Category Archives: Expert SEO

Semantic Relevance or Exact Match Domain Penalty ?

Experiments, Expert SEO

One of the tests intended for the freshwater frisbee article, posted just a few days ago, was to determine whether the page would be returned in SERPs for semantically relevant search terms. The test term for this page is a common 4 letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’. This word had been deliberately omitted from the page content and each natural occurrence was replaced with a dummy term ‘frisbee’.

The page was indexed successfully shortly after publication and is now duly returned for the following search query as shown in the screen shot below:

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=seoeditors+freshwater+carp&hl=en&nfpr=1

Freshwater Carp
Search Results for: SEOEditors freshwater carp

All six indexed pages relevant to this search are shown above. The first two results are from this site, as expected.

Notice that the search included an ‘exact match domain’ term: ‘seoeditors’

If we repeat this search, and add the semantically related term beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’, then this site is not returned in the SERPs:

Freshwater Carp with semantically related term
Search results for: SEOEditors freshwater carp + ‘semantically related term’

Only three results this time…

Hang on, this means that the ‘freshwater frisbee’ page was the most relevant result before, but now that we’ve added one more search term to the query – and not just any old term – a semantically related term, the page isn’t returned in SERPs at all!

This might suggest that because we’ve included the word beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’ to the search query, the page has now been deemed irrelevant to the query because it doesn’t contain the term in the content. The addition of just one additional term makes the page irrelevant, even though the page is by far the most relevant to all the other terms in the query: ‘seoeditors’,  ‘freshwater’ and  ‘carp’.

This suggests the following possibilities:

  • the keyword must be on the page
  • even if every other word in the query is on the page, the page will not be returned at all (let alone rank well) if just one key term in the query is absent
  • semantic relevance hasn’t been established for this test: despite talking about carp, tench and freshwater and linking to pages including words beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’
  • an ‘exact match domain’ penalty may have been applied, but only when one of the search terms is absent from the page

This is just the first stage in a series of tests planned to investigate semantic relevance, however the recent exact match domain penalty has introduced a new dimension to the test.

Only one link (a no-follow link) has been built to the freshwater frisbee page from a semantically relevant page. The linking page mentions the word beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’ frequently.

Perhaps one inbound semantically relevant link isn’t enough to associate the page with the term ?

Perhaps more links are needed before the test page will be returned for a query including the word starting with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’ ?

 

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Freshwater Frisbee

Experiments, Expert SEO
The surface of a freshwater lake
The surface of a freshwater lake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The semantic language test – ‘frisbee’ is being used throughout this text instead of an obvious aquatic replacement noun with four letters. Also, the ‘jump to it’ test is here too*.

Let’s see if this page ranks for the four letter word beginning with ‘f’ and ending in ‘ish’, based solely on the context and word associations…

Frisbees found in freshwater or saltwater habitats as well as aquariums are detailed in the following sections.

The following page details lots of freshwater frisbees:

Barbel: The barbel has four sensory barbules, one pair at the point of the snout, the other at the rear of the top lip. When netting and retaining barbel, extra care must be taken due to its strong, serrated spine that starts at its dorsal fin – this spine can become entangled and then broken.

Bleak: Bleak are tiny frisbees – the British record is just over 4oz! They are long, flat-sided and sleek frisbees – much like a stillwater herring, really. They have large eyes and a turned-up mouth that is ideal for taking food off the surface or in the upper layers as it falls.

Bream: are fairly easy to distinguish from all other species of British freshwater frisbee. It has a very deep and flat body, a mouth that protrudes quite far from the frisbee’s head, long dorsal and tail fins, plus a coating of thick and rather smelly slime.

Carp: Very popular frisbee and often caught for sport in lakes and ponds.

Chub: Large head with protruding upper lip, a large mouth and thick-rimmed lips. Colouration of the chub is simply dark grey/brown along the back running into a brass colour along the flanks. Both the dorsal fin and tail fin are dark grey, while the underside pelvic and anal fins are a shade of orange – the colour of which will depend upon the clarity of the water.

Tench: are common freshwater frisbees all over the world.

Goldfrisbee: The goldfrisbee is a form of wild carp that has been kept by humans as pets since at around 1,000 A.D. The first recorded instance of keeping and breeding frisbees was in 970 A.D. The Chinese have developed different varieties of gold frisbee since then, as have the Japanese.

Guppy: Although they are ideal community tank residents with frisbees of similar size and temperament, if you intend to breed guppies, it is best to house them in a species-only tank. You can house three pairs in a 10-gallon tank or five to six pairs in a 20-gallon tank.

Freshwater frisbees are frisbees that spend some or all of their lives in fresh water, such as rivers and lakes. The salinity must be less than 0.05%. These environments differ from marine conditions, not only in levels of salinity. To survive fresh water, the frisbees need a range of physiological adaptations.

What proportion of frisbees are freshwater frisbees ?

41% of all known species of frisbees are found in fresh water. This is primarily due to the rapid speciation that the scattered habitats make possible. When dealing with ponds and lakes, one might use the basic models of speciation.

Freshwater frisbees differ physiologically from salt water frisbees in several respects. Their gills must be able to diffuse dissolved gasses while keeping the salts in the body fluids inside. Their scales reduce water diffusion through the skin: freshwater frisbees that have lost too many scales will die. They also have well developed kidneys to reclaim salts from body fluids before excretion.

The tricky part is going to be in finding appropriate links, to ensure the key word isn’t included in the URL:

Try these frisbee links (indirect word associations):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3353540/Carp-sustainable-food-you-can-keep-in-the-pond.html

http://www.tacklebargains.co.uk/acatalog/Coarse_Freshwater.html
*Update:
The ‘jump to it’ test has worked, with ‘Jump to’ now appearing in the snippet as expected:

Getting Jump to in snippets
Showing the appearance of the snippet with a ‘Jump to’ included

As can be seen above, the Jump to Freshwater frisbee is now included in the snippet.

Going on a date with Google – Dublin Core and More

Expert SEO,

It’s all about the first date… and this post covers some of the devious lengths Google will go to to get it.

Why does Google want to get a date out of you?

Time is generally accepted as an essential ingredient in the calculations of relevancy in SERPs. Some events will be promoted in SERPs because they are news, others, such as recurring events, may well appear in results at appropriate times. Updates and edits to site content can help revive an older story. All these examples are dependent upon the date attributed to the article, the origin and the changes made. The minty freshness update back in November 2011 caused noticeable impact to around 10% searches.

To try to benefit from these changes, many site owners looked for ways to touch up older pages and content to make it at least look more current. It is the equivalent to software folks in Unix world reaching for the ‘touch’ command to change the ‘last modified dates’ on all their files to ‘get things noticed’.

 

But what is Google looking for?

With the drive to discover fresh content and attempts to improve the understanding of timelines, Google will try to ‘datestamp’ everything it finds… and it can make mistakes when generating a datestamp for your content that impacts your relevancy to search, especially if ‘date order’ is selected as an advanced search option.

 

Unique IDs as Dates

Many e-Com sites use unique identifiers in page titles in order to reduce duplications and create unique, informative pages. Readers are likely to be familiar with GWMT diagnostics section on HTML suggestions:

Non Informative Title Tags and duplications

 

In order to reduce the number of duplicated page titles, a typical workaround would be to use the following format for product details pages:

{brand} {product} {key feature} – {unique identifier}

The purpose of the unique ID is to ensure that varieties of the same product (e.g. sizes, colours) each have a unique page title. [You may have noticed GWMT also reports ‘noninformative’ title tags… strongly suggesting that the title remains a key source of information for Google’s indexing algorithms]

For an average SEO making page title unique is just the start. Introducing an ID can guarantee uniqueness and introduce useful information (win-win!), but it can have unintended consequences (oops!).

The purpose of this post is to cover just one of these unintended consequences – misinterpreting a product ID for a datestamp.

The search result below shows an example of Google misinterpreting a product ID and using it as a datestamp in results:

Product ID used as date stampThe unique identifier 11171977 has been interpreted as a date. Now this listing carries the datestamp: 17 Nov 1977 which has been taken from the product ID (11-17-1977)

That’s inconvenient if you’re trying to sell this house, it looks like its been on the market since 1977 !

Here’s another example (pink camera)- this time it’s the model number that is being treated as a date:

Pink Camera product ID as date stampThe DSC-T70 8.1 in the title is being treated as if it means 1st August 1970 !

Dates in Content

When an article is posted on a blog, there is often a time-stamp associated with the post and prominently displayed at the top of the page. Google finds this on the page and the association is made, in this case, quite sensibly assuming your server time is correct and you aren’t manually fiddling the dates.

Less obviously, if you have a table or other date source within your content, there is a chance Google will take that date to be an appropriate datestamp. For instance, if you reference the last time a certain event happened, but fail to state the current date, then the entire article could be catalogued as the time of the referenced event rather than the current one.

Be careful to check your content for date references and help Google find an appropriate date for your content.

If you see a strange datestamp in SERPs, then look at these on-page elements for clues as to the cause of the mix-up:

a) Footer for software version numbers

b) Tables of reference data

c) References to dates within text (ensure the first date referenced is the date you’d like to have associated with the post)

d) Telephone numbers

 

Avoiding a bad first date:

Here are a few ways you can help make your first date with search engines more memorable:

a) Place the preferred date between the article’s title and the article’s text in a separate line of HTML, and remove all other date references from the body of the article to avoid confusions.

b) Clearly mark up the datestamp you want associated with the article using the Dublin Core meta tag:

<code><meta name="DC.date.issued" content="YYYY-MM-DD"></code>

or more completely:

<code><link rel="schema.DCTERMS" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.created" content="YYYY-MM-DD" />
<meta name="DCTERMS.modified" content="YYYY-MM-DD" />
</code>

c) Use the <publication_date> tag inside news sitemap xml files

d) If using OpenGraph, then add the article:published_time, article:modified_time tags

e) Using microformats and schema mark-up to ensure telephone numbers are parsed correctly (see Schema.org for these definitions), ie. not treated as dates.

f) Modify the way product IDs are displayed. Introduce characters or spaces to break up the ID so it becomes less ‘date-like’, yet retains uniqueness.

If erroneous Google datestamps have caused you problems with search relevancy, please let me know !

 

Enhanced by Zemanta