Google are now famed for their Google Doodles and it’s no surprise today that they’re at it again. Today marks 60 years from the very first routemaster bus. Take a look at the Doodle below:
A lot as changed in 60 years and from the very first classic hop on hop off bus, to the modern hop on hop off Judge Dredd helmet looking one, the iconic image of a red London bus endures.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
As we all may be aware, today is the Autumnal Equinox. The point where the Earth is equidistant between the height of summer and the height of winter. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you like the cold like me) we’re heading towards Winter and not Summer.
This day also celebrates the first day of Autumn. Traditionally the nights are getting darker, leaves are turning golden brown and falling off trees and of course, the commercialisation of Christmas starts earlier and earlier every year.
Take a look at Google’s Doodle today to celebrate the start of Autumn:
What do you think of the Google Doodle?
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
China have long been known as a country that can be a bit oppressive. No where near a North Korea level of oppression, but the fact that China is N. Korea’s major ally shows that it’s not opposed to restrictive rights.
One of the main selling points for DuckDuckGo.com is that they’re are flying the flag for internet privacy. For example, DuckDuckGo don’t save your search data and don’t store any information that is send when you run a search.
For example, if you searched for “SEO in Manchester” on Google, Google would collect all the information from your search that it could. Including what operating system you’re using, what browser you’re using, what width screen you’re using and even your IP address.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t do any of these things so you can rest assured that your search remains private.
It’s this attitude towards private search that seems to have gotten DuckDuckGo banned from China. China have strict policies on what can and cannot be searched in their country, and it seems DuckDuckGo are not filtering their results in accordance to China’s policies.
It was confirmed by DuckDuckGo’s CEO yesterday in a Tweet which you can see below:
@SirSteven @duckduckgo @jasonqng we did get blocked as far as we know
— Gabriel Weinberg (@yegg) September 21, 2014
You can also check out the website blockedinchina.net to test for website blockages.
It is almost a compliment of China to recognise DuckDuckGo as a major search engine as it has also blocked access to Google in the past.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
It’s quite usual in SEO to see a small or large drop in traffic in accordance with certain algorithm changes, a new website going live or something similar.
What you wouldn’t expect is for Google to apply a Manual Action against your website by mistake, dropping your traffic by 90%!
90% is a huge loss of traffic. Especially for such a large company as Buffer. But even so, the fact that it was a MANUAL action and that it was also a Bug suggests that this was a serious error for Google.
Take a look at the screenshots from Buffer’s Analytics to see what a 90% drop in traffic looks like:
The team at Buffer reached out to John Mueller (Matt Cutts stand in) over Social Media and got the issue fixed. Upon the conclusion of this the Team at Buffer had the following to say:
Thankfully, our mystery has a happy—though slightly inconclusive—ending. Mueller’s team at Google found an issue and let us know they had fixed it. The manual action penalty was removed Aug. 28 and we began to see signs of recovery immediately after.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Organic traffic to Facebook pages has been dropping dramatically over the recent months/years. Often, studies have shown that even authoritative brands with huge followings on Facebook can manage a measly 2% organic reach to their page.
A lot of people have been very cynical about this and said it’s just a huge ploy so that business owners have to shell out more for advertising to promote their pages. Which is cruel and heartless and probably down to Mr Zuckerberg’s boardroom of profit hungry wall streeters, but if you were Facebook don’t pretend the same thought wouldn’t cross your mind.
But it seems organic reach is still possible with Facebook launching their new website designed specifically to help page owners reach out to more people organically.
They seem to centre their ideas around some main principles.
Facebook shows you how you can use one of their tools to manage mentions, find out where you’re mentioned and then interact with the user who’s mentioned you.
This stems from Facebook’s recent launch of their “autoplay’ feature for videos and the more you share your video the more views you get and click throughs to your page. Users will also share your video if it is good enough.
You can read more on this on their website.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google have secured a new patent this week. Their patent states as follows:
A computer implemented method for using search queries related to television programs. A server receives a user’s search query from an electronic device.
The server then determines, in accordance with the search query and television program related information for television programs available at a location associated with the electronic device during a specific time window, a television program currently being displayed in proximity to the electronic device, wherein the television program related information includes program descriptions for a plurality of television programs being broadcast for the associated location.
How do you think this will impact search results?
Google has long been committed to increasing the quality of search for its users. None more so than the “Quick Answer” boxes that sometimes show at the top of Google Search Results. Although this is great news for users, getting what they want much quicker, it is not the best news for publishers.
For example if you run an SEO Blog and write up a very detailed explanation of what SEO is, you can miss out on traffic as Google very succinctly sums things up on their knowledge graph box at the top of the page. See below:
As you can see in this box, the above is used to show a generic definition of SEO and a link to Wikipedia for those looking to secure more information on the subject. Now this is great if your blog used as the source and will no doubt add a fair amount of traffic to your blog.
But what about other queries? Such as “How old is Boris Johnson?”. Take a look below:
As you can see, the Google Knowledge Graph box is used again and his age is displayed. What you’ll also notice is that no source is given? Why?
Well according to Google, Boris Johnson’s age is “Basic Factual Information” so doesn’t really warrant a source. But SEO is deemed as “not widely known information” so requires a source. This also occurs when “relevant snippets are shown from a website”.
There are very few exempt cases, but with Apple launching their new iPhone 6 this week, Google credited the Apple website directly after receiving certain information about the phones from their rival.
Have you seen any cases like this before?
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google is constantly telling webmasters that quality of content is one of the best things to help you rank. They stop short of telling you exactly what the quality is that they’re after though. Blog posts can be powerful things and a great place to add quality content.
Neil Patel over at Quicksprout has put together the following infographic which helps detail out just what make a powerful blog post:
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
If you’re an SEO then you’ll be acutely aware of what Penguin is. There have been several versions of the penguin algorithm but the most controversial were 2.0 and 2.1.
The penguin algorithm is designed to review links to a website and then take the appropriate measures based on the links it finds. The problem was with Penguin was that it was too evolutionary.
For example. Back in 2008, it was often the case of whoever has the most links ranks the best. These days we’re much more aware of what we need to do to a website to get it to rank which include multitudes of on site factors as well as the quality of links. NOT the quantity.
Due to how it used to be, there are/were a lot of websites that used perfectly valid techniques in their day, which were then deemed spammy by the Penguin algorithm. As such, the fallout from the update was massive with a lot of Webmasters bleating about how unfair it was for Google to judge current websites on their past behaviour.
It has it’s merits of course. But you can understand Webmasters’ frustrations at the algorithm. And now we’re set to go through it all again. John Mueller, of Google, said today in a Google Hangout that there will definitely be a Penguin update before the end of the year and it could be in the “reasonable” future.
Ambiguous ay? What might be reasonable to Google might not be reasonable to you and me. One of the major things to notice about this update is that it is termed Penguin 3.0. And not Penguin 2.2 or something similar.
That is because the update is meant to be a big one. Not only will it refresh all the data it has, but it will also update the actual algorithm, enabling it to run refreshes more frequently in the future.
Why wait though? Are they getting close to releasing it? My theory is that they’re pretty much done, they’re just waiting for Matt Cutts to get back to let the big dog announce the new release.
So, if you’ve been engaging in some slightly less than white hat link building practices, it’s time to grab a cloth and clean up.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
At the start of the year, RE/code gave an announcement that it was teaming up with other tech companies Twitter and Stripe. They didn’t say what they were working on at the time but now it seems that they’ve launched their product.
“Buy It Now” is a phrase you would more readily associate with eBay, and the success of this has probably driven Twitter’s new addition to their Tweets. Twitter officially launched this beta test of sorts on Monday. With a statement of:
Today we are beginning to test a new way for you to discover and buy products on Twitter. For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow over time), some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button, letting you buy directly from the Tweet.
Which means that whoever is probably paying Twitter a lot of money will be included in the early rollout of this as one of their “selected partners”.
This seems to be the first step in making shopping easier from Twitter’s platform, especially on mobile devices.
One of the USPs for this seems to be Twitter promising users of this new buy feature a chance to buy items that “they can’t get anywhere else”. The benefit here seems two fold, 1) Twitter will get more users signing up just to follow their favourite bands for exclusive merchandise, 2) Bans/brands/advertisers will see a surge in new follows based solely on the strength of the special offers they can promote.
You can go through the purchase process in just a few taps and rest assured that your details are in safe hands. Twitter stores all your details securely and you have the option to remove them at any point.
For more information, see Twitter’s promotional Video below:
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google’s algorithms are often the subject of much discussion, chagrin, angst and other more colourful words. This is because Google themselves rarely announce when they release or are about to release an algorithm update.
Sure, once the fallout from algorithms reaches fever pitch they can sometimes say “Oh yeah, we did redefine everything is SEO over the weekend, thanks for noticing”.
They also give vague and nondescript warnings of “We’ll be releasing a new algorithm called [Insert_Animal_Name_Here] at some point in the future”.
There have been several rumours about Google launching a new refresh of Penguin or a large update of Panda recently. First off there were some suggestions of Google experimenting with a refresh of Penguin. Which got a lot of people very excited as they believe their sites are still “trapped” by Penguin and can’t get out until the algorithm updates.
Also last week there was a large scale suggestion of Google updating their Panda algorithm. But with Google already stating that they’ve stopped confirming Panda updates, we’re like not to know.
Now these algorithms are COMPLEX. Seriously complex, but thankfully Google’s John Mueller has taken time to write a helpful post in a Google Webmaster forum:
In theory: If a site is affected by any specific algorithm or its data, and it fixes the issue that led to that situation, then the algorithm and/or its data must be refreshed in order to see those changes. Sometimes those changes aren’t immediately visible even after a refresh, that’s normal too.
In practice, a site is never in a void alone with just a single algorithm. We use over 200 factors in crawling, indexing, and ranking. While there are some cases where a site is strongly affected by a single algorithm, that doesn’t mean that it won’t see any changes until that algorithm or its data is refreshed. For example, if a site is strongly affected by a web-spam algorithm, and you resolve all of those web-spam issues and work to make your site fantastic, you’re likely to see changes in search even before that algorithm or its data is refreshed. Some of those effects might be directly related to the changes you made (other algorithms finding that your site is really much better), some of them might be more indirect (users loving your updated site and recommending it to others).
So yes, in a theoretical void of just your site and a single algorithm (and of course such a void doesn’t really exist!), you’d need to wait for the algorithm and/or its data to refresh to see any changes based on the new situation. In practice, however, things are much more involved, and improvements that you make (especially significant ones) are likely to have visible effects even outside of that single algorithm. One part that helps to keep in mind here is that you shouldn’t be focusing on individual factors of individual algorithms, it makes much more sense to focus on your site overall — cleaning up individual issues, but not assuming that these are the only aspects worth working on.
All that said, we do realize that it would be great if we could speed the refresh-cycle of some of these algorithms up a bit, and I know the team is working on that. I know it can be frustrating to not see changes after spending a lot of time to improve things. In the meantime, I’d really recommend – as above – not focusing on any specific aspect of an algorithm, and instead making sure that your site is (or becomes) the absolute best of its kind by far.
Blog post by: Greg McVey
Google are fondly know for their creative doodles that cover the front page their search engine from time to time.
Today is another we find ourselves confronted with a diversion from the usual multicoloured lettering. Today we see a dark and sinister portrait of one character asleep and the other floating above with an outstretched arm ready to strike.
This is of course a replication of the famous artwork based on the story of Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu was a famous Irish writer most prolific in the late 1800s and his work perseveres today.
Indeed, Carmilla has been the basis of several modern films. His most other famous works include Uncle Silas and The House by the Graveyard.
Check out the Doodle below:
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Today a new Google Easter Egg has been discovered. This little treat is aimed at SEO geeks and server geeks alike. It’s based on an April Fools Joke from way back in 1998.
Google released it as a 418 Error code for websites and isn’t supported or meant to used at all. However if you visit this page then you can see the error code in action.
What’s more, if you’re on your phone and you tilt it, the teapot will actually start pouring. And if you’re on a destop, clicking the teapot will make it pour.
Check it out below:
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google have made some pretty groundbreaking changes to their algorithms and even introduced who new algorithms to combat change in the rankings.
In the infographic below we highlight the top 10 changes to the Google Search tool.
Simply copy the code from the box below and paste it onto your website to put this on your blog.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Twitter have launched a somewhat controversial feature to their timeline today. The idea of the Twitter timeline originally was to display the users only tweets from people they follow, along with retweets. Now however this looks set to change.
Users will now start seeing Tweets from people that they don’t follow. What’s the purpose in this? Surely if you’re not following them you don’t want to see their tweets. But Twitter’s idea behind this is that if your certain tweets become popular or even go viral, then you’re likely to see them.
This isn’t based solely on virility. Twitter will look to see what percentage of the people you are following to determine whether it is relevant enough to display to you. If a high percentage of people you follow are interacting with the Tweet, then it’s more likely to crop up on your timeline.
Twitter have explained this on their Frequently asked questions page by adding the following text:
Additionally, when we identify a Tweet, an account to follow, or other content that’s popular or relevant, we may add it to your timeline. This means you will sometimes see Tweets from accounts you don’t follow. We select each Tweet using a variety of signals, including how popular it is and how people in your network are interacting with it. Our goal is to make your home timeline even more relevant and interesting.
It has rubbed some users up the wrong way. You can see why, people don’t want content displaying to them from sources they’ve not subscribed to. But at the same time, Twitter could be helping enhance the user experience by introducing new and fresh content to users out of the blue.
What do you think of this new move by Twitter?
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google has a long history of penalising Link Networks. Here’s some examples. And this one.
This latest action comes whilst Matt Cutts, spam-fighting super techie and head of Google WebSpam team, is on annual leave. Which goes to show the strength in depth that Google have in their Webspam Team.
Johannes Mehlem was the man in charge of breaking the news to the unfortunate souls who have found their websites penalised by this action. See his Tweet below:
We have taken action on one European and one German linking network. Ressources on German Blog: https://t.co/6xJMZYMHZI
— Johannes Mehlem (@JohannesMehlem) August 18, 2014
Note that they specifically say a German network has been penalised, as well as saying a European network has been penalised too. This could mean one of two things a) the link network is so large that it spans a number of European countries and is therefore classed as European or b) Google want to hide the location of the links network for some reason. If it’s B, they haven’t done the best of jobs as Karolina Kruszyńska has posted another tweet in Polish announcing the same thing. Giving the distinct impression that the country the network has come from is in fact Polish. Check it out below:
Dziś podjęliśmy działania przeciwko europejskiemu i niemieckiemu systemowi wymiany linków. http://t.co/VtQ82nSIgz #bettersearch — Karolina Kruszyńska (@karo_krus) August 18, 2014
So, good news for all SEOs with more of the spam getting cut down from the SERPs. And if you’re one of the websites that’s been hit by this update, you should probably stop the way you’re currently working.
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Search engine optimisation, or organic inbound marketing as it is often known, is proven to be a cost effective yet chronically drawn out method of digital marketing. It is a slow burn process, and can take several months before optimisation really begins to show dividends. Improving a website’s structure, content and metrics, and improving its offsite perception requires a well planned campaign and a business’ commitment to it.
Because it can be a time consuming process to build up the organic capabilities of a website, people can often become frustrated with SEO and either give up on it or start investing in other, less effective, methods of marketing their websites and businesses.
Although Social Media has exploded in recent years and it is a very important part of SEO, it’s not as effective as SEO in generating inbound Leads. The same goes for outbound leads (cold calling) as they can often cost 80% than an inbound lead generated by SEO. Check out the full Infographic below:
Copy the code below to embed the infographic on your website:
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
Google today announced that they will, form now on, use SSL certificates as a ranking factor.
Now before you go out and buy the best most expensive SSL ever, Google have also said that the weight given to this ranking factor isn’t very much. Also, after running tests for several months, they have said they expect this new ranking signal to affect less than 1% of Google searches globally.
They’ve not done this without cause though. They’ve released this as a ranking signal in a bid to encourage more people to run their websites on HTTPS by default. They’re trying to build a safer and more secure web.
Check out what John Mueller has to say on the subject:
Adding an SSL to your website can be a bit tricky, so you need to make sure that you manage the transition properly and carefully. The last thing you want to do is thinking you’ll be receiving a ranking boost, botching it, and actually losing your rankings.
To help with this, Google have posted the following tips to help Webmasters with the upgrade of their website:
> Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
> Use 2048-bit key certificates
> Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
> Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
> Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
> Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
> Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
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