My first SEO post

So I started this blog so I could be more vocal about SEO. Pretty soon into it (it’s been less than a week) I already remember why all my previous attempts failed – it takes a lot of commitment and dedication to get this type of thing off the ground, and unless I’m the first person to blog about anything, it always feels like you’re just regurgitating old information. I did exactly that at work today with this post on Google’s faux pas over the weekend. By the time I’d got to the office after a busy weekend it had already been so well documented that it was hard to add anything new to the story.

The other story I picked up on today is Patrick Altoft’s post on Google passing anchor text through 301 redirects. This is really interesting, because I’ve noticed quite the opposite. As I mentioned previously, my site has been sitting around gathering dust for a while. Before I was Head of Natural Search at iCrossing, I used to use my website as a test bed for evaluating link techniques. I used to be a keen photographer, and one of the best ways I found of generating good links was by uploading my photos along with some text content, and then asking websites relevant to those photos to link to me. Within the last 6 months I decided to drop all that content, and 301 redirect everything to my homepage. I was aware that Google were dealing with Googlebombs, and I guess without putting to much time into thinking about it, I thought that the easiest way for Google to do this was to check that the text within external anchors matched onpage content. If you think about the “miserable failure” example, there would’ve been hundreds of links with that anchor text, but it never actually appears within the content on www.whitehouse.gov, and so it’s clearly a Googlebomb.

With that in mind, I was quite surprised when I started noticing that the homepage of my website started ranking for terms that weren’t present in the homepage content. One example of this can be seen here:

seafort-photos1

I wasn’t particularly happy with that showing in the SERPs, especially not the snippet text which is a relic from Dmoz, despite the use of the NOODP tag. If you’re checking up on that result, it hopefully shouldn’t be there for much longer because I’ve now replaced the old holding page with this blog.

As Patrick says in his post, when you check the cached snapshot, Google tells you that “these terms only appear in links to this page”. However, I started noticing that I was only ranking on the homepage for certain terms as a result of redirecting old pages. What was it that was causing my homepage to rank for some terms but not others? After much digging around, I came up with the following theory – Google doesn’t just look at page content to determine whether a link is trying to cause a Googlebomb. Google also looks at other onsite factors, such as internal anchor text. If for example URL A has lots of external links that say “miserable failure” but URL A has no content to match that anchor text, then it’s clearly being Googlebombed. However, even if URL A has no content to match the anchor text, it can satisfy the same criteria through internal anchors – perhaps an internal anchor that just says “miserable” and points at URL A is enough to tell Google that the external anchors shouldn’t be considered a Googlebomb.

How did I work out this was happening? I had some legacy pages on my website (I still do), that have odd bits of anchor text pointing to my homepage. Wherever these odd bits of internal anchors match external anchors, then my homepage continues to rank. Where they don’t match, my homepage no longer ranks. As I said previously, it’s very much a theory, but it seems to apply to all cases I’ve had to look at.

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