The EU Court rules on the Right to be Forgotten

A recent court ruling in the European Union has directed search engines to receive requests from people to remove users’ personal information if the information is found to be outdated or detrimental to the person concerned.

Popularly referred to as the Right to be Forgotten ruling, it states that a person is now able to submit an information removal request to a search engine. However, the search engine is not actually bound to act upon such a request to remove personal information. The person does have the right to appeal to an government authority upon the refusal of the search engine. Most of such removal requests will probably refer to a person’s actual name in some form, and modification keywords may or may not be entertained.

Of note is the fact that a person’s information will continue to exist online even if it is removed from a search engine, as the search engine merely links to the web page that is hosted on a separate web server. However, it will be more difficult to find online.

The the EU court seemed concerned that with the current state of search engines, it is may be easy to effectively pull together a profile on people in a way that might violate the rights of privacy. By removing links from Google and other search engines, it is much more difficult for private information to be found .

But things may not be so simple. If something is deleted from Google, it may still be found on other search engines such as Duck Duck Go or Bing. Someone should apply to any and all search engines in order to minimise the footprint of information online. The search engine must also have some sort of presence in a country of the EU. If the search engine operates completely out of the EU without offices or servers there, it can probably ignore any request.

Net66: Google Knowledge Graph Added to Google Maps

It looks like the expansion of Google’s knowledge graph is continuing. If you’re on Maps and searching for a place, a new “Quick Facts” card will appear when you search. Check out the screenshot below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Social Media Update: Pinterest & Twitter Release Awesome New Features

I’ve always been a big fan of Twitter and Pinterest. They’re easy to use, fun and, importantly to me, visual!

Facebook do have a news feed full of images admittedly, but there are now so many promoted posts on Facebook that sometimes I don’t look at things properly as my mind will assume it’d promoted and I switch off.

Pinterest, however, is based solely on images. So even if an image is promoted, it’s not likely to display very different at all. In fact, Pinterest are taking such a gradual approach to their adverts that they (initially) won’t be shown in your pin feed at all.

They’re restricting adverts to certain users and only displaying them in categories and search pages. Admittedly you do search a lot and you quite often find yourself browsing categories, but your pin feed will remain your own for now and there will be no sponsored pins in there.

The advertisers have been limited too. But don’t expect to get an invite any time soon, here’s a list of the brands that have been approved to use these paid ads:

ABC Family, Banana Republic, Expedia.com, GAP, General Mills, Kraft, lululemon athletica, Nestle (including Purina, Dreyer’s/Edy’s Ice Cream, Nespresso), Old Navy, Target, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and Ziploc.

Twitter have also been in the News this week as they’ve released a new “Mute” button. This is a feature designed to primarily improve the user experience for Twitter users.

If you follow someone but find yourself getting bored by their Tweets, then you can make the choice to unfollow them, which might upset your friend who posts a photo of literally every meal they eat and tag it with #epic, or you can just mute them. Their feelings and hashtags remain undamaged and you no longer receive updates from your friends diet.

You can mute users directly from one of their tweets or you can visit their profile and mute them that way. See below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Google’s Rivals and Other, Lesser Known Search Engines

Transcript:

Today, we’re going to talk about some Lesser known search engines. We all know Google is the king of the pack when it comes to searching online. From products to local services, and general knowledge, and everything in between, the world uses Google to search. However, you may be a bit surprised to know that not everyone uses Google all the time. In fact, there are other search engines out there too. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Bing.

Bing is the number two search engine in the US. Owned by the creator of the Windows operating system, Microsoft, and previously known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, Bing is a serious contender when it comes to online search. And has been steadily increasing search quality in recent years, and is often considered to be the biggest threat to Google’s dominance of the search industry. It has a user friendly interface, and is particularly renowned for local and video searches. Bing also powers all Yahoo searches, after a deal between the two companies.

Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go is another, now serious, contender. Often taken lightly in previous years, partially due to the whimsical name, Duck Duck Go has now made a name for its self when it comes to online search privacy. The search engine states that it does not store a user’s data when it comes to online search. In fact, online search privacy is Duck Duck Go’s unique selling proposition. It has recently made significant changes to its user interface and added new features, such as image search and auto suggest.

For more information about search and how to optimise for it, keep watching Net66

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Tripping Google’s Spam Filter – Things to Avoid

I’ve mentioned how to grab Google’s attention before. It’s not a good idea if you want to rank your site but Google is alerted to your site for a bad reason.

Here are some top tips on how NOT to trigger Google’s Spam Filter:

> DON’T register a domain with a trademarked name or phrase in it. Profiting from misdirected search traffic isn’t ethical and will do you no favours in the eyes of Google.

> DON’T register a misspelling of a popular domain, especially an industry rival as this also looks dodgy and will cause Google to take a closer look at your practices.

> DON’T send out a stream of pings to various servers in an attempt to convince them you have new content when you don’t.

> DON’T use the same title tag for an inordinate amount of pages. Also don’t use irrelevant or misrepresentative title tags.

> DON’T buy domains with a history of high traffic and redirect them to affiliate marketing pages.

> DON’T Participate in link farms or a free for all link exchange

Follow the above tips and Google won’t be feeling the need to investigate your online practices.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts Posts New Video on Backlinks and how Long They’ll Continue to Matter for.

It’s hard to argue against the case that backlinks are important to SEO in this day and age. Yes, the landscape of SEO is shifting slightly over to content and how much quality is in it, but links still play a massive part in this.

Look at guest posts. The focus is on content and surely on the quality of that content, but are users dishing out content to organically get their brand out there? Or are they focussing solely on the links that can be put into these posts?

You just have to look at Matt Cutts recent blog post on this to see what Google thinks of people who target guest bloggers for just link building purposes.

The reason that Guest blogging has decayed and fallen is that it works. Really well. So spammers have taken this tactic and absolutely hammered it. Seriously. I get emails left, right and centre from people who have THE best content ever and they’ve chosen my blog to publish it on. Lucky me!

As this tactic is now getting abused so much, it’s harder for Google to determine genuine blog posts from not so genuine ones. So they need other rankings signals to judge on. For instance, Google is working on looking at who might be posting content on websites.

Like Google Authorship, but not. So Google can check the patterns of content, see who’s posting what and then rank that content “in theory” on the content alone. Not with links.

See how else Google will begin to rank results in the future on Matts Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Will the Importance of Links Decrease Over Time?

People at Google have recently stated that the importance of backlinks within the overall ranking scheme could diminish over the next few years. According to observers, the search engine may be looking at alternative ways to determine the relevance of a website to a particular keyword. These include signals from experts, the qualitative and quantitative interaction of humans with the content, and other on-site indicators.

Signals from experts could be links from a top journalist to your site, for example. If the industry is the same as yours, or similar to yours, and the linking party is considered an expert, you could benefit immensely from such a link.

Alternatively, Authority websites can also be gauged by their on-site content. On-site content is one of the easiest ways a search engine can determine a site’s worth. Detecting content matter, nuances of language, use of industry terminology, quality of language used, and even grammar can help a search engine get to grips with site quality and any potential authority status.

Currently, inbound links are the most important ways a search engine can determine the relevance of a web page to a particular keyword. However, unscrupulous link builders have been using links to increase relevance for web pages that are not really relevant. Motives can include monetary profit for one’s business, or working on a client’s behalf to raise rankings.

Quality link building involves creating mutual relationships with other businesses and stakeholders, so that any links between websites act as reflections of real world relationships. These are likely to be trusted by search engines, and your website is more likely to receive the benefit and rank higher.

Net66: Yahoo Stops Honouring “Do Not Track”, Explains Why

Yahoo has recently stopped honouring the request of “Do Not Track” signals sent by browsers. The do not track idea was first touted as working until it broke that it was merely a request that browsers sent to websites.

Since then, more and more websites have stopped honouring these requests. See Yahoos statement below:

“As of today, web browser Do Not Track settings will no longer be enabled on Yahoo. As the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track, we’ve been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard. However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.”

The secondary implication of this is that Yahoo will now enable better personalisation of their search network. Much the same way Google do now.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Updates Guidelines on “Sneaky” Redirects

Page redirects have long been a form of “cloaking”. Which is bad in terms of Google. The reason why, because when you cloak a page, you’re effectively showing Google one page and the user a different page.

The reason this is so frowned upon is because the website could show Google a nice, relevant, high quality page full of great tips and advice, and then show a regular user a page of adverts. Bad idea.

This has been taken to an extreme where people will rank a page for the desktop, but when a user tries to access that page on a mobile device, they’re redirected to a completely different domain. Google had added the following into their webmaster guidelines to clear up exactly what is deemed outside their webmaster guidelines:

> Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different
> Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain

Google takes issues like this very seriously and will take manual action against your website if it does believe your website is violating their webmaster guidelines. Penalties can be a drop in your rankings and in rare cases it can involve the de-indexing of your whole website.

They also updated their terms on hacker websites that have redirects on them with the following:

“Hackers might inject malicious code to your website that redirects some users to harmful or spammy pages. The kind of redirect sometimes depends on referrer, user-agent, or device. For example, clicking a URL in Google search results could redirect you to a suspicious page, but there is no redirect when you visit the same URL directly from a browser.”

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts: Myth Busts the common myths of SEO.

Last week Matt Cutts spent over 4 minutes de-bunking SEO myths that are still cropping up at conferences and on blogs.

His intro launches into two theories that go against each other by way of Adwords. He states that there’s one side of the argument that claims if you buy Google Adwords then you rank higher. Yet there’s the other side claiming that if you DO buy adverts then you’ll rank higher.

Matt wants to get these two groups together, sit them down and start a war. Not really. He does want them to argue the pros and cons of each idea and come up with one for him to debunk.

The rest of the video is spent talking about how he thinks SEO is still “faddy”. For instance last year if you had a lot of article directories you could rank. And how now this year it’s guest blogging. See what the rest of the video has to say here:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Matt Cutts Tells us how Page Titles are Overwritten in the SERPs [Video]

Matt Cutts has released another Webmasters video today and this one is taking a look at Page Titles. Page titles are the title of the page. I know. But what they also do is contain information directly relating to the content of each page. Google will read this information and, where they can, use it.

However, if you have a certain keyword in your page title and a user searches for a different service, then Google will do what they can to change your page title and make sure that it’s still relevant.

For Example, Net66 are both a web design and an SEO company. If you were to search Net66 SEO, Our page title is more likely to show up with SEO keywords in there than if you were to search Net66 web design.

Google will pull information from your H1s, your on-page content and even the Open Directory project, if it can, to get the right information to that page. This is so that users can see best what the page relates to before they click through on it.

Take a look at the full video below:

What criteria does Google use to change the title it shows in the SERPs depending on the query? Does schema influence that? Maybe headings (h1, h2..) have more weight?
Christian Oliveira, Madrid

Why Google search results doesn’t show the current meta title of webpage? Instead of meta title search results show H1 tag from HTML page?
kbroka, Nepal

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: The Importance of Proper Keyword Reseach

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts Explains how to Outrank Larger Sites

It’s often a question posed by people who’s niche does include incredibly large brands. For example if you’re a sports shop, it’s likely you’re going to come up against Nike or Adidas or other companies that have millions to spend on online marketing. So how do you outrank them?

The full question put to Matt was as follows:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.
Dan

Straight off the bat, Matt is a little unimpressed. And he does make a point to. Think about the original social network (MySpace, for you younger readers), how is that now not still enjoying a monopoly of the market because it was such a giant? The answer is that Facebook came along, and Facebook did a better job than MySpace.

The same for Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and all these other social media sites that are now up there with Facebook and Twitter.

The most part of the video talks about how you can take your niche, and really make it your own. Give a different idea on everything, turn existing ideas on their head. Become authoritative in what you are talking about and Google will recognise this and increase your rankings.

Then once you’re an authority, you can add other dimensions to your business and become authoritative in other aspects of your industry. Eat, sleep, rinse, repeat and you will soon take stock of yourself and you will be a “giant” that other companies will struggle to overtake.

See the full video and hear Matts view on this in the below video:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Happy St. Georges Day! Google Doodle Celebrates

Happy St. George’s day from Everyone at Net66. Google has celebrated by releasing the following Google Doodle.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Take a look at Google’s Easter Eggs

Google have long had a good sense of humour. They offer tons of “extra” services that many companies don’t. For example they add topical features that pop up at the right time.

These bonus features are usually hidden but can be discovered. Termed as “Easter Eggs”, because you have to hunt for them, these bonus features are always a bit of fun. Just like the Atari game you can play on Google Images.

See what else you can do with Google’s Easter Eggs on our Video Below:

Transcript:

Hi Everyone, It’s Easter time! If you don’t have time for a real easter egg hunt, fear not! Did you know Google is more than a Search Engine? Yes it is also an easter egg factory.

You Don’t believe me? Well you can see for yourself. Google has created some very enjoyable easter eggs for you.

Let’s take a look at some of Google’s Easter eggs:

Blink HTML – this is a play on the HTML blink tag. Just type in Blink HTML into Google, and watch the search results page blink at you!

Want more HTML goodies? How about Marquee HTML. Just type in Marquee HTML, and watch Google’s text scroll across your page in a Marquee fashion

Feeling nostalgic? How about reliving the days of yore with Atari games? How about playing a game of Atari Breakout…just head on over to Google Images, and type in Atari Breakout. You can now play the age old game of the same name!

Feeling a bit more up to date? How about honing your starcraft skills, with Zerg Rush. Starcraft is a multiplayer strategy game created by Blizzard, and has a loyal following across the Internet. Well Google knows this, and has created an Easter egg for you Starcraft fans! Just type in Zerg Rush, and watch the little Zerglings eat up your bases that double as Google Search Results!

So now you too can have a super fun Easter, with your favourite search engine. What’s that? You’d rather have your website rank higher? Well for that, please do get in touch with Net 66.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google’s Matt Cutts on The Difference in Error Codes on your Website

Take a look at what Matt Cutts has to say on the difference between 410 and 440 error codes on your website:

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