Since Google's Penguin update people have been worrying about building links and the process they use to build links themselves.
What is the Penguin update all about?
In short, its Google’s latest attack on webspam – that is, those websites Google considers are ‘cheating’ their way to high rankings. Whereas the previous main update – ‘Panda’ – focussed on web content related issues, ‘Penguin’ focuses on the other main ranking factor – your backlinks. So, link farms, comment spam, paid for links, excessive interlinking between related sites, ‘unnatural’ anchor text, facile blog and forum posts are all under the spotlight. Here’s a post for you which will help you with getting your link building right.
How to build links
Firstly, when building links beware it needs to be seen as a natural process and so don’t just think about search engine rankings but think about where you place links and how these places will benefit you're website.
Your current links
As with with anything else it is best to start this process by looking at what you already have and trying to improve this first. The best way to do this is to visit your Google Webmaster account.
When you are logged in click through your links one at a time and check whether the link is on a relevant website; it is in a relevant place on the website and that the link has relevant anchor text. It can be beneficial if the anchor text includes your keyphrase for that page but really it is important that the link isn't simply your domain name. If the link is just your domain name you should see what you can do to change it, this will normally mean emailing the developer of the website that you have a listing on.
Once you have done this you don't only have more of an idea of how many link you have to your website but you also have a starting point which will allow you to track your links in future. So this is where you make a note of how many links you have and download these links so that you have a copy.
Looking at your competitors
Now that your links have been spring cleaned the next obvious point is to look at your competitor links to see if you can get additional online presence through the same areas. There are a couple of tools that are good for this: The SEO Moz Open Site Explorer and Back Link Watch
When using these tools you need to know who your competitors are so you can search for their links. You should already have a handful of competitors that you know of and have used for your keyphrase analysis. You should also type your keyphrases into Google to see if you have other online competitors that you didn't know of.
Once you have a list of domains simply work through these one at a time to see where they have links and if you think that you would benefit from links in the same place. Here you should also see how you can add links to these websites: Whether this is filling in a submission form or contacting a website owner.
Checking a website before building a link
You may of heard the term nofollow. This is a tag that can be added to a link to tell a search engine not to pass any link equity from one website to another and it looks like this:
<a href="http://www.domainname.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text Here</a>
If you only want links that pass equity from their website to your website then you should check the code on their website to see if they include this code. Also if the link is included within JavaScript then normally this link will not pass equity to your website.
So you are looking for code like this:
<a href="http://www.domainname.com">Anchor Text Here</a>
However there might be other attributes included within this such as id, class etc...
(<a class="bright-red" href="http://www.domainname.com">Anchor Text Here</a>)
Obviously when you check for the type of link you will need to look at links that exist on the website already.
You should also have the Google Toolbar installed on your website. This tool among other features has the Google Page Rank feature which allow you to see if a page had a PageRank and information on when it was cached.
Nowadays the Page Rank is only a small factor when looking at the importance of a website. However you should ensure that you are building a link from a website that has been cached by Google. To do this click on the Page Rank button then click on: Google Text Cache. If this gives you a 404 error then do not build a link from this website. If it hasn't been cached it has either been banned by Google or Google doesn't know it exists so the link will not be useful anyway.
Different types of links
There are a lot of different types of websites out there that you can get links from. Here are some of them:
Directories
Searching for directories
There are 2 main types of directories: Specific directories and General directories.
Specific directories are those that are industry or business specific. For example there are lots of directories out there that target travel such as Travel Directory. It is important to get listings on these types of website not only for search engines but to place your website in more potential search areas on the web.
There are literally millions of general directories across the web. For example one great directory is the Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ). It is also useful to be placed on this type of directory, again to increase your websites exposure.
As well as increasing your website exposure links from directories will improve you search engine rankings.
How to add your website to a directory
Here is a guide to show you how to Add your website to a directory
Paid directory listings
Although technically it is okay to pay for a directory listing as long as it isn't paying for a guaranteed place on the directory and is paying for admin costs we recommend not paying for directory listings unless they are with Yahoo or Yell.
Forums and Blogs
In the past these have been seen as good places for links. This can still be good but this should not be simply logging into a blog or forum and and sneaking in a link where you can. Apart from this being very unnatural, in time these links will normally be removed and classed as spam. Also on forums doing this is normally breaking the advertising rules that you signed up for.
However you can build links from blogs and forums overtime by becoming a guest blogger and overtime the webmaster may give you your own author page or something similar where you can add in a mention of your website.
Taking part in forums and blogs may also help with rankings in the future. Now that social media is becoming more important in search being a guest blogger for multiple websites and blogging on your own website will increase your website visibility online.
Finding directories, forums and blogs
As well as finding links through competitors, links can also be found in other ways. A very effective way is by searching for directories, blogs and forums. This can be done by typing your main phrase after a phrase such as blog, directory or forum.
Here is a website that does this for you, all you do is type in your main phrase then click on the different links – Solo SEO. We recommend not solely using Google for this because you can find other links through the other search engines.
Social Bookmarking
There are a lot of social bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and many more that people use more and more nowadays. These are fantastic websites for promoting blog posts but can also be used to promote your domain name as well. To do this you simply visit the website, register with them and start adding your social content. When you add a title for a link this will be the anchor text. Although some of these websites only offer nofollow or JavaScript links they are marketing tools within themselves and can add social equity to your website which as we mentioned earlier is becoming more important.
Articles
There are a lot of article and PR websites online that let you submit articles to them and some offer links back you your website. These links back you your website are normally because you include them within the article or in your personal information as the author of the article. Over the past few years these websites have started to remove most of the links within the article and added nofollow tags to the author informations. However again these can be useful to improve your online visibility and there are still a lot of websites out there that allow links to be included in the article, obviously if they are relevant.
Reciprocal links
Getting links from websites and people that you know is great for your website but you shouldn't just email every website that you find with a links page. This is something that should be done to improve a visitors experience.
So how can you exchange links without the old fashioned links/resources page? You should think about why a link from your website and a link from their website would benefit visitors then you should build this in. Here are a couple good examples:
Testimonials: Both having a small article explaining why you are happy working together;
Case Studies: Both explaining your business relationship: why it started; how it started, why you are both happy.
Summary
These are all good ways to manually increase your visibility online and most will also have the benefit of improving your search engines listings. However this need to be accompanied by exceptional content.
This month is mainly focussed on Google mainly because Google has been even busier than usual.
Google+ redesign
Google have announced a number of new features for Google+ including navigation and design changes.
Google says, “We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.”
Google targets web spam
In the last week of April Matt Cutts has announced that Google will make changes to it's algorithm specifically to target Black Hat SEO, or what Google call Black Hat WebSpam.
Here is an example of the type of WebSpam Google will be penalising (read the text it makes no sense):
Another step to reward high-quality sites
Google search query data improvements
When you log into Google Webmaster Tools you have probably noticed the Search Queries tool under Your Site On The Web. Over the last year this tool has changed a lot including some changes that to be honest aren't great: such as the average top position change which tells you your average top position for a keyphrase, however the problem is that this is an average and it you have listings in all 3 top positions your average position is 2.
Anyway, the changes include more historical data - from 35 days to 90 days, you can now see this data as soon as you verify your website and it collects up to 2,000 search terms.
Although this looks like a great tool I still think that Google Analytics is the best place to go for your website historical data.
Google Analytics 5
For a while now Google Analytics 5 has been an optional Beta and you have been able to switch to the older version. Now Google Analytics 5 is the main version and there is no more living in the past.
It may take a little bit of time to get used to the new layout but as soon as you do I'm sure you love it - We do...
Moving your website? Or just a redesign
When moving a website to a new domain name of redesigning a website with a new URL structure we always recommend setting up 301 redirects from the old content to the new content.
For small websites this is easy however for larger websites this is a lot more time consuming and web developers always recommend only redirecting some of the pages. Such as the top 10% of pages visited, or the top 200 pages.
Although the Google Webmaster Guidelines recommend redirecting all pages it is great to see Google writing an article to back this up: How to move your content to a new location.
Submitting images to Google
Google has announced how important it believes image searches are and offers additional information to help you get you images searched: 1,000 words about images.
Bing Keyword Suggestion Tool
Bing have released a new keywords suggestion tool.
This is a good tool to accompany other keyword suggestion tools. It is good for suggestions but it still makes more sense to use the Google Tool to work with search volumes.
Creating a content strategy
It is now a year after the launch of Google's Panda update and over the year we have seen a lot of websites penalised with every Google Panda upgrade. Although some of these website have been caught in the cross-fire most of these website had poor quality content. Ensuring your website has high quality content with relevant keyphrases has always been important to on-site optimisation and over the last year this has become more important than ever.
With Inbound Marketing becoming more important to promoting your website online it is important to create a content strategy rather than haphazardly trawling through your website adding extra content.
Its not just about your website of course as there are many places on the web to distribute your content to – not least of which is the social media sites mentioned below. Your website probably remains your most important digital asset though so is the best starting point.
Evaluate your website
Before creating a content strategy you should evaluate your website to see if there are any pages that are unnecessarily being indexed. These pages can be paginated product pages, non canonicalised pages, internal search result pages etc... The simplest way to find these is through a site search on Google (type [site:yoursite.com] into Google). The potential issue here is that duplicate content may have a detrimental affect on your Google rankings.
Revisit your Keyphrase Analysis
A good starting point should be to revisit your keyphrase analysis. It may have been a while since you performed your initial keyphrase analysis and although I'm sure you have performed keyphrase analysis when you have added new content to your website some of the initial analysis might be out of date or not performing well.
For this you should first work through your homepage and strongest pages on your website then move through to your deeper pages that are normally optimised for long-tail phrases.
Keeping a record
You should enter the keyphrases into a spreadsheet and include the page that they are included on.
Once you have this list you should perform the following tasks to ensure they are still good phrases:
Visit Analytics
You should login to your Analytics account and check to see how many visits you have had to see if the phrases are directing traffic to your website.
Search term suggestion tool
Visit a Search term suggestion tool such as Google's keyword tool to see if people are still searching for your keyphrases and to find alternative phrases that might be better.
Competitor analysis
Work through your competitors websites to see if there are any phrases that you should consider. However bear in mind that your competitors might not have it right...
Improving content
Now that we have the keyphrases we want we should ensure that each of these pages is well optimised for these phrases. Starting with the Title tags and meta data then moving to the content on the page. When writing the content for a page this content should be as interesting and definitive as possible. There is information on writing good content on our Homepage Optimisation Lesson
Content for the future
When you decide to create a content strategy you need to be in it for the long haul. This involves scheduling a given amount of time each week to content creation and engaging in social media.
Finding inspiration
While you revisited your keyphrase analysis you probably stumbled upon some more phrases that you can use in the future.
Transforming current content
Ask around the office. You probably already have a wide range of content that you haven't added to your website. This can include: guides, check lists, press releases, case studies, testimonials, Whitepapers, videos, articles etc..
Competitor content
See what your competitors are up to. Audit their website; see what type of content, how often they release this content, where they release this content (is this content being sent to their social media accounts)... Part of the audit should include gauging how good your competitor's content is and how yours can be much better.
Writing content
Now you should have a huge range of ideas about what to write about it is important not to simply start writing content and send it all out at once. Here are some tips on content and content distribution:
Decide where your content should go: Don't just add content to your website, think about other places to distribute including twitter, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn etc...
Decide how often to distribute: Don't just login at 2 p.m. every Friday for a few hours, spread your time through the week performing different tasks each day.
Keep up with trends: Don't get left behind, constantly monitor competitors and your industry to ensure your content is up to date.
Content Distribution Example
How Google Decide on Algorithm Changes
Google add 8 cameras and 16 microphones to a Google Algorithm Change meeting and broadcast this to the world. This video shows how every change even the smallest of changes get intense scrutiny by their search evaluation and ranking teams.
Google Improves it's Bad Ad Detection Process
Over the last few months there have been a few complaints about Google allowing malicious download ads and ads to websites containing scams and viruses. Although Google is always trying to detect and remove these ads they have improved their detection process considerably in March by:
- Allowing users to block counterfeit ads;
- Improving the automated systems that detect counterfeit ad to ban the advertiser and not just the ad;
- Google Staff will now actually view suspicious ads and decide whether to an them.
Six Fundamental SEO Tips
Google has released 6 SEO fundamental tips and here they are:
- Do something cool: This is a great way to stand out fro the competition;
- Include relevant words in your copy: Basically optimise your pages but don't keyword stuff, you can make sure your website is relevant for keywords without keyword stuffing;
- Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Our Free SEO lessons will show you how to align the title tag, meta keywords etc... on your website;
- Sign up for email forwarding in Google Webmaster Tools: SO you are the first to hear if Google sees anything wrong with your website;
- Attract Buzz: Write good interesting content that people will want to share and include social media buttons on your website to get natural links;
- Stay Fresh and Relevant: Keep content up to date and add new content whenever you can, however don't add content for the sake of it and keep the content relevant.
Google's Re-evaluation of Links Causes Problems
In February Google announced that it's changing the way it evaluates links. In particular they are switching off a method of link analysis that they have used for years. Now that this change and an update to Panda have been made we can see some websites de-indexed from Google.
In March it looks like blog networks have been hit by this change and Buildmyrank is actually shutting down.
Google has been cracking down on mass produced low quality content sites over the last year with Panda updates so the obvious next step was to move this into mass produced low quality links.
Nowadays we spend a lot of time in Google Webmaster Tools ensuring that our websites are running as smoothly as possible. So it's great to hear about Google's most recent change to their Crawl Error Tool.
Until recently Google has reported all crawl errors as URL errors but this isn't always the case sometimes there are errors across a full domain that affect all URL's. Google will now label these separately as Site Errors
What's the difference between Site Errors and URL Errors?
Site errors are not specific to URL's, they are errors that affect your whole website. Errors such as web server connectivity errors, problems accessing the robots.txt file, DNS resolution errors etc... However errors that are specific individual pages/URL's on your website are now flagged as URL Errors.
Site Errors
In the past Google reported site errors as URL errors. However this didn't make sense because they aren't specific to individual URL's but are errors with the full website and sometimes these errors would stop the Googlebot from even accessing the website.
Obviously if your website has no errors then you will see this in the tool.
URL Errors
If you have no site errors then you can have a look through any possible URL errors that you may have, safe in the knowledge that these aren't site errors and each error can be fixed individually.
There have also been some improvements to the URL Errors Tool. You can now instantly filter and sort the errors by any column which helps us to fix these errors in any order we want to such as by error type which is extremely useful.
With this tool we can also dive deeper into each individual error giving us more information about the error. Such as where the error is occurring (whether it is links from a page of the sitemap) and an actual link to the page so we can see the error in action.
We can also track the errors we have fixed by marking them as fixed. Goole will then remove these errors from the tool. However if the error is in fact not fixed then Google will flag this error again next time id indexes the page.
Image Previews (Available in the UK and USA)
For quite a while now Google has offered Related Searches in search results which has been very useful. This is also a feature that has improved image searches and now Google has taken this a step further and will actually give samples of images for these related searches which is fantastic to help with finding exactly what you’re looking for or just have fun exploring.
For example if you search for London the related searches show as London Underground, London Eye, London Big Ben etc... Now you can hover over one of these results to show a small selection of associated images.
Related Maps (Available in the UK and USA)
Google now shows sitelinks for maps listings which is a great improvement. Again a great example of this is London. When you search for London. You will now see sitelinks under the map listings allowing you to view Hotels, Restaurants and tourist locations.
Health Results (Only available in the USA for now)
More and more people are searching for health information on Google and now Google has made a big change to improve the search results. Google's data shows that a search for symptoms is often followed by a search for a related condition.
So Google have now made this process easier by showing possible related health conditions for the for the symptoms that you have searched for. For example, if you search for abdominal pain on my right side, you’ll be able to quickly see some potentially related conditions and learn more about them by clicking on the links in the list.
These are search results and are not authored by doctors or other medical experts
As mentioned last month Google is now publishing search quality improvements each month. In January as well as the Search Plus Your World Google we have already discussed Google has made another interesting change.
As part of Google's commitment to provide the best search results they have released a new Page Layout Algorithm Improvement. This is an improvement that Google has made directly from complaints from searches.
Many searchers have complained that when they visit a website they have to scroll down you find the content that they are looking for; normally this involves scrolling past ads on the page. So Google has now made an algorithm change to help websites that have useful content above-the-fold to rank better than other websites where the content is below-the-fold.
Many websites that do not have ads above-the-fold but offer no or little content above-the-fold may get caught in the cross-fire. Although this sounds very worrying Google have stated that this algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.
Here are some other changes Google have published on the Google Insider Blog:
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Fresher results;
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Faster autocomplete;
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Autocomplete spelling corrections;
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Better spelling full-page replacement;
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Better spelling corrections for rare queries;
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Improve detection of recurrent event pages;
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High-quality sites algorithm improvements;
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Cross-language refinements;
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English on Google Saudi Arabia;
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Improved scrolling for Image Search;
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Improved image search quality;
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More relevant related searches;
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Blending of news results;
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Automatically disable Google Instant based on computer speed.
For more information on these updates visit the Google Insider Blog
Is Google+ Important for your Business?
If you are interested in generating enquiries via online marketing the answer is yes, Google + is important to your business. Google + hasn't been around for long but already has over 90,000,000 users. Its doubled from 45,000,000 over the last 2 months and will continue to grow.
If in the past you haven't really seen how social networking websites can help your business then I understand why you might be sceptical about Google+. After all Google has tried social networking before with Google Buzz and Google Wave.
This Time It's Different
When searching for products and services on Google you have probably noticed that sometimes you will get personalised results (most of the time this is when you are logged in). We have seen this start a long time before Google+ and we will see this happen more and more in the future.
With the recent Google Algorithm update “Search Plus Your World” when someone is logged into Google+ they are getting personalised search results depending on their information together with the information of people in their Circles. We are also starting to see Google+ results appearing in search engine results when searchers are not logged into Google+.
With the knowledge that Google is making algorithm changes to support Google+ it is our opinion that you should have a Google+ account and a Google+ Page if you want to take advantage of the increasing integration we will see between search engine ranking results and G+.
Luckily we have something we prepared earlier to help you Create a Google+ Account. Also if you follow these instructions and create an account on Google then add Jan Klin to your Circles we will add you to our VIP Circle where we have just included tutorial that will show you how to effectively set up a Google+ Business Page.
Another Great Reason To Set Up a Google+ Page
At the moment you can search for a company on Google and find their Facebook page. Companies put a lot of effort into Facebook apart from just adding a page companies are constantly updating their status, engaging with Friends etc... But all of this extra involvement stays on Facebook. With Google+ this extra work that you put in will not only help you engage with people in your circles but will also appear in Google search results which is a great bonus.
This is just the start and Google+ already seems to be combining the best of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook into one platform.
We’re also looking forward to the PPC structure that Google are sure to add to Google+.
So Create a Google+ Account, add us to your Circles, create your business page and Google+ your world.
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Webmaster News
Google Page Titles
Google have recently announced (Better Page Titles in Search Results -12th Jan 2012) that the Google algorithm is so advanced that it no longer has to default to a website page Title Tag in it’s search results. If pages are well optimised for search engines then Google will use the Title Tag that has been used for the page because it will be relevant but for pages that don’t have Title Tags assigned or have irrelevant title tags such as (at this point I say shame on you); Google will use data that it deemed as most relevant.
You may have noticed this happening recently. Mainly we have seen Google Automatically adding company names to the end of title tags. For example if you type Blue Sheep Services into Google then you will see the following snippet:
However on this page the Title tag is simply so Google has added in the company name to improve it’s relevance to the search term used.
Google Monthly Series On Algorithm Changes
Last month Google Announced that from now on they will be publishing lists of improvements that they are making to search engines. This is a topic that we covered in our last News Round Up.
In December Google made 30 improvements and most of them now have codenames to make it easier for us to relate to them; awe thanks Google.
Here’s a summary and the detail can be found here …..Google Insider Search Blog
- Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”]
- More relevant sitelinks. [launch codename “concepts”, project codename “Megasitelinks”]
- Soft 404 Detection.
- More accurate country-restricted searches. [launch codename “greencr”]
- More rich snippets.
- Better infrastructure for autocomplete.
- Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”]
- Google Instant enhancements for Japanese.
- More accurate byline dates. [launch codename “foby”]
- Live results for NFL and college football. [project codename “Live Results”]
- Improved dataset for related queries.
- Related query improvements. [launch codename “lyndsy”]
- Better lyrics results. [launch codename “baschi”, project codename “Contra”]
- Tweak to +1 button on results page.
- Better spell correction in Vietnamese. [project codename “Pho Viet”]
- Upcoming events at venues.
- Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”]
- Improved Hebrew synonyms. [launch codename “SweatNovember”, project codename “Synonyms”]
- Safer searching. [launch codename “Hoengg”, project codename "SafeSearch"]
- Encrypted search available on new regional domains.
- Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”]
Other News
Google has profited from illegal Olympic Ticket Ads
The BBC has reported that There have been Google Ads selling unofficial Olympic 2012 tickets as well as fake Ids and Cannabis. However as soon as the BBC brought them to Google’s attention they were promptly removed. Olympic Ticket Ads – Full Story
New Google Changes Upset Twitter
This week Google announced a major search update called Google Search, Plus Your World. Which is includes Google+ in the Google search results to help personalise search results.
Twitter have claimed that this is bad for the web and will warp results.
Find out more about Google Search, Plus Your World.
To learn more about Online Marketing and how it can benefit you, book a place on our next SEO Training Course in Manchester on 22nd March?
Give us a call on 01928 788100 for more details.
Google is now including Google+ in search results. For quite a while now Google has been working on making search more personal. This started with the Google Social Search back in 2009 and now that Google has Google+ this is getting more and more advanced.
Now is a good time to let you know that this has not rolled out to the UK now so if you want to see this in action you should visit Google.com.
If you are not logged into Google then the results won’t be personalised; however there will still be changes in the search results to include Google+ information.
To show this we have used a generic term computers. If you search for this in Google.com then you will get the following screen.
Here you can see that a new People and Pages on Google+ has been added to the search results.
However when we login and type in SEO we can switch between personalised and non personal search with a simple click of a button.
When we click on the personalise button Google drills down into our Google+ data; including both our posts and pictures but also the pictures and posts of people in our circles and so on to give as much more personal experience.
Here we can see that we still have the People and Pages block but we also have the option to click on personal results that we can click on to open a new type of search.
Together with Google+ results appearing in this search. These are not just Google+ pages but actual posts from Google+.
Google have also included a profile search in this new change. If you start typing a name into Google it will show possible contacts from your circles and from other peoples circles that are in your circles:
Search, plus Your World
Get involved: Here is a tutorial on how to create a Google+ account
To learn more about Online Marketing and how it can benefit you, book a place on our next SEO Training Course in Manchester on 22nd March?
Give us a call on 01928 788100 for more details.