Let's have a Frank the Bunny Google Update

There was another update to the Google ranking algorithm around the 25th April, now called the Penguin Update for reasons known only to Google.

We’re hoping that Google starts showing a little more imagination and labels future updates after famous movie animals eg. Rin-Tin-Tin, Lassie, Miss Piggy, Cujo, Snowie, Nemo, Frank the Bunny and so on.

This update is another attempt by Google to reduce the impact of web spam in the search results and is alleged to specifically target “over optimisation”.

Based on what we have read, tested and witnessed, here are some factors that seem to help your search engine rankings post-Penguin.

• web sites with at least six pages of well written content of 400-800 words per page and lots of related keywords on those pages
• web sites with a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page (from a straight marketing point of view an FAQ page is a good idea anyway)
• web sites with customer reviews or customer testimonials
• web sites with low bounce rates and high reader engagement
• web sites with a contact page with the same street address that appears in Google Places, Yellow Pages and other online directories
• sites with About Us page with pictures and a history of the business
• NO Google Analytics installed
• WordPress sites with the All in One SEO plugin installed and switched on
• Interpage linking with less than text-book quality (random and sometimes illogical),  anchor text links to internal pages

In short, Google is starting to favour sites with useful and well structured content broken into logical chunks for readers.

One of the crazier things we have witnessed is that in many cases internal web pages are now ranking better than the home page for the site’s primary search term. This is happening frequently with WordPress category pages.

In other words Google may ignore the home page (probably because it is over-optimised), and now favours more natural internal pages .

Second Google PageRank Update 2012

It appears there was a mass Google PageRank update last night, the second for 2012.

At least 275 sites that we own or monitor have moved up or down (mainly up), but some sites in the more competitive lead-gen, travel and banking niches have dropped. One in particular went from a PR5 to PR1 in one fell swoop.

I suspect they had bought a bunch of links from blog networks.

I’m pleased Google is making things happen faster these days. There’s lot of Google Dancing going on so far this year.

Here’s some blog posts about Google PageRank for your enjoyment:

The last three months have been a wild ride for businesses whose primary source of sales leads is the Google natural search results.

The Panda series of Google rankings updates has meant gut-wrenching cuts in visitor numbers for some big players who have enjoyed good rankings for many years.

Nobody yet understands why the Google search results have changed so much. It’s not as if Google is ranking the highest quality sites first.

Conspiracy theorists speculate that Google is making the search results far less predictable in high-competition markets in an effort to push more advertisers into their Adwords program. From what I’ve heard that strategy is working very well for Google with record sign-ups and advertising revenues the last 2-3 months.

So what should you do if your business relies too heavily on the Google natural search results?

Here’s a few suggestions:

1. Consider trying Google Adwords. Yes, this is what Google wants you to do, but it’s all about the numbers. If the lifetime value of a new customer or client is more than 50 times the cost of a click, you would be crazy not to at least try Google Adwords. But be careful. Adwords can be complicated to set up and if you don’t do it properly you can burn through thousands of dollars in just a few days.

2. Investigate other forms of online advertising. For business to business advertising Linkedin is an excellent vehicle. The minimum spend is just $10 per day and the average cost per click or 1000 impressions is about $3.50. The best feature of Linkedin advertising is the degree of targeting. You can select by city, age, gender, job title, business size and even company name when you set up your campaign. Want to make a special offer only to people who work at Suncorp? You can with Linkedin. Over 2 million Australians are now on Linkedin. And unlike Facebook, most of these people on Linkedin can read and write.

3. Get more long-tail traffic. Rather than focusing all you SEO efforts on a few high-volume and high competition search terms, add some lower volume, low competition, but high-conversion terms. Here’s a blog post that explains: http://searchtempo.com/google-panda-insurance-the-long-tail-approach/

Until next week, remember that Google is not the internet

One of the great things about using a web site to generate sales leads is the wealth of useful marketing data you can gather using tools like Google Analytics, Statcounter or Piwik.

Most of these tools track the keywords people used to find your web site. This offers a great opportunity for you to get more traffic. Especially traffic from those “long tail” keyword phrases that convert to sales very well.

Lets say for example that your home page is optimised for “red widgets” and you see in your stats that a few visitors who have searched for “red widget packages” and eventually found your web site.

You check your rankings and you see that you rank at the bottom of page 2 of Google for “red widget packages”.

This is an awesome SEO opportunity. You see, you’ll probably find that people searching for “red widget packages” are far more motivated to buy than people searching for just “red widgets”. And the fact that they were prepared to go all the way to page 2 to find your site means they are super-motivated.

The golden rule of keyword research is: The longer the search term, the more motivated the person searching.

Here’s what you do:

1. Create a new web page for your site just about “red widget packages”. If you have a decent content management system like WordPress, then this is an easy job.

2. Optimise that page remembering important elements like metatags, headings, keyword copy density, image file names, image alt tags and site navigation.

3. Beg, borrow, buy or steal some quality external links into that new page. There’s a bunch of easy ways of getting links that we cover in our SEO training course. And if you are time poor, get yourself a Mister Purple Link Sandwich

In a few weeks you will probably find that new page on page one of the Google search results for the term “red widget packages”.

Follow this system for multiple keywords and before long you will see an increase in quality traffic.

There’s an old saying: “Lots of little fish are sweet”. It is so true.

There has been lots of chatter on SEO blogs and forums the last two days about another Google rankings update. Sites with no or very thin content are ranking number one for some competitive search terms whereas quality sites that have always been on page one are nowhere to be seen.

Here’s a quick example, this site is in spot 8 on page 1 in google.com.au for the term viagra - http://www.sahajayoga.com.au/

When I looked, the word viagra appears nowhere in the source code.  I wonder if the web site owner has noticed a big spike in traffic?

There is speculation that this is a glitch or a mistake, and the algorithm engineers have stuffed up because they are being dragged kicking and screaming into Google Plus engineering teams to take on the Facebook Taliban. In other words there are no Google grown-ups minding the search store.

The other conspiracy theory is that Google is trying to get more Adwords advertisers by making organic SEO too random, too unpredictable, just too freaking hard.

The risk that Google runs with these changes is that people who invest in organic SEO will shift their spend into other online mediums like Facebook or Linkedin advertising.

If your sites have been affected, the best advice is don’t panic. Yet

And if you are feeling angry, spend and extra hour on Facebook or Twitter today having a bitch about Google or switch to the fast, clean and relevant duckduckgo.com for all your search needs.

Remember back in the day when Google looked like duckduckgo does now? Lean, mean and useful.

This glitch will hopefully blow over in a week or so as Google realises the errors of its ways and puts the Panda in rehab.

I often meet business owners and marketing people who are paying a monthly fee for SEO services.

The standard business model for the SEO industry is to get an upfront payment for the keyword research and on-page web site optimisation and then a monthly retainer for ongoing SEO services ( link building).

The trouble is these business owners and marketing people don’t actually know what they are paying for. And some of these people are paying over $1000 per month.

Sure, they get a monthly keyword ranking report for their web site that is generated automatically by software. This report shows them how their web site is performing. But what they are not getting is relevant information as to the work performed by the SEO company to IMPROVE their rankings.

The trouble with many SEO service providers is they hate to be made accountable. They don’t like it when people ask specific questions about what they are getting for their monthly payment. eg “So what did you actually DO for me this month?”

So if you are paying a monthly fee to an SEO company, here’s some relevant questions you may wish to ask:

1. What keywords are you targeting for my business this this month?
2. On what basis did you choose those keywords? Search volume, customer motivation, customer location, expected conversion-rates ?
3. What new backlinks have you built for me (the specific url), and what are the anchor “texts” and destination urls for those backlinks?
4. Will those backlinks remain in place if I stop paying the monthly fee to your company?
5. What is the Google PageRank for each of the pages on which the new links have been built?
6. What types of links did you build for me eg: article, blog post, link exchange, blog roll, forum signature, social bookmark, video description, blog comment etc
7. What specific on-site SEO work was performed and how long did this work take? eg. new pages created, blog posted created, metatags optimised

Until next week,

PS – Next SEO Course details are here. I am very excited to report that a weight lifting coach by the name of Lisa who did the course late last year is now ranking number 1 for her primary search term and is now beating a ninemsn page.

By now you probably realise that if you want to rank well in Google you must get quality backlinks (links from web pages with good PageRank), from a variety of sources. It’s a good idea to spread your risk because Google may change it’s algorithm to discount certain types of links.

Notwithstanding the recent Google Panda updates, our experiments indicate that blog commenting does still work in driving traffic and in improving rankings.

One great place to get links to your web pages is through manual blog commenting. There is software out there that automates the process, but seriously, you are much better off doing manual commenting.

In short, what you do is find blog pages with decent PageRank, read the post and then contribute your ideas to the conversation.

Is this spamming?

If you actually read the post and make an intelligent contribution then the answer is “no”. If you just write something like “great post” hoping to get a free link then it could be seen as spamming and you are wasting your time. Just remember, that in 99% of cases a real human will read your comment before approving it and the resulting link.

Convinced?

To get you started, below is a list of four blog posts that allow commenting. Two are about food, one is about shoes and one is about design.

http://everydaypaleo.com/2011/03/05/fast-shrimp/

http://www.shoeblog.com/blog/kate-middletons-wedding-shoes/

http://webdesignerwall.com/trends/best-of-design-2010

http://www.fatmanunleashed.com/chocolate-cake-weight-loss-diet-disaster-food/

All these pages have PageRank ranging from 1 to 4.

In the old days of SEO one of the best ways of getting links was doing link exchanges with other web site owners.

These exchanges were usually with customers, suppliers, industry contacts and other organisations with some sort of personal or business relationship.

For a variety of reasons link exchanges went out of fashion as link-building automation systems and software became very popular.

You see, exchanging links with another web site owner takes a little bit of work and negotiation. You have to make contact, you have to put their link on your links page (which takes a little bit of technical skill), and ensure they return the favour by linking to your web site.

Yes, link exchanges went out of fashion. The thing is though they worked very well then and still work very well today.

You can imagine the benefits of getting 10 – 20 permanent links from relevant web sites that have decent PageRank. For most industries, that sort of link-power would get you on page one of Google pretty quickly.

And In case you’re wondering it is considered “white hat” because:

a. It’s manual, not automated
b. No money is involved
c. You have a relationship with the site you are exchanging links with
d. The links are usually from relevant content

So how do you go about it?

Here’s the steps:

1. Create a link or partners page on your web site.
2. Put a link on your home page to that new links page. A link using the anchor text Sites We Like, Partners or Associates should be enough. Over time the PageRank from your Home page will flow onto your links page.
3. Contact your suppliers, customers, friends and associates via telephone or email and ask if they want to exchange links.
4. For those that agree to the exchange, put a link on your links page using the anchor text they request.
5. Tell them when you have added their link to your link or partners page and request they return the favour.
6. Check to see that they have in fact added your link to their links page.

Yes, it does take a little effort, but it is worth it. To get you started I’d like to do a link exchange with you.

Click here for details and instructions. You will get a nice juicy link from a page with a PageRank of 2.

Resources

Here’s an interesting post about using Scrapebox to get whitehat links.

If your web site is built using WordPress or other system that automatically updates the sitemap as you add new pages, you can save a lot of time by including that sitemap in your link building efforts.

Rather than building new links to new pages as you create them, by building links to the sitemap the sitemap itself will pass on PageRank to those new pages.

Here’s an example of how it works:

Say you home page is www.myawesomesite.com and has a PageRank of 4.

On the home page you put a link to the sitemap (for example www.myawesomesite.com/sitemap.xml)

After a few months that sitemap will get a PageRank of it’s own. In this case it may even end up with a PageRank of 3.

Whenever you add new pages to your site those new pages will end up being listed in the sitemap. This sitemap will then pass on PageRank to the new pages meaning they will get indexed faster AND get better Google rankings for the target keywords.

Bottom line – build external links to your sitemap.

Here’s some related information about sitemaps:
http://www.measuredsem.com/blog/how-to-create-a-site-map
http://vuthang.org/seomaps-com-build-an-seo-sitemap
http://4visions.nl/en/wordpress-plugins/xml-sitemap-feed/
http://techmaza.in/10-most-popular-plugins-for-wordpress-blog/
http://www.iblogzone.com/2012/03/google-plugins-video-sitemaps-pinterest-business.html

Over the last nine months or so we have received and increasing number of calls and emails from people who have experienced a sudden drop in their Google rankings.

One of the many reasons Google may deindex a site or reduce its search engine position is that the site has been flagged as being a source of malicious software.

Database driven web sites (WordPress and Joomla being the most popular), are particularly vulnerable because some themes, components and plugins are not particularly secure and hackers can alter the code on your site to distribute malicious software on their behalf.

That’s why it’s a good idea to try to minimise the number of plugins you use and try to keep your version of content management system and the associated plugins up to date.

If you want to see if your web site has been flagged by Google there is a nice tool that will let you know.

The address for this tool is http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=yourwebsite.com.au
(change the yourwebsite.com.au to your web site)

Example: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=searchenginecourse.com.au

If you do see that your site has been flagged, you need to fix the vulnerability and then ask for a manual review via Google Webmaster Tools.