Why you'd want to know the update that caused it

The idea is that if you know which update caused your traffic to drop and you know what that update targeted, you only have to fix that specific issue and your rankings will be magically restored. The reality is that it's really not that black and white. Quite often now people blame one update, but if we look at the SearchMetrics stats for their domain, they've had a gradual decline over the last few months with a bigger decline in recent weeks. If we based our actions solely on what Penguin targeted (and that's not even really clear yet within the SEO community) we might be missing other issues.

There were other updates that didn't get named by Google in the same way but had a huge impact in some countries. We've seen sites with over-optimized anchor text being hit from the beginning of the year already, but suddenly people now attribute that to Penguin. The end result for you as a site owner: it doesn't matter.

You need to fix all your issues, not just the ones that this specific update "targets".

How to get "your" traffic back

First of all, it's not your traffic. It's Google's traffic. Being mad at Google, or anyone else for that matter, won't help you one bit, it's Google's traffic and they can do what they want with it. So to regain the traffic your website was getting from Google, you need to play by their rules and in all honesty: those rules haven't changed all that much over the last 10 years. The only thing that's happening is that all the ways people found of bending those rules are slowly breaking.

Don't try and play a game with Google if you don't understand what you're doing. There are dozens of great blackhats out there whom I respect, but that's because they do their own research and they don't start complaining publicly when Google catches them. If you have to read about and apply other people's tricks, you're probably not going to win. As the old saying goes: if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

So how do you get your traffic back? By getting your site re-aligned with Google's values. If you've lost in the Panda update and now recently lost a lot of traffic again, Google is sending you a message: your website doesn't fit our idea of quality. Fix that. Don't try to remove the one or two links that you think might have hurt you.

Now of course, you're more than welcome to order a website review and get our opinion, but please don't expect us to come up with a silver bullet. There are no silver bullets in SEO, just a lot of shiny silver drops of sweat, coming from your forehead.

Penguin, Panda, it’s not that black and white.. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

As a side note, BlueGlass LA is probably the best conference I've been to in a while, with a ridiculous line-up of speakers, if you're going to go to an internet marketing conference, BlueGlass conferences are seriously among the very best in the US, second only to SEOktoberfest.

Having a blast at BlueGlass LA is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

My background

As a former Theology student and as someone raised in the Christian tradition, I have a fairly specific (and in some eyes: stringent) set of ethics. I don't work on gambling or porn related sites because of that. I'm aware that others have different opinions on this and I don't judge others when they have other ethics with regards to their work. To each his own. Sometimes though, I draw the line.

Among my friends are some of the world's best black hat SEO's. These are also guys that will never break a law or willfully hurt other people to get their rankings, they just game Google's algorithms. I know Matt knows at least some of them and there's even a form of "honor" among them: he seems to appreciate their ability to outwit their algorithm. Unfortunately not everyone in the SEO "community" is that clean: some people are willing to break laws or hurt other people.

After the last SES conference in Amsterdam, which I arranged the speakers for, one of the speakers (not the keynote :) ) admitted to me he wouldn't mind teaching other people how to hack sites or how to build trojans to gain links. I was too startled to give a proper response but decided later that day that I would never allow him back on a conference I arranged speakers for.

Spammy Link Building in the Netherlands

The last few days there's been an outcry in the Netherlands over several companies using comment spam and forum spam as a method of gaining links. They'd been caught creating fake profiles on all sort of sites and pretending to interact while really only inserting their links. I had to laugh a bit, as would most of my UK, American and German friends, as that's so common outside of the Netherlands nobody would be surprised to see that anymore.

There was one specific case though that "hurt" more than others (which was by another company by the way). Someone had willfully created an account on a forum for MS (multiple sclerosis) patients, claiming to be a patient, while was spamming links there to health related offers. That's so low that it hurts.

Outing Non-ethical SEO practices: immoral?

Recently Joe Hall, whom I respect a lot, did a post saying SEO "outing" is immoral. He mentions that while the outed practices themselves might be non-ethical, those people have families too, etc. Basically: people lose their jobs because of it. That's true. And that's sad. Especially as most of those people will not know what hit them.

I will counter that though: those companies have grown by using their unethical methods, costing other people their jobs in other companies. This is a zero-sum game in most cases. Google doesn't tell people what to buy, it helps them find where they can buy it. Keep this in your mind at all times: search doesn't create demand, it merely funnels it. I refuse to let people who use unethical SEO methods "win" because they support families, simply because their more ethical competitors support families too.

I recently outed GoDaddy over using spammy link building techniques and got a lot of flack for that from other people in the industry. Some seem to think that it's all of "us" (SEO's) against "them" (Google). I wholeheartedly disagree. GoDaddy was using its paying customers to strengthen their own SEO without consulting them, in fact, they were specifically hiding what they were doing in their editor.

I don't mind them "playing" Google's algorithms. I mind them abusing their customers websites without their consent. The only way of making that stop is to ask Google to remove the value that abuse has. In the same way I loathe WordPress plugin developers who add links to their users sites without consent.

I will not "out" people for buying high quality, relevant links from high quality websites related to their own topic, I have less issues outing people who hack into my website to gain a few links. This happens more often than I dare to admit.

Policing the web

Joe goes further and says:

"If your paycheck doesn’t say “Google” on it, it’s not your job to police the web."

My paycheck doesn't say Google. I'm not policing the web. Neither is Google. Google is trying to maintain a set of rules within its own index. It has all the rights in the world to do that. My paycheck doesn't say "WordPress" either, yet I help develop that project because we all benefit. There really is such a thing as "the common good".

That's entirely different from outing every SEO I find that does something outside of Google's guidelines, I'm smart enough to create my own set of ethics. I hope you are too. I for one intend to help them battle unethical SEO's because I think we all benefit from that.

The ethics of SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.

So, Google wants to do something about over-optimization. That's not saying they want to do something about SEO. As Matt said on that same panel one more time, they have nothing against SEO, they have something against spamming.

So, if you write texts with a keyword density of 25%, you maybe should be worried. If you install an SEO plugin that helps you write more search engine friendly content (and even warns you when it thinks the keyword density is too high) and optimizes most of the technicalities for you, there's nothing to worry about. Several Googlers use my plugin, do you really think they'd do that if they considered it over-optimization?

Now, stop over-analyzing everything Matt says and get back to work, building good websites for users.

Over-Optimization vs Optimization is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The Site & The Problem

The site has a very simple concept: it explains how to pronounce certain words in several languages. When the site hadn't been optimized yet, most of the traffic was for the term "how do you say" or "how do you say that word" and for some specific pages. Those specific pages had been linked to by other websites.

You see, this site's issue was quite simple: there was no way one could get to a specific page without searching for it. So, in our review we proposed several methods of making a browsable archive, one that a search engine could go to and find all the pages in it. They did and the solution worked wonders, now, if you search for "How do you say fruits de mer", you're taken right to the best page for it: "how to say fruits de mer".

The Analytics

What that means traffic wise? Well, this, and we're only just getting started, as the site was updated on Jan 19th:

Update

After publication of this post Marie-Ora, who owns the website, sent me an updated screenshot of the stats:

Conclusion

Is there stuff on your site that is impossible to reach for search engines? Now is as good as time as any to fix that. Is your website not getting the traffic you're hoping for? Maybe we can help with a review!

Website Traffic times ten? Sometimes it’s easy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's been some outcry though, because Twitter and Facebook aren't "highlighted" as much as Google+ in those new social results. Danny is doing some awesome reporting on this, first in "Search Engines Should Be Like Santa From “Miracle On 34th Street”", later in an interview with Schmidt.

Google used to have access to the Twitter firehose, all the tweets coming in in realtime, enabling them to index tweets at light speed. Facebook used to show some friends of a person on a profile to visitors to that profile who aren't logged in, now look at the cache for my Facebook profile: just other people with the same name.

As I said in a reaction to a Google+ post by Jeff Jarvis: what both Twitter and Facebook are afraid of is that they're "giving" "their" social graph to Google, thereby allowing Google to easily grow its own social network because it would make it very easy for Google to suggest friends to you or say "these friends of yours already use Google+, shouldn't you use it too?". So by opening up, they'd open their books to a competitor.

This, ultimately, should be a users choice, not a platform choice. When it does become a user choice, of course Google should favor the social network the user is the most active on, so if I'm more active on Facebook than on Twitter or Google+, it should highlight that above the others. Right now, it seems to be mostly highlighting Google+, which will raise some eyebrows here and there and is food for discussion.

A while back at the first Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels, Bas van den Beld of State of Search interviewed Olivier Blanchard and myself about search and social. We talked about how the two intertwine and can't be unraveled, in fact, as Olivier said during the interview: "it's like coffee and cream, once they mix you can't get the cream out of the coffee". See the interview here (the sound is not the best ever, I know):

The thing is: this is a done deal. There's no way back. Search and social have now officially teamed up, so you might as well live with it. It also means that not using Google+ is... Not really an option if you're a marketer, but I guess we had that one coming for a while as well.

So, what does this mean from a tactics perspective? For now, it means: share every post on Google+ too, make sure you have Google+ buttons on your posts and, most importantly: keep building relations with people! It's not like that much changed; social mentions might have become a new and maybe even important ranking factor, but even quality links are usually the result of a relation, of social interaction.

The formula to success didn't change: you have to keep building relations / followers / an audience, create great content and make sure people notice it.

Search & Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Today I was sick and tired of getting beaten on some rankings I was working hard for, so I decided to dive a bit deeper and see why GoDaddy was ranking as well as they were. When I looked into the link profile for those high ranking pages, I found a lot of homepages linking to these landing pages with highly optimized anchor text. These were anchor texts like "ssl", "bulk email", "web hosting", "web hosting companies" etc. Stuff like that just doesn't happen by accident, so there had to be a reason for those. I was baffled when I found what they were doing.

Want a Website Tonight, anyone?

You see, GoDaddy offers a service called "Website Tonight"; this service allows you to quite easily create a website by offering you an editor and all sorts of widgets. Not exactly the power of WordPress, but nothing wrong with it from the users perspective. What is wrong is what I found when I created such a website: when you create such a website it has an image in the footer by default saying "Powered by Website Tonight". It's possible to turn this image off, but most people don't bother as in the editor it looks rather harmless, like this:

Now, if it were just that, I don't think I'd be all that bothered (not the border is because the image is selected). The issue is, that on the live test site I created, it looks like this:

That link wasn't there in the preview... That's called deceiving your customer. Note that by default, the image is black, you can switch it to white or you can switch it off, but in the editor it'll always show. This is probably the reason why some people choose to use the white version, as they think they can't disable it and want a version that's less ugly on their design.

Example time

Ok it's time I show you some real live examples of these I guess, these websites all have ugly links like that in their footer:

• http://www.motorinsurancee.com/
• http://www.universalhealthinfo.com/
• http://www.autoinsurancecoinc.com/
• http://handson3rd.com/
• http://www.onemilerunner.com/
• http://www.trophyshowroom.com/

But those links don't work, right? Wrong.

Google has been telling us for quite a while now that footer links etc. are not that important. Well guess what, that's not true if you have enough of them. Using SearchMetrics I ran a report for the top keywords they rank in the top 3 for. Each and every keyword in there that is not their brand name, from website hosting to webhosting to website builder, to domain name registration and more: all of those landing pages have exact match anchor text links pointing to them. All coming from these types of domains, thousands if not tens of thousands of clients who are paying for a service, are unknowingly also helping GoDaddy's business by helping it rank.

These links are on by default. They are not editorial. It's not the first time this happened, Hostgator has been caught adding links to their clients websites in the same way, I mention that in my WordPress hosting article. The issue is that Google rewards these kinds of practices with top rankings, which they shouldn't.

How well this works, well by my estimate they started doing this more aggressively in September / October of this year, see how their visibility according to SearchMetrics almost doubled:

This would correlate well with the Majestic SEO's historic back link data:

For hosting related terms like the ones GoDaddy targets, doubling your search engine visibility like that is worth a fortune. To show you even more how blatant these links are, this is a screenshot of the top pages report in Majestic, after doing an advanced historic report, look at the anchor texts and notice that the two with a flag on the right are reported wrongly, the anchor text for the link in fact is email marketing there as well. You can click for a larger version:

Some of these sites however already show these links a the beginning of 2011. See this archive.org example and this one to see that, they even changed the link in the meanwhile... What I think happened in September / October that made me catch them was that they started doing this for more keywords.

The long and short of it

GoDaddy is playing this game a bit too aggressively in my opinion, and Google should really start discounting those links. The right way would be for GoDaddy to ask their customers whether they're allowed to insert a link and make them choose where it points. No single customer would, by own volition, link to an email marketing page...

I am, though, disappointed in Google's filtering of these links; there are far too many spammy links pointing at those pages that:

• have a very unnatural anchor text distribution
• they're all in the footer of these sites
• are distributed over only a select number of IP's.

Those 3 things combined, I can't believe they didn't catch that.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying anything that GoDaddy does here is illegal from a legal point of view. In my opinion it's against search engines guidelines and they're not transparent towards their customers, so I'd call it bad karma.

Thanks goes out to Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO and Marcus Tober of SearchMetrics for helping me figure all this out.

GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Review snippets for everyone

For a while now, I had review snippets showing on my blog posts and pages here on yoast.com that I'd marked up appropriately. Over the last weeks I started noticing that I was seeing more rich snippets show up in more and more SERPs on sites that had not had them before. Yesterday I did a post on my Dutch blog to test this. I added a plugin called GD Star Rating, which allows people to rate posts.

This plugin has the ability to add rich snippet markup, but does it in a rather "hackish" way by hiding it:

It was good enough for testing though. I published a post about favicons, immediately gave it a 5 star rating myself so when Google spidered it, it had a rating, and low and behold, within the hour, this was showing in the Dutch SERPs:

Immediate rich snippets... You used to need to be whitelisted for this, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I've tested this with both microformat hreview markup and schema.org markup and both work 100% fine, even when hidden. That last bit is "new" as Google has always stated that you should not hide your code for rich snippets, which is also what I disliked about GD star rating. In most cases though, it's absolutely unnecessary to hide the results, you'll want to show them with stars and you can still make that machine readable too.

The conclusion here is simple: if you have reviews and you haven't marked them up as a rich snippet yet, go do that immediately. I've written how to's on hreview & rich snippets for WordPress and on rich snippets for Magento in the past, use those. For some of my clients I've seen as much as 20 to 30% uplift in the past, on the same rankings, when getting rich snippets, just because more people clicked on those results.

Combined rich snippets and author highlights

If you do a lot of searching for WordPress related terms in the English Google results you'll know that I have a so called "author highlight", based on the rel=author markup (for which you do still need to be whitelisted):

These aren't live in any other languages than english yet, so that's why you're not seeing that for my yoast.nl domain yet. A while ago, the combination of an author highlight with a rich snippet for a review would look like this:

Google dropped the +1 button recently, as in, it only shows on hover now. But what also changed is how this rich snippet is displayed, the author image is made a bit smaller and now the result looks like this:

While it looks a bit less "prominent" it actually takes up a bit more space in the search results and shows the authors name twice, which seems weird to me, so I think they'll change at some point too.

Other rich snippets

It seems as though you still need to be whitelisted for other types of snippets. For instance, I implemented the new software application snippets for my WordPress SEO plugin and Google Analytics for WordPress plugin pages, which would look something like this according to the rich snippets testing tool:

But those aren't showing yet, nor are the reviews embedded in it.

Conclusion

There's no more reason to wait with adding rich snippet markup to your pages, you really should just do it right now. I very much doubt whether this will continue to be as easy as it seems to be now though. It seems to me as though this is to easy to spam and no doubt affiliates will make a lot of use of this "feature". My guess is that soon we'll be wishing for Google to go back to actually white listing websites for rich snippets for reviews as well, because are results have become too cluttered.

Check out this video from when Google introduced Rich Snippets:

Rich Snippets showing up everywhere is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One "hub" page, if you will.

That page will need to be 100% awesome in all ways. Brian Clark of Copyblogger calls this type of content "cornerstone content" and has written an awesome article about it (a few years ago, already). In fact, go and read Brian's article, he explains that way better than I can, I'll wait... ... ... You're back? Ok, read on:

Position that new Cornerstone Content within your site

That article said a lot, right? It told you about keyword research, title tags and headlines, content and why your content needs to be awesome and more. Now let's talk about where, within your site, that content is going to live. In my opinion, really important content deserves a page within your site's structure, not a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks.

So, you go ahead and create that page within your site. Take some time for it, this is going to be the content that's going to make you rank, but not just that, it's going to be the content that is ranking. Which means real people will read it too and you need to convert those people. So think about search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that will end up on that page and give him / her something worth while.

Creating Internal Links

Now, once you have that cornerstone page, it's time for the next step: creating internal links for your article. You're going to do this by figuring out which pages Google already thinks are relevant for your targeted keyword / key phrase. The easiest way to figure out which pages Google thinks are relevant for that keyword is doing a "site:" search in Google. So if I were to try and find the most important page for "website review" within yoast.com, I'd search for:

site:yoast.com website review

You will probably find more than a few pages within your site. Go into each of those pages and add a link to your new cornerstone content. If possible, use the keyword you're targeting as the anchor text for that link, but most importantly: link from within the content. Don't just add some site wide sidebar / footer links. The reason for this is simple: links from within content are way more valuable than links from sidebars.

Afterwards, when you're writing more content for your site, when you touch on a topic related to your cornerstone content, don't forget to link to it! Now, let's go on to the last and final step:

Promote your Cornerstone Content

If you've created it well, your cornerstone content is something to be proud of, something that others will easily share and thus also something that will attract links. Don't be afraid to reach out to other people who have written about related topics: show them what you created and that it might be worth while for their visitors to see that. You might even want to offer them to write a guest post about the topic, linking back to your article.

Stock photo credit: Computer Generated Concept Of Cornerstone from Shutterstock.

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• Do you think the increased number of metatags released by Google are good for webmasters and the web, or just making things more complicated for the amateur so only those that can afford SEO consultancy will benefit?

  I think Google is making it harder in some ways, but they're also allowing us to help solve problems we couldn't solve before. Things like rel=canonical, rich snippets, rel=author and rel=next & rel=previous might make the "average" user think that more and more needs to be done. Some of them help us solve problems that we couldn't solve before, others allow for new options that just weren't there before. So yes, it's becoming a bit more technical, no I don't really think that's a bad thing. Does it mean more websites need an SEO? I don't think so, most of that stuff is covered by plugin authors like myself. My WordPress SEO plugin for instance already does 2 out of 4 of the above.

• According to you, what is the optimal way to use pagination in web shop pages (categories, filters) to prevent duplicate content issues and crawling issues?

  This is one of the hardest bits of e-Commerce SEO, mostly because it differs for each website. We encounter this regularly when we do website reviewsfor e-commerce sites: 9 out of 10 sites have bad categorization. I don't mind whether you use tags or categories or something else; I do mind if whatever you use isn't logical and doesn't allow me to easily find all the products you offer.

  Faceted search results are by far the most user-friendly in my opinion, but come with a set of SEO issues of their own: do you want all facets indexed? Usually the answer is no. Do you then want to keep them all out of the index? No. I want to hand pick which ones are indexed, yes, that's hard if not impossible in most systems. So you can understand that this is the sort of thing I can't answer in a couple of paragraphs, or even in a longer article. It requires a per site analysis and testing.

• How do you think G+ will help SEO for your website?

  It's already helping. Author highlighting through rel=author in combination with Google+ is proving to be a tremendous improver of click through rates from the search results. What would you click on? If you saw 5 results and one of them had an author picture next to it and stated the author was in 10,000+ circles? Right. Awesomeness.

  For the "average blogger" though, who's not getting highlighted in the search results yet and doesn't have a big following on Google+, it might seem less obvious. But trust me: you want to invest the time in it.

• Any WordPress Plugin you recommend to manage Schema microformats?

  None really. I think most of that belongs in your theme. The couple of plugins I've seen out there that say they do stuff with microformats do it through filthy hacks, or by hiding data. I would really suggest reading my articles on rich snippets and implementing it in your theme.

• Why does adding more content doesn't automatically lead to more visitors anymore? Do you really need links to every post to get the traffic?

  Yes you need links. Loads of unlinked pages within your site will usually not help you an awful lot anymore, even though it might have in the past. It depends a bit on your domain authority though, any post on this site will rank, regardless of whether that individual post has a lot of links to it or not. What does help is that I have a relatively "ok" internal link distribution and I tend to interlink my posts a lot.

• If you were to write the 10 commandments of WordPress & SEO, what would they be?

  Well, let's see, commandment #1: install & configure my WordPress SEO plugin. #2 through to #8: write great content. Commandment #9: properly tag / categorize that content. Commandment #10: talk to your prospective audience about what you've written on every platform that audience uses and engage with them. Bonus commandment #11: forget all other technical tricks.

• What is the best html5 resource you recommend (book or site) so I can point some of our programmers in that direction?

  Buy them this small book from Jeremy Keith & the great guys at A Book Apart, then send them to Dive Into HTML5.

• Best one for last: From your view, how to Recover from a Google Panda Penalty?

  The sites I've seen that really got hit don't really stand a chance of coming back, and usually rightfully so. The quick & dirty guide though is: get rid of all your low quality pages and make sure you offer a fantastic user experience and loads of added value. By then you won't need the Google traffic anymore of course, but that's usually the point when you'll get it in droves.

Questions and Answers – Google+ edition is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Clicky (aff) has recently added what I call passive rank tracking to their already awesome analytics package. André wrote about stuff you can do with the rank tracking in the Google referrer data over 2 years ago here on Yoast. About 2 years ago as well, I used this same referrer data to build a passive rank tracker, independent of Google Analytics, because I wanted to do things with that SEO ranking data that I couldn't do in Google.

The one metric I wanted most of all from that big blog of SEO ranking data is the average rank from referrers. You see, because of personalized search results, rankings are never the same and there's no "good" way of tracking the impact of personalized search. Now you have a semi decent average in Clicky though, so I like that.

Because Clicky has a pretty decent API too, you could use this to do all sorts of cool stuff. I use this kind of data in combination with Authority Labs and a new toolset in my arsenal, SEscout. Authority Labs shows me all sorts of info about universal search other tools don't give me, SEscout does hourly rankings when you have a paid account, which helps me track fluctuations in "the force" more easily.

SEO Ranking Data in Aggregate

Rankings for specific keywords are very often not that interesting for my clients, as outside of the clients for my website reviews, most of my SEO clients tend to think in tens or hundreds of thousands, if not millions of keywords, not one, two or ten. So for them I track rankings in aggregate, something you should probably do too if you track more than a couple of keywords. You can then answer questions like "how did we do on this keyword group", "how did we do on that keyword group". Authority Labs allows you to tag keywords which makes this kind of analysis even easier.

I then compare that aggregate number to the SearchMetrics data for their site and see how good that number is (usually they correlate very highly), after which I can see how well their competitors did using SearchMetrics as well.

The issue is with both Authority and SEscout: they don't give you the complete view because they don't do personalized search, which is good, because we want to know our "real" ranking, but it's also bad, because it might not always correlate well with our traffic. That's where the extra layer Clicky added comes in, which allows us to see just how much personalized search impacts those real rankings. For quite a few of my own keywords I can see that without personalized search, I'd get a lot less traffic, while for others it's completely the other way around.

Always correlate SEO ranking data with Analytics!

Of course, no ranking is worth anything if you can't correlate it to a decent amount of incoming traffic. Luckily, both the Google Analytics and Clicky API allow you to easily correlate the two and see where you have a chance of gaining more traffic.

One of my favorite ways of looking at sites SEO ranking data is looking at where they rank inbetween #5 and #10 that's already sending traffic. If a keyword you rank #8 for consistently sends you traffic, that's a keyword with enough traffic to optimize for and see if you can get into the top 5 or even the top 3.

And now, it's your turn! How and where do you use SEO ranking data? Share it in the comments!

Image credit: financial chart from Shutterstock.

SEO Ranking Data: Tracking Passively and Actively is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• If I have just made changes to my WP site, does it help to toggle the cache plugin?

  Absolutely. My SEO plugin force refreshes the cache because otherwise people start emailing me that stuff doesn't work when it works perfectly. On sites with more traffic though, you could also just leave the cache as is and wait it out a bit.

• How do I move a WordPress site, changing its permalinks but keeping the social numbers counts (post tweets/likes/shares)?

  The answer to this is an unfortunate but resounding: you don't. I've written a tutorial on moving WordPress to a new domain quite a while ago, but you simply can't keep those stats. All the more reason to think long and hard about moving domains...

• My buddy Richard thought he was funny, and asked: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a wouldchuck could chuck wood?

  The answer is simple, of course: a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

• Will you be focusing on wordpress for the rest of your life? If not what do you think will be the reason why you change your focus?

  I might be smart, but I'm no sightseer. Also, while I work with WordPress a lot, a lot of my time is also spent on consulting and website reviews (which we do for all sorts of sites).

• What is the best practice to SEO a WordPress.com site? Is it even possible?

  Of course there are things you could do on a WordPress.com site, some themes there are better than others and you can do a whole lot content wise. The minute you start asking questions like that though, you should really consider getting a self-hosted WordPress.org install and taking control of your own destiny. You'll reach a point where you'll want to do more and WordPress.com doesn't allow you to do that and the longer you wait, the harder it is to move, so, move now.

• When do you think that WordPress is going to completely rewrite their code base so it's an actual CMS instead of a hacked together glorified blogging system?

  I find I get that question quite a lot and it annoys me. WordPress is being rewritten all the time. Check out the development that happens on Trac. Most of the people who ask questions like that haven't had a decent look at the codebase for ages. WordPress IS way more than a glorified blogging system already and if there are specific issues you have with the way it's coded, patches are welcome!

• If you start working on a WordPress blog for a client and there are no plugins installed, which ones do you always install?

  A couple: my own WordPress SEO & Google Analytics plugins, W3 Total Cache and usually Gravity Forms. Of course each site is different so there'll be more plugins after that depending on that site's and site owners needs and wants.

• What do you think has more value? A good domain name or good link building?

  Good link building, any day, every day. You see, domain names, especially so called "exact match domain names" are bound to be devalued at some point. Good link building will always create traffic to your site, just from those links alone, so that's always worth while. Those links also bring in rankings but in really good link building, that's often just a side effect. I recently talked about Eric Ward's mailing list, you should check out that post.

• Your SEO plugin places a canonical tag on every generated page and I have an ongoing argument with a co-worker about that. He says that this tag should only be on pages that contain duplicate content and that it is intended to 'tell' the searchbot where to look for the original content. Googling around doesn't clarify a lot. Could you please tell your reasons behind placing it on every page?

  I get this discussion a lot. The thing is, if I was 100% sure that a URL could only be accessed through that specific URL with no query parameters added, I might not add a canonical. There's nothing against it, but it'd just be a bit cleaner. However, these URLs:

  http://www.example.com/

  http://www.example.com/?campaign=email

  Are essentially the same for a WordPress install in 99% of the cases. However, they're not the same for Google and other search engines. So, if I wouldn't add canonical, the link value of the second URL would be waisted and, in fact, you'd have a competing duplicate content URL in the search results. That's why I add it to all pages.

• I noticed you don't use a comment system like disqus or intense debate. Would be nice to hear your thoughts about whether we should or should not use a comment system in WordPress.

  If I were to use a comment system, I'd use Facebook comments. The benefits of that and the fact that it gets way less spam are quite high. So far I've decided not to do that yet because a couple of my regular visitors and active commenters actually don't have Facebook accounts. Also, my comment redirect plugin doesn't work with those systems, which I think is a pity.

  I'll say one thing: the amount of work I have to do to keep this blog spam free is nothing short of ridiculous. Read this post to see what I mean.

That's it, what do you think, should I do this more often?

Questions and Answers is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Google & Privacy… is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Just yesterday I was having a discussion with Nathan Rice, on of the developers of Genesis over how one should deal with paginated archives, eg. page 2 of my SEO category. In Genesis there is the option to canonicalize the subpages back to the first page of an archive. I have said, and will keep saying that I think that that's the sole big SEO mistake in that theme.

Enter rel="next" and rel="prev"

Now, as it goes with these things, Google has just posted the solution. They've asked to add rel="next" and rel="prev" to paginated archives, so that they can distinguish them as a series and, quote:

Send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series.

Bingo! That's what we want. The syntax is very simple. On http://yoast.com/cat/seo/page/2/ we should have a prev link pointing to the first page in the series and a next link pointing to the next page in the series, like so:

<link rel='prev' href='http://yoast.com/cat/seo/' />
<link rel='next' href='http://yoast.com/cat/seo/page/3/' />

Now I think this should be added in WordPress core, but of course it currently isn't. We have some other relation links in core right now, most of which are useless. In fact – with the exception of rel="prev" and rel="next" – they'll be removed from core anyway. I'm working on a patch for that combined with the ticket to add this to core. I'll probably need to combine that with the work Nathan and I were doing on canonical on another ticket.

Already in WordPress SEO by Yoast

For now though, I've added this functionality to my WordPress SEO plugin, so all you have to do is update to version 1.0.2 and you'll be taken care of!

rel=”next” & rel=”prev” for paginated archives is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Update August 23rd, 2011: Google has made a simpler version available to those of you who are not able to follow the instructions below. It is still recommended that you do in fact follow the instructions below if you have the appropriate access to the blog you're trying to do this on, if not, please follow the instructions I added at the bottom of this post. I also updated screenshots and added two video's with explanations. Let me know if you have more questions in the comments, I've updated the date of this post so it will pop up again in your reader.

I did see some more examples pop up, for example, when I searched for [highlighting authors], both this post from Matt Cutts (on highlighting authors in the comments) and this post from Gina Trapani got an author highlight.

1. Is the link to the Google Profile from the author page required?
2. How to add rel="author" to a link in your menu
3. How to allow authors to add rel="me" to links in their bio's
4. How to allow authors to set their Google Profile URL
5. How to change the author URL
6. Update: the simpler version
7. Last (but important!) step
8. rel="author" + rel="me" actually works!

Is the link to the Google Profile from the author page required?

Apparently, yes, it is. It's quite logical for Google to want a link from your Google profile to your author page, it makes 100% sure that you are indeed the author of that piece of content when you link to your Google Profile and back from your Google Profile to your author page. Of course the link to your Google Profile wouldn't be 100% needed for this, I don't know whether Google will keep this requirement.

The flow should thus be as follows: article links to author page on the same domain. The author page on the same domain links to the Google Profile. The Google profile, in turn, links back to the author page.

So you are not, as some people suggested, meant to link to your Google Profile straight from the article, instead, you should link to your author page on the domain you published the article at and that page in turn should link to your Google Profile and be linked from your Google Profile.

How to add rel="author" to a link in your menu

One of the issues that came up with is that some people don't want to show the author on each and every post when the author on that blog is always one single person. Those people will usually have an "about" page linked in their site's main navigation, for instance, Robert Scoble, on his blog Scobleizer:

That "about" link could very easily be used to identify him as the author of each and every post, to Google, if it had rel="author" sticked to it. Turns out that this is actually very easy to do if you use the WordPress menu editor.

Go to the Menus page and in the top right, click on screen options:

Once you click that link, it'll fold out, and the display options will show, including "Link Relationship (XFN)", be sure to check that box:

Once that box is checked, you can edit your menu item to include the link relationshop "author" which will cause it to get rel="author" added to it:

Be sure to just add "author" (without the quotes) this is enough to make sure the link will have rel="author" added to it.

How to allow authors to add rel="me" to links in their bio's

If you update your bio on a WordPress blog you write on to contain a link to your Google Profile and want to add rel="me", you'll come to the conclusion that WordPress strips out all the rel elements from links. Why it does that is beyond me, I've already opened a Trac ticket and created a patch to allow it. Until that is in core though (if it makes it in), you'll need to allow it yourself. To do that, simply add this to your site's functions.php file or functionality plugin:

function yoast_allow_rel() {
	global $allowedtags;
	$allowedtags['a']['rel'] = array ();
}
add_action( 'wp_loaded', 'yoast_allow_rel' );

This will allow all rel values to be used, nofollow as well. You could tighten this more but I doubt you'll need it.

How to allow authors to set their Google Profile URL

If you don't want authors to add the link to their bio but would rather give them an input field to enter their Google Profile URL, you'll need to hook into the contact methods functions of WordPress. First, tell WordPress you want to add the Google Profile contact method:

function yoast_add_google_profile( $contactmethods ) {
	// Add Google Profiles
	$contactmethods['google_profile'] = 'Google Profile URL';
	return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter( 'user_contactmethods', 'yoast_add_google_profile', 10, 1);

This will add an input field on their edit profile page below the default AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk / Jabber contact methods:

Second, in your theme's author.php file, the author template, you need to add a bit of code to output this new URL:

$google_profile = get_the_author_meta( 'google_profile' );
if ( $google_profile ) {
	echo '<a href="' . esc_url($google_profile) . '" rel="me">Google Profile</a>';
}

Of course you can style this in any way you want, show it in a list, etc. Here on yoast.com, for instance, I replaced the default contactmethods with Facebook, Twitter and the Google Profile.

How to change the author URL

If for one or more authors on your blog you want to change their default author URL, you could do something like this:

function yoast_change_author_link( $link, $author_id, $author ) {
  if ( 'admin' == $author )
    return 'http://example.com/about-me/';
  return $link;
}
add_filter( 'author_link', 'yoast_change_author_link', 10, 3 );

This would change the author URL for the author with username "admin" to http://example.com/about-me/, you should of course change this to what you need in your specific case. This should work with most themes, if it doesn't with your theme, let me know what theme you're using and I'll try to come up with a solution.

How can I test whether my rel="author" implementation works

Once you've added one of this bits above, you probably want to test whether it's working. To do that, use Google's Rich Snippets testing tool. You can find an example report showing that my implementation is correct here. See the screenshot:

Now don't forget to take the last step, keep on reading below the simple version!!

An explanation video from Google

After this post Google's Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson did a video on the topic, feel free to watch it here:

Update: the simpler version

Because not everyone either has the technical knowledge and/or the actual access to their sites to be able to accomplish the above, Google has made a simpler alternative. I don't know whether this alternative will work forever, it does work now though. It's quite simple, just follow these steps:

1. Find your Google Profile URL, copy paste it.
2. Create a link with that profile URL, and add this ?rel=author to the end of the URL.
3. As an anchor text, use your full name with a +, in my case the anchor text would be: +Joost de Valk
4. Go to the last step, below the video embedded below.

The full HTML of my profile link would look like this (line break just to make it easier to read, you shouldn't have that):

<a href="https://plus.google.com/115369062315673853712
/about?rel=author">+Joost de Valk</a>

Of course, there's a video explaining this version too:

Last (but important!) step

Whichever version of the code you used, be sure to submit your details through this form. You probably won't get an email back but at some point it (might) suddenly start working!

rel="author" + rel="me" actually works!

To show that the markup above works (I use the complete version, not the simple version):

rel=”author” and rel=”me” in WP and other platforms is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Link Building Tips from Eric Ward

There are a couple of guys out there who do have link building tips, tricks and ideas that might save your life. One guy, that's been doing this for ages, literally since before Google existed, in fact, since before the Yahoo! Directory existed, is my good friend Eric Ward. We started calling him LinkMoses, because he's just that old. Sorry Eric, it's true.

Here's the thing: Eric is giving away (well, selling, more on that later) tips, in a program he calls "LinkMoses Private". After 16 years of blogging (and I might persuade him to do a guest post here sometime in the future), he's gone for a paid program and if you're serious about link building, I think you should subscribe. The cost? A mere $8 a month.

That, my friends, is hilariously little money. If you get one good link a year out of what he sends you, it'll have been worth it. I've been following for a while now, and he has sent various "Link Opportunity Alerts" that I could use for my clients. Not "general advice" but specific sites to target for specific types of websites. Good solid links, with great instructions on how to get them. These are not paid links, they're awesome link opportunities that don't cost money!

I've subscribed for less than 2 months, because he's been going for less than two months, and already, I've gotten several links out of the link building tips. Now you see why I think all of you, should go and subscribe. I'm not getting paid for this, if I thought his content was bad I wouldn't share it with you. Go, subscribe, NOW!

Link Building Tips that Work is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Then, when working on another site yesterday, a Base64 encoding and Base64 decoding experiment, I needed an XML sitemap yet again. So I improved up the XML Sitemap PHP Script a bit further and decided it should be released.

Why make an XML Sitemap for Static Files?

Let's first address the "why" of this script: in lots of cases, you'll have static files, either they're PDF's, or static PHP or HTML files that create a site. I want all of those in an XML sitemap for two reasons:

• to tell Google that they're there;
• to be able to see in Google Webmaster Tools whether they're all indexed.

Configuring the XML Sitemap PHP script

Of course this script needs a bit of configuration before it'll work well. It has the following constant & variables:

• SITEMAP_DIR
  The directory to search for files in.
• $filetypes
  An array of all the file types that you wish to include in your XML sitemap.
• $replace
  An array of all the files that should be replace with other URL's, useful to, for instance, replace 'index.php' with an empty string, so it'll look like just example.com/
• $ignore
  An array of all the files to ignore in the XML sitemap, useful for your config.php, for instance
• $xsl
  A relative path to the XSL file included in the script.
• $chfreq
  The change frequency for files, can be 'hourly', 'daily', 'monthly' or 'never'.
• $prio
  The priority, a value between 0 and 1, since you can't differentiate between files, there's no big harm in setting them all to 1.

Styling the output of our XML Sitemap PHP Script

Of course, we'll want our XML Sitemap to look good, as well as work well. For that we use an XSL stylesheet which is included in the download. It makes the XML sitemap look like this:

XML Sitemap PHP Script output, styled with XSL

Download XML Sitemap PHP Script

I've added the whole script on Github, so you can play, fork, etc. Or you could just download the zip.

XML Sitemap PHP script is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let me give you the full history of the meta keywords tag's demise. In September 2009, Google announced officially what was already true for years back then: "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking". Matt Cutts explains it in a video:

Do Yahoo! and Bing use meta keywords?

In October of that same year, 2009, almost two years ago, at SMX East, Yahoo! announced they no longer use the meta keywords tag anymore either. This turned out to be not entirely true, as they do index them, but they won't help you one bit.

Bing said at one point, in a guide about how to optimize your page:

"It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low."

So basically they're encouraging you to do fill it out, even though the "credit" will be admittedly very, very low. I say: don't do it at all. Don't waste your time. Instead of thinking about which keywords to put in that silly meta keywords tag for 5 minutes, think about your content for 5 minutes longer. Really. It's worth it.

But I want meta keywords!!!

If you really can't live without them, go to the WordPress SEO dashboard and enable them:

Don't expect me to think you're cool though. The reality is, that if you're trying to rank for any term that's even only a little competitive, meta keywords won't help. You should write engaging, meaningful content on a technically well optimized platform and get good links and social engagement. That's what builds great rankings, meta keywords have nothing to do with it.

Meta Keywords: why I don’t use them is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Archives by date

Did you ever wake up in the morning and think "hey, I'm gonna go to site X and read what they wrote this time 4 years ago"? If you're searching for a post on a specific topic on a site, would you go to the monthly archives? Or would you start browsing by tag or category? The latter makes far more sense right? Real people hardly ever use date archives. They might sometimes (and of course you can now come up with 20 use cases for them), but in the majority of cases, archives by date are not the most useful archives on a blog. They do however live in a very large percentage of site wide sidebars. This means that on every page on such a site, there are a lot of links that point nowhere.

From an archive SEO perspective, the issue with archives by date is that they are only related because of just that: the date of publication.

Archives by taxonomy

Whether you use categories, tags or custom taxonomies, they all have one thing in common: you won't apply any of them to a post when it's not related to it. For instance, I'll tag this post "WordPress SEO", as it's related to that. All other posts with that tag are related to that topic too. Any search engine would like that and, surprise surprise, so do your users. Recently, in some testing here, I broke my tag archives. I got about 25 emails within 2 days about my tag archives being broken. Apparently, a lot of people actually use those!

So, if you have a date archive on your blog, do yourself a favor and improve the SEO of your site by removing them from your sidebar.

WordPress Archive SEO settings

My WordPress SEO plugins has several settings related to date archives:

The plugin either allows you to noindex, follow the archives, which means that they won't be shown in search result pages but search engines will follow the links on them, or to disable them entirely. As you can see, here on Yoast I've opted for the last. This means that if you try and access a date archive here on my blog you get redirected to the homepage.

Whether you decide to just noindex, follow them or disable them is up to you, but I urge you to really think hard about what the benefits are of having that date based archive in your sidebar. I personally think it should go. Would love to hear all your thoughts in the comments though!

Archive SEO: archive by topic, not by date is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

GeoSurf is basically a provider of proxy servers. What's cool about that? Well if you have say a proxy server in San Francisco, CA, USA, I could use that proxy to check the local rankings for a term there, or see how a certain site geo-targets to that area. The issue with most of the proxy servers out there is that it's darn hard to get a reliable proxy server in one place, let alone a reliable proxy server in 80 countries and in 20 of the US' most important designated market area's (DMA's).

GeoSurf has various features, but in its most simple form, it acts as a toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer. I'm too lazy to demo it myself, mostly because there's a pretty good video from them already that I'll embed below, but let me just say that I was absolutely astonished by both the ease of use and the speed of the proxies.

If you're on an enterprise plan, you can also use GeoSurf to connect through a VPN, a very useful service if you need to evaluate other stuff like ads inside messenger, application behavior etc. Though I wish they had an extension for Chrome as well, they currently don't, that wouldn't prevent me from using it.

The verdict about GeoSurf

If you ask me "buy or don't buy?", knowing that you have a need for a service like this, I'd say buy, immediately. I can honestly say that I'll probably keep using GeoSurf, if you're managing international search, ad or affiliate campaigns, you would probably love this service / tool too.

GeoSurf Review – I love it. is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!