Search Engine Musings

In the last few weeks I’ve been seeing some extremely variable results in the Google UK rankings. Some competitive search terms have been alternately ranking high and then dropping back by up to 150 places, back up high, back down again. Then at one point, just to confuse us further, any term that included my home town of Edinburgh simply dropped out of the indexes altogether. Weird.

It’s all a bit reminicent of the old days (all of two years ago!) of the infamous Google Dance, when excited and feaful webmasters would tremble at the first mention of it on the forums, knowing that their rankings would go crazy for the next few days. In these days of what Matt Cutts calls Everflux it’s not supposed to happen any more but something seems to be afoot. If anything this is more of a regular oscillation from one set of rankings to another - so my esteemed colleague at Oyster Web, John Hughes,  has christened it the Google Boogie. Just be careful you don’t pull a muscle trying to follow the gyrations

If you can’t understand why your site isn’t getting Google rankings try checking your web hosting!

There are various reasons why it might be causing you to lose search positions. A few years ago there were reports that one large hosting company had been blocking Googlebot from spidering any of its clients’ sites, apparently in order to save bandwidth. That would certainly be a major breach of faith, but as ever the onus is on you as the buyer to beware. There’s some very cheap hosting deals out there, but you have to ask why they are cheap. Maybe they don’t have essential facilities or support, access to log files, database capability, scripting languages, or as in that case, maybe you’ll never get any rankings from them and therefore never be able to attract traffic. Free lunches generally have a catch somewhere.

Geographical considerations for search engines

How about checking where your host’s servers are. Search engines have various ways of establishing where your site is based and generally assume that where it’s based in where it’s aimed at. No problem if you have a .co.uk address - you’re obviously UK. Likewise, if your address finishes .fr .es or .it then you’re assumed to be French, Spanish or Italian. But what if you have a .com address? .com is something of a historical anomaly from the days when the net was in its infancy and everyone (well, everyone in America) thought you could just split sites into commercial (.com), non-profit (.org), educational (.edu), and government (.gov).

For a long time everyone jumping on the internet bandwagon assumed you had to have a .com address (the press even called it the .com bubble) but in fact the main problem with it is that it has no geographical significance. Without that major clue the search engines resort to secondary information, and one of those is where the servers are based. If you are a UK company with a .com address and your host’s servers are in another European country then you have a problem - Google and MSN/Live won’t include your site in their UK-only search results.

I was once phoned by a company who hosted their servers in Ireland (Eire) and complained they could never get rankings in the UK. Sure enough I checked their hosting and then checked Google and Yahoo in Ireland - they had top ten results all over the place. Unfortunately they didn’t have any potential customers there. In the UK where their market was they were nowhere to be seen!

The same problem has long caused difficulties for Australian webmasters who tend to go for hosting in the USA where it is apparently much cheaper. If they’re using a .com address then they won’t get results in their own country.

So watch where you host your site - it could make the difference between the success or failure of your business.

I had an interesting phone call yesterday. A polite young man suggested that my SEO skills were in great demand in London, Dublin, and Gibraltar and I would be looking at a salary of £50,000. Now call me an old cynic (you’re an old cynic! .Ed) but I didn’t jump for joy at the prospect of oodles of cash and tons of sunshine (or even Guinness) ‘cos I’d already guessed what was coming. The catch? It would be in the online gambling industry!

Fact is there are some industies that are just not worth the effort to optimise for organic listings, and gambling / betting is one of them. There are a number of others - loans and bad debts, mainstream sex sites, mp3s, mobile phones for instance.

So what’s the problem with them?

• Impossibly competitive markets
• Bad site history or no history
• Black Hat opposition

Competing for rankings with the big boys

For all these areas there is an astonishing number of competing sites. Some long established and reputable - think big established betting shops, the big banks and loan companies, etc. - and some decidedly not reputable. The big guys can afford to spend massive amounts on advertising and site building, have usually had sites for many years, and those sites are usually big enough to cover just about every useful keyword available. The others guys cheat.

Domain name problems

If you’re entering one of these markets then you have two choices - start with a new domain name, or buy an established one. In a highly competitive market a new site on a new domain name will take a very long time to rank. Google aging filters will apply, and the usual remedy of getting links from trusted sites will be more difficult to apply. However if you try buying a domain name that has been operating previously then you may run into bad history problems. These appear when the previous owner has employed unethical techniques in trying to rank. If they’ve employed cloaking, or hidden text, or been connected to link farms, then this may very well affect your attempts to optimise the site because of the need to establish trust.

Competing with Black Hat techniques

What about the smaller opposition? A substantial number of them in any of these big money industries will be short term sites which are there to make a fast buck and then drop out again. They don’t care about long term results so they are happy to employ unethical or Black Hat techniques which may well get them highly ranked in the short term but will get them banned once the search engines work out what they’re doing. Because there is a constant stream of these there are always some of them competing against the ethically-built sites, making your job far more difficult than in a more normal business sector.

So I won’t be going to Gibraltar - pity, considering this year’s British Monsoon season summer. Anyone fancy a Guinness?