Net66 Video Blog: Guest Blog Network Gets Penalised by Google, Why?

Transcript:

Guest blog posts are a popularly used link building medium. Guest Blog posts have been an important channel for off site optimisation because they signify personal endorsement for brands or products. Blogs are websites of a rather personal nature, and can give a candid view of what a certain entity or subject matter is about.

Remember, search engines are all about putting machines in your shoes. Search engines try their best to emulate human behaviour, and to understand what human beings like or dislike.

Link building doesn’t really get any more genuine than an actual person writing about what they care about. Therefore, guest blog posts have been traditionally trusted by search engines.

However, we have recently received the news that a popularly used guest blogging network was penalised by Google.

Why did this happen? A blog network can be penalised because it was not been as stringent in weeding out low quality blogs. Such low quality blogs can place links in spammy, spun, or generally dubious content. Links embedding in such content can incur a penalty for your site.

You would be well advised from staying away from any such blog that has content that doesn’t read naturally. If you use a network, it is your own prerogative to screen the sites that are part of it. Just be careful who you are working with to review your product or service.

At Net66, we take link building and content partnership seriously. That is why we only work with trusted bloggers that write product reviews, endorsements and other information about your business, your products and services to make sure that they present a genuine picture of your offerings.

Blog Post by:
Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on Multiple Breadcrumbs

A good question for Matt Cutts is whether having multiple breadcrumbs on your site can confuse Googlebot. This question is from an E-commerce owner in Japan.

As ever with Google and Rankings etc, moderation is key. If you have a product that is in many categories and you have a list of 20 different breadcrumbs on your site. That’s probably a bit confusing. But again, if you have a product in a few categories and you only list one, that in turn won’t help Googlebot understand this product.

Breadcrumbs aren’t the sole factor in this as a proper structured website will also help this. So you don’t need to have every category your product is in on the website if your top menu is fixed. See the full video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Control your SmartHome from your SmartPhone Courtesy of Google [Infographic]

Google have been very busy recently buying up all sorts of different companies. But one that’s stood out recently and looks set to have a huge influence in 2014 is the company Nest, that Google bought recently for $3.2 billion dollars. $3.2 billion is not a small amount either, that’s just shy of £2 billion (£1,932,483,846) and enough to buy you 7,729,935,384 Mars bars!

Nest specialise in creating ‘Smart’ products for the home. Such as a smoke detector that can detect a rising temperature but then ‘talk’ to the thermostat to see if the heating has been turned up. You’ll also be able to turn it up and down via your smartphone after your smart doors let you know everyone has left the house.

Image Courtesy of ForRent.com

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google Applies New Layout to Search Results

Last Month I reported that Google were testing new layouts for their search results.

You can see the before and after images below:

It now seems that this has indeed been rolled out for every user. Are you seeing this new version? Or are you still seeing the old Google?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Matt Cutts Wielding the Banhammer Willy Nilly

On Wednesday I wrote a blog about what Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts, were doing about link networks. I included in this blog an updated list of banned link networks.

It looks like that list is already out of date as Matt Cutts and his BanHammer of Manual Action have taken two German scalps in the Link Network business. One of the companies has been named as efamous, the other escaped the public red-hands act.

See Matt Cutts’ ~~gloat~~ Tweet below:

Today we’re taking action on a German link network (efamous) and a German agency network that violate our guidelines.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 14, 2014

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on How to Tell Google You Have a Mobile Site

With the massive rise of mobile search and the raft of tablets and smartphones at our disposal, what’s the best way to let Google know you have a mobile version of your website?

Matt Cutts answers this question and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of responsive web design, CSS, JavaScript and Agent redirections.

See the full video below:

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Net66: Google Link Network Hit List Updated, Italians and Spanish be warned! [Tweets]

Google’s Matt Cutts has recently expanded his invasion of European link networks. In the past he’s already hit a few of them. Some of his targets:

Anglo Rank
Anonymous
Buzzea
Germans
Ghost 2.0
Sape
Text Link Ads

And now it looks like he’s targeting Spanish & Italian Networks too. Check out his tweets below:

And here's a reminder about unnatural/paid links for Italian: http://t.co/OoA4dSXqhI #hint #hint

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 10, 2014

A reminder (in Spanish) about unnatural/paid links and that we're willing to take action on them: http://t.co/uTBdJpRNbw

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 10, 2014

Blog Post by Greg McVey

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!

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:

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.

Net66: Google Celebrates International Womens Day with Google Doodle [Video]

Today is national women’s day and Google celebrated by adding a video to their home page. Check out screenshots below:

Net66: Google Celebrate Elizabeth Brownings Birthday with Google Doodle [Image]

Google today celebrated the birthday of Elizabeth Browning who was a famous poet from the Victorian Era

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

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:

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

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.

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:

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.