Penguin 2.0 Is Here

, ,

Well, the big event that the SEO community has been talking about for weeks has finally hit and everything is… mostly the same, unless you run sites known for spammy practices like porn or gambling. Two days ago, Google started rolling out Penguin 2.0. By Matt Cutts’ estimate, 2.3 percent of English-U.S. queries were affected.

While 2.3 percent of searches doesn’t sound like a lot, in all actuality that is thousands of websites being hit with penalties and sudden drops in the rankings, but if you’ve been keeping up with Google’s best practices, chances are you are safe.

None-the-less, in SEO it is always best to stay informed on these types of updates, and Penguin 2.0 does change the Google handles search a bit. To fill in everyone on all the details, Search Engine Journal’s John Rampton and Murray Newlands made a YouTube video covering everything you could want to know about Penguin 2.0.

Oh, and if you’ve been wanting to know why it’s called Penguin 2.0, Cutts says, “This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh).”

/0 Comments

Matt Cutts Explains Upcoming Domain Diversity Changes In SERPs

, ,

Google is always fighting to maintain diversity on their search engine results pages (SERPs). It has proven difficult over time to walk the line between offering searchers the content they want in easily browsable form, and keep the big established sites from completely dominating the results.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, recently used one of his YouTube videos to talk about how Google is managing this, and highlight an upcoming change that will hopefully keep you from getting pages full of essentially the same results. No one wants to see eight results from Yelp when they are looking for a restaurant review.

The change Google is making is aimed at making it harder for multiple results from the same domain name to rank for the same terms. Basically, once you’ve seen three or four results from a domain, even over the spread of a few results pages, it will become increasingly harder for any more pages from that domain to rank.

If you don’t quite get what this means, it is easier to understand in context. In the video, Matt walks us through the history of Google’s domain result diversity efforts. It also shows how Google tries to manage bringing you the best authoritative and reputable search results without allowing bigger brands to form monopolies on the results.

You can see the full breakdown of the domain diversity history at Search Engine Land or in Cutts’ video, but basically when Google started out there were no restrictions on the number of results per domain. It was quickly apparent that this system doesn’t work because you will get page upon page of results from the single highest ranked domain. Then came different forms of “host clustering” which prevented more than two results per domain to be shown in the search results, but this was easily worked around by spammers.

More recently, Google has used a sort of tiered system where the first SERPs for a term are as diverse as possible, allowing only a few results from the same domains, however as you progress into the later search result pages, more and more results were allowed from repeat domains. Now, Google is tightening the belt and making it harder for those repeat domains to even get onto the later SERPs.

/0 Comments

You Can Never Have Too Much AdWords Advice

, ,

In my opinion, you can never read too many opinions and advice columns on how to manage your PPC campaigns. Sure, some may turn out to be full of bad advice, but I believe every bit of information can either guide you to improving your own campaigns, or steer you away from looming mistakes. At the very least, it’s good to see what other people are doing in order to inspire you to come up with your own methods.

With that in mind, how could you avoid Chris Kent’s article at Search Engine Journal called ’10 Golden Rules of AdWords.’ It’s loaded with good information. Some of it is bordering on cliche, such as logging in to your account at least once a day and testing every conceivable movable piece. But, even these have been repeated for a reason. They are important and are a key to building a successful campaign.

My favorite pieces of advice are a suggestion of how to determine how much to bid for certain keywords. For many, this seems to be a guessing game, which is not good. Also, remember to link your PPC ads to the specific page your ad refers to. Don’t just leave traffic at your doorstep, invite them in and put them right where you want them. In other words, bypass your homepage and get users as close to a conversion as you can.

/0 Comments

Bing Plans To Improve On AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

, ,

A PPC war has started between Bing and Google and Microsoft Search Network’s GM fired the most recent shots. David Pann has bashed the effectiveness of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns for larger advertisers because of its bundling of desktop and tablet targeting options.

“For smaller advertisers that don’t distinguish between mobile, tablets and PCs Enhanced Campaigns may make sense. But for larger advertisers which understand that their messages must be different according to the device it will be harder and they will have to create workarounds,” Pann said.

Pann has a point and there have many independent reviewers who have essentially had the same critique since Google unveiled Enhanced Campaigns.

Take his opinions with a grain of salt, however, considering he is working for a direct competitor, who just happens to be rolling out their own version of Enhanced Campaigns in the coming months. Pann says Bing’s version will allow user’s to choose whether to combine mobile and desktop campaigns, or to keep them separate. Bing plans to launch their new product in beta sometime before fall and have a full release by the end of summer 2014.

For more, check out Jessica Davies article at The Drum.

/0 Comments

The Short Cutts Help You Sort Through Matt Cutts’ Videos

, ,

The Short Cutts

Are you familiar with Matt Cutts, the head of the Google Webspam team, and his YouTube videos? I share them here frequently, but even the ones I write about are just a selection of some of his best. Since he has started making the short informative videos in 2009, Cutts has made over five hundred of the videos.

Five hundred videos are a lot to sort through, and YouTube isn’t the best at helping you navigate large numbers of videos so Cutts’ videos were starting to get a bit jumbled. That’s why the online marketing company Click Consult created The Short Cutts, a site which organizes all of the Cutts videos into an easily usable resource for all SEO questions you may have.

Short Cutts QuestionFor anyone not already aware of Cutts’ YouTube posts, they all follow the fame pattern. A Google user asks a question about a topic, and Cutts answers the question as well as he can within a short two or maybe three minutes. Some question the usefulness of the videos because Cutts often can’t go into depth in the short time limit, but I think anyone can understand how important it is to hear information and answers to common SEO questions straight from his mouth, even if it is a little vague.

Possibly the best part of The Short Cutts is their method of displaying videos above two sets of text which may help give you a quick answer. The first block of text consists of the question Cutts is asked, and the second block of text gives a quick “yes or no” type answer which can help give you the answer to many of the more simple issues.

/0 Comments

Meet AdWords’ New Keyword Planner Tool

, ,

Do you use the AdWords tools ‘Google Keyword tool’ or ‘AdWords Traffic Estimator’? If so, this is news you’ll need to sit up and take notice of. Both tools seem to be being phased out by a new tool unveiled earlier this month, ‘AdWords Keyword Planner’.

Keyword Planner is a streamlined, focused way to launch new campaigns. Its easy to use wizard interface guides you step-by-step through the process of creating new campaigns and new ad groups.

Larry Kim, of Search Engine Land, has all the details of how to use the tool and what it is capable of doing. However, you may check your AdWords account and find no sign of the Keyword Planner. Right now, it’s only been made available in about 20-percent of accounts, but more accounts are being added all the time.

/0 Comments

The Comprehensive Guide To Unnatural Links and Their Penalties

, ,

Have you received an unnatural link penalty from Google? Are you worried about getting one? Or maybe you are just curious what constitutes an unnatural link. The answers out there are often woefully incomplete, or contradictory to other reputable sources out there.

It can sometimes feel like every different major SEO news source has their own exact definition of unnatural links, and sometimes they aren’t even that consistent. The problem just gets worse as these varying definitions are then interpreted by other writers trying to offer tips on how to recover from the penalties many have received.

If we can’t agree on a singular definition to unnatural links, how are we supposed to agree on a united way to deal with the penalties? All the confusion does is lead many site owners trying to get their site back on track down yet another wrong path.

Well, Search Engine Journal’s Pratik Dholakiya undertook the mammoth task of condensing all the information anyone could ever need to know about unnatural links and the penalties that come from them all into one informative article. From the basic information of how unnatural penalties became a huge problem for the SEO community and a singular definition for unnatural links, all the way to the secret tips many professionals haven’t been sharing, everything you need to find is there.

/0 Comments

Matt Cutts Warns Against Taking Google Patents Too Seriously

, ,

Another day, another Matt Cutts Google Webmaster Help video to talk about. This recent one deals with how SEO professionals pay close attention to any new Google patent that is remotely related to Search or Search Quality terms, and then speculate until some believe some very incorrect ideas about how Google is operating.

Cutts was asked what the latest SEO misconception he would “like to put to rest” and you could almost see the relief in his eyes as Cutts began explaining that patents aren’t necessarily put into practice.

“Just because a patent issues that has somebody’s name on it or someone who works at search quality or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are using that patent at that moment,” Cutts explained. “Sometimes you will see speculation Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that a domain was registered. That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily doing that, it just means that mechanism is patented.”

Basically, there is a practice of SEO professionals, especially bloggers and writers, to speculate based on patents they see have been filed, and this can grow to offering tips and suggestions about how to run your website based on speculation stemming from a patent that isn’t in use, which all comes together to create some widespread misinformation.

For example, consider the speculation that comes every time Apple files patents for future phones. While they’ve recently had trouble with leaking physical prototypes in various ways, in the past, Apple kept their secrets well guarded, and the speculation based on their patents were often outlandish, and at best completely wrong.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn and make predictions based on patents, especially if you see indicators that it has been implemented, but it is important to take every patent with a grain of salt. While Google has created the mechanisms for these patents, unless you see evidence, they probably aren’t worth getting worked up over.

/0 Comments

The 5 Most Basic SEO Mistakes

, , ,

While quality SEO is a complex, time-consuming job, there are many types of SEO that any site owner can do. There are also a lot of basic mistakes that site owners regularly make while trying to optimize their own page.

To help prevent these easily corrected mistakes, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of their Webspam team, devoted one of his recent YouTube videos (which you can watch below) to identifying the five most basic SEO mistakes anyone can make.

1) Not Making Your Site Crawlable – According to Cutts, the most common mistake “by volume” is simply not making Google able to crawl your site, or not even having a domain to begin with.

The way Google learns about sites is through web “crawlers” that index pages by following links. If you don’t provide links allowing Google’s bots to find your site, it won’t know what is there. If you can’t reach content by clicking normal links on the page in a text browser, it might as well not exist to Google.

2) Not Using Words People Are Searching For – Google also tries to connect people with the most relevant information for the exact search they used. If someone searches “how high is Mount Everest,” they will be connected with a site using those exact words on a page before they will be suggested a page using just “Mount Everest elevation.”

My favorite example Cutts uses of this is a restaurant’s website, mainly because it seems many restaurants have very minimal websites that are insanely in need of optimization and a bit of a design overhaul. When people look for a restaurant to eat, they search for a couple of things, mainly the location, menu, and hours. If the page has those listed in plain text, Google will index that information and direct more people to the site, than those with PDF menus or no information at all.

3) Focusing On Link Building – One of the biggest buzzwords in SEO is link building. It is one of the oldest strategies, and it is constantly tweaked by Google’s algorithms to keep it in the news regularly, but it may actually be dragging you down.

When people think link building, they cut off many other ideas and marketing options which will equally boost your site. Cutts suggests instead to focus on general marketing. If you make your website more well-known and respected within your community, you will attract real people, which will bring organic links which are much more respected by the search engines.

4) Bad Titles and Descriptions – Many people neglect their titles and descriptions assuming they will either be automatically filled in, or won’t matter in the long run. If your website says “untitled” in the title bar, it will also say “untitled” in a bookmarks folder as well as actual search results. Now ask yourself, would you click on a website without a title?

Similarly, the descriptions for webpages are often blank or copy and pasted straight from the page with no context. Your description should be enticing people to want to click on your page, as well as showing that you have the answer to the question they are searching for. If people can build entire followings around 140 character tweets, you should be able to make someone want to click your page with a 160 character description.

5) Not Using Webmaster Resources – This problem can only be born out of ignorance or laziness. There are countless SEO resources available out there, and most of them are free. The best resources anyone can turn too are the Webmaster Tools and Guidelines that Google offers, but you shouldn’t just stick to those either. There are blogs, webinars, videos, and forums all happy to teach you SEO, you just have to use them. If you’re reading this however, you probably don’t have this problem.

Conclusion

The most common SEO problems, according to Cutts, are also the most simple problems imaginable. There are resources available that will help you fix all your basic SEO problems, and you’ll learn more and get better through finding them and practicing. If you’re currently dealing with trying to learn how to make your site crawlable, you have a long way to go, but if you just keep working at it, you’ll be an SEO pro eventually.

/0 Comments

Advice For AdWords Scripts Users

, ,

AdWords scripts offer a great opportunity to personalize your campaigns, but they have their flaws. For instance, you’ll need to write the code yourself and their output logs are not very user friendly. Frederick Vallaeys has some in-depth, expert suggestions for frustrated scripts users to get more out of their campaigns and overcome these flaws at Search Engine Land.

Though you probably don’t need to worry about how to make scripts work for the largest of AdWords accounts, his advice on making scripts accessible even if you don’t know how to write code is particularly valuable information. Check it out if you are already using, or are thinking of using, AdWords scripts.

/0 Comments