The Benefits Of Participating In Our Professional Search Community
As a search and internet marketer, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work with our employers and clients, as well as the task of keeping up with the latest developments from search engines, social media platforms and industry tools. Today, I’d like to step back from this and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Conversion Types
Which conversion types best suit your business? Google now offers conversion types for nearly every business model, making it easier to attain your goals that much faster. Learn all about the many types of conversions you should be tracking and why.
Google’s Navneet Panda Gets A Published Patent But Was It The Panda Patent?
A couple days ago, Bill Slawski posted his usual Google has a new patent granted, this one he titled Google’s Panda Granted a Patent on Ranking Search Results.
The patent was granted on the 25th and is named Ranking search results…
Google On IE8 Drops SSL & Passes Full Referrer
If you are using Internet Explorer 8 and go to Google, the default experience will not be over SSL and thus the referrer data will pass in full to the webmaster…
Customize Your Google Navigation Bar
Google is rolling out a way to customize the apps and products you want to see in your Google navigation bar.
Google announced this on Google+ saying that this is rolling out over the next few weeks to everyone. Here is an animated GIF of how it will…
Google’s Matt Cutts: Almost All Penalties Are For Quality Violations
The other day, Steve Plunkett asked Matt Cutts of Google, what percentage of penalties/filters are based on violations of Google’s Quality Guidelines versus technology issues or bugs on the webmaster side?
Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: March 28, 2014
This week, we saw a lot of people talking about ranking changes in Google…
Why Econsultancy has implemented nofollow for guest blogging
10 facts
- We have always welcomed the right kind of guest bloggers. And we have always turned away the wrong kind.
- We have very, very strict guidelines.
- We do not accept ad hoc, one-off articles.
- We have never published advertorial on our site.
- We do not publish plenty of posts that don’t hit the spot.
- We really hate self-promotional posts.
- We really love practical posts.
- We edit all posts on Econsultancy multiple times prior to – and after – publication.
- We are fiercely protective about our brand.
- We give all authors a signature – essentially a small bio with links to the author’s website and social profiles (and no sketchy anchor text: all signatures follow the same format, and we editorially control them).
The problem
It’s that last sentence. Google is worried about links in signatures. I guess that can be gamed, on less scrupulous blogs. It’s just that our editorial bar is very high, and all outbound links have to be there on merit, and justified.
From a user experience perspective, links in signatures are entirely justifiable. I frequently check out writers in more detail, and wind up following people on the various social networks.
But should these links pass on any linkjuice? It seems not, if you want to play it safe (and we do).
Can’t Google discount these links at an algorithmic level? Apparently not, though perhaps that’s because there is no standard way of displaying bios and signatures. There may be a microformat, but certainly we’re not using one.
All signs suggest that we’re talking manual penalties here.
I’d like to think that if Google’s webspam team was to look at Econsultancy’s content, our guest bloggers, and the way we standardise the signatures, that we’d have no problem. But I can’t bank on that.
So we’ve made the change.
Michael Jackson was right
We are not alone. There are plenty of other publishers out there who have a strong guest blogging contingent. They are struggling with this issue too.
Rand over at Moz asked Matt Cutts about all this yesterday, and I hope a very black and white answer will be forthcoming.

Let’s see what Matt says.
I do wonder about how big the problem is for Google, as surely guest blogging is such a small piece of the overall jigsaw. And what about branded content, and native advertising? Where will all of this end?
One final thought: anybody who says links aren’t such a big deal for SEO anymore needs to have a major rethink.
Webmasters Getting Creative With Their Link Removal Requests & It Works
The new link building is link removal as some would say. Especially with all the craze around links and how they can get you penalized, link removal requests have become a thing all too familiar to anyone who runs a web site. The challenge, like with l…
Search In Pics: Google Spam Fighting, Venom At The GooglePlex & Sergey Brin Sky Diving Again
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google’s Brian White Fighting Spam: Source: Twitter Google’s…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Now Allows You To Rearrange The Google Navigation Bar
Google announced last night that you can now, or in the upcoming weeks as Google rolls it out, customize and rearrange the order of the products and apps within the Google navigation bar as you like. Meaning, if you want to move up the Google Maps icon…
3 Ways Merchants Can Gain More Visibility on Google
Highlighting Google special offers, using Google Consumer Surveys, and making sure you list all of your products on Google Shopping are three easy ways to get a jump on your competition – and they don’t require too much work.
KLM: Service is Sales – Koen Spiers #RIMC14
A full summary of KLM Keynote presentation by Koen Spiers (Social Commerce Manager for KLM) at Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference
Post from Ned Poulter on State of Digital
KLM: Service is Sales – Koen Spiers #RIMC14
Deep Dive into (Not Provided) Data and Ways Around It #SMX
A deep dive into (not provided) data and ways that you can get around it with other reports in Google Analytics.
Post from Guestpost on State of Digital
Deep Dive into (Not Provided) Data and Ways Around It #SMX
Matt Cutts on How to Tell Google When Multiple Domains are Related
How should you handle linking between many different country specific sites, or several sites your company owns that are all related, without running afoul of Google for unnatural linking? Google’s Matt Cutts shares advice on how to not look spammy.
Surviving the SEO "Slog" – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Working to ingrain SEO best practices in a company can take several months, and can involve a lengthy period of diminishing returns that we sometimes call the “SEO slog.” To make things worse, our clients and colleagues often expect a consistent improvement. The difference between those expectations and the reality is what Rand tackles in today’s Whiteboard Friday, offering you four ways to minimize what he calls the “delta of dissatisfaction.”
Surviving the SEO Slog – Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about the SEO slog. This is that really tough experience that many, many SEOs go through where, essentially, you’re putting a lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content, improving your keyword targeting, earning those links and mentions and social signals, user and usage data things, all the things that are going to help you perform on search engines, but you’re not seeing results. Virtually everyone who’s in the field has experienced this over the course of their career.
It happens because, a lot of the time, Google has got many, many triggers in their ranking systems to kind of check whether effort is worthy enough, or signals are organic and ongoing enough, to earn the site continued rankings, or whether there should be some sort of consideration and then evaluation and delay between when the effort is put in and things are improved and when results actually happen.
This is insidiously frustrating for lots of folks in the field. By the way, Google isn’t the only one responsible. Many times what happens is that SEOs make recommendations for organizations or inside their own organizations. They work with their marketing and their engineering teams to try and get things done, and it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to see the results of those.
So I actually really appreciated Scott Clark from BuzzMaven in Lexington. You can follow him on Twitter on @buzzmaven. Scott described this very eloquently. I like the graphic that he put together about the SEO slog. His blog post, by the way, was called “Thriving In the SEO Slog,” and he talked to a number of industry leaders, particularly those from consulting firms, about this process. He had a chart very similar to the one that I’m going to show you here.
Essentially, we have on the side here, effort. So a little bit of effort down on the bottom. Lots of effort and then a ton of effort right up on the top. Then, sort of month one through six, as you’re starting those SEO efforts and campaigns. This can happen on an entire website level, but this can also happen on a particular subsection of a website, or a new group of keywords, or a new set of content that you’re targeting.
What frequently happens is you see what’s needed to see return on investment, to see those improvements over time, versus what the expectations are, which I’ve got in purple versus orange, kind of diverge. So at the start, what’s needed, a lot of the time at the very start of an SEO campaign, especially if previous best practices haven’t been employed, it’s actually really minimal to start seeing a positive return on investment. But, over time, that effort ramps up a ton. You’ve got to do an incredible amount just to see a continued return on investment over those first few months, and there’s a delay between the effort that you put in here and when you’re seeing results towards the latter few months of a campaign.
Unfortunately, expectations are the opposite. A lot of clients, managers, teams, the people in your startup with you, the other folks that are in your consulting group, your client, all of these folks are expecting to see that effort is a little bit higher at the start, and then you kind of get the ball rolling and it goes down. That actually is true. The problem is it takes a long time to get that ball rolling. So what I usually see, what most of us in the industry see is that that effort ramps up tremendously in those first few months, and then over time it does go down a little bit. Maintaining those ongoing best practices is a little bit easier.
But this, right here, the difference between expectations and reality, that’s what I call the delta of dissatisfaction. People just get really frustrated around this.
There are a few good mitigation strategies, and some of these were mentioned, actually, by the experts that Scott Clark talked to in his post. The first one, the one that nearly every consultant mentioned, and I think is very smart, is to create the right expectations.
If you go into a client meeting, or you sit down with your marketing team, or you’re talking to your CEO about what you can and can’t accomplish, if you create the expectation that SEO is going to be this not necessarily silver bullet, but that you will make these investments and because things are done so badly today and the company you used to work for or the other websites that you’ve worked on had such success when you implemented these best practices, that you feel confident you can increase their rankings and their traffic and the acquisition of customers dramatically.
The problem gets created right then and there, because in the SEO world, for the last decade, for some reason people have held these two beliefs about SEO. Number one, that it’s a one-time activity, which is just dead wrong as all of you who are watching know. Number two is that once you optimize for the search engines, you are now optimal, and that means you don’t require additional ongoing effort, and the search engines will reward your efforts once they see them. Since Google’s crawling us so fast, well, we must get that benefit immediately.
Neither of these are the case. So creating the right expectations up front can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go ahead and make this chart and put it right in your presentations, as you’re showing the team, here’s what needs to be fixed. Here’s what we need to do. Here’s what I think we can accomplish. But, by the way, you’re going to think this can happen a lot faster than it can happen. If you tell them that up front, you’re creating those right expectations.
Number two, when things are going well, that’s a dangerous time, a very dangerous time. I urge folks not to just sort of celebrate and then create new projections, like, “Hey, well, we accomplished X. Y is certainly going to happen, and Y is going to be 2X, and 3X and 4X in six months and seven months and eight months.” Always create both a contingency plan, in case that traffic increase is temporary, and a conservative budget.
So I actually really like making budgets around traffic, around performance here at Moz, and in general that contain a best-case scenario and also a “and here’s what we’ll spend before we know whether this is the truth.” If you don’t, you can end up very, very sad.
Number three, make sure SEO isn’t your only inbound traffic channel, and it’s not the only inbound marketing effort that you’re working on. If you’re doing social media marketing and content marketing, you’re building an email list, and you’re doing branding and PR and outreach and connecting with your industry, you’re speaking at events, you’re doing paid forms of advertising as well, great. Now you’ve got some mitigation. Now you aren’t solely relying on SEO to provide all of the returns, and, thus, you can handle being off budget. If Google is 70% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, that’s huge. If Google is 20% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, oh, it’s not so bad. It’s only 2% off budget.
Number four, the last thing I’ll recommend here is that you measure and report leading indicators. By leading indicators, I mean not just the pages that are receiving traffic, but also things like link signals, rankings for long-tail stuff, looking at social shares, these leading indicators, these things that tend to, over time, correlate as rankings catch up to how your performance is going. By reporting on that kind of stuff, higher engagement on pages, those leading indicators will give you a sense of how things might be going two, three, four, five, six months from now with your search traffic and your rankings. That can be extremely helpful.
All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday,and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 27, 2014
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Car Makers Drove 14.4 Million Clicks From Google Ads In 2 Months (And That Doesn’t Include Mobile) A whopping 177 automotive manufacture sites drove 14.4…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Link Building Guide: When You Have No Links
Link building. The majority of the strategies below are cleanup strategies that will last for only a few months, but then you’ll be back to the drawing board. Coming up with an evergreen asset that can continue to build links and provide value (and revenue) in the long run should be your goal. That being […]
Car Makers Drove 14.4 Million Clicks From Google Ads In 2 Months (And That Doesn’t Include Mobile)
A whopping 177 automotive manufacture sites drove 14.4 million paid search clicks from Google ads on desktops and tablets this January and February. Of those 177 advertisers, the top 20 advertisers (roughly 11 percent) accounted for 81 percent of the paid search clicks in the two month period,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.