Category: seo

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

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 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

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

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

There’s no doubting that guest blogs are on the up and up in the SEO world. But as with all things that become a tool in the SEO world, there’s a risk of this practice getting taken up and abused by black hatters and spammers alike.

An example of this would be for a spammer to scrape emails from thousands of websites and then send the same guest blog request to each email account. Other techniques would be to spin articles or to post the same articles on different websites.

Matt also suggests that you should NOT use guest blogging as your sole link building practice. The links can be powerful, but you still need a wide variety in your link profile. See the full Video below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Anglo Rank are the latest link network to be taken down by Google. Google’s webspam team seem to be getting better and better at this as more and more networks are coming down.

This time is seems Matt Cutts has Tweeted about a certain company. See his quote below:

“There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together” Oh, Anglo Rank.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 6, 2013

He also went as far as to give some advice, again with a mocking hint aimed at Anglo Rank.

SEO tip: don’t use a blackhat link network that claims no footprints, but also has no refunds, no reports, no guarantees.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 6, 2013

So if you are or have been using Anglo Rank, prepare for some barren months ahead.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

In a nutshell, DISAVOW those links with the disavow link in Google’s Webmaster tools. Matt Cutts who does a lot of question answering for Google was given a question regarding the punishment and recovery from the international company Interflora.

It appeared for a time that Interflora were completely deindexed by Google as an exact match search for their company name failed to list them. The remarkable thing for this, however, was that after the penalisation of having their site deindexed by Google, they were back up and ranking in just 11 days. Admittedly they weren’t ranking for phrases as they were prior to the penalisation, but 11 days is a great result.

So this question was put to Matt Cutts, how did Interflora get back their rankings in just 11 days? You can see his answer below:

So it appears that when you do find yourself penalised for your shady link building techniques, take a figurative chainsaw to all potential bad links.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Despite Matt Cutts saying he didn’t expect PageRank to be updated again this year, Google has now updated it’s Toolbar PageRank for the first time since February.

Naturally the SEO community has exploded into a thousand different conversations about what this means, what this doesn’t mean, why Google are doing this, why Google have waited til now and of course all the previous arguments about what PageRank actually is and suggests.

The reason PageRank is such a hotly debated topic is because it’s a very obvious “at a glance” score of your website in the eyes of Google.

See Matt Cutts discussing PageRank below:

Blog Post by Greg McVey

We all know by now that it’s getting easier and easier to get your website penalised or even de-indexed by bad link building practices. Things such as too many keyword rich anchor texts pointing to your domain. Too many of a certain type of link can also get you penalised.

Opportunistic, there are more colourful words being used on the internet, webmasters have taken to building these types of lists to websites that they have no affiliation with. You might wonder why, as this is a bad practice, and it takes time and effort for no gain. But, you see when the penalised site comes back to this “opportunistic” webmaster, there will be a cost for the removal of the links.

Hardly the most ethical way to earn money and it is quite similar to some “customer review” sites out there who host bad reviews that you can pay to remove.

With Negative SEO though, you can win back control from the person who’s building said bad backlinks to your website. Here are some steps to help you:

First of all, find where the backlinks are coming from. Contact the webmaster. A lot. I don’t mean email them once and wait, email them at least once a day and try to get a phone number for them too. Keep in close contact with them until those links have been removed.

If the webmaster is uncooperative, then you need to take this a step further. Get a record of the contact you’ve made with this webmaster, and then you can add their website to a disavow file. Just before you upload the disavow file it might be worth one last try with the webmaster, inform them that it’s in their interest to avoid getting disavowed as Google will remove all worth from the links on their site.

If they don’t care, neither should you. Upload the disavow file with their website on it. There are still debates about the usefulness of the disavow file, but it is in keeping with Google’s recommendations so you shouldn’t fear doing this.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

With Penguin there are a lot of things you’re told not to do these days. Mainly, don’t use the old ways of generating links. I.e. don’t just ramp up the low quality, irrelevant link directories you used to use.

With all the great advice on what not to do, you might be left wondering what to do. Well here are some tips from Net66.

Focus on Your Content

Not technically link building as you’re not the one building the links, but if you spend time focussing on your content and making sure it’s as informative, entertaining and attractive as it can be, then people will naturally link to to. A la natural link building.

This could be anything from spending more time on your blog posts, to increasing the amount of content your website produces.

Guest Blogging

Now that the content on your own site is looking better, why not start looking to get your content published elsewhere via a guest post. But don’t think you can send one email out to hundreds of blogs and expect a good return. You can’t. Think of all the generic emails you get during the day, do you pay attention to them? Of course not, the same way no one will look at your generic email.

Take your time and read through their blog first. See if there’s anything on the blog you can speak to the webmaster about. If there’s anything you identify with or disagree with, bring that up when you contact them and start a dialogue. They’re much more likely to publish your writing this way.

These are just a SEO few tips but there are plenty of other ways to get good quality links to your site without resorting to black hat, unethical or poor techniques.

Blog Post by Greg McVey

Over at SearchEngineLand, they’re running a series of interviews aimed at helping people with their SEO. Here’s a helpful video showing you what to look for when identifying and recovering from link penalties.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google Adwords has long been known as PPC marketing. This means that your adverts can be displayed hundreds of times on Google, but, you only pay for your advert if somebody clicks on it.

A great idea. But now, that doesn’t seem to be working as well for Google. A lot of people have been talking about how Google’s revenues are down, and many people have speculated that a decrease in Adwords revenues is causing it.

Recently we’ve seen Google stop giving out search data to users of their analytics software, noting that you can still access the data on the Adwords interface. Many people said that this would push people over onto using Adwords just get this data.

But now, in a big refresh for Adwords, they allow you to purchase adverts that when you pay by viewable impression. Note here they say viewable impression. Ensuring that the end user will see your advert on screen before you’re charged.

Otherwise end users could load up a page where your advert is displayed at the bottom of the page. The user won’t see this advert unless they scroll far enough and if they don’t, even though the user hasn’t viewed your advert, you could still get charged as the loading of the advert could count as a “view”.

What do you think to these new changes? Leave a Reply below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

It used to be that websites were pretty much all html, and were image sparse and mainly text. These days though with CSS becoming more advanced every day, there are more ways to add content to a page, and more ways to link out from that page.

Google had a guideline that stated there should be no more than 100 links on a page at any one time. So with these new developments in CSS, SEOs had to make sure that the link count for each page was under 100.

But now Google has removed that stipulation from their on-site guidelines. See what Google’s Matt Cutts has to say on the subject below:

Blog Post by: Greg McVey