Your SEO strategy may need some serious re-adjustments as we are now looking at a brand spanking new ‘core algorithm update‘, to quote google as well as the impending penguin update ( that had a nice ring to it ).

Many webmasters have noticed a lot of dancing within the search engine results pages and it isn’t over yet. You may see your web pages showing up in wildly different positions – within the course of a single day.

If this is so, do not panic! ( Unless you are using spammy PBNs or mass link building software like GSA search engine ranker ).

The fluctuations are likely due to pre-launch penguin tests running in conjunction with the new algorithm. As to the core algorithm update itself, initial impressions are disappointing, as there is still a serious amount of spam in the SERPs.

Hopefully when the real time penguin does actually arrive ( it’s taking its time for sure ), there will be more positive things to report.

There is a good chance that some of the more spammy sites will be taken out as penguin is specifically designed to target off page activity. Let’s see it soon – definitely before the end of this month. Maybe..

First off, I was wrong – I thought that we might get a penguin in November, but it wasn’t to be. At least I’m in good company – Gary Illyes suggested that it was happening before the close of 2015.

Now, we find out that the new penguin 4 point whatever isn’t going to be released in 2015 after all. I, for one, am kind of disappointed. With the proliferation of spam in the search engine results pages, it could be a good thing that there is a new google penguin update in the pipeline.

And theoretically, at least, the real time iteration ( apparently, it definitely will be real time ) should offer some protection from negative SEO ( or at least a faster recovery for victims of negative search engine optimization campaigns ). The sooner this happens, the better. But if the algorithm needs further tweaking, so be it. It should be all the better for it.

Nevertheless, all previous penguin versions have failed. They have targeted innocent sites and let guilty black hatters off scott free. And the situation has only gotten worse. In fact, the google search results contain more spammy sites now than at any time in the last 5-7 years. So unfortunately, while we all hope that google will give us all a break with this update, things could get even worse – not better.

We’ll just have to wait ( again ) and see.

So will the new penguin update arrive in January as suggested? Seeing as they’ve already delayed it, I wouldn’t bank on it. It could be springtime in the rockies before P-day actually arrives.

Our last few posts have been closely related to organic search engine optimization and the upcoming google penguin update, but the reality has always been that SEO is not for everybody. And this isn’t just due to reasons related to one’s target market or budget – some people simply do not have the patience for search engine optimization. This can be the case with both marketers and clients alike.

Believe it or not, we are not saying that there is anything wrong with this. Some of my friends in the performance marketing industry wouldn’t touch SEO with a barge pole. Way too slow, they say ( organic optimization is actually getting slower too ). If this is the way you think, there is an alternative – PPC, or pay per click, marketing.

Need for speed

The best thing about pay per click advertising is the fact that it is fast – really fast. You can set your campaign up and have traffic within 24 hours, sometimes sooner. If you need traffic in a hurry, there is no doubt that pay per click is the very best way to get it.

Your options

Now you have several options as to where to go to advertise: for a genuine alternative to free search engine traffic, you’d really have to go with google adwords search ads. They are expensive, though. Facebook is also a good place for PPC advertising, but the targeting is totally different to adwords, so don’t expect the same kind of conversion rates as you would get from search based traffic ( facebook uses demographic targeting ).

Facebook’s ad review team tends to be hard to please too, so it is not uncommon to have to jump through a few hoops to get your ads approved. On the plus side, click prices are much lower than on google adwords search ( and probably quite a bit below google’s display network bid prices too ).

You also have Bing and a host of other pay per click advertising networks of varying quality. The choices truly are many for those in a hurry to get web traffic. Normally, you can also get more traffic with paid ads than you can with SEO – and the traffic is scalable. Provided you have the funds in place, that is.

The main point is this – do not just rely on slow, organic SEO. Yes, it’s great when you eventually reach the top for high traffic phrases, but not everyone has the patience necessary for the journey.

Be careful

Through PPC into the mix, but a final word of warning: be sure to do it right or you could lose a stack of cash ( something else my friends in the CPA industry keep telling me – I keep telling them I already know, by the way ). If you aren’t a skilled PPC marketer, then get one to manage your campaigns for you and you’ll have a much greater chance of reaching a positive ROI.

The upcoming google penguin algorithm update is still set to launch before the end of this year, but it may not be real time, according to google representative Gary Illyes. When asked if the new penguin would definitely be real time, Gary responded ‘we would hope so, but you never know‘.

Personally, I would be disappointed if we didn’t get the full blown, all guns blazing real time algorithm this time. In reality, it should already be here – having to wait until spring-summer 2016 for it would be a shame.

With all the spam sites that are currently ranking for highly desirable keyword phrases in google’s search engine results pages, a vanilla penguin update would be better than nothing ( provided it effectively targets spammy links this time ), but an algorithm that updates itself on the fly is what we really want to see.

And not just for targeting spam. As we pointed out in a previous post, a real time penguin algorithm should, in theory, lead to faster recovery times for sites that have been unfairly penalized ( either due to negative SEO or faults in some of google’s previous ant-spam measures ).

There is no doubt about it – all hard working and honest webmasters could benefit from a more accurate and subtle version of google penguin.

And real time is a no brainer. Let’s see it before the close of 2015.

PS I still feel that it is coming this month ( November ) as there are rumblings in the SERPs that suggest they are testing it already. And no, I personally don’t think this phenomena is due to panda or ‘zombie’ updates.

The news on twitter today is that google representatives have confirmed that the new real time penguin anti spam algorithm is coming before the end of 2015. As we covered recently, this penguin update will be different than any previous iteration. It will represent a switch to a real time implementation. If you build over optimized or low quality backlinks, you could get hit faster.

And if you suffer ranking drops and disavow links, your site could recover almost right away. In theory. Some experts question the effectiveness of the google disavow and reconsideration process, but time will tell if the situation will improve with this update.

If nothing else, it should quicken the feedback loop and allow webmasters to extrapolate ranking recovery with disavow file submission . Even naysayers do admit that ranking recovery is possible, to a degree at least. They just don’t attribute it to the disavow tool. I agree that removing backlinks, rather than disavowing them, is the best way to deal with spam penalties due to negative ( or just reckless ) SEO, and a reconsideration request can still be submitted.

So, before the end of this year is the current schedule for the real time penguin, but it could run into 2016 due to unforeseen delays. Personally, I have noticed the search engine results going haywire over the past two weeks. Some say panda, some say rank brain, but I say a penguin is lurching and that the next update will come sooner rather than later. My bet’s on November.

You may not know it, but you have a major potential advantage over your competition if you are running pay per click marketing campaigns – 90 plus percent of your competitors don’t know much about PPC. How can we say this without knowing what market you are in or who your competitors are? It’s simple – we know because this is the situation that exists in every market out there, both in Ireland and abroad.

What you do need to take advantage of this situation is this:

1. a decent ongoing digital marketing budget, a portion of which you can invest in PPC every month
2. a robust pay per click advertising strategy that allows you to develop a solid return on advertising spend
3. optional, but recommended: a team with years of experience in conversion tracking, web analytics, search engine marketing and conversion rate optimization

If you don’t have sufficient funding to run your campaigns ( I’d suggest a minimum of €1200 per month ), please stop reading now and go and get some. Search engine optimization can be a more affordable, albeit slower, option if you do have some capital, but not enough ( our prices for monthly SEO start at around €400 ).

Assuming you have enough money to comfortably afford PPC in the mid to long term, you need to focus on your strategy and your team. Even if you can cover the cost of bringing a PPC management agency on board, make it your business to learn as much about the workings of the google adwords system as you reasonably can.

While you couldn’t expect to develop as deep and as broad a knowledge of pay per click marketing as an experienced professional, a question you’d need to ask would be why would you pay money for something that you don’t understand the first thing about?

Your knowledge of PPC will put you in an excellent position to pick a management company as you will have no difficulty in separating the wheat from the chaff.

When you have a good working knowledge of the fundamentals of pay per click marketing and have selected a qualified agency to help you, you’ll be well placed to develop a strategy that is far superior to anything the vast majority of your competitors in the market will be able to muster.

Just keep in mind these two points:

Take responsibility for your own learning and get the knowledge you need to understand how PPC really works.

Select a first class agency that can help get you where you want to go.

With PPC, strategy is everything and your competitors are, by and large, too lazy to put in the time to learn about it – or even educate themselves about the differences between good and bad pay per click agencies ( there are plenty of bad ones ). Get the edge over them by following our advice.

Penguin is about to strike again apparently. Yes, it’s true – while google’s spokespeople haven’t given us anything definitive, they have said that they hope to roll out their latest penguin update before the end of 2015.

And it won’t be just any old update – this time, google will be making the switch to a real time algorithm, akin to the way their panda on page algorithm has been operating for some time now.

As a result of this, there isn’t quite the same fear of this penguin. Could it be a friendlier beast this time? Well who knows? But what we would say is that a real time algorithm definitely sounds much better than what we have now.

The current situation

Many spammy sites are still ranking on the first page of the search engine results pages ( SERPs ). It could be that the new iteration of google penguin will be much quicker to take these out. PBNs ( private blog networks ) will likely be targeted ( at least devalued, if not deindexed ) and, potentially best of all, sites that have been targeted by negative SEO campaigns could recover a lot faster ( possibly within a few days of the undesirable links being disavowed ). This would be excellent news for the thousands of webmasters who are waiting patently for their good quality websites to recover after being slapped.

While this is most supposition and not all of google’s ideas are beneficial to webmasters, there is reason to be hopeful. Previous penguin updates have left much to be desired – this one could actually deliver the kind of results that we all want. A crackdown on spam sites and faster recovery times for websites that were unfairly penalized. Let’s wait and see…

Yes, I am feeling OK and, yes, you did read the headline right. Bear with me, though, and I’ll explain my point to your satisfaction

When we tell you not to hire a web designer to create a website for you, we mean that you shouldn’t hire an individual or an agency that only designs websites. Most of the issues that we see with websites ( and there are many, believe me! ) are due to the fact that most sites are designed and developed by people who do not understand anything about the following two disciplines:

1. search engine optimization ( SEO )
2. conversation rate optimization ( CRO )

Why does this matter? Simply because no website should be ever created without having search engines like google in mind. As for conversion optimization, we have already made it clear that CRO doesn’t happen during web design or development, but rather in the real world via testing. However, a website should be designed with a few basic CRO best practices in mind ( for example, place your call to action above the fold and only have one primary CTA per page ) and, more importantly, with the option to easily and quickly customize and split test page variations.

Yes, you can get software to split test your landing pages separately from your main web pages, but it is still vital to have the option to customize individual pages on your main corporate site. Normal website designers just don’t think this way. They design sites that look good, but that struggle to rank in the search engines and that also fail to convert visitors into sales.

These problems are further compounded by the fact that every web design agency these days also specializes in SEO, CRO, PPC and web analytics. They’ll even do the dishes and take out the rubbish, if you’re nice to them.

Everybody that spends 15 minutes reading a wikipedia page about search engine optimization is an expert these days, apparently.

It’s easy to get sucked in by this kind of hype.

Now I don’t mean to have a go at web designers. What I’m saying is this – rather than hiring a web designer who doesn’t know anything about the things that actually cause a website to succeed or fail, instead hire real world direct response and search engine marketing experts with their own in house web design and development team.

Make sense? Thanks – I knew it would.

Not all web hosting companies are equal. There are many variables to take into consideration when selecting a host, including customer service and support, the country where the servers are, whether you have a cpanel and a whm ( web host manager ) and so on. The main choice for many webmasters, however, is whether they should stick with low cost shared hosting or stump up for fast dedicated or VPS ( virtual private server ) hosting.

Maybe you are considering dedicated hosting?

If so, here is our advice:

1. count the cost – dedicated hosting is a lot more expensive than regular hosting, often costing ten times more per month. Unless you can afford it comfortably, we’d suggest sticking with your old hosting for now.
2. ask yourself if you really need it. Not everyone needs dedicated, or even VPS, hosting. Unless you are running a lot of paid media traffic campaigns or are self hosting sophisticated software like imobitrax or tracking 202, forget it – you don’t even need it. The advantages of dedicated hosts are only really apparent when you are running the server at high volumes.

VPS can be a good compromise if you are getting reasonable traffic volume and are unhappy with the speed and general performance of your current hosting.

Are there SEO advantages to dedicated web hosting?

Yes – in certain cases. You have the advantage of not sharing your hosting with any dodgy sites that may be using the same company as you. And lightening fast page load speeds can be a positive ranking factor ( albeit one that is not entirely dictated by your hosting – consider a content delivery network as well ).

What if you can’t get dedicated hosting in the country that your site is geo-targeting or you can, but it’s too expensive? Won’t that negatively affect your rankings?

In a word, no. From our testing, having a host with servers in your home country has no impact – positive or negative – on your search engine rankings. If dedicated hosting works for you, go for it, regardless of the location of the servers. Instead, focus on the pricing, customer service ( look for reviews online ) and specification during the selection process.

There are numerous ways to drive traffic to your online properties. As a conscientious professional or entrepreneur, you probably have a main website and a number of business pages and profiles on third party sites.

Getting traffic to your official company site is likely to be your ultimate objective, but if you have links to your site on your other properties, this can result in some of the traffic from them being siphoned into your actual website.

Visitors that arrive at your social profiles on facebook, linkedin or google plus ( among others ) can therefore be directed back to your main website.

This kind of social media referral traffic can be targeted, but there are other ways to get traffic to your main website. Here are the main two:

1. Search engine optimization
2. Pay per click marketing

These approaches ( particularly SEO ) can also be effective for driving visitors to your third party web properties. This would make sense if you are running promotional campaigns on your facebook page, for example, or to build up the authority of your social profile pages for the purpose of increasing the value of their links to your company website.

Getting success with traffic generation

SEO and PPC are very different, but they both have one thing in common – they require consistent action if you want to see great results. Ideally, regardless of whether you are doing organic search engine optimization, search PPC or social media marketing, you should be increasing your traffic volume over time.

With SEO, this involves ranking for more keywords and / or improving your rankings. For pay per click ads, you can also target more keyword sets or simply increase your daily budget on your most profitable search terms. With social media, you can focus on social networking and even applying organic SEO principles to your social profiles. Paid facebook and linkedin ads can also be an excellent way to build up your follower base.

There are also other ways to generate traffic to your site, including PPV and banner ads.

Irrespective of your actual approach to traffic generation, success will depend on how well you execute your chosen strategies and efficient execution will only come with consistent application, experience and a sharp focus on the right elements of your business. In other words, stick with it. If you are working with an external agency like ours, be patient – if you have been prudent in your selection, your digital team will know how to do their job. It will take time, though, so again, keep the necessity for consistency in mind.