In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding off-page SEO is crucial for anyone looking to enhance their website’s visibility and authority. As we move into 2025, the strategies and best practices surrounding off-page SEO continue to adapt, making it essential for digital marketers, small business owners, and students in the UK to stay informed.

In this guide, I’ll delve into the off-page SEO definition, its importance, and actionable strategies to help you navigate this critical aspect of SEO.

Introduction to Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the techniques and strategies used to improve a website’s visibility and ranking on search engines by involving external factors. Unlike on-page SEO, which focuses on optimizing elements within the website, off-page SEO encompasses activities outside the website. It plays a crucial role in digital marketing by:

• Enhancing search engine rankings
• Increasing online visibility
• Building authority and trust
• Driving referral traffic
• Strengthening brand reputation

For instance, when a reputable site links back to your content, it signals to search engines that your site is credible and authoritative, which can significantly boost your rankings.

Key Differences Between On-Page and Off-Page SEO

To truly grasp the concept of off-page SEO, it’s important to understand how it differs from on-page SEO. Here’s a quick comparison:

While on-page SEO is about fine-tuning your website’s content and structure, off-page SEO is about building relationships and authority outside your website.

Top Off-Page SEO Techniques for 2025

Link Building

Link building remains a cornerstone of off-page SEO. It involves acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own, thereby improving authority and search rankings. Effective link-building strategies include:

• Guest Blogging: Writing articles for other websites in exchange for backlinks.
• Partnerships: Collaborating with other businesses or websites to exchange links.
• Directory Submissions: Listing your website in relevant online directories.

These techniques not only enhance your site’s authority but also drive referral traffic, a key factor in improving your site’s visibility.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can significantly enhance off-page SEO efforts by boosting brand visibility and facilitating link sharing. Statistics show that increased social engagement correlates with higher search rankings. By actively engaging with your audience on these platforms, you can drive more traffic to your site and increase your chances of acquiring backlinks.

Influencer Outreach

Collaborating with influencers can expand your reach and enhance credibility. By leveraging their audience, you can acquire quality backlinks and increase brand awareness. For example, an influencer mentioning your product or service can lead to a surge in traffic and potential backlinks from their followers.

Content Marketing

Effective content marketing involves creating valuable and shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks. Emerging trends in 2025 include interactive content and personalized experiences. By producing high-quality content that resonates with your audience, you increase the likelihood of it being shared and linked to by others.

Building Quality Backlinks

To acquire high-quality backlinks, consider the following strategies:

• Identify Relevant Websites and Blogs: Focus on sites within your niche that have high authority.
• Craft Personalized Outreach Emails: Tailor your communication to each recipient to increase your chances of success.
• Offer Valuable Content or Guest Posts: Provide content that adds value to the recipient’s audience.
• Build Relationships with Industry Influencers: Engage with influencers in your field to foster mutually beneficial relationships.
• Utilize Online Directories and Forums: Participate in relevant online communities to gain exposure and potential backlinks.

These strategies not only help in acquiring backlinks but also in building long-term relationships within your industry.

The Role of Social Media in Off-Page SEO

Social media platforms significantly impact off-page SEO by:

• Enhancing brand visibility
• Facilitating link sharing
• Driving referral traffic
• Engaging with the audience

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are essential tools in supporting SEO efforts. By maintaining an active presence on these platforms, you can engage with your audience, share valuable content, and increase your chances of acquiring backlinks.

Measuring Off-Page SEO Success

To track and measure the effectiveness of your off-page SEO strategies, consider these tools and metrics:

• Domain Authority: A metric that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages.
• Referral Traffic: The amount of traffic coming to your site from external sources.
• Social Signals: The engagement and interactions your content receives on social media platforms.

Recommended tools include Google Analytics and Ahrefs for monitoring these key performance indicators. These tools provide valuable insights into your off-page SEO efforts and help you make data-driven decisions.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Off-Page SEO

Avoid these frequent errors in off-page SEO:

• Buying Links: This can lead to penalties from search engines and damage your site’s reputation.
• Neglecting Social Media: Failing to engage with your audience on social media can limit your reach and visibility.
• Ignoring Local SEO: Overlooking local SEO opportunities can hinder your site’s performance in local search results.

To prevent these mistakes, focus on building organic relationships, maintaining an active social presence, and optimizing for local search. These practices will help you build a strong off-page SEO foundation.

Understanding and implementing effective off-page SEO strategies is essential for improving your website’s visibility and authority in 2025. By focusing on building quality backlinks, leveraging social media, and avoiding common pitfalls, you can enhance your site’s performance and achieve your digital marketing goals. For more insights and strategies, consider exploring my time saving SEO tips and digital PR services.

More resources to learn Off-Page SEO

• https://moz.com/learn/seo/off-site-seo
• https://www.semrush.com/blog/off-page-seo/
• https://backlinko.com/off-page-seo-guide
• https://optinmonster.com/off-page-seo/
• https://www.bluehost.com/blog/off-page-seo-checklist/
• https://searchengineland.com/off-page-optimization-447674

Off Page SEO FAQs

Understanding Off-Page SEO: Strategies and Best Practices for 2025 by Andrew Isidoro

Adding organisation schema markup to Shopify is not necessarily tricky, but it can be a bit daunting for some webmasters who are not used to JSON-LD or messing with Shopify’s liquid files.

The process involves creating and adding JSON-LD code to your Shopify store’s theme files. This can be a bit fiddly if you are not familiar with coding, but below is a handy step by step guide to get you started.

Why should webmasters add organisation schema to their websites?

• Improved search engine ranking: Schema markup can help websites rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because it provides search engines with more information about the content of a website, which helps them to better understand what the website is about.
• Increased click-through rate: Schema markup can also help to increase the click-through rate (CTR) of a website’s listings in SERPs. This is because it can make the listings more visually appealing and informative, which can make users more likely to click on them.
• Enhanced rich snippets: Schema markup can be used to create rich snippets, which are enhanced versions of search results listings that can include additional information, such as star ratings, price, or availability. Rich snippets can make a website’s listings more prominent in SERPs and can also help to increase CTR.
• Better understanding of your website by Google: Schema markup can help Google better understand your website and its content. This can lead to improved indexing and ranking of your website, as well as the ability for Google to display your website in other Google products, such as Google Maps or Google Shopping.

How to Add Organisation Schema to your Shopify Site

Step 1: Create your schema markup (JSON-LD)

You can use a schema markup generator to create your organisation schema. Here is an example of a JSON-LD schema for an organisation:

{ "@context": "http://schema.org", "@type": "Organization", "name": "My company", "url": "https://www.company.com", "logo": "https://www.company.com/logo.png", "contactPoint": [ { "@type": "ContactPoint", "telephone": "+1 555 555 5555", "email": "info@company.com" } ] }

Step 2: Creating your snippet file in Shopify

Log in to your Shopify store and go to Online store > Themes > Actions > Edit Code.

In the left-hand navigation, scroll down and open the snippets folder. Click Add a new snippet and name it something like “organisationschema”.

Paste your organisation schema (JSON-LD) into the empty field and hit save. Make sure to add div and script tags.

Step 3: Adding our new Schema snippet to the homepage

In the left-hand navigation, locate the index.liquid file which will be within the template directory.

In the index.liquid file, add the following code snippet:

{% include 'snippets/organizationschema.liquid' %}

This will add your organisation schema to the homepage of your Shopify store.

Step 4: Test

Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to test your organisation schema. Enter your homepage URL and click Test.

If the test is successful, you should see a green check mark next to your organisation schema.

So there you have it!

Adding schema markup to Shopify can be a bit tricky, but it is a worthwhile investment. Schema markup can help you improve your website’s search engine ranking and make it more accessible to users. If you are willing to put in the effort, you can learn how to add schema markup to Shopify and reap the benefits.

How to Add Organisation Schema to your Shopify Site by Andrew Isidoro

Changing consumers

In an age where competitor benchmarking and industry analysis is commonplace, marketers often lose sight of what really matters. The customer.

In an interview with First Round Review, Dropbox’s Head of Design, Soleio Cuervo said “Remember that you’re not competing against other services. You’re competing against people’s habits.”.

He’s 100% right.

Customers have become brand agnostic. Today, consumers have their regular purchases that they make routinely, applications that aid them and brands that help them define who they are and what they stand for. A study by Deloitte found that consumers buy online primarily out of ease and convenience, the lack of fixed opening hours, and the fact that they do not need to carry the products home themselves – and this holds the crux of the modern consumer.

Brands continue to play an important role in the purchase process but blind commitment to individual brands has decreased. Modern consumers switch brands, experiment, and are open for inspiration in their aim to help . In future, the number of newly emerging niche products and brands will continue to increase. Only brands that focus on the customer relationship and not the products can expect loyal customers. All others will experience much tougher competition. For retailers, digital technologies give the opportunity to extend their range considerably and to test the sale of new brands online.

Smartphones – Assistance and distraction.

Smartphones not only act as shopping assistants, but also as a serious source of distraction. At present, mobile phones tend to divert attention from buying, and not supporting the purchase process. But even today, some consumers already use their mobile phone to make better purchase decisions or buy cheaper elsewhere. Presently, fewer than 10% of respondents now use their smartphones in stores in most retail sectors. These figures are much higher for consumer electronics and home improvement products. With the increasing penetration of smartphones, this is set to change in the future. High street retailers will gain a wealth of opportunities to sell, and to give information, navigation and help.

Social commerce: Friend to salesperson.

Brands are now also beginning to weave social media into the sales process. Facebook, Twitter and the like are fast becoming not only communication tools, but also sales channels. The idea of social media becoming the “eCRM on acid” that will change the digital landscape seems to be edging closer;  turning customer’s friends and acquaintances into affiliates to meet the growing need for personal guidance and orientation of the modern consumer. They thus gain quality and flexibility. They can personalize the shopping experience, make more relevant offers and require less staff. Initial approaches are pointing toward this development. Even today, users who tell their friends what they are buying or were become eligible for discounts. Twitter is being used actively for sales help and product announcements. Retailers use Facebook to identify customers at the start of the buying process, present personalized offers and deliver recommendations from their friends. The first online stores are opening within Facebook. And the key to the success of new players such as Groupon is that many consumers shop together.

From advertising space to involvement space.

The era in which physical retail outlets and e-commerce were separate and competing spheres is drawing to a close. In the future, consumers will buy in numerous physical locations and via a variety of physical media. The triumphant progress of touchscreen computers and smartphones is making this possible. Consumers will be able to browse and make purchases at display windows and outdoor advertising spaces. They can also use touchscreens to order products in stores or view more information. Tablet computers let sellers present products more effectively and sell them directly. A variety of new digital services will support this buying process via sensors. Orders are then delivered or are ready for collection in the store.

Static business models

While consumers are changing their habits at an unprecedented rate to better fit their connected and “busy” lives; most businesses are failing to adapt with them. Sure there are a few that are looking to make their operations more digital. But it is the companies that look to drive a wedge into people’s habits that are the ones that are truly out there disrupting things. Take a look at Uber, for example:

“You used to walk out to the street to flag a taxi down. Now with Uber you can book a taxi home from work using your smartphone.”

Successful tech companies are built on new habits they helped form around the utility they have provided. Google, Ebay and Netflix are all examples of great habit changing business models that have replaced their analog counterparts.

As you think about your product or service, always be thinking about what people currently do and how you can create a new set of habits around your business. After all, that’s what retention really is —assisting people to build a routine around your product offering.

Forget Demographics. Consumer Habits Rule. by Andrew Isidoro

We live in an increasingly connected world of shifting environments, agility, and innovation. As customers, workers, and partners continue to relate to organisations in new ways, it becomes especially important to react to this age of increased connectivity by understanding how people interact and adopt a specific focus to keep up with the changing face of business. However, it can be difficult to intuitively know how to realign your business practices in a modern, interconnected world.

In my opinion, there is no better way to help you in re-orienting your digital leadership in the best possible direction than by learning from the success and mistakes of others. It’s also important to note that you needn’t manage staff to develop as a leader; in fact it can be even more beneficial to extend your leadership knowledge before you pick up undesirable habits.

The collection below features some of my favourite leadership books to boost your leadership and innovation:

1. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
2. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens
3. Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools
4. Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning
5. Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times
6. Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live
7. The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
8. The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
9. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
10. Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

These texts don’t have all the answers but they start a journey of discovery that you can use to deliver better results in various business environments.

What are your favourite books on leadership and innovation? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

11 Books to Boost Your Leadership and Innovation by Andrew Isidoro

These days, what matters is not who you know – but who knows you. That’s why networking has become such a talking point within small business circles. Whichever point you are in your career, whether you are a business owner starting a new venture or a professional looking to expand your circle of peers, networking plays a crucial part to the success of any business and can help grow your profile; encouraging you to connect with people who may become an integral part to your business or career plans in the near future.

For many the benefits of networking are vast and I truly believe it’s worth doing. The problem is that, for those of us with introverted tendencies, networking is hell.

Networking as an introvert

I think Andrea Ayres put it brilliantly:

I’m an introvert and people scare the hell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those super shy types but I’m not one to initiate a conversation if I don’t have to. In fact, very few people are fully introverts or extroverts, instead they probably share some characteristics of both but that doesn’t make social situations any less painful for those of us who lean towards the quieter side of that spectrum.

Networking events are usually big, busy affairs with hundreds of outgoing people talking and exchanging business cards. A scene I used to both admire and detest. I’m not good at these events. They, again as Andrea put it, “scare the hell out of me”. they are draining, nerve-wracking and inevitably for me, largely ineffective.

An introverts alternative to “networking”

Disillusioned by networking events, I stumbled on a sweet spot. Back in April 2014, I was honored to be asked to speak at BrightonSEO, a big conference to around 2000 people. I was terrified as I’d never spoken at anything more than a school play before but it was too good of an offer to turn down. Leaving the stage after the talk I felt relieved that it had all gone well. I sat through the remaining talks in my section while I planned how to escape the crowds to get a coffee somewhere quiet during the break when something miraculous happened. People began to talk to me.

One of the most difficult things for a nervous introvert at a networking event is to start a conversation with a stranger. I mean, what do you say? how do you keep a conversation going with a stranger? what if they don’t want to talk to me? what if they think my opinions are stupid? – these have been real thoughts in my head at one point or another. But here I was, networking with no effort expended. The conversation flowed perfectly as they asked me to expand further on the points I had made and spoke about their own experiences with entity search. I had ended up having 5 great conversations with some really nice people I’d have never of dared to approach otherwise.

A few weeks later, I was talking again. A friend of mine was looking for speakers for the Digital Marketing Show at the ExCeL in London, and I jumped at the chance. Hoping to recreate the networking success I had achieved in Brighton, I came off stage to be greeted to a small line of people who wanted to chat to me. That’s when I knew there was something to this speaking malarkey…

After two events I had spoken to more people than I had ever spoken to at the many events I’ve been to over the years. I’ve found no more efficient way of networking as an introvert than giving a talk. I could get my point across, leave my twitter account around for other introverts to chat online, have a few conversations with people who seek me out, then head home to recharge. Bliss.

I’ve since found a wonderful book on this subject called “Presentation Skills For Introverts“ where the author, Rob Dix, gives further advice on dealing with introversion in networking situations. I highly recommend it.

Do you have any advice or tips for introverts looking to network more successfully? Give us a hand and leave a comment below!

Networking as an Introvert needn’t be scary by Andrew Isidoro

The life of a digital marketer is one of constant multi-tasking. One second you are brainstorming ideas for interesting content, and the other you are auditing a website for technical SEO issues.

The name of the game is productivity; and the way to achieve this is through better organising your time to waste less on activities that don’t add value and spend more time on delivering for your clients and employer.

That’s why I got in touch with some really smart digital folk to help all of you save valuable time and become more productive and successful SEOs by providing you with their top hacks to help you get more done. Without further ado; let’s get started:

Simon Penson, Managing Director at Zazzle Media

“I spend a lot of time looking at competitor and market data and one of the toughest jobs is to understand how much overlap there is, especially when you are really trying to nail down a very relevant competitor for data dive purposes.

One way of doing this quickly without having to guess or spend hours looking at mountains of Excel data is to utilise a vastly underused little tool hidden within the SEMRush suite. In the ‘Tools’ tab you can find a Domain V Domain option and in here it is possible to paste in your competitor short-list. From here you can see how many keywords they share and it is then very simple to refine the list to a ‘best match’ scenario. From here you can then dive much deeper.”

Kevin Gibbons, Managing Director at Blueglass UK

“My tip is to learn when to switch off — I’m suggesting this because it’s the one I’ve found most difficult personally, but knowing when to stop is essential towards keeping a clear way of thinking.

Focused effort is so much more valuable — find the environment that allows you to block out any distractions and get the best results. One thing that helped me was to remove all social apps from my phone last summer and I haven’t missed them since — an even more surprisingly, I did the same with email 6 weeks ago and the world has kept turning too :)”

Gareth James, Freelance SEO at SEO Doctor

“Lots of automation tools are great for helping digital marketers save time, but my best time hack has been to actually work more efficiently. I started using the Pomodoro Technique last year and found it worked really well for me.

You basically work for 25 minutes then have a break for 5 minutes completing tasks in each time slot. Sounds simple, but it actually trains you to get tasks done faster and avoid other distractions like social media or watching Jeremy Kyle if you’re a freelancer.”

Kirsty Hulse, Head of SEO at Found

“Re-purpose old content. Often it’s easier, quicker and cheaper to inject new life in to successful old content than creating something new from scratch.

Got an infographic from a few months ago that worked well? Use a tool like Powtoon to turn the infographic in to a short video animation; or take similar content, give them a refresh and group them to create a “guide”. If you work in a fast paced industry — take snippets from old blog content and discuss new perspectives and how this may have changed.”

Steve Morgan, Freelance SEO at Morgan Online Marketing

“As part of my freelance work, I’ve done a bit of link removal/disavow work for clients who have been affected by Penguin and/or have acquired a Manual Action penalty. The fiddliest part of the work used to be grabbing the inbound link data from multiple sources (Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic, Open Site Explorer, etc.) and then removing the duplicates while keeping hold of the most information (as — for example — the GWT data only gives you the linking URL, but other tools give you more data, such as anchor text, Domain Authority, the page being linked to, etc.).

I found out about URL Profiler from someone and gave it a try. If you put all the data files into it, it automatically strips out the duplicates and gives you the data that you want for each and every URL. It saves so, so much time. My current licence ran out, but the next time I’m doing this type of work for someone, I’m renewing it straight away.

I also like to use the CONCATENATE formula in Excel to speed up with the disavow file creation process, which combines bits of data together from multiple cells into one cell. Fill Column A with “domain:”, put the actual domains in Column B (e.g. “example.com”), use the CONCATENATE formula in Column C — grabbing Columns A & B’s data — and it’ll combine them to make “domain:example.com” in every instance. URL Profiler can even give you just the domain for every link, making Column B really easy to put together, too.”

My own time-saving top tip

Reporting is the bane of digital marketer’s lives; regardless of their in-house/freelance/agency status. The measurable nature of the platforms we work on mean that we are required to constantly report on a number of metrics. My top time-saving tip is to spend a little time gathering reporting requirements and use those to automate as much as possible. Tools like AWR Cloud allow you to automate regular ranking reports, social media follower growth and (my personal favourite) visibility tracking for a large number of keywords.

Bonus tip for in-house SEOs — Have multiple product lines? Use automated Visibility Reporting through AWR to offer product / section level performance tracking to add value to the business on a more useful level.

So there we have it. A few time-saving ideas that have hopefully got you thinking about ways you can minimise wasted time within your working day. If you have any time-saving hacks you’d like to share; pop them in the comments. 

Time saving hacks from SEOs by Andrew Isidoro

As stories of NSA spying and the threat to our privacy have rippled through the press again in the past week or so due to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden’s appearance at the Moment of Truth rally in Auckland. They have done much to raise the profile of government intrusion into our personal lives but as more and more data is collected by corporations, are we looking at an enemy closer to home?

A few days ago I attended BrightonSEO; a fantastic conference that I have been to many times and was fortunate enough to speak at earlier in the year. One talk that really hit home with me was from Ian Miller who looked into the advancements that Google is making through research, development and acquisition into the Semantic Web. I’ve long felt that Google’s advancements will come fast and thick but I’d not fully comprehended just how far they are at present.

While fellow conference attendees and I returned home and took stock of the information we’d just absorbed; a clerk at the United States Patent office was priming his rubber stamp of approval for a new search patent from Mountain View.

Today, Google was granted a patent that outlines “A computer implemented method for using search queries related to television programs.”. This seems pretty benign but it really isn’t. Google’s new patent outlines a method to distinguish, through an extensive TV listing database cross referenced with a user’s location, what a searcher is watching at that very moment and adjust their search results accordingly.

Bill Slawski does a great job of disseminating what the patent actually means in the short-term but I can’t help but feel that this is the beginning of something much bigger; the start of our future without secrets.

A life without secrets

One of my favourite books of all time is the classic novel 1984 by George Orwell; if you haven’t read it I highly suggest you buy it now. The book explores a multitude of issues in a dystopian world where the government has total control over not only the public’s behaviour but also their thoughts due to their impetuous propaganda and constant surveillance. This is of course a far cry away from our current situation but one aspect of the novel became too vivid to ignore — that of the Telescreen.

Google released a new feature back in June 2013 that gave Google Now the ability to listen to TV programmes, identify them, and give more information about the episode you are watching. An element missing from the above patent but an improvement on its design I’m sure you’ll agree which begs the question; when/if this becomes integrated with Google search will Android devices become portable telescreens constantly listening to our day-to-day lives under the guise of an advanced “feature”?

Of course this is just one part of the puzzle but there are many more coming to the surface all the time. Most recently if you’re a Facebook user, you’ve probably noticed that the company is forcing users to download the Facebook Messenger app if they want to send and receive messages. Something which prompted Jonathan Zdziarski, a noted author and expert in iOS related digital forensics and security to look into the application and tweet:

“Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I’ve seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance,”

In an email to VICE’s Motherboard, Zdziarksi also told reporter Matthew Braga that Facebook logs “practically everything a user might do within the app.”

“[Facebook is] using some private APIs I didn’t even know were available inside the sandbox to be able to pull out your WiFi SSID (which could be used to snoop on which WiFi networks you’re connected to) and are even tapping the process list for various information on the device,” he wrote.

Herein lies the ever-increasing problem with our digital lives; a problem that we can’t put 100% at the door of Facebook, Google and other tech giants. Over the past few decades we have fuelled their success, offering up vast amounts of personal information to these services with little regard for how this information could potentially be used. I’ve written before about the level of personal data I have personally given up to Google’s search engine which has allowed them to “know” more about my personal life than some of my closest work colleagues. Unfortunately we are now at a critical mass where the amount of data freely available on us online has become dangerous.

A brilliant TED talk by Carnegie Mellon professor Alessandro Acquisti suggests we are making privacy tradeoffs as a result of the analysis of big data. Privacy-cracking techniques that until recently were not available broadly are now essentially open to anyone with an Internet connection. Facial recognition, for instance, has improved exponentially in recent years. He shows a project where he found he could take a photograph, match the face to publicly available information, and use the results to predict sensitive information such as a Social Security number. The most worrying part of his talk looks further ahead:

“Pushed to an extreme, you can imagine a future with strangers looking at you through Google Glass or their contact lens, and with seven or eight data points about you they could infer anything else about you,”

Marketers of the future will be able to scour your Facebook contacts, find your two best friends, and then blend their portraits to form a composite photograph. So next time you’re looking to buy something, the spokesperson will be an oddly familiar, friendly face, unrecognisable but subconsciously influential.

As Acquisti concludes “One of the defining fights of our time will be the fight for control over personal information” and it seems we are losing more and more ground by the day. One of my other favourite books of all time is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which technologies invented for freedom end up coercing citizens and it seems as though we are sprinting towards a similar fate. The game is on, in other words, whether we like it or not.

If you still wonder if this future without secrets is dangerous or if we should care? The simple answer: yes.

The more difficult question is can we realistically stop it?

The Future Isn’t Private: A Future without Secrets by Andrew Isidoro

There is a host of content marketing articles on the web, from content creation and optimisation to more strategic pieces around the finer points of the craft. The more and more of these I come across the more I keep coming to the same conclusion.

Why is no-one talking about the customer?

The customer (or consumer, user or whatever other pseudonym you wish to apply to them) has never lived in a more connected society than they do today. Face to face conversation, landline phone calls and postal mail have been joined, and to a degree replaced, by Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram and the seemingly ubiquitous Facebook. Add to that the ability to search almost the entire corpus of human knowledge through search engines like Google and Bing, and you begin to see the communicational prowess of the modern consumer. This evolution in communication has meant that content, and the way we use it to communicate to customers, needs to evolve too.

Just look at the prevalence of mobile devices, one of the most increasingly popular trends for modern consumers. With advances in technology being made, there are so many smartphones, tablets, and handheld devices that connect consumers with the Internet. The key is to recognise that mobile devices are not just phones anymore. For example within retail, smartphones play a central role at the point of sale as shopping assistants, with some consumers already using their mobile phone to make better purchase decisions or buy cheaper elsewhere.

Buyers tend to combine three sources of information to make good decisions in such a short time: media, social contacts and sales staff. According to a study by the Retail Revolution, the most commonly used sources for independently gathering information are newspapers, television and the Internet (48-90%). 43-68% use recommendations from friends and acquaintances as an orientation. 24-80% seek help from sales staff. Significant differences exist from sector to sector. As a rule, the more media-savvy consumers are, the more likely they are to obtain their own information. The less experience consumers have in a particular shopping sector, the more likely they are to also ask friends, acquaintances, or sales staff. For content marketer, it will become increasingly important not only to provide content to help convert, but to offer customers with the right information in the right place, often tailored to the context of the user and their device.

I guess the point of this article is to highlight the simple thought that while (some) core marketing principles still apply, your content marketing strategy must reach an increasingly fragmented and attention-deficient consumer…and don’t you forget it.

Recommended Reading

Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information – Itamar Simonson

Market-Led Strategic Change: Transforming the Process of Going to Market – Nigel Piercy

The Conversation Manager: The Power of the Modern Consumer, the End of the Traditional Advertiser – Steven Van Belleghem

Content Marketing and The Modern Consumer by Andrew Isidoro

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true” – Socrates

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Socrates poised that an ethical argument based on emotion was not one worth discussing, yet as SEO consultants, we have been guilty of this in recent weeks. Back in 2012 Google introduced a feature to the search results called the Knowledge Graph. It gave users an improvement to the level of their interaction with the SERPs that they had never seen before (or since). There has been much talk of this aspect of search over the past few months but the ethical questions to be discussed around the implementation of raw data into search deserve to be discussed with logic at the forefront. When discussing ethical matters like this; I’ve long been an advocate of the voice of the collective so for this post I have decided to surround myself with people much more intelligent than I such as Bill Slawski, Dr Pete Meyers and Gianluca Fiorelli. We discussed briefly over email the topics in question and here were their answers:

With Google expanding to include more panels pulled from pages without markup; how do you see information retrieval effecting brands, publishers and retailers alike?

The purpose behind knowledge panels are really two-fold. The first of those is to improve discoverability, to make it easier for people who don’t know a topic well to learn more, so that they have related information and topics to search for. The second purpose is similar to that of a snippet in search results. Knowledge panels provide a representation of the entities they are about, include some disambiguation information when there are other entities or concepts by the same name so that a search can explore those as well. In neither instance is the purpose to replace web pages or documents that might be pointed to by Google, but instead to give people more to search for from the search engine, including in many instances, topics that people often search for next historically when they perform a search for the original entity.

Bill Slawski

I think it depends a lot on the vertical. It’s easy to look at a quick answer derailing a result and see nothing but bad news. It’s fair to ask, though – if your business is nothing but aggregating easy answers (plus ads, most likely), how much value do you add? Sites that listed dates for major holidays provided a service for a while and made good money on ads, but now that Google can answer a question like “When is Christmas?”, that business model is over. Being brutally honest, though – it wasn’t a very strong model to begin with. On the other hand, imagine you’re a local restaurant, and Google is serving up a rich knowledge panel with your photos, address, telephone and today’s operating hours. Have they potentially taken a click from your website? Sure, but does that matter? They’ve made your brand look more credible and given people the information they need to find you. If those people walk in the door, it doesn’t matter where the information comes from. I’m not arguing about Google’s intent or responsibility to webmasters (I think they’ve milked “good for users” a bit too hard lately). I’m just saying that the impact on your business can vary wildly. Some people will do well.

Dr Pete

I think it is already doing it, if it true what implementation data are telling us about the real use of schema.org and other structured data, being it quite small with respect the total amount of web document indexed by Google. A very simple example is how Google is able (well, not always) to interpret authorship thanks to the by-line and with the rel=”author” being absent. How brands, publisher et al are going to be affected? I think that at first they will see and notice a traffic decrease, probably… But what they will also see will be – IMHO – a better quality of the traffic that still they will receive, also from a Knowledge Graph navigation. They will loose traffic that tends to bounce a lot or that is not going to convert ever. More over, if web site owners/SEO are able to monitor and control what Google is “scraping” from them, they can gain visibility above the fold in the SERPs, which is quite a precious value right now that organic search snippets visibility is shrinking.

Gianluca Fiorelli

Many see the see Google’s expansion of the knowledge graph to include more and more terms to be aggressive; Do you and would you ever recommend against schema.org or other microformats to limit information passed to search engines?

Search engines have been working to extract structured data from the somewhat unstructured nature of web pages for a long time. The labels from microformats and schema might make it easier for a search engine to extract information from a page, and if you want your page to be a source of such information, including that kind of markup isn’t a bad idea. I can envision some people portraying Google’s knowledgebase to be “aggressive”, and there have been people who have written about search engine bias, and a desire for search engines to show their own properties instead of those from original sources. But often those other properties are just more finely focused vertical searches.

Bill Slawski

There may be isolated cases, but in general, I wouldn’t recommend that. Google is going to find ways to extract data from someone, somehow. Either you can control that data and make sure it comes from you, or it can either (a) come from a competitor, or (b) come from you however Google finds and mangles it. From a purely commercial standpoint, I’m not sure what choice we have but to play the evolving game.

Dr Pete

No, I wouldn’t. What I would suggest, and actually that’s what I suggest to my clients from some time now, is to craft their content in order to have “answers” ready to be used by Google in the Knowledge Graph and Answers box, but to put special efforts in offering in-depth content in the same page. For instance, using as an example a site offering IP information, if it was just answering to a question like “what’s my IP” with just the IP number of a domain name, then that site is going to sink due to Answers box. But if in the same page the site offers deep information as what others domain are hosted in the same IP, what country is that IP assigned to, what historical information we can find about that IP, if that IP was ever flagged for malware and what kind of malware and so on, then we are offering informations that will be valuable to the users and that Google cannot offer with a simple answer.

Gianluca Fiorelli

Many webmasters have complained about results containing scraped data; but in your opinion is Google doing anything wrong? Is there any logical or ethical argument (from a user perspective) against Google presenting scraped data within panels?

One of the tenets of copyright is the concept of fair use, and there’s a 4 pronged test for whether a use of someone’s artistic work is or isn’t fair use. Facts themselves aren’t something you can copyright, though unique compilations of facts have been shown to be. So, Abraham Lincoln’s height isn’t something that you can copyright, and the fact that Bill Clinton plays the Saxophone isn’t either. If a summary of facts is shown in a knowledge panel from a templated Wikipedia biography box, that information isn’t necessarily going to stop people from visiting the Wikipedia page, and may actually encourage more people to visit it.

Bill Slawski

I think they’re starting to tip the balance. Google will argue that this data is good for users and that they’ve made webmasters a lot of money over the years. This is true, and we should be honest and admit it. Many of us have made a lot of money off of Google and they leveled the playing field for a while for small business. On the other hand, they make $60B/year, and the vast majority of that comes from either putting advertisements on search results extracted from our sites (AdWords) or on ads placed directly on our sites (AdSense). There’s always been an implied promise – Google will make money from our data, but in return they’ll drive traffic back to us. Once they start to extract answers or create knowledge panels that just link to more Google searches, the relationship starts to break. Is that illegal? No. Is it unethical? I think it’s a broken promise, even if the promise is implied. I think they run the risk that, pushed too hard, we may block our sites and abandon Google. They still hold most of the power, admittedly, but I don’t think they should take the balance lightly.

Dr Pete

My first reaction, as a marketer, is not really an happy one when I see Google “scraping” an answer from a site. But as a user I must admit that it really makes my life easier, and if the answer is followed by a link to the source (and that link should be more visible as such, not in light grey), I found myself clicking on that link many times and with a far more convinced interest than when I find the same hint from a search organic snippet. And that is surely better also for a the web site owner. So… after a more paused reflection, what I think Google is doing is not really scraping, but: a) offering an immediate answer for who is looking just that, especially on mobile; b) is doing somehow a sort of Curation of its own indexed data.

Gianluca Fiorelli

Where do you see the Knowledge Graph expanding to by 2020?

I can see more people working to help expand the amount of information shown in knowledge panels by 2020. We will see information that is publicly accessible but not necessarily publicly available on a wide scale, showing up in knowledge panel or Google Now card, or Google Field Trip card. These will include things like information from historical marker programs, inscriptions on landmarks and memorials, or from documents like historical register applications.

Bill Slawski

I strongly expect the on-the-fly Knowledge Graph to expand rapidly. Google can’t rely on human-edited databases for entity data – they have to be able to create entities and relationships directly from their index. Honestly, though, that expansion will happen in 2014-2015. By 2020, Google will have made the SERP completely modular, allowing for any variation of device, screen, resolution, etc. Ten-result pages will be gone and replaced with fully dynamic combinations of knowledge panels, targeted results (maybe just one or a handful, depending on the use case), and entity/relationship browsing. I’d expect something less linear and more mind-map style, especially for data on people, places, and things. I’d also expect the Knowledge Graph to expand into social and be more and more personalized. Part of that is already available in Google Now cards, but I’m not just talking about things like your flight status. I think Google will try to extract your own relationships and build on your network. There’s a huge untapped commercial potential in being able to personalize product recommendations built on your trust of your own connections, for example. Your Knowledge Graph experience and mine in 2020 may be completely different.

Dr Pete

It’s hard to know or even preview. What I expect is that Google will start looking at ways to avoid that people will be “spamming” the Knowledge Graph itself, which is now theoretically possible (and easy), as we can manipulate the sources from where big part of the information is pulled from.

Gianluca Fiorelli

In summary

The question of ethics surrounding the Knowledge Graph will no doubt continue for many months/years but there is one fact that is not going away; users love it. Providing answers within the search results not only allows users access to information at a glance but they also allow them to do all this within Google’s environment. That’s good UX. To paraphrase Socrates once more “From the users deepest desires often come the SEOs deadliest hate.” While the Knowledge Graph continues to give users a superior search experience; we can expect them to display more and more information within the SERPs. Ethical or not…

More on influencing the Knowledge Graph here but as always, let’s discuss in the comments!

Is the Knowledge Graph Ethical? by Andrew Isidoro

The world awoke on Tuesday to a new Microsoft CEO. Satya Nadella, the former Head of Cloud Computing, had been promoted in a pretty uneventful affair replacing the incumbent CEO Steve Ballmer.

The media picked the news up exceptionally quickly and the story spread around the web like a wildfire with news outlets, bloggers and social media all talking about what the appointment meant for the business and what changes Nadella would be likely to make.

There was one place however that didn’t even notice that anything had even happened. Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google’s news search served an updated story on the chief executive switch, of course, but the first visible result was provided by the Knowledge Graph, and despite it being a database containing encyclopedia entries on about 570m concepts, relationships, facts and figures, it was quickly made out of date by the Microsoft move. A fact I’m sure wasn’t lost on Nadella, a former Internet search employee.

I was alerted to this anomaly by Samuel Gibbs of the Guardian who wrote about the lag in the system. So I jumped at the chance to examine the issue in real-time.

The Knowledge Graph is fueled by a number of knowledge bases that push facts to be used in information panels, however, as shown in search patents unearthed by Bill Slawski, these need to be verifiable. Essentially Google needs two sources of information to verify against before they will insert data into a panel. This seemed like an ideal area to investigate further.

As Wikipedia is seen as an important source of information for the Knowledge Graph I began scanning through dbpedia, a database of Wikipedia used by many semantic web applications. Diving into the RDF output for Nadella and Ballmer’s entries came up with nothing to cause alarm. Both sets of data had been updated to include their new employment status.

Updating the Knowledge Graph

Now that there was one definite source of data on the web, I took to Freebase to edit their profiles to see if the Knowledge Graph could be “kicked into gear”.

After a few minutes I had entered Nadella’s new CEO status at Microsoft and updated Ballmer’s new employment details. Now I had to wait.

Using a tool called Page Monitor I tracked the RDF output of Freebase to see of there was a correlation between the time of publication to the moment the Knowledge Graph updated with the new information.

Alas, just a few hours after editing, the RDF dump had updated followed quickly by an updated entry within the SERPs:

So what does this tell us about the Knowledge Graph?

Verified sources
We have long understood that the Knowledge Graph needed multiple sources of information to populate a panel for an entity, and thanks to patents we had an indication that two separate sources of information would be enough to influence results. However, seeing this (albeit rough and ready) experiment in the wild gives a solid sign that this may well be the case.

Freebase as a source
Freebase is seen by many (myself included) as key to the growth of the Knowledge Graph and other semantic agents. This shows how Freebase data can also be used as a source of user-generated information that can be passed into the Knowledge Graph.

Time sensitivity is an issue
Last but not least, this debacle shows that for time sensitive information such as breaking news; the Knowledge Graph simply isn’t ready. The process of becoming (or editing) an entity isn’t well-known and as such will hamper the ability for Google to keep its panels updated to respond in (almost) real-time.

As more and more results begin to show more dynamic knowledge panels like these, it’s the job of an SEO consultant to understand how these panels are created, why and how they can affect our clients in the real world.

Problems with Breaking News with the Knowledge Graph by Andrew Isidoro

When I was in University I was pointed towards a book that might be of interest to me. The book was “1984” by George Orwell and upon reading it became a favourite of mine. For those that haven’t heard of this literary work before, the book is the story of Winston Smith and his perception of life; his intellectual rebellion against the “all seeing” Party and his consequent imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and re-education.

The character Winston Smith has no privacy. His apartment equipped with two-way telescreens, so that he may be watched or listened to at any time. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered and figures for all types of production are grossly exaggerated (or simply invented) to indicate an ever-growing economy, when the reality is the opposite.

It’s a fantastic book that I urge you to read as it outlines some key issues that we are seeing unfold today. I have only one quarrel with the text; Orwell was an optimist.

The year is 2013 and I have no privacy. My computer, mobile phone and gaming consoles have webcams that can be accessed by government bodies. My private email messages containing personal information are routinely opened and valuable information mined to sell me more products through advertising and every day more and more of my personal data is being collected by governments and corporations; and these are just the things that we now know about.

People are fiercely honest with the web. Our social networks are full of information that can be access by anyone at any time.

In 2011, Professor Alessandro Acquisti (et al) investigated the feasibility of combining publicly available Web 2.0 data with off-the-shelf face recognition software for the purpose of large-scale, automated individual identification. The study allowed them to create a basic system that could scan a user’s face and return personal information that had been collected from social media profiles. A scary thought in itself but by combining face recognition with the algorithms they developed in 2009 to predict Social Security Numbers from public data you begin to see how our data is at the mercy of technology.

Anyone that tells you that they have nothing to hide, just haven’t thought about it long enough.

Orwell was an Optimist… by Andrew Isidoro

Forget content. Data is King.

Over the past few years Google have moved into many different markets, innovated in many new ways and, in terms of products, have made more adjustments than Joan Rivers’ plastic surgeon. With the torrent of projects coming out of the Googleplex all seemingly heading in different directions, it’s difficult to see where Google’s business strategy lies as a whole.

A few months ago I read an article outlining “Google’s master plan” which outlined how the search giants’ overall business strategy was immensely simple:

“Get people to use the Internet more.”

The post was written by AJ Kohn and to this day is one of my favourites; not just because of its cynical outlook on the dystopian world of search but also because it’s actually a valid point.

“Google’s Evil Plan”

Believe it or not, despite the almost constant badgering about our digital economy in the information age, some five billion people are not connected to the Internet. To put it in another way; two-thirds of humanity are being denied online connectivity and the “economic promise” that comes with it.

Following this trail of thought, Google has much to gain from wider internet adoption. It means more users on its social network to help build the world’s most comprehensive database. It means more time browsing Youtube, more time using their search engine and ultimately more ads being served, clicked and paid for.

The way Google executes on this strategy is to improve speed and accessibility to the Internet by shortening the distance between any activity and the Internet. For instance, commuting to work by car can add an equivalent of up to five extra years’ worth of shifts at the office over the course of a working career.

That’s a lot of time to be offline; so Google are creating Driverless Cars to connect us. According to Nielsen, time spent on PCs and smartphones was up 21 percent from July 2011 to July 2012; Android and Google Glass were created to help us browse on the go. They made Chromebooks and services such as Google Drive for us to work with. Chrome to help us browse faster. They have even become an internet provider both in the US and in developing countries.

Sounds like a good plan but there is a major flaw in this theory. Competition.

Fly in the Ointment

The web is a wide and varied place and yet we seem to gravitate towards a relatively small set of websites time and time again. Social networking websites are a huge sector where we spend hours of our lives. The bad news for Google is that every second spent on these sites means lost ad revenue.

Despite the hype Google+ has not (yet) become the game changer it was touted to be. Facebook is still the world’s most browsed website regardless of whether people use a desktop or mobile device.

Google still faces stiff competition within search too. A recent article (and infographic) I wrote for Box UK highlighted the current marketplace showing growth for alternative search engines and offering a promising outlook for Bing in coming years.

There are a number of alternatives to Google products across the board, and whilst in search they are a dominant force, they are not so lucky in other product areas such as cloud storage.

What is interesting is how Google have begun to diversify the way they gather and store open data and user information to create a closed data system that is not only seemingly unrivaled, but also an extension of their monopoly on search and potentially the killer tool they need to gather more global impression share online.

Google doesn’t just want us online. They want us online and signed into a Google approved product to harvest, manipulate, sell and innovate on our data.

This really is beginning to make me feel like Winston Smith peering into the inner party, how about you?

The future of Google? by Andrew Isidoro

It was 7:51 a.m. on a cold Friday in January, the hustle and bustle of the morning rush hour fully underway. Over the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, not just professionally but perfectly, and over 1,000 people passed by as part of their morning commute. The talented performer earnt just £32 minus a few dollars and pocket change he’d used as seed money to get the ball rolling.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make. Carry on with their daily routine or break tradition to stop, listen and maybe donate to his cause.

His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities. He played these classical pieces on a $3.5 million violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari.

The violinist; none other than internationally acclaimed virtuoso Joshua Bell.

You could use this as a stick to beat the uncultured society that we live in (I make no excuses; I am one of the uncultured proles), but many of us go through our lives blinkered, hurried and ironclad, unwilling to let a chance encounter with something beautiful cause a hiccup in our routines.

My point is this:

Your peers and superiors are going about their daily business and not thinking about you, your work or the improvements you are making to your process, department and company as a whole. I’ve long been a believer in intrepreneurship but it’s not enough to just innovate in your role. You have to show your innovation, share them with your colleagues and entice them into thinking about improvements in their own role.

As I work at an Agile development consultancy (Box UK), we run daily stand up meetings; not only to keep the team on the same page with existing workloads but also to give our digital and marketing teams the chance to highlight the good work that they have done. It’s not something I was used to, but as you get more involved with this feedback process, you’ll see how beneficial it can be.

Would you appreciate or even notice a colleague doing great work if it wasn’t mentioned at lunch or in a meeting? And if you didn’t, how do you make sure your best staff are supported in their intrepreneurship?

Do You Notice Great Work? by Andrew Isidoro

For the past few days I have been noticing something very strange both in my own data and within the rank tracking software that we use at Box UK. Data was fluctuating massively each time a test was run and rankings were sporadic to say the least. I had spoken to colleagues and friends within the search industry about the issue but it seemed to be a bit of an anomaly until I came across a tweet by the one and only Dr Pete:

Rankings and Data Centre Fluctuations

The latest Penguin update (2.0 or version 4) was released on and is said to impact around “2.3% of English-US queries to the degree that a regular user might notice.”. Matt Cutts also mentioned that “The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more web spam will see more impact.” which does seem to rule out this hypothesis yet I’m not totally convinced.

Whether or not this is a planned staggered roll-out or a roll-back to previous states is unknown but could offer an explanation for the major SERP fluctuations that the UK has noticed frequently changing throughout the day based on different data centres.

I suppose the main thing to take away from this is that Penguin 2.0 has only just happened and very few (if anyone) within the industry knows the whole story surrounding this update. There have been hundreds of SEO experts outlining how to recover or take advantage of this update but all I can say is: take everything you read with a pinch of salt in the next few days/weeks and test for yourself. There be dragons…

Has anyone else noticed fluctuations in their search environment? Care to share any other theories on the matter? Let me know below.

Penguin 2.0 – Everyday It’s Shuffling! by Andrew Isidoro

As an online marketer, It’s pretty important to keep up to date on twitter, check up on great industry news sources such as inbound.org and generally stay on top of some of the great articles on the numerous industry blogs regularly.

Last week I came across a post on one of my regular reading haunches by Joe Hall entitled SEO “Outing” Is Immoral. For those of you that haven’t read it, Joe essentially argues that outing a website for bad SEO practices is unfair on the end clients that are unaware of the practices of their SEO company and that we are not paid to “police the web”.

I couldn’t really agree with the sentiment Joe was laying down. Small business owners have limited budgets and are the first ones to analyse what they are spending their money on. It takes seconds to run a simple search query on what they are about to embark on and what they are about to spend money on. Those that get caught on the wrong side of SEO ethics and get punished have no sympathy from me and nor should they.

My position was summed up by an anonymous commenter:

Should we be feeling bad for those honest business owners that have been caught up in this now or should we be feeling bad for those that struggled or didn’t survive in the past because their site was ranking behind a competitors site with an advantage provided by BMR?.

The topic of outing is by no means a new one, Aaron Wall made an epic post back in 2008, but as an industry we are no closer to an agreed plan of action and quite frankly I can’t understand why.

Yes, SEO has a terrible reputation. We are seen by some as the snake oil salesmen of the online world but there are also builders across the world are being called into half-finished jobs due to the work of a cowboy builder and everyone knows of that “dodgy” mechanic that robs you blind when all you wanted was new brake pads.

The difference between us and those other troubled industries is they are actively doing something about it. Here in the UK, you can’t turn on the TV without seeing another shadowy character being unmasked for their dodgy construction work, and now it’s about time we dealt with our cowboys.

With the Panda update, Google has made some really good progress in battling web-spam but as things stand, it’s still not good enough. I know I’m not the only one that is fed up of complaining to colleagues about the spam links I’m finding in competitor link profiles. I’m fed up of clearing the blog’s spam folder every 12 hours from lazy SEO’s and webmaster’s comment spam, but more than anything I’m fed up of protecting these cowboys while I work my ass off to help my clients online ethically.

I’m not saying we need to publicly “out” client websites but we can start to make a stand against crap SEO agencies. We all come across SEO companies using less than favourable methods to get their perfect anchor links. There comes a point where we need to offer a true disincentive to SEO agencies spamming the web and harming their clients businesses.

In the comments of Joe’s article, there was the beginnings of this from Andrew Girdwood‘s comment:

When an SEO agency emails one of my blogs, asking for a link and offering money then I don’t think it needs an independent adjudication panel in place to determine that they’re buying links.

We have a best practice guide. We have a rule list. I understand Google’s published guidelines and I know how SEOs are supposed to handle themselves, and it is certainly possible to tell when someone is ignoring these standards. By judging our contemporaries against these we can determine their ethics and act accordingly.

I propose that we define our own industry standard, we hold ourselves to the highest level of ethics and publicly identify those that choose to ignore them. The SEO industry needs validity and I think it’s time we educated the public on the good, the bad and the ugly.

What are your thoughts? Should those that know better sit idly by and let sleeping dogs lie or should they speak out and try to clean up the tarnished image of this industry?

SEO Ethics and Our Industries Cowboys by Andrew Isidoro

Blogger Outreach Guide

Guest blogging offers a great means of building up your SEO with quality links and offers both parties a win-win situation. The blogger gets great content that can be monetised and you get those all important links for your post panda SEO campaign. What’s more, by building long-term lasting relationships through a good blogger outreach plan, you can even generate further link building opportunities in the future.

While blogger outreach is a great source of links, scouring the web for opportunities can be quite the daunting task if you don’t have a good plan to back it up. So here in this blog post, I’ve laid out my guide to putting your blogger outreach plan into action. Blogger outreach is hard work, it will take countless hours and you’ll send a mind-numbing amount of emails in the process but keep in mind the ideas below, and you’ll get those positive responses in your inbox in no time!

• Prospecting relevant blogs

No-one understands your target audience as well as you do (if this isn’t the case, you have bigger worries than blogger outreach techniques) and you should be able to create useful content fairly easily.

The prospective websites you are looking for are relevant bloggers who have a history of accepting guest posts previously. Quality and relevance are what we’re looking for here. after all, if you’re going to spend the time to create some killer content, you want some decent link juice for it right?

Short-list a small number of relevant blogs. Sure it helps, but don’t worry if they haven’t previously accepted guest posts just focus on places where your content will be seen by your customers. About twenty prospects should work, and spend the time personalising each and every email you send them. Personalised engagement and communication is the silver bullet to a high response and adoption rate.

• Engaging the blogger

Most bloggers have their name and email address loud and clear on their blog. For those more, anonymous bloggers, make sure to first check their social media accounts (especially Twitter and Facebook) for their names and emails. You’d be surprised by the number of times I found the info I needed in their Twitter bio or Facebook info section, rather than on their blog. Marcus Taylor at SEOptimise, identified that some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, and may push you towards their preferred channel of communication.

The search for a blogger’s name and/or email should only last about a few minutes but it’s time that’s well worth taking. No-one likes an impersonal email, and in the age of social media accounts, Who-is and other quick identifiers, you should be able to find a name for a good portion of your short-list.

Another thing to keep in mind is the trusted ego boost. As an SEO, the art of schmoozing should be front and centre in your messages, and when you think about it, which of these messages would you respond to?

1. “Dear Webmaster, I love your SEO blog.”
2. “Hi Andrew, I’ve been reading your awesome blog post on “Blogger Outreach” and I loved it!”

If you didn’t choose the second option, I’d seriously recommend a trip to the doctors as you may have a severe mental illness that’s going to need medical attention.

• Keep in touch

Once you have managed to knock out a quality guest post on a short-listed blog, try to keep up the relationship with the owner so as to make the job easier next time. After all, who knows when you might have another opportunity to create content that would be perfect for their audience.

• Dealing with rejection

A great tip I was given when first starting out was that receiving an objection to your proposal is not the end of the conversation. It is just the beginning. They have just offered you the perfect excuse to contact the blogger again but this time addressing their issues with your idea gives you something solid and personal to base the conversation on.

At the end of the day, your blogger outreach plan needs to keep in mind that you’re dealing with people here, and unlike 90% of others on the web, these guys are getting crappy link building emails hundreds of times a day. Don’t be just another spam email. Be yourself and stand out from the pack by being honest and succinct in your emails. Effective blogger outreach isn’t always easy, but realising that there is more to securing a guest post than spraying and praying is the first step in building effective digital PR campaigns.

For further tips on constructing an outreach email, have a look at Hubspot’s great “How to Use Guest Blogging for Effective Link Building” post.

Tell me all about your own blogger outreach successes and failures in the comments.

Blogger Outreach: A Guide to Guest Posting by Andrew Isidoro

The search engine marketplace

2012 was a very busy year for Google with game-changing algorithm updates, growing unrest about them appearing to contradict their “Do No Evil” ethos and pressure from the marketing activity of some of the other search engines, most notably Bing.

With this ongoing disruption, the question is: have these changes and issues caused a shift in the battle for market share within search?

Let’s take a closer look.

The Algorithm

Search engines have been around for decades and are now more advanced than ever. They are still learning and adapting, however, and every year Google makes more than 500 changes to its algorithm to maintain market dominance. While most of these changes are pretty minor, there were several major updates in 2012 that drastically affected the user’s experience.

Venice

“Venice” was the local update which appeared to integrate local search data for local queries giving the user a much more tailored search result depending on their location.

Google now officially says that 40% of mobile queries are related to location, though Microsoft has previously stated this to be nearer 53%. If these figures are to be believed it makes sense to return local search queries that are much more relevant to those on mobile devices. After all, if I search for “Pizza…” I’m probably looking to order some food rather than wanting to see a pizza Wikipedia page. 

Penguin

Known to many as the “over-optimisation penalty”, Penguin was rolled out to help combat webspam in the search results by adjusting link-based spam factors. The Penguin update was easily the biggest of 2012 in a step towards “rewarding high-quality sites”. In an interview Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, explained that Penguin was designed to tackle “the stuff in the middle” between fantastic, high quality content and spam. Panda was all about spam, but the need for Penguin arose from this middle ground.

Search + Your World  

While Penguin was the biggest update of the year, the most radical shift in Google’s search engine in 2012 was towards social personalisation, in the form of Search + Your World.

With their new social platform Google+, Google aggressively pushed social data and user profiles into the search results in an attempt to drive sign-ups. They also added a new, prominent toggle button to shut off personalisation, though there have been rumblings on Twitter that this feature may be on its way out.

Though the most radical in terms of search engine behaviour, it hasn’t exactly been a popular move with users due to the loss of relevance in the search results as Google+ became more dominant. A recent survey by Pewinternet.org found that 65% of people asked considered a search engine collecting information about them to rank future search results as a bad thing.

Knowledge Graph

One change that was met with interest by many was a major step toward semantic search, seen in the introduction of an integrated “Knowledge Graph” in the search results displaying over 3.5 billion facts about 500 million people, places and things.

The Knowledge Graph attempts to provide users with a data-rich search result to help them answer questions and gather facts quickly, though the real strength is the Knowledge Graph idea itself, with Danny Sullivan noting that “if Google can better tag actual web pages to entities, then it can better understand what those pages are about and related to, which might increase the relevancy of its regular results”.

Google’s Business Practices

“Don’t be evil” is often quoted as the informal corporate slogan of Google, and they even claim to have made it a central part of their identity and core values, going as far as to include a similar “You can make money without doing evil” statement within their 10-point corporate philosophy.

While User Experience was clearly a consideration in their algorithm changes, it appears the search giant completely forgot about its “Don’t be evil” values. From lawsuits to full blown marketing nightmares, 2012 saw a number of blips in the Google philosophy.

Using research from Barry Adams, below are just a few of the issues Google had to answer for last year:

Illegal AdWords Advertisements

In January, Google was yet again caught selling AdWords space for illegal products. The ads included unofficial London 2012 Olympics ticket resellers, as well as cannabis and fake ID card sellers. This is of course nothing new; Google has already faced a number of expensive legal settlements for earlier offences.

Unethical Practice

Days after the illegal AdWords fiasco, Google was once again caught red-handed. This time though, things turned a little more sinister – they were found using a Kenyan business’s database to boost its own services.

Though the issue is very complex, the CEO of Mocality (the Kenyan business in question) Stefan Magdalinski sums it up as such:

“Since October (2011), Google’s GBKO (Get Kenyan Businesses Online campaign) appears to have been systematically accessing Mocality’s database and attempting to sell their competing product to our business owners. They have been telling untruths about their relationship with us, and about our business practices, in order to do so. As of January 11th, nearly 30% of our database has apparently been contacted. Furthermore, they now seem to have outsourced this operation from Kenya to India.

Until we uncovered the ‘India by way of Mountain View’ angle, I could have believed that this was a local team that somehow forgot the corporate motto, but not now.”

Invasion of Privacy

In February, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article outlining how Google had been bypassing the built-in privacy settings of millions of people using Safari on iPhones and computers and tracking their browsing habits despite them having requested that kind of monitoring be blocked. When surveyed, 86.4% of respondents were unhappy about Google bypassing browser privacy settings to track web activity.

Google was eventually forced to pay a $22.5m fine to the FTC.

Tax Avoidance

Tax has been a major issue for a number of companies lately with Google no different and, having paid just £6 million in corporation tax on £395 million of UK profit in 2011, it was part of a major media backlash worldwide. Bloomberg later reported that Google has avoided paying over $2bn in taxes by funnelling international revenues to offshore accounts in Bermuda.

When queried about these practices, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt simply calls it ‘capitalism‘.

Barry Adams, however, sums it up differently (this and all of Google’s 2012 experiences): 

“2012 has been a hallmark year for Google, when the world woke up to the fact that Google is just another profit-chasing corporation. Its products and services are not there purely for the betterment of mankind, but there’s a growing element of commercialisation inherent in Google’s offerings.”

Competitors

It seems that it wasn’t just the media who woke up to Google in 2012, but also their competitors.

Just days after Google announced they would begin tracking users universally across its Gmail, Search, YouTube and other services – sharing data on user activity across all of them in a widely condemned unified privacy policy – Microsoft seized their opportunity.

Google’s biggest threat, Microsoft-owned Bing, launch an anti-Google advertisement and website to help grease the wheels of user discontent. Even smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo set out their stall to promote their non-invasive product.

Market Share

With Google having had such a tough year then, what impact have these events had on the search engines in terms of their market share?

Desktop Overall Market Share

When it comes to searches made from laptops and PCs, Google still dominates. According to market data, Google has actually grown over the past 12 months with 83.24% of the market share today, up from 82.68% from January 2012 though down from the January 2011 figure (85.05%).

Bing and Yahoo are both growing steadily. We can see that Bing gained traction early in 2012, possibly due to Google’s invasive inclusion of Search + Your World into the SERPs, given that there is a strong correlation between the rise in Bing and Yahoo’s market share, and a slump in Google’s figures around the time of release and the following few months.

So how has Google managed to grow its desktop-based market share despite hurting its public image? Easy…web browsers.

2012 saw Google Chrome finally dethrone Internet Explorer as king of the browsers. Couple that with the fact that Firefox defaults to Google as its primary search engine and you have yourself a major advantage with non-technical users.

Mobile Overall Market Share

Mobile was a big talking point in 2012, with data suggesting that mobile devices will eventually overtake desktop as our primary method of choice for connecting to the web. Yet it is here that Google has dropped market share. Despite owning the most widespread mobile operating system, Android (with 68.3% of the market), Google fell from 91.47% share in January 2012 to 89.37% in December 2012. This may seem trivial but could be a sign of things to come.

IBM and Asymco have already noticed a correlation, in that Android users do not seem to engage with their browser when using their smartphone. A scary thought for a platform like Android, which depends more on engagement with other Google products than simply monetising its hardware.

Interestingly, Bing more than doubled its market share in the mobile arena from 0.95% in January 2012 up to 2.05% in December, buoyed by the growth of the Windows Phone. It is suggested that by 2016, Microsoft will have an 11% share of the mobile market – a 300%+ increase in just 3 years. Add this to the upcoming release of new Microsoft Surface tablets and the future looks bright for Bing.

Conclusion

2013 will be a very interesting time for search and we’d love to hear your predictions for how you think it will unfold. Do you think Google will continue to dominate or will rival search engines (or even the new Facebook Graph Search) eat away at Google’s market share? Share your thoughts and leave us a comment using the form below.

An analysis of the search engine marketplace by Andrew Isidoro

I haven’t written as much as I would have liked lately but a thought that has festered has drawn me back to the drawing/writing board, and that is Google’s latest addition to the Webmaster Toolset – the Disavow Links Tool.

Twitter has been awash with new blog posts about the new Google Disavow Tool ranging from quick updates to full-blown methods of using the new toy to its fullest extents. But there is another area that has me puzzled…

Google has a problem with identifying link spam. It’s evident to many of us when we see some of our competitor’s backlinks and not at all surprising considering the mammoth task that it is to police the web.

So it should be fairly obvious that they would use any data that is available to identify spammy websites that Google clearly don’t want cluttering up their search engine (and server space for that matter).

Enter the Disavow tool.

I completely agree with the general consensus that this tool will be a great way to keep a link profile looking squeaky clean  which many webmasters and SEO practitioners will find of great use. But I can’t help but think that it could be very dangerous in manipulative hands.

To clarify I’m not just talking about hacked Webmaster Tools accounts, I’m talking more on the lines of webmasters disavowing a competitors domain to try to get them positioned as a spammy site in the eyes of Google.

Dr Pete answered a similar question on his Moz post:

“Could they compile all of these lists across thousands of sites as a signal for which sites might have link problems (especially big directories)? Absolutely, they could. I don’t think that’s their ultimate goal or that they’re going to do that anytime soon, but it’s certainly possible.” – Dr Pete

Now, although his answer didn’t feel like the data wold be used in the algorithm, it does seem a little strange that they would not make use of such data.

That would mean, large-scale blog network owners could potentially now have a new money-making method and that is negative SEO using the disavow tool.

What are your thoughts? Do you think this data will be used in the algo? Have you used the tool yet? Drop me a comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Google Disavow Tool – Has Negative SEO got a new weapon? by Andrew Isidoro