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Home » Google » Page 5

Google

March 9, 2014 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Don’t Optimize for Google

On March 9, 2014 / Google, page content, user experience / 2 Comments

Huh???

Sure, Google gets twice as many searches as Yahoo and Bing combined, but you shouldn’t optimize for Google. You shouldn’t optimize for Yahoo and Bing either.

It’s the User. It’s always the User.

A poor UX will get you nowhere with Google.Identifying the right keywords and doing on-page keyword optimization is arguably the easy part. The hard part is developing a compelling UX (User Experience). In a competitive niche, that’s what separates the high flyers on Google from the also-rans.

Let’s think about that for a second. It’s always been Google’s goal to present the best sources of information for any given search. That’s why you won’t find multiple listings on the first page of results that all have the same content. They’re out there  — just look at websites developed by vertical market website vendors; they often have pages with lots of information, but pages that are the same on many other websites. Google never wants to show you more than one of those: the rest are all redundant.

User Experience

But it’s more than just having unique content on your site (although that is an irreducible essential). Your site needs to be easy to use, easy for users to find what they want, full of information not easily found elsewhere … it needs a good UX. That’s always been a #1 priority for Google and in their statement of philosophy headlined “Ten things we know to be true”, three of them relate directly to UX:

  • Focus on the user and all else will follow.
  • Fast is better than slow.
  • You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

I’ve written about all of those things in this blog before, but it wouldn’t hurt you to review some of them.

Focusing on the user is Google’s #1 value. We’ve gathered all the stuff we’ve posted on that subject in our User Experience category.

The speed issue is always a concern when we prepare optimization recommendations for our clients, and all of our posts on that subject are neatly combined into our Page Speed tag.

Recognition that people are increasingly accessing the web on their phones is inescapable. But many websites that look great on a desktop or laptop, or even on a tablet may be close to unusable on a phone. We’ve written about that, too.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

Like this post? Please say so with the Like button above or the +1 button below. Or tweet it with the button up top. Thanks for sharing.

How does your UX stack up against your competitors? Need some help beating them out in the rankings? If so, Rank Magic can help
,

November 8, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Why Your Page Speed May Be Sabotaging Your Rankings

On November 8, 2013 / Google, user experience / Leave a Comment

Google announced back in 2010 that Page Speed  — how quickly your web page downloads into a visitor’s browser  — would be a factor in rankings. That makes sense when you consider Google’s increasing emphasis on positive user experience. If you click on a first page result in Google and the page is annoyingly slow, Google looks bad for sending you there.

Page download speed can affect your rankings.Addressing page speed problems is a task for your webmaster. But knowing and caring about your page speed is your responsibility. The folks at Moz did a study a few weeks ago which showed that the “time to first bite” does, in fact, correlate with ranking position. Full time to completely download a page doesn’t seem to correlate with rankings, but the time it takes for the first byte of your page to be received by your browser does seem to correlate with rankings.

What’s interesting about this is the fact that what mostly controls the time to first byte is not your website design. That’s mostly governed by your web host and the efficiency of the web server housing your web pages.

That doesn’t mean the other measures of page download speed aren’t important. If a potential customer gets tired of waiting for everything on your page to appear and clicks away before the page is fully loaded, you’ve lost a potential customer regardless of how highly your page ranked.

What to take away from this:

  1. Your back end web server performance can affect your rankings. If you’re using a discount web hosting service, whether their speed is worse than other web hosts is something your webmaster would have to research for you.
  2. While time to fully download your web page may not affect rankings, it can affect overall user experience on your site and impact your conversion rate. That’s the percentage of visitors who become customers.
  3. Bear in mind that Google has always maintained that quality content is king, so improving your page speed can’t make up for mediocre content. Page speed is only one of about 200 factors that control your rankings.

How’s your time to first byte? Let us know in comments below.

March 14, 2013 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Are You At Risk For an Exact Match Domain Slapdown?

On March 14, 2013 / domains/URLs, Google / 1 Comment

For a long time, SEOs and some website owners have known the value of selecting a domain name that exactly matches a keyword that a site is optimizing for. Let’s say you want great search rankings for the keyword “NJ real estate lawyer”. You might attempt to register the domain NJRealEstateLawyer.com or RealEstateLawyerNJ.com. It used to work very well and the owners of those websites enjoyed a quick and easy path to the top of the search engine rankings.

Are the good times over?

Has your exact match domain gotten you a Google slapdown?
Last fall, Google released its EMD algorithm update. EMD stands for Exact Match Domain, and this update is designed to reduce or eliminate the preference given for domains with an exact keyword match like those above. It’s not designed to penalize them, but just to reduce the tendency to give preferential rankings to low quality or mediocre websites just because their domains were an exact match for a popular keyword.

In our experience, the EMD update has begun to do what’s intended. It doesn’t seem to be 100% effective yet, but the trend is clear: exact match domains no longer own the top rankings. According to an article in Search Engine Journal, these are some notable EMD websites that have seen significantly reduced rankings

  • www.bmicalculatormale.com
  • www.charterschools.org
  • playscrabble.net
  • www.purses.org
  • www.teethwhitening.com

Has this affected you?

If you’re not sure whether this has affected you, you need to do some monitoring of your keyword rankings. If you know you’ve suffered as a result of this update, the solution is to improve the quality of your website with appropriate SEO techniques. A high quality website should not feel any pain from the EMD update.

A high quality website should not feel any pain from the EMD update.

Click To Tweet

How to recover

The article linked above at Search Engine Journal has a good list of steps to take to recover from any EMD slapdown you may have suffered. Rather than duplicate them here, I refer you to that article.

Of course, if you need help with any of that, Rank Magic is here for you.

February 6, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

How to Disavow Bad Links

On February 6, 2013 / Bing, Google, links / Leave a Comment

LinksWeb sites suffering a significant loss of rankings as a result of the Penguin Update last spring have been scrambling to correct the factors that have hurt them. One main class of factors is on-page keyword stuffing. The other main factor is a bad inbound link profile.

 

Bad Backlink Profile

If you’re getting too many links with keyword-rich anchor text (the clickable text in the link that points to you) and few or none of the more generic type (your URL, your company or website name, or “click here”) that may be taken as another kind of keyword stuffing.

Also, if you’ve engaged a company to get you tons of links from non-relevant websites or participated in link farms, those links can hurt you as well. Some inexpensive off-shore outfits promise hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site from websites they own and control which were set up just for the purpose of providing those links. Others send comment spam to unrelated blogs, hoping those comments will be accepted and provide links back.

Some website owners worry that people might point bad links at their sites in an attempt to harm them with “negative SEO.”

All of these bogus or artificial links carry the risk of earning you a Penguin penalty. You need to try to get those links removed or dis-counted so they don’t continue to weigh down your rankings.

Disavowing Links in Google

Google to focus on user experience as a ranking factor.If you’ve contacted the webmasters of sites with bad links to you and have been unsuccessful in getting them to remove those links, Google has a “link disavowal” tool that can tell Google you disapprove of those links and they shouldn’t count toward your link authority. That will also cause them not to count toward a Penguin penalty as well. Google says this about the tool:

If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.

Search Engine Land wrote about the process a few weeks ago and their article is worth a read. To go straight to the Google tool, click here. I encourage you also to read Google’s instructions.

Caveat from Google

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

Microsoft BingBing has a Disavowal Tool, Too

To disavow links in Bing, you can do the same thing via Bing Webmaster Tools. An article about how to do that is here. I’ve seen no sign of a similar tool from Yahoo, but that may be unnecessary as Yahoo and Bing share the same index.

If you’ve suffered a Penguin Penalty, take a look at your incoming links and see if they may be the cause of your trouble.

If you need help with that, Rank Magic can help.

January 29, 2013 by Bill Treloar 15 Comments

Does Buying Google Ads Help Your Rankings?

On January 29, 2013 / Google, PPC/sponsored links, SEO practices / 15 Comments

Google AdWords logo

The Myth That Just Won’t Die

[Updated 2018: AdWords is now Google Ads.]

Almost 90% of searchers ignore the Google Ads.Does participating in Google Ads (Google’s Pay Per Click or PPC program) help your non-PPC rankings?

The corollary to that is the question:

Does Google punish sites that don’t pay them for for Google Ads by lowering their rankings, thus encouraging participation in Ads where Google makes money?

The SEO Myth That Just Won’t Die

Click To Tweet

The Answer is No.

Google AdWordsThe answer is No.  Always has been and always will.  The simple reason is that doing this would reduce the relevance of Google’s main organic rankings.  Consequently, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, or another search engine would unseat them as the Big Dog of search.

More savvy searchers typically skip over the PPC ads because they understand the sponsored links up top aren’t there because they’re the most relevant match for your search.  Those top-ranking PPC links are there largely because the advertiser is willing to pay more than others for your click.

A blog post over at WSI said it well:

No, buying Google Ads won't raise your organic rankings.Doing AdWords does NOT directly help or effect rankings.  Integrity in this area is a cornerstone of Google’s business. If this were violated it would damage Google beyond repair, not to mention a slew of legal actions.  Google would never risk those consequences.  Google has stated over and over that AdWords advertising will not affect rankings.  I don’t always believe Google but….

I have been managing Adwords and doing search engine optimization for my clients for many years.  I have managed every combination of clients that do or don’t do AdWords combined with SEO.  There have also been cases where SEO clients stop doing AdWords, or start doing AdWords.  I can say that I have never seen anything that indicated that AdWords affected rankings.

There are a number of reputable SEO research firms that study this issue and every one of them has come to the same conclusion: AdWords does not affect rankings.

Does Buying Google Ads Help Your Organic Rankings?

Click To Tweet

My experience is completely in agreement with that assessment.

There’s a place for Google Ads, of course.  And it’s true that if you show up in both the ads and the organic results on the first page it super-validates you as a site that searchers will want to click on first.  But Google Ads itself has no impact on how highly you rank in the organic results.

Bottom Line: Google Ads won’t help your organic rankings. Only SEO can do that.

Need help improving your online visibility? That’s what we do!  Click here to get in touch or call us at 1-866-RANKMAGIC.

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