Category: seo

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

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.

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<a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/net66-top-10-changes-google-search-infographic/”><img alt=”Net66 – Google 10 Milestones Updated” src=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Net66-Google-10-Milestones-Updated.png” title=”Net66 – Google 10 Milestones Updated” /></a> <br /> <p style=”font-size: 8px;”>Infographic Courtesy of <a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/”>Net66</a></p>

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.

The Networks

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:

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<div><a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/net66-infographic-why-seo-is-still-the-don/”><img alt=”Net66 SEO Infographic” src=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Net66Infographic.png” /></a> SEO Infographic by <a href=”https://netsixtysix.co.uk”>Net66</a></div>

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

In Google’s latest Webmaster Video, head of Webspam and selfie extraordinaire Matt Cutts reveals how Google ranks content that doesn’t have a lot of backlinks to it.

The lack of backlinks to a page takes Google back to when they were a search engine who didn’t really count links that much. So, they have to rely on the words on the page. Basically when then come across the first instance of a word on the page, they give a bit of weight to that word.

When they come across the second instance of the same word or phrases on the page, then it still give some weight to it. From then on it notes each use of the word they’re counting without necessarily giving it any more weight.

They monitor the use of the same word or phrase and if they believe it’s used too much, it will then think that the page is keyword stuffing. So somewhere after the first and second mention of your keyword there is the perfect balance of keywords and regular words.

The second way they do this is to inspect the domain and decide whether the domain itself is trustworthy/reputable:

You spent weeks perfecting that picture of yourself and now Google plans to get rid of it. According to Google they’ve spend a lot of time redesigning their search results to provide the cleanest and most effective results they can.

This involves removing the picture of yourself in the SERPs and also removing the number of +1s you’ve got and how many Circles you’re in. See the statement below:

We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results… As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count.

One of the reported benefits to having the picture including along with everything you’ve written is that it increased Click Through Rates on your listing.

That doesn’t look to have been affected with Google also saying:

Our experiments indicate that click-through behaviour on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.

What do you think to this news?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Reconsideration requests have long been a chagrin of SEOs who have had to submit them. You can spend hours, days or weeks (depending on how badly the site was penalised) trying to find out why and then going through the tedious process of link removing (if it’s Penguin) or a content audit (if it’s Panda). You could also be left banging your head against a brick wall if you’ve no idea why you’ve been penalised and Google’s reconsideration requests aren’t likely to help you.

… Until now.

In the past you received a notice that your site was in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Not much help at all. They then decided to help more with the identification and removal of bad links.

Then Google decided to help out a bit more by pointing out some example links that were causing a penalty.

Now, however, Google have allowed for a text box where the actual person, a real human being, can evaluate your site and then offer personalised advice on how you can recover from the penalties your site is under.

You can read what they have to say in the “A note from your reviewer” box that comes with the new responses. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how useful these new reconsiderations will be:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Ever since the rise of Payday loan companies, there has been a war raged on Google to get to the top for the phrase “payday loans”. The reason? Payday loans are short term loans and as such, have an unusually high APR. Basically, a HUGE interest rate.

As there is a huge interest rate, there is a chance for huge profit. Hence the amount of companies trying to get onto the first page for this phrase. This orgy or competition has gone on unchecked in the Black Hat world of SEO as more and more people are seeking a “quick buck” on Payday Loans as people try to get there and try to get there quickly.

As with all things SEO, the faster you do something, the more likely you are to get penalised. So much so that Google have had to release an new specific algorithm to tackle this.

Indeed, they’re already on their 3rd version of the algorithm. Last week Google updated it to identify and penalise spammy websites. This new version of the algorithm is to detect and combat very spammy queries that aren’t just related to the Payday Loans industry.

For example, queries such as Payday Loans, Casinos, Viagra, Porn. Basically, anything to do with the spammy emails you’ll find in your junk folder of your emails.

Have you noticed any changes on these search terms?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google has warned website owners to be more careful when serving mobile searchers. In fact, Google is so serious about its mobile customers that it is showing them which websites are showing less than optimal mobile websites.

On the Webmaster Central blog, Google told webmasters that it will be setting up special messages to alert mobile searchers if a website of interest has a “faulty redirect” in place that sends them to the websites homepage.

A lot of websites have less than optimal mobile builds, and such redirects are used as a stop gap measure to avoid a not found or 404 page. Many website owners do not know if their websites are properly optimised for mobile.

According to Google:

We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway.”

As is apparent, the warning is quite conspicuous within the mobile search results, and may likely discourage users from clicking.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel for webmasters. Google will warn website owners of such faulty redirects within the Crawl Errors section of Google Webmaster Tools.

If you are unsure if your website is optimised for mobile, get in touch with Net66!

There are all manner of pressing, valuable and insightful questions that are put to Matt Cutts each week for his Webmaster Video Tutorials.

For some reason he’s opted against good advice this week and chosen one of the more ridiculous questions that are put to him.

Credit where credit is due he still makes a seminal dip into the SEO advice with “we aim to cut all the spam wood so the quality wood can be displayed” but that’s as far as it gets. See the video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Transcript:

Today, we’re going to talk about some Lesser known search engines. We all know Google is the king of the pack when it comes to searching online. From products to local services, and general knowledge, and everything in between, the world uses Google to search. However, you may be a bit surprised to know that not everyone uses Google all the time. In fact, there are other search engines out there too. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Bing.

Bing is the number two search engine in the US. Owned by the creator of the Windows operating system, Microsoft, and previously known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, Bing is a serious contender when it comes to online search. And has been steadily increasing search quality in recent years, and is often considered to be the biggest threat to Google’s dominance of the search industry. It has a user friendly interface, and is particularly renowned for local and video searches. Bing also powers all Yahoo searches, after a deal between the two companies.

Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go is another, now serious, contender. Often taken lightly in previous years, partially due to the whimsical name, Duck Duck Go has now made a name for its self when it comes to online search privacy. The search engine states that it does not store a user’s data when it comes to online search. In fact, online search privacy is Duck Duck Go’s unique selling proposition. It has recently made significant changes to its user interface and added new features, such as image search and auto suggest.

For more information about search and how to optimise for it, keep watching Net66

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

I’ve mentioned how to grab Google’s attention before. It’s not a good idea if you want to rank your site but Google is alerted to your site for a bad reason.

Here are some top tips on how NOT to trigger Google’s Spam Filter:

> DON’T register a domain with a trademarked name or phrase in it. Profiting from misdirected search traffic isn’t ethical and will do you no favours in the eyes of Google.

> DON’T register a misspelling of a popular domain, especially an industry rival as this also looks dodgy and will cause Google to take a closer look at your practices.

> DON’T send out a stream of pings to various servers in an attempt to convince them you have new content when you don’t.

> DON’T use the same title tag for an inordinate amount of pages. Also don’t use irrelevant or misrepresentative title tags.

> DON’T buy domains with a history of high traffic and redirect them to affiliate marketing pages.

> DON’T Participate in link farms or a free for all link exchange

Follow the above tips and Google won’t be feeling the need to investigate your online practices.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey