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...
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
