Five MORE Reasons Your Site Might Have Been Google-Banned
Mar 12th
Despite all of your web marketing genius – you’ve carefully paced your link building activities, kept your keyword density to the minimum of the effective range and been checking for duplicate content every second day – Google still got the stick out and whacked your site. Why, oh why … oh WHY? Here are five more possible explanations.
1. Doorway pages
Google doesn’t like doorway pages. These pages are usually optimised to rank well for a particular keyword, but are ‘hidden’ from the navigation of the main site. Someone would usually enter a doorway page through a search engine result, but if they bookmarked your home page, wouldn’t be able to find it again. You see this often when companies service a sizeable physical area and want to optimise for several locations – “removalists Melbourne”, “removalists Coburg”, “removalists Northcote”, “removalists Brunswick”, for example. If you want to use doorway pages, make sure they’re accessible from the main navigation.
2. Redirect pages
You can redirect pages to other ones legitimately in Google, for example if you choose to change your domain name. However, the pages that come in groups of between 5 and 500, all targeting similar keyword phrases, and contain no content except links to other pages in the family, AND THEN redirect you to a different page when you click from search results, are a Google no-no.
3. Buying links
Google is keeping an index (funny, that) of all the sites that sell links to other sites, and is devaluing the links from those sites. You will end up paying for nothing – and probably getting slapped with a Google-fine, as well.
4. Linking to spam/bad neighborhoods
We’ve talked in a previous post about linking to spam and bad neighborhoods – Google doesn’t like it, and if you don’t keep on top of your checks you may find that previously reputable domains have expired and been bought out by spammers.
5. Code swapping
If you optimise a page for good rankings, and swap the content there once it is ranking well, Google will often penalise you when they crawl that page again.
Five Reasons Your Site Might Have Been Google-Banned
Mar 11th
Much like the God of the Old Testament, Google’s ways are mysterious. Also much like the old God, they are not always fair … sometimes they’ll smite a website that yea, verily, was practicing pure and innocent SEO 
. If you’ve been a victim of Google’s megalomaniac streak (or just their inability to actually check and assess every site that gets banned from the index, I suppose), here are the top five reasons why it might have happened.
1. Check Robots.txt
If you have an SEO company looking after your site, they have probably done this already. If you don’t have a consultant already, check this before calling anybody. It’s the website equivalent of calling the TV man to find out why your set won’t turn on, only to have him put the plug in the wall, charge you $100 and leave.
2. Duplicate content
It really sucks that Google penalizes both sites when duplicate content is discovered – because another site could steal your content without your knowledge quite easily. It like when your big brother hits you, and your Mum comes and puts you both in the corner. Big meanie! Regularly check that no other site is using your content. If you find they are, write to the owners and ask them to take it down … but change yours in the meantime.
3. Cloaking
If your pages are set up to deliver a different version to the search engine than to a real user, Google considers it cloaking and will permanently ban you. There are some legit reasons for cloaking – but if Google finds out, they won’t care about the reason. That big red, blue, green and yellow hammer will come down mercilessly.
4. Hidden text
Making your text the same colour as the background was previously thought to be a good way to get more keywords onto your page, without making your actual copy sound unnatural to visitors. Then the search engines figured out the trick, and the party ended.
5. Keyword stuffing
Even if visitors can see it, Google still doesn’t like keyword stuffing. You will certainly NEED to use keywords to help get your page in front of the people that want it – but Google is getting better at semantic interpretations, so you can use variations of your words quite safely, without hurting rankings too much.
Stop Your Outbound Links Murdering Your SERPs!
Mar 10th
We all know that both on-page and off-page internet marketing tactics can help boost your Google rankings. We also know that there are on-page factors that can get you banned from Google – things like copying someone else’s content, keyword stuffing, etc. Did you know, though, that there are off-page factors that can also get you kicked off the world’s biggest search engine? If you link to ‘bad neighborhoods’ … even if you link at a time when the web page is perfectly respectable, but the domain later gets marked as a link farm, a spammer, a keyword stuffer, etc, you could get banned by Google. So how do you find these nefarious sites that could undo all your good SEO work? Follow our guide.
Those nefarious site links can really make your rankings hurt...
1. Check out Bing.com
The lord and master of most of our computers, Microsoft, has created an awesome tool for checking whether you’re linking to spam – if you use it with a bit of ingenuity. You can use the ‘linkfromdomain’ command (without the apostrophes) to check whether links that originate in your domain point to spam.
2. Make a list of probable spam terms
Start off with drug names, pharmaceutical misspellings (like viagar and viegra, viox, sialis, etc), porn, sex, casino, poker, insurance deals, home finance, home equity, 4u, bllogspot, etc. Check out the lists (1 and 2) of words that trigger spam email filters to create a more extensive list.
3. Search for two or three words in conjunction with the linkfromdomain command
So you might type “linkfromdomain:webmarketinngexperts.com.au gambling casino poker” into Bing. Starting off by targeting several words at a time helps cut down the sheer number of pages that might use the term innocently.
4. If you’re concerned, do individual word searches
Alternatively, you can also search for individual terms that are far less likely to ‘innocently’ appear on web pages. Spam filter words like ‘Shemale’ or ‘lesbian’ are good examples.
5. Check out the sites and decide whether you want to keep the link
In many cases, instances of these words will be innocent. In some they will not – and better you find out than Google! Get rid of anything shady looking ASAP, or you could face an uphill battle to get your Google ranking back.
DIY SEO: Listing in Google Local
Mar 8th
If you own a local business and are doing web marketing, but haven’t yet looked at your own listing in Google Local … go do it. Right now, before you read any further. Drill Sergeant Pepper says go go go!
Now that you know your starting point, we’re going to show you how to make that listing prettier, help make sure that those reviews that show up are mostly positive (without cheating), and generally draw more customers through your sliding door. Here’s how to edit your Google Local listing, and what it could do for your business.
1. Go to www.google.com.au/lbc and add a new business
Most of this information is fairly straightforward, however close to the bottom of the listing page (as it stands currently) you’ll have to enter a description and category for your business. These will be critical in driving traffic to your site through Google Local. Make sure your description contains a variety of your keywords (don’t use word order variations, or singular AND plural versions). Choose your category carefully as well – use this list, and search the page with Ctrl+F to find your keywords and their associated category.
The other field you should take note of is the business name – it is likely that Google uses this to help rank you and display your results as well. If your official business name is ‘Making the Cut’, and you are a hairdresser, we advise you to list your business name as ‘Making the Cut Hairdressing’ in Google Local to have the best chance of being found.
2. Enter information
Throughout the rest of the process, enter as much information as possible about your business. Tell people how they can pay, tell them when you are open, tell them everything. Add photos, add videos, add all the additional details you can think of. The internet is there for information, and while some businesses have a competitive aversion to telling others what they do, customers expect it … and appreciate it.
3. Reviews
Check out where your competitors are getting reviews from in Google Local, and put up a physical sign in your shop asking people that had a good experience to post a review of your shop on that site. You will inevitably get some bad reviews as well – don’t worry too much about them. If you have a good business, you will get mostly good reviews.
Eight On-Page SEO Magic Bullets
Mar 5th
In SEO, if your competition is savvy, top search rankings comes down to time, creativity, dedication and persistence. However, if your competition is not savvy, or you are just starting out in the field, there are a few things you can do to make a big difference in how search engines view your pages. Today we are looking at the simple little on-page tasks that everybody (or their SEO firm) can do in less than a week, to instantly gain kudos with the search engines.
Magic SEO bullet breaks the Google front page barrier
1. Ensure internal links contain anchor text
Your own website is the place you have the most control … use it! Ensure that when you link to another page on your site, it is with relevant, keyworded anchor text.
2. Use your H1 tag
This is a must on all pages! The H1 tag is one of the major ways that Google decides what a page is about – one of the strongest ways to ensure that it matches a page up with a user search.
3. Use your H2 and H3 tags
Same as above. Not using these tags is a massive wasted opportunity.
4. Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
In some sites you will really have to prioritise the pages that you do this activity on … because it is a bit transparent when every one of your page headings starts with ‘Bangkok hotel’, or ‘hotel in Bangkok’ or ‘Luxury Bangkok hotel’ or ‘Discounts on Bangkok hotels’ that you care more about the search engines than you do about accurately describing content for your readers. A good page structure, created with SEO in mind, is obviously of help here.
5. Bold your keywords
Use the <strong> code to bold at least one instance of the keyword that you are targeting. No point overdoing this one … so it takes very little time.
6. Use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs
Google indexes punctuation, including underscores. It will recognise the words “Bangkok_hotel” within a URL as a single word. However, if you write “Bangkok-hotel” the page will rank for Bangkok, for hotel, and especially for Bangkok hotel.
7. Put alt tags on your photos and images
It doesn’t make a huge difference, but if you don’t add your alt tags, it is just another wasted opportunity. SEO has become such a big game that every one of these little things is absolutely necessary … if you wan to be competitive.
8. Don’t put anything more than three clicks away from the home page
Three degrees of separation is the golden rule for both users and search engines.
Is Google News for Yews?
Mar 4th
Google news sends almost a billion visitors to publishers worldwide … in a month! If you are doing internet marketing for a site with ‘newsworthy’ content, it is well worth investigating how you can start having Google news index your content. You can start your investigations on the very next line!
Artist's conceptulaization of the Google bot discovering news
Why publish in Google News?
Apart from the whole ‘be part of the billion clicks’ thing, there are very important SEO reasons for getting published in Google News. If your news article is highly relevant to a search, it automatically gets excellent real estate on the Google front page, via the ‘news results for xxyyz’ box. Additionally, if you have a highly trafficked article, you may get to the iGoogle news widget box, and get clicks from everyone that uses this widget on their iGoogle home page.
Getting content indexed
You can just leave your content there to be discovered … but considering the whole point of news is to be fresh, and Google might take up to 30 days to get round to your site again, submitting a Google News sitemap is a much better strategy. There is a Wordpress plugin for this purpose, or you can follow the guidelines from Google itself.
Using categories and subfolders
Google uses your own categories and subfolders, as well as the URLs they create and the keywords that naturally occur on your site, to decide what your content is about. You don’t want to keyword stuff (although do use keywords instead of referential phrases like ‘it’ or ‘them’).
If your news content is more of local interest, put it into a ‘State/Region/City’ subfolder on your site to help the dear Google bot.
Use static URLs
Otherwise you’ll destroy your Google ranking everytime it is refreshed. Create a permanent and unique URL for every story, and include ‘articleID=’ in the string to help Google identify it as news.
Put the date into the text
Placing it between the title and the body text helps Google News know the proper date of publication, as well as identifying it as news rather than ordinary HTML.
Don’t break up the text
If you ordinarily have advertisements in the middle of an article, or links to related posts at the bottom of the fold, take them out on your news pages.
And of course, don’t forget Yahoo News – still a significant source of traffic.
Four Things You Should Know About SEO in a Personal Search World
Mar 3rd
The launch of Google’s personalized search function in the not-too-distant past is still impacting the world of SEO. There are a lot of people panicking, probably equal numbers of people saying that they aren’t concerned, and many, many more that are simply oblivious. Today we are looking at some of the things that (as a business owner engaged in web marketing) you should know about Google’s personalized search.
1. People that don’t remain signed into a Google account don’t get it … to the same extent
Personalized search gives preference to results that you have visited before, and in order to do this it stores information about your surfing on its database, under your account. If a person doesn’t have a Google account, they don’t get the same level of personalized search – however you will still see results from your home region preferentially displayed, in most cases.
2. Google says … “pws=0″ turns personalization off
If you want to see what the results would look like without the personalization, Google says that you can add pws=0 to the end of your search term, and get an ‘unbiased’ search.
3. Tests say … not true
It seems that including pws=0 doesn’t completely change your search results as much as simply going to a different computer. SEO tests show little difference between a logged-in query and a pws=0 query.
4. The ultimate measure of success will always be the bottom line
All the debate over personalization is really starting to bring home the fact that it is the quality of your information and website that will really help build your bottom dollar. Ironically, this is exactly what Google wants … damn them!
Six Strategies for Holding Competitions to Get Backlinks
Mar 2nd
Running a competition or a giveaway is often touted as one of the most successful and failsafe strategies for sending visitors to your site, increasing branding visibility, and getting backlinks for SEO. However, since everybody has started saying how great it is, the ‘noise’ in the competition market is that much greater. You will actually have to compete to give things away, strange as that is! So today we are looking at six strategies to help you get the most value out of your competition for SEO.
'Running' a Competition
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1. Collect as much contact information as possible
… without scaring entrants away. It is a rich opportunity to get demographic information that you can use later in web marketing opportunities. Add a couple of demographics questions to a competition entry form, and you have instant extra value.
2. Use your own products or services as the prize where possible
Everybody wants a new iPad or a trip around the world, and these competitions will naturally create a huge following and number of entries. However, when you have to pay retail prices for the prize, the competition becomes decreasingly cost effective. Use your own products where possible.
3. Look for competition partners
You may be able to get some prizes donated if you email around your partners and offer to include their logo, tagline and contact details on the competition form. You’ll still have to donate the major prie if you want YOUR business to get the brand recognition, though!
4. List your competitions on comp sites
There is an entire community of people that play the statistical odds, entering every free competition they can, in the hope of winning prizes. There are also (naturally) websites that collect competitions for people that do this. Make sure your comp gets listed on these sites, such as::
- Loquax.co.uk (UK)
- ThePrizeFinder.com (UK)
- Compaholics (UK)
- CompetitionWinner.com.au (AU)
5. Video marketing to promote the comp
This can be ultra-effective … videos are easy to share on social sites, so lets people share with their friends.
6. Require a link back to your site
This ca be a great way to get backlinks … accept competition entries only from people who provide a link from their site to yours, in a fairly permanent place. The requirement could be reviewing one of your products and providing a link to it, for example.
4 Tools to Find Out What Keywords Your Competitors Are Using
Mar 1st
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely … but unfortunately there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. D’oh! However, one piece of knowledge in terms of internet marketing that equals quite a lot of power is knowing the keywords that your competitors are targeting. This gives you the opportunity to either try and target the same ones and steal their thunder (especially if you know that they don’t have an extensive or professional SEO program in place), or to target different alternatives in order to get a complementary market share. And on the net, everything is possible … so today we are looking at three tools you can use to get your competitors’ keywords.
The Keyword Spy Who Loved Me
1. The manual method
You can ‘View Page Source’ by right clicking anywhere (except on a link) on your competitors web pages, and then clicking Ctrl+F, and typing ‘keyword’. After this you’ll see the keywords listed for that page. Of course, these words might be very different to the ones that are actually drawing people to their site, or those that they rank well for in PPC, for example.
2. Visually
Check out their on-page content, and look for words or phrases that are repeated throughout the text, especially at the beginning. It is likely they are targeting these keywords.
3. Spyfu
This tool not only gives you your competitors keywords, but reveals trails of action that paid off for them, the ad copy that drives the most leads, etc. Of course, it costs money … and is not personalized to your business as ‘real’ SEO is!
4. Ranks.nl
If you are having a hard time visually picking out keywords from on-page copy, you can pop the URL in to ranks.nl and see what it thinks the most important terms on the page are.
Of course, you need to remember that knowing a competitor’s keywords doesn’t necessarily dictate the ones that you will use. Your two businesses might be more different (in consumer’s’ eyes) than you imagine. A good web marketing company can help give you a pro perspective on this.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #5
Feb 26th
People’s brains can do all sorts of tricky things … keep bodies alive, create the internet , that sort of thing. And if you’re in the web marketing game, understanding how they work can be of enormous benefit to your site, and your business generally. Today we continue our ‘Web Marketing with Neuroscience’ series, looking at short term memory and how it affects our internet use.
The limitations of short term memory
Short term memory is also sometimes called working memory. If our brains were like computers (fortunately AND unfortunately, they are not), this would be our RAM. Our short term memory has been observed to be able to hold between 4 and 9 items, depending on the test and the subject. The time duration is highly variable, but averages usually run around 20 seconds. Given the amount of info that we are exposed to on the internet, it makes sense to work with our website visitors’ short term memory limitations as much as possible. So how do you do that?
Working with short term memory
This is actually easier than you might think, and you’ll probably recognise many of the best practice guidelines from other posts we’ve done on usability and web design. So, before you forget what we’re talking about (!), here’s is how you can work within the limits of human short term memory on the web:
- Make sure your pages load quickly: If it takes so long for a page to load that users forget why they clicked it, they’ll just as likely click straight off. Don’t tempt people to look at other tabs while they’re in the middle of the checkout process on your site!
- Change the colour of links that have been visited: This is a site-specific issue, not a browser or computer issue. Every site owner has the responsibility to change the colour of visited links, so users know where they’ve been and feel like they’re running in circles.
- Categorise well: Try to create narrow categories and narrow pages … although not at the expense of maintaining a manageable menu structure.
- Provide a link to the homepage on every page: That way if people forget where they are, there is an emergency link to reset their search.
- Use breadcrumbs: Although, only if appropriate. Not all sites will naturally suit breadcrumbs.
- Offer Live Help and other assistance links within the body of the page: If people have to navigate to the Help section and then back to where they were, chances are that you’ll lose either a purchase or a visitor.
We recommend you check out the rest of our Web Marketing with Neuroscience posts as well … the brain is a fascinating thing, but especially when it could be making you more money .