This new and uncertain update, not named as yet and lacking a current Google press release has seen ranking results soaring and declining with much disruption and volatility associated with the Google dance. A few sites we monitored were ranking first page, then jumped to page 5 for a day only to return to page one with alternative URL’s being listed in the SERP compared to days before.

At the time of this article being written, the Google Index is  in disarray. This could be due to inconsistencies across 50+ data centers as Google works at synchronizing its data due to filters being tweaked, reversed or re-applied. It is uncertain how big this current change is, but it is safe to assume that it looks to be as big as the original Panda Update of February 23, 2011. For a list of Algorithm updates over the past few years, see this resource: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2011

When we have further news on how the Algorithm update has affected the Google Index and client ranking results we will report and publish our findings.

What is certain is the following:

It is estimated that Google implements 500+ algorithm changes every year. It is Google’s quest to deliver Relevant Quality Content to its user base. To ensure this, Google will continue to filter all the data it crawls, finds and indexes to ensure that only quality sites and pages are available for its user base.

Sites that are susceptible to being affected by the current update are:

• Sites having reciprocal links. Reciprocal linking is an old practice but still very much used today.
• Having blog roll links or site wide links. This practice may create too many links from one domain and may appear as manipulation of links or Page Rank.
• Old link building campaigns where a rinse and repeat method was used. Therefore, you find many links that may point to your site but has no authority or links pointing to your links. Flat structure linking is very visible to Google and will lead to de-indexing of those links tied to your website authority and ranking.

What we are facing in the SEO industry as a whole is Google filtering and de-indexing links that have no value, quality or relevancy to websites. This update could be responsible for the de-indexing and filtering of past SEO flat linking structures, spam and bad quality content linking to websites. The impact would be websites being stripped of incoming links leaving websites with less visibility and authority that affects authority and ranking.

Attention: There is 99% chance your SEO company used an Off Page Strategy that is currently being de-indexed and filtered out leaving your site with less authority and editorial votes. this WILL impact your rankings. Talk to us for a solution.

Some things to look out for are:

• Duplicate or Missing Title Tags
• Duplicate or Missing Descriptions

Although an easy fix, make sure you have the right advice and tools to do an audit and get the job done. Ask us to help you for a quick 1 day turnaround on an Audit and get you visible at a low cost before trying anything else.

Unnatural Link Development Explained (WARNING!!!)

Google only has On Page and Off Page link examination at it’s disposal to uncover and reverse engineer any site’s link profile. Unnatural linking takes place when you have incorrect ratios in your link profile when examining the following:

•  IP address referrals: When your link profile is not diverse enough and links are mostly coming from a small group of IP addresses e.g. a handful of articles or blog sites. These usually raise a flag with Google as it may appear that these links are part of a link farm, syndicate or proprietary network of owned and operated blogs.

• Website Profiles: When examining links to your website and they all appear to be from a select type of website e.g. Article sites only, Blog sites only etc. with no representation of diversity in representation, it may appear unnatural to search engines such as Google.

• Selective sites: When your link profile appears to be from only selected sites in your niche industry, geographical location or sites that are only on topic with your industry, your link profile may appear to be unnatural and controlled and raise an unnatural flag with Google and other search engines.

• Consistency: When your links are made up of keyword anchor text only e.g. Targeted Keyword etc. it does not represent a natural link ratio between Naked Links (http://www.website.com), Anchor Text Links (“keyphrase” linked to the site) and Call links (“click here”, “here”, “website”) it is easy to reverse engineer and uncover an unnatural link strategy.

• Top Heavy Linking: Your SEO firm might be linking only to the same pages each time for the same keyword, or link to the homepage of your website. An unnatural footprint and clear map to your linking strategy is left visible over time. Google can reverse engineer this footprint and impose penalties on your website pages or exclusion from its index.

• Empty Links: Links from properties that have no inherent authority or links of themselves. These are usually created as one-way links without having any link development of their own.

Natural Link Building Explained

Any person on the web can link to any page and any website without the permission or approval of the site owner. This is how natural linking takes place and grows over time. Anything worth linking to will be linked to from site owners, bloggers, advertisers, affiliates and social media sites. All links are great for your site, and help your business become more visible to search engines e.g. Google.

Examine what natural link building is and means to you on the Internet. Natural links are links that are uncontrolled, not manipulated or directed by a website owner and takes the form of randomness. A natural link profile appears to consist of the following:

• Random Anchor Text
• Random Geographical Linking from all over the world
• Diversity in IP addresses
• Inconsistent link text
• Linking to internal pages on website
• Representation with a diverse range of Website Profiles
• Links from desirable and undesirable sites (1% may be undesirable)
• Links from site unrelated to your industry.
• Linking from websites with their own SEO in place i.e. Quality Links.

We consult with and help online businesses rectify a problematic link profile, talk to us today to find out more.

Free Consultation

- All article URL’s need to contain at least 3 digits and must look static.
- It is considered better if the article name is H1/H2-tagged and the name should always be the same as the title page.
- It is recommended to publish your articles at least 3 times every day.

If possible you should have more than one site author and list these authors on a separate page. Each article for a news release should have your company information completed and contact details included and signed by the author. With articles it is very beneficial to include some images and video as this increases the richness of content and quality of your article, especially in post Panda update days.  Once you are happy with what you have and ready to display it to the world, submit your article to the Google News Team for review.

Some other suggestions to keep in mind are the factors of your own site where your article is hosted and how it relates to On-Page SEO and your domain strength. Much like general search ranking, this will influence your news rankings and display. It helps to update and publish article son your site site more than 3 times each day. It is most important to have original, unique article titles and content as Google News filters out any duplicate articles (we should know this by now right?). Being first or amongst the first to publish your news will get you more links and get you noticed by Google News.

Ensure that your articles are at least 300-500 words long.  Articles that are too short tend to be filtered out. If you are reporting on any local news, be sure to include the city and zip code as this could get you noticed in Google Local News. If possible, add images next to your listings.  When using images, ensure they all have captions, of medium size on page with no hyperlinks or link through.  Just display them close the the title of your article and you will be set to explore the world of news publication.

Hope this short article helped, stay tuned for our next update which will be a step by step guide in creating a news worthy article.

[notice]

The Power of Ripoff Report

Let us take a look at why the posts on this site command so much power in Google.

1. Their site is massive, with over 400k pages indexed in Google.  This gives them a very large presence.
2. The domain has been active since February 2000 and has over 80,000 backlinks which gives it great authority.

[/notice]

With this kind of power and authority behind them, it is not surprising that their posts manage to get into the top ranks on Google without any effort.

Below are a couple of strategies to try out if you have a Rip Off Report that is affecting your company rankings.

How to Beat Ripoff Report

To start with, do not make the mistake of posting rebuttal comments to the site.  Adding threads to the post will only make the link stronger and cause the post to rise in the search engine ranks.

The next step is to create blogs, web 2.0 and other sites.  These sites then need to be optimized for the keywords that show the Rip Off Reports in the search engines. You need to get your new sites listed and these should then push the negative listing off the page and onto the next.

Following this, register with as many social media sites as possible and optimize the profile pages.  Included in these social media sites are Facebook, Digg, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube.  You might find that to be effective you will need to create 100’s of these profile pages.

Another successful strategy is to start creating some link building campaigns.  Find some high authority sites that appear below the negative listing and start building links to these sites.  Once again you need to promote these sites and push them up in the ranks at the same time as pushing the negative down and off the page totally.  Use this same strategy to build links to your blog and web 2.0 sites.  This will ensure that your clients see less of the negative listings in the search engine rankings.

Lastly, write new articles and submit them to top article directories.  In your content, utilize your keywords and focus on positive and correct information about your business.

Battling these Rip Off Reports is a hard task and discouraging task as the posts often get pushed down and then manage to pop back up again and it seems like you have to start from the beginning.

Do not be discouraged, as with many other SEO strategies, it is consistency and determination that will give you the desired results in the end.

The Google Panda Update 3.3 around the 4th week of February has a lot of people scared.
Bottom line is that data has been refreshed, some sites were unfiltered from the last update, and others were filtered for the first time.

Google Panda 3.3 February Update…

40 Algorithm changes have been effected in February 2012, and most likely felt by many sites in March. here are some highlights to the most important changes:

• As with Panda 3.2 in January, 3.3 is a data refresh where some sites were released from Panda’s grip, and others felt the panda squeeze. It is not expected to affect rankings too much unless your site is heavy on advertising or you have duplicate content.
• Google turned off 2 methods for evaluating links. We have some ideas of what these could be but need to test. Google is being very vague on how link evaluation is approached moving forward.
• Fresh data is now detected even faster and more accurately. As we know, its only a mater of time for competition on content to take center stage. Content is more important now than ever, and fresh content that is.
• Correct image tagging and video tagging and the utilization of social media are becoming important factors 2012.

[attention]Here is a list of recent changes published by Google[/attention]

Make sure to consult with your SEO partner to keep you compliant and in good shape for 1012, contact your SEO agency for more details on staying on Google’s good side.

Old Notes below…

Some points on the Google Panda Algorithm update:

• Largest update and algorithm chances in over 8 years.
• Affected mostly Article, Content Syndication, Price comparison and some Web 2.0 sites.

Google Negatives

• Excessive Advertising on a site e.g. banner ads, text ads and AdSense.
• Excessive outbound links on your site pointing to other domains.
• Individual pages can bring down an entire site. Website’s need spring cleaning and watch out for:
• Old dated content
• Poorly written content
• Dead URL’s
• Duplicate content on your site. This is a site killer and more so now than ever. Duplicate content in syndication is not so much, but on the same domain, it is!
• Single source back-links from a limited number of domains. Link/Domain diversity is more important now than ever.

Google Positives

• Unique content for your site, no plagiarizing or poaching content. (site killer warning)
• Video content for your site is a must.
• Social media for your website is more important than ever. Synchronize your social media pages to your website.
• Including a blog on your site is very important helping visibility through fresh new content on a regular basis.
• Increase content and article length to 300+ words, no less.
• Register domains 3+ years

Small businesses must be competitive online and embrace the new media challenges that many traditional businesses face. The good thing is that it’s not too late, small businesses are still traditionalists and acting swiftly will go a very long way in dominating the local market space.

Here are some tips for leaping ahead of your competition:

1) Google Places

a) Make sure you have created or claimed your Google local business listing online by going here: http://www.google.com/local/add (if you don’t have a Gmail account, create one and you’re set by going to http://mail.google.com – it’s free)

b) Visit us for some Google Places optimization tips on internet marketing for small business and if nothing else is done other than creating your business listing for free, make sure to use a syndication service like Universal Business Listing to skyrocket your rankings to the top of Google Maps.

2) Website Keyword Optimization

a) Make sure if you have a website, to do basic keyword optimization on the content of the website, also known as On Page Search Engine Optimization.

b) A good resource is an article I wrote on Meta tags, this will be a great start to getting the edge over your competition, ready my guide on How to Use Meta Tags.

3) Blogs

a) If you don’t have a website, then creating a WordPress blog should be very easy (http://wordpress.org) , or we can help you set it up in a flash. You could also register a free blog (http://blogger.com) to start sharing your knowledge and content, remember to link back to your main website.

5) Video

a) Create a simple video about your business and submit this to http://youtube.com. This could be a webcam video of you introducing yourself to your market, sharing some slides of text or before and after pictures of your work. This will help you with credibility and trust and increase repeat traffic to your website.

6) One Last Golden Tip

a) Internet marketing for small business is easy when you do the above. [attention]Very important! Make sure you use the correct keywords in your copy and in your headline, this is very important. An example would be using the keywords or keyphrases that your local customers would use when searching for your products or services. For instance, referencing my local area, I would type something like, “dentist in jupiter florida” , or “plumber in jupiter” or “jupiter lawyer”. A very cool tool for researching your keywords can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?forceLegacy=true [/attention]

b) Again, make sure to use the keyphrase you want to strengthen in your content title and in your text body.

[alert]Learn How to use META TAGS in your Website[/alert]

This is only a start and should already give you 10x the exposure you are currently experiencing online, and if you don’t get any traffic to your website, then this will ensure that you will definitely start building a loyal customer base that will find you online.

Remember, the internet is not going away, and internet marketing for small business will become more complicated and more competitive in the months to come, you have a chance to dominate your market starting now.

Profitworx is an online mentoring program to help you market yourself online, join our newsletter for more tips and advice. We will be sharing knowledge and how to videos online and hope to see you visit us regularly. Ensure you dominate your market locally for years to come.

For those who are new to Search Engine Marketing and needing a quick explanation of the Google Page layout, here are a few minutes explaining how the page layout works and what to pay attention to.

Video coming soon…

Here are several methods that will help you get started in building a strong SEO plan for your website to get you a greater ROI:

Organic Optimization

Pay-for-placement strategies like PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising alone cannot guarantee optimum results for your advertising campaign. For one, the cost of this kind of method is becoming increasingly expensive. Also, PPC you can become a victim of PPC click fraud. PPC does not have residual benefits and once you turn off the ads from Google or Overture, the traffic stops coming. The answer to this problem would be to diversify. Organic SEO and PPC can be combined to successfully garner more visits from online users. Websites that are visible both organically and in paid placements have five times more chances of receiving clicks from online users. Diversifying your tactics buffers the expense benefit derived from the paid placement as well as increases clicks to up to 500%. The ads+search combination is a strategy that will definitely work for you.

Naturally listed sites, thanks to true SEO organic solutions and good content, offer higher possibilities of amassing greater ROI. The following facts support true SEO as the best method among organic solutions:

• Studies on user attitudes show that the greater number of Internet users like natural search results the most since the resulting listings were more relevant to their searches.
• Six out of every seven Internet user clicks are due to organic listings versus PPC listings.
• Good SEO gives you regularly updated, unique and relevant content as well as generates targeted traffic, which means that the people who will most likely click through to your site do so because your site’s content is relevant to their search query. The more relevant your content, the more chances you have of attracting search engine spiders that will get you higher page rankings.
• 60% of all top-ranking search engine listings are made up of organic listings.
• An SEO optimized and maintained website receives continuous traffic from key search engines for free. ROI is increased thanks to that traffic which has great potential of turning into clients.

Adding Relevant Links

Links are only valuable to your website when they are relevant. No matter how many reciprocal links your website may possess, major search engines still will not take any notice of your site unless those links have a substantial degree of relevancy to your website’s theme or content. This is simply because major engines have an aversion to links that are totally unrelated to a particular website’s topic. Relevant back and outbound links have the most weight when it comes to search engines. The more valuable links you have, the better the odds are for you of ranking higher on search indexes, thus giving you substantial ROI.

Measuring Web Traffic

Monitoring one’s web traffic is an essential part of measuring your marketing campaign’s degree of performance. It would be foolish to gamble away your money by having nothing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing methods by. A prudent marketer will always be watchful of his website’s traffic, since it would help him determine whether or not his chosen marketing tactics are worth the money he is investing in them.

If you know

• how consumers locate your website,
• where consumers come from,
• what specific keywords/phrases were used to arrive at your website,
• which search engines were used to get to your website,

then you will be armed with the right information to help you streamline your marketing campaign for maximum performance. You will be able to have power over your online company and your ROI.

Outsourcing Your SEO

Companies will perpetually seek ways to cut down costs at all working levels and that includes the arena of SEO Services and marketing for their online site. It takes a big budget to invest in maintaining in-house functions not to mention paying for the specialized skills and resources that have to go with them. Besides, corporations have other important things to spend on such as maintaining customer service levels and market shares. If a company wants to do its own SEO for its business website, then it is looking for a whole lot of responsibilities and expenses to attend to. To save time, effort, and money, outsourcing your company’s SEO is your best alternative. The short-term and long-term benefits (which include amping up your ROI) that you stand to gain from outsourcing SEO are just too cost-effective and convenient to pass up.

Methods of search engine optimization or SEO can basically be divided into three major groups, according to whether search engines find them acceptable or otherwise. Search engines base their indexes on logic which is why certain SEO techniques work well with search engine logarithms while others do not. That is why you need to differentiate which techniques are considered legitimate from those which will get you penalized or even banned. The three major groups are known as the White-Hat SEO methods, Grey-Hat SEO methods, and Black-Hat SEO methods.

1. White-Hat SEO Techniques

White-hat SEO techniques are those which are recognized by SEO’s and all major search engines as legitimate methods of optimization. Aside from the fact that using these SEO methods will never get you banned, white-hat SEO techniques maintain your website’s integrity as well as increase your search engine page ranking in the long run.

a. Content Creation

With content creation, we are referring to creating the kind of content that your site visitors will consider as well-written, original, relevant, and appealing. Basically speaking, the more your website’s content is regularly updated and rich in information, the more valuable your website will appear to search engines, thus increasing your chances of moving forward in the search listings. Aside from that, webmasters who are looking for websites to link to need to see that your content is actually worth linking to in the first place. Also, the extra pages that you get can target the additional keywords that are relevant to the page topic. Quality content requires much time and effort, but the long-term results are supremely worth all the trouble.

Another twist to this method is writing content for other people’s websites. Write interesting, relevant forum posts, articles, etc. that can make other readers want to post them on their sites. This helps build better links to your website, without having to give a reciprocal link back.

b. Reciprocal Linking and Internal Linking

With reciprocal linking, you have to remember that exchanging links must be done intelligently and with websites who have good reputations and have content that is related to your site’s own topics. Avoid linking to penalized websites and industries and instead, focus on websites that contain your target keywords. Strengthening your site’s relevancy through association will help your website succeed in the search indexes.

Internal linking, on the other hand, is all about adding text links to at least your homepage, near its bottom. These links should enable the site visitor to click through to each of your main internal webpages, together with a sitemap that can show your internal pages.

c. Site Optimization

Everything about your site must work hand in hand to maximize your website’s chances of exposure on search engines on the web. Think about creating a website that does not hinder conveying your message to your readers or hamper your content’s search engine efficacy. Maintaining the salability and message effectiveness of your website is key in site optimization.

2. Grey-Hat SEO Techniques

Techniques that belong to the grey-hat category are legitimate when properly utilized. However, these are often abused by unscrupulous SEO’s and webmasters. Although your website will not likely get banned from using grey-hat tactics, caution must still be exercised when using them. Abuse of these techniques will have you penalized by search engines, especially if your vigilant competitors report your activity to them, thus removing you from the competitive scene.

a. Cloaking

There are two arguably legitimate uses of cloaking. One is by reserving information for visitors while presenting different content to the search engines since you have a “Members Only” section. The second case is when an image-based website uses text to represent each of its webpages. As long as the text is an exact description of the images and the page, then it is considered as legitimate. It is best to ask permission first from each search engine in order to fully explain your reasons when planning to use any of these forms of cloaking.

b. Paid Links

Purchase links for your website only if your intention is to purely advertise your site’s products or services. Purchasing links to gain higher link-popularity will get your website penalized or your links discounted for abuse.

c. Duplicate Content

Search engines now have filtering mechanisms which locate pages that have content that are duplicated or extremely similar with each other. Once found, the duplicated content is eliminated. Competitors will also report their rival sites for duplicating content. In both instances, the erring website’s rankings will be penalized as result. Only resource websites are immune to this sanction since search engines allow them to have duplicate content since they serve as article indexes.

3. Black-Hat SEO Techniques

Under no circumstances must you be tempted to use black-hat techniques. Large scale abuse of these methods has caused major search engines to instantly ban and/or penalize users of these shady SEO tactics. Although black-hat techniques will increase your ranking quickly, your website will eventually be at the losing end since you will sooner or later be severely penalized or worse, permanently banned.

a. Keyword Stuffing

This is when an SEO or webmaster repeatedly puts a targeted key phrase on a page in an attempt to fool search engines into thinking that the words are relevant. The text is often in very tiny font size and placed at the bottom part of a webpage.

b. Hidden Text

Similar to keyword stuffing, this technique only differs in the fact that the text’s font color is exactly or almost the same as the webpage’s background (which can also be an image file).

c. Cloaking

This method of presenting information to search engines that is different from the actual information that human visitors get to see comes in many forms and is abused by many unethical webmasters and SEO’s. Again, this is risky since even if the search engines fail to detect your illegitimate methods, your competitors will surely report you as soon as they figure out your scheme.

d. Doorway Pages

Frequently generated by software and automatically added to a website, doorway pages are created for the exclusive purpose of targeting a certain keyword phrase/s to lure visitors and search engines and yet have little or no relevancy at all to any helpful topic. Usually the page only exists to contain the phrase, hoping that the visitor will click through to the homepage.

e. Redirects

Redirects are used to automatically transport visitors to a webpage, whether or not the webpage has something relevant or informative to offer them. Redirecting is used in complementing doorway pages.

f. Duplicate Sites

Created as a way to throwback search engines, webmasters using this method duplicate a site that they were promoting and put it online. They think that doing so will make the duplicate site outrank their original website and take their sales.

g. Interlinking

Linking together multiple websites created by a single owner to build overall link popularity is a black-hat technique. It was devised as incoming links became vital in boosting search engine page rank. Difficult for search engines to detect, users can only detect this technique if multiple websites end up having the top places on the search engine indexes.

Profitworx is a White-Hat SEO Company helping thousands of clients world wide increase their Organic Search Engine rankings through professional SEO Services and skilled SEO Consultants.

This article inspired by Beanstalk.