Category: Blog

Matt Cutts has released another Webmasters video today and this one is taking a look at Page Titles. Page titles are the title of the page. I know. But what they also do is contain information directly relating to the content of each page. Google will read this information and, where they can, use it.

However, if you have a certain keyword in your page title and a user searches for a different service, then Google will do what they can to change your page title and make sure that it’s still relevant.

For Example, Net66 are both a web design and an SEO company. If you were to search Net66 SEO, Our page title is more likely to show up with SEO keywords in there than if you were to search Net66 web design.

Google will pull information from your H1s, your on-page content and even the Open Directory project, if it can, to get the right information to that page. This is so that users can see best what the page relates to before they click through on it.

Take a look at the full video below:

What criteria does Google use to change the title it shows in the SERPs depending on the query? Does schema influence that? Maybe headings (h1, h2..) have more weight?
Christian Oliveira, Madrid

Why Google search results doesn’t show the current meta title of webpage? Instead of meta title search results show H1 tag from HTML page?
kbroka, Nepal

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It’s often a question posed by people who’s niche does include incredibly large brands. For example if you’re a sports shop, it’s likely you’re going to come up against Nike or Adidas or other companies that have millions to spend on online marketing. So how do you outrank them?

The full question put to Matt was as follows:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.
Dan

Straight off the bat, Matt is a little unimpressed. And he does make a point to. Think about the original social network (MySpace, for you younger readers), how is that now not still enjoying a monopoly of the market because it was such a giant? The answer is that Facebook came along, and Facebook did a better job than MySpace.

The same for Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and all these other social media sites that are now up there with Facebook and Twitter.

The most part of the video talks about how you can take your niche, and really make it your own. Give a different idea on everything, turn existing ideas on their head. Become authoritative in what you are talking about and Google will recognise this and increase your rankings.

Then once you’re an authority, you can add other dimensions to your business and become authoritative in other aspects of your industry. Eat, sleep, rinse, repeat and you will soon take stock of yourself and you will be a “giant” that other companies will struggle to overtake.

See the full video and hear Matts view on this in the below video:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Take a look at what Matt Cutts has to say on the difference between 410 and 440 error codes on your website:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

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

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

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

Incredibly proud of Japanese webspam team. Over last few months they’ve taken action on seven link networks! Makes playing field more level.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 8, 2014

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

Blog Post by: Greg McVey