Getting indexed and ranking with slightly less unique content!
Many webmasters have contacted me recently with the same problem. It’s an old problem that is still very important in all search engines. Their websites weren’t indexed entirely or perticular pages couldn’t even rank for the most unique text phrases although these pages were indexed. In this post I will give some pointers on effortlessly making pages more unique.
Untill now personalized search results where hard to unravel. The effect was minimal (in most cases) and we had only one identity to test with. But personalized search is gaining effect and for Google the results look promising enough to continue with further personalization. So what does this mean for search engine optimization? This article will shed a light on what is known about the personalized search algorithm and how it effects peoples behavior.
The Google algorithm changes slightly every day. Most of their very small algorithm changes are implemented to look for new signs of SEO spam. Most of the times when a new spam tactic is detected, it is verified manually and its characteristics are then fed to the algorithm. Google spamcops can also roundup all your spam manually aided by cool Google tools for internal use. So: “Don’t leave your fingerprints everywhere!” When one of your projects is caught, sacrifice it and save everything else you’ve build. (I type with my fingers, so I won’t call them footprints)
Yeah! Google is giving easily spamable results more exposure in their search results. Untill now it wasn’t worth the hassle to optimize video, images, news, local or books. But thanks to Google Universal Search this content will start showing up in the normal results. How to optimize these types of content for search is still unknown to many SEOs, so be one of the first to know and make it your specialty. In this article I will focus on image search.
So far Google was all about reading what normal users could read. If you made your website accessible to all visitors (including visually impaired), you had a perfect site for Google. Every guideline in the Webmaster guidelines has always been focussed on making a good website for users and forgetting about (spamming) search engines.
But now Google wants us to do the complete opposite. If links are extremely relevant to your users, but not contextual enough to search engines, you need to nofollow them or completely remove them to be able to score. Matt Cutts has written a few blog posts on nofollowing paid links.
What will they think of next? From now on you have to make your website for search engines and hope that it is ok for your visitors?!
How up-to-date does your SEO knowledge need to be?
I frequently talk to people that aren’t convinced that they need to keep their SEO knowledge up-to-date. “Old whitehat knowledge works just fine!” is what they say. And in some cases I think they have a point. Most SEOs don’t need to read all the SEO news everyday. But what changes do you need to check on a regular basis?
There is a good development in SEA. Landing page relevance is becoming more and more important for your ads! This means you can save more then half your advertising budget or get double the clicks, just by knowing both SEO and SEA. In this article I will give some information to influence the Quality score in Google.
Some years ago search engine optimization was mainly about using the right keyword densities in the text of your website. Nowadays it seems to have lost much of its importance. But isn’t it important anymore? In this article I will give my opinion and maybe we can get a discussion going on what you think.
Search engines try to program all spam detection methods into their algorithm (spam: as in very unrelevant results), but there are many exceptions where they use people to verify if a website is really breaking the rules of the webmaster guidelines (Google quality guidelines).
When does a search engine use manual spam detection?
