Category: Blog

Google often gets criticised by people on the webmaster forums for not giving enough information out when it hands our a Link Spam Penalty.

An example of the warning you get from these sites can be seen below:

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

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

Sincerely,

Google Search Quality Team

As you can see, Google hardly gives you fair warning on what to look for with the only advice being to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and ensure your website is within them. There are a lot of Guidelines Google has and this can be particularly baffling if you’ve been keeping within them to the best of your knowledge.

There was a raft of these warnings before the impending Penguin 2.0 update which certainly gave a lot of people and SEOs a sleepless night.

But today Google have made a promise to be more transparent with their warnings and include examples of the links that Google deems bad/inorganic/unnatural etc. The best thing is that Google say that the links won’t be generic sample links, but an actual link to your website that Google sees as unnatural.

What are your thoughts on this matter? Will this make it easier for Black Hat spammers to gain insight into what Google considers bad, or will it genuinely help Webmasters get better at their SEO?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

With the phrases “Content is King” still reverberating around the SEO sphere, blogging has taken centre stage in the push for fresh, relevant and most importantly of all, quality content. But with this extra focus on blogging, companies are at risk of piling too much pressure and expectation on their teams. Here’s some handy tips to help you with streamlining the SEO process.

Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth

In business it can be too easily assumed the larger team has the better chance of producing better content. This can be the case if managed properly, but your blogging team needs to focus on content creation and not wasting time debating blog titles with their supervisors who might have different views on what needs to be targeted. I don’t quite agree with this and believe whilst guidance should be given to your content creators, highest quality content comes from creativity, which the team should be free to use. So if you do have a lot of supervisors managing your content creation team, ask them to ease up a little and allow more freedom in the role.

Endless Editing

Having an editor can be a great thing. Someone who can double check the content you’ve created after you’ve spent a lot of time staring at the lines of text on screen, after all two heads are better than one. The problem with this, is if you have a team of editors who all need to sign your blog off. Blog writing isn’t the same as writing content for web pages, it’s much more casual and is actually better when personality and individualism shines through. Web page content is what needs to be edited to the nth degree as this forms the corporate face of your website. The last thing you want as a blog writer is to have several editors all offering differing opinions on certain points you’ve made and pointing out grammatical errors in the most pedantic of ways. So make time just for someone to check over it, fix any glaringly obvious typos and publish it.

Manage Expectations

Content is subjective. You can’t escape that fact and especially with the personal nature of blogging, people can flat out refuse to like and share your content if they don’t like it. A quick 5 minute blog post about a new test you’ll be running soon could garner many more shares than an in depth look at a test you’ve previously ran and are now dissecting the results of. Reason being, the 5 minute preview of a test could spark peoples enthusiasm a lot more. You can’t expect every blog post to go viral and just because you spend more time on post, doesn’t mean it’s going to be better than any other posts. So be realistic, don’t apply any unnecessary pressure on your team and offer encouragement instead.

Have you had any experience with these issues before? Let us know in the comments below:

Blog Post by:Greg McVey

We’re seeing it more and more these days. Google+ profiles in the search engine ranking pages, a lot of people have asked me how this is done so I recently wrote a blog about adding Google authorship to your blog.

The rel=”author” tag is used to give authorship of a blog post or published content on a website. This content is then associated with the Google+ profile listed in the rel=”author” link. So why do we want to be adding all the content we’ve written to our Google+ pages?

Well, it seems to be for a couple of reasons. For a start it makes Spam easier to find. If in future it’s commonplace for users to put their face to the content they’re writing, potential spammers will either shy away from doing this as it could compromise the security secrecy of their black hat ways, or make spam easier to find by putting their face to the content.

It can also help you find information by someone who may be considered to be an “authority” in their field. As an example, Matt Cutts is an authority in the field of SEO so if he’s writing somewhere, even if it’s a low PR blog or forum, then it is probably something worth listening to as he’s an “authority”. It also gives people a chance to build their authority. Greatly written content will attract high levels of user engagement, which will obviously let Google know “this content is definitely worth a read”, in Google seeing this that person’s content will rank higher as it engages users and is relevant for certain search terms. People will start to recognise the Google+ profile attached to this and then as this person’s face is everywhere, will themselves be more likely to click on content with that face on it.

You can see Matt Cutts full video response below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google have recently ran a string of stings on link networks. They’ve moved away slightly from link networks but are still targeting large organisations who orchestrate the selling of links. The latest neck on which the Google axe has swung is the link seller Text Link Ads (TLA).

Google’s Matt Cutts has been particularly vocal about this with a string of tweets recently which you can see here:

Along with the SAPE network and Interflora getting penalised, you can see Google are taking bad SEO practices seriously.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts is at it again debunking myths about SEO misconceptions that a lot of our industry believes. Check out the video below:

So there are main questions Matt is answering here with the summary of each (the video is 5 minutes long after all) below:

What does the SEO Industry not get about Updates?

Matts answer was pretty clear in that, the difference between a data refresh and an algorithm update constantly gets misinterpreted as one and the same. The explanation by Matt clearly differentiates the two. Algorithm updates change the way the algorithm thinks about the data it’s presented with. Data refreshes change update the data that the algorithm is given to deal with. Data refreshes also update the index, which is the full compilation of data that Google has on websites.

Where are SEOs spending too much time?

You could tell from Matt’s face that there are so many places that SEOs were spending time one when they could be focussing on something else. But alas, he had a time limit to observe. But what he did say is probably what a lot of SEOs spend most of their time doing, which is link building. Stating that SEOs get zoned in on link building so much that they lose the ability to see the bigger picture. He cited Craigs List as an example where the content and functionality of the site outweighed the lack of user interface. That is the bigger picture, having that something that everyone wants, not just link building on a poor site to get it to the top of Google.

So tell us, do you see the bigger picture or are you spending a lot of time on Link Building?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Everyone suffers from writers block from time to time. From the greats of J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Dan Brown (Who, bizarrely hangs himself upside down to relieve himself of this) to the common blogger. Here’s some help on what you can do to cure your writers block.

Read the News

I know it sounds simple, but what is the news when you think about it? It’s just people talking about what other people are doing. The content of the story writes itself from these events, what differs the News is the reporters take on it. You could go serious and write a construct a three page document on why genetically modified food is bad for the world and what you can do to stop it, citing various scientific studies in your piece to make it as accurate as possible. Or, you could write a sartirical piece blasting corporations that exploit this tactic as “God Pretenders”. If you have an opinion you can make content. Naturally of course you have to make it relevant. So if you’re a technology company, read the technology sections of a few news websites and give your opinion on a story that peaks your interest.

Read your old Blog Posts

If there’s nothing in the news, why not go back and re read a few of your older blog posts. You will have written something that, at the time, you were really passionate about. Months/years down the line your feelings may have changed towards this. You’re also getting quite a few things done at once. First and foremost you’ve found yourself a new blog post to write, secondly you can add an internal link to your old blog post boosting user engagement and finally you can put to rest that nagging feeling you’ve had about the subject and get your true feelings off your chest.

You can also find one blog post that not only creates a new post for you today, but could start a whole raft of blog posts on the subject. You can publicise this as a series or if you find yourself really getting behind a certain idea, you could publish a whole book on it as an ebook or hard copy.

Looking to other sources for inspiration has long been part of artistic culture, when looking at old posts or the news you have to make sure the content you’re publishing is different. And that difference comes from you, your opinion and your writing style. So give it a go and let me know if it helps your SEO.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We all know Matt Cutts as the face of Google’s Web Spam team. He gives us updates (sometimes) on what Google are (or are not) working on. What he actually does though is help SEOs, who read rafts of rumours, hearsay and fallacy on a daily basis, clarify some of the more far fetched rumours.

Over at Search Engine Land they’ve put together a flow chart based on Matt Cutts thinking that will help you classify whether or not to believe what you’ve just read:

Have a great weekend guys!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Many people were left confused yesterday when they went to boot up their SEOmoz account and were redirected from SEOmoz.org to Moz.com.

Departing from their orange, yellow and blue theme to a new, crisp, minimalist and simplistic design. Personally I think it’s brilliant. They’ve taken SEOmoz as far as they can, which is actually to the pinnacle of SEO knowledge and services keeping up with trends, Google updates and more which has seen them rise to where they are now. And when you reach the top and there’s no where else to go, what can you do?

Re-Brand! Yes, but what Moz have done is change their whole business image overnight. They’ve gone from a strictly SEO based company to a company that can offer a large variety of new software for a wider target audience. Constraining their business to the SEO audience doesn’t do them justice as the brilliant software developers they are.

You don’t need me to tell you this though, see what Moz.com are saying themselves:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It seems like everyone I’ve spoken to in the SEO Industry knows someone who’s been affected by Penguin 2.0. Whether it be rankings or traffic, everyone knows someone who’s losing out. So what steps can people take to help start off on the long road to recovery?

> Calm Down. It is not the end of the world. Tough love has to apply here as although your website may be losing traffic, at least you know what is causing this loss so you can create an action plan to tackle it. If there hadn’t been a large update and your website all of a sudden started losing rankings and traffic with no clear indication as to why, that might be the time to panic. Plus, if you’re remaining calm, you already have an edge over your rivals who have exhausted themselves flipping over tables and chairs and deciding to start from scratch.

> Think Long Term. I know as soon as something happens to your site that you want it back to where it was immediately so you start cracking the whip. WRONG. If you were to suddenly accumulate 20 pages of fresh content in a day alongside a multitude of keyword stuffed links, that’s like putting a  fire out with petrol. Adopting a long term approach enables you to not only rank again organically, but to also keep your rankings once you get there. Otherwise you’re only set up to have a flash in the pan of good rankings using a rushed, drastic, i-want-it-now approach.

> Bring down the hammer, Hard. Penguin 2.0 was massively critical about the links you’ve been building and the anchor text you’ve been using and with Google’s disavow tool now taking centre stage, it’s time to use it and use it well. Matt Cutts himself has recently said that people using the Disavow tool aren’t using it in the way it was designed for. Matt said people were “Going through their links with a fine toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete” and this makes sense. Some of these links could have been hard work to get, but if you’re keyword stuffing them, they need to go. People also think if they keep some of their links then they might rank once they’ve gotten rid of enough of them. This again needs to be looked at as a bad link is a bad link, no matter how powerful you perceive it to be. With your rankings and or traffic in the toilet anyway, you’ve nothing to lose so get rid of all bad links.

Hopefully you won’t have been affected by the Penguin update, but if you have I hope this information helps!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

So. Yesterday the big news broke that Penguin had been unleashed and all hell was set to break loose. In actual fact, this was all scaremongering by Link evaluation Software companies and people looking to charge a bit more to get your site “Penguin Ready”. When you think about it, as Penguin 2.0 was directly targeting Black Hat ways and Spam Links, if your SEO Company was pushing you to vet your links and invest a bit more this month, you have to wonder why. Were they engaging in black hat or spammy ways previously? If not, why were they pushing you?

Anyway that’s by the by. You can see from statisics released from SearchMetrics that the losers pretty much deserve to lose out with the top 25 losers of traffic and visibility across search engines being porn websites and game websites. Please bear in mind that the stats released are for the United States only. The UK results won’t be released until tomorrow. You can see the top 25 hardest hit websites below:

You would expect a few of the sites on the list to appear. Such as the gaming sites and the porn sites. But what on earth are the Salvation Army doing on there? Out of everyone on the list this stuck out to me the most so I did a little digging and found that although their link profile (below) looks fairly steady, they’ve been losing links at a rate that has seen them drop 15,000 links since March. Naturally it’s not just quantity, there will have been some quality link issues but 15k links is a lot.

Have you noticed any of your websites lose rankings? What about your competitors? You should only really see rankings/traffic affected if you have engaged in bad practices previously. Over the next few days many companies who have previously ranked will be conspicuous by their absence which will most likely be down to the update of Penguin.

SearchMetrics will be updating their data for the UK over the weekend so expect to see the hardest hit websites in the UK to have the spotlight shone on them come Monday.

Enjoy the bank holiday weekend!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Recently I brought you news of Google saying that the new Penguin update was still a few weeks away. Less than two weeks later however they’ve rolled the new update out and confirmed it. PANIC! No, don’t. You should only be panicking if you or your SEO Company have been engaging in link practices that don’t abide by Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

So why Penguin 2.0 and not Penguin 4? It’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0 as there have been changes made to the actual penguin algorithm, rather than a regular data refresh. Such an update in fact that Google have said around 2.3% of English queries will be affected and that “regular users” will notice a difference. I know 2.3% seems a bit minimal but with the amount of websites online in England at the minute, that figure has to be in the tens or hundreds of thousands of affected website out there.

There’s still the question of when there was an abnormal amount of fluctuations in rankings and traffic a few weeks ago. So what was that? Google themselves say it wasn’t an update to the Penguin algorithm, so could it have been a bit of a data refresh before the new Penguin Algorithm went live? Or was it just another Panda refresh that Google are no longer confirming? It’s unclear as Google haven’t commented on this.

The good news about this update is that Penguin is directly targeting spam and black hat results in search engines. This should lead to more accurate results in search engines with people who have engaged in previous black hat link campaigns dropping from results. So if someone has always used black hat techniques to rank higher than you and you have thought this unfair, look who has the last laugh!

So, has your site been affected?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We still see this on a day to day basis where companies or individuals out there are making rookie mistakes when it comes to SEO. So here are some common themes to avoid:

> Slow Page Load: You may have 100mbps fibre optic broadband, but other people out there may not be as lucky or that in to the internet to get such fast speeds. You also have to think about what’s on your website. If you have audio and video that loads up on your home page and plays straight away, not only is that annoying (opinion), but it is also a data hog. Hi Res images also fall into this category, especially now that Mobiles are coming into play a lot more. So try to trim your website up a bit. If a website doesn’t load in a couple of seconds, users are likely to leave.

> No Social Media: Not everyone is on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr yada yada yada yada. But most people are on at least one of these meaning if that user has a positive experience with your site and wants to repeat it socially, you’re bang out of luck and you’ve just lost a potential client. Not only is it down to conversions, search engines also look at social indicators in their algorithms. If your website is fully geared towards the search engines, whilst it might rank okay, as Google can’t see you being prominent socially it looks like users aren’t talking about your site and aren’t recommending you on social networks. An if these are real people making no real mentions or suggestions, why should Google mention or suggest you on their search engine?

> Writing for Search Engines: Again and again and again we see this where keywords are thrown into the midst of prose haphazardly to improve “Keyword Density”. Keyword Density is dead. If you indicate what your content is about in your title, and then write about that content, job done. Google doesn’t care how many times you’ve got “Dog Groomer Wigan” in your page, it cares about how well structured that content is, how well it reads and how users respond to it.

A few tips there to help you out with your SEO. What common SEO Errors do you dislike the most?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Another one bites the dust. Google have once again penalised a “Big Name” in business for their website practices. Sprint, who are a global provider of data, voice and internet services, received news of their penalty via Webmaster Tools and instantly took to the Google Webmaster forums for help.

Before we all get carried away wondering what black hat ways a big company is employed to strongarm their way to the top of the SERPs ensuring their dominance, the penalty Sprint received was one relating to user-generated spam and not to any practices Sprint themselves had put in place.

You could chastise Sprint, who are such a large company with quite a large amount of resources, for not preventing this happening in the first place. But then you have to consider that Sprint are a large company with an incredibly large website. Could you manage nearly 5,820,000 without allowing a solitary one to escape without having a proper review? Quite a challenge then.

But Sprint are not alone in this, the BBC have had a run in with Google and received the same penalty. More recently Firefox fell foul to the same thing. The issue with User Generated spam is that Google will let you know there is spam coming from your website, but it won’t tell you where. With web pages in the millions for some of the penalised companies you can imagine the enormity of the task at hand in finding the offending page.

Thankfully though it does seem that Google have found a way penalise individually offending pages if the website itself is not spamming anywhere else. Whilst this is a positive, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to find the time and resources to audit their whole site to fix what might be causing this penalty. They have to resort to doing what they can and hoping for the best.

Do you think Google should be more specific in the penalties it gives out?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google are once again making waves and this time it’s with conversational search. This new technology is called “OK Google” and is set to revolutionise the way we search. It’s coming to mobiles, desktops and even Google Glass (although the latter is called “OK Glass”). Google Glass constantly listens for the command “OK Glass” when you’re touching the device, and once it hears this phrase it then knows to run a search for you. The idea is also about having a conversation with your search engine rather than running a search, running a new search, running a slight variation of your first search etc. Here’s an example of how it’d go:

Me: Ok Google, who is #1 for SEO Manchester?

Google: Would return the search listings for the keyword “SEO Manchester”

Me: What about Web Design?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design Manchester”

Me: What about London?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design London”

You see the difference there? Rather than having to run three different searches for three different key phrases, OK Google remembers previous queries and alter the results according to new questions asked. Personally I think that’s brilliant. Imagine checking the price of something at an online shop, then only having to mention the other shops for the price of whatever it is you’re getting. It’s going to save so much time for people.

There are still quite a few kinks to work out though such a, with the “OK Glass” command, you have to be touching the Google Glasses you have on your head. So how that is going to pan on out desktops and mobile devices, but you can see that this is going to be big.

Will you be buying Google Glass?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

So this morning I arrived at the office nice and early, I had my porridge, I had my brew (Coffee, white, one) and there was even a good song on the radio. I started cycling through the Social Media accounts checking for new follow, tweets, likes, posts, +1s etc. But when I got to Google+ I was hit by a wave of confusion and confronted with this:

“But I’ve just checked Pinterest” I thought. Clearly this coffee isn’t working. I loaded it up again and was greeted with the same layout. Then it hit me that this was actually Google Plus and not Pinterest. Incredible, whilst not exactly a carbon copy of Pinterest, the design does seem to lend heavily from the infinite scroll, tiled panel design that was first introduced by the big P.

My first impression was, if it’s a toss up between this layout and the previous layout, it’s completely on par. I’m not championing the previous design, but neither am I shouting about this new design from the rooftops. However, after a couple of minutes of playing around with it, the news feed decided to finally respond to my browser and screen size and include a third column. I know it’s only a small thing, but it just seemed to make the whole thing sit together nicely.

Then there was the discovery of full width images spanning the width of the page and that really helped me warm towards the new news feed.

After my fill of the home page I went to my profile and was greeted by the biggest cover photo in the world. Check it out:

Pretty big. The rest of the profile panned out into all my latest updates spread over 3 columns. I’ve got to admit as well, the three column layout is brilliant. You add your updates in the very top left box which, as humans read from top left to bottom right, is perfectly placed. As opposed to Facebook where you’re made to add updates from the top of your news feed. A slight advantage to Google+ but an advantage nonetheless.

All in all I’d say Google has done a really great job with this. It looks like Google may have realised that it might never cater to everyone’s requirements for a Social Media platform, so it’s adapted to improve UX for the current clientele. After all Google+ is far more geared towards photo sharing than Facebook is.

Have you experienced the New Google+ yet? What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey