Net66: Matt Cutts Wielding the Banhammer Willy Nilly

On Wednesday I wrote a blog about what Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts, were doing about link networks. I included in this blog an updated list of banned link networks.

It looks like that list is already out of date as Matt Cutts and his BanHammer of Manual Action have taken two German scalps in the Link Network business. One of the companies has been named as efamous, the other escaped the public red-hands act.

See Matt Cutts’ gloat Tweet below:

 

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts on How to Tell Google You Have a Mobile Site

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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Net66: Google Link Network Hit List Updated, Italians and Spanish be warned! [Tweets]

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:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: How a Search Engine Works

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!

 

Save your searches with Bing Save

Bing is looking slowly gaining market share, and has established iteslf as the number two search engine in the United States. With the power of software behemoth Microsoft behind it, Bing invests a significant amount of resources into research and development. This has yielded the latest feature yet, called Bing Save.

This new functionality can be viewed as an amalgamation of search engine and social networking features. The feature allows users to save their favourite search results. A tiny “floppy disk”-like icon appears next to search results, which you can click to save the result to your records. The service is available as a public beta at bing.com/saves.  You also get access to bookmarking tools where you can bookmark content that you found elsewhere on the Web.

Other useful features of Bing Saves are the Public Feed and Trending sections. The Feed is a real time view of items being saved at the moment, and Trending is an area where you can find the most popular saved articles.

The service could potentially be a great source to discover popular content, and can even be a direct traffic source as visitors click through to popular websites featured in the Bing Saves Trending section.

 

Matt Cutts on What is and isn’t Considered a Paid Link

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

The true power of social media: Oscars break twitter record!

We all know that the Oscars are the main awards for the TV and film industry but last night it also made social media history. The power of social media is exceptional, the potential audience you can target is mind blowing.

At the Oscars last night there was many famous people in the same room and a piece of social media brilliance by Ellen Degeneres sent twitter into chaos!

Just take a look at this epic selfie;

ellen degeneres tweet

As you can see there are many of the worlds biggest stars in one photo. But just look at the amount of retweets it gained. There was that much of a buzz about the tweet, that it caused Twitter to briefly crash!

Ellen broke the record for the most retweeted tweet which was previously held by the president of the United States, Mr Barack Obama;

barack obama tweet

This tweet was put just after Obama had been re-elected in 2012 and generated 781,635 retweets and 295,875 favourites.

This just goes to show the true power of social media for that many people to be talking about the same subject it is rather remarkable. The speed that it happens also, approximately 779,000 retweeted Ellen’s selfie tweet in just half an hour.

It reached the million landmark within an hour and history was made by everyone involved!

Social media is an extremely under used tool to share content and images in this instance, there are so many users for you to share with and great opportunities for you to go viral.

So try it out implement more social media in your campaigns, interact with your audience and deliver the answers or services they want!

Posted by Jordan Whitehead

Net66 Video Blog: On Site Optimisation and How it helps your Website

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.

Net66: Google Testing New Search Results Layout

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:

Google-Old-Layout

 

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:

Google-New-Layout

 

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

Net66 Video Blog: Google glass and what it means for SEO [Video]

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.

Net66: Google Stands Against Russian Anti-Gay Legislation With Logo & Olympic Charter

 

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:

Google Gay Rights Logo

 

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

Net66: Not 100% Happy with your LookBack Video on Facebook? You can Change It!

images-2This week Facebook turned a whopping 10 years old! Not that old really, but with Net66 also celebrating their 10 year anniversary this month, it is still something to be proud of.

Facebook celebrated their 10 years in the business with a few announcements. First of all, they released their new newsreader app called Paper. What this does is quite simple really. It takes all the content released by your favourite news outlets, and then adds it into one app where you can browse them all at your convenience.

The second and more widely celebrated announcement was their “Lookback” feature. A video a little over a minute long that goes shows images from your first moments on Facebook, your most liked status’ and what you’ve shared.

The feature proved very popular with thousands of people sharing their own lookback videos. If you wish to view your own all you need to do is log into Facebook and visit: http://facebook.com/lookback/

On the help page associated with the lookback videos there’s a line of text saying “Click Edit Your Movie below the Video Player”. Although there isn’t a button there at present, Facebook have announced that the feature will be released. Here’s a quote from one representative of Facebook:

We will be launching an Edit feature soon that will allow people to change moments in their movies or update the ones they shared. I don’t have exact timing at the moment, but this will enable people to remove a post from the movie that was pre-selected and change it to a different one

Good news then. Will you be changing your Lookback Movie?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Google Launches New Manual Action Penalty

deadly-98846_640Today 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

Net66: Google Launch new Doodle for Google Contest!

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”.

Screen Shot 2014-02-04 at 18.25.05

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

Net66: German Link Buyers Beware!

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.

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 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

Net66 Video Blog: SEO & Social Media [Video]

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.