There is a hundred and one things that I would like to blog about but I’ve been very busy recently. Even my affiliate marketing is on the back burner. I’ve got a killer domain that needs to launch in the first two weeks of November but been entirely focused on work efforts. Past two weeks been working a lot on the Tesco Credit Card page. Later in the year I have a week off when I’ll be updating this more.

Many webmasters would agree that a 302 does not pass PageRank. However a recent blogpost at Search Engine Land and our own experiences at Arena Quantum may suggest otherwise. A 302 is used for a temporary redirect, and accordingly on paper should not pass PageRank. However what if the 302 redirect is in place for over two years? Would Google ignore the temporary classification of the redirect and change it to permanent? Our experience would indicate so. Consider the following example:

For whatever reason, when a high street brand created its website, it was decided that when a request for the root URL was made, it would redirect and serve content from two subfolders deep, with each subfolder containing relevant keywords (facepalm). This redirect would be done with a 302, as seen below:

302 redirect / www.example.com/widgets/blue/index.php

Overlooking the fact content of the homepage should be served without redirects, (constraints imposed), it was our recommendation that this redirect should be changed to a 301 permanent. In theory, all links pointing to www.example.com would make it the strongest page on the site, but the link equity would not pass to the page that served the content, thus creating a PageRank dam.  This theory is consistent with the experience of Tedster who stated he had worked with several large sites where “the PageRank stayed on the domain root for all of them”. The root domain for our client had 618 different domains pointing to it, from links from major publications including The Guardian. Potentially, this could be big.

Imagine our excitement. We’d identified the required change of redirect, got it implemented and waited for the ‘dam of PageRank’ to be unleashed, making the strength of deeper pages much stronger. Alas not. It’s been three months now and we have seen no impact. With consideration to the fact that the 302 had been in place for several years, it supports the theory that possibly after a given period of time, Google will start treating the 302 redirect as if it was a 301. It’s no surprise that this client had a number of other old 302 redirects for deeper pages. We made these 301 redirects too with no identifiable impact.

Do longstanding 302 redirects start to flow PageRank? It’s something that needs considering. Perhaps treating aged 302 redirects as permanent improves the quality of the link graph as a reference for Google to counter improper use of redirects.

This spreadsheet will allow you to quickly profile your competitor backlinks and identify what keywords they are likely to be targeting.

Simply copy and paste Open Site Explorer data into this spreadsheet, refresh the pivot table and you’ll see the top ten anchor texts used to link to a given website. In addition, a graph visually represents the distribution of anchor text. This graph will give some initial indicators on how natural the link profile of the website is. Download the link profile spreadsheet for free. Further instructions on how to use spreadsheet can be found below.

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A sad day in the SEO community as Google removes the previous interface for the Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool. It’s moments like this when we realise that wars and poverty aren’t important.

I use a range of tools on a daily basis including SEOmoz and Raven but neither are great for tracking rankings. SEOmoz has limits and can be expensive if you want track hundreds of keywords. The data output of Raven is pretty poor, and the interface isn’t so slick. Step in Advanced Web Ranking.

I work agency side in Central London. I have a lot of accounts and one aspect of agency side SEO is that there is a lot of reporting involved. Transparency is key and we report rankings progress across all keywords we optimise for. Raven is ok but I needed a tool that would run in the background, and with a few clicks I could export the data into an Excel pivot table and send over to the client. That’s exactly what Advanced Web Ranking allows me to do.

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Would have thought that live.com would have served a HTTP status code that informed Google Bot to not cache.

I’ve been working on affiliate site, online betting offers. It compiles free bets for users. It’s based on WordPress and I started off with a pretty simple theme and over the weeks have been modifying here and there until it looks rather unique. I’ve put together some nice CTAs that will hopefully boost conversion. Haven’t really started to link build for it yet, as I’m so busy with work at the moment. It’s a long term project but hoping to get some traffic for the 2010 World Cup that kicks off this week.

If it has, it doesn’t lie in the ability to spell. Photo taken from the pub last night.

This week I’ve given thought as to how Google determines domain age. I recently picked up a dropped domain that has previously been registered since 2007. I was feeling quite chuffed with picking up an aged domain, but then I give it some thought as to how Google would determine the age of a domain and perhaps my acquisition wasn’t as good as it first seems.

Market Samurai, a SEO tool has a feature entitled ‘SEO competition’. It essentially collects data for a variety of on page and off page factors allowing one to quickly assess how easy it is to target a niche. One of the factors it collects data for is domain age. Market Samurai uses the earliest record in archive.org to suggest how old a domain is.

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I’ve been working on one client’s account and encountered some consequence of the operations of the previous SEO agency. The SEO agency in question has actually won awards, which comes as a great surprise since the quality of the SEO and the value generated for the client is questionable. Occasionally I get contacted by other SEO companies proposing the outsourcing of work, but all too often it’s the same old story; poor SEO practices. Therefore I thought I’d take some time to compile some of the most common characteristics of poor SEO agencies.

1) They do blackhat SEO
Some of the other reasons will comprise of the dysfunctions of practicing blackhat SEO, however it warrants a separate factor. There is a time and a place for blackhat SEO but on client accounts isn’t one of them. With the size of the accounts I work on, there are various stakeholder group interests to be taken into consideration, the risks of a strategy featuring blackhat far, far outweigh the advantages. The consequences for being penalised with a major client is that people could lose their jobs, and investors could lose capital. These are not risks that can be taken, and so it’s essential that strategies should be white hat.

2) … and they do it badly

Not only do they do blackhat, they do it badly. Your inbound link portfolio consists of a large proportion of inbound links placed with no context, with the perfect anchor text on PR loaded, low domain authority pages. They make no regard to maintaining an organic looking anchor text distribution, nor a natural PR distribution of links. Probably all of your key phrase targeted links appear only on pages PR3 and above, sending alarm bells to Google.

You’ll likely to have a range of links on penalised pages too, lowering your domain authority and link reputation.

3) They will turn off all your links when you switch agency
Unless you plan to be with your SEO agency for the rest of time, one day you won’t renew your contract and when that day comes, your SEO agency will stop paying for all the links that have been giving your rankings. When that day comes, you’ll lose your rankings, your links and you will be back to square one. Not at any point are you generating any sustainable competitive advantage. Indeed, with consideration to this you’ll only building up your barriers to switching supplier which in turn makes you more dependable and places you in a worse position to negotiate new terms.

4) They target vanity terms with no consideration to ROI
It’s common for management to place great pleasure on vanity terms, and sometimes as an agency you have to fullfill this. However it’s the responsibility of the SEO agency to convey the importance of leading a ROI focused campaign that delivers returns, not boasting material for management. SEO isn’t just about attaining high position in Google, but high positions that deliver returns on investment. 80% of traffic can come from the long tail, and ignoring this can be a huge mistake too. I’d always recommend tracking search traffic through to sales, so you can see which keywords are delivering you sales, and accordingly target these.

5) They underestimate good on page optimisation
It’s true that the Google algorithm heavily values inbound links in determining rankings, but on page optimisation should not be neglected. As previously stated, 80% of traffic is generally derived from the long tail, and accordingly on page retains great importance. Getting a good, indexable website is crucial, and an approach to content creation that gives consideration to semantics allows your to far better target the long tail.

No doubt I’ll continue to keep coming up with ideas why your SEO agency sucks, but this list will do for now. If you’re looking for a SEO agency, make sure you are satisfied with these points when you pick one.