There are many many rankingfactors. Some more important than others, some more focussed on than others. It would be nice if you just had a checklist: do this and do that and you will rank. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it doesn’t work that way. There are many factors to take in account and each one can make a difference, or not.
To get a grip on which factors are important this infographic by Martin Missfeldt is a very handy one, because it clusters rankingfactors (not all of them, but quite a few) in major topics: Social, Backlinks, Author/Brand and On page. A very nice overview. (more…)
Bad links, there is a lot of discussion going around them at the moment with Panda and Penguin fresh in our memories. And with all the ‘outing’ going on, you better watch your steps right?
The question asked to Matt Cutts in his latest Webmasterhelp videos “What happens if I link to a good page that later becomes spammy?” therefore is one where the answer is listened to carefully by many SEOs.
The question is whether or not a site you link to, which used to have good content before, now turns ‘spumy’, will have a bad influence on your rankings. The answer? Cutts says ‘not to worry’, at least as long its not too many of these kind of links.
There are millions of business owners out there. Some big ones, but most of them small ones. Each of them has the same issue: getting online integrated in their business. But how?
The bigger companies hire agencies to do the online part for them, but there are many who can’t afford that or simply want to do this themselves. Google acknowledges that there is a big group out there looking for information just on how to get started.
That is why last week the search giant decided to launch the “Webmaster Academy“. A new online resource platform just for small businesses to learn about Google… (more…)
So our Friday Talk is back this week with a talk by Guy Kawasaki, a well known name in the social industry. Some regard him as a ‘spammer’ other as an ‘entrepreneur’ who gets everything out of what he does. In both cases there is a lot to learn from what he does and says.
At the Parallels Summit Kawasaki keynoted. You can find his talk below. Kawasaki explores why enchanting your customers is the key for service providers (or any entrepreneur) to build a business: it’s the path to differentiate yourself in the marketplace as you earn likability and trustworthiness.
Privacy is a ‘hot topic’ these days: how much does Google know? And Facebook? Maybe they even know more! Privacy is history Mark Zuckerberg believes. And he might be right. Look at how unsafe you really are online… (more…)
You may have noticed that a week ago many State of Search bloggers were present at one or more of the search events taking place in the UK. They were either speaking or blogging there.
A lot of great content was produced around the events International Search Summit, SMX London and SASCON. Maybe you missed some of it. Not to worry though, you can find an overview of everything written about the events below! (more…)
Again the search industry is once again in uproar. Why? Because somewhere somebody took a wrong turn, someone else saw it and told Google. And now Google is upset.
To be honest, it’s like looking at my kids sometimes, but that’s a different story. What is more interesting at this specific point is Google’s reaction yesterday to the alleged buying of links by search agency iAqcuire: they didn’t kick out the clients for who they may have bought links, they kicked out the agency.
It was smart find by Barry Schwartz at Searchengineland last night when he did a site command search for [site:www.iacquire.com] and didn’t get any results back. There was no site there, which usually means either the company has withdrawn itself from Google or has made a mistake (I’ve seen enough ‘no index’ which shouldn’t have been there in robots.txts around the globe over the past few years) or the company has been penalized by Google. (more…)
Every year Google looks back to the past and forward to the future with their ‘Zeitgeist’. A few days ago Larry Page, CEO of Google, held his ‘Zeitgeist’ talk in the UK.
Wearing his Google Glass he talked for twenty minutes about where Google is heading. You can see the entire video here, below are some highlighted quotes from the talk.
A few interesting remarks from Page:
“I think that the pace of change is really accelerating.”
“It is not a question of “if” now, it is just a question of “when.” “
“we have an awful lot of products, some of which people don’t seem to care that much about. So we went through and we — we went through kind of a painful process where we shut down or closed over 30 different things.”
“Google+ which is our social efforts, and people are a bit confused about this. I’d say that we think it’s really important that when you’re using Google, you be able to easily share things.”
“And the other part where people are a little bit confused about what we’re doing, that’s the social spine of Google. That means everything in Google gets better by being able to share and have identity and things like that.”
“I think if you used Google from five years ago, you’ll be astounded at how bad it is. Or how bad it was, right? And, you know, search has gotten a lot better.”
“Also maybe in the last week or so, we released this thing called the Knowledge Graph, or Knowledge Panels, we’re calling them, and those actually give you — if you search for “Tesla” now, “Tesla,” then you get the car and you get the scientist, and we know lots of things about them. So, you know, if you search about, you know, a different — a lake or something like that, we’ll know the depth of the lake.”
“And what we’re really trying to do is to really get to the point where we can represent knowledge and we can do much more complicated types of queries.”
“Search also is not just about finding things. It’s really about taking actions”
“You don’t want to just look at 10 different links but you want to actually buy something or you want to book a flight or you want to know what the weather is”
“Android’s really on fire now, which I probably don’t have to tell you all, and it’s very, very exciting. It’s a big area of focus for us, obviously.”
“We’ve actually been doubling revenue every year on YouTube for four years”
Oh and one more thing, you know, Larry says “you know” 70 times in twenty minutes…
It is time for change people. Change in the search engines. After Bing and Google now Yahoo decided to bring in a whole new way of searching: Yahoo! Axis.
With Axis Yahoo! introduces a way of searching which is much more visual and, as Yahoo claims, with much more interaction, “all without ever leaving the page you are on.” (more…)
Google once again has to answer to the EU. Yesterday Commissioner Joaquin Almunia wrote a letter to Eric Schmidt containing four major ‘concerns’ that the EU has when it comes to their investigation of several antitrust complaints which were issued last year.
Almunia also posted the concerns online and in that same article seemed to be hinting at a deal with Google. This might mean the EU is not to certain about the complaints and looking at the complaints at first sight there is no need for Google to be scared of the consequences, even though some points really touch in the core of Google’s business efforts. (more…)
Every SEO wants to check his rankings. Even though the world of search is changing, rankings still play a big role when it comes to the everyday job of the SEO. Yes, we have Universal Results, yes, Search Plus Your World is playing a huge part in our visibility, but rankings still are an important relative key performance indicator.
And with the ever internationalizing world of search (we can see how important internationalization has become by all the great content coming from the International Search Summit last week for example), we want to know how we do in different part of the world, on different search engines, not just Google.
Linkdex has understood the importance of the combination of the both and has added Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo to the list of search engines you can track your rankings. It has also added language options, which means you can check these search engines in over 35 countries in multiple languages. (more…)
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