Super duper new infographic by Tesco Compare Car Insurance. The new infographic compares a myriad of cars in terms of top speed, performance, new price and cost per mile. The amount of data on this infographic is so much that you need to click on the image to open up the lightbox.

Anyone who has worked on a financial client will appreciate the frustration SEOs commonly face. Google primarily uses the link graph as a proxy for determining what are useful sources of information, however because many of the financial companies are FSA regulated, their hands are legally tied on what content they can produce. In the instance of Mortgages for example, providers can offer the product, but can not take an advisory role. This makes it extremely difficult for websites to make their site worthy of generating authentic link citations.

Taking any client on a journey of producing content can be a difficult one, but those with some financial experience will hopefully appreciate what we have achieved even more. Sure there are some limitations with the infographic; it’s faced several amendments, and sure there are some limitations imposed on the CMS which has restricted our ability to make as shareable as we wanted, but it’s a good step forward and I’d personally appreciate any sharing that is done.

Visit Tesco Compare now, to compare Home Insurance

Yesterday I generated four iGaming players from 15 clicks. That’s great, however with the data that was available to me, I had no idea which pages on my website was sending the clicks that were driving converting clicks.

I have event tracking labels on all of my outbound affiliate links, so in Google Analytics I can drill down to some level to understand what keywords and landing pages are driving those sales, but beyond that, on my affiliate portals, I cant tell which traffic my site gets actually converts.

So I thought, wouldn’t be great if I could see which pages on my affiliate website were the clicks that converted?

1. On affiliate portals, create a different campaign URL for each of your main landing pages
2. Cloak each URL using .htaccess
3. Replace all of your outgoing links with variables
4. In a PHP file, set a URL variable using the  $_SERVER function
5. Write conditional statements that set the outgoing link based on matching the URL function
6. BOOM!

At Arena we have regular meetings with Google about organic search (it’s not with engineers, so about as insightful as you would expect), and it was in this session we vented our frustration over the removal of the monthly volumes being exported from the keyword suggestion tool. They said that they would feed this back to the product team, and sure enough, today I can see that when you export data from the keyword suggestion tool, you get monthly volumes again. No more normalising Insights data

Martin here at Arena has just been looking into how Google go about blocking the keyword in the referrer. We did a search for the term “seo” at https://www.google.com whilst logged into a Google Account. With Google Instant turned on it created the following URL…

https://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=seo&btnK=Google+Search

Wikipedia was top of the results, so we had a look at the html element containing the result, which looked like this…

You’ll see a bit a of JavaScript there bound to the ‘onmousedown’ event, which calls a function called ‘rwt(…)’. Here is the function declaration…

 
There is a lot going on in there, but essentially it redirects the browser to a new URL with the ‘q=’ parameter wiped (as indicated by the wonderful red arrow above), which then redirects to the desired page you clicked on in the search result (which is passed via the ‘url=’ parameter). So, from the search result itself (Wikipedia in this case), the referrer becomes…

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CGoQFjAA&

url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSearch_engine_optimization&ei=GpqeTqSzJsuFhQettaBN&
usg=AFQjCNHfIpCo_Ap336oSDlmNqh1STSriIg

Meaning the ‘q=’ parameter exists, but is empty! This is very bad news for our natural search scripts (and analytics packages full-stop!), the only thing we’ll be able to tell from the referrer is that they came from Google, any brand/generic keyword logic goes out of the window. The only thing we could do is isolate this traffic and track it differently, as we know it’ll be coming from ‘www.google.com/url…’ instead of ‘www.google.com/search…’.

This is one of my favourite SEO mythbusters.

It is the notion that preventing Google crawling a page in your robots.txt will prevent it appearing in organic search results. It’s rare to come across examples, but today I have, triggering me to make this blog post. In case there is any confusion, Matt Cutts explains it clearly in this Webmaster video. He also runs over the use of the meta noindex tag.

Here is the example. ESPN shop are disallowing all UAs from crawling the domain ESPNshop.co.uk.

However if you do some very strict searches, Google still shows the URL in search results.

I love quick wins. Remember if there is a page you want removed from Google organic search results, either

- Add the meta noindex to the <head> tag

- Remove the URL in Google Webmaster Tools

It looks like Google are giving users a subtle hint as to how they can access Google Plus. The arrow is animated; when you load the page the arrow is drawn.

Catching dropped domains can instantly provide you not only with a solid backlink profile decent but also referral traffic. In this blog post I provide some advice on how to catch them and bring them back to life, illustrated with my real life example.

Within a niche one of my clients works within, a satirical one page website generated hundreds of authoritative  of links (TBPR5 if that ticks your boat). I first saw it on Reddit and dreamt I had come up with the idea, as it was a rare testament to the fact content is king.

In a moment of idle web surfing, I went back to revisit the site only to see that the domain was pending deletion. For those unaware, this is generally the ‘lifecycle’ of a domain.

1. Available
2. Registered
3. Expiration (around 40 days)
4. Redemption period (around 30 days)
5. Pending deletion (around 5 days)

Until it hits pending deletion, the owner can claw back their domain. Fortunate timing for me, as it was already pending deletion so I knew it would just be a matter of time before it would become available.

At this point, I wouldn’t recommend just hanging around. Instead, use a number of backordering services, and where possible, all of them. Three noticeable companies include Pool.com, Namejet.com and snapnames.com. Generally you don’t pay unless they catch it, in which case you are quids in. If two or more people attempt to backorder it, it goes to auction. That’s what happened with me on Pool.com, and so it was set to go the highest bidder.

My auction went on for about 45 minutes, and ended up at around £230 ($400). Anyone who is familiar with paid linking will know this to be good value. Not that I was concerned, I wasn’t buying it for link equity, but just for fun and lulz.

I haven’t done this technique enough times to suggest that how I resuscitated it definitely the cause, but there is logic behind it. When I speak of resuscitating a dropped domain, I mean that TBPR returns. From this, I take Google to algorithmically valuing it in regards to page and domain authority, plus TrustRank as it did before it dropped. Here is what I did…

• Visit archives.org and return what content you can find possible
• This includes page titles and meta descriptions
• My site was ODP listed, so I matched natural search copy with that
• Don’t add any links (yet) until the domain has been brought back to life

Sure enough, come the next TBPR update, that little green box was back. The site was receiving around 3,000 visits a month from referral links and continues to grow. Think about how you can use this approach, but don’t abuse it.

1. Scrape around the Internet for sites with authoritative links that have dropped
2. Keep an eye on content that goes genuinely unintentionally viral, but may be likely to drop in the future with automatic tools
3. Harvest a list of dropping domains and pull SEOmoz data in to analyse strength to draw up a list of acquisitions
4. (My favourite) Take the referral traffic the sites was getting and use it to get eyeballs on your new content. If you’ve got a ton of referral traffic from places like Reddit, invite people to check out new content. With that, you can amplify new content you are creating and leverage more benefit.

Another awesome infographic Arena Quantum have produced for a client, congratulations to those who have worked on it.

Grow your own infographic from LoveTheGarden.com

Here at Arena Quantum we like to do multi-click attribution, providing an insight into the true value of generics. To do this, we require an ad server. As part of a mistake putting tracking on, we discovered a very unlikely ranking signal we had not considered before. We uncovered evidence to suggest that Google treats the URL you specify to track the pageview as, in the same way a canonical tag.

For example, we placed the following code on superwidgets.com/redwidgets. Note that the domain we played it on differs to the URL we wanted to track it as.

In this example, we also own cheapwidgets.com. Only when examining the inbound links being reported by Google Webmaster Tools I noticed that there was a reported to be a link from cheapwidgets.com.

I have scoured the web page on cheapwidgets.com and the only reference to cheapwidgets.com is in the tracking code. Therefore it looks like trackpageview can act like a cross domain canonical. Key takeaway for this? Double check your tracking code to make sure you aren’t leaking any link juice.