How The New Google Updates Affect Your Ranking On Google

Previously Google published a post detailing 10 recent changes to its algorithm following criticisms over their lack of transparency with their algorithm formula. Due to popular demand, Google will now publish a monthly blog series dedicated to smaller algorithm enhancements (See the latest changes below).

Scott Huffman, Engineering Director of Google Search, explains:

“We know people care about how search works, so we always want to push the envelope when it comes to transparency… The good news is that we make roughly 500 improvements in a given year, so there’s always more to share. With this blog series, we’ll be highlighting many of the subtler algorithmic and visible feature changes we make. These are changes that aren’t necessarily big enough to warrant entire blog posts on their own”.

Before I list the algorithm enhancements, I want to address an issue a reader brought up in our previous post “10 Google Algorithm Changes That Affect Your Ranking On Google”. They asked, “How should we adapt our websites to keep up with these changes?”. Continue reading »

How To Search Google Like A Pro

There’s no denying that Google search is an incredibly powerful tool. But like me, are you also tired of having irrelevant results at the top of the search engines? Do you search for a few keywords and continually vary the keywords until you finally find the results you were looking for? If so, I have a better solution for you. Few people are aware of all the shortcuts and tricks that help you enhance your search results. I’ve decided to share these with you in the form of a great infographic by HackCollege.

While the infographic is targeted towards college students, its tips are helpful for any Google user who wants to understand how to structure their search query to get the most accurate and relevant results. Continue reading »

10 Google Algorithm Changes That Affect Your Ranking On Google

Google makes about 500 changes to its search formula every year. As a webmaster it can be confusing trying to keep up with all these changes. Fortunately, Google have published a post detailing 10 recent changes to its algorithm which affect its secret process of ranking Internet websites. Note, Google have chosen to detail these particular updates as they are less vulnerable to being gamed (or exploited).
Continue reading »

How To Register .XXX Domain Name And Protect Your Brand Name

Surprisingly, today’s post isn’t about Google Plus, Twitter Tools or Facebook Tools! This month saw the launch of the .xxx internet domain, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a dedicated domain for the adult industry. ICANN hope using an obvious classification such as this will improve search for adult sites and help parents and schools more readily identify and filter these sites to protect children.

What does this mean for you?

Currently, ICANN is offering a pre-launch a.k.a. “Sunrise” phase to allow all types of businesses to claim an .xxx domain version of their URL. Why would businesses do this? Simply to protect the reputation of their brands by preventing adult sites from cybersquatting and/or claiming the brand name for themselves. No company wants an adult site using their brand name, so $300 to claim your domain isn’t such a bad deal.

In fact, media reports are stating that over 900,000 companies have requested to claim their name, of which 80% are not adult sites. Continue reading »

Twtrland Helps You Decide Who You Should Follow On Twitter

How do you decide if a user is worth following on Twitter? Previously, you had to base this decision on the few details available – the user’s avatar, description and the last couple of tweets. Not very reliable is it. Well the good news is, a new service called Twtrland now converts Twitter streams into a detailed profile page to help you decide whether they would be of interest to you.

Click here to view the rest of the article.

Why Do You Need Google Plus For Your Business And What Is The Social Network All About?

Chances are, you’ve been hearing about this new social network Google + and its potential to help businesses. But the reality is, it’s hard enough finding time to juggle all the different marketing initiatives you’re already part of and you’re hesitant to add another social site to the mix.  But the simple truth is: that’s where your potential audience is going so that’s where you need to be. In fact getting in on the ground floor ahead of your competition will have benefits as this network grows and prospers. But beyond this, few businesses seem to realize just how much SEO benefits Google + brings to businesses.

Google + & SEO

The SEO benefits of Google + are sure to be a hit with businesses looking to gain free organic search traffic (which is pretty much every business out there).

Google explains,

“Once these pages/profiles arrive they will probably operate in a way that’s pretty similar to Facebook Pages, but with some Google SEO benefits. They will be indexed, “followable” and individual updates or posts can be +1′d — much or all of which will be fed back into search results and rankings.”

Click here to continue reading the article.

Get Your Website Crawled And Indexed By Googlebot Within A Day

It’s frustrating having to wait up to several weeks for Googlebot (Google’s crawler) to notice new content added to your site. Well, Google have heard the complaints of webmasters and introduced a new tool called ‘Fetch as Googlebot” in Webmaster Tools.

Now you can directly request that Googlebot index your new and updated URL. The best part is, if it is approved for inclusion in their search engine index, this only takes up to 24 hours for your site to be crawled and indexed. But remember, this doesn’t guarantee that every URL can be indexed using this tool. They’ll still be evaluating whether a URL belongs in their search engine.

The benefits are clear. This allows visitors to view the updated cached version of your site with the new changes (Note: A Cached version of your page is just how the page looks when the search engine last indexed your page to its database. People may view this page if you actual site is temporarily down).  You wouldn’t want out-of-date content could appear in search results right, particularly if you need to update event and product details or if you’ve published the wrong information.

It’s also great for newly launched websites. If your website isn’t indexed, users won’t be able to find you from the search engines (which generally accounts for the majority of website traffic).

Continue reading »

Google +1 Button: What Is It And Why Should You Care?

Discover everything important you need to know about the Google +1 button  in this simple presentation we’ve created that has been viewed 20,000 + times on SlideShare.

I hope you found the slide helpful, if you’re looking for more information on the +1 button, check out our previous posts:

Facebook Releases Guide To Help Business Pages Boost Their Results

Facebook has just released their new ‘Facebook for Business’ guide. If you’re just getting starting with Facebook or looking for more ways to utilize the social network to grow your business, this is quite handy. Considering Google is currently banning all unauthorized business profiles from Google +, this is a good opportunity for Facebook to strengthen ties with businesses to prevent them from jumping ship to Google in the future.

Continue reading »

Google Vs Facebook: Who Will Win The Social Network War?

The internet has been in a frenzy over Google + this past month. Initially, many people thought Google would have a hard time convincing Facebook users to join this new social network. But contrary to this initial belief, Google + already has “millions” of users, surpassing Twitter to become the fastest growing social network.  This is fairly impressive considering it is still in its beta stage offering invite-only memberships. It is for this reason, as well as the reasons I will discuss below that I believe Google will win the social game against Facebook.

Continue reading »