Weblog New Zealand

Search Engine Optimisation is definitely an art, not an exact science. We have to make guesses at why Google is ranking clients sites certain ways.

Such as one question I have had today - Why does a webpage rank high for one phrase, and low for another?

Yes, you have checked, and the search phrases are in the page title, meta description, and in the content of the page. So you have done the on-page SEO correctly. The web page has enough power that it is ranking for one of the phrases in the title, so you know that it has in general enough incoming links.

This example is based on a case study of a client, but I have changed their name and details for this example.

Let’s say that your website has the following text on your page as its intro paragraph and the first time that the phrases have been mentioned uniquely on the page (fictitious example) – I have included the search phrases as the bold phrases

• QEDesign is a leading Auckland Website developer, responsible for the website design and website development of a number of New Zealand’s top 100 companies…

You happen to be ranking top ten for website development, being the phrase at the front of your title, but ranked 90^th for website design. 90^th is too low. Based on incoming links and relative power of the website, it should be at least ranked top 20. So why is it ranked so low?

Duplicated content can be one of the issues holding you back. This takes a number of forms:

1. Content duplicated
2. Inbound links duplication

Content duplicated

We can do a quick check to see whether the first instance of our search phrase on the page is contained within unique text. Take several words before, plus the search phrase, and several words after the search phrase. Enter that as a search query in Google in quote marks – ie “responsible for the website design and website development of a number” – when you include the quote marks into the search box, you are searching for that exact phrase

Now this post is likely at the moment to be the only instance of that search phrase, but in my clients case, there were hundreds of copies. Website scrapers had used that text on their pages making the text not unique to my client.

I did the same test for the meta description, and found that many hundreds of pages had also copied the exact meta description.

We then made both the meta description, and content unique. Merely making this change has resulted in many clients pages being ranked higher once their content has been made unique.

Inbound links duplication

The website I was checking had several hundred pages linking to it that contained the exact text “Website Design by TheirName”, many of these were whole of site links.

It is normal for a web developer to have links from clients into their website. However Google does not like “paid” links. What are “paid” links? Google prefers editorial links, where people have voluntarily linked to your site. Given what we know about duplicated text and Google wanting editorial links, we can make links from client sites more unique with the following methods

• Link from the homepage only – therefore the text before and after the link are not duplicated in the footer of every page of the site.
• Try and make the text before and after the link unique – ie “Website design by QEDesign”, and another being “QEDesign – Website Design”, and another “Website design and development by QEDesign” (with the links on the underlined text). You certainly need to get creative to come up with variations…

It will take my client some time to personalise all their incoming links, and it will take Google some time to respider all their clients websites and for what I consider the “penalty” to be removed. But it will be interesting to see the effect of these changes on the ranking of their website.

In the last week, Google has announced a major algorithm change as regards “duplication”. However, I have found the above issues still effect many clients websites.

SearchMasters are leading New Zealand Search Engine Optimisation consultants, training and working with web developers, and optimising businesses websites to get them ranked higher on Google. Contact Michael Brandon on ph 09 9504057 for help with the ranking of your or your clients websites.

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Guest post by Michael Brandon of SearchMasters.