SEO Blog

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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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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There’s always been a bit of controversy surrounding the ability to shop a competitor to Google if you find that they’re breaking the rules. Some suggest that this is unfair, particularly if you don’t at least contact the perpetrator first, others believe that site owners should pay the consequences of their actions – particularly if they’re unduly benefitting from their activities.

So what is the answer? If you’ve seen that another site has bought links, should you keep quiet or say something to the authorities?
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Sitelinks have been a part of Google’s organic and PPC results for some time now. They appear just below the Meta title or initial listing on results pages and generally lead to popular pages deeper within the site. However, earlier in the week Google took them to a whole new level, unveiling mega sitelinks.

Is essence, this concept provides brands with the chance to get prime real estate for their name. Organic results are now dominated by up to 10 links listed beneath the primary home page. So if you were to search for Sony, Vodafone, Thomas Cook or any other brand (major or minor) you can expect to see SERPs much like that shown below.
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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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If you have come up against one of the big, established brands online, you will probably be well aware of how difficult it is to dislodge them from the top of the search engines. Google have made it very clear that brands are given certain advantages, both for their name and associated products. The big brand update a couple of years back saw huge corporations soar to the top of a lot of listings, a position many still hold today.

One of the major advantages any brand has comes with the domain name. If they have decided to simply use the company name and it is unique (or at least reasonably unique), then top spot is almost assured. Of course, large brands can also take advantage of their size and clout, choosing to adopt an alternative URL and dominate that market as well.
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Google has been sending out widespread warnings to webmasters indulging in a little underhanded link building since December last year. However, it appears that some people still aren’t getting the message, as was discovered by WebProNews.

Essentially, if Google sends you an email suggesting that it has detected unnatural links on your site, the game is up. You’ll be handed a suspension and asked to resubmit your site when the offending links are removed. The issue for some webmasters is that there is no direct indication which links are ‘illegal’ and need to be removed. This has led to confusion amongst many.

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Search engine rankings aren’t created by pure chance. Google and Bing have sophisticated algorithms designed to provide the most accurate and authoritative listings. The information is fed back to them by ‘spiders’, which are simply robots that quickly crawl a website looking for keyword relevance.

The combination of a domain’s authority and a page’s relevance is therefore critical to where it ends up in the rankings. However there are many other things that you need to do in order to the grease the wheels of indexing, particularly if you are a new site or generally have to wait weeks to have changes show up in Google.
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