Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

Google today announced a new feature designed to give people greater control over the results they see. Do you think a lower ranked result is more useful? It’s easy to promote it to the top, delete a result you’re not interested in, or comment on results.

This is the logical next step in the evolution of Google as far as I’m concerned. Their algorithm has been tweaked until it can’t be tweaked any more without getting dynamic, on the fly, user interaction to help it be even more targeted and to develop further. And here it is…Google SearchWiki.

Now you can customise your search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. You can also see how other other searchers have customised any given result.

You’ll see the changes you make whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. The changes you make only affect your own search results , and your changes will be included on a public comments page where you can also view how the community has edited or commented on a set of results.

Will this go to impacting on the natural search listings long term…in my opinion yes!

Google Analytics have added a slight tweak to their tracking code in the past 2 days to include a try catch block, which hopefully will result in any problems arising with contacting their server will not stop the page from loading. The small tweak adds a try catch block at the end of the code.

New Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}

Old Google Analytics Tracking Code

var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-xxxxxxx-1″);
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

No they don’t have to have the www in there although it depends on how you display the URL to the end user. If you want the user to eventually end up at the www. version of the address then by not having it in there you’re just making Google have to do a redirect when it follows the link. You don’t want to end up with duplicate content, for example
http://www.mysite.co.uk, http://mysite.co.uk, http://mysite.co.uk/index.php and http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.php are the same URL.

This can be addressed with a Canonical redirect in your .htaccess file in the root of your domain. For best results, each page of a website should be reachable at a single persistent url. This address is known as the page’s canonical URL (Canonical refers to being the authoritative address).

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.co.uk [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/$1 [r=301,nc]
rewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mysite.co.uk/$1 [R=301]

What importance should be put on the category that Google defines your website in? If you take the Google Ad Planner it categorises a website in a given category related to your sector. Are you unlikely to rank against what you perceive to be a close competitor but to what Google sees as although industry related, unrelated to the niche you would ideally like to be in?

These categories are not only used in Google’s Ad Planner but surface in Google Analytics under benchmarking and also surface in Google Insight in exactly the same format. I recently interviewed a candidate for an SEO role who had worked for Google in India…she stated that she manually vetted sites before they went into the index…I wish I had asked her if some kind of categorisation was taking place or if this was her primary role in the entry process.

There is inevitably going to be websites which straddle categories and see competitors outranking them on a term they feel strongly on. Does this categorisation have an impact on what you can realistically rank for in the SERPS?

I always find it useful to give visual examples when giving SEO training so I built a tool to display what effect the key fields that editors fill in will represent when they are surfaced in the search engines. This is a very basic version of a tool i created for an in house CMS. Try the SEO Tool here. I hope to add a few more to the list which are currently in development.

I have been receiving a lot of traffic recently related to people asking about free 301 redirects for their related domain names in their 123-Reg account. The redirect which 123-Reg actually implements is in fact a 302. The only way to implement a 301 on a domain name is to change the name servers to point at someone who does support 301 redirects, however, there will be a cost associated with this. If you have a Plesk Control panel you could set up an account and configure the .htaccess to conduct the redirect but this will result in a waste of account space for such a trivial task. Depending on the importance of the domain name will generally decide upon the best strategy.

Advanced Segmentation Beta is starting to appear in Google Analytics accounts in the UK. Its very sketchy at the moment and even across different machines in the same office are showing different versions of Google Analytics.

Citys.info switched its servers on for business on Friday with a launch expected to challenge the best of the local guide platforms. The platform says it can be launched on any town or city (currently only in the UK) in a matter of hours. The internet franchise can be applied to your local town or city providing hotel bookings, event information, restaurant guides and reviews amongst a whole host of other information on a domain name of your choice said company owner Lee Woodman. To see a live working example visit Swansea.info which has been running for just over a year whilst the platform was developed in a live environment.

When asked how the platform would fair against its competitors Lee said “It’s simple; not only visually do our sites stand out but the engineering that has gone into the design of the management system is second to none. We hope to sit above our competitors such as TheBestOf and CityLocal. The way we have engineered the platform and structured our information architecture will give our franchise owners the edge when it comes to search engine placement. A lot of time has been spent making sure the platform has been optimised for natural search.”

The first Franchises are due to launch their new platforms early in 2009 with the likes of Portsmouth, Plymouth and London already snapped up.