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Google Changes Algorithm to Clean Up Clutter

by ~ March 4th, 2011

Amidst the recent peak of national press attention and chatter around search engine optimization (SEO), Google announced last week, via their official blog, an update to the Google algorithm. This algo change is designed to deliver more high-quality search results to its users. The purpose for this action by Google seems multifaceted and appears to be:

a) Part of Google’s response to recent questions over their search quality.
b) A direct attack on content farms. Content farms are mass-producers of content designed almost exclusively to deliver rankings in search engines – which compete with websites that may be considered more highly relevant.

The algorithm change was intended to improve the quality of sites that are surfacing in Google’s index, and as such, improve the consumer search experience. Because of this action Google has taken, most commentators are focusing on whether Demand Media and its competitors in the content market have been affected.  According to Demand Media, there has been no affect – and that seems to be backed up by some compelling data from Sistrix, a company that monitors search engine rankings regularly with a dataset of one million keywords. Following Google’s update to their algorithm, Sistrix published a list detailing the 25 biggest losers impacted by the change. As we might expect, the list is crammed full of content farms, most of which the average searcher has likely never heard of. However, many in the search industry expected to see more of Demand Media’s properties factored into the list. Continue reading >>

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Google Hangs An “Out of Business” Sign On JCPenney’s SEO Practices

by ~ February 17th, 2011

On February 12, the New York Times (NYT) ran a story on JCPenney and the means by which they came to enjoy dominance in Google’s search results.  The article showed how, through illicit “black hat” search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, JCPenney had managed to achieve prominent rankings across all of their major product categories. Often times, the retailer ranked higher than brand-owners’ sites for some of the products that are sold on jcpenney.com.  Through their investigations, the NYT discovered that there was an extensive paid linking program that was artificially inflating JCPenney’s rankings across a wide variety of search phrases. This type of prohibited optimization tactic violates Google’s terms of service. If these practices are employed and discovered, brands run the risk of penalization within – or removal from – Google’s search results.

Since the publication of the story, JCPenney has seen one of the most dominant search ranking campaigns in the market reduced by algorithmic penalties before being shredded by manual penalties applied by Google. While representatives of JCPenney claim innocence, and no proof of actual authorization or participation by Penney’s has been uncovered, the judgment has been rendered with rankings that had previously hit #1 for the company now being found in the range of position 70 on Google. Continue reading >>

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Are You Ready For App Optimization?

by ~ January 28th, 2011

Are you ready for the coming year and all the innovations in the search space that we are bound to see along the way?  We have all seen, and hopefully reacted to, the changes across the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) throughout 2010. From Google’s inclusion of video, news, local and real-time results, to Bing’s potentially game-changing data deal with Facebook that allows them to personalize by prioritizing websites that have been endorsed by your social network, it was a landmark year for innovation in the presentation of search results.2010 may have left some marketers flat-footed and reevaluating how their SEO strategy should be integrated with their social media activity. Instead of looking back, I want to look at what might be next. I posted previously about a probable development in the organic search algorithms – the use of more social indicators for ranking purposes – but in this post I want to take a look at what the engines might start indexing and ranking next.

Neilson placed 2010 U.S. smartphone penetration at 31%. There are over 250,000 apps in the iTunes App Store; over 80,000 apps in the Android Market and a trailing 6,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace – although I’ve seen figures as high as 300,000+, 130,000+ for the Apple App Store and Android Market respectively.Naturally, users tend to find their apps through the various app stores, however, it seems like a natural next step for the search engines to surface an app listing in response to a user search – particularly from a mobile device – when there is an app that delivers the answer that they are looking for (whether they knew that there was ‘an app for that’ or not). While there are some results appearing from the iTunes store – that Apple wisely redirects through to the application itself when clicked through on an iPhone, rather than just taking a user to the online iTunes store page – they do not yet appear in the listing as a ‘click to download’ app, which seems like a fairly logical progression in the personalization of search results. And from the other side, Apple is showing the way (again…) to Windows Phone and Android – in this case for delivering a good app-store user experience from the search results – as currently neither store has any results showing in their search results. If users want to see apps in their search results, the app stores need to make those apps available to crawlers for indexing and, in turn, visibility in the SERPs. When this happens, app-owners need to make sure they are prepared and have delivered optimized assets to their app stores.

My point is this – there are ways to optimize your apps for visibility within their various ‘natural” environments, and developers and brands alike should have been optimizing their app assets for small-screen app-store success up until now – but to future-proof your app-optimization, it would be worth thinking about how to make them rank and how they resolve in the regular search results as well. Time will tell if this potential next step in organic search evolution comes along – will Google only surface Android apps? Will Bing only surface Windows Phone Apps? Will they both only surface apps that don’t reduce search volume? Angry Birds, anyone?

Time will tell on how those SERPs shape up this year, but in the short term, it can’t hurt to be ready.

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SEO Tips from the Experts: The Truth About 301 Redirects

by ~ December 20th, 2010

301 redirects are an important tool for web developers and SEO’s, but sadly, 301s don’t pass 100% of the page rank through. This video blog will help you learn more about how 301 redirects actually work.


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Harnessing Social Data for Personalized Search

by ~ December 16th, 2010

The Oscars, Google’s search algorithm, the Eurovision Song Contest– they all famously choose the “best” answer to their questions by finding out who recommends whom -or what. The Oscars poll members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) – “the Academy” to its friends – to see who gets the most votes in a series of categories.  Google looks at the number of incoming links into a webpage, and the authority of those pages, to determine the authority of a webpage. The Eurovision Song Contest gives each competing nation several votes of different values that they can cast for anyone other than themselves.  It seems like a democratic system, on the surface;  at least it is if you’re a member of the Academy, own a website, or if you’re on the Eurovision committee for your country. Could you imagine only letting some people vote for your country’s president? It all seems a little elitist to me.  What about your poor huddled masses?  Most are not members of the Academy, don’t have their own website, nor are they living the dream of being part of their country’s Eurovision committee.  I’m thinking a lot more though, are probably members of one social network or another: Facebook (originally an elitist closed eco-system itself), MySpace, LinkedIn, Windows Live, to name just a few. Might there be something there that could  really democratize the web?

Last year, Bing managed to incorporate something that Google has been chasing for a while: true social search – as opposed to just universal search surfacing social content in the search results. Bing’s partnership with Facebook has given them access to the industry-standard social network. A hive of data that can be tapped to give even more personalized search results. If you are looking for a restaurant, and are logged into your Facebook account, then Bing will deliver search results that highlight restaurants that your friends “Like” – a true recommendation from a friend – on top of the algorithmic selections that they deliver. This is a huge step forward for personalization – and is one of the reasons that both Google and Microsoft were chasing a partnership with Facebook – although I don’t think that Bing received the acclaim that they deserve for this innovation.  It’s an interesting -and a positive-system, as there is no “Dislike” button, but as seen with relatively recent developments in Google’s search results, they are starting to consider the sentiment of pages that are linking to other pages to ensure that a page that is linked to with a lot of negative reviews is not gaining a top result, and as such greater exposure and more sales from the SERPs.

The interesting part of this to me, is a question: “What is the next data source?” I realize there are a lot of people busy working on or trying to work out what the next Facebook is, but I’m talking solely from the data perspective: Google needs to find an equivalent to Facebook, which is no easy task. They have made several attempts over the years to foster social networks of various sorts. One that I noticed recently was the Google Profile Pages – an opportunity to have users link through to their social networks, Twitter feeds, YouTube profiles, so that Google can understand what each user is doing and where. Google does not want to be reliant on a third party for their social indicator data if at all possible, and Bing shouldn’t rest on its laurels either. Microsoft has Windows Live, and could integrate a “Like” function – or a grading system if they wanted some more indicative data – fairly easily into the product to start generating their own “peer review data” for personalization purposes.

Either way, there is a potential sea-change in the way that Google, Bing et al are ranking pages – could social peer review be the new link-juice?  It presents an opportunity to ask not only the Academy, web developers, or committee members, but to ask the common person what their take is on a topic, and use that information to make tailored recommendations to their social-network-searcher-friend. Is this the wisdom of trusted crowds?

Can Microsoft capitalize on their lead? Is Google’s brand strong enough to get the data they need to take on the combination of Bing and Facebook? There is a lot to come in this space in 2011 as the search superpowers fight this one out and try to improve their recommendations and personalization.  Bring on the New Year!

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SEO 101: Link Building Basics

by ~ November 15th, 2010

Here is a quick explanation on why links are important for SEO, and how to optimize them to boost your organic search rankings.

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SEO 101: Page Rank Explained

by ~ November 15th, 2010

Page rank is an important factor in search engine rankings, but it’s often misunderstood. Here is a visual guide to what page rank is, and how search engines use it to determine the rankings of results.

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SEO 101: Meta Keywords Tag Optimization

by ~ November 15th, 2010

The meta keyword tag was heavily used for SEO in the late 90′s, but recently became obsolete when webmasters began abusing them for higher rankings. Should you still be optimizing the keywords on every page of your website?

Find out in this video blog.

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SEO 101: Alt Tag Optimization

by ~ September 25th, 2010

Images are an important page element to optimize in any SEO campaign. Learn a few basic tips on how to create and optimize an image alt tag for search engines in this video blog.

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SEO 101: Title Tag Optimization

by ~ September 23rd, 2010

Title tags are still an important element in search engine optimization. Here is a visual tutorial of how to create an HTML document with properly optimized title tags.

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