Cut the Links?

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. Continue reading →

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.

Duplicate content is a problem for search engines, and that makes it a problem for SEOs. Google  strongly dislikes including the same content more than once in search results, and if content exists in more than one place on a site, search engine algorithms have trouble determining which version they should include or exclude.

They also have difficulty knowing where to assign link juice and authority. This confusion can lead to sites experiencing a loss of traffic and reduced SERP rankings. Therefore, the “rel=canonical” element intends to help search engines. It does this by telling them which page is “the page” for specific content.

HTTP 501

Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock in recent days will be aware that GoDaddy recently suffered an outage that left millions of its client’s websites inaccessible. While this sort of downtime will obviously affect a site’s traffic and therefore revenue, many people are asking whether it will have an effect on their SEO.

The short answer to that question is no, probably not. Google generally isn’t happy when they find a site has disappeared from their index. However, they know problems happen. As long as these problems aren’t regular, a site’s SERP ranking likely won’t drop. Reliability is important. Therefore, a site that is often down will be ranked lower. But a short period of unavailability is unusual. It’s not a useful signal of a negative trend. Continue reading →