Helping Zillow and Trulia

Are You Helping Zillow and Trulia Outrank You

Are you helping Zillow and Trulia outrank you in Google SERP? Maybe you are, then again, maybe you’re not. An interesting article by realgeeks.com suggests these well-known real estate industry sites benefit from the links contained in the data widgets they provide for realtors in the USA.

Maybe you even thought you’d try to take advantage of their name recognition, and add one, two, or a few of their widgets to your site. Little did you know that by doing so, you are giving Zillow and Trulia more firepower to outrank your site.
It’s a brilliant scheme, really. Both Zillow and Trulia provide a full range of widgets for agents to use on their independent real estate sites.  Read more

On first glance the article makes sense, but is it the whole story?

GNAX Hosting – Early Results

GNAX Hosting – So Far So Good

Last week I moved my domain graphicline.co.za to GNAX VPS hosting. I’ve watched Google page load times get shockingly poor the past four months. Nothing I’ve done on-site to improve performance has made any difference. I’d already tried several caching systems and offloaded some files to a CDN and other fast servers – with no improvement.

Eventually, after trying everything else, the only conclusion I could draw was the long path bottleneck between Google’s Mountain View servers and the data centre servers hosting my domain was the main culprit in the time it took for Big G to load pages.

Average page loads for 2 of the sites (WordPress) on the domain had gone from under 2.5 seconds in May to over 4 seconds in August and over 5 by September, while the main site (Drupal) was approaching 4 seconds from under 2 in May. Minimum page load speed had got to nearly 4 seconds for one site by September.

No Loss to Penguin

Google Penguin Had Zero Impact on My Sites

April 24, 2012 and Google hits out against over-optimised sites with its Penguin algorithm. Penguin penalised websites with over optimised anchor text in incoming links – backlinks in other words.

The Penguin algorithm slipped past my attention until I read a tweet from Matt Cutts. I’m nearly obsessive about watching traffic stats for the sites in my portfolio; they get checked daily for activity of all types – traffic, attacks, broken links and so on, and I hadn’t seen any unusual traffic dips on April 24 or shortly after. If anything traffic  has increased to these websites since that time.

Cache Pre-load Impact on Performance

Cache Pre-load Improves Google Page Load

Using a cache pre-load system can improve Google crawl page load speed substantially as clearly shown in the infographic below. Google considers page load in it’s SERP algorithm as an indicator of site quality: Where two similar ranked sites exist, the site with faster load speed will usually get better SERP than a slower site. With this in mind surely it’s a good idea to make the effort to improve page load speed as much as possible.

Page load speed can be improved in a number of ways;  moving the site to a better hosting service, optimising the site technically, including getting rid of unnecessary plugins, keeping image size as small as possible, and using an effective caching system are some of the things we can do.

No matter how well all the other technical aspects are improved, caching the site, and especially pre-loading the cache, will make a big difference to page load speed.

Latest Links to Your Site

Google Webmaster Tools Latest Links to Site

Latest Links to your site; something new from Google Webmaster Tools. It’s been a while since Google added anything new to their webmaster tools collection, but this new information tool is a “goody”. Latest Links to your site is a downloadable file, in CSV or Google Docs format, providing the site owner with a list of discovered backlinks, sorted by date and date-stamped.

Find Trackback Spam

The first practical use that comes to mind for Webmaster Tools Latest Links is to check for trackback spam. Trackback spam is a black-hat SEO technique to get you to publish trackbacks. The spammer sends a trackback to a post on your blog, hoping it will be published automatically, or approved if comments approval is required. But the black-hat doesn’t actually publish a link to the post – it’s a scam. And being friendly WordPress.com bloggers many of us see a trackback and think, “how nice, someone has given me a backlink, let me reciprocate”.

WPOnlineStore PHP Fatal Error ‘function.require’

Googlebot Error with WPOnlineStore Plugin

Googlebot triggers a PHP Fatal Error ‘function.require‘ error causing the bot to receive a “500″ internal server error when trying to crawl the pages created by the WordPress WPOnlineStore plugin. In my previous post I mentioned this ongoing problem. Today I can provide some additional information.

The problem is not unique to my shop site; initial searches of the internet found only a few references to this problem. for the past two days the hosting company server engineers have been looking into the problem, unfortunately without any success. After disabling Apache mod_secure settings, which appeared to be causing the error, Googlebot still triggered this error.  As previously mentioned in Googlebot has Problems with WPOnlineStore, it is only Googlebot – and there lies the first clue.

Google Ranks WPOnlineStore Websites Badly

Googlebot has Problems with WPOnlineStore

There’s a few problems Googlebot (Google’s search engine spider) has with sites using the WPOnlineStore osCommerce plugin for WordPress. These problems result in WPOnlineStore website catalogue listings ranking badly in Google SERP, or not being indexed at all.

One of these only affects a few sites, the another is common to all standard self hosted WordPress sites using the WPOnlineStore plugin for e-commerce websites. Both these problems are extremely serious, but neither is a fault or bug in the plugin. The third problem Google has with WPOnlineStore e-commerce sites is the store XML sitemap – there isn’t one!

Adwords Budget

What Results to Expect from $1000 Google Adwords

A client asked me the other day “which is better – a direct adword spend of $1000 per month with Google, or share in a collaborative campaign for a similar monthly fee, where total spend is 100 times that”. I had to ask for time to carefully consider this request and my response.

Both Options have Merit

My instinct tells me that for many businesses a direct campaign with a budget of that amount will normally be better. But a total budget of $100k /month sounds very inviting. My first response must be; investigate how the collaborative campaign funds are used relative to your business.

If the advertiser (the client) has a good idea of the key terms he wants to use for the Adword campaign, and only needs results from a small possible selection – let’s say 10 terms – 10 ads, then the money may be better used in a private campaign.

However, if he wants to cover as many options as possible, then the group scheme may be better.

Key Words and Keywords

Confusing the Key Words

Why is there confusion about key words and what they are? I refer to content key words or terms. Perhaps the cause is the similarity perceived between the key word term for SERP and meta keywords. Possibly we (webmasters and other industry specialists) are to blame – perhaps we should have used a more accurate phrase to describe key words in content. KEY PHRASE or KEY SEARCH TERM is a more accurate identity for the idea of key words.

Key Search Term

Key Search Term perfectly describes the idea behind key words, “a group of words that a searcher will use to find information”.

The idea of using key words is producing an article ‘optimised’ for the best possible results in search engine results for an intended key term. In which case the article must be about the key phrase used, or the key term must be about the SUBJECT of the article. How Should Key Words be Used in Content extends this discussion in more detail.

Google Rich Snippets Not Working

Google SERP Not Showing Rich Snippets

After adding Rich Snippets Google does not show these in SERP. There are several reasons Google does not show rich snippet content in their search results. Rich snippets include Authorship Markup and Article Ratings e.g. GD Star Ratings for WordPress.

Google does not guarantee your rich snippets will be used in search results. The rich snippet program is intended to give searchers an indication they will find relevant, quality and original content on the page marked up with rich snippet content.

Rich Snippets Take Time to Include in Results Pages

Google takes some time before rich snippet content is displayed in SERP; up to around three months. Be patient. Make sure everything else is in order, and wait for results. While waiting concentrate on making sure the content of the site is suitable and fresh, and regular new articles are published.