How to Please the Penguin: Making Friends with Google’s New Ranking Algorithm

Posted by Vania B on May 11, 2012 | 0 comments

What is Penguin and why do we care?

Penguin is Google’s cutesy name for a powerful secret formula, a special blend of factors that currently determines Google search rankings. Penguin, just like Panda and previous Google formulas or algorithms, is part of the company’s ongoing mission to highlight Good and penalize Evil. In the Google Universe – the Googleverse, if you will – good web content is original. Good content is relevant to search terms. And good content is naturally popularized; it doesn’t rely on shady tactics to get a #1 ranking. Read on for specific tips about how to please the Penguin.

The Penguin likes keywords but only in moderation. Articles written by keyword stuffers (i.e., writers who go keyword-crazy) suffered major hits when the Penguin started patrol. How can the offending sites recover? You don’t need to order all new articles with lower keyword densities. One strategy is to use synonyms or near-synonyms as substitutes for overused keywords. For example, if you’ve used the keyword 2013 Lexus GS too many times in a review, replace some occurrences of the phrase with words like luxury hybrid or powerful vehicle. Besides that, the Penguin likes anchor text diversity. Varying the words used in your links may help improve your website’s ranking. In particular, it’s a good idea to monitor your use of “money keywords” versus the alternatives.

• Money keywords are the words and phrases you’re trying to rank well for.
• Non-money keywords are words and phrases such as “this blog post” or “our website.”

Microsite Masters has found that the new Google formula discourages sites that use money keywords as anchor text in 65% or more of inbound links. Thus it could be advantageous to actually use your domain name or a straightforward “click here” invitation as your link text.

Have Authorities Vouch for You

The Penguin is wary of strangers. Inbound links from authorities in your niche resonate with the Penguin. When an authoritative domain in your industry posts a link to your site, the Google ranking program becomes more confident about your relevance and high quality. After all, an authority link can’t be manipulated through gray-hat or black-hat tactics.

Conversely, spam recommendations will raise red flags. Excessive forum posts and low-quality blog comments are examples of inbound links that can hurt your ranking. If you’ve been a link farmer in the past, it’s time to prune your crop! You might find that removing harmful links is time-consuming, expensive or impossible. If that’s the case, focus on developing high-quality links through legitimate means such as guest blogging, content marketing and gaining authoritative recommendations. Also, submit a list of stubborn bad links to Google and explain how you’ve worked to remedy the matter.
Remember: The More Things Change…
Penguin has the same overall vision as its predecessors: to showcase original content that’s useful or entertaining. Now more than ever, Google can avoid highlighting the low quality or copied pages that have only risen through aggressive backlinking and other shady means. When you provide great articles, videos, infographics and so forth for web surfers, you’ll give the Penguin what it wants and you’ll become viewed as an authority by a wide web audience. Everybody wins.  

Content Marketing Tips and Strategies for Business

Posted by Andrew on Apr 12, 2012 | 0 comments

Subtle Selling: The New Art of Content Marketing

By Jorie Henrickson

Content marketing has become the                      
sweetheart of Fortune 500 ad execs.

Just last month, 100% of advertisers for American Eagle, General Mills and other major players surveyed by Outbrain reported using content marketing in their overall campaign strategies.

What is content marketing?

Basically it’s online content that’s more useful or entertaining than salesy. It’s rich with photos, reviews and other media that your target audience seeks out on its own. Especially when combined with social media, it can significantly expand brand awareness and help drive sales both online and offline.

Get an excellent ROI.

Content marketing in the hands of experts provides a high return on investment. Unlike traditional means of promotion – radio spots, TV commercials and newspaper ads – it isn’t the ephemeral mentioning of a weekend sale or highlighted product. Many investments made in content marketing have the potential to last indefinitely on the Internet. YouTube videos and product review blogs are just two examples of content marketing that endures.

Examples of Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating (or simply passing along) informative or entertaining material that appeals to your product’s target audience. This material might be a blog post, an online game, a video or a free download. Here are some examples.

Blogs

Here at Vab Media we write a lot of blogs for content marketing. For example, imagine that a client wants to populate an online dating website in San Francisco. Our marketing strategy might include posting blogs with titles like:

•  The Best Singles Bars in San Francisco
• How to Write a Dating Profile
• The Many Dates of Jerry Seinfeld

These blogs would be optimized to rank prominently in Google, Bing and other search engines without the need to pay for keywords. People seeking “singles bars in San Francisco” would naturally stumble upon the client’s blogs and online dating service. Exponential growth in brand awareness could come with the integration of Facebook “Like” buttons and other social media.

As the graphic below illustrates,blogging combined with social networking can help maintain your current following and attract new traffic.

Vlogs or Video Blogs

Content marketing also takes the form of video blogs. In the dating website example, a video blogger might:

• Provide relationship advice
• Share an amusing dating disaster
• Show how to prepare a romantic dinner
• Review dating websites

For a great example of effective humor in this genre, see Jenna Marbles on YouTube. Her video How to Avoid Talking to People You Don’t Want to Talk To has garnered more than 21 million hits:

Professionals with a more formal style are also using Internet video as cost-effective advertising. Ideally they post a combination of video and text to help with search engine optimization and appeal to different visitors’ preferences. For example, Vab Media worked with Reverend Gail Swain to advertise her Monterey Bay wedding services with video and a written statement of her philosophy:

Another example of using mixed media in content marketing comes from HBO. They used video blogging to support the hit drama Big Love. Although blogging wasn’t mentioned during the episodes, Internet fans became engrossed in the character Margene Henrickson’s video blog and her written commentary.

Posting video blogs on a regular basis is an excellent way to attract and maintain a following. How can you get the most payback for your efforts? See this article for the latest tips about optimizing your video for YouTube and other search engines.

Infographics

Infographics are the hottest form of content marketing for 2012.

What are infographics?
They’re basically traditional charts on steroids. They pack plenty of information into easy-to- understand pictures or charts. Ideally, infographics are engaging and are shared through social media.

Working with our dating website client, we might create an infographic like this one posted at Visual.Ly:   

An unexpected company – Timberland – also created a dating infographic. As Timberland’s efforts show, with content marketing it’s possible to boost brand awareness without selling your products or services in the usual way.

Producing this infographic gave Timberland a reason to venture beyond its traditional territory and raise brand awareness in new settings. Posted in blogs about dating or the environment, the image can engage Internet users who aren’t actively searching for Timberland’s product (outdoor wear). Subtle selling, indeed.

It’s easy to make your own infographics. Check out Visual.Ly for useful tools and one of the Internet’s best infographics collections.

More Forms of Content Marketing

Content marketing takes many forms. At Vab Media we provide clients with blogs, vlogs, Twitter content, Facebook pages and content marketing media in additional formats. Bookmark us and check back for new tips about content marketing, SEO and web development.

Want to learn more about how Vab Media can help you?

Jorie Henrickson is among our top copywriters. She writes and rewrites creative content to help websites draw traffic organically and keep visitors engaged. A highly adaptable writer, Jorie has extensive experience with traditional and SEO writing for academic, corporate, and non-profit organizations. Connect with Jorie on linkedin: Jorie Henrickson – SEO Writer on LinkedIn.

Panda 3.3 Update and 40 Google Search Algorithm Changes

Posted by Andrew on Mar 2, 2012 | 0 comments

Google works on changing and improving their search algorithm almost everyday, and with 500 plus changes happening over the course of the year, this month’s changes are of little surprise. The king of search has just announced on their Google Official Inside Search Blog, the latest Google Panda 3.3 update.

  With this new panda update there are also 40 other search algorithm changes that will impact the search results.

All of the changes and updates in the algorithm started and affected the search result since the beginning of February and some change results are still in the making.  Vab media would like to provide some insight into what this means for Search Engine Optimization and business owners.

We chose to highlight a few of the most important changes below.

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

What this means-  The moment Panda is mentioned, webmasters freak out and the SEO industry pays full attention hoping their clients’ rankings don’t suddenly drop. This brief announcement shows less of an importance as is it being buried in the list of 39 other changes.  One can draw conclusions that the algorithm implemented during the original Panda update is heading toward socially shared links, and in all likelihood, Google will be pulling the social data from their Google+ network.

“Link Evaluation: 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 re-architect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.”

What this means-  Some link building practices have been abused over the last few years by Black Hat SEO companies.  Google seems to putting more emphasis on social sharing and re-sharing data of a page than on their traditional link evaluation, which may have previously taken into account the of number of anchor text links pointing to a page. Google does not say whether this is a permanent change of a particular algorithm characteristic of the  way they assess links or an just an experiment to see if the accumulated data they collect will be sufficient to maintain or increase relevancy of people’s search results, while getting rid of spam and abuse.

“Spam Update: In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.”

What this means-  You should be focused on putting out high-quality, share-worthy content as much as ever. Just because Google is focusingon combining social media with search results, do not think that its spam filters are not being refined.

“Improvements to Ranking for Local Search Results: [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

What this means-   The ranking of your website in the local search results is now influenced by the ranking of your web pages in Universal search. This means you need to be optimizing all aspects of Universal search which includes videos, images, and maps in order to dominate Google’s first page results for local search. You need to take actions. Optimize your website and make sure it is done professionally and is optimized correctly to get you ranked on the first page for search queries related to your industry.

“More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].”

What this means-   YouTube is the second largest search engine surpassing Yahoo since last year. Google has been constantly refining this, as it will play an ever-increasing role in visual-media content. If you are adding video to your marketing efforts to drive potential customers to your business website, now  the titles, description and tags you use are an even more important part of your SEO strategies.

“Improved local results. We launched 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.”

What this means- Google’s local SEO vertical is ramping up.  Now the search engine knows where you are in an area and what’s around you. For the  small business owner, now is the time.to start using  local SEO best practices, and geo-tagging to help your  business get found locally by your local customers.

In Conclusion

This most recent Google Panda 3.3  update talks about the refinement of the data and promises accurate and sensitive results for the queries, so we can hope the impact on websites will be far less extreme than the first Panda update.   However, one of these updates that may bother some SEOs are the changes that Google talks about with their link evaluation.  By shutting down their old method of evaluating links that has been used for several years, indicates a huge shift which will surely change and evolve the strategies of link-building in the future.  It certainly looks like the importance of social sharing and Google+ will play a much larger part of the web going forward.

Here is the official blog written by Amit Singhal, Senior VP and Google Fellow

 Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February

“This month we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

• More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
• Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
• Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
• More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
• More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
• More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] 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.
• Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
• Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
• Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
• “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
• Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
• Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
• Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
• Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
• More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
• Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
• Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
• Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
• Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
• Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
• International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
• Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
• Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
• Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
• Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
• Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
• Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.”
• Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
• Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
• Link evaluation. 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.
• SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
• Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
• Improved local results. We launched 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.”

Search Plus your World with Google

Posted by Andrew on Jan 19, 2012 | 1 comment

Last week Google made some changes to your search results.  If you have a gmail and Google + account, and are logged in at the time of performing a search, you will see personalized results.  They are calling it Search Plus your World.  We noticed this change last week, and this is really promoting your friends and professional Google + connections.

What is Search Plus Your World showing you?

Personal Results

The new “Personal Results” view that appears in your search results now personalizes the search result listings you get based on both your social connections and your own search behavior.  In addition, content that’s been shared with you through your Google+ social network connections now also appears in results.  According to Google “The social search algorithm and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.”   They are featuring Google + content as well as photos that have been shared on it.  If you look at the image below of a search result for Vab Media, it shows the first result is our Google+ business page and then it shows links and images we have shared on the G+ plus network. This is a nice personal search feature.

Google profiles are featured more now

Another important algorithm change is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be featured more in Google search results.  The search results themselves are devoting much larger emphasis to displaying material from a Google+ person or Google+ Business Page. The results individuals see are now catered toward people in their own social networks, quite similar to how Facebook’s algorithm works when you search for people on FB.

People & Pages Suggestions

The final algorithm roll out is Google’s suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of your search results, when Google decides they are relevant.   Perform a search for movies or music and you will see many suggestions.  You might see well known or famous people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. Google is allowing you to be able follow them and connect with them on their Google+ social network.

Our conclusions

Overall, we find the integration that allows for searching through private and public material interesting.  We think many people will find some value in it.   If you don’t want these personal and private search results you can search in google chrome incognito mode or log out of your google account to get just public search results.

This opens up a whole world of possibilities for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and business owners. Now, you can promote your services to your colleagues and friends.  You’re in their circles, so now you just need to put your most popular links on Google + Social Network. Contact us for more marketing ideas and questions.  Read the actual article from Google below.

“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.”  -Amit Singhal, Google     

Contact us for a consultation & quote

*A disclaimer from Vab Media:  There’s been a lot of controversy in the web world and SEO community that the Giant, “Google” is promoting its own products in search results.  Whether this is true or not is not for us to decide.  We just want to let small business owners know about certain changes and how they can take advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms, even in the case that they may change in the future.

Foursquare helps you get more foot traffic…and now.. more brand exposure

Posted by Vania B on Nov 21, 2011 | 0 comments

Ten Most Recent Google Search Algorithm Updates.

Posted by Andrew on Nov 15, 2011 | 0 comments

Google has just announced its ten most recent important algorithm changes yesterday on their blog Google Insights.

We have been noticing many search engine changes lately.

We wanted to analyze a few of the algorithm changes that we think our important to webmasters and website owners. There are 3 out of the 10 that we would like to talk about in a litter further detail.

1)  Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content

Are long-Tail Keyword Phrases good for my Business?

Posted by Andrew on Aug 30, 2011 | 2 comments

What is a Long-tail keyword phrase?

Search engine algorithms’ are getting more complex and are always changing.

 This description explains indexing, “ When a website gets crawled by search engines, the search engines use automated software programs known as bots or spiders to survey the web and build their data bases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed.  Data collected from each web page are added to the search engine index. When you enter a search query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top. The most common form is text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.” -Monash.com