Google – Page 31 – The Web Authority

June 17, 2014June 14, 2014

Search Engines – What’s In and What’s Out

What gets the thumbs up from search engines?

There’s lots of chatter in my industry about the future of search engines and how Google’s new algorithms are changing the landscape of how business owners work to keep and improve their website’s placement on Google. What seem apparent to me is that the following important trends are surfacing and impacting what we see in the organic results.

What’s In?

1. Search results returned by location specificity. But not only your Google.com preference location that you have set, but by your mobile search history and actual Google recorded locations over time.

2. Search results returned by click through rate and bounce rate gathered by Google by users of the Chrome browser and Android tablet and smartphone operating systems. Anything Google can track it is and it appears to be using this aggregate information in returning search results.

What’s Out?

1. The ability to impact search results by building links and enhancing on-site keyword density.

2. The ability to impact search results by crafting title tags and H1 tags by page to try to boost search rankings.

3. Links from social media and activity on social media. Google is appearing to devalue these types of signals which is a reversal from their announcement that they were using them in their search algorithm over a year ago.

My Conclusion

As social activity can be spammed just like link building, Google appears to be devaluing these items in favor of location specificity through concrete user tracking based on search history and location. Just try to turn off Wi-Fi on your smartphone and you’ll see what I mean. In your Android system, Google keeps turning it back on as it uses Wi-Fi to track your location in order to know where you are so as to develop a better profile on you to determine what results to show you. Even if you turn it off, it will go back on.

Keep in mind that Google has now actively worked to tie your smartphone number to your desktop and tablet Google account and so now understands the full picture of who you are, where you live, and what you do based on your activity online and offline.

Google is using all this data on you to serve search results tailored just to your needs. It’s all about relevancy. See my next post on Thursday to see what you can and should do with your website based on what search engines are evolving to like for organic placement.

June 10, 2014June 7, 2014

Google is Serious About Smartphone Compatibility

Google is serious about forcing you to address smartphone compatibility on your website. In fact if you do not design now to accommodate smartphones Google is now actually lowering your Google AdWords Quality Score for your landing page. Now there is an even bigger penalty in Google Mobile Search.

On the Google blog this past week, Google showcased this image showing how it will now be tagging results in the mobile search results showing when a site is using a tool like DudaMobile or other service that simply redirects a user to the home page of a website and not the page mentioned in the actual search results.

That’s a huge black eye and sure to now kill any mobile traffic for sites that are not properly serving up mobile optimized content. With Google predicting that smartphone searches will eclipse desktop and tablet searches this year, Google is getting serious about search quality for smartphones.

You can read the full article from the Google blog and see a large photo of the return in the results red flagging sites that are not mobile responsive and redirect mobile users to the site home page not the real content.

Make sure that you read the details of what Google is now revealing on their best practices for websites and how to serve and design websites that are responsive as surely Google will be penalizing sites in the future that do not adhere to their best practices.

If you need a responsive website, I invite you to check our service offerings.

June 3, 2014June 3, 2014

Building Links With Dead Strategies

Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.

Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.

Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q

Now using this tactic to build inbound links may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.

With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.

A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords. There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.

For help in creating user-centric content and blog posts please make sure to review our service offerings.

May 29, 2014May 25, 2014

The End of Manipulating Google Places

Very quietly Google has changed Google Places to remove the ability to manipulate a listing for organic performance. This action has very quietly slipped under the radar, but the changes are big for businesses.

First, this last month, Google sent out notices to all Google+ Local businesses that duplicate listings of the same business would not be allowed. Google immediately disable access to all Google+ Local pages (also known as Google Maps pages and Google Places accounts) to email addresses that did not carry the business domain or were not recognized by Google as clearly being the account owner by email, or having the business phone number or carrying the registered address. This effectively locked out all third party account managers and update services.

Google then advised all account access users that the main account owner – not even the originator of the account, would have to allow access to any users from the parent account. Additionally that any approved users would then have to manage the account for two full weeks before transfer of the account could be done.

By making the linking and transfer process so complicated Google has effectively locked our all parties except the one account owner. Of additional important note is that Google has been removing one by one the items a business owner could actually change on their account.

Over time, Google has removed the ability to add keywords and to craft a message that helped the business place locally. Google even removed the ability for a monthly promotion as well as comments from the page owner.

With this most recent update Google has now forced all Places pages now into the format of a true Google+ page. No longer is the look and feel different of a Places page from a postable Google+ Business page but identical and one that you can now post to with a third party app like HootSuite.

These huge changes to who can own and update the page, what the page looks like, and how you interact with the local page have now made Google+ Local pages unable to really be optimized for organic placement. This bad for businesses, but great for Google. Google gets more people forced into Google+ and now nets out manipulation of local results.