In an attempt to offer its users better search results, Google has just implemented a significant change to its algorithm. The change will help boost the rankings of what are deemed to be high quality sites, and it will push low quality sites, such as content farms, further down the rankings.

Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, a principal engineer who helps the search engine giant fight spam, announced the algorithmic improvement in a post on Google’s blog. The change’s main goal is to improve relevancy among search results for users. By rewarding high quality sites for their content and punishing low quality sites for their supposed lack of content, users can get more of what they are looking for without having to weed through irrelevant sites. Google considers high quality sites to be those that offer original content, in-depth analysis, research, and more.

Although the blog post did not name any specific websites, it is likely that content farms are its main target. Content farms produce short, low value articles that are created in response to popular search queries. One such site is eHow, which pays freelance writers small fees to produce short articles on a variety of subjects.

Many content farm articles achieved high search engine rankings in the past, but offered little actual value to visitors. Google sees these sites as a form of spam that clutters its results. Other sites, which post unoriginal content and even go as far as to copy content, are also targeted in the algorithm change. It is unknown exactly how long it will take for the ranking changes to actualize, but they should gradually appear.

Prior to officially changing its algorithm, Google announced the release of the Personal Blocklist extension for users of its Chrome browser. The extension allows users to block specific domains from appearing in search results, essentially creating a blacklist of unwanted sites. Personal Blocklist also allows users to provide Google with feedback and opinions on the blocked sites.

Google stated that it did not use the extension’s feedback in making the algorithmic change, but there are some consistencies between the two. Approximately 84 percent of the most unpopular or blocked domains from Personal Blocklist have been negatively impacted since the change, which shows that it has worked in accordance with user opinion.

Algorithmic changes are nothing out of the ordinary for Google. The company tweaks its algorithm several times per year, and many times the changes are not officially announced. The latest change is worthy of an announcement because it affects 11.8 percent of Google’s queries.

As of now, the change has only been implemented in the United States. Google does plan to make it global in the future, however. As time passes, it should be interesting to see how the change affects the Internet landscape. With any luck, the rewards of higher rankings given to quality sites should create an improvement in terms of the overall level of quality of online content.

For more on this topic, visit http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html.

More Search Engine News Articles
More By wubayou

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Google-Changes-Algorithm-for-Low-Quality-Sites/

Do you post PDFs on your website? Maybe you offer them as educational material for your visitors. If so, you’re sitting on a search engine gold mine; you just need to optimize it. Keep reading to find out how.

The YOUMoz section of SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search) recently posted a checklist for performing SEO on PDFs, which is where I got much of this material. As with any checklist, the devil’s in the details. It starts with search-friendly file names. You make sure the file names of your other web pages are useful to searchers who find them in the SERPs, so don’t call it 1234.pdf, call it (for example) GrowTomatoes.pdf.

Tackle your PDF’s title tag in the same way. You optimize the tile tags of other web pages, so why not this one? Hold yourself to the same character limits as you would for the title tag of any other web page.

If you’re using Adobe Acrobat, you’ll get a description field. This translates to the meta description of a web page, and will be displayed in the SERPs under your title tag. Treat this as you would the meta description for any other web page; if you use them, keep it informative and concise, so your readers will really know what they’re getting when they click on the link.

Again, if you’re using Acrobat, there’s a way to view “Additional Metadata.” You’ll find additional fields to fill out there. Some search engines may rank some of these fields, so you may want to fill them out completely. After this, you’ll want to hit the Advanced menu and find the sub-menu for Accessibility. This is great if you want to help visitors with screen readers and magnifiers read your PDFs.

Do you use Alt tags on your regular web pages? Believe it or not, there are also ways to do this with images in your PDFs. Check your program. It’s another way to help the search engine spiders get a better handle on what your document is all about.

Okay, so you’ve added all of the “on-site” details that you would to any web page; how about the “off-site” details? I’m talking about links. You’ll definitely want to add a link in the document back to your website, for both the search engine spiders and your human readers. If other websites decide to host a copy of your PDF, that link in the document becomes a backlink to your website.

For obvious reasons, you won’t want others to be able to easily remove that link – or otherwise edit your PDF. So make sure  you write-protect it before putting it online.

Finally, you may feel certain that a PDF is the best way to offer your material, but not everyone who visits your website will agree with you. It’s always a good idea to offer different options to your visitors. So you might want to present HTML versions of your PDF documents. Many web surfers find them less of a hassle than clicking on a PDF and opening a reader when they just want to casually browse your site. If they like what they see in HTML, though, they may go to the PDF version to print it out later. So different formats are good for different purposes, and it’s helpful to your visitors – both humans and search engine spiders – to have more than one available.

More Search Optimization Articles
More By Terri Wells

Article source: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Remember-to-SEO-Your-PDFs/

I’m going to tell you why an SEO Book subscription, for many small businesses, is a much better investment than just hiring a firm or a freelancer.

We, as business owners, all realize that we need an online presence and the backbone of that presence is a top-notch SEO campaign.

Whether it be straight out SEO services, or help with Google Places, or help with reputation management, most small business owners realize they need to be “there” but aren’t quite sure how to do that properly.

You’re a small business owner, so am I and so are many members of our community industry. Our work lives as small business owners are typically filled with parts of various roles like:

• CEO
• customer service representative
• accountant
• IT manager
• marketing manager
• janitor

The problem is that SEO can be an abstract thing or idea for small business owners outside of the web marketing industry to grasp, learn, and implement correctly.

This problem leads to small businesses getting taken to the cleaners by either woefully inadequate (and expensive!) SEO firms, competing business models (like YellowPages YellowBook) selling their version of SEO services due to the significant decrease in revenue from the phonebook model, or just plain snake oil salespeople.

There are many qualified SEO providers out there, tons actually. There’s a lot of noise as well and when you don’t have a clear understanding of the business it can be hard to discern one from the other.

Finding a Worthy SEO Provider

So if a small business owner is able to carefully avoid those situations and find a reputable SEO firm, chances are that the price for those services will be out of reach or just not economical from an ROI standpoint for some small businesses (unless the firm is hurting for business or it’s a new firm starting out).

There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just simple economics. If a service provider can sell their services for 6 or 5 figure contracts consistently, then it doesn’t behoove their business interest to sell services for 4 or 3 figure contracts.

A Better Option

Even if we stipulate that a business can afford to hire a firm to handle their SEO campaign, where it makes sense for both the provider and the buyer, we’d like to present another option.

That option would be an SEO Book subscription ' class='wp-smiley' /> Compared to hiring an SEO company, your SEO Book subscription:

• is less expensive, resulting an in much higher ROI for your business
• is more direct and hands on, you get unbiased feedback from hundreds of SEO professionals
• gives the owner the ability to learn the ins and outs so they can manage things themselves
• trains the business owner about the industry and best practices so they can intelligently outsource services themselves if they so choose

SeoBook Subscription Options

There are 2 types of SeoBook subscriptions, with different levels of access. The first option is for access to our (over 100) training modules and our premium SEO tool set. The cost of that option is just $69 per month.

The second option is for access to those same training modules and tools, in addition to our community forums. Our community is the cornerstone of our subscription-based membership service.

Inside the forums you have instant access to the most up-to-date, cutting edge information where you will learn from some of the best minds in SEO.

For the purposes of this post I’m going to focus on the option which includes everything.

How Much Would You Invest in You?

When you started your small business you probably thought (correctly) that it was a good idea to at least have a solid understanding of the key concepts related to your business prior to hiring staff to handle day to day tasks.

You probably learned how to operate and troubleshoot equipment, customer service software, the phone system, the coffee pot ' class='wp-smiley' /> and so on. You likely know who your target market is and you know what type of message you want to convey via print and web design as well as sales copy.

Those are all things that you had to learn in order to grow your business and for your business to function properly.

You Are Your Business

By investing the time in yourself, and by extension to your business, you were able to confidently hire and train staff as well as put together a traditional marketing campaign with the help of local print vendors and maybe your local web design person.

When it comes to something like SEO, where there is no formal education or “certification” (thank goodness), you might have a tough time hiring something to do something you know very little about.

If you don’t know what works and what doesn’t how will you know if the provider is selling you a bag of smoke versus providing an actual quality service? You won’t know, and with what a good SEO campaign from a reputable provider can cost that can cause significant damage to your business.

You Are No Stranger to Hard Work

Investing time, practicing patience, and being willing to learn will reward you and your business many, many, many times over when it comes to the SEO industry. The fact is many people fail because they are lazy and unwilling to learn in addition to having a poor attitude.

You have probably perservered through that and are running a solid business so why not get even more ahead of your competition, lazy or otherwise.

Breaking Down the Costs

Most SEO campaigns can expect to see results in or around 6 months, so we’ll look at the 12 month costs because you should consider SEO (just like traditional marketing) as an ongoing effort to produce results for your business.

From experience I can tell you that a full-on SEO campaign from an experienced SEO or SEO firm for small businesses will likely start at $5,000 per month here in the states. Probably higher for a firm and that amount can flucuate depending on your needs but anything less than thousands per month is unlikely.

When I say full-on I mean the whole deal:

• keyword research
• competitive analysis
• analytics reviews and implementation for testing, tracking, tweaking
• site structure
• on-page SEO (title tags, page copy, and so on)
• off-page SEO, like link building
• adjusting tactics based on rankings growth or decline (and competitor watching)

If you are new to the SEO space you may not know what some of that means, but you know its important (or else you wouldn’t be reading this). You know that your visibility on the web is probably a crucial component of your small business’s long-term success.

Would you really want to outsource that for what it might cost you for an employee or two, without knowing exactly what it is the provider is/should be doing?

Don’t Pay 17x More Than You Need To!

So even being conservative in my estimate, you are talking about around $60k per year and that probably doesn’t include additional money you may need for getting links to your site via branding and such.

Meanwhile, you could be investing just $3,600 per *year* in yourself and your business while learning from quite a few of the thought leaders in the SEO space. Perhaps not the biggest self-promoters in the space but certainly some of the best minds.

My dad always told me to be very wary of someone constantly telling you they are the best at XYZ, usually they aren’t. The ones who are the best are doing the job everyday and doing it well, not telling YOU how great THEY are.

It’s important to keep in mind that an SEO book subscription is going to give you the tools you need, the training you need, and more importantly the knowledge you need to be successful. Have a question?

Just ask it in the community forums and we’ll answer it. In fact, many people will answer it and you’ll get wide range of tips from folks with loads of experience and success.

Membership Format

Now, the membership doesn’t mean that we’ll execute the plan for you but you’ll have a step by step guide on what to do, how to do it, why you’re doing it, and the tools you need to do it.

Plus, you have 24/7 access to the community forum which has hundreds of members and is quite active at all hours as we have members from all over the world.

But I Can Do it For Le$$….

There’s probably someone out there that will say “hey I can do that and do it well for like $2k a month”…ok, but even at that price point it’s $24k versus $3,600 per year!!

If you know what to do with your campaign you can easily outsource the “grunt” work for much cheaper dollars + become educated in a field that is very important now, and will be for the foreseeable future. I not only write this as an employee of SEO Book, but also as a person who was a customer for about a year before joining the site. During that time I helped get our company website squared away and learned how to automate or outsource many aspects of our business: from content, to promotion, to additional link development. And if you need help with any of that stuff, there is a requests forum where you can work with some of our members.

Heck, let’s even say someone would run a full-service SEO campaign for you at the absurdly low price point of $500/mo! (not likely, given that some quality links cost $299 per year each). Even before link development that’s still approaching *double* the cost of an SEO Book subscription while giving you insight from only one person versus hundreds, no premium tools or training modules, and no access to the latest information in the field as well as you not learning SEO from independent, unbiased sources.

In our community you can not only find out what is working right now, but you can also find someone who can help you get the job done without paying for the markup associated with high pressure salesmen or large bureaucratic firms where 50 folks are taking home weekly paychecks for the work done by 5 people.

Discounts on SEO-Related Products

Your SEO Book subscription also comes with tons of discounts on everything from link management software, rank checking applications, SEO conferences, Pay Per Click communities like PpcBlog.Com, web directories which can help with getting exposure/links to your site, social media monitoring services, and many more solid services.

There’s literally *thousands* of dollars in discounts available to our members.

Time is Money, Money is Time

The benefit in outsourcing anything is the time saved and/or the low cost. However, there are typically significant costs (and sometimes irreparable harm) associated with outsourcing any important part of your business to unqualified providers.

Without having the knowledge of what it is you are actually hiring for, you cannot be certain what exactly you are paying for.

Save yourself a lot of money and headaches, learn from the best, and beat your competition in the search engines.

When and if the time comes to hire an SEO firm, you will be fully prepared to make the right decision for your small business. What else could you ask for?

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/small-business-seo-services

It feels like old times.

Google makes a big algorithm change, and all hell breaks loose. Well, some hell, and some jumping for joy, depending on which direction a webmasters rankings went.

As I wrote in Content Farms Vs… at the beginning of last month:

Put it this way. Any algorithm that takes out Demand Media content is going to take out a lot of SEO content, too. SEO copy-writing? What is that? That’s what Demand Media do. As I outlined in the first paragraph, a lot of SEO content in not that different, and any algorithm that targets Demand Media’s content isn’t going to see any difference. Keyword traffic stream identical to title tag? Yep. A couple of hundred words? Yep. SEO format? Yep. Repeats keywords and keyword phrases a few times? Yep. Contributes to the betterment of mankind? Nope. SEO’s need to be careful what they wish for….

There were a lot sites following the SEO model of “writing for the keyword term” taken out, not just sites pejoratively labelled as “Content Farms”. Ironicly, the pinup example I used, Demand Media, got off lightly.

If you want more detail about what happened, and why, check out Aaron’s post Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up, and, if you’re a forum member, this very detailed and insightful thread.

Collateral Damage

Some people have suggested there has been much collateral damage. Google have taken out legitimate pages, too.

What happened is that the pages that were taken out shared enough similarity to pages on Content Farms and the algorithm simply did what it was designed to do, although Google have admitted – kinda – that the change still needs work. The ultimate judgement of whether this is a good or a bad thing comes down to what Google’s users think. Does Google deliver higher quality results, or doesn’t it?

This Guardian article outlines the frustration experienced by many:

I’m pissed because we’ve worked our asses off over the last two years to make this a successful site. Cult of Mac is an independently owned small business. We’re a startup. We have a small but talented team, and I’m the only full timer. We’re busting our chops to produce high-quality, original content on a shoestring budget.We were just starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After two years of uncertainty, the site finally looks like it will be able to stand on its two feet. But this is a major setback. Anyone got Larry’s cell number?

Scroll down, as there’s also some very interesting comments in reply to that post.

This is nothing new, of course, It’s been going on since search began. The search engines shrug, and send businesses that depend on them flying, whilst elevating others.

What can be done?

Spread The Risk

“Be less reliant on Google!”, people say.

It’s an easy thing to say, right, but what do you do when Google is the only search game in town? We know any business strategy that relies on an entity over which we have no control is high risk, but what choice is there? Wait for Bing to get their act together? Hope Blekko becomes the next big thing?

None of us can wait.

Sometimes, no matter how closely we stick to Google’s Guidelines, Google are going to change the game. Whether it is fair or not is beside the point, it’s going to happen.

So, we need to adopt web marketing strategies that help lessen this risk.

The best way to lessen this risk, of course, is to not rely on Google at all. Design your site strategy in such a way as that it wouldn’t grind to a halt if you blocked all spiders with a robots.txt. Treat any traffic from Google as a bonus. Such a strategy might involve PPC, brand building, offline advertising, social media, email marketing and the wealth of other channels open to you.

Try the above as an academic exercise. If you had to operate without natural traffic, does your business still stand up? Are you filling a niche with high demand, a demand you can see in other channels? Is there sufficient margin to advertise, or does your entire model rely on free search traffic? Are there viral elements which could be better exploited? Are there social elements which could be better exploited?

Academic exercises aside, we can also look to mitigate risk. Think about not putting all your eggs in one basket. Instead of running one site, run multiple sites using different SEO strategies on each. Aaron talks about running auxiliary sites in the forum.

Try to get pages (articles, advertising) on other sites in your niche. If your site is taken out, at least you still have a presence in your niche, albeit on someone else’s site. A kindly webmaster may even agree to repoint links to any new site you devise.

Do you have other ideas that help mitigate the risk? Add them to the comments.

It’s An Advantage Being An SEO

Finally, be pleased you’re an SEO.

SEO just got that much harder, and the harder it gets, the more your services are required, and the higher the barrier to entry for new publishers. Every day search is getting more complex. At the end of the day, it’s an algorithm change. It can be reverse engineered, and new strategies will be adopted to maximize the opportunity it presents.

Until such a time as Google tells us exactly what they want to see, and rewards such content, SEO’s will just keep doing what they do. And thank goodness Google isn’t entirely transparent. If they were the value of your SEO knowledge as a competitive advantage would plunge. For many of us, wages would quickly follow.

Sure a short-term hit is painful, but the best SEOs will recover.

As they do, other content producers will be left scratching their heads.

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/google-risk-and-opportunity

How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices? Probably never.

Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change.

Consider AdSense websites.

Hey Look, a Case Study!

When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, Hub Pages or EzineArticles.

Everyone thinks that their content is the cream of the crop that they will bounce back:

We are confident that over time the proven quality of our writers’ content will be attractive to users. We have faith in Google’s ability to tune results post major updates and are optimistic that the cream will rise back to the top in the coming weeks, which has been our experience with past updates – Paul Edmondson

The problem is that for many businesses there will be no bounce back. Some are simply over. The web has evolved the algorithm has moved beyond them.

Where is the Much Needed Disclaimer?

What makes this worse is that when Google gives a site their premium AdSense feed sets something up as a case study others will see that as an explicit endorsement.

THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD DO IT.

Even after Google torches the companies that follow Google suggested best practices those case studies live on, offering what now amounts to maps to Google hell.

Adding Insult to Injury

What makes such filters/penalties even more infuriating is that in some cases when your site is slapped with a negative karma penalty, others who steal your content wrap it in AdSense will outrank you, since their site does not yet have a negative karma penalty against it. ' class='wp-smiley' />

Individually the splog sites may not live long, but collectively they can keep outranking you to ensure you are invisible for your own words, even if you poured years of your life into creating something beautiful important.

As Cult of Mac reports:

As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.

But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.

That part in bold is the most outrageous part of this new “algorithmic” approach. When Google whacks your site then someone who steals your content will outrank you. And most sites stealing content *are* monetized via Google’s DoubleClick AdSense ads.

That whooshing sound you just heard was MFA sploggers making a mad dash to steal content from the list of currently penalized sites.

Cult of Mac is lucky they had enough pull with the press to get reconsidered. Most webmasters who got hit did not anyone who has contracts based on set traffic levels or tight margins which just turned negative are in a pretty crappy situation. Yet another example of the importance of not fueling growth with debt the importance of profit margins and a cash-on-hand safety net.

Who Are the Opportunistic Maximizers?

The problem with such an approach of maximizing everything you do to suck peak revenue out of the pageview is that things can change on a whim. I have seen some of Google’s 1 on 1 AdSense optimization advice they sent to a friend of mine. I told my friend that the optimization advise was at best short-term opportunism that would end up crushing them in the long run if they actually implemented it.

Google doesn’t care if following their advice torches your site if it makes them a bit more money, because ultimately there is another person standing in line waiting to follow.

My friend is lucky that they realized my advice was more trustworthy than the advice they were getting direct from Google. If they listened to Google back then their business might be destroyed today.

Google likes to position SEOs as exploiters out for the quick buck, but what honest analysis shows is that it is Google which is pushing the boundaries in terms of:

• monopolitistic bundling
• fair use / copyright
• trademark
• pushing deceptive ads

Google AdSense has a “get rich quick” ad category. That is something you won’t find on our website (and one of the reasons we will never put AdSense ads on this site)!

AdSense Heatmaps? Look Out Below!

One of the worst hit sites in the AdSense farm update was WiseGeek. Sure WiseGeek must have had something like a 20% ad clickthrough rate. But with traffic falling 75%, maybe they would have been better off building a cleaner experience with a 5% CTR.

That said, they were simply following Google AdSense best practices:

Collateral Damage

What was the most profitable best practices based approach suddenly falls short. And the results are not always predictable. When Google decided to attack content farms who honestly knew that:

1. somehow eHow.com would survive
2. yet somehow Google’s “algorithmic” approach would punt 10,000′s of smaller websites that have far higher content quality

In advance of the solution I was fairly certain eHow would survive, but what I underestimated was the Google engineers. Or rather the ignorance of same. I simply couldn’t imagine such a content farm algorithm going live that missed eHow and decimated the lives of so many independent webmasters.

I guess we can simply view this as an extension of Google’s you can have any web you want so long as it is corporate TM policy. I think Brett Tabke said it best in a recent AdSense thread:

When the rules and the enforcements are made up by monopolies in a make believe world – there is no cheating.

The only “cheatings” is when it gets outside the lines of the law. – Brett Tabke

After the farmer update layoffs are already happening. Not only for monolithic useless content mill websites, but even in organizations where the content is pure as the driven snow.

AskTheBuilder is yet another Google AdSense case study. In spite of being a niche player well regarded in his community, Sistrix data shows the site off 87% after the most recent Google update!

Who Caused the Content Farm Problem?

Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer’s exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It’s time to get away from it. – po

Smokescreen Misdirection

I have long highlighted that Google’s algorithmic-centric was blindingly hypocritical that I felt the approach was nothing more than a scammy cover though which they can selectively exercise editorial discretion while claiming that “the algorithm did it.”

Consider the following scenario:

• roll in an algorithm that aggressively penalizes tons of borderline edge cases
• see who complains to the media has connections with the media
• fix the rankings of those who you like those with sway, while ignoring the rest

Can You Trust Google?

All of this leads to the obvious question: can you trust Google?

The short answer is yes.

The long answer is you can *always* expect Google to do what is in the best interest of Google. As they plow into field after field (payments, local, mobile, ecommerce, mortgage, credit cards, travel, weddings, fashion, etc.) use their search dominance to manipulate other markets one would have to be blind to view Google as anything other than a competitor.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But some day they will come. And it is never fun when it happens to you. ' class='wp-smiley' />

Until that day may come, if you always follow their best practices, just remember … ' class='wp-smiley' />

Don’t say you were not warned!

Article source: http://www.seobook.com/can-you-trust-google