To Cover:

• Advertorials
• Spam Queries
• Sophisticated Link Analysis – Going Upstream
• Improvement on Hacked Sites
• Authority Boost
• Panda Sympathy
• Cluster of Results from Same Site
• Improved Webmaster Communication

Below is the 7:24 Video

“We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin,” said Matt Cutts. “Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a web spam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat web spam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper in have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

Advertorials

“We’ve also been looking at advertorials,” says Cutts .”That is sort of native advertising – and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines. So, again, if someone pays for coverage, or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank. We’ve seen a few sites in the U.S. and around the world that take money and do link to websites, and pass PageRank, so we’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines.”

“There’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank, and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure, so that users realize that something is paid – not organic or editorial,”

Spam Queries

“We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk. So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”

Link Analysis; Upstream

“We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers – some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on ways that that becomes less effective, and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”

“In fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis,” he adds. “We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munching, and see how good it looks. We’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.”

Hacked Sites

“We also continue to work on hacked sites in a couple different ways,” says Cutts. “Number one: trying to detect them better. We hope in the next few months to roll out a next-generation site detection that is even more comprehensive, and also trying to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they see confusion between hacked sites and sites that serve up malware, and ideally, you’d have a one-stop shop where once someone realizes that they’ve been hacked, they can go to Webmaster Tools, and have some single spot where they could go and have a lot more info to sort of point them in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites.”

Authority Boost

“We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters,” says Cutts. “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space. You know, it could be medical. It could be travel. Whatever. And try to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site, according to the algorithms, we think might be a little more appropriate for users.”

Panda Sympathy

“We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”

Domain Clustering of SERPs from Same Site

“We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from people about – if I go down three pages deep, I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain, and we’ve actually made things better in terms of – you would be less likely to see that on the first page, but more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking a change, which might deploy, which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site, then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.”

Improved Webmaster Communication

“We’re going to keep trying to figure out how we can give more information to webmasters…we’re also going to be looking for ways that we can provide more concrete details, [and] more example URLs that webmasters can use to figure out where to go to diagnose their site.”

We’ll keep you updated…

In the meantime, click below to get your complimentary search engine optimization and investigation report revealing why your website and web pages are not ranking at the top of Google and what you can do to fix that today!

Content can be utilized to its fullest by re-purposing an original, uniquely written piece of information into various forms of online digestible media. Since the goal of developing this content is to get it far and wide with as many eyeballs on it as possible, it better be real %^&* good.

By publishing great content the audience is engaged with solutions, stories, checklists, top 10 lists; useful information when good enough will lead to the rewards of being socially relevant, eventually dominating that specific social sphere of influence. Procure more social shares, more comments, more subscribers, re-tweets, views, votes, likes, stumbles, pins, and on and on it just continues to grow like a beast.

As mentioned, distributing high value content should be performed in many ways, below is a partial list of different types of social site categories and formats you can utilize. When creating content keep in mind that the higher the value, the higher the pay off.

• Article Directories
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Various Blog Platforms
• Video Sharing Sites
• Press Release Distribution
• Document Sharing Sites
• Web 2.0 Social Sites
• Software / Applications
• Related Free & Paid Link Directories
• Wikipedia & Other Related Wikis
• Local Directories & Citations
• RSS Feed Distributions
• Alexa Top Sites
• Majestic Million (export to spreadsheet & Ctrl-F(ind) related sites by keywords in their domains)
• Strategic Content Syndication (there are a number of ways to properly achieve this; one tool working well is IFTTT)

Use a free URL shortening service like Bit.ly to track specific links and to see in-depth click statistics.

By leveraging these channels with valued content (which is tied back to the main web site or brand), organic search rankings will climb to the top and ultimately dominate whatever relevant keyword phrase is targeted. Reach the top ranking in this fashion, makes it very difficult for any competitor to overtake that position.

Set up a value packed content marketing plan, that is scheduled, and strategic, it will pay huge dividends at the moment and long down the road.

For the latest details on optimizing your web presence through content marketing and syndication you can contact us here.

Launching a new site, or any major site update, for a large enterprise comes with some unique challenges. A short summary of some of the most common include those listed below.

SEO Challenges: New Site Launch Or Major Updates

1. Too many decision makers. This is one of the more basic headaches. Product marketing, engineering, PR and the executive branch can all weigh-in in ways that can have you ripping your hair out.
2. Many development priorities. This is often the most frustrating challenge, because it is the hardest one to combat. Other priorities may well be more important in the short term than what you are pushing for. Or, worse, it just makes it harder for you to get key players to buy into your idealistic view of the best way to build the new website.
3. Ignorance of SEO. You still run into those that think that SEO is unimportant. Yes, they are still out there. I dug into this a bit in my article, Why Do Brands Overlook the SEO Opportunity for Non-Branded Keywords?
4. Misinformation About SEO. This one is worse. The exec who thinks they know something, but the information is wrong, just might drive you mad. Just last week at SMX West, I was talking to one exec that told me they had just finished updating the meta keywords on 1800 to their pages. To them, this was SEO. The lost time is certainly one bad part of this, but worse still, to this exec, the SEO for the site was done. (I took it upon myself to set them straight.)
5. Misconceptions. The belief that SEO is Hopeless.

The above misinformation deserves its own brief discussion. Many believe that Google changes the rules at its whim, and hence, no SEO effort is sustainable. They have not yet bought into the basic concept that modern SEO is not about tricking Google; it is, in fact, a form of branding activity that uses many tactics that support the overall brand in ways well beyond pure ranking in the SERPs.

(Read Full Story)

Get Started on the Road to Top Rankings with our Complimentary Nothing-Held-Back SEO Report custom developed for your website.

I came across this article on the popular website Search Engine Guide; it was written by Stoney deGeyter and he explains in logical fashion the importance of looking at SEO (website marketing, social  media, link building, etc.) as an actual investment rather than a cost or expenditure.

I’ll let Stoney take it from here.

Enterprise SEO for the Small-to-Medium Business
by Stoney deGeyter

Every once in a while my company comes across a web marketing prospect looking for SEO, link building and social media services to get their uber-competitive keywords ranked #1 on Google. And then the bomb drops – their budget is a whopping $500! Whenever I come across these people who want so much for so little I want to wave my magic wand, click my heals together and rub the magic lamp sitting on my desk so that I can wish for an intravenous injection of whatever kool-aid they’ve been drinking.

Good SEO isn’t cheap, but that doesn’t mean it has to be expensive, either. Getting a quality SEO campaign isn’t so much about cost as it is about the value that the SEO campaign brings to the site. If the SEO campaign is profitable, then it really doesn’t matter how much it costs. Heck, if someone could promise me $5 in return for every $1 I spend, I’d mortgage my house, my car and even my brother to pull together every bit of cash I have. Unfortunately, I’ve already mortgaged my brother, and even the best SEOs cannot make such guarantees!

But that doesn’t mean SEO isn’t profitable. Done right, it is. In fact, SEO is one of the least expensive forms of marketing out there. Why so many website owners still refuse to invest as heavily in SEO as they do other marketing, I’ll never know.

Many small businesses spend more on building their website then they do on turning it into a business generator. Without SEO, your website is just a brochure. But an optimized website is a lead generator and a ridiculously awesome sales machine. Brochures are great and all, but I’d put my money on sales!

But many small businesses are “strapped” for money to invest into marketing. I get it, I’ve been there. But marketing has to be seen as an investment, rather than an expense. Smart investments are not always cheap investments. You can play the penny stocks all day and make $5, or you can invest in a company that’s going to return dividends of thousands.

Can Small Businesses Afford SEO?

Many small business owners want enterprise level SEO for pennies on the dollar. You don’t have to look too hard to find an SEO that’s offering cheap SEO services. But you also don’t have to look much further to find SEOs that provide cheap SEO services with very little optimization value.

Quality SEO isn’t difficult but it does take both knowledge and the time necessary to implement that knowledge. Essentially, SEO is a combination of research, diagnosis and implementation. All three of these are necessary to create an effective optimization campaign.

SEO without Research is Like…

Imagine for a second you bought a vehicle and you want to enter it into a race. You take it to a mechanic and ask him to make it a winning vehicle. There are a couple things the mechanic needs to know: 1) What kind of race will you be entering? 2) What are the vehicle specifications or requirements for that particular race?

Without getting getting answers to these questions, you might find your vehicle is prepped for the wrong kind of race. You might have paid $500 to be the winner of the pinewood derby! Yay!

Everybody wants to be a winner, but unfortunately, that’s $500 wasted because your mechanic (SEO) didn’t do the needed research – not only find out what you’re racing against, but also to figure out what needs to be done to get your vehicle (website) prepared to compete properly.

SEO without Diagnosis Is Like…

Let’s say you brought your car to a mechanic because you’ve been having problems. The first thing the mechanic does is try to diagnose the problem. In some cases, this process can be amazingly simple, but in others, it can be incredibly difficult.

There are a lot of tools available to help you diagnose website problems, but these may not always find the core problem. Or they might find multiple problems. A good SEO needs to be able to identify and diagnose issues, and this ability comes from spending time educating themselves about good website marketing strategies. You don’t know what’s wrong if you don’t really know what’s right.

Show a website to a “cheap” SEO and they might tell you that your tags need to be better optimized. Show the same site to an experienced SEO and they might spend a couple hours doing some digging to find the real problem. The more educated the SEO is, the more likely he or she will be able to provide a proper site diagnosis.

SEO without Implementation Is Like…

Say you brought your car to a specialist. He or she researches and diagnoses the problem and tells you exactly what you need to do. You thank them, take your car home and then never do anything about it. Maybe you couldn’t afford to do anything, or you were just looking to save a buck to do it yourself. Bottom line is, nothing got done.

What good is that to you? Sure, you know what needs to be done, but until you actually do it, you’re not going to get the benefit out of the research and diagnosis. SEO is no different. Unless the SEO recommendations are implemented, either by you or someone else, the diagnosis and research are all for nothing.

The cost of quality SEO is almost directly proportional to the skill level of the SEO and the time it takes to do the work. A low-skill SEO might charge you only $50 per hour, but might take 50 hours to do the job. A high-skilled SEO might charge an “outrageous” $200 per hour, but can get the same job done in just 10 hours.

While the $50-per-hour SEO might sound like a good deal, once you do the math, you realize you just spend more money on the same job. To top it off, the low-skilled SEO very likely didn’t do as good of a job, so you just paid more for less. That’s not good value!

SEO Can Always Be Affordable, but It Isn’t Always Cheap

SEO doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, the expense of an SEO campaign is just relative to the return. To some small businesses, anything more than a few hundred dollars can seem expensive. But if the value returned is several thousand dollars, then it’s not so expensive after all. Similarly, you may save money on cheap SEO, but $500 spent on SEO that provides $500 is much more expensive.

SEO often has more value than the sum of its parts. Investing in research, diagnosis and implementation can appear to cost a great deal, but the returns are often exponentially greater. The idea is to consider SEO an investment, rather than a cost. Any good investment gives a good return. And as long as SEO is delivering ROI, there truly is no cost at all. With that, every small business can afford enterprise level SEO. How much you invest isn’t a matter of how much you have, but how much return you want.

Article Link

See ADVERTISING COST COMPARISION CHART for traditional advertising costs and audience reach matched up with SEO.

SEO has long relied on keywords to define content development, URL structure, and anchor text tactics.

We won’t dwell on Google’s Penguin and Panda updates as the nails in the coffin for over-optimized content and link profiles, but just know both of these algorithmic animals contributed to considerable change in SEO tactics and strategies over the past 18 months, including how SEO practitioners should be looking at keywords.

Keywords Are Dead!

Back when search engines were young and users less savvy, Google introduced keywords as the search methodology. With the maturing of search algorithms and the growing sophistication of Internet users’ behavior most searchers:

• Know how to “Google” (a verb since 2006).
• Understand where to click in the results.
• Expect relevance after the click.
• Know how to refine a non-relevant search.

The old interpretation of keywords is no longer true; users are not typing simple keywords that yield simple Google results. Users are entering “queries” – phrases that match specific search intent – and Google attempts to match that intent based on search data, click data, and heuristics, and then serves richer (and hopefully more relevant) intent-based results:

• Knowledge graph “instant results” for people, places and things.
• Local results.
• Google Autocomplete.
• Google spelling correction.
• Product listings / shopping for buying signals.
• Dictionary results for “definition-based” queries.

Long Live User Search Intent!

We live in an online world where users know what they’re looking for and search engines are getting much better at satisfying the user intent through their search results. But where does your brand fit into all this?

Your brand’s website and online presence needs to align around targeted customer intent(s) not traditional keywords focused optimization. What does this mean for your 2013 strategy? Focus toward tactics that will play to Google’s more complex side: mapping queries to actions, intent research, and aligned content creation.

Mapping Queries to Value

• List everything your company does and potentially wants to be found for. Look at it as an exercise in topic relevance. Ask yourself, for what kind of topics or queries should you appear? (Products, services, expertise, location etc.)
• Segment these topics by types of intent. List each topic under one of four headings:
  • Navigational.
  • Informational.
  • Commercial (note: a commercial query is an informational search with future business implications – i.e., comparison searches).
  • Transactional.
• Assign value to each topic in each column to help prioritize efforts and resource allocation. Values can be assigned as either a dollar amount or a simple 1 to 10 value. For example: An informational intent topic search that includes a location would have a greater value than one without.

Intent Research

• Doing traditional keyword search volume type discovery is still necessary, but search marketers must now also understand a user’s intent around a particular keyword or query.
• Look for new sources of query research like social monitoring, owned assets (social profiles), and onsite polls, surveys, or contests.
• Don’t discount research performed on your own site. If you have a search box on your site, are you collecting valuable intent based data? How are users formulating queries? What are they specifically searching for and from which page?
• Move offline with your research with informal meet-ups, focus groups, and peer groups and ask simple questions like “how would you search for product or service x?”

(Full Article)

I’ve long advocated a common-sense approach to algorithm chasing with SEO. What most people don’t understand is that with today’s algorithms, there is almost no such thing as a top search engine ranking. There is simply exposure. You either get more of it or less of it. Rankings play a role, but not in the way most people think.

Here are some little known facts about Google:

• Google analyzes somewhere around 200 different ranking signals. At least that was in 2009. It’s probably more today. Most of these ranking signals are pretty well known, but there is still some significant argument within the community about many of them.

• Each Google ranking signal may carry varying degrees of weight and importance, any of which may be tweaked, improved, degraded or removed at any time. Google is constantly rolling out algorithm tweaks and changes, adjusting the signals or even adding or removing them as they feel the need. While these changes may not be major, they can – and do – have an effect on how pages rank.

• There is no one single Google algorithm. In fact, at any one time there may be anywhere from 50-200 different algorithms at work. These different algorithms might be in play for different industries, different types of searches or testing the effects of various algorithm changes before a full push.

• Panda and Penguin updates are not updates, but filters that they periodically run their index through. If your site got hit with these updates, fixing the problem that caused it won’t bring immediate results. You have to wait until the next time Google runs the filter.

• The zip code you are searching from can have an impact on your search results. Google tries to determine which queries are geographical in nature and deliver results most relevant to your particular location. The same search from a different location will produce very different results.

• Google has been working personalization into the search results for some time. If you’re logged into Google, it’s keeping record of your search history and sites you typically click on. The more information it has on your preferences, the better it is able to deliver results to your liking – or at least what Google thinks is to your liking.

• Adding a new twist to personalization are your social signals. Google is now personalizing results based on who you are connected with (in Google+) and pages they may have +1′ed. That means your “friends” are directly influencing which sites you see when you perform a search!

So what does all this amount to? Well, it means that the results you see may or may not be a reflection of the Internet at large. If you see your site come up #1 in the search results for your keywords, that might simply be a result of your own personalizations, localizations or socializations. If you turn all those off and you’re still in the top spot, you likely aren’t for a lot of other searchers that are getting results based on their own personalizations, localizations and socializations.

[ Read the Full "Beat the Algorithms?" article ]

Additional SEO News Below:

8-SEO-Tips-That-Take-15-Minutes-or-Less

121-link-building-posts-the-2012-round-up

2013-SEO-Playbook

If you’re doing ANY work to rank for a keyword, it’s critical to review your SEO competition matrix.

Picking a keyword based on just keyword competition alone (such as Title Competition, for example), is NOT enough… There’s plenty of keywords out there with low Title competition which have fierce front-page competition!

So, make sure you double check to make sure you’re not trying to outrank the 800 Pound Gorillas in your market with high authority, squillions of backlinks and targeted on page optimization!

However, there’s a problem! Understanding Competition & Backlink Analysis Can Still Be Really Confusing. Here’s Why…

While your Market Samurai Competition module gives you a concise, “at a glance” view of your key competition indicators, many of these are far from perfect. For example:

• Google PageRank (PR) - this is Google’s own measure of web-page “importance” and has long been to many the industry benchmark. It’s a scale from 0 to 10, with a score of 9 to 10 representing extreme authority (think sites like twitter.com, Facebook.com etc) and scores of 0 – 2 being low authority sites. Whilst we like measures from Google (especially as we optimise for Google), the problems with PageRank (or PR) are numerous:
  • Unwieldy Increments – The scale Google use is “logarithmic”, which means the gap between a PR 5 and 6 is huge (and gets bigger every day). To give quality feedback on your progress in building authority, your need far more granular measures (e.g. decimal scores like 5.2 out of 10)
  • Slow Updates - Internally, Google’s measure of PageRank is updated dynamically any time a new link is added, but the number that Google gives YOU is only updated about every three months. That means you can only get feedback 4 times a year! That sucks. To make it worse, when your competitors (or you) launch a new page, that page will INSTANTLY gain authority from any internal site links, but will show up as a PageRank of ZERO until the next update happens (leaving you to think your competitors are weaker than they really are – a fatal rookie error!).
  • Pending death - This one will probably draw a few comments, but I predict Google’s Page Rank will be pulled very soon. PageRank was initially a publicity tool and has now been removed from display in the Google toolbar. While tools exist that can still access the data (including Market Samurai)… Very few real REGULAR people are using it. Practically the only people who look at PageRank now are us SEOs… What’s the benefit to Google in maintaining it something that’s basically only used by those in the SEO industry? That’s why I don’t think it’s long for this world.
• Backlink counts - Market Samurai provides a range of backlink counts including the number of links to a site, to a page and the number of different domains linking to a target site or page. These are great measures of the QUANTITY of links but give no indication of QUALITY. In a world where one good link can drive more authority than 1000 poor ones, quantity measures are limited.
• Specialist Indicators – The competition module shows links from speciality sites like educational sites and high profile directories like the Yahoo & DMOZ directories. These give us a hint as to the presence of “quality” backlinks, but it’s very possible to have an incredibly powerful link profile and not be linked from these sources.

Good News – Now the mystery is gone with two brilliant new measures…

We’re really excited to announce the integration of two BRAND NEW, insightful metrics from our data partners at Majestic SEO.

Update Market Samurai today, and you’ll find these two new data points in the SEO Competition Matrix:

1. New Importance Measure – “Citation Flow” or CF
(Like Google’s Page Rank but built the way SEOs need it.)

Majestic SEO recently released a new metric called “Citation Flow” and it’s ready to go.

Citation Flow is very similar to Page Rank. We were privileged to be part of Majestic’s Beta trials (and indeed gave quite a bit of feedback direct to their developers). As part of this, we did a broad comparison between Citation Flow and Google’s PageRank. The correlation between the two is excellent.

Plus, to help SEOs like you and I, you’ll also get these critical (and long awaited) features:

1. Precision for Sensible Measurement – Citation Flow is a measure from 0 – 100 (rather than 0 -10), meaning you can track your progress far more accurately.
2. Regular Updates for Fast Feedback – Majestic update their metrics DAILY (rather than Google’s approximate 90+ day update cycle).
3. Longevity – as a commercial metric from a long established provider, we can reasonably expect this data source to remain stable. (PageRank won’t be with the SEO community too much longer we predict!)

2. New Authority Measure – “Trust Flow” or TF
(The ‘secret sauce’ in modern search algorithms?)

It turns out the web can be broken up into neighbourhoods – trusted sites generally link to trusted sites and nasty, dodgy and spammy sites tend to link to each other too.

It’s why many SEOs talk about “authority” or “hub” sites… What they really are talking about is the concept of “Trust” or “Authority”…

Our second new measure, “Trust Flow” is built around an analysis of the flow of “Trust” through links from trusted, higher authority sources.

Similar to Citation Flow, it’s a score out of 100 and as you’d expect, reputable sites sites get high scores and new or dodgy sites get low scores.

SEO commentators have long been talking about the influence of links from trusted sources, and with Majestic Trust Flow, we now have a quality measure of this.

For those SEO Nerds out there – Trust Flow is similar to Yahoo’s famous TrustRank

Anything not to love?

Whilst these new metrics are visible the majority of the time, in a couple of markets I was able to find ranked pages with no Citation Flow or Trust Flow values. These were mainly obscure pages from mega sites like Amazon, Pinterest or YouTube. However in each case, by reviewing the Citation and Trust Flow values that were available, I was still able to get a good gauge of competition.

Full Article

SEO WEB STRATEGY

1. Product or Service Offering
2. Define Target Audience
3. Website Design
4. Name Capture
5. Keyword Research
6. On-Page SEO
7. Content Creation *
8. Promotional Setup
9. Social Media Marketing
10. Link Building **
11. Traffic Conversions 
12. Tracking and Testing

* Used for content creation
** Used for link building

• Articles
• Press Releases
• Video
• Audio – Podcasts
• PDFs
• Images
• Bookmarking
• Web 2.0 Profiles
• Secondary Blog Content
• Wiki Content
• Micro Blog Content
• Forum Participation
• Blog Commenting
• Q&A Content

This is really basic but provides some tips to help your online marketing efforts.

Was There A Google Panda Refresh? #22

19 Nov 12′ by www.seroundtable.com

In this post Barry Schwartz reports Google’s Panda refresh starting around Friday, November 16th rumours spreading among webmasters on various forums. All waiting for confirmation from Google.