SEOs don’t ‘get’ publishing

by James on June 29, 2009

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The vast majority of people who work in search and digital marketing are unfortunately woefully unaware of the challenges that face large publishing companies. Those that do like Brent D Payne are few and far between, but provide a very different viewpoint on how search works and benefits companies.

There are a number of issues that are specific to large publishing companies. Some of them need to change, and some of them bloggers can really learn from. I’m going to highlight some of these problems and look at what others can take away from big publishers.

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Track Keyword, Rank and Landing Page with Google Analytics

by james on May 5, 2009

Google recently changed the referring strings that they are using to send traffic through to sites once you click on a search result. One of the major benefits of this to analytics geeks and SEOs is that you can now see where you rank for a given keyword, and what page people go to when clicking on the search result.

A post on the Google Anayltics blog mentioned the gradual roll out of these new referring URLs for some search queries. It was pretty much immediately noticed by people like Patrick at Blogstorm that there is a number contained within the string, the example which was given being:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

You can see cd=7 within the string, and Patrick wondered if this could be the rank that a result appears it. In the comments on the post, Matt Cutts suggested very strongly that this was the case. For the search geeks amongst us, this was fantastic news, as it means that we can now track rank against keywords and the landing page people go to.
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April 18, 2009

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Using blog content theft to your advantage

February 23, 2009

At some point or another as a blogger you will almost certainly have to deal with scraper sites. For those that don’t know, these are sites that take your content and republish it as their own, often (in fact mostly) without properly attributing the source.
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Canonical URLs and duplicate content

February 13, 2009

Duplicate content is something that many webmasters agonise over, trying to ensure that you have just one copy of the same content on one URL, rather than having several URLs that point to the same content. The issue is often complicated further when you have an analytics package that parses in specific strings to the [...]

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Wordpress update errors

February 12, 2009

A quick note for anyone coming across the error:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction() (previously declared…
When upgrading their Wordpress installation. It’s probably because you have the excellent Wordpress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin installed – simply deactivate it, and run the built in Wordpress upgrader. Once it has run, you can happily reactivate WPAU.

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November 30, 2008

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Having explained the idea behind my Bristol SEO experiment to my colleague and fellow digital marketer, Cole Whitelaw, he decided that he could beat me, but rank for Cardiff SEO instead. So we’ve decided to have a competition, where I can’t use external links to get me up the rankings, and he can’t use internal [...]

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