A look at the much publicised case of gourmetgiftbasket.com and why Google looks to punish sites with ranking penalties for buying paid links.
Google hates paid links. Epitomising PageRank manipulation, it allows sites to gain an unfair advantage in their rankings. This in turn can skew results and lead to algorithmic confusion – not good for a search engine’s reputation.
Therefore when they find out a site has been buying up links, they tend to come down pretty hard on them. Just ask Ryan Abood.
Owner of gourmetgiftbasket.com, Mr. Abood discovered first hand just how serious a ranking penalty can be. His site disappeared from the pages of Google overnight, costing his business an estimated $4 million [see: How Google Cost Me $4 Million].
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In the second part of our look at how a brand identity developed online and in the real world can influence SEO we look at how it can all come together. Interplanetary alignment, karmic balance or divine synchronicity; whatever it may be, businesses are boosting their SEO efforts through exposure alone.
As we found yesterday, this is easier to measure in relatively new companies [see: How Brand Awareness Can Prove To Be an SEO Asset]. Trying to find how a Microsoft campaign may have influenced their site’s SEO campaign and link building efforts could prove more challenging – not least because their self-titled .com domain has over 127 million links currently.
The first part left off with a look at Wonga.com and its quick rise to prominence. We looked at how regular press coverage, full media marketing and sponsorship were helping to grow their search engine visibility and link profile.
Whilst this isn’t accidental per se, in-house efforts were clearly being magnified by external buzz.
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This is the first in a two part look at how developing your brand’s awareness both offline and on can benefit your SEO work.
When it comes to successfully implementing Search Engine Optimisation theory, there is often a fair amount of hard work and effort required. There’s keyword research to be done, content to be written and links to be sought. This all takes time.
For most websites this is a building process. Create the navigation, implement copy on each page and then develop links. There’s no shortcut and this could take months to have any effect on search engine rankings. Keeping the faith is often the biggest challenge in these early days.
But what are search engine rankings for? Why is it that sites covet the exposure that Google provides?
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Through rapid industry growth and business awareness Search Engine Marketing Jobs are becoming a far more common entity across jobs boards and the web in general. If you’ve got the skills this article explains 13 ways to get recruited in to an SEO Job. Don’t forget to view our latest SEO Vacancies as well.
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Anyone involved in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will undoubtedly spend some of their time trying to find new link building opportunities. Whilst this is perfectly sensible, there are many occasion when existing third party links exist but point to a dead page, i.e. the page no longer exists and results in a 404 error. Bad news.
There are many tools to help spot broken links such as the fantastic Xenu application but even Google Webmaster Tools provides this information. We’ve reported this before – Google Webmaster Tools Reports 404s – but worth repeating again. More…
What do you do when your site just isn’t getting anywhere in the search engines? Here’s our quick SEO troubleshooting guide.
It’s a frustration felt by many website owners. You have a decent enough site, it has a few rankings and gets a little bit of traffic. However, that just isn’t enough.
It takes time and money to develop a website, so understandably you want to see some end results. Whether you’re doing your own Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or have outsourced it, this can often bear the bear the brunt of your frustrations.
Why aren’t you higher up in the rankings? Why are search engines overlooking you in favour of your competitors? The likelihood is that it your site just isn’t seen as an authority yet. You aren’t giving Google enough information to persuade them to reconsider their rankings.
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Avoiding the politics of the Google MayDay Algorithm update and subsequent fallout, one benefit of the changes is that attention has been drawn to optimising pages as an individual entity.
While search engine commentators were endlessly speculating about Caffeine, Google themselves were readying a major algorithm update. MayDay came in almost unnoticed and certainly unheralded. But the consequences of this algorithm update were felt far wider and in greater concentration than anything Caffeine has offered so far.
Principally affecting pages lower down in a website’s architecture, MayDay relegated and promoted thousands of sites almost overnight. The strength of opinion and the impact of these changes was evidenced in the responses we received to our post earlier in the month – Mayday Alert for Webmasters after Google Algorithm Change.
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Despite a rather underwhelming start, the World Cup is still dominating pub conversations, media waffle and the online community. So, what better analogy to explain exactly how Search Engine Optimisation works?
When you create a website and you begin optimising it, this is like a country starting out in the preliminary qualifying round. You’re full of hope and expectation, there are plenty of challenges ahead, but ultimately you want to get that ultimate prize – top spot on Google for you primary keyword, or, to keep in with the analogy, the World Cup trophy itself.
The path to the ultimate goal is a long hard slog. It is littered with important decisions, plenty of hard work and a few wrong turns. But, just as with the World Cup, you can’t get your hands on the prize until you have beaten the best in the world. To do this you slowly have to build, learn and refine.
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The more pages your site has, the more opportunities it has to rank for new terms. But how can you add content without adding clutter?
Every page on your site has optimised content. Visitors and search engines seem satisfied by your unique body copy, but you’re not. You’ve reached a crossroads.
Whilst the site has achieved good rankings for some terms, there are still more that you want to target. Hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities to get your site noticed. What can you do to increase the size of your site, get more pages and earn some new rankings without shoehorning in worthless content?
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A paid link by any other name…Google finally get tough on UK newspapers profiting from advertorials after the Express Group’s ill-advised promotional email campaign.
It appears that UK national newspapers aren’t exempt from Google’s rules on paid links. Earlier in the week the Express Group was snared for their brazen campaign to sell links in advertorials and archived pages.
We received the very same message that many other SEOs throughout the country encountered. Addressed from the Express Group, it very kindly offered space on its site for a small fee. Unsurprisingly that was soon consigned to the junk folder.
It wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time such an offer is made. In fact, it helped to inspire our post on how you define ethical link building in SEO. After all, this is a major UK printed press company. Their overtures were so brazen that you had to wonder how long Google would allow it to continue and whether anybody could possibly be lured into this flawed scheme.
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Link bait, paid links, link farms, article marketing; all of these can, in theory at least, improve your linking profile and SEO strength, but what is the real difference between ethical and unethical link building?
Links, as we all know, provide the backbone of SEO. As such, there is now huge importance placed on earning links; even to the extent where an entire industry has sprouted devoted to providing dedicated link building services and linking opportunities.
With so much weight given to the gaining of quality links, the stakes have been raised. Businesses have begun to recognise their value and efforts to obtain the most prized trackbacks have been ramped up.
The metaphorical currency of links has stepped into the real world. Despite going against Google’s rule of “Buying or selling links that pass PageRank” [see: 5 Questions You Should Be Asking Before Outsourcing SEO], many are still prepared to pay hard cash for a single link that can bring serious value.
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We look at the vital questions that you need to be asking your potential SEO Company before signing on the dotted line.
At Impact Media we deal with a number of enquiries every day about how we can help companies improve their search engine visibility. Some prospective clients have an understanding of SEO, some don’t. This is what you would expect.
But for those who don’t know exactly what search engine optimisation is, outsourcing it can be a real leap of faith. You have invested time and money into creating a website that you’re proud of. This website is there to promote your business, products or services; therefore it is only right that you want it to succeed. Then you have to pass it over to somebody else to do work that you may not even be completely aware of; not easy.
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Now that Google have officially confirmed that site speed has become a ranking factor, we explore the implications this could have for your website.
To answer the first portion of the title, site speed (or page load time) is a measurement of how fast your website loads. This is usually an average figure taken from the moment a visitor lands on the page to the time it is fully loaded; this is ordinarily calculated by the search engine when crawling a site.
Site speed came to prominence late last year when Google announced that they would be incorporating it as a ranking factor [see: Could Page Load Time Become a Ranking Factor on Google?]. In the past week this has gone from theory to practice. Google are now taking site speed into account for certain search terms.
But the abiding message in all of this is not to panic. If your site is sluggish you won’t suddenly free fall through the rankings. Site speed will be just one of around 200 individual ranking factors that the Google algorithm uses. How much weight it will be given is yet to be seen.
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They may make for slightly uncomfortable bedfellows, but Google (and the other search engines) need Search Engine Optimisation, just like SEO needs Google. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them, the ultimate marriage of convenience.
The whole point of a search engine algorithm is to index websites by mathematically calculating dozens of ranking factors. Search Engine Optimisation is, by its very nature, a process that continuously looks for ways to improve rankings by any legitimate means possible. Google wants to keep things natural; SEO just wants what’s best for a particular site.
Search engines have to fight a constant battle to prevent unscrupulous types gaming their system. Whilst they have no (open) objection to developers strengthening their site and abiding by the rules; Google, Bing and Yahoo are constantly having to monitor for techniques that may undermine their algorithm.
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The days are getting longer. The weather is warming up (supposedly). Easter is just around the corner. All of this means that spring has finally sprung! So what better time to give your website a spring clean?
After a cold, gloomy winter, energies are renewed for the onset of the summer months. With the ice, snow, rain and fog soon to be a thing of the past (not soon enough here), there is optimism once again about the year ahead of us.
With freshness and positivity abound, now is the time to give your website a spring clean.
Time has a way of wearing us all down a little. Maybe we’re not as spritely as we once were, don’t have the same drive or enthusiasm for something. This happens on websites too.
Small issues, such as broken links, out-dated text and design quirks, can slowly clump together and drag down your website. Individually they are forgivable; together they give a worn appearance, implying that a site is under-developed and out-dated. So now is the time to spruce things up.
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