Anyone for Google chocolate?
Full story: Cadburys’ Google+ page.
2011
Whether booking a holiday or buying a cooker, we all at some point or another have turned to Google or an appropriate review website to find out what others think. After all, the social proof provided by other people is often the strongest influence on deciding to buy.
Some of our clients have actively courted customer reviews, by signing up for third party customer review sites such as Trustpilot. Trustpilot particularly encourages customers to leave reviews, and our clients’ experiences of the service (and others like it) has been entirely positive.
On the odd occasion a customer has left a slightly negative review, it’s been a great chance to dive straight in, apologise for the issue and publicly offer to put the issue right. The response to this has been fantastic, with the same customer usually replying back with great glee about the personal service they’ve just received. The beauty of this, of course, is that other potential customers see.
Here’s a great article on how to response to negative online reviews, to turn them to your advantage.
We’re big fans of SEOMoz. Their blog is always chock full of industry leading advice, and their suite of tools (the keyword difficulty tool and the Open Site Explorer) see some particularly heavy usage at Woof Towers.
Always pushing forward, they’ve just announced the addition of a new Social Analytics component to their Pro tools for subscribers. Looking forward to giving this a run out today.
The words ‘duplicate content’ are bandied about with, well, gay abandon in SEO circles it seems. It seems to be one topic that is often totally misunderstood, even by SEO professionals. Rumours about the ‘penalties’ of duplicate content are particularly rife. We spend a great deal of our time as consultants debunking these myths.
If you’re confused about duplicate content (on your site and outside of your site), you could do worse than read SEOMoz’s in-depth resource on the subject: what it is, how it happens, how to diagnose it and how to fix it.
We’re big fans of Raven’s SEO tools here at Woof. The whole suite is really useful for a whole raft of SEO tasks: research, monitoring, tracking, etc.
Raven already boasts a nice suite of research tools but if I’m honest, I’ve always found them just a little lacking. They always seemed to fall slightly short of being really useful.
No more. Really excited to hear about a whole new Research Central module being rolled out soon out now!
We’ve been having a play with the beta and have to say: it’s very impressive and more than fills the gaps we’d previously found with their research tools.
Google have been guilty of being incredibly secretive about how they rank websites in the past.
The method they use to rank websites—or their ‘algorithm’—has been a closely guarded secret, precisely to discourage webmasters and site owners trying to reverse engineer the algorithm for their own gain.
Over the last few years though, the company have been far more open about their methods, largely led by Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam and search quality team).
In the continuing spirit of openness, here are details of Google’s 10 recent algorithm changes. Recommended reading for webmasters.
You’ll likely by now be aware of Google+ – Google’s answer to Facebook.
By all accounts the service has been a success with regular web users, with a reported 15 million sign-ups within the first week.
However, unlike Facebook, Google until now haven’t allowed businesses to set up Google+ pages for business.
I love the keyword research process. At the start of a project, it’s a time of discovery and infinite possibility. In the thick of a project, it provides actionable data to help take things to another level.
As always with SEO, there’s a ton of really poor advice out there on the subject of keyword research.
Here are 9 classic pieces of keyword research advice that absolutely suck, from the always insightful Ian Lurie.
Summary: We’ve recently been trialling a whole host of keyword rank tracking applications. While far from perfect, we’ve found that Advanced Web Ranking is most definitely the best of the bunch, for our criteria and requirements.
It’s the age old story all over again. Site owners create sites, try to do what they can, maybe they even read Google’s webmaster guidelines. Everything seems to be working for a while. They get comfortable even. Happy. Ecstatic as the money rolls in.
Then Google takes action against spammers or against some other perceived problematic aspect of their SERPs. And inevitably, some of those otherwise innocent site owners watch as their sites take a nose dive. Money lost. Hearts broken. Chaos ensues…
via The Farmer Update Harmed Codependent Site Owners.
It’s a now age-old, oft-repeating story. Google makes a significant change to their ranking algorithm, rankings fluctuate wildly, search engine professionals whip themselves up into a tizz…
We’ve avoided commenting on the ‘Farmer’ algorithm update, mostly because it’s impossible to really see the effects until the changes have taken hold and settled. No point in speculating.
For our own internal project sites and our clients’ sites, nothing appears to have really changed (except a few have seen significant ranking increases—but that may well just be due to the work we’ve been doing).
However, we have heard from a few friends, particularly with e-commerce stores, that rankings appear to have been hit pretty badly. Our speculation: because this algorithm change targeted content rather than backlink sources, stores using the standard manufacturer’s product descriptions have been dropped like a stone. These product descriptions will appear on thousands of other e-commerce stores selling the same products, so sites bearing the same content could be seen by Google as holding less worth for search engine users.
Whatever the reason, it does appear that many perfectly innocent sites have been affected. The Farmer Update Harmed Codependent Site Owners is a great article that looks at this in more depth. Worth a read.
