Pleasanton Web Design

Google has reportedly name it’s latest algorithm update. Google “Penguin” is aimed at over-optimization. Here are the key points to consider:

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.

4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

8. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

These guidelines are nothing new, which makes you wonder if something else has actually changed, or if they have really just implemented a way of better enforcing these guidelines.

As with Google Panda, the actual results of the update appear to be that spam sites have been promoted and many quality sites have been smoked. The assumption is that a lot of blatant spam has been removed from the index, and additional tweaking is needed. We’ll see if that’s the case as things progress.

There’s been a lot of talk recently in the SEO world about over-optimization penalties that Google has apparently been rolling out over the last month or so. Many sites have already lost ranking or have been de-indexed altogether. Google hasn’t announced anything officially yet, but announcements from them generally come shortly after a major change has been completely implemented.

Rand at SEOMOZ put up a great summary of six really spammy things that webmasters and SEOs should stop doing in anticipation of the over-optimization penalties full implementation:

1. Use of unnatural Page Titles

Bad: A list of  keyword phrases, then “your brand” tacked on at the end.

Good: Your brand, and then a natural description of your services, which will include the most important keywords anyway.

2. Manipulative Internal Linking - Linking every instance of a keyword with identical anchor text in body of your content or in a side bar  to same the page. Only the first instance will count and the rest will tag you as a spammer.

3. Keyword stuffed footer links. Don’t use  keyword link lists in the footer of your website.

4. Keyword stuffed content blocks.  If it has no value other than the keywords in contains, get rid of it.

5. Backlinks from penalty-likely sources. (Check out this detailed article on how to monitor your backlink profile for penalties)

• Link Networks
• Comment Spam
• Automated Software
• Forum Signature Links
• Reciprocal Links
• Article Marketing

6.  Similar pages targeting different keywords with only slight differences in content. Instead, optimize a single page for the multiple keyword variations.

Making these changes may be a hard pill to swallow, especially if your success has been based on some of these shady tactics. It will be better in the long run to take a small hit right now than to get completely pulled from the SERPs by a Google penalty that is just around the corner.

In late February, Google gave webmasters a rare treat by supplying a detailed list of updates to their search engine algorithm. Continuing with item-by-item analysis:

10. “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

The “site:” operator is a handy advanced search tool you can use on Google Search to see the pages that Google has indexed for a Website.

Judging by the description it appears that Google is now more carefully selecting URLs to display for this advanced search query. This would help the display for larger websites that have many URLs, as well as many different types of pages. Rather than displaying page after page of results of a similar type up front, you should now be getting a more diverse mix of pages that will better help you understand the website more quickly.

When using the “site:” operator, Google will also display an ad encouraging you to set up Webmaster Tools. What you, as a webmaster, will gain from Google Webmaster Tools is not an improved version of the “site:” operator, but other data that will help supplement it.

Previous Articles covering Google Panda 3.3

No. 1 -More Coverage for Related Searches
No. 2: Tweak the Categorizer for Expanded Sitelinks
No. 3: Less Duplication in Expanded Sitelinks
No. 4: More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page
No. 5: More locally relevant predictions in YouTube
No. 6: More accurate detection of official pages
No. 7: Refreshed per-URL country information
No. 8: Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search
No. 9: Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

8. Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

You may have noticed, that images are showing up on a wider variety of SERPs. I have some blogs that get most of their traffic from image search, so selecting quality images and properly tagging them is of the uttmost importance. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Include keywords in the filename
2. Include keywords in the img “Alt” tag (important for the visually impaired visitors as well)
3. Include keywords in the img “Titile” tag
4. Use microdata and create a Rich Snippet 

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

A translation from this French SEO Expert points out that Top Level Domains (TLD) are the best identifiers of the country that the content of a website is intended for. It would follow that Google would want to keep up with the most recent TLD data.

Having worked on sites that have targeted Japan and mainland China, I can attest to the fact that getting country-specific domain names isn’t always easy if your business is not based in those places. To those of use who got by targeting those countries without the advantage of the appropriate TLD, our work might have gotten harder. Probably, though, this is just a clean-up, rather than a tweak that puts more weight on those country-specific TLDs.

I am, in fact, set to relaunch one such site in the coming weeks. I’ll update the blog with any new information I gain. In the meantime, anyone in a similar situation who is having problems as a result of this update, please comment!

Troy Philis

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Google (or at least their CEO, Eric Schmidt) sees Brands as the way to sort out the cesspool that is the internet. So making sure that the official pages, especially of big brands, are properly identified, should be a priority of Google’s search algorithm.

As this seo blogger points out, the change is probably aimed at sites that attempt to identify themselves as official pages, but aren’t, thus taking advantage of that boost in ranking that Google gives to official pages. If your site attempts this, your ranking may have been hurt, and rightfully so. Most SMBs (small or medium sized businesses) were probably unaffected by this particular tweak.

Google “Suggest” is one of the 40 search quality updates Google implemented last month.

5. More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

Suggesting queries as you are typing in the query box has two main purposes

1. For you, the searcher, it can save you time, as you may see the full search query displayed among the suggestions as you type.
2. It helps Google direct searchers towards the more popular search queries, which are the “suggestions” it gives.

It is likely that if you see something close to what you started to type, you’ll click on it rather than complete your originally intended query. If you fail to see helpful suggestions, you’ll complete your own query.

Now the suggestions for YouTube will have a local component, and serve up suggestions that are more relevant based on the location Google believes you to be searching from. More relevant suggestions means there is more chance that you will click on one, and that is what Google would like you to do.

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates:

4. More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

Not a big deal in itself, as far as I’m concerned. The most interesting detail is the mention of Google’s use of “rich snippets” that supplement the display of images for things like recipes, applications, movie posters and shopping results. Rich snippets are basically a method of tagging data and relating it to a type of information. For example declaring this in a tag itemtype=”http://schema.org/Recipe” tells Google that the information is related to a recipe, and further specifying predefined attributes such as “cookTime” and “photo” gives Google the information they need to confidently display that information and the image, knowing that it will make sense to the user.

Google’s preferred rich snippet format is microdata. Web developers can create a wide variety of rich snippets and test them using rich snippets testing tool.

And of course rich snippets have potential for search engine performance. Here’s a great article on using rich snippets for SEO.

Continuing with the series of posts covering Google’s announced Search Quality Updates in February 2012:

Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.

Google was apparently having a problem with the way it automatically created Sitelinks for websites. If you are unfamiliar with the term “Sitelinks,” they are the 6 or so links to subpages listed after the top result, of the search results where Google is pretty sure that the top result stands out above the rest in relevance. Here’s an example:

Please note that personalization does play a factor in the display of Sitelinks. Google is much more certain to display them for sites you have shared on Google Plus.

Snippets are the description portion of Google search results, under the linked page title that you click on, and above the display URL. Google uses these snippets as clues to the content of the target page when deciding which pages to include in the Sitelinks. Since the occurrence of Sitelinks has noticeably increased of late, especially for those who use Google Plus, Google was apparently seeing a lot of problems in duplication with the algorithm they were using to create them. As lower quality websites built on open source CMS systems started getting Sitelinks, their tendency to create pages with duplicate meta description tags was probably a big part of the problem. Now Google says they have to problem fixed. Bully for them!

Google has recently announced 40 updates to it’s search functionality that are supposed to improve the quality of searches and provide added value to searchers. Anyone who has followed Google’s updates for any length of time is aware that the real reason behind updates is generally to make more money for Google. If improving quality and adding value for searchers happens as a serendipitous side effect, enjoy!

Over the next 40 days I’ll try to dig into each announced change and highlight the most salient aspects from the perspective of a small to medium size business trying to get some traffic to their website through organic search.

#1: More coverage for related searches.

[launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

The “searches related to” section is found at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP) and is comprised of a list of eight related search terms. Clicking on a search term will bring you to a new SERP for that term.

• How does this help you as a searcher? If, after reaching the bottom of the results page, you haven’t clicked on anything, Google thinks maybe you used the wrong search term, and is offering some popular terms it feels is related.
• How does this help Google? For one thing, Google has the opportunity to push you to a popular SERP, which in terms of it’s Adwords PPC program, is a more competitive page, with more expensive clicks.
• How does this hurt the small business? People who click on those links won’t be going to Page 2. This becomes increasingly important as Google fills the SERPs with it’s own content and redesigns pages that push more organic results off of Page 1.

With the increase of the number of queries that the “searches related to” will appear on, these effects will obviously become more prevalent. In the end this feature gives Google an opportunity to control where a lost searcher goes, which is primarily good for Google.