Strange SERPs results

As I wrote a few days ago, SoftwareLode has been disappearing from Google search results. I did have 3500 pages in the main index in mid-January but over the following weeks most of my pages were dumped from the index and my visitor levels crashed. Whereas I was making a good $5 a day on Adsense I ended up being lucky to make $1.

The strange thing was though that for keywords on the homepage I still did well. For "Free DVD Software" I was still on page 1 and for "Free Software Downloads" I was around #40. In the last week though, I started disappearing for "Free Software Downloads" too. For the last 3 days I didn't appear anywhere for this keyword in the first 1000 results.

Today though the trend is reversing and all of a sudden I have 100 more pages in the main index than yesterday. The other good news is that I'm doing better than ever for "Free Software Downloads" - I'm at #27 on google.co.uk and #19 on google.ca. This compares with SoftTester at positions #49 and #68 respectively on .co.uk and .ca. Why SoftwareLode is higher than SoftTester I'm not sure.

Cycle of incorrect pages

I've been doing some work on softtester and noticed my page errors table was 80mb, I was shocked.

So I picked one record, one from an actual user, not a robot. However both are the same in this discussion.

The record shows a page which doesn't exist, correctly.

However, google and other sites don't get a 404 error, they are presented with a search script which provides them with alternative results.

In this case, its presented with 1 search result of the page they were looking for, however this record was deleted some time ago and a re-submitted program / accepted program is been shown. However this new program although with the same name has the new page name format program-name-program-id.

Lets just recap...

Page requested :-  abc-program.shtml

Search page shows :- abc-program-999.shtml

However it could just as easily be

free-dvd-ripper.shtml

with search page shows :-my-company-free-dvd-supreme-ripper.shtml

So I'm in a loop with google / robots.
I don't want to show a nasty 404 error page, but I need to break the cycle, so that google is updated and looses the old url.

Or do I? , it is traffic.
Maybe I'm being penalised by google?

Anyway, if I wanted to break this cycle I guess I could just add NOINDEX,FOLLOW.

Thoughts?

by JM

Welcome Illusion

I'd just like to welcome Illusion (aka Dan) to the blog, me and Blue have known him for a while. Hes a student and studying programming at university, hes done work for us both on RentACoder.

OK, I'm going to set the ball rolling and discuss his software site, which we will call 321 so were keeping some anonymity.

I'm going to start with the basics.

Have you emailed those software submission service providers, some provide web submission and others provide software?

Whats your linking building strategry?

by JM

SEO Tweaks for this Blog

In the last few weeks this blog has lost its PageRank. PageRank as an end in itself has little value but it is a measure of how much Google likes a webpage. A page without an assigned rank is very unlikely to appear in the SERPs. Dipsy made a post a little while back saying that it was hard to find older posts that covered topics we were currently discussing.

I wonder whether both these things - loss of PR and difficulty in finding things - can be improved by one simple tweak. The thing we haven't bothered to do on this blog is do any real linking between posts themselves. We've simply relied on tags and categories.

One of the main SEO tips for placing links between pages is to give a link good anchor text and to place the link within a paragraph of text on the same topic as the target of the link. Looking at Google Analytics, it seems that its mainly the newer posts that get the traffic. If we try to do this in the future then we might pull some of the older posts out of purgatory and get some more traffic.

I believe there is a similar posts plugin for Wordpress that can do some of this work for us automatically. Has anyone come across this plug-in?

It might be a bit tiresome with nearly 200 posts on the blog but I'll try and spend some time interlinking the older posts I've made - where appropriate - over the next few weeks.

by ML

Using allintitle: to measure the competition for a keyword

If you are looking for a rough and ready way of measuring the competitiveness of a set of keywords, there's a number of methods you can user. You can use Google's Adwords keyword  tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to give relative indications of how much competition there is for a particular search term. I always find the measure provided by the Adwords tool a little confusing though since you never know what the values displayed actually mean. If the competition bar is set at 75% blue what does this mean compared to a bar at 25%? Is it a linear scale for example meaning that 3 times as many sites are optimising for the 75% term compared to the 25% term?

Another way of gauging how much competition a keyword has is by using the Google allintitle: operator. The allintitle operator shows how many web pages have ALL the words in the keyword/ phrase in their title. Since a webpage's title is possibly the biggest SEO factor, this gives a rough measure of how many pages are competing for the term. Checking out some terms which I'd expect to be very commonly used on Google - allinttitle:web design - and - allinttitle:seo - I get the results:

titles containing web design: 10,300,000 results
titles containing seo: 13,600,000 results

Contrast these results with a term that we wouldn't expect to be very commonly used - harpenden decorators

titles containing harpenden decorators: 6 results

Or something middling common - software promotion

titles containing software promotion: 79,800

When looking for keywords for a new website, balancing the keywords to aim at against their competitiveness is tricky. The temptation is to aim for those that have the highest search volumes. However, this may be setting the target too high. Using tools like Google's Adwords Keyword research tool and the allintitle: operator, you can try and find a balance between keywords that have a reasonable search volume and those that are not too competitive.

by ML

Homepage Title Tag: Possible improvements

I've been looking at the title tags on the homepages of both SoftTester and SoftwareLode to see if there's any improvements that can be made to try and get more visitors.

On SoftwareLode, I'm going to shuffle the order of items in the title as the Free Software Downloads phrase isn't attracting any visitors for me. The middle phrase in the title - Free DVD Software - gets me a few visitors though as does the Free Photo Software phrase. The phrase I'm going to try out is "Antivirus Software". This phrase has 550,000 searches a month according to Google's own keyword volume tool. This is much more than either of the other two phrases (DVD/ Photo). I'm also adding an antivirus-software.php page to SoftwareLode to see if that gets visitors.

On SoftTester, two of the phrases in the title might not be doing much to attract traffic - "shareware programs" and "freeware programs". It might be an idea to change these to something else and see if any more visitors arrive. Softtester already has handy links for certain phrases in one of the columns on the homepage. It might be an idea to include these phrases in the homepage title. Here are the search volumes for some of the phrases on the homepage now:

anti virus software: 60, 500

dvd ripper: 90.500

However, these two phrases have higher search volumes:

antivirus software: 550,000

dvd software: 246,000

Note that changing "anti virus" to "antivirus" makes a big difference according to the Google keyword tool.

How about changing the homepage title to:

Free Software Downloads | Antivirus Software | DVD Software

and seeing if any more people hit the homepage?

by ML

PageRank N/A: Why do no inner pages have a rank?

Ever since this blog was assigned a Google pagerank, I've been looking to see if any of the older posts have a rank. As far as I can tell, none of the post pages do. On my software blog, the homepage doesn't have an assigned rank but a smattering of the older posts have a pagerank of 1. I don't  understand this at all - maybe it's just be down to the mysterious way Google operates.

My blog used to have a PageRank of 3. I think this was mainly because I gave it a link from my main site. The link was in place for two or three weeks and I think this was enough to give the PR 3 value. When I removed the link, the PR dropped but for some reason some of the older posts still have a rank.

Any ideas why none of the posts on this blog have a rank? Or are there some that do and I've just missed them?

by ML

New Directory Submission Tool Release

Over at SliQTools, I've made a new release of my free directory submission software, SliQ Submitter.

Functionally, it's not a major release but a lot of effort, over many days, has gone in to checking and tidying up the supported list of web directories. In version 1.0.X, SliQ supported over 2100 web directories. However, in the 3 or 4 months since it was last release a lot of the directories had switched to requiring payment for a listing. A fair number had gone to the wall too or their domains had expired.

In version 1.1, there are now 1250 free web directories supported. This is still a pretty big list and if a good percentage of the directories accept your site, you should get a good kick in SERPs performance and visitors.

by ML

Picking good keywords for your home page

I'm currently trying to get to a certain level of completion with my shop site(s) before I start to do some serious link building (although I haven't figured that bit out yet).

I've optimized my sub pages with carefully chosen keywords that I think should produce visitors which will buy that item. Although the keywords haven't been my first choice keywords, they have a good projected traffic level, look to be achievable from the results shown on google and the competition level looks good too.

Now I need to choose the keywords for my home page, I have spent time looking for keywords and time thinking what to do for the best, over several days. I haven't been able to find achievable, relevant keywords. Unlike my sub pages I feel the home page needs to use keywords which are really quite relevant and that users will use.

After much thought I've come to the conclusion that I have to use keywords that people will use, even if these keywords look unachievable.

I'm hoping PR will seep through from my sub pages and raise the PR of my main page.

I looked, with surprise, the other day and found that I hadn't used mike submitter tool on my jewellery site (the site I'm talking about in this post). However, as the url of my site is http://www.mcls4u.com/shop I'm worried that as this is a sub page I might not be able to use mike program and maybe a couple of months ago, this is the reason why I didn't use mikes prog in the first place. For those of you that don't know, must directory sites don't accept sub pages.

I just wanted to get that off my chest as I've had this issue bouncing round my head for several days and I keep changing my mind. My main worry was that I'd be using keywords which would never get visitors, like the keywords I've used on my older sites in the past.

But as I say I don't think I have any choice. This decision does worry me though. :(

by
JM

I've just shelved my To Do list...

For the last couple of weeks I've been lacking motivation, I've had so many things going on in my life and I've been getting quite stressed.

Theres things which have needed doing for ages.

Well they will all have to wait a bit longer.

I've decided that since I spent an afternoon a couple of weeks ago doing keyword research with the adwords tool, that I need to do this for all my websites / products.

I've had my To Do (21 page) document open several times over the past couple of weeks, I've had some notes on this blog pinned open in Fire Fox, but none of them mean anything unless people can find me / my products.

I really feel this time that this method of finding good keywords will work.
The only difficulty is deciding whether people will buy if they use a certain keyword.

At this point since that first afternoon I've got 5 sale pitch content pages finished and I've commissioned 11 more today. I know this will take a week maybe 2, so I can do some other research for other products now.

by
JM

A marketing tip

This doesn't have as much SEO value as for marketing, but it does have a little SEO value.

I was told to pretend you are your customers and post of forums saying how good your products were, providing links etc.

I guess from an SEO point of view you'd have to be picking about the PR value of the sites you choose.

Also from a marketing point of view you would have to post on a popular forum.

It does seem a lot of work when you consider the benefits.

by
JM

PR Update Again

Google has exported the latest PR values to the toolbar today. Both Access Database Security and SliQTools are winners with PR increases from 0 to 2 and from 3 to 4 respectively but again this blog didn't get assigned a PR.

Have you noticed changes on any other sites?

by ML

Free article sites

At least a year ago, I read about free article sites and added some article pages to my kids mask factory site. Aaron just emailed me, he'd done a personal search and found one of my articles.

I guess there is some value is having these pages, but I'm not sure whether such pages lead to sales. But are these pages valuable for an SEO / Google point of view?

Maybe I should add some free articles to my other sites?

I guess I know the answer to this question, these articles haven't led to a massive raise in sales, although I can't really tell.

by
JM

Adwords Tool, competition indication, whats good ?

We've been using the adwords keyword tool to try and find good keywords. My initial thoughts where that I should avoid ANYTHING with any competition but have at least a thousand search volume.

However, Aaron found a video on how to use the tool and this changed our / my understanding of it.

Heres the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDB6T_L-mqs.

In the video it says you should have around 100,000 search volume and the guy ignored the competition indicator.

Mike, whats your understanding / thoughts?

I'm not thinking I should have waited with my directory submission until I'd found good keywords to use in the links, however I can now change them I guess, so it doesn't look like I've got lots of the same.

by
JM
EDIT: I've also learned from the video, that you REALLY need to know your keywords and near keywords, I mean, I did realise this to a certain extent, but this guy knows numbers too. I think I'm going to have to keep records, I just don't know what. Although, I guess keyword / phrase and search volume, would be start.

Well done to BlueSkiMoney

Well done to BlueSkiMoney aka Aaron, We've been chatting about SEO and using the adwords tool and watching some howto videos from youtube and last night hes, produced what I think is a well SEO page.

http://www.burnyourvinyls.com/audio-adaptors/2-5-to-3-5-adaptor-headphones-adaptor-mobile-phone-adapter/prod_11.php

Having said this there is always room improvement, he could do with more content and some internal links and of course some incoming links to that page or more probable his home page.

Anyways I think this first good attempt.

by
JM

Going along with the traffic

I may be imagining things, but I've noticed something funny with the traffic to my main site in the last few weeks. For most of the last 6 months, visitors to my main site followed the same pattern - up on specific days of the week, down on certain others, up at certain times of day and so on. This pattern was as reliable as clockwork.

In the last 5 to 6 weeks however, the pattern has changed. Days which had lots of visitors no longer do - at least as a porportion of overall traffic, whereas other days now have proportionally more. I also notice that Softtester's traffic goes up and down inline with my main site's traffic - a bit like US and UK shares!

The only thing I can put this down to is that I've done a whole load more PAD file submissions in the past couple of months and I'm tapping into the same type of traffic visiting Softtester. Also Softtester is an old site in comparison with mine. In non-UK countries I've only begun to do well really since the end of July so perhaps now my visitor profile is beginning to match Softtester's more global audience.

by ML

Shop Sites, should they be like normal sites too?

At the moment my shop sites are my top priority, well my kids maths site is and anything I can transfer into the jewellery site I do that too.

I've been using the adwords keyword tool to try and add some further keywords into my product pages.

Then I started thinking, it difficult to add content to shop sites without ruining your product pages. So what about genuine content pages?

I suppose the difficultly is what content do people who are searching to buy your product want to see?

by JM

Sitemaps and big sites

I'm just thinking I really need sitemaps for softtester but theres 60,000 urls / dynamic pages.

Even if I have a-z pages, the sitemap files are going to be huge.

What should I do ?

by JM

WOW, WOW, Google webmaster tools and top searches ?

Mike, I'm guessing you haven't seen this, or haven't noticed it or well at least you don't use it.
As you do searches on google and look at your position.

Google webmaster tools, has a top searches feature which shows the keyword used and the postion you are for that page on google.

So if we use word tracker to check that term gets lots a of hits...

Then surely this is all we need to do to find googd keywords, well that and some common sense to make sure people will use the keyword in the right way. And obviously we have to be getting some of those hots in the first place to see the term in google tools.

Seems like the holy grail to me ?

by JM

SEo'ing for German

Well I've been looking for a German keyword suggestion tool.

I translated keyword suggestion tool which translates as Keyword Vorschlags Tool.

I searched for this on google.de and found this.

http://www.ranking-check.de/keyword-datenbank.php

I did a quick search on Informationsverwaltung (which means
Information management) and found it had 259..

Geschätzte mtl. Abfragen bei Google
Which means..
Estimated monthly. Queries on Google.

So I guess this is a good keyword to have, but I'm not sure if people would use it to buy my software.
I'm currently position 19 on google.de.

Maybe I just need to figure out what keywords sell in english and translate to german...
Hmmm

Thoughts?

by JM