Category: Google

In Google’s latest Webmaster Video, head of Webspam and selfie extraordinaire Matt Cutts reveals how Google ranks content that doesn’t have a lot of backlinks to it.

The lack of backlinks to a page takes Google back to when they were a search engine who didn’t really count links that much. So, they have to rely on the words on the page. Basically when then come across the first instance of a word on the page, they give a bit of weight to that word.

When they come across the second instance of the same word or phrases on the page, then it still give some weight to it. From then on it notes each use of the word they’re counting without necessarily giving it any more weight.

They monitor the use of the same word or phrase and if they believe it’s used too much, it will then think that the page is keyword stuffing. So somewhere after the first and second mention of your keyword there is the perfect balance of keywords and regular words.

The second way they do this is to inspect the domain and decide whether the domain itself is trustworthy/reputable:

You spent weeks perfecting that picture of yourself and now Google plans to get rid of it. According to Google they’ve spend a lot of time redesigning their search results to provide the cleanest and most effective results they can.

This involves removing the picture of yourself in the SERPs and also removing the number of +1s you’ve got and how many Circles you’re in. See the statement below:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results… As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count.

One of the reported benefits to having the picture including along with everything you’ve written is that it increased Click Through Rates on your listing.

That doesn’t look to have been affected with Google also saying:

Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.

What do you think to this news?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Reconsideration requests have long been a chagrin of SEOs who have had to submit them. You can spend hours, days or weeks (depending on how badly the site was penalised) trying to find out why and then going through the tedious process of link removing (if it’s Penguin) or a content audit (if it’s Panda). You could also be left banging your head against a brick wall if you’ve no idea why you’ve been penalised and Google’s reconsideration requests aren’t likely to help you.

… Until now.

In the past you received a notice that your site was in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Not much help at all. They then decided to help more with the identification and removal of bad links.

Then Google decided to help out a bit more by pointing out some example links that were causing a penalty.

Now, however, Google have allowed for a text box where the actual person, a real human being, can evaluate your site and then offer personalised advice on how you can recover from the penalties your site is under.

You can read what they have to say in the “A note from your reviewer” box that comes with the new responses. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how useful these new reconsiderations will be:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Ever since the rise of Payday loan companies, there has been a war raged on Google to get to the top for the phrase “payday loans”. The reason? Payday loans are short term loans and as such, have an unusually high APR. Basically, a HUGE interest rate.

As there is a huge interest rate, there is a chance for huge profit. Hence the amount of companies trying to get onto the first page for this phrase. This orgy or competition has gone on unchecked in the Black Hat world of SEO as more and more people are seeking a “quick buck” on Payday Loans as people try to get there and try to get there quickly.

As with all things SEO, the faster you do something, the more likely you are to get penalised. So much so that Google have had to release an new specific algorithm to tackle this.

Indeed, they’re already on their 3rd version of the algorithm. Last week Google updated it to identify and penalise spammy websites. This new version of the algorithm is to detect and combat very spammy queries that aren’t just related to the Payday Loans industry.

For example, queries such as Payday Loans, Casinos, Viagra, Porn. Basically, anything to do with the spammy emails you’ll find in your junk folder of your emails.

Have you noticed any changes on these search terms?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

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!

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

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

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

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