Bloom Digital Marketing » SEO

Recent Google algorithm changes

bloom — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 20:33:33 +0000

Google makes constant changes to its algorithm…how it reads and evaluates a web pages relevance, quality and ultimately deserved rankings. It’s part of Google’s ongoing quest to provide the most relevant, current and high quality search results for each and every query made via its search and display network properties. In 2011, there have been over 500 algorithms updates. Here is a list of ten improvements just from the last two weeks as reported by Matt Cutts in the Google Inside Search blog…(please note, references to ‘we’ are referring to Google)

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 the 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.

Before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine.

Mobile and localized paid search on the rise

bloom — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:45:43 +0000

In early 2011, SEMPO published a report that indicates companies are spending more on paid mobile search than ever before, actually doubling from the same period last year.

Localized paid search is becoming the most popular, with the study finding that 22% of respondents’ budgets were spent locally on targeted paid search. In the US the same question was asked to companies and it found that a greater proportion of company’s’ pay per click marketing budgets were being allocated to local search, with actual figures being 37% for agency respondents and 23% for clients.

Some other key findings from the study include the following:

The rise of the mobile internet is the trend which is regarded as having the most impact on search marketing, with more than three-quarters of companies (79%) deeming it as ‘highly significant’ or ‘significant’.
The use of social networks for marketing continues to grow. The percentage of company respondents who say they use Facebook for marketing now stands at 84%, up from 73% last year.
More companies are outsourcing search and social media. Only 44% of companies are now carrying out search engine optimization in-house, compared to 51% last year. Only 55% are doing social media marketing in-house, compared to 62% a year ago.
Companies and agencies are increasingly using third party bid management technology for paid search marketing. Just under half of responding companies conducting search engine marketing rely on basic tools.
Google’s dominance as a search engine is clear from both advertiser and agency results, with the vast majority of companies (95%) paying to advertise on Google AdWords.

(Source: Mobilemarketingwatch.com, May 2011)

Set a preferred domain for search

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:31:47 +0000

So what is a preferred domain? The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results. By not setting a preferred domain, your www. and non-www version of the web site may be seen as duplicate content. And this would be bad!

If for some reason you cannot find your web site in Google when you type in www.example.com. Try example.com instead. Google may see the non-www version as the preferred domain.

So how can you set a preferred domain? You can set a preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. This is usually the first thing we check for our SEO clients. Here’s how to do it:

To specify your preferred domain (Source: Google):

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Settings.
3. In the Preferred domain section, select the option you want.

You may need to reverify ownership of your sites. Because setting a preferred domain impacts both crawling and indexing, we need to ensure that you own both versions. Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case. Generally, once you have verified one version of the domain, we can easily verify the other using the original verification method. However, if you’ve removed the file, meta tag, or DNS record, you’ll need to repeat the verification steps.

Note: Once you’ve set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

Tne

Googles dislike for duplicate content

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:23:24 +0000

There is nothing that search engines hate more than duplicate content. Google and the other search engines have very stringent criteria for detecting duplicate content.

Here is Google’s definition of Duplicate Content:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.

Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don’t publish pages for which you don’t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

Understand your content management system: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

How SEO can Help your Business

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:52:05 +0000

We are often asked exactly how is it that SEO (search engine optimization) can help a business. SEO is the process of making your website comply with what the search engines consider important in terms of having a useful, up to date and easy to navigate website.

Search engines are all about providing the end user with relevant information, a properly optimized website gives the user the information they are searching for and it is also easy for the search engine robots to index.

Try this for your own website:

Without using your business name, try searching for your products or services.. does your site come up? if not, just imagine what kind of opportunities you are missing out on, potential customers wanting to buy from you but cannot find you. This is the equivalent of having your storefront hidden behind a brick wall.

The good news is that SEO can help you make your site easier to find, we have prepared a video that will show you how this works:

SEO to help your business

Clients are Trying to Find your Business Every Day, can they Find You?

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 22:49:20 +0000

The Yellow Pages will soon be a thing of the past, nowadays people are turning to the Internet to find information about local businesses.
We created a video to show you how users are looking for businesses like yours on the web.
You can watch the video by clicking the link below:

Developing incoming links for SEO. It’s a painful task but somebody’s gotta do it.

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:07:55 +0000

Incoming links to a web site are vital to SEO. The more incoming links the better because each incoming link is like a vote for your site. The more votes, the more Google will like you and give you better rankings in organic results.

Getting incoming links is a daunting task especially because they must be links from high quality web sites. Stay away from link farms or any so called SEO Specialist that claims to be able to get you hundreds of incoming links for just $299!

So what can you do to get quick and high quality links to your web site? Try Content Sharing sites and Social Bookmarking sites.

First create an article that includes keywords that you want to rank well for. This article should be informational rather than an advertorial for your business and at least 250 words. Create hyperlinks back to your web site within the content. Then create a few different versions of this same article by moving around paragraphs, sentences, changing the headlines etc. The purpose of this is to avoid duplicate content issues. Search engines won’t index content that they deem to be duplicate content.

Second, submit the articles to content sharing sites such as ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com etc. Then once you have create a login on the varous sites, posted your article and a link has been created on the content sharing site, submit the links to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg and hundred of others.

This is an extremely powerful way to create high quality incoming links to your web site and boost your rankings in organic search results. The only drawback is that it is extremely time consuming and if you are not an SEO geek you may find it to be the most excruciating task of your life….and thus conveniently never get around to doing it.

Link development via content sharing, social bookmarking etc is one of the areas we specialize in. We are SEO geeks and rather enjoy it so let us know if you need help in this or any other area of SEO.

Local Businesses – Optimize for more than just your brand

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:20:07 +0000

On the weekend we were headed to Milestones in Yaletown for brunch with the family. Being the Internet people that we are, we naturally went to Google and searched for ‘Milestones Yaletown hours’. And guess who came up in the top 5 organic search results? Well it wasn’t the milestonesrestaurants.com web site. This is surprising.

Local businesses need to look at their optimization efforts from all different angles. It’s not enough to just optimize for your brand name anymore even if you are well known local brand. In the case of Milestones, web sites such as dinehere.ca, foodvancouver.com, martiniboys.com, urbanspoon.com, all came up in results way before the Milestones web site when we searched for ‘Milestones Yaletown hours’. Milestonesrestaurant.com was #9!!!! Milestones should be number 1 for this query especially considering that we included their brand name in our query.

So how did the other sites rank so well for this query. It’s simple, they localized it. They each had a page dedicated to the Milestones Yaletown web site, these dedicated pages had ‘milestones’ and ‘yaletown’ in the url file name (i.e. dinehere.ca/vancouver/milestones-grill-and-bar-yaletown and http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/14/181178/restaurant/Yaletown/Milestones-Grill-and-Bar-Vancouver). And in the case of foodvancouver.com, Milestones Yaletown was set up in Google Maps (Show map of 1109 Hamilton St, Vancouver, BC V6B 1A1). So all these other web sites have keyword rich pages dedicated to the Yaletown establishment and a Google Maps listing to boot….so why doesn’t the Milestones web site. This is what came up #9 in organic search results:

Milestones Restaurants – Vancouver
Hours of Operation: Weekday Opening – 11 am Weekend Opening – 9:30 am … Milestone’s Yaletown is located in the heart of Vancouver’s trendy lofts and …
www.milestonesrestaurants.com/index.php?id=353/

And thus the #9 ranking for their own brand… behind all these other local sites. Their local competitor, the Keg Yaletown did a better job with their SEO. When we query ‘the keg yaletown hours’ in Google, their local listings appears followed by the dedicated Keg Yaletown page on their own web site: www.kegsteakhouse.com/en/locations/BC/…/yaletown-keg/

If you run a local business, don’t make the same mistake as Milestones. Take every measure to ensure that you appear for your own brand no matter what the search query.

Duplicate content on .ca and .com domains

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:24:03 +0000

A client asked us today….

Is it okay to have a .com and .ca version of the same web site? Or should we choose a completely different URL for the Canadian web site? Is this a big mistake for rankings?

The domain would not make much of a difference if the two sites look and sound the same. Having a .ca and a .com web site would be okay as long as the web sites are noticeably different and the .ca web site has Canadian focused content and is hosted on a Canadian IP address.

In addition to changing some of the content to make it more Canadian focused, error on the side of caution and give the two sites more uniqueness by changing some navigation items especially if they are html text based.

Be careful. Duplicate content issues can mess up rankings for both web sites so don’t risk it and try to make the two sites as different as possible.

Also, check out Google’s Duplicate Content info page:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

It says ‘ Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.”

For example, when we search for ‘toyota’ in Google, the .ca web site is #1 but the .com web site is not in the top 30 results. In this case, the .ca and .com web sites are completely different and Google was able to recognize that the .ca domain has Canadian content.

The 10 most effective DIY SEO Tactics for the Small Business Owner

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:04:31 +0000

Even if you don’t have a budget to hire a pro to make the most of your website, we have put together a list of tasks you can do yourself to take your Internet marketing to the next level.

The tasks are:

Title tags: At the very top of your browser window lies you page title, if you don’t have a custom title there is normally defaults to “Internet Explorer” or something like “Home” this is one of the most important parts on your website, it is like your presentation card to search engines. It should describe your product or service in 10 words or less.

Have text on every page. Although search engines have come along way on how well they index images and flash content, they crawl and index text better than anything else. Try to have at least 250 words of text on your most important pages.

Have a sitemap. A sitemap is just a directory of your website, both users and search engines find they very useful and you will receive their loyalty in return!

Use specific terms to describe your services. Keep in mind the immensity of the web, stay away from general terms when describing your products or services, include the geographical area tat you serve if possible. For example, if you sell wooden children’s toys and you only ship within California, it would be wise to describe your product like this: “California Wooden Children’s Toys”

Stay away from 100% flash websites. These days search engines can index websites made in flash; however, they still have a hard time reading text within the flash movie. It is perfectly OK to have some flash content, but having a combination of text and flash will bring you the best results.

Create a Local Business Listing. Google, Yahoo and Bing allow you to create a free local business listing, the importance of having these listings is that they are displayed prominently on search results pages when a user searches for your products.

The URL’s where you can create these listings are:

Google – www.google.com/local/add
Yahoo – listings.local.yahoo.com
Bing – https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx

Get listed on Yellow Pages and Yelp. You can also get free listings on the Yellow pages and on Yelp, these listings help you with your rankings and they can also send you visitors directly, make sure that you create your listing with complete information about your business, try adding pictures, hours, coupons, etc.

Ask you suppliers to link to you. Search engines count every link pointing to your website as a vote, the more links that your website has pointing at it the better. Ask your clients and supplier to place links on their website pointing to yours.

Use Social Bookmarking. In the old days, everyone would save their bookmarks on their own computer, in these days of cloud computing a lot of people are using online services to store and share their bookmarks, besides being very convenient to have your bookmarks available on every computer you use, by sharing your bookmarks you can attract visitors to your website that would have not heard about your company otherwise. Some of the most popular services of this kind are: Delicious, Mr. Wong, Propeller, StumbleUpon, etc.

Open a Twitter an Facebook account. Unless you have been in outer space in recent months, you probably heard about the social media craze that is taking the Internet by storm. Even if you don’t have time to update your accounts, it is wise to at least open a Facebook and a Twitter account under your company name, otherwise you risk having an impersonator open accounts with your name.

And remember, Bloom Marketing SEO specialists are here to help. Contact us for more information about our services and fees.