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Upcoming Google Update to Penalize “Over-Optimized” Sites

April 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Rarely do we get a glimpse of a Google algorithm update before it occurs. But during a recent panel discussion at the SXSW event in Austin, Texas, Google’s spam chief Matt Cutts announced some minor tweaks to the search engine’s algorithm.

Dubbed the “Venice” update, Cutts said Google would punish sites that are too optimized for SEO, or what he called “over optimized” or “overly SEO’d” (…according to reports from HubSpot and Search Engine Land).

Although Cutts initially had planned not to announce the update ahead of time, he decided to go ahead and spill the beans following a question the panel received from an attendee at the SXSW event.

Basically, the question asked what Google was doing to prevent overly optimized content. For example, if you search for “three-winged widgets” on Google and the first result is just a keyword stuffed document, it won’t have much value to you, the reader.

In his response to the attendee’s question, Cutts explained the changes as “trying to make the algorithm more adaptive.” Sites that will be penalized will be those who are clearly engaging in keyword stuffing, exchanging too many links and any other practices that go beyond “…what a normal person would expect.”

I’ve done things SEO-e and other sources have suggested I do. Will I have to worry about being penalized for following standard recommendations?

A similar question was asked of Cutts by our friend Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land and the short answer is no, it won’t.

Those who will be penalized are sites whose content is driven by keywords rather than topics. If you’re selecting topics based on what you’re audience wants you shouldn’t have anything to worry about provided you’re not stuffing your content with keywords. As we’ve said before, if you spam your content with keywords to the point that it doesn’t read naturally, your site will be either ignored or penalized.

In a follow-up to Cutts’ response, Bing’s Duane Forrester added that social sharing is an important signal as to how others value your content. If others think you have great content, they will “…amplify it” Forrester explains.

“If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially about you and about your content. Those are really important signals for us,” explains Forrester.

In light of these revelations by Cutts, we want to take a moment to reiterate the old rule of thumb.

  • 2-3 separate, unique keywords on a page
  • Vary your use of keywords (i.e. singular, plural, stemming, synonyms)
  • Above all, make sure your copy reads naturally. If it feels spammy to you, then it likely contains too many keywords

In the end, if you’re writing with your readers in mind first and the search engines second, you should be okay. Make your readers the first priority and the rankings will follow provided your site is easily crawlable so the bots can actually read and index your content.

Read some of our prior posts on keywords and how you can maximize keyword instances without your content being too spammy.

Are you concerned about Google’s Venice update? What are your thoughts on penalizing sites for over-optimization?

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

3 Steps You Should Take Before Linking to another Site

Latent Semantic Indexing – A New Way to Look at Keywords

Standard Keyword Research Won’t Always Tell you what your Prospects are Looking For

11 Steps to Increasing Keyword Saturation while Maintaining Valuable Content

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Outlook for Search – Building High Rankings in 2012

January 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Well, a New Year has passed and we bid farewell to 2011. It was certainly an exciting year, especially in search and online marketing which saw changes occur at warp speed.

Over the last few weeks of 2011, we took a break to assess the state of search engine optimization and where things were headed going into 2012. We do this in order to help our clients (…and readers of this blog) better understand where they should focus their online marketing efforts.

After reflecting on where we’ve been and where we’re going, we quickly realized that the lines between different types of search – namely organic, local, mobile and social – are now being blurred more than ever. Rather than web search strictly being the center of activity online, social is increasingly becoming the focus.

According to an exclusive web tutorial from Planet Ocean, web search was the sun and other types of search (…or planets) revolved around it. Now, instead of web search being the sun, social is quickly becoming the center of the universe with other types of search (…or planets) revolving around it.

As we’ve said here many times over the last year, being social is a critical strategy to being successful online – this will become even more critical in the coming year. A cursory review of search results for a variety of terms shows social mentions and engagement alongside traditional webpages.

Social is being aggressively integrated in Bing, who has partnerships with Facebook, Skype and Twitter. Google has basically bet the farm on its new social network Google +.

From these arrangements and others, we can ascertain that social sharing will increasingly integrate with web search. Going forward, social shares or votes will increasingly be the new links.

How many have liked, +1’d or otherwise made a comment regarding content on your site?

So how can I ensure my site continues to rank high in 2012?

Dominating your market online in the new year will require some tried and true methods mixed with some new ways of engaging your audience online.

Since the web has become increasingly social, it’s become increasingly democratized as well. Users will more and more be the driving force in determining which social networking platforms you ultimately adopt.

The key to all of this though is content – as in years past, successful online marketing will be driven by your ability to create reference grade content that helps the reader. In turn, this can lead to true engagement that builds trust and value.

Rather than a few pages earning links, success online will hinge more on how socially engaging your content is.

The more likes, +1s and buzz your content has, the better your business will do.

Besides content itself, freshness will also be a driving factor in maintaining and building high search rankings. It’s increasingly become clear that Google and others are placing a high value on ‘fresh’ content. Just in the last two months, we’ve seen Google make updates to its algorithms to reward sites with fresh content, especially in areas that are always changing.

This update though has sadly penalized some sites with great ‘evergreen’ content that’s been around awhile but still valuable. Repurposing this content will help you get around this ‘freshness’ problem, especially if you experienced a drop in rankings due to this latest update.

Also in 2012, expect to see more firms using social media tools for product development and testing as well as technical support.

What about mobile-based search? Will it continue to grow in 2012?

An emphatic yes!! It’s projected that by 2015, more users in the U.S. will access the Internet through their smartphones or tablets than a regular computer.

Mobile search is deeply tied into local search with over 40% of searches on a mobile device being for something local like a restaurant, doctor’s office or brick and mortar store. According to Google, 44% of searches from a mobile device in the 2011 holiday shopping season were for store locations and last-minute gifts.

With mobile devices, users can seamlessly float between mobile, local and product search as well as their social media activities.

In 2012, it’s imperative that local business establish their presence on places like Bing Local, Google Places, Foursquare and others. Don’t be hesitant to allow reviews – customer reviews give you an opportunity to address grievances and open yourself up to new ways of engaging customers.

So there you have it – things will continue to move at wharp speed in this new year – social and mobile is most certainly revolutionizing how people interact and find things they need.

Stay tuned to our search engine optimization blog as we slice and dice the trends and developments in the search marketing world. Most of all relax and have fun with the possibilities the online sphere will bring in 2012.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In

7 Strategies for Maintaining ‘Fresh’ Content

Preparing for the Mobile Revolution – Part I

Preparing for the Mobile Revolution – Part II

3 Ways Social Media, SEO and Content Marketing Work Together

Reputation Management – Maintaining & Enhancing your Company’s Good Name

Filed Under: Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Using a Bing Search Box Rather than a Google One

December 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Many top websites today include additional features on the site’s pages. One of those is a Google search box, which is integrated with the site-specific search box. You can easily type in a keyword phrase and choose whether to search the site or Google for that information.

A new WebMasterWorld thread though has some webmasters considering a switch to Bing’s search box.

Each has their reasons with one of the big ones being the ease at which the change can be made. One contributor says he’s interested in changing because Google’s “AdSense for Search” already has a plethora of information about his visitors. While he understands Microsoft will get this information too, he feels it will slow the amount of information Google collects in a day.

Another webmaster gives his initial impressions:

  • Easy to setup
  • Results are excellent
  • Results look good
  • Search box books better than Google
  • Likes the pop-up results window
  • Loads in all browsers except Opera, which only displays it periodically

All of our sites currently contain the Google search box. Would we consider changing?

Perhaps – from the sounds of these comments, Bing’s site search functions work pretty well.

But Google remains the top search engine and actually gained market share in September. Bing is listed #3 by comScore and while they have an ongoing partnership with Yahoo, both of them put together still take less than half of the market share Google does.

See the chart below:

Explicit Core Share* of U.S. Searches Among Leading Providers, September 2010 vs August 2010
  Share of Searches (%)
Domain August 2010 September 2010

Month-over-Month Point
Change (%)
Google Sites 65.4 66.1 0.7
Yahoo Sites 17.4 16.7 -0.7
Microsoft Sites 11.1 11.2 0.1
Ask Network 3.8 3.7 -0.1
AOL Network 2.3 2.3 0.0

Note: Data is based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

*Excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with search results.
Source: comScore 2010

Filed Under: Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Site Architecture Tagged With: , , , , ,

Ways You Can Still Use Frames and Have High Rankings

November 10, 2010 by Leave a Comment

One of the tenets of good site architecture is avoiding frames. While they may look nice, they’ve only spelled trouble in the past from an SEO perspective. If you have a bunch of great content wrapped up in frames, nobody would be able to find it since search engine spiders could not crawl frames.

That is of course you’re very knowledgeable and know how you can both have frames and an easy-crawlable site.

To clarify, a frame is actually an HTML element that pulls content from another URL and directs it to a URL of your choice…in a non-technical sense, frames essentially copy everything on a page to mirror it on another page. There are some good reasons why you would want to use frames…just be careful on how you use them to ensure your site indeed gets crawled by the search engine spiders.

Use specific tags in your HTML code to ensure framed content gets indexed

It’s not that Google and Bing don’t index content within a <frameset> tag but what usually occurs is the search engines will index framed and non-framed content separately and catalogue them as two separate pages.

Viewing frames as images is a good way to look at them. If you absolutely must use frames, you should provide a keyword-rich description of the image in case it doesn’t load. The <noframe> tag explains to users and search engines what the framed content is if it fails to load.

<noframes>Put your keyword-rich frame describing content here.</noframes>

Two important things to consider when using <noframes>: (1) place them as high up on the page as possible so it’s easily readable by search engine spiders and users whose browsers don’t support frames and (2) be sure the <noframe> tag is outside the <frames> or <iframes> tag. If it isn’t, that content may not get picked up by the search engine spiders.

Another “frames” tag for that’s gaining a lot of popularity is the <iframe> tag. It’s used to embed dynamic information and a wide variety of widgets on a site…Facebook’s “Like” button/widget is one common use for an <iframe> tag.

Many who use <iframe> though don’t realize that it doesn’t generate a link back to their site – which is one of the main reasons to use the tag in the first place.

Fortunately, there is a way to get that link by setting up the code as indexable content with the <iframe> tag. Setting up the code in the following way will get the content and any links indexed.

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php”
scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ style=”border:none; overflow:hidden;
width:150px; height:50px;” allowTransparency=”true”>

Content, and links will get indexed here by most engines as it is visible text on the page. Anything that is pulled in using the iframe tag, will not get indexed with the page. So if you want your iframe powered widgets to generate a link back to your site, make sure and include that code in this area.

</iframe>

Generally speaking, we avoid frames on sites we work with if at all possible since it’s very difficult to ensure the content is indexed by the search engines and readable by our users. <Iframe> tags on the other hand can be a good method of building links when they’re used properly.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A Quick Link Building How-To for Small Businesses – Part II

August 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment

In the second part of our quick little link building guide (see part I here), we will explore the differences in links and ways you can get more inbound links to your website.

Not all links carry the same value in the eyes of the search engines…some are more valuable than others. Links from established websites usually carry the greatest value since their PageRank is much higher (because they have a vast amount of links already). For example, a link from CNN.com will carry much more value than one from a free press release distribution service few have ever heard of.

A link from a small business directory like www.sbdpro.com will be more valuable than one from a directory that uses no-follow tags. Speaking of no-follow tags, it’s the bane of any inexperienced link builder’s existence.

No-follow is basically a link search engines cannot follow so therefore, it has no value. Links from Facebook, Twitter and many online ads are usually no-follow so try your best to avoid these. They don’t hurt anything but they don’t help you either so you would be wasting valuable time if you try and acquire these.

So how can I build incoming links naturally?

Like we said before, you want a good mix of links to your site that appear naturally. Having 100 links from the same place will be a red flag to the search engines. They will most likely penalize you in this situation, which is not a good one to be in.

Some good places to get inbound links include: directories, press releases and blogs.

Directories – Links from professional organizations, online communities, forums and business directories can provide great links for your site. Examples include DMOZ.org, business.com, Yahoo!, Best of the Web and more. Be sure your directory listings are fully optimized to get the full benefits.

Press Releases – Writing and distributing press releases to various outlets are another great way to gain inbound links to your site. Not only will people be able to learn about what’s happening at your company, you will build more links to your site.

Blogs – You can also link to relevant pages on your website from your blog. Building relationships with other bloggers will also bring great links to your blog and website. Active blogs with large followings are your best bet but you can also target lesser known blogs as well. As their PageRank grows, the value of the link will grow with it.

Another way you can build links is to create content so fascinating and valuable that other people will want to link to it. This is the ultimate way to build links but is also the hardest.

Create a schedule for link building – for example, you could find a directory once a month and create links in your blog every week or two. And carefully evaluate directories and press release outlets to determine the value they can pass to you. Different directories and press release outlets can offer a wide variety of link value (check out our article on press release optimization for more).

How can I see who’s linking to me?

Another important aspect of building links is inventorying what you have already and checking on that periodically. You can easily see who Google is crediting a link to you by entering “link:www.yourwebsite.com” in the search bar (without the quotations).

This won’t show you all of the links but if you’re inclined to, you can use Google’s free webmaster tools for more in-depth research…Yahoo’s Site Explorer is another tool to see what links Yahoo! are showing for your site.

You should make it a point to checkup on these every month or so. And build relationships with more web properties too…obtaining a link not only helps your prospects in the search engines, it is also a great compliment and professional networking tool.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , ,
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