The last 12-18 months of Google changes to content and link building practices have impacts far above simply just changing tactics or getting a Manual Action removed. It has turned many business owners to have resentment towards other website who have not yet been affected through the changes. (more…)
The last two weeks I have been at conferences, you may have read my post on “Ask the ex Googlers anything” at BrightonSEO another great conference, but this time I did something a little different, I called it “Live Content Marketing”, with an audience of 2500 people a Brighton Dome I decided to perform a rap!?! Yes I rapped at an SEO conference.
Welcome to State of Search’s coverage of the wildly popular BrightonSEO conference! We’ll be posting session write-ups throughout the day from our bloggers on the scene.
The first session of the day at BrightonSEO 2013 in Dome Concert Hall was ask the Ex-Googlers anything. With Ex Google employee speakers:
Over the last 12 months with Google upping the ante on web spam in particular related to link building, there has been a general shift from the use of Free directories, article marketing to blogger out reach, PR and of course content marketing. Some great tools have been produced to help your efforts, whether it be to think of content suggestions or find ideas which have worked well.
Last year Yousaf Sekander launched his https://socialcrawlytics.com/ tool, which was basically a web software that you could put any site in and see which pages were shared the most and you could view number of tweets, Facebook shares etc. This was a great tool to look at what content has done well, not only on your own site but competitors or influential blogs etc.
Unfortunately I was unable to attend #linklove this year but the Distilled conference’s are some of my preferred simply down to the quality of the sessions. So like any self respecting SEO I was hooked on twitter and there was a particular session by Ian Lurie from Portant Inc on “Enterprise Link Spam Analysis” you can find full details on the session from our very own Gianluca Fiorelli by clicking the previous link.
Portant then released a white paper on “Google Declining Spam Tolerance.”
The past twelve months have been crazy, Content Marketing seemed to have created a fight between PR people and SEO’s with the result a new hybrid genre of “content marketing specialists”, why? Simply because all those statements Google would make about what you can’t do when link building have started to come true.
In February and March 2012 we saw the first major influx of Unnatural Links warnings this was coupled with the advent of Google’s Penguin Algorithm and we saw sites plummet, businesses close, a mad craze happened while SEO’s across the Globe tried to remove links and then Google introduced the Disavow tool.
Well Rand Fishkin mentioned some ideas back in 2010 and I’ll use his quote before I start this article.
First off, let me just say that there are a lot of people smarter and more experienced in scalably attacking web spam than I am working in the Search Quality division at Google and specifically on the Spam team.
- Rand Fishkin
This article focus’s on some of my work over the past twelve months in particular relation to SERP Penalties and Unnatural Links Warnings. it’s also very timely because of the recent uproar across the industry with Interflora being penalized. (more…)
Last Year I wrote a post about 16 ways to visualise back link data, to be honest I could have listed a hundred but didn’t for two reasons, one blog writing does takes time and two I listed ones I often used and found productive in one form or another.
Of course the landscape in search has changed over the past 12 months with the obvious question, how reliable is link data when a disavow tool has been introduced?
In November this year I decided to book a holiday for over Christmas, in particular a SKI Holiday. I of course looked on line initially to gauge prices and then went into Thomson & Tomas Cook branches (Off Line.)
Firstly what I realised is that these travel companies may be some of the biggest in the UK, however in their stores they general market Holidays in the Sun, when it came to ski-ing (This is based on the representatives I spoke to) they were not much use.
I decided to go back on-line because I had specific requirements I wasn’t willing to book without talking to someone, I called a company called Crystal Ski. I realised very quickly that Crystal provide Ski & Snowboard holidays and so could give me all the advice I needed and couldn’t get in a general holiday shop or from a general Online holiday site.
I decided to make the purchase via phone and off course forgot about it.
I’d like to thank Justin Parks for highlighting this News today about “Video Hits Twitter” with the Vine iPhone App.
VINE LABS INC have created an App (iPhone Only currently / Android is planned to be released) which allows users to create a six second looping video which they can post to twitter. The APP’s development co-insides with a recent acquisition twitter made back in 2012 of the Start up “Vine”. – The app was actually launched before twitter purchased the company.
So hope you have all enjoyed Christmas, I have two children (one more on the way) and Christmas is very much a time of reflection. Partly because its the one time in the year when I actually shut down (at least for a few days). As I sit down to write this post some people are still enjoying the festivity and some are back in work getting ready for 2013.
So I’ll admit I love researched, data driven posts (Little Geeky, but that’s what floats my boat) but I thought I’d share with you some of the articles, videos and blogs which I have found useful, inspiring or influential over the past twelve months. (more…)
SASCON is most known for their two day conference once a year but the organisers also bring a smaller version of the event, which is much more focussed topic wise and is only half a day. Last week SASCON organised an afternoon about mobile and local. (more…)
Earlier this year I was speaking on a Panel with Will Critchlow at A4U Expo London “you-are-the-weakest-link-goodbye“. It was chaired by James Ray of Forward 3D and one of the points Will raised was that if you had an email database you could actually import the list of emails into Facebook and then target the applicable Facebook accounts for those email addresses with ads.
I liked this idea and so as soon as I was back in the office I started a little research into how this could be done… However I found very little information. Of course there was details about how you can import a list of custom email addresses for you Facebook Page and send out a message, but in my experience this has not worked so well.
My Next Step, I called the UK team of Facebook Directly, apart from trying to sell me something they advised that targeting ads to custom email addresses couldn’t be done. They did advise this might be something available in the US but it wasn’t currently available in the UK.
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