Having spent some time looking through the State of Search blog to see what areas have not been covered, I was surprised to see that we had a limited number of posts surrounding Pinterest. This up and coming social platform is continuing to gain traction and more and more businesses are starting to take note.
With this in mind, I wanted to share with all the State of Search readers some 9 tips for making Pinterest work for your business profile page.
You can safely say that internet marketing in general is going through an important shift. The rules are being changed, the focus is changing. It seems as if finally marketeers start to understand that they are not just there to spit out messages to as many people as possible, hoping someone will pick it up. They are starting to realise they are working with humans. And Social Media and Search are playing a big role in this shift.
Of course the changes Google (and Bing as well) are currently making to how they work are playing a big role in the mindset of the users. Implementing the authorship markup and connecting social accounts to search results and personalising search as a whole are important elements that make marketers think more personal than they were used to in the past decade.
With this change it becomes more important to know who it actually is you are targeting. Which person is influential in a certain topic and even more important, who is connected to that person. Some online marketing tools act on that as well. Linkdex was the first to implement authorship in their tool. They gave you a nice overview of who writes about what topic, giving you an indication of where your targeting should go. But as Matt Roberts, the brains behind Linkdex, said in Iceland last week: that is just a list. We want to know a lot more. As Roberts puts it: we want to know who to take to lunch. (more…)
Unfortunately I was unable to attend #linklove this year but the Distilled conference’s are some of my preferred simply down to the quality of the sessions. So like any self respecting SEO I was hooked on twitter and there was a particular session by Ian Lurie from Portant Inc on “Enterprise Link Spam Analysis” you can find full details on the session from our very own Gianluca Fiorelli by clicking the previous link.
Portant then released a white paper on “Google Declining Spam Tolerance.”
A great intro from Bas at the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference to the ‘State of Search & Social’ track. Ever the historian – Bas states that the first guy that ever got social right was Jesus… then one of his followers unfollowed him…
Starting with the general idea of Search. In times before a great many modern things existed, if you wanted to know something, you would go to the most knowledgeable person in the town and ask them answers – both Search AND Social.
Next came the library where you would climb to the top of the stairs to get to the book you wanted – search.
Over time, we eventually come to the Search Bar – where we can now can search the entire world.
Search has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time in a different way – the next thing is Google glass – the future of social, the future for search – it’s going to be creepy search – but it’s still search. (more…)
Today welcomed some interested news in the search world and particularly those with an Easterly looking view. The announcement that Johnny Zhu’s CharmClick and Sri Sharma’s Net Media Planet will form an exclusive deal to partner with Baidu, China’s biggest search engine. I took the time to speak to them both to help State of Search readers understand what this new deal meant for European brands and how this exclusive partnership could help efforts targeting Chinese searchers. (more…)
Yesterday Google announced the upcoming death of Google Reader. A shock went through the Tech World: how are we now going to keep up with all that is written in our industry? It even got as far as petitions being set up.
But before you jump to the petition board: there are enough alternatives. There is Social Media off course, but if you want to stick to RSS there are several options as well. Below I’ve highlighted three types of alternatives: the (mainly) desktop alternative, the all platform alternative and the pure tablet alternative. Each with their own advantages. (more…)
Last weekend I spoke at Be Wizard in Italy. The speaker line-up included Cindy Krum, Aleyda Solis, John Mueller, David Sottimano, Gianluca Fiorelli and as per the title of this post Avinash Kaushik. The conference was fantastic and I learned tonnes from every session. Today I wanted to share my notes from Avinash’s session on Facebook for businesses. (more…)
I believe that there is a problem that SEO is facing in 2013, and will continue to face moving forward. I believe there is the risk that, as SEOs, we will spend too much time focusing on what we’re going to call ourselves and forget exactly what it is that we should be doing. Both to raise the profile of SEO as an industry, and continue to push the boundaries. While we’ve heard the pleas that ‘SEO is dead’ for a long time now, and SEO has had it’s fair share of criticism. I believe this is unfounded, spend in SEO is burgeoning and grown hugely, and it is not going to go anywhere soon.
However, a spate of new monikers or ‘rebranding’ in the industry has only served to confuse things in a way that we are siloing ourselves and causing alienation amongst the broader online marketing community. (more…)
This is a guest post by Grosen Fris, SEO at OnlinePartners in Denmark
Google’s hreflang option for international SEO has been available for more than a year now, so we decided it was time to conduct a clinical SEO test to see if it works as promised.
In addition to testing if Google’s hreflang option has an effect on how your web sites’ performs in Google’s country-specific indexes, like e.g. Google.co.uk and Google.dk, we also tested whether hreflang can be combined with canonical in case you have problems with duplicate content on your web sites.
Hreflang is very interesting for web sites that have e.g. more or less identical english content spread across different sub domains or country code top-level domains (ccTLD) – e.g. mydomain.co.uk for UK and mydomain.ie for Ireland.
You may get the following advantages, when you e.g. have several web shops each targeting a specific country, despite the fact that their content is almost 100% identical and thus have major problems with duplicate content.
We also wanted to test hreflang in combination with canonical because Google on the one hand states that you should do so if you have problems with duplicate content, on the other hand we have also spoken with many SEO’s who were not sure about this.
However, it does make sense to be able to combine hreflang and canonical.
We have used the following (sub)domains to conduct this test, and we encourage all to take a look at how they are set up.
| Country | Language | (Sub)domain |
| Not selected | English | http://href-lang.com |
| Australia | English | http://au.href-lang.com |
| United Kingdom | English | http://uk.href-lang.com |
| Ireland | English | http://ie.href-lang.com |
When you look at a single test site, none of the pages have duplicate content, this is ensured due to the use of gibberish english – i.e. english words automatically and randomly selected for each page. However if you compare each test web site you will see that they are 100% identical across the four test (sub)domains..
Each test web site is set up as follows.
We only used GWT to monitor the indexing of each test web site.Each page contains the following:
The configuration of hreflang and canonical on a page is as follows
| Country | Language | (Sub)domain | hreflang | canonical |
| Not selected | English | http://href-lang.com | en | Points to http://href-lang.com |
| Australia | English | http://au.href-lang.com | en-au | Points to http://href-lang.com |
| United Kingdom | English | http://uk.href-lang.com | en-gb | Points to http://href-lang.com |
| Ireland | English | http://ie.href-lang.com | en-ie | Points to http://href-lang.com |
Example:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://href-lang.com/chordospartium-pane.html" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ie" href="http://ie.href-lang.com/chordospartium-pane.html" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="http://au.href-lang.com/chordospartium-pane.html" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://uk.href-lang.com/chordospartium-pane.html" /> <link rel="canonical" href="http://href-lang.com/chordospartium-pane.html" />
Here you can see the complete setup of a page – click on image to enlarge (original here)
We conducted site: searches in Google and we watched the indexing in GWT.
Initially, both the main domain and the sub domains where indexed in Google, but when the sub domains reached up to approx. 80-110 pages being indexed, the indexing stopped and began to roll back. I assume it is because Google’s bot first crawls the pages on the test web sites, and then later another routine is doing analysis of other elements such as hreflang and canonical. Thus Google’s search results do not immediately reflect the use of hreflang and canonical. At this moment where I write this blog post GWT states that is has reviewed approx. 870 of the 901 pages on each sub domain and that there are only approx. 16-31 pages on each sub domain that are still indexed in Google, however we expect that to be fully adjusted in the near future. All in all what we saw in GWT related to the indexing of the 3 sub domains were as we expected.
Unfortunately the two screen dumps below are in danish as it was not possible for me to change the GWT interface from danish to english.
Click on image to enlarge (original here)
However, the indexing of the main domain was a bit of a surprise, the reason is that due to the use of hreflang and canonical it seems as if GWT perceived the 4 test web sites as one single web site. The 4 test web sites consists of 4 x 901 pages = 3,604 pages, and as this blog post is being written GWT states that 4,409 pages have been crawled and reviewed. That is 800 pages more than actually exists on the 4 test web sites and I have no immediate idea why GWT is so inaccurate on this specific number?
Click on image to enlarge (original here)
Below is a list of how many pages Google so far has reviewed for each test web site, the maximum number of pages that have been indexed and how many pages is currently indexed in Google.
| Country | (Sub)domain | Number of pages reviewed |
Number of pages indexed (maximum) |
Number of pages indexed (for the moment) |
| Not selected | http://href-lang.com | 4,409 | 1,129 | 895 |
| Australia | http://au.href-lang.com | 871 | 110 | 34 |
| United Kingdom | http://uk.href-lang.com | 870 | 83 | 16 |
| Ireland | http://ie.href-lang.com | 869 | 74 | 19 |
We have conducted tests in Google’s country-specific indexes via both real people and tools:
The following search phrases were tested in Google’s different country-specific indexes. Please try for yourself by copy/paste the search phrases from the fields below and try them in Google (consider including the double quotation marks as this makes a test search in Google more accurate).
| Level at test web site |
Search phrase |
| 1. | |
| 1.5 | |
| 1.6.5 | |
| 1.7.1.8 |
All test search phrases showed the expected (sub)domains in Googles search results:
| Geo-IP | (Sub)domain in SERPs |
| USA | http://href-lang.com |
| Canada | http://href-lang.com |
| Australia | http://au.href-lang.com |
| United Kingdom | http://uk.href-lang.com |
| Ireland | http://ie.href-lang.com |
| Denmark | http://href-lang.com |
Finally I should like to say that earlier it was not a good idea to let the three sub domains or equivalent ccTLD’s be indexed in Google, because of the problems with double content. At the same time it would be almost impossible to get other than the main .com domain to appear in all search results, even when searching in Google’s country-specific indexes. But thanks to hreflang and canonical, this is now possible.
Please beware that we also present the results from this test in this YouTube video
Sony recently unveiled plans to release the PlayStation 4, ushering in the eighth generation of video games consoles. Fans went berserk online and during the week of the announcement 1 in every 900 searches online were related to the new Sony console. In amongst the thousands of different ways that people were searching for PlayStation though, one of the most striking things was that relatively few people were actually using the term ‘playstation’ which had me wondering – is the PlayStation brand dying?
Of course the entity that is PlayStation remains incredibly strong, but in terms of taxonomy (how we name stuff) people are much more likely to search for the acronym ‘ps’ rather than ‘playstation’. On the day of the Sony announcement (20 February 2013) ‘ps4’ was the 31st most searched for term in the UK compared to ‘playstation 4’ which ranked in 40th position. When we looked at the total search volume of recurring keywords for PlayStation 4 searches between December 2012 and February 2013 only 33% of searches included the word ‘playstation’ whereas 67% included ‘ps4’. (more…)
Can a good SEO live without tools? If you look at how the industry behaves you would say the answer is ‘no’. Sessions at conferences where tools are discussed are always packed full.
And if you look at the sheer number of tools available for SEO’s there is no other conclusion then yes, because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many out there!
But do good tools make a good SEO? And could a good SEO do without the tools? Well that is a whole different question which is interesting to explore. So for Tools Week I decided to go and ask some industry experts to share their opinions on this topic. With the help of Marcus Tandler, Alex Moss, Disa Johnson, Debra Mastaler, Dennis Goedegebuure and Julie Joyce, let’s try to look at every side of the story. (more…)
I used to be a bit of an SEO tool junkie. Whenever a new tool was announced I’d drop everything and go find out what it did, signup for a free trial or even start paying for it straight away if I was really impressed.
But my life as an SEO didn’t start like this because I didn’t have the money to invest in tools, I built my first website using Notepad and a free FTP program. Even when I started to learn SEO properly and get my sites ranking, it was a while before I could afford to buy a website creator and some spamming link building software. I learnt most of my skills the hard way, I really wanted to take the easy route and let tools do the hard work for me, but I genuinely couldn’t afford to.
Looking back, I think I was making up for lost time when I started signing up for every new tool that came along! I seem to have gone back the other way now as I only use a small amount of SEO tools each and every day.
The fact is, you probably don’t need to pay for SEO tools in order to learn your trade or get results. But in many instances, they can sure make your life a hell of a lot easier and free up your time to work on more interesting tasks. But how do you know when to invest? How much should you invest? How do you know that a subscription is worth keeping?
Hopefully I can help answer some of these questions as part of tools week here on State of Search. (more…)
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