Google, Google, Google. It’s been with us now for 12 years and has become the essential tool for navigating the eye watering amount of content that has been created by commercial sites, blogs, article directories and others.

SEO

For those who have taken full advantage of how SEO with Google works, the benefits have been huge. As direct consequence of this, what are known as ‘content farms’ have appeared, created to drive page views from content written by low paid writers.

These content farms, whilst being more than uneasy about being labelled as such, have grown exponentially – with brands such as Examiner.com, Suite 101 and About.com.

Some say that these sites have become a threat to Google, because the quality of writing varies a great deal; low quality, mass produced articles are not what Google’s searchers want.

Blekko, not yet launched, seeks to eliminate this poor quality writing. By using something called slashtags – a personalised raft of mini-indexes – authoritative or favourite sites can be kept track of. Someone who likes, say, model train sets, can find blogs and content on the subject of a higher quality. By looking over slashtags from other trusted users, more authoritative blogs can be found.

In terms of SEO, it might point to a time when SEO agencies need to direct their efforts towards creating truly high quality content – something they should be doing already. Here at High Position we understand the importance of creating content that meets the demands of search engine compliancy while being genuinely informative or entertaining. For content creation and SEO that achieves true balance, get in touch today.

The alliance between Google’s only competitors Yahoo and Bing seems to be moving full steam ahead. It was announced earlier that Yahoo was beginning to test Bing-powered results and senior staff at the company are saying that up to 25% of the results returned from Yahoo searches are powered by Microsoft’s search engine.

Users might not always see a ‘powered by Bing’ badge on their results straight away, but this will be the eventual layout when the full rollout happens in September or October.

SEO

As it stands right now, you have a one in four chance of seeing a Bing-powered search result in natural search, but you won’t necessarily know it. What this will mean for SEO professionals working on optimising for Yahoo and Bing is debateable, but it could certainly lead to saving a lot of time as Bing’s results will be Yahoo’s results.

This is certainly an interesting time in the search engine landscape and it will be interesting to see how this impacts the SEO industry.

The search engine giant Google has always claimed that staff members working on Google product pages have no added advantage in ethical SEO than the any other optimisation professional, and therefore cannot monopolise search results. The news that Adwords help pages were banned by Google for inadvertent cloaking is therefore incontrovertible, and somewhat hilarious evidence that this may in fact be true.

SEO Guidelines

Google’s ethical SEO guidelines are put in place to ensure that search results are demonstrative of what is actually on the landing page to give  user-relevant results. Sites that use cloaking therefore are going against these guidelines, which will result in them being banned from Google’s listings. When Adwords help pages mysteriously dropped from search results it transpired that whoever was working on the product pages in question had violated the rules by hiding sections of page content.

A spokesperson at Google confirmed that Adwords support pages were indeed showing the user different content to the information being offered to the crawler, and stated that this was an inadvertent mistake rather than blatant breach of the guidelines. The mistake, however, does back up the fact that those optimising Google product pages don’t have any specialist knowledge just because they are working for a company that specialises in search.

Ethical SEO

As soon as the error was noticed, Google withdrew the pages, and have begun an investigation to determine how it happened. This is not the first time Google have violated the guidelines, they were banned for cloaking back in 2005, but is a warning to SEO professionals to be vigilant with internal infrastructure. Failure to ensure cached and non-cached versions of a page match up could result in being banned for unethical SEO practices. Whereas Google could state that it was a genuine error that was immediately dealt with, another company may find that the penalties are more severe, and that problem pages are banned altogether despite ethical SEO being at the core of business practice.

Yahoo! has announced enhancements to its Yahoo! Search assist in the form of real-time search suggestions to queries.

The new suggestion algorithm will provide suggestions which are much nearer to real-time than ever before, something that’s especially relevant when top news stories or sporting events are unfolding, for example.

Yahoo! drew on the World Cup in its blog to outline how the new algorithm would assist a user wanting to know which match would be coming next in the tournament.

SEO

It’s an interesting move from Yahoo! and one that may help to push it forwards again in the search engine market. SEO professionals have long since put Yahoo! on a backburner in terms of its importance in search marketing, because it has lost so much of its search market share and has been concentrating efforts elsewhere, seemingly giving up on search.

But this on-the-ball development indicates that in terms of SEO, Yahoo! is not quite yet dead in the water. In a similar vein of focusing on real-time, user-generated content, Yahoo! is also set to reverse the dogma of news selection and deliverance.

The company has developed a new model which will see it tomorrow launch a news blog whose topics will be guided by search queries from web users. This new approach flies in the face of the traditional news dissemination model, whereby editors decide what the masses need to know, and what they don’t.

Named The Upshot, the blog will be produced from analysis of common words and search terms from users of Yahoo!’s online network.

These developments show that while Yahoo! retains none of its former search glory, it is still one to watch.

Yahoo are due to release their new book on the 6th of July. The ‘Yahoo Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing and Creating Content for the Digital World’, which is one of the first guides of its kind, specialising in generating content for the online medium. This book features a list of keyword research tools to use and – surprisingly – includes one from Google as well as WordTracker and Keyword Discovery.

The biggest surprise – and possibly tearjerker, depending on your perspective – is that Yahoo used to own Overture, which was a much-beloved keyword research tool. Everyone seemed to use it and it was a dark day in the world of SEO when Yahoo discontinued it two years ago, perhaps pre-empting their decision to move away from search and focus on other things.

Search Engine Optimisation

Everyone in the search engine optimisation world knows the importance of solid keyword research and the right tools are essential for this. Whether you use Google’s, WordTracker or something else, the message from the Style Guide is clear: don’t come to Yahoo if you’ve got keyword research to do.

The biggest surprise here, however, isn’t that Google is included in Yahoo’s list, it’s that none of the tools from Microsoft’s adLabs are considering Yahoo and Bing are sharing algorithms now. Read into that what you will.

As well as good SEO, there is negative SEO; blackhat techniques employed by a competitor to attempt to devalue your sites rankings in search engines, and it’s something to be on guard against.

Duplicate content

It’s important to check regularly that none of the content on your website is duplicated elsewhere on the web, and you should monitor this intermittently as it will affect SEO. Black hat techniques have included people duplicating a competitor’s web content when they change it, and submitting a site map of the duplicated page to search engines so that this duplicate content is indexed first and the original content is ignored as duplicate. It’s hard to prove this one, so watch out for it. Always make sure your content is unique, both from external pages and other internal pages on your own site.

URL manipulation

If a page on a website has dynamic URLs whilst keeping the same content, for example http://website.co.uk/index.php?page=23 and http://website.co.uk/index.php?page=24 both displaying the same page, then the site is vulnerable to negative SEO. A competitor could create hundreds of links posted all over the web in link farms, forums, directories and blogs with slightly different URLs that all point to exactly the same content, and search engines will mark this site out as using black hat techniques, and penalise it, affecting rankings.

Set up Google alerts

This is a great thing to do, both in terms of monitoring exactly what is being said online about your brand anywhere on the web; forums, articles, blogs etc, and also to detect hacking. Many spammers try to hack high-ranking sites to place links to their sites on yours. The most common types of spammers are those pedalling porn, pharmaceutical drugs and Viagra, so setting up alerts for this on your site is a valuable exercise.

Spotting damaging content in media such as forums can help you police brand protection, and most forum hosts will happily remove malicious, damaging content for your site if you approach them and explain the situation.

Google bowling

Google bowling was once a common practice, but is now, according to Matt Cutts, generally very difficult to do, and a waste of someone’s time and money.

It worked by causing search engines to believe the targeted site is overly spammy by adding numerous of links from ‘bad’ pages, such as link farms and auto-generated spammy pages. If thousands of links to the site are generated in rapid succession in only the space of a few days, a spam alert could be triggered, affecting the rankings of the targeted site.

Google is quite adept at detecting this process now, and would recognise the different patterns of link building conducted by spammers compared with your own, and would devalue these links rather than your site. However, if you have been involved in spammy link-building yourself for the same site, you could be penalised, so avoid this at all costs.

The importance of Facebook for internet marketing purposes has never been more prominent, but now it seems the social networking site has its fingers in even more pies as an American divorce-lawyer group claims Facebook, and to a lesser extent other social media, is now cited in 81 per cent of its cases.

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers told the Associated Press that over the past five yearsm Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, as well as YouTube and LinkedIn, have all increasingly made appearances in cases.

It seems that over-sharing of information and sloppy attention to covering up devious behaviour are the main causes for the site being used as evidence in bitter divorce battles, not just simply the improved medium for instigating affairs and extra-marital behaviour Facebook presents.

For example, one husband who was vehemently denying all knowledge and existence of an anger management issue had warned visitors to his page, in the biography box beneath his profile picture, that he would ‘kick your ass into submission’ should anyone be foolish enough to ‘get in my face’. Certainly a contradictory set of statements.

Another man, who was seeking primary custody of his children, declared a single and childless status in his profile on match.com.

SEO

While all of the examples cited are humorous to say the least, they important role social media sites are playing in everyday life, and this means for businesses too.

It’s not only the reputations of divorcees that come into play when social media is involved. Company and brand reputation rides on proper social media management

Businesses must now add social media plug-ins to their sites, and the amount of ‘likes’ a company’s page has pushes it higher up in search relevance, acting very much like organic SEO.

With Facebook.com now more visited than Google.com, companies are realising that internet marketing is no longer only about Google. It’s been common knowledge for some time in the industry that Google is investing in ways to keep its web dominance, and speculation is rife that the search giant will soon be launching a new social media platform of its own, possibly named ‘Google Me’.

All of this points to the fact that for any internet marketer, a multi-faceted, dynamic approach must be implemented, incorporating social media and on-site strategies like conversion rate optimisation as well as traditional SEO measures.

Facebook have been using an open graph API since April of this year, enabling semantic search with the Facebook ‘like’ button. When searching for a product, business or venue using the social networking platform, a user will be presented with a list of results that their friends like, including non FB sites. This list of trusted results is understandably growing in popularity, and as such, SEO strategies tailored to search via Facebook have the potential to boost ranking considerably.

Facebook SEO

Optimising a website so it appears in Facebook listings can easily be done by adding the social media platform’s ’social plug-ins’ enabling bookers to like the site; and because more and more people are using FB to search, it is an SEO opportunity that not many businesses, bands, manufacturers and entertainment venues will want to miss. Social media has taken over from pornography as the number one reason to go online, which is one very good reason to start optimising for FB. Ranking factors for the semantic search include the usual SEO favourites, such as having the keyword in the title, or name and in the Wall post content. Having a high number of fans or friends is also a factor; the two combining to create what should be genuine, relevant and therefore authoritative listings. Organic SEO in other words, with the ‘like’ button essentially acting as a link.

Internet Marketing

Using FB as part of an internet marketing strategy makes perfect sense, but the idea that it may one day take over from Google is being dismissed as unrealistic. Although in excess of 50,000 websites chose to add FB’s social media plug-ins to their site within just the first week of the launch, this only boosted search via the platform to 2.7% in the US. With Google still controlling in the region of 63% of the American search market, it is clear that revenue for internet marketing will go to the most popular search platform, but optimising for FB will be part of an overall strategy.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is having a bit of an overhaul right now. Not only are they holding celebrity-laden parties to announce their changes to the entertainment-based results that they’ve made, they are also including plenty of other useful changes including one which could become very important to searchers – the inclusion of deep content in their search.

The search engine is also unveiling a revamped look and feel, dropping the tabs directly below the search box and also a fairly substantial overhaul of the way the results are presented for autos, health and financial searches.

Search Engine Optimisation

It’s the deep content results that could have real implications for the search engine optimisation community. Bing is now indexing complete articles – some of which are thousands of words long – and posting them in search results. This is definitely something that could be leveraged for results in a Bing-orientated SEO campaign and is also a useful feature for users too.

There is always the concern that this could confuse matters a little if the algorithm isn’t quite selective enough and all your results are articles which aren’t really that relevant to what it is you’re searching for. Only time will tell if that’s what happens.

Ultimately, this latest update and the new features that Bing is rolling out is a bold move at separating it from the ubiquitous Google and cementing it as a ‘Decision Engine’ rather than a ‘search engine’ per se, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important for the search engine optimisation community to know what’s going on with it and how to help clients to get the best possible results.

As the UK tentatively edges its way out of recession many companies are looking to increase their budgets for SEO and paid search. Advertising is key when it comes to selling your product or services and in a bid to increase business flow, the UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report, published by Econsultancy, claims that 60% of companies plan to increase spending on SEO, that’s a jump of 15% over last year, and a further 52% of companies saying they intend to increase PPC budgets, a rise of 7% over last year.

This report is highly credible as it comes from the UKs largest annual survey of search marketers and is well respected within the industry. Econsultancy’s UK Research Director Linus Gregoriadis says that the industry of SEO as a whole has been pretty resilient during the recession. This is due to the knowledge that most shopping and business searches are now done online, leading to the recognition that SEO and PPC continuously deliver return on investment.

Social media marketing is also fast becoming a top SEO tool and 65% of companies say they plan to use this avenue to increase traffic and links to their website. In fact, 15% of these companies plan to increase social media budgets by 100%.

This is great news for High Position – one of Europe’s top SEO companies. Having already done great things for companies such as Budget Car Hire, Hoseasons, Inchcape and Sony the rise in SEO spending comes as welcome news and we look forward to applying our SEO expertise to ever more companies looking to increase their search profile.