If you’ve been involved in the SEO industry for very long at all, you’ll undoubtedly be aware of the importance of robots.txt files in certain circumstances.
Robots.txt files can be very useful in determining how your site is viewed by Google and the other search engines out there. Not only can you forbid the search engines from seeing (and therefore indexing) your site at all; you can also hide specific pages from their view.

For bigger sites, such as ecommerce platforms with hundreds and hundreds of pages, this can mean configuring quite a sizeable robots.txt file. And this is exactly where the problem can occur. Via his Google + page, Googler John Mueller recently reminded SEOs that, ideally, robot.txt files should be no larger than 500kb in size.

According to JM, Google’s web spider, or Googlebot for short will only read the first 500kb of any robots file. This means that if you have important information in your file, but it’s larger than 500kb then you could be leading Google to disregard said information. This could lead to serious problems and could even mean that your robots.txt file doesn’t succeed in performing the task that you originally configured it for – potentially causing big problems with your SEO campaign.

More than this, an unnecessarily large robots file could be exactly that; unnecessary and could suggest that the entire build and coding of your site might need a rethink. With Google and SEO in mind, remember to check your robots file after any work is done on the site, and remember that the simpler your site is to navigate, the better chance Googlebot has of doing so successfully.

Just how important is Google + in terms of SEO and search results? Should we be going through and +1ing all of our sites and clients’ sites in order to improve their rankings. In light of a seemingly insignificant change made to Google’s results pages last week, I thought I’d consider this question for a moment.

On Friday many in the SEO industry noticed that Google had removed the +1 button from its search results. Where previously you could see the button next to every listing, you now had to hover over said listing to even see the button. Only when you hover over the button itself did it reveal itself in colour.

Your response to this might be: who cares? Well, when you consider that in marketing and advertising ‘out of sight’ is very much ‘out of mind’ you begin to puzzle at this latest move from Google. Why go from having your social media platform’s button on 10 listings on the page to having it on none at all? Surely this will diminish the online presence of Google + and work contrary to Google’s well laid plans to challenge Facebook and Twitter for social supremacy?

You could argue that having the button appear when you roll over a listing has more impact as it draws your eye which might be true, but I still feel that this will lead to fewer listings being +1ed.

If Google are content to reduce the impetus on Google +, then it suggests that their intentions to include it as a major ranking signal are less fierce than first thought. Google has of course stated that the amount of +1s is already a ranking signal, but this latest move suggests that’s all it will ever be.

Even if Google aren’t intentionally reducing their focus on the +1 ranking signal, by hiding it from the SERPs their arguably still doing this. Less visibility means fewer clicks and fewer clicks will inevitably inhibit the growth of the social media platform, and without a healthy and well used platform there’s absolutely no use in Google using +1s as a ranking signal, let alone a major factor.

Finally, to throw an additional spanner into the works, Google also announced last week that they were inviting social media platforms and similar networks to work with them to create improved social analytics for users. You can’t help but view the search engine as a cautious player in the online community, moving one chess pieces to distract their opponent from others. What does this mean for social signals in search? Is Google looking to create a social analytics platform which it can use itself and integrate into the ranking algorithm?

I think that although these changes and announcements are an indication of Google’s intentions, we can’t know for sure until we wait to see what happens. In the meantime, I think integrating social buttons into your website, engaging with your customers via social media and maintaining a rounded online presence will all be enough to help your site when it comes to social signals and SEO, at least for now.

Another week has gone by and Google have implemented yet another change to their search results for us to take a look at. I must admit, attempting to chronicle these many changes is becoming quite an addiction of mine.

So basically, Google has changed the way rel=author tags function in the search results. Just to recap, the rel=author tag, once implemented into the coding of your site and reciprocally linked with your Google + profile, would give you a by line and photo next to your blog listings in the SERPs. The change implemented toward the end of last week concerned what happened when this author name or by line was clicked.

Previously clicking either would have taken you straight through to that author’s Google+ profile. Now however, clicking the author name or image runs a new search for that author, and Google has leaked + profile information through to the main search results, including a sample of the author’s bio and listings of recent blogs by them.

The new function also displays recent status updates from the author’s page. Interestingly, once you click either the author by line or image in the search results Google automatically adds that author to your search filters, meaning that any searches you make after that point will only return results authored by that person. You should be able to see a box in the search bar containing the author’s name – simply click the ‘x’ to remove it and go back to searching normally.

It would be worth mentioning at this point that this new functionality only appears to have been implemented on Google.com, with the .co.uk rel=author tag appearing to do absolutely nothing at present. Clicking an author’s by line or image in google.co.uk at present either does nothing or simply reloads the same page, meaning we might want to stay tuned for the update to be rolled out over here across the pond.

So briefly then, what does this all tell us about SEO? Well, it’s clearer than ever than Google are fusing search and social for the long haul. With a link to the official Google+ business pages in the footer of Google.co.uk and Google.com and these changes happening weekly, it’s obvious that they want businesses to get on board with +.

I suspect that this is because their search algorithm is going to give  more and more weight to Google + signals in the future – why wouldn’t Google trust a site’s authority according to a social media platform that It regulates itself? It would be like taking a son or daughter’s recommendation regarding a nice restaurant to go to – you can trust their opinion because you raised them and know they can be relied upon.

I think that authorship and the rel=author tag is so important and is going to become even more so in future. Why would Google go to all this trouble if they weren’t intending on including an author’s authority as a major ranking factor? Sure, usability and functionality has always been important to the search engine in and of itself, but their priority always has been the relevance of results, and it’s that which a reliable and authoritative expert author can help them deliver.

Big hat tip to Search Engine Land for this one.

Google make hundreds of changes to their search ranking algorithm each year and this year is no exception – over 500 changes were made to help improve the way Google delivers results to the end user.

In line with Google’s efforts to keep the search results fresh and current, I thought I’d list some of the most recent changes Google has made to the search results to improve the quality even further.

In brief, here are 5 of the changes Google has made to the search results over the last couple of weeks that affect the vast majority of us:

Fresher Search Results

Affecting over 35% of all search queries, Google have made changes to place emphasis on more resent content. This would affect news items, blogs and also recently updated pages so now it’s more important than ever to keep your website current and update it regularly.

Date-Restricted Search

As a result in part of the above changes to place emphasis on fresh content, date-restricted search – whereby a user selects a date range to display results from – Google have made changes to make their search results for these dates more consistently accurate.

Official Page Detection

We know that Google places a lot of emphasis on brands to determine which site should be displayed for a particular brand search, such as the actual home page for a particular company, club or brand name. Google has announced that this has now been refined to make their judgement more accurate and consistent.

More Comprehensive Search Results

Snippets that appear within the search results have been made more comprehensive as the crawlers begin to understand page structure better. Google are now able to include more page content and less information from headers and/or menu systems allowing us to see more relevant information in the search results to help us make a better decision on whether we want to visit each particular site.

Better Page Titles

Looking at a number of signals when generating a page title for the search results, Google is now placing places less emphasis on duplicated anchor text in links pointing to a particular page. The result of this is being able to display titles that are more specific to the content of the page itself.

SEO is an excellent method of improving your website’s visibility online and ultimately generating traffic. However, organic traffic has some drawbacks:

• You can’t easily test landing pages, headlines, and templates
• You can’t get rapid feedback
• You don’t get traffic on certain keywords until you rank for the terms

This is where PPC campaigns can help out your SEO by allowing you to conduct testing which heralds instant feedback.

Please see below my top 3 ways a PPC account can help you gather the data you need to make the right SEO decisions.

Testing Home Pages

If you’re thinking about changing your homepage or making some adjustments to the existing one with the aim of increasing your site’s performance, one of the first things you’d want to do after designing the new page would be to test it to check it is actually an improvement on the old one.

Unfortunately, you can’t simply upload a few homepages and tell the search engines to rotate which one the traffic goes too. You also don’t want all of these homepages indexed as that can cause issues with your existing rankings.

Never fear as there is a solution; simply put your new homepage designs in their own folder and use robot.txt file on them to disallow any crawling by the search engines to prevent these pages being indexed and affecting your existing SEO rankings.

Then send your desired traffic to these pages via PPC and monitor the results via analytics or alike.

Testing Title Tags

Webpage title tags serve two major purposes:

• Tell a search engine what your page is about
• Serve as a headline on the search engine result pages

What your headline says when displayed on the SERPs is the difference between your page gaining the click or not.

The main goal of a PPC adverts headline is to showcase your product/service, offering and drawing attention to itself with the ultimate aim of gaining the click. Therefore the overall goals of an organic title tag and a PPC adverts headline are very similar.

Most page titles are 55 – 65 characters and a PPC adverts headline, when shown above the search results with extended headlines activated, can be up to 60 characters which means you can test a variety of page titles via PPC to determine which have the best click through rate before you place them on your website. This is a really simple tip but can make a big difference to the amount of traffic your organic listing generates.

Test New Keywords

If you’re thinking of adding some new keywords to optimise for organically but are not sure if they are the right keywords for you site or if the return they’ll bring will warrant the investment of optimising for them, then PPC is a great way of finding out if they will work for your site without having to update your onsite and offsite SEO.

By setting up ad groups for your potential new keywords and then monitoring your sites analytics, you can gain a valuable insight into whether these keywords will be worth targeting via an organic campaign.