Month: October 2012

Since the Penguin algorithm changes, SEOs have been worried about a couple of things in particular. Firstly, they are concerned that all the illicit link-building tactics that their client’s previous SEOs engaged in (because, of course, they would never do such things themselves) are now going to have a negative consequence on a site’s ranking. The second major concern is that competitors can take advantage of Google’s scrutinizing of backlink profiles to deliberately create “bad links” and incur a penalty.

To allay some of those fears Google have released a tool

that will allow webmasters to disavow those incoming links that might be causing their sites to be flagged by Google as engaging in bad link-building practices. (more…)

That wily fox Matt Cutts once again set about the clucking SEOs this month with a Twitter announcement that Google were making changes to their algorithm focusing on page layout.

Google uses aspects of page layout as one of the signals that determines SERP ranking. They are especially concerned that, all else being equal, they don’t rank pages highly when the ‘above the fold’ portion of the page does not contain useful content for visitors. What that generally means is that they would rather web site owners didn’t fill the part of the page that first appears to visitors with adverts and bury the content further down the page.

Unfortunately, Google, with their usual lack of clarity, has failed to stipulate exactly what constitutes good content ‘above the fold’, but the common sense approach is usually best. Google tend to attempt to put themselves in the place of their users, and ask what is that user likely to find most useful. They may get that wrong fairly frequently, but absent any better data, this is probably the best approach for website owners too.