Category: Google

Posted on

Google Says It Hates Keyword Stuffing But Why Do Top Sites Still Use It?

Google hates keyword stuffing and clearly addressed this SEO tactic in the Panda update last year. In fact, Google actually states this in their webmaster guidelines about keyword stuffing:

 “Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Examples of keyword stuffing include:

  • Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
  • Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
  • Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:
    We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you’re thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.”

Here are some sites online that are using keyword stuffing so you can take a real world look at this technique in action:

http://www.ranchland.com/
Take a look at the footer to see the stuffing in action? But although this site is clearly in violation of Google’s rules, it is still getting top placement on important industry specific keywords. Take a look at the content and you’ll see that it is in some places nearly unreadable for keywords interspersed in the content. So why has this site not been penalized? There simply may be more at play than we know that is keeping this site in the top spot.

 

Keyword Stuffing in action.
Keyword Stuffing in action.

http://www.bowcolabs.com/
Here’s another site that is using the tactic that Google has clearly disavowed at the bottom of the page just as an example. Although this site does not have top 60 result placement, it is a fine example of what to steer clear of in regards to keyword stuffing.

So back to the topic, if Google hates keyword stuffing, why are top sites still using it and why have they not dropped in placement? Although these sites may have slipped through Google’s filter, there may be other factors at play that are keeping top sites using stuffing still at the top. Or it may also be that Google simply has not caught up with sites using these tactics. Whatever the reason, for sites that are using this stuffing, I would recommend a slow revision to remove it while improving content and user engagement.

I personally don’t believe that using just these disavowed techniques will get any site top placement. What gets placement is a combination of quality content, some degree of keyword density (1% to 2%), quality inbound links, and shareable content.

Posted on

GMail and the Promotion Tab

Google has made some big changes in the last several weeks in GMail. One of the biggest changes is that they are now more aggressively showing advertising in your inbox that looks like actual messages. One of the other big changes that impacts those of us that do e-newsletters is that this type of correspondence will now appear in the default “promotions” tab.

In this video from the Social Media Examiner, you can see how you can help consumers to understand how to tag your emailings so that they will go to the main inbox versus the promotion tab. It is an interesting short video and well worth the look to see if you need to do any instruction in your next newsletter on how to tag your mailings.

So far the industry is reporting about a 10% drop in openings from GMail users now that Google has instituted this design change/filter in GMail accounts.

To watch this online, please visit this page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Elz_1KQnmA

Posted on

Matt Cutts from Google on Link Building

In a recent interview done for an article by Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting, Matt Cutts, the lead Web Spam engineer for Google,  tells the industry that “link building is not illegal.”

However, in the same interview Matt goes on to state that there is a link building tactic that Google now considers web spam.

Links from press releases that are really written just to build links are no longer valued by Google. However if links that are generated by a news resource  reading the press release and then contacting the business to write an article which then linking back to the businesses website would be a great way to build links. So press releases are not dead persay, just now more what they were intended to be; a way to let the press know of something newsworthy. Not a link building strategy unto itself as SEO’s have previously used them as.

Matt and Eric agree that one of the best Google-approved ways to build links is by having great sharable content that is followed, talked about, and cited on social media sites like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. But, they both agree that just vomiting out links to your content on social media is not what they intend; rather audience engagement that  is built around content which is then shared throughout followers networks.

If you are looking for a new content strategy for your blog and social media, we invite you to visit our website to find out more about how we can help you.

Posted on

What Does Google Say About Page Load Speed?

Just how fast your website pages load may be just one of the newest factors in regards to where Google ranks you in the search results. In fact Google considers PageSpeed so important that it has released a new tool for you to test your mobile and desktop versions so as to give you concrete areas of improvement.

Here’s the tool’s URL: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Google considers page load time or PageSpeed (as Google has coined the term) an important factor in supplying relevant content in its search results. Since 2010 Google has been clocking websites but just recently really started pushing sites to improve PageSpeed.

Here’s a quote from 2010 as posted on the Google Webmaster Blog letting you know that Google has felt PageSpeed is an important issue for over three years:

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.” Full article.

Now experts say that you’ll lose about 7% of your potential site traffic for every second it takes your page to load. Factor into that, that more users have faster Internet connections and a lower tolerance for a slow loading page and you start to see that changing technology and demographics are all a part of why Google is now laser- focused on PageSpeed.

In fact, in 2013 Google even has created a special team called “Make the Web Fast” headed by engineer Ilya Grigorik. You can watch his Google viewpoint in this interesting top level video. As Ilya notes, the speed problem for most website lies in un-optimized images. Ilya states that a one second threshold is the new web standard. So pushing the speed envelop to serve pages in under one second is their new goal.

In a recent case study done by Google and Bing slow loading pages 2,000 millisecond delays cause a 4.3% drop in traffic and lower customer satisfaction. You can see more details on this study in the video noted above.

Whatever Google decides is crucial for their search engine’s performance, you as a site owner should make important for your site and webmaster in order to place now on Google.com.