In the video he responds to the question ‘What should be we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO from Google?’ and points out that one of the reasons that they (Google) don’t make ‘what’s coming’ announcements is that plans can and do change. But with that disclaimer he outlined some of what the Google engineers are working on and he described the Penguin 2.0 update as a webspam change that is expected to go a bit deeper and have more of an impact than the original Penguin roll out.

Penguin 2.0 Rolled Out

Mr Cutts then announced from his blog that the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm had begun to roll out during the afternoon of the 22^nd of May 2013. He states that around 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to a degree that a regular search user may notice. He also tells us that the change has already finished rolling out for other languages worldwide and that languages with more webspam will see more of an impact.

Penguin 1.0

The original Google Penguin update in April 2012 targeted sites that exhibited signals indicating spammy tactics had been used to manipulate the search rankings. Typically these tactics included gaining lots of links to specific site pages using targeted keywords as anchor text. Some of the sites which used this tactic received the widely reported Google link warning message via Google webmaster tools.

“We’ve detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We don’t want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realise that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.”

Recovering sites from the impact of this assessment has been a long and hard struggle for many. Later in 2012 Google introduced their disavow tool which enabled webmasters, who were making efforts to clean up their site’s backlink profiles, to disavow spammy links which they had been unable to remove or change. Many believe that the link-data, gathered by the Google disavow tool, underpins the Penguin 2.0 webspam update and Matt Cutts has spoken of a completely different and sophisticated link analysis system which is in the early days of development.

Payday Loans

Although the original Penguin roll out had an enormous impact, spammy, low quality link building has continued to be effectively employed in many industries. One area in which this has been abundantly apparent and noted by Mr Cutts is the Payday Loans sector in the Google UK search results.

Brief examination of the sites and pages which were ranking prominently for queries such as ‘Payday loans’ and ‘short term loans’ before the Penguin 2.0 update quickly showed that spammy links had been used to drive relatively fresh domains to the top of the SERPs. The top ranking site in the UK for these queries was a domain which was only one month old but had a high number of inbound links using these keywords as anchor text. Re-examining the search results subsequent to the roll out shows this site ranking at around #70 for the term ‘payday loans’ and outside the top 100 for the term ‘short term loans’, both of which were previously returning the site in the #1 spot.

Anchor Text

Glancing at the anchor text used in backlinks clearly highlights the queries which had been targeted.

Short Term Loans – Link Anchor Text

Link Velocity

The rate at which links have been acquired shows the heavy focus on link-building since the site launch.

Short Term Loans – Link Velocity

Relevance and Authority

Examination of just a few of the pages hosting links to this domain confirms the low quality, non-editorial nature of these links.

Short Term Loans – Link Example

Link Spam

This example shows that although many websites were affected by Penguin 1.0 (and subsequent 1.1 and 1.2 updates) the impact was not universal. Link spam continued to be an effective tactic used by some to push fresh domains to the top of the search results in competitive sectors.

Matt Cutts has stated that the Payday loans sector in the Google UK results is being tackled in two ways and that, by the end of the summer, link spammers will stand less chance of ranking. He has talked about going upstream in order to deny the value of links to spammers and it is clear that Google aims to stamp out the use of low quality link building tactics, tools and services.

It looks like this first iteration of the Penguin 2.0 webspam algorithm update has already had a significant impact on this sector in the Google UK search results.

Are You Ready for Penguin 2.0?

Although you may think that your site complies with Google’s goals and is free from any whiff of spammy links are you certain that this is how it looks to the search giant? You may have never purchased any links, or advertorials which pass pagerank, or used tools like SENuke to gain links, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that your site is free from risk.

Has your site suffered a sudden decline in ranking visibility? Have you noticed a sudden drop in your site traffic? Here are just a handful of questions to ask yourself along with a few recommendations that will help you to assess the Penguin-compliance status of your website.

1. Is your site submitted to Google webmaster tools and verified?
   • If Google is important to your website then it’s essential to have submitted and verified ownership of your site in Google webmaster tools.
2. Do you know what your site’s backlink profile looks like?
   • Auditing your site’s backlinks is highly recommended. This is most effectively carried out using multiple tools in order to gain a comprehensive assessment. Recommended tools include the Google Webmaster Tools inbound link report, AHrefs.com, MajesticSEO.com and the excellent SEOMoz Open Site Explorer tool.
3. How does your site compare with others in your sector?
   • Consider aspects of your site’s usability, performance, authority, engagement and the frequency of updates compared with competitor websites. A great tool for monitoring competitor site updates is changedetection.com.
4. What are you doing to fulfil the needs and desires of the visitors attracted to your site?
   • Who are your target audience?
   • Why would they visit your website?
   • What is the intent that drives their visits?
   • How does your website support their desires?
   • What do you do to encourage visitors to share your content with their friends?
   • What value does your site offer over and above that which visitors would expect?

What is Penguin 2.0 Looking For?

Over the forthcoming weeks and months stories will be reported of the Penguin 2.0 winners and losers. As for Penguin 1.0 (and 1.1 and 1.2) these stories will help to identify the specific signals and tactics which the webspam algorithm is using to identify sites that have engaged in practices which don’t comply with Google’s guidelines.

The tactics and practices targeted by Penguin 2.0 will more than likely include some of the following.

1. Advertorial style backlinks which pass PageRank
2. Use of link networks
3. Over use of specific keywords as anchor text
4. Low quality, easily acquired links (forum profile links, blog comment links, sponsorship links etc.) often sold in ‘link packets’
5. Links from non-relevant sites and pages
6. Multi-tiered link-building
7. Links from low authority sites and pages
8. Non-editorial links
9. Links from spammed bookmarking sites
10. Links from low quality, automated content
11. Blackhat SEO practices
12. Spammy practices intended to manipulate search rankings

It’s clear that the Penguin 2.0 update has already had a dramatic impact on certain high-profile sectors of search in which aggressive, spammy tactics were continuing to be used to manipulate rankings.

If your site is one of those affected by this latest update and you know that you have engaged in these practices then it’s a fair cop. You will need to decide whether recovering your site or site’s from the Penguin slap is a worthwhile, cost-effective strategy. But if you have been adversely affected by this update and you don’t know why then a detailed site audit and investigation is what you will need.

The post Is Your Website Ready for Penguin 2.0? appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

The first Penguin algorithm update was announced on April 24th 2012. Now there’s another major Google ‘Penguin’ update on the way.

The news comes straight from the horse’s mouth, courtesy of Google’s Matt Cutts. The update is set to go deeper and have a greater impact than the 2012 version. Apparently the folks at Google are calling it Penguin 2.0 and they’re close to roll-out.

Penguin 2012 dealt with sites whose owners had over-indulged in low quality, spammy link-building that gained them lots of links using the money terms that they wanted to rank for as anchor text. It affected around 3.1% of English language search queries and as much as 3% in other languages.

The update’s aim was to penalise websites which had used manipulative techniques to win high rankings in the search results and while it was designed to catch excessive spammers, a lot of ordinary site owners also came under fire, either through ignorance or retrospectively risky SEO.

Here’s a link to the Search Engine Land site, where you’ll find more info about the 2013 Penguin update. And here’s the video about the next generation Penguin update, Matt Cutts in action:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The post Google Penguin Update May 2013 – Hang onto your SEO hats! appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

Spend time enjoying it and you’ll increase the average time visitors spent on my site, which is good for SEO. Thanks!

And thank you to Andrew Bowman for a delightfully realistic piece of Flash animation.

The post Fun for Friday – Here’s a spider for you appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

Don’t hide! Reveal your site’s intention to search engines with on-site SEO.

SEO has undergone profound changes over the past couple of years as Google tightens up its algorithms, slapping down sites with unnatural backlink profiles and sub-standard content.

SEO isn’t about buying or otherwise ‘acquiring’ backlinks and stuffing content with key terms any more, although there was nothing wrong with these techniques – they worked perfectly well in the olden days when Google’s algorithms weren’t anywhere near as intelligent and subtle. But what does SEO actually mean these days?

Much more than the techie side of life

Contemporary SEO encompasses much more than the technical aspects of website implementation. It’s vital stuff because when you pay attention to all the factors it involves, more visitors will find your site and be engaged by it when they get there. OK, they might not make an immediate purchase. But the site will have grabbed their attention, fuelled their interest and raised their awareness, all of which are crucial steps in the customer journey.

A definition of SEO

Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz.org recently described SEO as: “The combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines.”

Cool. But let’s look at the on-site side of SEO life first.

Search engines – Pretty damn clever but still intrinsically dumb

Search engine optimisation pays attention to an incredible variety of nitty-gritty detail that make it easy for visitors and search engines to interpret and understand web pages. Although search engine technology has become very sophisticated, it’s still impossible for them to experience and evaluate web pages in the same way a human visitor would.

I’m shocked by the number of web designers who still don’t bother with on-site SEO. The resulting sites often can’t be indexed by Google and co, full stop, which is just crazy. And although they’re  top quality eye candy, the owners face huge problems achieving organic visibility because of poor site structure, silly page titles and meta data, no thought given to key terms, canonical issues and so on. In other words, the basics.

Whether you like it or not, you still need to ‘tell’ search engines what every page is about. And on-site optimisation – AKA common sense – is still the only way to do it. Whatever route you take to site visibility you really can’t avoid on-site optimisation. And you need to take it into consideration at the very beginning of the design process. It’s no good going back later and trying to fix it.

Paid or organic visibility?

There are variations in the percentages of folk who click on the paid listings and organic search results, depending on the search query and other factors. But research indicate around 20% of search users click on a paid advert and 80% on the organic listings.

How come? Perhaps counter-intuitively, people tend to trust the organic search results because they know prominent sites deliver the best results for their search queries. Whereas sites in the paid section of the SERPs are there because site owners have paid to be there, not through merit.

Even if you’re planning to use AdWords to win search visibility, paying good money to appeal to the 20% or so who’ll click on the paid results, it’s obvious SEO is enormously important if you want to hook the other 80%.

Traditional marketing comes to the fore

As  writer with a strong direct marketing background it’s lovely to see SEO growing up, so much so that some industry luminaries believe it’s on the brink of changing its name to the much more accurate ‘digital marketing’.

The first step in any marketing activity is to define the target audience. It’s also useful, in the context of search marketing, to define a handful of example search queries that potential customers might use. Why bother defining your audience? There are two main reasons:

1. Keyword research: Having a good understanding of who the website is intended for informs keyword research. Rather than focus solely on terms that relate to the products or services sold through a site, it’s much better to identify key terms that relate directly to the needs of the people it’s aimed at.
2. Content creation: It is important to provide content and resources that are as relevant and useful to site visitors as possible. An appreciation of the specific needs and concerns of the target audience, along with what influences their buying decisions, is enormously beneficial in developing content they’ll love.

Getting your key terms act together

Key term research is fundamental to internet marketing success. Why? A thorough and accurate understanding of the queries people enter into search engines lets you develop relevant site content that’ll potentially rank for their search queries, engaging visitors when they land on pages because the content fulfils their intent.

The most important SEO advice on the planet!

Google’s webmaster guidelines confirm the importance of understanding the terms people use when searching, and how they should be included in the website for pages to be listed in the organic search results. This is what they say:

“Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.”

They provide an excellent example:

If your web page is about the height of Mount Everest it’s no good calling it ‘everest-info.htm’ or ‘mountain-stuff.htm’ or ‘page-one.htm’. Call it ‘how-high-is-mount-everest.htm’. Use the H1 header ‘How high is Mount Everest?’, use relevant related phrases within your copy, create the right meta data and so on, and you stand a decent chance of being found when people type ‘how high is Mount Everest’ into Google, Bing or Yahoo.

Simple. Elegant. Logical. You’re not playing the system, you’re abiding by it.

Put it all together and you get…

Audience insight plus key term research gives you the knowledge you need to get cracking and pin down your site architecture and page focus and create content prospects are likely to look for. Then you can go forth and have fun engaging with off-site SEO, knowing your site is tailored directly to the needs of visitors and search engines. In an online world that’s more competitive and crowded by the day, where perfection isn’t an option but a must-have, you’d be mad not to.

What about off-site SEO? I’ll cover that next.

(Thanks to PacificRim at www.sxc.hu for the fab cat image) 

The post SEO: what does it mean in today’s context? appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Everyone’s heard of spam. But what about bacn? 

Widely slammed as the new scourge of our inboxes, bacn isn’t spam. But it isn’t personal email either. It hovers uncomfortably between useless and useful in a dreary email marketing no-man’s land. You don’t really like it. But you don’t hate it either. It’s the marketing equivalent of magnolia paint: acceptable, neutral, dull.

You might have signed up for email updates on a whim, or through force of habit. But unless the messages are useful, relevant, interesting and all that good stuff, they don’t resonate.

It’s all very well creating worthy email marketing content. But you need to step up your game if you want to avoid generating bacn.

How do I avoid creating bacn?

Wouldn’t it be lovely if people fainted with pleasure when reading our news and spent the rest of their lives unable to eat or sleep with the sheer excitement of it all?

In reality most people never get further than the subject line. They’re too busy, too preoccupied, not in the mood, having a bad hair day, at the wrong end of the buying cycle for a multitude of reasons from the sublime to the ridiculous. All of which makes creating email marketing messages that deliver real value, pleasure and usefulness pretty damn tricky.

Luckily there are a few things you can do to minimise the risk of creating bacn.

Getting your subject line right isn’t enough

While a compelling subject line encourages people to open the package, it can’t help you if there’s a bacn buttie inside. Imagine the disappointment when you open an exciting-sounding email only to find it’s about as thrilling as watching grass grow.

Looking the part

Most of us can look at the content of emails from our inbox without having to actually open the messages. If it looks boring it doesn’t matter how shockingly brilliant your subject line is – they’ll hover and delete. Your looks are as important as your content in this context – include fab images, use colour to its best effect and create a template that’s just as easy to find your way around as it is good looking.

Relevant or off-piste?

You could stick to being strictly relevant, narrowing your content down ’til it squeaks in an effort to target people’s interests and needs head on with all guns blazing. Or widen your reach and talk about interesting off-piste subjects to pique and hold your audience’s attention. Or do a bit of both.

Being extraordinary 

Whether it’s off-piste or bang on target make your emails worth the bother: powerful and definite not limp, bland and middle-of-the-road. I know everyone’s banging on about it but you need to be extraordinary. It’s usually easier said than done, but within the realms of possibility.

Setting the right tone of voice

Drone, drone, drone…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Make everything you write a pleasure to read and it’s less likely you’ll end up with bacn. Err towards a professional tone of voice if you need to, or take a lighter tone if you’re selling less serious stuff.  But make your voice recognisable and consistent, warm and attractive, and you’ll weave the right kind of spell.

Analysing customer data 

You can use customer data to tailor email marketing messages according to what people have bought, when and how, observing and analysing their buying behaviour.

Imagine someone has just bought a small blue thing. Would they like to know about the big red thing you’ve just got in stock? It helps to apply logic like this and if marketers’ faith in targeting has any real welly behind it, customer data analysis should help you achieve bacn-free email marketing.

Avoiding hard sells

Do you enjoy being bombarded by hard sells? Probably not. Nor do most of us. Go light on the selling, heavy on the interesting, informing, entertaining and inspiring.

Only contacting people when there’s something to say

There’s nothing worse than sending a marketing message just because it’s on your schedule. If you don’t have anything worthwhile to say, don’t say anything. Less is more. Never ‘do’ marketing just for the sake of it.

Providing opt outs in every communication

It’s best marketing practice to give people the chance to opt out every time you contact them, not just at the start of your relationship. Opt out stats are also handy for analysis. If one particular message makes people opt out in droves, take a long, hard look at it and see if you can figure out why they disliked it so much. And don’t make the same mistake again!

(Thanks to the talented Oscar Nilson on sxc.hu for the lovely royalty-free image) 

The post Your email marketing: bacn or ham? appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

I talked about naming images for SEO a while ago. But I thought it’d also be interesting to look at naming images with visually impaired people in mind. How descriptive can you get without creating stupidly long file names?

One of my recent posts included an image of a lion.  I called it ‘lion’. Which in retrospect isn’t really good enough.

‘Lion’ could mean a lion in the far distance set against the tawny African savannah. It might mean a lion’s silhouette against a fiery setting sun. Or a lion lounging in a tree, gnawing at a bloody chunk of prey. It’s actually a close-up of a lion’s face.

If I was visually impaired I’d appreciate more detail. Close-up-of-a-male-lion-face-in-golds-and-browns-with-a-bit-of-mane-showing.jpg would be silly. But something like male-lion-face-close-up.jpg would do a much better job of describing exactly what the image is than a one-word file name.

Of course you can include keyterms in image file names. But it’s a bad idea to take the mickey and risk the wrath of search engines. Take it easy and exercise common sense. Only include a keyterm if it’s strictly relevant to the image – in other words it helps blind site visitors ‘get’ the subject matter. People first, search engines second.

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What is comment spam?

Comment spam is meaningless generic rubbish, posted on a blog in the hope the owner will approve it and inadvertently give the originator a backlink they don’t deserve.

Here’s an example: “I really like your style, please post more subjects like this”. It seems harmless enough at first glance but that’s the whole point – the text makes sense whatever the subject of your post, something that should always ring alarm bells.

A few clever comment spammers make the effort to craft unique comments that’re directly relevant the post’s content, which is comparatively cool and verging on marketing. But they’re still only doing it on the off chance you’ll approve their comment and activate the link it contains.

Nofollowing dubious comment spam links

Bad links can mean penalties – we know that. If in doubt, you can always make links in dubious blog comments ‘nofollow’, which means they can’t confer any link equity onto  the originating site, making it pointless and powerless. But the thing is, just mentioning a bad neighbourhood might eventually have a negative effect.

Again, it makes sense. Simply mentioning trusted sites is thought to help credibility. If you mention crappy places without linking, does it adversely affect your search positions? Potentially yes, because Google and Co are having to pull out every stop, no matter how small, to sort the wheat from the chaff and deliver perfect search results to users. While it might not matter now, it might matter a great deal at some point in the future.

Managing user generated content

1. add a comment spam filter to your blog, for example the Akismet plug-in for WordPress

2. screen all user-generated content and delete the rubbish

3. never make a blog comment live without checking it carefully first

4. if a comment is relevant, intelligent and worth keeping, nofollow the links it contains unless you are 100% happy to personally vouch for the website it points at

5. if an individual regularly makes interesting, useful, well thought through comments into your blog, you can consider rewarding good behaviour by allowing a follow link from one of their comments… but proceed with caution and visit the site first before making your decision. If it’s a reputable, good quality site fair enough. If it’s a load of old crap, step away

How to nofollow links

Nofollow is a simple way to tell search engines not to follow links on a page. You can often configure blog settings to make all comment links nofollow, which’ll save you time and effort and cut the risk of nasties slipping through your net. Otherwise, here’s the code: just add the rel=”nofollow” code to the link and that’s that:

<a href=”http://thelinkinthecommentspam.co.uk” rel=”nofollow”>Blah link anchor text.</a>

The post When user-generated content goes wrong appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

Despite my lovely new bright pink keyboard, which is marvellously un-sticky without so much as a crumb or scrap of fluff to block the pads, I’ve managed to clock up some splendid mis-types this month.

As usual spellcheck let them sail through unharmed. But they were caught by my eagle copywriter’s eye before they could do any mischief. Here they are.

• Targets and gaols (goals)
• food for the brian (brain)
• gird your lions (loins)
• spreadshit (spreadsheet!)
• alanise (analyse)
• cause ham to your computer (harm)

Just typing them out made me giggle. Oh, I love my job.

The post Crazy mis-types for April appeared first on Kate Naylor freelance copywriter.

A biting breeze cut its teeth on the still-bare trees but we headed east anyway, taking a circuitous route from home to join the South Downs Way at Breaky Bottom Farm, which nestles in a deep, chalky fold.

Cool, secret forests. The intricate map of jigsaw puzzle fields stretching north towards Surrey. The beach where your feet slip-slide-sink in warm flint cobbles. Sussex is very lovely. But the hard spine of the Downs, pinned under a bright sky by circling buzzards, must be one of the most exhilarating landscapes to lose yourself in.

Emerald sheep-shorn grass with arching spring-clear blue above, dotted with cotton bud cumulus spread into streaks by the wind. The loose bellowing of cows thrown our way on the buffety air. Occasional chattering groups of cagouled and booted hikers, red cheeked and cheery.

Curling wearily along the banks of the Cuckmere at low tide with a leg-sore cowboy’s lurching gait, we inch across the map towards the coast and catch a well-earned bus home.

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