Comments for Rob Green

Comment on Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search? by Rob Green

Rob Green — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:15:38 +0000

@Dan – I think that’s a good idea to test, and it avoids sending people to the SERP where they could get lost.

@Jonaths – From what I have seen, the personalisation of a results page only seems to favour a site that you have clicked through to from another (or the same) SERP. For what I was describing, the visit to the site wouldn’t have to be a bounced visit – but how much would a bounce from a site negatively affect a site’s ranking (in terms of Vince), against the potentially positive effect of you having visited that site (in terms of personalisation).

Now I am getting confused as well!?!

Comment on Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search? by Jonaths

Jonaths — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:14:06 +0000

I could be way off here (I normally am), but from what I’ve seen I wouldn’t say personalised search is query dependent, just visit dependent. So imagine you regularly visit http://www.example.com, and that page has content for “widgets”, but you’ve never visited http://www.example.com/widgets, and you’ve certainly never Googled “example widgets”. So the first time you do a search for “widgets”, Google artificially increases the rankings for http://www.example.com/widgets.

As you say, if someone searches for “example widget” and then bounces, then that perhaps isn’t a great signal that http://www.example.com should rank for “widgets”. But having said that, isn’t that exactly how Vince works? I’m confusing myself now.

Comment on Who are you Optimising for with Personalised Search? by Dan

Dan — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:40:16 +0000

I wonder if I’m Feeling Lucky, or Address Bar searches count?

You could put I’m feeling lucky links in all your email marketing:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=bbc+news&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&aq=f&aqi=g4g-s1g5&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=

Address bar searches seem to use gfns=1 to auto redirect to the first result:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=0&q=bbc+news

Would be worth checking out.

Comment on Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems by tiroir

tiroir — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:03:01 +0000

Hi Rob,

Don’t be confused, I bet they just came across some mess of duplicate content as can easily happen on international websites.

Comment on Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems by Dan

Dan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:45:58 +0000

Both Google and Yahoo have said having the same content on multiple ccTLDs isn’t an issue.

So for example I guess if you have only one domain hosting US, UK and Australian content that’s pretty much identical, you can get around it by geo-targeting the sub-folders appropriately.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-info-from-google-and-yahoo-tilts-the-geotargeting-balance

Comment on Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems by Rob Green

Rob Green — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:15:43 +0000

@kelvinnewman – apologies if i sound like I am calling you out specifically. I have heard this more than once, not just from you.

By using the canonical tag you ensuring that one version of a particular language content will never rank, in any engines.

The point of being a business that operates in more than one country is that you have a website that has content that can be shown to users in all of those countries. The canonical tag can solve duplicate content issues, but should be used to canonicalise two pages aimed at different markets, in my opinion.

If I operated in the UK and US (for instance), and used the canonical tag to point all the US pages to their UK equivalents, people searching in the US would never see the US pages, and the UK pages would never rank very well in the US SERPs.

Comment on Rel=Canonical Doesn’t Solve International SEO Problems by kelvinnewman

kelvinnewman — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:16:47 +0000

Like i said in our post, having unique content for each variation is always going to be the best option.

But if you have 10k pages it’s going to be difficult to scale the process of making them all unique. I think the rel canon can be a good hack or work-round, do you not think it could work in that kind of situation?

Comment on The UK SERP’s are Fine by More rubbish UK search results » malcolm coles

More rubbish UK search results » malcolm coles — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:11:46 +0000

[...] Green recently argued that the UK SERPS are fine: If you search for a query that is much more commonly used in another English speaking country, you [...]

Comment on Why is there no SEO Qualification? by Lynn Masn

Lynn Masn — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:47:24 +0000

I’m happy lol to view that some one finally posts something non-traditional about search engines.

Comment on Why is there no SEO Qualification? by Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:35:34 +0000

These initiatives have a tendency to die. I did, btw, correct some grammatical errors in my article after reading your post so you spurred me to action.

Anyway, “good post” — really. More people need to discuss this topic on both sides of the pond.