SEO & PPC Blog

Google Algorithm Change Cracks Down On Spam And Crap Link Building

Google  recently updated their algorithm and implemented several changes to improve their search results. As with any update to Google, there are clear winners and losers. I was pleasantly surprised to see that several of our clients competitors found themselves in the losers category since they were relying heavily on keyword domains with poorly built, spammy links in addition to other sneaky, grey or black hat tactics. These type of tactics never last long as Google has shown today.

The Almighty Matt Cutts of the Google Web Spam Team explains the update:

“We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

Things are only going to get tougher for SEO’s that are not implementing content driving strategies and fully leveraging social media like Google +.

Steve Jobs – I’ll Miss You

Today the world has lost a visionary, a brilliant marketer, and a person who built a company that transcended branding. Steve Jobs has served as a personal inspiration to me in the realm of business and as I type this very blog post on a Macbook Pro, I can’t help but quickly recall the many different ways that his products and company have changed my life. From watching Toy Story for the very first time when I was younger, to crafting PPC, SEO, and web design projects on the different mac computers I have owned. One of the biggest things I admired about Steve Jobs was his dedication to his vision at Apple and how he would often personally respond to emails that people would send to his very well known email address. He was a man who was not driven by money, but ambition and that is a rare quality in today’s world where money is such a motivating factor for so many people. Watching Steve Jobs at work was like watching a master craftsmen outdo his last performance – everytime. I hope that in growing my company I can at times use Steve’s brilliance as an inspiration. I will miss you Steve.

Google Says 3rd Party Review Sites More Valuable Than Google Places

The customer lobby blog has highlighted an interesting snippet of information regarding Google Places page reviews and just who gets the majority of clicks when a searcher is poking through the search results.

From Google’s Response to their Senate Hearing:

1. CLAIM: “Is a consumer (or a small business, for that matter) well served when Google artificially promotes its own properties regardless of merit? This has nothing to do with helping consumers get to the best information; it has everything to do with generating more revenue.”RESPONSE: In fact, most of the click traffic (roughly two-thirds of clicks) from our local search result pages goes directly to small business websites, and review sites make up the next largest percentage (about a quarter of clicks). Less than 10% of clicks from our local results page go to Google Place Pages.

This just goes to show that it is extremely important to claim your Google Places page, but it is possibly more important to properly seek out citations and aggregate your business data to different 3rd party sources such as Customer Lobby, Insiderpages, and other local small business listing sites.

Google’s Secret Sauce Algorithm Recreated?

I was browsing the seobook forums and a user posted a link to this interesting article discussing how these academics basically set out to recreate Google’s algorithm with the help of a self learning machine. The interesting part is that their machine was able to predict the top results 8 0ut of 10 times, or 80% of the time!  Ted Ives makes an interesting point in his blog post about the missed opportunity to analyze incoming anchor text in this study. His post dives a little deeper into the data as well, going so far as to provide a detailed chart with ranking factors and their respective weight based on the study. Here are the ranking features used in the study, but definitely check out Ted’s chart on his post.

 

Google +1 to Drastically Alter Rankings?

Google recently came out with the +1 button, and describes it as:

The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.”

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

The +1 button’s timing seems to be a direct response to Bing and Facebook’s announcment that they would be working together to bring social results to the search engine. That partnership has the potential to change the search business big time.

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