Google Algorithm Updates, Panda 3.2 and Why Design Matters

by Nate Devore on January 26, 2012 · 0 comments

You’re probably tired of hearing about the updates for Google’s Panda Algorithm.

2011 was the Year of Google Panda and there is no turning back (sorry!)

This week Google rolled out another update to it’s panda machine learning algrotihm called Panda 3.2.

This update was considered “minor.”

A few days ago, Google also released a change to their alogirthm that affected websites that contained advertisements above the fold.

Google warned webmasters that you need to start focusing more on user experience (UX), layout, and overall design of your website.

But this is a good thing.

After all google just wants to improve the search experience.

Sites that are well designed, have high quality content, and play by the rules will see an increase in traffic and rankings.

The reason all of this happened was because Google received complaints from their users about ad-littered websites that made it hard to find the content they were looking for.

Google suggests that the majority of your advertising should be found below the fold leaving the reader with worth while material when the page opens up.

Design REALLY Matters

Clean, affective design is really important. Make sure your content can be easily consumed. Have consistant branding accross all of your web pages. Make sure if you do place advertisements that you are not blocking the view of your good content.

Just by using some quality designs with WordPress should do the trick. Remember too if you need custom design or development work to hire a professional (shamless prop for me).

Analyze Your Backlinks (important!)

Pay close attention to your back-links which are coming from potential demoted sites. So if you have back-links that are coming from a website that has been affected by the algorithm and has a ton of ads on the site, you might want to re-evaluate your back-linking strategy.

Social Indicators are increasingly important (duh!)

Make sure all of your content can be easily shared with social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Consider the new networks too like Pinterest (more on that later).

Also think about how and why your content is likely to be shared. Especially since Facebook moved beyond the like button.

Strategic placement of your advertisements

Make sure you place your advertisements in strategic locations. You can still have a top header ad banner but make sure it doesn’t get in the way of your main content. Consider including your banner ads or affiliate codes in small numbers in the sidebar and within your pages content. Just avoid cluttering them together.

How have Google’s latest changes affected your business? Let me know if I can help-leave a comment below:

 

{ 0 comments }

New Bookmarklet Adds More Social Networks to Search Plus Your World

by Nate Devore on January 24, 2012 · 0 comments

When Search Plus Your World launched, I talked about how this was a paradigm shift in SEO. It’s Google’s attempt to create a social search engine. But the problem a lot of us have is that Google is biased to Google Plus.

When you search for movies in Google, you see a listing of Google Plus profiles in the right column. No mention of Twitter, Facebook, or other networks. When you search movies, Hugh Jackman’s Google+ profile shows up in the right column.

But when you search Hugh Jackman, you see his Twitter profile is the first social network listed in the organic results. Clearly he has more engagement on his Twitter account and that should be reflected when doing the original search for movies.

Focusontheuser.org

A group of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other networks got together and created this bookmarklet.

When you use it, you can see what Google could potentially look like if they opened up to more networks without favoring their G+ product.

Google is a business afterall and I can understand them wanting to promote their product. But they have always been about the user while delivering the most relevent results. It would make sense to integrate all of the other networks too.

The project focusontheuser.org is open source and the group plans to submit the code to Google to take it as a consideration.

If you want to learn more about the project, I wrote earlier about how this new hack forces Google to show more than Google Plus results.

What does this mean for the rest of us?

Clearly you should be leveraging Google Plus as part of your social media strategy. It’s even more important because SEO without Social is a dying breed. Searchengineland had a great article on the topic of Google Plus and SEO being the”new link.”

It will be interesting to see what Google does in 2012 to integrate other social networks. What do you think will happen?

{ 0 comments }

Using Google+ Ripples to Analyze Content and Find Influencers

by Nate Devore on January 14, 2012 · 0 comments

Do you know where to find influencers to share your content with? Influencers are people who have a large following and can potentially make your blog content spread virally. These people are usually power users and can help if you are just starting online.

With Google+ Ripples you can identify potential influencers, track how your content was shared over time, and track comments and interactions.

Just like Facebook Insights allows you to see what content was most effective and how far it reached your audience, Google’s Ripple tool allows you to do the same but with a different interface.

Find Ripples

When your on Google Plus, look for a content post and click the drop down arrow at the top right of the post. Click on “view ripples” and this takes you to the interface.

The Interface

Google+ Ripples has a neat interface that allows you to analyze who shared your content and how it was shared.  The interface is fully interactive. You can zoom in and out and even play back the way your content was shared with a time-lapse feature. 

Identifying the influencer

First, you need to find people who share something similar to your niche. If your into photography for example, you need to identify some of the top photographers on Google Plus.

The tool I use to find people on G+ is FindPeopleOnPlus. Begin by searching for photography (or your keyword of choice) and then scroll through the results until you find someone who has a high rating (plus clout).

You can also use the various filters to sort your results. I filtered by photography as a profession.

I found +Thomas Hawk one of the most influential photographers on Google Plus. I then found a post that received 40 shares. Below is what the ripple looks like.

Notice the influencers are identified by the larger circles. In this case, each influencer doesn’t have a lot of re-shares, instead the ripple consists of a lot of individual shares. But the larger circles tells us the content was placed in-front of a lot more eyeballs because those users are in more circles (have more followers).

In addition to the graph, you can also look at the statistics and numbers behind the ripple. 

Connect with the influencer

Once you find someone who is in your niche market and you decide they have good potential to increase the awareness of your content to their circles, then its time to connect with them and build a relationship.

By visiting their Google+ profile you can easily identify multiple forms of communication. Most people on G+ have their website address and connect their other social networks like Twitter and Facebook to G+.

Reach out by simply talking to them or giving them something of value. Don’t ask for anything up front, now is the time to build a relationship.

Mention them in a comment by using +theirname when you comment on their content. 

Once you build a relationship with the person, now it’s time to share content with them and ask them politely to re-share your content. Be sure you always ask without obligation.

Say something like “do you mind sharing this?” or “if this is something you are interested in can you share it?”

Repeat the process 

You can rinse and repeat this process and connect with more people in your niche. As you continue to produce content for your website and share it on G+ you will begin to see increase in exposure and hopefully traffic back to your website.

In addition to connecting on G+ be sure to reach across networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to connect with the same influencers there.

Google+ Ripples vs Facebook Insights

Looking at Facebook‘s insights, you do have a lot of data to work with but the presentation of the data is lacking compared to Google+ Ripples. It will only be a matter of time before more analytics are integrated into Facebook Pages and Google will most likely include some sort of “ripples” with their current Google Analytics product.

Google has stated that Ripples is experimental and there is no clear vision of where this thing is going. But for now, it remains a good tool to include in your social media arsenal.

What do you think? Do you have any plans to use Google Ripples?



{ 0 comments }

Google Rolls Out Personalized Search: A Paradigm Shift For Google and SEO

by Nate Devore on January 10, 2012 · 0 comments

Google just announced MAJOR changes to the way Google Search displays results.

In the coming days, Google Plus will be completely integrated into our favorite search tool delivering completely personalized search results.

I originally found out via Louis Gray on Google Plus (you should circle him).

Remember when Google announced the change to SSL for users logged into Google? A lot of SEO’s were concerned (and still are) about the keyword data not showing in Google Analytics.

Now SEO’s have reason to be even more concerned. Google Search just got flipped upside down and sideways. More people will be logged into Google and less keyword data will be available. I expect and can only hope for new social analytics integrated into Google Analytics.

Sooner or later…

I’ve been saying this for months now that I strongly believe Google Plus will give us a new face to Google Search. Yup they just confirmed it!

Personalized web search results is here to stay. Some of you may or may not realize that the results you are receiving in Google Search are based on your preferences, friends and search history online.

Search, plus Your World.

Google says, “Search has always brought you information from across the web. Now, search gets better by including photos, posts, and more from you and your friends. When signed in with Google+, you’ll find personal results and profiles of people you know or follow. You can even expand your world by discovering people related to your search.”

Personal Results will allow you to see photos and posts shared by you and your friends on Google Plus tailored just for you when searching on Google. You will also be able to quickly find pages and people who share similar interests to your search term.

When searching for your friends on Google (I am not sure how many people do this) but you will now find the right person every time because it will be synced with Google Plus.

Google is also giving gravity to authors who are in the authorship pilot program.

You can disable all personal searches and receive the global search queries. Google is including a nice toggle switch that allows users to toggle on and off personalization.

If you don’t see personalized search now, it’s coming…

Search plus Your World will be gradually released over the next few days to people signed into Google.

“We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.”

Quality content & market leadership will prevail

If you run a blog or website and are trying to make money online, your primary focus should be creating quality content and becoming a market leader in your niche. Brands will have to embrace Google’s decision and jump on the Google Plus bandwagon. Change is inevitable. Traditional SEO is still playing a roll. You still need quality backlinks to rank. But as social and personalized results become connected further into Google’s products like Google Places and Adwords, businesses will just need to adapt and market their content in different ways.

More sources:

CNN Writes that its the most radical change to Google Search
Searchengineland has a great article about the changes.

What do you think about these changes to Google Search? I want to read your comments below:

{ 0 comments }

New Report Shows Social Media Usage for Enterprise Companies

by Nate Devore on January 6, 2012 · 0 comments

Suffering from Social Media overload? Managing all of your social networks, updating G+ and all that? Just imagine trying to manage 178 accounts!

On average enterprise companies have 178 social media accounts to manage. That's a lot of tweeting, uploading of photos to flickr, and engaging fans and customers through Facebook and Google Plus. You can read about the report below.

There are tools to help the process but you still need a team to manage it all.
For those of you who don't have 178 accounts and manage your own blog or brand, what tools do you use? Do you have a content strategy for social media?

Reshared post from +Marketing Land

On average, companies with a 1,000 employees or more were found to have 40 Twitter accounts, 30 Facebook accounts and 10 YouTube accounts (don't forget Google+). And less than half of them have a coordinated effort. Head hurt yet?

Embedded Link

Social Media Overload: Enterprise Companies Average 178 Company-Owned Accounts
This may sound familiar: You’re active on Twitter and Facebook, and you’re trying to keep up with Google+ while also keeping your blog active and making sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date. You p…

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

{ 0 comments }

Google+ Brand Page Status Updates Showing in Search Results [news]

by Nate Devore on December 23, 2011 · 0 comments

Often times people ask, “why do I need Google Plus?”

The answer: it’s Google silly!

Sooner or later, Google will start integrating their new social network into their flagship products like Google Adwords & organic search. Oh wait, they just did this…

I’ve been saying this since the first rumors started appearing earlier this year about the G+ product.

Jeffbullas has a great article on how Adwords is being impacted by social.

Google Has The Technology

Remember too, Google purchased the company PostRank almost a year ago. So that gave me a signal that Google wants to start integrating “social” into their search algorithms to compete with Facebook.

It’s clear now the direction Google is heading. A great article by Hubspot highlighted that Google + Status updates are now showing up in organic search results.

Use Keywords with Google Plus

For example, when searching for keywords and keyphrases, status updates posted on your G+ brand page that match those keywords, are showing up in the search results.

When writing your content on Google Plus, it’s very important to start including keywords you want to rank for just like you would with your blog. The marketing benefits here can be quite good and if you start now you will be ahead of the curve.

For example, do a search for “post to blog from google plus” and you will see my post about Blogging with Google Plus Plugin for WordPress on my personal profile 4th on the 1st page.

Google + Brand Pages & Personal Page Updates

Not only are Google Plus brand pages showing up in the search results, personal profile updates are too. For example, I have a personal G+ profile for me and then I have several brand pages for my various websites.

Why does this matter?

If you strive to create valuable content in your niche, then when people decide to share that content (that should be optimized with your keywords) they unknowingly help your content rank better in the search engines.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a plugin that you can use to post directly from Google Plus to your blog. You can download it here.

What about you? Are you using Google Plus yet? Why or why not?

{ 0 comments }

Google Plus Team Introduces Google+ Creative Kit for Photos

by Nate Devore on October 27, 2011 · 0 comments

The team at Google Plus have just released this fun new Google+ Creative Kit which allows users to easily make powerful edits to photos they upload on the Google Plus platform.

Photos are essential to social networking so it makes sense to implement these features and G+ is doing this unbelievably well. They are slowly adding updates to the platform and with this newest release, users can do minor corrections, edits, and apply effects to photos they upload.

Remember to upload your own Halloween renditions of you on #gplushalloween where everyone has been uploading their latest Halloween profile pics edited with the creative kit.

These new features are going to be gradually rolled out to users. If you don't see these options yet, just wait because they are on the way!

Do you think this was a good move for G+?

View the video below:

Google+ Update: Add Fun to Your Photos with the Creative Kit

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

{ 0 comments }

Ad agencies entertain the thought of what Google + Brand Pages "might"…

by Nate Devore on October 22, 2011 · 2 comments

Ad agencies entertain the thought of what Google + Brand Pages "might" look like

Mashable asked a few ad agencies to conceptualize Google + brand pages and this is what they came up with (link below).

Already some big brands like +Ford Motor Company are testing out G+. When will these new brand pages be announced? Hopefully sometime soon before the end of the year-this article hints maybe sooner http://venpop.com/2011/google-nearly-ready-to-roll-out-brand-pages/

The other question to be answered is how will the functionality of circles and other features work with brand pages and can Google + set itself apart from Facebook fan pages?

How do you think brand pages will work?

Reshared post from +Pete Cashmore

This is really cool: What Google+ brand pages might look like.

Embedded Link

What Google+ Brand Pages Could Look Like [PICS]
Mashable asked some ad agencies to imagine what Google+ brand pages could look like. Here are some examples.

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

{ 2 comments }

Google's new SSL implementation hides valuable keyword data from webmasters

by Nate Devore on October 22, 2011 · 0 comments

Google's new SSL implementation hides valuable keyword data from webmasters

Facebook already uses SSL (https in url) to protect the privacy of it's users. This week Google announced that signed-in users will be routed to a secured search environment using SSL. This is great for the user but some SEOs and webmasters are outraged by the changes because it deprives us of the all important keyword data. In other words, we don't know what the user typed into Google to arrive at our site. If you are using Google Analytics, you will just see the term "not-provided" instead of the keyword.

Only Organic Search

Now Google says this will only result in about 10% of the overall searches so we should still be able to see 90% of the raw data. But some folks are upset that all of the data will still be supplied to Google Adwords users. If someone clicks on a paid advertising link, the referral data is passed along-not organic search.

Google Plus

With more users adopting G+ (over 40m now?) that means more users logged in-not including Gmail! Something tells me it might (over time) affect more than 10% of the data.

Social Analytics

I've been scratching my head at this move too and how this will eventually play out. Also, when might we start to see social analytics and G+ play a role? Also, Google recently purchased postrank.com which delivered real-time social data and trends. I suspect soon we will see this incorporated with G+?

Despite all of the turmoil and anti-Google blog post rants this week, I managed to find some great resources to read further about the changes. My favorite of the week just released today is from SEOMoz.

Resources on Google's SSL Announcement
While some gracefully agreed and accepted the changes, others declared outright war: http://searchnewscentral.com/20111019195/Latest/dear-google-this-is-war.html

Check out SEOMoz's Post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-hides-search-referral-data-with-new-ssl-implementation-emergency-whiteboard-friday

Embedded Link

Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation – Emergency Whiteboard Friday
On Tuesday, Google announced that signed-in users will, by default, be routed to the SSL version of Google (https://www.google.com). Before Tuesday, most users used non-SSL Google for their searches. …

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

{ 0 comments }

Get Real-time Earthquake Updates on Google Plus

by Nate Devore on October 20, 2011 · 0 comments

Just by following the earthquake stream on G+ you can see updates from people all over the world. In the past, Twitter definitely has been a powerful tool for getting real-time updates from citizen reporters around the world-think back to the tsunami and earth quakes in Japan and other disasters like earthquakes in Chili.

I personally like the way G+ displays content visually and aesthetically. So it makes perfect sense to monitor real-time trends through it.

Also, search Google for real-time updates. If you type in earthquake you might see this published 35 minutes ago:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/20/national/main20123429.shtml

Be sure to circle +Louis Gray for G+ updates and more :)

View comments here-https://plus.google.com/s/earthquake
#earthquake

Reshared post from +Cory Bergman

Updated: Small #earthquake rattles San Francisco Bay Area. USGS says it was a 3.9 magnitude near Berkeley.

Embedded Link

Magnitude 3.9 – SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, responsible for monitoring, reporting, and researching earthquakes and earthquake hazards

Google+: View post on Google+

Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell.

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries