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Now before you wonder why I’m asking this question, there is a legitimate reason behind this.

Let me give you an example. fishingnetsonline.co.uk has previously been owned and used by a spammer. It’s had thousands of spammy links sent to it, had a keyword density in double figures and meta descriptions as long as my arm. It ranks ok but it’s getting to the point where more is going in than coming out for the Spammer, so to squeeze as much as they can out the domain they then decide to sell it.

Along comes Bob. Bob’s your average guy who owns a fishing net shop and doesn’t have a website. It’s coming into fishing season and Bob decides the times is right to finally get online. To him, fishingnetsonline.co.uk is the perfect website for him. It ranks ok, it’s already been registered and established online, all he needs is a new website on it and he’s ready to catch some interest.

His site has been live a week and everything is ok but then he get’s a Webmaster Tools notification. His site is violating Google’s quality guidelines in spectacular fashion, which leaves Bob thinking “Well this isn’t fair, I’ve got a new website and have no affiliation with the old website or it’s previous actions. Now I’m out of pocket having bought the domain (for a steep rate I must add), a new website, hosting and I’m hemorrhaging money because the site I’ve put together is nowhere with no rankings”.

So, can poor old Bob rescue his website and his money? The answer is yes, but in theory.

There are two types of penalties that Google can hand out to sites that are spamming. Manual penalties, when a member of Google’s Webspam team decide that you’re a spammer and apply a penalty, and Algorithmic penalties, when Google’s algorithm applies a penalty based on crawl stats.

Now you can clean up your site, remove all outbound spammy links, edit your content to regular keyword densities, create genuine quality content on your blog and submit a reconsideration request to Google. The Webspam Team will see this and remove any manual penalties in place. However, everytime the algorithm crawls your site it can still see the rafts of spammy inbound links to your site that are currently hindering your rankings.

Google does offer a solution by way of the disavow tool. This entails analysing every link to your site that you can find, uploading them to a spreadsheet and adding this to your Google Webmaster tools account so that the algorithm can read it. This process however is not instantaneous and far from thorough.

My advice would be to check any used domain that you’re thinking of buying. Put it into ahrefs.com or opensiteexplorer.org to see whether there is a history of spammy links to it. These are free resources to use and very user friendly however if you are uncomfortable or not very handy with the internet then enlist the help of a friend who is.

I’d also advise, if you are a new business or getting your first website then consider a brand new domain.

Posted by Greg McVey

This week we’ve seen some quite high profile incidents that have been covered endlessly all over the Media, including Social Media.

First of all, we’ve seen Paris Brown vilified in the media for making what could be considered homophobic and racist tweets. This has been such a high profile case due to her becoming the Youth Crime Commissioner for Kent. The Kent Police Crime Commissioner has also added that Paris’ tweets weren’t checked before she was awarded the £15,000 a year job.

So this raises a question. Should Social Media accounts be taken into account when employees are interviewed?

Some who would say no point towards the privacy of your Social Life and the right you have to enjoy yourself when not at work. After all, does your social life affect your ability to do a certain job?

Those who say yes point towards your social media accounts as indicative of your true character. Especially for such sensitive jobs as childcare, social workers and other such professions.

If so, then the second Social Media fracas this week could land some people in hot water. The passing yesterday of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher split opinion in a highly bi-polar way.

Some greeted the news with enthusiasm, posting their delight at such tidings. Others were less disrespectful and merely mentioned they had no remorse but also no happiness.

Then you had the opposite end of the spectrum, where people mourned Thatcher’s passing and were critical of people who were openly in a state of delirium.

So following the first incident are there now hundreds, maybe even thousands of jobs at stake due to the fact their social media accounts contain posts mocking and insulting the a recently deceased human being?

My own personal advice would be to find a balance between what you post and how your privacy settings are configured on your Social Media accounts.

What do you think?

Posted by Greg McVey.

With the most recent Penguin refresh affecting quite a lot of websites out there and the perennial problem of “I can’t help who links to me”, this question is getting more and more frequently asked.

Thankfully Matt Cutts has released a video answering this question once and for all. Before we get into the explanation, let me give you an example.

You’ve got a blog that creates original, quality content that also has a high page rank. Let’s call this site A.

Site B is your site. You also create beautiful, descriptive content so successfully that site A decides it’s going to link to you.

Site C isn’t in the same league. The content it creates is OK but no trails are blazed with it. Site C has a low page rank and would ideally like this to change so it approaches site A and requests a link, but offers to pay for it. Site A agrees and sees this as an avenue of revenue eventually selling quite a few links.

Invariably this is picked up by Google who then takes the following steps:

> Reduces Site A’s Toolbar PageRank by anywhere between 20%-50%

> Prevents PageRank being Passed forward.

> Removes trust from any links pointing out from site A.

As you can see that’s a pretty hefty penalty for selling a few links but there are no active penalisations that are passed on due to this link.

However, you do have to deal with the fact that you’ve lost link juice from Site A so there is a slight downside to this.

Phew! Glad we got all that cleared up. Once again thank you to Matt Cutts.

Posted by Greg McVey

Most SEO Technicians know who Matt Cutts is from the very large number of videos that he has made over the last few years, as well as being head of Google’s WebSpam division. I am sure at some point in our lives we have all checked a few out by him for whatever the reason. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of them?

I personally find that Matt Cutts makes very detailed videos that can often turn out to be quite lengthy. Without realising it you can become so engrossed with the chase for new information that you can end up spend far too much time watching them. After all time is money. Another thing to consider is that the video can be quite simply out of date from Google’s ever changing algorithm, so it is important to check that you’re watching fresh videos.

The benefits of these detailed videos are quite straight forward really. Maybe it is so you can quite simply learn something new, gaining a more detailed answer or a full explanation may be what you need. Everybody is different and have their own way of learning.

This is where The Short Cutts comes in! Taking lengthy answers and making them short. This is great for people who don’t have time to spend watching video after video to get the answer what they need, with The Short Cutts it simply tells you the question and answer. Straight to the point, Simple, easy and fast.

What The Short Cutts allows you to do is search a question within its large database of videos, this will then bring up the relevant videos that Matt Cutts has recorded from the question that you have searched with underneath your question and answer to it. It will also provide the full clip for you to watch if you wish to gain a more detailed answer, giving you the best of both worlds.

Posted by Greg McVey

Guest blogging or guest posting as some may call it started to create a bigger presence towards the end of last year. This was mainly due to content marketing. Since the start of 2013 this technique of link building has grown and many webmasters are using it more and more. This is a smart move considering the changes which have been made to Google’s algorithm, penalising big sites (Interflora) and various other linking networks.

How to choose a platform to post on.

This is the very first action you should do and that is to determine the blog you wish to put your content on. When doing this the niche needs to be relevant not exactly identical but there needs to be some sort of relevance. Always look out for any spun content, keyword stuffing or duplicate content as this could have an effect on the power of the link.

Ideally you need a platform which is related to your niche, which has no grey/black hat SEO featured with it. You can determine that through the page rank and link profile (that is also a good factor to check) along with the social media presence.

Content

Now for the most important part and that is your content. The idea of writing the content for a successful guest post is to keep the audience entertained. Ideally 500 words minimum and related to the niche.

A good tip is to use graphics and humour to keep the target audience engaged in the subject, because let’s face it you could be reading about your favourite thing in the world but if it is all one big long paragraph of text then you will not read it correctly. Use titles to break up the content and add some cliff-hangers just to add that bit more suspense.

The thing with guest blogging is that it is beneficial for both parties involved and I think this is why Google values the link as much as it does. You are engaging with others related to the topic and you are working for a backlink which is what the recent panda refreshes have been all about.

Best possible result?

If you have done all of the above, added fresh, relevant and engaging content to a relevant high authority domain then not only will your site move up the SERPs but there is also a chance that you could go viral.

This would mean promoting your post to relevant forums, use your social media accounts and depending on how high you are on the SERPs it could happen.

Now there has previously been news that Google are now penalising link networks and most recently SAPE Network. We have never heard of this type of link network due its black/grey hat reputation as we strictly use just white hat search engine optimisation Techniques. I have done my research on the SAPE Network and this is what I have found out;

What is the SAPE Network?

SAPE is a Russian website which offers thousands and thousands of webmasters high PR Links with any niche you require and low outbound links. Including directory submissions, Google +1s, social bookmarks, retweets basically everything to give your site a bigger presence on the web.

So this is basically selling high PR link packages which we all know is the biggest NO in Google’s guidelines so it was only a matter of time before they got found out. SAPE was probably the biggest black hat network that was being used as the way the network was set out; it promised customers instant results and sales at a relatively low cost. Whilst having the safety from search engine updates by using sites with different IPs, name servers and hosting companies making the links untraceable.

Now obviously it sounds too good to be true and it is as it would be a definite that your website would get heavily penalised for breaking the rules and would have a bad reputation with Google which is the last thing you want!

This doesn’t seem to be because of a latest algorithm update but it seems to me and many other webmasters, that Google are targeting specific link networks recently (BuildMyRank.com being another) and also Interflora for the use of advertorial links. Google are finally showing people that they are specifically targeting sites that are selling links and breaking their code of conduct.

If you have used this kind of service, Google will find you out and you will pay the price.

There have been a few rumours that Google have been penalising websites just for being critical to Google’s tactics and procedures. It’d be such a shame if Google was to take the approach of banning these websites for dishing out bad press, so much for Free Speech!

However, the man from Google (Matt Cutts) says that this isnt the case at all, never has been and never will be. This is exactly the way it should be too, you cant be a giant such as Google and not be able to take criticism from time to time, and at times they do deserve it. I’m sure there is a long line of businesses who have been hit and lost revenue due to Google’s seemingly strange and sudden changes to their algorithm.

Then of course you have the fact that whatever Joe Bloggs happens to do online, you can bet Google wont be far behind, watching what you do, then adapting a similar approach themselves to cash in. Sometimes you just think, really Mr Google?? Do you have to stick your finger in all these other pies too? But I guess that’s the nature of large companies, some call it good business sense, others call it plain greed.

Whatever your views on Google, one thing is for sure, like them or loathe them, they have helped to change the way in which we use the internet. For all the people who have been hit and lost money using  Google’s search engine, I’m sure there are hundreds who have profited and made money.

So by no means is Google perfect, on a weekly basis it can often baffle, bamboozle and frustrate even the likes of a professional SEO company like ours. However in the grand scheme of things it is good for the average internet user and most likely provides more benefit then anything else.

So there you go Mr Google! A bit of criticism there for you, I’m sure you’ll find that most people find it fair, but at least I added in the odd compliment for good measure too.

So if you are worried about getting the slap from Google, then rather than being worried about what you say about the big G’, you really do want to pay more attention to your page layout, architecture of site, duplicate content and what backlinks you are using. These are still looking like the main things a Webmaster needs to keep an eye on to be able to use the world’s biggest search engine successfully, Freedom of speech is still going strong people!!

You may or may not have noticed the new tool Google have released a car and travel insurance quote search. Yes you heard it, now I and many other people were surprised with this move by Google as it could have an effect on the current leading price comparison sites. After having a play around with this tool (not going to tell you the price of my quote by the way!) I have to admit it is very simple to use and less time consuming than other price comparison sites.

Well it makes sense really doesn’t it; Google has all the information stored which will therefore bring a more accurate result to the user whilst also making it as easy as possible at the same time. When I am looking for a quote the most time consuming process is finding out when the car was made and how much it is valued at, Google already knows this information and gives it you automatically! You only really have to put in your required cover, personal details and any car modifications and Google does the rest of the work for you.

Why Google Car Insurance quotes are more reliable than any other prices comparison sites;

Any price comparison site, Google already knows the ins and outs of. They can give the user a better choice of insurance companies as every insurance company website on the Internet will have been crawled by Google’s algorithm and therefore indexed and stored. So what better results can we really ask for?

As for the travel insurance search, if you type in “Travel Insurance” it doesn’t appear? Well this obviously tells us that the car insurance tool is more profitable to users. Would you agree?

Where does this leave price comparison websites?

I personally think that this new move by Google will have much of an effect on websites such as moneysupermarket.com or confused.com. It may cause some fluctuations in users but all in all I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The big question is, what are Google planning on doing with this? Is it to bring high quality results to users, which is what Google stress they are all about, or is it just to make a little bit of extra money (not that they need it)?

Answers on a postcard.

I apologise now for any avid SEO fans out there as this will definitely be a case of me covering the basics.
But after speaking with various clients this week, it’s very much been a case of us teaching each other.

For instance, I wouldn’t know where to begin if I were to make a Wedding Cake, I can only just manage the microwave and the oven remains my Everest. The same thing applies to my knowledge of Counselling, a thump on the arm and a perky “Chin Up” is the best you’d get from me. However we have clients who excel in their field and rightly so after years of experience.

Recently however we have had a raft of new clients and enquiries where many of them have previously fallen foul of Google and their stringent Webmaster Guidelines. So rather than focus on what to do, here’s what NOT to do:

 

Content

Everyone has heard the phrase “Content is King”. Bandied about for years now this is as true now as it was the first day it was coined. Especially now that Content Marketing  is so important. So here’s some pitfalls to avoid when it comes to content:

• Duplicate Content – It’s so easy to copy and paste these days, especially if you’re in a rush and need new content for your site. Copying another companies content is not only bad for SEO, but it’s bad for your company as a whole. It’s Plagiarism and definitely against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Thankfully there are tools out there to check for duplicate content.
• Low Quality Content – Quickly hashing together 100 words and repeating keywords for the sake of it is a very bad idea. Google’s Penguin update was designed with this sort of content in mind. Affecting one in ten websites in the US low quality content will only lead to low quality rankings.
• Illegible or Spun Content – Spun content is the act of writing out some content and then hitting it really hard with a thesaurus (or using synonyms of words). For Example: “Search Engine Optimisation is harder than it looks” if spun could read “Look Machine Streamline is unyielding than it searches”. As the words are generated individually, you can end up with some highly incomprehensible content, not good for users = not good for Google.

Link Building 

Back in the day Link Building was easy. £50 for 200 links and you’re King of Google. These days however Link Building is fraught with difficulties and what is one day a good practice, can soon turn into a bad practice and bite your site in it’s proverbial back end. So here’s what to avoid when embarking on a Link Building Campaign:

• £50 for 200 PR6 links – Remember the phrase “if it’s too good to be true it usually is”? Definitely true in this case. Google does not allow paid links that pass PR (Page Rank) and will penalise your site if it believes you’ve paid for links. It’s not just the little guys in this either Interflora were recently penalised for doing just that, allegedly of course.
• Link Velocity – Or the rate at which you gain links. Even if you don’t pay for links and decide to do your link building for the month in a day, then this looks too unnatural to Google who won’t hesitate to let you know their thoughts on unnatural Link Building (they hate it).
• Unbalanced Link Profile – Your link profile consists of the type of link (Social Media, Directory, Blog Comment) as well as the anchor text (i.e. click here, visit site, even a keyword will do). So say you’re a Chauffeur Service and 95% of your link profile consists of links from blog comments with the anchor text “Chauffeur Service”, do you think that’s natural? Neither does Google.

 

What you have to think when “Look Machine Streamlining” your website is “Does this look natural?”. Google wants to give it’s users the best results it can so remember, you’re writing for the user, not for Google.