Google’s Penguin Update
Tuesday, April 24th, was a day that seemed normal until, a reasonably noticeable drop in rankings changed things. What did Google do? Could it have been another, more aggressive version of Panda? A part of the “no ads above the fold” algorithm change? Maybe it was the famed and feared over-optimization penalty that has been looming since Matt Cutts mentioned it a couple of months back?
Apparently, it turned out to be a uniquely different new search algorithm targeted at catching webspam, strangely enough called “Penguin” (black and white like a Panda, although not as large or imposing…) – this is actually the change Matt Cutts was talking about, but he told Search Engine Land that using the term “over-optimization” wasn’t entirely accurate, because the algorithm doesn’t target SEO, just webspam. Now, normally, the majority of peoplewould say webmasters don’t need to panic about this sort of thing , provided that their sites aren’t spammy. However the perception Google’s algorithm has of spam as well as the perception of spam that you, as a site owner may have are not the same – so, even though you may believe your own site would not be affected, it usually is plausible (though Google does state that this update only has an effect on around 3.1% of searches).
This algorithm boils down towards the age-old battle between “white hat” as opposed to the “black hat” SEO. It will “Reward” high-quality sites and punish black hat webspam which is everyone’s goal in this algorithm update.
Basic Things to Avoid :
Google is on a mission to rank high-quality sites and lower sites that “are participating in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings,” the search algorithm will specifically be attuned to tactics that webmasters could use to get better rankings through questionable schemes, such as the following:
Keyword Stuffing – Avoid repeating your keywords too many times on a page (in fact, try to stay within 2-4 times), and steer clear of throwing keywords into content that is definitely unrelated for them. Should you use keywords and phrases more often than once, be sure they make sense in perspective and that the article flows while using the keywords included. This ensures the user’s reading experience is a useful one knowning that your site content is correctly optimized for search engine utilization.
Link Schemes – Since you probably know, Google analyzes the number of sites backlinking to you (the greater sites that link back to yours, the greater you’re considered an “authority” by Google) as a means of discerning whether your website is relevant and beneficial to users. Your link profile has a large amount to do with your site’s rankings. Backlinks you build needs to be quality ones, and in addition they really should be strongly related your website. Quality over quantity is quickly becoming a new industry standard.
Duplicate Content – An honest mistake is ok, however when you are purposely plagiarizing and copying content, don’t anticipate to rank in the SERPs and, with a related note: Don’t Post Good Content. Post GREAT content. Obviously, as Google indicates in their Webmaster Guidelines, it’s always better to naturally garner links simply by creating relevant, high-quality content that people naturally hyperlink to. However, for sites that take part in SEO, this may not always be the easiest thing to do. Regardless of how you garner links, your content should ALWAYS be great – content that is certainly grammatically correct, that flows, and that is certainly easily consumed by the search engines like google and not loaded with keywords. As Google concludes: “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization to be able to focus on creating amazing, compelling websites).”
Do you want more Information, or if you would like to find out more info on Internet search algorithm updates? Need methods for engaging in white hat SEO? Visit our B2B blog for regular updates, free tips, and more. Have questions that are more specific in your business? Give us a call at 888-888-1022.
The $684 billion Internet economy
The Internet accounted for $684 billion, or 4.7% of all U.S. economic activity in 2010, Boston Consulting Group found. By way of comparison, the federal government, contributed $625 billion, or 4.3%, to the nation’s output.
If it was considered its own separate industry, the Internet would also be larger than America’s education, construction or agricultural sectors.
In the retail sphere alone, e-commerce accounted for 5% of U.S. sales in 2010.
“All businesses are increasingly digital and need to think about how to take advantage of these opportunities,” said Dominic Field, a BCG partner and co-author of the report. “And for policymakers, we would hope they recognize the importance of Internet growth and making sure their countries are taking advantage of these opportunities.”
As a share of gross domestic product, only three countries have larger Internet economies: the United Kingdom, South Korea and China. The U.S. is tied with Japan.
Boston Consulting Group predicts the Internet will grow about 10% a year through 2016 in the Group of 20 nations. It will grow nearly twice as fast in emerging markets as in developed economies, with Argentina and India accounting for the fastest growth, the study said.
“The U.S. is relatively mature as an Internet economy, whereas some of the developing economies are further behind — so their growth rates are higher,” Field said.
Granted, measuring the full impact of the Internet can be a fuzzy matter. In the Boston Consulting Group study, the researchers included the impact of e-commerce, what consumers pay to access the Internet and money spent by businesses and the government on building Internet infrastructure.
Google’s “over optimization” Penalty
Recently, Matt Cutts spoke at SXSW where he announced that Google is working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed.”
Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO.
Here is the transcription from SEL of Matt Cutts:
What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.
Back in 2009, Matt did a video on over optimization penalties saying there was no such thing. Here is that video:
What does this mean for Search Engine Optimization for 2012+? Well, there’s two main points to take away from this: On-site optimization or “over optimization” and Off-site link building.
On-site optimization or “over optimization”
What does this mean? Why would it matter? Well, basically it comes down to whether or not your site or page contains valuable unique content that’s fresh and not full of ads or just a ‘lander’ where you capture a lead with very little content. Lander pages are great for converting an online Ad (Adsense, etc.) but not for SEO. Keep your landers separate from your primary page. In other words, don’t make your home page the “lander” page. Make it useful. If you’re creating a lander for advertising and conversion tracking, then make it separate from your home page.
Are you updating your content often? Weekly? Are you linking to ‘bad neighborhoods’ (i.e. link sharing programs or anything else that may seem a bit unscrupulous)? Are you not allowing some of your ‘link juice’ to be credited to other sites? In other words, you should typically use no-follows for any links going out of your site — unless it’s a similar site which you should allow some of your link-juice to follow. Don’t sell links on your site and don’t engage in any activity on-site that will penalize your work.
So what to do?
On-site optimization in the very basic form should concentrate around your primary keywords, but also make it valuable for the visitor (aka real humans) that come your way.
Just make sure your keyword for your page is in the Title, H1/H2/H3 tags, bold somewhere, italicized somewhere and typically within the last paragraph of the page. Make sure your keyword density isn’t too high and make sure your page is natural and has more content than all the navigation and template text on your site. In other words, if you have a lot of navigation & template text (footer, etc.) but your actual real content on the site is < that of the nav + footer, etc… then you might want to increase your content… keep it fresh!
Don’t overly use multiple keywords on any single page. Use a keyword map that helps you organize your website with they keywords you’re focusing on such as:
Off-site link building
What’s at issue here and what will it mean for the future for link building? Who is ultimately effected by this upcoming algorithmic change?
No one can be certain but we do know Google and Bing are looking for quality content and quality backlinks. For the software vendors that create tools that try and game the search engines by creating thousands of backlinks, spamming the search engines or hiring individuals or companies that promise 20,000 backlinks in 1 week for $100.. those types of organizations are going to be worthless. Although Google won’t penalize you for those hideous no-quality backlinks, they won’t help either.
What works now and in the future is unique quality content created and distributed throughout the Internet written for humans to read and utilize. Creating unique external content about your company or website, linking back to you is key. Try and find websites that have articles or content like your own and ask if they would link to you but this is hard on an individual basis. For example, put yourself in their position, would you blindly link back to someone without something in return? What would that “something” be? Would be be a monetary fee? Why would anyone want to link back to your website especially if it’s a product page or you’re selling something. If your page is full of ads I certainly wouldn’t link back to you.. why would anyone else?
Conclusion
Converg helps overcome these obstacles by doing all this work for you. We help Fortune 500 companies with their organic search optimization and do it ‘naturally’. No quick fix, no crazy link schemes.
When we do your link building for you and create that buzz about your company or services, it’s just natural for the search engines to follow suit and make your site more prominent over your competition.
Facebook Stores Shutdown Within Months of Launching
Retailers including J.C. Penney, Nordstrom and GameStop closed their Facebook stores within months of launching them, throwing the future of Facebook commerce into doubt, says Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” Mulpuru said. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
“It never did make sense”, said Shane Kinsch of Converg Media. “It was dead before it started. Many companies rightfully want to be where customers are but in this case, like many social media destinations, users just want to be left alone.” Read more at Bloomberg…
Yahoo! Search Traffic Plummets
The trend is clear: Yahoo!’s search traffic Free Falls.
The Search Engine wars have always been sketchy with each trying to reach more visitors and appealing to visitors to use them as their “homepage”. The search engine wars will forever continue, but for the time being, the results are clear. For the past 3 months, Yahoo! has been losing a lot of traffic.
Google is the recipient for most of the traffic loss from Yahoo! as seen in the numbers below. The agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! hasn’t helped stop the big fish, Google and probably will never stop Google’s momentum. If you didn’t already know, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides Yahoo!’s paid search. Microsoft retains all money made from Bing advertising, while Yahoo! only keeps about 90% of the ad revenue from Yahoo!
The results below are explicit “core” search queries where users enter a search term in the search box o none of the three sites. It doesn’t include other search features that may be part of the search engine. It does not contain mobile search traffic numbers nor searches performed outside of the United States — two more areas where Google is even that much more dominant.
The numbers for for the last year.. notice the RED section below of Yahoo!’s steep decline in traffic.
Domain Bias in Web Search
Research performed by Samuel Ieong, Nina Mishra, Eldar Sadikov, and Li Zhang of Microsoft and Stanford University provides an interesting fact for how human behaviors affect the choice of search results when it comes to domain names.
Is there really Domain Bias in Web Search?
This paper uncovers a new phenomenon in web search that we call domain bias — a user’s propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain. We provide evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. We begin by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, we find that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, we run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. We find that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of systematic domain preferences, even after factoring out confounding issues such as position bias and relevance, two factors that have been used extensively in past work to explain user behavior. The existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains.
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Another reason why inbound marketing is winning is because it costs less than traditional marketing. Why try to buy your way in when consumers aren’t even paying attention? Here are some stats from the infographic below.
- 44% of direct mail is never opened. That’s a waste of time, postage and paper.
- 86% of people skip through television commercials.
- 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.”
- The cost per lead in outbound marketing is more than for inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing focuses on earning, not buying, a person’s attention, which is done through social media and engaging content, such as blogs, podcasts and white papers. This content is interesting, informative and adds value, creating a positive connection in the eyes of the consumer, thus making him more likely to engage your brand and buy the product. So it costs less and has better a ROI.
This infographic from an infographic design agency,Voltier Digital highlights the differences between the two kinds of marketing
Why you should Ping your Sitemap
A sitemap is more than just a list of links on your website that makeup the “site” , it’s an easy way for the search engines to get a taste of what your site is about.
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First, Create your Sitemap
If you need help creating your initial sitemap, there’s a lot of free sitemap generators out there to get you started with your initial XML sitemap. After you create your sitemap, save it to your website. Keep in mind, you’ll want to keep your sitemap updated as often as you make changes to your website, then ping the search engines to tell them to look for the update.
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Tell the Search Engines When you Update your Sitemap
If your website, blog or content management system doesn’t already “ping” the search engines and update your sitemap automatically with your new updates and content, we offer this as a free service to our clients. We generate your website’s sitemap from the outside using our own website ‘crawler’ just like the search engines. We then save this in an open format where the search engines can interpret and process it. We then tell the search engines with a simple ping, that they should take a look at your sitemap and note any changes.
Keep in mind, like everything else you can do all this yourself but we’ve perfected it and it’s just a basic part of our service. If you want to do this yourself, the search engines have a special URL for you to go to.
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How to Ping Google
Google is definitely the dominant search engine, and you will want to tell the “big G” when you make any updates or changes to your website. Google also has a sitemap tool in their Google Webmaster tools area. If you haven’t already created your Google Webmaster account, you should. There’s a lot of valuable data out there and you can track when they crawl your site and how many of your links are in their index..
The ping url is:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
You should receive a message stating that your sitemap has been successfully added to their list of sitemaps to crawl.
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How to Ping Bing / MSN
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
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How to Ping Ask
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
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Where’s Yahoo!? Well, as of March 2011, they shutdown this service because they’re integrating with Bing, so use the Bing link.
Marketing Turns to the Web as .Com turns 25
March 15th, 1985 – Two and a half decades ago, when the first .com was awarded, there was no advertising on the Web.
Now it looks as if Internet advertising is set to take over take print advertising in the United States. According to a survey by research firm Outsell Inc. of more than 1,000 US advertisers, companies plan to spend nearly $120 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to seminars on the web, while they plan to spend about $112 billion on print strategies such as newspaper and magazine ads. (http://www.outsellinc.com/press/press_releases/ad_study_2010)
“Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding. As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they’re spreading their spending over a widening set of options,” said Chuck Richard, Vice President and Lead Analyst, Outsell.
If the forecast holds true, the U.S. will follow the UK, which became the first major economy where advertisers spent more on Internet advertising than on TV advertising, with a record £1.75bn online spent in the first six months of 2009, according to guardian.co.uk.
The .com world may only be 25, but as the shift in advertising dollars shows that it is growing up fast.
