Initial reflections of Penguin 4.0: Brand Love

One particular trend I notice is major sites and brands taking over several top 3 positions (or top 2) in Google for competitive keywords. But after the first 3 search results you’re not that confident about the quality anymore, except for the local results. Many competitive keywords in combination with location [keyword + location] show map results after the initial 2-3 organic results.
Great SEOs probably remember that Eric Schmidt, current executive chairman and former CEO, said that “Brands are the solution, not the problem” already back in 2008. That is a SEO trend which has been increasing in the last years. Expect to see many trusted sites in the top of Google, especially for competitive keywords. Some examples of such sites might be famous brands, Wikipedia or major newspapers.

Which are the losers in the new Google Penguin 4.0 update?

Lets divide the losers into three different categories; domains, links and on-site factors.

Targeting spammy domains

Misspelled domains and very long keyword domains, often containing both 3 words and two hyphens (-), seems to be hit harder (example: online-key-word.co.uk). If it’s a causal effect or not is too early to say. In general, if you bought a very cheap domain in order to game/trick Google, it might be an even worse idea after the latest Penguin update. If your domain name doesn’t sound trustworthy or interesting, leading to lower CTR in the SERPS, it might also be affected by Penguin 4.0.

Link related factors in Google’s Penguin update

A few trends link building trends have been observed by SEO Specialist, such as:
-Affected sites often get many links at one time and then don’t do anything for months or years. They obviously deserve to get targeted. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is not a one-off task. Website optimisation requires continuity in order to succeed. One-time link building solutions are not the way to go in 2013 and beyond.
-Have your site got a majority of low quality links or untrusted and not very relevant links? You might be in trouble.. Don’t expect to rank well in Google at least, unless you do some serious work.
-A low amount of brand links and natural anchor text seems to be a negative factor in this update.
-Do you have a high degree of links from foreign countries with spammy link building techniques? You should’ve done like Google and listened to SEO Specialist’s earlier suggestions about what defines unnatural and toxic links and our examples of unnatural links.
-Many sitewide links? Well, a considerable amount of the Penguin 4.0 losers have too many sitewide links.

Main negative on-site factor

It appears that sites with weak content or not very unique content are hit harder. Whether it is a coincidence or not I leave unsaid.

Which type of websites benefit from Google Penguin 4.0 (2013)

Smart SEOs have followed the guidelines and taken the safe route forward. Here are some of the factors we believe Penguin winners adopted:

Using relevant and better domains

Generic one and two words domains under the most appropriate TLD are ranking better in Google for several of the keywords I tend to follow. It might be too early to draw any conclusions, but if you’re about to choose a new domain, read this popular guide about choosing domains.. Natural and good domains can provide a ranking boost. Not to forget, quite a few short domains seems to rank better than before.

How do Penguin 4.0 winners work with link building?

It’s clear that relevance is more important now then every before. Be careful with those low quality links; they might do more harm than benefits. Further, be careful to don’t look too optimised (over-optimise) in terms of anchor text, titles etc. Once again, remember what the former Google CEO said: “Brands are the solution, not the problem”. So think and work like a brand and get links like them. Many brand links and natural links seems to give a boost in this update and is a common factor for many who ranks top 3 in Google.

What is your take on the new Google Penguin 4.0? Update: Here are a few more examples of winners and losers from Search Metrics blog.

Positive with Google Keyword Planner SEOs & Paid Search Specialists
+Only one Google keyword tool to handle.
+Like with the Keyword tool you can filter/exclude words and phrases you don’t want to target. It’s even possible for the planning tool to automatically exclude words from your negative keyword list.
+Enter your own or competitors landing pages and receive keyword suggestions.

Negative with Google Keyword Planner for SEOs & Paid Search Specialists
-You have to login to Adwords to use it.
-Set-up to maximise revenue for Google while increasing bid prices (CPC) for customers.

Back to the main question; Can Google Keyword Planner improve how you handle SEO? In one way it will be easier to just have one tool from Google. On the other hand, Google Keyword Tool usually did the same job for anyone working with SEO. So my guess is that it will not change much with regards to search engine specialists handle SEO. For PPC specialists it will certainly make life a little easier. My only worry is that it might be another smart way to drive up click prices for Google – just like when keyword positions was removed from Adwords last year. What is your best guess?

Note: The two old keyword tools will close down in about 2 months from now so you better start getting used to the new one.

What’s excellent with Bing Places

-Great rating options: Bing have more user friendly ratings for businesses. For a restaurant they include service, food quality, value, atmosphere and drinks. Google bought Zagat but can still not get out the best of restaurant review.
-Menu: Bing Places feature the menu for many restaurants. Great layout and easy to find.
-Link to your Facebook page: Every restaurant can direct users to they Facebook page. Great with a few social options.

What Bing Places don’t have

-360 photos: Bing don’t have StreetView Inside. Hey, they don’t even have StreetView.
-International presence: Only U.S businesses can take full advantage of Bing Places. Why is that? Are they trying to annoy
citizens from other countries?
-Price level: Instead of showing the price level, Bing call showcase ‘value’.

Bing also explain that you’ll no longer be able to create QR codes, daily deals or coupon offers. Among the new features with Bing Places we find the possibillity to add links to videos. If you want to know more, here is the official page (www.bingplaces.com).

SEO Specialist conclude that guest posting can be beneficial for both the author and blog if done in the right way. Today, SEO Specialist will discuss how guest posting can be included in long term search engine optimisation strategies. Below are 3 advantages with guest posts and the same amount of disadvantages. Let’s start with the opportunities:

3 SEO Opportunities with guest posts

SEO Specialist discuss a few opportunities with great guest blogging content.

1. Publishing Guest Posts Gives Updated Content
Businesses and website owners are usually busy checking and responding to e-mails, handling clients and bringing in new business. Handling content writing can be very time consuming and writing unique and fascinating web copy can be hard. Allowing a skilled guest blogger to write a great article related to your business can save you time and still help to improve your search engine visibility.

2. Increase visibility by getting more indexed pages
Any SEO analysis will conclude that the amount of indexed pages and how quickly and continuous a site it grows might be one of many indicators of possible success in search engine rankings. While there are many different ways of increasing indexed pages you should always keep in mind to offer something new, unique and beneficial for the people visiting your site.

3. Save time while getting free content
Writing relevant, interesting and absolutely outstanding content takes long time.

3 risks with guest posts

Here we explain a few risks that might occur when approving not so great guest bloggers to post on your site.

1. Unrelated content can hurt
Some less credible guest bloggers might use irrelevant links or write content not focused on your audience. They might try to drive traffic and promote themselves instead of talking to your readers and give them great advice. Such less informative guest posts are likely to do more harm than good and should be avoided. If content from repeated guest posts differ considerably from your normal content it might be more risk than reward. Not only will it upset returning visitors but Google might also think the site lack focus and classify it as a less trusted site.

2. Google distrust sites with many poor outgoing links
Select your guest bloggers carefully and be selective with outgoing links. Too many outgoing links of low quality can harm your own site. Google penalise sites linking out excessively to poor neighbourhoods so make sure you only approve guest posts from trusted, high quality authors. Only allow a limited number of outgoing links from the guest posts on your site.

3. Avoid duplicate content
Use Copyscape or other similar service to check that the content is not live on the web already. You don’t want to be the second or third blog posting the same content. Read more about duplicate content and other technical issues here.

A great guest post goes hand in hand with search engine friendly content and best practices for SEO. Be careful with the bloggers you accept and set-up limit about the outgoing links allowed.
What is your experience with guest posts? Any luck yet or still not convinced about the possible advantages?

The analysis might be helpful predicting daily price moves in the Dow Jones industrial average and perhaps other stock market indices. People naturally search for how their employer perform, cause for concern and the economic climate in general when they have reasons to be worried. Same is true when the stock market start to go up; people turn to Google searching for the best way to invest money, how they can increase leverage, buy a new house etc.

Above: 326 % return over 7 years.

How do people search in Google when the market is going up?

A theory of power-law distributions in financial market fluctuations (2003) suggest that “Movements in the markets exert immense impacts on personal fortunes and geopolitical events, generating considerable scientific attention to this subject”. Two different strategies have been used in this scientific paper by Tobias Preis of Warwick Business School, Helen Susannah Moat of University College London, and H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University:

1. Google trends long strategy

The first strategy buys stocks in Dow Jones industrial average when the search volume in Google trends decrease for keywords such as:
-Debt
-Unemployment
-Dow jones
-Revenue
-Investment
-Inflation

2. Google trends short strategy

The second strategy sells stocks in Dow Jones industrial average when the search volume in Google trends increase for keywords such as:
-Economics
-Stocks
-Dow Jones
-Unemployment
-Marriage
-Leverage

Limitations of this study

Perhaps Google trends will be used in a different manner by equity traders in the future. But there are still a few limitations, for instance:
-The authors claim that the results suggest that these warning signs in search volume data could have been exploited in the construction of profitable trading strategies.
-They only use either long positions or short positions in the same trading strategy.
-The research should primary be seen as a quantification of the relationship between changes in search volume and changes in stock market prices. Future work will be needed to provide a thorough explanation of the underlying psychological mechanisms which lead people to search for terms like debt before selling stocks at a lower price.
-The current data set of around 90 keywords and one major stock index is rather limited. Further, the keywords used are very general and not related to actual companies or stock. In coming updates of Google trends it might be possible to get more in-depth data sets even for more specific keywords.

Would you like to know more? Read the supplementary information about Quantifying Trading Behavior in Financial Markets Using Google Trends here or the scientific report over here.

Do you think Google trends can help predict stock market movements? Would you consider buying stocks with help of Google trends? SEO Specialist are confident the last word is not said about this kind of research and hope to see more academic papers related to this subject; especially with larger keyword data set including specific companies names.

1. Competing with Adsense

Google Affiliate Network has been competing with Adsense but it’s less profitable and requires way more customer support. While Adsense can be profitable very quickly, affiliate marketing on the other hand requires that Google work with the publishers and advice how to drive more sales.

2. Brands choose Adwords over Google Affiliate Network

It’s now clear that most reputable brands are advertising with Adwords instead of Google Affiliate Network. There are many huge competitors in the affiliate sector with long experience while Microsoft Advertising is the only small competitor to Google Adwords.

3. CPC vs CPA

CPC is more attractive vs CPA from a business perspective. It’s easier for a business to earn money from pay per click compared to cost per acquisition. CPA requires hard work with publishers to understand the concept while CPC is only a click away from earning money.

4. Affiliate marketing is labour intense

Unlike Adsense, affiliate marketing requires that you contact publishers, advice and motivate them to promote various products and services. SEO Specialist was signed up for Google Affiliate Network but never got contacted by a single affiliate manager.

5. Different customer relation

Google and most companies would prefer working directly with their customers without having to manage a middle hand, eg. affiliate manager. In Adsense, Google can work directly with merchants without having to manage relations with affiliates.
SEO Specialist believes it might take a few years before Google try another model in the world of affiliate marketing. After all, they already got a few alternative products that might be adjusted in the future.

Below are 5 interesting locations covered by Google Street View:

1. Antarctica (South Pole)

2. Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australia

3. Las Vegas

4. Budapest

5. Buckingham Palace, London

Which countries are not covered by Google Street View yet?

Apart from South Africa and Lesotho, much of Africa don’t have Google Street View yet.
Many Asian countries such as Iran, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are also in queue to be included.

What can be done to get traffic from Street View?

You business can be connected with Street View. You can adopt Google Business Photos – Street View Inside – by contacting a Google trusted photographer, certified by the search giant to shoot businesses. Try 360 Photographer for instance. They’ve done a great job so far with small, medium size and large businesses.

What’s included in Google’s SEO Guide?

In contradiction to other definitions and guidelines by Google the latest site is split into chapters based on which level you reached. All resources are informative and clearly describe which Google web analytic tools you can use to analyse traffic and increase traffic. They cover basic techniques such as unique content, relevant titles, ALT-tags and description text. The video below gives a brief overview of what’s in the SEO guide for businesses.

The latest webmaster guide from Google also urge businesses to sign up for Google Places and claim your own Google+ listing. Under ‘optimize your site’ they suggest putting your phone number in a prominent place, showing customer reviews and add a map for directions and make the website user friendly. Anything they forgot?

What’s NOT included in Google’s SEO Guide?

The most important factor for any website to succeed in search engine are is backlinks. Why is that not mentioned on the main page of Webmaster Academy?

You have to dig really deep into the sub-pages to come across anything releated to backlinks. Go to the headline ‘Make sure your content is relevant and useful‘ and continue to paragraph 4.

“Tell the world about your site. Incoming links to your site help Google determine your site’s relevance to the user’s query. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors”.

If it only was that easy to get natural and relevant links. However, we are not surprised Google present it this way to make webmasters focus on creating great content rather than building links. Google is a search engine and don’t want to talk about the obvious with links. If all webmasters created useful and unique content, much of the problems would be solved for the most popular search engine.

If you want to learn more, visit the official beginner guide here and select the tabs for experienced webmaster or tips for businesses if you prefer.

Alternative SEO Guide by specialists

If you want to read a SEO guide by search engine professionals covering everything you need to know about SEO, check out our free material today! SEO Specialist cover 15 chapters about link building and in-depth information about SEO analysis and on-page SEO. Most topics rany web developer or marketing professional would need can be found in the above mentioned guide.

After years of reliance on backlinks, Matt Cutts today announced that backlinks are dead. The unannounced speech took place on a TED Fellows meeting in LA and came as a surprise for around 500 participating webmasters and SEOs. We all knew the days were coming when links are going to play a smaller factor in Google, but perhaps not this quick? Without any previous warnings the updated ranking factors are going live the 10th of April. Webmasters are suggested to put more focus on content and social media in the future.

What’s key to success after backlinks?

Matt Cutts told that he don’t want to give any exact formula to search engine optimisation but he would suggest creating unique content, interesting videos and stay engaged in social media (Google+, Facebook and Twitter). “We are obviously going to focus more on user engagement following the quick growth of Google Plus”, says Matt Cutts. Other possible areas were Google will put more focus include, but are not limited to semantic content analysis, time on site and bounce rates.

Did you anticipate this was coming? What kind of web spam are going to be popular after links are dead?

Why do pre-market considerations matter for SEO?

Pre-market considerations is what eventually lead to purchases and by catching the user early you have a higher possibility to sell your services. A majority of people about to buy a car do cross shopping, comparing various brands, vehicle segments (luxury, SUV, sport car?), and 3rd party auto sites. It appears that age group 18-34 is more open-minded and more likely to consider a wider range of brands than people above 35, according to Google’s recent studies.

Undecided shoppers are at the same time more likely to engage with your site. Do you know what they are looking for? You need to understand people’s search behaviour and how you can create new and outstanding content for their needs. SEO Specialist usually recommends starting with keywords analysis and review current search volume in your segment. Next step is to create amazing content and get links from trusted websites.

Call us at 0800 157 7736 if you need help with pre-market considerations that matter for SEO.

Learn further how consumers discover and choose brands and the greatest opportunities for brand influence at Google Think. It seems like the insights from Google Think is based on U.S research, but some consumer purchase and engagement behavior are probably kind of similar in UK.

Want to know more? Visit the official URL for Google real time insights. They have some great statistics for a several different verticals.

A few hours ago, Victorias new ecommerce shop went live (www.VictoriaBeckham.com). It’s still in beta and the Adobe Flash plugin keep crashing. But at least Victory Beckhams shop looks minimalistic and stylish while giving a good feeling about the excellent fashion designer. However, from a SEO Specialist’s point of view it looks like there are quite a bit too do. Let’s review how Victoria Beckham can improve her SEO and be found in search engines.

1. Content is king – but never for fashion sites?

People working with SEO often say that content is king but incidentally, over 95 % of all fashion sites don’t get it. One exception is Asos, with another record year with revenues from online sales exceeding £550 million last year. However, Next and John Lewis are also doing fairly well and can be found for quite a few relevant keywords.

Victoria Beckams shop on the other side have quite a few problems. For starters, the start page doesn’t have any text content, only two links and a background video. The two main sub-pages are not much better. No photos, no content – only a handful of links. It’s really sad to see since those are important pages in terms of SEO.

When we go into sub-categories in the shop, Victoria Beckham don’t categorize different accessories, ready to wear dresses, eyewear or demin. Every single product category is shown on one single page. There is a filter function but it’s not search engine friendly and with so few products it’s not very useful either. Victoria Beckham is known for her passion for accessories and the shop sell pouches, shoulder bags and ladies leather bags. The problem is that her accessories for sale are not tagged or categoriesed. Potentially, there is a lots of traffic to catch from a few small changes on her site.

2. Why care about titles, headlines and descriptions?

Today the titles, headlines and meta descriptions are too general for a style icon! Titles are pure boring and all are written in CAPITAL LETTERS instead of SEO friendly titles. Why are you screaming Ms Beckham? We want to know what you provide before visiting you shop. Otherwise, we might go to another site. Instead of describing what’s unique with every sub-page, a general meta description text is used. Not very helpful if you want to get extra visitors and ranking in search engines.
Here is the current default description text at Victoria Beckhams site:
“Welcome to the Official Victoria Beckham website. Here you will find details on the latest collections, worldwide stockists, press and contact information”. Obviously, it’s general and works for most pages but it’s not relevant enough to stand out in the search results.

3. What about news and new products?

In the world of fashion, news are important. In competitive sectors like ecommerce shops selling clothes it’s required to update your site frequently if you should be taken serious. Today, the site is not set-up allowing news post.

On the plus side, Victoria Beckam already has several powerful links so it’s possible to have a head start if on-page SEO is done properly.

What’s more to do with Victoria Beckhams site?

There are obviously many other things to consider when doing in-depth SEO and if you want to get a feeling of the potential, please read our extensive SEO guide. Do you have a fashion site and need help to get found online? Contact SEO Specialist today at 0800 157 7736 or use the contact form.

The public can then vote for their favourite projects. Each finalist will pitch its concept in early June to a panel of judges including Sir Richard Branson, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Jilly Forster.

How can I apply?

You have to apply by 17th of April, 2013. Eligable contestants should either be registered with the Charity Commission of England and Wales or the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator or (2) recognised as a charity for tax purposes by HMRC. Your organisation should preferably have a website, clear mission and estimated budget for 2012 and 2013. Describe your project idea, why it matters and the size and risk of the problem.

What can I win?

The total price sum is £2 million which will be devided to 4 organisations in UK. Are you keen to register for the Global Impact Challenge? Read more at the official UK site or U.S site.