Search Engine Marketing Archive

I was doing some research and came accross a (not new) Matt Cutts video about web hosting server location and it’s impact on SEO.
What I understand from that video (and from my personal experience with European websites hosted in a single country) is that Google used to only check for country specific TLD (Top Level Domain e.g .fr or .co.uk) to decide if the website was relevant for a certain country.
That was, like Matt Cutts says, back in the days.

Now, they still use the country code TLD but if they face a generic TLD such as .com or .org they check the host server country to determine the website’s relevance for specific countries.
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But, they are also checking the IP of country specific TLD to determine if they are relevant for other countries.
I’ve seen some examples where .com.au websites were achieving high rankings in the UK SERPs because they were hosted in England
The important learning is yet to come: those websites were still ranking high in the Australian search engines.
They were not losing any rankings in Australia, they were just getting a boost in the UK.

So the main issue would not be about getting bad results in the country you target but more about getting good results in an irrelevant country, which will only happen if your website is in the same language used in the country your host is located (Canadian website hosted in france, German website hosted in Austria, …).

I heard somewhere that Google is still working on that issue though.

Anyway, in an ideal world your French website would have a French domain name and be hosted in France.
But for huge organizations that have the same the website duplicated in 10 or 20 different local versions, all hosted in the same country, the benefits would not be worth the cost.

Just buy your country specific TLD, configure each one correctly so that they point to the corresponding localised homepage and your local rankings will be just fine.

PS: You can also check the SEOmoz post about international versions of websites. There are some interesting tips in it.

There are lots of articles about Twitter and its benefits for SEO. I recommend reading econsultancy.com, mashable.com and sitepoint.com.
But in all those articles, I didn’t see the key element that makes Twitter updates even more valuable from a SEO perspective: The DoFollow link.

Twitter NoFollow policy

As most of you must know, all the links posted in your twitter updates have a NoFollow attribute. (see example on the left)
The guys at Twitter aren’t stupid, they knew everyone would have abused the status updates for their SEO needs.
As a result, Search Engine do read and index your status updates but don’t bother following and  indexing the links in it, making them less useful for SEO.
That’s where Black Hat SEO enter the game!

How to use DoFollow links in Twitter
There’s only one link you can use in Twitter that does not have the NoFollow attribute.
It’s the link to the website of the Twitter client you used to post your Status update.
Most of the time it reads Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, web or one of the hundred of Twitter client out there.
As you can see in the picture at the end of this post, I changed mine to link to my Blog and so can you!

If you are using Wordpress, just install Tweetable and follow the configuration steps (you need php 5).

If you are not using Wordpress and want to advertise your website or blog follow the instructions below:
1. Download the Twitter Seo Tool script (created by www.seoblackout.com) and unzip it on your server (you need php 5)
2. Log in your Twitter account and go to http://twitter.com/oauth_clients/new
3. Fill in the form:
- Application name: Enter the link anchor you want
- Description: Enter whatever you want
- Application Website: This is the URL you want to optimize. It can be your domain name or a deeplink to a content page
- Organization: Enter whatever you want
- Website:  Enter whatever you want
- Application Type: Check Browser
- Callback URL: Enter the Twitter SEO Tool script URL. For Example: http://www.mydomain.com/twitterseotool_EN/index.php
- Default Access type: Check Read & Write
- Use Twitter for login: Check Yes, use Twitter for login
4. Click Save
5. Click Edit Application Settings and check “Yes, use Twitter for login” since it has probably not been taken into account due to a technical issue from Twitter
6. Copy and paste your Consumerkey and Consumersecret to a text file
7. On your server, open the index.php file in the twitterseotool_EN folder with a text editor and enter the required information: Twitter username, script URL, Application name, consumerkey and consumersecret
8. Save the file on your server
9. Enter the script URL in your browser, open it and follow the last steps.

That’s it! As you can see in the example below, there is no Nofollow attribute in the link to my blog

Now you can update your status and receive link juice to your website from your twitter.com page.
Of course this is kind of a Twitter exploit and I doubt it will work for ages but as long as it works, you should definitely use it.

I need to write about flash and SEO, even if every SEO in the blogosphere has already talked about it.
The reason: Every non-SEO people who work in the digital world think flash is now SEO friendly thanks to Google.
Google has been able to read flash for years now and each year they talk about it on their blog during summer time.
They did that in June 2009, June 2008, July 2007, it’s Google’s summer topic!

Here’s my thought on that: Flash is NOT SEO Friendly

Let me explain why:

Improved Flash indexing
The word that confuses people is “indexing”.
In the SEO World, indexing content is the ability to read and archive content.
As stated above, Google is able to read text content in flash files if they have been correctly generated (See the Adobe SEO Technology Center for more info on that).
When Google has finished reading the text content of the flash animation, it saves it in its database with all the other information about the page like the URL, title, incoming and outgoing links and 100 other factors.
Now Google knows that page and has lots of information about it but for the page to show up in SERPs, Google needs to “rank” it amongst other pages.

Flash content does not rank as well as HTML content
The main problem search engines have with flash content is determining how the f*** will that content appear in a browser.
I’m not a developer but I’ve been in the SEO industry for long enough and know enough great flash developers to know that there are hundreds of possibilities to make text content in flash file visible for search engines and hide it for users without the search engines noticing anything.
That’s something we did in the past with HTML: Hiding content in the meta keywords, descriptions, comments, white text on white background and all that stuff that search engines can now easily detect and consider as spam.
But with flash, it’s more difficult for search engines to detect it because the content may be hidden for a good reason, like being part of the second “page” of a single flash file, or it may just be spam.

When to use flash and still rank well?
The only time you could use text content in a flash file without taking too much risk for your SERPs is for keywords you are the only one competing for.
Seriously, just take Google’s example in their last blog post about their capability to index flash content: “2002 VW Transporter 888″ ??? Are you kidding me?
The flash website they show us is the only one competing for that query!
What kind of example is that ?

Google will always prefer HTML websites
There are two main reasons to that:
1/ As I explained, Google knows what you do with your HTML content and trust it more than flash content.
2/ People tend to link to HTML content because they can get a direct URL to the page they want, therefore passing link juice that Google loves. Most of the time, you can’t get a direct link to the content you’re interested in with a flash website and don’t link to it.

Use technologies for what they were created for:
HTML is for content
Flash is for decoration and creative enhancement