First this though, as far as SEO goes, the Google Plus profile pages no longer have PR and Google Plus has turned off the dofollow links from their comments (just like it did on YouTube). Why Google exactly changed it’s policy, we’ll never know. My guess is that Google Plus was using this very dodgy tactic to attract webmasters to help it compete with Facebook. Like I said, very dodgy way of trying to get your social solution used.

Google Plus (G+) is a waste of SEO-time - heading for the deadpool ?

What still helps is getting G+ ‘likes’ because Google is using these into their search engine query results. Or at least they want to use it because there is little to no adoption of G+ buttons on sites and if used they show little to no interaction movement with internet users. And that lack of human interest in Google Plus and that G+ button is a MAJOR problem for Google.

Sure, certain researchers (like U.S. analyst Paul Allen) say that Google’s social networking site will have more than 400 million registered users by the end of 2012. But surely, Allen is confusing ‘users’ with ‘members’. A ‘user’ would indicate that he or she actually ‘uses’ the services. Hardly anyone is actually ‘using’ it as such, reducing every profile to just a membership and that’s it.

Continue reading “Google Plus (G+) is a waste of SEO-time – heading for the deadpool ?” »

Does a Google sandbox exist for new sites? If your SEO-guy is an amateur yes

Over the past 10 years, I have have talked to many SEO companies, checking out if they had any new insights. Most of the times, if not all always, they talked about the Google Sandbox when it came to launching new websites. That sandbox would make it impossible for your site to be indexed quickly.

Weird, since I started with my first site in 1997 I have never had any problem getting sites indexed, and usually within 24 hours after launching them.

Don’t get me wrong, that sandbox does exist, but it doesn’t have to. Indeed, new sites, no matter how well optimized, will not rank high on Google (it’s a different story on MSN and Yahoo where they are rather quickly indexed) and will often not get indexed for months. Some SEO-people claim that Google can keep your site in limbo for 6 to 8 months. If you planned a quick-win online, that isn’t particularly encouraging, is it?

So why did this never happen to me? If you take Search Engine Optimization seriously, you will always have pretty ‘good ranking link domains’ (not link farms mind you) at hand, which you own and curate. With good ranking link domains I mean proper well visited, indexed websites that act as a gateway for Google to check out new links and domains via proper syntaxes and content. Problem is, lots of SEO-people are either juniors working for a bigger company (and often only capable of telling you what the books thought them) or freelance people with little or no own properties online from where they can ‘push’ an indexation.

The result of this : you get forced to start buying links in order to push Google to index your website. In other words, you’re already doing something wrong (in the eyes of Google) before you started. Of course, don’t believe Google is God, their ‘don’t do evil’ mantra vanished from their websites a long time ago. And if you think you should screw them by buying links, by all means do. But, that should not be your decision to make if your SEO partner has done a proper job.

My advice : check out a new SEO-partner, ask him/her for sites he/she (or her company) own and run themselves. Are these sites well indexed, well visited ? If your SEO-partner-to-be has no own websites that can give you a nice introduction link, you should start wondering how he/she will get your website up and running in no time without buying links. You should also start wondering if that SEO-partner is capable of helping you…at all.

Spam trackback in WordPress

On WordPress you have a box right below the text editor titled ‘Send Trackbacks’. If users put the URL of your post there and publish or update their posts, your blog will get a trackback notification and probably put a link on your comments section to that blog. Nice? Not really.

Because if you have a blog or website that runs on WordPress, you probably, or most certainly have noticed that you have to endure lots of trackback powered comment spam. The modus operandi is simple: a blog links to a post on your blog by adding a link under a certain (set of) keyword(s). This creates a trackback in the comment field of your website. However, when you actually go back to the website that powered the trackback you’ll see that it holds nothing but unrelated content and perhaps also your link (but more often than not this link has by then been removed).

The purpose of these trackbacks is simple, the scrupulous website wants to steal some of your page rank / link juice.

Continue reading “Why you should disable trackbacks on your WordPress blog” »

Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?

Many SEO gurus have wondered whether social media links are taken into account by search engines AND if they can increase your search rankings. Well, too bad if you never bothered too much about social media when being an SEO professional, because the Googles and Bings of this world do take them into account and they can increase your search rankings.

That’s a B.I.G. B.O.M.B. drop, for many.

On the whole, search engines such as Google and Bing consider social media links to be very interesting indications as to whether a link should be given some extra (social) value or not (aka ‘link juice’). That they are being considered is theoretically not really logical – I agree – since most, if not all, social media links are ‘not followed’. However, from a semantic side it would make no sense taking that specific ‘rel’ into consideration when evaluating links which are (re)tweeted or shared.

Especially in the case of Twitter, you can expect its firehoze to affect real time (news) search results. It’s still unclear how Google does this since they no longer have a deal with Twitter to tap into their tweet firehoze, but the fact is that they do use Twitter in their search rankings. As far as sharing links on Facebook and retweeting links on Twitter, there will be link juice passed on if there is a lot of sharing and retweeting happening. And that is a massive change for many in the SEO industry who up until now contented themselves with onsite and off site SEO/linkbuilding.

Continue reading “Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?” »

Here’s a question which was asked to Google’s Matt Cutts in August of last year. It’s an SEO question – or rather an SEO suggestion – that I have heard a lot in the past years but which basically makes no sense practically if Google knows what it does, and Google often does.

“If we add more than one link from page A to page B, do we pass more PageRank juice and additional anchor text info? (Also can you tell us if links from A to A count?)”

Matt Cutts was a bit vague in his answer on the first part (on the second as well actually) as you can see in the video below. Notice also the words ‘original formulation‘, ‘original pagerank‘ which are used in his explanation.

Continue reading “Do multiple links from page A to page B increase pagerank ?” »

Several major UK entertainment industry groups have accused Google and Bing of directing searchers to illegal content. The groups involved include the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the Premier League, the Publishers Association and a TV/film trade group called the Pact.

And they have a very valid point. On September 26, 2011 for instance, the BPI made test searches on Google for the name of each of the UK’s top 20 singles and albums, followed in each case by the word ‘mp3′. On average, 16 of the first 20 Google results for charts singles and 15 of the top 20 search results for chart albums linked to known illegal sites. You could say it’s a matter of smart SEO from the side of the illegal websites, but that’s not the complete story as Google still offers results for combinations that can only lead to illegal sites (Apple still doesn’t use ‘torrent’ as far as we know, nor does Amazon).

Continue reading “Google and Bing caught in the act of directing users to illegal content in 80% of the cases” »

Things are not looking splendid for Google+. The network is, despite the (forced) growth of users, bleeding in activity.  Except for a few hardcore anti-facebookers, nobody is actively using the service, and you can hardly build a community on that lot… Add to that a continuous outage problem: the very unresponsive share field when you actually try to share links, trouble finding the link’s meta data, disappearing profiles, etc…

You would almost believe that Google announced its G+ importance on SEO-level just to lure the SEO-people worldwide into posting on the network. Not that it would have any effect if nobody is actually using the service after all.

In a desperate attempt to get the service known (that doesn’t mean being used, mind you!) Google has now used David Beckham in an advert to promote Google+. Watch the advert above… find the hotspot!

We aren’t convinced this will be the trigger for G+ to gain momentum amidst its silent user database though.