Comments on: Ranking and SEO – light on a dark art

By: Yousaf

Yousaf — Mon, 09 May 2011 16:31:35 +0000

Hi Lorna,

Google makes over 500 changes to its algorithm annually. You are absolutely right about site structure and internal linking. A website should ideally have no more than 3 click deep structure with a logical internal linking strategy.

As far as traffic drops are concerned they are mainly as a result of algorithm change such as the one we had a couple of months ago – it was called the “Panda” update you can read more on it here http://www.elevatelocal.co.uk/blog/googles-post-panda-guidance-09052798

By: Carla

Carla — Thu, 05 May 2011 07:47:14 +0000

The problem with the field of SEO is that it at the stage of knowledge generation, lacks standards and in my view hardly any consensus on what works and what does not work. The evidence points to the Panda update which saw many site tumble off the SERPs. Many sites have found it difficult to recover because of the absence of measurable factors that can be point to why there was a dip in rankings. Persons often speak of generating quality content as a factor for improving rankings? , but “what is quality content”?. The truth of the matter is that SEO is too subjective and until measurable standards (agreed upon) are implemented we will forever be discussing these very same issues. JMHO

PS: please delete first post I omitted some word so I posted again, sorry!

By: Dave Jenkins

Dave Jenkins — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:51:56 +0000

This is a very interesting point. For a long time, academic institutions and their staff have put informative and accurate information onto the web. However, they have generally, never considered the SEO aspects of getting their information to the top of the search engines. I think this is a two fold problem, however.
1. The academics themselves need to take more interest in SEO 2. The search engines themsevles, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing should really rank these sites a little higher.

The recent Googe Panda Update has highlighted a couple of issues. Such as how eHow was getting ranked higher than many academic articles in relation to search terms such as “level 4 brain cancer”. Most web surfers looking for information on that would just click the top link on Google and not look at the domain/site that is providing that information.

Hopefully, things will start to change for the better, as I for one, want the academic results appearing above the non-academic ones when searching for medical related things!

By: Lorna

Lorna — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 11:35:39 +0000

Thank Julie! That looks like another invaluable resource.

By: Julie Walling

Julie Walling — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:22:39 +0000

Hi Lorna and Jenny,

This posting on Search Engine Land by George Aspland, Founder and President of eVision also provides a helpful check list to follow to audit your site on a regular basis. This type of audit can help to catch hidden issues.

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-improve-organic-search-results-with-a-simple-site-audit-63696

By: Lorna

Lorna — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:53:07 +0000

Thanks Jenny. That’s really useful to know. Does fixing the links bring your ranking back up to its previous position or do you have to work your way back up again?

By: Jenny Gray

Jenny Gray — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:19:25 +0000

For the record, I think we’ve tracked down our problem on OpenLearn, and it would appear to be a bit of an own-goal. We restructured the site following a mainstreaming of our production practices. Deep links into the site were changed (aka broken).

Google’s response to following those broken deeplinks from other’s sites to ours was to cut our ranking.

Moral of the story – even if you’re publishing your sitemap to Google, you need to put in redirects for everything if you restructure.

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Wed, 09 Feb 2011 16:54:56 +0000

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