Steve’s Blog

March Update to Search Engine Optimization Test

As reported in earlier posts (launch post, first update and second update) we’re running a test comparing the search engine optimization capabilites of Joomla, Drupal and WordPress.  We created three sites, Jabalpur.net.in (WordPress) Amritsar.net.in (Drupal) and Vadodara.net.in (Joomla). Each website was created with a similar amount of content, similar Overture results and a similar domain name.

Within two weeks the WordPress site was so far ahead that it looked as if they competition was over. Slowly however, Drupal and Joomla have recovered until they now lead the pack. The Joomla site now has 5 top ten rankings in every search engine that we’re following and the Drupal site continues to climb, only in second place by a small amount.

{moschart id=13}

 

OK, Cool…But what does this mean in the real world?

 

SEORefugee.com has a post discussing how irregular updates may be more damaging to your search engine ranking than never posting at all. By looking at Google’s Patent Application, he summises that Google makes a decision about your site….

  • Is it a blog? If so, we’ll expect it to be updated regularly
  • Is it a corporate website? If so, we can expect it to remain relatively unchanged

Basically, Google is asking you to decide what kind of site you want to be and then to walk the walk. If run a blog that used to be updated every day, but now hasn’t seen fresh content two months, why should Google rank you? Why should searchers have to wade through months-old blog posts?

What is the one of the easiest ways Google can determine what kind of site you’re running? Your software. If you install a WordPress site you are telling Google that you’re starting a blog and that it will be updated regularly. If you install Joomla or Drupal, Google has no such expectations. Maybe that is why WordPress started so strongly, but has since fallen behind. If you don’t meet expectations, you will be penalised.

 

Where next for our SEO tests?

We’d like to pick your brains. This time next month, we’re going to launch another SEO test to run alongside this one.

Hopefully this new test will be bigger, better and more accurate. How should we do this? We’re interested in testing the SEO capabilities of Open Source websites. How can we improve on this first small-scale test?

  • Should we add an HTML site for comparison purposes (a control sample) ?
  • Should we build sites focusing on a more competitive topic or less?
  • Are there errors in this current test that we need to corrrect?

All opinions welcome….

Read MoreMarch Update to Search Engine Optimization Test

Is Social Networking Right for Your Site?

Five things to consider before adding social networking features to your site, or even more seriously, launching a 100% social networking site:

  1. It is absurdly difficult to monetize even a very successful social networking site. Facebook has a click-through rate on its ads of 0.04%. That means they need 1 million page views to generate 400 clicks. If those clicks bring in 40 cents each, they’re looking at 1 million page views just to earn $100. MySpace has a CTR (click-through rate) of 0.10%, which is equally useless. The problem is that people who spend a lot of time on social sites are either so used to seeing the ads that they don’t notice them any more, or they spend too much time online and don’t make much money. Probably both. Subscriptions rarely work either, because they’re used to getting such services for free. You will need another business model.

  2. Its expensive to monitor. Unfortunately, an honesty policy won’t catch all the spam, inappropriate content and insults flying around on your site. You need to make sure you have the resources to actively monitor activity on your site. Its possible to get involved in court cases because someone said something derogatory about someone else on your site. The New York Times had an article a few months ago about Legacy.com, which employs 45 people just to stop visitors posting nasty things about the dead. Now imagine how many people large websites need to monitor what is said about the living.

  3. The competition is extraordinary. Sit and watch the Mashable.com blog every day for a few weeks. You’ll be shocked by how many sites are launching and competing in the marketplace. Watch for a few months and you’ll start to see news about those same sites closing down or putting themselves up for sale.

  4. Its a moving target. Getting into the game requires a constant investment in technology to keep people interested and generate repeat visitors. The move from printed books to photography and then TV and mobile phones took 500 years. On the net a similar shift took just 8 years, as this image from Mashable makes clear. If you do start a social site, you may find yourself on a hamster wheel of development.

  5. It creates a lot of low value, junk pages that can hurt your SEO. When was the last time you ran into a MySpace page while searching on Google? If you do want to add social features it might be worth putting them into a subdomain where they can do less damage to your rankings.
Read MoreIs Social Networking Right for Your Site?

Free Joomla Templates and Great CSS Advice

Its great to see people in the Joomla community taking the time and effort to build free sites that are genuninely useful resources. Today, I’ll highlight two of the very best:

Joomla24.com 

Back in the Mambo days, when I was first investigating Mambo there was one place go to in order to find quality, free templates – Mambohut.com. I spent many hours learning how to design for Mambo by downloading and tearing apart designs from that site. Since the move to Joomla, that site hasn’t been update very regularly and so its great so see a new site provide such a comprehensive resource.

 

One thing that often bugs me about free download sites is the sheer number of Adsense and affilitate banners, blocking easy navigation of the site and often crowded around the "download" button, in order to try and gain a few extra bucks a day. Joomla24.com manages to advertise while making sure that the site is still easy on the eye and intuitive to navigate. They also claim to have 1300 templates available.

JoomlaCSSGuide.com

Until now, when people asked me how to learn and research the default CSS for Joomla, I’d pointed them over to Joomlart’s tutorial. In the future, I’ll be recommending JoomlaCSSGuide.com which takes the Joomlart concept one step further and breaks down not just the CSS for content items but also all the core components, modules and mambots. Its an excellent site that must have taken quite a bit of work to get ready for launch.

 

One minor quibble – it would be nice if people launching new sites took the time to build a small "About Us" page. Nothing builds trust quite as quickly as being upfront about how you are.

Read MoreFree Joomla Templates and Great CSS Advice

Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 3

MoonRay, one of the developers over at Joomlaspan.com has been developing a lot of useful tools for Joomla. We use his Google Translation module on the right side of our site, and it really gets a lot of heavy usage.

 

He uses the Simple Machines-Joomla Bridge on his site and has been kind enough to publish a tutorial, explaining how to overcome metadata problems caused by the integration. You can see the results live at Joomlaspan.

 

Click here to read Moonray’s tutorial. 

 

Read MoreSimple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 3

Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2

 Yesterday we compared the metadata produced by three different forum setups for Joomla sites:

 

  • Simple Machines integrated with Joomla
  • Simple Machines unintegrated with Joomla
  • VBulletin

 

Today, we’re going to take that a step further and see how well these forums suceed in getting the posts indexed. We’ll also see how many of those posts end up in Google’s regular index and how many end up in Google’s supplemental index where most searchers will never find them. (Click here to find out more about the supplemental index.)

How did we calculate these figures?

  • Total Posts. We went to the forum and used their own statistics.
  • Pages Indexed. site: http://forum.joomla.org. This show all your pages indexed by Google.
  • Pages in Supplemental Index. site: http://forum.joomla.org *** -sljktf. This show all your pages in the supplemental index.
  • Percentage of posts compared to indexed pages. The closer this number is to 100, the better.
  • Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index. The closer this number is to 0, the better.

 

{moschart id=12}

 

What can we learn from these results?

 

  • Both Joomla.org and Rockettheme.com have a very low percentage of their posts indexed by Google. Both use Simple Machines. Joomlashack also uses SMF has done a great job by getting around three-fourths of its posts indexed.
  • It seems clear that a well set up VBulletin forum does a better job of keeping pages out of Google’s supplemental index although it is far from a cure-all as Joomlart’s results show.

 

Without knowing more about the technical aspects of the various sites its hard to diagnose what is causing the differences. However, these tests are important ones that you can run regularly. There is nothing wrong with having pages in the supplemental index, nor with not having 100% of your pages indexed. However, you do need to test often in order to make sure that your site is moving in the right direction. A sudden shift of 10% of your pages into the supplemental index can have a huge affect on your earnings.

 

Finally, full disclosure – this is where Alledia.com stands. Bear in mind that our site should be doing better than a forum, because it is much easier to keep regular content pages out of the supplemental index, compared to forum pages:

  • Pages Indexed. 706
  • Pages in Supplemental Index. 204
  • Percentage of indexed pages in the supplemental index. 28%

 

Read MoreSimple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 2

Simple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 1

Now that Joomla has been around for 18 months, some of its forums are starting to get pretty big. They are becoming potentially huge SEO assets for the accompanying websites. Although not comprehensive, this is a list of some of the biggest Joomla forums:

  • Joomla.org: 720,130 Posts (SMF – not integrated)
  • Joomla.de: 390,000 Posts (VBulletin)
  • Rockettheme.com: 42,377 Posts (SMF – integrated)
  • Joomla.fr: 27,035 Posts (VBulletin)
  • Joomlashack.com: 17,166 Posts (SMF – integrated)
  • Mosets.com: 16,166 Posts (VBulletin)
  • J-Prosolution.com: 13,292 Posts (VBulletin)
  • Joomlart.com: 9,109 Posts (VBulletin)

One thing that immediately becomes evident is that only two of these eight forums are actually integrated into Joomla.

Search for the Rockettheme.com forums and the results are had to distinguish from each other:

 

If you search for the Joomlashack.com forums and you get similar results.


On the other hand, the Joomla.org forums are also built with Simple Machines but they aren’t integrated into Joomla and they don’t have the same problems with metadata:


The Mosets.com forums are built with VBulletin and are not integrated into Joomla:


Clearly the forums that aren’t integrated into Joomla produce much better metadata. If the Simple Machines Bridge wants to become a more popular, a solution will need to be found for the lack of meta titles, descriptions and keywords. Those sites using the Bridge aren’t getting the maximum possible SEO benefit from their large forums. Also, its likely that the click-through rate is lower for these pages because the visitors who find them in Google don’t have a clear idea about what they’ll find when they click.

Tomorrow, in Part 2, we’ll take a closer look at other SEO aspects of forums inside and outside of Joomla.

Read MoreSimple Machines Forum, Joomla and SEO Part 1

Dashes or Underscores? Setting up your Joomla SEO

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard the great news that the default version of Joomla 1.5 will produce more Search Engine Friendly URLs than the current package.

The forum post has turned from happiness to suggestions about what the new URLs should look like.

One of the key questions was whether underscores should remain in the URL or if dashes would be better.

Should URLs be www.joomla.com/1.5-is-now-out or should it be www.joomla.com/1.5_is_now_out ?

The answer is simple: 

  • Dashes are better for searching. Matt Cutts, the Google engineer, gives a technical explanation of this on his blog.
  • Dashes are better for readability. As Ken, the developer of Open-SEF points out, underscores are much harder to read, especially if they are in a link that is underlined.
  • Dashes are actually used in English. See if you can name 10 English words with a – in them. Now see if you can name 10 English words with an _.

If you have a well-established site using underscores, is it worth moving over? Probably not, because of all the time it would take to reindex your site, but for all new sites, dashes are definitely the best bet.

Proof of this idea can be found with three simple searches:

  • search engine friendly     26,300,000 Google results
  • search-engine-friendly     1,530,000 Google results
  • search_engine_friendly     476 Google results

Read MoreDashes or Underscores? Setting up your Joomla SEO

Why Does Google trust some Joomla Sites more than others?

Search for Joomla (click here to try it) and you get something that has been apperaring more and more in Google search results.


Joomla.org is at the top with four extra links underneath:

joomla-ranking.png

Obviously, this is a pretty good situation to be in for any site, not only in the number one position for a search term, but with top 5 results.

So how do you get this benefit, which Google calls "Sitelinks". Well, there are certain requirements that your site needs to meet, which Google explains here. Basically, they say your site needs to be useful for visitors and easy for the googlebot to crawl. They also say that the whole process is completely automated, which led me to wonder what criteria sites need to meet. So, with help from Brian Teeman over at Joomla.org, I did some research using prominent Joomla sites:



  Age (Archive.org)
  Yahoo Links
 Cached Pages   Page Rank
  Alexa Rank
Websites that DO have Sitelinks status      
Joomla.org 9-2005 3,380,000  184,000 9  398
Joomlashack.com 10-2005 263,000  23,000 7 4,303
Rockettheme.com 1-2006 888,000 26,400 7  4,794
IJoomla.com 1-2006 33,200 6,040
 6
 10,896
JoomlaSEO.net 11-2005  355 156 5 94,457
Phil-Taylor.com 5-2001 24,100
 2,260
 7 23,147
     Websites that DON’T have Sitelinks status
Alledia.com   – 5,940 735 5 47,011
CompassDesigns.net 11-2005 229,000  2,440 7
 16,705
ELearningForce.biz   – 286
 1,410
 5 181,063
PixelsParadise.com  – 23,900  494  5
 46,412
Sakic.net 05-2002  10,600
 1,200
 7 57,304
J-Prosolution.com  – 7,650 72 6  17,546

Clearly this is just a fraction of the statistics considered by Google but I wondered what can we learn from this brief overview:

  • Age is the single most important factor, although far from the only one.
  • Those sites with Sitelinks do have generally have more incoming links, more cached pages and a higher page rank. JoomlaSEO.net is clearly the odd one out here. Do they mainly by focusing on a very small niche?
  • A forum builds website size and helps a site reach "trusted status". The only site not in the top section with a strong forum is J-Prosolution. They have two problems – one is a relatively new site and the other is having their forum in a subdomain, which is thought to have a diluted effect on a sites rankings compared to a forum in the root. (See this link for a discussion)
  • Having a Site Map or even a Google Site Map doesn’t seem to be a big deal. I could only iJoomla.com and JoomlaSEO.net had either in the top six sites.

Any more thoughts on what distinguishes the top six from the other six are very welcome.

Read MoreWhy Does Google trust some Joomla Sites more than others?

Why I’d Love Joomla Developers to Stop Encoding Components

Those of you who know me realise I rarely, rarely get worked up ….. I think this is the first time I’ve used this blog to blow off steam. Its so rare, I’ve even had to create a whole new blog category for this.

Anyway, the last couple of weeks I’ve been frustrated one recurring problem – encoded components. This issue has come up in three different situations:

Continue reading “Why I’d Love Joomla Developers to Stop Encoding Components”

Read MoreWhy I’d Love Joomla Developers to Stop Encoding Components