Impact of SEO on Google’s New Privacy

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Recently Google announced they’re would be making Search more secure. Secure in lament sense means rather than searching google’s engine from http://www.google.com, you may be searching Google via https://www.google.com (note the ‘s’ in http).

What does this mean and how does it impact businesses and their Search strategies, especially SEO. Google will begin redirecting users who are signed into their Google account (GooglePlus, Gmail, Calendar, Android, etc.) to their secure website vs. its open public website when a potential customer or users performs a search

Google has become more and more customized and personalized in their search results, thus now attempting to better protect its users (google account holders). This at first seems good, but for marketers, especially SEO experts and search engine marketers, its the start of a few problems. The first that we’ve come across is now that users who search under the secured google domain (as they’re signed into their google account), the analytics (ex. Google Analytics) will not show you the search terms and keywords that were used by the users / customers who arrived at your online business via the secured google search.

This creates a few problems for marketers and agencies such as broken transparency of the impact of their search engine optimization strategies, and the performance of the optimization. In other words, if an SEO expert optimizes an online business on specific action-oriented ‘buy’ keywords, and attains a stronger SERP (search engine result) position as a result, does the keyword a) draw the traffic to the site, and b) did it convert the visitor to a lead or customer. Under the new encrypted (secure) Google URL, the web analyst and conversion optimizer won’t have the full view on this any more.

According to Google:

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Tips: SEO Mistakes 101

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An SEO 101 topic, many times inexperienced digital marketers or webmasters  makes simple SEO mistakes that shatters an SEO campaign. Below are a few reasons why an SEO Campaign isn’t effective or note working, and how to fix it: Read more

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Tips: Bad Link Development

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Bad Link DevelopmentIt is true that all Link building or link development efforts will not contribute to great rankings. Too many spammy links can even get you listed out of the SERP’s (search engine result pages). The following helps the beginner understand link development tactics better off avoiding. Unless you’ve got an art for blackhat link development, see our other tips on building quality links.What is considered as a bad link? Read more
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Tip: Link Building in Post Panda World

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Pay more attention towards relevant content, traffic sources and conversions rather than emphasizing on Page rank. Old link building methods are just not that effective in this Post Panda world (what is Google’s Panda update) and you need to switch to these new link building strategies that will give your website a boost, or learn more why the Panda update caused websites to drop in rankings.

Guest Blogging: It’s a great way to obtain quality links and to extend your network. It benefits both the Guest and the Host as the Host receives quality fresh content and the Guest receives the backlink. Read more

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Tip: Link Building

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Link Building counts for the credibility, and contributes to reputation, of your website. The more credible and reputable, the higher search engine rankings you’ll receive, and aims to accomplish the goal of attaining search engine positioning within the ‘Golden Triangle’ (top 3-4 search results) that drive more than 80% of click thrus from Search. Here are some tips and trends that are likely to impact your Link Building efforts:

  • Start using mix-match technique for link popularity building and that makes your site reliable.
  • Focus more on how to secure the links that help you in long run.
  • Social media integration – (ex. YouTube, Google +1 and other social media where conversations and linkage is being published on your brand), and keyword in tweets including a link back to your website and this when indexed in Google helps in your link building efforts.
  • Forum participation
  • Industry authority sites and organizations (ex. better business bureau, and others)
  • Like your reputation, link reputation is built on quality, not quantity.

There are other link building techniques and tactics we employ in client projects and within our mentoring and coaching services. Inquire within to see which tactic direction would work best for your website.

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Tips: SEO & Social Bookmarking

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Social Bookmarking websites attract a considerable amount of user attention and are still a significant part of any organic SEO campaign. Most of these websites use No Follow attribute so as not to pass link juice to websites that they don’t trust. But here search engines are not the entire limit of the world, there are users also who are looking for information on the web and you can fetch direct traffic to your website through these no follow links even if you don’t get Google traffic.

Social Bookmarking websites attract a considerable amount of user attention and are still a significant part of any organic SEO campaign. Most of these websites use No Follow attribute so as not to pass link juice to websites that they don’t trust. But here search engines are not the entire limit of the world, there are users also who are looking for information on the web and you can fetch direct traffic to your website through these no follow links even if you don’t get Google traffic.

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Tips: Google’s Panda Update

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Recently Google announced a major algorithm update on how it ranks websites and this affected almost 12 % of the search engine results. “Panda Update” named after one of the Google’s engineer was designed to get rid of low quality websites-websites with copied and low-value content that is of no use for the readers.

At the same time, it aimed at providing better search engine rankings to the websites with original and informative content. With this update, it is now required to tweak your SEO strategies a bit in order to rank high is SERP.

Focus on creating high-quality content for your website and you can use the Panda as an advantage.

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Tips: SEO & Internal Link Value

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Internal links of a website is one of the most neglected aspects of SEO in many cases. Although inbound links do not carry same value as by external links, they are important to help search engines understand site architecture, internal flow of PR, indexing of more pages and leverage the use of anchor text within a website.

It also improves user experience and leads to more page views on the website. Websites such as Wikipedia are using hundreds of internal links to their own advantage. Also, search engines do not differentiate between internal absolute or relative links.

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SEO Octagan: Google vs Content Farms

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There has been a lot of buzz this past week about Google’s latest algorithm update, labeled the “Farmer Update,” performed in February 2011. This algorithm update from Google aims to take on content farms; spammy, low-quality content sites that have been crowding their search results.

“Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible…This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on…”

The Google crackdown affected 11.8% of search queries.

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Google Page Rank – Schooling the Scholars

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A common tactic of increasing page rank to improve organic search results is to align your site with authority sites in your business vertical, industry or just plain gorilla PR sites. This is all worked into Google’s algorithm to help determine a sites reputation, thus position in Google’s SERPs (Search engine result pages). One recent event however to strategically manipulate this comes from Overstock.com. I tip my hat for the effort.

Overstock.com’s tactically brilliant yet ethically deficient plan to game Google’s search engine has blown up in its face.

The popular online discounter had struck deals with several universities, offering students and faculty 10% off in certain categories in exchange for a product-based link from campus websites. Google has been known to rank sites higher if they are linked to from the authoritative vantage point of .edu domains.

Smart move by Overstock? Not so fast. Google’s been coming under fire for the sneaky ways that content farms and some e-tailers are trying to rank higher on popular search queries. One can argue whether Overstock’s ploy was white-hat or black-hat, but the correct answer is that the closeouts specialist was donning a gray hat here.

Google doesn’t like to be embarrassed this way, so it’s penalizing Overstock’s organic results by backing out the PageRank gains resulting from its .edu campus invasion.

As Rick at Fool.com elegantly put it, ‘I guess the scholar just got schooled”.

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