News & Trends – Page 15 – McCord Web Services The Web Authority

February 13, 2014February 8, 2014

Building Links Using Article Directories is a Dead Strategy

Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.

Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms mainly based in India. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.

Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q

It is important to understand that this approach was highly useful and beneficial to websites one and definitely two years ago. But now using this tactic may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.

With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.

A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords.

There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.

September 12, 2013September 19, 2013

Structured Data Gives Google What It Wants

Google recommends that website owners start to provide special XML code snippets to assist it in sorting and categorizing their website data. This is called structured data and is usually done in a format known as microdata.

This new format is not hard to understand nor is it hard to implement, but it is important to know that Google considers its use important and is making it fairly simple for website owners to add these code snippets.

First, not all data on your website can be marked up as structured data. For now Google is only using code for products, local businesses – including address, phone, and other information, articles, software applications, reviews, and movies. Each year Google has added new categories as they expand the types of data that they are integrating into search results.

Here’s an example of coding for a review:

<div><img src=”http://www.mccordweb.com/images/five-stars.gif” alt=”Five Stars” height=”20″ width=”83″ align=”absmiddle” border=”0″ /> Overall Rating 5 out of 5 "Very Professional and helpful. Quality of the writing was excellent."

Neil Primack, Owner, Florida Health Insurance Broker Jupiter, Florida</div>

Notice that the review has special tags that denote rating, vcard, title, name, locality, and region? This is all a part of sorting the data for Google in their approved and specific format. Google makes it pretty easy for website owners to start using structured data and has even provided some great online tools.

Here are a few resources for you to consider:

Google’s blog post on the topic:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-started-with-structured-data.html

Structured Data Markup Helper:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/

Embedding Structured Data for Gmail:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/embedding-schemas-in-emails

Google Webmaster Tools Data Highligher:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

Structured Data Bread Crumb Snippet:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

July 8, 2013July 5, 2013

Google Introduces Consumer Surveys

Google has just introduced a new program to track consumer satisfaction with your website. You can read the full announcement on the Google Blog. Personally I feel that this is another Carrot and Stick application from Google. The carrot will be you get free code and information about how your own visitors feel about your website. Google gets information that it may use to rank your website organically.

To me it sure looks similar to Friend Connect which had been retired. The more information that we willingly give to Google about our own website visitors the more Google knows about our traffic. It would be very naive to think that Google will not use this information we give it using Consumer Surveys for anything but its own use to know the mind of our own site visitors.

Does it cost money? Here’s the pricing:

“The default questions are free and you can customize questions for just $0.01 per response or $5.00 for 500 responses.”

Do I recommend that website owners use Consumer Surveys? Not at this time until we know more about what Google is doing with the information.

July 5, 2013June 29, 2013

Google – First the Carrot and Then the Stick!

If you’ve been in the web industry as long as I have (since 2001) you would have seen Google’s purchase of Urchin Statistics which became Google Analytics. It used to be that a website owner very carefully guarded their website activity; what generated clicks, page paths, traffic, and trends. When Google offered Google Analytics to the world for free, nearly every website owner flocked to implement this free application that previously was only available to those willing to pay $500 a month for a subscription. Voilà the carrot!

Google gave us the carrot with Google Analytics. The Stick?

Little did we know that sharing our website statistical information would in the long run impact our own organic placement on Google.com. In this age of Snowden and the NSA and the harvesting of big data, one would have to be very naive to think that Google, having access to all this previously closely guarded information would not include some of this data into their algorithm to determine organic placement. Personally based on patent disclosures over the years, I could see that Google was patenting using click through rates to help to determine organic page rank. With over 200 factors impacting organic placement and Google having data from Google Analytics available for their own purposes, it only makes sense that by taking the carrot we’ve allowed Google to use the stick on us in regards to our own website placement.

By potentially using our own data as well as click through data from Google.com activity to rack and stack websites is not that far of a reach in today’s world. Although I don’t believe that our own data is being used maliciously to hurt our own placement by Google, it makes sense that Google is using aggregate data by industry and possibly even our own website statistics as just one piece of their own racking and stacking algorithm.

It all started with Google Analytics, when we as webmasters shared this private information with Google. Little did we know years later that this same information might be used to lower or raise our own rankings. I do not have definitive information that Google is using Google Analytics data in their algorithm, but it would make sense for them to use aggregate data to develop benchmarks by industry so as to evaluate the importance of websites and rankings within that industry; just my thoughts for today.