Fun Friday SEO
24 December 2009
Marc's special SEO Christmas wish list
Photo by ercwttmn via Creative Commons |
Well the silly season is upon us, the year is winding down with all matter of festivities (the Bruce Clay Christmas party was most enjoyable) taking place. Having decided to go the Christmas shopping online route and not run the gauntlet shopping with the heavy crowds, I have become pretty adept at making wish lists. So to end off a very successful year of the Bruce Clay Blog, I give you Marc's very special SEO Christmas wish list:
1. Please clean up your results Google: The other day I was doing some searches for a fairly generic name, which also happened to be a celebrity, all of a sudden I had SERPS that looked like a taxi dashboard, there were videos, pictures, real-time results and PPC results, oh and a small smattering of regular organic results. If Google is using click behaviour to implement personalised search, then surely they can observe I hardly ever click through to videos and images in my results and provide more organic results and less of the 'fluff'? Next time I have a purely information query perhaps Wikipedia will be my first choice.
2. Matt Cutts: Not just Matt Cutts mind you, but Matt in full Santa regalia sliding down the chimney and asking for me to come away with him on his sled (eco friendly of course) to the Googleplex in Mountain View to personally review the algorithm and give my very valuable insight. This is only slightly less likely than me being asked to play professional soccer for Tottenham Hotspurs, but a guy can dream can't he.
3. Don't kill the Yahoo link command: Since Google stopped supporting the link command and Microsoft never really did, there has only been one (excluding pricey programs, many of which rely on the Yahoo link command anyway) real tool for SEO newcomers to conduct competitive link analysis, the Yahoo site/link command. With the 'sale' of Yahoo to Microsoft, there air has been thick with rumours that the Yahoo link command may also stop working, please let it live, purty please!
4. A better way to leverage Twitter: Currently the real-time results for the search engines aren't that great, I find them annoying and don't see them as adding value. Lisa Barone has also shown how spammy real-time search can be. I think that, if leveraged correctly, real-time search results can be great, but I think in a rush to outdo each other, the search engines jumped the gun on this one.
5. A Eureka moment: Not really the kind that Archimedes had in his bathtub but really a kind of singularity moment where everybody in the world suddenly has an epiphany and all of a sudden knows exactly what search engine optimisation is. Im a little bit tired of friends and family asking me what I do and when I reply SEO, I'm generally met with a blank stare in return. If in the extremely unlikely scenario that this singularity doesn't occur, perhaps some better worldwide publicity and education regarding SEO would be great.
6. SEO Report: Not just any report mind you, but a fully automated tool that creates client specific, customised rankings, traffic and SEO KPI reports that provide intelligent, actionable insights for both Bruce Clay and our clients all at the click of a button, first time, every time. I dont think there's an app for that.
7. Make Google Analytics real-time: There is a lag in reporting statics within GA of about 3 hours between the event occurring and GA reporting on it. If Google can implement real-time search, surely they can get real time reporting right too. Oh and while we are on Google Analytics, the ability to transfer ownership of profiles between accounts would be greatly appreciated.
8. Make it easier to report spam: Currently you have to log into your webmaster account to report any kind of spam, this makes it an inconvenient and long process, if there was an easier way to do this, (say putting a 'report spam button' next to the SERPS whilst logged into your account) more people would report spammy sites and the search engines indexes would be alot cleaner.
9. Better competition for Google: It is said competition drives innovation and for a while (in search anyway) Google has had no real competitors; they had 65.6% of the search market share in November. I am hoping that Bing will soon integrate all the Yahoo search technology and this jump-starts a search engine conflict that will drive up quality control, features, relevancy, useful features and value add to both Google and Bing.
10. Charlize Theron's phone number: It's for SEO I swear, just wanted to let her know that her website should have unique title tags for each page and that she should have a robots.txt and sitemap.xml file :)
Hope you enjoyed my wish list (was just kidding Charlize, but seriously my email is on the blog :)). The Bruce Clay Australia office is closing tomorrow until Monday the 4th of January. From all the folks at Bruce Clay, have a great festival season and a grand New Years. See you on the other side.
Marc
Posted by Marc Elison on 24 December 2009 at 9:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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4 December 2009
SEO is so Postmodern
Photo by tew via Creative Commons |
Oh, people love throwing this label around. Being called Postmodern is totally zeitgeist and will definitely increase your buzz on the street. It's worked for architecture, business, novels, music, the arts, even specific human beings. You're just not modern unless you're Postmodern. Therefore, for a bit of Friday fun, I've ventured into theoretical territory to see if SEO (the Bruce Clay way) can proudly wear the postmodern jacket.
Postmodernism and Search Engine Optimisation are young in terms of their respective fields. No one is sure what either one really is, both have this mysterious appeal. You may feel you know what they are, but you'll never be entirely sure. Moreover, as is the nature of them both, once you stop to reflect, you've fallen behind.
Both have a shady past. The Postmodernism grew out of the Modernist movement, which it thought of as an overprotective parent. Whereas SEO has it's black sheep of the family (or is that hat).
However, to find any real similarities, you'll need to look at the core of SEO, optimising websites. The first ranking goal of any website is to become equal among the ranking leaders, which means finding the best keywords for your target market and recording the finer details of the sites leading those rankings. This gives you an idea on how to match the highest ranked sites. Once the site is equal with the best, the design can then develop into a unique style.
Similarly, the Postmodernist examines the nuances of conventions. The conventions (the ways others are doing things) need to be learnt, experienced and aced. Only then can they create a unique style, something that sees through the conventions and challenges them to change.
SEO and PM emphasize the little things, taking time working through the nuances. Get prepared to hear lots of 'nothing to report today'. However, if you've done things correctly, it'll eventually come together.
Both take an unusual approach to spoken truths. PM is renowned for its mistrust of theories. They would rather experience and come to their own conclusions, living and dying by their own sword. SEOs on the other hand, as a colleague of mine stated, are better rewarded for taking a 'do as we do not as we say' approach to search engines. SEOs have learnt over the years that search engines can intentionally set you off on the wrong path. The answer is to look for the finer details and understand their own language, commonly referred to as Googlespeak.
I think the similarities between to two are the result of something inherent in them both. Both are a never-ending process. PM doesn't believe in finishing. In addition, technically SEO does have a definitive end, the algorithm; our goal is to be lest imperfect. What 'imperfect' is however, is what we dont know.
Have a good weekend everyone.
Posted by Matthew Geale on 4 December 2009 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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13 November 2009
New Keywords User Interface for Google Webmaster Tools
Photo by Yodel Anecdotal via Creative Commons |
In a special post-Halloween, the Google Webmaster Central Blog announced a change to the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools. The major changes are:
• The data is now updated daily
• Google now displays how many occurrences of the keyword through the site
• Google displays a number of URL's through the site that contains the specific keyword
• A frequency column which displays the prominence of a keyword compared to other keywords on the site
These features are useful in identifying URL's that might have been hacked. Another good use for these new interface features is checking Google in indexing all your pages, especially after a major change in hosting or web language. Essentially this new interface helps you visualise more easily how Google views your site.
Posted by Marc Elison on 13 November 2009 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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30 October 2009
Google Social Search
Photo by manfrys via Creative Commons |
Google's Social Search was announced this week by the Official Google Blog. It sounds like a great tool for making search results more relevant. Social Search essentially pulls in information from social networks to augment Google's search results. It achieves this by aggregating your social circle ( Google creates your social circle by scraping your Gmail friends, your blogs on Google reader, your Twitter followers, your Friendfeed contacts and a variety of other sources ) information and relating any input your social circle has to your search results.
One thing to bear in mind is that it's not twitter search and it's not real-time search. I would have liked to tell you I have tested it this service and it's great. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be bringing up any results for anyone in the Bruce Clay Australia Office. I have tried it logged into my Google, Facebook, Twitter and with my Google reader open and links to my social media account within my Google profile implemented but unfortunately no results come up in the social search option. So either I don't have a social circle ( according to Google ) or my social circle has no input on a wide variety of searches ( from cars to seo ) or the most likely option, that Google Social search is still a little buggy, especially with sites outside the Google.com domain. Attached is a screenshot of my social search.
However this is a Google labs 'experiment' and I'm sure they will iron the bugs out soon. From what I have heard and read from people whose social search is active, it's really nifty and if (make that when) this social search is added to the blended results, it will definitely add value for the searcher.
There are privacy concerns with regard to Google social search, but that fear has been allayed by Matt Cutts who says any of the information returned with social search information will already be public and indexed by Google, they are just helping to assign this information to relevant search results. The results are also tailored specifically to you so nobody else will see your social circle.
What does this mean for search engine optimisation? Well it means that people in the SEO industry are going to have to monitor social media much more carefully for input that could affect the search engine rankings and conversions. We might see more SEO's getting into the social media field to get positive comments for certain results ( gaming social media accounts perhaps ).
There are some immediate benefits for the average searcher. Imagine you are searching for ' Italian restaurant Sydney', your results are not only ranked by relevance but also by positive or negative input your social circle has on the Italian restaurant scene in Sydney. This combined with the news that Google will be indexing and using twitter for relevancy of recent events all points to more accurate and relevant search results, which will make more searches happy and in turn make Google more revenue.
Posted by Marc Elison on 30 October 2009 at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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23 October 2009
Twitter | Bing and Google Seal the Deal
The biggest news this week was the fact that Bing is starting to index and list in its search results, Twitter and Facebook information that has been made public by the profile owners. Oh and Google is doing the same thing re Twitter, but it's a planned rollout over the next few months, WOW that is big news. That's 54 million monthly Twitter uses whose tweets will now be in the SERPS. This has a really good outlook the big search giants in regards of value they can add as with a lot search segments (news, online shopping, recent events etc) the most recent news are often the most relevant.
Photo by respres via Creative Commons |
This doesn't however mean that your once pristine search engine results will be polluted by largely inconsequential tweets and Facebook status updates. More than likely the big search engines will use all this additional data to leverage existing results and refine them using the additional Facebook and Twitter data to get the most relevant sites to the top of the rankings. I think a big factor will be how the search engines rank tweets as relevant or not. Will they use number of followers? Re-tweets? Specific mentions across other social media outlets? I think this will be one of the most difficult parts of the deal for the search engines to work out. An interesting aside is that Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg mentioned that no money changed hands with Microsoft with regards to their deal.
Some reviews of the Bing Twitter search has revealed that some already established Twitter search engines have better effectiveness and features. Such engines like Tweetme is said to be far more advanced in terms of interacting with Twitter than Bing, unfortunately without changing my Bing locale setting, I can't confirm this. It seems the Bing Twitter search is not available in Australia, see below.
I attempted to find some information about how much data the Twitter servers actually hold but was ultimately unsuccessful but the point I wanted to get across was that's it's got to be loads. All that data is now going to be duplicated within not only Bing but also Google, now when you add in the additional Facebook data that Bing is going to sift through, thats alot of storage requirements. If I was an investor I would look at who provides storage and servers to these behemoths and get involved right away.
What does this mean for search engine optimisation? Well, you should tweet all new content created, this might get it indexed more quickly. What will be very interesting is the value that search engines will assign to the value of links and would the value of links change if the search engines 'see' the tweet as an authority ? There are also spam considerations here, Twitter is inherently easy to spam and the search engines will have to implement some pretty stringent spam measures, will these measures filter out any SEO specific measures to take advantage of Twitter? Here is a list of some good seo tips for Twitter that might be more applicable in the next few months.
Personally I think this is a good thing, if it is done correctly that is. More real-time results, more relevancy will be added to the SERPS. This will only be the case if this extra data stream is integrated in a way where useless ancillary tweets are eliminated, spam is filtered and ranking algorithm is perfected in a way that it allocated high relevance to trusted tweets while discarding the one-offs and tweets about how you like your toast.
Enjoy your Weekend all.
Posted by Marc Elison on 23 October 2009 at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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9 October 2009
How to be a better SEO
We all know people in the search engine optimisation field can be a competitive bunch, all trying to get to that number 1 ranking for their chosen key terms, phrases etc. This competitive nature drives a desire to be better and do better in most of the SEO's that I know. This really is a good thing as it drives people to innovation, and I think even more importantly to better themselves and improve their skills as SEO's. But how can you become a better SEO?
 Photo by World Economic Forum via Creative Commons |
Expand your Skill set
A lot of people in the SEO industry either have marketing-esque or IT-based origins and historically these are two disciplines haven't overlapped much with the few exceptions (looking at you Steve Jobs). People with marketing qualifications have been hesitant to branch into the IT field and vice versa, however if you want to become a successful SEO you need to have a fair bit of knowledge of both. Personally, I came from a predominantly marketing background, and I felt it was imperative that I learnt some IT and in particular HTML and CSS skills. Yep that was me, the guy reading HTML for dummies on the bus and let me tell you something it has been a massive help in my SEO analysis work.
No longer am I the one going to the technical guru asking the difference between a span and a div, now I can figure it out for myself and see how certain HTML impacts of the SEO effectiveness of the page I'm analysing, awesome. Similarly, if you are a complete coding freak who views a website and automatically sees the code behind it (Neo style from the matrix) but has never explored the wonderful world of Google Analytics it is time to get involved, study up on some Google analytics tutorials, visit Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik (in my opinion one of the best analytics blogs on the web) and get a heads up on what great things you can do with Google analytics. If you are unsure about where to start do a website audit (not a real website audit but you know what I mean) on your own SEO skills, find out where you think you are great and where you are not so great and concentrate on improving your weaker areas. Many SEO companies also deliver training programs, which specifically address certain SEO areas such as SEO copy writing or link building; these may seem fairly pricey but are usually worth the outlay as they can provide valuable SEO information that is presented in a structured way. In fact Bruce Clay Australia is running a 1 day SEO training course in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during October.
Read, Read, Read
An imperative part of being an SEO is keeping up to date with new developments, emerging technology and current trends. For example, when the no=follow/Pagerank sculpting debacle (Matt Cutts dropped a bomb shell that Pagerank sculpting no longer works to help flow more PageRank to the unblocked pages) erupted, I needed to know what was going on ASAP to soothe anxious clients, but how did I know what to tell them? Well, I have about 20 different online marketing/search engine optimisation/general marketing/Search engine webmaster central emails or information updates sent to me daily. If I have the time I also peruse my RSS reader, which has some less vital but always informative posts on topics ranging from Google's less than stellar handling of old Usenet archives to Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing short stories. There are a couple places to start off here, The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog is always a good resource and well as Search Engine Land's Search Cap, which is a collection of the week's best articles and resources from around the web. The more resources you read the more resources you will find and it's all about prioritising and finding the blogs/updates that you feel give you the best value.
Start your own site and Experiment
This was something that was suggested to me as soon as I got into the industry, and I regret the fact that I only acted on this advice about a year later. You can learn a fortune of theoretical information about SEO on the web, but if you never put that intelligence into practice you won't improve yourself as an SEO as quickly and effectively as you could. Believe me its alot easier to tinker with your own site and stuff it up completely than explaining to your boss why you mistakenly disallowed all the search engine spiders in the robots.txt file and your clients' site is not longer ranking for anything (this happened to a friend of a friend, promise :) ). If you are looking to get to grips with the Google Website Optimiser where you can use different types of testing to see if a red button or green button will get you more conversions, it is also easier to implement this on your own site. Another advantage of setting up your own site is that is gives you a unique insight into how your clients might think and what metrics and KPI's to present to clients to show that your SEO efforts are actually working.
There are heaps of other things you can do like : improving your people and public speaking skills, getting to grips and exploring new social media trends and networks, getting to grips with the mainstream advertising industry and what methods and techniques they employ that you could borrow to improve your SEO, the ability to hypnotise Matt Cutts and steal his Google knowledge and...... well I could go on forever but they key here, is knowing yourself and being able to prioritise what new skills or projects would most benefit you as a practitioner of SEO and endeavour to improve yourself in these areas.
Posted by Marc Elison on 9 October 2009 at 1:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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2 October 2009
Google Webmaster Tools
Some people in the office have called me a bit of a Google fan boy and you know what, I am a bit. If you look at how much help and assistance Google offers website owners and anyone involved in the web, it's hard not to be a little bit of a fan. One of the Google products I use every day is their webmaster tools.
 Photo by SEO Toronto via Creative Commons |
Google webmaster tools are super easy to set up. It is as easy as signing up for a Google account and uploading a html file to the root directory of your site to validate that the site is in fact yours. Then the fun begins. Google webmaster tools provides a wealth of information for your site on the web and a lot of the intelligence can be used to further tweak and optimise your site to improve the ROI gained from your website.
You may be able to extract a lot of the information that is contained in Google webmaster tools from other sources, but it can be time consuming and the intel might not always be that accurate. Here are some of my favourite parts of Google webmaster tools.
• Top search queries -This section returns information about your best pages on your site in terms of driving traffic and converting people who view your site in the SERPS into people who actually visit your site. One page converting better than others? Have a look at its title tag; see how you can modify title tags on other pages throughout your site to be more like the better converting pages. You can also find out what keywords your site ranks for, cool!
• Links to your site -Links are the life blood of SEO, generally speaking the more links to your site, the better it is going to rank. In Google webmaster tools you can download every link pointing to your site, and you can even find out what pages have more links than others. You can find out which pages garner more links and create similar content for other pages in order to get natural back links.
• HTML suggestions- Google webmaster tools even helps you find out potential HTML problems with your site. When the GoogleBot spiders your site it makes note of duplicate meta descriptions, short meta descriptions and meta descriptions that are too long. You can do the same thing with title tags. This allows you to fix any HTML errors that might have a negative effect on your rankings within Google.
• Crawler Access- We recently had a client who couldn't understand why their traffic had suddenly dropped about 90% in the space of about a week. A quick visit to Google webmaster tools illuminated the fact that they had disallowed access for the GoogleBot to their entire site, probably not the smartest move but by using Google webmaster it was quickly rectified.
• Settings- You can even use Google webmaster tools to target a specific county for your site. You also have the ability to make your site appear with the www preceding it or not.
But don't take my word for it, setup Google webmaster tools on your site today and find out what a useful and productivity enhancement tool Google webmaster tools can be.
Have a Good long weekend everyone.
P.S Happy birthday for a certain Mr Clay who celebrated his special day during the week.
Posted by Marc Elison on 2 October 2009 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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25 September 2009
SEO Tools | My favourites
So working in SEO means that a lot of the time half my Firefox screen is normally taken up by the website I am viewing and the other half by various tools and toolbars that allow me to do my job more effectively and efficiently, so I thought I would quickly share with you some of my most used and useful search engine optimisation tools.
 Photo by Matt Browne via Creative Commons |
Bruce Clay SEM Toolbar
Anytime I mention SEO tools, I am contractually bound to mention Bruce's Toolbar, JOKES. But seriously, this toolbar may not have all the functionality of some of the other tools but the fact that it seamlessly integrates with the Bruce Clay SEO Toolset (which I use all the time) makes it one of my most used tools. Even if you don't have a Toolset account, the free tools available with the toolbar are very useful, the keyword density analysis is excellent and can find a lot of on-page optimisation issues. The proxy support is great for those SEO's who practice their craft around the world and need to see search results that appear naturally in the country the site is being targeted/ hosted. The keyword statistics gives some great information including demographic information and a whole bunch of other cool stuff as can be seen in the image below. Now I didn't always use the toolbar as it only ran on internet explorer ( and I like internet explorer as much as I like a freak Sydney Dust Storm that covers my room in a fine red dust ), but a few months ago Bruce adapted the toolbar so that it runs in Firefox too (yay).
Download page for the SEM Toolbar
Web Developer Toolbar
This is one seriously in depth and extensive tool. It is in the form of a toolbar that seamless integrates with my Firefox. It's just so easy to do complex tasks with this tool. Want to see how the page renders with Java Script turned off? Two Clicks and you have it. Want to see how the site looks without the CSS file? Two clicks and you have it. Want to see the alt attributes of every image displayed next to the actual image? Two clicks and you have it, notice a recurring theme going on? The Web developer toolbar also integrates with 3rd party applications so it makes it easy to validate HTML and check the CSS files are working accurately. For anyone involved in any form of online marketing, be it web design, SEO or anything in between the Web Developer Toolbar is a must have.
Download page for the Web Developer Toolbar
Firebug
This a great tool for the more technically minded SEO/web developer/gummy bear out there. It is really great for analysing snippets of code or finding out how a certain element on a page actually works. As the Firebug website states "You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page". A great thing is that you dont even need web access for it to work; it runs purely within the Firefox environment with no connections needed (obviously you might need to connect to actually see the web site you are analysing). It is pretty lean on resource use goes into a suspended state of animation until you call on it. You can also use its tools to identify why your site might be loading more slowly than usual. The newer versions of Firebug also have some really cool AJAX analysis tools.
This is far from an exhaustive list and are just the 3 tools I probably use the most. The one thing that all these seo tools have in common? THEY ARE FREE, that's right, you dont have to outlay one cent for these impressive functions and cool productivity tools.
Have a great weekend all.
Posted by Marc Elison on 25 September 2009 at 1:34 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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11 September 2009
If House was an SEO
I love soccer, I really do, I play as much as I can, normally about 3 times a week. On Saturday I was playing and managed to completely mangle my foot (I would post a picture but I don't want to scare away what loyal readers we have). So I hobbled into work the other day [after a full 3 days of not pitching up might I just add - Kate] with my pimp cane [it is not cool, sorry to burst your bubble... - Kate] and was quickly dubbed House. It could be the designer stubble, the arrogance, the complete and utter narcissism or the fact that I call people numbers but it's probably the cane and the limp. It got me thinking, if House was an SEO, what would he be like?
 Photo by LiGado em Série's via Creative Commons |
House is a maverick, a brilliant physician and a master at diagnosis, he is also slightly mentally unstable and a loner. His methods are often unconventional and put him at odds with his superiors and co-workers and his character has many similarities to Sherlock Holmes. With all these bizarre character traits what kind of SEO would he be?
Well first of all I reckon house would be a freelancer, his loner status and inability to play nice with others would mean this would be his most productive role. House only takes cases which are interesting to him and being as good as he is, means he could cherry pick his clients and only take the interesting cases. House would be a master at diagnosing why a site is not ranking or why traffic is on the downturn. However, House is very abrasive and probably would do what he thinks is best with no regard to what his current employer/designer/marketing department wants, I could see him quoting Henry Ford when he said "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse". I could see House getting up at an SMX site clinic and not only completely ripping apart the site on view but also his fellow panel members (be interesting to see how Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin would respond to that). [I think even mighty Matt would just wanna grab an autograph! - Kate]
In the TV series House is addicted to Vicodin, in my quasi world with House as an SEO he would be addicted to Redbull staying up all night long analysing hundreds of thousands of lines of codes to see why his client's site is doing badly [Sounds like the BCA analysts - Kate]. He would also come up with new, inventive and innovative search engine optimisation techniques to boost the sites under his control [thats more like the BCA search managers... - Kate]. House is one of those people who are missing the brain-mouth filter and it would be a joy to see him in conversation with a bluechip CEO saying exactly what he thinks of the current online marketing activities.
I think House would be one engaging, entertaining, brilliant and infuriating exponent of SEO and would love to see someone of his ilk actually in the SEO world, do you know of any House-esque characters in the online world ?
Have a good weekend all.
Posted by Marc Elison on 11 September 2009 at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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28 August 2009
How a drop in rankings is like a broken heart
You know the feeling, you are in the throes of devotion, every colour seems brighter, each day seems more beautiful, you find yourself wrapped in an ambrosia of infatuation, yes thats what happens when your website starts to rank #1 . Being in love can elicit similar emotions, maybe slightly less intense (I am a true geek aren't I). I have been lucky enough to experience the full range of emotions when it comes to caring deeply for that someone special, unfortunately I have also had the heartbreak that comes when something so fantastic ends abruptly. It got me thinking about when the big G had a major algorithm shift and my site disappeared from the front page of the rankings, I had a feeling similar to the heartbreak that I had previously endured.
 Photo by TimOve via Creative Commons |
Now I know that having your heart broken and your website's rankings battered are two different things however they do have similar results. Denial is one of the first emotions that come to mind. "It can't be over, it just can't, maybe I am logged in and my personal search history is clouding the results, no that's not happening, maybe my host has been down or I didn't pay my account, nope not that either, oh wait let me log into webmaster tools and see if I have a message indicating some kind of penalty, wrong again, wait I remember I was messing with my robots.txt file, did I accidentally put a disallow all? Not that either"
Anger is probably the next emotion you are going to feel. "You dumped me out of the rankings? You can't do that, I get almost 100 visitors a day, you can't just take me out of the first page ranking results, don't you know who I am? I am going to march all the way to Mountain View and open a can of whoop a@$. Fine, two can play that game, you want to play hardball I'll play hard ball, im going to stop spending my $100 a month on PPC, see how you like it "
Next up is normally bargaining "Im really sorry and contrite, maybe we can make a deal? How about I increase my spending to $200 a month and I will send Larry, Sergey and Matt a fruit basket every week for a year, come on Matt I love cats too, icanhascheezburger is my favourite site. Wait I know, I will submit a re-inclusion request, maybe that will do it, come on if you put me back in the first 3 results I will only create unique content, will never spam, no more white text on white background, I will be good, just help me out here, PURTY PLEASE."
Now what? Bring out the ice cream and start to weep. Grief is the next emotion and it's incredibly powerful. Waves of it can crash over you, making melancholy your usual state of being. Analysis of what you could have done wrong also occurs. "Was my content to similar to my competitor? Were my title tags too similar on my site? Did the search engines find out that my one link from a pagerank 4 site was actually bought? Should I have double checked my host to ensure that no banned I.P addresses were hosted by them? I knew I should have varied my anchor text, stoopid stoopid Marc."
The last stage is acceptance. This is possibly the most important stage to handle correctly. "So what? I never really like that site anyway, come on a site on the latest poodle fashion and hair trends was so 2008 and was never really going to take off, the measly 5 bucks a month I was getting from Adsense, pffff who needs it, I am going to build a bigger site, a better site, one with all the best SEO practices around, this site is going to be great, the best ever, me and this site are going to be together forever"
So in alot of ways a broken heart and a site at the top ranking can make you feel a similar way. Of course true heartbreak can be devastating and very difficult to get over. However the moral of the story is the same, you need to deal with your emotions, get over it and get back on the horse and get out there, planning new sites, applying the best search engine optimisation techniques on your other sites, come back better stronger and happier.
Have a good weekend everyone.
Posted by Marc Elison on 28 August 2009 at 1:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
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Marc Elison
Kate Gamble
Martin Orliac
