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

Consistency in Links is Critical!

Finding somewhere to put a link back to your website, whether its a business, blog or hobby website is simple. You may get ‘giddy’ and spend a day building, 5, 10 or 20 links pointing back to your websites. Which is great! and it may help, But is it enough?

Maybe it’s not enough and thats why people will go to websites who are offering 5000 links in 2 days posted back to your website, probably on of the most dangerous things you can do to your business!

Sure you may spike up the rankings on google for a few days, but its almost guaranteed you come tumbling down faster than a rock falling off a cliff face!

So how is backlinking done correctly, in short, as natural as possible is the answer.

Ask yourself this question, does adding 500, 100 or 500 links to your website in a week sound natural to you?

Im guessing not.

Infact unless you have done a radio or even television campaign then your very unlikely to acquire those kinds of links in such a short amount of time!

So its fair to say adding loads of links to your website is a bad idea. What about ‘a little but often’?

Well little and often is a good idea, it would appear more natural, and in small low competitive niches you can get somewhere, especially if you have located and only target high PR, very relevant quality websites to point back to you.

However, what if your business or websites are in a medium competetitive niche? What do you do then?

To many links and you’ll get slapped, not enough links and your not going to get anywhere fast!

Well in truth, finding links is one thing, submitted and creating links is quite easy to. But do you know what, arguably the hardest thing when creating links is to maintain a natural appearance? What do we call this..

Link Velocity!!

For those who don’t know what this is, link velocity is basically the creation of backlinks to your website consistently, continuously day after day., week after week and even month after month if need be.

Arguably, this is probably the hardest thing to achieve for an SEO’er.

Can you imagine how much work is involved submitted links day after day, after day.

How many people do you think are excited with their websites at first and then after a few weeks or even a few days! stop creating backlings, give up and simply because they can no longer be bothered, and lets face it there is never any guarantees with SEO!

So how is this achieved?

In short, resources and processes.

Sure you can do all this yourself for your own business or websites.

All you need to do is take a crash course in SEO, know how it works, find out what’s working with Google, and then figure out what websites shod have a link going back to your websites.

But, if you don’t have a spare 6 – 12 months to figure this out, this is when you get a team of SEO experts on your side who have already figured this out, who already know where those places are to create links pointing back to your website, which are relevant and of high quality.

Not only that, but we can assure you when you think you’ve mastered Google and your rankings increase, Google will probably change it all again leaving you back at square 1!

So do you really have the spare time at your disposal to figure it out and implement it?

or would you rather spend your valuable time running your business, doing what you do best.

Net66 SEO: Vanquish Pandas, Penguins and Black Hats as Matt Cutts in this fun Donkey Kong Remake [Link]

Matt Cutts has now been the authority on good, proper white hat SEO for years now. Too white if you ask some, misleading if you ask others and a god if you find a particular type of SEO.

His fame has now seen him feature in a remake of Nintendo’s classic game Donkey Kong. In the original you were Mario (yes, THE Mario) and you had to climb scaffolding to rescue the princess whilst avoiding barrels that were, for some reason, being thrown at you by a large gorilla.

In this quirky take on the game, you can play as Matt Cutts. Picking up bonus’ such as Social Media posts, links and white hat SEOs. Make sure to avoid the pitfalls of Penguins and Pandas though, otherwise you’ll lose your points. See the image below for the in game action:

You can play the game, created by NetVoucherCodes, here!

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:

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:

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

Link Earning with the use of social media

Link Earning is becoming a more popular phrase within the SEO industry, especially with the way Google is evolving continuously. This new technique is having a great effect with Google and other search engines.

What is Link Earning?

Link Earning is basically giving your target audience content that they would benefit from. We have heard the phrase content is king so many times but there is a lot of truth behind it. Whilst link earning is gradually taking over from link building, the content required is a lot more advanced.

Writing the perfect content is the crux with link earning. Content with plenty of images, videos and links to reliable resources, also humerous content and fun to read. A mixture of these features will make the perfect recipe for link earning.

How to share my content?

This is a question we get asked a lot and what people don’t realise is that the answer is right under their noses! The internet. The best way to share content first of all is across all of your social media platforms.

Social media is a highly underestimated tool in the standard SEO arsenal which many people forget the shear power it has. Take a look at these sweet tips from Rand Fishkin;

The aim for link earning is not to only sharing your content across the web but where the full benefit comes into play is other people sharing it. So with social media you have a wide audience, therefore more of a chance someone will share your content.

Also, social media gives you the chance to go viral and make a name for yourself on the web.

There is not only social media which we can use to link earn but also blogs, forums and Q&A websites. (NOTE: the topic needs to be relevant to your content).

The reason these type of websites are perfect for sharing content is that they are normally full of people asking advice and you can put a reply with a link to your content.

If this is beneficial for the target audience then you will start to gain a reputation and become a well known trusted source of information regarding your chosen niche!

In summary, we need to start evaluating our methods and techniques in accordance to the updates Google has rolled out. I am a firm believer that link earning via social media is exactly what Google want you to do. It shows a sense of social engagement and content sharing.

Posted by Jordan Whitehead

Net66 Video Blog: How to Build Links Through Infographics and Guest Blogs [Video]

In this day and age the world is full of information on how NOT to link build. Today, we discuss how to link build in our above video blog. See our transcript below:

Link building is a great way to show the search engines that other websites consider your website worthy of mention or endorsement. Today, we’re going to take a look at some popular link building methods, or channels as we like to call them.

First, let’s talk about infographics. Infographics are visual representations that help you quickly make sense of large or important sets of data. The graphics take advantage of human’s innate receptiveness to visual cues and patterns, using shapes and colours to quickly convey hat could otherwise involve large amounts of text.

Infographics by their very nature are designed to be so attractive that they have a high propensity to go viral. and can be shared across social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. People are naturally compelled to link toward these data visualisations as they share between their friends.

Guest bog posts are another popular link building channel. These involve building relationships within your industry or business niche, and placing high quality content or blog posts to create value through content partnerships.

These guest blog posts can the harbour a link to your website, creating an endorsement from the hosting website towards yours.

Guest blog posts are a very natural way of link building, as they mimic the natural business and person to person relationships of the real world.

Quality link building when performed organically and synergistically creates a natural and authoritative link profile, signalling to the search engines that your website is worth linking to and ultimately ranking in the search results.

For more information about SEO, keep watching the Net66 channel.

Thank you!

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Net66: Times when Google have penalised THEMSELVES!

Let’s face it companies in the online marketing industry cannot help but have a chuckle between themselves when a big branded company gets penalised by Google. Such as Interflora, BBC and most recently Expedia.

But what some companies don’t know is that there have been times in the past where Google, yes GOOGLE have been left with egg on their face by breaking their own violations. This is not a one off by Google, they have actually been penalised a number of times.

Here are just a couple of occurrences;

Google Chrome Penalisation

One of the biggest no no’s in Google’s books is buying links to achieve a better ranking on their search engine, which brings me to the first occurrence.

The most recent penalisation which occurred to them was back in 2012. During this time Google had just launched their Chrome browser and started a campaign to promote it.

However, this campaign didn’t go as planned. As you may have guessed, Google found themselves buying links as part of their campaign.

The punishment was quite severe for them, this being that they disappeared for the phrase “Google Chrome” for approximately two months!

BADwords

Another product of Google’s which was hit by their algorithm is Google Adwords. This occurred in 2010 and was penalised for breaking their cloaking violations. The help pages within adwords were showing inconsistencies with the robots and what human users could see.

The punishment in this instance was that the rankings lowered for phrases such as “adwords help” and “help with Google adwords”. Although to this very day nobody knows how long this penalty was put in place for.

It just goes to show that the creators of the algorithm cannot beat it. This surely sends a message out to people and companies involved in SEO that there is no easy way to the top of the SERPs.

Posted by Jordan Whitehead

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 Launches New Manual Action Penalty

Today 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: 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.

@schikowski yup, it’s on our radar.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) January 29, 2014

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 reminder (in German) that paid links that pass PageRank violate our guidelines: http://t.co/u1MpvL7kh4

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 3, 2014

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.

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 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 Link Building

Transcript:

Welcome to Net66.

Today, Net66 is 10 years old. We’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings as a local web design company to a top ranked SEO agency in central Manchester. This is not just our opinion, if you were to ask Google the top ranked company for “SEO in Manchester”, they would state Net66 as the number one agency for this term on their search engine.

Today, on the 13th January 2014 marks ten years in the SEO industry for Net66 and is also the date we publish our first video blog. I’m Waqar and today we are briefly going to touch upon one of the most important topics in SEO, link building.

Link building is essentially the electronic perception management system on the web and is an integral part for any SEO campaign. Links from high quality websites act as endorsements or votes for your website, causing search engines such as Google to perceive those websites to be endorsing yours.

This can result in higher search engine rankings for your most valuable keywords. Today, Search Engine Optimisation is incomplete without quality perception management on the web.

Now link building is the most effective way to accomplish this. Net66 provides a variety of link building techniques such as guest blog posts, info-graphics, article syndication and much much more. To learn more about link building and what it can do for your business, or for a free website assessment, please feel free to reach out to us.

Thank you.