Tag: Google

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Matt Cutts from Google on Link Building

In a recent interview done for an article by Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting, Matt Cutts, the lead Web Spam engineer for Google,  tells the industry that “link building is not illegal.”

However, in the same interview Matt goes on to state that there is a link building tactic that Google now considers web spam.

Links from press releases that are really written just to build links are no longer valued by Google. However if links that are generated by a news resource  reading the press release and then contacting the business to write an article which then linking back to the businesses website would be a great way to build links. So press releases are not dead persay, just now more what they were intended to be; a way to let the press know of something newsworthy. Not a link building strategy unto itself as SEO’s have previously used them as.

Matt and Eric agree that one of the best Google-approved ways to build links is by having great sharable content that is followed, talked about, and cited on social media sites like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook. But, they both agree that just vomiting out links to your content on social media is not what they intend; rather audience engagement that  is built around content which is then shared throughout followers networks.

If you are looking for a new content strategy for your blog and social media, we invite you to visit our website to find out more about how we can help you.

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What Does Google Say About Page Load Speed?

Just how fast your website pages load may be just one of the newest factors in regards to where Google ranks you in the search results. In fact Google considers PageSpeed so important that it has released a new tool for you to test your mobile and desktop versions so as to give you concrete areas of improvement.

Here’s the tool’s URL: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Google considers page load time or PageSpeed (as Google has coined the term) an important factor in supplying relevant content in its search results. Since 2010 Google has been clocking websites but just recently really started pushing sites to improve PageSpeed.

Here’s a quote from 2010 as posted on the Google Webmaster Blog letting you know that Google has felt PageSpeed is an important issue for over three years:

“You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.” Full article.

Now experts say that you’ll lose about 7% of your potential site traffic for every second it takes your page to load. Factor into that, that more users have faster Internet connections and a lower tolerance for a slow loading page and you start to see that changing technology and demographics are all a part of why Google is now laser- focused on PageSpeed.

In fact, in 2013 Google even has created a special team called “Make the Web Fast” headed by engineer Ilya Grigorik. You can watch his Google viewpoint in this interesting top level video. As Ilya notes, the speed problem for most website lies in un-optimized images. Ilya states that a one second threshold is the new web standard. So pushing the speed envelop to serve pages in under one second is their new goal.

In a recent case study done by Google and Bing slow loading pages 2,000 millisecond delays cause a 4.3% drop in traffic and lower customer satisfaction. You can see more details on this study in the video noted above.

Whatever Google decides is crucial for their search engine’s performance, you as a site owner should make important for your site and webmaster in order to place now on Google.com.

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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.

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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?
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.