Ofcom complaints
For our main article advice for Ofcom complaints please click here. ‘Ofcom complaints’ is a search term for which TelecomsAdvice is ranked highly in Google – at least until mid-December and then something happened so that visitors for ‘Ofcom complaints’ dropped off significantly. The primary landing page for ‘Ofcom complaints’ was our information sheet on the communications complaints process for which Ofcom is responsible but which is sub-contracted to either Otelo, the telecomunications Ombudsman, or Cisas, a commercial Alternative Disputes Resolution Service. I am not sure what changed to make our page at http://www.telecomsadvice.org.uk/infosheets/ofcom_telecommunications_internet_complaints_ombudsman_otelo_cisas.html drop out of the Google search but it made me do a bit of research on search terms and search engine optimisation.
One of the things that struck me was that for every four searches for ‘Ofcom complaints’ there was one for ‘Oftel complaints’; Oftel was absorbed into the new organisation Ofcom at the end of 2003 – so Ofcom need to do a bit more work on publicising their role – but coming back to search engine optimisation, it sems that ‘blogs’ – daily ‘web-logs’ like this TelecomsAdvice blog, seem to do quite well in Google. This blog uses open source software called ‘WordPress’ which appears to have good search engine optimisation built in and which can be enhanced with ‘plug-ins’.
I had changed some of the ‘meta data’ – that is the title and description, etc. that search engines can read but are not visible to visitors on the webpage (unless you use the ‘view > page source’ browser facility), I changed the wording from a straight ‘Ofcom complaints’ to include ‘telephone complaints’ and ‘mobile phone complaints’ which I thought would attract more visits – so maybe that had made a difference, but there are other factors which a website administrator doesn’t have much control over such as who links to your pages and what tags they use on the links which I believe make a big difference. Anyway, I have changed the titles and descriptions back to include ‘Ofcom complaints’ so we’ll see what effect that has.
As an addendum – I used a free online duplicate content and plagiarism search tool and checker which identified a site which had simply copied and pasted, probably automatcally, the whole page into their own blog in early December. I suspect that when I updated our own page, Google saw the other copy as older and ours as a duplicate which then got downgraded in the search results. I have had the offending page removed.
For those who are interested, TelecomsAdvice ranks well for ‘business telecoms’, and particularly for ‘small business telecoms’, ‘small business telephone systems’ and similar terms – and to be honest that is where most of the advertising revenue comes from – visitors searching for the business telecoms related terms are the ones who click on the ‘telephone system’, ‘VoIP’, ‘mobile phone’ and ‘broadband’ ads that appear around the pages – so the loss of traffic on ‘Ofcom complaints’ isn’t significant in revenue – but it is frustrating when you try to optimise your site for search engines and it goes wrong.
If you want to see what the relative popularity of search terms is, Google has a keyword tool in its Adsense section – but be careful when changing anything, updating old pages can have a negative effect!
As you may have guessed, this blog post is more about experimenting with whether I can get ‘Ofcom complaints’ back in the top Google search rankings – but hopefully it is also an example of how fickle search engines can be.
If you are looking for information on how to make a complaint about a telephone company or other communications provider then click here!