Category: SEO

Once upon a time, the internet was a great place where you could do anything and get away with it. As the internet grew, so did social networking sites. There was a large amount of information, so much so that it was difficult to discern truth from reality. As people arbitrarily continued to dump information on the internet, regardless of relevance, Google stepped in and began to throw its weight around in an effort to ensure search engine results quality. This became necessary mainly because Google was losing money to paid SEO companies who had figured out how to game the system so that their clients always came to the top of the search results. Also, there were companies who copied work from other websites through APIs and automated algorithms, creating very low-quality websites with nothing but copied material.

So in this article I discuss the different software algorithms Google added to its search rankings in order to ensure its search results were more accurate.

Google Panda

This program is named after Naveneet Panda, the Google engineer who developed the technology behind the algorithm that was first released in February 2011. Google Panda is aimed at delisting websites that use low-quality content. If a website fails the Panda test, it will be removed from the search results or penalized signficantly.

Impacted Area

Any websites who were blatantly copying content from other websites were automatically blacklisted. Websites who indulged in keyword stuffing were also penalized. Other victims to fall prey to the Panda Penalty were websites with excessive advertisements. However, following a wave of “scrapers” (websites who use content copied from other websites), Google was compelled to issue a list of 23 bullet points in a bid to define a high quality site.

Google Penguin

This is the codename for an algorithm that was launched in April 2012. Google Penguin emerged from the Panda algorithm, which was more limited in scope than its successor. And both algorithms still operate together. Panda being more strict (penalty or no penalty), whereas Penguin is designed to influence rankings on a smaller scale. For example, Penguin can influence where in the rankings your page is displayed, such as position 1 verses position 5. Google Penguin was designed to weed out websites who failed to follow and who violated Google’s “Webmaster Guidelines”. These guidelines have been very explicitly given, and are the basis of good SEO.

Impacted Area

If a website was low quality, Penguin drop the entire site, including all of its pages, in the search engine results. If Google doesn’t trust a website, chances are it will not rank anyway. What Penguin does is it lets Google know your site or page is trustworthy. Age of the domain, links coming in, links going out, how long someone stays on the website to read it, how many times people click around on the website, whether there is a sitemap, how long does the site take to load, is there a privacy policy, etc. All of these factors play into the Google Trust, which influences site rank or page rank in the search engine results under Penguin.

Google Hummingbird

According to journalist and web editor Steve Masters, “The Hummingbird approach should be inspirational to anyone managing and planning content — if you aren’t already thinking like Hummingbird, you should be. In a nutshell, think about why people are looking for something rather than what they are looking for. A content strategy should be designed to answer their needs, not just provide them with facts.” This is a fitting description of what Google Hummingbird is designed to do. Google began to use Hummingbird from August 2013, but the official announcement of the change came only in September of the same year. The main objective of Google Hummingbird is to create a more organized system for indexing of information. Like the previous campaigns, Google Hummingbird also aims at improving the quality of content that gets posted on the internet. The main focus is on context of content and the meaning of entire sentences and conversations, rather than analysis of single words or phrases.

Impacted Area

Some top ranking sites experienced a revision of page rank based on the flow of natural content on their websites. Hence content which was organized on the basis of “Who, Why, Where, and How” were the ones to benefit from this change, and extensive use of synonyms also helped in improving the SEO of these sites. For example, if you search for “colleges”, you might get some results that include the synonym “universities”. “St. Patty’s Day” will return results for “St. Patrick’s Day”. Hummingbird helps Google better understand the inputs from the user to convey the value of the output even if the word isn’t an exact match keyword.

Google Pigeon

In July 2014, the Google Pigeon algorithm was launched. The algorithm is supposed to bridge the gap between general, worldwide search results and local search results. It also addresses a few other issues regarding shortcomings that had been previously identified in the way Google presents search results. The focus of this algorithm is to increase the rank of local listings in a search. According to Google, the Pigeon algorithm has created “closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm(s).” Google Pigeon is also a response to complaints by Yelp that even when a search was done specifically for Yelp’s reviews, Google’s reviews were being highlighted instead.

Impacted Area

Google Maps results appear and disappear depending on slight adjustments in addresses. Several websites have had their rankings drop or totally disappear, and then suddenly pop back. However, the general consensus seems to be reflected by Author Neil Patel of Search Engine Land who says, “Those of us who travel to San Francisco, talk to colleagues in Tel Aviv, tweak a client’s website in London, and teleconference with service providers in Perth and New York still need to grasp the importance of local search.”

If a company based out of Virginia makes a website that includes over 100 pages with each page being a different city in America, Pigeon will not rank those different city pages unless the company has a local presence (address) in each of those cities. Local results are designed for people who want to drive or call a company or organization in their area. Local results are not for national companies trying to pretend to be local when they are not.

Differences Defined

The common objective of all four algorithms rolled out by Google over the last five years is to improve the quality of search results, and to give relevance to high-quality and relevant content. Each campaign launched by Google had some specific objectives, which distinguished one from another. Let us consider the difference between all four campaigns by Google:

• Google Panda was the first major overhaul since the launch of the search engine, and one of the most comprehensive – even now, in 2015, there are websites who are struggling to recover and remedy the Panda penalty imposed on them.
• The later algorithms released by Google were more focused, each in its own specific way. Initially, it was difficult to identify Google violations under the Panda regime. However, with the release of Google’s 23 bullet points and its Webmaster Guidelines, it became easier to identify and rectify the deviations of various websites.
• Google Penguin targeted Black Hat operators who were using unscrupulous and unfair practices to achieve good page rankings, by violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and more specifically those who practiced spamdexing and link bombing.
• The goals of Google Hummingbird were more subtle but far-reaching, with an aim to improve the quality of content by changing the way an algorithm detects the meanings of words and conversational search.
• With Pigeon, Google is attempting to give more importance to local search results, which hopefully should give rise to more effective local Google searches for users.

As an SEO person myself, I have received these algorithms with mixed reviews. While we enjoy the quality of a lot of the search results now, often great content is buried because it just does not have a chance to break through all of these algorithms. Many SEOs think that Google is simply doing this to ensure money is spent on its main revenue generator – Google Adwords. Google Adwords is Google’s pay-to-play system that displays ads on the search page and on websites.

Regardless of the challenges, SEO is still alive and well today. It centers around having quality content, brand awareness, and starting conversations.

I am going to tell you want questions to ask your SEO Company, or a company you are thinking of hiring. These questions will help you gauge whether or not you are going to get your money’s worth out of them.

Background On SEO

SEO is very, very hard to do. Especially since the world’s largest search engine is in direct competition with search optimizing firms. They want the cost of providing SEO services to be so egregious that you will save more money going through their pay per click portal called Google Adsense.

Recently Google decided that videos are no longer going to rank for what they used to. Because of this, entire companies that based their content marketing strategies around videos lost a tremendous amount of traffic overnight.

Also, recently Google decided that Google Authorship, where your picture is displayed next to the article you wrote in search results, is no longer. Google Authorship in the search results went away just like that. And this happened just a few weeks ago. Authorship still plays a role, but not as prominently displayed as before.

Then, companies that ranked very high for local services like lawn mowing, plumbing, lawyers, doctors, etc. recently found their SEO world turned upside down because of Google’s Pigeon algorithm (implemented in July of 2014). This algorithm is designed to ensure the best results locally come to the top. This is a good thing, but not necessarily a good thing for companies that were already ranked high and now have to adapt and overcome these new challenges.

Question 1:  What is Google Pagerank?

A typical answer should sound something like this. Google Pagerank is a numbering system assigned by Google to websites on a scale of 1-10. It is named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google. It is on the exponential scale, meaning that a Pagerank of “2” is 10 times more in rank authority than a Pagerank of “1”. Pagerank increases on your website when a website with a certain Pagerank links to your website. Pagerank is specific to domains and specific to pages. There are certain pages with no Pagerank because Pagerank is specific to pages and not necessarily domains. Pagerank is just one metric in Google’s overall algorithm of hundreds of data points. There is talk of removing Pagerank in the future, but that is unlikely since it is a great distraction for people trying to do SEO to focus on and it helps Google find spammers trying to the game the system by pointing too many links to their sites.

Question 2: What is the difference between a “dofollow” link and a “nofollow” link?

Answer: A dofollow link is a standard link and passes Google Pagerank from one site to another site. A dofollow link also tells Google that you are associating your page with the page you are linking to. A nofollow link does not pass Pagerank and does not associate your page with another page. A nofollow link still affects the other page by sending Google signals in its algorithm, although no one knows how prominent or how important those signals are and what they affect.  I suspect it could be relevancy signals. Nofollow links do also dilute other dofollow links on the same page. For instance, if you have 4 dofollow links and 1 nofollow link, each of the dofollow links only pass 1/5 of the Pagerank because the nofollow link takes up one of the 1/5 Pagerank even though it doesn’t pass Pagerank.

Question 3: Who are my main competitors online, what are they spending on pay per click ads, what are their top keywords, what is their Pagerank, and how many links are pointing to their site?

Any SEO with basic SEO experience should be able to easily with a few clicks of a button do decent competitive analysis. They should be able to tell you very close answers to the above questions. If they can’t, you are probably going to waste a lot of money on them.

Question 4: Should I use an article submission service for back links?

If they say yes, fire them immediately. You don’t want to submit your articles to the be blasted all over the world wide web. If you article ends up in too many places with the same anchor texts, it can penalize your page and your website will get deranked from Google’s search until you clean up all the bad places the article went.

Question 5: What are the main Google algorithm updates and what do they regulate in Google’s search results?

If your SEO can’t rattle these off and explain what they mean during an interview, then how can they know how to properly implement an SEO strategy on your behalf?

Panda:

Designed to reduce web content spam and low quality content by replacing them with higher quality content in the search results. Targets scrapers and content farms that add very little real content.

Penguin:

Targets link spam and websites that are trying to manipulate the search results artificially through linking schemes. Quickly identifies those websites using linking techniques that clearly violate Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Pigeon:

An improved local search algorithm designed to produce a results page more like the traditional search results instead of a bunch of local listings of local companies. So if you search “Tampa Real Estate” you are no longer going to get a bunch of realtors and their offices on a map, but instead you will get a listing of websites like Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, and Century 21. Google is trying to hone in on what local results people want to see and Pigeon is trying to do that.

Hummingbird:

Focuses on the entire meaning of the search instead of just each individual word in the search phrase. It is Google’s attempt at conversational search, the “why” behind the search, and the “what” the searcher is looking for even if it doesn’t necessarily mean exactly what they are typing in.

Question 6: Who is Rand Fishkin?

He is the Founder of one of the most prominent SEO websites – MOZ and is one of the main SEO influencers that any good SEO company would be able to know about. Rand is infamous for his beard and curly mustache.

Question 7: Who is Mark Traphagen?

This is a little harder question, but if your SEO gets it right, he/she is not only into SEO, but sends a strong signal that they understand Google+ and its role in helping your SEO strategy. Mark is one of the main SEO influencers on Google+ (with 96K followers) and is Senior Director of Online Marketing at Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO company similar to Grow To Win Marketing.

Question 8: Are press releases good for back links to help grow Pagerank?

If they say yes, then run as fast as you can. Press releases are good for brand mentions, getting traffic, getting exposure, and sending relevancy signals to Google. We have had some success with press releases, but not for getting back links to increase Pagerank. It is important for your SEO to be able to articulate the pros and cons of a press release, to ensure the links are nofollow, and to ensure the links are to your main homepage at the bottom of the release and not anchor text dofollow links in the body of the release.

Question 9: Are directory submission sites good for back links?

No. Don’t submit anything to a mass submission engine that will blast your website to the four winds. You land in too many bad neighborhoods and your site will get tanked. It is always better to submit your website individually and manually to select, relevant, and specifically chosen directories. There are a lot of factors in submitting to a directory and the wrong one can create a lot of problems.

Question 10:  What is the best website platform/engine to use for SEO?

If they say anything other than WordPress they are missing the mark.  Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team recently told a room full of WordPress webmasters, “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO“. Sure you can use other platforms, but the SEO pro will have to put a heck of a lot more work in to optimize the system and the client (you) will end up paying for that time. It is better to save yourself a lot of money and headache and just use WordPress. If they aren’t using WordPress to build your site, chances are they are not very SEO-knowledgeable.

by Spence Rogers

Google created Google+ with search engine optimization in mind.  That is why it is important for us to provide helpful Google+ search engine optimization tips. The social juggernaut will eventually dominate all search engine results above all other social media platforms. With the advent of Google+, the SEO techniques for webmasters changed very quickly.  Although standard on page website SEO is a very powerful platform to help your search engine ranking and SEO dreams, optimizing your Google+ page is necessary to unleash your website’s full potential.

Google+ is much more than a social media page that you build upon to connect with people and interests.  A Google+ page is a massive platform to help you make your presence known.  To optimize a Google+ page all you have to do is keep certain details in mind and you will have a very optimized page that shows up in the search engines and in Google+’s own people search. Here are a few initial tips that will help you with your page performance.

1.  Complete your profile:

The most important aspect of any Google+ page when it comes to search optimization is the completion of all the personal as well as professional credentials regarding the page. An incomplete profile does more harm than good and will not be given the credibility in Google’s algorithm that more complete pages receive.

2.  Optimize the title tag:

Title tag optimization plays a pivotal role in helping your post rank well in Google search. A good Google+ title can take your post a long way and fetch you amazing results.

3.  Set up authorship:

Visuals do matter, and in this case, they can be game changers for your page. Choosing an author picture can add some valuable points to your table and help your page push through. Your posts can help you steal traffic from your competitor up the ladder if you have a catchy display picture and successfully implemented the author tag.

4. Link it directly to your page:

Connecting your Google+ page directly to your website definitely adds to your SEO rankings. This can be done using a simple piece of code in your webpage and you are ready to go.

5. Get followers and +1’s:

It is always about the numbers and in this case the higher the number of your followers the better you perform on the SEO table. +1’s also play a pivotal role in moving you up the charts.

Optimize your Google+ Search Engine Optimization and buckle up for the ride to the top of the list.