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Google Image Search – What have they done this time?

Apr 12th, 2013
by Admin.
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What in the name of god have they done this time?

OK here’s the theory, those of you who have been avid readers of this blog and my arcane ramblings over the past few years will realise I have no love for Google (oh god here he goes again on one of his “rants” I hear you cry?) because of the cack-handed way they always seem to deliver or roll out their “algorithm updates”.

How can such an organization seemingly filled to the rafters of so called intelligent people so habitually get it wrong but I digress, back to the theory.

Webmasters complaining about changes made by Google is nothing new. Every time Google releases a major algorithm update like Penguin or Panda, the outcry is everywhere. But, like it or not, that’s Google trying to better its algorithm, and ultimately improve its search results. You could also argue that any traffic one site loses, another gains. Somebody wins.

OK that’s the theory but funny it never seems to work out that way and especially with their latest developments regarding Image Search.

Now any good SEO Agency worth their salt will advise you that it is advisable to been seen almost everywhere for a client. The name of the game nowadays is all about branding and making sure that your name is found everywhere above all others so as well as making sure you rank in conventional SERPS you need to make sure you can be found in places like Google Blog Search, Image Search etc etc.

But….

The Image Search story is a bit different, however. This is not an algorithmic change designed to point users to higher quality images or more relevant image results. It’s a cosmetic change, and while some users may find the experience to be an upgrade, it’s clear that many webmasters have not welcomed the redesign.

 “55% dropped for websites with images…”

“My traffic has dropped to 1/5 of what it was before the new Google Images search roll out…”

“My traffic was cut by half overnight…”

“My image based website has lost 2/3 of the visitors after the change…”

“Google image traffic has dropped by 50-70% on my site…”

That was back in January. It doesn’t appear that things have gotten much better.

Define Media Group published some findings from a recent study on Monday (hat tip to Search Engine Land). According to the firm, you might as well spend your time in other areas of search engine optimization and online marketing, and not worry so much about optimizing for image search anymore.

“We analyzed the image search traffic of 87 domains and found a 63% decrease in image search referrals after Google’s new image search UI was released,” explains Shahzad Abbas. “Publishers that had previously benefitted the most from their image optimization efforts suffered the greatest losses after the image search update, experiencing declines nearing 80%.”

“In the eleven weeks after Google’s new image search was released, there has been no recovery – which means for image search, the significantly reduced traffic levels we’re seeing is the new normal,” he adds. “In the aftermath of the new image search experience, image SEO has been severely compromised, and we have no choice but to recommend deprioritizing image SEO when weighed against other search traffic initiatives.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that your images could turn up in universal search results on Google’s web results pages, but even then, personalized “Search Plus Your World” results tend to get the emphasis when applicable.

It’s all made even more interesting due to the fact that Google pitched the changes as good for webmasters, indicating that they would actually drive more traffic to sites.

“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” wrote associate product manager Hongyi Li in the announcement. “This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.”

“The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view,” Li added. “This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.”

It’s possible that some sites are seeing more traffic from the Image Search changes, and just aren’t being as vocal, but there has been an overwhelming amount of complaints since the redesign, and this new study is not doing anything to defend Google’s case.

Of course, Google is all about placing users first (even over webmasters), and they’ll continue to do what they think is best for them. From a user experience perspective, the changes aren’t bad. But that’s little consolation for those who now have to find other ways to get their content in front of an audience.

Sometimes you just have to sit tight with Google….and some”hot” dofollow Academic Wikis available.

Apr 24th, 2012
by Admin.
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The world of SEO is not the greatest place to be in at the moment as the likes of Google play a perverse online version of Basket Ball at the moment with their index and to say it makes for nerve racking client meetings is a gross understatement.

However despite all of the online shenanigans, sometimes it pays to just go back and be “old school” for a while and sit tight when all around you is bouncing around maniacally.

This is not easy I can tell you and when you have a client getting near hysterical because their main keywords have gone “walk about” and wiped out about 75% of their traffic, sometimes the answer they least want to hear is…”lets’ just sit tight and see what happens”.

You have to be very careful at junctures like these as though to “sit tight” may well be the best course of action, as I have said; sometimes it is the least sort of thing a hysterical client wishes to hear.

We’ve been in just such a situation these last 10 days or so with one of our clients who has a nice site that’s based in the Health Niche and to say we’ve been under pressure is playing down the situation “big time”.

The trouble as I’ve said is that when an array of hitherto rather stable keywords and SERPS disappears almost overnight it is very easy to break out into wholesale panic. The trouble was that the more we analysed the situation and thought about it, the less inclined we were to actually effect wholesale changes to our SEO approach and “game plan”.

You could almost cut the sense of relief with a knife when thank god, the clients main term came back onto Page 1 in Google after a 10 day absence touring round “the nether regions” of online obscurity.

This was not, as it turned out, anything to do with the so called current “Panda Massacres” or anything like that but a phenomena that was more familiar.

A good old fashioned “Google Dance”.

Unpleasant nonetheless and if you are suffering from any form of “gastric issues” then this sort of occurrence could be defined as almost the perfect form of “online laxative” such was the very “uncool” situation client wise.

The trouble is nowadays it is very easy to over react and abandon Tactics and approaches mid Campaign if suddenly your SERPS go awry but sometimes that is the last thing you should do.

It is sometimes beneficial when the “brown smelly stuff hits the fan” to actually sit down and think logically at times as these such is the crazy world we inhabit called SEO.

When the bottom has seemingly appeared to fall out of your marketing world sometimes it pays to sit down and analyse why you think this has happened before you make a move and sometimes the result of that analysis and introspection is actually to do nothing especially if your previous actions had been well thought out, researched and seemingly well implemented.

Too often we seem to hear nowadays of client scenarios appearing to go badly wrong and all the blame seems to be laid at the doors of the “manic Panda” when actually it is something different altogether.

Think before you make a move….always. You’d be surprised at the numbers of those who don’t.

Lastly, last week, we informed you of the fact that we had some rather nice dofollow wikis that folks could use for their Marketing and Link Building Campaigns. There were 120 dofollow wikis that were based around the Apple Snow Leopard OS and the cost of them was $80 for the 120.

This week we have something hat is even tastier and much much rarer and that is 80 rather nice Authority sites based around the Academic world. Now the euphemism for this is usually the “EDU market” but that would actually be a gross over simplification as in this case, in this list is a very prestigious German University that is certainly not an EDU domain suffix (but is Still a PR8) and several Academic Institutions in the UK (all ac.uk) plus some nice Colleges and Universities in the Far east that are also not EDU’s. Plus also within this list are a long time favourite of mine and that is some nice “K12.us” domains which represent the US education sector just below the University and college sector.

I personally love these as they seem to get crawled very quickly and stay indexed due to their very nature plus even if the wikis get restricted, quite often the pages don’t get taken down so your links remain “in situ”. They also often have some nice PR on the homepage of the site and quite often this is PR4 or 5.

Anyway we have a very limited number of these that are available as we like to use these “in house” in a lot of our domestic Campaigns so we’re limiting the number of lists we’re making available to 12 copies and these will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

Priority will also be given to members or readers who have already bought the 120 dofollow list to be fair.

PR on these sites ranges from PR8 at the top end (a nice number plus as I said some nice prestigious European Uni’s from at least 3 different Countries so a terrific IP spread) to those we have not yet had the time to allocate Page Rank to but in a spot check just before this newsletter was published I took 3 of the N/A Page Rank assessed sites and two of them turned out to be PR4′s on a manual inspection!!

Anyway this list is available for $80 and as I’ve said is available on a first come first served basis. Our PayPal address is as usual info@simpleleveraging.com .

We will also be running another webinar on these within the next 7 days and priority on that webinar will be given to those who have bought the lists which is only fair.

What Makes an Authority Site and also how to get your hands on links from 20 .Gov sites?

Mar 3rd, 2012
by Admin.
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What makes and Authority site? It’s another one of those questions that we regularly get asked and again the answer could be viewed in two ways.

Firstly on a very simple basic level, an Authority site is one that is recognized as an Authority within its particular topic or niche. For example, www.bbc.co.uk is viewed as an authority site within the News and Current affairs spectrum and in the area of Aerospace then www.nasa.gov would be viewed as an authority site alongside political websites such as http://www.number10.gov.uk/ in the UK and http://www.whitehouse.gov/ in the US. It could be argued with events on both sides of the Atlantic recently that both of these sites are pretty compromised (allegedly) but I digress.

The common theme in all of these examples is that they exist primarily for the dissemination of information and have no commercial bias whatsoever and therefore their information by and large is unbiased with no commercial intent whatsoever.

It is this last category that makes EDU and Academic Domains so useful and worthwhile as they are deemed to have relative unimpeachable independent non bias. It is also this aspect that goes way and beyond the domain suffix .edu as well as the majority of leading Academic Institutions worldwide are in fact not straight .edu’s but either variants such as in Australia .edu.au or in the UK, .ac.uk

On the next level an Authority site is one that is deemed to be an Authority in its niche by virtue of the experience and quality of the editorial and information published by the site. This latter category is helped by the way that site is perceived or viewed by other web sites i.e. are many other sites of a non commercial bias linking to it for example?

It is this second Category that for our purposes is slightly more achievable for us to achieve for our own or client’s websites.

Now as most readers will be aware we have been focussing a lot of our intention recently towards Wikis as sources of links and a lot of folks have asked why?

The answer as far as we have been observing is that whether they are nofollow or dofollow neither makes any difference as far as we are concerned as it is not Page Rank we are at all interested in here. Ot is the fact that currently they are helping our Press Campaigns “hit it out of the Park” at the moment. Currently we are getting a 90% success rate in getting our Press Releases within the top 5 in Google and in the most recent case of this morning we had 2 PR’s in the same top 5 slot in Google for the same phrase and all within 51 minutes of the release coming out.

Next up is the target to keep them there!

That having been said, having other Authority sites link to you does help you “up the ladder” and it’s to that end that I want to bring to everyone’s attention some very cool very rare information we have just finished compiling this morning.

Our list of Wikis using the MediaWiki platform has risen now to over 3,000 now and within that there are 117 EDU Domains plus 6 Gov sites with 3 satellite Gov / political domains. Now these are all working Wikis that we have placed material on within the past 3 weeks so the work.

What we compiled this morning is of more interest and to be honest much more “Mega Hot” in as much as our research has unearthed signup pages and logins for 20 .Gov Wikis plus 3 satellite sites.

Now to be brutally blunt, using .Govs as part of your Link Building strategy is very much a specialised business and has to be handled correctly. Anyone who tells you otherwise is, as we say in the UK, “talking out their backside” but handled correctly can gain great results big time.

How rare are .Gov sites?

Well in our major Wiki list of 3,178 sites we have 6 of them plus 3 satellites.

In this list researched and compiled this morning we have 20 .Gov sites plus 3 satellites. Now these are.Gov sites that are truly spread across the world so the IP spread is to die for plus the geo coverage is great. There are of course a couple of mainstream US .Govs in there as well.

I am making this limited list of .Gov sites available to a very small group of people plus running a Webinar next week where we go through the do’s and don’ts of how to handle these sites properly and not get your material banned.

Now the places on this Webinar and the number of copies of this list will be limited to 15 as these sites are that rare. The cost of this list plus access to the webinar is $35 and is purely available on a first come first served basis. Send the funds via PayPal to info at simpleleveraging.com  and you’ll get out on the list

These sites are hot, they are rare so get in now to secure your place and I’ll get your place allocated.

I am also running another Webinar on the subject of dealing with and handling .EDU sites in the next 10 days and those who have already signed up will be notified of times shortly.

Back to the .Gov sites, get in quick as places are limited.

More Google Post Panda Testing

Jan 29th, 2012
by Admin.
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Just thought I’d drop a quick update to yesterdays email where I discussed an ongoing case study we were carrying out on some brand new domains and also checking how well the SLS Network was performing at the start of 2012.

OK interim stats are as follows:

1. 15 Domains bought and launched

2. All 15 were indexed and were starting to rank (albeit in a limited manner) within 24 hours.

3. For Narrow match terms, 4 had hit Page 1 in Google within 3 days, 5 had hit Page 2, 1 was on Page3, 1 was on Page 4 whilst the remaining 4 were lost in the mire (sub Page 5 but we’ll get them to where we want them to be ( it’ll just take some more time). So that’s a 60% success rate at Page 2 plus within 3 days.

On one of the sites we carried out more of an in-depth analysis and I am forwarding this video to my small “Peer Group Review Team” to confirm and the results picked up from that were really exciting. OK it was a tightly focused Niche we were after but still in narrow match had 411,000 competing pages and the results we had were as follows:

The time period was as mentioned three days since we bought and registered this domain and we were looking at the following results for one term (our main and keyword targeted term) plus as we had launched a while network of sites there was also some collateral penetration as well in that some of our other sites were also showing up for this term:

1. 5 Places controlled by us on Page1 in Google.

2. 4 Places on Page 2.

3. 5 Places on Page 3 (including Bookmark Directories).

4. 7 Places on Page 4 (including Bookmark Directories).

5. 5 places on Page 5 (including Bookmark Directories).

Plus when we expanded the Search queries it showed on Pages 9 & 10 that we had in some cases 90% of the page tie up for our sites / terms etc when we also took into consideration the member Directories of SLS which had also started to appear.

All we used in this promotion were a couple of items that we discuss in the members area of SLS plus the Bookmark Network using one account to deep link the sites.

So the quick response to does Social Bookmarking still work in 2012 (heck there was a post in the Warrior Forum recently that predicted the “death of…..” yawn) is yes and is alive and kicking.

The key thing that you have to bear in mind and I’ve stated this on countless times over the years, SEO is a constantly moving form of marketing. You have to keep evolving or you are finished and that’s what Simple Leveraging does, it moves constantly with the times and if it seems that in 2012 we are massively different animal to how we were in 2009 when we first emerged then in certain cases we are but in our core methodology? Nope, our principles and approach have stayed the same, just the implementation of them has been slightly “tweaked” that’s all.

How to own 95% of Google in Under 24 hours?

Nov 1st, 2011
by Admin.
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Yes you read it right correctly, this is how we took a particular term that was OK a very tightly focused niche term, but one that had adverts running as far as Page 2 in Google and therefore was making money (or so Google thought so) and we ended up “owning” 95% of Google in under 24 hours.

Actually astute viewers of the video when it comes out will spot that we actually did this in just less than 13 hours!

So what did we do?

First in broad match our Press Release for the Client hit the No 2 slot out of 309 million pages in 13 hours and in narrow match we ended up with our Press Release taking 19 out of the top 20 slots in Google in the same period

Now the video, though having been recorded, is not going to appear for another 14 days or so as we are live in the midst of the Campaign for the Client and to be blunt, I don’t want any enterprising folks out there “nicking our niche” but the video proof is there and when I deem it safe the video will come out to our members only download area.

So how was this done?

  1. Careful Keyword Research.
  2. Timing
  3. Proper and planned use of META Data

Firstly as Myra and I discussed in our recent Web Discussion, it was all down to careful Keyword Research for the right term for the client. Secondly as this particular Season Campaign has just got underway I guess our timing was pretty hot in that we hit the tracks running just before the previous Seasonal campaign had actually ended. Thirdly and last of all we made sure that our MEAT Data for the Keyword Research was included right up at the front of the Press Release.

Now astute Google watchers will know that Google have fine-tuned their algorithm recently and for the time being seem to be using for the Meta Inserts in the SERPS, the first 300 Characters of the main body copy of the piece you are trying to optimise for.

Now the Golden Rule here is to try and make sure you get your main Key phrase inserted right there at the start of your piece. Now this is not new and has been standard SEO practice for years but it did seem to have gone slightly out of fashion recently but now appears to have come back to the fore in Campaigns or so our research has shown.

So given the fact that in Press Releases our distributor automatically assigns the first 300 characters to the Meta description and this includes the beginning information, for example:

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 17, 2011)

This means it shortens your ability to use the keywords in the first 145-155 characters in the meta description that Google displays before it truncates. So make use of your keywords in the Meta description early on, ideally right in the first part of the first sentence.

Anyway enough of this. I’ll get the video put into the Members only support area of the Forum within the next 14 days or so but to further add proof to the fact that we’re not sensationalising this, I’ve released the video to a couple of SLS members to get them to verify that we’re not making this up. I’ll get them to add their comments to back up our claims.

The Real Reason we build Back Links to our Tiered Pages

Oct 25th, 2011
by Admin.
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One of the things I love about Simple Leveraging is that the “knowledge share” truly goes in more than one direction. This has been evidenced particularly in two incidences that spring to mind for me.

Firstly the experience working with Myra Love on our forthcoming project provisionally entitled “Multi Disciplinary Marketing” where we took the $240K in four days Campaign and analysed it’s various component parts and broke it down into stages and examined in detail.

Secondly, it was after talking to another SL member, Dave “Quinn” Thomas over cool ways to promote Wikis etc and this opened my eyes to a technique that I was aware of but hadn’t really thought about too much in detail.

I have now though, but perhaps it might be an idea to get back to basics first.

Why do we pursue this whole concept of Tiered / Layered Multi-level Linking? Firstly it’s something that we have been advocating and doing at Simple Leveraging by and large well before most others but more importantly why?

It’s a question I get asked all the time, why do you advise the constant building of links to support links to support…….etc  etc?

The answer is very simple. It is because of the transient nature of certain forms of Link Support that we use in our Campaigns. Now that is not to say that short term support is a bad thing, it’s more a case of understanding fully what is going on.

For example, one of the first things we want to do with a site is build in Authority links as soon as is possible. Now in most cases this means getting links on High Page Rank Social Media sites and / or Press Releases.

Now in a lot of cases the Home Page PR of a lot of these sites is fairly high ((5+) and the knock on effect is a fairly vigorous (if we’ve planned and executed it properly) short term “hit” on our sites that results in a rise up the “SERPS”.

Now as they all say, “What goes up always has to come down” and that is the case with the effect received from those short term links but there are steps that we should do almost immediately to mitigate any potential downfall.

I explain it with diagrams and a PowerPoint in this short video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxboJJneJg0  but the upshot is that sooner or later pages gaining the benefit of links from these High Page Rank Home Pages drop the moment that the links themselves disappear and the inbound links form these sites tend to come from less powerful inner pages.

Hopefully by then, all good promoters / Link Builders will have already had in place additional Link placements to add support to these pages. In the case of declining Press Releases, usually a fairly vigorous Link Building Campaign (from SLS etc) is good enough to not only arrest the decline but in most cases reverse it.

I’ve also uploaded to the Members Only Downloads area of the Forum another more in depth video that goes into detail a very useful little technique that drives excellent authority links from a PR8 Site to all of our Press Releases no matter how many we have, within seconds. You can also use this to replicate this technique with at least one other Authority site also. The video can be found here:

http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,187.0.html

 

Are NoFollow Links any use?

Aug 17th, 2011
by Admin.
1 comment

This question was asked recently at one of the Forums that I participate in and I thought that the reply I gave might be of use here as well.

The answer to this is very straight forward. One of the most important factors that appears to have emerged in the latest Google “Algo” update was that they were now looking at the breadth, strength and variety of the inbound links that appear in your back links “landscape”. The old days of just getting loads of so called “dofollow” anchor links from one site / IP no longer cut it.

Now whilst folks have caught on about the IP diversity (still not to the extent they should have) people still haven’t fully appreciated the fact about “Link Diversity”. By this I mean that Google are looking now for a bank links landscape that as fully replicates that created by a human as possible. To this end they are now looking to see a variety in styles of links such as a mix of dofollow / nofollow, directs, indirects, typos etc in fact anything that looks like it could have been created by hand rather than an automatic submission bot.

At the same time time there appears to have been a re emergence of a concept they first looked at a few years ago called “Trust Rank”. This looks at the site that the inbound links originate from and assesses the “trustworthiness” or “authority status” of the site as it lies within your back links landscape. This is where EDU sites really come into their own and even if they only provide “nofollow” links. As most of these EDU Domains are virtually coming down with authority back links within their own profile, a lot of this is passed on in a way that is quite different to the old and now defunct (in reality) concept of Page Rank.

So to sum up (before I go too much about this) nofollow links from EDU domains are really valuable in a number of hitherto misunderstood ways. There are also a number of other factors that give benefit as well.

Panda 2.2, Trust Rank and 50 EDU Properties to place your own copy and Links

Jul 1st, 2011
by Admin.
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Recently I wrote about some information we had gleaned about the latest Panda Update and touched upon the concept of “Trust rank” and as such have had quite a few emails asking could I elaborate on this further?

Well the story behind Trust Rank is this.

As a concept it has been researched by two separate organisations, Google and Yahoo. As a concept behind the scenes it had been around for some time in the Google camp but it was actually Yahoo who first went public about it really when one of their researchers alongside some research personnel from Stanford in 2004 put together a Paper entitled: “Combating Web Spam with TrustRank”. For those who want to pursue this matter further the paper has been retrieved and put online and can be found here:

http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

Apparently at the same time Google had been doing some behind the scenes work on a similar concept called Trust Rank and registered the Trademark “Trustrank” as Matt Cutts (the public face of Google) explains here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8mUXQzwEvs

Now where all of this falls into place with my feelings in my last Newsletter are this. Google has been searching for some time to further provide more background analysis on the “worthiness” of Web Sites and how they stack up.

Initially this was to be provided by using data from their Page Rank analysis but since Page Rank has been generally accepted to have been on the slide for the past few years (Google themselves downgraded it from being the “jewel in the Crown” in the Search Algorithm now to being “one of 200 other ranking factors” – bit of a drop in emphasis I think you’ll agree?) they have had to look further afield.

They then decided to expand the Trust Rank concept further in 2009 when as well as having the Trademark registered they registered the Patent as well. Now things were getting really serious and it is only now some 2 -2 ½ years later that we are starting to see the true manifestation in this with the Panda Update.

Looking round for methods to try and help them get some sort of handle on the generally accepted worthiness of a site, they hit upon the idea of seeing how a site was viewed by virtue of how a site was viewed by its peers hence the appearance of the “+1” concept. Now this, as in all things, can be gerrymandered such is the good and bad side of human endeavour but it goes some way to showing where they are going.

The other parts of the Trust rank concept lie in an old view of “you are known by the Company that you keep” or who links to you. Now we know also that Google tried to control this with the much vaunted “rel=nofollow” attribute but once again this has now also turned into a dead duck so where does this all lead us?

Well as I said in one of the newsletters of a month ago that I felt that with Panda, Google were turning back the clock to almost the days of the late Nineties with their views on inbound links etc.

Now my views on this are as follows. I think that there are certain aspects of Linking that Google are trying to downplay in the algorithm but with the absence of any credible alternative they cannot nor ever will truly be able to remove data from Link Building entirely. So the upshot of that being is that for the time being we are all safe there folks as far as our Back Link building efforts are concerned but what I think Google are placing more emphasis now than perhaps they have done before, is the nature of the IP spread of those links.

Whereas in the past, conventional wisdom was that with a few PR5 – PR 6+ links from a couple of websites you could drive a site up the serps, now that is no longer true in the same way. What Google now want to see are links, but instead of a few folks voting i.e. just one or two sites they want to see loads more and those votes need to come from as wide a section of the Internet population than before.

So the upshot of all of this is that you need to have your links coming from a much wider variety of sites than before.

So what about Authority and Trust?

Now to further this and aid the overall Trust and Respect for a site, if you can throw as many links to your site from as many different types of sites as possible – so much the better especially if those links are from perceived trusted domains such as .Govs and .EDU’s.

Google’s love affair with .EDU’s and .Govs lies not as most folks think, in a fixation with the domain suffix but rather with the nature of the sites themselves. Indeed we have found in our own research that a great many Education / Academic sites that are not .EDU’s for instance are just as powerful if not more so at times.

For instance in the UK, the domain suffix .EDU doesn’t exist rather the academic suffix is .ac.uk and this is a the case in a great many other territories worldwide so as we have seen the power and authority doesn’t necessarily stem from the suffix, rather the nature of the site itself and that fact that these sites (as Matt Cutts himself has been quoted) tend to have loads of authority links pointing at them as well so this in turn gives their outbound links out more power.

So where does this leave rel=nofollow links from .EDU’s?

Exactly as where it left them before to be blunt. Just as powerful but with a different dimension i.e. the fact they originate from where they do carries a different set of weight rather than any PR juice that folks think they might not be able to impart.

For your own back links profile and authority status the fact that you might be able to count as many quality EDU links in your profile goes a long way to help confer “trust status” as far as the Search Engines are concerned.

To further this we have been running an associate program to our main Bookmarking Program and this has been centred round locating development spaces within various EDU properties where you can insert your own content under your own editorial control. Called the Lost Art of Conversation we have now reached Module 4 and in Module 4 we now have 50 EDU properties that you can insert your own Links and copy. Now these properties include a mixture of DoFollow and NoFollow links but as has now been conclusively proved for Trust and Authority status the NoFollow attribute is by and large of no consequence.

As with before we will only be releasing limited copies of this Module to the general public and I wanted to notify members of my Newsletter first. The uptake of previous Modules was such that they never actually made it to public release as they were all snapped up by readers of this newsletter and members of Simple Leveraging. The cost of Module 4 of The Lost Art will be $75 and if anyone is interested then send the $75 to info@simpleleveraging.com and I’ll forward the zip file with the contents through to you straight away.

 

Panda 2.2 – It’s a matter of Trust?

Jun 30th, 2011
by Admin.
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I’ve been quite busy today trying to fathom out the fallout from the latest in the Google shake ups and it reminded me of a variation on an old joke and it goes like this:

A man is walking down a beach one day looking at the sea shore and also at the other side of the bay where he has to drive to work every day and also thinking about how long it takes him to drive to work and back every day and suddenly spies a bottle half submerged in the sand and his gives the bottle a kick.

There is suddenly a loud explosion followed by lots of smoke and a Genie appears looking very unhappy;

“What’s your problem mate? I’ve been asleep for thousands of years and you have to go and wake me up like that but as I’m here I have to follow tradition and give you a wish. Your wish is my command master?”

The man ponders on this and then comes up with an idea.

“I’d like you to build me a bridge joining this side of the bay to my place of work thirty miles away across the bay?”

The Genie looks at him incredulously and replies “Are you serious? Do you know how much steel and concrete that would require? The man hours, the materials, the environmental impact. Totally impossible but as this is not the answer you were looking for or expecting I’ll grant you one more wish?”

Now prior to going out for a walk that day the man had been spending some time at home on his PC trying to find a present for his wife using Google as a Search Engine with no luck and he thought:

“OK, I’d like you to tell me exactly how Google works and how they rank items as I couldn’t find a suitable present for my wife today”

The Genie looks at him slightly puzzled and then puts his arm round the man and starts to walk him down the beach and replies:

“Now tell me about this bridge you want me to build? Do you want one lane there and back or two….”

Such is life with Google at present but the one thing that is starting to appear as a constant is that Google is looking for quality content and also links from sites with authority and trust. This it would appear is almost more important than Page Rank. In fact it would appear that the much vaunted but never fully implemented concept of Trust Rank might at last be appearing again. Now this also touches upon another one of the supposedly “Sacred Cows” of the Internet – the “Nofollow Link”

Now to understand this fully you have to take a slightly more “holistic” view towards Link building and this was best described recently by a quote I found on another site recently:

“A link is not just about PageRank anymore, but trust and brand awareness. In fact, even though search engines do not carry PR through the no followed link to your site, they record it and they take notice that your site has been cited in a site. If that site is an authoritative one or a trusted seed, somehow its aura will reflect on your own web site, which will gain trust and relevance to the eyes of the search engines, therefore better rankings.”

Now taking this further, of the many important factors surrounding Links (and Google reputedly calculate up to 200 different factors in their current algorithm) the following three factors I think are of tremendous importance:

1.      There is More Than Link Juice That Determine Link Value

Going on the assumption that nofollow links don’t pass much link juice, they still pass relevance. Just because Google doesn’t “count” the link, doesn’t mean that they don’t see what anchor text is being used. The anchor text is still showing the search engines what your site is about and is passing relevancy.

2.      Some NoFollowed Links Are Very Trust-worthy

I (and others) also believe that nofollow links pass trust. If you have a link on Wikipedia or a major Academic Establishment for example, do you really believe that the search engines won’t pay attention to that link? If you can get links on highly trusted domains, whether they are nofollow or not, they will be taken into consideration by the search engines.

3.      Keep It Real (and Natural)

Lastly, if you’re building incoming links to your site and almost all of them are dofollow links, your link profile is going to look very unnatural. A natural link profile will have nofollow links, dofollow links, different domains (.info., org, .com, etc.) and various types of anchor text (brand name, url only, keywords, “click here”, etc). This is how a link profile should look and this is how you build a trusted domain.

To support this hypothesis I came across the following Blog Post from quite an eminent SEO Practitioner recently and it rather interestingly supports this theory:

http://www.socialseo.com/blog/an-experiment-nofollow-links-do-pass-value-and-rankings-in-google.html

There are more recent blog posts and discussions but I thought this post from late 2010 was still fairly relevant but now more so with the antics of our big Panda shaped friend.

So I believe that the upshot of all of this is that if you can get a link or series of links from a fairly trustworthy source then it is going to do wonders for your Link Building.  Link Building should not all be about how you can gerrymander a profile using just tightly focussed terms and only DoFollow links but other aspects as well.

Get some links from some trustworthy sources regardless of the attribute and you’ll be surprised at what they can do.

Just like waiting for a Bus – Nothing happens then along come two at once!!

Jun 28th, 2011
by Admin.
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We have saying here in the UK (and I’m sure it’s the same all over the world with different regional variations) and it goes like this.

“It’s like waiting for a London Bus – nothing happens for a long time and then along come two at once”

Well folks such is life with Google at the moment. Not only did they shake the world big time earlier this year with their not so cute and very definitely not so cuddly Panda Update but they’ve just gone one (if not two times definitely worse) better by now not only hitting us with “Panda The Sequel 2.2 – The Search Engine fights back” followed by the latest in their PR Updates which to be honest if you follow these things carefully is nothing short of a joke.

Sadly this one’s “a joke with a jag” (as we say over here in Northern Ireland) as the joke has left a bitter and sour taste in the mouths of web developers the world over.

To be honest it’s a bit early for a full report and understanding of what is going on and certainly as far as the PR Update is concerned as that is still ongoing according to Industry types the world over but “Panda the Sequel” or “Return of the SEO’s” (how many Star Wars gags can a guy crack – answer loads if needed?) is going to cause almost as much grief as the original one caused if initial feedback is concerned.

Watch this space and we’ll get some feedback live as soon as we can.

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