Coast Digital Blog

Back in March 2009, Matt Cutts explained an algorithm change (which he nicknamed ‘Vince’) that would improve rankings for larger brands and authority websites. If you missed it, here's the footage from YouTube.

The algorithm change initially seemed to affect US results only, but in the last few days we have noticed this change is being extended to the UK

The development will mainly affect the big keywords such as “credit cards”, “loans”, “holidays” and so on. Bigger brands will easily achieve good search rank for terms associated with their business, and this will be less dependent on the number and quality of their inbound links. Google claims the algorithm takes 'trust' into account when showing results for the more general keywords, thereby giving bigger brands a higher search position than before.

But why does Google assume the big brands are worth trusting? Surely they are no more trustworthy than small and medium sized companies that provide a quality service? Until the recent recession, most individuals put their trust in certain financial organisations, only to be let down by their unscrupulous dealings. Do these companies deserve higher search rankings as a result?

Let's look at what the recent algorithm change means for average Joe. If you have a lesser-known brand that ranks well for one of the ‘big terms’, largely because you provide a lot of excellent content and have quality inbound links, you will now struggle harder to compete with the bigger brands who will rank higher on the basis of 'trust'. You may also find your rankings drop for the bigger search terms, with brand names leapfrogging over you as they land at the top of the results table.

So how do you combat this change? Most importantly, you need to establish your website as an authority on your subject or specialism and create more buzz around your company name. In doing so, more people will search specifically for your brand, increasing the number of online discussions, reviews and recommendations you receive. Google will then start to recognise you as an authority and 'trust' you as one of the big players.

Gone are the days when bulk link submissions and mass article distribution would throw you higher in the SERP’s. Now the only way to compete on some of the more generic terms is to gain Google’s trust by raising your awareness online and offline. We can help you to do this – so if you want to keep as visible as possible please contact us.

Have you ever seen ITV’s dramatisations of the Hornblower stories? Even if you’re not a sucker for tales of naval derring-do, these yarns are exceptionally well told and filmed. And if you do like your quarterdecks bloody, your victuals salty and your Frenchmen insolent, then these are certainly the tales for you.

That’s the view I arrived at the other evening, after watching the first of the series on ITV’s website. I was so impressed that I breezed into my local library and set about searching for copies of the original novels by C.S. Forester.

Now, before I get started, I’d better point out that I’m new to the area. I’m not used to the quirks and foibles of this particular library. And I only had 15 minutes to spare.

But if I came away with one thing – and it certainly wasn’t a book – it was a reminder of how far electronic search has come over the last decade.

Remember how search used to be?
Maybe it’s because I was pushed for time, or possibly because I’d spent five or six minutes reading the spines of dreadful large-print romance titles as I waited for the catalogue terminal to boot up, but I somehow lost focus. Some wiring in my brain went awry and I got E.M. Forster and C.S. Forester jumbled up into a single entity. I ran a search for titles by C.S. Forster who – if ever he existed – didn’t publish any books that were subsequently acquired by Essex Libraries.  

It struck me that, if I’d made the same mistake on Google, I’d still have found what I was looking for. Not only would fuzzy logic have turned up plenty of pages about C.S. Forester, but I’d also find material by people across the world who had made the same idiotic typing mistake as me. (And sure enough, tapping ‘cs forster’ into Google takes you straight to Barnes & Noble’s website. It’s nice to know I’m not alone).

Anyway, I backtracked and typed in ‘Hornblower’. I got plenty of results then, but every time I clicked on one I discovered the book in question was kept at Harlow. So I decided to look at the Dewey numbers for the series, so I could use them find the right shelves. They weren’t listed. In despair, I noted the books were shelved under ‘Adventure’, and hunted out the relevant section. No Hornblower.

I gave up. I’ll get them second hand from Abebooks.co.uk instead.

Making the readable findable
I don’t think anyone would deny that well-known, good quality content is easy to find via a search engine. And that’s lucky for us, because we tend to find a search engine we like and then stick to it (don’t believe me? Just type in “search engine loyalty” into Google, Yahoo, Bing or whichever rival you prefer).

Relying on a single search method isn’t new, of course. I remember sitting in a university lecture about 15 years ago, delivered by the brilliant Scottish poet Robert Crawford (I say brilliant because, before he’d ever set eyes on me, he wrote on one of my class tests that I had “the makings of a clear, sharp writer.” I don’t need much praise to get me through two decades, no matter how wrong he might actually have been).

Anyway, to cut to the chase, Dr Crawford asked how many of the 200 or so first-year students who were in the room had actually used the library’s page catalogue. Mine was one of about three hands that went up.

I’ll give you a bit of context. The University Library was, comparatively speaking, very well stocked. Between 1710 and 1836 it had been a copyright library, meaning its holdings of antiquarian books was enormous. However, the electronic catalogue only indexed books published after about 1972 (I forget the exact date). Anything earlier than that could be found only in the vast bound indexes, into which were pasted handwritten and typewritten entries – in very many cases, a joy to read themselves.

So what?
Amazingly, there is a point to all this. The people who relied on the electronic indexes could easily find books that were of excellent quality. But unless they used the paper catalogues, they would only ever unearth a small proportion of the material that was relevant to their search.

You get the same problem when you rely on only one search engine. You are at the mercy of the way that search facility operates, and what it deems worthy of giving prominence. It’s not usually a problem when it comes to the mainstream stuff – you’ll always find your Hornblower – but there’s bound to be a wealth of quality content that you’re simply never going to find.

And the big change is?
If you don’t find a book in a library catalogue, it doesn’t change the quality of that book. But, for the first time I can think of, an indexing system itself can have a detrimental effect on content.

Think about it. Imagine if C.S. Forester were a young writer today, and he was trying to publish tales of maritime daring on the web, he’d be sorely tempted to tamper with his text to get better search engine rankings.

Say, for example, he’d just penned this phrase (it’s spoken by Napoleon in ‘Hornblower During a Crisis’):

Death is nothing, but to live defeated and without glory is to die every day.

He’d probably get out his red marker and start adding in a few words that would appeal to his intended audience of naval and maritime history enthusiasts and memorabilia collectors. After a sprinking of targeted keywords it could end up looking like this:

“Death is nothing,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, surrounded by men in naval uniforms that would later count among some of the most collectable naval memorabilia available to enthusiasts of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. “But,” he continued as the sun glinted off the uniform buttons, naval medals and 18th-century cutlasses of his sailors, “to live defeated and without glory is to die every day.”

And there’s the rub. Lots more people would find the content, but far fewer of them would want to read it. Partly because the quality of the writing was shoddier, but also because it was starting to read like so many other things out there on the web. And if your content is dull and reads exactly like the competition’s, you’re not got to get the best results from your visitors - no matter how easily they find you.

So how do I make content readable as well as findable?
I’m all for compromise. Search engines need to find your stuff. That’s why I’ve put SEO in this title - I know it’ll pick up the right sort of visitors.

But in my next post, I’m going to take you through some of the SEO tricks that have shaped people’s content to the extent that they are now very, very boring. And I’ll be starting with:

10 REASONS WHY TOP 10 LISTS ARE A TURN-OFF

I write a news item for this site almost every morning, but only rarely does a story make me cheer out loud.

Today's certainly did. I was trying to get to grips with what Google PageRank sculpting was all about, and why so many people were up in arms about the search engine's revised treatment of the 'nofollow' attribute.

In a nutshell, lots of people use the 'nofollow' attribute on their internal and external website links. Some do it to keep irrelevant content out of search results. Others are more cunning, and use nofollow to stop pages bleeding 'link juice', thereby bumping up their position in the search engines.

Well, that's the gist. Or at least I thought it was. So, to find out more, I went straight to the source of the controversy: Matt Cutts' blog.

I'm sure you'll let me know if I've got my bickers in a twist (here is not the place for detail), but Matt's revelation that Google search robots had secretly spent the last year or more dealing differently with nofollow links was - in my opinion - brilliant news. More than one commentator got hot under the collar, gloomily predicting that SEO optimised sites would rarely - if ever - link to sites elsewhere on the web, hoping by these methods to hoard their link juice and shore up their PageRank.

Which, surely, is a classic example of mistaking procedure for quality, packaging over content. Especially when taken in conjunction with Matt Cutts' remark:

The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

And that's when I cheered. Unless I'm reading it wrong, what Matt Cutts is saying is that the web should be more about human beings, and less about technical manipulations and coding strategies. He's talking about search that increasingly wants to reward pages that people want to read, products that people want to buy, and sites that contain interesting and appealing links to similarly attractive places.

Slightly Utopian, perhaps, but surely the point of search is to match people with the sites they want to see - and never knew they wanted to see? And given the nofollow changes took place over a year ago, it would seem to me that the sites that currently have excellent rankings are also likely to have great content - and in some cases despite their nofollow strategy, not because of it.

And the sites with clever nofollow and poor content? Seems to me like yet one more way of telling Google you're just out for rankings. Maybe, at last, we're going to switch our gaze from search's engine to the person sitting in the driving seat.

If so, I'm all for it.

I was converted to broadband in 2003, when BT ran a promotion in the London Evening Standard. At the time it seemed most ISPs wanted to charge a hefty installation or equipment fee, and my finances didn't run to hefty. So I was thrilled to spot - and accept - the BT offer that gave me a free ADSL modem, two webcams (Mac incompatible - I gave them to my brother) and a reasonable monthly tariff.

I also liked the fact I could plug the modem into my existing socket, rather than pay another firm to bring new wiring into my Hackney flat via a communal entrance hall (I did just that with a gas pipe a few years later, but that's another story).

Convenience, then, was what kept me with BT. That and the fact the equipment just worked. The initial 512kbps modem gave way to the first Home Hub. Which was replaced by a sleeker, blacker device.

Where it went wrong
I won't deny that we had related teething problems - being assigned a non-working Hub phone number meant I spent a day or two speaking to BT employees on several continents - but the broadband was always exemplary.

Until I moved from Hackney to Colchester.

And exchanged 7mbps broadband for a theoretical maximum of 3.

I'd have been prepared to accept this as the price of a happier life - after all, Spotify still runs happily at lower speeds - if only the connection was reliable.

It wasn't. And it still isn't. It cuts out often, and the lights on the Hub flash orange and red, before cutting out altogether. I can never get more than about 1.3mbps. If anyone rings me up, it cuts my broadband off. In the evenings, it sometimes seems like I'm connected to a dial-up service.

Complaining on Twitter
Some people might say ringing up BT is the way to get things done, but after my earlier experiences I felt life was too short. Instead, I had a moan on Twitter.

BT in Colchester conspires to keep me on the Information Bridleway. Why can't I have a fast, reliable broadband connection?

Soon after, I got a tweet from @BTCare.

@benlocker Can I help?

I responded with my postcode and email address, and then got some great customer service. After being asked for details, I catalogued my troubles and got an email straight back.

Hi Ben,

I have had a good look at the line and although you are correct in that you do have a long line. I really worry about the fact you have problems in sync'ing the Hub, dropping out when calls come through and the like.

This usually indicates that the internal wiring in the property can be causing a lot of your issues. I ask you to check...

And then came lots of handy advice about iPlates (Google them) and a promise - later repeated - to monitor my connection.

Getting results?
Of course, a proactive stance on Twitter has to be backed up with results. And that's the nub for any business that wants to use Twitter for customer service and brand protection - it's a brilliant idea to give personal care using social media, but be sure you follow through with solutions.

I'd be interested to know of other firms that are good at it. I really do think it's a cheap, effective way of reaching a motivated cross-section of consumers and customers.

In the meantime, I'll be tweeting to let you know how my iPlate works. And if that doesn't appeal, you can always follow @coastdigital instead.

Twitter recently announced that it has changed its title tags for profiles, making a big impact on how high these pages are ranked in search engines.

The news can be either good or bad, depending on who you are! For those who want visibility, it will be a blessing. Others are going to have to adapt.

If you tweet for informational purposes then the changes couldn’t be better. But if you tweet about your mother-in-law’s annoying habits or why your colleagues could give David Brent a run for their money, then you’d better wise up to increased search engine exposure.

Let’s take a look at the changes, using the US President as an example. I used the Wayback Machine to view his profile, as it appeared in 2007. Take a look at the title tag in my browser.

2007 Format: Twitter / Username

In contrast, today’s format looks like this: Full name (username) on Twitter

Small change – big results!
So, what can you expect when you search for someone’s personal name?

If they have an online presence, you would usually see their profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and My Space amid Google’s first two results pages. With the recent changes, however, you’re likely to see a person’s Twitter page rank highest of all.

It makes me wonder what Twitter will do next, as I’m certain we will see a few more changes made to benefit search.

Interestingly Google has also undertaken a Pagerank update that has slashed the ranking of many Twitter pages. Twitter itself has risen from rank 8 to 9, but most profiles have dropped – from 8 to 6, from 7 to 4 and so on.

Staying on the same topic, Facebook announced yesterday that it is also changing its link structure. The site plans to use the usernames as the URL extension instead of the current, randomly assigned number.

For example:

Facebook has posted:

We're planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Is this recognition that Twitter is one step ahead of the game, having already propelled ‘Tweeters’ to higher search rankings than MySpace and Facebook profiles?

Either way, it’s safe to say that the changes are going to have a big impact, just as the Twitter changes did. And from my point of view, it’s great that these social sites are finally becoming more search friendly.

It looks like Google is going to update its Adwords trademark policies again.

As a few sources reported recently, Google is trialling the removal of trademarking in the US market, starting on 15th June 2009.
 
Advertisers in the UK market can already bid on each others' trade-names. For example, if Adidas want to bid on the term 'nike shoes', there's nothing to stop them. What they can't do, though, is use the trademark text in their actual Google advert. 

That's about to change. In the future, advertisers could be allowed to use any ad text in their PPC (pay per click) advertising. Google believes that this will make things much clearer for the consumer - advertisers can use trademarks in print adverts, so why shouldn't they do it online?
 
It's a pro-competitive move. Let's take a look at the Google Adwords blog:

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn't list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like "Buy discount cola" and "Snacks on sale." The ads wouldn't be useful since you wouldn't know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

The thinking behind the change isn't one of allowing major brands to bid on competitors' trademarks. Conversely, it seems to be about letting multi-brand stores to use several trademarks in one advert. Stores like JJB Sports will finally be allowed to inform the web user which brands they stock.
 
Again, the Adwords blog seems to confirm this:

...under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.

What does the update mean for you?
The chances are that the new policies will reach the UK by August 2009. This would follow a normal Google roll-out pattern.
 
We can also expect paid search to get more competitive again. It will get more expensive for brand owners to protect 'their patch' and they will once again see advertisers moving in to make sales from brand-related search queries. This will - in the short-term - inflate PPC bid prices. If you are a defensive brand owner - use your partners, resellers and PPC affiliate partners to defend your search positions.
 
The update will not affect brand-owners that are already working with resellers of their products. Brand-owners that took the opportunity to update their trademark policies during the last update in May 2008 - the ones that chose to work with their partners and resellers - won't need to make too many changes. Just keep an eye out for new advertisers beyond your immediate circle of friends.
 
Defending your brand - there are still options
There will still be a trademark infringement process that can be called upon. Google, is still “willing to perform a limited investigation of reasonable complaints about use of trademarks in ads.” According to the policy, advertisers may violate the new rule if they don’t actually sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services corresponding to the trademarked term.

Whatever happens next, it's as well to be prepared. It's not as though UK brand owners won't have seen this one coming.