Just came back from the Affilicon conference where I participated on the Future of SEO panel and gave a talk about behavioral parameters that (maybe are and) will possibly be used by search engines in their ranking algos. The response to the presentation was great (especially from the SEO crowd at the conference). All in all, had a great time, met a few new people, started rolling the ball on some SEO meetups and cooperations we may organize here in the near future and enjoyed the panels. Food was also great. Kudos to Itay and the crew for putting everything together and big Thank You for providing the opportunity to participate on the panel. Here is the presentation I gave:

We usually focus on optimization for the organic SERPs, but there is a lot of traffic to be found in other Google Services as well. For example, if we look at the levels of traffic other Google subdomains are receiving, we will find that even though the numbers drop sharply after google.com, there are still substantial numbers in other services:

(taken from Wolfram Alpha, originally from Alexa)

Specifically, Google News can be a great source of traffic not only due to the volume of searches performed, but also due to perceived authority that listing in the News section can carry. I don’t have any hard data on this, but it would be interesting to compare the conversion rate of News visitors vs. regular search visitors.

In any case, I wanted to share a problem one of our clients had with his Google News listings recently and the way how we managed to solve this problem, hoping that this solution will help other people with similar problems.

We’ve noticed that the number of visitors coming from Google News has dropped sharply in mid-April. Performing a site: search on Google News, showed that the most recent article indexed was from April 18th. Since this specific client publishes several news articles a day, all of which usually get featured on Google News immediately, it was obvious there was a problem.

A quick check of the Google Webmaster Tools of the site discovered a list of news-related errors, the most frequent one being “Title not Found”

Searching for that specific error on Google, led me to this thread on Google News Help forum, which in turn pointed to this page on Google News Help for Publishers section. There are two suggested ways to fix this particular problem:

1. Make sure that the title is repeated both in the <title> tag and again in the body of the article in <h1> tags. The suggestion is that these two are as similar as possible, although we found that they do not have to be identical
2. Ensure that the <h1> title in the body of the article is not hyperlinked

Prior to the first delisting of this client’s articles from Google News, they performed a number of changes on the website, including hyperlinking the <h1>Title to point back to the original article page. This practice is commonly used to both ensure the link back to the original content from the websites that pick up the articles feed from the website and to tell Google which of the articles is the original one and thus prevent duplicate content issues.

It turns out that this hyperlink was preventing Google News bot to correctly identify the Title of each article and therefore to stop lisitng them in Google News. Removal of this hyperlink got the client’s articles back into the Google News in a matter of minutes.

Quick glance at other Google News listed sources shows that the majority of them do not have hyperlinked Titles. There are those that do (like LA Times for example), but they may be doing something else to ensure the correct recognition of the Title. In any case, if you are planning on getting your site listed in Google News, linking from the <h1> title of each article is not something I would recommend.

So after installing my snazzy new blog, changing the theme and playing with the plugins, I decided to try the Windows Live Writer. A friend of mine has warmly recommended it and since he is a sucker for WP, I reckoned it is a good bet.

So I download it and install it and when I try to connect my blog to it, I get the following message:

“Invalid Server Response – The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server.”

OK. I couldn’t expect to get it from the first try. So I uninstall the WLW. Nothing. I reinstall the WordPress. Nothing. I change the hosting. Nothing.

So I turn to Google in despair and find four different solutions:

1. There is a problem with the PHP version. Solution: the following code should be added to the top of the xmlrpc.php file:

   $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA = file_get_contents(“php://input”);

   Source

2. There is a problem with .htaccess. The following code should be added to the .htaccess file:

   <Files xmlrpc.php>
   SecFilterInheritance Off
   </Files>

   Source

3. There is a clash between WLW and some of the installed plugins. Disable the clashing plugins.
   
   Source

4. There are some extra lines in all kind of files that xmlrpc.php is referring to so the php functions calling those file are not able to execute. Solution: Use Fiddler to monitor the HTTP traffic between the WLW and your hosting and find the calls to files that are giving the error.

   Source

Well, needless to say, none of those worked for me. However in the comments of the solution #4, I find the following gem:

Check the WLW log as well. Go to Help, About and click on the Show Log File link.

Well, I try and find the following lines in the WLW log:

<b>Warning</b>: include_once(public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php) [<a href='function.include-once'>function.include-once</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>43</b><br />
<b>Warning</b>: include_once() [<a href='function.include'>function.include</a>]: Failed opening ‘/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php’ for inclusion in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>43</b><br />
<b>Fatal error</b>: Class ‘IXR_Server’ not found in <b>/public_html/www.seo-scientist.com/xmlrpc.php</b> on line <b>73</b><br />

Just to translate: xmlrpc.php was trying to access the class named class-IXR.php from line 43 and line 73 and not finding it in the /wp-include/ directory. So I access the directory and I see that the stupid FTP client has converted all my filenames to lowercase. One change of one filename and everything works perfectly.

You can’t beat the feeling…