SEO Blog

One of the biggest questions that people are asking is whether or not social signals actually affect your rankings? Digital marketing and SEO in particular is malleable, meaning that anyone working within SEO can never rest on their laurels, or practice what they learned five or ten years ago. To be on top, you need to keep up-to-speed with the latest changes, if not it’s your website that will suffer. So, with the increasing focus on social media and the attention that businesses are giving to Google Plus, will any of this start to have an effect on your website’s rankings?
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Search engine giant Google have revealed another new change to their algorithm, this time in the form of a page layout update. The change has been brought in to help users find high-quality websites in the search results, with the aim of delivering a better user experience. Sites without much content above the fold of a webpage will be affected. This is because the update has been made to eradicate users  struggling to find the content once they have clicked on the link within the SERP.

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After yesterday’s announcement that Google would now be incorporating even more social functions into SERPs, it’s well worth looking at the potential implications for SEOs and site owners.

The update, which has been called ‘Search, Plus Your World’, effectively drags in content, profiles and other search results from your network of friends. Whilst it is by no means the first time that Google has shuffled its results pages or integrated social elements, the potential impact of this move could be much more significant than most.
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Last week Google was caught buying links, albeit in a slightly round about kind of fashion. One of the agencies that they had hired to promote Chrome rather foolishly attached some blatant followed links in a number of video adverts as well as a fair few blog posts. It was a bit of an embarrassing own goal for the search engine and one that has since forced them to enforce a manual penalty on their own site.

It’s a strange situation and one that only came to the world’s attention thanks to some sleuthing from Aaron Wall. How is it that a company which effectively polices the content online and ranks everything according to strict guidelines has been found breaking its own rules?
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Each year Google compile the most searched for terms of the year, with 2011 throwing up some fantastic insights into the UK’s search behaviour. Amongst the winners this year was the Royal Wedding as well as the fabled iPhone 5.

The Search Engine giant, which dominates the UK search market, have also revealed various other categories, such as the fastest rising people, movies, TV and sports terms as well as the most searched for ‘how to’ and ‘what is’. So who topped the lists in each category? Here are the highlights….
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Since Google’s Panda update, which was essentially a change in the algorithm ranking factor used by Google, there have been even more challenges presented to those working in SEO and for those implementing SEO techniques for their website.

The change was introduced on a global scale during April 2011 and has since been updated regularly. The reason for these changes? Well they were brought in to focus on quality control within search and to also punish the ranking of websites using poor quality content. Making sure your site doesn’t get punished by the big panda is very important as your site will drop downwards in the SERPs.

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This week, search engine giants Google announced that Google Plus pages will now be available for businesses and brands. Available for small and large companies, this means you now have another avenue to market and promote your products and services to the world.

Introduced to compete with existing social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Google have opened up the network allowing businesses and brands to make the most of the new profile pages and networking opportunities. Formerly, the only way you could join the network was through a friend request, but now all of this has changed. There are also some differences between Google+and some of the more established, long running social media networking sites on the Internet.

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It’s taken a good few months, but Google have finally opened Google+ to the world. This means you can sign up today and start building your network, if you haven’t already. You won’t need an invite and it’s free to do.

Now whether or not you want to get involved in ANOTHER social network is entirely up to you. Google have already given some businesses the boot, so if you’re looking to market your company on Plus, think again. It is for human users and the search giant is keen to keep it that way.
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Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, recently visited Edinburgh to speak at the International TV Festival, and it’s sparked a revived interest into the ailing Google TV project. During his address to the MacTaggart lecture theatre he announced plans to release Google TV across Europe within six months. ‘TV Meets Web. Web Meets TV’ so the tagline goes, but what is it and what does it mean for the SEO industry?

It’s not the first time that the world of SEO has asked this question. Google TV was launched last October in the US, and in Schmidt’s own words “[it’s ]not been a huge success”. This was largely due to the slow uptake from networks to broadcast their content through the new Google TV set top box.
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An SEO will always tell you that what they’re doing is beneficial to the way search engines function. However, critics will usually suggest that ‘gaming’ the algorithm to give a site an advantage is unfair and ultimately lessens the quality of results. So who is actually right?

Well, there’s little doubt that search engine optimisation has been used to pillage and plunder rankings in the past. Back at the turn of the millennium, you could pretty much get any site ranked as long as you had a high keyword density and a fair few thousand reciprocal links. The algorithms of Yahoo and Google simply weren’t effective enough at sniffing out bad practices, which meant that spammers could get any site into the top spaces.
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