Blog

We’re seeing it more and more these days. Google+ profiles in the search engine ranking pages, a lot of people have asked me how this is done so I recently wrote a blog about adding Google authorship to your blog.

The rel=”author” tag is used to give authorship of a blog post or published content on a website. This content is then associated with the Google+ profile listed in the rel=”author” link. So why do we want to be adding all the content we’ve written to our Google+ pages?

Well, it seems to be for a couple of reasons. For a start it makes Spam easier to find. If in future it’s commonplace for users to put their face to the content they’re writing, potential spammers will either shy away from doing this as it could compromise the security secrecy of their black hat ways, or make spam easier to find by putting their face to the content.

It can also help you find information by someone who may be considered to be an “authority” in their field. As an example, Matt Cutts is an authority in the field of SEO so if he’s writing somewhere, even if it’s a low PR blog or forum, then it is probably something worth listening to as he’s an “authority”. It also gives people a chance to build their authority. Greatly written content will attract high levels of user engagement, which will obviously let Google know “this content is definitely worth a read”, in Google seeing this that person’s content will rank higher as it engages users and is relevant for certain search terms. People will start to recognise the Google+ profile attached to this and then as this person’s face is everywhere, will themselves be more likely to click on content with that face on it.

You can see Matt Cutts full video response below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google have recently ran a string of stings on link networks. They’ve moved away slightly from link networks but are still targeting large organisations who orchestrate the selling of links. The latest neck on which the Google axe has swung is the link seller Text Link Ads (TLA).

Google’s Matt Cutts has been particularly vocal about this with a string of tweets recently which you can see here:

Along with the SAPE network and Interflora getting penalised, you can see Google are taking bad SEO practices seriously.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts is at it again debunking myths about SEO misconceptions that a lot of our industry believes. Check out the video below:

So there are main questions Matt is answering here with the summary of each (the video is 5 minutes long after all) below:

What does the SEO Industry not get about Updates?

Matts answer was pretty clear in that, the difference between a data refresh and an algorithm update constantly gets misinterpreted as one and the same. The explanation by Matt clearly differentiates the two. Algorithm updates change the way the algorithm thinks about the data it’s presented with. Data refreshes change update the data that the algorithm is given to deal with. Data refreshes also update the index, which is the full compilation of data that Google has on websites.

Where are SEOs spending too much time?

You could tell from Matt’s face that there are so many places that SEOs were spending time one when they could be focussing on something else. But alas, he had a time limit to observe. But what he did say is probably what a lot of SEOs spend most of their time doing, which is link building. Stating that SEOs get zoned in on link building so much that they lose the ability to see the bigger picture. He cited Craigs List as an example where the content and functionality of the site outweighed the lack of user interface. That is the bigger picture, having that something that everyone wants, not just link building on a poor site to get it to the top of Google.

So tell us, do you see the bigger picture or are you spending a lot of time on Link Building?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Everyone suffers from writers block from time to time. From the greats of J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Dan Brown (Who, bizarrely hangs himself upside down to relieve himself of this) to the common blogger. Here’s some help on what you can do to cure your writers block.

Read the News

I know it sounds simple, but what is the news when you think about it? It’s just people talking about what other people are doing. The content of the story writes itself from these events, what differs the News is the reporters take on it. You could go serious and write a construct a three page document on why genetically modified food is bad for the world and what you can do to stop it, citing various scientific studies in your piece to make it as accurate as possible. Or, you could write a sartirical piece blasting corporations that exploit this tactic as “God Pretenders”. If you have an opinion you can make content. Naturally of course you have to make it relevant. So if you’re a technology company, read the technology sections of a few news websites and give your opinion on a story that peaks your interest.

Read your old Blog Posts

If there’s nothing in the news, why not go back and re read a few of your older blog posts. You will have written something that, at the time, you were really passionate about. Months/years down the line your feelings may have changed towards this. You’re also getting quite a few things done at once. First and foremost you’ve found yourself a new blog post to write, secondly you can add an internal link to your old blog post boosting user engagement and finally you can put to rest that nagging feeling you’ve had about the subject and get your true feelings off your chest.

You can also find one blog post that not only creates a new post for you today, but could start a whole raft of blog posts on the subject. You can publicise this as a series or if you find yourself really getting behind a certain idea, you could publish a whole book on it as an ebook or hard copy.

Looking to other sources for inspiration has long been part of artistic culture, when looking at old posts or the news you have to make sure the content you’re publishing is different. And that difference comes from you, your opinion and your writing style. So give it a go and let me know if it helps your SEO.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We all know Matt Cutts as the face of Google’s Web Spam team. He gives us updates (sometimes) on what Google are (or are not) working on. What he actually does though is help SEOs, who read rafts of rumours, hearsay and fallacy on a daily basis, clarify some of the more far fetched rumours.

Over at Search Engine Land they’ve put together a flow chart based on Matt Cutts thinking that will help you classify whether or not to believe what you’ve just read:

 

Have a great weekend guys!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Many people were left confused yesterday when they went to boot up their SEOmoz account and were redirected from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com.

Departing from their orange, yellow and blue theme to a new, crisp, minimalist and simplistic design. Personally I think it’s brilliant. They’ve taken SEOmoz as far as they can, which is actually to the pinnacle of SEO knowledge and services keeping up with trends, Google updates and more which has seen them rise to where they are now. And when you reach the top and there’s no where else to go, what can you do?

Re-Brand! Yes, but what Moz have done is change their whole business image overnight. They’ve gone from a strictly SEO based company to a company that can offer a large variety of new software for a wider target audience. Constraining their business to the SEO audience doesn’t do them justice as the brilliant software developers they are.

You don’t need me to tell you this though, see what Moz.com are saying themselves:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It seems like everyone I’ve spoken to in the SEO Industry knows someone who’s been affected by Penguin 2.0. Whether it be rankings or traffic, everyone knows someone who’s losing out. So what steps can people take to help start off on the long road to recovery?

> Calm Down. It is not the end of the world. Tough love has to apply here as although your website may be losing traffic, at least you know what is causing this loss so you can create an action plan to tackle it. If there hadn’t been a large update and your website all of a sudden started losing rankings and traffic with no clear indication as to why, that might be the time to panic. Plus, if you’re remaining calm, you already have an edge over your rivals who have exhausted themselves flipping over tables and chairs and deciding to start from scratch.

> Think Long Term. I know as soon as something happens to your site that you want it back to where it was immediately so you start cracking the whip. WRONG. If you were to suddenly accumulate 20 pages of fresh content in a day alongside a multitude of keyword stuffed links, that’s like putting a  fire out with petrol. Adopting a long term approach enables you to not only rank again organically, but to also keep your rankings once you get there. Otherwise you’re only set up to have a flash in the pan of good rankings using a rushed, drastic, i-want-it-now approach.

> Bring down the hammer, Hard. Penguin 2.0 was massively critical about the links you’ve been building and the anchor text you’ve been using and with Google’s disavow tool now taking centre stage, it’s time to use it and use it well. Matt Cutts himself has recently said that people using the Disavow tool aren’t using it in the way it was designed for. Matt said people were “Going through their links with a fine toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete” and this makes sense. Some of these links could have been hard work to get, but if you’re keyword stuffing them, they need to go. People also think if they keep some of their links then they might rank once they’ve gotten rid of enough of them. This again needs to be looked at as a bad link is a bad link, no matter how powerful you perceive it to be. With your rankings and or traffic in the toilet anyway, you’ve nothing to lose so get rid of all bad links.

Hopefully you won’t have been affected by the Penguin update, but if you have I hope this information helps!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

So. Yesterday the big news broke that Penguin had been unleashed and all hell was set to break loose. In actual fact, this was all scaremongering by Link evaluation Software companies and people looking to charge a bit more to get your site “Penguin Ready”. When you think about it, as Penguin 2.0 was directly targeting Black Hat ways and Spam Links, if your SEO Company was pushing you to vet your links and invest a bit more this month, you have to wonder why. Were they engaging in black hat or spammy ways previously? If not, why were they pushing you?

Anyway that’s by the by. You can see from statisics released from SearchMetrics that the losers pretty much deserve to lose out with the top 25 losers of traffic and visibility across search engines being porn websites and game websites. Please bear in mind that the stats released are for the United States only. The UK results won’t be released until tomorrow. You can see the top 25 hardest hit websites below:

You would expect a few of the sites on the list to appear. Such as the gaming sites and the porn sites. But what on earth are the Salvation Army doing on there? Out of everyone on the list this stuck out to me the most so I did a little digging and found that although their link profile (below) looks fairly steady, they’ve been losing links at a rate that has seen them drop 15,000 links since March. Naturally it’s not just quantity, there will have been some quality link issues but 15k links is a lot.

Have you noticed any of your websites lose rankings? What about your competitors? You should only really see rankings/traffic affected if you have engaged in bad practices previously. Over the next few days many companies who have previously ranked will be conspicuous by their absence which will most likely be down to the update of Penguin.

SearchMetrics will be updating their data for the UK over the weekend so expect to see the hardest hit websites in the UK to have the spotlight shone on them come Monday.

Enjoy the bank holiday weekend!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Recently I brought you news of Google saying that the new Penguin update was still a few weeks away. Less than two weeks later however they’ve rolled the new update out and confirmed it. PANIC! No, don’t. You should only be panicking if you or your SEO Company have been engaging in link practices that don’t abide by Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

So why Penguin 2.0 and not Penguin 4? It’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0 as there have been changes made to the actual penguin algorithm, rather than a regular data refresh. Such an update in fact that Google have said around 2.3% of English queries will be affected and that “regular users” will notice a difference. I know 2.3% seems a bit minimal but with the amount of websites online in England at the minute, that figure has to be in the tens or hundreds of thousands of affected website out there.

There’s still the question of when there was an abnormal amount of fluctuations in rankings and traffic a few weeks ago. So what was that? Google themselves say it wasn’t an update to the Penguin algorithm, so could it have been a bit of a data refresh before the new Penguin Algorithm went live? Or was it just another Panda refresh that Google are no longer confirming? It’s unclear as Google haven’t commented on this.

The good news about this update is that Penguin is directly targeting spam and black hat results in search engines. This should lead to more accurate results in search engines with people who have engaged in previous black hat link campaigns dropping from results. So if someone has always used black hat techniques to rank higher than you and you have thought this unfair, look who has the last laugh!

So, has your site been affected?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We still see this on a day to day basis where companies or individuals out there are making rookie mistakes when it comes to SEO. So here are some common themes to avoid:

> Slow Page Load: You may have 100mbps fibre optic broadband, but other people out there may not be as lucky or that in to the internet to get such fast speeds. You also have to think about what’s on your website. If you have audio and video that loads up on your home page and plays straight away, not only is that annoying (opinion), but it is also a data hog. Hi Res images also fall into this category, especially now that Mobiles are coming into play a lot more. So try to trim your website up a bit. If a website doesn’t load in a couple of seconds, users are likely to leave.

> No Social Media: Not everyone is on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr yada yada yada yada. But most people are on at least one of these meaning if that user has a positive experience with your site and wants to repeat it socially, you’re bang out of luck and you’ve just lost a potential client. Not only is it down to conversions, search engines also look at social indicators in their algorithms. If your website is fully geared towards the search engines, whilst it might rank okay, as Google can’t see you being prominent socially it looks like users aren’t talking about your site and aren’t recommending you on social networks. An if these are real people making no real mentions or suggestions, why should Google mention or suggest you on their search engine?

> Writing for Search Engines: Again and again and again we see this where keywords are thrown into the midst of prose haphazardly to improve “Keyword Density”. Keyword Density is dead. If you indicate what your content is about in your title, and then write about that content, job done. Google doesn’t care how many times you’ve got “Dog Groomer Wigan” in your page, it cares about how well structured that content is, how well it reads and how users respond to it.

A few tips there to help you out with your SEO. What common SEO Errors do you dislike the most?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

 

Another one bites the dust. Google have once again penalised a “Big Name” in business for their website practices. Sprint, who are a global provider of data, voice and internet services, received news of their penalty via Webmaster Tools and instantly took to the Google Webmaster forums for help.

Before we all get carried away wondering what black hat ways a big company is employed to strongarm their way to the top of the SERPs ensuring their dominance, the penalty Sprint received was one relating to user-generated spam and not to any practices Sprint themselves had put in place.

You could chastise Sprint, who are such a large company with quite a large amount of resources, for not preventing this happening in the first place. But then you have to consider that Sprint are a large company with an incredibly large website. Could you manage nearly 5,820,000 without allowing a solitary one to escape without having a proper review? Quite a challenge then.

But Sprint are not alone in this, the BBC have had a run in with Google and received the same penalty. More recently Firefox fell foul to the same thing. The issue with User Generated spam is that Google will let you know there is spam coming from your website, but it won’t tell you where. With web pages in the millions for some of the penalised companies you can imagine the enormity of the task at hand in finding the offending page.

Thankfully though it does seem that Google have found a way penalise individually offending pages if the website itself is not spamming anywhere else. Whilst this is a positive, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to find the time and resources to audit their whole site to fix what might be causing this penalty. They have to resort to doing what they can and hoping for the best.

Do you think Google should be more specific in the penalties it gives out?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google are once again making waves and this time it’s with conversational search. This new technology is called “OK Google” and is set to revolutionise the way we search. It’s coming to mobiles, desktops and even Google Glass (although the latter is called “OK Glass”). Google Glass constantly listens for the command “OK Glass” when you’re touching the device, and once it hears this phrase it then knows to run a search for you. The idea is also about having a conversation with your search engine rather than running a search, running a new search, running a slight variation of your first search etc. Here’s an example of how it’d go:

Me: Ok Google, who is #1 for SEO Manchester?

Google: Would return the search listings for the keyword “SEO Manchester”

Me: What about Web Design?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design Manchester”

Me: What about London?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design London”

You see the difference there? Rather than having to run three different searches for three different key phrases, OK Google remembers previous queries and alter the results according to new questions asked. Personally I think that’s brilliant. Imagine checking the price of something at an online shop, then only having to mention the other shops for the price of whatever it is you’re getting. It’s going to save so much time for people.

There are still quite a few kinks to work out though such a, with the “OK Glass” command, you have to be touching the Google Glasses you have on your head. So how that is going to pan on out desktops and mobile devices, but you can see that this is going to be big.

Will you be buying Google Glass?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

So this morning I arrived at the office nice and early, I had my porridge, I had my brew (Coffee, white, one) and there was even a good song on the radio. I started cycling through the Social Media accounts checking for new follow, tweets, likes, posts, +1s etc. But when I got to Google+ I was hit by a wave of confusion and confronted with this:

“But I’ve just checked Pinterest” I thought. Clearly this coffee isn’t working. I loaded it up again and was greeted with the same layout. Then it hit me that this was actually Google Plus and not Pinterest. Incredible, whilst not exactly a carbon copy of Pinterest, the design does seem to lend heavily from the infinite scroll, tiled panel design that was first introduced by the big P.

My first impression was, if it’s a toss up between this layout and the previous layout, it’s completely on par. I’m not championing the previous design, but neither am I shouting about this new design from the rooftops. However, after a couple of minutes of playing around with it, the news feed decided to finally respond to my browser and screen size and include a third column. I know it’s only a small thing, but it just seemed to make the whole thing sit together nicely.

Then there was the discovery of full width images spanning the width of the page and that really helped me warm towards the new news feed.

After my fill of the home page I went to my profile and was greeted by the biggest cover photo in the world. Check it out:

Pretty big. The rest of the profile panned out into all my latest updates spread over 3 columns. I’ve got to admit as well, the three column layout is brilliant. You add your updates in the very top left box which, as humans read from top left to bottom right, is perfectly placed. As opposed to Facebook where you’re made to add updates from the top of your news feed. A slight advantage to Google+ but an advantage nonetheless.

All in all I’d say Google has done a really great job with this. It looks like Google may have realised that it might never cater to everyone’s requirements for a Social Media platform, so it’s adapted to improve UX for the current clientele. After all Google+ is far more geared towards photo sharing than Facebook is.

Have you experienced the New Google+ yet? What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

What a week so far. Is it really only Wednesday? We’ve had confirmation that Penguin is only a few weeks away from Matt Cutts himself. Prompting a raft of people asking about the best way to vet their previous, maybe not so squeaky clean, link building techniques. Naturally we have a lot of advice for people and are willing to help out, even offering a penguin guide on how you can help prepare for Penguin 2.0.

There was a brief respite when we all had a quick time out to play Atari classic Breakout, but now we have even more news from Google and that now great source of information Matt Cutts. Once again it seems like Google are tightening the noose on Link Networks. Their previous High profile tart was the SAPE Network that got penalised and vanished from the Search Engines. The knock on effect would have been bad for a lot of sites that would have lost the value from any links from that network. And obviously from losing that many links at once, their rankings would have dropped drastically.

This news has come by way of Matt Cutts himself once again. He’s posted a few tweets recently outlining his and Google’s desire to really punish sites that are benefitting from spam and they’re definitely cranking it up on the Link Networks. Look at the Tweets below to see what has been said:

So without specifying which Link network has been hit, Matt Cutts has inferred that Google have “took action on several thousand linksellers” which has to amount to a link network. I’ve still not heard anything as to which network has been hit, but I’m sure over the coming days all will be revealed.

Which Link Network do you think has been hit?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey.

Recently it seems that all the talk on the web from Manchester SEO forums, blogs and other news stories has been about recent fluctuations in rankings and traffic. Rumours abound that this was the start of Penguin 4, But Matt Cutts himself has waded into the mess of confusion to clear a few things up. First of all he has categorically stated that there was no Penguin update last week, you can see from the Tweet below/totheleftright?

So what was it? More than likely it was part of Panda refreshing itself now that it is part of the algorithm. So GREAT! There’s still time to Prepare for Penguin. But ‘our Matthew went further than that to definitely rule out that this was a Penguin update by announcing that Penguin 2.0 is still “a few weeks away”.

Penguin 2.0? But we’re currently on Penguin 3. Surely the next update has to be Penguin 4, can Google not count? What Google have done is subtle but they’ve announced that this is going to be a Big Penguin, PenguinZilla in fact. Maybe not that big, but Google have confirmed that this will be the biggest penguin update yet as internally it’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0. The rest of the Penguin updates have subsequently been devalued to:

> Penguin 1 is now Penguin 1.0
> Penguin 2 is now Penguin 1.1
> Penguin 3 is now Penguin 1.2
> And Penguin 4 is now Penguin 2.0

A big step up indeed. However there are still issues with this, especially when it’s left to Google to decide when an update is big enough to progress from 1.2 to 2.0. For example, look at the Panda updates that were released last year that had a few occasional big refreshes but then a long period of small refreshes that eventually led to there being a panda 3.92. This got too much for everyone who then started re-numbering all updates chronologically regardless of size.

We’ll be calling the next update Penguin 2.0, but the crux of the matter here is, Penguin is on it’s way, and it is going to be big. So make sure you’re prepared and start counting your links.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

I’ve heard and read a lot recently about fluctuations in a lot of different areas particularly concerning rankings and traffic. Naturally everyone assumed that there was another Google update which had caused the fluctuations in ranking and traffic. But after being questioned several times, Google responded with it’s default answer:

““We have nothing to announce at this time. We make over 500 changes to our algorithms a year, so there will always be fluctuations in our rankings in addition to normal crawling and indexing.”

Hardly helpful but with the amount of people reporting the fluctuations there has to be something going on surely?! Well there isn’t a definite yes or no and I apologise for calling you Shirley.

In the past with certain updates, Google has been very transparent when dealing with updates in the past. Remember the EMD update? Exact Match Domains (EMD) are what’s used when people want to rank for a keyword or phrase and buy a domain name with the keywords in it. For example if you wanted to rank for “Manchester SEO Company” you would want to have a domain like http://manchesterseocompany.com/ As the keywords are in the domain, Google would realise this domain is relevant for the keywords searched and thus rank it in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages) higher than it would if it didn’t have an EMD. This is quite clearly unfair, especially considering that the people who bought the EMDs could have an inferior site offering an inferior service.

So, Google released an update that refused to count keywords in the domain towards rankings in an effort to be fair. However there are still arguments about how effective this really was as people have claimed to see rises in rankings for EMDs afterwards.

Google has also been clear about Penguin and Panda updates in the past. Which lends weight to the argument that Google haven’t released an update otherwise they would have mentioned it.

You also need to take into consideration that last month Google announced that they would no longer be confirming Panda Updates and were integrating Panda into the algorithm itself. So have they released a new algorithm with Panda introduced in it? Or have the ran a quick Panda refresh in addition to the latest changes to the algorithm?

We can spend days and weeks debating it and never know for sure. The only facts we have at the moment are that a) people are reporting fluctuations in rankings and traffic b) Google aren’t confirming anything.

So what do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Yesterday I talked about “What is Google Authorship”. At the moment the true power of Google Authorship has yet to be revealed however there are quite a few rumours around the SEOSphere that this could be very beneficial to SEO. The reasons, as I explained yesterday, stem from the fact that there is now a boom of content on the web. This is stemming from Google’s push to encourage natural links through great content.

As with all things SEO, there were the companies who did this properly through organic content marketing creating properly structured campaigns. And there were those who scraped together small paragraphs of keyword rich text and flung this out into the web flooding the internet with chaff. Google Authorship is meant to help with this by penning verified Google+ accounts to the blogs they write for.

For example, if you search “What Happens if a Penalised site links to me?” You will see the following:

So how do you get this showing up on your Blog? Pay attention and you’ll have no trouble doing this by the end of this post. Follow the steps below:

> First of all, you need to sign up to Google+ and get yourself a Google Plus Profile, like this one. Ensure you have a recognisable and clear profile picture and that your profile is fully filled out.

> Ensure you actually include a line or a short author Bio in the content you’re publishing. i.e. Blog Post by Greg McVey. The name you include on the content you’re publishing  has to match the name of the profile on your Google+ profile.

> Finally, make sure you have an email address that ends with the domain you’re publishing the content on. So for me I would need greg@net66.co.uk, as I’m publishing to https://netsixtysix.co.uk/ Which is what I have. Then you need use This Tool to verify that you own that address, it’ll send you a verification email and you’ll need to click a link within this email. This then adds your @domain.co.uk address to your profile, as well as a link to the domain your email address is on.

Voila! You have now verified that you are a content publisher for the domain you’ve just registered and that you want to link your Google+ profile to it. Excellent!

So how to I pen individual pieces of content?

If it’s a one off piece, you can use the following:

Blog Post by <a href=”https://plus.google.com/[enter your google+ account number]?rel=author”>[Your Name Here]</a>

However a lot of people are the sole contributors to their blog and to painstakingly go through each page individually is not productive one bit. So how can you do this sitewide? Luckily, it is a simple manner of including one link in the header of your website. If you have a static HTML website then unfortunately, as with all sitewide changes, you will have to change each HTML file individually. However, most blogs are WordPress these days anyway so for most it is a simple fix.

The code is entered after the first <head> tag and before the closing </head> tag. The code is as follows:

<link rel=”author” href=”https://plus.google.com/[enter your google+ account number]”>

Entered into your header this will associate one author with every page on your website.

And there you go. A simple guide on how to enable Google Authorship on your Blog.

Blog Post by : Greg McVey