By Stan Wang, Director of Search

The latest news in the SEO world is that Google recently announced that they are including site speed as a factor in their ranking algorithm.  “Site speed” is defined simply as how quickly a website responds to web requests.  Before we talk about the implications of this change let’s go over a few important facts as mentioned by Google:

·         Page relevance is weighted much more heavily

·         The changes were launched “a few weeks back”

·         Fewer than 1% of search queries are affected

·         Currently only applies to English searches on google.com

Now of course the obvious question is - what does this mean for my SEO efforts? 

Borrowing from the Google Search Quality Team’s Principal Engineer, Matt Cutts, the first order of business is: don’t panic.  According to Google, this change has affected a very small percentage of search queries. 

Casual observation would support this attitude as well.  Few if any people even noticed the change when it was rolled out around early March.  Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any unexpected changes in our clients’ rankings at Red Bricks.  With nary a change in search engine results, the time to hit the panic button is not now. 

Google also mentions that relevancy factors are still weighted much more heavily than site speed.  That means things like keyword relevance, site authority, and backlinks -. i.e., all the things a good SEO program has been doing all along - are still the most important factors for ranking.

Does this mean there that nothing should be in done in response to this algorithm change?  Certainly not!  Google uses a multitude of factors to rank pages and it is important to do well in as many of them as possible.  While it is difficult to pinpoint precisely what Google may be looking for in a newly released factor, we can definitely approximate site speeds by looking at the page load times of the top performing sites out there.  The slowest of top performing sites generally have page load times of up to seven seconds.  A good rule of thumb for your website’s pages is to outperform this bottom quartile and have page load times of less than 7 seconds. Ideally, your page load times would be clocked at under 4 seconds.  There are several free page load analysis tools available, including Google Webmaster Tools, Page Speed, and YSlow. 

The good news is that the majority of sites require no immediate action., Page load times are easy to measure, and having a faster website offers benefits beyond helping search engine rankings.  As is typical for Google, they will monitor this change on google.com before rolling it out internationally. 

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By Micah Fisher-Kirshner, Search Strategist

As any other marketing channel, search engine optimization must be taken to a new level for international campaigns in order to properly optimize a site across one or many international websites. A cookie cutter approach to internationalization may work in some cases, but without a proper foundation of international SEO, this will most likely lead to an array of SEO issues further on.

Stay Consistent

Setting the ground work for sub-domains or separate domains requires consistency across all international sites as mixing and matching can often lead to confusion and tracking problems. Even then, prepare for potential problems in advance where some domain names may already have been purchased or where specific countries (such as China) prefer acquiring a domain hosted within that country.

Consider who controls each international SEO area in order to avoid problems with delegation of authority. At the same time, establish some baselines of allowed practices so that inconsistencies are not brought to light negatively such as Google Japan’s use of paid blogs that violated Google’s own SEO guidelines.

Provide Flexibility

A strict policy guideline or best practice for international SEO will quickly fail as Google does not dominate every market, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Even Google’s algorithm is not universal where certain tactics long-since forgotten in the United States is alive and well abroad.

Avoid Duplicating Duplications

More than likely the main domestic website already includes numerous amounts of duplicate content that is in the pipeline to be fixed. Keep in mind that those issues will be compounded if not planned for out of the gate for international campaigns. Search engines will be particularly confused which website to rank in which country if content is exactly the same across the US, the UK, Ireland, etc. Create new content and custom-tailor it to the specific geographic area.

Translate

Even with English as language of commerce, many countries primary online language is something other than English. Many countries in Europe have more than two languages as the national language, so be prepared to have multiple same-country websites in multiple languages in order to satisfy both the user and the search engines for searchers’ preferences. Furthermore, find a good translation for your business name and products in order to avoid horrible conversions such as when Chevy went into the Mexico car market with a brand product called Nova (translated as “no go”).

Localise the Language

Even if your website is launching in another English-speaking country, this does not mean that the same spelling, words, or meanings are going to equate. Optimizing a website for a common spelling in the US and exporting that to the UK may result in one’s SEO being optimized for a misspelling. The same goes for any other languages (Spain vs. Venezuela vs. Mexico vs. Columbia, etc.) and optimizing a website on the wrong keyword phrase or spelling can result in a perceived poor quality from both visitors and search engines.

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By Craig Hordlow, Chief Search Strategist

An editor of Wikipedia reported recently that the people’s encyclopedia will combat the huge problem of link spam by using the “nofollow” attribute for all external links.

What does all of that mean?
Google looks at links - who is linking to who - in order to get a sense of authority. VERY simplistically stated, the more links you have, the more of an authority you appear to be.

Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, marketers looking for links find Wikipedia an easy target. Wikipedia’s editors and community have tried to counter the onslaught by manually removing inappropriate links (by creating a disincentive). Critics argue that most spammers will spam anyway; they tend to shoot first and ask questions later.

The “nofollow” attribute is crudely referred to by SEO’s as a “link condom”. As the visual might suggest, the attribute wraps the link up so that search engines will not pass on “link juice”.

The real discussion about this decision should center around how this will affect Google’s results. In theory at least, Google might give preference to sites like Wikipedia (many SEOs believe sites are “white-listed”) because they have human review. But if there is a trend towards using the nofollow attribute, then Google’s algorithm will be incrementally disempowered.

In Larry Page’s original paper on PageRank, he referred to sites that did not link to any other sites and noted the problem they introduced. Page called these pages “dangling links”, and defined them as:

“any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them…Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated.”

If Google still handles dangling links the same way (removes them from pageRank calcuations), and if Wikipedia, the 12th most visited site on the Web, is indicative of a trend, then Google should worry about prominent, trusted sites not contributing to the accuracy of their PageRank calculations. I don’t think Wikipedia’s decision will significantly affect Google results, but there will be some impact.

One timely note: the major experiment I am doing right now is on dangling links. I am using the “nofollow” attribute on internal AND external links of a large site to study the redistribution of PageRank internally.

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