With the massive rise of mobile search and the raft of tablets and smartphones at our disposal, what’s the best way to let Google know you have a mobile version of your website?
Matt Cutts answers this question and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of responsive web design, CSS, JavaScript and Agent redirections.
See the full video below:
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Google’s Matt Cutts has recently expanded his invasion of European link networks. In the past he’s already hit a few of them. Some of his targets:
Anglo Rank
Anonymous
Buzzea
Germans
Ghost 2.0
Sape
Text Link Ads
And now it looks like he’s targeting Spanish & Italian Networks too. Check out his tweets below:
And here's a reminder about unnatural/paid links for Italian: http://t.co/OoA4dSXqhI #hint #hint
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 10, 2014
A reminder (in Spanish) about unnatural/paid links and that we're willing to take action on them: http://t.co/uTBdJpRNbw
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 10, 2014
Transcript:
Welcome to Net66!
Today, we’re going to take a look at how a search engine works from the inside. Lets take a look at the innards of a search engine.
First, we’ve got the world wide web. Next the spider traverses the world wide web. The Spider is a specialised computer program built by search engines to crawl or traverse the world wide web.
The spider passes its findings onto the search engine where the data is extracted, tokenised by which it means that the data is broken up into little bits, discrete bits such as title tags and h1 tags. It is then selected and unwanted bits are discarded, and finally stored.
It is then passed into the data warehouse that houses all of the search engine’s cache. Now lets take a look at what happens on the other side when a user makes a query in the search engine. We’ve got the user here, the query is passed, first to the proxy server, the proxy server is responsible for all the local communication to and from the user.
Next it is passed to the personalisation server. This is responsible for the geographical and other localised preferences for the user.
From there the data is passed to the web server. The web server is like any other web server on the internet that deals primarily with TCP/IP communication on the internet that passes through TCP/IP port 80.
From there, the data is passed into the search engine. The query is then extracted from the data stores and passed to the data server.
The Data server serves the data from the data warehouse to the semantic algorithms. The semantic algorithms are responsible for translating the data from the data warehouse into a 1-10 search engine results page.
This is further propagated into the search results we see, on Google for example.
The search results are then passed into the web server and from there they’re served back to the personalisation and geo-targeting server, from there to the proxy server and then finally, to the user as a 1-10 list of search results.
And that is briefly how a search engine works from the inside.
Thanks for watching!
Google today celebrated the birthday of Elizabeth Browning who was a famous poet from the Victorian Era
Matt Cutts, the batman of Google’s antispam team, has released a video on Paid Links and how Google are judging them.
Advertised Paid Link
Thank you captain obvious. If there is a website willing to accept an amount of money in exchange for placing a link to your website then that is, believe it or not, a paid link.
Other less obvious paid links would be advertising on a website where links to your site aren’t nofollowed or redirected.
Value
Google also look at the value of what is on offer. For instance, if you’re given a free stress ball from a counselling company that has their logo on it, chances are they aren’t expecting you to rush to the nearest internet cafe to blog about your good fortune whilst including a link to their site. So they aren’t really paying you for a link if you do choose to blog about it and link to their site.
However, if you’re given a substantial amount of money and you do happen to write a blog linking to the donators site, that could be deemed a paid link.
How Close to Money is what you’re Given
Similar to value, Google will inspect what you’ve received in exchange for a link to someones site. If what you’ve been given is similar to money, a gift card for instance, as that’s pretty much as close to money as you can get without it being actual money, then that link will be treated as page.
Gift Vs Loan
Tech companies will often loan out their latest products to tech bloggers so they can get good reviews. This is standard fare. It changes when the products are given as a gift, rather than a loan. The gifting of this product is closer to payment than a loan.
Hear more form Matt below:
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Matt Cutts has now been the authority on good, proper white hat SEO for years now. Too white if you ask some, misleading if you ask others and a god if you find a particular type of SEO.
His fame has now seen him feature in a remake of Nintendo’s classic game Donkey Kong. In the original you were Mario (yes, THE Mario) and you had to climb scaffolding to rescue the princess whilst avoiding barrels that were, for some reason, being thrown at you by a large gorilla.
In this quirky take on the game, you can play as Matt Cutts. Picking up bonus’ such as Social Media posts, links and white hat SEOs. Make sure to avoid the pitfalls of Penguins and Pandas though, otherwise you’ll lose your points. See the image below for the in game action:
You can play the game, created by NetVoucherCodes, here!
Transcript:
Welcome to Net66. Today, we’re going to be talking about on-site optimisation. On-site optimisation is one of the twin pillars of SEO, the other being off-site link building. On-site optimisation involves proactively managing the evolution of a website and its various components to ensure that it gains favour with the search engines.
A website is a system with many components, such as title tags, header tags, paragraphs, sidebars, textual content, images, and internal and external links. All these components interact with each other to create the perfect website.
All of a website parts can be modified through on-site best practices to ensure that they portray the best picture of your business. Let’s take a look at some of these opportunities.
Title tags are by far the most important part of any web page. These appear in the blue bar at the top of your browser, and also show up as the blue clickable link in the search engine results pages. Title tags signal to the search engine what the page is all about, and usually host the most important keywords describing that page. It is extremely important to make sure you get your title tags right.
Header tags such as H1s, H2 and H3s are other important parts of a page. These specify captions on a page, with the H1 forming the most important caption, followed by H2, and H3 in that order. Header tags should reflect the keywords that you have in your title tag.
The page’s textual content should also incorporate the kewyords mentioned in the title and headers. These are just some of the on-page components that we can optimise.
For more about on-site SEO, keep watching Net 66. Thank You.
Google seem to be testing new layouts for their search results. We’ve known they’ve been testing layouts for their adwords for a while. But now they seem to be testing a new layout for the search results too.
See the below screenshots for the difference in the new and old layouts:
The above is the old version which still uses the champagne background for the adwords. They also underline all links in this. See the below screenshot:
You can see that there is now no background behind the ads and the new Ads button. The title of each listing is now visibly the biggest part of the listing.
What do you think of the new layout?
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Link Earning is becoming a more popular phrase within the SEO industry, especially with the way Google is evolving continuously. This new technique is having a great effect with Google and other search engines.
What is Link Earning?
Link Earning is basically giving your target audience content that they would benefit from. We have heard the phrase content is king so many times but there is a lot of truth behind it. Whilst link earning is gradually taking over from link building, the content required is a lot more advanced.
Writing the perfect content is the crux with link earning. Content with plenty of images, videos and links to reliable resources, also humerous content and fun to read. A mixture of these features will make the perfect recipe for link earning.
How to share my content?
This is a question we get asked a lot and what people don’t realise is that the answer is right under their noses! The internet. The best way to share content first of all is across all of your social media platforms.
Social media is a highly underestimated tool in the standard SEO arsenal which many people forget the shear power it has. Take a look at these sweet tips from Rand Fishkin;
The aim for link earning is not to only sharing your content across the web but where the full benefit comes into play is other people sharing it. So with social media you have a wide audience, therefore more of a chance someone will share your content.
Also, social media gives you the chance to go viral and make a name for yourself on the web.
There is not only social media which we can use to link earn but also blogs, forums and Q&A websites. (NOTE: the topic needs to be relevant to your content).
The reason these type of websites are perfect for sharing content is that they are normally full of people asking advice and you can put a reply with a link to your content.
If this is beneficial for the target audience then you will start to gain a reputation and become a well known trusted source of information regarding your chosen niche!
In summary, we need to start evaluating our methods and techniques in accordance to the updates Google has rolled out. I am a firm believer that link earning via social media is exactly what Google want you to do. It shows a sense of social engagement and content sharing.
Posted by Jordan Whitehead
In this day and age the world is full of information on how NOT to link build. Today, we discuss how to link build in our above video blog. See our transcript below:
Link building is a great way to show the search engines that other websites consider your website worthy of mention or endorsement. Today, we’re going to take a look at some popular link building methods, or channels as we like to call them.
First, let’s talk about infographics. Infographics are visual representations that help you quickly make sense of large or important sets of data. The graphics take advantage of human’s innate receptiveness to visual cues and patterns, using shapes and colours to quickly convey hat could otherwise involve large amounts of text.
Infographics by their very nature are designed to be so attractive that they have a high propensity to go viral. and can be shared across social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. People are naturally compelled to link toward these data visualisations as they share between their friends.
Guest bog posts are another popular link building channel. These involve building relationships within your industry or business niche, and placing high quality content or blog posts to create value through content partnerships.
These guest blog posts can the harbour a link to your website, creating an endorsement from the hosting website towards yours.
Guest blog posts are a very natural way of link building, as they mimic the natural business and person to person relationships of the real world.
Quality link building when performed organically and synergistically creates a natural and authoritative link profile, signalling to the search engines that your website is worth linking to and ultimately ranking in the search results.
For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net66 channel.
Thank you!
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google have set up an interactive Doodle where you can make your own chocolates for your sweetheart. You can then send a link to the chocolates you’ve created to your valentine.
Check it out below:
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Let’s face it companies in the online marketing industry cannot help but have a chuckle between themselves when a big branded company gets penalised by Google. Such as Interflora, BBC and most recently Expedia.
But what some companies don’t know is that there have been times in the past where Google, yes GOOGLE have been left with egg on their face by breaking their own violations. This is not a one off by Google, they have actually been penalised a number of times.
Here are just a couple of occurrences;
Google Chrome Penalisation
One of the biggest no no’s in Google’s books is buying links to achieve a better ranking on their search engine, which brings me to the first occurrence.
The most recent penalisation which occurred to them was back in 2012. During this time Google had just launched their Chrome browser and started a campaign to promote it.
However, this campaign didn’t go as planned. As you may have guessed, Google found themselves buying links as part of their campaign.
The punishment was quite severe for them, this being that they disappeared for the phrase “Google Chrome” for approximately two months!
BADwords
Another product of Google’s which was hit by their algorithm is Google Adwords. This occurred in 2010 and was penalised for breaking their cloaking violations. The help pages within adwords were showing inconsistencies with the robots and what human users could see.
The punishment in this instance was that the rankings lowered for phrases such as “adwords help” and “help with Google adwords”. Although to this very day nobody knows how long this penalty was put in place for.
It just goes to show that the creators of the algorithm cannot beat it. This surely sends a message out to people and companies involved in SEO that there is no easy way to the top of the SERPs.
Posted by Jordan Whitehead
Here is another informative video blog by Net66.
Welcome to Net66.
Today we are going to be talking about Google Glass. What is Google Glass? It is actually a wearable computer that you can put on your head as spectacles. It has a tiny heads up display, a camera and sound capabilities.
Google Glass is especially important for SEO as it will allow people to search for products and services on the move, you could look at a product in a store and search for similar or cheaper products. You might even be able to complete a purchase by simply winking at a product.
Search results will be displayed as in-sole cards which you can then swipe away to move onto the next one. Insole cards are boxes of information that display text in large concise lettering. This means that customers might not really want to browse beyond the top one or two search results.
This also implies that if your business is not ranking in the top one or two positions a Google Glass user might not really want to see it. How will this change SEO?
Well for one, businesses can aim to rank in the top positions for less competitive keywords. In other words it may be better to rank number one for many lesser used keywords than ranking on the first page for more popular keywords.
With Google Glass, audio search may also become more popular as people simply choose to search for things by more impulsive uttering keywords. All this may change SEO as we know it but it all depends on how many people take up Google Glass.
Google Glass is set to arrive in late 2014 and we at Net66 are ready for it. Are you?
Thank You.
It’s been widely documented for a while and a lot of companies have taken some stick for it. Today, Russia begin hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics. This might seem a bit run of the mill as the olympics are hosted every four years, but Russia have legislation in place that bans gay “propaganda”.
The very loosely termed law could get you arrested if you’re seen to promote homosexuality. Which, in this day and age, is actually quite a popular thing to do with more and more people accepting it.
But Google today made in very clear on where they stand on Gay rights by adding a rainbow (ubiquitous within the gay rights movement) themed logo and a quote from the Olympic Charter. See the image below:
Usually when Google does release its Doodles, they can often restrict which countries the Doodles are displayed to. But this Google Doodle seems to display on all country’s Google home pages. Again, another strong statement from Google.
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Today Google have launched a new penalty they can impose on your website as a manual action. This is where a member of the webspam team, an actual person, takes a look at your website and applies a penalty. Rather than an algorithmic penalty whereby Google’s algorithm automatically applies penalisations.
It’s being called “Spammy Structured Markup”, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. If Google decide you have incorrectly added structured data to a page as a way to boost your sites performance in the search engines then this penalty will be served to you.
The full description reads as follows:
Spammy structured markup
Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.
This follows Google’s recent change to their structured data where they removed 15% of what you could add as structured data. Effectively making structured markup more exclusive.
So if you have structured markup on your website, it will be worth double checking it.
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Google are always updating their web search home page’s logo. There’s been quite a few of them. But now there’s a chance for someone who isn’t a regular doodler to get their image on the front page of Google.
Unfortunately it’s not open to everyone as you have to be a student. Parents and guardians can submit on behalf of their children and there are downloadable “Class Packs” for teachers.
The theme of this competitions is “If I could invent one thing to make the world a better place”.
It is not only the prestige of having your logo design shown to millions of people that the winner of the competition receives. There are other, more valuable, prizes on offer. The winner will receive a $30,000 college scholarship with the student’s school earning a $50,000 Google for Technology grant.
Applicants will be judged by a talented and experienced group of professionals. Here’s the full line up:
> Lemony Snicket, Author.
> Rick Riordan, Author.
> Ron Garan, Astronaut.
> Chris Miller, Director.
> Phil Lord, Director.
The final winner will be announced some time in June.
Blog Post by Greg McVey
Last week we reported that Google had successfully targeted and brought down a French link network named Buzzea. Matt Cutts tweeted about this to celebrate and there were some pretty interesting follow up tweets.
After the initial Tweet, many people put questions and requests to Matt, and although not all of them were answered, there was one response in particular that raised eyebrows.
@schikowski yup, it’s on our radar.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 29, 2014
As you can see, this clearly gives an indication of what Matt Cutts and the Web Spam team are up to. He further reiterated that point today by releasing another Tweet. Take a look:
A reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: http://t.co/u1MpvL7kh4
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 3, 2014
A friendly reminder there from Matt on just what does violate the guidelines. If you are in Germany and if you are purchasing links, I’d recommend getting rid of any you’ve paid for as it looks like the hammer is set to fall on yet another link network.
Blog post by: Greg McVey
Take a look at this weeks video blog from Net66. This time we’re discussing SEO & Social Media.
Welcome to Net66.
Today we are going to be talking about social signals and SEO. Social media is a young medium of communication which has quickly established itself as a genuine source of online expression. It is intensely personal, so entities such as tweets and likes can act as strong signals of endorsement from individual personalities.
Twitter and Facebook are the two most prominent social media sites that reference content across the web. Pinterest and Reddit come in a close second. Twitter, meanwhile offers a special pronounced real time discussion about a business’ offerings.
Pinterest also gives brands the chance to showcase their offerings as images, whilst Reddit can offer an impartial, non-promotional review of your product or business. Google + offers its operator Google the most direct access to personal signals imaginable.
Since we know search engines aim to emulate human behaviour to put themselves in your shoes as if you were. It would be very logical to assume that they would also take notice of social signals and incorporate their outputs in search engine rankings.
Indeed, over the years professional SEO practitioners have mentioned a direct correlation between the intensity of social signals and search engine rankings. We at Net66 tend to agree with this hypothesis.
For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net66 channel.
Thank you.
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