Google warns searchers of Faulty Mobile Redirects

Google has warned website owners to be more careful when serving mobile searchers. In fact, Google is so serious about its mobile customers that it is showing them which websites are showing less than optimal mobile websites.

On the Webmaster Central blog, Google told webmasters that it will be setting up special messages to alert mobile searchers if a website of interest has a “faulty redirect” in place that sends them to the websites homepage.

A lot of websites have less than optimal mobile builds, and such redirects are used as a stop gap measure to avoid a not found or 404 page. Many website owners do not know if their websites are properly optimised for mobile.

According to Google:

We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway.”

As is apparent, the warning is quite conspicuous within the mobile search results, and may likely discourage users from clicking.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel for webmasters. Google will warn website owners of such faulty redirects within the Crawl Errors section of Google Webmaster Tools.

If you are unsure if your website is optimised for mobile, get in touch with Net66!

Content Sharing to Increase Traffic

The ultimate aim of a business website is to increase business and generate revenue, but in order to do this you need to drive traffic to your site. People aren’t automatically going to know it is there; there is no ‘stumbling across’ a website or happening to notice it as you might a print ad or display.

You need to actively promote the site, but putting it on your sales collateral, putting it in any other advertising such as print, and carrying out PPC paid ads to encourage people to click through to your site. You also need to carry out SEO to ensure that your site is listed on the SERPs so that people searching for a business such as yours can find you.

A relatively new way to promote websites is through sharing content, otherwise known as content marketing. Content marketing is a new buzz word in digital marketing, and is often explored at conferences. It is the process of sharing content you’ve written with impartial sites, that either mentions you and your company and/or link back to your site.

It may seem like the only content worth sharing is that that is promoting your business or service and products. However, whilst you want it to relate to your industry and leverage a positive message towards your services and products, any content that you share can help to increase traffic.

In fact, the more objective it is, and the more that you make it appealing and readable, the more likely it is to increase traffic to your site.

Here is how content sharing can increase traffic to your site:

• The link leading back to your site could positively impact your search engine ranking, giving you a higher position on search engine listings, and a more visible web presence, making people more likely to see you and more likely to visit your site.

• If the article mentions your product or service and gives a positive impression of your business, product or service, they might click on the link to find out more.

• Even if there isn’t a link the fact that you and/or your business are mentioned on a good quality site establishes you as an expert in your field. People will get a great impression of you and be more likely to look for your business if and/or when they are looking for your product or service.

• It establishes a need for your product or service if written and leveraged right. Maybe you have a product or service that people hadn’t realised was available until now, and it just so happens to meet a need that they have exactly. Your content could create a light bulb moment for them and push them to the point of investing in what you do or sell.

Content sharing to increase traffic only works if people see and like your work, so make sure that it is well written and posted in the right place in order to give the best impression possible.

Blog Post written by Jordan Whitehead

Net66 SEO: How Much Wood Would a Matt Cutts Cut if a Matt Cutts Could Cut Wood?

There are all manner of pressing, valuable and insightful questions that are put to Matt Cutts each week for his Webmaster Video Tutorials.

For some reason he’s opted against good advice this week and chosen one of the more ridiculous questions that are put to him.

Credit where credit is due he still makes a seminal dip into the SEO advice with “we aim to cut all the spam wood so the quality wood can be displayed” but that’s as far as it gets. See the video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Negative SEO, What is it and how you can recover from it.

What is negative SEO? Negative SEO refers to the practice of maliciously harming other websites in order to reduce their rankings in the search engines. Some unscrupulous SEOs can indulge in black hat tactics to reduce the reputation of a competitors website.

These can include gaining illicit access to a website to modify on-site content in order to create the impression of a poor quality or black hat website. This can also include creating low quality or spammy links to your website. Another tactic can involve creating duplicate copies of your website, in order to get you targeted for duplicate content.

Duplicate content is frowned upon by the search engines, so your site can be confused as being a copy whereas the actual copies can be seen to be originals.

Bad links are a frequent cause of negative SEO.

How can you tell if you’ve been hit by negative SEO? Well, apart from noticing that your keyword rankings have fallen, you can take a look at your link profile. Use a tool such as Majestic SEO or OpenSiteExplorer to analyse your backlink profile. This will detail most or all of the links pointing in to your business website. You can then analyse the quality of each site or domain linking in.

Sifting through thousands of links can be difficult and tiring for most business owners. Fortunately, Net66 can effectively analyse your backlink profile to determine whether or not you’ve been a victim of Negative SEO.

We can then take appropriate remedial actions to get your website back up in the rankings.

Net66: Google Celebrates European Parliament with Google Doodle

Google has a long history of changing their logo on commemorative days. There have been so many that you’ve probably missed a lot of them. Thankfully you can catch up with them all on Google’s official Google Doodle Website.

As there are always different countries celebrating different events, you can see what is being and what has been celebrated around the world.

In England however, as today is the day people are casting their votes for who gets at seat in Europe, Google has doodled a new logo. See it below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Why SEO Is Incomplete Without Pinterest

When the major social media platform Pinterest added a new search feature helping users find their favourite pins faster, it became quite evident search engine optimisation is likely to get a tremendous boost as well.

A massive 30 billion pins were posted across an equally impressive 750 million Pinterest boards by April 2014 easily demonstrating tremendous potential for businesses to use the feature to their advantage. It turns out to be an exercise in using search terms in sync with the latest search feature offered by the platform.

Social media is turning out to be a very important medium for brands to make their presence felt online. Changes introduced by different platforms become important components of marketing strategy. It is widely known Pinterest uses media content to broadcast information with the help of infographics and other visual aids.

People have low attention spans and tend to lose interest if searches take too long. By making it easier for people to find their favourite infographics faster, Pinterest actually helps businesses adopt similar techniques to reach people in need of their products.

Categorising Products For Better SEO Results

People look for specific topics but often use a limited number of search terms during organic searches. Pinterest now adopts relevant filters to help users get precise search results much faster. For example, a broad search term like “recipe” is likely to yield a great number of infographics. People may be interested in specific categories like “vegan,” “vegetarian,” “paleo,” or “gluten free.”

Filters are now introduced using these categories to help people get targeted information.
Users hardly have the time to read through a lengthy article. They find it easier to browse through an infographic to get valuable information about specific products.

A massive 75% traffic rate is established by Pinterest through mobile phone marketing alone making it quite obvious people on the move prefer media content as well. The new search feature is likely to be improved upon adding custom categories and other guided features in time.

Improved SEO With Optimized Boards

Boards within Pinterest can be easily optimised for improved SEO results. How the process is to be fine-tuned may be a matter of discussion, but it must be noted the social media platform sets up a specific number of boards for users. Selected preferences are likely to determine how Pinterest categorises individual pins. Users can now use keyword-specific content with focus on spreading them across proper categories to further simplify search functions.

Pinterest not long ago also introduced promoted pins, a bit like PPC. Depending on your budget you can advertise sponsored pins, which as you may guess gets tons of traffic but will come at a hefty price.

Take the example of users in Manchester looking for information on trending topics. Search terms can be used to introduce products in the first 5 boards appearing above the fold. A fantastic first impression is created with users finding exactly what they were looking for. A product related to the search term is now synchronised to yield more traffic.

Probability of users having great visual experiences translating into potential buyers is much higher. Better interaction with superior search functionality make positive SEO results in Manchester achievable in lesser time and by just keeping in touch with a feature that works seamlessly with a website’s on-page optimization.

Take a look at these cool SEO tricks for Pinterest:

Posted by Jordan Whitehead

The EU Court rules on the Right to be Forgotten

A recent court ruling in the European Union has directed search engines to receive requests from people to remove users’ personal information if the information is found to be outdated or detrimental to the person concerned.

Popularly referred to as the Right to be Forgotten ruling, it states that a person is now able to submit an information removal request to a search engine. However, the search engine is not actually bound to act upon such a request to remove personal information. The person does have the right to appeal to an government authority upon the refusal of the search engine. Most of such removal requests will probably refer to a person’s actual name in some form, and modification keywords may or may not be entertained.

Of note is the fact that a person’s information will continue to exist online even if it is removed from a search engine, as the search engine merely links to the web page that is hosted on a separate web server. However, it will be more difficult to find online.

The the EU court seemed concerned that with the current state of search engines, it is may be easy to effectively pull together a profile on people in a way that might violate the rights of privacy. By removing links from Google and other search engines, it is much more difficult for private information to be found .

But things may not be so simple. If something is deleted from Google, it may still be found on other search engines such as Duck Duck Go or Bing. Someone should apply to any and all search engines in order to minimise the footprint of information online. The search engine must also have some sort of presence in a country of the EU. If the search engine operates completely out of the EU without offices or servers there, it can probably ignore any request.

Net66: Google Knowledge Graph Added to Google Maps

It looks like the expansion of Google’s knowledge graph is continuing. If you’re on Maps and searching for a place, a new “Quick Facts” card will appear when you search. Check out the screenshot below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Social Media Update: Pinterest & Twitter Release Awesome New Features

I’ve always been a big fan of Twitter and Pinterest. They’re easy to use, fun and, importantly to me, visual!

Facebook do have a news feed full of images admittedly, but there are now so many promoted posts on Facebook that sometimes I don’t look at things properly as my mind will assume it’d promoted and I switch off.

Pinterest, however, is based solely on images. So even if an image is promoted, it’s not likely to display very different at all. In fact, Pinterest are taking such a gradual approach to their adverts that they (initially) won’t be shown in your pin feed at all.

They’re restricting adverts to certain users and only displaying them in categories and search pages. Admittedly you do search a lot and you quite often find yourself browsing categories, but your pin feed will remain your own for now and there will be no sponsored pins in there.

The advertisers have been limited too. But don’t expect to get an invite any time soon, here’s a list of the brands that have been approved to use these paid ads:

ABC Family, Banana Republic, Expedia.com, GAP, General Mills, Kraft, lululemon athletica, Nestle (including Purina, Dreyer’s/Edy’s Ice Cream, Nespresso), Old Navy, Target, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and Ziploc.

Twitter have also been in the News this week as they’ve released a new “Mute” button. This is a feature designed to primarily improve the user experience for Twitter users.

If you follow someone but find yourself getting bored by their Tweets, then you can make the choice to unfollow them, which might upset your friend who posts a photo of literally every meal they eat and tag it with #epic, or you can just mute them. Their feelings and hashtags remain undamaged and you no longer receive updates from your friends diet.

You can mute users directly from one of their tweets or you can visit their profile and mute them that way. See below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Google’s Rivals and Other, Lesser Known Search Engines

Transcript:

Today, we’re going to talk about some Lesser known search engines. We all know Google is the king of the pack when it comes to searching online. From products to local services, and general knowledge, and everything in between, the world uses Google to search. However, you may be a bit surprised to know that not everyone uses Google all the time. In fact, there are other search engines out there too. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Bing.

Bing is the number two search engine in the US. Owned by the creator of the Windows operating system, Microsoft, and previously known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, Bing is a serious contender when it comes to online search. And has been steadily increasing search quality in recent years, and is often considered to be the biggest threat to Google’s dominance of the search industry. It has a user friendly interface, and is particularly renowned for local and video searches. Bing also powers all Yahoo searches, after a deal between the two companies.

Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go is another, now serious, contender. Often taken lightly in previous years, partially due to the whimsical name, Duck Duck Go has now made a name for its self when it comes to online search privacy. The search engine states that it does not store a user’s data when it comes to online search. In fact, online search privacy is Duck Duck Go’s unique selling proposition. It has recently made significant changes to its user interface and added new features, such as image search and auto suggest.

For more information about search and how to optimise for it, keep watching Net66

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Tripping Google’s Spam Filter – Things to Avoid

I’ve mentioned how to grab Google’s attention before. It’s not a good idea if you want to rank your site but Google is alerted to your site for a bad reason.

Here are some top tips on how NOT to trigger Google’s Spam Filter:

> DON’T register a domain with a trademarked name or phrase in it. Profiting from misdirected search traffic isn’t ethical and will do you no favours in the eyes of Google.

> DON’T register a misspelling of a popular domain, especially an industry rival as this also looks dodgy and will cause Google to take a closer look at your practices.

> DON’T send out a stream of pings to various servers in an attempt to convince them you have new content when you don’t.

> DON’T use the same title tag for an inordinate amount of pages. Also don’t use irrelevant or misrepresentative title tags.

> DON’T buy domains with a history of high traffic and redirect them to affiliate marketing pages.

> DON’T Participate in link farms or a free for all link exchange

Follow the above tips and Google won’t be feeling the need to investigate your online practices.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts Posts New Video on Backlinks and how Long They’ll Continue to Matter for.

It’s hard to argue against the case that backlinks are important to SEO in this day and age. Yes, the landscape of SEO is shifting slightly over to content and how much quality is in it, but links still play a massive part in this.

Look at guest posts. The focus is on content and surely on the quality of that content, but are users dishing out content to organically get their brand out there? Or are they focussing solely on the links that can be put into these posts?

You just have to look at Matt Cutts recent blog post on this to see what Google thinks of people who target guest bloggers for just link building purposes.

The reason that Guest blogging has decayed and fallen is that it works. Really well. So spammers have taken this tactic and absolutely hammered it. Seriously. I get emails left, right and centre from people who have THE best content ever and they’ve chosen my blog to publish it on. Lucky me!

As this tactic is now getting abused so much, it’s harder for Google to determine genuine blog posts from not so genuine ones. So they need other rankings signals to judge on. For instance, Google is working on looking at who might be posting content on websites.

Like Google Authorship, but not. So Google can check the patterns of content, see who’s posting what and then rank that content “in theory” on the content alone. Not with links.

See how else Google will begin to rank results in the future on Matts Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Will the Importance of Links Decrease Over Time?

People at Google have recently stated that the importance of backlinks within the overall ranking scheme could diminish over the next few years. According to observers, the search engine may be looking at alternative ways to determine the relevance of a website to a particular keyword. These include signals from experts, the qualitative and quantitative interaction of humans with the content, and other on-site indicators.

Signals from experts could be links from a top journalist to your site, for example. If the industry is the same as yours, or similar to yours, and the linking party is considered an expert, you could benefit immensely from such a link.

Alternatively, Authority websites can also be gauged by their on-site content. On-site content is one of the easiest ways a search engine can determine a site’s worth. Detecting content matter, nuances of language, use of industry terminology, quality of language used, and even grammar can help a search engine get to grips with site quality and any potential authority status.

Currently, inbound links are the most important ways a search engine can determine the relevance of a web page to a particular keyword. However, unscrupulous link builders have been using links to increase relevance for web pages that are not really relevant. Motives can include monetary profit for one’s business, or working on a client’s behalf to raise rankings.

Quality link building involves creating mutual relationships with other businesses and stakeholders, so that any links between websites act as reflections of real world relationships. These are likely to be trusted by search engines, and your website is more likely to receive the benefit and rank higher.

Net66: Yahoo Stops Honouring “Do Not Track”, Explains Why

Yahoo has recently stopped honouring the request of “Do Not Track” signals sent by browsers. The do not track idea was first touted as working until it broke that it was merely a request that browsers sent to websites.

Since then, more and more websites have stopped honouring these requests. See Yahoos statement below:

“As of today, web browser Do Not Track settings will no longer be enabled on Yahoo. As the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track, we’ve been at the heart of conversations surrounding how to develop the most user-friendly standard. However, we have yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the broader tech industry.”

The secondary implication of this is that Yahoo will now enable better personalisation of their search network. Much the same way Google do now.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Updates Guidelines on “Sneaky” Redirects

Page redirects have long been a form of “cloaking”. Which is bad in terms of Google. The reason why, because when you cloak a page, you’re effectively showing Google one page and the user a different page.

The reason this is so frowned upon is because the website could show Google a nice, relevant, high quality page full of great tips and advice, and then show a regular user a page of adverts. Bad idea.

This has been taken to an extreme where people will rank a page for the desktop, but when a user tries to access that page on a mobile device, they’re redirected to a completely different domain. Google had added the following into their webmaster guidelines to clear up exactly what is deemed outside their webmaster guidelines:

> Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different
> Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain

Google takes issues like this very seriously and will take manual action against your website if it does believe your website is violating their webmaster guidelines. Penalties can be a drop in your rankings and in rare cases it can involve the de-indexing of your whole website.

They also updated their terms on hacker websites that have redirects on them with the following:

“Hackers might inject malicious code to your website that redirects some users to harmful or spammy pages. The kind of redirect sometimes depends on referrer, user-agent, or device. For example, clicking a URL in Google search results could redirect you to a suspicious page, but there is no redirect when you visit the same URL directly from a browser.”

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts: Myth Busts the common myths of SEO.

Last week Matt Cutts spent over 4 minutes de-bunking SEO myths that are still cropping up at conferences and on blogs.

His intro launches into two theories that go against each other by way of Adwords. He states that there’s one side of the argument that claims if you buy Google Adwords then you rank higher. Yet there’s the other side claiming that if you DO buy adverts then you’ll rank higher.

Matt wants to get these two groups together, sit them down and start a war. Not really. He does want them to argue the pros and cons of each idea and come up with one for him to debunk.

The rest of the video is spent talking about how he thinks SEO is still “faddy”. For instance last year if you had a lot of article directories you could rank. And how now this year it’s guest blogging. See what the rest of the video has to say here:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Bad links are a frequent cause of negative SEO.

Junoba

Smashfuse

Topsy