Tag Archives: SEO

Search Engine Optimization

// Laura

Google Penguin 2.0 rolled out

Since the last Google Panda update in March this year, webmasters have been waiting for Google Penguin 2.0 to hit the search results. Yesterday, the 22nd of May, Google rolled out “the next generation of Penguin”, Penguin 2.0 update.

According to Matt Cutts, the new Penguin will have much bigger impact in certain small areas and it will go deeper than the previous update:

“It’s gonna have a pretty big impact on web spam.”

Matt Cutts stated that about 2.3 % of Eglish-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The update will affect non-English queries as well, and the scope of Penguin varies by language: languages with more webspam will see more impact.

But what will Penguin 2.0 bring?

Penguin 2.0 was specifically going to target black hat spam, but it will have significantly bigger impact on spam than the other Penguin updates have had.

Sources:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2270007/Google-Penguin-2.0-Update-is-Live

// Laura

Nordic Search offers – Free SEO Analysis

How is your website optimized from SEO perspective? How is your website ranking today? How is your link profile?

Some websites have a great design but nobody can find them because they are not ranking in search engines. Some websites have been recently punished by Google because of over-optimization or bad design.

Free SEO Analysis

Nordic Search is offering an initial SEO Analysis for free to discover the weaknesses of your website and giving you suggestions how to improve the site from SEO perspective. The analysis can be either related to onsite optimization or your site’s link profile.

If you are interested in getting your website analyzed, contact us by sending us an email, tell us a bit about your business and target market, and what you would like to achieve by SEO.

Write “Analyzing website” as a subject line so we know immediately what your email is about.

// Laura

Nordic Search recruiting: Finnish Website Promoter

Nordic Search is looking for a Finnish speaking Website Promoter.

Are you a creative, street smart and ambitious person with passion towards internet? Are you money-driven and motivated to work hard to reach your goals?

If your answer is “Yes” to the questions above, this might be a good match for you.

As a Website Promoter you will be working with different clients and make sure that they will be visible in Internet. The work can be done on freelance bases.

We are offering a young, dynamic and flexible working environment. You will get a solid base for working with Internet marketing in the future through learning a lot about Google, link building and search engine optimization (SEO).

If you find this interesting, send your CV + cover letter and convince us to take you on board!

// Laura

Link building facing huge challenges nowadays

After the famous Google Penguin Update, the importance of hard-to-get quality links has become clear to all. What you should aim today is to get links meant for humans, not for Google.

So what does this all mean?

Linking from relevant places

Don’t just submit links to different directories just because they are directories. Choose the best and biggest ones, where people actually go to look for websites. Examples could be Dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, etc.

If you want to make blog commenting, do it only if you really have something smart to say and you believe that the link you are posting in a comment provides some value to the blogger, or other readers. Otherwise, just skip it.

I could go on and on about this, but what I really want to say is that you should avoid all kinds of link building activity where the main purpose is just to get SEO optimized links and affect to your search engine rankings.

You want to be linked from places where you are having actual audience that might see your link and click on it directly to visit. You want the links from these kind of places that believe the link will benefit some human beings by providing them more information beyond what’s on the page itself, not because they are thinking the link will benefit someone to rank better.

Yes I know, earned links are not easy links. But they are worth it, or at least they won’t lead you to get penalized by Google.

Unnatural looking links

So what are then unnatural looking links? The examples I am going to give you are based on the examples I found from Search Engine Land’s article Can There Really Be 85 Types of Unnatural Links. (Don’t worry, not going to list all 85 types.)

1. You have a link from a sports bar based in Paris to your boxing club in Birmingham. This is a classical unnatural link that has no natural connection in subject matter or location between these two websites.

2. The title tag and the heading tag of some of your internal pages are the exact keyword match for several anchor text links from other websites pointing at your site. This is clearly unnatural.

3. Your less-good-blog or site has ten times more blogroll links than your nearest competitor. The amount of links should go hand in hand with the quality of your website. If your bad quality SMS loan site has 100 blogroll links, it will be seen as unnatural.

4. If your website has 1000 unique domains linking to it and 400 of them are coming from some directory, or file named /resources-links.html, links.asp, or /exchange-links.html, it is definitely unnatural. When half of your inbounds originate from links pages, that is unnatural.

5. Your site has a high amount of incoming links, but all these links are coming just from few resources.

6. Sitewide-links

7. Blog networks and article networks.

8. Mass directory submissions outside of your vertical.

9. Link(s) from (a) site(s) that offers no contact information, author name, etc.

10. Blogs with 3 external links from each blog post: one link to Wikipedia, one to .gov or .edu site, and one to a client site.

There are surely more different types of unnatural looking links, here was listed only 10 of them. Please go and read the article published in Search Engine Land (natural link above) if you are interested in reading further about unnatural looking links.

What is a good link profile then?

Good link profile is diverse. There are links from blogs, static pages, news websites, directories (good ones), social media bookmarks, etc.

Some of the links can be SEO optimized links, but majority should be just natural links, placed by webmaster. These include URL-links, brand links, long-tail keywords, just some word like “read more here“, etc.

It is very important to vary the anchor text, also the top level domain (.net, .com, .org, etc.) and geo location of the site linking to your site.

The link types should also vary: some links should be permanent, some footer links, some links from sidebar, some links should point to your subpages, some links should come from other website’s subpages, some from the homepage.

Important is just to try to have the link profile as diverse as possible, and of course, natural.

// Laura

Last month’s Google Updates

Google’s search quality updates in March have been available now for over one week. There has been updates, or tweaks, for example in anchor texts, image search, navigational search and indexation of profile pages.

There are few items that stand out, and we will have a look at those more closely.

Anchor text tweaks

There are two items on the list in regards to tweaks in anchor texts: tweaks to handling of anchor text and better interpretation of and use of anchor text. The first one talks about how the specific classifier has been turned off, and the second mentions a new way of determining anchor text relevance.

Word-to-word from Google’s announcement:

Tweaks to handling of anchor text: This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.

Better interpretation of and use of anchor text: We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

The both explanations are very unclear, so we have to just keep guessing what Google exactly means by these updates.

Image Search Changes

You can spot a couple of items from the list that are related to image search, more specifically to the quality of the pages on which images appear: more relevant image search results and improvement to image search relevance. The first one talks about how lower quality pages with relevant images are rewarded; the second one talks about how images on better quality pages are rewarded.

More relevant image search results: This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. This makes it more likely that you’ll find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality.

Improvement to image search relevance: We’ve updated signals to better promote reasonably sized images on high-quality landing pages.

Again, sounds complicated and quite unclear how these changes should actually be interpreted.

Other items

There were few other items that raised my attention as well. These are:

Better indexing of profile pages: This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in our index from more than two-hundred social sites.

Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing: We generally ignore punctuation symbols in queries. Based on analysis of our query stream, we’ve now started to index the following heavily used symbols: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. We’ll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants.

Fewer undesired synonyms: When you search on Google, we often identify other search terms that might have the same meaning as what you entered in the box (synonyms) and surface results for those terms as well when it might be helpful. This month we tweaked a classifier to prevent unhelpful synonyms from being introduced as content in the results set.

Improvements to freshness: We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries.

As you can see, Google doesn’t provide us with very clear explanations regarding these updates. It is just us who need to guess how to react to these changes and how to start implementing them.

If you are interested in checking out the whole list, you can find it here.

// Laura

Watch out with overly SEO’ed sites!

The head of Google’s search spam team, Matt Cutts, announced that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites that are overdoing their SEO.

According to Matt Cutts this is Google’s attempt to “level the playing field” between webmasters that build quality content versus webmaster who are just simply doing aggressive SEO.

Barry Swartz quoted Matt Cutts in his article in Search Engine Roundtable:

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

There has been complaints of ranking changes this week, even though Google has denied any updates of any sorts. Maybe it is just Google testing the becoming update…

You can listen the audio recording from the panel Matt Cutts was on at SXSW about a week ago, when they were discussing about the new update.

// Katrina

SEO in Poland

Search engine marketing (SEM), especially search engine optimization (SEO), is developing and growing very rapidly in Poland. There is a growing competition for SEO in the Polish market since more and more people are involved in SEO.Search is the perfect place for promotion: over 90 % of all Internet users are using search engines like Google.

Did you know that there are over 40 million people who speak Polish and it is the second largest Slavic language after Russian? This group of 40 million people could be your potential clients, and majority of them can be reached by being visible in search engines.

Internet advertising in Poland has so far turned out to be immune to the crisis. The industry grew by 25.4 % during the first half of 2011. Poland spent more money for SEM than Finland and France, around €250 million during the first 6 months in 2011, which is almost as much as Czech Republic, Sweden and Germany.

Participation in the types of advertising

2009

2010

2011
display 50 proc. 45 proc. 40 proc.
SEM 26 proc. 30 proc. 34 proc.
sdvertisments 15 proc. 17 proc. 18 proc.
e-mail 6 proc. 6 proc. 7 proc.

sources: IAB Polska, Raport AdEx 2010, AdEx 2011H1

Written by Katrina Gajewska 

// Laura

Google Panda 3.3 Update confirmed together with 40 search updates

Again new Google Panda update confirmed. Together with confirming this new 3.3 Panda Update, Google announced 40 search updates that happened in February.

This article will point out few of the search updates I find most important and explain what Google says about the newest Panda update.

Google Panda 3.3 Update

“This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”

So basically, this update sounds very similar to the update that Google launched mid-January, Panda 3.2. This update was described only as a “data refresh” and not related to new or changed ranking signals.

You can check again this infographics to see the full background of the Panda update that Google introduced 1 year ago.

Evaluating Links

Google has been using for years a certain link evaluation signal. Now it will be getting rid of that, surely causing some discussion:

“We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.”

Google is reluctant to give away too many details about ranking signals and the company has indicated that the blog post says everything they want to say.

Local Search Rankings

Google says that traditional algorithmic ranking factors are playing bigger part in improving local search rankings.

“This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

Since Google launched its Places Search in late 2010, traditional SEO has played a bigger part in Google’s local search. This seems to be even further enforced.

According to Google’s post local results are being improved because of a “new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”

More accurate detection of official pages

Google has made an adjustment how they detect official pages by using codename “WRE”. By this adjustment Google wants to make identifications more accurate.

“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.”

Improvement to Freshness

Google introduced its “Fresh” algorithm change in late 2011. The purpose was to make search results more fresh, more current. Now Google wants to improve this algorithm change:

“We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.”

Other Google Updates

I won’t recap all the 40 search updates in this post, but you can find them here. There are some thing pointed out that you should pay attention to, such as:

  • “Site:” query update
  • International launch of shopping rich snippets
  • Updates related to sitelinks and related searches.
// Laura

Do you have too much ads on your site?

Google has introduced again a new algorithm change, “page layout algorithm”.  The new change is aimed for penalizing sites that are too heavily loaded with ads.

Google posted the same information about the new change on its Inside Search blog and Google Webmaster Central blog:

“We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

This change doesn’t impact on sites that are using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads; it only applies to static ads in fixed positions on pages themselves.

How do you know what is too much?

According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, Google won’t be offering any kinds of tools to tell if you have too much ads or not.  Google is encouraging people to make use of  e.g. its Google Browser Size tool to understand how much page’s content compared to ads is visible to visitors under various screen resolutions at first glance when they open the page.

Google’s blog post addresses though, that the change should only hit pages that have abnormally large number of ads above-the-fold (compared to the web as a whole).  And according to Cutts again, the change will impact less that 1 % of Google’s searches globally.

So if you have little or no content showing above the fold for commonly-used screen resolutions, I would advice you to fix your site, just in case. And do it fast, the change has already started going into effect.