Find50-Marketing » webmaster_tools

reducing your Google rankings ?

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:54:17 +0000

Recently the UK government announced that over 1000 government web sites have been closed and another 615 are scheduled to close. A lot of these sites had a close relationship with the charity sector and no doubt had backlinks to various charity sector sites. It is unlikely that any of the closed sites sites have any permanent redirects (301`s) in place. This means that anyone who visits them will get a `Site Not Found ` message. At best visitors will be redirected to another government web site. Either way all the referral traffic (see Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Referring Sites ) and the google ranking that they passed to your site via these links will be lost. This will have a real impact on traffic to many charity sites as Google gives great weight to .gov links when deciding who to rank for a particular search query.

What to do ? Go to your Webmaster Tools account and look in Your site on the web > Links to your site. Download these links to Excel and find the ones with .gov extensions. Then very politely contact the organisation and ask them to put a 301 redirect on the pages that you appeared on. Then find the new government site ( or indeed any government site) that deals with your charity or condition and ask them for a backlink to you site.

Webmaster Tools Search Query data and ranking

admin — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:14:35 +0000

Google have again updated the search query data that they are providing in Webmaster Tools. The data can be found in WMT under the tab `Your Site on the Web`> `Top Search Queries`. ( The posting below titled `Webmaster Tools data for Marketing` gives more info on WMT layout) . This update shows many more Search Queries ( 3/7,000 in some of my accounts) with a Google Analytics style graph, a Search Box to find a specific Query term plus date menus to isolate data for a specific period. eg How did we rank do for a specific keyword/phrase for that race/event/cause last week or month ? However the most interesting thing, which is only briefly mentioned in the Google blog posting, is the `% Clickthrough` column. Some bloggers have mentioned that Google is looking to add more weight in the search results algorithm to those pages that are popular with users. This would be consistent with the approach used in Google AdWords where a discount in applied to the cost of each Click for those keywords that have a high Quality Score and hence CTR. ( It is worth noting that the Impression and Click data shown in WMT do not match the data you will find in your Google Analytics account. My analysis shows that the number of clicks shown in GA is consistently higher than the WMT by around 20 %. )

So what to do: 1. Look at the list of Queries and see if there are any that you would like a page on your site to rank higher for. If you see a suitable Query with a high number of Impressions take a closer look. If your highest ranked page for that term is below Position 1 or 2, and consequently getting few Clicks, you should look to optimise that page for this Query. To do that look at on-page factors, particularly the Page Title, then look to get back links, ideally from external sites, with the Query as the anchor text.

2. Check the snippet which appears in the Google SERPS results for the top terms that you want to be found for. Does the snippet ( and the Page Title) accurately describe what you are offering and if so does it encourage visitors to your page ?

Webmaster Tools data for marketing

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:11:56 +0000

Google recently updated Webmaster Tools making it easiser for marketing and business types to find great data to improve site performance. The good stuff is under the tab Your site on the web. Top Search Queries tells you the number of times your site appeared in Google search results ranked in order plus the percentage of those top queries represented by each query. So to begin with you are looking for the larger percentages. Next, to the right of the query term, is the Position that your highest ranked page appeared for that query. So if you are ranked low for a query term that has a large percentage of impressions that represents a good opportunity for more traffic for that term if you can get a better ranking.

Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries

Further to the right is the section headed Clickthrough. Here you can see similar data but now for those who clicked through to your site. First look at the search query terms. Are there any here that you did not expect ? If you are gettings clicks from a term that you do not rank highly for and want more of that traffic then get working on that. Note that you can select the specific date range and region that you are particularly interested in.

Further down Your Site on the web is the Keywords menu. This shows ” the most common keywords Google found when it crawling your site “. This is great data when planning the next steps for your site.