UK SEO Consultant | Just Search's Neil Walker

I stumbled across a SERP today which I had never seen. At the bottom of the listings it said:

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

The Search Query was for “Ugg Boots” and it showed the following under the usual SERP’s

So why did this appear?
Well it gives two clear links for why the information was missing of:

• http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/dmca.html
• http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=11441

The first is a link to Google which talks about “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” it states the following:

Regardless of whether we may be liable for such infringement under local country law or United States law, our response to these notices may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers. If we remove or disable access in response to such a notice, we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the owner or administrator of the affected site or content so that he/she may make a counter notification. We may also document notices of alleged infringement upon which we act.

The next link shows you the actual letter added to www.chilleffects.org and quote says the below among other things:

I. Multiple images and/or text that appear on the website at topbootsmart.com are unauthorized reproductions of Deckers’ copyrighted works. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §512, we hereby request that you expeditiously remove the website located at topbootsmart.com from your web search results for violations of United States Copyright law.

So the infringing website of “topbootsmart.com” has been removed from the listings under the copyright act. It looks to me like they have been selling the genuine article but do not have authorisation from UGG itself and so they have applied for the listing to be removed.

Impact on the future

This is the first time i have ever seen this and so it does have an impact on affiliate websites or store which sell items which they are not supposed to be selling. (I wonder how ebay would take this.)

So if anyone else has seen results like this let me know.

Something for companies and brands to think about!

This obviously now gives many companies away of getting rid of companies selling their items which are not authorised. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I’ll let you decide.

Well the title of this post may read a little greater than it is but what I will say is that this post will include some revolutionary Google Analytic filters. I can’t take the credit I didn’t write them so i will shows some link love to the original posts, however I have read the posts, implemented the filters and added my own spin as always.

So if you’ve seen these before then good for you, if not then your day is about to change so much for the better.

Google Analytics Profiles
Best practice for Google Analytics is setting up various profiles, this is done so when ever you manipulate the core data you have this separated from the original. (This standard Google post talks about why you should set up separate profiles.)

So in my mind I thought if I was starting with a new client or site what profiles would I want to set up?

Profiles Summery

• Standard Profile (No filters)
• Organic Filter with Ranking Correlation – http://yoast.com/new-seo-reports-for-google-analytics/
• Set up Universal Search filters – http://garmahis.com/tips/google-analytics/
• Track Google Map clicks – http://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/04/09/tracking-local-search-traffic-with-analytics/
• Set up detailed PPC keyword data – This allows you to track what keywords brought visitors in from broad match Phrase in your ad campaigns http://garmahis.com/tips/google-analytics/

Above are the 5 standard profiles I would set up as a standard Google Analytics setup. There are other filters which I might use but they are on a per case basis.

Google Ranking Reports – Why doesn’t Google Analytics do this anyway? Oh because it’s to do with SEO!

I have given the links to the original resources above but I’m going to extend the section on Google rankings in Google Analytics. This to me is simply one of the best filters created for Google Analytics in a long time. For SEO’s that see the benefit in this it is overwhelming , well lets explain why.

Firstly big thanks to the people involved with creating this report:

• Yoast – http://yoast.com/ for giving the guys the guest blog opportunity with his site. (Who said guest blogging was just for links!)
• André Scholten – He was the first person to create the ranking filter for analytic’s.
• Reinout Wolfert for his article on creating an advance segment for looking at the first page keyword versus overall traffic and how this increases over time.

Now the thank you’s are out of the way lets look at putting this filter in place.

Implementing the filter

Step One: Create a new profile and align it to your website.
Step two: Add a filter to only use Organic Traffic.

Step three: Add a filter to only use Google Traffic.

Step four: Now add a filter to give every referral from Google Organic searches a ’start’ parameter.

Step five: Now add the actual SEO ranking filter.

Step Six: Complete.

We now have the filter in place and very soon analytic’s will be pulling in the data so the big questions now are where do I find the data in Google Analytics and how can I use it?

Where to find the data!
You need to drill down through your analytic’s as follows:

• Dashboard
• Traffic Sources
• Keywords
• User defined Value

The best way to do this is on the keyword screen keep the first column as “keyword” and make the second drop down as “User defined Value”.

Advanced ways of using the information

Well the first image to look at is below this shows one and half days worth of data but you can clearly see the yellow link indicating the number of visit from first page listings. Now if you do this over months of your SEO campaign you can then see with a quick visual if you are getting more visitors from your 1st page rankings i.e. potentially more first page rankings.

Really getting down to business

So we now have everything setup and we’ve been gathering data, let export it into excel and have some fun!
Depending on how many keywords or results you have to export you may need to add the following code to URL:


&limit=50000


This allows you to export up to 50000 rows from analytics into excel. Bear in mind that it will still only display 500.

Setting Up excel

Once you have exported the data to excel, you can keep which ever columns you like, however in this instance I have kept:

• Keyword
• User defined value
• Visits
• Ecommerce Conversion rate
• Count (I Simply added =SUM(1) into another column)

Now remember the data I have is from 1.5 days worth of traffic, so firstly we are going to see how many keyword visits were on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th ,5th and above pages.

Use the following code in excel to search the “User defined value” for the page listings. Remember the following meanings:

• (page: 0) = Page 1
• (page: 10) = Page 2
• (page: 20) = Page 3
• Etc..

The Excel Formula:


=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 0*")
=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 10*")
=COUNTIFS($B2:$B506, "*(page: 20*")
Etc..


This will simply count the column for cells that contain the information between “* *”.

The Results

The Trick now is to look at where your receiving traffic from keywords which are ranked on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pages and then correlate this information with the Google Adwords keywords tool for predicting traffic, you may find some quick wins, that you can easily push up the rankings.

Reporting
You can also look at your overall performance each month, when I have that data, I’ll give you an update. But you will probably agree these are definitely the profiles you should setup as standard within Google analytics.

I’ve been dealing with a website recently that’s home page has stopped ranking in Google, I’ve seen this before a number of times and is often due to another site scraping the content. This happens all the time and in the majority of cases it has no effect on the main site but occasionally it does.

Sites such as the ones below can often scrap your site and appear for your content when you do not:

• whois.domaintools.com
• aboutus.org

The problem specifically with whois.domaintools.com is that it spiders your content and then displays it within an “SEO browser”, however Google can spider this content and as stated above this can often rank higher than the original source.

Solution
Well the first solution which in the majority of cases works is simply rewrite your home page content! But domain tools can spider your website again and then take your new content so here we are left with a lose lose situation, or are we?

When researching this subject i came across one of the best Google webmaster forum threads I have ever read. Why? because two top contributors had a two page argument over the following:

• One said you should block domain tool via Robot.txt
• The other said use IP blocking

After reading the two articles which are over a year old I checked to see if “Phil Payne” who advised the robots.txt method was correct.

And unfortunately for the other contributor it looks like he was, check: http://whois.domaintools.com/hotlines.co.uk

You will notice that the site “hotlines” no longer has text displayed on Domain tools. (The other server information is still there.)

So how did he do it?

Simply he looked at domain tools information about their spider and stopped it in the robots.txt file.

“http://www.domaintools.com/webmasters/surveybot.php”


# DomainTools
User-agent: SurveyBot
Disallow: /


I hope you find this as useful as I did.