SEO Blog

Google to Review the use of NoIndex - February 25th, 2008

In the world of Search Engine Optimisation there is little Meta tag called NoIndex. You can guess what it does; in Google it stops your page from being indexed. It seems now that Google are having a re think of what the NoIndex tag should actually do. At the moment if you no index your page Google and Ask do not have that page in their index at all, Its not the same for other search engines though, over at MSN and Yahoo your page could still appear in the index, the only difference is that there is no snippet with the page, with yahoo they even provide a cached snapshot of your page so how is that being no indexed?

Google has a choice of three over how to treat NoIndex,

1 They can drop any page that has a no index and not let it into the index.
2 They can display the URL of the page that has a no index but not show any other information
3 If the page is listed in a directory then it will display the link only, if its not in the directory then it will drop the page completely

Googles argument is that there are a few webmasters that are not having their pages listed in Google because they have a no index tag incorrectly placed on their page. Recently some big government websites have been dropped from Google because they had NoIndex when they shouldn’t have, this is why they are looking at displaying the pages as just a link.

The argument from the other side is that if you are a developer or even performing SEO on a test page on a clients server you don’t want the test page to be indexed as it would be duplicate content, We can place a no index on the page to ensure that the test page does not get listed. If Google start to list the pages anyway then are they going to discount any content on the page as it could be a test page with duplicate content.

My personal view on the matter is that search engines should stop trying to confuse the situation. NoIndex should mean that the page is not index for any reason. If developers forget to take the tag out after the page has gone live then they will soon realise their mistake when the listings start to drop.

Gary
NSEO Programmer

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Should I Bid On Competitors Names Using Pay-Per-Click? - February 25th, 2008

Do you believe that you should be bidding on your competitors name’s keywords in your pay per click account? Or are you annoyed that your competitor’s are bidding on your company name? I had a discussion with a client last week about this issue and thought it worth a mention.

On the one hand, some might say it’s a sneaky manoeuvre and advertisers using this strategy are just trying to pass themselves off as another company.

However, that shouldn’t be the case. Your ad text should never try to trick anyone into thinking that they are clicking through to another company. What the ad text should do is offer the consumer an alternative supplier to the company they’re considering visiting.

Hence, when you do bid on a competitor’s name, make it crystal clear that you are not them. After all, you don’t want a visitor to click through to your site for a mere 5 seconds. What you should do is guess-timate what the consumer is looking for. So, if I wanted to bid on a competitor who supplies shoes and clothes, I might try split-testing three ads; one about shoes, one about clothes and a general one that covers both.

The main advantage to brand terms is that they are so cheap in most industries, you can pick up a decent position at less than 10 pence per click.

If you are concerned that others may be bidding on your company name, you can register the name with the Google Trademark team, which will take around six weeks on average to go through, depending upon their workload. That will stop anyone from being able to bid on your name unless you specifically write to Google and allow it.

Personally, I think you should bid on competitor’s key terms. Get them in your pay per click account now!

Lianne
PPC Account Manager

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