Recently I brought you news of Google saying that the new Penguin update was still a few weeks away. Less than two weeks later however they’ve rolled the new update out and confirmed it. PANIC! No, don’t. You should only be panicking if you or your SEO Company have been engaging in link practices that don’t abide by Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

So why Penguin 2.0 and not Penguin 4? It’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0 as there have been changes made to the actual penguin algorithm, rather than a regular data refresh. Such an update in fact that Google have said around 2.3% of English queries will be affected and that “regular users” will notice a difference. I know 2.3% seems a bit minimal but with the amount of websites online in England at the minute, that figure has to be in the tens or hundreds of thousands of affected website out there.

There’s still the question of when there was an abnormal amount of fluctuations in rankings and traffic a few weeks ago. So what was that? Google themselves say it wasn’t an update to the Penguin algorithm, so could it have been a bit of a data refresh before the new Penguin Algorithm went live? Or was it just another Panda refresh that Google are no longer confirming? It’s unclear as Google haven’t commented on this.

The good news about this update is that Penguin is directly targeting spam and black hat results in search engines. This should lead to more accurate results in search engines with people who have engaged in previous black hat link campaigns dropping from results. So if someone has always used black hat techniques to rank higher than you and you have thought this unfair, look who has the last laugh!

So, has your site been affected?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

We still see this on a day to day basis where companies or individuals out there are making rookie mistakes when it comes to SEO. So here are some common themes to avoid:

> Slow Page Load: You may have 100mbps fibre optic broadband, but other people out there may not be as lucky or that in to the internet to get such fast speeds. You also have to think about what’s on your website. If you have audio and video that loads up on your home page and plays straight away, not only is that annoying (opinion), but it is also a data hog. Hi Res images also fall into this category, especially now that Mobiles are coming into play a lot more. So try to trim your website up a bit. If a website doesn’t load in a couple of seconds, users are likely to leave.

> No Social Media: Not everyone is on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr yada yada yada yada. But most people are on at least one of these meaning if that user has a positive experience with your site and wants to repeat it socially, you’re bang out of luck and you’ve just lost a potential client. Not only is it down to conversions, search engines also look at social indicators in their algorithms. If your website is fully geared towards the search engines, whilst it might rank okay, as Google can’t see you being prominent socially it looks like users aren’t talking about your site and aren’t recommending you on social networks. An if these are real people making no real mentions or suggestions, why should Google mention or suggest you on their search engine?

> Writing for Search Engines: Again and again and again we see this where keywords are thrown into the midst of prose haphazardly to improve “Keyword Density”. Keyword Density is dead. If you indicate what your content is about in your title, and then write about that content, job done. Google doesn’t care how many times you’ve got “Dog Groomer Wigan” in your page, it cares about how well structured that content is, how well it reads and how users respond to it.

A few tips there to help you out with your SEO. What common SEO Errors do you dislike the most?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

The term “content is king” is vastly used by the webmasters of the SEO world, in all fairness it is becoming very generic but is still extremely important that it stays in your head. At the end of last year Google introduced a tool in webmaster which will help you structure you content more effectively, increasing the quality and therefore possibly increasing your websites performance in the SERPs.

Not many people have really recognised this tool and so I thought it might be a good time to give them a little reminder due to the up and coming penguin update. This little tool could be the margin of the quality content in which Penguin will reward.

By using the data highlighter tool, it gives you the opportunity to structure all content within your website. Presenting your content in a way which is more understandable for the audience, Google’s algorithm will take into consideration; the easier to read the better it will score you. Simple?

For example, is you have a website which promotes events then you can use the data highlighter tool to tag important details for Google to present more attractively, such as the location, price and date, basically any crucial information which will bring you more traffic/potential business etc… after Google has crawled your re-tagged page it will then be available for rich snippets.

Please note that this tool does not work on pages which haven’t been cached and not in Google’s index. To find the data highlighter tool simply go to your webmaster tools, click on the “optimisation” tab and then the “data highlighter” tool will be available from there.

A very clever thing which has been included with this tool is that after manually highlighting and tagging your content in a consistent format (mainly for events pages) the tool will adapt to this and start suggesting tags for you to include and help speed up your work, clever Google eh.

Now before the introduction of the tool webmasters had to learn the HTML code to add their structured markup content and it became very time consuming. Not anymore this tool is simple and easy to use, all you need to use is your mouse to point and click which data you wish to highlight.

Blog Post by: Jordan Whitehead

Another one bites the dust. Google have once again penalised a “Big Name” in business for their website practices. Sprint, who are a global provider of data, voice and internet services, received news of their penalty via Webmaster Tools and instantly took to the Google Webmaster forums for help.

Before we all get carried away wondering what black hat ways a big company is employed to strongarm their way to the top of the SERPs ensuring their dominance, the penalty Sprint received was one relating to user-generated spam and not to any practices Sprint themselves had put in place.

You could chastise Sprint, who are such a large company with quite a large amount of resources, for not preventing this happening in the first place. But then you have to consider that Sprint are a large company with an incredibly large website. Could you manage nearly 5,820,000 without allowing a solitary one to escape without having a proper review? Quite a challenge then.

But Sprint are not alone in this, the BBC have had a run in with Google and received the same penalty. More recently Firefox fell foul to the same thing. The issue with User Generated spam is that Google will let you know there is spam coming from your website, but it won’t tell you where. With web pages in the millions for some of the penalised companies you can imagine the enormity of the task at hand in finding the offending page.

Thankfully though it does seem that Google have found a way penalise individually offending pages if the website itself is not spamming anywhere else. Whilst this is a positive, it can be quite difficult for smaller companies to find the time and resources to audit their whole site to fix what might be causing this penalty. They have to resort to doing what they can and hoping for the best.

Do you think Google should be more specific in the penalties it gives out?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

Google are once again making waves and this time it’s with conversational search. This new technology is called “OK Google” and is set to revolutionise the way we search. It’s coming to mobiles, desktops and even Google Glass (although the latter is called “OK Glass”). Google Glass constantly listens for the command “OK Glass” when you’re touching the device, and once it hears this phrase it then knows to run a search for you. The idea is also about having a conversation with your search engine rather than running a search, running a new search, running a slight variation of your first search etc. Here’s an example of how it’d go:

Me: Ok Google, who is #1 for SEO Manchester?

Google: Would return the search listings for the keyword “SEO Manchester”

Me: What about Web Design?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design Manchester”

Me: What about London?

Google: Would return the search listings for “Web Design London”

You see the difference there? Rather than having to run three different searches for three different key phrases, OK Google remembers previous queries and alter the results according to new questions asked. Personally I think that’s brilliant. Imagine checking the price of something at an online shop, then only having to mention the other shops for the price of whatever it is you’re getting. It’s going to save so much time for people.

There are still quite a few kinks to work out though such a, with the “OK Glass” command, you have to be touching the Google Glasses you have on your head. So how that is going to pan on out desktops and mobile devices, but you can see that this is going to be big.

Will you be buying Google Glass?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

So this morning I arrived at the office nice and early, I had my porridge, I had my brew (Coffee, white, one) and there was even a good song on the radio. I started cycling through the Social Media accounts checking for new follow, tweets, likes, posts, +1s etc. But when I got to Google+ I was hit by a wave of confusion and confronted with this:

“But I’ve just checked Pinterest” I thought. Clearly this coffee isn’t working. I loaded it up again and was greeted with the same layout. Then it hit me that this was actually Google Plus and not Pinterest. Incredible, whilst not exactly a carbon copy of Pinterest, the design does seem to lend heavily from the infinite scroll, tiled panel design that was first introduced by the big P.

My first impression was, if it’s a toss up between this layout and the previous layout, it’s completely on par. I’m not championing the previous design, but neither am I shouting about this new design from the rooftops. However, after a couple of minutes of playing around with it, the news feed decided to finally respond to my browser and screen size and include a third column. I know it’s only a small thing, but it just seemed to make the whole thing sit together nicely.

Then there was the discovery of full width images spanning the width of the page and that really helped me warm towards the new news feed.

After my fill of the home page I went to my profile and was greeted by the biggest cover photo in the world. Check it out:

Pretty big. The rest of the profile panned out into all my latest updates spread over 3 columns. I’ve got to admit as well, the three column layout is brilliant. You add your updates in the very top left box which, as humans read from top left to bottom right, is perfectly placed. As opposed to Facebook where you’re made to add updates from the top of your news feed. A slight advantage to Google+ but an advantage nonetheless.

All in all I’d say Google has done a really great job with this. It looks like Google may have realised that it might never cater to everyone’s requirements for a Social Media platform, so it’s adapted to improve UX for the current clientele. After all Google+ is far more geared towards photo sharing than Facebook is.

Have you experienced the New Google+ yet? What do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

What a week so far. Is it really only Wednesday? We’ve had confirmation that Penguin is only a few weeks away from Matt Cutts himself. Prompting a raft of people asking about the best way to vet their previous, maybe not so squeaky clean, link building techniques. Naturally we have a lot of advice for people and are willing to help out, even offering a penguin guide on how you can help prepare for Penguin 2.0.

There was a brief respite when we all had a quick time out to play Atari classic Breakout, but now we have even more news from Google and that now great source of information Matt Cutts. Once again it seems like Google are tightening the noose on Link Networks. Their previous High profile tart was the SAPE Network that got penalised and vanished from the Search Engines. The knock on effect would have been bad for a lot of sites that would have lost the value from any links from that network. And obviously from losing that many links at once, their rankings would have dropped drastically.

This news has come by way of Matt Cutts himself once again. He’s posted a few tweets recently outlining his and Google’s desire to really punish sites that are benefitting from spam and they’re definitely cranking it up on the Link Networks. Look at the Tweets below to see what has been said:

So without specifying which Link network has been hit, Matt Cutts has inferred that Google have “took action on several thousand linksellers” which has to amount to a link network. I’ve still not heard anything as to which network has been hit, but I’m sure over the coming days all will be revealed.

Which Link Network do you think has been hit?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey.

It’s not often I find myself searching “Atari Breakout” on Google Image search (you can do it now if you want but you’ll spoil the surprise) but today myself and maybe a few other employees have ran this search a few times. The reason being that it is Atari Breakout’s official 37th anniversary/birthday today. And to celebrate Google employees have created a sublime easter egg where you get to play breakout with the images included in the search. Just like the below:

This isn’t the first time Google have released such an easter egg. There is also the Zerg Rush easter egg, click here to try it out, basically when you enter the search your results are are attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty letter Os. Armed only with your mouse you have to set about them and do your best to preserve your precious results. This was based on the excellent strategy game StarCraft.

There is also a flight simulater in Google Earth as well as a brilliant Pac Man game that wasn’t actually an easter egg but a Google Doodle instead. Thankfully the doodles are archived and we can still geek out and play them on our breaks. You also get other easter eggs when searching:

> Do a Barrel Roll

> Askew

> Recursion

> Anagram

> Define Anagram

My personal favourites are last three as I’m a massive fan of wordplay and incessantly, much to the annoyance of the office, crack puns.

What’s your favourite Google Easter Egg?

Recently it seems that all the talk on the web from Manchester SEO forums, blogs and other news stories has been about recent fluctuations in rankings and traffic. Rumours abound that this was the start of Penguin 4, But Matt Cutts himself has waded into the mess of confusion to clear a few things up. First of all he has categorically stated that there was no Penguin update last week, you can see from the Tweet below/totheleftright?

So what was it? More than likely it was part of Panda refreshing itself now that it is part of the algorithm. So GREAT! There’s still time to Prepare for Penguin. But ‘our Matthew went further than that to definitely rule out that this was a Penguin update by announcing that Penguin 2.0 is still “a few weeks away”.

Penguin 2.0? But we’re currently on Penguin 3. Surely the next update has to be Penguin 4, can Google not count? What Google have done is subtle but they’ve announced that this is going to be a Big Penguin, PenguinZilla in fact. Maybe not that big, but Google have confirmed that this will be the biggest penguin update yet as internally it’s being referred to as Penguin 2.0. The rest of the Penguin updates have subsequently been devalued to:

> Penguin 1 is now Penguin 1.0
> Penguin 2 is now Penguin 1.1
> Penguin 3 is now Penguin 1.2
> And Penguin 4 is now Penguin 2.0

A big step up indeed. However there are still issues with this, especially when it’s left to Google to decide when an update is big enough to progress from 1.2 to 2.0. For example, look at the Panda updates that were released last year that had a few occasional big refreshes but then a long period of small refreshes that eventually led to there being a panda 3.92. This got too much for everyone who then started re-numbering all updates chronologically regardless of size.

We’ll be calling the next update Penguin 2.0, but the crux of the matter here is, Penguin is on it’s way, and it is going to be big. So make sure you’re prepared and start counting your links.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey

I’ve heard and read a lot recently about fluctuations in a lot of different areas particularly concerning rankings and traffic. Naturally everyone assumed that there was another Google update which had caused the fluctuations in ranking and traffic. But after being questioned several times, Google responded with it’s default answer:

““We have nothing to announce at this time. We make over 500 changes to our algorithms a year, so there will always be fluctuations in our rankings in addition to normal crawling and indexing.”

Hardly helpful but with the amount of people reporting the fluctuations there has to be something going on surely?! Well there isn’t a definite yes or no and I apologise for calling you Shirley.

In the past with certain updates, Google has been very transparent when dealing with updates in the past. Remember the EMD update? Exact Match Domains (EMD) are what’s used when people want to rank for a keyword or phrase and buy a domain name with the keywords in it. For example if you wanted to rank for “Manchester SEO Company” you would want to have a domain like http://manchesterseocompany.com/ As the keywords are in the domain, Google would realise this domain is relevant for the keywords searched and thus rank it in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages) higher than it would if it didn’t have an EMD. This is quite clearly unfair, especially considering that the people who bought the EMDs could have an inferior site offering an inferior service.

So, Google released an update that refused to count keywords in the domain towards rankings in an effort to be fair. However there are still arguments about how effective this really was as people have claimed to see rises in rankings for EMDs afterwards.

Google has also been clear about Penguin and Panda updates in the past. Which lends weight to the argument that Google haven’t released an update otherwise they would have mentioned it.

You also need to take into consideration that last month Google announced that they would no longer be confirming Panda Updates and were integrating Panda into the algorithm itself. So have they released a new algorithm with Panda introduced in it? Or have the ran a quick Panda refresh in addition to the latest changes to the algorithm?

We can spend days and weeks debating it and never know for sure. The only facts we have at the moment are that a) people are reporting fluctuations in rankings and traffic b) Google aren’t confirming anything.

So what do you think?

Blog Post by: Greg McVey