Author Archives: Gabriel Homer

About Gabriel Homer

A webmaster, php, seo, marketer and snowboarder. He runs many sites and has helped selected clients create businesses online since 96. My google+

How to Remove Your Name from Google

Do you know what people are saying about you or your business online?

September 2015 is looking to be the biggest month ever for people looking for “How to Remove My Name from Google” and the like.

The graph above shows the spike in searches for this phrase.

One of the biggest reason is the aftermath of Ashley Madison, a Canadian based dating service and social media site that encourages married people to have affairs. On the 15th of July 2015 hackers stole all of their customers personal details and threatened to publish online.

How are you managing your Online Reputation?

‘What people say about your company online has become the single most important reflection of your company’s quality, reliability, and skill.’

A post on Seroundtable here show how SEOs are being asked to remove the names off the Top 10 listings. This service is call Online Reputation Management, we have worked with clients in the past to solve issues were Google will rank negative content about a person/product/company etc. You have spent years building up your business online and all of this hard work can quickly be undone if someone publishes a negative review about your company. Methods to fix the issue include getting the content removed and out ranking the content (pushing it down the results).

Regarding Ashley Madison many “big names” have already been outed which makes its a massive job.

If you need any help looking into getting content removed OR pushed down the results then let us know.

How to remove semalt.com from Google Analytics referral data

Do you referral stats in google Analytics looks like this?

Semalt is a bot that will crawl your site for information about the page content and many other aspects of the website.

If you haven’t signed up for the service like me then the bot is gathering information for competitive analysis.

For me I have no problem with the bot or the business that semalt offer but its the fact is messes with my stats.

As the bot will not follow the rules of robots.txt according to all the WOT reports here then your can try requesting removal from them directly via this link.

So you are using Google Analytics and want to remove Semalt.com from your stats?

First log into your google Analytics account and click on the website property in question.
Next click on the admin link show here:

Now you should see 3 columns. Columns Account, Property and View.
In the middle column labelled Property click Tracking info as below:

The tracking info should now show in a drop down.
Now click on referral exclusion list as below:

Simply then add the domain to the exclusion list. You can do this with any domain you’d like.

Important notes

This will only working with ga.js or an analytics.js and not with doubleclick.

Other options for removal of semalt referrals

If you don’t want the bot slowing down your site and also messing with your stats then .htaccess is your best option.

.htaccess code:

# block semalt.com
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} semalt\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

What about Google Analytics views?

You can follow the steps in the domain exclusion but select the 3rd column “Views” then select “Filters” then click “New Filter” then select “custom filter” next pick “exclude” and add the “semalt”

A full guide to view filters which is well worth reading can be found here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033162?hl=en-GB

If you need any help setting up View filters and any other type of Google Analytics setup then let us know.

Eu goes all “Some results may have been removed”

Currently you can type in any name in the UK and about 50% of the time google will now show a warning!

Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe

After the EU ruling here google have started to display the above message on many name searches.

Try it on your own name and see if you get the message.. My name is very rare, My full name is only showing about 30 results and all are mine but I get the message that content “could” of been removed which is hasn’t.

Pinterest Now Has Analytics – adds reach, impressions and more

Today Pinterest has launched Analytics for business accounts.

The Analytics breaks down in the following areas:

Pins – Pins are the daily average number of pins from your website.
Pinners – Pinners are the daily average number of people who pinned from your website.
Repins – Repins are the daily average number of times pins from your website were repinned on Pinterest.
Repinners – Repinners are the daily average number of people who repinned your pins.
Impressions – Impressions are the daily average number of times your pins appeared on Pinterest in the main feed, in search results, or on on boards.
Reach – Reach are the daily average number of people who saw your pins on Pinterest.
Clicks – Clicks are the daily average number of clicks to your website that came from Pinterest.
Visitors – Visitors are the daily average number of people who visited your website from Pinterest.

Here is an example of one of my accounts [click image to enlarge if needed]:

Pinterest adds Analytics

The big thing is to note is the Analytics is only for the Account and NOT for the domain

You can see here the same time period for the same site in Google Analytics:

My pins on my account only drove around 10% of the total referrals from Pinterest. So it’s key to remember your need to multi up the reach by this factor. Hence in theory the reach on pinterest during that time period would be 10×123,000 = 1.2million.. Which is much more in-line with other social networks like Facebook and twitter.

Bad Google Merchants Could See A Drop In Organic Ranking

This story goes back to 2010 when a feature in the New York Times wrote about bad customer service from a glasses / sun glasses online store. The key to the story was the organic rankings came from people writing, blogging and basically linking to the site because of the poor customer experience.

This then opened the debate regarding can google tell good from bad? A link is a link?

In short Google in 2010 ended up downgraded the site manually. You can read all about it in the following blog post:

Back to 2013

Matt Cutts of google brought the topic back up at SXSW conference last week suggesting google are going to look at the issue again and downgrade organic ranking of merchants with poor customer experiences:

“because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results”

Credit for the quote and conference coverage to searchengineroundtable

This of course all ties in with google’s “trusted stores”

When will google trusted stores come to the uk?

Currently you still have to be based in the US and price in USD to be a trusted store. Google haven’t mention anything about other countries as yet. If you or your client is in the US then check out how to become a Trusted store merchant here.

I’ve worked with google Merchant Center (froogle, google base) from the start. I’ve even had chance to help Clay, the product manager at google, out back in 2006 with all the problems it had with the crazy data feeds and delays back in the day.

Google’s St David’s Day Logo 2013

Google’s St David’s Day Logo

Happy St David’s Day!

Today google’s logo celebrates the patron saint of Wales St David.

I do love the fact google has included the dragon leak and of course good old traditional daffodils (did you spot them).

What’s the logo and the day all about?

Saint David’s Day (Welsh: Dydd Gwyl Dewi) is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on the 1st of March each year. The first day of March was chosen in remembrance of the death of Saint David. Tradition holds that he died on that day in 589.The date was declared a national day of celebration within Wales in the 18th century.

See more information about St David here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_David%27s_Day

Of course if I’m logged into my google account I don’t see the St David’s Day logo but the following:

Yes.. I’m a year older 🙁 hence the google birthday logo for me today…

Have a great day all!

Google Organic UK Shopping Results Being Removed

As most of you know google is slowly switching over it’s shopping results from a free model to a Pay Per Click Model. Here in the UK Google has said the following:

Google Shopping will be transitioning to a new experience in the UK beginning 13 February 2013.

Over the past weeks google shopping results have been showing less and less in the organic results and more and more shopping ads are showing.

This graph below shows the real results for a site with referrals from just the organic shopping channel, which you can clearly see the drop in visits hence drop in exposure of the organic shopping listing on the search results pages:

With organic search flat lining site owners really need to consider the use of the Pay Per Click model now being used.

Here is the impressions chart (the number of times an ad is shown) for the Pay Per Click shopping ads in the UK over the same time period:

It’s pretty clear to see if you are not running the PPC Uk Google Shopping you’ll be messing out on what you once had. Feel free to contact us regarding google shopping and advertising on google.

Do 301 redirect pass all the link juice?

Matt Cutts of google explains in the video below about the myth of loss of link value (juice) passed via a 301 redirect.

Firstly what is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is a signal sent by your web server via the header of a page to say “this page have moved permanently”

Why would you use a 301 redirect?
Page A has no use to users due to it being duplicated somewhere else or the product has been updated with the latest version but the old page still gets traffic and internal/external links/bookmarks. By adding the redirect you are directing users to a current and valid page.

The video is short but worth a watch.

The myth mainly came about when people 301’d a page and saw the rankings wouldn’t completely pass BUT the main reason for this myth is it would take a while for google to recalculate and pass the value. The theory was that the full value was never passed however Matt goes on record to explain that the value is the same a 1 link on that page.

It’s worth considering the page you are 301’ing is very likely to be more than 1 link so you “should” see a loss in value to the pages that are linked but not 301’d as you can only 301 to a single page.

Here at ripplegen we have worked on millions of 301’s in areas of redesign, re-structure and removal of duplicate content. Contact us for more information