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Net66 Video Blog: How a Search Engine Works

Transcript:

Welcome to Net66! 

Today, we’re going to take a look at how a search engine works from the inside. Lets take a look at the innards of a search engine. 

First, we’ve got the world wide web. Next the spider traverses the world wide web. The Spider is a specialised computer program built by search engines to crawl or traverse the world wide web. 

The spider passes its findings onto the search engine where the data is extracted, tokenised by which it means that the data is broken up into little bits, discrete bits such as title tags and h1 tags. It is then selected and unwanted bits are discarded, and finally stored. 

It is then passed into the data warehouse that houses all of the search engine’s cache. Now lets take a look at what happens on the other side when a user makes a query in the search engine. We’ve got the user here, the query is passed, first to the proxy server, the proxy server is responsible for all the local communication to and from the user. 

Next it is passed to the personalisation server. This is responsible for the geographical and other localised preferences for the user.

From there the data is passed to the web server. The web server is like any other web server on the internet that deals primarily with TCP/IP communication on the internet that passes through TCP/IP port 80. 

From there, the data is passed into the search engine. The query is then extracted from the data stores and passed to the data server. 

The Data server serves the data from the data warehouse to the semantic algorithms. The semantic algorithms are responsible for translating the data from the data warehouse into a 1-10 search engine results page. 

This is further propagated into the search results we see, on Google for example. 

The search results are then passed into the web server and from there they’re served back to the personalisation and geo-targeting server, from there to the proxy server and then finally, to the user as a 1-10 list of search results. 

And that is briefly how a search engine works from the inside. 

Thanks for watching!

 

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Net66: Google Gives Hope to the Good Guys of SEO

Despite years of experience and a vast wealth of resources at their disposal, Google can still miss the odd spam site that ranks really well.

This is addressed in Matt Cutts Webmaster video today. The question he was asked is as follows:

Matt, Does the good guys still stand a chance? We’re a small company that hired an SEO firm that we thought was legit, but destroyed our rankings w/ spam backlinks. We’ve tried everything but nothing helps. What can a company with good intentions do?
Daniel, Miami, FL

Poor Daniel. He’s hired an SEO firm who’ve pulled the wool over his eyes and spammed his website. As Daniel sees himself as a good guy then he wants to know how to remedy his site and whether you can get results without spamming.

The answer is, yes! Of course. Google is hell bent on getting rid of all spammy results in their search engine. Unfortunately there can be some techniques that are still very much “Quick win”. An SEO firm will get your website ranked, however they will achieve this using black hat techniques. Google will find out that the wrong techniques have been used and will apply a manual action against the offending site.

However Matt does say that the more people using black hat techniques, the more likely they are to get penalised, leading to more space above for white hat sites to move into. See the full video below:

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Shop Fitters go online in the Northwest

Online sales are forming a bigger and bigger chunk of small and medium sized businesses’ revenue every year. Today, brick and mortar shops belonging to a bewildering array of industries are going online in a bid to secure their marketing future. Even such traditional industries as builders, joiners, and even shop fitters are taking to the online arena.

Manchester is no stranger to quality building services providers. Clarke Gough, one of the most established shop fitters in Manchester have recently boosted their web presence with enhancements to their website and a foray into social media. Clarke Gough were in the news due to their refurbishment fitting the iconic Sankeys club just before its re-opening in December 2013. Sankeys was once voted to be the most popular club in the world, and the fact it chose Clarke Gough for their interiors speaks volumes about the latter’s shop fitting credentials.

Recently, Clarke Gough teamed up with the charity Mustard Tree and Manchester Arndale to build the Empty Shop, a charity concept where a shop entirely devoid of contents would be filled up by donations of clothes and used belongings. As a leading interiors provider, Clarke Gough deems it important to give back to society and the city of Manchester.

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Save your searches with Bing Save

Bing is looking slowly gaining market share, and has established iteslf as the number two search engine in the United States. With the power of software behemoth Microsoft behind it, Bing invests a significant amount of resources into research and development. This has yielded the latest feature yet, called Bing Save.

This new functionality can be viewed as an amalgamation of search engine and social networking features. The feature allows users to save their favourite search results. A tiny “floppy disk”-like icon appears next to search results, which you can click to save the result to your records. The service is available as a public beta at bing.com/saves.  You also get access to bookmarking tools where you can bookmark content that you found elsewhere on the Web.

Other useful features of Bing Saves are the Public Feed and Trending sections. The Feed is a real time view of items being saved at the moment, and Trending is an area where you can find the most popular saved articles.

The service could potentially be a great source to discover popular content, and can even be a direct traffic source as visitors click through to popular websites featured in the Bing Saves Trending section.

 

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Matt Cutts on What is and isn’t Considered a Paid Link

Matt Cutts, the batman of Google’s antispam team, has released a video on Paid Links and how Google are judging them.

Advertised Paid Link

Thank you captain obvious. If there is a website willing to accept an amount of money in exchange for placing a link to your website then that is, believe it or not, a paid link.
Other less obvious paid links would be advertising on a website where links to your site aren’t nofollowed or redirected.

Value

Google also look at the value of what is on offer. For instance, if you’re given a free stress ball from a counselling company that has their logo on it, chances are they aren’t expecting you to rush to the nearest internet cafe to blog about your good fortune whilst including a link to their site. So they aren’t really paying you for a link if you do choose to blog about it and link to their site.
However, if you’re given a substantial amount of money and you do happen to write a blog linking to the donators site, that could be deemed a paid link.

How Close to Money is what you’re Given

Similar to value, Google will inspect what you’ve received in exchange for a link to someones site. If what you’ve been given is similar to money, a gift card for instance, as that’s pretty much as close to money as you can get without it being actual money, then that link will be treated as page.

Gift Vs Loan

Tech companies will often loan out their latest products to tech bloggers so they can get good reviews. This is standard fare. It changes when the products are given as a gift, rather than a loan. The gifting of this product is closer to payment than a loan.

Hear more form Matt below:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

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The true power of social media: Oscars break twitter record!

We all know that the Oscars are the main awards for the TV and film industry but last night it also made social media history. The power of social media is exceptional, the potential audience you can target is mind blowing.

At the Oscars last night there was many famous people in the same room and a piece of social media brilliance by Ellen Degeneres sent twitter into chaos!

Just take a look at this epic selfie;

ellen degeneres tweet

As you can see there are many of the worlds biggest stars in one photo. But just look at the amount of retweets it gained. There was that much of a buzz about the tweet, that it caused Twitter to briefly crash!

Ellen broke the record for the most retweeted tweet which was previously held by the president of the United States, Mr Barack Obama;

barack obama tweet

This tweet was put just after Obama had been re-elected in 2012 and generated 781,635 retweets and 295,875 favourites.

This just goes to show the true power of social media for that many people to be talking about the same subject it is rather remarkable. The speed that it happens also, approximately 779,000 retweeted Ellen’s selfie tweet in just half an hour.

It reached the million landmark within an hour and history was made by everyone involved!

Social media is an extremely under used tool to share content and images in this instance, there are so many users for you to share with and great opportunities for you to go viral.

So try it out implement more social media in your campaigns, interact with your audience and deliver the answers or services they want!

Posted by Jordan Whitehead

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Consistency in Links is Critical!

Finding somewhere to put a link back to your website, whether its a business, blog or hobby website is simple. You may get ‘giddy’ and spend a day building, 5, 10 or 20 links pointing back to your websites. Which is great! and it may help, But is it enough?

Maybe it’s not enough and thats why people will go to websites who are offering 5000 links in 2 days posted back to your website, probably on of the most dangerous things you can do to your business!

Sure you may spike up the rankings on google for a few days, but its almost guaranteed you come tumbling down faster than a rock falling off a cliff face!

So how is backlinking done correctly, in short, as natural as possible is the answer.

Ask yourself this question, does adding 500, 100 or 500 links to your website in a week sound natural to you?

Im guessing not.

Infact unless you have done a radio or even television campaign then your very unlikely to acquire those kinds of links in such a short amount of time!

So its fair to say adding loads of links to your website is a bad idea. What about ‘a little but often’?

Well little and often is a good idea, it would appear more natural, and in small low competitive niches you can get somewhere, especially if you have located and only target high PR, very relevant quality websites to point back to you.

However, what if your business or websites are in a medium competetitive niche? What do you do then?

To many links and you’ll get slapped, not enough links and your not going to get anywhere fast!

Well in truth, finding links is one thing, submitted and creating links is quite easy to. But do you know what, arguably  the hardest thing when creating links is to maintain a natural appearance? What do we call this..

Link Velocity!!

For those who don’t know what this is, link velocity is basically the creation of backlinks to your website consistently, continuously day after day., week after week and even month after month if need be.

Arguably, this is probably the hardest thing to achieve for an SEO’er.

Can you imagine how much work is involved submitted links day after day, after day.

How many people do you think are excited with their websites at first and then after a few weeks or even a few days! stop creating backlings, give up and simply because they can no longer be bothered, and lets face it there is never any guarantees with SEO!

So how is this achieved?

In short, resources and processes.

Sure you can do all this yourself for your own business or websites.

All you need to do is take a crash course in SEO, know how it works, find out what’s working with Google, and then figure out what websites shod have a link going back to your websites.

But, if you don’t have a spare 6 – 12 months to figure this out, this is when you get a team of SEO experts on your side who have already figured this out, who already know where those places are to create links pointing back to your website, which are relevant and of high quality.

Not only that, but we can assure you when you think you’ve mastered Google and your rankings increase, Google will probably change it all again leaving you back at square 1!

So do you really have the spare time at your disposal to figure it out and implement it?

or would you rather spend your valuable time running your business, doing what you do best.

 

 

 

 

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Net66 SEO: Vanquish Pandas, Penguins and Black Hats as Matt Cutts in this fun Donkey Kong Remake [Link]

Matt Cutts has now been the authority on good, proper white hat SEO for years now. Too white if you ask some, misleading if you ask others and a god if you find a particular type of SEO.

His fame has now seen him feature in a remake of Nintendo’s classic game Donkey Kong. In the original you were Mario (yes, THE Mario) and you had to climb scaffolding to rescue the princess whilst avoiding barrels that were, for some reason, being thrown at you by a large gorilla.

In this quirky take on the game, you can play as Matt Cutts. Picking up bonus’ such as Social Media posts, links and white hat SEOs. Make sure to avoid the pitfalls of Penguins and Pandas though, otherwise you’ll lose your points. See the image below for the in game action:

Donkey Cutts

You can play the game, created by NetVoucherCodes, here!

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Net66 Video Blog: On Site Optimisation and How it helps your Website

Transcript:

Welcome to Net66. Today, we’re going to be talking about on-site optimisation. On-site optimisation is one of the twin pillars of SEO, the other being off-site link building. On-site optimisation involves proactively managing the evolution of a website and its various components to ensure that it gains favour with the search engines.

A website is a system with many components, such as title tags, header tags, paragraphs, sidebars, textual content, images, and internal and external links. All these components interact with each other to create the perfect website.

All of a website parts can be modified through on-site best practices to ensure that they portray the best picture of your business. Let’s take a look at some of these opportunities.

Title tags are by far the most important part of any web page. These appear in the blue bar at the top of your browser, and also show up as the blue clickable link in the search engine results pages. Title tags signal to the search engine what the page is all about, and usually host the most important keywords describing that page. It is extremely important to make sure you get your title tags right.

Header tags such as H1s, H2 and H3s are other important parts of a page. These specify captions on a page, with the H1 forming the most important caption, followed by H2, and H3 in that order. Header tags should reflect the keywords that you have in your title tag.

The page’s textual content should also incorporate the kewyords mentioned in the title and headers. These are just some of the on-page components that we can optimise.
For more about on-site SEO, keep watching Net 66. Thank You.

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Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on Whether Exif Data Contributes to Rankings [Video]

Matt Cutts, head of the webspam team at Google, has today released a webmasters video giving information on whether or not EXIF data is used in determining rankings.

To start, lets look at what EXIF actually is. It stands for Exchangeable Image File and is pretty much a stamp of the camera type onto the image. For instance, the information it places on there is the aperture, exposure and f number of the camera used to take the image, camera settings to you and me.

What Matt Cutts says is that Google reserves the right to use the data. And indeed on Google Image Search, EXIF data was sometimes displayed to the right hand side of the images in the search.

See what Matt Cutts has to say in full about this below:

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The New Google Maps is almost here

Google has announced that a newer version of Google Maps is in the works, and is actually due to be launched in the coming few weeks.

In a new announcement Brian McClendan Google’s VP of Maps states that the new version of the very popular mapping product will bring the following new features:

Geographical Search Overlays: searching for a service in a certain area will bring up local businesses, and clicking on a local map result will expand the result into more detail, such as related businesses or competitors in the area.

Efficient route calculation: the new Google maps will be able to tell you the most efficient route from point A to point B, taking into account such factors as traffic, distance and mode of transport (such as car, bike or bus). Multiple routes would be compared, detailing time and distance.

Send map to car: You can actually select your make of car, and send the map to its navigational system.

3D drive through: You can also get an animated drive through of your journey, similar to a satnav simulation.

Find out more on Google’s blog.

 

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Net66: Google Explain What Search Results Would be like without Backlinks

There’s been a lot of talk about backlinks and how relevant they are these days. Of course they’re still relevant. But a lot of people have been suggesting that the death of link building is nigh.

On one hand you have Panda, designed to inspect your content and make sure that it is of a high enough standard. Then you have penguin, making sure that your links are in order and that you aren’t employing any bad practices. And on the third hand you have Hummingbird, which looks at how your content is presented to a human and ranks websites in terms of conversational search.

Penguin especially has caused a lot of uproar in the past over its aggressive policing of links. This isn’t without reason, links have long been the most effective way for black hat SEOs to manipulate the search engine listings. So, what would the world of Google look like without using backlinks to rank websites?

In theory, it would rely solely on content and how well this has been put together. Panda would remove all the poor quality articles, and hummingbird would help with making them available to long term search. Apparently not. Matt Cutts, head of webspam of Google, says that although there isn’t a version of Google available to the public like this, they have experimented with this in the past.

It did not go well. See what Matt Cutts has to say below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

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Net66: Google Testing New Search Results Layout

Google seem to be testing new layouts for their search results. We’ve known they’ve been testing layouts for their adwords for a while. But now they seem to be testing a new layout for the search results too.

See the below screenshots for the difference in the new and old layouts:

Google-Old-Layout

 

The above is the old version which still uses the champagne background for the adwords. They also underline all links in this. See the below screenshot:

Google-New-Layout

 

You can see that there is now no background behind the ads and the new Ads button. The title of each listing is now visibly the biggest part of the listing.

What do you think of the new layout?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

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Net66 Video Blog: How to Build Links Through Infographics and Guest Blogs [Video]

In this day and age the world is full of information on how NOT to link build. Today, we discuss how to link build in our above video blog. See our transcript below:

Link building is a great way to show the search engines that other websites consider your website worthy of mention or endorsement. Today, we’re going to take a look at some popular link building methods, or channels as we like to call them.

First, let’s talk about infographics. Infographics are visual representations that help you quickly make sense of large or important sets of data. The graphics take advantage of human’s innate receptiveness to visual cues and patterns, using shapes and colours to quickly convey hat could otherwise involve large amounts of text.

Infographics by their very nature are designed to be so attractive that they have a high propensity to go viral. and can be shared across social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. People are naturally compelled to link toward these data visualisations as they share between their friends.

Guest bog posts are another popular link building channel. These involve building relationships within your industry or business niche, and placing high quality content or blog posts to create value through content partnerships.

These guest blog posts can the harbour a link to your website, creating an endorsement from the hosting website towards yours.

Guest blog posts are a very natural way of link building, as they mimic the natural business and person to person relationships of the real world.

Quality link building when performed organically and synergistically creates a natural and authoritative link profile, signalling to the search engines that your website is worth linking to and ultimately ranking in the search results.

For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net66 channel.

Thank you!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey