As part of my work in updating the recently published 2009 edition of the Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to SEO, and training on the Advanced SEO course it's essential I stay up-to-date by reviewing the thousands of announcements by Google and commentary by SEO bloggers.
While all SEO professionals and agencies will be doing this too, many general marketers, digital marketers don't have time for this, so in my blog category "Latest Updates on Google Marketing" I hope it's useful to catalogue the most significant changes in marketing and any actions you should take.
So, for me, these are the most significant changes in H1 2009 that Google has made which affect the natural search listings and so, SEO practice. The most important one for UK businesses is at the end. I also have a follow-up post on Google updates in Q2 2009.
Category: Index inclusion
What is it? The canonical link element rel="canonical" is added to a page within the header (<head>) of a page, typically by developers, as follows
<link href="http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product" rel="canonical">
This provides a hint to a search engine about which is the most important or original page if pages are identical or similar in terms of content, but have a different URL. Different URLs with similar content are common in these situations:
Tracking ids added to the query string:
http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product"&trackingid=123
Session ids added to the query string:
http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product"&sessionid=123
Faceted search parameters for advanced search engines::
http://www.example.com/product.php?id=neat-product"&sort_order="ascending"
Why is it significant? Many sites suffer from duplicate content, i.e. additional pages that may be stored or excluded from the Google Index. This is a problem since it effectively dilutes the impact of your pages since Google may flow the value it attributes to your site (through PageRank) around more pages rather than keeping it focused on the ones you want to rank. Using rel=canonical effectively flows the ranking from internal and potentially external links back to a single page. It may also mean that less relevant pages are displayed in the search index for users.
Note that this doesn't help across domains/sites, for example for syndicated content such as press releases.
What should you do? Ask your SEO company or technical team whether they are auditing and then minimising duplicate content through using rel=canonical or other measures such as excluding duplicates through robots.txt.
More information / How Tos:
Why is it significant? Searchers are now prompted with related searches in a number of locations, so if you can rank well for these, they can give incremental traffic.
They also give useful ideas for copywriters showing synonyms and interesting qualifiers to add within the copy or maybe interesting titles for blog posts. If you combine them with the new "Show Options" feature you can browse with these always displayed.
Turning to longer snippets I can't get too excited about these since they only seem to show up for long-long tail queries. This doesn't warrant rewriting all your meta descriptions. For example, if I search on "Internet Marketing training course" I see this snippet for Econsultancy with standard two lines taken from the meta description attribute.
If I expand the search to "Internet Marketing Training course London UK" (6 words) I see the same snippet, but when I add "email marketing" (8 words) I then finally see the longer 3 line snippet pulled from the page:
So no real action required here, just continue copywriting for those long-tail searches.
More information / How Tos:
Why is it significant? This is useful since it reduces the need for rank checking services like Advanced Web Ranking, Web Position Gold, etc to determine ranking positions which is partly why Google introduced the feature. Of course it won"€™t show how your rankings compare to competitors, or where you aren"€™t ranking.
What should you do? Consider implementing using the instructions below, and then you can potentially compare fluctuations in your your natural ranking position for target keywords with your average position for a paid search AdWords result to decide how you best integrate paid and natural positions.
More information / How Tos:
Why is it significant? This feature will encourage people to look for content such as videos and forums postings more, but from a practical point of view, for the digital marketer it has these advantages:
The example given includes starred product ratings for a product.
Why is it significant? This is significant in that it marks a move towards the semantic web with additional descriptive information about each page being added into the listings.
It also marks a move towards Google disintermediating the comparison sites like Kelkoo.com (as it is already with its Product Search).
What should you do? Probably "a wait and see" approach for retailers, although it could potentially give you an edge since we know that reviews increase conversions and including this snippet within the SERPs should increase CTR in the same way that Google Checkout can increase CTR for AdWords.
More information / How Tos:
<a href="http://www.externalsite.com" rel="nofollow">Visit external site</a>.
Some companies mistakenly used this to limit "PageRank leakage", but is generally believed that links out to related sites can be a postive factor.
Nofollow is also used extensively in social networks and in forums to limit any value comment spammers get from posting in the forums to their own sites for SEO benefits.
It was soon realised that there would be some benefits from PageRank sculpting within a site to flow link equity to the most important pages rather than diluting it in irrelevant pages such as "Add to Basket".
Why is it significant? Comments from Google at the time suggested that it could give benefits by excluding less relevant pages from the index and some tests/discussions on SEO fora seemed to support this.
The latest change is caused by statements at conferences that Pagerank sculpting may not be worthwhile and may actually be damaging. Conspiracy theorists (and there are naturally more amongst SEOers than elsewhere) believe that Google has changed it's position on no follow because it actually works quite well!
What should you do? There appears to be little evidence of PageRank sculpting causing damage, so it would seems it's not necessary to reverse it. However, if you are about to embark on it, don't expect major benefits, indeed it can be seen as a minor benefit and there are many other things you should get right first - follow Rand Fishkin's excellent flow chart in the post below to see what these are.
More information / How Tos:
Category: SEO Ranking factors
Why is it significant? Many companies lost rankings and so business, but I guess there were winners too, particularly amongst the bigger brands. Some of the effects which I have noticed and mentioned in the Webmaster World discussions include:
What should you do? Watch this space. It's now more important than ever to have an extensive list of target keyphrases in different categories and to note how you're performing through analytics (visits and conversion from SEO) or ranking positions.
With well over 200 ranking factors and many filters within that, it's getting more difficult to isolate the reasons for changes, but since the update has not stabilised it's worth checking to see from tests and the consensus on specialist forums like SEOmoz, Webmasterworld when it does.
More information / How Tos:
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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