Category: Google

Google are continuing to test changes to their advertising platforms with the news that they are now serving up ads in the knowledge graph. For instance, if you were searching for a new Chevrolet Camaro, the following could be appearing in the knowledge graph box:

The thing to notice here is the “Dealers Nearby”. It shows here that the nearby dealers are there because they’ve paid for it. Noted as such by the small “Ad” placed just above it.

What do you think about Google’s new advertising move?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Image from Search Engine Land

There’s no doubting that guest blogs are on the up and up in the SEO world. But as with all things that become a tool in the SEO world, there’s a risk of this practice getting taken up and abused by black hatters and spammers alike.

An example of this would be for a spammer to scrape emails from thousands of websites and then send the same guest blog request to each email account. Other techniques would be to spin articles or to post the same articles on different websites.

Matt also suggests that you should NOT use guest blogging as your sole link building practice. The links can be powerful, but you still need a wide variety in your link profile. See the full Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Anglo Rank are the latest link network to be taken down by Google. Google’s webspam team seem to be getting better and better at this as more and more networks are coming down.

This time is seems Matt Cutts has Tweeted about a certain company. See his quote below:

“There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together” Oh, Anglo Rank.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 6, 2013

He also went as far as to give some advice, again with a mocking hint aimed at Anglo Rank.

SEO tip: don’t use a blackhat link network that claims no footprints, but also has no refunds, no reports, no guarantees.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 6, 2013

So if you are or have been using Anglo Rank, prepare for some barren months ahead.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

In a nutshell, DISAVOW those links with the disavow link in Google’s Webmaster tools. Matt Cutts who does a lot of question answering for Google was given a question regarding the punishment and recovery from the international company Interflora.

It appeared for a time that Interflora were completely deindexed by Google as an exact match search for their company name failed to list them. The remarkable thing for this, however, was that after the penalisation of having their site deindexed by Google, they were back up and ranking in just 11 days. Admittedly they weren’t ranking for phrases as they were prior to the penalisation, but 11 days is a great result.

So this question was put to Matt Cutts, how did Interflora get back their rankings in just 11 days? You can see his answer below:

So it appears that when you do find yourself penalised for your shady link building techniques, take a figurative chainsaw to all potential bad links.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Despite Matt Cutts saying he didn’t expect PageRank to be updated again this year, Google has now updated it’s Toolbar PageRank for the first time since February.

Naturally the SEO community has exploded into a thousand different conversations about what this means, what this doesn’t mean, why Google are doing this, why Google have waited til now and of course all the previous arguments about what PageRank actually is and suggests.

The reason PageRank is such a hotly debated topic is because it’s a very obvious “at a glance” score of your website in the eyes of Google.

See Matt Cutts discussing PageRank below:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

We all know by now that it’s getting easier and easier to get your website penalised or even de-indexed by bad link building practices. Things such as too many keyword rich anchor texts pointing to your domain. Too many of a certain type of link can also get you penalised.

Opportunistic, there are more colourful words being used on the internet, webmasters have taken to building these types of lists to websites that they have no affiliation with. You might wonder why, as this is a bad practice, and it takes time and effort for no gain. But, you see when the penalised site comes back to this “opportunistic” webmaster, there will be a cost for the removal of the links.

Hardly the most ethical way to earn money and it is quite similar to some “customer review” sites out there who host bad reviews that you can pay to remove.

With Negative SEO though, you can win back control from the person who’s building said bad backlinks to your website. Here are some steps to help you:

First of all, find where the backlinks are coming from. Contact the webmaster. A lot. I don’t mean email them once and wait, email them at least once a day and try to get a phone number for them too. Keep in close contact with them until those links have been removed.

If the webmaster is uncooperative, then you need to take this a step further. Get a record of the contact you’ve made with this webmaster, and then you can add their website to a disavow file. Just before you upload the disavow file it might be worth one last try with the webmaster, inform them that it’s in their interest to avoid getting disavowed as Google will remove all worth from the links on their site.

If they don’t care, neither should you. Upload the disavow file with their website on it. There are still debates about the usefulness of the disavow file, but it is in keeping with Google’s recommendations so you shouldn’t fear doing this.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

With Penguin there are a lot of things you’re told not to do these days. Mainly, don’t use the old ways of generating links. I.e. don’t just ramp up the low quality, irrelevant link directories you used to use.

With all the great advice on what not to do, you might be left wondering what to do. Well here are some tips from Net66.

Focus on Your Content

Not technically link building as you’re not the one building the links, but if you spend time focussing on your content and making sure it’s as informative, entertaining and attractive as it can be, then people will naturally link to to. A la natural link building.

This could be anything from spending more time on your blog posts, to increasing the amount of content your website produces.

Guest Blogging

Now that the content on your own site is looking better, why not start looking to get your content published elsewhere via a guest post. But don’t think you can send one email out to hundreds of blogs and expect a good return. You can’t. Think of all the generic emails you get during the day, do you pay attention to them? Of course not, the same way no one will look at your generic email.

Take your time and read through their blog first. See if there’s anything on the blog you can speak to the webmaster about. If there’s anything you identify with or disagree with, bring that up when you contact them and start a dialogue. They’re much more likely to publish your writing this way.

These are just a SEO few tips but there are plenty of other ways to get good quality links to your site without resorting to black hat, unethical or poor techniques.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Over at SearchEngineLand, they’re running a series of interviews aimed at helping people with their SEO. Here’s a helpful video showing you what to look for when identifying and recovering from link penalties.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Adwords has long been known as PPC marketing. This means that your adverts can be displayed hundreds of times on Google, but, you only pay for your advert if somebody clicks on it.

A great idea. But now, that doesn’t seem to be working as well for Google. A lot of people have been talking about how Google’s revenues are down, and many people have speculated that a decrease in Adwords revenues is causing it.

Recently we’ve seen Google stop giving out search data to users of their analytics software, noting that you can still access the data on the Adwords interface. Many people said that this would push people over onto using Adwords just get this data.

But now, in a big refresh for Adwords, they allow you to purchase adverts that when you pay by viewable impression. Note here they say viewable impression. Ensuring that the end user will see your advert on screen before you’re charged.

Otherwise end users could load up a page where your advert is displayed at the bottom of the page. The user won’t see this advert unless they scroll far enough and if they don’t, even though the user hasn’t viewed your advert, you could still get charged as the loading of the advert could count as a “view”.

What do you think to these new changes? Leave a Reply below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It used to be that websites were pretty much all html, and were image sparse and mainly text. These days though with CSS becoming more advanced every day, there are more ways to add content to a page, and more ways to link out from that page.

Google had a guideline that stated there should be no more than 100 links on a page at any one time. So with these new developments in CSS, SEOs had to make sure that the link count for each page was under 100.

But now Google has removed that stipulation from their on-site guidelines. See what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the subject below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

This topic has been getting a lot of coverage consistently this year. Namely down to the fact that there have been some massive updates in the world of SEO this year. Penguin 2.0, the integration of Panda into the algorithm and, of course, the latest and biggest update Hummingbird.

This has effectively signalled the end for bad link building practices. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people still out there who practice these techniques. Lets take a look at which techniques to avoid.

Buying Links

You’d think this would go without saying these days but unfortunately this is still rife amongst SEOs. It’s seen as a quick win thing, and you might get some luck out of it. But Google will realise what you’ve done, and then you’ll be in an even worse position than when you started off.

Article Directories

These did actually help SEO at one point. Content was written and published to relevant sectors of article directories. Then came the spammers. Spun content and automatic submissions grew exponentially and Google had no choice but to ban or take manual action on some article directories. These days it would be surprising if Google took article directories seriously.

Low Quality Link Directories

As with article directories, you can still do this well. What you need is an industry specific, high quality, structured directory. You should upload accurate information about your company and avoid exact match anchor text. What you don’t want, is to hit hundreds of general link directories with exact match anchors. That will get you nowhere.

Are there any other techniques you would avoid using when link building?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Whenever SEOs gather for a chat, whether it be at a conference or, if we’re particularly lucky, a pub, you cannot escape the conversation without the pros, cons, reasons and rhymes for and against the use of meta tags.

The meta keywords attribute discussion has died down a fair bit with the universal opinion being: You do not need meta keywords tags and they’re a complete waste of time.

The other opinion, widely panned by observers of the first opinion, is that you do need them. Reason being: You don’t need skirting boards in a house, they do however mark the bottom of the wall, which is obvious. Yet it’s rare you come across a house without skirting boards in . In effect, it’s better to have it an not need it than need it and not have it.

Even though Google have said they don’t use the meta keywords tag for ranking, it’s still nice to have it there for structure etc.

The Meta Description tag however, is much more open to debate. Everyone agrees that you need them. Everyone agrees they should be unique. But not everyone agrees you should have them on every page.

Naturally you should add them to any important pages. But for all other pages on your website, should you have a unique meta description? A default one? Well, the question was put to Matt Cutts in the following:

“Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description?”

Matt’s answer below:

As you can see, there are some definitive answers there. First of all, no duplicates. Matt made that much clear, each meta description should be unique if present. Secondly, it’s better to have no meta description at all than a duplicate.

Finally, although you may have an auto generated snippet acting as your meta descriptions, which ensures unique content, if it doesn’t read well then you should re-write it manually. You have to put the user first here and make sure you’re helping them as much as possible by adding correct, legible content on your site.

Blog Post by Greg McVey