Search Engine Solutions Blog

Google made the unconventional move of announcing a potential major change to its organic search results algorithm. The announcement heralded “a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s Web search.”

Every once in a while Google makes a major algorithmic change to its organic results. In reality, its organic algorithm changes at least monthly, if not more frequently, but the major changes are sometimes announced. Even when they aren’t, these changes are quickly named by the industry, like hurricanes named at the time they prove themselves able to do damage

Like prior major changes in the algorithm, Caffeine will profoundly affect the SEO industry and may impact your SEO rankings or traffic, positively or negatively. It may also significantly impact your PPC (AdWords) search strategy and that of your competitor.

Let’s look at the stated objective for Caffeine and imagine how these changes might shake things up, based on the attributes and dimensions that were mentioned in Google’s announcement.

Index Size and Speed
Problem: News sites and real-time blogging platforms, both within social media sites like Facebook and through sites like Twitter, generate a huge volume of content that is only fresh for a short time.
Solution: Google Caffeine will index, refresh and rank them faster.

Accuracy
Problem: Most people would agree that Google is fairly accurate now. However, for certain query types, its accuracy is still fairly poor. In particular, Google struggles with integrating local results into the organic results beyond the local results section.
Solution: Work harder on Google maps. Interestingly, with Caffeine I noticed less news included and more local business listings included. Of course, they aren’t always at the top; the top organic listings are generally not geocentric and are often links to a wiki or other reference site.

Personalization
Problem: The personalization extends beyond geographic data center issues to the user level. This means that even if you have what looks like a top organic position, you may not have that position for everyone who searches.
Solution: You’ll have to make your own determination based on what your lost opportunity might be. I recommend testing paid listings even when you have a top organic listing.

Try it now with your own keywords www2.sandbox.google.com and report me with your findings!

Q: We want to rank better for certain keywords in Google.

Thanks,
Chris

A: Site Analysis
Your major problem is that the site has no “Google Properties” to compete on major keywords (you are okay with tiny keywords like “*****”).

The Solution
To be on Google 1st page for “*****” you need 505 pages (you have 211) on your website optimized for this keyword along with only 12 good links and few social components.

Products like “static site wizard” will solve 60% of the problem. The rest are to get good links and social networking.

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

Official Google blog on Sitelinks

Which links does Google use for the Site-links?
Google seems to use the first level links of a homepage for the Site links. The links should be descriptive text links or image links with a ALT tag. JavaScript is not considered for Sitelinks. Google uses 2 to 8 links for the Sitelinks of a website. Google assigns the number of links to each website by the number of internal links it determines.
The text that is used for the Sitelinks can be the text that are used for the link on the homepage or the title of the linked page. It seems that Google prefers links that appear at the top left of a webpage.

How can you get Site-links for your domain?

1. Your website must be authority with #1 ranking for the searched keyword.
2. Your domain must be at least 2 years old. It seems that younger websites don’t get Sitelinks.
3. The number of searches and the number of clicks that your website gets for a certain keyword seem to be considered. Keywords that aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks. It also seems that your website has to get many clicks for the searched keyword.
4. The number of links that point to your website with the searched keyword as the anchor text seem to influence the creation of Sitelinks. Sitelinks only seem to appear for the main keywords of a website, not for all keywords for which a website is listed.

If your website meets these criteria Google might assign Sitelinks to your website for your most important keywords.
Sitelinks can be a nice addition for searches for general keywords but they usually won’t appear for searches that consist of two to four words. These words are the most important keywords for website promotion and search engine optimization.

People who search for multiple word keywords are more likely to purchase goods or services than people using fewer words.

Can I help you?
Call The Search Engine Doctor today for free sitelinks advice under your domain!

No its not. TrustRank is not Pagerank. TrustRank is Combating Web Spam with TrustRank using Stanford University research. Full details are here: http://www.acroterion.ca/TrustRank-Stanford-University.pdf

“Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.” Stanford InfoLab Publication.

Layman language of TrustRank formula can be found at http://www.umbrella-consultancy.co.uk/art1-trustrank.htm

TrustRank Explain Starts Here

If someone with a red (negative) reputation votes for you (good or bad), it doesn’t affect your reputation, because in the eyes of the system they are not trusted because others who ARE trusted have said so. While a vote (good or bad) from someone with many squares of reputation can lift you up on high, or condemn you to the fiery furnace, while votes from those with one or two squares of reputation will count, but not for much. This is a simplified form of TrustRank.

It is my belief that TrustRank will compound so that the sum of the whole will be greater than the parts. so if a site got links from a seed site it would be worth x, but a site with links from two seed sites could be x +y + compounded trust value.

Below is a graphical representation of how it might work, but I have for simplicity not added the compounding value, and have used round numbers. Google Page Rank uses a whole number of 1 as a base for each page, and a €™voting value€™ of .85 of the Page Rank value. (This being the result of the .15 dampening factor applied to all pages when determining the value of outbound links from a page).

So the old adage of build quality content that people will want to link to, means more than ever now.

Want some easy Google credits? No problem.

I believe that Google is counting how many people are using the “I’m Feeling Lucky” option. Technically it’s very simple as the core search engine needs to redirect you to the first position in its results set, so it “clicks” in your behalf on this organic listing. So now that it knows the URL, why not to save it to a database and give higher ranking score for more frequent “luckiers”? It’s simple as that!

What do do?

Search for a keyword that placing your website on the first Google spot (organic only, no compass or AdWords) and open a fresh Google search screen. Use the keyword you’ve found and click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky”. That’s it. If you have Google Toolbar (you don’t? Get it right away here (feature list) and opt it out to show PageRank) use it as your first choice.

What should I do if my keyword search is not found on the first position?
Search for your company name plus the keyword. (E.g new york movers flatrate)

One Warning – Don’t get carried away! It is not a good idea to exceed a too much clicks a day from you and your employees, friends, or your clients who love you.

This is a message I have received today from Google:

Today we’ll disclose some of the AdSense and AdWords algorithm facts. The best way to describe such a complex system is by using graphs. No more words, there you go:

Click here to download full diagram [PDF 2.08 MB]