Image above: I’m only ranking at #113 for [seo] in “people and pages” but some of my best friends are around me

While everybody was writing posts what the new Google personal search aka “Google Search Plus Your World” means for SEO I almost started to write one about what Google Search Plus means for SEO 2.0

Then I decided to be more conservative and just summarized a few common sense hands on SEO techniques for Google Search Plus and personal search results.

Neither personal search or social search is new to Google. It’s just a huge leap forward this time after it has been a bit neglected in recent years.

Google+ and +1 are part of the main motivation behind this new move. Also, the so called link economy where many webmasters are buying links to game Google is the target.

Google wants to know who you are and what you like in order to ensure that low quality web sites do not get the attention they sometimes mistakenly still get on Google search.

We have to understand first that Google Search Plus has a two tiered approach. You get still in a way organic results where personal/social search results are mixed in prominently and you can click on the “personal results” link below the search box to see solely your own search results nobody else sees in that way:

Everybody who is logged in into one of the manifold Google services will see the the new personal search results sooner or later. Logged out users will get some very broad suggestions too. They mainly see suggested profiles on the right of search results:

To really use this feature you at least need a Google Profile and a Google+ membership

if you ask me. Then you need to have some people connect to you via Google+ or other services you are using with the notable exception of Facebook it seems. These services have to be linked on your Google Profile to count.

What more can you do?

Google Profile

• Connect other sites – Link all your other profiles and sites even less obvious ones like Friendfeed or WordPress.com
• Describe yourself – Your short “Occupation” description on your profile matters a lot it seems. Also your latest “Employment” seems to have a big impact. Mention your keyword here.
• Claim authorship – Use the new authorship markup by Google and link back to your Google Profile from your blog posts or respective bio below.

Images

• Use images on your blog – Images on my blog that are properly tagged show up in image results. Michael Gray‘s images do perform even better, they come in second even when I’m logged in
• Share images on Google+ – Images shared on Google+ rank as well quite obviously
• Upload images to your profile using Picasa – Your profile image but also other images uploaded to Picasa perform very well
• Practice image SEO – Consider common sense image SEO best practices like understandable file names instead of numbers.

Google+

• Use on topic circles – Create topical circles on Google+ – I write mainly about SEO, blogging and social media thus I created these three circles for examples (and a few more).
• Use Google+ actively and frequently – Activity counts, even feeding in Twitter updates automatically, pages and profiles by active people show up much higher
• Encourage feedback – Feedback like comments and shares is very important, some profiles with more controversial posts with lots of comments show on top
• Make many people add you to circles – The number of circles you are in counts, Danny Sullivan is in 300k circles so ends up being the suggested user for SEO despite listing at as only one topics he deals with
• Make sure you’re in the right circles – The names of the circles you are in counts as well so when you are selling SEO use the term to describe yourself not many others
• Let people link to you on profiles – The number of people who connect their profile to your site is  a factor thus make your employees link, this is one of the reasons the guys from Dejan SEO ranks so well.
• Participate in social networking – Socialize with relevant people who are on your level. I don’t expect Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin to +1 my posts, I will +1 theirs from time, but I focus on people who are into SEO etc. and have enough time to read my posts as well.
• Share circles – You can create and share circles with other people. They can add all of the people at once.

Blogging

• Use buttons – Add a +1 button to your blog postings. I use the WordPress extension by Pleer SEO.
• Write about Google+ – Blog about Google+ your profile, your page and what’s going on there.
• Use a badge – Add a Google+ badge to add you to “your circles” in the sidebar for example.
• Call to action – Ask people to +1 your postings with a little call to action in the last sentence and display the button below.
• Check shares – Monitor who shares your postings on Google+ using Topsy and add these people to your circles.

Google +1

• +1 quality and popular sites – Clicking +1 is a double edged sword. Your authority influences the things you vote up but also the sites you +1 are influencing your reputation. Vote up crap nobody else likes and you get less influential on Google as a whole not just Google+ They call it Agent Rank. I’m afraid by quality sites they mean mostly popular sites so you have to +1 main stream sources not only high quality niche sites.
• +1 sites you often use – To see the sites you really like on top you simply have to +1 them. The more you +1 them the more likely they are to appear on top.
• +1 your own sites – I don’t like this as I prefer other people to vote for me but it seems you have to vote for own sites and articles. It seems Google doesn’t dislike self-promotion unless of course your won sites are the only ones you push.
• +1 what’s on top – To get more exposure on other people’s results it seems you have to +1 what’s already on top in organic search. A woman I follow on Twitter linked to the Wikipedia definition of SEO on her private blog and now I see her on top of my search results. I had to look up who she is, she doesn’t even follow me back.

Google+ Page

• Add keyword to name – Use your keyword in the Google+ page description. Point Blank SEO ranks better than just Point Blank of course when it comes to [seo]. The Point Blank SEO team does not only rank because of the keyword, they have a hugely popular Google+ baiting post but it surely helps.
• Update frequently – It’s crucial to update your page regularly. You know Google loves content, it’s their business model that you provide free content for them so they reward those who do provide it. Also people like me do not follow empty pages unless they trust the source already.
• Socialize using your page – Companies can follow people on Google+ and +1 updates it seems. They can comment and share like any other user.

Other techniques

• Use keywords in titles – It seems post titles with the keyword mentioned more than once rank better in personal results.
• Use common words – You can optimize for common words again. When I search for car, house or even love I see personal results but most of them are not relevant, they keywords may match but in most cases the whole update may be completely irrelevant to me. So it’s good to provide a few updates using these simple terms if you care for them.
• Share off-topic – Do not only share work related content. Google+ is not like Facebook, you don’t have to share baby and per photos all the time but some occasional beauty and humor is great to make people happy and encourage engagement I’ve noticed. It’s better than just talking about SEO.

Thanks Niall Mackenzie for screenshots he provided for this post

These are just common sense SEO techniques for Google+, the SEO 2.0 part of it starts when engaging with people. This is a bit tougher and can’t fit in short list items easily. I think I will elaborate on it in the near future. I’m still testing and trying to find out myself what’s it all about.

I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad that SEO 2.0 has become main stream finally. You can’t ignore it anymore. Social media participation and outreach from now directly affects search results. It’s about time. I’ve got used to it in 2008 already when I added StumbleUpon to my search results. Google+ integration is even better.

You can’t be a bot anymore.

Get personal now. +1 this post if you like it and join me on Google+!

Also please share more techniques on how to optimize for the new Google Search Plus Your World in the comments.

Related posts:

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists

Above: Not personalized search results for the query [content strategy mistakes]. I rank at #7. Look who ranks at #2 and #4.

While trying to assess the impact of stolen and otherwise copied content on my rankings here on the SEO 2.0 blog I’ve found an anomaly in the Google results I want to share with you.

A post from a popular web design blog, indeed a blog I like very much, Six Revisions outranks other far more relevant search results.

How does it do it? It succeeds by a single keyword mention below the posting:

and most importantly a category named after part of the keyphrase in question: “content strategy”:

http://sixrevisions.com/content-strategy/5-common-seo-mistakes-with-web-page-titles/

So the most significant onpage ranking factor seems to be the category keywords in the URL.

The site has lots of backlinks, the post itself as well. There are no incoming links with the keyword combination in the anchor text according to Blekko though:

Above: Blekko showing the inbound link anchor texts. None of them contain the term “content strategy”

Still it outranks other pages that really deal with content strategy mistakes while itself the post does only cover SEO mistakes.

What do you think? Is this an exception from the rule? Are category keywords in the URL a significant ranking signal now or does Google favor authority sites so much these days hat they need only slightly relevant content to outrank the competition that covers the topic at stake directly?

You may wonder why I rank so bad in this example. My blog has been “pandalized” recently during a minor Panda update with the number 2.5.2. I have been removed from the top 10 for all two word keyphrases I have been ranking in the top 10 for years. You won’t find my blog  anymore for phrases like

• [seo blog]
• [image seo]
• [advanced seo]
• [url seo]

anymore. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t rank higher for [content strategy mistakes]. I only rank for some very long long tail queries now.

Also take note that an aggregator called Scoop.it curated by a friend mine, Gabriella of Level 343 who cites my posts ranks higher than the post on SEO 2.0 itself. I have asked on Twitter whether other SEO people can confirm that keyword mentions in categories are an important ranking factor these days.

I know that the impact of keywords in URLs beyond the domains has been negligible over the recent years. Has Google changed this? Two SEO experts, Shark SEO and Mark of Guava have weighed in that there might be different reasons but were as well surprised by this example. What do you think?

P.S.: I didn’t link out to any of the sites or pages involved here in order not to skew the results.

Related posts:

1. StumbleUpon Adds SEO Category
2. Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
3. Matt Cutts Acknowledges SEO 2.0 Tactic of Linking Out as Ranking Factor (Nofollow is Dead)

1. StumbleUpon Adds SEO Category
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3. Matt Cutts Acknowledges SEO 2.0 Tactic of Linking Out as Ranking Factor (Nofollow is Dead)

robots.txt, a protocol that helps search engines to find out which part of a website should not be included in its index. According to Wikipedia

The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web crawlers and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable.

As an SEO, you must have tried this search operator in Google: [site:example.com]. This simply returns the pages from example.com that have been crawled and included in the Google index. The Google bot does not crawl any pages that are ‘disallowed’ by the robots.txt file. Everything makes sense till now but what if your robots.txt file started to appear in Google search results?

To be honest I thought somebody is poking fun at me. It doesn’t sound logical at all. After reading a tweet by Peter Handley aka @ismepete I took it seriously though. He is one of the brightest minds in the search industry!

Shocked, amazed and I guess somewhat a mix of both, I quickly jumped over to Google to see it for myself and guess what I found?

You see, Peter is not the only one dealing with this but websites like

• Dailymail
• Webmasterworld
• Last.fm

and many others… all have their robots.txt file indexed in Google.

You see, it’s simply illogical to block ‘robots.txt’ in a robots.txt file. This didn’t make any sense to me:

Why Google actually indexes this file and how to de-index from the search engine?

Why does Google index the robots.txt?

There can be multiple reasons why Google indexes the robots.txt file but I have figured out two as the most common reasons why search engines index particular pages and later show them as results for a query.

1. Links:

Google follows links, you know it, right? From one link to another and the chain continues. When links are pointing to the robots.txt file from external sources (different websites pointing to your robots.txt file) or internally (some page of your website that points to robots.txt file), Google will probably index it.

1. Social signals:

The faster way to get Google’s attention to a page I know is to share it on social platforms like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook (Google currently can’t see private Facebook sharing activity). When for some reason you or someone share your robots.txt on social sites this can be another common reason that makes Google index the page file.

Consider Rishi Lakhani who wrote a letter to Google in his website’s robot.txt file: Check this out, it’s still there on his website. Rishi Lakhani shared his creative robots.txt on Twitter and it went viral. According to Shared Count, Rishi Lakhani’s robots.txt file got:

• Facebook Likes: 21
• Facebook Comments: 8
• Facebook Shares: 33
• Twitter: 1232

Now, you know why Google will probably going to index your robots.txt file so let’s talk about action now!

How to de-index the robots.txt?

Don’t link, don’t share:

This is not always in your control, especially not to make people link a specific page on websites like the “Webmasterworld” forum or Last.fm. Theoretically though if you don’t link it and don’t share on social platforms, Google will not show it.

URL removal request:

That’s the only idea I have found, simple yet powerful and safe way to get your robots.txt file out of the Google index. It’s great because the user’s site ownership is verified and shows even the progress for each request.

These are two of the ways I know how to deal with the above mentioned issue. In case you think you have a better solution for the robots.txt indexing problem, please share it with the community in the comment section.

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2. Google Indexes Twitter Links
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Wow. Awesome! After just a dozen of tries I could sign up for Google+! Sadly it happened on late Friday so that I ended up trying it out on the weekend. You know I hate working on the weekend but after a while I had the impression that this is what I do on Google+.

You may already know that after a few years of social media enthusiasm I grew more and more critical of the whole hype.

Why do I have to work for free to make Mark Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire? This is one of the questions I asked myself when joining Facebook in 2008 (shortly after they entered the German market). I asked it myself again when I finally decided to actually use Facebook in 2010.

I test a lot of new tools but these days I don’t do it just for the sake of it anymore.

Just because a tool is free as in beer doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost me money to use. I could spend the time working on my won Web real estate so there must be a compelling reason to use a tool. Otherwise it’s a waste of time and money.

I still use plenty of social media sites, services and tools. I use

1. Delicious
2. Twitter
3. Tumblr

every day. I even use this forgotten social browsing tool called Browzmi almost daily because there is a rational reason to do so. Facebook and LinkedIn also have a role in my overall social media strategy but I use them only occasionally when I have a concrete task to accomplish (LinkedIn) or some time left (Facebook).

I use Tumblr and Browzmi only privately in the sense that I don’t earn money using them but it still makes some sense for inspiration or organizational purposes.

So here comes Google+ and requires a significant time investment on my side.

I schedule just 30 minutes a day for social media use, the same amount I schedule for sorting and answering emails that are not part of my projects. The only tool I used throughout the day until now was Delicious, I was bookmarking everything I’ve found of some interest in the SEO, social media and blogging sphere. Occasional off topic saves included. Later I use them for my blog posts.

When Google launched the +1 button I started adding +1 votes to all kinds of sites I appreciate. I +1 a lot, even more than I use Delicious, Twitter, Facebook together. I just vote for everything I appreciate no matter the language or topic.

Google+ doesn’t automatically display these +1 votes like Facebook does with likes.

So my Google+ stream is a different one than the +1 stream. That’s good because I don’t flood my SEO followers with off topic stuff from all over the Web but when I’d like to share something on G+ as well I don’t have an option to do so.

Instead I noticed that Google+ works a lot like Google Buzz, it encourages discussions. That’s great if you want to start one but I rarely do and when I do people don’t contribute. People like to discuss about stuff that doesn’t matter much. They like to discuss opinions.

I’m interested in opinions but not in discussing them.

Every opinion, even the “wrong” one has some value as it shows that some people think in a certain manner. You can adapt then once you know. You can’t argue with people’s opinion much though. It costs lots of effort to even make a point that contradicts someone elses’ opinion. You could argue all day and starve in the meantime.

So how does Google+ add to my social media strategy? It adds a place where I can discuss stuff, whether Google+ is this or that and whether it should add this or that feature, or whether Facebook is better or not. That’s great for Google+ engineers, they can learn a lot from these discussions. To me it’s just working for free for Google.

Why should I? To push my own properties there? Maybe. I will still have to find out. Maybe next weekend. Until them I consider switching of these notifications that follow me when logged in into Google. There is Greasemonkey script for that. I’ll have to find the link.

Also it took lots of work to organize just a few dozens of people into circles. I will have to plan this time investment. As I socialize mostly with the same people I am connected with on Twitter, Facebook and the likes I have to find more reasons to do so beyond just discussing opinions. I may create circles for all of my different blogs so that I can serve all my audiences, but that’s also additional workload.

How does Google+ add to your social media strategy? Does it only add more work to your todo list? What are your actual use cases? What does the “plus” actually stand for?

* Image by Akane Yamada.

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1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. What the Numerous Digg Bans Can Teach Us about Social Media (Companies)
3. Stop Social Media Hopping Now to Save Your Business Later

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Link building or attracting links is quite hard these days. Most people are looking for short cuts like paid links in spite of them being outside the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

While some big brands may get away with paid links at least as long Google buys them as well most average website owners have to sift through forums or trust clandestine text link ad market places. Most people new to SEO simply don’t know where to buy links. Your search is over!

I’ve found a place you can buy links by the millions without ever getting caught.

Where is the land of all links you can buy? It’s Turkey. It seems Matt Cutts has never been there and thus the site in question openly advertises their link selling business. The company is called Ülker and their scheme is quite ingenious! After buying the link you can actually drink it! Yes, it’s no joke. You can drink the link! It’ even prepackaged in cans or bottles. Also there are plenty of flavors.

Long story short: Buying links by Ülker is completely risk free. You won’t get penalized for them whatsoever.

Unless of course Google finds a way to crawl your intestines. So next time you ask where to buy links at least don’t ask Google. You may find dubious offers like this one. Also it’s like asking a police officer where to buy pot!

Related posts:

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Image: This is how logged out Google users see Google +1 votes. They display only on the first result.

When Google initially introduced the Google +1 feature for search results many people in the SEO industry and beyond argued that it makes no sense to click +1 on search results. I was in fact supporting this notion of uselessness.

Now that the actual Google +1 button for websites is available as well another round of

“why would anybody click it?”

posts has appeared. This time I’m not so pessimistic though.

I’ve watched the way I use the +1 button and have seen the button appear all over the place within days. Plus, surprisingly the button counts are quite impressive in many cases. Also I have included the button on SEO 2.0 as well and in spite of not having published any new posts in weeks some +1 clicks appeared on my old postings.

Of course these insights are completely subjective and I have once again no numbers or pretty graphs to back it up but I have asked myself why the heck I am clicking +1 all the time while rarely clicking “like” or actually tweeting a post in the last few days?

I didn’t want to write another cliche “10 reasons to” click the Google +1 button on websites but there are quite a few use cases by now.

Reasons not to +1

First let me explain the most common arguments saying that nobody besides webmasters who vote themselves up (After all +1 votes count as a ranking factor according to Google.) will have the incentive to click +1. There are basically mainly three of them.

• No friends or followers to send to.
• Google Profile being obligatory.
• Questionable privacy and sharing of +1 data.

Why would anybody click +1 if thee are no friends and followers to actually share the news with? On Facebook your friends and family see it, on Twitter your followers with all kinds of backgrounds do. On Google +1 there is actually a void, nobody follows your +1 “shares” and thus they are meaningless, unless of course you search for something someone else has voted up by +1.

Then there is the notion that you can’t use +1 without a Google Profile. This point was already used to denounce Google Buzz which requires a profile as well. Why would anybody want to have a Google Profile nobody else ever visits. After all it’s not a social network, it’s just a profile in the wild.

There is of course the privacy problem like with all Google products these days. While you can opt out and make your +1 votes private many people do not trust Google with their data. Also some of them might not want to be seen recommending a site in the search results to people they either barely know or worse people they work with etc.

Also as Andrew Nattan points out he doesn’t want to see other people recommending shoes he’d never wear while he just wants to search for shoes without any bias and any interference by other people.

Reasons to +1

I can very well understand all these issues but by now I’m quite convinced that they are not enough to actually stop people from using Google +1 and I do not only mean webmasters including the button but also people clicking the buttons. On the contrary. By now I believe that there are more reasons to click the +1 button than any other buttons we already have.

First let me explain why I don’t tweet or “like” most sites, even those I really appreciate. For tweets it’s by today’s standards not simple enough. I have to click on a button and then I end up on Twitter or a third party site where I actually have to click again and in many cases where I have to write something witty to entice my followers to click the link. In most cases I use my own tools anyways but even my j.mp sidebar takes quite a lot of work in a way to simply share a link.

Now isn’t that a reason to use Facebook like all the time? Well, it might be but let’s take a look at my 100 – 150 select friends on Facebook. I befriended mostly people from the search industry but also there is my mother, some people I went to school with in Germany, even my first love from Poland (I think I was 12 then) wanted to befriend me. I haven’t met or contacted her in the last 24 years.

I guess most people have more family, friends and colleagues in there. Also not everybody has friends who speak different languages. Nonetheless just imagine me “liking” several German and Polish sites or posts a day or even dozens. My search industry colleagues might unfriend me soon for flooding them with stuff they can’t even read. So of course I am very choosy what I “like” on Facebook. Additionally

I don’t want people to know that I like gay Muslim anarchists for instance unless they search for them on Google and thus are also interested in this niche topic.

So what can I do in these cases?

I can plus one everything I like, dozens of articles in a row. I can vote up German, Polish and even Spanish or French sites (as I learned those languages as well). I can vote up gay Muslim anarchists without ostracizing my search marketing friends.

Still, you would ask, why? Don’t I admit that nobody can see it? Well, sooner or later you might search for something I already clicked +1 on. Also I want to show my appreciation to the webmaster. I want other readers to see that this site, page or post has been approved by other people already.

Also I want to find this site next time I search for it. Your own Google +1 votes will not only push the resource you voted up in other people’s results it will also show up in yours and have a direct impact on the ranking. We still don’t know yet how big this will be, but a study already claims that the ranking benefit is quite considerable. Still there are more reasons to click +1:

Image: My Google Bookmarks results for the query [seo blog]. Take note that the formerly bookmarked results I have clicked +1 on recently have a new date and tend to show up on top.

A +1 updates a bookmark on Google Bookmarks.

Yes, I use Google Bookmarks for ages. I have started around 2006 I think. Today I can find every single site I bookmarked there, I can see all my starred results from former Google SearchWiki. I can see all the bookmarked sites I clicked +1 in the search results there on top with a new date and I expect them to show all +1′s from search results and websites as well sooner or later.

Last but not least I expect Google to merge Google Buzz and Google+1 in the near future. It does not make sense to have to separate social media entities like that.

So you see there are plenty of reasons to use Google +1. Especially for me. I use Delicious as well and I bookmark dozens of pages a day in some cases so I may even switch to Google Bookmarks as soon as Google implements one click bookmarking using +1.

What about the privacy? Well, privacy concerns abound when it comes To Google and Facebook and it hasn’t stopped most people from using me. Even “conspiracy theorists” like myself, Matt Cutts refers to privacy advocates as such use Facebook and Google Chrome. I use Iron, the spyware free Chrome version.

Likewise most people use one or the other Google service, be it GMail, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Analytics or whatever. So in some cases you will already have a Google Profile by way of using one of these services. Google could set them up automatically when it decides to. Until now it isn’t obligatory but for some it is and I have one since 2008 I think.

Also I assume that the CIA already knows that I like gay Muslim anarchists so why not tell everybody?

What about the people who do not want me to advise them on buying shoes? Well, some don’t but many others will be glad to have someone they know to help them out.

Do you already use Google +1 on your site? Do you click Google +1 buttons on websites or in search results? Tell me about it or at least click the +1 below.

Related posts:

1. Google +1: The New SearchWiki?
2. Mob vs Smart Mob: 7 Reasons Why StumbleUpon Traffic Is the Best Social Media Traffic
3. 7 SEO 2.0 Lessons: SEO for Humans Instead of Spiders is Not About Google and “Content is King”

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Whether you’re spitting rhymes about gold chains and Adidas kicks, or shaping your web strategy, one thing is essential… “Keepin’ it fresh.”

Fresh content is unique and engaging, and Google likes that.

It seems nowadays, the Google team wants your website to keep content as fresh as organic veggies, by updating information weekly, if not daily.

It has been quite the year for search engine marketing strategy. What was a relatively stable way of doing things is now totally flip flopped. Ever since Google’s Caffeine update in 2010, it seems that marketers are constantly keeping one eye on Google, trying to understand what to do, and how to do it best. Currently, search engine optimizers must focus on restructuring their websites, producing better content, and disseminating this content on social media.

As the landscape continues to shift one thing is for certain, Google doesn’t like low quality material; and what was once a mass strategy to publish and disseminate as many pages as possible is now a systematic approach to index and push high quality material.

In April last year, Google unveiled its Caffeine update which allowed indexing in almost real time. It became blatantly apparent for search engine marketers after the Mayday update, how non-unique content is punished within their algorithms. In November 2010, Google Instant sent shockwaves through search engine land, as people proclaim, “SEO is dead.”
 
What Are The Experts Saying?

Truth is, SEO isn’t dead, it is just fragmenting as search engines find better ways to index and understand content. Here are a few of my favorite takes on our current search engine landscape:

“Maybe the problem isn’t the thin content that users detest seeing in search results. Maybe the problem is with SEO itself. The purpose of SEO is to achieve top rankings and visibility, maximum impressions and clicks in SERPs”- Adam Audette

“It’s the epic frenemy battle of SEOs vs. Search Engines that whittles the SEO techniques down to what eminently points to no other option but to have a great product. What is a great product? It’s a site that people want to go to, return to, share with their networks, email their friends, etc., (aka building natural links and “buzz”). Get it? Great content and natural links and buzz = the new SEO”- Laura Lippay

“Rules of engagement:

• Write meaningful posts.
• Help people.
• Solve problems.
• Promote these posts, socially and otherwise.”- Mark Jackson

How Prevalent are Google’s Changes?

SEO really isn’t anything to freak out about. SEO best practices really haven’t changed too much since 2010. High level strategy may have changed somewhat (emphasis on different SEO tactics), but the people who cut corners are often the ones crying when Google changes an algorithm. We all know that, even though Google’s algorithm will continue to adjust, quality content and best practices will remain current.

Everybody seems to think that Google is moving towards search personalization and social integration in their search results. However, something I found rather ironic and funny is the fact that Google returns only one site that has been published in the past year for the unfiltered search term “fresh content seo” (see screen shot below):

Regardless of this irony, to stay in the safe zone, and continue ranking for search terms on Google, shift your high level strategy to incorporate daily content disseminated through social media. Focus on solving problems with your content and promoting this on multiple different mediums and will be ranking for years.

This is a guest post by Matt Krautstrunk. He is a writer based in San Diego, California, providing insight on topics ranging from social media marketing to merchant services for Resource Nation. Opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the SEO 2.0 views.

* Image source: Urb.com

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1. You Need Better Not More
2. How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
3. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality

1. You Need Better Not More
2. How to Get Content and Earn Credibility with Old News
3. The Anatomy of an SEO 2.0 Web Directory of the Highest Quality

Usually when people refer to their competitors they name a few businesses from the same industry who sell the same products or services as them. This might be true for the offline world but

on the Web there are much bigger competitors. Who are they?

This is for many search engine results the most common list:

1. Google
2. Wikipedia
3. Mainstream media
4. Amazon
5. Ebay
6. Content farms
7. Shopping search engines
8. A-list bloggers
9. Spammers
10. Your actual competitors

Your actual competitors who sell the same stuff you offer do not have to be at the end of this list, it depends on the niche, keywords and how competitive they are. Nonetheless they are by far not your most important competition. Besides, your industry peers are not necessarily just rivals. You can work together for the benefit of all parties involved. I’ll explain below.

That’s one of the main differences between SEO and SEO 2.0: In old school SEO people believed that they have to hoard PageRank and never link out at all, not to mention to competing sites. When blogs and social media finally arrived in business circles most sane people have abandoned this approach.

These days the SEO industry has a whole blogosphere of its own which is highly interlinked both by hyperlinks and real life links between humans.

Also most SEO specialists are heavy users of social media and sharing links by their peers all of the time. Twitter, LinkedIn , Facebook, Quora and all kinds of other social media outlets have been embraced by the SEO practitioner early on.

Your most dangerous competition are the big guys, as you see in the list above at least nine of these mentioned above are big guys.

Google is the elephant in the room you directly compete with. It’s not just search, it’s the attention economy. As Aaron Wall correctly points out Google is grabbing more and more real estate in the SERPs.

Many users won’t even notice your organic search results before they click a Google ad or one of the myriad of their other properties and services. You can’t compete with Google, you can try to buy your way into Google ads but when Google chooses to display their other services on top of yours you lost. You have to focus on a keyword Google hasn’t usurped completely then.

A huge competitor is also Wikipedia, the greatest content farm of all that successfully poses as a non-profit while earning money ”by donations” and not paying their contributors. Wikipedia will outrank your site in most cases even when it’s ridiculous. Search for [film] or even [films] and Google will serve you a Wikipedia entry which explains what a film is on top.

Another even more disturbing competitor is mainstream media. They do not only cover news anymore these days, they are frantically searching for SEO opportunities as well so that they will rank on top for queries like [iPad].

Amazon and Ebay are also almost everywhere and either you join them or you risk obscurity for many keywords and phrases.

Many people have written about content farms and the Google quality update aimed at curbing their prominence in Google results. Even though Demand Media’s eHow and About.com by the NYT have lost a bit after the second part of the update called ”Panda” hit them they still thrive. Demand Media, owner of eHow, has stunned experts with its recent numbers.

Shopping search engines have been hit hard by the latest update but they are still competition you have to watch closely. Price comparison sites are often at the forefront of modern SEO. You need to know what they are doing to be able to cope with changes.

A-list bloggers and industrial strength spammers seem like an unlikely couple to mention together but they are both more important than you. Try to rank in the technology sector and a-list bloggers will make you humble. You can’t compete with giants Engadget, Gizmodo out of nowhere. They have whole teams of writers frantically covering the latest gadgets.

Try the same thing in the pharmacy business online and you’ll face a huge onslaught of spam infested sites and hacked pages redirecting you do the spammer’s shops. Spammers are faster than the search engines and they’ll always find a loophole. So while they might disappear on one day they will reappear on the next with another site or hijacked blog.

Now, how can you compete with all of them? There are two ways to do so. The most common one is:

If you can’t beat them, join them: Pay for Google ads, contribute to Wikipedia, send out press releases to journalists, set up an Ebay and Amazon shop, add articles to article directories or other content farms, guest blog on a-list blogs and buy links.

There is also a new way, the SEO 2.0 way: Joining forces with other bloggers or peers, sometimes your actual competitors. You can outrank the big guys by working together with other bloggers. I have done that in the past by joining a group of bloggers determined to help each other but I always preferred the intuitive SEO 2.0 way of cooperation. It’s been called mutual aid prior to the Internet.

I link out to my peers or “competitors” and they link back to me.

Not all of them do, but some of them do and some even give back more than they get because once you give and get a few times you stop counting. You just share resources as in real life with friends and family.

Cooperation not competition is the only way bloggers and small businesses can compete with their real competitors from big business and big media, big Google included.

Related posts:

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
3. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog

1. 7 Social Sites Every Business and Professional Should Use
2. How to Fight Big Business in Google and Beyond with Smart Mob SEO
3. Words that Damage Trust in Your Blog

I was awestruck today when I noticed that the perhaps most important German blogging conference re:publica sells high PageRank links.

Paid links are forbidden by the Google Webmaster Guidelines since 2007

and Google has repeatedly asked webmasters to report paid links aimed at manipulating Google’s PageRank algorithm over the recent years.

The more astounded I was when I discovered that

Google itself, Google.de to be more exact buys a link on the same page.

It’s right there on the homepage. It has PageRank 7 and the links are easily identifiable as Sponsors.

So I took a look at the source code and was quite sure that my Quirk SearchStatus extension has overlooked the obligatory “nofollow” attribute you have to add to sponsored links to stay within the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

I mean after all, these people, the blogging elite of Germany are Internet savvy professionals. They have to know it.

The more I was dumbfounded when I discovered the actual source code. In it you can clearly see anchor text that doesn’t show up on the page itself. It’s hidden. You can see images only that is the logos of the companies buying links at re:publica.

In the source code it says though:


<ul class="sponsors kooperationspartner">
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.sony.de/" title="Sony">Sony</a></li>
<li><a target="_new" href="http://www.google.de">Google</a></li>;

among others.

So not only are these paid links. This site and with it Google itself violate the Google Webmaster guidelines by using hidden text as well. It’s one of the oldest spam techniques there are on the Web. Here the site uses CSS to hide the text.

So what does this mean? Has Google revised its stance on paid links, now the it buy links itself?

I don’t know what to believe by now. In the past Google departments all over the world have been caught buying links but in most cases they a good excuse. What’s the excuse here? Will Google.de and re:republica get penalized by Matt Cutts? We’ll see.

This blog is probably not important enough to make Google.de and the German blogging elite revise their site so I hope some more important publications cover this story as well.

As far as I’m concerned I don’t think it’s OK to force the little guy with a blog to remove a few paid links on a blog that make a bit extra money while allowing huge corporations like

• HP
• Sony
• Google

itself to buy links with hidden anchor text to manipulate PageRank and search results.

It smells like double standards.

Btw.: re:publica sells links all over the site, not just on the homepage. There are dozens of them. It’s not just one of two.

Of course you can become a cynic and consider site that sell links to Google as a save haven from now. Whenever you want to buy links on high PageRank sites make sure to do it on sites that sell to Google as well.

P.S.: The webmaster of re:publica know what nofollow is. They have links on the homepage that use nofollow. They use nofollow on links from Twitter updates.

Related posts:

1. Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
2. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!
3. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google

1. Google Filters: Exact Match Anchor Text Links Are the New Meta Keywords
2. Where to Buy Links? Turkey!
3. 20 Ways to Get Legit Paid Links Without Getting Penalized by Google

2.5 Years ago I hailed the new search results customization feature by Google called SearchWiki.

I loved it in spite of it being broken from the start. Nonetheless the sheer possibilities once it worked were exactly what I needed to make SEO 2.0 truly become mainstream. I was one of the few people who liked SearchWiki and over the years they phased it out. Just a few weeks ago Google removed the star option to vote up or favorite search results.

Apparently SearchWiki never took off or worked on a large enough scale.

Sad but true. Last week Google reintroduced a SearchWiki-like feature though. Now it’s called Google +1 and instead of buttons to vote results up or down that later became a star you can see a +1 button on your search results once you manage to set up Google +1.

I struggled to do so and finally made it. Now Google +1 appears in my Google.com results (but not on local Google sites like co.uk or .de).

At first I was like “great my SearchWiki is back” but then I found out that it is not, at least not in the way I’d wish. Google +1 is like SearchWiki but with less features. You can vote up sites appearing in search results but you can’t vote those down you don’t want to see.

Google still treats me like a SEO newbie and shows me Wikipedia results along with the Google SEO introduction for noobs. Moreover I get seo-usa.org which is a false friend not dealing with search engine optimization at all. Additionally I get low quality sites like SEO Chat served.

There are strange things happening in these results too, I don’t see the homepage of SEOmoz inspite of voting it up, starring it and bookmarking it on Google bookmarks, I get an old resource from 2008 I’m not particularly interested in.

What’s most striking though is that I can’t see the +1′s by other people

with one exception, I see that Ruud Hein has voted up his site, Search Engine People.

Also social search results and +1 votes seemingly collide with each other. I have voted up SEO Book as well but I can’t see it. Instead I only see that Aaron Wall has shared it.

Just go back to 2008 and compare my custom made SEO results from back then. They were far better and more relevant. There really was an incentive to customize or vote for them. Also look at the sheer number of votes by other people I could see back then. Social proof at its best. Don’t get me wrong, I trust Ruud and he’s my one my best online friends in the SEO industry but where the heck are all the others? I don’ think they haven’t tried Google +1 one week after it’s launch.

Maybe when Google +1 buttons are available for websites as well, similar to the Facebook like button it will turn out useful.

Right now Google +1 has no value even if you really want it to.

I guess it will take Google another 10 years to remove Wikipedia from my results for SEO. Or they just want me to remember the official SEO definition as I don’t care for it and keep on practicing SEO 2.0 whether they like it or not. Or should I say whether they plus one it or not?

Related posts:

1. Why Click the Google +1 Button on Websites Instead of Liking or Tweeting Them?
2. SearchWiki: Power to the People! Great News for SEO 2.0
3. CNN Adds Mixx Buttons, 5 of Them!

1. Why Click the Google +1 Button on Websites Instead of Liking or Tweeting Them?
2. SearchWiki: Power to the People! Great News for SEO 2.0
3. CNN Adds Mixx Buttons, 5 of Them!