Posts About ‘Search Quality’

Easy step-by-step guide to finding low quality links

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2012 was an amazing year for link building, a lot changed and to be honest I’m glad those changes happened. I think it is necessary in order for our industry to grow up and be taken more seriously in the marketing space. A lot of us add a huge amount of value to businesses, it’s time we were recognsised for that rather than relying on and being remembered for low quality tactics that should never have worked in the first place.

The first step for many is to undo the work previously done and this starts with finding the low quality links that may have been built many years ago. If you’ve been hit by a penalty, then you’ll also probably want to get them removed. This post is a step-by-step guide to finding what are likely to be low quality links.

This post will use a number of tools to help, however you need to use your own judgement and common sense too and not remove links which are clearly not hurting. I heard stories of people emailing Yoast to remove links from his site – that is just crazy. (more…)

Google Shows Us The Search Quality Meeting

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One of the most named points of criticism towards Google is their openness. In the past when you had a Googler at an event you were sure he or she was not going to say a word more than necessary.

In the past year or so this has changed. Google is much more focussed on openness. It might be triggered by the infringements they have gotten where especially the US government has complained about Google being to ‘vague’ or it might have been triggered by the fact that Google for many has become the ‘big and dangerous’ company and they want their brand image to go back to the ‘tech boys’ it was before.

Fact is they are a lot more open, or at least they seem to be. On conferences Googlers seem more open, Google is now giving us monthly updates on their changes, and this week they post a video of their Search Quality Meeting. An 8 minute video showing us the meeting it is all about, or as Amit Singhal says: “This meeting is the heart of what we do, what we approve, how we run search.” (more…)

An Interview With the Search Quality Alliance

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What would you do if you worked for Google, left and started your own business? You would probably focus on that business and would try to get as much out of it as possible, even using the knowledge you had build up at Google.

So when Six former Googlers from the Search Quality announced they were joining together in something called the “Search Quality Alliance” many immediately thought this was about making money. And using their Google background to do so. It is not. They decided “to share their expertise and evangelize successful White Hat search engine optimization in the search industry”. For free, because they feel it is their duty.

We talked to the team containing of six ex-Googlers from five different countries and with a lot of European focus and asked them about their initiative. (more…)