Matt Cutts answers my question on Universal search results

For those of you that haven’t seen it Ryanair showed a textbook example of how not to response to blog posts on Jason Roe’s blog – A employee or a few employees responded to Jason’s post on an error in a very negative and aggressive manor. Ryanair statement says they don’t engage in blog commenting and i can see why now!!

The best bit is there Ryanair’s response:

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.

Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

So Ryanair have delt with this by calling all bloggers idiots and lunatic, well done that’s going to solve the issue.

Conclusion, if you don’t know how to deal with social media avoid it cause this is going to hurt!!

I’ve just spotted something hugely irregular in Google and wondered if anyone else has spotted anything?

Google ‘UK tick’ is showing the RAC as 6th for car insurance – Google.co.uk is showing them at 38th (where they normally are). With Google checking IP addresses for location i haven’t seen this much of a difference for a long time.

Has anyone else spotted anything like this happening recently? Could this be Google testing localisation?

UPDATE:

OK yesterday the RAC went down to 9th in UK pages but it was for the homepage instead of the car insurance page.

Today it has gone back but is now also 8th for car insurance in google.co.uk. This is an amazing result and they have jump 30 places over night – amazing because they are my/Soup’s client in case anyone was wondering why I’m so excited!!

DannyGuk also mentioned on Twitter that he has been seeing big changes in Google, so is their a Google update in progress??

UPDATE PART 2

OK just read a fantastic post by Aaron Wall on SEOBook – http://www.seobook.com/google-branding. Aaron has also spotted the change and believes it is down to Google giving more weight to ‘brands’ so they are looking at user stats and giving more weight to the overall site. This would make sense for the RAC as they get a lot of traffic for general motor news and for their main product area (breakdown cover). So this high volume of traffic is resulting in Google adding a huge weight to their other terms – in this case car insurance.

If anyone else has any other views please comment.

Within webmaster tools there is an option under settings to set your site’s crawl rate between ‘slower’ – an option to decrease the traffic on the server and may decrease freshness and ‘faster’ – an option to increase the traffic on your site and increase freshness.

When this first came out a few months back i set it to faster, i don’t get much traffic anyway so thought i would see what it does. At the same time i started to post more regularly on my blog and was noticing that the posts were getting indexed virtually daily. At the same time one of the major seo blogs (can’t remember which one) did a bit of research around this and found that the option wasn’t making any difference to the index time on their site so they concluded it had no benefit.

Based on this story i put the fast index times down to the regular updates on the blog and the daily posts, so i turned the crawl rate back to normal. I continued to post regularly and now noticed it was taking several days for my new posts to become indexed, a major problem when i was trying to write information on topics that were very new and if they weren’t appearing in Google’s results for several days I was losing out on a fair amount of traffic as everyone posted similar stories. So i put the crawl rate back to maximum and again noticed my posted getting indexed daily, in some cases immediately! My recent post about rel=”canonical” was indexed at 17.23 more or less a couple of minutes after i published it! It was indexed so quickly that it’s still got some mistakes in it that i edited out a couple of minutes after publishing it.

Not only does this show who efficient Google has become at indexing fresh content but it also shows the importance of increasing the crawl rate to the smaller blogs. The large blogs with regular updates and traffic will probably not see the difference as Google will probably index them daily anyway but the small blogs need to take this approach if they want to get fresh content into the search results before anyone else and give themselves a chance again some of the larger sites. I know i will be.

OK i’ve started to run a test on this Rel=”canonical” code to see if and how it works.

I have created two pages – test.html and landingpage.html. I have linked to the ‘test.html’ so it will get indexed with the term ‘leeski testski’.The test.html page has the rel=canonical code linking to landingpage.html, with no other page linking to the landingpage.html.

No if this code works then the landingpage.html should get indexed when the test.html gets indexed. The test.html page is now indexed but the landingpage.html isn’t – so that hasn’t worked.

The second thing that should happen is Google should not rank the test.html page, as in-theory they shouldn’t be indexing it. When i search for ‘leeski testski’ the test page ranks – so that doesn’t work either.

So what’s wrong??

The code i have used is – link rel=”canonical” href=”landingpage.html” /

First thing that stands out is that it’s a relative link but Google Webmaster Blog says:
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” / ?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the link tag. Also, if you include a base link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

So that tends to mean it should work – but to make sure i have changed it to an absolute URL.

Another reason could be that both pages need to already be indexed? This is just an idea but would make sense, i mean if it is duplicate content then Google should have found both of them already. Will test this idea later once i am sure the absolute URL isn’t the issue.

Let me know your thoughts.