Guest post by Chris from HitReach – Dundee SEO

For some time it has been thought that page speed was a major factor in site SEO, well since Google announced so anyway.

Because of this many webmasters have paired the poor performance of their sites with page speed, which given the power Google have over search. Many webmasters and those working in SEO put all (or a large portion) of their faith in Google, in much the same way web searchers (myself included) do for good Organic listings.

Page speed is ultimately a metric which contributes to users bouncing from the site which in turn reduces your websites visibility within the Organic search results. So being the webmaster of a slow site does mean you will ultimately be discounted in some way, by how much depends on the user really.

If you haven’t heard Google has just released its new search innovation Google Instant, we explore what this means for SEO. A few have even said SEO is dead – is it really? I don’t think so, but let’s examine what’s going on with the search results now that Google Instant is now in play…

More head terms – less long tail

Source http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruscoe/597968628/

Google has historically had a huge amount of long tail searches now that Google Instant has come along I predict that the long tail’s days are over why? Read on.

Searching before users would commonly add extra words to their queries to focus their searches specifically to their location or more specifically to their intent – before trying the head term first. That un-tried head term may have serviced the users request and now with Google Instant and its coupled Google Suggestions they will get serviced first.

Google isn’t great at localising search results yet and queries (especially in the UK) such as “Accountant in XYX” are still and will remain commonplace – but I wouldn’t expect that to last too much longer, I’m sure personalisation is now top of Google’s agenda.

What does this mean? Users will find the intent of their search query often before they have even completed their query and likely before they have included that additional keyword needed for a term your site has targeted. SEO’s will need to focus on broader search terms more so now. Localised searches are good for now – but I wouldn’t place my bets (or my money) on them lasting too much longer.

More medium term searches

To use an example Google used at their launch event; “Cavalier King Charles Spaniel”. A typical searcher would (I assume) usually just search for the single term and more than likely click one of the results there, Google offers up some suggestions and as it is now so easy to preview the results we will likely see more activity for this sort of search result.

What does this mean? Expect more traffic for prefix searches any search where a common prefix is used will now probably be used far more frequently by users.

Less results above the fold

Now that the search suggestions drop down is taking considerable amounts of screen space pushing the search results down in the process, and with Google saturating the results with paid listings some queries are only showing 3 (well 2.5!) organic results on 1280×800 (imagine what 800×600 is like?). 3 organic search results and wait for it – 12 paid listings, 4 of which are above the organic listings!

What does this mean? SEO is now even more important – top 3 is where it’s always counted and now even more so!

Tons of space for organic listings!

More opportunity in prefixes for long tail

Prefixed search modifiers are now potentially more important than ever and should be the core of your long tail search optimisation campaigns. Let’s say for example’s sake that “compare credit cards” and “credit cards comparison” have identical search volumes a user searching for “credit cards comparison” will now see results matching his query for the term “credit cards” as they are typing, whereas with “compare credit cards” the modifier is entered before anything else so the resulting listings will show the long tail results.

What does this mean? “<Modifier> Head term” searches are now more likely to be fulfilled than “head term <modifier>”.

Compare Credit Cards - Long Tail Search

Credit Cards typed - no need to add comparison, there is a "compare" listing already - long tail lost!

To Summarise

First of all SEO is not dead, Google Instant has made some changes and we as consultants just have to work with the changes to overcome them – change is prevalent in digital marketing, thats what makes it so much fun

As SEO’s we should:

• Quit using typos
• Optimise for the prefix for the long tail and not an affix
• Rank in the top 3 results (easier said than done tho – right?)
• Embrace Google Suggestions within your keyword research
• Optimise for any suggestions suggested as affixes for your targets

I would imagine in a few months time Google Adwords’ keyword tools will have updated and will show volumes taking the instant search into account – and then it’ll be business as usual and we can all stop fretting, well at least until they change something else.

Google has been at the forefront of the search market since its inception in 1998 reinventing the way search engines work then and now they’ve done it again with Google Instant.

Google Instant takes their previous suggestion engine and adds searching-as-you-type based on the recommended searches, you get shown results from as little as just a single character.

Google Estimates:

• Previously it took approximately 15 seconds per search
• With instant search users save 2-5 seconds per search
• This will save users 3.5 million seconds per day – 11 hours per second

As I’m lazy, here are some pictures instead of a video:

Notice how I’ve searched for “Search e” and the search engine has assumed I’m after “Search Engine” and shows me the results for that search term instantly.

You can use your cursors to select different searches from the list of suggestions – these are then instantly displayed below – no need to hit enter.

Can Google Instant be turned off?

Use the drop down next to instant search suggestions to turn off instant search.

Is it available on smart phones yet?

Not yet Google claims it won’t be long and I think this will be where instant will really shine – typing on your phone can be tedious and this will speed up the process by multiples.

Checkout this video of mobile search (Mashable):

Google’s Introducing Video

More information here on Google (http://www.google.com/instant/)

Other coverage

• OnlineSales.co.uk
• Search Engine Land
• SEO Book

Google Webmaster Tools gets a bit of slack because you are “giving Google too much information” I say take off your tinfoil hats, there is method behind the madness and GWT can be an invaluable tool for crawling diagnostics – as this post proves.

A few weeks ago a publication of ours underwent an overhaul, everything you can think of changed including content, design and backend. We heavily tested all relevant redirects, optimised the site for its new angle and pushed it live. Our traffic dropped from search engines considerably, which we did expect, but not to this extent – our website was removed from the search results in its entirety!

As a result, our search traffic tanked

A little concerned, I started digging around a little and noticed the cache dates on any indexed page were pre-dating the date we pushed the website live – now I’m really concerned, have we been penalised? Ack!

I logged into Google Webmaster Tools and checking our crawl stats I saw Google had stopped indexing our website completely – to me this was further evidence Google had penalised us.

Frustrated and baffled, I had checked the obvious things, I didn’t have a robots.txt disallow or meta robots noindex or anything like that. I did notice our robots.txt file was blank, but I often upload a blank robots.txt file to stop any 404 error’s in our server logs, so I didn’t think this would have been a problem.

Going back to Webmaster Tools, further frustrated I checked the crawl errors and then I found a ton of errors under the unreachable header, at this point it was clear that something was wrong on our end and it was related to our robots.txt file.

Going back to the robots.txt file, it appears the file was blank but it wasn’t because I had uploaded a blank file – it was my CMS taking grip of the URL request and throwing a 500 server error!

Google treats a 500 internal server error as if the destination is unreachable (makes perfect sense), if Google cannot access your robots.txt page and the http error code is something other than 404 (ie 500) then Google will assume that the website is under a “Disallow: /” for the duration that the robots.txt file returns that error.

From Google

URL unreachable /robots.txt unreachable

Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn’t crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn’t crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.

This is one of the more peculiar errors we have experienced affecting crawl rates and without Google Webmaster Tools this error would have taken far longer to resolve and I’d probably be here next month with the same problem. This type of error is of high priority in my opinion, and a warning should be shown and perhaps an email sent by Google Webmaster Tools if this error is discovered upon a crawl.

Google has confirmed a tweak in its ranking algorithm’s; for some search queries instead of displaying up to two rankings from a domain they can now display several more (we’ve seen up to seven so far!).

From the Google Blog

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

This could potentially make a reputation manager’s job much easier, especially if their website gets chosen for extra ranked pages. On the flip side though, users searching for a company name may now not get shown bad press which should affect the users decision to make purchase.

A good example of a company that has bad press associated with their SERPs is Redsave (example), they deceptively get customers into a £20 per month charge to their credit card for a little cheaper initial purchase, now customers searching for their company name see bad press from several websites and are likely to be put off – a good user experience. Now if Google were to adopt more results from the Redsave domain this bad press could be pushed off the front page of the SERPs and that in my opinion is a bad user experience.

On the other end of the spectrum is the affiliate filled bingo SERPs, as an example a search for “Sun Bingo” shows 8 affiliate website “reviews” (hah, sure) and 2 listings for the official Sun Bingo website. In my opinion, it would be better if Google displayed 8 listings in this case instead of the 2.

The problem I see here is, how algorithmically can they realistically automate this without some form of human intervention? A/B split testing and somehow monitoring user satisfaction I guess is how they’ll do it, but even with a huge result set, that isn’t an exact science!

Bing announced today that they are now using Wolfram Alpha for many more generic queries, they have previously implemented it for nutritional information in the past and have flicked the switch for the rest of the information as of today (Seems like its US only at the moment).

Examples:

• gdp of France
• what is the capital of France
• boiling point of water
• current population in India to that of China
• what is the literacy in India as compared to China?

Blekko the search engine start-up by Greg Lindahl and Rich Skrenta just entered beta and we got our hands on an invite! We’ve had a couple of days to play with it and we are definitely impressed so far!

Blekko obviously isn’t going to be able to compete with the likes of Google right off the bat, however they’ve got a couple little tricks up their sleeves both to interest casual users (slash tags) and webmasters (some fancy SEO features). They seem to focused on a simple to customise and highly open search experience, and although it might sound a bit strange it works surprisingly well.

Standard Search Functionality

You can’t really call a search engine a search engine if it doesn’t offer any kind of search functionality and Blekko for the first private beta isn’t doing too badly at all!

Slash Tags – User Customisable Search

Custom slash tag

Blekko’s primary feature – Slash tags allow users to filter their search results based on a user-defined or Blekko defined list of websites. This is much like a Google Co-Op search engine, except much simpler to create and built directly into the search engines core. After creating a slash tag you can run a search against them by typing the slash tag followed by your search query, the format is: “/<your-username>/<your-tag-name> <search>”.

Fully Open Search Engine

Blekko /rank slash tag allows you to find out what is driving the ranking for a URL.

Blekko couldn’t be called a search engine if it didn’t offer a search experience, which it does and not too badly either. What is more interesting for SEO’s though; Blekko is very open even down to the point of going into great detail why a website is ranking how it is in the results. By adding the slash tag “/rank” to the end of your search query Blekko will reveal all! A picture says a thousand words they say, and in this case it really does…

The full details upon a /rank query

As you can see there is a lot of details they let you in on, much of it can be deduced by yourself but there is the odd check mark that is a little vague and I would expect to see some clarification in their help sections in the weeks before they go live.

SEO Features

Blekko offers a ton of different information about websites and offers up some interesting tables and graphs to help visualise and analyse a websites on-page and off-page SEO.

Again pictures can say this better than words:

The different countries linking to a URL

Anchor text ratio's are available which shows the number of times a particular anchor is used in a websites backlinks.

Shows the pages external links ordered by Blekko's ranking algorithm - shows your best backlinks.

The "Sections" tab, it seems to break the website into "SEO Sections" the red example shows as "excluded" and the blue one as "included" - no real information about this yet.

Compare one website with up to 3 others comparing all sorts of different linking and ranking metrics.

As well as the above Blekko also offers:

• As above backlinks but for a whole domain (think Yahoo! linkdomain: operator but ordered by the best backlinks first)
• Website Source – This appears to simply be highlighted source code when they last crawled the website
• Duplicated Content – Shows you other websites that are copying your content, or if you are that way inclined websites content that you are copying

Problems Currently

• Multiple Listings in the SERPs for one base domain – For example wikipedia has 3 listings for the search “SEO”, not what you’d expect to find for an extremely competitive search term – this is due to excessive domain authority.
• International Listings in SERPs – Currently Blekko does not filter out non-english results from its listings, there is of course more than one language in use today but it is easy enough to detect browser language and filter based on that or even have a separate (sub)domain for other countries as Google does.
• Small index size – While its not tiny, its far from large and Blekko will need to start indexing far more content if they expect to compete with some of the bigger engines – or even with some of the current SEO tools available online, all require a large index to be of use.
• No API, yet – Its early days but an open API will set this search engine apart from its competitors and give webmasters a compelling reason to use and keep using the service.

I am truly impressed with Blekko so far, it has piles of potential but just isn’t quite there – yet. Blekko give us an API and a fresher, bigger index and you’ve got a winner on your hands.