Does the physical location matter at all? With the introduction of the hreflang attribute we decided to check how it works in practice for different language and location settings. We tested the three following factors for two different languages (en/pl) and two locations (GB/PL): Physical location of the searcher (UK vs PL) Country specific Google [...]
We have just spotted today that Google started displaying a message instead of an empty description. This happens when you disallow a page in robots.txt preventing Google from indexing the content of a page and therefore the description as well. The message looks like this: The “learn more” link points to: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449 It is [...]
There was never any doubt that BrightonSEO was once again going to justify itself as the ‘must attend’ UK search conference last Friday (September 14th, 2012). The conference itself has grown massively in the last few years and the queue served as a visual testament as 100′s of excited ‘spammers’ gently weaved their way from the Royal Pavillion [...]
SEO What? Deliverance. Oh, right. Thanks. When Kelvin asked me to prepare a presentation outlining how to deliver SEO change at a big brands it got me thinking about the unique position SEO’s find themselves in at large corporations. SEO Deliverance is my take on how to successfully integrate and manage the SEO tasks [...]
Google have been quoting figures on the number of registered Google Plus users since the launch which have showed a consistent growth. Google has certainly succeeded in getting people to agree to try Google+ but does this mean it’s a successful social network? Increased traffic Referral traffic from Google Plus has not been [...]
A few weeks ago, one of our clients accidentally released duplicate description tags across all the pages in one section of their site. They were using template based formats for the descriptions so that every page would have a unique description but the system failed and every description ended up being identical. The effect on [...]
— DESCRIPTION: Each user starts the journey from being a new visitor to a website. New visits are attracted by either brand or non-brand campaigns resulting in “new non-brand” or “new brand” visits. The goal is to convert new visitors into ideally “registered brand” users. Users of different type should be a subject of customised messaging [...]
It’s been over a year since Google conducted a survey asking webmaster which features they wanted the most. Our analysis of that survey showed that people were desperate for more information on backlinks. Google obliged by updating ‘Links to your site’ in Webmaster Tools to provide a full list of all backlinks which could be exported in [...]
The value of using the meta keywords tag has long been contested amongst SEOs. In september 2009 Matt Cutts of confirmed the commonly held view that Google has never used meta keywords tag. It’s unusual for Google to be this direct so apparently this issue hasn’t been easy to ignore and they probably thought this [...]
Google recently added a new report to Webmaster Tools called ‘short meta descriptions’ which sits under the HTML Suggestions menu. Analysing the data for a few large sites quickly showed that descriptions of 49 characters or less are included in the report. So what is the impact of having a ‘short’ meta description? On the [...]