Some of you might have come across my posts on gaming Klout followed by even more shocking Klout case studies. Well today I came across a new service which proves a good point. It goes on to prove how farcical social media “influence” measurement is. Meet Klouchebag.com a brilliant website created by Tom Scott.

Just like myself, looks like Tom was fed up of Klout and the “influence” it wields in misleading the so called social media gurus. Tom states “I was annoyed with the fuss around Klout, the horrible social-game that assigns you a score based on how “influential” you are online. This is the result.”

Klouchebag gives me a good opportunity to do something that I have always wanted, here it is:

Tom dispenses valuable advice at the bottom of Klouchebag.com, he says “concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you’ll soon realise that it doesn’t matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.”

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Google’s Penguin update was rolled out this week. It focuses on several things including, site-wide links that go against Google Webmaster Guidelines, spun content and over optimisation. If you think you have been hit by the latest update then there are a few things that you should consider doing before complaining to Google.

1. It is very likely that you would have recieved an “unnatural links detected” notice. Analyse your back link profile and single out any site-wide links from non-relevant blogs/sites. Here is a simple method that you can utilize to achieve this.

2. If your rankings have dropped it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have been hit by the Penguin update. Google did make a mistake and admitted that it was incorrectly classifying some subdomain/domains as “parked domains”. Matt Cutts from Google recommends filling out this form for those who believe they were targeted by mistake. The form says “if your site was affected by the “Penguin” webspam algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and you don’t think it should have been affected, please give us more details below. It will then as you for the URL of your page, a few examples of keywords that you’d expect it to show for but which instead lists “non-ideal results” and any additional comments.

3. If your back link profile highlights that you have acquired links from non-relevant site, particularly links that are placed site-wide then I recommend removing those links and submitting a reconsideration request. Give as much information as you can in your reconsideration request. It would be very useful to highlight all the links that you have taken down.

If your analytic data indicates that your traffic dropped before 24th of April then it is very likely that your site was hit by the latest Panda update and not Penguin. Panda 3.5 was rolled out on 19th April to target low quality sites, in some ways Panda 3.5 only takes into account content and not your back link profile.

With that said, if your site has low quality pages and you have acquired unnatural links then it is very likely that you have or will be hit by both updates.

Was the Penguin Update successful?

It is too early to to make a judgement because it takes some time before these updates come into full effect. With that said, several individuals have highlighted that the latest updates weren’t that successful. For example if you search for viagra, you will see a lot of spammy and hacked sites. Danny Sullivan‘s research reveals some interesting facts on this. He states that “Google fails to list the official Viagra site in the top results, something that Bing gets right.”

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Over the past few weeks there has been a lot of talk about “unnatural links detected” notices that are being sent to webmasters. If you have done a good job then you would have not seen the notice so here is what it looks like.

Received a notice but no change in my rankings?

The majority of sites which have received the unnatural links detected notice haven’t witnessed any major changes in their rankings, not yet anyway. In a way, it makes sense to notify webmaster beforehand to give them the chance to rectify things before their rankings/traffic drop.

Yesterday in announcement on Webmaster Central Blog, Matt Cutts stated:

In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

In a way Google’s announcement is very timely, it is my personal view that the latest unnatural links detected notice is closely related to the upcoming algorithm update, particularly because Matt Cutts refers to violation of existing quality guidelines.  I should also point out that Matt Cutts also refers to spun content.

What kind of links lead to unnatural links detected notice?

Based on my own observation and backed by data at my disposal I think the main offender is site-wide links, particularly blogrolls. Obviously site-wide links are not the only offenders because if you accumulated a large number of links with the same signature/pattern then it would be very obvious to search engines that they are not editorial links. Furthermore, if you have acquired links through blog networks then rest assured that you will get a notice even if you have got away with it so far.

Google’s notice is very generic, it doesn’t give any information apart from saying that “examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.” Therefore it is up to you to the offending links. Chances are that you either already know what you have been up to and are in the best position to recognize the links straight away or you have inherited a site. Obviously if you have inherited a site then you have to do a bit of digging.

How to find “unnatural links” in your link profile?

If you have inherited a site then there are a few different ways to pinpoint offending links. MajesticSEO has written a really good post on this, using a few different methodologies.

First and foremost, you need to analyse your link profile and there are two things you should look out for.

1. Anchor Text Distribution
2. Site-wide links

Let’s assume that you are optimising www.somebrandshoes.com. It will be very unnatural and highly unlikely for a lot of people to link to your website using “women’s shoes” as an anchor text. If your back link profile indicates that “women’s shoes” makes up a large percentage of your anchor texts then it is highly plausible that the vast majority of those links are built unnaturally.

The most easiest way to find offending links is to use CognitiveSEO. CognitiveSEO’s link classification and site classification features are pretty good for this task because it can help you analyse your link profile very quickly. You can use the link classification data to figure out which links originate from blogs and then drill down to see whether those links are placed in blogroll or not. Furthermore, CognitiveSEO provides rich data on anchor text distribution, see below.

Now that you know your top anchor texts, you need to figure where the vast majorities of these links originate from. Remember, you need to look out for site-wide links, particularly in blogroll sections. Click on Inbound Link Analysis tab and then click on Inbound Link Profiles. This will give an overview of your entire link profile. You will then need to use Inbound Links Filters to lists all the links that are placed in blogrolls, to do this you need to go into Link Positioning and then select Blogroll, see screenshot.

CognitiveSEO will now give you a list of links that are placed in blogrolls. Look at your top anchor texts and check for them in blogrolls. If “women’s shoes” anchor text appears in a number of blogrolls then those are your offending links. You need to get rid of those links and then notify Google about it through a reconsideration request via Google Webmaster Tools.

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Last year in his verbal testimony to US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee Yelp’s CEO stated that “the experience in my industry is telling: Google forces review websites to provide their content for free to benefit Google’s own competing product – not consumers. Google then gives its own product preferential treatment in Google search results.”

The verbal testimony delivered by Yelp’s CEO was very charitable because Google doesn’t only give preferential treatment to their own products; they promote half-baked products that hurt scores of businesses, particularly small businesses.

Google Places is an absolute nightmare, full of problems and glitches yet Google has integrated it in their “organic” search results.

No such thing as “organic results”:

There is no such thing as “organic” or “natural” unbiased results on Google anymore, almost. Google is using what we knew as “organic” results to promote its own products i.e. Google Places, Google Maps, Google Books, Youtube and their rather unsuccessful attempt at social networking, Google+.

Take a look at most search results and figure out how much real estate Google uses for its own products and be the judge yourself or take a look at the example below – the entire page is full of Google properties. 

Question for Google:

Have you ever considered how bad Google Places/Map listings are for users and businesses?

You keep going on about “user experience” but are turning a blind eye when it comes to the elephant in the room! Here is the latest “user experience” sermon from Google’s Matts Cutts, “I wanted to clarify a quick point: when people search for a phone number and land on a page like the one below, it’s not really useful and a bad user experience.”

Google Places is full of bugs:

There are countless examples of Google Places/Map Listing errors and bugs. Mike Blumenthal has created a list of current bugs in Google Places and Google Places dashboard. This is not a complete list of Google Places bugs, I have seen a lot of weird bugs and problems with Google Places that are not included in Mike’s list.

Try this query and you will see the following result (see screen shot). Take  a closer there is no telephone number next to the worthing-martinco.co.uk results in the map listing. Now take a look at the normal result below it and you will see the corresponding telephone number.

Now take a look at the actual Google Places listing for this business, see below. The phone number is not there at all and the business owner has tried for months to rectify this issue. They have submitted countless “report a problem” tickets to Google but nothing has been done about this! When the business owner changes the business details in the Google Places dashboard the change doesn’t reflect anywhere, it has been months. They have tried the so called troubleshooter “My Listing has incorrect information” but still no luck.

Is this what Google calls good user experience? If you can’t fix these issues why are you including a half-baked product in to the so called “organic” results? You can’t fix it, businesses don’t have any control to rectify it either!

Google Places landing pages:

Let me give you another example to show you that this is not an isolated case, infact it is not even the worst case! Below is another example, again this is another letting agent and this business has reported issues for months without any luck! Take a closer look and you will see that cinema events are included in the Places page. Cinema “upcoming events” in a estate agent’s business listing? User experience!!?

It doesn’t stop there, for the same business listing, Google includes cinema’s reviews which means all the negative reviews for that cinema are associated to this estate agent’s business, see below.

Google, you have not fixed these issues. When these issues are reported, you don’t fix them! No body expects you to fix things the moment a report has been submitted but this is getting silly! You are hurting businesses and you know it!

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Just over a year ago Microsoft created iecountdown.com to raise awareness and to get people to upgrade their IE6 browsers to a modern browser. We were one of the first companies who supported this initiative and as a result we were contacted by the Internet Explorer team to get some “goodies”. Today we received a few IE6 Countdown shirts in the post and thought we should share a couple of pictures of our team donning them. As you can see members of our web design team Ian and Adam are the ones sporting the biggest grins and rightly so!

Left to Right - Adam Davies, Ian, Yousaf, Adam Craddock

Left to Right - Adam Davies, Ian, Yousaf, Adam Craddock

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Larry Page has been back at the helm of Google for a year now and during this period he has tried to turn Google services in an integrated ecosystem. Larry has prioritized social networking and since the rather tricky launch of Google+, Google has tried to have a consistent look and feel across all their products.

Google+’s user interface didn’t have anything unique but since it’s launch Google has had enough time to gather sizeable amount of data to analyse the user experience of their social network. On Monday they released four videos demonstrating their new user interface which I must admit looks really good both aesthetically and based on what I have seen in the videos I think the UX would be good as well.

Here is a screenshot of the new interface:

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

During a panel at SXSW Matt Cutts revealed that his team are currently working on a new update that penalises over optimised sites. Although Matt Cutts refers to this new update as something new, I don’t think that is the case. Over optimisation penalties have existed for a number of years i.e. high ratio of exact match anchor text leads to “drop 50″ penalty which means that if you have a high number of links with exact match anchor text pointing to your website then your site will drop from page one to page five.

Here is the actual transcription of what Matt Cutts said:

“We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

I want to start this rather short post with a very bold statement. Pi is beautiful!

Today is the 3/14 which means it is Pi Day and you would expect that a technology company that has maths coursing through its veins would actually celebrate Pi Day but Google would rather celebrate Akira Yoshizawa’s work by creating a doodle and sticking it on its homepage. The sheer beauty of this mathematical constant deserves a doodle let alone its importance in our everyday lives. Google should have created a doodle for Pi Day not because of Pi’s beauty  but because Pi is enters all branches of science, be it mathematics, theoretical physics, chemistry and astrophysics.

My question is simple. Why should a tech company who hires thousands of math boffins celebrate Akira Something and not our beloved Pi Day?

Surely, Pi has contributed more to the humanity than Akira Something. No wonder why one of their ex-employees state that Google is no longer a technology company – read “Why I left Google“.

James Whittakers puts it in really simple words, he says “the Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.”

I raised this issue on Google+ and John Mueller who works at Google replied saying:

“Doodles are the fun, surprising and sometimes spontaneous changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries and the lives of famous artists, pioneers and scientists. We’ve had a doodle for “pi-day” before, we generally don’t want to limit ourselves to repeating the same event every year. Also, if you’re aware of a significant event that you feel is worth celebrating as a doodle, let us know about it at proposals@google.com!”

I have nothing against this Akira guy, but as a scientist I find it really annoying when thing like this get overlooked.

To those of you who love Pi, happy Pi Day.

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local

Comparing the specifications of all three iPad generations, illustrating how the iPad has grown and evolved over the years:

Digital Marketing Agency Elevate Local