Search Engine Optimization

The SEO industry exists mostly because of Google. Whether we SEO professionals love or love to hate the search behemoth, we all have jobs because of Google. Even whispers and rumors of an algorithm update can have a major impact in the SEO world, because the way we do our jobs is directly influenced by how Google does theirs. So when Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search spam team, announces that Google is working on a tweak to the algorithm that will punish sites that are too optimized for SEO, everyone gets a little jumpy. Here is what Matt Cutts had to say about the pending algorithm update at a SXSW panel a few weeks ago;

… the idea basically is to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all of those people who have sort of been doing…over-optimization or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level. And so that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website, the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that if people don’t do SEO we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area.

After news of the pending over optimization algorithm update hit the web the other week, a few of my clients wanted to know how this was going to affect their websites. Were their sites at risk of an over optimization penalty? I read a few more recaps of the panel discussion to get a better understanding of what exactly “over optimization” means to Google, and I told them that as long as their site has been practicing white hat SEO all along (which it definitely has since my company started managing it) then you are in no danger of being flagged for over optimization. Matt Cutts even admitted, “If you’re white hat or doing very little SEO, you’re not going to be affected by this change.”

This update is designed to help smaller, mom-and-pop websites that are producing great content and have user-friendly websites to perform better in the search engines, even if they don’t have the SEO budget to compete with the big brands. Personally, I think that’s great. There are plenty of smaller websites out there that do everything by the book when it comes to SEO, but they are blocked out of the SERPs because bigger brands can just dump money into their SEO campaigns. Giving these quality websites the opportunity to really make an impact in the search engines is long overdue.

Every since Google came out with the first Panda update last year that put the kibosh on content farms, they have moving in this direction; great content is what matters the most for great SEO. I told one of my clients that since their white has been well optimized in accord with Google’s quality guidelines AND they are producing a ton of great content, this update should theoretically help their website do even better in the SERPs. So if you are worried about getting an over optimization penalty from Google, double check your SEO efforts. If everything has been white hat then you have nothing to worry about.

Back in October Google rocked the world of SEO with their announcement that they intended to make search more secure by encrypting search data. When someone who was logged into their Gmail account searched in Google, their search query wouldn’t be sent over to the site owner whose site they visited, protecting their privacy. Site owners and SEO professionals alike where less than thrilled with this announcement. Without accurate data regarding visitor search behavior and what keywords they used to find our sites, how could we make accurate SEO recommendations and updates?

Google assured us that the encrypted data would only impact about 10% of our analytics, which was something I thought I could manage. Having 90% of the information isn’t perfect, but it still allows us to make reasonable SEO recommendations and insights. But lately I’ve been noticing that for some of my clients that “Not Found” data is nearly 40%! That’s a far cry from the 10% Google promised us. How is any site owner supposed to judge the effectiveness of their SEO campaign and target the right keywords if so much information is missing?

However, where I really take issue with the “Not Provided” is that is ISN’T happening when a searcher clicks on a PPC ad. According to the Google blog,

If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.

I find the fact that Google will still pass the data along provided someone clicks on a PPC ad (which the advertiser is paying for!) and not from the organic listings to be a double standard. If Google is so committed to making search more secure, shouldn’t they be encrypting the data from all sources? Why do PPC campaigns get to pass unscathed by the effects of encrypted search while Google Analytics for organic data is compromised? It has made me wonder if Google is considering rolling out a paid version of analytics in the future—would they charge users for all the information they used to give away for free? If that is the case then how many site owners would bite the bullet and pay? Or is Google trying to drive more site owners to create PPC campaigns (AdWords is Google’s biggest stream of revenue) in order to use that data to bolster their SEO?

While there are analytics alternatives, many of these are very expensive and out of reach for the average small business owner. They, like much of the SEO industry, rely on the information gleamed from Google Analytics in order to run their SEO campaigns. With so much of the data being “not provided,” how are they supposed to create and monitor an SEO campaign? I doubt many site owners want to take a shot in the dark when it comes to their SEO. It leaves many site owners stuck between a rock and a hard place.

What are your thoughts on Google’s “Not Provided” data? How has your site been impacted by encrypted search and what measures are you taking to counteract the loss of information?

Just last week, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land reported the latest Google algorithm update which targets ad heavy websites. As Google’s official blog post announcing the page layout algorithm says, the update affects “… sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. Matt Cutts warned that this update was coming back in November at PubCon.

How many ads is too many?

As a user, I appreciate Google’s attempt to take on ad heavy sites. It’s annoying to have to dig through a page of ads to find the one snippet of content I am looking for and it creates a bad user experience. On the other hand, who is Google to tell a website owner how to run their business? I don’t have AdSense ads on my site because that’s not how I earn revenue. However, a blogger might rely heavily on those ads to supplement their income. And with the AdSense guidelines saying “ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold,” why wouldn’t a site owner place ads up top?

Google says their page layout algorithm update is designed to target websites that “load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree,” but doesn’t spell out exactly what’s excessive. In Danny Sullivan’s article, he interviewed Matt Cutts who said that Google isn’t going to provide any official tools to determine if your site was guilty of excessive ads, making it even harder for site owners to know where the line is. It’s easy to tell when a site has gone overboard, but what about the ones that are borderline?

Something very important to mention from Sullivan’s article—one ad heavy page can impact the ranking of your entire site, not just that page. If you think you might be toeing the line of “excessive” with your ads on any page of your website, it would be wise to remove a few to protect yourself from the update as much as possible. Keep in mind that if your website is whacked with a penalty, it could be weeks before that penalty is lifted and your site regains some of its old rankings. Much like the Panda updates, Google has to recrawl your site to see what (if any) errors you have corrected or if you are guilty of new ones.

What are your thoughts on the latest update from Google?

In late October, Google announced that, in order to make search more secure for their users, they were “enhancing our default search experience…when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page.” Basically, Google is no longer passing data about users’ search behavior (like what keywords they used) over the site they clicked on from the SERP.

So what does this mean for website owners? Google spelled it out in the same blog post

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools.

Understandably, the SEO community was more than a little nervous after this announcement. Being able to identify which keywords a person searched for before they arrived at a website is one of the most important pieces of information we have to make educated SEO recommendations for our clients. Website owners who manage their own SEO rely on this information as well. Targeting the right keywords is one of the fundamental musts of any SEO campaign. If we can’t see what search queries people are using to find our site, then we don’t know if we are targeting the right keywords! I don’t like to blindly pick and choose what keywords I think are best for a site without having the data to back it up.

Matt Cutts, the director of web spam at Google, announced that Google estimates this change would impact less than 10% of searches being conducted on a daily basis, but I’ve heard grumblings among the search community that it might be much more. As for my own site, I noticed a significant jump in the number of “Not Provided” organic search visits. While it isn’t yet a percentage I feel I should be worrying about, if the trend continues I feel that I won’t be able to trust Google Analytics for vital SEO data!

One of the reasons Google’s new and improved encrypted data is making many site owners nervous is because, even though Google is making the search experience more secure for users, they are also focusing on increasing the number of people with Google accounts. I have a Gmail account that I am almost constantly logged into on my home computer. That means most of my search behavior is being hidden 24-7 from the sites I visit! Droid phones (which now have over half of the Smartphone market share) require a Google account in order to be activated, meaning data from mobile devices (which I suspect will become an increasingly important market for SEO) is being limited as well.

One of the more frustrating aspects of encrypted search is that it doesn’t affect PPC data, only organic search. Search data is still being provided for Google advertisers, even if someone that clicks on the ad is logged in to their Google account. It makes you wonder if Google is trying to kill two birds with one stone with encrypted search—they make searching more secure for the users (quelling privacy concerns) AND they get advertisers to spend more on their PPC campaigns just to get more accurate data that can be used in their SEO campaigns.

What are your thoughts on encrypted search?

The search engines work to please their customers, just like any other business. For Bing, Google and Yahoo, this means providing the best results possible for any and all search queries. One of the ways they are working to improve their user-experience is by offering more personalized results.

Here are 3 ways the search engines personalize the SERPs:

Location
Type “pizza” into Google; what does your SERP look like? Chances are the first results Google pulled are all pizza places near your town. After those come the national brands like Dominos and Papa John’s. But how does Google know where you live? Easy, it uses the IP address from computer to determine your location. Google knows that when most people search for things like “pizza” or “dry cleaner” they are looking for local results, even if they didn’t search using localized keywords.

Search History
Think of the search engines as a technological Big Brother. They know where you’ve been, how you search and what you look at online. It may sound a little creepy, but knowing your search history means that Google and Bing can deliver results that you are more likely to find useful and interesting, based on your previous search activity.

Social Signals
Back in May, Bing and Facebook teamed up to bring the “Friend Effect” to Bing’s search results. The Bing-Facebook integration allowed users who were signed into Facebook to see what websites their social connections had Liked and Shared in Facebook right in the Bing SERP. Some pages would actually rank better when a user was logged in to Facebook than they would normally, just because that person’s social network had Liked it.

Meanwhile, Google was busy creating their version of the Like button, the +1. When a user is logged into their Google account, they can publicly +1 a webpage they like. That +1 will show up on their Google profile and their profile image will be placed next to the +1 button in the SERP for their social network to see.

Some have argued that this kind of personalization takes the “fun” out of search engines because it narrows the search results to what Google and Bing think you are most likely to find interesting, choosing what you do and do not see. They believe that personalized search results are actually narrowing our worlds and not expanding them. Other says that personalized search means better search results, making the search engines more valuable to the users. Personalized search reduces the clutter and noise of the Internet and focuses on what the user really needs.

What do you think about personalized search?