not talk about blue widgets but all the sites say it does, then it is flawed and those sites should not be trusted.

It is a real world example of 200 hundred people telling me MacDonald's sell red wine only to find when I get there, they don't, you would know not to go there again for red wine and not trust those 200 people again with that question.

F.

[DannyS]

Thanks Guys

It would be interesting if Google does lose its faith in links totally. First it sees it is being distorted by massive reciprocal linking and switches the power to trust or authority links. Now it finds it can't trust them because the big guys are into SEO also or are selling text links. ;-) I guess the only good link will end up being one in the middle of whole lot of relevant text.

Where can they go now? Will it be down to user experience, pulling reviews from the social networking sites and trying to monitor visitor patterns from the click-thrus on Google? (So should we let Google Analytics loose on our sites or might some of the numbers actually damage our positions?)

Strength being passed from local search results looks a possibility. If you are holding a good local position it shows you are real and not just a made for Adsense site. As Google Maps starts to take local input here in Thailand I'm making sure we are feeding KML files to them.

Mainly I'm just finding ways of adding unique content. I'm hoping that long-term this will be the answer.

Danny

[Black_Knight]

Localisation has certainly become an increasingly important factor over the past 18 months, especially with Google. I'm guessing that with your being based in Bangkok that will be one of the things you'll most need to get to grips with.

In some cases, I'm seeing signs that localisation of backlinks may definitely have become a favour - i.e. that backlinks all coming from a certain region might be used to determine a regional popularity, and lack of regional backlinks might be a reason to downgrade a site's performance in localised results. It is very early days still in proving or measuing this though, so just take it as a point of interest for now.

Afterthought

I'd also say with some certainty that the 'value' of any given backlink has less than ever to do with its pagerank anymore, and a lot more to do with the 'citation value' for a site - i.e. does this site have a great 'hub' factor of consistently poviding only high-quality links out. One link froma site that has a history of only purely quality outbound linking, a high trust factor in its links, can be worth hundreds of links from sites without that hub score, even if they hae higher PageRank

[DannyS]

The problem with localization is that sometimes you don't want the local market, you are after the world market or one in another country, but it gets interesting if you can use the strength in local searches to add power to you main target if that makes sense. I am lucky as I have a project coming up that is aimed at a very local target, a single town in Thailand.

Re. content - I have an idea. Every website should adopt one or two teenagers, give them free space on the site to do what they want and see the main site shoot up in the engines;-)

A bit more seriously though, I ask every new website customer if they have an interest they could share with the world on their website apart from the business they want the site for. Even if you can just give them a blog on the site it would help. I'm doing a travel agency site and one of the guys there likes old 60s and 70s cars so we will build him some pages he can update himself and a Coppermine gallery bridged into the site software. We can throw in some aircraft information and pictures and hopefully the search engines will see it all as both unique and relevant content, i.e. transport and travel, aircraft and booking flights.

Danny

[bobbb]

Off topic for Bwelford

The argument is that the big guys can just create a flood of legitimate websites to ensure only their websites are featured in the Top Ten for their important keywords.

Would you be able to point me to some links on this. Searched your posts here and saw none that seemed to be on that subject. For long I suspected this but would like to hear what people in the know think.

[bwelford]

Hi bobbb,

Aaron Wall seems to be credited with starting this in his post, Large Brands Double Dipping in Google's Organic Search Results. Many others have since taken up the theme.

Steve Rubel, in Crowdsourcing, a New System for Measuring Influence (Beta), points to a new Edelman approach to all this question of authority instead of using Links. This is more related to Social Media than to Search IMHO.

[bobbb]

Thanks.

Just clicked the first link and the very first thing I see is "many sites like eBay have begun abusing the hole with"

Well well well.