The latest news and views on what is happening in Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing
Could Google introduce a penalty for guest blogging?
This is inspired by David Edbrooke-Stainer from WTF SEO. In reply to my post ‘What does Matt Cutts mean: Guest Blogging is Done’ David said he would never use guest blogging.
His argument runs that guest blogging is essentially a way of paying for links. The content you give to the blogger is the payment in return for which you get a link or two.
Hardly has guest blogging become all the rage in SEO than Matt Cutts says it is ‘done’ or ,for want of a better word, ‘dead’. But where did the fashion come from and is it really all over?
In the early days it was all about getting links to your website and the easiest way to do that was just swapping links. I’ll link to you if you link to me.
The question, “How much will you charge to rank my site for Keyword X”? has not changed and the relentless spamming of blogs and forums suggests there are still many companies prepared to make promises that it can be done via any type of link building.
But Google’s changes over the last two years, and the advent of Hummingbird, have made this task very different as we go forward into 2014.
I was recently asked the question, “What is the connection between SEO and PPC?”. The client asking was a little confused because SEO is supposed to be about getting organic rankings and PPC is supposed to be part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and so paid rankings.
I had mentioned that we could use PPC to improve his organic rankings and it left him puzzled. So how does it work?
I’m often to be found banging on to clients about how important it is for them to manage their online reputation. I bang on because it is hard for most to prioritize this task when there doesn’t seem to be any urgency.
Then one day, because you simply can’t please everybody, a negative review appears somewhere on the web and all hell breaks lose.
One of those ever popular requests I get in my email box is “Can you SEO my website?”. Yes I can but what are you actually asking?
Over and over on the Website Design sites I also see phrases like “SEO built in” but does that mean you will be top of the search engines?
The short answer is “No”.
Hot on the heels of Penguin 2.1 is the every frequent question from webmasters who have lost their rankings – “Has Google Penalised me?”. Almost always the answer is no, there is no penalty.
I say almost – because if you have received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about unnatural links then it’s too late, you have been up to things which Google really doesn’t like and the wrist slapping has been done.
Well Google has rolled out another update of it’s Penguin Algorithm aimed at websites who have been ranking high due to poor quality links from spammy type sites (link farms, content farms, etc.).
My mailbox has been buzzing with people who have seen their traffic plummet since the weekend and as this algorithm is still rolling out there may be more to come.
There was a time when webmasters were obsessed with page load time. A sure held belief that if you could reduce the period from 2 seconds to 0.5 of a second it would be the path to better rankings.
There was, and still is, some truth in it. Search engines like Google want to produce a set of search results that don’t disappoint the user and pages that take for ever to display can annoy.
I’ve written before about the way websites can rank, and rank well, with no backlinks at all in my post SEO: Building backlinks doesn’t work (and that was going back nearly two years!).
I did make the point there that backlinks do have their place but this does now need some clarification.
