Where Does Negative SEO Come From?

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‘Negative SEO’ means anything malicious someone does to harm your site’s rankings. If someone really attacks your link profile and if it going to be effective you’ll see unexplained. The Impact of an attack is often temporary. People many times use methods that get quickly removed or discounted and when the link go away, the problem always goes away. It is easy to be so aggressive that Google spots the attack and devalues the links. If someone really is out to get you and wants to spend time and money, there is no doubt, they can do a lot of damage . The SEO problems for websites in 2012 in 99% of cases are self-inflicted.

Read the full article here:
Were You Hit by Negative SEO? | SEOmoz

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Google Plus 30 Point Review System (by Zagat) Explained

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As you have likely noticed by now, Google merged Google Plus and Google Places. This has changed the way that Places listings are showing up in a few ways. One of the changes that is most noticeable is the review system – it used to be an easy to see 5-star system. What happened?

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Google Search Rankings – The Human Component

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The Googlebot is Google’s automated program for searching and indexing content on the Internet. In the realm of SEO, the first part of good optimization is all about crafting textual content that’s visible and makes sense to Googlebot. After Googlebot indexes a page, the Google algorithm takes the content text and automatically ranks it on the search results page according to the search terms that the user enters into Google search. If your optimized website performs well for the term “electronic widgets,” for example, the Google algorithm will place your site near or at the top of the search results whenever someone uses Google to search for “electronic widgets.” Did you know that in addition to its automated components like Googlebot and the algorithm that Google also uses human site raters in the ranking of websites?

Google employs hundreds of site raters who rate a huge number of websites on relevancy. The input collected from this team doesn’t directly influence the search results, but it does influence the Google engineers in changing the algorithm to better serve more relevant results to the search engine user.

In this great video, Google senior software engineer Matt Cutts, demystifies this process by explaining how human website raters are used in testing changes to the Google algorithm. Essentially, after a change to the automatic search ranking is made, Google performs many test queries and evaluates what has changed in the results. The new search results are checked against the results before the change, and then presented to the human raters – in what Matt Cutts calls a “blind taste test” – to determine which set of search engine results are more relevant and useful. Only after analyzing and evaluating the feedback of the human raters are the new search results then tested with a small, carefully selected number of Internet users. Only if this last round of surveys on the algorithm change prove the results more accurate and useful will the updated algorithm be integrated into Google Search for the use of the public. It’s an exhaustive process, but that’s how much Google wants its search engine to be the most relevant on the web.

Watch the video here:

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March 2012 – Major Changes From Google

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Google’s made some very big changes in the past couple of weeks, and it’s affecting more sites than previously expected. In what way? Depending on how SEO has been done, some sites are dropping a few positions, some are dropping by multiple pages.

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7 Internet Marketing Mistakes

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In the effort to get links and spread word of your business online, many people can get a bit overzealous.  Ryan Sammy put together an excellent list detailing the 7 deadly sins of content promotion.  I’ve summarized them here, with my own input on it.

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Local Businesses – is Internet Marketing Worthwhile?

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In the past, most local businesses never thought they could compete with major companies.  The marketing budget needed to really make a similar impact was usually way out of their capabilities.  However, with Google’s latest updates, it’s looking like the smaller business has a much better chance of staying within the public’s eyes.

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Major Google Places Updates to Organic Results

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Today Google’s made a major change in Google Places (known to many as Google Maps).  The 7-box is no longer a separate entity, but is now merged with the full organic results.  This is a game-changer for SEO.

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Google Instant and SEO – How Is SEO Affected by Google Instant?

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As most everyone has noticed by this point, Google Instant is now live.  Searches provide results real-time, making the things you’re searching for appear more quickly, and in some cases, allowing searchers to find other results they may not otherwise have discovered.  There is a lot of speculation out there on how this will affect SEO.

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Yahoo and Bing Join – Bing Results Now Show On Yahoo

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This was something that had been coming, but it was unknown exactly when the date would be.  Yahoo and Microsoft have made an alliance.  It’s called the “Search Alliance”.  Originally it was intended as a unification for paid advertisements, but it’s clear now that the unification is for both paid and organic listings; do a search on both Yahoo and Bing for a keyword phrase, and the results are now identical.

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Good SEO vs Easy SEO

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I’ve been taking a look at some of my competition lately and seeing their bragging about achieving first page ranking for keywords, and in some cases top position ranking for keywords.  Well, for people who are looking to get SEO services from a company or an individual, be sure to keep some things in mind before being impressed by achievements such as these.

There’s a good list of things to double check (or to ask) when you see rankings like this in a portfolio:

  1. How many results do you get for that keyword in the search engine? If you do a search in Google and get under 200,000 listings, there’s a good chance it’s very easy to rank for that keyword.  There are exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, if no one’s competing for the keyword, it’s easy to rank for.  But again – if no one’s competing for the keyword, chances are it’s not worth ranking for.  We’ve got a few clients with keywords that are ranked on the first page that have search results numbering over 6,000,000.
  2. What kind of traffic does that keyword get? There are different ways to learn about this, but you should see if the keywords that are being ranked highly actually get good traffic.  You may have a number one position, but if it only gets two searches a month – is it really something that’s worth it?  As always, there are exceptions to this rule (if you can close on one of those two searches and it’s worth six figures, that’d be worth it), but usually getting no traffic means the keyword is not worth as much.
  3. What other keywords are ranked for that site? So they have shown a single keyword phrase for their SEO’d site.  Is it the only one that’s ranked?  A good SEO should be able to rank highly for multiple keywords.  Ideally, multiple targeted keywords.
  4. Is the SEO company’s site ranking for keywords? If the company claims to do SEO, it would make sense that they would rank for keywords themselves, correct?  If you ask and they can show no good results for their own site in the search engines, be very cautious about trusting them with your own site.

When you hire someone for SEO work, they should be able to provide information on what keywords they are targeting and show you the results that it’s bringing.  Having a particular ranking is worth nothing if you don’t see results from that position in the search engine listings.  Check this list to see what those results are really worth, and if it’s good SEO or just easy SEO to put something into a portfolio.

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