Net66: Google Take Down ANOTHER Link Network [Tweet]

So that’s SAPE, Text Link Ads, The Ghost Network and Anglo Rank.

Today they’ve managed to take down a French Link Network named Buzzea. See Matt Cutt’s Tweet from this morning:

Today we're taking action on a French link network that violates our quality guidelines (Buzzea).

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 29, 2014

It’s good to know that many large scale link networks are getting taken down, and rightly so.

In the fallout from the tweet, Matt Cutts was asked by one tweeter to take a look at German link networks. Interesting to note that Matt Cutts said “It’s” on our radar, potentially indicating one network in particular.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts Advises Older Domains on how to Keep Rankings [Video]

Matt Cutts has released another Webmaster Video answering a question put to him but an SEO. The question put to Matt was this:

I have been in business for over 14 years with my domain, and see much newer domains passing me. Any algorithms to protect older domains/sites in business from newer sites with more spam?
eliasseo, New York

Matt Cutts first advice was to ignore the websites with spam. Google are constantly updating their algorithms to remove spam from their search results. You have to think though, the webmaster, eliasseo, will gain nothing from saying spam sites are overtaking him. With Matt Cutts dismissing this out of hand straight away I’d be a little miffed.

Matt does, however, carry on answering eliasseo’s question. He goes on to state that it’s usually the other way round with this. And that most of the time it’s new sites wondering how to bypass the older domains that have built up domain authority.

The advise is, although your domain might be old and powerful, if you haven’t updated your website in a while then that’s going to hurt. Google is contstantly trying to put the user first and if you’ve bee “coasting” on your rankings for some time, and not changing your website for fear of a change to rankings, your site will stagnate and other websites will overtake you.

See the full video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Celebrates French Architect

French Architect Eugene Biollet-le-Duc may not be a household name for many of us, as many of don’t pursue the subject of gothic revivals of medieval buildings. But I’m sure some of us do.

If you’re one of the people who doesn’t know him by name, you’ll certainly recognise some of the restorations he completed in life. One such instance being Notre Dame, the famous church in the heart of Paris.

Today Google decided to honour his achievements with a Google Doodle, See the image below:

Net66 Video Blog: What is Ethical SEO?

Check out our latest video blog on the differences between unethical and ethical SEO.

What is the difference between ethical and unethical SEO?

Ethical search engine optimisation is performed while following the guidelines of the major search engines such as Google. This means that content is created that is original, meaningful, and congruent with the website or business purpose.

Additionally, ethical SEO entails that any link building performed must add value to the wider World Wide Web. Links should be a reflection of natural social and business relationships, so they act as votes and endorsements ff website content.

Unethical SEO, meanwhile, could encompass black hat techniques such as link farming, hidden content, or paid links.

Paid links are especially frowned upon by the search engines, as they can hide or obfuscate a website’s true worth on the Web. They can create a false picture of external endorsement, which can confuse search engines and cause artificially inflated rankings.

These practices detract from a meaningful experience on the Web, and websites indulging in them can be penalised by the search engines.

Google algorithmic updates such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird can contribute to the filtering of unethically optimised websites, contributing to a higher search experience.

For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net 66 channel. Thank You.

Net66: Google Adwords Cracking down on Bad Adverts

SEO is constantly dogged by headlines highlighting bad practises and it is quite rare that you hear about a bad Adword campaign. I think this has more to do with SEO being a long term achievement that’s slow to recover, rather than a yes or no approval that can be switched on and off.

That’s not to say that bad Adwords practises aren’t highlighted. A recent report from Google showed that they removed 350 million adverts from their systems last year. Here’s a quote from Mike Hochberg who is the Director of Ads Engineering at Google:

We’ve allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

As you can see, they’re taking it seriously and with 350 million ads removed last year, they seem to be doing a good job.

Here’s a list of the worst offenders for Bad Ads:

Counterfeit goods: 14,000 advertisers banned for trying to sell these.
Illegal online pharmacies: 2 million ads removed.
Copyright infringement: 5,000 AdSense accounts disabled for violating copyright.
Tech support scams: 4,000 AdWords accounts removed.
Malware: 400,000 ads disabled from sites hiding malware.
Get rich quick schemes: 10,000 ads disabled for sites promoting these.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Matt Cutts Gives Clear Advice on Guest Blogging, Edits it Later On.

Matt Cutts has long been Google‘s first and foremost outlet for what to do and what not to do in regards to your SEO. Yesterday Matt Cutts published a blog post outlining what can only be described as pretty clear advice on Guest Blogging, particularly the following quote:

Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.

Pretty clear right? Well you’d think so as Matt continues along this vein and further discredits the act of guest blogging due to the fact that, as ever, spammers are flooding this practise with low quality guest posts.

This is now and forever will be the case. Look at link directories, now they’re spammy and very low quality, apart from the rare hidden gems. But once they were a great source of links. The same happened for article marketing to a lesser degree, when once you might have decided on running some, this now is a very bad idea.

I think the straw that broke the camels back with Matt was when he received an unsolicited email from someone that just didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t specific to his blog and was poorly written. AKA spam.

But Matt went on to give further advice after, I suspect, a poor reaction to his blog post. He clarifies further by stating that:

There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.).

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy

So it seems that guest blogging is still a good idea. All that Matt wanted to point out is that it’s being exploited by spammers, as is pretty much every other SEO technique out there. So why, at first, did he come out to say to definitely stop Guest Blogging?

What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Video Blog: Hummingbird and what it means for your business.

Late last year Google released their new Hummingbird algorithm. This was a major change for Google and affected 95% of their search results. This was a major change as a lot of their other updates, mainly panda and penguin, can affect anywhere between 0.1 and 2% of queries.

This has a lot to do with the switch of searches to mobile. As more and more people are using products such as Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now, voice search is increasing and search patterns are changing. More and more people are searching less for [keyword][area] and are more prone to asking “Where is the nearest [keyword] in [area]?”.

These requests need to be processed differently which is why Goole have released this update. For a more detailed view on Hummingbird see below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Doodle Celebrates

Google runs a second concurrent Doodle today celebrating the life of Dian Fossey. Dian was once the foremost primatologist in the world and worked closely with Gorillas in Rwanda. She wrote the book Gorillas in the Mist in 1983 which combines her own personal story of living in Rwanda working with the gorillas, with her scientific research.

Dian was murdered on December 27th 1985. The case remains open but there is speculation that she was murdered due to her anti-poaching and anti-tourism agenda.

The note below is her las in her diary and beneath that is Google’s Doodle.

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

Net66: Google Doodle Celebrates 255 Years of the British Museum

Evidently it’s not just Net66 celebrating an anniversary this week. The British Museum has been running for a little bit longer than our 10 years, clocking up an impressive 255 years!

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: What if Google Was a Real Person?

A lot of people on Twitter today are asking what if Google was a real person. This is all thanks to College Humour who produced a skit video portraying Google. It gave me pause for thought. At first I thought of the comparison we’ve already made here at Net66 that Google is like a librarian.

But then I started thinking more, I mean a whole person can’t just be summed up as a “librarian” (I think). They’d have to be more than that. For a start they would have to know pretty much everything there is to know about anything in the world. Secondly, and more importantly, they would have to spend their days dealing with queries from everyone who had one.

But it does beg the question, if Google were a person, and you had to go to them to query them personally, would your queries change?

Would you be more polite when asking? Would you be more direct? Would you be embarrassed? People use Google every day to look up their ailments, but would you be more comfortable going to your doctor for advise, or asking Google?

In the video by college humour, Google is portrayed as your typical office worker in drab clothes and lacklustre attitude. What isn’t portrayed, however, are the Adwords. For every query you had, you’d have three champagne dressed people offering you their answers, with some more on the side dressed in similar garb as Google themselves offering you their answers too.

They would also be undoubtedly, unashamedly, unabashedly stinking rich. Think about it, in recent weeks and months Google on whim bought several of the top robot building companies out there. That’s a lot of money to be throwing around. Especially when you know they’ve got a plan to turn their robotics into another successful business.

On the down side however, I’m more than willing to be there’d be a few harsh words for Google from everyone who is unhappy about Google+ and its recent integration to YouTube.

What do you think Google would be like?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66 Turns 10 Years Old Today! Happy Birthday to Me!

10 years ago it was 2004, Facebook wasn’t a global phenomenon, Manchester United were chasing more than just 4th, Manchester City still employed Robbie Fowler, and Neil McVey had just bought the domain https://netsixtysix.co.uk.

Fast forward 10 years and Facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world, Manchester United are 7th in the league, City now employ Sergio Aguero and Neil McVey has gone from working out of a spare bedroom, to several offices in Manchester City Centre.

Not only that, what was a very small operation with two family members is now an international company that has expanded it’s services and client base exponentially. This is the transformation we’ve gone through here at Net66 and we couldn’t be happier to celebrate our 10 year Anniversary.

We have our development team, our design team, our SEO team, our admin team, customer service team and a whole host of other staff. A far cry from when our two directors were all that Net66 consisted of.

It’s not just about us though, it’s about our clients as well. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some amazing people over the years with a lot of clients working with us still. Take, for instance, Meqs consultants and Warwick Motorcycles, they were there at the very beginning of Net66’s journey and they’re still here now having both purchased websites from us within the last year. The former also taking up one of our SEO packages too.

We’ve seen ourselves go through our own fair share of websites too always looking to keep on trend with the latest design happenings. Our SEO has also grown from an experimental side department to one of the biggest aspects of our business. Our own progress now sees us top ranked for SEO in Manchester.

We’ve also grown as a family with not only Neil & Tom getting on board, but David, Greg (me) and Grace have all joined Net66. This is why we pride ourselves on being a family company and to this day we still hold true to our family values.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66 – Google Doodle: Simone de Beauvoir is Celebrated in Google’s Doodle

Google’s Doodles have long been one of those unexpected perks of the day where you access your favourite search engine and are presented with a little bonus.

Today’s little piece of new knowledge came in the form of a cartoon of Simone de Beauvoir. Born in France, Simone became a leading light in quite a few different ways. She was an existentialist, philosopher, intellectual, feminist and much much more.

View her Wikipedia page to find out more. Image below:

Simone de Beauvoir

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Net66: Snapchat For Businesses, Confide in your Colleagues

There is a new start up coming from a pair of New York City tech executives who have banded together to produce Confide, which is quickly being described as the Snapchat for businesses.

The premise of Snapchat is simple, you can send an image, video or message to one of your friends, and after a certain amount of time this image, video or message will be deleted.

The reason why this has been targeted directly at businesses seems to stem from LinkedIn. Facebook was the first truly massive social network, 7/10 adults who are internet users are also users of Facebook. As Facebook was a more informal place for people to post pictures of their every day life, including weekend escapades, there was a market for a more formal, professional Social Network. A la LinkedIn.

This new start up aims to provide a professional version of Snapchat. As this is a more formal operation, security measures have been stepped up as well. For instance, where (at first) users could screenshot Snapchat messages, Confide doesn’t allow this feature so you can be sure your messages are deleted when the message has been delivered.

They also offer a more secure way of transferring data with the messages you send never being stored on any of Confide’s servers. When they’re passing through the servers, they remain encrypted, the key to the encryption is only ever stored on the recipients phone too.

So if someone were to intercept a transmission, they would only get the encrypted version which would be incredibly hard to crack. So security seems to be a key feature of this app.

Would you use something like this?

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Google Webmaster Tools Offers More Data For Impressions & Searches

Google has been a bit stingy with data recently. Especially since they decided they weren’t going to pass keyword data through Google Analytics anymore which drew the ire of nearly every single SEO out there. What compounded this unfairness is that Google say they were doing it for Security reasons, although they have no problem sharing the data with paying Adwords users.

They are now however giving exact amounts of clicks and impressions in their Webmaster Tools. If you log into your Webmaster Tools account and navigate to Search Traffic > Search Queries, you’ll find your stats for phrases you rank for. These stats are immensely useful when looking at a sites performance as you can check your impressions, clicks, CTR (click through rate) and average position.

It was Google’s John Mueller who announced this today on the Google Webmaster Blog. Declaring that websites statistics will no longer be rounded up (or “bucketed”) in the Webmaster Tools Feature.

Have you checked your statistics today? How are they looking?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: A New Year but the Same Old Google, Rap Genius gets Rapped.

Now I don’t mean to say that Google is resting on it’s globally huge laurels, I merely intend to inform you that Google is continuing it’s harsh critique of bad link building practices.

Rap Genius is a website dedicated to creating a large library of rap lyrics that are highly searchable. For example if you heard a lyric and couldn’t remember the song, you could type it into Google’s search engine where Rap Genius is trying to rank.

The success of the website eventually led to the website landing a #1 spot on Google for the phrase “rap lyrics”, a choice phrase.

Unfortunately for Rap Genius, they recently started an ill-fated link building campaign that led to the removal of their entire site from the Google Listings. Even when you searched “Rap Genius” word for word, the website didn’t show up.

The reason being, Rap Genius were offering to tweet links to their near 140k followers, from websites that linked to Rap Genius. Punters accepted this challenge and soon the links were flowing between websites, and that is where the major problem occurred.

Much in the same way that Interflora were penalised for offering “gifts” to bloggers who would blog about them, Google saw this as a way of purchasing links, even though there was no actual money exchanged, the “gift” or the tweet was sufficient reward to encourage people to link to their sites.

Just like Interflora though, Rap Genius has now recovered from this blip in their link building campaign. Not only have they recovered, but they recovered in style and in just 10 days. They have also been restored to the #1 position on Google for Rap Lyrics.

Unfortunately, having to removed so many links does seem to have affected their overall rankings with not as many first page listings as before. This should also remedy itself with time.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Google Glass Gets an Upgrade [Vine Video]

Last month Google announced that they would be upgrading their Google Glass. Current owners of the technology, who are at the moment beta testers for the products, could either keep the pair they had currently, or trade it in for the new headset.

When they released the statement they announced that anyone who wished to trade their pair could let Google know and Google would “Reserve a place in line” for them. Once their new Google Glass was ready, they’d receive an email and could go pick it up.

People must be getting emails as there’s now a bit of an internet buzz about the new headset which has featured on a Vine video recently. The headset, although visually similar, has a few marked upgrades.

The small in built speaker form the last Google Glass headsets has been replaced by a removable earbud option that plugs into the headset. This is mainly due to most testers of the product saying that it was hard to hear anything unless you were sat in a quiet room.

Allowing for this earbud will be especially useful for when you’re using satellite navigation or watching films.

Another big change is the new addition of “Prescription Frames” which would be specifically designed to cater to Glass. Check out the unboxing of the new Google Glass below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Manchester City, Barcelona and the importance of Goals

Last week in Munich, there was a Chilean manager of a football team beating the current Champions League Champions. His team were currently in front by one goal and needed another goal to win the group.

Unfortunately for Mr Pellegrini, he had miscalculated what was actually needed. The unfortunate City boss was left with egg on his face after having substituted a striker (who scores goals) for a defender (who doesn’t).

It was made even worse by the fact that after the match, he indicated that had his team scored again, he would have brought on another striker to go after the top of the group. When they only needed one more goal anyway. Oops.

The reason the top of the group is so important is that the next game you play is against the runners up of other groups and therefore, on paper, an easier game.

So that miscalculation by the City manager has set them playing against Barcelona, a very good team, instead of a lesser team such as Olympiakos.

So this is why you should always plot out your goals and make sure you’re on top of them. If Mr Pellegrini was as astute a mathematician as he is a tactician (only at the Etihad of course) then he would have realised he only needed one more goal and could have ended up playing a much easier team.

If you’re a business owner and you haven’t done your calculations correctly this could seriously cost you money and your business.

So make sure you have your business goals set, and definitely make sure your calculations are correct, or you could end up like old Pellegrini.

Google Testing Adverts in the Knowledge Graph Boxes

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