Net66: Google to Get tough on Abusive Images

Google have today announced measures that will block people searching for abusive images and in particular, child abuse images.

The don’t stop at just blocking searches though, they’ve taken action blocking thousands of videos and images that are known to contain abusive images.

The extent to which Google has committed themselves to this campaign is such that over 100,000 phrases related to abuse have been blocked. This has been coupled with the ability to “tag” known videos and images as duplicates of previously blocked material.

These changes directly affect Google’s search engines across the glove and in over 150 languages.

After growing unease and calls for the internet giant to do more, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt says “we’ve listened” and that’s the reason why these measures have been taken. He went on to say:

“We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”

This all comes before Google’s meeting with the Prime Minister where representatives of Microsoft and BT will also be present.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: How You Should Submit a Guest Post

Guest posting is a bit contentious at the minute. There are those who say it’s a great links back to your own site from relevant websites that’s really great for SEO. Especially if you can get keyword links from the site you’re posting on. It’s all natural and loved by Google.

Then there are those who are cynics and say that guest posting isn’t natural and you shouldn’t have keyword anchors on there as it’s spammy. There are even those who say it is spammy as a lot of people pay for guest posts making them paid follow links. Bad for SEO.

Whatever you think on the matter, here are some tips you can use so that you will have a better chance to add a guest post to someone else’s website.

Read Their Posts: You might be a great writer, but if you’re writing with a view that’s opposed to the website you will be publishing on, then you wont be able to publish a guest post on that site. For example, you talk to the owner of a forum who wants you to write a post. The forum owner encourages keywords in their reply signatures as it’s good for SEO and this is how they get traffic to their site. If you then write an article condemning spammy, over optimised anchor links in forum signatures, it might not get published (the might is sarcastic, you have close to no chance). Maybe a bit of an extreme example, but you do need to make sure you’re reading the blogs you want to post on so that you’ll be able to further that website’s point.

Be Friendly: If you have a blog, you’ll probably get at least 2 emails a day from people asking to publish on your website. They’ll have a standard “Dear Website Owner, we’ve read your blog and would very much like to help contribute to the excellent writing on there”. Chances are, hundreds of other website owners got the same email and rather than smiling and enjoying such a glowing compliment, would be a bit more cynical and delete the email attributing it as spam. So send a personalised email, add some excerpts of blogs that you’ve read. Remember you’re emailing someone with a personality, so show off yours.

Follow these tips and you’ll be sure to see an increase in your guest post submission success rate.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Plus Could Start Charging for Vanity URLs

It’s a strange concept but now a new one. As with everything you upload to Social Media sites, although you’re uploading your own content, as soon as it hits their servers they can do with it pretty much what they want.

Even if you own it, and especially if you have intellectual property rights on it, you give Facebook and all the companies they own the right to use it. Here’s an exerpt from their terms:

“you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License).”

So, unless you delete your content, Facebook can use it however they want. Even if they use it for their commercial gain and give you nothing, you’ve let them as you’ve agreed to their terms.

With Google Plus, they have equally totalitarian terms and conditions when it comes to their new custom URL feature. As we all know, URLs on Google+ aren’t the prettiest of things. For example, my own is: https://plus.google.com/100119952662552310660/posts

Hardly a reference to myself. But now Google+ allows you to create custom URLs, but under their terms a copy of which is as follows:

“Google+ Custom URLs Terms of Use

When you claim and use a custom URL, you must follow the Google Terms of Service, the Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy, and the Google+ Pages Additional Terms of Service (if applicable), and the following policies:

We reserve the right to reclaim custom URLs or remove them for any reason, and without notice.
Custom URLs are free for now, but we may start charging a fee for them. However, we will tell you before we start charging and give you the choice to stop participating first.
Don’t include words and phrases in your custom URL that would violate the Google+ User Content and Conduct Policy
If you violate our policies or terms of service we may take a variety of actions, including suspending your access to Google+ and your use of custom URLs.”

I’ve highlighted the main issues here. Although you may think you’ve laid a claim to your new Google Plus URL, and you can then spend money promoting this and having it added to your website, business cards, flyers and other marketing items, Google can still strip you of it. Without warning or notice and for no reason, the injustice! Then, they have the cheek to ask you for money to get it back.

Of course this isn’t a tactic Google are likely to employ, I’m merely highlighting a worst case scenario. Still, it does give you pause for thought. Do you think Google will start charging for vanity URLs?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 [Infographic] – Troubleshoot your Google Authorship

If you’re having trouble with your Google Authorship, you can see Net66’s how-to on adding Google authorship to you page. You can also use this handy infographic from Search Engine Land:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Honours Remembrence day with Simple Home Page

Every year on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, people up and down the country stop what they’re doing and pause for one or two minutes to remember the soldiers of war.

In the USA this is veterans day, in the UK and the Commonwealth it is remembrance day. To commemorate this day with a mark of respect of it’s own, Google has added a poppy to it’s home page. See the tribute below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Becomes Insight Into Your Own Mind

Have you seen Google’s Doodle today? If you have, have you seen into yourself? I ask as Google’s Doodle is an ink blot test that psychiatrists used to get into your head. The would show you a blot of ink which would look ambiguous. The way you perceived the blot would then give the psychiatrist an insight into the way you think, enabling them to get on your level and help you out. All theoretical of course. Here’s an example inkblot:

I did’t really see much in this one. Maybe two sort of pseudo elephants or something. I gave it another go:

This one was much clearer though, as far as I could tell, it was some form of stag. You can see it’s two large eyes at the bottom and then its antlers at the top. Yes of course I’m joking. It’s twin dinosaurs balancing on balls.

Clearly this test wasn’t intended to be a serious test, and if you don’t believe me and can see real meaning in the above two images, please tell me what the rest are:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Clears up Mystery Barge

If you’re unaware of what this mystery barge is, you can see a picture of it below. It’s been the source of quite a lot of speculation recently with the most commonly touted suggestion of the barges being off shore data centres.

The suggestion of off shore data centres raised quite a lot of concern with a few people suggesting that Google could use these data centres to escape US Law. As the barges were moveable, they could be floated into international waters and therefore a law unto themselves.

Google of course denied this. In fact, it’s not to be anything like that. They released a statement laughing off some of the wilder suggestions which apparently included the insinuation that they were housing the last living dinosaur. Full Statement:

“Google Barge … A floating data center? A wild party boat? A barge housing the last remaining dinosaur? Sadly, none of the above. Although it’s still early days and things may change, we’re exploring using the barge as an interactive space where people can learn about new technology.”

Rather than answer most questions it does seem to have prompted more. Especially with the incredibly vague “interactive space”. And just what is this new technology? Is it somewhere where people can go and test a Google Car or Google Glass?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Auto Complete Gets a Bashing

As with most things concerning Google, no matter how good it’s service is, there are always some bugs and people who notice them. One thing however that doesn’t seem to be a bug, but Google still gets criticised for, is it’s auto complete feature.

It’s been getting a lot of criticism at high levels with even the UN running a campaign for women’s rights using the feature. The reason Google has been used is not only down to the fact that it’s the biggest search engine out there. But more to do with the fact that Google aggregates data to come up with its instant suggestions.

Here’s the advert that is causing so much of a stir:

So how have these results come about? Google stores every single search made on their search engine. They measure the words used and the position in the sentence used. They then count the words, they count the sentences, then they will count the first two words used, then the first second and third words used and so on and so forth.

Then they’ll begin to examine how many times each word positioned second, is used after the first word in the sentence. Then after word one, in our example “women”, the word “shouldn’t” will then be suggested.

Now the complaints being levied are two fold on this account. People are blaming Google for suggesting such things as “Women shouldn’t vote”, but at the same time, it’s us users who are making those searches. An argument also exists that Google is in effect finishing our sentences, and people who wouldn’t usually search for something like that, will indeed search for it as they have their curiosity aroused.

Do you think Google should be doing more about this? Or so you think that it’s down to users to change this?

Net66: Google Provides Disavowed Links in Bad Links Example

Google have been looking to improve their Webmaster tools for a good long while now and it seems like they’re maybe doing too much. Before certain changes were made, if you received a penalty from Google, then you would be told that you have a penalty, but not why.

This issue grew to prominence in the aftermath of the Penguin update. As penguin targeted bad links, and a lot of people had been engaging in bad link practices (not always intentionally and maliciously), there was a big rise in people getting link penalties. Sounds good. Google doing their job, cracking down on spam.

But this wasn’t the case. A lot of people were upset with Google as they thought they had been link building naturally, and found it unfair that Google would now tell them that some of their links had the site penalised. But they wouldn’t tell you exactly which links.

They eventually realised that this was in fact a little unfair and decided to offer more help with this by providing example bad links. This in theory is great as it will tell you exactly where you went wrong with your SEO and through finding this out, you can then apply a fix to your website.

However, there’s been a post recently in the webmaster forums that has caused some controversy. A forum poster recently received a link that they had previously disavowed as an example bad link from Google. As we all know disavowed links shouldn’t be taken into account by Google. So what were they doing sending a link they shouldn’t be regarding, as an example bad link?

Some theorists say that Google still take into account links that you’ve built in the past, even if they are in the disavow section. Seems a bit unfair doesn’t it. Almost as if you’re getting tarred with the same brush as black hat SEOs.

My theory however is that a bad link is a bank link regardless of whether or not you’ve disavowed the link or not. If you have disavowed links and received a link back from Google, I think that what Google is saying is that you will have more of these types of links that you need to remove. After all, the link is only an example. So look at the type of link you receive, analyse it, find out why it breaks Google’s guidelines, and then find the rest of the links to your site that match the same profile.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Could Be Closing Authorship Program

Not long ago the internet was alive with Google’s Authorship Program believing that it could revolutionise the already revolutionary exponential growth of Content Marketing.

The argument was that there was going to be an “Authorship rank”. And that this would be directly related to how often each author wrote, how many websites they wrote on and of course, relevant to how much quality was in the content.

These three factors would then be combined to give a rough estimate of the Rank of an Author. So if you have an author write a blog post on your website who is associated with only one other website and whilst they do write consistently, the quality isn’t great and it doesn’t get that much traffic, this might not be a big bonus to your website.

However if you get quite a few different authors who all publish great content on a couple of popular sites in your industry, and you get them to write for you, their Author Rank will pass onto your site, boosting your SEO.

Sadly, no one knows if this is the case or not. And now it looks like all that speculation was for naught. Google Authorship is set to be changing as we know it. The main reason for this seems to be participation, or rather, the lack of it. Not enough top quality authors are in the Authorship programme so to use authorship and author rank as ranking indicators could cause some pretty large and well known blogs to lose rankings because of it.

The good news however, is that Authorship markup still increases click through rates from the SERPs and the markup is here to stay. So if you STILL haven’t added Google Authorship to your blog, you need to.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google Doodle goes all Spooky for Halloween

Google usually celebrates special occasions by turning the large Google logo you can find on the home page into an topical image, game or an interactive graphic. This year in particular the interactive nature of Google’s Doodle has been upped quiet a lot. The graphic itself looks like the below:

As you can see it features a witch and a cauldron and four ingredients. Each two ingredients you mix takes you to another screen where you play a little mini game or enjoy a wee graphic. Have you had fun with the google today?

This isn’t the first time Google has changed their logo for Halloween. In 2012 it featured a haunted street where you can go trick or treating! In 2011 as well they changed their logo but this time it displayed a time lapse of people from Google carving large pumpkins

Happy Halloween!

Net66 Google: Knowledge Graph Easter Eggs are Frighteningly Fun

Google has recently courted controversy with its open graph recently. But it’s back to it’s regular self today having fixed the error that was exploited yesterday.

Today we’ve seen a much different side to the Google knowledge graph. We’ve seen Google back to it’s little treats of Easter Eggs. An Easter Egg is a hidden feature or a bonus feature in digital media such as software, websites or DVDs. For example, when you type askew into Google, the screen tilts. Easter Eggs tend to be humorous in this way quite a lot with Google.

And you’ll find that they’ve this year added Easter Eggs into their Knowledge Graph results. For Example, see the image below:

Thankfully for us, Google advises us on how to avoid zombies and even where their weak spots are. There’s also one for Vampires:

There are lots more so, so get hunting for them!

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66 Google: Knowledge Graph Error Exploits Unfortunate Loophole

There’s a time and a place for serious Wikipedia entries. Apparently the World Series final (an all American baseball competition) is not one of these times. It seems that the Google knowledge graph draws at least some of it’s content from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia of course is the internet authority on life and is 100% accurate. I’m joking, although it is perceived to be that way. Wikipedia is user edited which does attest to it’s validity of being a useful website. You see the idea was, if you are a rocket scientist and a user of the website, you can add an article on rocket scientist. And if some young pretender makes an error in a rocket science related article, you can correct it.

What Wikipedia didn’t contend with was sports rivalries. As fans of opposing teams started to change rival’s entries on the website. The most high profile case of course being the infamous Thierry Henry handball incident. I won’t post what it was changed to, but it has something to do with the day after Monday and an appointment the week after.

The world series error is a little less full of profanity, and a little more childish. Never the less it still exploits a hole in Google’s knowledge graph that could let people down on subjects they want to read about. Especially when the subject itself is so topical.

See the image below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 SEO: The NoFollow Tag and Everything you Need to Know About it. [Infographic]

If you’re involved with SEO somehow, either as a technician or as a client, then you’ll have probably heard these two phrases get bandied about. NoFollow Lin and Follow Link. There is a difference in these links, the main one being that a follow link will allow link “juice” to flow through it. Whereas a nofollow link will not pass any juice on.

The reason that this is significant is that Google uses link juice to gauge how popular and how trusted it is. In the past it will have relied heavily on this but now, Google places much more emphasis on the quality of content and how your website can engage the user.

So, if you want to link to a website, but you don’t necessarily want to recommend it, you would use the NoFollow attribute. Below is a helpful infographic from Search Engine Land to help you know when (not) to use the nofollow attribute:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66 SEO: 301 Redirects. To www. or to not www.

I know we’ve probably paraphrased Hamlet enough in our blog titles, but it will probably always happen. And it’s a nice quote. But alas, I digress. A recent Webmaster Forums user stated that he has webmaster accounts for his website’s www.domain.com and domain.com. That’s not unusual, in fact, it’s actually quite prudent.

The problem came when this user was hit by a link penalty courtesy of Penguin 2.1. So after extensive cleaning and finally rectifying what was a fault in their previous link campaigns, they had their link penalty removed.

But here’s the weird part. The only had their link penalty removed for the www.domain.com whilst the penalty for the domain.com website remained. This has left the user quite discontent as after all their hard work and successful removal of any bad links, they still won’t register on Google for www.domain.com (their domain). Bad Luck.

The reason they won’t show is because the penalised domain.com is still pointing at the www.domain.com so passing on the penalty.

Have you heard of anything like this happening before?

Creating the Social Media Pulse

So Google has made a load of changes recently, some of which were their biggest in the last 12 years!

Its been quite some 12 – 18 months, you could almost say that Google has completely revamped and the ball game has now changed when it comes to succeeding online.

But what do we make of this, is it now harder to rank on google, be seen and drive traffic to your website?

Well the answer is yes and no.

If you think your going to still be able to manipulate Google, by doing black hat or grey hat methods, then your going to be progressively disappointed. Google is smart, has been smart for the last 10 years, and is only ever going to get smarter, especially with the amount of resources it has at its disposal, so there’s only one way know to beat this Goliath and thats to play it at its own game.

What should you do to Make Google Happy?

Well before we answer that lets have a brief look into what the 3 main updates actually entail over the last year or two.

Panda

This one was all about content, if you had duplicate content on your website your gone!, if you had low quality poor content on your website your gone!

Penguin

This update focused mainly on the backlinks you had going to your website. This was were most people would try and pull the wool over the eyes of Google, and sure they may have succeeded for a while, but inevitably Google pounced back and their backlinking algorithm now is very different to what it was before.

Hummingbird

Now this is an interesting one, arguably the smallest update of the 3, but certainly one that has also reaped havoc in the world of online marketing and SEO.

So what is Hummingbird?

Well with the risk of over simplifying it, this update was all about the “user experience” if Google can be blamed for being obsessed with anything, then its definitely user experience.

In short,what is your user getting from your website when they visit it? What are you offering to them?

Do you provide quality content which is unique, do you offer a service; whether it be online or offline? Are you unique and original?

The Social Media Element

One of the good things about Hummingbird is that no matter how complicated and complex you may thing these updates are, it can be massively simplified, well.. to a degree.

What Google seems to have done now is take social media very much into consideration. You (the people) are the best algorithm that any computer or brain can come up with right now. If your on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or Linked In and your accounts are going bananas, then who is google to argue?

Don’t get me wrong, ranking on google and getting traffic isn’t just about being on Facebook etc. but its a box that no business can now leave, not tick it and be forgotten about.

By being social, by updating your account, by having others comment and get involved with what your doing, this is a great measuring stick for Google to go off, and being part of a good solid rounded SEO package will stand you in good stead for better rankings, more traffic and more sales and leads, now which business doesn’t want that?

Net66 SEO: What Can I do about Keywords 100% Not Provided

You may have heard the news doing the circuit on the SEO blogs that Google Analytics will no longer be providing keyword data. That is, of course, unless you’re willing to forego all your previous SEO work and switch to Paid Adverts a la Google Adwords. Failing that if you have a spare £90,000 per year lying around, you could easily afford Google Analytics Premium. Where “user privacy” – the reason Google are switching to (not provided) keywords – appears to be easily bought.

But we’re not here to gripe about who appears to be taking advantage of a monopoly position, we’re here to discuss what can be done to regain some useful data back from Google. See our top tips below:

Take Advantage of your Landing Pages

As we all know, one of the main keys in SEO is relevance. You want to optimise a specific page for each individual keyword. So now that you’ve done that, you’ll be able to look at which pages are the most relevant for each keyword. Through Google Analytics (It is still quite useful after all) if you navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > Landing Pages. This shows you a a list of your most popular landing pages and also just exactly how many hits you’re getting directly to them. Adding an advanced search to this will also help you narrow it down. If you add the secondary dimension as source and then search this for “Google”, it will show only the Google traffic to your landing pages.

Analysing the statistics from this section you’ll be able to discern which pages are performing better than others. For example our SEO services has more hits to it this month than our website design page. So from that it’s indicative we’re getting found more for SEO related keywords than web design keyword. Apply the same principle to your own clients’ analytics and you’ll be able to privide them with more accurate data.

Using Google Webmasters Tools

Google also offer a range of Webmasters Tools which help you produce a website worth of Google’s listings. In this set of tools you’ll find such things as the links Google have discovered to your site, which can prove an excellent link analysis tool. Especially when you consider that if you are ever to receive a link warning from them, they almost always refer to the links contained within webmaster.

But what we’re after here is the “keywords” section of Google Webmasters Tools. You can access it by clicking Search Engine > Search Queries. This will provide you with a list of your most popular queries and how many impressions you’ve made. You’ll also be able to see just how many clicks you’re getting from your impressions as well. This will give you some great data such as which pages appear for that search term the most as well as their average ranking positions in the search engines.

So although we might not be getting the best and most accurate data from Google Analytics anymore, there’s no need to panic massively as there’s still a lot you can do. Such as the above tips.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey