Weekly SEO news: 8 September 2009
Welcome to the latest issue of the Search Engine Facts newsletter.

This week, we're taking a look at the effect of the URL structure of a web page on its position in Google's search results. What can you do to improve the position of your own website?

The final version of IBP 11.6 is available: The version has a much faster keyword tool and it offers many improvements.

In the news: Yahoo updates its index, Google's Eric Schmidt talks about the future of search, Google releases a new trends tool and more.

Table of contents:

We hope that you enjoy this newsletter and that it helps you to get more out of your website. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

Best regards,
Andre Voget, Johannes Selbach, Axandra CEO
1. The effect of your URL structure on your Google rankings

Does Google care about the position of a web page on your server? Does it make a difference if a web page is in the root directory of your website or in a sub directory? How does your URL structure influence the position of your web pages in Google's search results?

Trailing slashes and sub directories

A popular assumption is that Google prefers pages that are in the root directory of a website.

If an URL contains many trailing slashes (meaning the page is placed in a sub-sub-directory) then Google might not think that the page is important in relation to the other pages.

Although this statement is often repeated in SEO forums, it is probably not true.

The visibility of a web page counts, not its position

If a web page is linked throughout your website and if the page has inbound links then the web page will be indexed and ranked by Google without any problems.

Most web pages on today's websites are created dynamically and the URL that is displayed in a web browser presents only a virtual site structure that is not really available on the server.

As there are no real folders on the server, search engines won't find a valuable ranking signal if they look at things like presence or absence of directories.

What does this mean for your website?

If you want to show search engines that a page on your website is important, link to it from many other pages of your website so that it can easily be found.

A page that gets many links (both from your own website and from other websites) will get the attention that it deserves from Google's indexing robot.

When you should care about the structure of your URLs

1. URL stripping can cause problems

Rumor has it that Google uses URL stripping to index web pages. That means that Google shortens the path to an URL to find new pages on a site. For example, "www.example.com/folder/keyword.htm" would be shortened to "www.example.com/folder/".

If you use dynamically created URLs then you should make sure that all virtual folders return real web pages a "404 not found" pages. Otherwise, Google might think that you have many faulty pages and/or that your website has a low quality.

2. Shorter URLs can be better for your website visitors

Although most web surfers don't pay attention to the URL in the browser address bar, shorter URLs can enhance the user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to remember and they can improve the direct type-in traffic.

3. Short URLs get more clicks

A search marketing study found out that web surfers clicked short URLs twice as often as long URLs in Google's search results. Long URLs are cut off in Google search engine result pages. Web surfers cannot see where they are going to go and this can decrease the click-through rate.

4. The URLs of your web pages can contain your keywords

The words that appear in the URL of a web page can influence the position of the web page for these words. For that reason, it can make sense to rewrite your URLs so that they include the keywords for which you want to have high rankings.

Analyze your web pages with IBP's Top 10 Optimizer to find out if the URL structure of your web pages prevents them from getting top rankings on Google. In addition to the URL structure, the top 10 optimizer will analyze more than 75 factors that influence the position of your website in Google's search results.

You will get detailed and concrete advice on how to change your web pages so that they can be found for the keywords of your choice on Google's first result page.

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2. Search engine news and articles of the week

Yahoo
Yahoo updates its index

"We're rolling out a web index update over the next few days. During this process, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index."



Search engine Quintura releases search cloud with pop up search results

"The widget looks like an interactive tag cloud. However, the site search results will pop up when users click a tag. [...] We believe that this feature will improve user experience and increase a number of search result clicks."



Eric SchmidtGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt on the future of search: "connect it straight to your brain"

"Now, Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head. And so we joke about this and said, we have not quite figured out what that problem looks like… But that would solve the problem. In other words, if we just – if you had the thought and we knew what you meant, we could run it and we could run it in parallel."



 Google Domestic Trends: tracking economic sectors

"Google Domestic Trends tracks Google search traffic across specific sectors of the economy. The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight. We've created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment."



 Google Search replaces Yahoo search engine on Yahoo portal

"In an amazing development in the UK, Google search has just replaced Yahoo’s web search engine for natural and sponsored results on BT Yahoo, the online portal for BT Broadband users that is run by Yahoo. [...]

It represents a strange move for Yahoo on the back of the 10 year search deal that was announced with Microsoft last month, that will result in Microsoft Bing becoming the default search engine on Yahoo.com with Yahoo’s sales teams selling the ad inventory on both services."



Search engine newslets

  • Yahoo insiders take $2,159 out for every $1 they spend on stock.
  • Google executive to quit.
  • Is this the real answer to Google's "unexplained phenomenon" puzzle?
  • Czechs get to vote on Streetview sites.
  • Hoax: Nessie on Google Earth.
  • Google UK on fire (literally).
  • Investors unhappy as Yahoo boss Bartz earns $2m from share sales.

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3. New IBP 11.6

IBP 11.6

IBP is now available in version 11.6. The new version has several improvements:

  • New, Keyword Manager: The "Get keywords from competitors" feature now supports https websites.

  • Improved, Keyword Manager: The Google AdWords keyword tool now returns the local search numbers instead of the global ones. For example, this allows you to get the American/British/Australian/Canadian/etc. search numbers instead of the total numbers of all English numbers combined.

  • Improved project management: The Edit Project window now lets you specify really all project settings.

  • Improved project management: Some ranking report settings need not be specified in every project individually anymore. They can now be found in the General Settings window.

  • Improved project management: In the IBP Business Edition, all references to IBP in the reports are now removed automatically. You don't have to check a checkbox for every project anymore.

  • Improved the stability of remote-controlling Internet Explorer. If you're still getting crashes, make sure you use Internet Explorer 8 and remove any unnecessary add-ons and toolbars.

  • Improved, Keyword Density Analyzer: The PDF report does not break the pages after every section anymore so you will save a lot of pages.

  • Improved: The backup file is now smaller in many cases.

  • Improved the visibility of the help texts in the General Settings window.

  • Fixed, Keyword Manager: Under certain circumstances, the Export Keywords window would not take over your keywords.

  • Fixed, Link Manager: The "Add Site Filters" were not displayed.

  • Several improvements and bug fixes in the Keyword Manager, Top 10 Optimizer, Link Manager, Ranking Manager, Submission Manager, and PPC Manager.

Download IBP 11.6.

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4. Success stories

Sophie Erhard"I also appreciate the quick customer service."

"I have been using IBP software from the day it was launched. My clients brazilbotanicals.com, polynesia.com and hawaiitours.com have all achieved top 10 rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing for their targeted search terms.

I also appreciate the quick customer service I always get from Axandra."
Christian Wilson, http://hawaiitours.com/


220,000 readers will see YOUR website

Let us know how IBP has helped you to improve your website and we might publish your success story with a link to your website in this newsletter. The more detailed your story is, the better.

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5. Previous articles

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