Google has published today a great interactive web page that shows how Google search works.

It’s quite a basic level but it nicely conveys the work that goes behind the scenes to crawl the web and deliver search results to the end use.

There are some interesting links to click on too.  I particularly liked the one that shows you which web pages have recently been removed for spam reasons.

Check out how search works.

I posted an in-depth article on the Artemis SEO Sussex website recently and just realised I didn’t share it on here.

The article is about how you can recover from a certain type of duplicate content issue, one where duplication is only detected at the point at which the query, which will serve your page up in results, is made.

You can read it here:

Query Level Duplicate Content – The Solution

This is quite an important “discovery” as many people think that their website or page has been penalised in some sort of way, when in actual fact the solution is pretty simple and immediate.

Have a read of the article if you feel that your pages aren’t appearing in search results because they may just be a little to similar to others.

It was interesting to read the other day that The Guardian newspaper has decided to kill off it’s Facebook newspaper app, deciding instead to use Facebook to drive traffic to that content on its own website.  I think we’re going to be seeing this happening a lot more over the coming months.

It’s something I’ve been preaching about for a long time.  It pains me when I see companies who post a substantial amount of content on social media sites instead of publishing it on their own sites.

This is particularly true of websites that use plugins such as the Facebook comments plugin which enables people to comment on articles or blogs using Facebook.  When comments are post like this, the comments belong to Facebook and not to the website where the comments are made.  Why give valuable content away to a third party?

Temporary Social Boost

These tools are great for getting some instant gratification in the form of traffic from the likes of Facebook and Twitter but after the moment has passed the content no longer appears in people’s news feeds and is more or less lost forever.

The benefit of the share is generally only temporary.

Wouldn’t it be a much better idea to ensure that that content remains on your own website for search engines to discover and potentially continue to drive traffic to your website for weeks, months and even years later?  Of course it would.

Social media websites should be used to simply share your content, not to publish your valuable content on them; YouTube being the exception as it’s very expensive to host videos.  But this is particularly true of Facebook who are making it increasingly difficult for businesses to get a free presence in users’ news feeds.

So don’t give away your content.  It’s the most valuable thing you have as a website owner and it can work for you for many months down the road.

I hear it all the time:  ”SEO is dead, it’s all about social media now”.  What a load of rubbish.

Feast your eyes on the chart above.  The data is a few months old but it paints a very clear picture of the amount of traffic referred to websites from different sources.

The data was complied by Shareaholic in this study.  The data comes from analysing over 200,000 websites and 270 million unique visitors in a month.  That’s a pretty large data source to work with!

See that big blue bit, the one that stands out above all of the others?  That is FREE traffic from organic listings on Google alone.  It actually equates to a staggering 48% of ALL web traffic.

It’s more than ALL of the referral traffic from all of the social media websites combined.

What’s really interesting is that this ties in with what I’ve been saying for years.  Facebook (at 6%) is the best site for referral traffic and that Twitter is languishing at less than 1%, one of the worst performing and now even beaten by the much newer social website, Pinterest.

So, do you waste you time LOLing about on the social media sites or get serious and put your energies into SEO?

The proof is in the data…

When something keeps happening over and over again it ceases being a coincidence and starts becoming a fact.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on several projects in relatively competitive niches. I’ve been doing some aggressive link building campaigns to get those sites ranking on the first page of Google. Part of the strategy involved in doing this is researching competitor backlinks.

For each niche I’ve meticulously studied the backlinks for all of the sites on the first two pages, so I know the order of results for every given keyphrase. The page 1 results, in particular, have pretty much remained static in the all of the time I’ve been targeting being a part of it. We’re talking months.

Then something odd keeps happening…

Every time I get the sites ranking on page 1, the entire order of results appears to change. It’s not sites just being pushed down by my sites, but the whole order of results changes.

Sites that have been ranking say at number 3 for months all of a sudden get demoted to positions much further down the page, such as 7 or 8 or even on to page 2.

This phenomenon keeps happening…every time we hit the front page for competitive keyphrases.

Caching in action

I can only deduce that the reason for this is that Google doesn’t recalculate the order of results every time you search for a given query. If it’s already served those results before, which is highly likely, then why recalculate them again? Simply display the results previously returned.

I really do believe that Google caches search results pages, which makes sense anyway, as it speeds up the process, and that the only time they change is when a website appears to merit entering the exclusive page 1 club.

Have you seen this happening yourself? It would be interesting to know that it’s not just me going mad and that this happening over 10 times this year isn’t just a coincidence.

When I tell people that two months ago I deleted my Facebook account I’m greeted with looks of horror and total surprise. You’d think I’d just announced that I’d murdered someone with a toothpick.

But yes, my long standing Facebook account with over 600 “friends” is no more and I feel so much better for it.

As an online marketer I suppose I’m supposed to spend my time raving about Facebook and the wonder that it is and why everyone should be using it as a marketing tool.

But that’s just not how I see it or feel about it.

Too Much Noise

For me in the end Facebook just because more online “noise” to deal with every day, noise I could do without. I already have enough noise running my business and dealing with my emails and personal life.

I started using Facebook in the early days and it was quite a bit of fun back then. Those of us who used to use it very frequently enjoyed the simple experience. We shared good stuff, talked rubbish and wasted a few hours a week achieving nothing

Many of these friends no longer use the site either and if they do it’s only very infrequently.

I found I was wasting too much time with Facebook, faffing about with their privacy settings, going through a load of posts that meant nothing to me, removing myself from groups I kept getting added to automatically; it all just become a real time waster.

It’s a bit like watching TV….most of the time it’s pointless.

For me Facebook really screwed up when they introduced the new timeline feature. I always hated it and it just soured the whole experience and I’m far from being the only person that feels like this.

Don’t Mention The Share Price

In fact, if you’re not aware, the online gaming company Zynga who make games that can be played through Facebook, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, have also suffered with the new timeline feature (apart from for other reasons). They are losing paying users at a very fast rate and believe it or not, one seventh of Facebook’s revenues comes from Zynga!

As Zynga’s share price has plummeted to the lows of around $2 from a heady $20 when it floated last December, so has Facebook’s, now hovering under the $20 mark having started at $38.

These trends mean something.

Although Facebook has reached the one billion user mark and it is an almighty machine, I can’t see them continuing in their current state. They are desperate to increase revenues and we’re already seeing what’s going on in the sense that they have done an agreement with a UK gambling website to feature on the site, they will push more ads to mobile devices, they will share more data with advertisers, etc.

Even the days of having a page on Google as a business and getting loads of traffic from it, well that’s much more difficult now. Now they want you to pay to promote your page posts, otherwise they won’t be featured so heavily.

What was once a simple and effective resource has now become a major business with shareholders whose focus is not so much about the user experience but on how to make more money from all of those users.

Personally, I just don’t want to be a part of it.

There are other options

Not being on Facebook does not make me some sort of outcast. I still look relatively normal and have a life outside of the virtual world, but I have definitely shifted my focus as to where I want to spend my time online.

In the early days of Twitter I have to say I just didn’t get it. What on Earth was the point? What strangers really care what I’m doing?

It took a bit of time but eventually it started to click into place. As Twitter has grown so has its usefulness, unlike Facebook which I think has gone backwards. I have really warmed to Twitter. I pick up really useful local news that people post, interesting blog posts related to stuff I care about and it’s quick and simple to scan.

I can also see the search facility on Twitter becoming increasingly important on a day to day basis. When news is breaking or something is happening, Twitter is the place where you’ll get immediate information and comments from people in those places.

It’s the first place I went to when Michael Jackson died, Google had nothing about it for a while, I went there the other day when WhatsApp appeared to have stopped working. Twitter search is real time and although people will spam it, it’s an incredibly useful tool.

I’m also just getting into Google+ now. I know it’s early days but Google will preserver with it and it will become an increasingly popular social and marketing tool, especially as it will one day definitely start to influence search results. We are already seeing this to an extent with the authorship markup facility where you can add your image to search results.

And Foursquare, never got it at first but great useful website/ app too.

Friends will be friends

As it is I don’t need Facebook to keep in touch with my friends. I don’t actually have 600 friends. My friends contact me on WhatsApp, by phone or email. That’s enough for me and when we meet up we share stories and have a good laugh. I don’t need Facebook to keep in touch with them.

I’ve built up businesses from scratch without the help of Facebook and will continue to do so.

Facebook is not the only way to be social online, there are many opportunities and businesses need to focus on the ones that work best for them, not just use them because everyone else is.

I know many people who really do value the site, for example, to keep in touch with family abroad, but for now I’m going to continue being a non member and observe what goes on from the outside.

I’m quite happy with that.

Although Bing beat them to it some time ago, today Google announced their new Disavow Links Tool.  It’s a way to help you tell Google if you feel some of the links pointing to your website could be hurting it in the search results.

If you’ve either been done some very questionable linking to your website or your SEO company has, then you may find that your website has been somehow penalised for this in search results.

Alternatively, it could be that one of your competitors has pointed a load of spam links to your site, either way, it’s not too difficult to bring a website crashing and burning down.

In a way this new tool is Google’s admission that other websites can harm your rankings, even if it’s no fault of your own.

Tread Carefully

Unless you have serious problems with your website’s rankings and received an unnatural link warning in Webmaster Tools, or you’ve been hit by that unfriendly Penguin update, then you don’t need to use this at all.

It’s sometimes difficult to know which links to you site are actually causing it problems, so unless you really know what you’re doing, don’t use it.

It takes weeks for Google to ignore the links you tell them about and even longer if you are trying to reverse it.

Here’s Matt Cutts saying what you need to know about all of this:

I appear to be having quite a lot of fights on webmaster forums these days.  I keep getting increasingly frustrated with people who have been hanging around on these forums for years and whenever someone new comes along and asks a simple question, they just get pounced on.

I was on the Google Webmaster Help Forum again today with the intention of helping out some people but I had to leave before I virtually killed someone.  Why when someone asks a legitimate question do the so called “experts” think it’s ok to be rude and belittle their question?

On another forum I lost it last week with someone.

A new member joined asking for advice as to why his website had been kicked out of Google’s search results.  A long-time know-it-all poster had nothing useful to say apart from “it’s probably because your website is in a niche with many other websites and you’re not offering anything new”.

Isn’t that the dumbest answer ever?  Has he never heard of competition?  Can we not have more than one website about a particular subject?  What an idiot.

Suffice to say I gave him a peace of my mind and they didn’t post again for a while!

There’s just no need to snotty, obnoxious behaviour on help forums.   It just drives people away.

OK, rant over.

Most people who aren’t studying Google search results day in and day won’t have realised that Google is showing just seven results instead of ten on the first page for certain search queries.

I’ve been reading on various sites that many SEOs and webmasters think that this is a big deal, when in actual fact it’s not.  On pages with 10 results, positions 8, 9 and 1o hardly yield any clicks.

The brand effect

Google loves brands and loves to fill it’s search results with them for the basic reason that brands tend to spend a lot of money and put in great effort to ensure their websites are great.  Google wants to return great results to its users so it fits that they should choose to prefer brands.

But how do you know if Google thinks you’re a brand?

Well, this is where the seven results page comes in.  If you search for the name of any brand you will tend to see that the main website for the brand will display sitelinks and often other universal search extras, such as videos, places, shopping results, etc.

But more consistent is that when searching for a brand, Google will return just seven results-

So search for your company name, if you see the site links and just  seven results on the first page, it’s a good sign that Google thinks your business website name is a brand.

Considering what I said earlier, this is a really positive sign so keep growing your brand online, you’ve already done the hard work in getting recognised as one.

Minor weather report: Update of goo.gl/OpIDL launching today. ~0.7% of English queries noticeably affected.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 9, 2012

I’ve not got any sites that have been affected by this update as quite a while back I realised that have too many ads ATF (above-the-fold) is not great for users, even if it is great in terms of generating money I therefore moved all mine down.

However, whereas I can understand most of Google’s updates, although not always like them, this one has me baffled as they are acting like hypocrites.  Here are the results I see for a search for “marbella property”:

So, Google is saying they don’t like it when too many ads appearing above the fold?  Should they stop for a minute and take a look at their own website for a minute?

In my example above, three large ads appear above the results, loads on the right and only two and a bit actual results appear on my screen.

And the worse thing is that like the EMD, Penguin and Panda updates, if you’ve been hit by this one no matter what you do the site won’t rank properly again until the Top Heavy algorithm runs again.  This algorithm first ran in January and then in September.  It’s a bit cruel, surely, to punish a website for that long??

Hypocrites?  You bet.