Category: Google

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Can Older Websites Retain Their Organic Placement?

Matt Cutts from Google helps to demystify the issue that many older and previously well placed websites ask frequently, “how can I maintain my organic placement against new website startups in my industry?”

You can watch the full video here.


Here are my tips to assist you even further on this important topic.

1. Just because you’ve had great organic placement for years does not assure that your site will continue to be well placed now and in the future. It is important to know that your placement can be pushed down as new more relevant websites appear. Even those that are brand new.

2. If your website is over five years old, it is absolutely time to budget for a complete redo. Not only a design change but a full review of your content and how you are using technology on your website. If you don’t have YouTube videos on your website, you are really missing a strong channel that will drive traffic and keep visitors coming back to visit.

3. Have you really read your own content? Have you looked at your Google Analytics data in the last month on your website traffic? If things are falling off for you, you will want to look at your message, look at your bounce rate, and time spent on your website. If the numbers are low, it is time to really think of the things you can add or remove from your site to improve value to your readers.

It is very important to understand that just because your business and website have been around for a while does not guarantee organic placement. Google is evaluating click through rates, time spent on your site, and a user’s search history to rack and stack websites. If your numbers are low or your site is stale your placement will drop when compared to other hungrier, more relevant websites.

If you need professional eyes on your site to help understand where you are and where you should be, we offer a SEO placement review that may be of value to you as you evaluate what you should do to move up or retain your site placement. I invite you to read more and check pricing.

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Guest Blogging as We Know It is Dead – Per Matt Cutts

You know something for SEO tactics is dead when Google’s Matt Cutts comes out point blank and says:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.” Read the full blog post.

But not only does this mean that the tactic is dead, but continuing to use a tactic like this for link building may actually get you penalized in the Google index.

Let’s Explore Guest Blogging Further

Here’s what’s considered bad:

If you or your SEO firm were trolling the web and sending out unsolicited notes to webmasters saying “Hey use this blog post and keep the links as dofollow, or we’ll pay you to post this content”, ouch, watch out! This is exactly what Matt is talking about that you need to steer clear of.

Here’s what’s still considered good:

If you are guest blogging for a news site like SiteProNews, the Huffington Post, industry trade journals – these types of high quality guest blogging opportunities and high profile exposure can really continue to work for you; building your online authority. But the reality of these types of gigs is that they are few and far between and not available to the typical newbie.

Tie the demise of guest blogging in with Matt’s thumb’s down on article marketing and you can clearly see that link building now is considered a spammy practice and one worthy of a Google penalty.

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What to Know About Google’s Structured Data

Google recommends that website owners start to provide special XML code snippets to assist it in sorting and categorizing their website data. This is called structured data and is usually done in a format known as microdata.

This new format is not hard to understand nor is it hard to implement, but it is important to know that Google considers its use important and is making it fairly simple for website owners to add these code snippets.

First, not all data on your website can be marked up as structured data. For now Google is only using code for products, local businesses – including address, phone, and other information, articles, software applications, reviews, events, and movies.  Each year Google has added new categories as they expand the types of data that they are integrating into search results.

Use of special tags:

Coding a review will need special tags that denote rating, vcard, title, name, locality, and region. This is all a part of sorting the data for Google in their approved and specific format. Google makes it pretty easy for website owners to start using structured data and has even provided some great online tools.

Here are a few additional resources for you to consider:

Google’s blog post on the topic:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html

Structured Data Markup Helper:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/

Embedding Structured Data for Gmail:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/embedding-schemas-in-emails

Google Webmaster Tools Data Highligher:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Structured Data Bread Crumb Snippet:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

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Google States They Do Not Use Facebook or Twitter for Ranking

Matt Cutts, the lead Spam Engineer at Google revealed just this last week that Google is not using Facebook or Twitter posts or profiles for index ranking. This is very big news and a change in what Google has stated about how social impacts their algorithm.

You can watch the full YouTube video here.

Here’s the bottom-line about using social media and Google rankings:

1. Google is not ranking your site based on the activity you have on social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter.

2. Google does look at links that are shared on these social sites just like they look at content pages when they can spider the content.

3. Google is concerned about using social profiles to create “identity” as this may change or be blocked over time.

4. Google is not recording, for their algorithm, the number of likes or followers a social profile has.

5. Matt Cutts states that he personally likes social profiles for sharing and driving traffic, but does not recommend using them as an avenue to impact Google search placement.

This is an interesting change for Google as previously Google has stated that it did include likes and follower numbers as part of social signals and that these social signals impacted organic placement.

My recommendation is to continue to use Twitter and Facebook if it makes sense to do so. Some businesses have a rich forum on Facebook and should not abandon their followers just because they now don’t get SEO juice from activity there. But for SEO’s to encourage social media interaction now appears to be just one more SEO tactic that Google is clearly disavowing as a way to get organic placement.