Biznology

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Matt Cutts and the rest of the Google webspam fighting team decided they’d give everyone in the industry a heart attack last week with Matt Cutts latest video. In this longer than average video, Cutts discusses some of things that Penguin 2.0 will be focusing on, which has caused SEOs, online marketers, webmasters, and many more to FREAK OUT. This happens with any release from Google or Matt Cutts, but this roar is particularly loud due to the encompassing nature of the Penguin updates, but here is why everyone should just take a deep breath and stop stressing about Penguin 2.0. Read the remainder of this entry »

Panda and Penguin

Last month, I wrote about how SEO is not just the domain of consultants. Rather, every person in digital media production needs to know how their work affects search effectiveness. If SEO is seen not as a well-kept secret by the few SEO consultants, but as a vital skill for everyone, organizations will be much more effective in producing findable content for the target audience, especially in the age of Google Panda. Thing is, if you rely on Google to discover your content and give it the value it deserves, you will often be disappointed. You also need to build a network of links into your content, which tell Google about the relative importance of the content in the context of other related content. In the age of Google Penguin, this can’t be an artificial process performed by SEO consultants. It needs to be built into the publishing process. This means coordinating your publishing efforts with other internal content strategists, with paid search leads, media relations managers, and especially community managers. Giving these folks the SEO skills they need to help promote your content is just as important as building the content right in the first place.

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Some of you might have a high opinion of SEO people. (C’mon, aren’t there a couple of you out there?) If you have that high opinion, then don’t read this story, because there a few people who are less than ethical out there. Google had an announcement this week that has been a long time coming–you can now disavow links to your site. Some of you might be asking, why would you ever want to do that? Links to your site are good, right? Well, mostly, yes. But if you had a few ethical lapses, you might want to erase those problems. Read the remainder of this entry »

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Last month, I talked about The Seven C’s of Content Quality, as a way of helping you develop higher quality content. Why is this important? Because the Google Panda algorithm rewards quality content above any other on-page signal, and the Seven C’s serve as a proxy for Panda’s content quality algorithm. Still, on-page factors are less important to Google ranking than links and social signals—how Google determines the relative importance and context of the page to other experiences on the web. That’s what we’ll cover today. Read the remainder of this entry »

I was sitting in a hotel lobby preparing to present as part of a panel at OMMA Global in San Francisco when a co-panelist said something that shocked me. “People ask why I got out of SEO to focus on paid media. I answer that Google wrecked SEO, so all that’s left is paid.” The context: we were talking about all the changes Google has made recently to make SEO more difficult–some might say impossible. As the global search strategist for IBM and a co-author of a book on writing for search engines, I am well aware of the difficult times ahead for SEOs. But it shocked me that smart people like my co-panelist would abandon the field altogether because he was sure that Google is killing SEO and that trend will only get worse over time. Read the remainder of this entry »