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Google Authorship has been around for a while now and is rumoured to be good for SEO. Whilst not everyone is using it, it’s definitely gaining traction becoming more and more popular. The industry buzz is that this is going to be the biggest thing since sliced PageRank, or PageRank or indeed, sliced bread.

So What is It?

Due to its still relatively low popularity, I do get quite a few people asking me about this. Authorship is adding an “Author” to any content published on your website or your blog. It just so happens that the Author Bio is a Google+ profile. You can see mine here.

The reason behind Google making a move towards authorships comes from their extra scrutiny on Link Building. Google’s recent shift in policy has led to them becoming much more tenacious and pedantic when expecting links. If it get’s even the merest whiff of suspicion that you may have purchased a high PR link that is also rel=”dofollow” in order to manipulate search engine listings, then it will devalue that link.

With this new tactic fully employed now, one of the best ways to garner inbound links is to use Link Bait so people organically link to your website. With this approach the internet figuratively exploded with content. So how do you set your content apart from the rest? Google Authorship helps set you aside from the group.

I’ll be covering, in depth, all the different ways to add authorship to your blogs tomorrow but for now, here’s the code to quickly add this authorship to your Blog:

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

Simple as that, but of course you have to go through the Google Authorship Verification Process first. Which of course, will be posted tomorrow in depth.

I hope to see you tomorrow.

Greg McVey

 

Frustration I would say is the most linked word with this question. Whilst it is a valid question, there are many answers to it that could lead to a whole series of blog posts on the manner of SEO. However here are some answers to help you understand.

Analyzing Competition

First of all, if you’re just starting your SEO then you can bet the shirt on your back that there are already competitors ranking for the phrases that you wish to also rank for. This in itself is a disadvantage as your competitors could have quite a head start in the race for #1 listings. And as you’re just setting off, now far behind your competition, it can take some time to overtake them.

Link Building Authority

Search engines and Google in Particular look to the quantity and quality of links to a website when determining where to rank websites. Analysing your Competitors backlinks can be an enduring task as you have to find the truly quality links that are shared by all the top sites for the key phrases you wish to link for. After this you then have to start the process of getting a link to your site from the aforementioned shared top links of your competitors.

Overtaking Competitors

That’s just the start, as you then have to go out and find and build your own links to show Google why you deserve to be ranked above your competitors. There are quite a few ways to generate and build links to your site including Creating Content, guest posts, blog posts, social sharing to name but a few.
Then there’s the onsite structure of your website that needs to be streamlined particularly for SEO. For example, you need to ensure each image file you have contains a relevant title tag and alt tag, each keyphrase has to have a page dedicated to it. Page titles, headers and more all have to be fine tuned to ensure the best results.

To much too fast = bad

Back in the day it was literally a case of “Whoever has the most keywords wins”. Then Google evolved to include a philosophy of “Whoever has the most links wins”. Naturally this left Google’s rankings wide open to manipulation where a spammer could just outsource link building and generate 500 links overnight to rocket up the rankings. If someone overtook them they could then repeat this procedure. Because of this and the advancement of Google’s algorithm, it can now detect a lot of links generated at once and apply punishments to sites Google believes has violated it’s guidelines.

So all in all, there are quite a few reasons that SEO can take so long.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Now first of all if you don’t know what the “not provided” result means in Google Analytics, it is basically people searching when they are signed into their Gmail account. The reason behind this is that when you are signed into your Gmail you will then be on a secure server which is encrypted with SSL. You will notice this in your address bar as it will change from http:// to https://. Google cannot track your data due to the security of the SSL because you have entered a password to login.

I seen a statistic on the internet which shown that the news site Buzzfeed investigated the traffic to its own website and 200 websites within their network and the organic traffic had declined from September last year. Websites including Fark and The Huffington Post which are big websites are seeing decrease in traffic. So the people at Buzzfeed have now two theories are users decreasing their visits to the website or is the data generated by Google not giving them the accurate results they need because of not provided?

We are all still a bit clueless in the not provided result as it was what many people branded a side of Google as “dark”. Google hit back at these claims saying that they were doing mainly for privacy and security for your account. Which in my personal opinion as someone who works in SEO Manchester based just to be specific, I want the most accurate data possible on my websites but I can also understand the fact that Google has to keep its product and their clients’ data secure so it is a bit frustrating in both ways.

At the end of the day Google is a business who have a product (Gmail) and there job is to protect the clientele from spam and being hacked which is why we see the not provided result. Ask yourself this question. Is it really worth Google risking all the private data of their client base just to satisfy a handful of them?

Like Coca Cola and Pepsi, there is always going to be a comparison between Google and Bing. But which one of them works better? The answer is there is no answer, individual results are always going to be tailor made by search history, location and whatever other secrets are included in the Search Engine algorithm that makes personalised web searches personal. So what can we do if everything’s subjective? We shall run a case study!

Recently CERN who basically created the origins of what we now call the World Wide Web have decided to host a copy of the First Ever Website back on its original domain. It’s been hosted elsewhere since then by W3C. You can view the very first website ever at it’s original domain address here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

But how does Google and Bing manage search requests for the first ever website? We’ll test that now. by entering “First Website Ever” into Google and Bing respectively. We’ll add a control to this little experiment and we’ll start be searching the URL first. See the Results below:

Google Returns: The first website ever at it’s original URL. Followed by CERN’s modern website. Followed by two more results from CERN.

Bing Returns: The first website ever at it’s original URL. Followed by CERN’s modern website. Followed by a few news articles and then a wiki.

So the first two results are exactly the same. No real surprise there as we were using a very specific search term. But it’s interesting to see how Google continues to list CERN’s website and Bing chose to list news items related to the search term. Which do you prefer?

So now lets really put it to the test and search for “First Website Ever”. See results below:

Google Returns: The first website Ever. Followed by Cern’s website. Followed by News relating to the first ever website.

Bing Returns: A copy of the the first ever website hosted on W3.org. Then followed by CERN’s modern website.

A clear win for Google then. But like I’ve mentioned above, there are a lot of factors that affect rankings and localisation is definitely one of them. So give this little test a go and let me know how you get on.

Blog By: Greg McVey

Facebook Vs Twitter. Google Vs Bing. Manchester United Vs Manchester City (Hardly a fair fight I know, 20). And even the Star Wars Prequels Vs the Star Wars Sequels.

There’s conflict everywhere but one we see every single day is Search Engine Optimisation VS Web Design. I’ll first explain why there is such a divide between the two.

The Viewpoint of an SEO

Functionality > Presentation. In an ideal world the whole of a site that’s ready to be optimised needs to be content rich. There can be no flash and at least an image per page. Eveything can be controlled by one plugin where you can manage all the meta and rich snippets. Everything the website needs to rank for has it’s own section, there’s a blog which is updated daily with quality content. The reality however varies wildy from this idealistic view. There are still sites that are written in static .html that makes it hard to create anything dynamic. Coding can be erratic and some sites can be hacked together where editing a single line of code can knock the whole website out of sync. You can still get website written in .aspx that is a programming language created by Microsoft, and whilst some people are still advocates of it they are finding their numbers dwindling.

The Viewpoint of a Web Designer

Presentation > Functionality.  To any web designer worth their salt, a website HAS to have that extra special something that makes it stand out in front of all the other competitors websites. In an ideal world for a Web Designer, websites in search engines would rank according to how good they look regardless of their Meta titles or how many links there are to them (although from an SEO point of view a beautiful site generates links organically with friends sharing sites saying “Check this beautiful site”). Content to a Web designer would be irrelevant as surely how a site looks is the only thing that matters.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As I mentioned, the above is a snapshot of the Viewpoint of a Web designer and an SEO, it’s entirely subjective. There is no right or wrong. However I will say this. In each industry, as with all industries you do get the the good and the bad. There will be companies out there who are after a quick buck so have together a pretty decent looking website that is not easily optimised or edited, much to the irk of the designated SEO Technician who will complain whole heartedly about Web Designers.

On the other side of this coin however there will be a web designer who has had one of their lovingly created websites ruined by some amateur “SEO Technician” who keyword stuffs, buys hundreds of bad links and then disappears at the first sign of a Google Webmaster warning.

So in the end it doesn’t boil down to SEO Vs Web Design, it comes down to people complaining about people who haven’t done their job properly.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

 

There are a few things in SEO that can really make a difference in the SEO to your website. With Search engine Optimisation now there are things you can do to promote Social Sharing on your website that makes it easier to generate organic links.

Remove extra Steps

If you have a step in a process that you like but that isn’t necessary, REMOVE IT. With the removal of a step you can earn or lose a potential client or link. You need to make sure that the user on your site is having a great time and as user engagement is linked with SEO this definitely needs evaluating. For example, if you’re setting up a sign up form for your blog, you want to treat this as “How can I make the experience great for the user” rather than “How much information can I get from this user”. Some websites employ this tactic requiring your first and last name, your mobile number, your address, your email address and the creation of an account on their website. “I only want to sign up to new blog posts, why do they want so much information? I’ll just check back with their website from time to time, it’s easier”. And that’s how you lose a potential long term user of your site.

Keep Users Logged in.

If you do have a user interface where people log in and become part of an online community, then a big part of keeping user engagement high is to keep the user logged in. With a raft of Social Media accounts, email accounts and more, I sometimes have a bit of trouble remembering them all. If I sign in to a casual community and have to log in and forget my password, I have a lot of passwords and am more likely to leave to a community where I’m already signed in. I know this seems lazy in one of the highest degrees but it is an example that rings true. Especially true on mobile devices. Think about it, if you’re on your smartphone and you have the Facebook app and have to sign in to it every time you want to check, it’ll get to the point where you won’t want to check Facebook due to the hassle of signing in. This is the same as logging in to any website.

Finally, Make it easier to socially share.

You can see from the bottom of this post we have the options to share automatically to the most popular social networks. Simple, Easy, Clean.

Do you have any tips of your own for increasing User Engagement?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey.

So very many Manchester SEO Companies, in the UK and the whole world have been affected in some way by last 2012’s “Year of the Penguin”. And that was just the starter. Investigating quite a few companies who have had link building conducted by an outsourced “Guaranteed Link Building” company, leads me to believe that there are highly likely going to be many more this year.

So what can you do to prepare for this penguin themed pretence for penalisation? The answer, is a lot.

I’ve reported on Interflora getting penalised and bouncing back quickly, so there is a way to be prepared for this. Here are some tips I believe will help:

> VET YOUR LINKS. Seriously. Right now you need to be very aware of what sites are linking to your website. Group them into Low risk, Medium risk and High risk. I’d even go so far as to use Google’s Disavow tool to make sure the High risk sites linking to your site aren’t counted against you. This way you’d pre-empt any penalisation. Medium risk links are also ones to segregate in preparation for if you need to disavow those too.

> Re-Evaluate your definition of a link: The phrase “A link is a link” has been bandied about for far too long. This is wildly inaccurate and has been for some time. It’s not just a race for the amount of links with [Keyword] in there. This is now actually bad for your site. If you have a lot of low quality links to your site with keyword stuffed text, that isn’t natural, Google will see this and Google will apply a penalty. Create differing anchor text keywords and expand the sources from which you’re getting these links. Use long tail keywords and keyword rich anchor text sporadically whilst mixing in generic “Click Here” links, branded links and quite simply your URL.

These tips should help you weather the Penguin Storm if it hits you.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Interflora, The BBC and now Mozilla? Google have been relentless in their pursuit of spam recently. A campaign leaving waves of devastation all over the SEO world. A lot of people think Google are being too picky as a lot of sites claim to have been penalised but have no record of ever knowingly conducting any black hat SEO. Predominantly these have been Algorithmic penalties dished out by Google’s Web Crawler, but every now and then you hear about a Manual Penalty too.

Mozilla is the latest high profile victim in this crusade against webspam. Not through unethical backlinking, cloaking or any other black hat SEO, but by User Generated spam. Mozilla received this message:

Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.

A bit harsh then that Google would punish a site that has been taken advantage of by it’s users. However, Google have issued a granular manual penalty. Not penalising the site overall, but singling out the page that was generating the spam and penalising that. Good news right? Wrong. As it left Mozilla completely in the dark about which page was penalised.

It’s a theme we’ve seen a lot after the latest Penguin refresh which generated thousands of “Unnatural Link Warnings”. You can see an example one below:

Dear site owner or webmaster of ….
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

A fair warning you would think, but in the world of SEO Link Building is a massive part of the optimisation of a website. So if you’ve built a website and had it optimised and you’ve had a lot of links built and then you get the warning, it’s quite annoying that Google have told you that your site has unnatural links and you may be penalised, but NOT telling you which links in particular are offending.

This has led to a lot of people getting out the scythe for their links when really all they needed was a pair of tweasers. In Mozilla’s case though, Google took the preliminary step of removing the offending result from their index. This annoyed Mozilla as their site is huge and the quickest was to find this spam would have been searching for it through Google. But as Google have removed the page, it can’t be found to be fixed.

What do you think to Google’s Webmaster Warnings?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We all want to have time to do everything in our days which includes the full SEO circle of Link Building, Content Creation and Social Media. But you can spend hours and hours poring through hundreds and hundreds of potential link opportunities looking for that one needle in the bails of hay. Leaving you little time to generate content and get it published across the multitude of Social Networks and Bookmarks that can benefit this content.

Here are some tips to help you better manage your time and get the most out of your day.

Guarantee One Link A Day – Within a Limit: I know this sounds oxymoronic but if you set out with the intention to create one quality link every day within the first two hours of the day, it motivates you to go out and get that link; but at the same time if you exhaust every avenue and can’t find anything beneficial to your site, you’ll reach the time limit and have to move on to something else. On the other side of this coin, if you manage to create a fantastic link in the first 20 minutes, the you’ve got a lot more time to chase other great links without the pressure on you which, in some cases at least, can really help the link builder in question.

Set aside time for Content Creation: You don’t have time to write, you’re busy! I understand, I’ve had days where I’ve chased my tail so much I started to wonder why I had a tail. So set a time period where you can settle in to writing. It doesn’t have to be long, 30-45 minutes is sufficient. Even if you’ve got writers block this time can be spent generating ideas for further blog posts or blocks of content. You could spend 25 minutes turning your brain into a paperweight and then in the 26th minute have an epiphany about a weeks worth of content. Time spent away from the pressure cooker of the day to day tasks can help you free your mind and open it to content creation.

So give this a go. Make time for content. Set a link building limit. And make sure you work smarter, not harder.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

“Google What?” the cries ring out, but fear not there’s an explanation. In layman’s terms, Google’s rival to Siri. It’s an application you can get on Android Smartphones that uses your location, local time settings and other features to give you information that you need when you need it.

As indicated in it’s title, Google Now is all about the present. It works by offering a series of “Cards” that you can customise around your life. For example:

The Traffic Card: As Google has an extensive maps feature, it can now monitor traffic to and from certain places. Say you log on to your home wifi and your works wifi everyday. You log off your home WiFi at around 08:30 am and log on to your work’s WiFi at 08:50 am. Google Now will recognise this as your commute to work and prompt you to save “Work” as a location. Then every day at around 08:25 am your Traffic Card will alert you as to how bad traffic might be between the route between home and work. A nifty little tool.

You can also get cards for the Weather, Sports, Time Zones, Currency exchange rates and one of my favourite, the Calendar. You can hook up the calendar on your mobile phone to Google Now so that you never forget an appointment. You get alerts reminding you of appointments for the day and you’re always a step ahead as you’re always aware of upcoming events too.

But how will this fit on to the home page of Google.co.uk? It’s not a mobile phone so can’t guess your commute between home and work. The answer will lie with a Gmail account. Not only this, but with the recent news that Google is discontinuing iGoogle (a previous home dashboard for Google) Google Now could already have been earmarked to replace this.

Sign in to your Google account and bingo, Google Now will display the Weather, Time Zones, Currency etc automatically based on the browser settings of the computer you’re using to access google.co.uk. There may be some manual configuration of the Traffic Card having to manually assign work and home locations but after that, one quick log in at home before you set off to work and all your information is there. Happy Days.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey writing for Net66

Getting your website flagged could make your business stand out a bit more and hopefully attract new visitors, new potential clients and new business. However that one entity you don’t want to flag your website to is Google, mainly for SEO reasons. Reason being if your site does get flagged it could put you in front of Google’s Web Spam team who will go through your site with a fine comb and look to restrict your progress wherever you can. Not out of any malicious intent, but Google pride themselves on having the best results that not only are accurate, but provide a great user experience.

One of the things that could get your website flagged is by adding a lot of content at a time. To rank on the first page of Google’s organic listings, you have to have an organic site. Organic sites grow and develop and if they were to suddenly bloom from 50 pages to 9,000 then alarm bells will soundly ring out. Let me give you an example.

You’re a company that launched a website last year and you are now ranking quite well for your phrases. One of your diligent staff members finds an archive of content, nearly 2,000 pages worth. All the content is relevant, good quality and can only improve your user’s experience. Your instinct would be to get it all on your website as soon as possible to boost your rankings. But if you’re adding a lot of content at once then Google could be prompted to investigate.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if your site has only ever employed White Hat tactics. A member of Google’s webspam team will take a look at your site to make sure the content you’re adding is quality, relevant and not intended to manipulate the rankings.

In an ideal world, you should break the content you’re adding into chunks and upload them gradually. Now I don’t expect everyone to do this as it is impractical and can take up a fair amount of time what with the planning, the breaking down, the categorising etc. But if you want to do it properly then that is the way you should do it.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

In my honest opinion I would say yes. Risks, whilst they can go wrong, also have the added benefit of working out better than you could ever have hoped. There’s a difference between taking risks and making informed decisions.

For example, an informed decision is going to Tesco and picking up a Value lasagne. You know that there’s a chance of horse meat being in there, but because you’re aware of it that’s an informed decision.

A risk would be to go up to a burger van and order a burger. There’s a chance that there is horse meat in there, but there is no way of knowing and a high chance that your risk will pay off. A la the burger will be delicious.

Now, to make it more SEO Specific here are some risks that are worth taking:

> Hiring an inexperienced SEO writer: There’s a difference between ability and skill. You could spend money hiring a skilled SEO writer who can churn out all the posts you require, but it will cost as they have built up their skills and commend a great CV. However hiring someone inexperienced with SEO writing, but a person who has the ability to write great content is well worth the risk. You can offer support, guidance and training to this new person with the natural ability and they can learn the skills that will turn them into a great SEO writer based on their natural ability.

> Re-Designing your website: But the pages wont match up and it’ll confuse the search engine spiders and everything will change and it’s bad for SEO. But on the plus side, user engagement could shoot through the roof. A brand new site that looks the bees knees with a brilliant UI and UX (User Interface/Experience) is going to reduce bounce rate so much and improve the conversion rate of your site. And surely that outweighs the possibility of a few weeks with poor rankings that are more than likely to return anyway.

Bearing in mind this is my personal opinion if you take these risks and they don’t pay off then you should be they were a risk and not bulletproof.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey writing for Net66

Back in July 2010 a study was conducted measuring the amount of pages returned by a search engine that contained malware. Google had over twice the malware results of Twitter, Bing and Yahoo combined.

This must have hurt Google to the very core because another study has been published and three years on, Google isn’t at the top of the pile for free malware, they’re now languishing at the bottom enjoying the fact that they now provide the least amount of Malware.

This study discovered the following results:

1. Google performed best in these results returning only 0.0025% results with malware in them
2. Blekko search engine came second best with a 0.0067 percent return
3. Bing returned nearly 5 times as many malicious results as Google with a 0.012% return.
4. Standing atop the group, lord of free malware was the yandex search engine with 0.024% of results containing malware

As you can see that’s quite a turnaround with Google performing admirably especially when you consider that Google’s nearest rival Bing had nearly 5 times as many malicious results.

The study went further with this and even reported on what results are most likely to bring back malicious pages. The most likely was searching for current affairs. Malicious pages take advantage of user’s thirst for breaking news and as there is a rush on to learn, people are a bit more careless when clicking links.

Another previous study also found that searching for “Free Downloads” or “Free Music” or quite a lot of things that are free that people don’t pay for 100% of the time.

So my advice would be to check and double check all pages you’re accessing and if you get a malware warning, turn tail and run. Only get your breaking news sources from trusted news websites.

Posted by Greg McVey.