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Understanding and Establishing Micro Goals for Your Social Media Campaigns

Written on July 20, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, searchengineguide

by Jennifer Laycock

A few weeks ago I wrote a handful of articles on how to develop a proper social media strategy by developing goals, breaking those goals into supportive goals and matching goals to appropriate tactics. Those three articles outline the foundation that needs to be laid for any good social media plan, but your job doesn’t stop there. In fact, if you want to do things properly, your job is just getting started.

First, let’s quickly recap what your process would look like if you were to map it out based solely on those three articles. For each of your primary goals, the process might look a little something like this:

You would have started with your primary goal, broken it down into supportive goals, matched those goals to appropriate tactics and determined which social media outlets best allowed you to implement those tactics. After a few weeks or months, you’d sit down and ask yourself if you’d met your primary goal.

There’s really nothing wrong with going about the process this way, but there is a better way. What you need to do is understand the area between the outlets and success…that grey area where things can go right or wrong and you can be completely oblivious.

Understanding Micro Goals

Within that grey area is where our micro goals are going to live. These goals will sound familiar to most of you, because they’re actually the types of “goals” that get kicked around by people who know very little about social media strategy. Things like number of Facebook followers or number of RSS subscribers. Things that on the surface are almost worthless, but when combined with a solid strategy actually become crucial to the long term success of your campaigns.

Micro-goals are basically the various numbers you can tally up from your involvement in different social media outlets. They can easily be tracked and tallied over time and they give you a concrete gauge of your interactions with consumers and how those interactions are changing over time.

Establishing Micro Goals

You’ll need to have worked your way through your strategy to the point of selecting your social media tools before you’ll be ready to establish your micro goals. For the most part, there are universal micro goals that will need to be tracked across the board for all companies. These will serve as the starting points to help you realize what you should be tracking.


You’ll also need to have a solid understanding of your goals and supportive goals so you can fine tune your micro goals to your specific needs. For example, everyone will want to track the number of RSS and Email subscribers to their blog, but only some companies will need to track the number of PDF downloads or the number of leads generated from the blog.

Here are a few examples of specialized micro goals that might be tied to specific campaign goals:

If you are using Facebook to drive people to events or sales, RSVPs will become an important part of you campaign and an essential micro goal to track. If you’re using Flickr to build up press relations with bloggers and mainstream media, tracking the number of times your Creative Commons licensed photos are used will be important to track.

Sit down with your team, talk through your strategy and examine the list of actions consumers can take on each of the social media platforms you plan to utilize. Then add these to your list. Your finished product should give you quite a hefty list of things to track over the course of your campaign.

The Next Steps

Now that you understand what micro-goals are and how to establish them, you’re ready to learn how to put them to work to improve the performance of your campaigns. In my next post, I’ll talk about how to use these newly defined micro-goals to fine tune your social media efforts as you’re moving forward with your campaigns.

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Understanding and Establishing Micro Goals for Your Social Media Campaigns

Facebook: Please update your email address.

Written on June 17, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: blackhat, book, seo

What the fuck is wrong with facebook and their?:

Our systems have detected that [email address] is no longer a valid email. Facebook requires all users to maintain an active contact email. Please enter and confirm a new contact email below:

I fucking validated it 5 times now including 2 days ago and I’m still getting this message. Get your shit together already, Facebook; You’re the number one destination on the Internet.

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Facebook: Please update your email address.

Twitter Accounts Cross the 105 Million Mark

Written on April 15, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

The quest to decipher just how many actual users there are of Twitter continues. Yesterday at the Chirp conference being held for Twitter developers, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the group that the number of registered users (let’s call them accounts) is 105 million. That is considerably more the 65 million that comScore has estimated the number at. Macworld reports

Twitter has 105 million registered users, with 300,000 new users signing up every day, Stone said, opening Twitter’s Chirp conference at the Palace of Fine Arts before an audience of just shy of 1,000 developers. That user figure is more than a recent estimate from comScore, which pegged Twitter’s user base at 65 million.

The Twitter API (application programming interface) fields 3 billion requests per day, Williams said. “That’s bigger than all but a couple of Web sites in the world,” he said, claiming it makes Twitter “about the same size as Yahoo.” He said the service has grown 1,500 percent each year on average since “Twitter Inc.” was founded three years ago this month. The service is also fielding about 19 billion searches a month, Williams said, which compares to about 90 billion for Google.

Those are big numbers for sure. The question is just how many of those registered users represent actual active Twitter users. I know of many accounts that sit dormant to protect a brand or have been abandoned by people who caught Twitter fever then determined that there was no value in the service for them. I like to caution in these instances that the hyper usage levels that are seen my social media “experts” and “gurus” and (gulp…) “ninjas” are not reflective of how much the service is used by folks that are not in the industry.

Then there is the question with regard to using Twitter as to how much traffic is seen directly on the Twitter site vs. third party apps like TweetDeck etc. Conventional wisdom has been that the traffic is a 50/50 split but Stone stated that it more like 75/25 with the larger number representing those who do not use the Twitter site to use Twitter. You would expect him to make the numbers appear that way to show how much potential growth there is for the actual site traffic thus giving advertisers the impression that the future is much brighter for sure.

Other tidbits revealed at the conference include the production of an Android app, the 100,000 downloads of Twitter’s official Blackberry app (which is pretty good, I must admit) and the purchase of a one man company which created what will be the basis of the official iPhone app that is on the short term horizon as well.

Since this was being said at a developer conference the Twitter execs who were speaking tried to put nervous Twitter developers at ease. A Reuters report says

Twitter sought to reassure independent software developers at the conference that the company’s moves to add its own home-grown features and versions of the service would not shut out the more than 100,000 third-party programs that have been built to work alongside and enhance Twitter.

“Twitter is truly a collaboration and that is not changing,” said Williams.

But Stone said Twitter would continue to fill in holes it sees in the main product by developing new features and acquiring companies.

“I anticipate a few more” acquisitions this year, Stone said. “I don’t know if we’re going too crazy. But there’s certain things that we need to get done and we want to get done fast, and there’s certain things we can take our time building.”

Maybe those in attendance started setting their eyes on being like that one-man show that was purchased by Twitter. Of course, with over 100,000 developers out there trying to cash-in maybe a lottery ticket would be just as effective to generate income.

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Twitter Accounts Cross the 105 Million Mark

Twitter Ads Finally Set To Make Public Debut

Written on April 13, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing

It has been a long awaited and long talked about prospect but it looks like Twitter is finally letting us all know at least one way that they plan to make money. To literally no one’s surprise it will be through ads that Twitter calls “Promoted Tweets”.

The New York Times reports

Twitter will unveil on Tuesday a much-anticipated plan for making money from advertising, finally answering the question of how the company expects to turn its exponential growth into revenue.

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

Twitter has had its feet to the fire for quite some time as to what they would do to mine their millions of users for the gold that they represent to advertisers. This program is the first phase of that process.

John Batelle offers some interesting insights into this big development. His reaction to the same quote from the NYT is

The news is not so much that Twitter will show sponsored tweets in search results – after all, we’re pretty used to that, thanks to AdWords. The real news is the second part: Twitter will include sponsored tweets in the “the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.”

Regardless of where Twitter users consumer their Twitter feeds, the reality is this: Twitter’s new ad platform will mark the first time, ever, that users of the service will see a tweet from someone they have not explicitly decided to follow.

This will certainly attract every opinion from every person on the planet. Some will predict the demise of Twitter as a useful tool. Some will hail Twitter for finally wanting to be a real business. Others who are new to Twitter will not know that there ever was a time where Twitter was ad free. In other words, we are at the announcement stage of what is likely to become a long and closely monitored (meaning picked to shreds) process. To make the definitive statement on if this new platform will be the new AdWords is premature at best and foolish at worst.

As for my opinion. Well, I am not an influencer, per se, but I am a Twitter user. As a result I will be the target for these ads. As a result, my biggest question is can Twitter deliver on its desire to deliver the most relevant ad at the most appropriate time? Pretty simple. If I start to see ads for all kinds of junk with no apparent relevance to my Twitter use then I will be aggravated. Will it mean that I leave Twitter? Not likely. My hope is that they can do a better job than Facebook does and at least offer some variety of ads.

So let’s look at how these ads will work for now.

When a Twitter user searches for a word an advertiser bought, the promoted message will show up at the top of the results, even if it was written much earlier. The posts say they are promoted by the company in small type, and when someone rolls over a promoted post with a cursor, it turns yellow.

Note that for now these ads will appear following a Twitter search on the Twitter site. These two features alone will limit just who sees any ads from the onset.

Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.

If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post. That means that the company will not have to pay for it, and users will not see ads they do not find useful, Dick Costolo, Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer said

It’s when the ads move into a Twitter stream and reach third party apps that the real program will be unveiled.

In the next phase of Twitter’s revenue plan, it will show promoted posts in a user’s Twitter stream, even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser.

For example, if someone has been following people who write about travel, they could see a promoted post from Virgin America on holiday fare discounts.

So sound off Marketing Pilgrim readers. Is the is the end of the Twitter world as we know it? Is this the day you have dreaded or the day you have waited for. If you are a Twitter user but not a potential advertiser I suspect you will have a much different view of this then just a pure marketer would. Let’s hear it.

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Twitter Ads Finally Set To Make Public Debut

Linkscape Index Update and a Peek Behind the Curtains

Written on March 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: seo

Posted by Nick Gerner

Last week we updated the Linkscape index, and we’ve been doing it again this week.

Facebook More Popular Than Google: So?

Written on March 21, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, Object, book, marketing, seo

According to Hitwise, Facebook just became more popular than Google Search.

become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week

Not sure of HitWises methodology - why aren’t they comparing all Google’s web functions, including Maps and Mail? - but good on Facebook! For a site that didn’t exist in 2003, that is quite some achievement.

What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Not much.

Given the lock-in for return visits, it’s unsurprising that Facebook might receive more visits than a search engine. However, the most important aspect of different channels, as far as a web marketer is concerned, is: does the traffic convert to cash at some point?

Measure Success

Social Media Marketing, like SEO, is a tatic. However, if the tactic don’t translate into more business, then it’s a waste of time. Whatever channel you use, it is important to establish KPIs - key performance indicators - that measure the effectiveness of your tactics, and directly relate to the success of you business.

For example, one of the KPIs often mentioned in SMM is volume metrics, such as number of followers, subscribers etc. If we were to relate this metric back to our business objectives, we’d ask how does having a higher number of followers, or people claiming to be followers, result in more business? How many of those followers are really engaging with you? Or are they, literally, just making up the numbers?

I’ve seen social media companies fudge this aspect. Some play around with the term ROI, changing the “I” from “investment” to “influence”, or to “interest”, and use the number of followers as evidence of the level of interest in a clients services or brand.

The bottom line is the golden KPI. It can become blurred in bigger organizations, but for the little guy, it is crucial.

Volume Metrics Can Be Deceiving

Search marketers know that the volume game can be an illusion when it comes to making money.

“Jokes” may be a very popular keyword term, but it’s not making people any money because there is no commercial intent. “Second mortgages” is not a particularly popular term in terms of volume, but is lucrative as it has clear commercial intent. A high position for second mortgages in search rankings will make you money.

Conversely, how difficult would it be to get buzz around the term “second mortgages” via social media? Sure, with some inventive twisting and disguising of the true message it could be done, but really, it’s pushing water uphill. The social environment isn’t really suited to such a message.

Choose The Right Environment

The two channels are like apples and oranges.

Different environments work for different messages. Social media is great for generating awareness, getting people talking, and when integrated with an SEO strategy can be a great way of getting links. Primarily, it’s a brand strategy. However, because it is a social environment, there is less tolerance of overt commercial activity that in direct channels.

Typical social media measurements include:

• Business outcomes - can you link the campaign to specific interactions, such as sales?
• Influencer Reach - how many influencers picked up on your message and spread it?
• Audience Reach - how many visitors saw your message? Link this metric to…
• Engagement - how many of those people who saw you message contacted you, or took a desired action?

Conversely, SEO isn’t much use for building brand awareness or encouraging people to talk about your message. The environment is similar to direct marketing. It is well suited to direct response and commercial activity, as the intent of the user can be determined, and if that intent is commercial, then people welcome commercial messages.

What Is Your Business

Hanging out and being cool on Facebook isn’t a business

Business on the web typically falls into one of nine groups. Which is yours?

• Brokerage - bringing buyers and sellers together
• Advertising - displaying/selling advertising
• Infomediary - run programs such as ad networks
• Merchant - sell stuff
• Manufacturer (Direct) - make and sell stuff
• Affiliate - sell other peoples stuff and take a commission
• Community - leverage your community to sell something else
• Subscription - sell content/training on an on-going basis
• Utility - pay as you go usage

Decide which business you are in. When deciding on marketing and advertising tactics, ask yourself which environment is best suited to developing your business, then develop KPIs that support that business. You key KPI should be the bottom line - either this activity returns more money than you spend, or it doesn’t.

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Facebook More Popular Than Google: So?

SEO Health Checks - Regular Housekeeping Tasks for Your Website’s SEO

Written on March 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Posted by richardbaxterseo

Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performance.

General Error Checking

General errors can crop up continually with any website and left unchecked, their volume could spiral out of control. Working on improving and resolving large numbers of 404 and timeout errors on your site can help search engines minimise the bandwidth used to completely crawl your site. It’s arguable that minimising crawl errors and general accessibility issues can help get new and updated content into search engine indexes more quickly and often, a good thing for SEO!

If you want to get smart with error handling and other crawl issues, start by getting a Google Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at “Crawl errors” found via the “diagnostics” panel after you’ve verified your site:

Paying particular attention to the “Not found” and “Timed out” reports, it’s wise to test each error with a http header checker online or using a Firefox plug-in such as Live Http Headers or Http Fox. I find that drilling down into the first 100 or so errors, you tend to find a common pattern with many that lead to only a few fixes being required. I like to focus on 404 error pages that have external links first to get maximum SEO value from legacy links.

It’s important to note that sometimes, there’s more to an error report than just the URL listed in the console. I’ve found issues such as multiple redirects ending in a 404 error which is important information to brief your developers, potentially saving them a lot of diagnostics time.

As a side note, be careful how you interpret the “Restricted by robots.txt” reports. Sometimes, those URL’s aren’t directly blocked by robots.txt at all! If you’ve been scratching your head about the URLs in the report, run the http header check. Often, a URL listed in this report is part of a chain of redirects that ends or contains a URL that is blocked by robots.txt.

For extra insight, you should try the IIS SEO Toolkit or running the classic Xenu’s Link Sleuth Crawl both of which can reveal a number of additional problems. Tom wrote a nice article on Xenu and amongst his tips, setting the options to “Treat redirections as errors” is one of my favourites. As well as internal crawl error checking, a site of any size should try to avoid redirects via internal links. From time to time, using Fetch as Googlebot inside Webmaster tools or browsing your site with JavaScript and CSS disabled using Web Developer Toolbar with your user agent set to Googlebot can also reveal hidden problems.

Linking Out to 404 Errors?

Linking out to expired external URLs isn’t great for user experience, and implies perhaps that as a resource, your site is getting out of date. Consider checking your outbound external links for errors by using the “Check external links” setting in Xenu.

Canonicalisation

You spent time and effort specifying rules for canonicalized URLs across your site, but when was the last time you checked the rules you painstakingly devised are still in place? Thanks to the ever evolving nature of our websites, things change. Redirect rules can be left out of updated site releases and your canonicalization is back to square one. You should always be working towards reducing internal duplicate content as a best practice gesture, and without solely relying on the rel=”canonical” attribute.

Checking the following can quickly reveal if you could have a problem:

• www or non www redirects (choose either, but always use a 301)
• trailing slash (choose to leave out like SEOmoz, or in, like SEOgadget but don’t allow both)
• Case redirects – a 301 redirect to all lower case URLs can solve a lot of headaches or title case redirects if you want to capitalise place names like some travel sites do

“Spot checks” of Front End Code, Missing Page Titles and Duplicate Meta

Just every now and again, it’s nice to take another look at your own code. Even if you don’t find a problem that needs fixing, you might find inspiration to make an enhancement, test a new approach or bring your site up to date with SEO best practice.

One quick check I find useful is under “Diagnostics” > “HTML suggestions” in Webmaster tools:

Duplicated title tags or meta descriptions or both can reveal problems with your dynamic page templates, missed opportunities or canonicalization issues.

Site Indexation

Site indexation, or the number of pages that receive one visit or more from a search engine in a given period of time, is a powerful metric to quickly assess how many pages on your site are generating traffic.

Aside from the obvious merit in tracking site indexation over time as an SEO KPI, the metric can also reveal unintended indexing issues like leaked tracking or exit URLs on affiliate sites or huge amounts of indexed duplicate content. If the number of pages Google claims to have indexed on your site is vastly different to the site indexation numbers you’re seeing through analytics, you may have found a new problem to solve.

Indexed Development / Staging Servers

Is your staging or development server accessible from outside your office IP range? It might be worth checking that none of your development pages are cached by the major search engines. There’s nothing worse than discovering a ranking development server URL (it does happen!) with dummy products and prices in the database. You just know that customer is going to have a bad time on a development server! If you discover an issue, talk to your development team about restricting access via IP to the staging site or consider redirecting search engine bots to the correct version of your site.

Significant / Recent Changes to Server Performance

Google have put a lot of effort into helping webmasters identify site speed issues and it could make a lot of sense to keep a regular check on your performance if you’re not doing so already. There are a few useful tools out there to help you speed up your site, starting with Google’s “Site performance” reported located under “Labs” in Webmaster tools:

It’s good to check out the “Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)” report found under “Diagnostics > Crawl stats” in Webmaster tools, too:

Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine. It’s also a favourite subject of mine! What checks do you carry out regularly to manage the performance of your website? Do you have your own routine? If you manage a large site, or many large sites, what “industrial strength” tools or automated processes do you gain the most insight from?

This is a post by Richard Baxter, Founder and SEO Consultant at SEOgadget.co.uk - a niche UK SEO Agency specialising in helping people and organisations succeed in search. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz.

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SEO Health Checks - Regular Housekeeping Tasks for Your Website’s SEO

McTweets: Over 1 Billion Served

Written on February 10, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

So what’s the deal? Is Twitter slowing down or speeding up? Reports of slowing of growth in visitors and accounts of Twitter has created a stir for some. Unfortunately for Twitter that is the price of a ‘hockey stick’ growth pattern which is associated with rapid mass appeal. It’s every business’ dream but goes up must come down at least a little. Trouble is, that kind of growth is unsustainable and then the non-thinking nay-sayers come out of the woodwork with their doomsday predictions about the future (full disclosure: I suspect I have fallen into this category at times. Guilty as charged.)

So what do you do when you see something as popular as Twitter being taken through the ringer on its growth? Measure something else that looks like growth! Royal Pingdom has done that by measuring the number of tweets per month rather than visitors or users and they have attached a magic number to it as well that always gets attention: 1 billion (please take time out to do your best Dr. Evil impersonation in honor of this milestone). Here’s the pretty picture for you and be sure to read the methodology for the research after.

Methodology: To be able to calculate the number of tweets per month, we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself.

There are many different things that can be taken from this data. On one hand it can be looked at that while the number of users coming to Twitter as slowed the usage of the existing users is increasing. The implication is that they are getting value and using it more.

That might be true but let’s take a look at the dark side of this kind of research. If the user base is not growing at the rate as the number of tweets there may be another cause than just existing users tweeting more. What would that be? Twitter spam is on the rise! I think that this is the most likely cause of such an increase in tweets when the other growth metrics have slowed. If the complaints of Twitter users in general are any indication, I am putting my money on this horse.

Are you tweeting more or less? Do you think this growth in tweets is organic or spamtastic?

Go here to read the rest:
McTweets: Over 1 Billion Served

Testing How Crawl Priority Works

Written on February 5, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: seo

Posted by mgalecki

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

A SHORT INTRODUCTION…

We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones. The architecture of a website is usually correlated with the popularity of these pages expressed by number of backlinks:

• Home page has the most backlinks,
• 1st (e.g. product categories), 2nd & 3rd level pages obtain less links,
• finally the least important are deep pages (with articles, classified ads, product pages, etc).

The above mentioned “importance” of web pages versus the web site architecture has been illustrated in one of the Rand’s posts titled “Diagrams for Solving Crawl Priority & Indexation Issues“:

Important pages tend to have a different priority of indexation, and this was also presented very nicely by Rand:

Purple spots are those with the highest number of external links. As it can be seen, the pages which are close, take some of the popularity and they pass part of it further (pink spots). All the other spots stand for pages that are too far from the entrance points of search engine robots, which means that the chance of their indexation is much smaller.

In case of classified websites, which contain a lot of content, the above diagram should include subsequent category listing or search results pages. They are obviously less important than the main category pages, but their indexing additionally influences the indexation of their components - ad details pages. This is particularly important when the listing starts with so called premium ads, which change less often than standard classifieds.

BEFORE THE TEST…

Having this theoretical information, we have decided to see how it is like in practice. We have analyzed a website of http://www.morusek.pl (with animals and pets related classifieds from Poland) which has a total number of indexed pages exceeding 100,000. Using the combination of “site” and “inurl” queries we checked what is the number of indexed pages with a list of classifieds (in Polish “ogloszenia”): http://www.google.pl/search?q=site3A2F022+inurl%3Aogloszenia

The initial results were the following:

To continue the analysis, we excluded the first pages, as the numbers here are influenced by existence of some category pages with no classifieds at the moment, but which are indexable (there are crawlable links in the menu). In addition, to verify the effectiveness of the “site” query, we took into account a number of pages reported by Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) under “Internal Links”. The results were as follows:

WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO KNOW?

The first conclusion is obviously that the higher the page number is, the less probability that the page will be indexed. Secondly, while the actual numbers of GWT and “site” queries vary a lot, the trends (slopes) are almost the same. On average, the chance that the robot will crawl to the next page of search results decreases by 1,2-1,3% per page.

It is also interesting that, according to Google Webmaster Tools, pages from 2 to 4 have a good indexation ratio which later decreases dramatically at the fifth position. For example, for sites with number 4 the level of indexation is 60%, while for pages number 15 it falls below 30% (according to Google Webmaster Tools), or 40% (for the command “site” in Google). This is due to the fact that Googlebots have a much longer way to reach the appropriate link in case of the latter (a link to page 15 first appears on page 12), while there are direct links to pages 2, 3 and 4 on the first pages of search listings (see below):

THE SUBJECT OF THE TEST: INTRODUCING MORE LINKS

We decided to test what would be the changes in indexation ratios if we introduced more links to subsequent ad listings pages. On the first page of each category we added links to the 5th, 10th and 15th pages as show on the picture below:

After a month we tested the changes. Due to inaccurate results returned by the command “site” in Google (number of indexed pages seemed to be greater than the actual number of them) we present data from Google Webmaster Tools (internal links) only:

THE RESULTS

The graph clearly shows us that indexation of pages that were added to the listing on the first page is much higher after the change (pages: 5th, 10th and 15th), and actually equals the indexation of pages 2, 3 and 4.

However, the increase in indexation of pages directly linked from the home page did not affect the indexation of the neighbouring pages. For example, we can see a huge increase for page 10, but there is no change for pages 9 and 11. The conclusion is that for Googlebots these pages are too far from the points of entry. Only category pages for main region have incoming links. To index page 9 of the intersection of categories and regions, the robots would have to go the following path:

1. main category page (entry point),
2. category page + region (first page of results),
3. category page + region (tenth page of results),
4. category page + region (page 9
   

   Tags: chance ,first ,google ,home ,level ,morusek-pl ,number ,poland ,post ,robot ,search-engine ,space ,trends

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