Google Search Update - May 2008

Whilst searching for a client's site on Google today I noticed that Google are now pushing their Google Books service in the main SERPS. As this search for "restaurant designers" shows the results are liberally sprinkled with results from books.google.co.uk.

This update also shows a marked downturn in rankings for sites with high numbers of reciprocal links. The last major update started this process and now it seems to be complete with reciprocal links seeming to bear very little weight anymore. Search Engine Roundtable also reports the update has introduced some more improvements to Google's semantic search and the ability to recognise more complex plurals.

Google's VisualRank

The Register reports that two researchers from Google recently presented a paper called "PageRank for Product Image Search." The new system uses image recognition software and also seeks to understand what is pictured in the image and assign it to a "visual theme", similar to how the main Google index ranks websites and pages in themes. The images are also run through an iterative procedure based on Google's PageRank computation so a numerical weight (or rank) is assigned to each image. This early version of the algorithm reportedly cuts irrelevant results by as much as 83%.

Google and other image search engines usually rely on the text around an image, it's alt and title attributes and the file name for indexing and ranking purposes and although VisualRank is merely an idea at the moment it seems highly likely this system could be applied to the whole Google images database within the next few years.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has this very interesting post on "Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites" and offers some useful information for not only reaching visually-impaired users but also helping the search engines spider your site.

Can mini-sites help your rankings?

I'm often asked if mini-sites can help search engine rankings. These mini sites used to be called doorway sites back in the bad old days of SEO but now it seems like the mini-site is making a comeback.
Once upon a time a doorway page or site was a heavily (usually over) optimized page or site that ranked highly for a single keyword or phrase and pointed the user to your main domain, sometimes via a redirect command, sometimes by a hyperlink. Of course the search engines eventually got wise to this practice and banned all the doorway pages and the practice all but died out.
In these times of over-optimization penalties, cross-linking penalties and duplicate content penalties it seemed like the doorway site had no place in the modern SEO arsenal however the doorway site has re-invented itself as the mini-site. By creating multiple, highly-focused, mini-sites you can boost your site's rankings. Of course links from sites that are related to your topic are always useful but there are several things to watch out for:

• Don't repeat content that's already on your main site.


• Keep your page on theme and focused on one small area of your business or a particular product.


• Don't inter-link your mini-sites. Yes it's fine if they all link to your main site, that's the point afterall, but don't try to boost your mini-sites link popularity by linking them all to each other. Down that path lies disaster and poor rankings.


• Keep the content fresh, add to or makeover the site from time to time. Make sure the links still work at regular intervals and make sure the spiders keep coming back. Of course blogs are great for mini-sites as they can be highly focused in their subject matter, are easy to set up and they generate fresh content via comments from visitors.


• Don't forget to SEO your mini-site! If the spiders don't visit, the site won't be worth anything!

And the evidence for my claims? A client of mine, Safety Services Direct, recently built a number of mini-sites for his Health and Safety site focusing on different aspects and products such as Safety Check Direct, focusing on Contractor Competence Assessments, which is generating some nice backlinks for his main site. I also recently created Safety News and Reviews which also links to Safety Services Direct and another health and safety client of mine. This site takes the form of original articles on health and safety with recommended products on each page deep-linking to the respective clients' sites.

Another client, Cox and Plant, created a series of mini-sites for their ranges of bucket conveyors and other products with great success. Each mini-site ranks well for it's respective keywords and in turn lends some potent link juice to the parent company's site.

In conclusion, as with any site if you stick to the guidelines you won't go far wrong and you'll improve in thos all important rankings.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for making information universally accessible

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog has posted these "Tips for making information universally accessible". Written by a visually impaired researcher at Google it offers some simple, common-sense tips to improve your site and also help your search engine rankings at the same time, not to mention opening up your site to thousands of visually impaired web users / potential customers.

The article also shows us Google Accessible Search, a beta product that ranks accessible sites higher than their non-accessible equivalents. Of course in a perfect world where every site was web standards compliant and accessible such a feature would not be needed but unfortunately whilst we still have WYSIWYG editors that created non-standard code or use their own proprietary code there will always be a need for accessible search engines.

Denial Design aims to make all the sites we develop as accessible as possible and to W3C web standards. For more information visit our accessibility page.

Yahoo Layoffs Begin As Microsoft Bid Rebuffed

ABC News reports that the Yahoo Layoffs Begin. Up to 1000 Yahoo! employees are being laid-off as part of job cutbacks. The news comes just a few days after Yahoo! rejected a bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. News then emerged that Yahoo! may ally itself with AOL in a bid to fight off the Microsoft takeover. Although in my opinion this could be a very bad move given the company's track record with other firms such as Netscape.

Optimizing using one way links only

I've recently been experimenting with optimizing a site using just one-way text links and am having some success. Using a mix of social bookmarking sites and directory submissions I have been able to get a site ranked in the major search engines with absolutely no on-page optimization. The site ranks for phrases such as "central heating", "central heating supplies", "towel radiators" and "towel rails" which are fairly competitive terms. Now I just need to work on "gas boiler" and "gas central heating"... And of course the deep links in this post should help ;)