To test this, we took a domain with no history (never registered, no backlinks) and made a page with 250 links on it. Those links refer to pages with also 250 on it (and so on…). The linktext and URL’s were numbered from 1 till 250, In the same order as they appeared in the source code. We submitted the URL via “addurl” and waited.

On the first visit of Googlebot it only visited the root page (http://example.com/). After a few hours it returned and visited all the 250 pages it found on the root page. At first it seemed that Google was dividing all the links on the pages into three blocks:

• Block1: links 1 till 9
• Block2: links 10 till 99
• Block3: links 100 till 250

If Googlebot visits a page there is a good chance that it will follow links from one or more of the blocks. The links are crawled in a batch per block in a random order. The chances that block 1 is crawled is three times greater then block 2 and even 6 times greater then block 3. In block 3 there are two links which have a slightly higher chance to be crawled: link /100/ and /200/.

With only the results of this test it is to early to conclude that Google always divides a page into these blocks. It is possible that Google bases its blocks on the length of the link text, on the length of a URL, on the position of the link etcetera. To exclude al the other possibilities we have set up some other tests.

The test which gave us the decisive answer was a test with the length of URL’s in random order on a page. Those links linked to similar pages with also links with various lengths in random order (etcetera). Googlebot seems to crawl links in order of length. A good thing to know if you want to do some advanced site structure sculpting.

Takeaways

With these insights choosing the length of your URL’s becomes more important. It is a good way to influence Googlebot so you should choose the length of each URL wisely. Google crawls short URL’s before it crawls the longer URL’s. It doesn’t help to make all your URL’s short. If they all have an equal length they will get crawled at random. Always consider the need for indexation and the need to be crawled if you choose your URL.

So it’s good to take it into account when you are designing your site structure. Probably it is even more important for linkbuilding. We have not tested it yet, but there is a good chance Google crawls external links the same way. This would mean that if your URL is on a page with hundreds of other links, you may increase your crawl chance if you have the shortest URL.

note: This insight is part of a thesis, more to come soon. (link will be placed here.)

Google’s crawl order is a post from: Onetomarket

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SEO ranking factors 2010, a.o. presented by Rand Fishkin SEOmoz

Recently a patent has been granted to Google about the reasonable surfer model. Rand Fishkin explained this patent and what it meant for SEO. This session was also about the correlation between titles, headings and alt attributes within a website based on facts done by research of SEOmoz.

Linkbuilding outside of the box

This session was about linkbuilding. A lot of interesting tools were mentioned including Majestic SEO, TagCrowd and the recently launched InfluenceFinder. We have found the session about ‘how to get links from university and government websites’ particularly interesting – creative ways to get real valuable authoritative links.

Top Ten Customized Search Analytics reports

Most important thing about this session is that Web Analytics does not exist of just generating reports. It is much more than this and requires the right interpretation of the data. Good reports are necessary for interpretation and analysis of the data and some examples were shown during this session.
Important part of this track was the Visitor Journey of Customer Journey. Tracking First click visits and beyond. Something also in coherence with conversion attribution

Will Critchlow (Distilled Ltd.) his presentation is available on scribd.

The Art of Measuring Local & Mobile Search results.

Martijn Beijk, SEO Consultant and Local Search specialist at Onetomarket was a speaker at SMX Advanced London in the session ‘The Art of Measuring Local & Mobile Search Results’ together with Mike Belasco (seOverflow) and Christine Churchill (Keyrelevance).
This session was about gaining insight and visibility into both online and offline conversions from local and mobile search results. Apart from the implementation of analytics on results from Google Places the presentation of Martijn Beijk also mentioned ways to gain more insight in offline sales by using in-store surveys, coupons, etc. Important part of the presentation was an attribution model. One that could fit ‘Latent Offline Conversions’. The visitor that is orientating on your website but might be buying the product offline, in your store. Attached you will find Martijn’s Presentation with some take aways.

Summary of SMX Advanced London 2010 is a post from: Onetomarket

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The SearchWiki enables people to vote a single search result up or down on the search result page, or actually remove it within your personalized results. It also gives you the possibility to add a personal, public note in which you say something about the result of website. Google states that this data won’t be used in the ranking algorithm. Since we all know Google is able to do very smart things with data, this eventually will be used in their ranking algorithm of course.

A lot of rumors are floating around, about this being an SEO killer, or this being the end of SEO as we know it. Internet is changing, Google is changing, and society in general is changing. This is happening rapidly and the result of it is a more social, a more semantic and better user experience. Shift happens! And this is a good thing. Since we like to keep you ahead of your competition we’ve changed the basics of our optimization advice a while ago.

Onetomarket walks the right path of the force since 2004. We’ve successfully transformed from a company with smart technical tricks to a company that helps you with you on line business and visibility with a solid foundation in SEO and SEA. Since we’ve seen this coming a long time ago we already chose to help our clients creating valuable and likeable content. This content advice always had the customers of our clients in mind at first. Ergo, good content and social media in general has been on our agenda a long time.

We, as Onetomarket see this as a great opportunity for Google to weed out even more ‘bad’ websites and improve the user experience with search. This will also enlarge our role which we have for our clients, by taking care of even better content and advising them how to think, work and actually do the job for best user experience. We know it’s not the easiest route to take, but by being critical and user focused you will be prepared for the future.

By only using technical tricks like ‘landing pages’ your website probably shouldn’t rank that high. On site optimization is still getting more important everyday. Al your pages should have a purpose and this purpose should be measured and even optimized. Therefore our services like Web analytics, on site SEO, Blended Search and conversion optimization.

The Searchwiki option from Google brings our clients, their customers and Onetomarket closer together and therefore we fully embrace the SearchWiki functionality Google officially launched as of today.

Google’s SearchWiki and Onetomarket’s point of view is a post from: Onetomarket

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The target group of the book are marketers with a basic knowledge of on line. Therefore, we also give information about the role of SEO within the on line marketing mix. A technical person also finds very interesting stuff within the book, especially in the chapters about client side and server side coding.

The content of the book is divided into twelve chapters:

1. What is SEO?
2. How do people use search engines?
3. Determining keywords
4. Sitestructures
5. Content
6. Client side
7. Server side
8. Link building
9. Link building techniques
10. Web analytics
11. Selecting an SEO partner
12. SEO within the (on line) marketing mix

The book is available under ISBN number 9789059403680 and consists of 224 pages. We’re very proud of it and we’ll keep you posted with info about the English version.

Onetomarket writes book on SEO is a post from: Onetomarket

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