Google – Page 45 – The Web Authority

May 22, 2013May 18, 2013

Penguin 2.0 is Coming – Brace Yourself

Matt Cutts, one of Google’s lead spam engineers, is telling my industry that another large algorithm update is coming in the upcoming weeks. He has stated that it will be an important update and may impact many sites. Google is calling this pending update Penguin 2.0.

Many sites got hit severely by Google last year with the double whammy called Penguin and Panda and most have still not recovered. In fact according to a recent article only 5% of the sites affected have been able to re-mediate their placement. Hit hard were e-commerce website that do not have unique product content and sites with duplicate content. But additionally hit were legitimate websites that had tried to boost their organic placement by using link farms, link exchanges, and link spam creation.

Matt Cutts again states for the record that websites that have unique, well-written, shareable content will benefit from these upcoming algorithm updates but others who do not have this focus will see their placement drop. Here’s an article online that provides a nice short synopsis about what Penguin 2.0 will be doing. This Penguin update will focus on inbound links again as in the previous Penguin update of 2012.

On our end, we’ve already started to see site owners look to mix up their anchor text and move away from repetitive keyword dense anchor text in content and blog posts. Cutts states that this algorithm will be a big one and we recommend that you not ignore his warnings.

May 20, 2013May 18, 2013

Advertorials and Google

Matt Cutts, Google’s voice to my industry, has recently stated in a video that Google considers advertorials and sites that use them without a no follow tag to be in violation of Google’s quality guidelines. You can watch the full video here.

So what exactly is an advertorial and why should I steer clear of them for now?

Wikipedia says this about advertorials:

“Advertorials differ from traditional advertisements in that they are designed to look like the articles that appear in the publication. …The differences may be subtle, and disclaimers—such as the word “advertisement”—may or may not appear. Sometimes terms describing the advertorial such as a “special promotional feature” or “special advertising section” are used. The tone of the advertorials is usually closer to that of a press release than of an objective news story.”

In other words many advertorials are created to appear as if they were native articles belonging to a website or news site. They may not even be marked as a paid advertisement; but that is exactly what they are. A huge cottage industry has grown up around the creation and marketing as well as the placement of advertorials. Just recently sites which use advertorials and sell space have started to (in some cases) mark these well written articles as advertising. Some sites still flow PageRank to the promoted site providing SEO benefits.

Matt Cutts states plainly that these SEO based activities are clear violations of Google’s policies and in near future updates sites that use, promote, and place advertorials will be penalized in organic placement. For now, I highly recommend that using advertorials not be a part of your promotion programs.

May 17, 2013May 11, 2013

Google’s New Keyword Planner for AdWords

Coming to Google AdWords accounts and accessed from the tools menu drop down is a powerful new tool called the Keyword Planner. I am seeing this new tool in many of my client AdWords accounts as of today. This new tool is a real gem and a wonderful improvement to Google’s integrated keyword tools.

Start looking for the Keyword Planner in your AdWords account.

The Keyword Planner is powerful, you can now really estimate activity

Choose options before you start search for keywords, estimate your own list, multiply your keywords.
Choose targeting for estimates not only at the national level but get estimates at the state and city level.
Set your average cost per click with a slider and set a daily budget to see results.

But that’s not all, you can do more:

Pick over a list of keyword suggestions.
Set the match type of keywords to target.
Cull out keywords as you go.
Download your new list as a .csv or an AdWords Editor import file.

I am just starting now to run the Keyword Planner through its paces in client accounts and so far I am finding the suggestions for my specific needs an excellent starting point. I am still carefully reviewing keywords on load, but there are some variations that I feel are pretty good additions to my client accounts.

What I like is the speed. I created a new list of phrase matched targeted keywords that look like they could really generate some sales with a few clicks and in under 10 minutes. As I try the tool out more this week, I’ll let you know additional thoughts.

For now, look in the tools section of the AdWords accounts you manage to see if you find the the Keyword Planner there. For the accounts I am managing, the tool seems to be appearing in accounts that are about 90 days old or younger. My older accounts do not have the tool appearing yet in the drop down menu.

May 15, 2013May 11, 2013

Is AuthorRank or BrandRank Coming for Businesses on Google?

Is AuthorRank or BrandRank coming for businesses on Google? That’s an interesting question and one that I feel Google is leaning toward based on the chatter online, but one I doubt we will see this year. What exactly is BrandRank? First, let’s start with a little bit of detail.

This past year Google really pushed AuthorRank as a way to verify authors and help to build credibility of content. It all starts with a personal Google+ page, a tie-in to your website, and then tagging of your content you may write around the web. When properly done, you will see a face next to an article and SEO juice flows from links to the owner’s website, to the Google+ page, and pushes results higher in personalize and organic placement. It is a real boon for writers such as myself.

Google understood that there are many businesses where this benefit of authority of content would be valuable, especially for big companies/brands. So it quietly rolled out rel=”publisher” in addition to rel=”author”. For brands and companies the ability to tie together a website, blog, Google+ Business page using the publisher tag makes terrific sense.

However, Google has already stated that it won’t be putting a face or brand icon next to any of these results, at least not for right now. With Google really pushing AuthorRank, I would expect them to do the same with BrandRank, but more judiciously and most likely not this year. I just don’t think that they want to dilute what is happening with AuthorRank yet, but I feel that BrandRank will come in the relatively near future.

In the meantime, I would strongly recommend that you position yourself early and start working to develop BrandRank if it is meaningful for your business. Preferentially use AuthorRank if it makes sense to your business or BrandRank if you are a medium to large business.