SEO Experiments

It's SEO experiment time. This one is inspired by a recent webinar from the SEO Braintrust folks and, of course, something I saw on a client's site. In the webinar, Leslie Rhode reminded me of discussions way back when regarding first link priority. The topic isn't new as many before this webinar, including Matt Cutts, have commented on it. But what I've yet to see is anyone test how image links are handled (Michael VanDeMar makes a recommendation though). So that's what I'm doing here today... Basically repeating previous tests except the first link is an image.

First Link:

Second Link:

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I'll put the results into an amendment to this post so stay tuned.

Update 2009-12-29
Just checked the SERPs. Neither link appears to be having any effect. I'll check again in a week or so.

Update 2010-01-07
Checked the SERPs again. No change i.e. neither link is having any effect. I didn't expect results to take this long. Oh well.

Update 2010-01-12
Thanks to Zoe and Andy for pointing out that the SERPs are now including additional results. It looks like the text link (second) is passing anchor text while the image link (first) isn't. I think I'll wait for another week to see if things "stick".

I was looking through a client's data in Google Webmaster Tools recently and noticed tens of thousands of bad internal links. All of these links could be boiled down to a handful of patterns which struck me as odd because I should've noticed these bad links before. A little digging revealed that Google has been aggressively crawling links that are in JavaScript code.

A recent article by the Google Operating System blog resulted in quite a lot of excitement in the SEO world although I'm not entirely sure why. The observation that the author of the article shared is that Google is promoting new pages to the top of the SERPs despite that new content not having any authority because it is new. This phenomenon is 6 months old though and that's why I'm confused about the current excitement. I've seen new posts go to the top of the SERPs right after they were published including a recent experiment with auto-generated content. Such news posts would then drop away after a few days and then follow the normal process of climbing the rankings just like any other page.

Folder depth comes up every now and again as a ranking factor (albeit a small one). And while setting up an experiment to measure the ranking benefits of a root-level page vs. one buried within sub-folders wouldn't be easy, it is easy to find out if search engines will give up on files buried too deeply. My current take is that folder depth, within reason, won't stop a search engine. I believe I once read that Yahoo "cared" about folder depth, but now I think current theory is that all of the major engines are now more concerned about click-depth i.e. the number of clicks from the home page.

The following text is auto-generated. It has been posted here as a test. Feel free to read this to get a sense of the state of free content generators, but you'll quickly see that despite there being a lot of words, taken as a whole it's all meaningless. I'm curious to see if this gibberish can obtain rankings. For this test, the target phrase is SEO Services Company which has about 1 million competing sites in Google.

Google recently introduced an interesting feature to their Webmaster Tools console. With this option you can specify the geographic region that a web site, sub-domain, or sub-folder is most relevant. This is particular useful for companies that have dropped the SEO ball and have not registered the country-specific TLDs for the international versions of their sites.

About 5 weeks ago I submitted an article to another site (the name of which is purposefully not written) on SEO strategy. I've now posted that same article on this site to see if I can rank better than the other site.

At the end of December I moved a bunch of SEO content from one blog to the one you're reading now. I made that move because SEO was taking over my other blog which originally had a broader technology focus including software development, project management, and IT in general. This blog, SearchGrit, focus on just SEO and SEM.

Images have always posed a challenge for search engine optimizers. The problem, of course, is that search engines can't read the text on images. And while the ideal is to have text as plain HTML, sometimes it's necessary to use images. So how do you tell search engines what content is in the image and therefore have pages rank well for such content?

JavaScript allows web developers to have their web pages react to user actions e.g. cascading menus. And despite the many incompatibilities between different browsers, the use of JavaScript is now ubiquitous and by all accounts a successful technology. However, when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), JavaScript is problematic.

When changing page names on an existing site the typical advice is to setup a 301 permanent redirect from the old page to the new page. The idea behind this technique is to ensure that search engines update their databases accordingly. Ideally, the search engines will also pass on any existing trust from the old page to the new page.