You can see these doorways for yourself by doing a Site:search in Google: site:hugoboss.com/glossar/ (To only see English doorway pages go here: site:hugoboss.com/glossar/en/). Note that you need to switch off JavaScript in your browser in order to prevent the redirection. Here’s the difference between what the visitor and Googlebot sees when visiting the same URL:

This is a classic case of sneaky JavaScript redirection which Google and other search engines clearly forbid. In a futile attempt to hide these doorways the webmaster has hidden links pointing to them in the page footers with a noscript tag. Here is a screenshot of the code containing these hidden links.

It makes me sad to see this kind of cheating, especially by well-known brands who have enough time and budget to be better than the rest. Not only are these fast-track techniques useless, they are also a major waste of time and energy. Rather than trying to scam their way up, they should’ve just looked for ways to beef up their existing pages to make them more search engine friendly. Now they will have to start from scratch.

Just a note on what not to submit:

• Social bookmarking websites or link directories
• Smaller (low quality) websites which mainly focus on one subject
• Other low quality and spammy sites which are not content farms, e.g. spam blogs, link farms, etc.

Thank you in advance and am looking forward to your submissions!

Photo credit: Sunflowers by Daniel Knecht

Instead of continuing the never-ending loop of hunting down the offenders, wouldn’t the right thing be to fight it in its roots?

Here are in my opinion a number of negative side effects of the existence of Google toolbar PageRank:

• It’s utterly useless as a KPI, but unfortunately many decisions are based on its existence. There are no correlation what so ever between the perceived PageRank value and other meaningful KPIs such as website traffic, search engine rankings, conversion rate, bounce rate, depth of visits, etc etc. It’s just a number, and a very useless one for that matter.
• Many webmasters put an undeserved amount of time and energy on trying to increase their PageRank. This is valuable time which should’ve instead been spent on analyzing and improving vital areas such as accessibility (e.g. usability, findability, load time), identity (e.g. design, information clarity), content (e.g. call to action), and of course conversions!
• Many reputable websites and site-owners are seduced by link vendors to link to unrelated websites in exchange for money or backlinks to their own site and a promise of higher PR. These actions are not only ineffective, but often times threatens the success of an online business. Here’s a question everyone should ask themselves: If you would choose, would you rather increase your PR by X points, or receive X% less search engine traffic because Google penalized your site for buying/selling links!?
• The algorithms behind evaluating and ranking webpages use a large set of signals and factors – to simplify this massive computation into a figure of 1-10 is a degradation of Google’s technology, brand, and reputation. These misunderstanding lead to more confusing questions such as: My page has PRx, why is Google then ranking me below all these other sites which all have lower PR than mine!?

My proposed solution: just remove the Toolbar PageRank display! It’s obvious to me that the consensus among Googlers is that they don’t find it useful either. As a matter of fact Google removed the PageRank metric from the Google Webmaster Tools back in late 2009 for this particular reason. Susan Moskwa, a Webmaster Trends Analyst and a former colleague of mine at Google then said:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :)

Google’s search quality wouldn’t jump up over night if toolbar PageRank was removed and link sellers would continue to fool naive businesses with their attempts. That said, with no PR to show for, it would become very hard for link traders to wave their PageRank card when asking for a price, and more webmasters would hopefully start looking at the relevancy of the links and choose not to acquire links just for the sake of it. This would thus make a noticeable dent on the link trading business which many times is to blame for worsened search quality.

So my question is why is the PageRank display still available in the toolbar!? Are there any meaningful use cases for keeping the Toolbar PageRank? Matt Cutts tweeted yesterday about an expected roll out of new Toolbar PageRank values, and I’m still wondering what’s the use?

 
Photo Credit: Google Toolbar PageRank Meter by dannysullivan, on Flickr

Here is an example from Google.de for the query “krankenkasse” (health insurance provider):

Another example from Google.se for the query “tandläkare malmö” (dentist malmö):

One obvious effect of this roll-out is that first-page organic search listings for this type of queries will be considerably reduced. This will hence impact location directory and review services such as Yelp and Qype, as well as many other smaller vertical directories very negatively in terms of search engine traffic.

This piece of news from August suddenly makes much more sense:

Google to create 200 jobs in Dublin - The Irish Times:
“The Dublin operations centre will primarily focus on our geographic-based products to ensure a great local experience for our users across Europe. We are constantly seeking to improve and further develop our location based products and Dublin will now be a centre of excellence for this activity,” Google’s director of geo operations in Europe David Martin said.

“Google Maps displays so much more than the geography of a place, and now incorporates rich data from thousands of sources in different languages from across the world and also includes local business listings. This operations centre will help to manage these data sources to give Google Maps users even more local information than before.”

I wonder who will be the first to announce the imminent death of SEO!? :) Has your site been impacted by this change? Looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comments.

Other blogs who’ve covered this:
New Place Search Shows Google’s Commitment To Local – Search Engine Land
Google introducing Place Search – klikki blog
Hotels – Local Results go Crazy – Dave Naylor
Google introducing Place Search – klikki blog
[Swedish] Google ritar om kartan igen – Nikke Index

It’s however not all bad as there are a few brands which have understood the fact that web is not TV and hence created websites which fit the medium nicely – we will look at them too.

A few points which apply to most of the bad websites; they are built fully or partially in Adobe Flash. This means there are a number of visitor types who cannot access the content published on these websites, i.e: 1) Visitors who don’t have, or have disabled, Flash in their browsers, some obvious examples are iPhone and iPad users, 2) search engine spiders, 3) users with slow internet connection (incl. mobile surfers), and 4) visually impaired visitors using screen readers to access the web.

Here is a simple example of Prada’s website and how Google’s algorithms see it:

I hope the image is clear enough. With Flash mainly being a graphic medium, search engines are generally blocked from reading, understanding, and indexing the published content (yes, I know there are some exceptions). In short, if you build your website with this platform, you are surely digging yourself a nice big hole to throw your money in.

The question you may ask now is how big is this user group and if it’s worthwhile adjusting to their needs?! The answer is Yes and I let the data speak for itself:

• There are 1 billion searches performed on Google alone EVERY DAY
• There have so far been over 60 million iPhones sold worldwide
• iPads are currently selling 4.5million per quarter
• With 33% of the market, Android smartphones are currently the most popular smartphones (iOS has 22% market shares)

‘Nuff said.

In the listed examples below, make sure to compare the “regular” website seen in your browsers against the text-only cache which shows how the page is seen by Google’s search algorithms. You’ll be surprised how different some sites look to users versus search engines.

So Much Money Wasted

Below is a list of well-known fashion brands who have failed to produce accessible websites; let’s call them the Sucky Crowd. There are obviously many more fashion brands out there but we don’t have the time to analyze them all.

Manolo Blahnik (Google cache)
When your website is not among the top3 Google search results for your own brand name you know you’ve messed up big time! The official website also fails to show up for searches for basic keywords like “manolo shoes“. The website is implemented fully in Flash and Google has only a few PDF files indexed. There’s also a page scroll from hell which I dare you to use…

Christian Louboutin (Google cache)
Once again, the website is fully in Flash and there are only a handful of pages indexed by Google. Lucky for them the site ranks quite well for short head keywords.

Prada (Google cache)
Built entirely in Flash, this websites contains a huge amount of rich content such as articles, images, and videos. Unfortunately none of this is visible to visitors who don’t have Flash (= Google).

Converse (Google cache)
Funny thing here is that they have developed quite OK looking pages for the iPhone (judged by the CSS filename). These pages are well indexed since they don’t use Flash, but a normal user will get redirected to the Flash version. Below is an example of these redirections (you must turn off JavaScript to stop the redirection):

http://www.converse.com/products/collections/chucktaylor/108929F
redirects to http://www.converse.com/#/products/collections/chucktaylor/108929F

Also, they have the nerve to blame the browser for their mishap – this is from their error message on the pages:

Just to let you know your browser won’t let you see everything here. But you can still buy all of our stuff. Nice

Wrong, nothing nice about this.

H&M (Google cache)
These guys have actually managed to offer a great non-Flash version, and what’s baffling is that it looks EXACTLY the same as the Flash website. So why on earth they continue to shove the Flash site down customers’ throats is anybody’s guess really. Read a more detailed site review on Econsultancy.

Hermes (Google cache)
The main site is a disaster – not only because of Flash – but because all internal links are implemented with JavaScript! The webshop is a whole other story with top level URLs looking like this:

http://uk.hermes.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?storeId=10201&catalogId=10051&langId=-11&categoryId=130042&leftCategoryId=130042&topCategoryId=130042&parentCategoryId=130042&nbItem=0

At least they aren’t using Flash in the shop…

CHANEL (Google cache)
One positive thing with this site is that there are unique URLs generated for each page in the Flash file. If only there was any content to read on those pages.

Dolce&Gabanna (Google cache)
When I first entered the front page I was surprised to see that it was NOT IN FLASH! That feeling lasted until I tried to navigate to another page on the site. Yes, you guessed it. At least the online store is not as bad.

Onitsuka Tiger (Google cache)
Terrible.

Tiger of Sweden (Google cache)
Everything in Flash except for the blog (WordPress) which is the best thing on this site. Also, the main page seems to have been hacked (cache from 27 Sep) and filled with spammy links. The live page seems to be clean however – hackings suck!

Some Exceptions To The Rule

Luckily there are those who’ve actually got it and managed to spend their money (surely much less than the ones above) to create websites which not only look good, but have also nailed the accessibility and search engine friendly aspects of webdesign.

French Connection (Google cache)
It’s difficult to say anything negative about this site. By building an accessible website and following the basic SEO guidelines French Connection manages to rank well for a wide range of keywords including specific phrases such as “french connection shirt” or “jeans women french connection“.

GAP (Google cache)
No Flash whatsoever here. All categories and product pages are presented through basic HTML. They could however tidy up their URLs.

Jimmy Choo (Google cache)
One of the most optimized websites in this category. Minimal use of Flash creates an accessible and attractive website.

ZARA (Google cache)
There is no Flash nor other accessibility issues, but what’s up with the huuuuge URLs?!

Burberry (Google cache)
Quite a good site where Flash is used for what it’s aimed for: animations and unimportant graphics. The rest is in plain HTML. There are many SEO improvements to be made here, but accessibility is not one of them.

Ralph Lauren (Google cache)
Some use of Flash, but the regular product pages look decent. URLs are however very messy.

Marc Jacobs (Google cache)
The navigation is kept away from the Flashy parts and the category pages are accessible. Also, the product pages are bang on.

Calvin Klein Jeans (Google cache)
Nice use of Flash – category and product pages remain fully accessible to search robots.

Among the list of accessible sites you can find several Swedish brands:

Nudie Jeans (Google cache)
Product pages look pretty neat, I wish I could say the same about the URL-formatting.

Acne Jeans (Google cache)
Once again, a nice website with no technical difficulties, and the product pages are quite optimal. The URL format is however awful. Also, for some reason they are using two domains, www.acnestudios.com and www.acnejeans.com which doesn’t really make any sense.

Flippa K (Google cache)
The site rocks because it’s built on WordPress! One negative aspect here is that the products load in a popup window which makes them unreachable to search engines.

WeSC (Google cache)
Designed and developed in Berlin, this site offers a very fast and search engine friendly experience.

Conclusions: Who needs Google!? We are the f$#&ing GUCCI!!

The bad websites in this list surely see traffic to their websites, but a) that’s not the point, and b) I can confidently approximate this being from users who search for branded keywords (e.g. ‘prada’ or ‘hermes’), and considerably less or no traffic from more specific searches containing more keywords like ‘onitsuka tiger sneaker mexico’, ‘manolo pumps’, or ‘sneaker converse leather’.

Is that a bad thing, you ask? Hell Yes! As a brand you should work hard to own your search results for all your relevant search phrases. That’s something which all of these and many other highly brand-focused companies utterly fail at.

By avoiding Flash sites you won’t only open up your content to search engines and non-Flash enabled browsers, but your site will load faster, show up in search engines for many more of your related keywords, as well as being more flexible to changes in the future (i.e. HTML won’t go old). It’s also generally easier to measure and analyze user activities on a HTML site and you’ll be able to better optimize your content to increase conversions.

Accessibility, Accessibility, Accessibility

When I say you should build accessible websites, it’s not meant as any of the regular SEO mumbo-jumbo you read on the blogosphere, but really one of the fundamental principles for publishing content on the web. I hear over and over again that Flash is not the problem blabla, and that you can in fact build search engine friendly websites despite using Flash. There is some truth in that, i.e. you can indeed build a Flash site with different degrees of search engine friendliness. But the fact remains that a Flash site can never compete with a HTML-only one, no matter how hard you try. One very simple way to show this is by looking at all the sites which rank above you for your keywords – how many of them use Flash!?

So what do you do if you’ve been screwed by some hot-shot agency who sold you an expensive Flash website?! Lucky for you there are a few things you can do to ease the pain:

• First, kick yourself for not consulting with an SEO consultant before writing that check.
• Create a non-FLASH HTML version of your site and let search engines index it.
• If your site is built entirely with Flash, consider using tools such as sIFR which can make some of the content available to search engines.

If your web agency tells you things like “hmm, but it won’t look as hip/ cutting edge / exclusive / emotional / blabla” then fire their asses because a) they don’t care about your business, and b) they don’t do their job well enough – the web is full of websites with gorgeous original design and I’ve seen people creating magic with CSS and jQuery.

In your future web projects, make sure to limit the use of Flash to non-essential elements such as video players, animations, and anything else on top of a text-only website. With the increasing popularity of HTML5 we can hope to see less and less websites implemented in Flash in the future. But then again, major agencies have been fully aware of these issues for a long time and still they spit out useless websites like the ones you have seen here. The only way to solve this is better customer knowledge about the basic aspects of search engine friendly websites which will certainly save money during development, and make more money in the long run from happy online users. But then again, the fashion industry has always been more focused on form rather than function.

Do you know any websites who use Flash successfully? Any other thoughts or comments on the subject? Looking forward to hearing from you in the comments.

Google Instant – Live updating search result page

This new interface updates as a user types in the search query. Not only will the regular search results update as a user types in letters in the search field, but elements from Universal Search (maps, news, shopping, etc) as well as AdWords ads will also update in real time. This results in a user seeing a much larger set of search results as the query is being typed in and refined. In addition, the query suggestions (Google Suggest) play a more central role in discovering possible queries and relevant websites.

Some advantages of Google Instant are:

• Searching is now much faster which results in people performing a higher number of searches and in their viewing more potential listings in their search for information.
• Since users are shown a much larger set of search results, there is a much higher chance of your pages being displayed in the SERPs.
• Users can now easier modify their query which results in more specific queries which will drive relevant traffic to your website.

Google preparing for Instant Search

Looking back at the past months you can follow the steps Google has taken towards this major release:

1. May – Google Caffeine: This was advertised as the new infrastructure which would allow Google to offer new and faster services in the future. It’s however assumed that Caffeine went live long before the official announcement in June.
2. May -May Day update: Google changed the way it handled long tail queries (queries where there is a smaller set of results available). This resulted in many large sites with high domain trust losing traffic to smaller sites with more specific content.
3. August – Handling navigational queries: With this change Google started to show more results from the same domain for navigational queries. For instance if you search for a brand name (e.g. ‘sony’), there is now a higher chance that several more pages from the official domain are listed in the top 10.

Impact of Google Instant Search on SEO

In general this new feature won’t change the basic rules of SEO since Google’s algorithms will continue evaluating webpages in the same way as before. Webmasters should hence continue focusing on their content, traffic, and conversions. What changes however is the way users will go about finding information, how they interact with search results as they learn to use more specific search queries, and how they review the results before making a choice.

• CTR  is the new ranking. The click-through rate for organic listings becomes more important than pure rankings since users will see many more search results in each session.
• Creating relevant content which better targets specific queries will drive more traffic as users learn to perform better searches.
• Experimenting with page titles and snippets and tracking the changes in CTR becomes even more important.
• Universal Search listings (images, video thumbnails, maps, shopping, etc) will attract more clicks since dense graphic elements will draw more attention in a fast updating interface.
• The traditional Golden Triangle theory regarding the users’ eye movements on search result pages is no longer true. Earlier you performed a search, sat back and studied the results and the ads before either clicking on a listing, or modifying your query. This will now be substantially different as the users’ eyes will wander up and down between the query field, listings, Universal Search entries, and AdWords ads. I’m looking forward to the first eye tracking study for the new search page.
• Searches with short queries will fall considerably since people usually come to Google with a very specific goal in mind. The now interactive search result page allows users to dig deeper into a subject until they’ve found a reasonable set of search results which better fits their intent.

For those proclaiming the death of SEO, I would actually argue the opposite.

This is definitely a game changer but it does not change the way serious SEOs have worked for a long period of time. That includes focusing on important KPIs other than rankings. Instant Search is however a massive headache for those who still treat SEO as a magic formula and have been focusing on optimizing for mere nuances in Google’s search algorithm. They will continue wasting their time focusing on the petty details in the algorithms instead of working on improving the overall value of the sites they are promoting.

All in all, no matter what some people wrongly proclaim, SEO is certainly not dead – it just got more interesting.

This post is cross posted in Swedish to Search Integration blog: Google Instant och dess påverkan på SEO

I’m very happy to be invited back to SMX Stockholm this year. It will be the second time I’m attending this conference. Two years ago I spoke at two sessions on Google Universal Search as well as Personalized Search. This time around I have been invited to speak at two sessions again, which I’m very excited about:

Search Engine Friendly Web Design
Why do developers create websites which are not understood by search engines? Here I’ll mainly talk about how onsite Search Engine Optimization is not very different than optimal web development. I’ll also talk about the often difficult relationship between web developers and SEO consultants, the reasons for the negative attitude towards SEO and how the two fields can better work together.

Conversion Science
Ok, you’ve got traffic – now what? I will be speaking about why it’s important to measure everything and how small changes can have a substantial impact on your business. I will also talk about common design and technical pitfalls.

SMX Stockholm takes place on 28-29 September in Clarion Hotel Sign (agenda here). Use the discount code SECRET010 and receive 15% off the ticket price (2-Day or 1-Day Pass SMX or Combi Pass for SMX & eMetrics).

I’m really looking forward to meeting old and new friends, including two of my former Google colleagues and friends, Jonas and Anu who are also coming to SMX.

In addition to the SMX conference, I will also be speaking at a breakfast seminar organized by Edelman PR and my business partner in Sweden Search Integration. Info in Swedish and sign up link can be found here.

After the May Day update many websites reported a significant loss of traffic, while others have seen improved traffic from search engines. After all, Google’s Search index resembles an ecosystem where one site’s loss is another one’s gain.

If you are using Google Analytics there is an easy way to check if and how this update has affected your performance in Google. In order to segment and analyze your long tail traffic you need to set up Advanced Segments using Regular Expressions. The nifty thing with Advanced Segments is that they allow you to analyze historical data, something which is not possible with filters, and to easily share them with others. Below I  have created 4 different segments which will hopefully help you get started with analyzing your long tail traffic. Simply click on any of the links to add them to your own Google Analytics profiles.

>> segment single-keyword queries

>> segment multi-keyword queries (>1)

>> segment two-keyword queries

>> segment three-keyword queries

For those of you interested, here is the basic regular expression used in the examples above. When applied with the Keyword dimension it filters in visits where exactly two keywords were used.

^(\S+)\s(\S+)$

With one of these Advanced Segments activated, you can for instance search for any patterns in your traffic from Google. You can find this report under [Traffic Sources > Search Engines > google].

I would love to hear your feedback, as well as any findings related to this Google update. Happy analyzing! :)

Photo credit: jean-fabien on Flickr

Annotations now seem to be rolled out to all users and here are 8 suggestions on how you can use it in your SEO projects.

In general you should make a habit of creating a note in Google Analytics for the following reasons:

- Technical adjustments including server updates and migrations, change of hosting provider, changes in the code (scripts, CSS, etc), database updates and modifications, etc.

- Structural modifications such as changes to your H-tags, URL structure, meta-robot tags, robots.txt, sitemaps submissions, etc.

- Editorial updates including copywriting, experiments with call to action, page titles, link anchor texts, etc.

- Campaign launches, both paid and organic, as well as offline campaigns. Changes in for instance AdWords budget should also be logged.

- PR work including articles written about you, your company or product, or related stories which could indirectly stimulate interest in your content.

- SEO related announcements including changes in search algorithms or introduction of new features, for instance launch of Google Caffeine, Personalized Search, and Real-Time Search.

- New inbound links to track any positive effect on your rankings and traffic.

- Seasonal trends, for instance start of the summer holiday season, related seasonal keyword trends such as ‘winter tires’ and ‘soccer world cup’, related behavioural trends resulting in higher search volumes in specific keyword clusters, e.g. health and fitness queries after the Christmas holiday season, etc

Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments section. Here is a video explaining how you can create an annotation in Google Analytics:

Update February 4: Following this post and my email conversations with the folks at Digg, they corrected their robots.txt file on January 29.

I was recently looking through some of the major tech news sites around the web and studying their usage of the robots.txt protocol. I came across Digg.com and found a potential error in their robots file which is costing them a lot of lost search engine traffic, as well as revenue from advertising. Since it looks like an honest mistake, I thought I write about it so that you won’t make the same mistake. For those of you not familiar with robots.txt, it is a way for webmasters to give instructions to search engine crawlers (also called robots and spiders) about what they are allowed to crawl, and which areas of the website should not be accessed. You can read more about the robots.txt protocol here.

To come back to Digg.com, I found a mistake among the instructions which causes a large part of the website (the Gadgets directory) to become inaccessible to search engines. If you take a look at their robots.txt file, you can find the following instruction:

Disallow: /gadget

If you are a SEO geek (like me) you have probably noticed the open ending to this line, and hence the wild card effect it causes in practice. What this line basically says is to block access to all content which have ‘digg.com/gadget’ as part of their URL. Note that this is not the same as exclusively blocking the “gadget” directory, but is far more inclusive. In practice, this instruction also covers Digg’s Gadgets directory, ‘digg.com/gadgets‘ (note the ending ‘s’), and hence the problem! The correct implementation includes a forward slash ending the line in order to avoid the wild card effect:

Disallow: /gadget/

Digg has a large amount of pages in its index, for instance a Google site search shows close to 290 thousands pages in the ‘digg.com/apple‘ directory alone.  We can therefore only speculate exactly how much search engine traffic Digg.com is shutting out by accidentally blocking the /gadgets/ directory (Yahoo Site Explorer shows 108 thousands pages in /gadgets/). This could be done intentionally, but it seems more likely to be an honest mistake (it’s one sinlge “/” missing after all). According to Compete.com, Digg has around 40mil monthly unique visitors, so I can only speculate around how much money such a small mistake has cost them in advertising revenues during this period.

Finally, the lessons we learn from this are to:

1) generate easy to read robots.txt files so it’s easier to spot such mistakes. There are online tools which help constructing and deciphering robots.txt files.

2) always use web analytics tools and segment your traffic so it’s clear to you what is going on across the various parts of your site.

3) be afraid of the wildcard effect, in fact just completely avoid anything with the word “wild” in it :)

What are other important things to think about when creating a robots.txt file?