Matt Cutts describes one of the raters’ processes as “side by side” testing. Let’s break this down… The engineers provide two search results for the same query to the raters. One of the results was an “improvement” to the existing algorithm, but the raters don’t know which one is which. Matt Cutts goes on to call this the “blind taste test.” This is when the “side by side” really comes into play, as they literally put the results side by side – pretty much exactly like this:

Once they have the results side by side, the raters go down each list and decide whether the left result is better, or the right. They will make comments about how each site was either useful, irrelevant, or simply spam. These results are analyzed thoroughly by the engineers and analysts to determine which algorithm should be used. They also put these different algorithms into live play and let you, the average Google user, determine which algorithm is best. They collect data on how many times certain links were clicked, yada yada yada.. And I am pretty sure that you and I both are going to click on the links with the most valuable content rather than the spam, right? Before we get to that…

One common misconception is that when the Google raters determine if a link is irrelevant, they boot your website from the rankings to never be seen again. This is not true. The information gathered is definitely used to help rank the websites that are most valuable and authoritative, but your website doesn’t get blacklisted by these Google raters. Now, Matt Cutts does go onto say that websites considered to be spam by the raters is a different story and would be discussed in another video.

Want my opinion?

Okay, here we go. First, my question is what defines spam? Is spam over-optimization and keyword stuffing? In my opinion, yes it is, but the definition of web spam can change from person to person. One rater may think a site is spam, but another may think differently. Who is right?

This just emphasizes why content is so important. If you create quality content regularly that people – and Google raters – want to click on, you will never have to worry about getting blacklisted, or even have trouble ranking. If you are just creating pages, stuffing them with keywords, and simply writing articles for ranking purposes rather than trying to arm the web with your value-adding content, then yes, you should be worried, and are probably wondering right now why you aren’t ranking at all for any of your keywords. In my opinion, if the content on a page doesn’t look natural and I wouldn’t hear someone talk like that normally – IT IS SPAM! For instance, “If you need a Tallahassee FL attorney, you’ve come to the right place. We have over 30 years in Tallahassee Fl personal injury law.” Would any well-respected lawyer talk to you like that? No. There are definitely times when it is necessary to include keywords, but do it in moderation – and be logical about it. If if doesn’t sound right when you read it to yourself, it’s not going to sound right to the end-user.

All in all, I believe that it is only a matter of time before spammers will have no choice but to leave their black hat ways, but until then, those of us who provide good content – or at least try to – can sit back and watch our fresh and unique content bounce the spammers out of Google one by one.

+Cullie Burris

There are a lot of people out there who would simply just delete negative comments (if they have permission), that way the only reviews people see are the positive ones. But, this is not what the consumer wants to see. They actually respond better when they notice a company proactively responding to these negative reviews, as well as thanking the customers for positive reviews. This lets your future customer know that you actively care about the customer and their satisfaction. A customer probably won’t be turned off by seeing a page with 100% positive reviews, but they are definitely going to be more intrigued when they notice the constant B2C interaction as they browse from review site to review site.

Check out the first few minutes of this interview with Australia’s David Cannell.

A lot of companies will just create fake content that seems positive to drive the negative results to the end of the search results. We definitely want to create new content to replace the old content, however creating fake content is misleading and can end up negatively affecting your business even more.

The main objective is provide new content that is positive – and TRUE. This can be done through blog posts, encouraging existing clients to write reviews, forum postings, and press releases. But in my opinion, the best way to maintain your reputation – and I want to emphasize this – PROACTIVELY RESPOND TO BOTH NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE REVIEWS DAILY. The problem with this is that it can become time consuming and eats away at time that should be spent doing more internal business processes.

For instance, above is a screen shot of 2 reviews on Yelp for an Atlanta Walmart. One is a positive and one is negative – so, how are you going to decide which review to go with? Would it sway your decision one way if both reviews had a response from Walmart? I think so. If one thanks the customer for their positive review, that shows they’re engaged. If the other response to the negative review thanks them for their visit, apologizes for the bad experience, and asks what they can do to improve – well, that shows they’re engaged AND concerned about the customer having a great experience every time.

Which sites should you be concerned with most?

The top 4 sites to be concerned with for reputation management are Google Places, Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter. There are many other websites you should also keep up with, however these four will be your bread and butter.

Trying to run a business while trying to juggle responding to comments/reviews, writing press releases, blog posts, and encouraging new and existing customers to post can be overwhelming. If you are looking for someone to re-establish your online presence in a positive way, Graceful Penguin would be glad to help. Let our Atlanta reputation management experts take care of it so you can concentrate on the more important business aspects. Sign up for your free consultation.

+Cullie Burris

Now that it is a widely accepted solution, there are widely known problems that you run into when designing sites to be viewed in seemingly infinite range of widths and heights. First off we’re going to tackle the issues presented by navigating your site at different sizes.

Navigation

One of the first things I always think about when designing a website is the site map and how the navigation is going to work. Single level? Dropdowns? Maybe a nifty little sidebar nav? There are a billion different aspects of a site that determine what type of nav is going to work best in each situation, but that’s conversation for another day. For this one we’re going to assume you at least know what type of navigation your going to use.

So your nav bar is set up and it works wonderfully – until your screen gets just a little too small and then things start dropping down to the next line and it looks awful. Now you have a couple of options. We’ll take a look at CSS-Tricks and how they handle their navigation at different screen sizes.

CSS-Tricks navigation at full-width

You can see that it’s a very clean, single level navigation with icons and descriptive text. At this full-width size it’s very easy to get all of those elements in there and looking good. But what happens when the screen gets to netbook/small desktop window/horizontal tablet size…?

CSS-Tricks navigation at mid-size (small desktop window, tablet in landscape, net-book)

Simple enough – they drop down to the next level and stack! They had to get rid of the smaller descriptive text at this size, but the icons and text stay relatively the same. But even this stacked version won’t fit on skinnier windows or a tablet in portrait orientation, so what happens then…?

CSS-Tricks navigation at tablet in portrait size

Again, another so simple it would just about hit you in the face solution – drop the icon to get rid of some width and throw back in the descriptive text underneath. Still works perfectly and still offers a further description of what you’re clicking on. But even this simple setup won’t fit on your smart phone, right?

CSS-Tricks navigation at phone size

Maybe it is that simple – the exact same link layout as the previous screenshot just stacked  two’s instead of four’s. So at a few main break points in the design – desktop, net-book/tablet landscape, tablet portrait, and mobile – the design of the links in the navigation has to change but they generally keep the same design aspects and spacing at every size to maintain some consistency.

Another Site, Another Method

Now we’re going to take a look at how another one of my favorite sites on the web handles its navigation at different screen sizes. Smashing Magazine was recently redesigned to incorporate ever screen size from monster monitor to tiny phone, but we’re just going to look at a few of the key break points.

Smashing Magazine's navigation at full-width

Since Smashing Magazine is such a large collection of articles with many, many subjects covered, they have main navigation as well as a sub-navigation available at this full-width size. Since they have so much width to work with they went with a two-columned navigation that sits the left of the main content. This works great for large monitors, but for a regular laptops having four columns is going to be very cluttered, so…

Smashing Magazine's navigation at standard laptop size

Yet again, it’s another super simple solution – moved the left-most main navigation column to the top as a standard horizontal menu. It easily frees up more width in the design for the content and is still very functional as the main navigation. But that column still takes up a lot of room on let’s say a tablet in landscape

Smashing Magazine's navigation at mid-size (small desktop window, tablet in landscape, net-book)

I feel like there’s a pattern here – another easy fix by taking the left-column sub-navigation and placing it as another horizontal nav bar under the main navigation. It still conveys itself as a sub-nav very clearly but it now gives the smaller screen-size more width for viewing the content. It is still a full-width navigation so on a phone you would have to…

Smashing Magazine's navigation at phone size

Put all the links in a drop-down selection menu? Why not – it works, it takes up the least amount of space possible, and it naturally uses a phone’s inherent selection method when it’s clicked. It retains the native operations of the phone, and looks clean and simple across all platforms. This being said, it does limit the navigation a bit – in fact, I’ve actually tried to look up an article that I had previously read on my computer on my phone and wasn’t able to locate it because it was under a nav option that’s no longer available at the mobile menu size.

In Conclusion…

There is no ‘correct’ way to responsively design your site’s navigation. There’s a ton of ways out there to go about it and you just have to pick the method that makes the most sense for your particular site. The navigation on a big site like Smashing Magazine will have to be done differently than the navigation for your business simple 5 page brochure style site. The best thing to do is have a good, long sit down with your site map and a laptop, click-through some examples and think up something perfect for your navigation whether its one of the solutions above or something completely new and creative.

+Jack Nycz

So, how is Google doing this? The answer is…

rel=”author” and rel=”me”

These HTML tags are Google’s new experiment to give authors credit for their content. By adding a link to your Google+ profile with ?rel=author added to the end of it is the easy way to do it for those who don’t have access to their header file, or don’t know how to do it the way Google would prefer you to do so. What this does is it notifies Google that the owner of the linked Google+ account is responsible for that content.

But what stops me from linking to President Obama’s profile and claiming he wrote something about pulling 100% of troops out of Afghanistan and Google believing it to be him? Well, Google has implemented a checks and balances system (pun definitely intended) to ensure this sort of thing is prevented. You will receive a notification in your Google+ account asking you to confirm that you are, in fact, the author of whatever content was linked to your profile. If you don’t confirm, that blog post or article will not be accredited to that author, and will simply not be trusted as content put out by President Obama.

What exactly does this mean for SEO?

For those people who write a lot of value adding content, this could mean that once you write a blog, it could get instant credit, and because you have provided a lot of good content that people share, your new content will be deemed as trustworthy, causing your blog to rank higher in the search engines.

While this is new and Google is still working out the kinks, I highly recommend everyone start doing this, because well, Google said to do so. I like the fact that they are doing this, because it will help weed out a lot of the black hat SEOs out there who write over-optimized blogs simply for keyword stuffing. If you consistently put out value-adding content, you will surely, over time, start to gain some Google street credit.

Check out this video below by Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson where they go into more detail about how this process works:

The authorship markup can be a little confusing for those who aren’t too familiar with HTML, so check out this excellent post by Joost De Valk. He takes you step by step through the process and explains rel=”author” and rel=”me” into greater detail.

While links are still around 60% of Google’s algorithm, it is definitely a good idea to stay on top of what Google is up to, because things like this will end up becoming a larger part of the algorithm, while number of (quality) links will begin to ride the bench.

+Cullie Burris

Once your site has been complete, we will give you a login URL, a username and a password. Go to your URL (usually www.yoursite.com/wp-admin) and enter that username and password and you’ll be logged into your WordPress site.

2. Navigate the dashboard

Once your logged in, you’ll see a variety of options on the left hand side. In the picture below we’ve pointed out where you can access your ‘Posts’ as well as your ‘Pages’. The difference between ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ is easy – Posts are articles that go inside of the blog section, while Pages are the main pages in your site – usually things like ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, etc.

Add a new post or navigate to an old post

Once you click on ‘Posts’, you’ll come to the page below. To add a new post you can click ‘Add New’ at the top of the page. To edit a previous post, you can just click on any of the blog titles to edit that post.

Add content/edit a post

Once you get a single post page, you’ll see the screen below. First and foremost you will want to pick a creative and relevant title for your blog post. Directly below that is where you will add/edit content for the post. On the top-right of that content section are the buttons ‘Visual’ and ‘HTML’. You’ll want to make sure that ‘Visual’ is selected unless you know how to write code.

On the right are two sections called ‘Category’ and ‘Tags’. Category is going to be just that – the main category for the blog post. Tags are more specific to the post itself. For example, if you had a car website, the Category might be ‘Muscle Cars’ and some tags might be ‘Mustang’, ‘Yellow’, and ‘V8′.

Once you’ve completed your post, you’ll want to either save it as a draft or publish it. Both of these options can be found to the right of where you edit your content.

+Jack Nycz

The way we used to deal with making something mobile, even a couple of years ago, was to make an entirely different site (you know – the url’s like m.google.com) and then detect it was mobile and redirect to that completely different site. There were a lot of downsides to this method, the most obvious being that you had to update everything twice whenever you did anything.

Well, in 2011 that thinking was officially blown out of the water by a short book titled, very appropriately, Responsive Web Design. It instantly changed the entire web design industry by illustrating a new way of going about adapting websites to different screen sizes by styling the content differently based on how large the viewing screen is. Instead of a whole new website for mobile devices, your now just adding a new section to the websites style sheet to apply new styling for the different devices.

A couple of months down the road responsive web design has swept across the industry. It sparked flame-wars of epic proportion, those who fell in love instantly with the concept and those that argued that serving the same content up to everyone is still the way to go. I fell in the first of the two groups and have used every new technique I can get my hands on as this new way of designing gains traction as the way to go.

I’ll be posting more stuff on responsive web design in the weeks to come, including a brief overview of how we went about making this site and some of the techniques and scripts that we used. Check back soon!

+Jack Nycz

1. Do they dominate the search rankings for their own keywords?

How can a company claim to get you to the first page of Google for your keywords when they can’t even rank their own page? One way to check is to find out what city their company resides in, and type that along with “seo” in Google – then check to see if their website ranks well. So for instance, if Joe’s SEO company was in Atlanta, you would search for Atlanta SEO, and see if Joe’s SEO company is near the top. If so, they might be alright. If not, don’t even bother with them. However, ask them how long they have been in business. It is very possible they are a new company, but have brought with them the knowledge to do some serious damage. This is where you’d have to use your own judgement based on the techniques they use to accomplish their tasks.

2. Do they outsource?

This can be a hard question to answer, as many SEO firms will tell you they have a “team,” which very well could mean they have a team on staff, or it could also mean they have a team in the Philippines who build links. With the Panda update, a lot of directories and content farms have been devalued, and are no longer very useful. If they promise to build you 1000 links per month, I would be very weary, as quantitative links can still be useful, but more emphasis is now being placed on qualitative links, and building too many links too quickly may get you penalized by Google.

3. How many Facebook fans or Twitter followers do they have?

Now, this is the biggest giveaway, in my opinion, in determining whether an SEO company truly generates genuine fans and traffic. Check out their Facebook page and Twitter page and take a peek at how many fans/followers they have. Initially, it may look like an impressive Facebook marketing campaign with 3000+ users, however, when you dive deeper and actually look at WHO these people are, you will find something interesting. Majority of their “fans” are auto-generated accounts, or accounts created by spammers, and you will notice this based on the names associated with their accounts. If the names don’t look natural, they probably aren’t. There are many sites out there that allow you to “buy” fans, or exchange a “like” for a “like.” While it is quick and easy to get these fans, these people will never be anyone who is actually going to purchase your product or service, therefore their “loyalty” is pointless. The whole point of using social media networks is to build an audience who are actually interested in what you provide. Don’t be fooled, get REAL fans and followers.

4. Do they guarantee first page rankings in the first month of service?

If any SEO firm tells you that they can have you ranked on the first page of Google for any and all of your keywords in the first month of service, well, RUN FOR THE HILLS! While it is possible for this to happen, there are just too many factors at play to guarantee any time table in this industry. The industry average for seeing ranking results is approximately 3 months. This is because SEO has to be done slowly over time so it is deemed natural, rather than building a million links in a week and getting flagged. A lot of firms will try and tie you into a contract, which can be good and bad, depending on the terms. If a firm tries to tie you into a 6-month contract, again run for the hills. They simply just want you to obligate your money to them, regardless of their performance. However, if the company requests you sign a 3-month contract, don’t be scared. You would only be shooting yourself in the foot if you did one month’s worth of SEO and then stopped. All the work done for the month would be wasted, along with the money you spent. You should always give your SEO firm 3 months to deliver.

5. Last but not least, do they have any success stories?

A lot of sales reps for SEO companies will bombard you with questions in order to divert your attention away from any questions you might ask them – questions they may not be able to answer. Ask them for some example successes, projects they have done in the past that proves they can rank websites at the top. After they tell you, double check. Search the keyword they claimed to rank and see if that website shows up. It is possible they ranked someone very quickly, but got flagged just as quickly. A simple screen shot on their website showing “#1 rankings” isn’t enough. Ranking for one day is a lot different than maintaining that rank over time.


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Some other things you want to make sure your SEO firm provides is top-quality keyword research. Just because you think you know which keyword you want to rank for doesn’t mean it is the best one, or the most profitable one. You SEO company needs to think like the average user as to pinpoint the keywords they are searching for. This research should be done for free before you start a campaign to see where your website stands based on keywords and competition. What is determined by the preliminary research will dictate the price of your campaign, so make sure you don’t start a campaign without this being done first.

Graceful Penguin’s Atlanta SEO experts provide solid campaigns using the most innovative and up-to-date techniques that are unique to your company’s needs. Give us a call today!

+Cullie Burris

We are excited to announce the launch of our new website for Graceful Penguin LLC!

If you haven’t been able to tell, we are a full service web design and internet marketing company based in Atlanta that specializes in SEO and social media. We build structurally sound websites that reverberate whatever image you want your company to portray. On top of that, we use our internet marketing skills to help drive your website to the top of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, while building your target audience via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Check out our portfolio to see some of our completed projects.

If you aren’t sure as to how Graceful Penguin can help jump-start your business online, fill out our form, give us a call, or chat with us right now using the button on the bottom right corner of your browser. Thanks for stopping by!

DESIGN, DRIVE, DELIVER!

+Cullie Burris