Posts on: SEO

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…

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,…

Most SEO companies are aware that semantic code has an effect on how Google indexes and ranks a website. Many web master’s, however, are unaware of the extent it’s influence has, so let’s cover the basics. Coding semantically simply means following development standards and using best practices which have evolved over several years to build the best website or application possible. It is often referred to as structural code by some developers. It’s a simple idea, but the benefits this…

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…

Dominique provides a simple seo checklist which covers the basics of on-page optimisation

Building back links is a large part of any SEO engineer’s working day. As a result there are numerous articles, tips, and tricks freely available. This article covers white-hat SEO techniques many SEO companies use and the transparency that our in-house approach is proud of. I want to make it clear that I don’t claim to be an expert, as I believe only Google’s engineers working on the ranking algorithms can make such claims, but I have many hours experience…

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…

In a recent post titled Search Quality Highlights: 40 Changes for February, Google’s Amit Singhal wrote about some of the latest changes Google has introduced to its different algorithms including an amendment to its previously known Panda update. I have published a list of top 50 winners and losers of Google Panda earlier today and could not understand why Amazon.com was one of the top losers, it was a complete anomaly so I had to dig deep to see if I…

Winners Here are the top 50 sites which have gained visibility in the search results. # Domain Previous Week 02/23/2012 Percentage 1 twitter.com 1064809 1155066 8.48% 2 youtube.com 811917 860550 5.99% 3 bbc.co.uk 3335612 3381336 1.37% 4 wikipedia.org 14527163 14571189 0.30% 5 google.com 1041299 1076923 3.42% 6 telegraph.co.uk 1056644 1082670 2.46% 7 guardian.co.uk 1814174 1840185 1.43% 8 microsoft.com 375044 399372 6.49% 9 mega.co.uk 659 24021 3545.07% 10 imdb.com 2383852 2400227 0.69% 11 thestudentroom.co.uk 76001 91439 20.31% 12 talktalk.net 4552 19790…

Sometimes you might come across a scenario where you might want the t.co version of your URL without tweeting it on Twitter publicly. Usually this is mostly for SEO purposes where you want to copy/paste the t.co URL for sharing on other sites or you might want to see it just out of pure curiosity.