Welcome back Rankers. Last week, last Thursday in fact, was a big day here in the office. We had our highest traffic day for the website in a single day, ever. It was because of IOS5, what’s IOS5? It’s the new operating system for things like your Iphone, your Ipod touch, your Apple TV, your Ipad. The new operating was released last week, lots of excitement, I was excited, I came in here early got my Itunes, tried to download it and it said it’ll be finished in about 7 years and it was saying the same thing to everybody around the planet basically. It wasn’t able to be downloaded, it was just getting hammered. The Apple server was getting hammered because everybody wanted this piece of software. One of our writers in here, said there’s a better way to get it, you just go and do this and you pull this switch over here and you put that URL in there and I said Yeah OK. I wasn’t that interested because it sounded like too much hard work to me. Then later on in the day one of the other guys was trying it and it worked for him as well, I think it was Byron and he said “You know what, this would make a great blog post”. And all of a sudden we all just went “Oh yeah of course it would why didn’t we think of that earlier?” So Michael, the writer whose idea this was wrote the blog post. This is the page that got us about 650 views in about 36 hours, something like that. You can see that it’s only had 32 tweets, it’s only had 21 likes and it’s only had 2 +1’s if you know what I mean. I know what you’re thinking, e3 right but that’s it that’s all the backlinks it’s had that we initiated with. We didn’t put our backlinks on networks, we didn’t jump into forums and put backlinks in forums. Within 12 hours it was ranking #1 for download iOS5 or iOS5 download timeout which was the main problem. People were having problems with timeouts trying to get it. So the traffic actually came from, we got 155 hits just from Google itself being real time. We were ranking on the Saturday, so about 30 hours after the post went live we got about up as high as 5 for download iOS5 with no other backlinks except a little bit of social media here. We’re nowhere to be found for that phrase, we got to #1 for the timeout phrase but the download iOS5 phrase only got as high as 5 and then it disappeared. The only linking that we did was here. This is what you would typically expect with social media signals for Google. They’re time sensitive, they have a short life span unless people keep talking about it. If people keep talking about it and keep sharing it then Google will keep taking notice but it won’t if it’s transient in nature like this event was. People could download iOS5 after the initial rush and they didn’t have a problem with it. Incidentally, Google Webmaster Tools was showing that we had in this period 110 different queries and that’s not searches, that’s queries. It’s saying here 2,500 different searches for that particular phrase that we would have been ranking for. Admittedly some of them would have been on page 2 so we wouldn’t be getting traffic from them because no one goes to page 2. This is the spike of the traffic and what happened. This referral source here is Twitter being #1, Google being #2 which really surprised me because it was such a short timeframe and we didn’t have any backlinks so why would we rank for those things or those phrases. They were hard phrases to rank for but because we got the amount of referrals from Twitter I believe that sent a social signal to Google to say this is popular right now so you need to show it. There were only 32 tweets so all this traffic would have come from the followers of those people that tweeted and probably about 10 of those were from us. Just interesting to see what effect social signals have and that you actually can rank for something just through social signals. But if we wanted to keep that page on the front page of Google for download iOS5 we’d probably have to do more work with more pages inside the index inside our site linking back to that particular page referencing it.
The other interesting thing that happened this week which kind of made me think about that experience and what you’re up against with Google. This is an excellent interview by a guy called Eric Enge (I don’t know if that’s how you spell his name) if you go to stonetemple.com you’ll find this interview. He’s interviewing Google’s chief scientist, essentially, and basically what he’s saying is reiterating 2 things for me anyway, there’s a lot more in the article than just the 2 things. It’s a really good read, it talks about Google translate and everything. He emphasizes that Google is making up to 2 changes per day to the algorithm. This isn’t just tinkering with the edges of the website this is like to the algorithm itself and also he reiterated that speed is so important now. You’ve got to have fast pages, you’ve got to have fast delivery. In this article he brings out Google’s even going to the extend of trying to guess what it is that you are searching for and the most relevant page for that search and is trying to cache in the background for you. If you’ve got a slow website they’re going to ignore you, you’re not going to be included in that because it’s going to hold up the user experience too much. We’ve seen it time and time again, slow sites equals bad rankings.
The other interesting thing that came out this week. If you use Google Webmaster Tools regularly you may be a bit flummoxed. It’s always concerned, well not concerned me but thinking “Why are you telling me that Google? That doesn’t make a lot of sense”. It’s under this diagnostics area, under crawl errors. It says here quite clearly these are Crawl Errors and then it says here Restricted by robots.txt, it’s like well “Why are you telling me that’s an error?” I’ve gone through and restricted all these parameters – replytocom – if you’ve got a Wordpress site you’ll know why I’ve done that. But why are you telling me this is presumably an error. There was an excellent discussion that Matt Cutts was involved with last week and it was about how sites can get pushed out of the search results if they have a lot of auto generated pages from search and those sorts of things which Google doesn’t deem to be that useful to the user. One of the things that came out of the discussion is that this guy here says “I build webmaster tools so this confusion is entirely my fault”. The fault that he’s talking about is that what’s restricted by robots.txt is coming up in crawl errors. The reason that’s in there is it’s a report to show what’s being blocked and to correct it in case some of those things in robot.txt you didn’t expect to be blocked. For all of those who have asked me over the years “Why is Google saying this is restricted by robots.txt is an error?” It’s just purely putting the information in here that it’s found in robots.txt and it won’t crawl just so you know, in case there’s anything in there that shouldn’t be and you can change it.
Had a heap more to talk about this week but we’re just not going to have time. Thanks very much. See you next week. Bye.
Oh!! One more thing, Michael would kill me if I didn’t talk about this. In the site we now have a new category called Ask Jim. This is because we get a lot of queries via Twitter, obviously Facebook all of those things. If you have a question about SEO just ask on Twitter on jimboot or at stewartmedia or on the facebook page which is facebook.com/melbourneseo we’ll put answer up here or you can come and comment on any of these.
That really is it. See you next week. Bye.
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