One of our blogs received a seemingly innocuous comment:
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The writer was Astol@gmail.com from IP address 180.246.178.46. There was no URL in the comment, which is a dead giveaway of drive-by comment spam. None of our blogs allows unmoderated comments. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent update to the Google Algorithm is penalising websites that feature too much ad space above the fold of the website. The fold is the point at which the page cuts off at the bottom of a particular screen. The fold can be at different points for different people depending on their screen size or resolution. If the user sees mostly ads when the page loads and not much content, they are forced to scroll down and this is inconvenient and Google is addressing this issue.
Google isn’t penalising sites for having too many ads on the page in particular, but is just penalising the placement. No one would recommend clogging up your page with advertising, but if you want ads on your site, just make sure it doesn’t fill up the top of the page.
The top and left side of the page will often have navigation tools on it; these are not ads but if they are too bulky they could push your site content too low below the fold. Try to keep as much actual content above the fold as possible.
There is a free Google tool called the Browser Size Tool. This shows how much of your page the user is going to see when they first see the page. URL:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog
Anyone who gets caught up in this change and notices their ranking dropping will have to wait until the spider crawls their page again, you might be waiting a few weeks before any noticeable changes take place.
Google claims that only about 1% of websites will be affected and that most typical users will not even notice a change in rankings.
Mike Blumenthal is a Local Search expert and well respected in our industry. We don’t go to the same conferences, so we haven’t met in person, but we have interacted many times over the past five years. He maintains a popular blog: Understanding Google Places & Local Search – Developing Knowledge about Local Search. He took some time out to share some thoughts with our readers.
Ash: How and when did you get into Local Search? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.
I had run a large family retail business. A division of that business involved technology and since 1996 we had build and hosted small websites. In 2000 I wanted to build a website for the business but was frustrated by the tools available to me. As a result my designer found some great lightweight open source software that she modified to function as a small business content management system. I liked it so much that I decided to focus on web development for small and medium businesses in our market. Read the rest of this entry »
Occasionally we publish ranking checks featuring various industries and this month it is the turn of Australian law firms. A few of them show signs of search engine optimisation (SEO), and a handful have done a good job, as the results will show. SEO causes a website to show in the first page of a search engine for a specific search. As there are millions of possible word combinations that may lead to a law firm’s website, you cannot expect to rank well for all of them, but you should try to rank for the ones that will bring you new clients.
The top 20 results (first two pages) were checked across Google, Yahoo and Bing. Yahoo uses Bing results now, but in a different way. Normally we check only the first page, but in a few legal specialties such as Insurance, Maritime, Energy or Mining, there would have been no law firm on the first page. I have no personal connection with any of the firms mentioned, past or present. They were selected based on the ones that showed up in the top 100 results for the various keywords. So, if a site is not listed, it did not rank in the top 100 results for the chosen keywords.
When searching, you may have noticed that the top results are often from Wikipedia, universities, magazine/news articles, legal publishers, law associations, or directories, which are not business competitors. However, they are ranking competitors and some are difficult to outrank. Of course, ranking depends on the exact search term used, so Wikipedia or the University of Melbourne (for example) will not rank if you are searching for “Brisbane commercial lawyers”. Read the rest of this entry »
Ash: How and when did you get into Local Search? What is your current role in your business? Tell us a little about the typical challenges you face in your work.
I first got into local search while in 1996-97 working for Verizon’s Superpages.com (actually, this was before Verizon — it was GTE Directories Corporation back then), when I was asked by one of our business development people to look into ways to increase the site’s organic search traffic. I was the site’s Analyst back then, and I noticed that people didn’t just arrive on the site’s homepage, but that they also could arrive via other site pages which got indexed in search engines. It didn’t take long to figure that if we built pages targeting consumers’ keyword phrases, such as “boston seafood restaurants” or “hotels, miami, fl”, we might be able to get more traffic than just trying to target “yellow pages”. So, I put together a pilot test involving some dozens of pages engineered to target business categories or geographic areas or combinations of both, and the limited research experiment showed a clear advantage. Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter is always on the forefront of breaking news. As soon as anything happens, it spreads over Twitter like wildfire. Twitter is often the first place check to find the most recent links, discussions etc.
In the past Google actually had an agreement with Twitter to have a real-time feed of related tweets appearing in the search results, but that expired in July 2011. These Tweets were often the most relevant search results.
Now though Google is trying to make its search engine more personalised for people logged into Google+, where results that your friends may have +1’d or images they’ve uploaded to their profile from a particular travel destination might start popping up in among the image search. They call this update “Search Plus Your World” (SPY World?). Read the rest of this entry »
Malware and hacked sites are more common than you might think. According to Matt Cutts’ recent video even people like Donald Trump and Al Gore have had their websites hacked.
“Malware” can be any kind of malicious code that is designed to cause problems for a computer or network. Examples of this include spyware, Trojans, viruses and worms. It could also include a hacker making changes to the site adding extra pages designed to phish customers. This means tricking them into giving out personal or credit card information. Malware may change/steal your passwords, access your credit card details or other personal information, hijack or lock you out of your computer and much more. Read the rest of this entry »
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Leading Boston search marketer Ted Ulle joins teaching faculty of TrainSEM
Boston, MA, January 9, 2012 — Well-known search marketer Ted Ulle, who is better known as “tedster” in online circles, is bringing his vast knowledge and experience to the search marketing training curriculum at TrainSEM.com, which is based in Melbourne, Australia.
With over 30,000 quality posts at webmasterworld.com since 2000 and numerous public-speaking engagements each year, Ted is best known for his helpful responses to search engine optimization questions.
TrainSEM CEO Ash Nallawalla quit his day job in 2007 to start Australia’s first classroom-based courses in search engine optimization (SEO). Says Nallawalla, “Owing to a scarcity of reputable SEO training, anyone can offer SEO services. Unfortunately, some so-called SEOs have not updated their knowledge for many years and do not deliver what their clients expect. We do not perform SEO tasks, so we do not compete with our students, unlike some others. We train and we advise.” says Ash.
“With Ted’s help, TrainSEM will offer its training classes in North America in the coming months. Search engines keep their ranking algorithms a secret, so SEO experts have to reverse-engineer these constantly changing secrets”, he added. “We could not think of a better qualified expert than Ted to join our teaching faculty.”
TrainSEM also offers courses online at http://www.trainsem.com.
File Type Detection – Now instead of clicking on a particular icon for the file type you are going to upload you just press the 1 button and upload whatever media file you want and WordPress will work it out and then display the appropriate fields for you to fill out based on the file type.
Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader – Many websites have allowed this for quite some time, it’s a great time saver. Dragging files from your desktop or a folder on your computer right into the browser is much faster than searching through folders to find things, especially if you are do not store your files in a neat and organised fashion.
Here you can see a photo being dragged into the file uploader.
The TrainSEM team went to Pubcon a couple of weeks ago.
Katrina Klier spoke about how your fans need to trust your brand and find your interactions online to be authentic and personal. Have your Facebook / Twitter accounts appear to be an actual person not just a brand and people will trust what you say more. Be conversational with your community and get them talking and make sure you respond back. People like knowing they are being listened to.
Sanjay Sabnani talked about the importance of forums. He said that forums are 7-8 times bigger than the blogosphere and yet we do not talk about them. We end up there via search engines then move on. He mentioned some interesting strategies to actually use forums to sell your products without getting seen as spam.
These are his 11 golden rules for forums:
Read the rest of this entry »
