Posts About ‘Google’

Penguins, Anchor Text and Headaches: What Do We Do Now?

As a link builder, what particularly interested/scared me most about the Penguin update was the part which penalised the use of over-optimised anchor text. I must’ve read 10 blog posts about it but still, in amongst the bumph remains my biggest question; what anchor text am I supposed to use now? I’m not going to focus on the Penguin update as a whole, instead I’m going to delve into the world of exact match anchor texts, and try to work out exactly what us link builders are supposed to do now that the Penguins are in force. (more…)

Google Ranking Factors 2012 in One Overview

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…)

Google Launches “Webmaster Academy”

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…)

Google Celebrates Your Birthday

Maybe you already noticed in the last couple of years that Google is celebrating your own birthday with a special doodle. When the magical moment of your birthday has arrived then go to the homepage of the search engine and you will see the logo, when hovering over the image with your mouse the the text ‘Happy Birthday [Frontname]’ will show, after clicking on the doodle there’s no search query like with normal doodles but in this case your own profile on Google+ will open instead.

Google shows the doodle based on the date in your profile and ofcourse the logo is only shown when you are logged in. Tis started in 2010 and recently Google renewed the logo I noticed today after opening the homepage, the new version has more cakes and firework then the previous version, both versions below.

In any case it´s a nice way to congratulate users with there birthday, so thanks Google!

Previous version

Is Google Declaring War by Banning an Agency for Mistakes on Clients Sites?

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…)

Larry Page: “Search is not just about finding things. It’s about taking actions”

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…

The EU Threatens Google, But Have They Got a Case..?

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…)

Facebook IPO: Can It Beat Google?

Last Friday Facebook went ‘public’. Facebook stocks went up and down but did not as well as many would have thought beforehand. Still, Facebook got a lot more money from going public than Google did back in the days. But that probably isn’t that surprising considering the change in time and the more digital focus these days.

Both Google and Facebook make their money through advertising. And that money is what investors are after. So how much chance will investors have when it comes to getting a lot of money out of both? Which one is best to focus on? Wordstream made the below infographic to figure out just that. (more…)

10 Post Penguin Link Building Tips

So Penguin has come and gone, and you are still wondering what do I do. You may be unsure where to target your link building efforts, as you are afraid that any links you may build can make your situation worse. I’ll be honest, I had a client see a drop on two of their sites, and while it was not my fault (BAD LINKBUILDER!), it requires immediate attention. So I started at the top, working through our link builders years of work to see just how far off of google’s mark we were. Here are 10 of the maxims for her to use in future link-building efforts, and I hope they are of use to you and your webmaster! (more…)

Google Launches Knowledge Graph: Direct (not SEO-able) Answers

At SMX London last Monday Amit Singhal was already talking about the direction Google was going in. He there gave the example of the Taj Mahal. Are you looking for information on the monument or the closest Indian restaurant with that name. Google wants to give the right answer on queries like that.

Last night Amit Singhal gave the same example in a blogpost which announced the launch of the “Knowledge Graph“, it is the actual roll out of the tests we saw last week. With Knowledge Graph Google wants to “help you discover new information quickly and easily.” Simply said: its about answers, not the links. At SMX Singhal also said “Google has always been about giving the best answer on search queries” and this is an extension to that given.

The data Google is showing is gathered from specific sources which means the SEOs can’t ‘touch’ it and will be part of the discussion on whether Google is ‘stealing’ traffic from sites.

What is it?

The Knowledge Graph is about connecting people, places and things and giving facts and data about the search you are doing. You are getting more information on the query than just the links to other sites. Google is actually giving you direct information in the SERPS.

The Knowledge Graph does a few things:

Find the right thing
Google figures out, based on your personalized data, what exactly you mean when you are looking for the Taj Mahal. But next to that they also show a box with results which could be about the other meanings of Taj Mahal.

Getting the best summary
Google says it can now better understand your query so it will give you facts on the search you are looking for and primarily shows you the data which fits your needs best. This is what we spotted last week as a test.

Deeper and broader
Finally Google says they give us more specific types of information, right in the search results.

How do they know?

Two questions arise: how does Google know what exactly we want and where do they get the data from?

To start with the first question: Google studies the users and looks at relationships, not just in sites but all entities together. They are taking the social graph and the link graph and are combining the data from there together. In short: they are tracking our every move to figure out what kind of results we would like to have returned. Are you looking for (Indian) food or restaurants a lot? Your “Taj Mahal” search will show you more information on the Indian restaurants close to you, while if Google has figured out you love travel or culture you will see more about the monument.

The second question is where do they get that information? Google itself says they primarily use public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. But it could also be that the data comes from another site. Google says it “currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.” And at Searchengineland Danny Sullivan noted that Amit Singhal has said: “Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it”.

First step to the end of SEO?

In his post Singhal also points out this is “a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.” Google is moving into the direction the Wall Street Journal was talking about: giving straight answers and ‘ignoring’ the regular ten blue links.

Is Google really moving away from the ten blue links and are we as website owners doomed? Is this the actual first step to the end of SEO as we know it?

According to Singhal at SMX this kind of traffic is not taking away traffic from most sites but some sites might lose some traffic. That sounds like trying to be politically correct and it reminds me of the things that were said about the ‘not provided’ in Google Anlaytics: they said it would be a small percentage, but it seems to be growing.

SEO will not ‘die’ over this, but it does mean that search is becoming much more about being visible within the results, you need to stand out, so the focus of many search marketers will not just be on ranking, but also on optimizing for the SERPS: making sure you stand out.

Google however is step by step changing search with first Search Plus Your World and now this. Whether or not they are changing it in the right direction remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure: they are far from done…

Find more on Techmeme, Searchengineland and Google’s official post

Google+ify Or Die

Danny started by giving the background on Google+ and how we need to engage with it to expand and future proof our SEO strategies.

Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor, State of Search

Bas started by going through the numbers. Google + is still very small when compared to Facebook from an engagement and a visitor perspective. This leads to apathy towards Google+ but there is more to it than that. Eric Schmidt’s recent quote about everything moving towards the Google + platform in the future shows how important it is.

Mind set

People are using Google+ because they have to. The mind set is key. The most basic human needs is the need to connect with others. It’s a nice sentiment but how is it important? Google has started analysing how people work and are translating that to the search engine. People trust authorities, People want what others have which is largely fuelled by jealousy. We are also open to peer pressure. We also like to spread the word about products and other people.

Google + is bringing in these elements into the search environment. Stop thinking they will kick out Facebook, it’s to get a grip on who we are. It’s all about data. We are getting personalised results in the US already and that’s coming to Europe soon. This is all to figure out who you are, who your friends are, what you do and to which entities you are connected. Go to http://google.com/s2/search/social#gd and you can see who Google thinks you are connected to. These connections power Google social search and they are constantly trying to get more of the offline world online.

How do these factors influence the results?

They are showing authoritative people within each sector. Rel Author is also powering this. Personalised search is also sharing other things like who is at which event. The images increase the amount of click through for those results. You can also thank people that share your content. Google results are also showing conversations in Google+ and you can participate in that conversation in the search results.

How do you use this?

People are more interested in the stuff their social circle share than your stuff. Your target audience are the people that share your content as much as the people that are buying your product. Find your brand advocates. Make sure that you make your content shareable. Work on your social circle and create content that your market wants.

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Strategy, SEOptimise

Kevin wanted to share how much juice you get from Google+, in theory annotations can increase your CTR by 5- 10% according to Google.

1) Miele: 19% CTR without +1s and 0% with the +1s.

2) Soft32 has 456 people that like their brand page – 9% CTR without +1s and 5% CTR with +1s

Overall in both CTR cases G+ had a negative impact but it actually makes sense because the +1 listings are less relevant than the informational results. The second reason is that the brand CTR is always going to be big compared to the deeper pages. Kevin argues that the CTR is really not the major win. The win is that you are getting traffic you would not otherwise get.

He tested clients with G+ vs. clients without.

They saw a 19.5% decrease in organic traffic for clients that aren’t using Google+. The converse was true with clients seeing a 43% increase in clients that did use Google+.

Asos is doing a lot with Google+ which has had a major search impact for Asos.com search impact. They are seeing a 100% improvement on organic traffic.

This doesn’t mean that Google+ has a direct correlation to organic rankings. Google+ doesn’t really matter at the moment in the algo but it is very likely to be there in the future. Google + is being pushed like crazy with 353 million pages indexed.

With Google penguin making things harder links are becoming more outdated as an authority element. This paves the way for social signals to form a bigger part of the algorithm.

5 tips for G+

1) Focus your SEO strategy on great content, don’t chase the algorithm, build great content

2) Build a great content team. Community managers, bloggers, content strategists, infographic designers, guest authors and video producers are all key parts of SEO teams in the future. Bring in people that can make your content stand out more.

3) Use rel=author to get more value

4) Create a G+ brand page and link to your site this syncs up your home page + 1s with your brand + 1s. Brand page +1s have been shown to influence search more than home page + 1s

5) Go in once a day and share your post and comment on your friend’s posts

Google + Tools:

1) View your social connections to a scary level (link is above in Bas’ presentation)

2) Find influencers on findpeopleonplus.com

3) Analyse your reach on Google+ Ripples and evaluate people that share people like you

4) Social sources analytics stream in GA

So in summary G+ has a negative CTR but that doesn’t matter because they are ranking better because of it. Ensure that content marketing is a central part of your SEO strategy.

How to Rank Number One on Google According to Matt Cutts

It’s the question everybody wants answered: how to rank number one on Google. And since Matt Cutts is answering questions in his Google Webmaster videos, why not asking him how to rank number one? This video might give you answer or might not…