malcolm coles

Google’s rolling out personalised search to everyone, even if you’re not signed in. It means that: The results you see aren’t what everyone else sees, making SEO analysis that much harder.

And If you do a rubbish job of selling your site (either through the title in the results, or in terms of what they see when they click through) to people who commonly perform the same search, your site is going to drop out of their results. Gulp.

Tags: google, seo

Google’s new layout (only on google.com, not .co.uk, so far) has increased the importance of local SEO about a million times. Check out these two screenshots of a search for “St Albans offices” – one on google.com and one on google.co.uk.

Tags: google, seo

Search Google for I’m a Celebrity, which starts today, and ITV’s site is top – as it should be. Search Google for I’m a Celebrity 2009, however, and the ITV site is only fourth – behind Digital Spy, the Metro and Free Betting Online.

I’m a Celebrity 2009 results
I’m a Celebrity 2009 results

Even worse, the Free Betting site is an affiliate site with a massively optimised page designed to get I’m a Celebrity traffic – that links out to free sports (not TV-related) betting sites.

Tags: google, itv, seo

Wordpress has a habit of replacing normal quote marks with “curly” or smart quotes – the ones that look different at the start of a quote than at the end. They look nice – but they tend to break copy and paste (especially when you’re pasting code, such as my wordpress title / description code).

Tags: seo

While idly checking Google’s results for a Jan Moir search, I noticed that a top-10 result for the Angry Mob’s site – a post from September called Jan Moir: I’m thinking she’s a piece of sh*t – has been toned down in Google’s results.

So does Google edit out swear words for popular searches? Or has it done a manual hack on this one post to spare Jan’s blushes? The evidence is leaning towards the latter …

Tags: google, jan moir, seo

Want to get your Twitter page doing better in Google for a search on your name? Here’s a way to get a link off the BBC to your Twitter URL.

Tags: bbc, links, nofollow, seo

Is Google using signals from Twitteras part of its ranking decisions. You could see why it want to – seeing which pages people are passing around on Twitter would help it work out which pages are relevant for ‘newsy’ search terms (those where there is a big surge in searches for particular keywords).
The evidence

Testing such a thing would be a nightmare – how could you set up 2 different, but similar, pages and get loads of people to tweet one and not the other? I managed to set up this test by accident – here are the results.

Tags: google, seo, twitter statistics

I thought it was interesting to compare two graphs as they seem to go in opposite directions:

SEOmoz’s new one on the relationship between word count and the likelihood of people linking to you
Nielsen’s graph from last year showing that the more you write, the less as a % of the total visitors will [...]

Tags: links, seo, usability

As part of the fuss over Jan Moir, the Daily Mail ended up changing the headline and the URL of its story and 301 redirecting the old URL to the new one. I wondered what would happen to the Sidewikis written on the original URL. The answer: the Sidewikis remain with a message saying they were originally about a previous URL.

Tags: google, jan moir, redirect, seo, Sidewiki

I’ve pointed out that any concerned parents searching Google for information on the cervical cancer jab (in the tragic wake of a schoolgirl’s death) see a mass of negative and inaccurate information about the vaccine linking the girl’s death to the vaccine.

It turns out she died of an unrelated tumour. However, the results are likely to give parents second thoughts about allowing their daughters to be caccinated, even though the injection will save hundreds of lives a year.
YOU can help do something about this.

Tags: Best of 2009, cervical cancer jab, seo

I just tweeted that I was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. (Sidewiki is Google’s new way to let you see what other users have said about a page while you look at it).

It looks like I’m too late as the Mail already has been sidewikied as this picture shows.

Tags: Express, Guardian, seo, Sidewiki

Google is (sometimes) showing multiple threads for forum sites when they appear in the results.

Tags: google, seo

Following on from the SEO of A to Z, here’s which sites rank first for the numbers one to 20.

Tags: seo

I’ve been trying to get people I work with to stop filling out meta keywords fields for ages, with varying degrees of success.

Google has come out and said this: “Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking? In a word, no.”

Tags: bing, google, seo

Rather than bookmarking Google Analytics, for some reason I type a random letter in the Google toolbar, and navigate to my Google account. Anyway, as a result I thought it would be interesting to list the top sites that Google returns for single-letter searches. At the bottom are links to other people who have done something similar in the past outside the UK.

Tags: google, seo

Patrick Swayze has died. So has Keith Floyd.

So no surprise that UK newspapers are rushing to publish as many news stories as they can on the subject to try to appear multiple times in the news and web search results, even if some of the pages are very similar.

Tags: Guardian, Mail, seo, Telegraph

The Mirror has removed some of the links to MoneyExtra that I recently warned looked like paid-for links added for SEO reasons (which would put them in breach of Google’s guidelines).

Of the 11 pages I pointed out: 5 contained links to the MoneyExtra credit card page – 4 have had the MoneyExtra links removed …

Tags: google, Mirror, newspaper paid links, nofollow, paid links, seo

Interesting post by Martin Belam on advertisers telling people to search for the phrase “Where can I find the UKs cheapest cars” (link is to his blog).

Tags: google, seo

However, the Mirror wants to beware how its links look. Let’s take a look at a few pages – stories which share these characteristics:

* All contain exactly three links to a MoneyExtra page.
* All three links use different anchor text.
* The text happens to be competitive search terms.
* And MoneyExtra isn’t mentioned in the article itself.

Tags: Best of 2009, google, Mirror, newspaper paid links, paid links, seo

There are several ways you can use Google to find out what terms people are searching for, and how popular those search terms are.

I’ve used them to check search terms related to The X Factor (ITV’s talent show) – and I reckon Google Insights is better than the Google Adwords Keywords tool.

Tags: autosuggest, google, reviews, seo, x factor