Whilst doing a little searching I found and adwords ad on search that had a little eye catching symbol. I reckon that this would increase CTR.

What do you reckon?

Then I also came across this one

I noticed this today. Not sure if it is new. I have seen other instances of it. But not one like this.

Whenever anyone asks me to try and find out why their website has dropped in rankings I go through a quick mental checklist to see what may be occurring. This can save loads of time and faffing about as you can zero in on the problem efficiently.

Some of these checks can be simple to do but in a few cases if you do find that the problem is one of these you should probably seek professional advice to avoid making further problems.

In no particular order of ease or importance:

Have you checked your htaccess file?
If you don’t know if you have a htaccess file, as a rough guide you only get them on apache servers. To see what your website is running look at netcraft.

Next, log into the server and look for any unusual lines in the htaccess file. If you don’t feel confident doing this, get your web developer to check for you. What you should look for is a rule based around the most common user agents :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !googlebot|slurp|msnbot [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://othersite.com [R,L]

What this does is tell Googlebot and other search spiders that the page has moved to othersite.com so the othersite.com gets the benefits of the links, but the page still shows to the average user.

I have seen this tactic used, very sneaky, but very real.

Have you checked your robots.txt file?
As with the htaccess file the robots.txt file may or may not be present, but it can be used on all webhosts and tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t index. Robots.txt information page.

I saw on instance where a server was hacked and the only change made was to add one disallow directive, that basically told Google NOT to index and entire folder. Now this was 1000’s of pages and they all started slipping out of the Google index.

We could not trace the hack when we found it, however it was sadly, rather beautiful.

Have you made any changes to what you do?
Have you recently changed your SEO or added some new links, or done something new. For example, I have seen instances where a website owner employed someone else to get them links, but they went mental and got them 1000’s of links, links which were far from clean, they were blog comment links. So if you have had some SEO work done, find out exactly what they did and if you are lucky you might be able to rectify what has been done.

Have you made any technical changes, like hosting upgrades or change of IP/DNS etc?
Since you last had ranking have you moved hosts, or changed IP or it could be as simple as the server being down. So ask your technical person if you don’t know yourself.

Of course there is the damn right weird, like when Godaddy blocked GoogleBot, but you can get to that when this list of checks is fruitless.

Have you redesigned the layout or internal linking structure?
Have you recently updated the site, either in terms of design or the whole navigation. What can happen is pages are lost by creating broken links or you may have shifted the weight of a page by altering the internal anchor text.

Have you got any redirects in place?
Redirects can cause problems. More often than not, check out my 6 simple tips to protect your website.

Do you have duplicate content issues?
Duplicate content on a website can cause a drop in rankings, by basically filtering out your website from the SERPs. To see if you may have duplicate content issues, then take sentence from a page that may have been affected and do as search on Google for that exact string. If your listing no longer appears you may have issues. It is possible for someone else to create duplicate content on your site.

Are you having server header issues?
Have you changed anything on a server level that may have altered the headers served from your pages. If you don’t know what server headers are, they are part of the http protocol. For example a 404 code is the server telling the visitor or Googlebot that the page does not exist. So mixing up these headers and serving the wrong ones can deeply impact what gets indexed. In one case I worked on the CMS adopted a method of making dynamic content appear static with mod_rewrite but even when the page was really there the response header was saying that is wasn’t. So the page never got indexed, or it could mean that is got dropped from the index after a change.

Did the ranking drop occur after a Google ranking update?
Have you checked the forums, is there a lot of chatter about sites losing rankings. If there is you may be onto to something. For the moment though ….do nothing… quickly changing what might be the problem may be the worst thing you can do if you are not sure exactly what the issue is. If you are not sure get professional help. Sometimes it can be as simply a blip or burp in the Google algorithm and well worth waiting for things to settle.

Have you completely disappeared from the SERPs or dropped 30 places or some other tangible drop?
There can be a whole host of reasons why a website has dropped in the rankings, but getting the correct diagnosis is not always easy. One to check for is the +30 penalty. Have you dropped exactly 30 places in the SERP’s? Maybe you have the +30 penalty/filter. You should be able to fix this by looking at your linking patterns and cleaning up some stuff you may have added lately.

To be honest the penalty issue is so vast it deserves a post of it’s own. Same old advice, get some pro help if you are not sure.

Are Google messing with something?
Maybe you are falling foul of something like geo-filtering, which in its simplest format is where Google filter you out of appearing in the co.uk search results, because your server is located in a different country. So check local variations of the Google search.

Well that is it for now. I hope you don’t have the need for these, but my guess is that at some point you may encounter one of these. The same advice goes with most things, if you are not sure get qualified professional advice.

Cheers

Rich

There are many things you have to do to protect online assets. These are important things I am referring to, like preventing dupe content and making sure you don’t succumb to a 302 mishap.

I was asked the other day if all this checking and securing was going to make any money or make the site appear higher in the serps. I said plainly and clearly ‘no it wont’. I then went onto to explain that the first part of SEO is about protecting your assets. I asked him to imagine making his house really nice, lots of new paint, funky furniture and ornaments that he and his wife loved. Now I said “would you go out leave the door open for a load of crack heads to come rounds have a big party and piss all over the floor?”. Naturally he said no.

So what can you do to protect yourself from the crack heads?

OK we are trying to stop crack heads having a big party, so whilst we should be concerned about cat burglars getting in (proper hackers/script kiddies), we are only interested in general house keeping, as after all if a cat burglar wants into your gaff, they probably will succeed.

So, in no particular order.

1. Protect against non www and www version of websites using a 301 redirect of the non www to the www version.

So if someone requests the following website : http://threadwatch.org they get served a 301 and end up on : http://www.threadwatch.org.

This can be achieved by using the htaccess file and adding the following code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Put that into your htaccess file and try it out. If you get a 500 error, you have a syntax error, which is cool as htaccess editing is quick, just edit it and fix the problem. As a final test, go to a server header checker and put in both versions and make sure one shows a 200 code and the other a 301.

2. Check for wildcard subdomains, by simply going to the website and adding crazy phrases instead of the http://ebaysucks.google.com/ and check that they don’t give a 200 response. I used this example as I know I would not happen. There are plenty out there that do this, and as a result show an entire copy of the site, which can a do get indexed! I am not going to say who they are, that aint playing fair, but they are out there.

3. Check for urls that don’t exist, but the 404 page gives 200 code. Yep it seems crazy but some people configure custom 404 error pages, to give a 200 code. A 200 code is basically saying that this page exists, so links to that page could produce duplicate content. Servers that give a 200 for everything are a bad bad idea, as it is very unlikely that a website will always have page. As a side note I would suggest you put something useful on your custom 404 error page, just make sure you serve the correct header. This way you give the search engine the right signal and you can help the user get to the part of the site they want. So offer a search box, a link home etc, and apologise, even if it is not really your fault!

4. If you have website logs, in a publicly accessible folder, password protect it NOW. It only takes one referrer for these logs to be spidered and indexed. So people may know your inner most log secrets and you could find you get log spammed to hell as some of these links can give link juice. All a bad person has to do it become top referrer to your website and they get a link back.

5. Make sure you protect against people looking for flaws with mod_rewrite queries. Quite often the query is made up of only part of the URL, For example the following url:

/dvds/horror/chainsaw-massacre.php

Often you will find that only the last elements grabbed from the url are actually put into the query:

/dvds/horror/chainsaw-massacre.php

This means pages can be served with duplicate content by someone frigging with the URL:

/dvds/i-like-beer/chainsaw-massacre.php
/especially-fosters/horror/chainsaw-massacre.php

So a user or a search engine will see the chainsaw massacre page, but under a different URL, so dupe content.

So to protect against this, build the query up using all the elements of the url which can be done in many ways. You could get the full URL and do a check that dvd and horror are present and if they are not throw a 404. The best way in this case would be to build up the query to include the categories with this pseudo code:

$film = ‘chainsaw massacre’;
$cat = ‘horror’;
$type = ‘dvds’;

SELECT * FROM FILMS
WHERE films_name = ‘chainsaw massacre’
AND films_category = ‘horror’
AND films_type = ‘DVD’

This way, only when all the cases have been met do you get the data returned.

6. Check for 302 redirects and remove them. 302 redirects. Google and Yahoo have had issues with this type of redirect. In some cases people have been able to point their site via a 302 redirect and hijack your site. God only knows why this has been allowed to occur, but occur it does. I saw one friend knacker their site for 3 months due to one badly placed 302 redirect.

Well that’s the first set of check checks, I will add things to look for next.

Don’t nausea up your hard work, get the basics right first!

Or at least they should be, check this out:

www.thrifty.co.uk

They do some mental H1 stuffing after a nice redirect.

Having real quick peak they have lots of lovely doorway pages and that’s just for starters!
Why of why do these big companies get so stitched up by dodgy SEO’s, they could rank so easily with what they have at their disposal.

Sidenote: I am available if the pay is right

On my travels I come across all sorts of stuff. Well imagine my surprise when I saw an ebay auction for hosting on .gov domains.

Some brand new web space on a .gov domain name for you to host your website.
I understand that if you are a search marketer this has a lot of value.
Want to bid or even just have a look, check it out, only £1000. My thought would be how long it would last.

Gov Hosting

Very sly

OK this may be old news but I spotted something I have not seen before.

I was doing a search for something that I noticed and got a little image of a musical note and an indented listing:

I followed that link and got what looked like a load of album links for that artist

Then following one of those I got a listing of the tracks of that album, with links to discuss etc.

So is this new or old old old.