Category: Google

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Plan Ahead with Google’s Digital Will

There have recently been some very sad stories in the news of young people who committed suicide and their parents were fighting to get access to their minor children’s or young adults online photos and Facebook pages and even emails. It is heartbreaking for these parents to hear that they have no legal access to these accounts.

Google has just introduced a new digital will that allows you to cede your online rights to items on Google properties to your loved ones before you die. It’s called the Inactive Account Manager. You can sign up or find out more on this Google page.

First off you will need to login to the Inactive Account Manager using your Google ID. From there you will add a mobile phone number for verification and security and then set a time out period, such as one month. Then you specify if you want someone else to have access to your account and their email address or if you want all your data deleted. This leaves you in control of what you have online. The choices you make will affect all Google properties like Picassa and Google+.

 

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Why Does Your Page and Website Fluctuate in Organic Placement?

It is not unusual for a new page on your website, or for that matter a new website to place, well initially in the organic search results and then drop in placement over time. Why?

Matt Cutts at Google explains why there are fluctuations in organic placement on Google.com in this video found on YouTube http://youtu.be/BzfK6isC7CA.

Here’s a synopsis:

  • As Google spiders the Web, it may find similar content knocking down your placement.
  • New content may be created over time that is more recent and knocks down your placement.
  • Google initially boosts the page and then drops it if over time it does not garner backlinks.
  • Google is initially guessing where a page should place and then understands later due to links and co-citation if the page should continue to stay highly placed.

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Matt Cutts on WordPress SEO

If you can’t see this YouTube video, you can watch it on YouTube.

In this video you’ll see pure unvarnished personable Matt Cutts, cat lover, talking about blogging and WordPress. Although the video is really for a newbie webmasters and not really for hard core SEO pros.

There are some good nuggets in the video and here they are:

  1. WordPress takes care of about 90% of the mechanics of search engine optimization.
  2. You can optimize WordPress with a few simple plug-ins.
  3. Matt likes Cookies for Comments and Enforce www Preference for his own blog.
  4. PageRank is the number of people that link to you and how important they are. The higher your PageRank the higher you’ll place organically. Quantity is not important, but rather the quality of links.
  5. You can flow through your PageRank to other sites by linking out to them. But the authority decays with each link.
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Why I am Watching Co-Citation

I get asked all the time, “what are you watching, what’s new and exciting, what trends to you see happening?” Right now, I’m watching co-citation.Google has made really sweeping changes to how it rates websites and what used to work for years to garner organic placement is not considered spammy by Google and may even run into a placement smackdown filter. This is why I am very carefully and intensely watching co-citation.

Watching co-citation.
Watching co-citation.

Here are a few articles about co-citation that you may want to read:

SEOMoz take on co-citation

Jim Boykin’s take on co-citation

In lay terms, co-citation is close to link bait and article marketing but with natural growth. Both authors state that Google and Bing as so smart now that they do not have to be fed keyword phrases, they will decide on their own based on the content that links to you. But, here’s the change it is not the link text that they are weighing, but rather the jist of the content where the link to your website is embedded. In fact, the page that links to you may not even link to your service and may not even contain keywords on which you want to place. Instead it is an “authority” factor.

So here’s what I understand so far…

Google and Bing spider the web, they read incidents of mentions of your name and content, they spider your own website and get a picture of the services you provide, then they review how what people say about you and the authority of the site that links to your site talks about you. They then use this in their algorithm to place you in importance to being an authority on a specific topic. Way Cool!

Although I don’t think that anyone in my industry really knows yet what works for organic placement in this new world on Google and Bing, but it is clear that content, the sharing of your content will be a very strong impact for organic placement.