What Google Wants – Branding With SEO – Owning The Discussion

The other day Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt stated that the Internet is a cesspool and that the way to succeed online is through branding and discussion. While I have been complaining for a while about how Google’s SERP’s are watered down, it is nice to see them actually agreeing, and doing something about it. Since Google has cracked down on sites that sell link juice it has been increasingly more difficult to obtain quality inbound links that are relevant to your content. So what is a webmaster to do?

I had a discussion with a friend of mine, Christian Sterner the CEO and founder of Wellcomemat a video portal for videoagraphers, and we were talking about Universal Search and how to best leverage all of wellcomemat.com’s user generated content. I was pushing the commenting, telling him that they need to reward users that ask and answer questions. It was then that he said something that really put the whole thing into perspective: “the best sites online, OWN THE DISCUSSION on their topics”. That really puts the whole thing in a nutshell. I have proven time and time again that sites that push out quality content and that have users that ask question in the form of comments, rule the SERPs for their topics.

How To Own The Discussion

While Google is pushing branding, which I agree with to an extent, I have always pushed content and comments as I have found that WordPress posts historically get into the SERPs quickly, but tend to fade away over time. UNLESS THEY ARE HEAVILY COMMENTED. It was through this information that I found a great WP Plugin that takes the most recent comments and allows you to put them in a sidebar widget. I use that along with another plugin that lists the most popular posts based upon commenting. By putting both of these in the sidebar of the homepage of my client’s blog, I have seen an increase in placement for ALL of the posts that were linked from the home page through BOTH the popular posts and recent comments.

We all hate comment spam, and I am not in any way shape or form suggesting that you spam other peoples sites with comments. I am stating that you need to get comments going on your own site. You need to break the ice and ask and answer your own questions at first so that users see their questions will be answered in a timely manner. If you can get users to ask questions on your posts, you will OWN THE DISCUSSION.

Social Network Marketing at one time was a great source of inbound links, but that has changed since Google strong armed them into nofollowing their outbound links. Now social network marketing is good for exposure and traffic building, and of course branding, but little else except for a couple of document sharing sites. While SMO and social network marketing are still part of the game plan for SEO, we are focused more with on page optimization and commenting to drive discussion. Feel free to give us a call if you want to get started owning the discussion on Google. 727-251-2058

Google Page Rank Hits Thousands Of Sites

Many webmasters woke up to lower Page Rank and fallen rankings this morning as Google does another PR update. Over the weekend Google updated its Page Rank toolbar meter. Usually this doesn’t effect rankings simultaneously, but this update is different! Some websites that lost PR also lost substantial placement as well. As I was checking my client’s rankings after the update, I noticed quite a few competitors’ sites had fallen. Looking at their PR confirmed that this time Google followed through with it’s threat against sites selling links, and not only lowered Page Rank, but rankings as well.

Websites that have quality unique content were the beneficiaries of updated Page Rank on their newer content. Some WordPress pages that I created 3 weeks ago now have a 4 PR. This is the fastest update I have seen in years. If Google continues to make quick Page Rank updates that coincide with changes in the index, then they will go back to being the most relevant search engine. I have been complaining for a while about Google’s watered down results, but this could be a new turn towards Google being able to get spammers and scrapers out of the top results.

Duplicate content and ad only sites that steal content are one of the top 10 Internet Plagues, and the one that irks me the most. We provide only unique and researched content for our clients and there is nothing worse than someone stealing your content and making money off of it with ads. Hopefully these sites will fall all the way out of Google!

Google Is Not Your Friend!

I know that is quite a statement – Google is not your friend. In fact while they forge the perception that they are this hip and cool bunch of guys and gals that got started in their garage, the fact is, they run their business with the same imperialistic techniques as the evil empire Microsoft. Google can be very convincing in how they operate, not as an empire out to rule the world, but as a lovable group out to make the world and the Internet a better place for all.

Google’s business tactics are down right scary, as is the amount of private data they are gathering about us and our websites. I am highly concerned that they are applying the data they are gathering through the toolbar, analytics, iGoogle, Gmail and the Webmaster Center and using it against site owners. Their so-called “war on paid links” is a perfect example of how Google is weeding out the competition. Anybody who owns a site and is selling links on it, is a competitor of Google, which is why they are devoting so much energy to stopping paid links. It has nothing to do with the watering down of the index or spoofing the index. Rather, it’s all about money – their money and our money.

If they are so concerned with the nature of things on the web, why don’t they stop allowing sites that have no viable content to place Google Ads on them? There is nothing worse than wasting time searching for something and getting caught in a loop of paid advertising sites that just link to other paid sites through Google Ads. You all know what I am talking about. More and more of these phony websites are getting into the index. What’s worse is that they are allowed to compete for ad space with legitimate companies and drive the cost per click up without delivering any actual content. We’ve all wasted a lot of time searching for products and weeding through the tangle of ad only sites.

So what are we to do about it? Google accounts for 65% of my referrer traffic. Even though I have no ads on this site and my revenue comes from providing services and not from my website, how would I be able to feed my kids if I lost my traffic from Google? Like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984, Google is an all-seeing, all powerful overseer of the Internet and it’s either their way or the highway. My biggest problem with Google is the single-mindedness over paid links.

I agree that links to online gambling or casinos on a site about cat food is bad, but who are they to penalize both the advertiser and the publisher when a legitimate on-topic paid link deal is done? What’s worse is the manner in which they police paid links, by having other webmasters nark out their competitors in Google Webmaster Center. What stops a low placed website owner from snitching on a higher placed competitor just to hurt their placement?

Google’s so-called “war on paid links” is just another way for black-hat SEO to win over the hard working guys that optimize their sites, write solid content and use aggressive link strategies. It’s harder than ever to pick up links. In fact, reciprocal linking has also lost weight in the Google algorithm. So what are we supposed to do to earn links? Unless you post articles about Britney Spears, it’s unlikely that a website about network topology is going to generate lots of “buzz”.

I am a firm believer in paid links from relevant sites as well as on-topic paid posts by bloggers. Google should not take on the role as the Internet police. People like me that use paid linking should not be punished for making a content exchange that involves money. As long as the content is relevant, Google should back off. It’s time that we see Google for what they are – the enemy. The only way we can strike back is to stop paying them. If everyone took down their ads, stopped clicking on ads, and didn’t buy ads for just one day, Google would get a very strong message to back off! Just one day of lost revenue would certainly wake them up to the fact that their “paid link war” is bogus and we aren’t going to take it!

Google Webmaster Center Updates

If you are using the Google Webmaster Center then you have seen some changes recently to both the interface and the features. A lot of industry people were expecting a Google update to Page Rank a couple of weeks ago. I believe they are waiting to update PR until they have finished rolling out the latest Webmaster Center upgrades as well as their latest Universal Search updates.

If you follow the Web 2.0 and Search Engine Optimization philosophy than this should get you excited. Both Universal Search and the addition of RSS subscriber tracking to the Webmaster Center are steps in the right direction for Google and could truly benefit Social Network Marketing SEO.

How Google’s Webmaster Center Updates Can Help Your Site’s Placement

Before we get started, if you are unsure of what we are talking about below are some earlier posts that explain why all this is important.

• The Changing Face Of Google – Universal Search is explained in this article.
• Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing - SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized social network marketing is covered in this post.
• RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained - RSS syndication is explained here.
• RSS Syndication Services FeedBurner – this post explained how FeedBurner works. It was written prior to Google’s purchase of FeedBurner which is talked about in my Web 2.0 Podcast. Also of note is the updated post about FeedBurner RSS to Email service.

If you are not using Google’s Webmaster Center you aren’t getting the most out of your site. If you are than you have an edge over your competitors and have a ton of useful information about how GoogleBot spiders your site. Tomorrow I will be posting a video tutorial that will be a visual guide on how to get going with Google’s Webmaster Center.

Changes To Google’s Webmaster Center

The first thing you will notice is the look of the center is different. The dashboard is basically the same giving you a quick glance at vital stats about your site including errors or any crawl issues your site might have. The first major change is the new navigation element at the left. Below is a shot of the new nav:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see there is now a blue box with your main page choices. The page that you are on is highlighted a deep blue. As you navigate around the different main sections, each one has subcategories on the left in the nav, as well as links and short descriptions in the body of the page.

The choices are Diagnostics which give you the option of looking at the crawl stats for either a normal web crawl or a mobile web crawl. If your site isn’t set up for viewing over a mobile phone then all you need be concerned with is the web crawl.

 

 

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The next section Statistics has some of the most important info within the Webmaster Center. The next figure shows the options you will see when on the Statistics main page.

The best part of the statistics is the Page Rank meter which is under Crawl Stats:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The most important part of this is the Page Rank Yet To be Assigned. The longer your bar, the better. Right before this blog obtained its PR, the Page Rank Yet To be Assigned was about half way. Once the Page Rank update came a few months back, my blog had gotten a 3 PR up to all the pages and posts up to 1 week prior to the update. I was happy to see the blog got the same PR that my site was awarded. Even though this domain is 6 years old, the site is less than a year old and is doing pretty good considering.The moral of this is, the higher your Page Rank Yet To Be Assigned your site is, the better you are going to do in the next update.The next upgrade is very cool. They added a link to your subscriber stats. This shows how many RSS subscribers you have through Google. Now before you get too excited, they have a few issues that will need to be resolved. Right now they are pulling the feed location out of the auto discovery RSS header if you haven’t added an RSS feed as a sitemap. OK so what is the big deal? If you are like me you are using FeedBurner to manage your feeds. Even with feed control plugins such as Feed Locations or FeedBurner’s Feed Smith, the self discovery will show the default www.blog/feed location that is default in WordPress as opposed to the feedburner.com feed that users will actually subscribe to.

Another problem is you can’t add a feed that isn’t in your domain to the sitemap section of the Webmaster Center. This means you can’t add the FeedBurner URL. I have asked them to make an exception for FeedBurner and I believe their response will be favorable since they no own FeedBurner. There is a big difference between the 16 Google subscribers and the 150 FeedBurner subscribers I actually have. And this isn’t showing the hundreds of RSS to Email subscribers that I have through FeedBlitz. On the bright side, FeedBurner is now giving me credit for those FeedBlitz RSS to Email subscribers in my control panel, but that has yet to show up in my overall subscribers number in their analytics.

The next section is also very important. Links can give you a very clear picture of how many inbound links Google is giving your site credit for.

It will show you all the pages on your site that has inbound links and give you a number of how many inbounds each page has. You can click on the link and it will show you what sites are linking to you, at least in the eyes of GoogleBot. Below is a shot of that feature in action:

A great upgrade would be to eliminate internal links from your own site. Google will count links from your own site if you use Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) linking structure like I do. That means that your internal links are not relative i.e.

(a href=”/contactus.html” mce_href=”/contactus.html” )Contact Us(/a) this is a relative link

(a href=”http: //w w w.website.com/contactus.html”)Contact Us(/a) this is a FQDN link.

Other than SEO, FQDN linking can protect your site from being stolen in its entirety by scrapers. If you have all relative links someone can rip your whole site and put it up on their domain in 5 seconds!

By using Google’s link tool, you can see if your reciprocal link partners have kept your link on their site. It is also a great way to see if your purchased links are showing up. If you are unsure about the different types of inbound links there are, read my post on Linking Strategies: How To Get Inbound Links. I know there are a lot of people who are against paid links, but if the site and content are relevant, then it is just another form of advertising. I am totally opposed to paid linking that puts links on sites that have nothing to do with the content on either site.

Along with external or inbound links, Google also shows you your internal linking structure. This is useful to see how often certain areas of your site is crawled. They give you the date the link was last spidered which can indicate how important certain pages of your site are to Google. With more emphasis being put on Universal Search having fresh content is more important than ever. If you haven’t added a blog or other types of news type content management to your site, now is the time. If you are unsure how to get going with Web 2.0 and Social Network Marketing visit our Managed Content Syndication Services page and find out how we can get the ball rolling and take your Internet Presence to another level!

The next section of the Webmaster Center is for Sitemaps. These are XML sitemaps that tell Google about your site. If you don’t have an XML sitemap you better get one quick! WordPress has a plugin that will create one, but if you have a non-blog website I recommend that you use Sitemap Writer Pro, go ahead and use my discount code and save some $$$, enter this code when you buy it: MS130807EN and save 30%. It’s a great tool and it is the only sitemap writer program that can crawl a dynamic site with over 10,000 URL’s and NOT crash.

The final section of the new Google Webmaster Center is Tools. I could write a whole post just about how to use the tools section, but I am going to focus only on what is different. The best change is more information about your site’s robots.txt file. The link above is geared towards WordPress robots.txt, but also talks about regular robots files and links to my other posts about it. This tool is good to see the exact time that Google crawls your site. This can give you a heads up when last minute changes are needed. The first thing a spider does is scan your server site header then look at the robots.txt. It is so important to have duplicate content and private areas of your site disallowed. Any server action that can put a spider into a loop, like a cgi-bin application for a shopping cart, will force the search engine spider to leave your site!

Some other new goodies in the Tools section are the enhanced images section and remove URL’s. I don’t have a lot of info on the enhanced images section, but will be delving into it as I build and optimize my wife’s new Art site. She is starting a company called Original Oils Only which is about collecting art. It will need a lot of images that we are going to want spidered and indexed so I will keep you all updated on how the enhanced images can benefit your search engine placement.

The remove URL’s is a huge new feature. Yahoo’s Site Explorer released a similar tool months ago which is very good for getting URL’s out of the index that have either been eliminated, redirected or are leftovers from an older site. By using the web crawl diagnostics to see what problems the spiders have when crawling your site, you can now do something about it and request that they are removed. Obviously this can be very dangerous, so read everything carefully and pay attention to what you are doing. Last month I noticed that Google had made changes to its verification process, tightening up security on your site’s verification process. It would be very bad if a hacker or one of your competitors was able to remove URL’s off of your site.

The other features within tools have been around since the beginning and will be covered in my Google Webmaster Center video tutorial I will be releasing soon. As always leave a comment or question below and I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible!

The Changing Face Of Google

Google is now rolling out it’s latest update called Universal Search. While this is one of the most important changes to the SERP’s in years, there is no reason to panic! If you are like me, your site has an active Web 2.0 marketing plan. The inclusion of more prominently displayed news and other related media results will be a big plus to sites that include Social Network Marketing applications like WordPress.

Google’s Universal Search Explained

Google SERP’s are now beginning to present results to users of its main Web search engine, including images, video clips, book information, news headlines and local business (through Google Maps).

Google said the change, which it calls “universal search,” required a multiyear effort to update it’s technical infrastructure and the algorithms it uses to rank and display their search results. Google’s move comes as other Internet Search Engines such as ASK, Windows Live and Yahoo are also working on changes to their functionality, including adding different types of information into the SERPS. In my article Website Usability and Search Engine Optimization I describe a little about Google’s new action plan.

If you take into consideration the focus that Google is putting on personalized search and incorporate Universal Search into that business model, the results are startling. It is obvious that Google is fully committed to being a one stop Internet shop for everything that a user needs. The promotion of Google Base and Google Checkout is more evidence that Google doesn’t expect users to need to go anywhere else. By gathering as much information about the way average users behave is the backbone of Universal Search.

Google is taking the data it gathers through personal search and the Google Toolbar and applying the results into Universal Search. A lot of people are complaining over privacy issues and the sheer amount of data that Google is gathering, as well as the tight lipped manner in which Google uses that data. I personally have found my search experience is much better when signed in to personal search. Google has seen the patterns of sites I click on and is doing a better job of putting relevant sites in front of me.

How Universal Search Effects Website Owners

How do these changes effect you and your site? If you are a service or information site that doesn’t sell goods and products then you absolutely must have a blog or other dynamic content system. I am seeing sites that are 10 years old and industry leaders falling down the SERPS and being replaced by 1 and 2 year old blogs! I use WordPress as my content management system and prefer that it is added as an extension to an existing domain. This make the domain itself a publisher.

If you have an e-commerce site, then Google Base and Google Checkout is the way to go. The thing you have to keep in mind about Google Base is you really should use the API to submit your product info. A spreadsheet might be a short term solution, but if you don’t keep it updated, you have the chance of your store being ousted every 45 days. Like Froogle, Google Base requires that stores keep their content and products fresh and updated.

In conclusion Universal Search is going to greatly assist users in finding relevant information about the topics they are interested in. From a standpoint of a publisher it will mean that you will have to keep your site fresh and dynamic to stay in the SERPS as a relevant source or an authority on any given subject.