Tag: SEO

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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.

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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.

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Top Five SEO Areas to Focus On

I watched this video recently from Matt Cutts, from Google, on what are the top five SEO areas to concentrate your efforts on and wanted to give you a synopsis and additional insights from my own point of view. Matt’s video is excellent, so make sure to check it out as well.

1. Have a website, domain, be crawable, don’t hide or lock down important content.

Seems like a no-brainer here right? But you would be surprised at the number of people who still don’t have their own domain, are using free services for their website, or hide their best content behind a wall trying to get email addresses to read their best content. Don’t do that!

Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.
Build web authority and trust to place better on Google.com.

2. Include the right words on the page and especially in query type phrases.

You’d think that this would be common sense, but this is easily overlooked. I’ve seen sites include their important keywords in images (that are not readable by the Googlebot) or forget to include top phrases completely on the home page which is their most important page for Google.

3. Think not about link building but rather creating converting or compelling content.

This is a hard one for many people to grasp. Google wants to spider content that actually provides value to your readers not just a brochure of your services. Sites that invest in creating shareable content that is more than a listing of services will receive better rankings.

Now here’s an interesting note from the video, Matt says don’t just invest in search placement widen your reach consider other avenues including paid advertising, billboard, and other ways to get your message out to your audience. Broaden your marketing plan for a wider appeal.

4. Craft your Meta title and Meta description carefully.

These two source code tags are top real estate for websites. Special attention should be paid to create great tags that are more than a listing of keywords and that entice visitors to click in. The Meta description will appear as your snippet in Google.com. Make sure it works to entice readers to click in to your site.

5. Use all the free webmaster resources.

Google has some great and free tools to use to understand what is happening with your website. Make sure you are using the Google Webmaster Control Panel and Google Analytics to know what is happening on your website.

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Cross Linking Domains You Own

Cross Linking
Cross Linking

This question comes up a fair amount when we have business owners who have multiple website – “Should I link and cross link my various web properties?” First, most website owners would simply do this without thought and there is no reason why you should not if you have one or two website properties. In fact, it makes perfect sense to do so and you may actually get some backlink benefits from doing this.

There are however some situations where doing so will be a negative for your organic placement. Here are when you should be careful doing so.

  1. If you have several websites but you do not reveal that you own the properties and you are actually trying to appear as if you were different businesses, I would not cross link the sites.
  2. If the content is the same on the web properties, I would not cross link the sites.
  3. If the businesses are totally different, say one is to sell dog toys and the other is to provide web consulting. I would not cross link the sites.
  4. If you have created many, many, keyword domains and you are trying to use cross linking these multiple sites for organic placement improvement. I would not cross link the sites. You may have been able to do so before and received a benefit, but not Google is identifying sites using this tactic as link spam and is actively penalizing their organic placement on Google.com.