Author: Alan

Google has a long history of penalising Link Networks. Here’s some examples. And this one.

This latest action comes whilst Matt Cutts, spam-fighting super techie and head of Google WebSpam team, is on annual leave. Which goes to show the strength in depth that Google have in their Webspam Team.

The Networks

Johannes Mehlem was the man in charge of breaking the news to the unfortunate souls who have found their websites penalised by this action. See his Tweet below:

We have taken action on one European and one German linking network. Ressources on German Blog: https://t.co/6xJMZYMHZI

— Johannes Mehlem (@JohannesMehlem) August 18, 2014

Note that they specifically say a German network has been penalised, as well as saying a European network has been penalised too. This could mean one of two things a) the link network is so large that it spans a number of European countries and is therefore classed as European or b) Google want to hide the location of the links network for some reason. If it’s B, they haven’t done the best of jobs as Karolina Kruszyńska has posted another tweet in Polish announcing the same thing. Giving the distinct impression that the country the network has come from is in fact Polish. Check it out below:

Dziś podjęliśmy działania przeciwko europejskiemu i niemieckiemu systemowi wymiany linków. http://t.co/VtQ82nSIgz #bettersearch — Karolina Kruszyńska (@karo_krus) August 18, 2014

So, good news for all SEOs with more of the spam getting cut down from the SERPs. And if you’re one of the websites that’s been hit by this update, you should probably stop the way you’re currently working.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Search engine optimisation, or organic inbound marketing as it is often known, is proven to be a cost effective yet chronically drawn out method of digital marketing. It is a slow burn process, and can take several months before optimisation really begins to show dividends. Improving a website’s structure, content and metrics, and improving its offsite perception requires a well planned campaign and a business’ commitment to it.

Because it can be a time consuming process to build up the organic capabilities of a website, people can often become frustrated with SEO and either give up on it or start investing in other, less effective, methods of marketing their websites and businesses.

Although Social Media has exploded in recent years and it is a very important part of SEO, it’s not as effective as SEO in generating inbound Leads. The same goes for outbound leads (cold calling) as they can often cost 80% than an inbound lead generated by SEO. Check out the full Infographic below:

Copy the code below to embed the infographic on your website:
<div><a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/net66-infographic-why-seo-is-still-the-don/”><img alt=”Net66 SEO Infographic” src=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Net66Infographic.png” /></a> SEO Infographic by <a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk”>Net66</a></div>

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

In Google’s latest Webmaster Video, head of Webspam and selfie extraordinaire Matt Cutts reveals how Google ranks content that doesn’t have a lot of backlinks to it.

The lack of backlinks to a page takes Google back to when they were a search engine who didn’t really count links that much. So, they have to rely on the words on the page. Basically when then come across the first instance of a word on the page, they give a bit of weight to that word.

When they come across the second instance of the same word or phrases on the page, then it still give some weight to it. From then on it notes each use of the word they’re counting without necessarily giving it any more weight.

They monitor the use of the same word or phrase and if they believe it’s used too much, it will then think that the page is keyword stuffing. So somewhere after the first and second mention of your keyword there is the perfect balance of keywords and regular words.

The second way they do this is to inspect the domain and decide whether the domain itself is trustworthy/reputable:

You spent weeks perfecting that picture of yourself and now Google plans to get rid of it. According to Google they’ve spend a lot of time redesigning their search results to provide the cleanest and most effective results they can.

This involves removing the picture of yourself in the SERPs and also removing the number of +1s you’ve got and how many Circles you’re in. See the statement below:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results… As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count.

One of the reported benefits to having the picture including along with everything you’ve written is that it increased Click Through Rates on your listing.

That doesn’t look to have been affected with Google also saying:

Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.

What do you think to this news?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Reconsideration requests have long been a chagrin of SEOs who have had to submit them. You can spend hours, days or weeks (depending on how badly the site was penalised) trying to find out why and then going through the tedious process of link removing (if it’s Penguin) or a content audit (if it’s Panda). You could also be left banging your head against a brick wall if you’ve no idea why you’ve been penalised and Google’s reconsideration requests aren’t likely to help you.

… Until now.

In the past you received a notice that your site was in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Not much help at all. They then decided to help more with the identification and removal of bad links.

Then Google decided to help out a bit more by pointing out some example links that were causing a penalty.

Now, however, Google have allowed for a text box where the actual person, a real human being, can evaluate your site and then offer personalised advice on how you can recover from the penalties your site is under.

You can read what they have to say in the “A note from your reviewer” box that comes with the new responses. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how useful these new reconsiderations will be:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey