Category: Blog

SEO is constantly dogged by headlines highlighting bad practises and it is quite rare that you hear about a bad Adword campaign. I think this has more to do with SEO being a long term achievement that’s slow to recover, rather than a yes or no approval that can be switched on and off.

That’s not to say that bad Adwords practises aren’t highlighted. A recent report from Google showed that they removed 350 million adverts from their systems last year. Here’s a quote from Mike Hochberg who is the Director of Ads Engineering at Google:

We’ve allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web.  Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

As you can see, they’re taking it seriously and with 350 million ads removed last year, they seem to be doing a good job.

Here’s a list of the worst offenders for Bad Ads:

• Counterfeit goods: 14,000 advertisers banned for trying to sell these.
• Illegal online pharmacies: 2 million ads removed.
• Copyright infringement: 5,000 AdSense accounts disabled for violating copyright.
• Tech support scams: 4,000 AdWords accounts removed.
• Malware: 400,000 ads disabled from sites hiding malware.
• Get rich quick schemes: 10,000 ads disabled for sites promoting these.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts has long been Google‘s first and foremost outlet for what to do and what not to do in regards to your SEO. Yesterday Matt Cutts published a blog post outlining what can only be described as pretty clear advice on Guest Blogging, particularly the following quote:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.

Pretty clear right? Well you’d think so as Matt continues along this vein and further discredits the act of guest blogging due to the fact that, as ever, spammers are flooding this practise with low quality guest posts.

This is now and forever will be the case. Look at link directories, now they’re spammy and very low quality, apart from the rare hidden gems. But once they were a great source of links. The same happened for article marketing to a lesser degree, when once you might have decided on running some, this now is a very bad idea.

I think the straw that broke the camels back with Matt was when he received an unsolicited email from someone that just didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t specific to his blog and was poorly written. AKA spam.

But Matt went on to give further advice after, I suspect, a poor reaction to his blog post. He clarifies further by stating that:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.).

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy

So it seems that guest blogging is still a good idea. All that Matt wanted to point out is that it’s being exploited by spammers, as is pretty much every other SEO technique out there. So why, at first, did he come out to say to definitely stop Guest Blogging?

What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Late last year Google released their new Hummingbird algorithm. This was a major change for Google and affected 95% of their search results. This was a major change as a lot of their other updates, mainly panda and penguin, can affect anywhere between 0.1 and 2% of queries.

This has a lot to do with the switch of searches to mobile. As more and more people are using products such as Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now, voice search is increasing and search patterns are changing. More and more people are searching less for [keyword][area] and are more prone to asking “Where is the nearest [keyword] in [area]?”.

These requests need to be processed differently which is why Goole have released this update. For a more detailed view on Hummingbird see below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

There is a new start up coming from a pair of New York City tech executives who have banded together to produce Confide, which is quickly being described as the Snapchat for businesses.

The premise of Snapchat is simple, you can send an image, video or message to one of your friends, and after a certain amount of time this image, video or message will be deleted.

The reason why this has been targeted directly at businesses seems to stem from LinkedIn. Facebook was the first truly massive social network, 7/10 adults who are internet users are also users of Facebook. As Facebook was a more informal place for people to post pictures of their every day life, including weekend escapades, there was a market for a more formal, professional Social Network. A la LinkedIn.

This new start up aims to provide a professional version of Snapchat. As this is a more formal operation, security measures have been stepped up as well. For instance, where (at first) users could screenshot Snapchat messages, Confide doesn’t allow this feature so you can be sure your messages are deleted when the message has been delivered.

They also offer a more secure way of transferring data with the messages you send never being stored on any of Confide’s servers. When they’re passing through the servers, they remain encrypted, the key to the encryption is only ever stored on the recipients phone too.

So if someone were to intercept a transmission, they would only get the encrypted version which would be incredibly hard to crack. So security seems to be a key feature of this app.

Would you use something like this?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google has been a bit stingy with data recently. Especially since they decided they weren’t going to pass keyword data through Google Analytics anymore which drew the ire of nearly every single SEO out there. What compounded this unfairness is that Google say they were doing it for Security reasons, although they have no problem sharing the data with paying Adwords users.

They are now however giving exact amounts of clicks and impressions in their Webmaster Tools. If you log into your Webmaster Tools account and navigate to Search Traffic > Search Queries, you’ll find your stats for phrases you rank for. These stats are immensely useful when looking at a sites performance as you can check your impressions, clicks, CTR (click through rate) and average position.

It was Google’s John Mueller who announced this today on the Google Webmaster Blog. Declaring that websites statistics will no longer be rounded up (or “bucketed”) in the Webmaster Tools Feature.

Have you checked your statistics today? How are they looking?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Now I don’t mean to say that Google is resting on it’s globally huge laurels, I merely intend to inform you that Google is continuing it’s harsh critique of bad link building practices.

Rap Genius is a website dedicated to creating a large library of rap lyrics that are highly searchable. For example if you heard a lyric and couldn’t remember the song, you could type it into Google’s search engine where Rap Genius is trying to rank.

The success of the website eventually led to the website landing a #1 spot on Google for the phrase “rap lyrics”, a choice phrase.

Unfortunately for Rap Genius, they recently started an ill-fated link building campaign that led to the removal of their entire site from the Google Listings. Even when you searched “Rap Genius” word for word, the website didn’t show up.

The reason being, Rap Genius were offering to tweet links to their near 140k followers, from websites that linked to Rap Genius. Punters accepted this challenge and soon the links were flowing between websites, and that is where the major problem occurred.

Much in the same way that Interflora were penalised for offering “gifts” to bloggers who would blog about them, Google saw this as a way of purchasing links, even though there was no actual money exchanged, the “gift” or the tweet was sufficient reward to encourage people to link to their sites.

Just like Interflora though, Rap Genius has now recovered from this blip in their link building campaign. Not only have they recovered, but they recovered in style and in just 10 days. They have also been restored to the #1 position on Google for Rap Lyrics.

Unfortunately, having to removed so many links does seem to have affected their overall rankings with not as many first page listings as before. This should also remedy itself with time.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google are continuing to test changes to their advertising platforms with the news that they are now serving up ads in the knowledge graph. For instance, if you were searching for a new Chevrolet Camaro, the following could be appearing in the knowledge graph box:

The thing to notice here is the “Dealers Nearby”. It shows here that the nearby dealers are there because they’ve paid for it. Noted as such by the small “Ad” placed just above it.

What do you think about Google’s new advertising move?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Image from Search Engine Land

There’s no doubting that guest blogs are on the up and up in the SEO world. But as with all things that become a tool in the SEO world, there’s a risk of this practice getting taken up and abused by black hatters and spammers alike.

An example of this would be for a spammer to scrape emails from thousands of websites and then send the same guest blog request to each email account. Other techniques would be to spin articles or to post the same articles on different websites.

Matt also suggests that you should NOT use guest blogging as your sole link building practice. The links can be powerful, but you still need a wide variety in your link profile. See the full Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey