Search Engine Musings

[edit - I must be psychic - the same day that I wrote this post the Google Webmaster Central Blog announced
Supplemental goes mainstream. Seems they don’t agree with my reasoning and are determined to make it harder for us. Only time will tell if the results from the two indexes really do come together, but certainly the comments on that announcement seem pretty skeptical.]

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about Google’s removal of a search method (though it looked more like a hack) which was supposed to allow you to check which of your pages were in the supplemental index rather than the main one.

It should be said that there was always some doubt about this method - it seems to have thrown up inconsistent results and there was a suggestion that it was possible to appear in both indexes at the same time so the results could be misleading. No wonder supplementals are a source of confusion.

At various times we’ve had Matt Cutts suggesting that we’re all too hung up on supplementals and even that Google might remove the supplemental indicator from the site: command results. [edit - which is what they’ve now done] The latter seems like a very retrograde step as it’ll leave people even more in the dark than ever about what Google thinks of their pages, and it will simply fuel rumours of the sort that cause so many problems for those without the experience to follow good practice or the money to employ professional help, rumours which Matt himself will then have to debunk.

So are we all hung up on supplementals? Well there seems little doubt that a supplemental page will not rank in a competitive field. I have recently seen a revamped site which had poor connection to its detail pages. To rememedy this an intermediate page was built which contained a great deal of information and linked to subpages which again had lots of good quality information around which the deepest detail pages were clustered. When this intermediate page first went live it immediately started to rank for a number of terms, and the subpages also started to rank. However a few weeks later the intermediate page dropped into the supplemental index, as did the subpages; the rankings immediately vanished, and have not returned.

Such a situation seems to lack natural justice and is likely to cause confusion amongst reputable webmasters who are trying to produce good sites - which is what Google claim to want. Since we don’t know exactly why pages can go supplemental some people will speculate and be tempted to take actions that may not be to the benefit of their users. Cutts has hinted that one of the reasons is lack of PageRank. That sounds dangerously like an invitation to point lots of links at the pages concerned as well as saying that quality is secondary to link strength. And then they wonder why people go out and buy links!

We can also look at the other end of the problem - what if we allow for the moment that there are perfectly good reasons in the algorithm for downgrading a page, and let’s say that a particular page isn’t good enough, isn’t worth ranking in the main index. Shouldn’t a conscientious webmaster be given a method by which they can check which pages of their site are regarded as poor, so they can take action to improve them?

Come on Google, give us the information we need to improve our sites, and then reward those improvements accordingly. Happier webmasters, better sites, better quality search results. Isn’t that what we all want?

Why should you care about Yahoo and MSN?

Increasingly I hear prospective clients say that they are only interested in Google results and nothing else. However, while Google are way out of sight in traffic referrals and both Yahoo and MSN/Live Search can be erratic and unreliable, I feel this is a bad approach to search engine optimisation in general.

There are two reasons for this:

• Over reliance on one source of traffic
• Narrow thinking in terms of site development

In the first case you have no fallback position if it all goes wrong. What if Google, in its attempts to eradicate spam, make another major algorithm change such as has happened a few times over the last few years? Even if you’re innocent you could still be caught up in the fallout and lose key rankings. That’s always going to hurt, but if you’ve no rankings elsewhere it could be fatal to your business. Rankings on Yahoo might just keep you going until Google works out the bugs.

The second case is to my mind even more important. If you’re constantly thinking about Google and what they’re doing then you’re not thinking about your customers. Your mindset may increasingly be to look for tricks and techniques that chase rankings rather than pursue good design, good content, and good usability. If that’s where you end up then you’ll find your conversion rate dropping because your customers no longer like your site.

SEO shouldn’t be about making poor sites rank above their level, it should be about building a site that deserves to rank well because it’s a good user experience, and then making sure it achieves that deserved ranking.

Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land branched out into a new area at the weekend - social networking for SEOs. Since the denizens of Digg decided to bury any vaguely search related topic that came their way in the misguided belief that all SEOs were spammers, there’s been fewer places where you could have search community news and discussions without subscribing to a wide range of blogs or RSS feeds. So Danny’s answer is to build his own version - Sphinn (and yes, no-one seems too sure how to pronounce it).

Danny is widely regarded as the top SEO guru and I’ve no doubt that most decent SEO’s will be queuing up to join anything that has his name on it and which helps their articles gain visibility. Bet the guys at SEOMoz wish they’d thought of it first

Pity the Americans won’t understand any Alastair Campbell jokes…

PPC experts in the US are worried that recent attempts by the search engines to expand their services and the range of displayed results is causing a drop in the effectiveness of Pay Per Click advertising. This is the paid for results that are shown on the right hand side of most search engines’ results and in some cases at the top and bottom in pale coloured boxes. It seems that click through rates (CTR) have been unusually low for the last month.

The theory, and it’s a fairly convincing one, is that the maps, images or videos which are being displayed above the main organic text results take the eye left and down so that viewers hardly notice the PPC results at all.

If this results in advertisers losing faith in PPC then Google in particular may find their revenues dropping. Will this cause them to rethink Universal Search or will they adopt another approach such as redesigning their results pages? For so long their clean interface and layout was part of their attraction but it’s becoming gradually more cluttered.

So far we still haven’t seen much of the Universal style results in the UK - I wonder if this is because we’re lagging the US or if there are second thoughts creeping in?