How to Please the Penguin: Making Friends with Google’s New Ranking Algorithm
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.
Mind Your Keyword Use
Was your website unfairly penalized in the Penguin switch? Google knows that the best content isn’t always detected by a formula. If you think that your website was unfairly targeted, use the Google web form to request a human review of your website’s ranking.
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.
Penguin Survival Tip: Banish Duplicate Content
Duplicate content hurts your ranking now more than ever. If you’ve taken great content from someone else, have it rewritten for unique value. Has someone stolen web content from you? Use Copyscape to find out. If you’ve been ripped off, you can report the offender to Google.
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.
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Ten Most Recent Google Search Algorithm Updates.
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
“This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.” -Matt Cutts
The above paragraph points out that Google is starting put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. This approach conforms to what they’re looking at from a “inbound links” or back-linking point of view as well. They seem to be putting more emphasis to links from the actual content body of the page than the header, side navigation or footer links. So, make sure that the actual body of your text includes your most important search terms. Don’t overdue it though with the amount of links.
2) Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors
“We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.”-Matt Cutts
I myself, have been noticing lately in search results that the exact keyword phrase anchor text is not always the deciding ranking factor lately. We don’t know if this has been abused by people wanting to fool the search engines. Google seems to paying more attention to the page content than the backlinks. They’re also say they are de-emphasizing the “exact anchor text” backlinks. This means you should look at altering your “exact anchor text” approach if you have not already done so.
Let’s say that you wrote a blog titled “Private Jets”; if you build links to this page only with the “Private jets” anchor text, Google might see it as possible spam. That’s why the anchor text strategy should be diversified and not concentrated on only one or a few phrases. Instead you can also use “Luxury jets, private planes, Gulfstream” etc. This will be much more effective. If you need help in finding semantically related synonyms for a specific search term, just use the “Google Suggest” feature for terms that Google thinks might be relevant for the term “Private Jets”. Or look at the bottom of a page for other search terms that Google is suggesting.
3) Fresher, more recent results
“As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.”-Matt Cutts
Business websites that have news in their content will benefit from this. This means that you need your update your content more often now. We would suggest you to get a list of your most read or visited / converting pages from Google analytics and create a schedule to update these every 30 days or so. You can make slight changes to the content of a page. If you do not update content, you might see your search rankings drop, as fresher content becomes available elsewhere. It will help if you have a dynamic sitemap, which will reflect the “last update” dates and times. This is very important algorithm change. These are just a few of the 500 algorithm changes that have happened over this past year. It is good to stay up search engine news in order to protect your business online. We would like to know what other website owners think about these changes?
Below is a copy of the changes as worded by Google webmaster Matt Cutts:
- Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
- Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
- Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
- Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
- Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
- Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
- Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
- Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
- Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
- Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
Post Google Panda factors to think about besides Page Rank
Having a high Page Rank for your site is good, but it’s not the only factor that determines your website’s relevance in terms of search results.
What is the real end goal to having a successful site on the web? To make more money, attract more visitors and readers right?! It is impossible to know and understand every search metric and algorithm being used, since Google uses more than 200 to determine search engine result pages (SERP). In the post panda era, creating your sites content with the reader’s experience in mind is a good place to start. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to use for measuring your site’s web traffic.
The more you think about the visitor experience when creating robust content and adding pictures the better off you will be. These metrics are important to look at for the user experience. In the post panda seo environment, the amount of time users stay on your website will play a role in how Google views your site. Seomoz did a whiteboard friday a few weeks ago about post panda and your site, they went into a lot detail about this subject.
“Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that’s decent. That’s pretty good. If they’re browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, “Ew, I don’t know if I want to get myself involved in that. They’ve got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I’m not going to get involved.” Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.” – Seomoz Rand Fishkin
Below are a few definitions from Google web master’s latest blogs about this subject:
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Conversion rate
A “conversion” is when a visitor does what you want them to do on your website. A conversion might be completing a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or downloading a white paper. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who convert (perform a conversion). This is a perfect example of a metric that, unlike PageRank, is directly tied to your business goals. When users convert they’re doing something that directly benefits your organization in a measurable way! Whereas your PageRank is both difficult to measure accurately, and can go up or down without having any direct effect on your business.
Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
In the context of organic search results, your clickthrough rate is how often people click on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results. A low CTR means that, no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren’t clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don’t think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks better. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site’s titles and snippets in our search results: are they compelling? Do they accurately represent the content of each URL? Do they give searchers a reason to click on them? Here’s some advice for improving your snippets; the HTML suggestions section of Webmaster Tools can also point you to pages that may need help. Again, remember that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if searchers don’t want to click on.
google-panda-update
Conclusions about Page Rank and Search Engine Page Results factors to keep in mind.
PageRank is just one of many ranking factors used to determine ranking in search results. Try to improve your website’s speed or loading page time. Studies show faster sites create a happier user experience. When a site responds slowly, visitors get impatience and spend less time there. Sometimes using flash and image sliders can slow down your website. These are just a few of the 200 metrics Google uses. Of course relevance of a page is still the biggest factor in search results. The anchor text of a link is usually far more important than whether it’s on a high PageRank page. And having lots of high quality backlinks is also important in search results. If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best. Feel free to visit our other blogs for more useful information.
Read MoreGoogle is always changing and evolving, are you?
What You Need to Know About Today’s SEO
Google is creating new algorithms all the time.
“The “Panda” algorithm change has improved rankings for a large number of high-quality websites. Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year.” -Google webmaster blog
SEO is a moving target. Search engines are constantly changing and evolving; they are consistently refining their techniques and algorithms to supply the best, relevant results to searchers.They are also making it tougher for unfair “black hat” marketers to manipulate search engine results by trying optimization tricks. This is a good thing… at Vab Media ; we have always advocated using ethical SEO based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to boost your rankings and traffic.
That is the reason why we stress to our clients that SEO should be considered a marathon instead of a race to the finish line. Using tricks and manipulation may get you fast results but they are going to be fleeting and may even be damaging. Using legitimate and effective SEO strategies will deliver more impressive, lasting results.
Local SEO is the method of targeting buyers in a local geography for the services and products that local companies provide. According to comScore, an industry leader in Internet research, 63% of U.S. Internet users perform local searches. Of those local searches, roughly 41% were hunting for info on a local service in their home area.
The study also found that consumers searching locally typically take action. Almost half (47%) of local searchers visited the local merchant as a direct result of their search behavior. For small to medium sized businesses, local SEO now has the one of the highest investment returns our of all the marketing mediums online.
While most people still use a variety of different methods to find local business, the study found what people seem to prefer as their first choice for doing so: (Source: comScore, Georgia Institute of Technology).
1. Search Engines (31%)
2. Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%)
3. Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%)
4. Local Search Sites (11%)
4 reasons to do SEO:
1. Better ROI – SEO is a long term strategy which brings a greater ROI than in PPC marketing.
2. Credibility – SEO work brings higher levels of credibility with your customers. (About The Author)
3. Track & Prove Success – Discover what your customer are typing into Google, and which keyword convert the highest. We install web metrics to show you what is working and what is not working with your SEO strategy.
4. Tapping the trend — 81% of all consumers are now making purchasing decisions online. Websites are no longer optional. SEO will drive traffic to your site.
1st Page Google Guarantee
Despite what you read, it is impossible for any SEO company to guarantee you a #1 ranking in organic search engine results. However, we understand that you still want some assurance that you will get the best possible results by signing on with us instead of a competitor.
Vab Media Web Design and SEO Marketing Firm has a stellar track record of helping our clients increase their rankings and, more importantly, their sales through our web site optimization services. Even though there is no way we (or any other company) can guarantee a 1st Page ranking in Google, Yahoo! or Live Search (MSN), we are willing to put our money where our mouth is by offering you our 1st Page Google Guarantee.
Under our 1st Page Guarantee, if we do not deliver the results we promise (10 new first page ranks) we will render our services free of cost until we deliver on our promise. This lowers your financial risk as you will only be charged fees for truly measurable results… first page rankings! Vab Media will bring the client’s web site to the 1st page Google results for 10 new keyword phrases. This ranking guarantee is not search engine specific and only applies to those clients who complete The SEO SUCCESS Plan (3 month plan).
It is important to realize that the competition is also spending money on SEO, and this will affect your ranks. If your competition decides to spend money to out rank you, we do not have control over this. For this reason, client is encouraged to continue to work with Vab Media to sustain the ranks. For the most part, once you get ranked, only a minimum amount of work is required to sustain ranks.
Company Overview: About Us
Vab Media is a search engine optimization firm specializing in local and national organic search. We help clients increase their sales through local and national search engine optimization. Vab Media will work exclusively with your business to promote your website to search engines using acceptable practices based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to boost your ranking and traffic. Our goal is to make sure your website is visible to potential customers who are searching for products and services in your business category .
To really make your SEO campaign a success, our SEO team will first develop a deep understanding of your business; what you are trying to accomplish and what your goals are. Our discovery interview provides you with the opportunity to supply us with the required information that we need to make your campaign a success. In addition you can ask any questions that may be concerning you in regards to the types of changes that will be made to your web site, when to expect results, how it’s possible for you to help maximize your campaign and more.
Keyword Research
The keyword research process is the foundation to a successful SEO campaign. Our total keyword research process permits us to identify the following :
- Target keywords which will produce the highest volume of traffic
- Keywords that the competition are using to find success
- Significant high traffic keywords your rival does not know about
- Newly rising keywords primarily based on new trends & services and products related to your site
- Keywords with high conversion rates to raise your ROI
This info will help us identify search phrases that are vital to your SEO campaign and overall net success.
Website Analysis
There are 3 key areas the search engines look at ; your web site code, your server and your prior history inside search engines. Our team completes a total research package based on your domains origination, to the way the search engines see your site today. Below you will find an inventory of areas our team will cover :
- Research of server at the host level, DNS setup, IP setup
- Research of site structure & page relations
- Current indexation standing across the major search engines
- Research of any issues now impacting search engine spidering
- Research of site link structure, page structure, navigational structure and hierarchical system of content of the site.
Content Analysis
A Content Analysis Report is performed on pages throughout your web site. This permits us to identify the present pages and content which has the capability to help support your selected keywords and sustain long-term top 10 rankings. If your internet site is short of additional content, we then assign one of our pro content writers to guarantee the correct selling message is conveyed and new creative copy is written specifically with SEO Goals in mind.
Content Writing
There are occasions when sites don’t have enough content to support their SEO campaign ; there are times where pages in your site are ideal for the visitor, but missing integral parts for a successful SEO campaign. As you may know, Content is King on the net. We provide a professional content writing service that will permit you to keep your current content intact, while incorporating new content and / or pages in your site to maximize the success of your SEO campaign. This highly creative content will incorporate your selling message, robust calls to action and exhibit the same appearance as your current net pages. In addition, we write with theme keywords to respect LSI (latent semantic indexing). You will always have the final say of any new content made for your web site.
Competitor Analysis
The only real way to beat the competition is to understand the competition! Our SEO team will identify the competition based totally on the keywords you select ; find the keywords that they are targeting, discover sites that link to them, compare your site to your competition, and identify precisely what is needed to out-rank them and get top ten rankings for your target keywords. This info is then used to craft your Link Plan , Content research, and SEO Implementation.
email us at vania@vabulous.com or visit other pages on our website for more information http://vabulous.com/
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Google PageRank Updated 2011
Google PageRank Update June 27, 2011
Google describes PageRank:
| “ | PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. |
Here is a link to Google PageRank checker.
Here are some tips on how to increase PageRank.
Please remember it is Pagerank, meaning each and every page can have a different rank. Generally your homepage or main index page will have higher rank than your inner pages and posts. But, occasionally an inner page, such as a popular blog post will out rank your homepage. The more you update your site’s content the better. Keep your readers in mind when deciding what to post next. It also helps if people are commenting and linking to your blog posts. The new Google Panda is awesome!
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How to target and rank high for low competion keywords
Increasing your site’s Google Page Rank
How to Increase Your Google Page Ranking
The most common question webmasters have in relation to Google is: “How do I improve [or increase] my PageRank? Before we go in to answering this question, it is important to take into consideration what PageRank is, how it is calculated, and what it means for your site.
Google PageRank, based on a scale of 0 to 10, is the means by which Google ranks the worth of particular site. Theoretically, a site with a PageRank of 8 is generally of more use to the average visitor than a site with a PageRank of 3. Accordingly, sites with a higher pagerank rank higher in the Google search results for a given keyword than those with a lower pagerank. The goal of google’s search results is to provide the user with the most trustworthy sites that include the particular keyword phrase they have entered into the search field.
PageRank is calculated based almost entirely upon two factors: how many other sites link to your site, and the PageRank of those sites that link to you. Ideally, you want a lot of sites with a high PageRank to link to your site. Getting many low or zero PageRank sites to link to your site won’t do you much good. In fact, there is some evidence that Google penalizes sites that have an abnormally high number of low PageRank sites linking to them. This situation is usually indicative of someone trying to cheat the system by simply adding links to useless pages in so-called “link farms.” So, in a sense, Google is capable of recognizing whether your site hangs out with a good crowd or a bad crowd by what kind of sites link to yours. It is much better to get a few sites (preferably a .ORG or .EDU) with a high PageRank to link to yours (especially those with PageRanks higher than your own) than a bunch of sites with low or zero PageRank.
PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. What this roughly means is that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4. So, there are likely over a 100 times as many web pages with a PageRank of 2 than there are with a PageRank of 4. This means that if you get to a PageRank of 6 or so, you’re likely well into the top 0.1% of all websites out there. If most of your peer group is straggling around with a PR2 or PR3, you’re way ahead of the game. Currently our website is a PageRank 4. The higher up you get in the numbers the harder it is to move up. Meaning it is easier to go from a PR1 to PR2 than it is to from a PR5 to a PR6.
PageRank is crucially important because it determines, in part, in what order your website will show up in Google’s results. Besides PageRank, the other factor is largely website content – i.e. what your site actually contains, what keyword and keyword phrases are present in your text and how often they appear. If two sites have basically the same content, cover the same topic, and have the same keyword saturation (the percentage of keywords in the entire text), then the one with the higher PageRank will almost always come out on top.
Okay, now for ways to improve your PageRank, legally and fairly:
Read MoreNew York SEO, Search Engine Optimization
The best Search Engine Optimization Services in New York. (SEO)
New York City, with a population of over 8,000,000 people, is the most populous city in the United States. It is known for its status as a financial, cultural, transportation, and manufacturing center. This dangerous combination makes competition of small and mid-sized businesses pretty fierce. Many organizations push online marketing efforts, spending thousands on prepaid advertising, paid search campaigns and other activities.
However, the most effective way to get your target audience — doesn’t matter what business you’re in — is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your New York business can easily crush competition by capturing the best possible customers — people who search for your services, and find them. There are occasions when sites don’t have enough content to support their SEO campaign, there are times where pages in your site are ideal for the visitor, but missing integral parts for a successful SEO campaign. As you may know Content is king on the net. We provide a professional content writing service that will permit you to keep your current content, while incorporating new content and / or pages in your site to maximize the success of your SEO campaign. This highly creative content will incorporate your selling message, robust calls to action and exhibit the same appearance as your current net pages.
View Our SEO Case StudiesSo how does this magic work? Simple:
- a customer types in something like “New York Business Insurance” into a Search Engine like Google or Bing
- if you were selling Insurance and were our client, your website would be come up on they first page of google for targeted key words.
- if the customer goes for a map search, your business would be listed on the map — easily visible to all customers
- you get your New York customers, conversions, sales, etc
*note: New York Business Insurance is merely an example, people search for everything, literally
We offer a full spectrum of services from concept to website development and the actual SEO. If you already have a website, we’ll easily modify it (without any serious visual changes — unless you want them of course!) to get more Search Engine visibility. Want to increase your companies sales? Try conversion rate optimization services to help turn more visitors into customers.
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