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Matt Cutts Posts New Video on Backlinks and how Long They’ll Continue to Matter for.

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

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Net66 Video Blog: Will the Importance of Links Decrease Over Time?

People at Google have recently stated that the importance of backlinks within the overall ranking scheme could diminish over the next few years. According to observers, the search engine may be looking at alternative ways to determine the relevance of a website to a particular keyword. These include signals from experts, the qualitative and quantitative interaction of humans with the content, and other on-site indicators.

Signals from experts could be links from a top journalist to your site, for example. If the industry is the same as yours, or similar to yours, and the linking party is considered an expert, you could benefit immensely from such a link.

Alternatively, Authority websites can also be gauged by their on-site content. On-site content is one of the easiest ways a search engine can determine a site’s worth. Detecting content matter, nuances of language, use of industry terminology, quality of language used, and even grammar can help a search engine get to grips with site quality and any potential authority status.

Currently, inbound links are the most important ways a search engine can determine the relevance of a web page to a particular keyword. However, unscrupulous link builders have been using links to increase relevance for web pages that are not really relevant. Motives can include monetary profit for one’s business, or working on a client’s behalf to raise rankings.

Quality link building involves creating mutual relationships with other businesses and stakeholders, so that any links between websites act as reflections of real world relationships. These are likely to be trusted by search engines, and your website is more likely to receive the benefit and rank higher.

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Net66: Google Updates Guidelines on “Sneaky” Redirects

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

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Matt Cutts: Myth Busts the common myths of SEO.

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

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Net66: Matt Cutts Tells us how Page Titles are Overwritten in the SERPs [Video]

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

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Net66: Google’s Matt Cutts Explains how to Outrank Larger Sites

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

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The Importance of Outbound Links [Video Blog]

Transcript:

The importance of outbound links

Usually, when we talk about link building we refer to inbound links to a website. However, another important aspect of a website is its outbound links. These are links that point out from your website, toward other websites.

Outbound link are especially easy to manage, since we do have control over our websites. What are some of the things we can do to ensure that outbound links are good and beneficial, and not at all detrimental to our cause?

First, we need to ensure that any outbound links are relevant to the page on which they are found. So if a web page is about gardening, you cannot have an outbound link about insurance.

Next, we need to make sure that the page on which the outbound link is found, is relevant to the rest of the website. For example, you cannot have a special page dedicated to an irrelevant topic, for the sole purpose of housing that link. Many people would probably approach you to house such a new page on your site, with their link in it. Do not easily give in to their demands, because if the page is not relevant to your own website, your entire website runs the risk of being penalised.

Yes, your whole website can be penalised and can thus loose its rankings, if you are hosting irrelevant content with outbound links in them. They key here is the relevance or otherwise of the new page in question.

You are free to decide what level of freedom you are willing to offer people who write on your website. Just be careful when accepting guest blog post offers from others.

 

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Net66: Google’s “Not Provided” is Now Rolling out to Adwords Subscribers

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

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Google Penalises more Link Networks – Tokyo Style

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:

 

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

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Reputation as a Variable in SEO [Video Blog]

We all know about on-site and off-site SEO. Today we’re going to talk about a lesser known variable in SEO: Reputation. What is reputation? In real life, reputation refers to the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about an entity or person.

When it comes to search marketing, on-site and off-site optimisation are really all about building your reputation. Think of the online world as a mirror of the real world. Links toward a website actually result from reputation. In this way, links are a by product of better reputation, not the goal.

You are defined by the company you keep. This is especially true online, and search engines go to great lengths to understand your company and associates to get a better idea of what you’re about.
Reputation can be traced from both website mentions of your brand, links to you, or social media signals talking about you.

There is a difference between acting good and actually being good. In the real world, we can usually sense who’s genuine and who’s faking it. Search engines are now getting better and better at differentiating between genuinely good sites and those that are trying to look good.

So what can we do to stay ahead in the game? Well, for one thing, we can be really good at what we claim to be doing, or selling. Genuine competence will win out in the end. Professional help will always provide you with significant advantage, however, and good SEO consultancy will help you stay ahead of the game. Keep watching Net66.

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Google’s Matt Cutts on how Google Discerns True Authority from Short Term Popularity

Matt Cutts released another WebMaster Tools blog today he was put the following question:

As Google continues to add social signals to the algorithm, how do you separate simple popularity from true authority?

The first thing to note about this question is that Matt Cutts brushes off the first part of the question regarding Social Signals. He said that Google using social signals was an assumption and then left it there neither confirming or denying they do. Odd.

On to the meat of the matter though. First off, Matt states that people can wrongly state that PageRank is a matter of reputation and trust rather than just popularity. He gives a very good example. For example, nudey sites are very popular, but you’re not going to be putting links to them on your blog are you?

On the other hand, an estate agents website might not be the most popular and get thousands of visitors, but the people who do visit the website are more likely to link to it. So it’s hard for Google to say qualitatively which website is more popular.

See the rest of his video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

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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

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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

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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!