SEO Starts Here
In last week’s post I discussed how I’m putting together an online SEO Course. One of the elements I mentioned was looking at webmaster tools and the index. Today I take a look at a FMCG brand’s webmaster tools and the Google index. It’s clear that I’m the only one looking at it. Their online marketers are certainly not. If they were they’d understand why they are not ranking for their own brand! I don’t care how difficult a phrase is to rank, if it’s your brand Google WANTS to rank you on page one. If you’re not, there is a problem with your site not Google.
A Stable Site Is Good SEO
Take a look at this graph. This is bad. It represents the number of pages on a site that Google crawls over time.
Over the last 12 months the amount of pages this site has had in the Google index has jumped all around the place. as low as 2000 as high as 10,000. If you were doing a major redesign you may see this rise or drop sharply once depending on how the number of pages changed on your site. Jumping around like the one above is bad though for a number of reasons. Pages that may have had ranking could have disappeared or perhaps Google is crawling pages you don’t want it to. Think of your site as a destination that Google is deciding whether or not to send it’s users to. If it looks like your site is a big ball of confusing nonsense, Google aint sending its users to you. To find this graph for your own site go into Google webmaster tools and click on Google Index – Index Status.
SEO Is An Ecosystem
I love that. I stole it from Ophelie Lechat of Flippa.com when she casually mentioned it to me at the PBEVENT . The relationship of your pages to one another affects their authority for a given phrase. Their hierarchy, how they link to each other and depth of content across the site. If you have pages continually changing in the index or lots of junk pages in the index it will adversely affect this ecosystem. In the case of the above site I had a look at the 404 errors.
Aaaargh! This site has more 404 errors than pages!! When you see an index graph all over the place you will usually see a lot of errors as well. What’s worse Google thinks that most of these errors are from links within the site. Google says
“Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google” See that qualifier at the start, “Generally”. There are two types of 404s, ones that Google finds from other sites linking to nonexistent page on yours and erroneous links off your site. In this case it’s the latter and that WILL affect your ranking. You can’t control other sites linking to you badly but you can control links within your own site. In the case above, pages have been deleted or moved and no one told Google. As Google had previously crawled all these pages, it goes looking for them again and can’t find them. Why would Google send its users to a site full of busted links?
This company does not deserve it’s website!
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
