Google: April’s Search Quality Highlights

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Chuck Turack

Each month now Matt Cutts posts some information about the changes to Google’s search algorithm. You can visit the blog here. This is a great resource and helps us in the SEO world determine if we need to make any changes to our SEO strategy. However, for those of you that are not experts, here is the important stuff and what it means to you:

1. “Improvements to local navigational searches.” – This is an attempt to get better results for searches that include location information(city, zip, etc). This will affect business that rely on ‘local’ traffic from web searches to get local leads. Key factors to help determine if a site will be effected are: site navigation, ‘location’ pages, maps/address data.

2. “No freshness boost for low-quality content. ” – Freshness of content has long been a factor in Google ranking algorithm. This update takes the quality of the content into account when evaluating new content. To comply with this, make sure all new content you add to any of your web properties is not only unique, make sure it is accurate and valuable as well.

3. “Keyword stuffing classifier improvement.” – Keyword stuffing is using a key term many time within a document to try and manipulate the results. Say, including the term ‘Chicago movers’ on a page 50+ times in many different areas on the page; title tags, alt tags, main navigation, body, anchors, footer, etc. This has been a SEO topic for a long time, but Google is basically tightening the belt here. Actively looking for more keyword stuffing while diminishing the value of those key words in certain places. make sure your not using any one key word to often. If you us standard grammar, write quality content, and have a company like Spectrum to handle the website code, you’ll be in good shape.

The 49 other updates in the article, while important, don’t have a large impact on SEO as a broad topic, most will only effect a small set of results. Have any questions? Ask me on Twitter @SEOesq .

Google Puts a Freeze on Web SPAM

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Lauren Santucci

Local search is changing the way consumers find and purchase products. Google is an ever evolving animal with the most recent change being Google’s algorithm adjustment referred to as the Penguin Update (Previously known as the Webspam Update). This update is Google’s way of cracking down on search engine manipulation to maintain a quality web experience for users – cleaning up the spam in other words. Google’s quality guidelines explain what features are needed to create a good website from the viewpoint of their engineers. The SEO engineers at Spectrum make sure to follow these quality guidelines to prevent the Penguin update from affecting your website. We stick to these ethical SEO best practices:

Make your site’s webpages for your readers, not just for search engine optimization. Quality content is crucial when creating and maintaining a solid web presence, and is even more important when trying to gain good SERP(search engine results page) real estate.
Don’t use black hat SEO techniques because they are used to get higher SERP rankings in an unethical manner.
Avoid link building shortcuts. Do not participate in paid link building or link building exchange schemes to increase your website’s page rank.

With the Penguin Update, penalties will be given to those website’s practicing unethical SEO techniques, and in the case of Google’s 2011 Panda Update – praise for good techniques. Quality content is a fundamental rule when it comes to creating a web presence.

With these rapid changes, parent companies have more difficulty keeping track of their vast network of dealers/members to see if their network is keeping up with local search and ethical SEO techniques. Would you like to learn more about Google algorithm changes? Tips on how to produce great websites with quality content and white hat SEO techniques? Connect with us!

Have a more specific question? Contact us here.

Black Hat SEO

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Greg W

Black Hat SEO has been and will be around for quite some time. We all know that if there is a way to exploit something, someone will. Those of us who want to be successful now AND in the long run, know we need to stay away from these practices. Most ‘black hat’ is done with some intent to deceive or trick the search engines. Something they don’t like at all. Here we’ll review some of the activities that will get you panelized or banned from organic search results.

A. Cloaking

There are several types of ‘cloaking’ out there, but fundamentally it’s changing the code or content that your server outputs based on who is asking. An old example of this stems from pages that ‘sell’ versus pages that rank. You want Google and Bing to see a well optimized, keyword rich page that will rank well. However, you want a consumer to visit a page that ’sells’ the consumer on your product or services. To achieve this, a programmer can code the server to display one page to Google so it ranks well and another completely different page to a web user to try and ‘convert’ them.

SEO Recommendations: Do NOT engage in this. The SE’s will discover this and penalize your site.

Tips:

1. Make sure your SEO firm is ‘White Hat’

2. Google “‘Keyword’ Directories” to find some niche directory sites

3. Avoid automated submissions, do it manually

B. Link Farms

There are all types of links, but a link farm is a group of web sites that hyperlink out to every other site in that group. All of these sites are working to benefit one another. By doing so, link farms are spamming the index of a search engine (spamdexing or spamexing). Links need to be coming directly through relevant websites, if these are just sites they were posted on to try to boost Page Ranking, then they are basically attempting to cheat search engines.

SEO Recommendations: Avoid participating in link farms as your site may have its search rankings penalized for participating in a link farm.

C. Invisible Links

Invisible links are just like any other link on a web page, but as you may suspect, they are invisible. Let’s say the background color for a website is white, in that case an invisible link would be in white text. These links may be invisible to the human eye, but search engines would pick up on these unappreciated links.

SEO Recommendations: Stay away from Invisible Links, search engines will figure out what you are doing and may even go as far as to exclude the site from an indexing list.

D. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page has its meta tags loaded with keywords. Every website has a title to the page that you are viewing. Just look at the top of this page. See those keywords? Now, those are perfectly normal, but keyword stuffing would be where you’d see an endless assortment of keywords placed in the meta tags in the hopes of a better Page Rank through search engines.

SEO Recommendations: Keywords should definitely be in your meta tags, but if you go overboard with the amount of keywords use, search engines will not take a liking to your page and you may be penalized.

E. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like. When you have a site, avoid having the same content spread out over multiple pages. Besides it being lazy, it can eventually end up hurting your website in the long run. Make sure every page is personalized for the benefit of your readers and your own business.

SEO Recommendations: You want to avoid duplicate content across any sites as Google penalizes Page Rank when it determines that the content is duplicated by other sites.