Mon 30 Mar 2009
Illustrating Google Double Listing Ranking Strategy
Blurb by Shaun Anderson (Hobo)Last week I mentioned optimising your site to take advantage of Google double or indented listings. Earlier I wrote about the next Google Pagerank update and I thought this was an ideal opportunity to illustrate what I meant about double listing optimisation – a very simple seo tactic.
- Customers where asking me about the ‘pending’ PR update
- When I was browsing my logs I noticed I was getting a fair bit of trafic from people wanting to know ‘when is the next pagerank’ too
- I considered I could kill two birds with one stone and do a post, as I noticed I never really answered this exact query in the ranking post.
I checked Google and saw I was in fact no2 result and still getting traffic. I also noticed that if I optimised a page correctly, I’d get a double listing, and push the competitor website from 1 to actually position 3.
Here’s where I started – number 2 in Google UK:
and below is the end result – Number 1 and 2 in Google (see here). I knew if I optimised for the actual query it would pick my page and promote the original page on my domain above the ‘competitor’ page.
Now I’ll get more traffic and most of the traffic from this term until somebody does it to me.
It’s this exact scenario any site content editor can replicate, writing different pages on your site targeting different variations on a theme rather than just continuously edit one page in search of ranking nirvana (No1).
You can use the same tactic with every page on your site, although it’s far easier to optimise for a less competitive term (like the one illustrated).
Double Listings, Double The Work, Double The Return
Ok not quite double the return, but this strategy boosts targetted traffic around content you already have. Yes, unfortunately it means double the work in some cases, but it’s worth it.
Note – Not sure how many birds I am killing with this stone. I might get a double listing about double listings too. UK SERPS anyway.
Qucik tip – check your stats, see what’s bringing the traffic in, optimise more pages for those terms to increase your traffic and clickthru rate (when I see a double listing I usually think “this website talks about this topic a lot, perhaps it’s an authority on the subject” – perhaps others do to).
Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)
Off-topic, I know. But I noticed an interesting thing recently with my site. It is frequently updated and Goggle regularly crawls it. And if I search with site: mydomain.com/sub in the past 24 hours, 4-5 thousands of pages are always returned.
However, if I search for the title of some of the pages (even between quotes to make the search more specific), none is returned.
Isn’t that strange? Using the site: operator should be the right way to check whether pages have been included in Goggle’s index. At least this is what Google says.
But, then why do they are not returned in normal searches, even when very specific.
Sorry, again, to be off-topic. However, I thought this information could be useful to you, unless you already knew it.
Mark
Some questions. how much Pagerank has the site, how many pages, what’s the quality of your links, also have you checked for canonical issues? And I take it all pages are unique content not found on other sites?
I have seen few websites which are ranking twice for a single keyword on a SERP.
May be it’s a new kind of algorithm by Google.
I usually update my own website once a week. And noticed that from the 1st month of 2009 that Google is now crawling my website thrice a month which is a good indication.