Category: SEO

The practice of SEO is quite common among business owners today, even though very few frequently re-evaluate their SEO strategies.

Tactics that might have worked in the past may not yield any positive results today. Several practices of SEO might attract you unmerited penalties from search engines, and compromise your ranking in the SERPs. The following are six of the most dangerous SEO techniques that you should avoid in 2018:

Unnatural links

Most webmasters understand the importance of link building when it comes to attaining higher search engine rankings and increasing organic traffic. However, the links you build to your website must be of the highest quality, and from legitimate sources.

Unnatural links generally involve stuffing backlinks bought from illegal websites. These are incredibly spammy and low quality links that can really negatively impact your SEO. Some webmasters take the extra initiative of hiding the links so that the audiences do not see them. Whichever way, Google and other search engines have become stricter in observation of these types of practices, and are known to heavily penalize websites that engage in this behavior.

Keyword stuffing

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of using identified keywords with the aim of reaching as many people as possible by ranking at the top of the search engines. However, like unnatural links, keyword stuffing is distasteful to search engines, not to mention, audiences.

Overusing key terms in your copy not only looks like you are trying too hard to make your article relevant but it also makes your content look poorly-researched and untrustworthy. Instead, you can determine various positions to use your keywords, like titles, metadata, image captions and descriptions, and strategically within the copy.

Further, you want to opt for long-term keywords, not only for the fact that they are more descriptive but also in the way they help in minimizing cases of keyword stuffing.

Unpleasant interstitial ads

Truthfully, pop-up ads can be very annoying, especially to mobile site users who have a small screen surface to work with. Even though ads are an income strategy for websites, it is wise to cut down on unpleasant interstitial ads.

Most people using the internet fret from sites heavily mounted with ads in the fear of catching a virus or attracting hackers to their devices and accounts. Therefore, the wrong use of unpleasant adds increase your bounce-rate, which equates to the rate at which people exit your website after a visit.

If you must use ads, assign them to a small portion of your website, in such a way that the user has enough room to keep scrolling on content that interests them. Remember you should also be keen to ensure a smooth and pleasant user experience, including optimizing page load speed.

Duplicate content

Since there is a high value for content in terms of SEO, it tends to get overwhelming for website owners to constantly develop high-quality and exciting content. As the pressure mounts, it is common for webmasters to generate duplicate content, sometimes similar to previous information on their websites, and other times similar to other content owners.

Either way, Google finds this as a way to manipulate search rankings, and this will directly impact your organic results. In fact, if you check the keyword rank tracker at serpbook.com, Google displays the original content as the source of information, which means the duplicate material may not make it to the SERP.

Furthermore, you risk landing into copyright issues for the reasons of plagiarism and stand the chance of tainting your reputation online. Aim to increase the quantity of content your share by working to remain consistent with your posting frequency, and also, ensure you stick close to originality, with a flair for your brand’s identity.

Article spinning

In a bid to run away from duplicate content, webmasters indulge in article spinning, which is a black hat SEO practice. The idea here is to manipulate a piece of work to come up with a rewritten piece of content that seems to be different from the original one, to impress search engines.

The truth of the matter is, search engines love fresh content, and article spinning is stale and can get your websites flagged as spam, or otherwise penalized on SERP. Also, the use of article spinning software produces low-quality content that is an unreadable version of the original content.

Remember, whether you change the terms and phrases used in a copy to generate a different article or duplicate it as it is, it passes out the same idea, and this does not add any value to your target audience.

Comment spamming on blogs

Commenting on other people’s websites is a great way to remain relevant online, increase your brand’s visibility, form relationships with other webmasters, as well as increase audience engagement. However, comment spamming is a technique that webmasters use to build up a comment section with feedback and links pointing back to their websites, which is a means to manipulate their search rankings.

Today, Google has changed its algorithm to punish such acts. The translation here is that the comments you post on blogs should be informative and value-adding, instead of generic messages. If correctly done, it can be an ideal source of backlinks (although no-follow), therefore, avoid unevaluable comments like ‘great post.’

The practice of SEO is one that is engaging and demanding of commitment to put up with the continuity of bettering your website. However, you must tread carefully when operating online, because your reputation is always at stake, and the internet never forgets.

Author Bio

Maycon Diniz Lopes is the content manager of Serpbook. Serpbook is an online platform that gives you information about everything you need to monitor, automate and report on your keyword rankings. It also provides you with local and global SEO rank tracking in real time for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

 

Are you engaging in any of these harmful SEO strategies?

No matter what your website is about, you need internal links. Why? Internal links are a great way to spread traffic, driving people to more pages of your site, for a start. Links also help readers find what they need, keep them engaged and, by extension, lower your bounce rate. Even better, internal links can boost your overall SEO — as they show search engines how your pages relate to one another and distribute page authority across your site.

So, whether your ultimate goal is more page views for more advertising dollars or better leads to convert into customers, internal links are key. How should you go about increasing them? What are the best practices for internal linking on your blog? Here is a look at what you need to know.

1. Build a lot of content. Step one to building good internal links is creating a lot of quality content. More pages mean more opportunities to link — leading to a better internal linking strategy for your site.
2. Use descriptive anchor text in links. Make sure that all your internal links use anchor text instead of images (or images of text) or generic text, for that matter. Rather than using a phrase such as “learn more here,” try telling visitors the context of the link, using relevant keywords. At the same time, the words you use as anchor text should feel natural; don’t try to force anything.
3. Prioritize the reader experience. Many website best practices go back to a foundational concept: Help the reader. So, in terms of link strategy, ask yourself: What links will be legitimately useful to readers? How can you point them to related resources that will match the context of a page? This helps you know how and where to link.
4. Link less to the homepage and more to other pages. If you’re like most bloggers, you’re already linking to your homepage throughout your site. This means you don’t need more link juice going to that page; it’s got the strongest authority already. Rather, spread the page authority among your site by pointing to other, lesser-found pages. If you already have an SEO campaign underway, you’ll want to link most often to the site pages that are SEO targets. This helps increase their authority, which is one factor in higher search rankings.
5. Find related pages through Google search. Sometimes you’ll remember old posts that are relevant to a new one you’re writing, and it’ll be easy to incorporate them into your content. Other times, you’ll need to search. Here’s an easy way to do it: Go to Google and search “site:yourURL.com” followed by your topic. The results will show you related posts you’ve written, which may be a natural fit for internal links.
6. Aim for about 3-5 internal links per post (per 500-600 words). Filling your posts with dozens of internal links is not a faster path to high SEO rankings. Remember, you’re trying to add value to your readers’ lives. Depending on the type of post (interview, roundup, how-to, etc.), it may make sense to add more or fewer links. In general, though, it’s a good idea to shoot for two to three internal links at minimum. This does not include the homepage or other high-ranking pages such as your “About” page or “Contact” page. Instead, try to link deeper into your archives, to posts that see less traffic day to day.
7. Use the smallest number of links possible between your homepage and any other page. Think of links like degrees of separation. To make content more findable, you want to minimize the degrees of separation between your homepage and other pages on your site. This is where categories and tags can be so useful. Ideally, you arrange your content like a pyramid — the homepage is on top, linking to a handful of pages (i.e., your categories), which link to pages (such as posts).
8. Regularly check for broken internal links. Internal links are useful only if they’re working. When one of your blog posts links, for example, to a page you’ve deleted, all that does is damage SEO. Regularly check for broken internal links with free tools such as BrokenLinkCheck.com or DeadLinkChecker.com. Then, either change the link or 301 redirect the broken link to the closest relevant page.

When it comes to blogging, internal links are vital. Build a better site by strategically incorporating relevant links throughout your posts! To make the most of the links you use throughout your site, follow the best practices above.

Author bio:

 

Shanna Mallon is a contributing writer for Straight North, a professional SEO consultant agency in Chicago. Shanna has been writing professionally online since 2007.

 

What does your internal link strategy look like?

I’ve had a few questions recently about how to set up 301 redirects in WordPress, so I figured it was a good blog topic for today.

Now there’s multiple ways you can set up 301 redirects on your WordPress site, but the one I’m going to show you today is super simple.

But first let’s quickly go over why you would want to set up a 301 redirect on your website in the first place.

When To Use 301 Redirects?

There are a few instances where you would want to use a 301 redirect on your WordPress site.

Let’s go over a few of the most important reasons for this below.

404 Errors:

404 Errors are basically broken or dead links/pages on your website (see screenshot below as an example). What you would want to do in this situation is 301 redirect that broken link to the next most relevant page. This is an SEO best practice for two reasons. One, it will send visitors to a live page rather than them landing on a broken page and two it will pass the link equity from the original page to the 301 redirected page (assuming the original page had some authority and/or backlinks built to it). Correcting 404 errors using 301 redirects can be a quick win for webmasters and is something worth monitoring every month using tools like Google Search Console, MOZ, Screaming Frog and Ahrefs.

Duplicate Content:

In certain cases sometimes your website will contain duplicate content which can negatively affect your SEO. Pages that are too similar to each other can confuse Google on which one they should ultimately rank, which could result in de-indexing and drops in search rankings. Therefore you’d want to 301 redirect the duplicate page to the preferred page (alternatively you can use a canonical tag or write more unique content for the page). Duplicate content can also be caused by having multiple versions of a website. For example, if you have both an “http” and “https” version of your website, this can cause a mess of duplicate content issues which could wreak havoc on your search engine rankings. But simply 301 redirecting all “http” pages to “https” would solve this problem.

Newer/Better Version of a Page:

Sometimes you may want to use a 301 redirect in WordPress for an old blog post. Let’s say one of your blog posts is really outdated and irrelevant at this point and you recently wrote a more updated article on that particular topic. You may want to use a 301 redirect here. Not only will you send visitors to a fresher article, but you will also pass the link equity/authority to this new blog post.

How To Set Up 301 Redirects In WordPress

1.) First things first, login into your WordPress website.

2.) Then in the dashboard on the left hand side click “Plugins” and then “Add New”.

 

3.) Next in the search box, type in “301 Redirects”.

4.) Install the plugin named “Simple 301 Redirects”…Keep in mind that any of these WordPress plugins will most likely work just fine but this is the one that I personally use.

5.) Then make sure you hit “Activate”

6.) Once this is activated, on the left hand side again hover over “Settings” and then select “301 redirects”

 

7.) Where the two empty boxes are within the plugin is where you will set up a 301 redirect. The 404 error you will put in first (left box) and then the link you want to 301 redirect to will be second (right box). Make sure you only take the end of your URLs for this to work. For example, if my 404 error was from this URL http://evanhoeflichmarketing.com/nopage I’d just want to copy /nopage and paste it in the left box. Same goes for the 301 redirect. Note: To 301 redirect to your home page simply use / to make this happen. See below for a few examples of my 404 errors on the left and my 301 redirects on the right.

 

8.) Click “Save Changes” and test out your page(s) to ensure they’re 301 redirecting correctly.

It’s really as simple as that to set up 301 redirects in WordPress using a very basic plugin.

Of course there are other and more advanced ways of doing this, but I think this is great approach for most WordPress bloggers.

I also recorded a tutorial video on how to do this if you’d rather watch that..Please see below.

You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel here for additional blogging and SEO related tactics.

Keyword research can be an overwhelming and confusing task for many bloggers.

I know when I first started out, I had no idea what types of keywords to target and made many mistakes in the process.

Thankfully after years of SEO experience working with a variety of clients and after much trial and error on my own blog, it has become much clearer to me the types of terms to target.

In this blog post we will go over 3 simple steps on how to properly do keyword research for SEO which will ultimately help drive more traffic to your website.

How To Do Keyword Research for SEO- 3 Simple Tips

Step #1– Start With An Idea:

Have an idea of the type of term(s) you’d like to target. For example, maybe you’re interested in targeting the keyword “traffic generation” for a blog post. Just knowing this gives you some direction and is a good starting point that we can use in step #2. If you need help coming up with ideas, analyze your competitors and look into what’s trending in your niche.

Step #2– Plug Your Keyword Into A Keyword Research Tool:

Plug the term “traffic generation” into a keyword research tool to generate additional ideas. The keyword research tool I recommend is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel and it’s also free to use.  Here are a few other good keyword research tools below as well:

• Ubersuggest (free)
• Google Keyword Planner (free)
• MOZ Keyword Explorer (paid)
• Keywordtool.io/google (paid)

Using Ubersuggest have “Web” selected and “English/ United States” and click “Look Up”. This will now populate a list for you to analyze.

 

As you can see, “traffic generation” has 590 monthly searches which is pretty good, however (and a big however), that specific keyword is going to be incredibly competitive and difficult to rank highly for since it’s so broad.

Which brings me to my next point…

Step #3– Go After Long-Tail Type Keyword Phrases

The problem I see with many new bloggers when it comes to keyword research is that they try and target the most competitive terms (mainly because of monthly search volume) and wonder why they are buried in the search results and are receiving ZERO traffic.

These keywords are extremely hard to rank for and especially for a brand new website with no authority yet. A better approach to start gaining some traction would be to focus on long-tail keywords phrases. This means go after terms that have anywhere from 3-5 words in them. For example, Ubersuggest provided me with a whole bunch of keyword ideas and variations…See screenshot below (this is just a snapshot of the entire list):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After analyzing the list a bit, I found some really great long-tail terms to go after. Instead of targeting “traffic generation” (which we already established is too competitive for a newer website), see below for a handful of keyword phrases that may be a better alternative:

• “how to increase website traffic” – 480 searches per month
• “how to get traffic to your blog” – 320 searches per month
• “how to increase website traffic for free” – 170 searches per month
• “get more traffic to your website” – 70 searches per month
• “how to get traffic to my website” – 70 searches per month
• “how to get visitors to your website” – 50 searches per month
• “how to generate traffic to my website” – 40 searches per month

Now some of you may be saying “40 searches per month, that’s peanuts”!

Well, I won’t argue with you there, but if it’s highly targeted traffic from Google it’s still very valuable.

I personally rank on page #1 of Google for keywords with 100 monthly searches or lower that I do very well with…and especially since they are easier to rank for.

Now let’s say that over the next 12 months you rank highly for 20-30 long-tail keyword phrases at an average of 70 visitors per month, that could easily generate you over 1,000 organic search visitors each and every month.

This could continue to build overtime, with the right SEO strategy, and snowball to thousands of unique visitors per month.

Please note: I’m all for going after some competitive terms with high monthly search volume (as I do myself), but not for bloggers who are just starting out.

Before attacking really competitive keyword phrases, you really need to get your website authority up by building quality backlinks.

Conclusion:

The only way to get better with keyword research and ranking your website in Google is through practice, trial and error. The more you do this, the more confident you will be in selecting the right keyword phrases. Remember to focus on long-tail terms at first for the best chance of ranking in the search results. Once your website gains more authority, you can then start to target some broader terms. Watch the YouTube version of this blog post here.

SEO experts have been saying it for years: backlinks are one of the most important factors for ranking in search results. So it’s no wonder that you’re exploring your options and putting together a strategy for building quality links to your website to get more traffic.

But building links is not easy, in fact it’s hard work. Surely there must be some shortcuts you can take to speed up the results. Maybe you should drop five bucks for 1,000 backlinks on Fiverr? Or perhaps you should buy 100 of those cheap link packages on Black Hat World? Surely all those links will skyrocket your blog to the top of the search results!

Yeah, right.

As with many other things in life, there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way. You get what you pay for, and building backlinks the wrong way will get your site penalized so hard that you might never recover.

So forget about the shortcuts. Hang that black hat back up on the coat rack. Roll up your sleeves and get ready to do some real work. Here are three of the right ways to build links that will get you solid traffic results for months and years to come.

1. Focus on Quality Over Quantity

It wasn’t very long ago that you could easily spam a bunch of forums and blogs and create thousands of backlinks on autopilot — and get great results! But those days are over, and nobody should be surprised about it.

Still, it’s amazing how many SEO “experts” are still pushing low-quality spam links. Do they not realize that that ship has sailed? Do they really think that they can escape Google penalties while doing stuff like that?

If you want to get more traffic for the long term without destroying your reputation and rankings, then you need to focus on getting backlinks from high-quality websites with content that is relevant to your own.

Start by reaching out to blogs in your industry and in related niches. Then go for top media sites and blogs with massive traffic. You can also do press releases with local media sites and bloggers, if your customer base is geo-targeted to your local area.

2. But Also Focus on Quantity

While it’s far more important to seek out high-quality links from authoritative websites with high levels of traffic, it’s still important to get as many of them as you can. The web pages that rank in the top spots in search results not only have high-quality links pointing at them, but they also have a large quantity of such backlinks. So if you are going after high-volume keywords with tough competition, then you need to get a lot of quality backlinks.

This is going to take a lot of work. There is no getting around this fact. You need to actually interact with editors and staff at these blogs. You need to offer them something of value, such as high-quality guest posts, infographics and relevant brand mentions.

Yes, it will take a lot more work to get links like these — especially to get a lot of them — but the good news is that once you start landing high-quality links, it then becomes easier to get additional links from other high-quality sources.

For instance, landing your first guest post on a site like Entrepreneur.com might take a lot of time and effort. But once you have that clip under your belt, it will then become a lot easier to land guest posts — and backlinks — on other authoritative sites like Forbes, FastCompany, Wired and Inc.

3. Build Your Personal Brand

One of the keys to landing backlinks and guest posts on high-quality blogs in your niche is to build your personal brand.

When your reputation precedes you, you’ll find that guest post opportunities actually come to you. Quality sites and media outlets will actually start reaching out to you and asking you to contribute to their publication. At this point, things really start to pick up momentum.

But getting to this point is the tricky part. You have to commit to a consistent campaign of outreach, real networking and non-stop guest posting. You’ll need to get your name out there however you can in the beginning, and it can be frustrating if nobody has heard of you yet.

Don’t let that discourage you, though. Every top business leader was once a nobody. Every industry expert in your niche started out as a no-name guest poster. But if you commit to putting in the work, the results are yours for the taking.

Building backlinks that will stand the test of time is a lot harder than it was in the past. You really have to work for those links. But one strong link from a reputable site is worth thousands of links from lesser-known blogs. So make up your mind to go all in on backlinking. Then make a plan incorporating the ideas above and then spend time every week putting the plan into action.

If you link it, they will come.

Author Bio

James Gorski: In addition to being the editor at designrfix and writing about tech, web and graphic design among other subjects, I love “unplug” and be outdoors hiking and enjoying nature. If you can’t reach me, it’s probably because where I am at doesn’t have cell phone reception.

 

Have any specific link building questions?

Let James and I know in the comments section below!

 

In an ideal world, the quality of your website and the features included in your products/services would be all it takes to ensure the success of your brand online.

Unfortunately, this often isn’t enough.

No matter how advanced or sophisticated search engine algorithms become, they still have certain patterns you have to accommodate to in order to get more visibility. This is why you need a proper SEO strategy in place.

Nevertheless, while everyone boasts about their SEO abilities, a staggeringly large number of digital marketers are still unsure about what it is that makes a thriving SEO campaign. With this in mind, here are four things you have to keep an eye on.

1. Set your budget

The greatest misconception about digital marketing is that you can do it efficiently for free. Sure, self-promoting your content on social networks and sending emails to your contacts is also a form of marketing, but what about PPC (pay-per-click campaign), Facebook advertisements and premium SEO tools? In other words, what about the most efficient digital marketing methods? In order to use them, you have to be ready to allocate at least some of your resources, however, making this choice may not be as easy as you’ve been led to believe.

When setting your digital marketing budget, you have to take several things into consideration, all of which depend on your situation, which is why being honest with yourself is paramount. For instance, you need to set your goals early on, analyze your current visibility and consider your target demographic. Once you have all of this out of the way, you will be able to set a minimal budget that helps you achieve your plans.

2. Explore your demographic

Before you start with any further actions, you have to analyze your target audience and do your best to try and understand them. Find out exactly who they are and what types of keywords they are searching for. This will better help you craft your SEO plan.

One of the most reliable sources of data is paid surveys, seeing as how their participants also have a financial incentive to give honest (actionable) answers. Knowing your customer to a “T” before starting any SEO work is essential to success.

3. Start with on-site optimization

When it comes to boosting your visibility, reach and traffic in general, you need to realize that it all starts and ends with your on-site SEO. A non-optimized, non-responsive and poorly designed website will drive your audience away in no time, which will make your bounce rate skyrocket and therefore, result in decreased search engine rankings. To avoid this, you should work on your website prior to trying off-site SEO techniques that we will discuss below.

For more specifics on how to actually optimize your website properly, check out my post here.

Another mistake you need to avoid is looking at your website only through the eyes of your audience. Keep in mind that you also have to impress search engines, so try looking at your site’s infrastructure from their perspective as well. Metadata, tags, website speed and crawler-friendly navigation should be your top priorities.

4. Off-page SEO

Once your website is properly optimized with on-site SEO best practices, you need to shift your focus towards off-page SEO. Sure, tags and metadata are still important, however, if you’ve already set a proper infrastructure, you can just update this on the go, as soon as you upload a new piece of content. Your focus during the initial stages of off-page SEO needs to be A) proper keyword research and B) building quality backlinks. Needless to say, these two are the main pillars of an organic SEO campaign.

By pulling these two things off, your link building efforts will be much more efficient. Unfortunately, unless you’re a skilled copywriter or creative yourself, you might not be able to do all of this on your own. Web designers and writers are essential allies in this line of work, which is why an experienced digital marketer also has to possess certain organizational and negotiation abilities.

Conclusion

SEO is a process that takes time and should by no means be rushed. If you’re not comfortable attacking the SEO for your website on your own, then it’s a good idea to hire an experienced SEO specialist. Combine SEO with various other marketing strategies for the best chance of success and maximum exposure for your business!

Author Bio:

Lauren Wiseman is an entrepreneur, currently based in Melbourne and a regular contributor to bizzmarkblog.com. She assists clients in growing their personal and professional brands in a fast-changing and demanding market environment. Covering finance and investment topics, Lauren strongly believes in holistic approach to business.

 

Do you currently have an SEO plan in place?

Let us know in the comments section below!

Since the internet was created for the mainstream audience there has been an ongoing battle to create and optimize websites for the sake of increasing search engine rankings. However, this has never been a steady road.

Throughout its history, SEO has gone from throwing in keywords in white at the bottom of a website with vast amounts of link farms, to creating high quality content and adopting a strong link building strategy. As Google controls that vast majority of search traffic, when Google makes a change to its algorithm it effects the entire world of SEO. In this article we will look at how SEO has changed over the last 17 years of its existence.

SEO In The 1990’s

Throughout the 1990s there were several search engine projects developed such as Architext created in 1993 by six Stanford students, Matthew Gray’s World Wide Web Wanderer, along with Ask Jeeves in 1997. It wasn’t however until the early 2000s with the launch of Google’s Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) that we arguably start seeing webmasters paying close attention to measuring the rankings of websites. TBPR allowed webmasters to for the first time comprehend what search engines and specifically Google perceived to be a good website. You could argue that this is the point that SEO started, as it gave a way for webmasters to measure the success of optimization techniques on their websites. It was at this point that Google released its white hat guidelines that would allow the correct websites and best quality websites to appear at the correct place. However, whilst these guidelines existed, they were largely ignored as Google’s algorithm was fairly easy to cheat in that day.

2000-2010

The first documented update to Google’s algorithm was launched in 2002, after which many webmasters suffered heavy casualties. Webmasters complained of ranking within the top 10 results only to completely drop off the search engine results overnight. Prior to this shift, Google would update its algorithm every month with changes here and there, but this was an algorithmic update that would change the entire world of SEO. People complained that relevant searches were being deranked in favour of irrelevant search results. This was due to the way in which this update affected those who had optimized their site on what was previously considered perfectly acceptable link building techniques. After this change, Google began its mission to create a search engine algorithm that focused on providing the user with the most relevant content possible.

During 2003 Google launched eight documented updates in a major attempt at cracking down on black hat SEO. The updates were; Boston, Cassandra, Dominic, Esmerala, Fritz, Supplemental Index update (September Update), and Florida. Cassandra was the first update to come down hard on hidden text and hidden links along with dealing with issues such as large scale link farming. The most notable update was the final update of the year “Florida”, which Search Engine Journal has claimed to be Google’s first major update, and the update that changed SEO forever. After this update, all previous  spammy tactics of SEO e.g hidden text, keyword stuffing, multiple sites under same brand were completely eliminated as a method of improving a website’s SEO. This was a time when retailers relied drastically upon affiliates for their traffic, and affiliate based websites were some of the worst hit by the algorithmic update. In return retailers saw a drastic reduction in website traffic as a result of the update. This triggered a tremendous amount out of outcry from companies, since some were going out of business and some even threatened to sue.

2005 marked a massive change in the world of SEO with the introduction of the no-follow attribute. This was a time in which Google joined forces with MSN and Yahoo to crack down on spammy blog comment links. As of today the vast majority of links found in comment sections of websites automatically use the “no-follow” attribute. It was also the year in which Google launched the Google Analytics tool created to help webmasters have a better understanding of the operations of their website along with detailed traffic statistics. In June 2005 Google launched its personalized search function whilst this is a far cry from the personalised search that Google now uses today, it was a drastic improvement from Google’s previous attempt at personalising search results. The Jagger update was an update targeted at reciprocal links, link farms and paid links. Other updates in 2005 also included the introduction of XML sitemaps that could be submitted through webmaster tools, along with the introduction of Google Local/Maps which drastically grew the world of local SEO. A final update which rolled over until March 2006 was known as “Big Daddy” changing the way that Google handled URL canonicalization and 301/302 redirects along with other technical issues.

Throughout the latter half of the noughties there were relatively small updates from Google that to varying degrees had an impact on SEO. However it wasn’t until 2009 that we started to see Google again implement major changes. It was the year that Bing argued that it was going to show drastically better and more relevant search results than Google- a plan that never came into fruition. It was a year that the “Caffeine” update was first previewed, an update aptly named for its focus on drastically boosting Google’s crawling and indexing speed. It wasn’t until the year drew to a close in December 2009 where google found a way of implementing real-time search with Twitter Feeds, Google News and newly indexed content. Prior to this, SEO and search engines only really focused on websites that were designed for the long-term, now journalists and the news world needed to focus on optimizing their content and entering into the world of SEO.

2011-Today

2011-2012 marked two years that many SEO agencies went bust practically overnight, and the reason for this was the Panda update. For a while now many webmasters realized that .edu and links with hypertext such as “van repair” or “car for sale” would result in a higher serp ranking. After Panda tactics such as these had been abused so much, sites that attempted similar practices were deranked. The first major focus for Panda was “thin content”. This would be websites that offered hardly any quality content that were clearly set up for the purpose of increasing search rankings. Duplicate content (content that is somewhere else on the internet) suffered exceptionally heavy repercussions. Low-quality-content that essentially offered no useful value to human readers was swiftly deranked. Authority also became an increasingly important factor in which Google now turns to and stated that they would focus on websites with links from trustworthy sites rather than sites than low authority blog sites. Content farming (creating a website with tons of low quality content with its sole purpose of increasing the serp rankings of other websites) was also cracked on. Further updates included high-ad-to-content-ratio, low-quality content surrounding affiliate links, websites blocked by users, content mismatching search queries etc. Additional important updates include the introduction of schema markup and Google +.

The final massive update from Google was the Penguin update launched in 2012. This was an update that aimed at taking down the more subtle black hat techniques however many have argued that it negatively affected websites using what was previously considered white hat techniques. It meant that sites using spammy hyperlinks around good quality content suffered deranking in the SERPs. There have not been many updates since then apart from a heavier focus on local search which started in 2015 along with a stronger focus on mobile-friendly websites. Google continues to update its algorithm and the way in which the search engine operates, however recently there have been no major changes. We can only speculate what the next great update (if there will be one) will be.  The likeliest theory I would put forward is a clampdown on high-quality PBN’s which continue to exist and many have argued produce positive results. These are blog networks owned by SEO professionals that produce high quality content, with non-spammy links, designed and optimized well but exist purely for the purpose of boosting search rankings. It’s something that google has said it is against but at the moment is finding very difficult to detect, 2018 could be the year that this changes.

Author Bio:

 

Robert Bailey is the managing director of a digital marketing agency specialising in SEO based in Cardiff called SEO Article Heroes.

 

I hope you enjoyed this post from Robert on the “History of SEO”…Feel free to contact us with any further questions!