Welcome back Rankers. What an eventful and sad week with the loss of Steve Jobs. That guy, like most of us in this industry, had a huge impact on my business over the last 3 years. We switched the whole business across to Mac in 2008, I now have an Ipad, an Iphone, an Apple TV and I don’t know what I’d do without the devices. I bought an Ipod touch when they first came out just to get an idea of what the design was all about and I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe we could go from something like the Nokia or this device here, it’s the world’s first MP3 player, holds a massive 8 songs to what we have today. What a guy! As weird as it is to me, I was actually working with John Scully, the guy who sacked Steve Jobs from Apple when OS10 was coming out. So Steve Jobs would have been back at Apple and John Scully would have been out and when I say OS10 based on a Unix operating environment, intel chips, an operating system for the masses that just works beautifully and it still does. So, sadly missed.
This week I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about online reputation management. Well, not so much online reputation management but the sorts of things people will end up searching for based on what they’ve heard from their friends. Also I’m incorporating into this the merging, if you like, of part of webmaster tools into Google Analytics which happened last week. Basically what Google has done is moved the part of Google Webmaster Tools which is under Search Queries. You will now find this and you’ve got to hook it up, connect it and plug it in, I’ll show where you do that. If you go into Traffic Sources in Google Analytics then Search Engine Optimization then Queries and then you’ll get that information within your analytics environment. It really isn’t that much different it’s just that it’s just one interface to access this information because your impression information is really important. A lot of people will be used to impression information if you’ve been running Adwords campaigns. Impressions, basically is the amount of times someone types a phrase in. So for instance, this is the phrase “gasp fail” we were trying to rank for and we can see here it got 250 impressions. That means 250 people have typed it in since the 26th of Sept to the 10th of Oct. in Australia and of those 250 50 people have clicked on our link which on average ranked about 3.7. So it went to #1 than dropped back to #2, it started at #4 over this period of time, that’s where the average comes from. So that gives us a click through rate of 18%. If you’re used to Adwords you’d be used to these sorts of calculations. But what’s important in this situation is – look at this one here – gasp Melbourne, we weren’t trying to rank for that. Incidentally there’s 76 phrases here that we’ve ended up ranking for with one article. So when people tell you they’ll have a primary phrase, a secondary phrase and a tertiary phrase it’s like well sure it’s good to know which phrases are the most popular or less popular as you go down the track but seriously if you write a good piece of content using the keywords that your customers use you will rank for hundreds of phrases. This is one article, one page and we’ve got 76 different versions of the word gasp. You’ll see here gasp Melbourne, this is what’s interesting, this is why you need this data, 500 impressions but only 30 clicks. So only a click through rate of 5.4% but look at the average position, 7.6. So it’s right down towards the bottom of the page, it’s still getting a 5% click through rate but there’s 500 impressions. Imagine what would happen if we got that to #1, I’m not going to try because seriously what am I going to do with that traffic right. This is how you would use your impressions information in Google Webmaster Tools. Bring it into analytics, you’ll love it. It’s great. Just remember, the things your missing out on if you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools setup are to me the most important tools for SEO. This is where I start, there’s a lot of other tools out there but Google Webmaster Tools is it. I was going to say something else but it wouldn’t have been family friendly. The most important ones for me are always under Diagnostics, that’s where I would start when I go to analyze a site, so get that.
The other story this week in online reputation management is that Google was sued by a bloke called Jamie McIntyre who was trying to get the details of a site called jamiemcintyreexposed.com. Now you might think why would you sue Google to get the details of a third party site. Well, the reason is a convoluted one. If you do a Who Is look up on jamiemcintyreexposed.com you will see that it’s all domains by proxy, which basically means it’s a private registration and they’re hiding their details. They don’t want anyone to find out who they are or they just want some privacy. Turns out that this site has been calling Jamie McIntyre a “thieving scumbag” amongst other things as reported in Newslimited.com. So what they’ve done is they’ve seen at some point, this site has had Google AdSense on it. Now, you would question the intelligence of someone who sets up a site purely to attack a third person and then put AdSense on it. Anyway, Jamie McIntyre’s lawyers have gone to the courts saying “Google, give us the details of this guy who you have an advertising relationship with”. The court said “Yeah you got to do it”. So they have got 28 days to do it. Presumably they are looking for information like this which is our own account information for Google AdSense which is when you have Adwords on your own site. It give you the payee name, you know, who the cheque gets made out to, Address all that sort of stuff. They’ve got 28 days to hand over that information. There’s no AdSense on that site now but when did they get rid of the AdSense, did they close that account, how much data has Google got on hand now anyway. You’ll see here there’s already been some legal responses to some of the search results. If you were to type in “Jamie mcintyre exposed” now, you will see that the pages that were ranking, well you won’t see them because they’ve been removed but there were pages ranking apparently that were the most damaging. It looks like they have now been removed in response to a legal request. It’s not clear at the moment whether that’s Jamie McIntyre’s lawyers but you would think that’s the logical people who would’ve made that legal request. The story in News Ltd doesn’t tell us much more about it. I don’t understand what the court case would have been to remove those pages from Google because if you do a search on the site jamiemacintyreexposed.com there’s still about 30 pages in the index and they’re all pretty nasty pages. I mean none of them are really that nice but I’d say what they’ve done here is the pages that were ranking up high for his name, they have actually taken legal action to get removed. I’ve never seen that successful, that’s the first time I’ve seen that so they must have had pretty good grounds for Google to comply with that and then the court case following that trying to find out who actually owns the site by Google handing over the AdSense data.
That is it for todays show. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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