Where are you from? Norfolk

…and your chosen specialist subject is? Just general knowledge really. I like being a jack of all trades!

Currently on Spotify, I am mostly listening to… Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan.

How do you take your tea/coffee? Tea. Milk no sugar. I’m sweet enough.

What books/blogs are you currently reading? Mythical Man Month by Fredrick P. Brooks. Poems of W.H Auden, selected by John Fuller and some other, proper geeky books!

The last place I went on holiday was… a Greek island. Small Cyclades. Beautiful, hot and secluded.

When at the pub, I’ll be having… a Bitter. Preferably Adnams.

My favourite animal is… Well, In real life, I prefer dogs to cats. But on the internet, I prefer cats. The internet is made of cats.

My least favourite sport is… Curling. I can’t stand it. WTF do you watch it for? Or play it for that matter? It’s a ridiculous sport!

If we could employ a famous face in the team, who would you choose? I think Jack Nicholson would be a laugh.

Mac or PC? Linux

Beatles or Rolling Stones? Stones.  Music with BALLS!

Marmite or Peanut Butter? Marmite

Night Owl or Early Riser? Early Riser

White Hart or Refinery? White Hart. I’ve not been to the Refinery yet. They keep a good pint at the Dickens.

What are your thoughts of the team so far? Many and varied. Mostly positive!

And finally… if your friends had to describe you in three words, what would they be?
That’s an impossible question that one! Maybe: very, very difficult.

The Problem

The website was performing moderately for boat manufacturer based searches within Google search results (such as “fairline boats for sale”) but there was still much room for improvement.

Along with manfacturer based searches, we also wanted to improve our ranking for the most generic term of “boats for sale” for which we were appearing around page 10 of results.

So what did we do?

We focussed on three main areas:

Document outline – Over time, as the website grew, the document outline got a little left behind.  We ensured that all pages throughout the website were semantically correct; whether you were looking at the homepage, a list of boats or an actual boat itself.  Obviously the benefit from this being that spiders can crawl our nicely strucutred pages much easier.

Friendly URL’s – All page url’s were made up of the standard symfony stucture based on search criteria.  This would work well for when a user performed a real search on the website, but for popular pages we want to encourage regular crawling of, it didn’t work well at all.  For example, previously the page for displaying all Beneteau boats for sale would have been http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/Boats/preSearch/ locationCountryId/0/manufacturer/Beneteau/clearAll/1 and has now been updated to a concise http://www.MYWEBSITE.com/Search-by-manufacturer/Beneteau

The updates on the URL structures affected:

• Popular Brands
• Country (great for our long tail indexing)
• Boat types

Obviously, we had to put some 301 rules in, so we can catch old pages successfully

Stop the SPAM!

YBW is lucky to have a thriving forum community.  So whilst the discussions grow and grow, so does the amount of instances of links in the YBW portal navigation (shown below).

Whilst these links are valuable for a user; for a spider it could be considered as keyword spamming.  So we simply made these links nofollow if they were found within the Forum.

The Results

As mentioned above, our generic search of “boats for sale” saw us somewhere around 100+ on Google.

We continued to monitor daily to see what affect our changes were having.  Generally, our new URLs were indexed within 2 days.  In terms of the generic search results placement, we saw a steady progress upwards to pages 4-5 of SERPs within the first two weeks.

Today, we are appearing at the top of the second page (14th postition) which is a fantastic climb within only three weeks of putting the changes public.  Obviously, we still have room for improvement by getting to the first page; but we have some further ideas in the pipeline!