There is so much going on in the industry, how do you know where to begin reading the news and know exactly what to take on board? Here are some of the news from this past month which I found interesting and what I wanted to share with you. (This does not mean the posts I didn’t mention were not interesting – I just can’t write them all down). I am planning on writing a summary of some of the most interesting news in search monthly, so if there is something I have missed, please let me know.

Penguin 2.0

I particularly liked RustyBrick’s post earlier this month about Penguin.  In the post it featured one webmaster who thought he had been hit by Penguin 2.0, as he had a sudden drop in traffic and therefore he wrote to Google.  Google responded to the webmaster and they said it was just normal fluctuations even though it was not usual for the webmaster to see these changes in traffic.

Summary: Google are as clear as mud about their updates.

Continue reading

We only just had the Penguin 2.0 update at the end of May and then we have been hit by another update from our friends at Google in June.  For sites that are in .com.au, it may be hard to see whether the Penguin 2.0 had an impact on their site or if it was the latter update considering the fact the updates do not always impact non .com domains straight away.

There was a great post on MozCon about the June 25^th update and which queries and sites were affected.   I suggest for those interested to know about exactly how their client may be affected by this last update, please read.  I thought it was an interesting post, but it also made me start questioning the fact that we all know that there are over 200 updates from Google a year and they announce just a handful of them, so why does everyone always go crazy when these announcements are made? Does Google think we are just sitting around waiting for these updates to then change our SEO strategy?

Continue reading

In my last post I talked about how to React to Penguin 2.0, keep calm and don’t chase the algorithm. I mentioned Search Engine Journal’s post about how to recover from an unnatural link penalty.  I will now explain in more detail how to do this.

Please note that an unnatural link penalty is different to Penguin and Panda, it is not indication that you have been affected by Panda.  Marie Haynes goes into detail about this on SEOmoz blog.

In short, Penguin was released on April 24, 2012 and was designed to fight webspam which involved keyword stuffing and buying links.. Panda was released in February 2011 (worldwide April 2011)  and then on September 18, 2012, a Penda refresh was rolled out. It targeted sites with duplicate and thin content and aimed to lower the rank of these lower quality sites. The change affected rankings of almost 12% of search results.

Continue reading

Penguin 2.0 was rolled out on Wednesday US time, meaning it affected UK Wednesday evening and Australia/Asia Thursday morning. How many of your clients have been affected or have been asking about Penguin 2.0?  I wanted to share with you some of the best posts I have found on Penguin 2.0 and how you should react to this latest algorithm update.

Continue reading

This was a great session by Jim Boykin, the founder of Internet Marketing Ninjas.   Jim started off by getting to the point.  He said a lot people feel that they did not wrong.  People thought that their sites were doing well, they were ranking from a few paid links and they thought they were safe and they were then banned.

How do you know if you have been hit by Panda?  One clear sign is that traffic to your site has decreased.  Some people are just waiting it out, hoping they will soon get their traffic without changing their sites.  But you need to act if you want to see your online visibility increase.

Continue reading

One of the interesting sessions from SES New York was how to show the value of SEO to the board of directors.  This was in the “SEO in the Boardroom” session, moderated by Simon Heseltine,  For all those in SEO, we have heard too often the question “What is the value of SEO”?, and “Why should I pay for this “free” traffic?

Seth Besmertnik, the CEO of Conductor Inc, was the first to present in this session.

Continue reading

Bill Hunt’s presentation on mining your search keywords at SES NY was very interesting.  I had seen Bill speak at SMX NY and he always shares great examples which allows us to implement his recommendations immediately.  Bill Hunt is the SES Advisory Board and is also President of Back Azimuth Consulting. 

Bill started the presentation by asking the audience:

Why don’t we leverage search and social data?

• Marketing programes are siloed
• Lack of search, Business Intelligence, Sales and Social
• We do not have time
• It seems too complicated and we do not know how to

Continue reading

One of the great content marketing sessions at SES NY featured two great speakers, Laura Lippay from SEO Gadget and Shari Thurlow.

Laura Lippay  – CEO of SEO Gadget US

Laura from the US office of SEOGadget, kicked off the session stating that link building does work, she has always been white hat.  Therefore as Google updated its algorithm (with the many updates), she had to get creative to earn these links.

Link building has changed

People are now all of a sudden losing money off the back of poor link building.  Some may not have known what link building they were doing (maybe their agencies were the ones doing all the black hat),  while others knew full well the link building was short term.

Continue reading

The first Search London day time event took place last month at the Google campus.  This was also the first time we held an event at Google campus.  We had a great turnout and James Carson made a video from the day.

Dixon Jones presented some of the key features of Majestic SEO.