Category: News

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

Page redirects have long been a form of “cloaking”. Which is bad in terms of Google. The reason why, because when you cloak a page, you’re effectively showing Google one page and the user a different page.

The reason this is so frowned upon is because the website could show Google a nice, relevant, high quality page full of great tips and advice, and then show a regular user a page of adverts. Bad idea.

This has been taken to an extreme where people will rank a page for the desktop, but when a user tries to access that page on a mobile device, they’re redirected to a completely different domain. Google had added the following into their webmaster guidelines to clear up exactly what is deemed outside their webmaster guidelines:

> Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different
> Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain

Google takes issues like this very seriously and will take manual action against your website if it does believe your website is violating their webmaster guidelines. Penalties can be a drop in your rankings and in rare cases it can involve the de-indexing of your whole website.

They also updated their terms on hacker websites that have redirects on them with the following:

“Hackers might inject malicious code to your website that redirects some users to harmful or spammy pages. The kind of redirect sometimes depends on referrer, user-agent, or device. For example, clicking a URL in Google search results could redirect you to a suspicious page, but there is no redirect when you visit the same URL directly from a browser.”

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Last week Matt Cutts spent over 4 minutes de-bunking SEO myths that are still cropping up at conferences and on blogs.

His intro launches into two theories that go against each other by way of Adwords. He states that there’s one side of the argument that claims if you buy Google Adwords then you rank higher. Yet there’s the other side claiming that if you DO buy adverts then you’ll rank higher.

Matt wants to get these two groups together, sit them down and start a war. Not really. He does want them to argue the pros and cons of each idea and come up with one for him to debunk.

The rest of the video is spent talking about how he thinks SEO is still “faddy”. For instance last year if you had a lot of article directories you could rank. And how now this year it’s guest blogging. See what the rest of the video has to say here:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Matt Cutts has released another Webmasters video today and this one is taking a look at Page Titles. Page titles are the title of the page. I know. But what they also do is contain information directly relating to the content of each page. Google will read this information and, where they can, use it.

However, if you have a certain keyword in your page title and a user searches for a different service, then Google will do what they can to change your page title and make sure that it’s still relevant.

For Example, Net66 are both a web design and an SEO company. If you were to search Net66 SEO, Our page title is more likely to show up with SEO keywords in there than if you were to search Net66 web design.

Google will pull information from your H1s, your on-page content and even the Open Directory project, if it can, to get the right information to that page. This is so that users can see best what the page relates to before they click through on it.

Take a look at the full video below:

What criteria does Google use to change the title it shows in the SERPs depending on the query? Does schema influence that? Maybe headings (h1, h2..) have more weight?
Christian Oliveira, Madrid

Why Google search results doesn’t show the current meta title of webpage? Instead of meta title search results show H1 tag from HTML page?
kbroka, Nepal

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It’s often a question posed by people who’s niche does include incredibly large brands. For example if you’re a sports shop, it’s likely you’re going to come up against Nike or Adidas or other companies that have millions to spend on online marketing. So how do you outrank them?

The full question put to Matt was as follows:

How can smaller sites with superior content ever rank over sites with superior traffic? It’s a vicious circle: A regional or national brick-and-mortar brand has higher traffic, leads to a higher rank, which leads to higher traffic, ad infinitum.
Dan

Straight off the bat, Matt is a little unimpressed. And he does make a point to. Think about the original social network (MySpace, for you younger readers), how is that now not still enjoying a monopoly of the market because it was such a giant? The answer is that Facebook came along, and Facebook did a better job than MySpace.

The same for Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and all these other social media sites that are now up there with Facebook and Twitter.

The most part of the video talks about how you can take your niche, and really make it your own. Give a different idea on everything, turn existing ideas on their head. Become authoritative in what you are talking about and Google will recognise this and increase your rankings.

Then once you’re an authority, you can add other dimensions to your business and become authoritative in other aspects of your industry. Eat, sleep, rinse, repeat and you will soon take stock of yourself and you will be a “giant” that other companies will struggle to overtake.

See the full video and hear Matts view on this in the below video:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Take a look at what Matt Cutts has to say on the difference between 410 and 440 error codes on your website:

If you’re not aware of what “Not Provided” is, you’ve not worked in SEO. Last year, Google decided it was going to encrypt search data to better protect the security of the user. You see in Google Analytics, you could look at what phrases organic users had searched to get through to your website. Despite the fact that individuals couldn’t be traced through analytics and identified as searching certain phrases, Google stopped supplying keyword data.

Taking data from internet marketers made their jobs much much harder. Without the data in analytics, you couldn’t see what your client was getting found for and you couldn’t measure your success.

To add salt to the very open and sore wound of this, Google continued to supply keyword data to users of Adwords. On one hand it was “We’re removing keyword data to protect our users’ privacy” but on the other it was “you can still get this data if you use our paid service though”.

This naturally made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. To help soothe people’s anger we wrote a guide on what to do with 100% not provided.

But now, it looks like Google will be rolling out the same restrictive measures to Google Adwords users too. Showing that they aren’t just trying to move people from organic SEO to Adwords, that they actually want to protect users’ privacy.

The source of this is unconfirmed but news is breaking on more and more sites that this is the plan for Google’s paid search.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It wasn’t Godzilla who this time wreaked havoc in Japan, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a more polar opposite. On one hand you have a nuclear powered gargantuan lizard that breathes fire, has laser eyes and once swam to New York (despite coming from Japan, that’s FAR!).

On the other hand you have the vaguely teddy-bear shaped Matt Cutts, who spends his time learning the ukulele, going off gluten and making the web a better place.

To make the web a better place and more importantly, to make sure that Google’s search results don’t include any spam or feigned results, Matt Cutts’ Japanese web spam team have taken action on 7 Link Networks from Japan. See the congratulatory tweet from Matt below:

Incredibly proud of Japanese webspam team. Over last few months they’ve taken action on seven link networks! Makes playing field more level.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 8, 2014

It seems like Google has been penalising Link Networks for months now. And when you look at the numbers, they’re churning out the results quite nicely. One of my previous posts has discussed this and listed the victims.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey