The NY Times has an interesting article about how J.C. Penney employed an SEO firm to bolster their Google Rank using Black Hat SEO techniques.

The article explains how they generated thousands of paid links to rank for terms such as “casual dresses”.

You can ready the article here : The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

Unfortunately the article also rewards J.C.Penney with followed links:

Google has responded using what the NY Times reports as “manual” intervention which has resulted in JCP dropping from position #1 to #68 in the SERPS.

This manual change is interesting as Google have said in the past that they don’t interfere with the SERPs and that the results are all algorithmically generated.   So did they alter the algorithm, or is there some form of blacklist which is applied to the results?

It’d be interesting to hear a technical explanation from Google’s Matt Cutts on what actions were taken to correct the SERPS to ignore the paid links.

I’ve been seeing this feature appearing in a lot of results recently.   When searching for a group of keywords, when you reach the destination page there is an overlay such as the one below:

I’ve only noticed this recently and it doesn’t appear on all destination pages?

Clicking on the “Jump to text >>” link takes you direct to the most relevant place on the page for the search query.

It appears that this is a feature of the IE Google Toolbar, however it must’ve been automatically enabled as it’s not something I chose to switch on?  

Now, I’m not complaining as I often find this useful to quickly find the information I’m looking for, however other users don’t like this feature as can be seen in this thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=5e7f4946c1b363d4&hl=en

If you want to disable the “Quick Scroll” try the following:

1) Click on the wrench icon in the toolbar

2) on the Tools tab, deselect “Quick Scroll”

3) Click Save

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Following the recent changes to the BBC news website there has been some talk in the SEO community about the affect this has had.

A tweet from @tomcritchlow of Distilled this morning had me wondering how the transition to the new site was going:

I first noticed that the PR of the new www.bbc.co.uk/news website is currently 0 – though this is understandable as the PR updates are fairly infrequent.   It’s interesting though that a 301 redirect doesn’t transfer the PR value of the original source page?

Next – I thought I’d take a look at the cached page that Google have for the new home page to see how recent it was.   Here’s the surprising result:

Odd?   Are Google not indexing the new home page?   A check of their robots.txt file didn’t show any problems?

Looking at the robots.txt file – I noticed that the news site has it’s on sitemap:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news_sitemap.xml

Looking through the contents of this file – it looks like there are entries for most languages on the site – but oddly I could not see English in the list?

Is this an oversight or are the BBC just relying on in-links and internal linking to ensure that Google indexes the site.

Here’s the (albeit rough) stats from Google on the number of pages of each site in their index:

Quite a difference!   It’ll be interesting to follow this over the next week to see how the figures change.

What was also interesting was the pages shown in the index.   For the old site, the home page and the top category pages are showing top of the list:

However for the new site – only deeper article pages are shown, which matches what I saw earlier with the home page not showing in the Google cache.

We’ll have to keep an eye on the results over the next few days to see how the statistics change.    It’s certainly a brave move on behalf of the BBC to undertake such a widespread restructuring and maybe the results will help others in similar situations?

As one of the most popular news sites on the Internet, the the BBC News website has recently been updated.  

What’s interesting about this update though is that a lot of the changes seem to be SEO driven.   In November last year, BBC editors wrote a blog post explaining how they were already making changes specifically for the benefit of Search Engines.

Site Evolution

Lets start by looking at the evolution of the BBC News website over the years courtesy of the Wayback Machine:

BBC News Website 1998 -1999

BBC News Website 2000 – 2001

BBC News Website 2002 – 2003

BBC News Website 2004 – 2006

BBC News Website 2007 – 2009

As you can see, the layout has stayed fairly static over the years, with the main changes being to fonts, color schemes and additional graphics.

New Design

OK – so now let’s take a look at the new site:

The first thing you notice is that the categories are now across the top of the page, rather than down the left.   This gives the page additional real-estate for larger graphics, and more importantly longer headlines.

I mentioned earlier that the editors had blogged last year about how the site changes were SEO based.   In a post by Steve Herman he explains how they decided to make the headlines on article pages longer for the benefit of search engines (chasing the long tail?)

With the extra space gained by moving the categories to the top of the page, they can now extend the headlines as they did with internal articles.   There are also theories that links higher up the page are given more weight than those lower, in footers or sidebars (as on the original layout).  

Redirect

The next change is quite subtle and I doubt a lot of people will notice – the original home page at http://news.bbc.co.uk now 301 redirects to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news.     Is this a sign of the BBC trying to improve their www. site by sending to link juice and PR it’s way?

Social Media

The BBC have now embraced social media and have added the usual share buttons to all articles as you can see in the screenshot below.

BBC Editor, Steve Hermen said last November “A growing number of users come to stories on the BBC site from places other than our own front page – for example search engines, other sites, personal recommendations, Twitter or RSS feeds”.   

This change will make it much easier for readers to share news articles on the major Social Networks.

Link Sculpting

There’s more emphasis on links to other (in particular – popular) articles now – an example of which you can see below:  

More page space has been dedicated to related articles and analysis and there’s also a push to include more media with additional links to image galleries and videos.

By creating additional inter-article linking, is this a sign that the BBC are trying to spread the flow of link juice throughout the site?

Summary

Whether you like the new look or not will be a personal choice, but as you can see from above, it looks like the BBC is taking SEO seriously.  

So seriously, that their willing to use SEO as a reason to change the look and feel of a site which has been popular with readers for many years!

Here’s a great video from the recent Google I/O conference.  

In the video, Google’s Matt Cutts runs through several site reviews with the help of Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox.

Last week Google announced that the asynchronous tracking tag which has been in beta testing is now officially available.

Yesterday they updated the Google Analytics interface to support this new style tag when you’re adding tracking to a new website.

This should bring asynchronous tracking to many more sites – improving both results and page loading speed.

You can find further details and instructions on setting up the new tracking code at the Google Analytics Blog

Following the quiet release of Yandex to the English speaking search market, I’ve done some digging and found the Webmaster interface.

The site is in Russian, however Google translate does an excellent job of translating to English.   The only problem is that the text on the buttons isn’t translated due to them being bitmaps, however you can usually guess the function.

Take the front page as an example – the green button is a fairly obvious first step:

The first step is to register a username – the process is fairly straightforward and only takes a few minutes:

Once you’re logged in – the main things to watch for are “My Sites” and “Add Site”.   The Add site process is similar to Google, giving you the option of uploading a text file to the website or adding a meta tag.

Once registered you’re presented with all kinds of stats – just like with the Google Webmaster interface:

Here’s the full list of available statistics/reports available from the left hand menu:

As you can see – a wealth of information and plenty to keep an SEO busy for a while!

One little thing that caught my eye was a reference to a statistic “TIC”.   Turns out that this is a citation index that Yandex use to rank pages.     Here’s their description:

Citation index (or IC) – adopted in the scientific world a measure of "importance" of works of a scientist. The value of the index is determined by the number of references to this work (or name) in other sources. However, for truly accurate determination of the significance of scientific works is important not only number references to them, but quality these links. Thus, the work may invoke an authoritative academic publication, a popular pamphlet, or entertainment magazine. The importance of such links is different.

Our theme citation index (CY) defines "authority" of Internet resources based on qualitative characteristics of links to them from other sites. This qualitative feature we call "weight" links. The formula is specially developed algorithm. Important role played thematic affinity resource and reference it sites. In itself, the number of links to resources also affects the value of its CY, but CY is not determined number options, and the sum of their Weights.

CY as a means of determining the credibility of resources designed to ensure the relevance of the location of resources under the headings Yandex directory. CY is not a purely quantitative characteristic, so we show some of the rounded values that help to navigate the "importance" ("authority") resources in each area (theme).

The idea is simple citation index – usually the people who create a website on the internet, with the attention and responsibility related to its content, as well as to the content of what they refer to, and thereby encourage their visitors. Our thematic index takes into account the number of links to the site from other sites, making these links is different "weight" (ie value) depending on the credibility of the referring sites.

I’ll certainly be investigating this more over the next few days as will many others in the SEO industry.   From first looks, Yandex is going to make a big impression!

Yandex Webmaster Interface

As a follow-up post on duplicate content on WordPress blogs – here’s an additional tip.

You can stop the search engines from indexing duplicate pages such as monthly/daily archives by using the following code snippet:

if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page() || is_category() || is_tag())
{
       echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />’;
}
else
{
        echo ‘<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />’;
}

You can add or remove arguments in line 1 to include or exclude pages form being indexed.

The code should be inserted into the <head> section of header.php.

Here’s a quick tip for WordPress users.   Identical title tags on pages are frowned upon by search engines, so ideally you want each title tag (and meta description) to be unique. 

With WordPress you’ll find that your second page, third page etc all have the same title.   You can fix this with the following PHP code:

<?php if ($paged < 2){} else {echo (‘ Page ‘); echo ($paged);} ?>

By inserting the above into the title tag – if the page is the page 1, nothing will happen but for any other pages it will append “Page #".

You can use similar code in the Meta Description too to help make it unique.