Google seems to be ramping up its aggression towards spammy search results as it has now moved to make the spam reporting feature a permanent part of the search experience, reports eWeek. Previously, this was relegated to a browser extension for Chrome, but is now rolling out as part of all search results. Just how the Google team will use what is reported is a mystery, so we can only hope that justice will prevail.
Category: Search
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Stephan Spencer at SearchEngineLand penned a pair of articles about a year ago that addressed 72 SEO (search engine optimization) myths. Who knew there were 72 things not true about SEO? In any technical marketing situation, there are a lot of people who claim they know what they are doing, with few who actual do. This creates many problems both for the industry, and for the client, who is given misinformation or worse yet, poor results from their financial investment.
Stephan makes a very strong point – the less you put in, the less you get. Meaning that “you get what you pay for”. If you approach SEO by hiring someone with a year of experience who “claims” they know what they are doing, you’re not going to get a lot of value – especially if you have them doing other stuff.
The bottom line is that if you haven’t been too SEO-savvy, you’ll have some catch up to do and some training of your web team. And please note, most technical web teams do not know SEO! It’s not a given! Use these two articles as a checklist when interviewing your SEO employee or agency. If they know that these are myths, then you are in good hands. If not, keep looking!
The first 36:
http://searchengineland.com/36-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-40076The 2nd 36:
http://searchengineland.com/36-more-seo-myths-that-wont-die-but-need-to-41999 -
Mahalo’s Google rankings are starting to dip. Hopefully this is just the beginning of what is to come… content farms being pushed out of business in favor of real, high quality content, made by experts.
Allen Stern reports the details at CenterNetworks.com: http://www.centernetworks.com/mahalo-reduces-headcount-google-algo-change
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This week Google updated it’s search algorithm to enable users to provide feedback that helps Google refine search results by potentially lowering the value of content farm and other crappy sites.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145733
My concern is that unscrupulous business people (the same ones who create the content farms and do keyword stuffing, etc.) will now flag genuine sites of their competitors to try to game Google into lowering legit sites.
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Joseph Kershbaum at SearchEngineWatch penned two great articles on Automated Rules for Google AdWords. Everyone should use automated rules, but getting started is kid of intimidating. Here are two articles that can help break the ice:
Part I: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641760
Part II: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641909
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I love WordPress. Everyone should use WordPress. It’s typically one of the first things I recommend to clients.
Here’s a great article compiled by Matt Krautstrunk at Six Revisions listing eight WordPress plug-ins that focus on SEO. Use them!
http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/seo-plugins/
Early today I gave a lecture on SEO to a interactive marketing team about how to refine and improve their current SEO efforts. Needless to say, many of these tools will help!
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Rob Chant at SearchEngineWatch.com penned an article on SEO and the role of keyword ranking and why you shouldn’t worry too much about micro-managing this… instead, focus on long tail and other SEO practices.
Today (Monday), I spent part of my President’s Day holiday giving a short (30 minute) lecture on SEO, discussing both the technical side and content side. While the info was high-level, one of my main points was the value of long tail search and optimizing pages for this.
Here’s the article: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641912
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If you are an AdWords user, you need to read this article ASAP:
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=145284
Basically, if your advert appears in position #1, and consists of a headline in a proper sentence, then your 2nd line of text may be automatically moved up to the first line to produce a longer headline.
One of my colleagues experienced this which dramatically increased the CTR rate (Google’s goal), but without producing a material increase in quality traffic. Thus, all the additional traffic produced proportionately fewer conversions, resulting in a massive increase in CPL and total cost. This was not a good result, so the ad needed to be reworked (or the bid lowered so it would not appear as #1).
So, you should run an audit of your campaigns to see if ad copy should be updated. You may not want a full sentence to appear – or may want to change what it says so it is more accurate as a headline.
The reason more people click it is most likely related to the fact that it more closely resembles organic results.
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Not much new to add to my analysis, but between the post, eWeek and the New York Times, I’d say awareness has increased in the last two weeks dramatically.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/29/AR2011012903731.html
Dan Soschin 