If you are following the latest SEO industry news, you have probably heard about the Google "May Day" update. Google's Matt Cutts confirmed that this Search algorithm change mainly affects long tail searches (watch the video here). Long tail searches can be obscure and/or rare queries where the set of fitting search results is relatively small. Most commonly however they describe those searches where at least 3-4 words (and often more) are used.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 ...Read More
A while back Google Analytics announced a new feature which allows users to add annotations to their traffic data for easier tracking of changes in website traffic. This feature allows users to make better sense of the data by incorporating a log of all internal and external changes which could influence the traffic to the website. This feature is especially handy when you manage several websites and want to keep track of updates across the different domains.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 ...Read More
This is something which I'm really excited about and I believe is a real killer feature for Google Search. Unfortunately with the frantic hype around Apple's announcement of the iPad, this news has not yet got the attention it really deserves. Back in October 2009 Google announced Social Search as an experiment on Google Labs. Users could then opt-in and test the feature which enabled them to find more relevant results from their broader social circle. The result is relevant information recommended by your contacts which is bound to be better than from strangers, and which results in a more personalized search experience. Yesterday Google rolled this feature out of experimental and into beta which means it's now available for everyone.The principles of the Social Search feature are very simple. As a user I can create a Google Profile and link it with my various public accounts on for instance Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. Google then uses this information, plus other clues such as my Gmail contacts or blogs in my Google Reader, to generate a social graph of my direct connections, friends of friends and so on. Next time I perform a search, the search algorithms look through the public content published in my social graph to see if there is something relevant available.Here is an example of how it can look like: when I for instance search for [301 redirect], I get two very relevant results from my social circle blended with other results. One is an excellent blogpost from my ...Read More
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, ...Read More
My name is Hessam Lavi and I live in Berlin, Germany. I'm an ex-Googler and have worked with Search and SEO for almost 5 years now. Apart from the obvious (optimization, conversion, web analytics etc) I'm also passionate about music and photography. 
