If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible.
What does “Keyword not defined” mean in the Referers > Search Engines keywords report?
“Keyword not defined” means the search engine did not pass to your website the keyword used by your visitors — Search engines hide the keyword for privacy reasons. It is common that most keywords are “Not defined” after Google changes made in early 2012.
It will only get “worse”…
Some search engines (Google for all logged in users, DuckDuckGo, Firefox latest version now also removes keywords, etc.) may not specify the keyword used to reach your website. Piwik will report the keyword as “Keyword not defined”. It means that Piwik has detected that the visitor came from a search engine, but the keyword was not provided in the Referrer URL.
There is no way to access the keyword in this case, and no other web analytics tool can get this information neither.
Here’s a little tidbit for webmasters worrying about on site SEO. We have noticed lately that google can override the title tag on your web page and use it’s own title tag in the search engine results (SERP). So if your title tag is non existent or says ‘untitled’ then google will choose a title for you. Or if you have a long complicated title tag, then it will show a simplified title instead. It does still use the title tag for ranking the page. Here what Google’s SEO guru has to say on the matter below:
It looks like Google Plus +1 has made an appearance on Googles webmaster tools this morning. You can see The number of unique visitors that have +1 a page on your site. Also the search impact of the +1 button appearing in the SERPs.
Just checked a page from the gapco.co.uk site to see how it has indexed on Google and noticed that not only did google ignore the meta description for the search result snippet but also now explains on the page previe where the snippet text has been taken from.
So in this example it is taken from two different parts of the page.
<title>Buy Subdecay |BABY QUASAR | Effects Pedals | GAPco</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Mega Deals on Guitars, Amps, Effects Pedals and Power Supplies at our online store. We sell Electro Harmonix, Rivera, Fulltone, MI Pedals, Subdecay” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”SubDecay” />
You can post a link on your twitter status and facebook wall, but it would be nice to know how effective this link is and how many people clicked on it. One way is to have Google analytics installed and configured on the landing page, but you may want to see stats for links to pages on different sites not owned or managed by you too.
One easy way to do this is to use Google new URL shortener. www.goo.gl. I recoemmend that you use this service while logged into your Google account, as you can then see a history of the URLs you have shortened before.
So for example I want to place a link to our Zone1 Creative page for ‘Website Design‘ which has been SEO’d for ‘web site design brighton’.
I take the url http://www.zone1creative.co.uk/website-design-brighton-hove-sussex and place it into the google url shortener and get given a short URL – http://goo.gl/5bxJF.
I can then log into Twitter and post a message with a link about website design in brighton.
Just updated our site portfolio with our latest #websitedesign projects http://goo.gl/5bxJF
Then once you have posted the tweet, you can click on the shortened link to go through to the Zone1 Creative site. The go back to www.goo.gl and you will see in the url history that there is one click against your new url. Click on details and you get a break down of where the link was clicked, as other people could retweet it, post it on facebook etc.
The details page also gives you a 3D barcode that can be used on your site or on paper work and product designs. Not sure how many people actually use 3D barcodes but it seems like all the major corporate companies are using them on product packaging and flyers.
Bimg/Microsoft have updated their webmaster tools suite to match Google’s offering this morning. A quick look at the features shows that they are now giving siomiliar information to what Google also provide but with the addition of fancy graphs using Microsoft silverlight.
Its a big jump from their previous offering, which did not provide webmasters with much feedback. This now leaves Yahoo way behind with their site explorer offering and Ask who have not even started to provide such features.
Zone 1 Creative recently went live with a new online store built in X-Cart call the Guitar Amps & Pedal Co. GAPco.co.uk.
The site replaced audiotoyz.co.uk and guitars-amps-uk.co.uk and so had instance traffic from these already indexed sites. One of the first things that I did was to install the XML Sitemaps module from magenticONE and also upload the froogle file to Google base so the products were searchable via Google Product search.
As usual google took it time to index the site, and after about two weeks we started to appear. However I was suprised with the amount of traffic we had generated from Google product Search. Our best clicked through product was the ‘Fulltone OCD‘ and we even made a sale on the first day it wen t live. Not had that for a while.
It goes to show how import this tool is for e-commerce owners, and it is also important to tweak the feed file as much as possible. One essential tweak that I made to xcart core build was to automatically add the manufactuer name to the beginning of the product name. So instead of being OCD it now read Fulltone OCD.
If you’ve ever been caught up in linkspam, you may have seen a message in Webmaster Tools about “unnatural links” pointing to your site. We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes that violate our quality guidelines. If you get this message, we recommend that you remove from the web as many spammy or low-quality links to your site as possible.
