How Do You Resolve a Search Engine Penalty?
The very first thing you have to do is determine if your search engine penalty is a result of a manual act or simply because of an algorithm update. For instance, the Penguin update was a change to Google’s algorithm so if your site’s organic visitor traffic dropped off on or just after April 24th, 2012, there is a good change it’s because of an algorithmic penalty. A manual penalty means someone (a human employee) at Google reviewed your site and decided to impose a penalty to your site specifically. This happened to JCPenney after their site got ousted for buying links. Why is it important to determine if your search engine penalty was a manual action or the result of an algorithm change? Because CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Analytics “Not Provided” Is Getting Worse
Last year Google announced that they would start encrypting search data when a user is logged into their Google account. Google Analytics would still track these visitors once they arrived on the site, but the keywords searches used to find the website would now be listed under “Not Provided”. Google assured site owners that the encrypted search would only impact about 10% of analytics. Although it’s less than ideal, I was still confident that I’d be able to make valuable SEO recommendations for my SEO clients based on the remaining data. However, it became quickly evident that the 10% was a far cry from what was actually happening. It’s been less than a year since Google announced their encrypted search update, and CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Will Penguin Target Keyword Rich Domains Next?
Many site owners are still feeling the effects of Google’s Penguin update , which went live on April 24th. In my opinion, that rollout is just the first in a long line of Penguin updates to come. Since Panda launched in February of last year there have been about 15 subsequent Panda updates; I firmly believe Google will do the same thing with Penguin. So the question then becomes, what’s next for Penguin? Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m willing to bet a Penguin update that goes after keyword rich domains can’t be too far off. To me, a Google attack on keyword rich domains seems like the most logical step. Panda targeted sites with low-quality content and Penguin really CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Will Your Site Be Flagged for Over Optimization?
The SEO industry exists mostly because of Google. Whether we SEO professionals love or love to hate the search behemoth, we all have jobs because of Google. Even whispers and rumors of an algorithm update can have a major impact in the SEO world, because the way we do our jobs is directly influenced by how Google does theirs. So when Matt Cutts, head of Google's search spam team, announces that Google is working on a tweak to the algorithm that will punish sites that are too optimized for SEO, everyone gets a little jumpy. Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the pending algorithm update at a SXSW panel a few weeks ago; … the idea basically is to CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Analytics “Not Provided” is a Double Standard
Back in October Google rocked the world of SEO with their announcement that they intended to make search more secure by encrypting search data. When someone who was logged into their Gmail account searched in Google, their search query wouldn’t be sent over to the site owner whose site they visited, protecting their privacy. Site owners and SEO professionals alike where less than thrilled with this announcement. Without accurate data regarding visitor search behavior and what keywords they used to find our sites, how could we make accurate SEO recommendations and updates? Google assured us that the encrypted data would only impact about 10% of our analytics, which was something I thought I could manage. Having 90% of CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google’s Algorithm Update Targets Ad Heavy Sites
Just last week, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land reported the latest Google algorithm update which targets ad heavy websites. As Google’s official blog post announcing the page layout algorithm says, the update affects “… sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. Matt Cutts warned that this update was coming back in November at PubCon. How many ads is too many? As a user, I appreciate Google’s attempt to take on ad heavy sites. It’s annoying to have to dig through a page of ads to find the one snippet of content I am looking for CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How Will Encrypted Search Data Impact SEO?
In late October, Google announced that, in order to make search more secure for their users, they were “enhancing our default search experience…when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page.” Basically, Google is no longer passing data about users’ search behavior (like what keywords they used) over the site they clicked on from the SERP. So what does this mean for website owners? Google spelled it out in the same blog post What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
How the Search Engines Personalize Your Search Experience
The search engines work to please their customers, just like any other business. For Bing, Google and Yahoo, this means providing the best results possible for any and all search queries. One of the ways they are working to improve their user-experience is by offering more personalized results. Here are 3 ways the search engines personalize the SERPs: Location Type “pizza” into Google; what does your SERP look like? Chances are the first results Google pulled are all pizza places near your town. After those come the national brands like Dominos and Papa John’s. But how does Google know where you live? Easy, it uses the IP address from computer to determine your location. Google knows that when most people search for things like “pizza” or “dry CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Places Can Be Frustrating!
This isn’t the first time a business owner has had issues with Google Places and it probably won’t be the last, but I decided to share my recent experience with Google Places so business owners having problems with their own account can see that even an SEO firm (that does this for a living!) isn’t immune to bad customer service. Here’s the scenario: My company recently moved to a new office (you can read about the SEO lesson I learned from that move) so I needed to update our Google Places listing to reflect the new address. Any business owner who has tried to update their address of phone number knows it’s not a simple task. First off, in order to update an CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
5 Surefire Ways to Annoy the Search Engines
The search engines don’t take kindly to sites that try to manipulate the search results in their favor. Black hat SEO firms and spammers are constantly looking for new ways to twist the ranking factors. For instance, having a lot of links pointing to your site is important for SEO, so spammers get links from low quality, spammy sites to boost their link number. Never mind that these links are coming from spam blogs, they choose quantity over quality. 1. Throwaway domains Google specifically warns against throwaway domains in their SEO Webmaster Guidelines. A throwaway domain is a domain that has very little real value, and is just used to build link popularity to a second site. Many black hat SEO firms will use throwaway domains CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
What Do You Love? Google Wants to Help
Yesterday, the editors over at TechCrunch were some of the first to discover the latest addition to the Google pantheon of gadgets, tool and all-around fun stuff. With little to no fanfare from Google itself, WDYL.com (What Do You Love?) made its quiet online debut. As TechCrunch reported, …the idea is to return users a single page of relevant results across many of Google’s products for whatever query is typed into the wdyl search box. The “search” button is even a heart. Cute. TechCrunch also reported that the best queries for WDYL are for vague, broad terms. Being intrigued I strolled over to the new search engine (note, you have to include the www. in the address, otherwise you get an CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Panda 2.2 is Just Around the Corner
Attention all SEO experts, marketers web masters and business owners! Panda 2.2 is coming up and soon. Is your site ready for the next algorithm update? At the SMX Advanced Marketing Conference held two weeks ago, Matt Cutts confirmed that the Panda 2.2 update has been approved, but not yet rolled out. The next update will reportedly target sites that re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content. This was a common complaint among many web site owners about the first Panda update. Since Google couldn’t accurately identify the original source, the real author was sometimes penalized as a content farm along with the spammers. “A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” said Cutts during his CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Facebook Integration Brings Personalized Search Results to Bing
The worlds of SEO and social media were rocked the other day when Bing announced they will incorporate Facebook data into their search results for the most personal social-search integration to hit the web. What does this mean for the user? If you search for something on Bing and are logged into your Facebook account, you will see which pages, products and websites your friends Like and recommend high in the results, regardless of where that page ranks in the general SERP. Back in October 2010, Bing one-upped Google be forming a partnership with Facebook, establishing the importance of social factors on search results. The amount of information shared between Facebook and Bing was limited, but the foundation was set. Then in February of this year, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Yahoo! Launches Search Direct
Yahoo! grabbed the attention of the marketing industry earlier this week when the company announced the debut of Yahoo! Search Direct. Yahoo! Search Direct is similar to Google Instant, where “suggestions” pop up as the user is typing in their search query. Yahoo! announced that “[w]ith Search Direct, Yahoo! content is combined with information from the Web to provide rich answers, not just links, and to give people the option to immediately engage or continue to a traditional search results page.” In order to not look like a copycat program, Search Direct has a few key features that set it apart from Google Instant. First off, before a user even begins to type in their search keywords, Search Direct provides them with CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google’s Update is Why Your Marketing Needs to be Diversified
Google has power. They know it. We know it. Likely, that power won’t change anytime soon and all we’re left to do is try to understand their rules and algorithms as best as we possibly can to engage in tactics that will allow our website to rank well in the search engine’s results pages. Google’s recent algorithm change that targets “content farms”, or content sites that are of low-quality, impacts nearly 12% of queries according to Google. This is a pretty significant number and the results have been seen pretty quickly. This is a change that not only affects searches, but also affects people on a more personal level. Mahalo announced that it would lay off 10% CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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