SEO Blog

This is a post based purely in the hypothetical. It is not a ringing endorsement of sabotage or other such skulduggery. However, it won’t have escaped your attention that Google have been pretty vocal about how they plan to punish those who break their rules.

For this we need to go back to the pre Panda days and look at the shenanigans surround JC Penney et al. Now, in the most part, these sites (and many others) were being targeted because of paid links within their profile. This is no less of an issue now, however everybody appears to have moved on somewhat and it has all been swept under the carpet a little.
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One of the few things that you can’t optimise is time. You can’t pretend to have more authority than you have, the search engines can see it in black and white. So, bearing in mind that domain age can be used as a ranking factor, straight off the bat we can already see why more established sites can have a much easier ride.

But time offers more than simply an ability to strengthen, it also provides an opportunity to overcome penalties. If you have been naughty in the past and received a slap on the wrist from Google, then you might see your rankings slump markedly for a while. This is your penalty and it can be costly.
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Whenever there is a new algorithm update or search add-on people inevitably look for the potential benefits. However, on the flipside, it’s difficult to ignore the negative side too. With the search engines working hard to stop people benefitting from things like email spam and paid links, surely we are on our way to search nirvana – where results are accurate and tailored to our intentions.

Unfortunately this is rarely the case. Let’s look at Google +1 as a prime example. Here you have a great tool for people to share their favourite sites amongst friends and help Google to gauge which are the most popular pages. This could one day have an influence on the SERPs, meaning that genuine human factors are being employed to rank sites. Great news, right?
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For every business there has to be a cut-off point, where you’ve taken enough of a risk and aren’t seeing the benefit from it. From Forex traders to estate agents, we all have our buy and sell point. So when should you consider reducing or stopping your investment in Search Engine Optimisation?

As an SEO I am usually going to suggest that you should carry on through thick and thin, but sometimes optimisation simply isn’t going to help. There are some situations where a little added patience will pay off and others where it’s only going to cost you more. You need to work out which of these camps your site sits in.
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Unfortunately there are very few sites that can boldly claim to maintain any form of consistency within their rankings – particularly in the long-tail terms. So what can you do to limit these fluctuations and can they be avoided outright?

Well, the simple answer is that, no, you can’t ever be exempt from changes in rankings. This is simply because the search engines are in a constant state of flux. Even if your site hasn’t changed, there’s a good chance that your competitors’ pages or even the algorithm itself have been updated. Nothing stands still in SEO for long and nowhere is this felt more than in the world of rankings.
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With the recent panda update there has been a fair amount of focus on the issue of duplicate content. Whilst there have been some who have claimed that there’s no such thing as truly original content, I think we can safely leave these arguments to one side for now. What I want to focus on is the issue of copy on your site, as well as marketing it elsewhere.

Essentially, duplicate content can be defined as anything that has been used elsewhere in some form. Whether it’s a small snippet, a paragraph or a whole page, Google can be a little sensitive when it sees the same thing time and time again.
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We all have moments where we’re entirely blinkered by our own vision and are convinced that everything is fine – when truthfully it’s pretty evident that it’s not. It doesn’t matter how much pride you need to swallow sometimes, for the good of your site, you need to broaden your horizons a little bit.

So what do I mean exactly?

Well, has anybody told you that your pages load pretty slowly? This is easy to ignore and forget about, after all you probably have far bigger problems to worry about, right? Well, no not really, if you are being told that you site is slow, you need to take action – promptly.
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Well it has finally happened, Google have rolled out the Panda update to all English language sites – including the UK of course. Therefore the shifting sands of search have washed up on these shores, helping some to get noticed whilst others are swept out to sea (never to be seen again).

Unsurprisingly it has very much followed the same pattern as we saw when it was initially launched in the United States, with sites featuring limited or duplicate content suffering most. This has seen many comparison sites, article directories and online voucher providers plummet down the SERPs.
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Search Engine Optimisation is polarised, both as an industry and a practice.  There are those that stick rigidly to the rules and look for new ways to develop sites without incurring the wrath of angry search engines – white hats. Then there are those who do the exact opposite – black hats.

In recent weeks this debate has stepped up a little. In fact just about everybody is having their say on which is right and which is wrong. The basic truth is that both work, however one is entirely safe whilst the other certainly is not.

Black hat largely relies on underhanded techniques designed to slip under the radar. These tactics are far from accidental and are in fact incredibly clever – and effective. Despite the huge risks, black hat SEO survives thanks to the huge potential rewards.
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Fundamentally speaking, any link (legally sourced of course) will have a positive effect on your site – one way or another. In the past links through social networking sites were simply seen as a way of building a little publicity and traffic; however it was largely accepted that they had zero influence on rankings or SEO.

Today this isn’t the case, well not exactly anyway. The major search engines have made great strides in their ability to stream information from social media platforms and effectively judge authority within this sphere. In turn this has led them to openly admit that they do use influence as a ranking factor within their SERPs – albeit probably not a major one.

Numerous people have run tests on solely promoting posts or random pages through Twitter and found that rankings can be achieved – often pretty decent ones at that. However, these do tend to be temporary, often a few days, before they start slipping (unless link building is applied of course).
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