Category Archives: Monthly Updates

February 2014 Update in SEO – Earning Links

This past month, there was a lot content written about link analysis, link removals and link building. In this post I wanted to share with you “Link Earning”, in 2014, companies want to earn links. This was always the case but in the past as you know, people have been naughty and bought links.

Before you can earn links, it is important to analyse your old links. In a post last July, I wrote about How to Recover From an Unnatural Link Penalty. Jon Ball wrote a very interesting post earlier this month on Search Engine Land about back link clean up. As Jon mentioned, only clean up your links if:

1. You have received a manual penalty or an unnatural links warning in Google Webmaster Tools

2. Your site is not ranking high as it used to which may be due to an algorithmic penalty

September Update in SEO – Google Hummingbird and 100% Not Provided

By Jo Turnbull, posted in Monthly Updates 100% Not Provided, Google Hummingbird on October 22, 2013

September was a very busy month, which is why I have been delayed in posting this month’s round up. Google celebrated their 15th birthday with two major changes, it introduced in the last week of September:

1- 100% not provided

2- Hummingbird

What a birthday present it shared with all of us – encrypting search query data, which means rolling out 100% not provided over the next couple of months. The change comes as no surprise as the monopoly of Google has grown from strength to strength. As they see the power of GA as a great free analytics tool take shape, Google want to change the boundaries. This encryption of all searches has come earlier than anticipated but is not really a surprise to the SEO industry who seem to always be severely impacted by the Google updates.

What does this 100% not provided mean for those in SEO? I wrote a detailed explanation on the iProspect blog, here is a summary:

August Update in SEO – Link Building

By Jo Turnbull, posted in Monthly Updates Link Building on August 31, 2013

Despite August being the holiday/vacation time, a lot has happened this month.

For this month’s round up on SEO Jo Blogs, I am going to focus on link building. The post to kick this off is the one by Julie Joyce on Search Engine Watching, giving the Link Building A – Z Guide Definition Terms. If you have questions about link building before you read this, you certainly won’t after.

Guest Posting when done correctly is good for SEO

Grant Draper from VibeTech Media wrote an interesting post on searchenginepeople earlier this month about how to get the benefit of guest posting with Google’s blessing. With the recent algo updates, webmasters may be scared about accepting guest posts. But they should not be if the content is relevant to the site and it has not been written just for the sake of it, with a link back. It is more important to have relevant content rather than getting a link from a high PR page (which used to help sites rank). If you are having guest posts on your site, make sure you set the guidelines, such as the length, the number of links within the body, the rights to the images and ask writers reply to comments.

Webmasters should also be outreaching to those who already writing about their products/services but not linking to them.

July Update in SEO – Monthly New Blasts

By Jo Turnbull, posted in Monthly Updates Guest Blogging, Link Building on July 28, 2013

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.

June 25th Google Update

By Jo Turnbull, posted in Monthly Updates Penguin 2.0 on July 7, 2013

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?