in the future it’s likely Google will use the data to at least make obvious changes. An example is if “thousands of people” were to knock a search result off a search page, they’d be likely to make a change

Just gather enough friends

I can see the blackhat SEO community already grouping together to “bump-up” each others’ sites in the search results. Though I doubt it is just blackhatters planning such activity. Watch the callout for reciprocated votes spreading like wildfire through any tech or marketing oriented social network! If Google have made buying links unacceptable behaviour, what about buying votes?

Just like any form community voting, it is open to abuse and manipulation. One might consider that Google are intelligent enough to measure such voting effectively, but it will instantly become another weapon in the SEO’s search manipulation arsenal.

Weakening SEOs power

Searchwiki itself, in my opinion, is a direct stab at the SEO industry to weaken its stronghold on the way search results are presented to the searcher. Personalised search results where the individual is in control, removes the effectiveness of SEO. One cannot determine with confidence what search results an individual might be seeing for a particular keyword, because Searchwiki allows a user to place whatever search results they wish at the top positions for a particular search.

If uptake of Searchwiki is broad enough, SEO will need to become increasingly focused on long-tail search terms – those that are searched less often and I would suggest are less likely to see the searcher feeling the need to manipulate their results. Highly competitive terms – where a searcher might be more likely to keep searching through page after page of results to find the one they want – are more likely to be clicked to the top of the list in Searchwiki.

Swings and roundabouts

There seem to be some opportunity here on all sides. Users may find their search results more acceptable for terms they regularly hunt, while pure on and off-page optimisation could become less important.

I wonder when we might begin seeing page title and description content on search results specifically designed to encourage a searcher to click their little Searchwiki icon to move that result to the top..?

Every link must count

Link building effort, whether as a result of active placement of links yourself or by other sites organically lining to your great content, is impotent if the search engines are not aware of the page linking to you, and therefore not aware of the link. Most advice on link building you’ll find around the web, excludes one critical, additional task: ensuring pages that link to you are indexed in the search engines.

If you create the link yourself in whatever method, you will be aware of where that link has been placed – providing you are sensible and record the locations of your links, of course. But what about organic links, how can you discover where they have been placed?

Who links to you?

If a search engine already knows about a page that links to you, all is well and there’s nothing more for you to do. To discover which links fit into this category, simply perform a search in the following format: link:yourdomainhere.com. Every page returned will have within it a link to the domain you entered. But what should concern you are the pages that link but do not show from this search.

Logs, logs, logs

Whatever system you choose, whether it be visitor traffic logs provided by your web host, the free Google Analytics, or some other logging service, you should be able to access detailed lists of refers: where people came from when they visited your site.

Scour your refer logs and check every site you have not already checked (you’re keeping records, right?) to see if that page is in the search engine index. Do this by placing the entire page URL as a site search, like this: site:referdomain.com/page-that-sent-the-visitor.html. If no pages are returned, then that page is “unindexed”.

Linking out

The best way of letting a search engine know about a site or page is to create a link to it. When you discover an unindexed refer, link back, it’s as simple as that!

Where you place that link back might depend on the structure of your site, or you may want to place the link back on a completely different site to avoid direct reciprocal – or two-way – linking (managing non-reciprocal linking like this is a whole other subject and beyond the scope of this post). In its simplest form, create some kind of “Sites that link here” page, containing all the unindexed refers you have found.

Check them after a couple of weeks and if the page has found its way into the search engine, remove the link from your site.

Time and effort

Scouring through refer logs for unindexed pages may seem a troublesome task, but with the amount of effort needed to link build in the first place, it is vital to squeeze as much value from that effort as possible.

Try to imagine that each link pointing towards your site is like a beam of light from a torch … The more links pointing to your site and the more powerful they are, the brighter your site will shine, making it easier for Google to “see” what’s in your site when they’re looking to see if you’re relevant to a searcher’s query.

Content creators have complete control over where we shine our torch beams, through deciding where to point our torches, but also through use of the ‘nofollow’ directive

nofollow – don’t follow this beam, thanks

Too many outgoing links from a web page or blog post can ‘leak’ a site’s limited supply of light energy. The simple addition of rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink informs Google to ignore the light emitting from that link, therefore protecting our own limited pool of light energy from being spread too thinly elsewhere. Google not only ignores the light, it also refrains from following that link to its destination to see what’s there, while humans can still see and click the link to visit the destination.

Spammers love links

Links are the primary method search engine spammers use to boost their money-earning sites in the search engines. So-called “Black-Hat” practices include the creation of hundreds of websites all interlinked into a network. When a site is created, this network is used to shine hundreds of torch-beams at this new site, thus making it shine and getting it noticed.

Search engines (Google in particular) are continuously improving their methods to spot and down-rate such link networks, demoting the value of their collective torch-beams, and tagging them as ‘bad neighborhoods’. And here we have the potential problem.

You cannot control your incoming links

Just as it makes sense not to link out to – thus creating an association with – so-called bad neighborhoods, I expect you can see the potential pitfalls of receiving incoming links from such places. A link creates an association between the two sites being connected.

Search engine spammer sites frequently use content ’scraped’ from RSS feeds – it’s easy and it’s automated, leading to a constantly updated, never ending supply of content. In most cases, the scraped content will also include a hyperlink back to its originating site. If your content has been scraped, you could have your site associated to a bad neighborhood through their link back to you. Without your knowledge, your image with the search engines could become tainted.

Sinister SEO

I have never seen it happen to a site I have run, but the principle of negatively affecting your competition through tainting their site with bad neighborhood backlinks has been much discussed in SEO circles. In theory, it is possible.

A case for “noarrive”

You have no control over who links to your site, but if you discover less than reputable incoming links, it might be appropriate to request Google ignore those links, tagging them as being irrelevant to your content: the mirror image of the nofollow directive.

This discussion suggests having Google provide a list of backlinks to your site, attached to which is a ‘delete’ button to remove the association of that link from the Google index.

I propose being able to add a directive to your site’s robots.txt file to instruct Google to ignore links from specific domains or IP addresses. This provides more control and a broader scope to limit potential damage once the tainted back-link has been discovered. This ability would also kill any deliberate competitive damage to your site’s image with the search engines through tainted back-links.

Conclusion

Issues with negative effects of links – deliberate or otherwise – are never going to be eliminated entirely. As the search engines get better at filtering genuine connections from manipulated ones, so the manipulators find a new tactic – it is inevitable. But any tool we can employ to minimise such negative effects will inevitably lead to search engines providing more accurate and valuable search results to the searcher – and that can never be a bad thing for the internet as a whole.

Photo: Peter Mueller

Your page title is everything

The title of your page – the text that appears at the very top of your browser – is treated with some reverence by search engines in determining what a page – or blog post – is about. Your first step is to ensure that your blog post titles are accurate representations of the content and contain the key words and terms that people might be searching for. Before writing a new post, spend a few minutes doing a little research on the terms people are actually searching for and write your title accordingly. Page/article titles which match closely to searched terms will be much more likely to grab the attention of the searcher.

How do you find out what people are searching for?
Never consider your search behaviour as being representative of the rest of the internet, so research is vital to targeting potential new blog readers.

• Wordtracker.com – expensive, but considered as the best for keyword research
• Overture search tool – free, but a little clunky, not as up to date as Wordtracker, and sometimes suffers server overload
• SEO Book keyword tool – additional useful free research tool

Your title terms are being abused by your blog

Have a look at the browser title of one of your blog posts. You will almost certainly see that the main title of your blog comes before your blog post title. Most blog applications arrange the title by default in this way.

Search engines weight the importance of the first words and phrases it finds in the title of a page or blog post. Therefore it is essential that you swap these two elements around, ensuring the blog or page title appears before the main site title. Click on any blog post on this site and you will see just that.

Switching the two may be a matter of installing a plugin (Wordpress users can use SEO Title Tag) to do it automatically, or you must make a small change to your blog theme template, physically putting one before the other.

This is just the first step

There is a lot more to optimising your blog for search engine success, but this is the first and most critical step. This step alone is unlikely to leap you right to the number one spot for a common search term, however. But considering your blog post headlines and ensuring those headlines appear first in the page title, will guarantee you improved placement in search engine results, and therefore more visitors. Try it and do let me know how you get on.