In Melbourne we actually have penguins. There is a small colony of them in a St Kilda a bayside suburb. They’re very cute, not like Matt Cutts’ Penguin.

A Melbourne Penguin

1. Check the frequency of anchor text in your backlinks.

Using a backlink checking tool like majesticseo, you can sort your backlinks by anchor text. If you have a lot of backlinks that have the same anchor text you may have a bit of an issue. This is what happened last time with Penguin 1.0. Sites that were buying getting backlinks from paid articles guest blogs posts tended to have the same anchor text across hundreds of backlinks. Google then discounted a lot of these sorts of links and sites that were benefiting from them plummeted. The reason for this is very simple. Google is using the existence of a backlink as a vote for your page. It is unlikely that hundreds of webmasters would link the exact same phrase to your website, therefore the backlinks must be contrived and not a real citation for your content.

2. Check where you are getting backlinks from

If you have employed someone that is promising you X amount of backlinks a month, then you may have some issues. Chances are they are doing something like I show in today’s video. I have no doubt the sites getting backlinks from the .org.au site that is the subject of the video, would have benefited from them. Not anymore though. I have checked several of them and they were hit by the May 3 Update that ..ahem… we detected here first . This is why it feels like a little bit of Penguin 2.0 has already been rolled out here. The content of the posts I show in today’s video are totally irrelevant to the rest of the site, so Google will now discount the value of these links.

3. Start getting good backlinks!

Create content and share it with people who you think might be interested in it. Write guest articles for other sites if you think it is good for traffic or attention but don’t do it for the backlink. In today’s video I expand on a couple of these ideas and share some simple ideas you may not have thought.

If you drop when Penguin 2.0 comes out, remember it is not a penalty! You can come back from it.

As if the last few weeks haven’t been tumultuous enough for businesses SEO with Google changes, there is more on the way. Matt Cutts released a video (below) today announcing what to expect in the next few months from Google. It’s going to upset a lot of people but there are some wins if you think you have been hit unfairly by Panda updates. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Penguin 2.0 is coming.

I’ve been saying this since late April and we thought the changes we saw recently were related to a new Penguin. We’re still not sure. What we are sure of now is that is imminent. Matt has said it is going to be more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and that had a massive effect on rankings, so hold onto your collective hats.

2. Panda Gets Fixed

Matt has admitted (kind of) that the Panda update went to far. They will be adjusting it to un-punish sites that were caught up unfairly in this update. Too bad if your revenue went through the floor in the last six months because of Panda and you thought you were doing all the right things.

3. Authorship

He also said they will be rewarding content that has “authority” . Authorship is my guess. If your site has some of the most reputable authors on your site your content is now going to rank higher. This could be the much talked about AuthorRankupdate.

4. Spammy Backlinks

Generally if you are doing spammy backlinking on sites it’s going to be bad for you. This will hit a lot of affiliate sites that engage in this practice as well as sites that have backlinks from poor content that may have previously helped their ranking.
Here’s Matt’s video.

The massive Google update we saw last week is still evolving but here’s what you need to know so far. We don’t even have a name for this update yet so I can’t try to rank for it About a month ago I said Penguin 2.0 was coming it feels different to Penguin though.

1. Broad category searches are location dependent

Google Places results still seem to be jumping all over the place and of course vary from city to city as they always have. Now we are seeing that with organic results as well. Last week it was possible for you to rank nationally for a broad category even if you only had an address in one city. This no longer seems to be the case. If you want to rank in a city for a broad category you’d better have an address in that city. Also make sure your address page is using structured data.

2. Ecommerce SEO Is Unaffected If Structured Properly

If you have your ecommerce product data structured properly you should be able to rank in any city in a country for a given product. See the structured data link above. Product related SERPs do not change much from city to city. However all the ecommerce sites we have looked at so far that rank for individual products have good structured data. The same would apply to event related sites. We are now checking all our ecommerce clients SEO and tweaking where necessary. Of course make sure your ecommerce site is not making these seo mistakes.

3. Focus on the longtail for searches outside your city

If you are an ecommerce site you should be focussing more on the longtail and not on the broad search phrases for users outside of your city.

What is your experience with this change? What are you seeing that I have missed? Love to hear your experience.

Whooa big change today. On Wednesday our Head of Development Jine, noticed that the “places” menu item had disappeared from Google. This is a capture from my video of April 16.

Places menu two weeks ago

Places menu disappears tweet

Today’s SEO Ranking Reports.

We check our clients rankings everyday. We like to know what Google is up to on a daily basis. Today is BIG. We have had some of our major clients jump into top 3 spots from outside the top 50 for single highly competitive keyword. Jine came in excitedly and explained about one client we were having trouble with had moved onto the front page.. then another. I said to her, Google has updated. There has been a change. She agreed and then we got to work on the parallels between the clients that had all jumped onto the front page for highly competitive phrases. We realised they were all already ranking for their main keyword + Melbourne. So “blue widgets Melbourne” if you like but the keyword without Melbourne was nowhere to be found. Then Nick one of our First Year SEOs, said, “They’ve replaced places for organic…” I quickly asked them to test the theory. Check clients in other states and cross reference where the addresses are. Sure enough he was right… kind of. Our clients are now ranking for single competitive keywords that Google was ignoring if they have an address in the city where the search is being done!!

More to follow.

We’re not sure who the losers are at this stage, all we know is that our clients are winners. There will be more to come on this but I would love to know what you are seeing. I said a few weeks back I thought there was a big change coming. Didn’t expect this though.

UPDATE

Seeing some major losers here, Beacon lighting has been hit, looks like Woolworths Money as well.

Google are usually pretty coy and vague when they talk about keyword specifics. You may remember last year I did a post and video on Michael Jones of Google and how he basically said don’t worry about your keywords. Earlier this year Google hinted at this again in the SEO Cheat Sheet where they said be “descriptive” with your filenames, headings and URLs. They forgot to tell you to use your keywords in these descriptions. Well Matt Cutts just released a video where he talks about being VERY specific about your keywords. I’ll drop it in at the end of this post. As much as Google has got better about understanding the relationships between words by looking at their context, you still need to have the keywords you want to rank for on the page. A simple concept right? You would think so but I have been talking about keyword research for a long time and I’m constantly surprised by businesses who don’t want the keywords they want to rank for on their page.

Press Releases.. really?

Mat also said, as did Michael last year, that press releases are a good way to expose users to your content. I guess they mean backlinks. Some of the press releases from SEO companies I see though are disastrously spun nonsensical twaddle. I sure hope Google is not rewarding rubbish content like this that I found in Google News.

An example of SEO Press Releases that proliferate on Google News

Linguistic Gymnastics

Sometimes it can be difficult to work a phrase into an article so it sounds natural. For instance if I wanted to rank for “Advertising Company Melbourne” it’s kind of hard to make it sound natural. For services, people will often use a geographic qualifier to get more relevant results. Gone are the days where you would have an article that read like “So if you are looking for an Advertising company Melbourne..” although I am sure there are a few on this site scattered about over the last 8 years:) However you could say “We are the best advertising company Melbourne has to offer”. Slightly messes up the meaning of the search but you get the idea.

Blogging Yet?

In his video Matt also talked about using more content. For years a lot of us have been talking about publishing content as essential for SEO. That was one of the reasons I started doing these videos back in 2006 and published my first one to Youtube in 2007. Today this concept is called “Content Marketing” and we’re finding that sites are being rewarded more than ever now if they have a blog and update it regularly. In today’s video I take a look at a great opportunity that is coming up at the end of this month with Darren Rowse also known as Problogger. If you want to take the next step with your business into the world of blogging (and you should) you can’t go wrong with Darren and this masterclass he is doing as part of PESA. This man taught me a lot.

Proof of blogging & SEO

We created a report 12 months ago on power company websites and their ranking and then repeated it again this year. We found that all the companies that had added blogs in that time now ranked higher than they did last year. If I can work out how to remove the commercially sensitive data so it still makes sense I’ll publish some of the findings here.

Here is Matt’s video as promised.

Google continually changes the rules for their products. Back in 2005 I used to do a lot of adwords for myself. This was before I had staff or office rent. Back then I was able to sell other people’s products and not even have my own website. It was great fun. Every month I used to go to the post office and pick up my USD cheques. That’s when the USD was worth a lot more than it is now and the CPC I was paying was around 15 cents, so great profits! Every morning I used to get up and check my various affiliate accounts and of course my adwords account.

Google Adwords Rule Change

I can’t remember exactly when it was, probably 2006 I think, Google changed the rules. You could no longer have an adwords account so that it was purely setup with your clickbank link and you had to have your own site. Basically they killed a lot of income for a lot of people overnight and no doubt a good chunk of revenue for themselves. That’s when I got more heavily involved in SEO and started doing the weekly video. Well Google has changed the rules again and unlike some of their rule changes over the years, this one presents opportunities for you to make more money… after you spend a bit of course.

Trademark Bidding Benefits

Up until today you have not been able to use someone else’s trademark as a keyword in your Adwords campaigns. If you did, most likely your campaign would be automatically flagged and not be able to run. If you have a brand or an offering that is not well known you can now put it in front of people searching for the bigger household names for a fraction of the cost. For instance if someone searches for Nike, Adidas can have an ad appear. Hijacking someone’s brand in an adwords campaign is nothing new but hijacking a trademark is. What I have found with some of our ecommerce customers is that bidding on a competitors brand can result in some very high quality traffic. You have to be clever about it though. In the ad below you can see that the ANZ Bank is bidding on the CBA brand (Is that a trademark?).

ANZ Adwords bidding on CBA

3 Tips To Targeting Trademarks

1. Like all adwords campaigns you must of course be relevant. You need to stay laser focused on your choice of keywords you are bidding on, the user intent and of course your adcopy.
2. Use negative keywords. If you are targeting people looking for a home loan with “CBA interest rates” you don’t want your ad coming up when people are looking for good rates for their deposits. Use deposits and their variants so your ads don’t appear. This will also help your quality score.
3. Sound fresh & urgent. The user is already searching for a trademark. They have already made a choice. You have to jolt them from that with the key phrase you have chosen to bid on and your adcopy. For instance you may target unhappy customers using a competitors trademark in the search. Letting users know you have a sale on right now is also effective. A user might be looking for the best price on an item that is trademarked, you can now get in front of that customer quickly and for the most part, cheaply.

Back in 2008 or 2009 when Google Maps was trasitioning into Google Places a lot of us SEOs tried to be too clever for our own good. We put our keywords in our business name, stuffed them into every nook & cranny we could find in the places dashboard. I even setup a PO Box in the centre of Melbourne so I could have a CBD address. The latter plan did not work. Subsequently we had a a couple of places accounts suspended. Places has always been a bit of a basket case though. One time I saw my places account combined with another Melbourne SEO company. Google had merged our names at our address. Being an SEO I have a healthy paranoia and contacted the other SEO Company. They were just as bewildered as us. Eventually I just decided to play ball with Google. On the weekly video back then I said if you like the show leave a review on our Places account. Within 24 hours we had 20 to 30 reviews. Then BOOM! Our account got shut down. When I was talking to a couple of Melbourne based Google employees they told me it would have triggered the algorithm because I had so many reviews in such a short space of time.

What a dumb algorithm

I wasn’t gaming the system, paying for reviews, all the reviews were from legitimate people who watched the show. Discerning, intelligent folk like yourself no doubt. We all know there are plenty of fake reviews out there that are spaced out over time on places accounts so as not to trigger the algorithm but they are fake! Ours were real. If this trigger still exists there are plenty of businesses that could be hurt from it as Google+Local or Places for Business provides a great source of traffic for many local businesses. There are legitimate reasons why it could occur if a business is running an event that people love and they all leave a review within a short space of time.

Negative SEO

What an easy way though, for your competitors to destroy your places rank. Simply get some school kids to go and leave reviews on your competitors places account in a short space of time and BOOM they’re gone. That’s how it used to be anyway. Has it changed? Maybe with the stronger verification of Google users through Google profiles it has but there are still plenty of reviews out there from anonymous “Google users”

Google Places STill Broken

As I demonstrate in today’s show Google Places is still broken with faulty listings, duplicate listings, impossible verifications for national businesses and many other flaws. I’d love to hear your experiences with Places.

Let’s find out if Negative SEO is possible

I’d like to know if this “review frequency” trigger still exists. A simple mind like mine can come up with plenty of ways to verify a review so why can’t Google? IP address, geo-location, time zone, Google profiles etc etc all present tools that Google could use. To test if it is still in use I’d like YOU to leave a review on our Google Places account IF you like the weekly videos. In turn I will give you nothing, no quid pro quo, no free beer or anything like that because that would be breaking Google’s terms of service. You can leave a review here https://plus.google.com/102157136147219937337/about?hl=en

. People have already started to review and nothing seems to have broken yet… maybe you’ll be the one that does it . Love to hear your stories about Google Places.

We work on a lot of ecommerce sites SEO. By far the biggest issue we see are 404 errors.

404 errors are bad for SEO

If Google comes to your site and finds a lot of missing pages, which is what 404 erros are, it essentially sees a faulty site. If all your competitors have faulty sites as well that may not be a big deal as it puts you on a level playing field. If Google can send it’s users to a site for the same search that is not faulty though, it will. The more competitive the keywords you are targeting the more important it is that your site is free of errors.

Discontinued Products

The main reason that ecommerce sites have 404 errors is because they discontinue products and delete the page. This means that a page that was once there has now gone. Google may have known of it previously because it had crawled it before or it found a link to it somewhere. Having a few of these errors is not necessarily a big deal. If you are changing your product lineup regularly though and ignoring Google you do so at your peril.

What would you do in a real shop?

A few weeks ago Google released its SEO Cheat sheet. One of the things it suggested is that you should treat your online shop as you would an offline one. Specifically keep updating it to keep customers interested in coming back.  I would extrapolate on this idea and suggest giving customers information on discontinued products.

Ways to help SEO & your customers

Permanently redirect the page to a new equivalent one after you have deleted.

Put a notice on the page that the product has been discontinued with a link to the new equivalent page and add a canonical tag if the old product was simple variation.

Watch this week’s video for some other ideas and a report that will tell you what is making you money and what is not.

Got an ecommerce site? How do you handle old products?

You may have missed a small announcement by Google last week about an Adwords policy change. It only caught my eye because Chris Morley of onlinemarketexperts.com did a post about it. It all started back in 2005.

PPC 2005 style.

Not a lot has changed in Google Adwords since 2005. Sure there’s been a lot of rule changes, interface tweaks and we now have things like “Quality score” and the Adwords Editor but Adwords is fundamentally the same as it was back then. For you kids reading this, this was a strange time before the smart phone, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube & Google video had only really just started.

Telstra, the owner of a classifieds site was running Google ads using the brand names of car dealerships. In 2007 Our ACCC decided this was false & deceptive conduct and decided to take Google & Telstra to court. I said at the time time this was a bad idea and now nearly 6 years later the Australian High Court has also said this was dumb (I’m paraphrasing). This finding came down in early February.

Trademarks in Adwords

For years now, Google has automatically banned users ability to bid on known trademarks and certainly not allowed them to be used in Ad copy unless you had special permission. Last week all that changed with an Adwords Policy Update. Google has said it has brought into line it Adwords policy for China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Brazil with the rest of the world and will now allow bidding on trademark keywords.

Big change for Google.

This may not seem like much of change but it represents potentially a lot more revenue for Google and a big change in the markets mentioned above. If you have a trademark but don’t have a related adwords campaign for it maybe now is a good time to start. Watch the video above to see what I mean. What do you think? Just a way for Google to make heaps more cash or simply bringing their policy into line with the rest of the world? Are you buying trademarked keywords yet? How is it going for you?

Yesterday a report was released by Portent, an agency based in Seattle. They have observed that it looks as though Google’s ability to better detect spam links has become stronger. This was one of the original reasons for the Penguin update nearly a year ago. An article in Search Engine Watch about the report has some good analysis on it.

I Hadn’t noticed much change with our own clients ranking as we don’t do any of the more spammy link building techniques. So in today’s show I take a look at the local market for a very competitive phrase. “Credit Cards”.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

If you watch the show regularly you will know I use this search a lot as a benchmark. Today I reveal some of the link building that has been done for one of the top three brands in the space and how it has crippled their rankings. Just last November this brand was in the top 3 spots for “credit cards” now it’s in 2nd page oblivion.

Matt Cutts with a stronger SEO Spam detector

Penguin turns 1 Party

This lends credence to the Portent claim that Google is becoming stronger in it’s ability to detect spammy links. On the 25th of April 2013 the Penguin Algorithm update turns 1 YO. I hope you didn’t get it anything. Let’s face it there is still a lot of spammy link building going on. Over the last year we’ve seen a gradual improvement of Penguin algorithm. Matt Cutts has been promising us for a while now that the next Penguin update will be very scary indeed. Maybe it’s just around the corner. Love to hear your experience.