Do you remember our experiment to split our sitemaps for geo-targeted SEO? Ten weeks ago we implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target the UK and Ireland sections of our website to their intended audiences. The initial part was easy – it took a few minutes to create separate subfolders and set a target country in the Google’s Webmaster Tools. The harder part was to monitor its influence and measure the results.

We chose a control group of 200 pages and monitored their rankings on Google.com, Google.ie and Google.co.uk. Many competing factors can affect the position of a page in the search results but we were hoping that as a result of geo-targeting the British and Irish pages that they would improve their rankings on Google.co.uk and Google.ie respectively.

Unfortunately that’s not what happened. Our Irish pages dropped in the search results by 1-2 positions on average, both on Google.ie and Google.com. On the other hand, the UK pages improved their rankings by 2-3 positions both on Google.co.uk and Google.com. It’s impossible to draw a valid positive or negative conclusion based on these results. However, we can say it hasn’t been a success and that’s why we’ve stopped the experiment and gone back to the old way.

We’re not very disappointed by these results as everybody knows that SEO-ing a website on a .com domain, all in English, but targeted to audiences in many countries all around the world is not that easy. We keep trying though, testing, experimenting and sharing what we’ve learned with you. Do you have any other ideas we could try out?

One of the real challenges facing us at RevaHealth.com is how best to SEO the different sections of our website that should be targeted at specific countries, but don’t exist neatly in one subdirectory or sub-domain, or have localised (i.e. translated) content.

Two weeks ago we posted the results of our ccTLD SEO experiment, where we described our attempts to improve the rankings of some of our UK and Ireland targeted pages by redirecting them from our .com site to our .co.uk and .ie sites respectively.

Following on from a suggestion by Leo Fogarty and an article by Lisa Myers we have now implemented multiple sitemaps to geo-target sections of our website to their intended audiences.

First we created /IE and /UK subfolders on the .com site. Then we made sitemaps of the sections of the site to be geo-targeted to Irish and British audiences respectively and put these into these folders. Finally we submitted these sitemaps to Google’s Webmaster Tools, making sure to geo-target each of the subfolders containing the sitemaps to their intended target countries.

Specifically, we geo-targeted the folder www.revahealth.com/IE/ to Ireland, and put the sitemap with pages we want to target to an Irish audience into that folder. We did the same for the /UK/ subfolder.

By doing this we hope to improve our rankings on Google.ie and Google.co.uk, and to increase traffic to our UK and Irish pages. Setting a geographic target in Google Webmaster Tools shouldn’t impact our pages’ positions in the search results unless the user chooses the “pages from Ireland” or “pages from the UK” option. That’s why this experiment seems less risky and shouldn’t jeopardise our positions on Google.com.

We will keep you informed if we see any positive or negative effects. Have any of you tried this or something similar in the past? Leave us a comment and let us know how it worked out for you.

[UPDATE - 16/02/2010]

We’ve finished testing this now so go have a read of the results of our geo-targeted sitemaps test.

A few months ago, in the post Using Country Specific Domains For SEO we introduced you to the idea of redirecting half of our Irish and UK pages from RevaHealth’s .com domain to our local .ie and .co.uk domains. In this follow up post we describe how the experiment turned out to be successful, but with a very disappointing result.

The main goal of all search engines is to return results from the sites that are the most useful and relevant to a user query. Sites with country-coded top-level domains, such as .ie, are associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. By default, and all other things being equal, sites with a .ie domain are interpreted as more relevant for users in Ireland. For generic top-level domains such as .com Google allows site owners to manually assign a preferred country in their Webmaster Tools.

As our .com domain’s content covers many countries we can’t use this particular feature to optimize the site for a particular region. Instead, we were hoping that by redirecting our Irish and UK pages to their local domains that those pages would benefit from a boost in search results positioning on Google.ie and Google.co.uk as being targeted at their local audiences.

The initial results were terrible. The redirected pages dropped in the SERPs by about 3 positions. As our Irish pages previously ranked better than our UK ones they suffered even more. (Ireland was our first local area of interest and those pages were in the index much earlier.)

After a few weeks our results moved slightly in the right direction but were still behind the control group. We decided to let the experiment run for longer, almost four months in total, to be sure that the conclusion drawn was correct. In the end we turned off the redirections, just last week in fact. The experiment was successful in terms of achieving measurable and unambiguous results, but unfortunately they were very disappointing.

Our redirected .com pages disappeared from the index and over time their corresponding .ie and .co.uk pages were indexed instead. However, they never reached the search results positions we had had before with our .com pages. We speculated that our .com domain had more trust and authority than our country specific domains and that’s why pages from RevaHealth.com ranked better even in Google’s country specific search engines.

Now, just one week after undoing the redirects, most of the .com pages have regained their positions from before the experiment, which we think goes some way to validating our speculation. Our generic .com domain, which is crawled much more frequently than our local domains are, does seem to be a more trusted site, not only by Google.com but also by Google.ie and Google.co.uk.

Have you run any similar experiments that you can share with us?

We publish a lot of web pages on RevaHealth.com, tens of millions of them in fact. One of the SEO problems we run into because of this is that a lot of them are very similar to other pages on the site. For example our page for cosmetic surgeons in London is extremely similar to our page for cosmetic surgeons in the EC district of London. This results in the search engines sometimes thinking that we are publishing duplicate pages, even though the pages are perfectly valid and are distinct pages from a newly landed user’s perspective.

The SEO problem with duplicate pages is that Google doesn’t want to clog up its index with a whole bunch of duplicate content, so it tries to cull the duplicate content from its index. In our case it only includes cosmetic surgeons in London in its search results.

In the past we included machine generated text on each page, in an effort to describe on the page in a way people could easily understand what the content was without having to write tens of millions of descriptions by hand. However, because this particular block of text was quite similar from page to page, it hindered us rather than helped us in relation to duplicate content. So we set about trying to find a way to increase the originality of each page.

On a side note, it is possible for you to take control over your own duplicate content and to tell the search engines which page is the original or most important version of a page rather than letting them make that decision for you. You can use either canonical URLs or 301 redirects, something we’ll discuss in another blog post. For now, this is something that we do already, but as the pages are actually valid, non-duplicate pages for our visitors, we think that this shouldn’t be necessary.

So, going back to looking at how to increase the originality of the content on our pages, we took our search results for Dentists in Mexico as our test bed. For 50% of the locations in Mexico we added 2-3 paragraphs of location descriptions taken from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has relevant content that can be re-used on other sites thanks to the GNU Free Documentation License. The link to the original source of the text was included underneath.

We were hoping that syndicating content from Wikipedia could alleviate the duplicate content issue along with giving our visitors a better experience. We let the test run for three months.

The Results

Although our results shouldn’t be regarded as complete, we found that the inclusion of Wikipedia content on our search results pages had no effect on whether the page was included in the main Google index.

However, we also found that all pages with Wikipedia content that were already in the search results dropped by around 3 positions, while all control pages gained on average 2 positions!

Search engines want and reward original content. It is known that Google uses document similarity techniques to keep searchers from finding redundant content in search results. Our experiment left no doubt about it. I only wonder how will Google solve the problem in the current large scale web syndication era if it is possible to find 5 exactly the same articles on the top 5 sites in the results for many of Google searches, e.g.

http://www.google.com/#q=Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+Content

Do you know how many unique queries are bringing your site visitors? Last week for RevaHealth.com the number was 17,181! It shows that the long tail is working. When applied to search engine traffic, this simply means that a website receives most of its visitors through a collection of low-volume search queries rather than a handful of major keywords.

There are a few reasons why we optimise RevaHealth.com for long tail key phrases. Firstly, it’s much easier for us to rank well on search engines for rare key phrases because of the lack of competition. For example, our site isn’t listed within the Top 10 Google SERPs for ‘dentists’, while for ‘dentists dublin’ we are in position one. Being able to rank so well for these long tail keywords guarantees us a large slice of the traffic these keywords generate.

Secondly, in order to target the long tail, we have created a lot of pages, which means we end up with a lot of pages indexed (39,900 so far), which gives us great visibility. What’s more, this increased visibility is very valuable, growing our audience and earning potential revenue. What’s more targeted visitors seeking very specific information tend to useg long tail keywords and as a results are more likely to convert or click on contextual ads, increasing our revenue per visitor.

Discovering which long tail key phrases are relevant to your business isn’t difficult but it is time consuming. There are a number of great free tools available from Google: Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights For Search, Google Trends. Sometimes however the simplest way to get good information is to actually publish pages with unique sets of keywords and see whats gets traffic. We rely on this method of generating content as we continue to add new treatment categories and destinations on a regular basis.

A recent Google study on search engine users’ behaviour provides more evidence that back up the theory of the long tail. According to the research, as time passes, people are using longer and longer phrases in the search box.

The 2008 average is 2.2 words for query, while in 1994 it was only 1.2 words. Some sources mention even higher numbers, for example, the Nielsen Norman Group cite 3.1 words per query. And this number still grows.

These are examples our search terms that have directed traffic to RevaHealth.com:

• how much does braces cost in mexico
• anyone had liposculpture with dr robin van look?
• board-certified plastic surgeon in poland
• list of dentists in singapore dental clinics
• effective face lift in the philippines

The long tail is, then, an undeniable opportunity to attract more visitors. Targeting multi-word search queries, optimising a website and creating content to match the long tail, allows us to win potential users and buyers. The down side is you need to create a lot of pages with unique and valuable content so that the search engines index them.

Understanding users’ behaviour and expectations for web search can be very valuable for site developers and web workers. While many SEO techniques rely on the actual actions of the user, for example mouse clicks or query streams, eye tracking can give us more detailed observations about how users actually interact with the information in front of them.

The fact that the top search results get the most attention from users is self-evident. But a study by Google backed up claims that strategies for scanning search results are different for different task types. These two task types are defined as transactional and informational. It means that you must understand which of these terms describes your website before deciding on SEO and SEM activity.

This is the standard and well known ‘Google Golden Triangle’ 

You’ll notice an ‘F’ shaped scan pattern. The eye tends to travel vertically along the left hand-side of the results, looking for relevant words and then scan to the right if something catches the
user’s attention.

This is the eye-tracking result for a transaction-oriented query:

and for an information-oriented query:

The difference is considerable, with the eye scanning further downwards along transaction oriented sites, looking for several options, and scanning across for information oriented ones, seeking more information about a particular result. These images present rather bad news for informative websites. While transaction
oriented sites can afford to be further down the search listings, information-oriented sites cannot.

Microsoft conducted a similar study on how users respond to a set of search results. They also looked at two kinds of search tasks: navigational (where users are seeking a specific Web page) and informational (where users seek specific information). The analyses showed not only what people mainly look at, but also what they select. Of course, it is clicking rather than looking that has a major effect on the performance of a website.

This table illustrates the percentage of people who looked at the result (in black), versus those who clicked on it (in red).

For navigational search, everyone looked at the first result. When the target was position 2, this dropped to 89%, then down to 56% for 8th, which isn’t so bad.

For informational search, the chance of looking at the item drops further from 94% for position 1, to 22% for position 8. Microsoft results correspond nearly exactly with Google’s triangles.

The decreased probability of clicking on the item is obviously related to the probability of looking at it. However, the dramatic fall for informational search from position 1 to position 2, is explained by the strong confidence users have in search engine performance. Participants were fairly likely to look at the
results for position 2 and lower, but were extremely disinclined to click on them.

So what conclusions can be drawn for information-oriented websites? If people trust the ranking determined by search engines like Google more than their own judgement, we should actually optimise our websites for the ‘Big G’, not for the users. All we need to do is to look reliable as, when their goal is to acquire some kind of information, searchers generally don’t care where that information is found, so long as the destination site looks authoritative.

In light of these studies, it seems that I have no excuse anymore when Caelens ays that the position 3, or even position 2 in the SERPs isn’t good enough. He is right! Being in position 2 is worse by as much as 56% than being in position 1. A SEO worker’s strategy for increasing traffic needs to be: Get to the top or die trying!

Many thanks to blogstorm for publishing this article.