Jun 242011
I really like Dilbert cartoons, so it was funny to see this strip in my twitter feed this morning. Personally, my opinion on SEO is more in line with Dilbert’s boss. What’s so unethical about ‘black hat’ tactics anyway? As long as the website deserves to be on page one, I say it’s ok to give Google a nudge in the right direction.
A very interesting & insightful presentation from Rand Fishkin, owner and founder of SEOmoz. Here, Rand discusses the state of various Google & Bing search indicies, and how many are awash with spam websites. The future of SEO? watch and find out =)
A couple of days ago Google announced the launch of Google Shopping in Australia, and the consequences for ecommerce websites could be huge. For those of you who don’t know, Google shopping is a service which has been operating in the .com search results for some time, and allows retailers to upload their products to Google so that they can be returned as ‘Shopping’ results (similar to existing Image or Video verticles).
Apr 042011
Last year Google let it be known that page speed would be incorporated into their algorithm as a ranking signal. Now they’ve released a free tool over at Google Labs that gives webpages a score out of 100 based on how quickly, or how slowly they load. The cool thing is Google also gives you recomendations as to how you can improve the speed of your pages, if they’re not loading at an optimal rate. The screenshot below shows some of the recommendations given for this page (which only managed to score a 67/100). As you can see, recommendations are organised nicely in order of priority, and you can even generate reports specifically for mobile performance:
The fact that Google’s bothered to put this amount of effort into the tool (when there were already speed test tools available), leads me to think page speed may be more important than I had originally thought. In any case, this tool offers some cool recommendations that you can relay to your clients through your audits/reports.
A very insightful article was published today by Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land, explaining Google’s plans to roll out its +1 update in the near future. Basically, +1 is a button which acts in a similar fashion to Facebook’s ‘like’ functionality. This button will sit alongside search results (paid and organic), and will influence the rankings for users who run in the same social networks. Webmasters will also be able to embed the button on their website itslef, so that users can ‘+1′ pages straight from the source. Facebook and Twitter networks are not being incorporated currently, although Google says this is the direction the +1 functionality will take eventually.
You can imagine the impact this update will have on SEO, as people’s search results become more and more personalised based on what their friends recommend. I’m not predicting the death of SEO just yet however. At the end of the day, Google’s index will need to remain objective to avoid a viscious cycle (whereby only +1d websites appear in my search results, so I never see anything else). Instead I would imagine +1d websites taking one or two positions at the top of the heap, and acting more like a places listing or a video search result. This would be more in keeping with Google’s want for varied search results, which has been the increasing trend over the last few years.
Mar 242011
A new Google infographic has been published by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall this week. In a similar vein to the ‘History of the Google Algorthim‘ posted here a few days ago, Aaron’s document covers Google’s major updates, from their birth in the late 90′s up to the present day. Again, this is an interesting history lesson for SEO’s who haven’t been in the game from day one. Anyone else notice this document reads like a history of Skynet?
According to Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Roundtable there could be a Google Toolbar update in the works for March, with some webmasters reporting changes to their PageRank on threads from Webmaster World and DigitalPoint. Since learning of the possible update I’ve checked a number of my client’s websites for expected increases, but unfortunately have no changes to report. Of course, it’s quite possible that the update has yet to take effect in Australia. As far as I know Google has not confirmed whether changes to the Toolbar algorthim have in fact been made, but as soon as they do I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, keep your eyes glued to that green fairy dust!
This is a really interesting video post from Google’s Webmaster Help account on YouTube. In it, Matt Cutts makes an important distinction between manual and algorthimic penalties, before explaining how these different penalties can be lifted. Unfortunately, Google is yet to offer webmasters any explaination as to why a website has been blacklisted, which can make it difficult to resolve the undisclosed issues.
A very cool infographic was published by the level 343 blog a few days ago, providing a history of Google’s algorhithmic updates dating back to ‘the death of PageRank’ back in 2002. This is a fun little diagram, but also a valuable history lesson for SEOs who havn’t been in the industry for that long. Word is Google’s next major update will be targeting exact match domain names…
