September 2006 Newsletter

Google as you've never seen it before

Came across this fabulous "Heat Map" of a Google results page:

The Heat Map tracks eye movements (brighter colours: more eye contact) and mouse clicks (the crosses) of several hundred users.

My first reactions to the Heat Map were:

• No surprise to see that it's good to be No 1.
• Encouraging to see that many people are looking past the first couple of results, with many scrolling all the way down the page to result No 10.
• Very few people are looking at the paid ads on the right of the page - even though they are presented "above the fold" (the portion of the screen that's visible when the page first loads).

Here's a great quote from one of the authors of the study, Enquiro's Gord Hotchkiss:

"We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link. The past few studies we've done, this one included, shows that there's a huge importance placed on where the eyeballs end up on the page. Clicks happen pretty quickly. It just shows that search marketing is a real estate game. It's all about location, location, location."

Could we help you to improve the organic search position of your website? Get in touch!

Multiple Home Pages and Link Dilution

You may remember from the last edition that we talked about websites with multiple home pages.

This time I want to talk about why this is "a bad thing."

The Power of Incoming Links

As you may know, one of the most powerful influences on the search ranking of a web page is the number and quality of its incoming links. (Incoming links are links from an external website to a particular page.)

Consider the following web pages:

• Web Page 1 has just one incoming link.
• Web Page 2 has two incoming links will therefore rank better in search results than Web Page 1.

The quantity of incoming links is one factor, but search engines are more and more concerned with the quality of each link. Thus:

• Web Page 3 has two incoming links, but one of the links is from a website that the search engines consider to be important. As a result, Web Page 3 is likely to rank better in search results than Web Page 2.

What does this have to do with multiple Home Pages?

To understand the connection, consider two similar websites. Website 1 has one Home Page, and Website 2 has two (identical) Home Pages.

Let's now assume that each website has two incoming links to its Home Page:

• The Home Page of Website 1 benefits from two incoming links.
• Although Website 2 also has two incoming links, they are shared between its two Home Pages. Each Home Page receives the benefit of just one incoming link.

Put another way, Website 2 has diluted the impact of its incoming links.

Here's the rub:

• The development work that went into each website was the same
• The effort that went into garnering incoming links was the same
• But Website 1 will achieve a higher search engine rank
• As a result, Website 1 is likely to receive much more traffic than Website 2

Duplicate Websites

Multiple Home Pages are not the only form of content duplication. It's not uncommon to find .co.uk and .com versions of the same website.

• The web page on www.hi-rank.co.uk benefits from two incoming links.
• The two links are shared between the two indentical web pages on www.lo-rank.co.uk and www.lo-rank.com: each receives the benefit of just one incoming link.
• www.hi-rank.co.uk will achieve a higher search ranking than either of the other websites.

Conclusion

Whenever you duplicate content, you run the risk of diluting the effect of your incoming links.

All the intended benefits of multiple websites and pages can be achieved without content duplication. If we can help you to "de-duplicate" your website, please get in touch.