31 Mar, 2009 | Written by Glenn Crocker | under SEO
Looking today at a client’s blog SEO, I noticed that they’ve got PageRank heading to their wp-login.php:
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Looking today at a client’s blog SEO, I noticed that they’ve got PageRank heading to their wp-login.php:
Working today on a client site that had a couple of PageRank issues, I once again ran A1 Website Analyzer, and found a couple of interesting problems. Just let it scan the site, then click ‘Analyze website’ and ‘External’ to see how much on-site link love is headed off-site:
On this particular site, each page links to a customer support portal hosted by SalesForce.com. So by not using rel=”nofollow”, we’re sending all that tasty link juice to SalesForce. No good!
The way this link was set up, we were leaking as much PageRank to SalesForce as we send to our own 2nd-level pages. Fixing this should help significantly.
The other problem is that the home page has lower on-site PageRank than other pages, but the solution for that will have to wait for another day.
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, and check it often for clients’ sites, to see how things are going and get ideas about how to make improvements. One of the most frustrating stats for me is the “Bounce”. Today, I’ll show you a new tool for getting inside what happens during a bounce.
I’ve seen this a bunch recently, so when I saw this on Twitter tonight, I was curious what was up:
I have a great new tool that spiders sites and helps understand what’s up with on-site PageRank flow. It’s A1 Website Analyzer (free full-featured 30-day trial download), from Microsys Tools. I’ve used Xenu and other spider tools in the past, but what sets this tool apart is their on-site PageRank simulator. This is a GREAT asset for understanding where PageRank is going and how to make it flow better.
One of the great mysteries of Google Analytics is just why they won’t let us see referring URLs of our users. Probably some privacy concern of Google’s, but it’s easy as pie to get from web server logs, so I don’t understand the issue.
I’m so dependent on Analytics for day-to-day work that I really would prefer to have all the info in one place (Analytics) instead of having to integrate log-based reporting (and deal with clients asking why the two give different numbers!). Here’s how to do it:
I normally set up sites to just log 404s and check the log files for problems, which is fine for me, but hard for clients. Here’s how I recently set up a site so the client’s marketing folks could spot 404s on their own:
I have a client who manages their own AdWords campaigns, but I check in on them once a month and see if anything is obviously going wrong. This works well, because the client is in control and handles day-to-day changes without me charging them, but they also have a “safety net” in case problems come up.
This morning, I noticed they have a broad match keyword getting LOTS of impressions and NO clicks. This is dragging down their Ad Group’s quality and costing them more on the keywords they are getting clicks on.
So, why might this happen? There are a few possibilities:
We have a little telescope, and were out looking at the moon a few weeks ago. The image through the eyepiece was just amazing, and I thought I might be able to get a picture of it holding my DSLR camera. It worked out pretty well!
One of the big problems we see with clients’ campaigns is that they have keywords (or groups, or whole campaigns) that have excessively high bounce rates. Those should be taken out behind the barn and shot, but how do you separate the bad ones from the good ones? Analytics makes it easy!
Finding High Bounce Rate Keywords
Here’s how:
I’ve been using Google Docs more and more lately, and wanted to use their Spreadsheet for some AdWords bulk writing, but needed a letter counter to be sure my titles and ad lines were short enough to work.
PPCProz.com has the code for Excel here: http://blog.ppcproz.com/2009/02/3-secrets-creating-adwords-ads.html
So it was just a question of converting it to Google’s spreadsheet. Google spreadsheet doesn’t support formulas in conditional coloring, so I had to embed the formulas in the cells, then apply conditional coloring. Not too much harder, and I tweaked it to show the number of remaining characters until you go over the limit, then turn red. Here’s how:
I've got a new tool & book available for advertisers who want to move from losing money to making money with AdWords. Check it out!
I'm a web developer, SEO and PPC guy in the midwest. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you find some useful info! You can follow me on Twitter @gcrocker.
