The Importance of Outbound Links [Video Blog]

Transcript:

The importance of outbound links

Usually, when we talk about link building we refer to inbound links to a website. However, another important aspect of a website is its outbound links. These are links that point out from your website, toward other websites.

Outbound link are especially easy to manage, since we do have control over our websites. What are some of the things we can do to ensure that outbound links are good and beneficial, and not at all detrimental to our cause?

First, we need to ensure that any outbound links are relevant to the page on which they are found. So if a web page is about gardening, you cannot have an outbound link about insurance.

Next, we need to make sure that the page on which the outbound link is found, is relevant to the rest of the website. For example, you cannot have a special page dedicated to an irrelevant topic, for the sole purpose of housing that link. Many people would probably approach you to house such a new page on your site, with their link in it. Do not easily give in to their demands, because if the page is not relevant to your own website, your entire website runs the risk of being penalised.

Yes, your whole website can be penalised and can thus loose its rankings, if you are hosting irrelevant content with outbound links in them. They key here is the relevance or otherwise of the new page in question.

You are free to decide what level of freedom you are willing to offer people who write on your website. Just be careful when accepting guest blog post offers from others.

 

Google Continues Front Page Development by Removing Video Thumbnails

We’re all familiar with Google’s search results. I’m sure you hear the phrase “Dunno, Google It” at least once every day. “YouTube it” isn’t far behind but it still applicable. I’ve mentioned this as YouTube videos are very popular and when you search for, say tutorials, videos that are contained on web pages and that have the correct structured data will show up as a thumbnail image next to the listing on Google.

It seems that Google aren’t happy with this layout at the moment and are looking at improving this for users. As in keeping with the latest design trends. Minimalism is playing a part in Google’s mind and the new video results no longer feature the thumbnail of the video.

Instead they feature a small, favicon sized, grey button with the play symbol on there and the time next to it. Take a look at the proposed new design below:

new-google-video-result-ui

old-google-video-result-ui

What do you think of the new design?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s “Not Provided” is Now Rolling out to Adwords Subscribers

If you’re not aware of what “Not Provided” is, you’ve not worked in SEO. Last year, Google decided it was going to encrypt search data to better protect the security of the user. You see in Google Analytics, you could look at what phrases organic users had searched to get through to your website. Despite the fact that individuals couldn’t be traced through analytics and identified as searching certain phrases, Google stopped supplying keyword data.

Taking data from internet marketers made their jobs much much harder. Without the data in analytics, you couldn’t see what your client was getting found for and you couldn’t measure your success.

To add salt to the very open and sore wound of this, Google continued to supply keyword data to users of Adwords. On one hand it was “We’re removing keyword data to protect our users’ privacy” but on the other it was “you can still get this data if you use our paid service though”.

This naturally made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. To help soothe people’s anger we wrote a guide on what to do with 100% not provided.

But now, it looks like Google will be rolling out the same restrictive measures to Google Adwords users too. Showing that they aren’t just trying to move people from organic SEO to Adwords, that they actually want to protect users’ privacy.

The source of this is unconfirmed but news is breaking on more and more sites that this is the plan for Google’s paid search.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Penalises more Link Networks – Tokyo Style

It wasn’t Godzilla who this time wreaked havoc in Japan, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a more polar opposite. On one hand you have a nuclear powered gargantuan lizard that breathes fire, has laser eyes and once swam to New York (despite coming from Japan, that’s FAR!).

On the other hand you have the vaguely teddy-bear shaped Matt Cutts, who spends his time learning the ukulele, going off gluten and making the web a better place.

To make the web a better place and more importantly, to make sure that Google’s search results don’t include any spam or feigned results, Matt Cutts’ Japanese web spam team have taken action on 7 Link Networks from Japan. See the congratulatory tweet from Matt below:

 

It seems like Google has been penalising Link Networks for months now. And when you look at the numbers, they’re churning out the results quite nicely. One of my previous posts has discussed this and listed the victims.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Updates Privacy Policy

It’s not often Google updates it’s privacy policy, but considering how large a company Google is you can expect slight changes to privacy policy to affect a lot of users.

Especially when you consider it’s not just Google Search and Google Plus, but it’s YouTube and it’s Gmail too. Google operate a One-policy privacy policy across their products. So the same ideas that apply to YouTube’s services also apply to Google Search.

You can find the full privacy policy here. As you can see they’ve highlighted the differences they’ve made to their privacy policy on page. See below:

Google Privacy Policy Changes

Have you read the complete updates? What do you think to the changes made?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Reputation as a Variable in SEO [Video Blog]

We all know about on-site and off-site SEO. Today we’re going to talk about a lesser known variable in SEO: Reputation. What is reputation? In real life, reputation refers to the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about an entity or person.

When it comes to search marketing, on-site and off-site optimisation are really all about building your reputation. Think of the online world as a mirror of the real world. Links toward a website actually result from reputation. In this way, links are a by product of better reputation, not the goal.

You are defined by the company you keep. This is especially true online, and search engines go to great lengths to understand your company and associates to get a better idea of what you’re about.
Reputation can be traced from both website mentions of your brand, links to you, or social media signals talking about you.

There is a difference between acting good and actually being good. In the real world, we can usually sense who’s genuine and who’s faking it. Search engines are now getting better and better at differentiating between genuinely good sites and those that are trying to look good.

So what can we do to stay ahead in the game? Well, for one thing, we can be really good at what we claim to be doing, or selling. Genuine competence will win out in the end. Professional help will always provide you with significant advantage, however, and good SEO consultancy will help you stay ahead of the game. Keep watching Net66.

Google’s Matt Cutts on how Google Discerns True Authority from Short Term Popularity

Matt Cutts released another WebMaster Tools blog today he was put the following question:

As Google continues to add social signals to the algorithm, how do you separate simple popularity from true authority?

The first thing to note about this question is that Matt Cutts brushes off the first part of the question regarding Social Signals. He said that Google using social signals was an assumption and then left it there neither confirming or denying they do. Odd.

On to the meat of the matter though. First off, Matt states that people can wrongly state that PageRank is a matter of reputation and trust rather than just popularity. He gives a very good example. For example, nudey sites are very popular, but you’re not going to be putting links to them on your blog are you?

On the other hand, an estate agents website might not be the most popular and get thousands of visitors, but the people who do visit the website are more likely to link to it. So it’s hard for Google to say qualitatively which website is more popular.

See the rest of his video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google+ Introduces a New View Count for Profiles [Image]

It has to be said now that Google+ is a proper Social Media player. It might not be up there with Twitter and Facebook just yet, but there’s definite promise. Plus, Google will eventually shoehorn their users into using it anyway.

Recently they merged together the comments on YouTube with Google+. They were prompting a lot of users who previously had no Plus profile to create one in order to let them comment on the videos they were watching.

A new feature that has launched recently now displays the number of views your profile has been viewed (6,806 thanks for asking). See how it looks below:

view-count

This does bring up a lot of questions. Including what constitutes a view. Thankfully one of Google’s resident techies has posted the following FAQ:

What does this number count? This is total views on your profile, your posts, your photos, and your videos.

What constitutes a “view?” For your profile, when someone goes to view your profile page. For other things, it’s when they look at it — e.g., when one of your posts shows up on someone’s screen. (That’s because this is how most people read posts: showing up in a stream, without clicking on it explicitly) Looking at your hovercard doesn’t count.

Is this related to +1’s, reshares, etc.? Only in that someone who +1’ed your post also probably saw it. You can already see counts for those on individual posts, etc., and before today you could see view counts for each photo if you looked carefully at the one-up view — now you can see that for everything.

If someone reshares my post, does that count? Yes, since a viewer is seeing your content. Ditto if someone sees your post through an “Alice +1’ed this,” through a post embedded on a page, or any other way that someone encounters it.

I don’t want to show this on my profile! You can hide this by going to your settings page. Go to plus.google.com/settings and look for “Show how many times your profile and content have been viewed.”

This seems strange: Some people seem to have a lot more views relative to their number of followers than others. Is something broken? Not at all. Some people have a lot of followers but don’t engage with them well, while other people engage amazingly with a smaller group.

How many views has your profile got?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Guest Blog Network Gets Penalised by Google, Why?

Transcript:

Guest blog posts are a popularly used link building medium. Guest Blog posts have been an important channel for off site optimisation because they signify personal endorsement for brands or products. Blogs are websites of a rather personal nature, and can give a candid view of what a certain entity or subject matter is about.

Remember, search engines are all about putting machines in your shoes. Search engines try their best to emulate human behaviour, and to understand what human beings like or dislike.

Link building doesn’t really get any more genuine than an actual person writing about what they care about. Therefore, guest blog posts have been traditionally trusted by search engines.

However, we have recently received the news that a popularly used guest blogging network was penalised by Google.

Why did this happen? A blog network can be penalised because it was not been as stringent in weeding out low quality blogs. Such low quality blogs can place links in spammy, spun, or generally dubious content. Links embedding in such content can incur a penalty for your site.

You would be well advised from staying away from any such blog that has content that doesn’t read naturally. If you use a network, it is your own prerogative to screen the sites that are part of it. Just be careful who you are working with to review your product or service.

At Net66, we take link building and content partnership seriously. That is why we only work with trusted bloggers that write product reviews, endorsements and other information about your business, your products and services to make sure that they present a genuine picture of your offerings.

Blog Post by:
Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on Multiple Breadcrumbs

A good question for Matt Cutts is whether having multiple breadcrumbs on your site can confuse Googlebot. This question is from an E-commerce owner in Japan.

As ever with Google and Rankings etc, moderation is key. If you have a product that is in many categories and you have a list of 20 different breadcrumbs on your site. That’s probably a bit confusing. But again, if you have a product in a few categories and you only list one, that in turn won’t help Googlebot understand this product.

Breadcrumbs aren’t the sole factor in this as a proper structured website will also help this. So you don’t need to have every category your product is in on the website if your top menu is fixed. See the full video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Control your SmartHome from your SmartPhone Courtesy of Google [Infographic]

Google have been very busy recently buying up all sorts of different companies. But one that’s stood out recently and looks set to have a huge influence in 2014 is the company Nest, that Google bought recently for $3.2 billion dollars. $3.2 billion is not a small amount either, that’s just shy of £2 billion (£1,932,483,846) and enough to buy you 7,729,935,384 Mars bars!

Nest specialise in creating ‘Smart’ products for the home. Such as a smoke detector that can detect a rising temperature but then ‘talk’ to the thermostat to see if the heating has been turned up. You’ll also be able to turn it up and down via your smartphone after your smart doors let you know everyone has left the house.

The-Google-Smart-Home-ForRent.com-Homes.com_

Image Courtesy of ForRent.com

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Matt Cutts Wielding the Banhammer Willy Nilly

On Wednesday I wrote a blog about what Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts, were doing about link networks. I included in this blog an updated list of banned link networks.

It looks like that list is already out of date as Matt Cutts and his BanHammer of Manual Action have taken two German scalps in the Link Network business. One of the companies has been named as efamous, the other escaped the public red-hands act.

See Matt Cutts’ gloat Tweet below:

 

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on How to Tell Google You Have a Mobile Site

With the massive rise of mobile search and the raft of tablets and smartphones at our disposal, what’s the best way to let Google know you have a mobile version of your website?

Matt Cutts answers this question and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of responsive web design, CSS, JavaScript and Agent redirections.

See the full video below:

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Net66: Google Link Network Hit List Updated, Italians and Spanish be warned! [Tweets]

Google’s Matt Cutts has recently expanded his invasion of European link networks. In the past he’s already hit a few of them. Some of his targets:

Anglo Rank
Anonymous
Buzzea
Germans
Ghost 2.0
Sape
Text Link Ads

And now it looks like he’s targeting Spanish & Italian Networks too. Check out his tweets below:

Blog Post by Greg McVey