Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Google | Posted on 14-05-2010
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over the past couple of weeks I had a problem with one of my blogs the DNS and everything went to pot. So I’ve rest it up on a new host and as it had links pointing to it Google nicely spidered the domain with the empty installation of WordPress on it. No big deal – add some old content (no back up so I hacked through the cache pages) and the ping will kick in and get it spidered. At least that was the thought.
Googles cocked it up – no biggie just now but kinda weird results coming out which gives a little insight into something I know about and have seen before but not on one of my sites. So I’m having a look for the site name (“discover whisky”) and sub pages are higher than the homepage appear. A touch strange but not overly expected – but it had the new homepage last night when I pinged some stuff out. Que cera – more DC madness but for May 2010 not unusual.
But above my site in the SERPs is a listing for a different website! no reference to my site at all.
Discover Whisky Cache
Other Site Cache
The images are a wee bit small but you can see it’s the same page of content – and having a look Google has indexed loads of ‘em. But you will see the same domain is listed within the wee grey box at the top (you may need a telescope but the full siuze images are clearer if you click on the thumbs).
The kinda cool/dodgy/mistake in all of this is the way that Google appears to be indexing duplicate pages – I mean 100% duplicate pages. In that it’s giving every page of this sort the same URL reference string. Ever wondered what that funny string of random characters was on a cache result: strings like “q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:www.discoverwhisky.co.uk” in this segment of the URL for the cache page? It’s a page reference (of some sort). And my whisky blog homepage has the same bloody reference as the other site: “q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:kellyguimont.com”. So for example the URL http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4m23wQS3MZAJ:www.google.co.uk/ gives you the same cache page despite the domain being different.
It doesn’t matter what you change the domain to in this string it’s always the same page that will be returned within the cache page.
And so the reason for the issue becomes clearer – when trying to ascertain whats going on my domain has the links and this other one has the content ownership. The same issue you get when an affiliate steals your content whacks it on their site and get’s you kicked out of Google – or it could be a dodgy SEO company doing it to you by ways of a ‘negative seo’ campaign (something which one day I may go into at some length on this site).
On a number of cache requests since may day update I’ve seen the URL reference part of the string being wrong and no cache page being returned. So this may just be an extension of this issue.
Anyway I thought some folks may find this duplicate content indexintg issue kind of interesting or just a bit freaky. Any additional thoughts let me know in the comments.
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Google | Posted on 25-03-2010
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It’s very rare that I’m on Google.com but today I had to go and help someone with some queries and whilst they were typing I saw a strange result. As they were typing in the brand they were researching up popped a link within the Google suggestion box (this is not something I’ve been able to replicate on Google.co.uk yet).
EEk - when did they start adding links to the suggestions drop down menu on Google.com
This aint the actual search they were doing but one of a range of intercepts in the drop down I found.
Triggering the link in Google suggest
It would appear from what I’ve seen so far that it’s really only brand searches which trigger the addition of the top ranked natural search result within the suggest drop down. Brand searches I’ve located so far include:
Anyone seen any others?
Cheers to Paul from the PPC team @ Equator Glasgow for reducing my ignorance in this matte
I love being able to wander about in an analytics account and being able to empirically prove the value that a search engine optimisation campaign has delivered. Showing the value of online investment in pounds and pence is one of the true revolutions that analytics and Internet marketing really brings to a business. To do this we all rely on our analytics being useful – and if the data going into your analytics is not correct the information you get from it can be seriously devalued. Increasingly I’m finding that analytics platforms, Google Analytics in particular, are reporting Google Product Search as natural search – not nice if you want to determine the worth of SEO or product search. With just a simple change to your product search information you can prevent this – and start analysing the true value of your online marketing channels.
There was me minding my own business and wandered into the breeze media website – last time I spoke to them sure they were in Perth or something – anyway after a wander through their source code (as I am a nosey sod) I found references to the page tracking software provided by Pagealizer.
Any one else used this? I’ve meesed about with stuff like Crazy Egg and Click Density in the past but they’ve not done the stuff with scroll lengths as far as I’m aware.
Anyone know of anything similar or better – even better would be a script I could install on my own servers and mess about with at my lesiure.
Related Blogs
- Related Blogs on pagetracking
In recent weeks I’m sure you’ll have seen Chameleon Search in the SERPs and generally you’ll have found it useful. That said recently I’ve found a strange little thing going on with the keyword ‘tenders‘.
The Result set asks me if I meant to search for “EastEnders”!!!
This seems completely off the wall and strange but I guess thats what you get when Google try and run some automation on language analysis. You get mistakes. Maybe its a stange UK thing (like “search engine optimisation” and “search engine optimization“) and we’ll have to get used to it.
My main thought is that there seems to be no feedback loop on this. How do you say that as an average human being you feel that “tenders” is in no way related to “eastenders”?
Cheers to Andy for the heads up and good luck with optimising the word tenders – only an extra three places to go for that site you’re working on.
Related Blogs
It may seem a little strange to say that Search Engine Optimisation is not all about positions but its true. Real business focussed SEO is about making money and all too often too many people get lost in a war for a position and lose sight of using natural optimisation to generate cash.
How many of you optimise your homepage for the most competitive natural search terms – come on get your hand up I can see you getting a little bit uncomfortable. Everyones done it at some stage fixed the homepage content, developed links, fixed the technical aspects on your server, tidied up your HTML and you rank and the sales don’t appear. You’ve got the traffic but not the sales.
It’s likely this is because you’ve optimised the wrong page!
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Blogging, Wordpress | Posted on 27-03-2009
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Just saw in flock that I could connect to my blog here via flock and though I;d give it a quick test run.
Related Blogs
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Affiliate Marketing | Posted on 25-03-2009
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Every so often even I have to admit to the genius, and down right evilness, of some affiliate marketing technniques. And this one has really got me in awe of the guys who do it – they should get a gold medal for the concept and a smack in the head for implementing it. Using some Yahoo! technology you too can hijack the brand listings of a merchant and make sure that every time someone searches for their brand and clicks the natural result it counts as an affiliate click and as a result an affiliate sale.
