Archive for May, 2012

More guidance on building high-quality sites

Published by Todd Herman on May 29th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Friday, May 06, 2011 at 11:22 AM

Webmaster level: All

In recent months we’ve been especially focused on helping people find high-quality sites in Google’s search results. The “Panda” algorithm change has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites, so most of you reading have nothing to be concerned about. However, for the sites that may have been affected by Panda we wanted to provide additional guidance on how Google searches for high-quality sites.

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals. Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. In fact, since we launched Panda, we’ve rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.

What counts as a high-quality site?

Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content. The recent “Panda” change tackles the difficult task of algorithmically assessing website quality.   Taking a step back, we wanted to explain some of the ideas and research that drive the development of our algorithms.

Below are some questions that one could use to assess the “quality” of a page or an article. These are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves as we write algorithms that attempt to assess site quality.  Think of it as our take at encoding what we think our users want.

Of course, we aren’t disclosing the actual ranking signals used in our algorithms because we don’t want folks to game our search results; but if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue:

  • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  • Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
  • Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
  • Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
  • Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
  • Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
  • Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
  • Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
  • How much quality control is done on content?
  • Does the article describe both sides of a story?
  • Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
  • Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
  • Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
  • For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
  • Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
  • Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
  • Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
  • Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
  • Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  • Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
  • Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
  • Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
  • Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Writing an algorithm to assess page or site quality is a much harder task, but we hope the questions above give some insight into how we try to write algorithms that distinguish higher-quality sites from lower-quality sites.

What you can do

We’ve been hearing from many of you that you want more guidance on what you can do to improve your rankings on Google, particularly if you think you’ve been impacted by the Panda update. We encourage you to keep questions like the ones above in mind as you focus on developing high-quality content rather than trying to optimize for any particular Google algorithm.

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

We’re continuing to work on additional algorithmic iterations to help webmasters operating high-quality sites get more traffic from search. As you continue to improve your sites, rather than focusing on one particular algorithmic tweak, we encourage you to ask yourself the same sorts of questions we ask when looking at the big picture. This way your site will be more likely to rank well for the long-term. In the meantime, if you have feedback, please tell us through our Webmaster Forum. We continue to monitor threads on the forum and pass site info on to the search quality team as we work on future iterations of our ranking algorithms.

Written by , Google Fellow

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Another step to reward high-quality sites

Published by Todd Herman on May 29th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

 Webmaster Central Blog

Google has said before that search engine optimization, or SEO, can be positive and constructive—and we’re not the only ones. Effective search engine optimization can make a site more crawlable and make individual pages more accessible and easier to find. Search engine optimization includes things as simple as keyword research to ensure that the right words are on the page, not just industry jargon that normal people will never type.
“White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.
The opposite of “white hat” SEO is something called “black hat webspam” (we say “webspam” to distinguish it from email spam). In the pursuit of higher rankings or traffic, a few sites use techniques that don’t benefit users, where the intent is to look for shortcuts or loopholes that would rank pages higher than they deserve to be ranked. We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.
The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs. We also want the “good guys” making great sites for users, not just algorithms, to see their effort rewarded. To that end we’ve launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don’t make much content available “above the fold.”
In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.
Here’s an example of a webspam tactic like keyword stuffing taken from a site that will be affected by this change:

Of course, most sites affected by this change aren’t so blatant. Here’s an example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.
The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice.
We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites. As always, we’ll keep our ears open for feedback on ways to iterate and improve our ranking algorithms toward that goal.
Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer

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Real link building is more important than ever

Published by Todd Herman on May 29th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Much has been said about the importance of a natural backlink profile since Google released the Penguin algorithm update. Is it possible to actively build links and still have a natural backlink profile?

Real link building is more important than ever

The importance of link building hasn’t decreased with Google’s Penguin update. Actually, link building has become more important than before. The difference is that link spamming doesn’t work anymore.

Blasting your link to thousands of sites and fully automated backlink networks have lost their power. Given the fact that these links never were useful to real Internet users, it’s remarkable that Google took so long to devaluate that type of backlinks.

Link building is not about manipulating search rankings (surprise)

Higher search engine rankings are a natural by-product if you build links correctly. The main purpose of link building (and SEO in general) is to get targeted visitors to your website.

Backlinks can help you with the following:

  1. backlinks can increase the search engine rankings of your site
  2. backlinks can help you to get targeted visitors
  3. backlinks can help your company reputation

If you focus your link building activities on 2 and 3 then 1 will come naturally.

Link building can lead to a natural backlink profile

The reason why some people think that link building leads to an unnatural backlink profile is that they confuse link building with link spamming. SEO is not spamming and the whole SEO industry has suffered a lot from people using the term ‘SEO’ to sell their spamming products.

The key to a natural backlink profile is a simple question: “Could the link exist without asking for it?” Many people just don’t link to your site because they don’t know it or because they don’t have the time to research links about a topic.

Help these people who would naturally link to your site by informing them about linkworthy content on your site that is related to their site. Asking the right people for the right reason often leads to much better results than the scattershot approach that is used by many companies.

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Contextual Link Building

Published by Todd Herman on May 29th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Most The Effective Inbound Links!

It is necessary to hire the best SEO Company that stays updated with the latest buzz in the search engine algorithms and have the ability to adopt novel SEO techniques without much delay.

From our long experience in SEO industry we have been able to provide strong and incremental boost to our client’s websites through natural link building, now we strongly advice contextual links, Google and other search engines like content based links. We will provide you great, high valued and quality links which will help you in long term rankings based on reputation of those links.

In Contextual Link Building, We will provide links from blogs posts and content rich sites. We create blog post as per your web site theme having links within post of your web site URL with different anchor texts specified by you. Our long term approach, expertise and quality of links provide you top rankings in search engines. Google love themed, quality and high authority links which are coming from contents related to your industry. In contextual links, PR has not much value. We provide quality based on contents!

Why You Should Purchase:

» High quality links from most relevant and unique content – No duplicacy

» Link juice from different blogs

» Quick boost in search engine rankings

» Most efficient and quickest way to be among top 10

» Low cost packages with high value

» 10 quality back links for each content link

» Timely project execution with detailed report

We will write unique content related to your website and can put upto 2 anchor text in 1 article. We are using organic & search engine friendly Contextual Link Building techniques and posting no more than 20 submissions per day so that equal amount of work done on regular basis. In web, content is king so links should be placed in content that will help us to make our website catchier by search.

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7 Reasons Content Marketing is Better Than Link Building

Published by Todd Herman on May 25th, 2012 - in SEO Company

Content marketing and link building both have their merits in the realm of search marketing. However, the tale of the tape reveals that content marketing has a distinct advantage over link building for marketers. Here are seven reasons why.

1. You Can Measure the Value of Content Easier Than you Can a Link

I often get asked by clients how much is a link worth? By this they mean what value is it giving to a site? Of course, this is very difficult to quantify. Even if it is contributing towards an increase in rankings or traffic, how do you put a value on of this in terms how much of a contribution it is having without considering other factors?

Alternatively, if you create a piece of content for a site, you will know how many links that content has generated, how many social votes it has, how many referral visits it’s got, how much organic search traffic it’s created and which search terms achieved rankings etc.

And more importantly, how much revenue has that content generated you? With content, you can provide a client with that answer (e.g., one days worth of effort on content creation has generated you $x,000 is so much easier for a CMO to quantify than the same on link building which “has helped towards increasing our rankings”).

2. It’s Natural

You are writing content and naturally generating links as a result of writing great content. People are choosing to blog about it, share it socially, and generally create a buzz because it’s interesting to them!

Compare this with competitor analysis or submission based link building – there’s a common trend there which shows that these websites are not linking to you because they like you, they’re linking to you because you asked them to (or even paid them to).

3. Good Content Writers are Cheaper than Good Link Builders

Hiring good SEOs is hard. Link builders in particular.

However, hiring a good copywriter really isn’t that difficult. There are lots of people out there with strong copywriting skills – you just need to identify the creative ones who are good at blogging and generating social attention.

4. It’s More Scalable

Building a strong SEO team really isn’t easy. You either:

  • Have to get in people with experience, paying a premium for this and have to hope they are as good as they seemed in the interview.
  • Take on people with limited experience and accept that it’s going to take you a minimum of 12 months to get them close to where you want them to be.
  • Get it wrong – in which case you need to realise you got it wrong quickly!

So scaling a content team becomes a much easier task because copywriters are cheaper, they’re easier to find and they’re more replaceable – so while you obviously want to retain them, it doesn’t set you back too far if they leave. Plus you can mix the skills you have in your team as it grows, so don’t just hire bloggers – hire video producers, infographic designers, and community managers.

To move forward, it’s vital you hire the right people – and building a content team is much less of a risk than building an SEO team is ever likely to be.

5. It’s More Defensible to Algorithm Updates

Anyone who’s suffered from a Penguin or Panda attack will tell you Google loves brands. So what do you do if you’ve been hit by either of these? Easy, you build a brand!

The days of chasing Google’s algorithm, and finding the next quick fix or SEO tactic, are disappearing quickly. So instead of focusing on whatever type of link hasn’t been hit by a penalty yet – make content marketing the center of your SEO strategy instead.

You’re likely to see much greater rewards this way and it’s long-term. So you’ll be the one looking forward to Google’s next algorithm update, instead of being the one scared if you’ve been caught out and worrying that your whole business model has to be re-visited!

6. Authoritative Writers Are The Future

Social media is all about people – if you want to assess a company’s social strategy, it’s not just about a brand or fan page – it’s about the people who work there, too.

This is where Google+ authorship comes in. Google wants to know about the people who write on websites and blogs – and if they know this they will have more trust in you. If you write frequently for authoritative sources and you’ve built a strong social footprint, they’ll like you even more!

So set up Google authorship and encourage social promotion around your content from your authors and bloggers.

7. It’s More Fun

Who wants to dig through thousands of rows full of Excel data to try and replicate links or sit for hours on end submitting to directories or article sites?

And who wants to write creative content and be social online, building up connections to help you share that content?

I’m sure some people who are very good at both. But I know which one I’d rather do – and I think I know which strategy Google’s algorithm prefers!

by ,

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Linkedin Marketing Professional – SEO Expert

Published by Todd Herman on May 24th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Joining Linkedin was one of the best online business decisions we could make. From a progressive website designer to a top notch SEO Expert, there is pretty much nothing that you cant find in Linkedin.

It is a north America Internet network consisting of a multitude of service providers. Join Linkedin, and your sure to take your small business to the next level by finding a Linkedin Marketing Professional that knows how to market Linkedin.

You are able to start a group to network and discuss different abilities and difficulties of others. Joining other groups makes for a great place to gain leads and conversions no matter what you offer.

Conducting yourself as a profesionl at all times is essetial as most HNWIs (high net-worth individuals) are only lookers and dont comment in groups, rather contact you through your websuite. So what you comment on in groups, HNWI’s will see.

A good rule of thumb on linkedin and any social or business network is that someone is always watching you. Make sure your comments are professional and knowable. The more of an authority in your niche the more you will get noticed and your leads will increase. SEO Expert, CanadaSEO Professional Ltd.

 

 

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Jenn Owen of Langley, B.C. won an amazing $500 – Stunt BUXX

Published by Todd Herman on May 24th, 2012 - in Canada SEO Professional Ltd.

Jenn Owen of Langley, B.C. won an amazing $500 for only submitting her idea for our Stunt Buxx ‘Canada Day’ Contest. Visit this link to see co-owner Ryan Bennett literally give away 500. BUXX! Visit YouTube and see what the commotion is all bout! – Video Contests  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soBwt-Aoi-E&feature=g-upl.

If you are looking to win money in our online video contests that are real contests to win money then visit http://www.stuntbuxx.com.

  • Online Video Contests
  • Contests To Win Money
  • Online Contests
  • Win Money
  • Viral Media Challenge

Take care and we will see you there!

 

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Google Places is Toast!

Published by Todd Herman on May 24th, 2012 - in SEO Company

The Death Clock Is Ticking on Google Places:

Google Places like a thorn in your side?  You are not alone….

Be patient because good news is on the way. To recognize the inevitable changes that are planned for Google Places, you just need to step back and look at Google’s current business focus on Social, Local, and Mobile (So-Lo-Mo). Google Places is an old technology that is broken. Automotive Dealers have reported that their reviews appear and disappear on a regular basis. Google Places business addresses and phone numbers have been reported to revert back to older versions that were updated.

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Visualize Your Backlinks with Google Fusion Tables

Published by Todd Herman on May 22nd, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Visualize Your Backlinks with Google Fusion Tables

Data can be boring. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good spreadsheet as much as I love a good novel, but whenever I can get away with it, I’d much rather just see the movie.

Visualization and presentation have never been more important then they are today. The amount of data that we collect, process, and analyze is overwhelming. Have you ever peeked into the backlink profile for a domain that has over a million links? Can you even imagine what a million links looks like? I can’t. Luckily, we’ve come a long way in terms of visualization since the invention of the pie chart.

Introducing . . . Fusion Tables.

In typical Google fashion, Google quietly rolled out a brand new “Experimental” version of their Fusion Table application a few weeks ago. If you haven’t had the chance (or reason) to play with Fusion Tables yet, the time has come. Consider it Google Spreadsheets on steroids, or Google’s answer to “big data.” I’ll be writing a lot more on how to harness the power of Fusion Tables to create massive databases, but for now, I just want to focus on one incredibly awesome feature–the Network Graph.

Who said that competitor backlink research couldn’t be fun? Aside from hosting enormous amounts of data, Fusion Tables can also visualize the connections between your data in a simple, interactive map. This new Network Graph feature takes seconds to set up and can have many different applications.

You can view the completed Network Graph and Fusion Table here.

Want to SEE who is linking to you? Here’s how:

1. Gather your data

For this experiment, I gathered the backlink profiles for four companies in the SEO industry, SEER Interactive, Distilled, SEOMoz, and Zamolution (who rank #1 for “Philadelphia SEO Company”). What I wanted to see is how are these four sites connected? I pulled all of this data using SEOMoz’s ever-so-helpful Open Site Explorer. You can gather your data any way you choose.

2. Clean up your data.

If you’re pulling a lot data from a lot different places, you might want to clean it up. Fusion Tables will actually do this for you and you can even merge tables and aggregate data via the web interface, however, it is still “experimental” and there are still some bugs so I prefer to have everything in one pretty .csv.

3. Create a new Fusion Table

Head on over to Google Docs / Google Drive / Whatever We’re Supposed To Call It Now and Create > New Table.

(If there’s no option for Table, try logging in with a non-Google Apps account)

From there, it’s pretty straight forward. You can either upload a CSV, use an existing Google Spreadsheet or create an empty table.

After you’re done uploading, you can choose which columns you want to import.

4. Create a Network Graph

Once you have your massive table of data, you can create your Network graph under Experiment > Network Graph

Set Vertex 1 to URL and Vertex 2 to Target URL and weigh by Number of Links

BOOM. That’s it. Now the fun begins.

As you increase the number of nodes shown, more and more blue links begin to appear. At around 2,000 nodes, it’ll start to become unresponsive. You can also use the Filter feature and filter out all links that have a Page Authority lower than 30.

Analyze This

So what does this tell us (other than that SEOMoz = the Death Star)? Well, for starters, if I were an SEO company, I’d want to make sure I was getting a piece of this pie. This visualization gives us a very clear picture on where we’re getting our links from.

Need help identifying a link network? Here’s your tool. Want to find out who the Death Star is in your industry? Here’s your tool.

Social Media

If you’re like me, you probably thought that this kind of Network Graph visualization would be great for visualizing social media data. It is. Here I pulled some Twitter data from some of the big names in the SEO industry to see who is following who.


A Few Things To Consider:

This is barely scratching the surface of what Fusion Tables can do. Since this is “Experimental” also don’t expect things to run smoothly. This feature could also disappear over night (although I hope it doesn’t). Believe me, there is A LOT more that can be done with Fusion Tables and this is a great push by Google to help make data less intimidating.

Written by Mark Cianfrani

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Back to late 1994 with some of the first search engines

Published by Todd Herman on May 18th, 2012 - in Guest Post SEO

Our personal SEM achievments date back to late 1994 with some of the first search engines like WebCrawler, Lycos and Yahoo search listings manipulation.

Our SEO company services have grown and evolved to what is now one of the top services in Canada’s existance to date.
Canada SEO Professional Ltd.

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