I find it remarkable that there is such a frenzy becuase of the recent Google Updates.  Search Engine Land has it right–go back to the basics when it comes to Local Marketing.  Check out their article on five things you can do to increase local visability.

See on searchengineland.com

Google’s free online language translation service instantly translates text and web pages.

See on translate.google.com

If you were hit by penguin (ok, bad visual being hit by a penguin) Majestic SEO’s new metrics will show you if you have links in bad neighborhoods and now gives a trust factor that should help with SEO.

Majestic SEO announced a new set of link metrics they came up with that should give Google’s PageRank metric and SEOmoz’s MozRank a run for their money.

See on searchengineland.com

Social sharing–it’s the new back link so to speak.  We shouldn’t be shocked that this is the case.  Google started showing social mentions and posts, etc. from friends in personal search results.

Now although I’m not particularly happy with how Google has handled certain things (including the possibility of negative SEO which I wrote about a few weeks ago) using social signals to help determine rankings makes sense.  Search engines are about people so people voting on content is a great strategy.

You also may have been a victim of localized results–meaning if your business appears to be location based to Google even though you are national–you might have to add more content that makes it really clear that you are national.  The more content you have, the older your site, the more authority it has, will all help you in the rankings.

So here’s a few things that matter now in the new world of Google search:

• Now, this is a bit personal, but really take a look at your site and its content.  Is it compelling?  Did you dial it in? Or is it up to the standard of what you would like to read?
• Make sure you have a FB like or a G+ share button on every page and post on your site. (Author authority seems to matter and our limited tests show that G+ somehow counts more than FB.)
• Details count–content should be original and well written.  Share it on social sites and if good, will go viral.
• On Page factors are more important so make sure each page has title tags, keywords and descriptions.
• Don’t abuse internal linking — that used to work great (where you’d have a word highlighted on your site to go to a specific page on your site)–overdoing it creates a penalty.
• Press releases–don’t forget to press release news worthy items.
• Guest blogging–get your content disseminated on other blogs by being a “guest” writer.

Anyway, it stinks if you lost some rankings, but what goes up must come down and conversely, what goes down can come up.  With a little effort and the right strategy, you can raise in the rankings again.

Oh, there is also Pinterest–which is a pretty cool site–I’ll be writing another article on this next week.

In February Google updated its algorithm yet again.  Now the reason for this is up for speculation but Google has said it’s to make a better user experience.  In Google’s eye, they would like every search to serve up exactly what the searcher is looking for.  Its earlier updates have always favored high quality content that creates a great user experience.  I don’t think anyone would argue with that. I surely won’t or don’t.

But this update also penalized many sites just because they or the company that they hired used certain blog networks to help get their sites higher up in the search engines.  In fact, several networks have been de-indexed.  (What that mean is that the sites in question can’t be found on Google–it’s as if they don’t exist.)  Now while some things can be overdone and too much of anything can be a bad thing, what Google did here (including sending out over 700,000 notices to webmasters that they appear to have some unusual linking to their sites) has hurt a lot of innocent people who have good sites, with good content that are now forced to either pay for their traffic or go out of business.

My research has found that Google is also favoring content that has been shared on Google + even more than on Facebook.  Google + is a great platform BUT it isn’t gaining the popularity that I originally thought it would have.  Yes, we all have our profiles there and share the occasional thing, but it’s a bit of a ghost town.  Is Google forcing us to use its social networking platform in order to help our rankings on Google proper?  I think so and it’s not fair.

Google’s own Matt Cutts said at South by South West that Google will be penalizing sites for “over-optimization.”  What is over optimization?  Well, it’s a general term and there are no stead fast rules.  If you do any type of link building there is a point where Google considers it overdone.  None of us in the search engine community know exactly what they look for–although badly spun articles and blog networks is what they are looking for right now.  All we can do is try one thing or another and see how it effects the search engines.  You can overdo it by linking internally to pages within your site but no one knows at what point Google will consider it overdone.  Now, they say that this is to level the playing field and that the search engine will find the most relevant content for the end user, but I tend to disagree (black hat techniques not being part of my equation here.)  If you are optimizing your site and creating what people want to read, you shouldn’t be penalized for being smarter than your competitor which brings me to another point that actually scares the hell out of me.

The recent algorithm change has also opened up a huge hole for the unethical and nefarious.  It’s now possible to effectively knock out your competition by sending links to their site.  This practice, now being called “negative SEO” is where you take garbage links (from comments or x rated sites) and send a ton of them to a competitors site.  This has been tested by a few and I’ve seen the case studies. Negative SEO works and it’s totally unethical.  The new Google algorithm has a gaping hole in it and I hope they fix this sooner rather than later.  Here’s a post on Google + about this and here’s a link to a case study on negative SEO.

Many in the community have also pointed out (correctly, I will say) that we are giving Google too much information about who we are and what we do.  Many sites that are not affected are not using Google’s free analytics product but other software to measure their stats.  I haven’t taken the plunge to moving all our sites to another platform, but we are researching alternatives.   I hate this game of cat and mouse.  I just want the efforts for our clients and ourselves to generate a great user experience that in turn will bring in more business.  A lofty goal?  Maybe.  But that’s the way it should be in my opinion.

Am I putting myself in danger by writing this on my blog?  Probably, but it needs to be said.

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