The problem is that Google doesn’t like people “artificially” boosting their sites, and unfortunately, most SEO revolves around working out how the search engines rank sites and optimizing sites to suit. However, Google is clever and keeps finding new ways to outwit SEO companies, meaning we always have to keep on our toes!

The most recent algorithm change was rolled out on April 24th, and has been called the “Penguin Update”. One of the biggest changes to the new algorithm was targeting sites that are over-optimized (in other words, sites that have had a lot of SEO work!). The biggest focus of penguin was penalizing sites that utilized so-called “link spam”.  It’s been known for a long time that Google favors websites that have lots of links from other sites. Of course, people took advantage of this by creating as many links on as many other sites as possible, all linking to their site (and these links were also keyword optimized, to really show Google what the site should be ranked for).

Google naturally got wise to the number of artificially created links, and decided to come down pretty hard on sites that had too much “unnatural linking” which led to the fall of many once highly placed sites, and the decimation of several online businesses. Essentially, penguin targeted pretty much everything that most SEO practitioners have been doing for years!

Basically, this means that businesses and those who do SEO have to come up with new practices and methods for ranking sites. Google wants to see if the link structure looks natural, which means that SEO companies who have only used a limited number of keywords to create backlinks, are now having to work hard to fix the problem. This means creating new and varied ways of backlinking, as well as working on other means of promoting the website, that may not revolve so much around search engine marketing.

Unfortunately, a lot of small businesses have been struck very hard by the changes. Firstly, many don’t have the immediate funds to hire SEO companies to fix the damage, and many had no idea how SEO worked in the first place, so don’t understand what’s happened.

The first thing businesses need to do is to focus their online strategy on creating quality content. No matter what else is done to improve their site, content will always be key. Sites with regularly added, fresh content are always seen as more relevant than sites which are thrown up and never updated. Sites with well written and informative articles are also well regarded by the search engines.

Finally, it’s important not to panic because your website has lost its ranking in the most recent update. Look at the strategies being used to optimize the site, and then change them to suit. Add more quality content on a regular basis, and ensure any linking strategies are done very naturally and slowly. Use a variety of sources for backlinks, and also focus on promotion using social media. As long as you keep on top of your business, and focus on quality over quantity, your website will eventually weather the storm.

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Google actually put into place one of the largest changes in its algorithm, which was estimated to affect up to 12% of search engine results. 12% may not sound like a lot, but when you consider the billions of websites online, you start to realize how extraordinarily huge these changes were.

Google’s goal, as always is to ensure that its results are as relevant as possible, they also want to ensure that results served up to Google users are as high in quality as possible. I suppose though, the question is, what does Google consider to be high quality, and is it the same as the users?

Sure, nobody wants to see junky spam sites coming up in the #1 position when they’re looking for some serious information. However, that doesn’t mean that legitimate sites whose aim is to provide useful information haven’t been hit by the change either.

One of the most noticeable changes is that “content farm” sites appear to have suffered large drops in rankings. These sites, which include AOL, the Huffington Post, Maholo and others have been known to produce content catering to the most searched terms of the day. The idea being, of course, that if they can keep up there with the trends, and the pages they create can rank, they’ll get lots of visitors.

There are a range of content based websites on the Internet. Some are there to provide genuinely useful information, others have very generic pages which are sometimes poorly written, and others are just pure spam sites designed to get traffic (which will hopefully click on a paid link and thus earn the website owner revenue). The problem here is that there’s a fine line between useful information and not-so-useful information, and sites providing great content have found themselves suffering under the latest algorithm change as well as those producing great quantities of generic rubbish or spam.

Naturally, with large algorithm changes, website owners and businesses have to come up with a way (fast!) to get their sites ranking again, which generally means figuring out what stopped them ranking in the first place. It’s virtually impossible to work out exactly how Google’s algorithm works, and Google wants to keep it that way. All website owners can do is tweak their sites and their SEO and look for what works and what doesn’t as far as ranking is concerned.

But what do these changes mean for the small business owner? At the moment, it doesn’t seem as if these changes will affect many small business owners too much at all. If you’ve got a particular business in your local area and you’ve got a website for that business, there’s no reason why local searchers for a business such as yours won’t still be able to find it online. Google still wants to provide relevance, and if your site is relevant, you really shouldn’t have too many problems ranking highly.

As always ensure you provide good content and useful information to your customers, and there’s no reason why you’ll ever be penalized by Google. It’s only when business owners engage in poor SEO and in “gaming” the search engines that they suffer (good SEO techniques will always work, poor ones ultimately cause problems even for solid businesses).

Fortunately, a lot of businesses have found success through their online presence. As more and more people turn to the search engines in their quest for information about local businesses, so local businesses are in turn, building websites to promote themselves. As a result, many flagging businesses have seen an increase in clientele and have gained market share in their local area.

However, there’s trouble ahead!

What many businesses don’t realize is how insecure their highly ranked positions are in the search engines – and it’s not just because their competitors’ sites are chasing theirs! While a business may happily sit atop the search engine results for months, or even years at a time, that same business can come crashing down in a heap all too quickly.

So how does this happen? The answer is quite simple, but also quite surprising. There are some fundamental flaws in the search engines – including Google – which allow unscrupulous hackers and scammers to take advantage of a loophole in the system and hijack the highest ranked listings! Sounds like some kind of conspiracy, right? I admit it, when I heard about these loopholes I was very skeptical, but the more I looked into it the more I learned, the more horrified I became.

There are millions of businesses today whose earnings rely on their search engine placement, and almost every single one of them is in danger of losing their hard earned profits. This is especially true for businesses who draw a significant proportion of their customers from their online presence.

To find out exactly how your business is in danger, and to learn how you can protect your business, contact us at SEO Expert Global. You’ll be shocked at exactly how vulnerable you are, but happily surprised to discover how simple it is to secure your place firmly at the top of the search engine results.

Let’s start off by discussing WHY SEO articles have been promoted as being necessary. The search engines use the content on a page to decide how relevant the page is for particular keywords or search terms. Therefore, the more information on the page about something in particular, the higher the page should rank (provided, of course, it has enough backlinks as well as other SEO in place). This makes sense, BUT it doesn’t always make sense to have sites full of keyword filled SEO articles.

For example, if you have an ecommerce site with a shopping cart and you’re selling lots and lots of articles, do you REALLY need all your pages to be full of articles? Well, not really. Obviously if you’re selling a product you want to include relevant information about the product for your potential buyers, but you don’t need several hundred words discussing the history of each and every product on your site. Visitors to your site will be those who are looking to buy Product X, not read several hundred words about Product X!

In fact, if you do a search for any popular product online, you’ll probably find several shopping sites all selling the product, most which won’t have reams of irrelevant information about it, just the basic information any searcher needs in order to decide whether or not to buy the product, and the all important “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button.

This is not to say that a site shouldn’t be content rich. Your site needs quality content, but you need to look at your site not just from the search engine’s perspective, but from the perspective of visitors to your site. Naturally, if you’re creating a site full of information then you’ll need to provide content in the form of articles, videos or whatever media you’re choosing to educate your visitors. However, if your just selling products, it doesn’t always make sense to have reams of articles about your products.

What if you’re an offline business, what sort of site do you need then? Obviously, if you’re looking for visitors (both to your site and to your place of business) you’ll have to provide them the sort of information they’re looking for. If you’re an accountant, for example, you may wish to provide information about the various accounting services your firm specializes in. This means, if you’re writing articles for your site (or having someone write them for you), you want them to be specific to your firm and to describe exactly what services you perform. What you include on your site MUST be relevant to your business. You don’t want a general article about “accounting”, because anyone looking for your site is probably going to have some idea of what accounting is. In fact, they’ll most likely be looking for a particular firm in your area to do business with.

What does this mean? It means to look at your site from the perspective of potential visitors. What do THEY want from your site? More importantly, what sort of information are they going to expect your site to provide for them? It’s pretty certain that if they’re looking for information about a product they want to buy, they’re not going to want to sift through several hundred words of irrelevant nonsense about the product! If they’re looking for a local accounting firm or law firm, they’re equally not going to want to read several hundred words about “accounting” or “law”!

This means that if you’re looking for cheap and easy SEO articles to fill your website, you may have to think again. If you do need to have your writing outsourced, you may need to pay a little more and get quality writing that is very specific to the services or goods you’re offering on your site. High quality text IS important, but only if it meets the needs of your visitors.

It is still possible to use keywords effectively in your content, without overwhelming your visitor with irrelevant rubbish! Remember that some of the most successful sites have very little in the way of keyword rich content (think of how popular YouTube videos are, for example, or products on websites like Amazon) because they’re well set up sites and they have a lot of popularity in the form of good quality backlinks.

The question is: will this make a significant difference to viewer’s searching habits, or will most just ignore the small magnifying glass. After all, while it’s possible to see a quick view of the site (and on some pages Google also magnifies some of the text so it’s possible to see at least some of the content using the preview feature) it’s not possible to get a really good idea of the information a site provides without actually clicking on the link.

According to Jeremy Silber of Google, studies have demonstrated that users who actually make use of the preview feature are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. So is a 5% increase in user satisfaction really worth it? Well, it can be assumed that any improvement in search engine user’s satisfaction is important, and Google naturally wants to keep its share of the market over the other popular search engines Yahoo and Bing.

So what does it mean for the actual site owners? Well, given that users can actually see your site (at least in a minimized form) before clicking on it means that, to at least a certain extent, the design of your site is going to increase in importance. Because very little of the content itself can be viewed, it’s going to be the overall look of the site that will determine whether someone using the preview will click or not.

To get an idea of the appearance of your own site using the instant preview feature, do a search for your website and have a look. Does it look inviting? Informative? Is it the sort of site you’d want to visit? Hopefully you answered yes to all these questions! One of the things I’ve personally noticed is that videos don’t look good using the preview feature. When you visit a page with videos you can generally see at least an image of the video when the page loads up, but this doesn’t show with the preview feature, meaning that sites which use video may actually appear less informative and interesting than those which rely on static images. This is interesting given the popularity of video on websites today, and begs the question of whether this preview feature will work against such sites (including this one!) which use video as an important part of their presentation.

The biggest benefit that I can see is that it makes it easier to know in advance whether a site is full of potentially useful content, or is advertising heavy. Many Internet users still prefer to visit sites where content seems more of a priority than sales, so this could be a lesson in toning down your site’s content if you do utilize a lot of paid advertising.

However, as with every thing else, the most important facts still stand: a quality website is one with plenty of useful information, is easy to navigate, and is pleasing to view. If your site meets all these criteria, Google’s changes shouldn’t have any negative impact.

A lot of business owners are understandably worried that the recent changes to Google Places will have an affect on their rankings, especially if they’ve seen their previously high listed Google Places ranking disappear. And what about those businesses who had sites ranking at the top of the organic listings, but had no Google Places listing?

One thing this update shows is that for any local business, it’s crucial to have both a well SEO’d website, as well as a well optimized Google Places listing. With both in place, there’s no reason why a business needs to be left behind after Google’s recent update. But what if your business has been affected? How can you use the changes to your benefit?

Well let’s look at the upside. In the past I had noticed that in some markets, the organic listings under the Google Places map weren’t actually business sites at all, some were actually directories that listed local businesses, and for some reason ranked higher than many local business sites, and quite honestly, not really helpful for people looking for a business. With the new changes, such sites will find it much harder to rank, especially as they don’t represent an actual business, and thus won’t show up with a Google Places listing.

But what about those businesses which are now getting less custom because they never had a website to start off with, just a high ranked Google Places listing? Well, certainly it may be tougher for those businesses to reach the heights they once comfortably sat at, but it’s never impossible. In fact, they may be in a better position to benefit from the new Google Places. The same goes for businesses that once held a high organic listing, but are now sitting below those successful Google Places listings.

The first thing any business needs is a well optimized website. That’s pretty much crucial in today’s tough marketplace. And, whether starting from scratch or not, it’s important to get your site looked at by an SEO company that specializes in helping local businesses get ranked. They’ll let you know exactly what your site needs in order to be competitive, and will be able to analyze not just your site, but those of your competitors, so they can determine exactly how tough it will be to get to that crucial number one position.

The other crucial thing, of course, is a well optimized Google Places listing, which requires putting in every detail necessary when filling out the Google Places information, including adding pictures and videos, and getting client reviews. The more effort that’s put into filling out that listing, the higher it will inevitably rank, and this, plus a well optimized site, is what will make the difference between getting noticed and sinking into obscurity.

For starters, it’s a great idea to get links from other trusted sites! A trusted site that links to another site is, in essence, passing on some of its trustworthiness (why, after all, would a trusted site link to a site that’s of poor quality?). Now, it may be pretty difficult to get a link from a site that’s right up there in the trust stakes, but there is a trickle down effect. So for example, you want a link from trusted site A, but it’s really hard to get a link from A, you may be able to get a link from B, which is a site that A links to. Even though you’re not getting a direct link from site A, the fact that it’s linked to B which links to your site, will have a positive impact.

Conversely, linking to a trusted site from your site also has a positive impact on your site’s trustworthiness in the eyes of Google. If you create a link to, say, a page on Wikipedia that deals with your topic, Google can see that your site isn’t just being linked into, but is also linking out to sites that it considers trustworthy, and you are therefore providing your readers with quality resources on your topic. A site that just has incoming links doesn’t necessarily appear as trustworthy as one that has links both into it and out from it!

Another tried and true method of getting trust is by getting links from related websites. If someone else’s website is on a similar topic to yours, and they link to your site, they’re in effect saying: “This website has useful information on my topic”. The more Google sees that your site is linked to from other sites in similar niches, the more likely they’ll consider your site to be a good resource for people searching for information on that topic.

At the same time, you need to avoid linking your site to low quality sites (especially spam sites). You don’t want to appear to be supporting sites that Google doesn’t like. You may ask why anyone would link to a rubby, spammy site, but it does happen, for various reasons. For example, you may have a blog where you discuss various topics, and you want to discuss something you read on a particular website and don’t support. Many site owners inadvertently give that site a “vote” by creating a clickable link to the page they’re referencing. The simple way around this is to NOT make the link clickable. You can reference the website in the form: ihatethissite.com, so visitors to your site can copy the address to the other site, but don’t do so by allowing them to click on the link.

Another thing website owners sometimes do, is they offer paid links from their site to other sites. It may seem fairly harmless to offer links from your high PR site to other site owners (and it can also generate a nice chunk of change), but if you’re not careful, you could find yourself offering links to unscrupulous spam sites, which will ultimately impact on your site’s good name in the search engines.

Other great places to get linnks from are social media websites. The more often your site gets a mention from a popular site, the more likely the search engines will start to see it as a high quality site. This basically means, make sure you socially bookmark your site, and encourage your visitors to do so also, as the more “votes” it gets from such sites, the better light it will be seen in.

Finally, a trustworthy website is one that isn’t static, and isn’t too small. A single page site will rarely, if ever, get a high trust ranking in the eyes of the search engines. On the other hand, sites that continuously offer new content and additional information, will be seen in a better light. Sites that get regularly updated, for starters, are more likely to be offering information that’s current and relevant, whereas a site that never gets updated will soon be seen as one that’s potentially out of date.

Remember that while trust is just one factor in where your site ranks, if your site is in a very competitive field, it’s crucial to optimize it in as many ways as possible in order to get that elusive number one spot on the search engines.

So, what happened? Well a study was conducted that looked at search behavior a week prior to and a week following the launch of Google Instant. In that time, over 800,000 visits from various high traffic sites by search term length were examined, and they showed that there was virtually no change in the searcher’s behavior as a result of the Google Instant change.

Now, another few weeks have passed, Google Instant has become more familiar to users, and therefore results may have changed since that initial first week, right? Well, let’s see… This time, researchers looked at search behavior for the two weeks preceeding the Google Instant rollout, and for the four weeks after the change occurred. Over the total six week period, 2.7 million visits were analyzed (and that’s a LOT of analysis!).

Now, one may expect that after the rollout of Google Instant that there would have been a higher percentage of longer tailed keywords (because Google Instant “predicts” a longer tailed keyword than the user actually types in, if users were actually utilizing that result, they’d select the long tailed keyword that was predicted more frequently). Instead, there was little change demonstrated in the percentage of longer tail visits.

The most significant change seems to be that one word visitors seem to spend little less time on site, which may or may not have anything to do with the result of Google Instant. However, when longer tailed keywords are examined there were absolutely no changes in time spent on page or page views, suggesting that the belief that Instant would increase relevancy don’t seem to be correct.

The biggest change seems to be a 3% increase in the number of three word phrases to two word phrases searched for. So, yes, there could be a slight impact of Google Instant there, but it’s really quite small.

Overall, it appears that Google’s visitors haven’t really changed their search behavior at all since Instant was released. Maybe this is because the results suggested are not what visitors are actually looking for, or maybe it’s just that visitors know what they want to search for and don’t want Google’s interference.

Personally, Google Instant hasn’t changed much for me at all. If I want to do a search, I perform it normally. As I type fairly quickly, the amount of time it takes to type a single word is usually not much longer (if any) than the time needed to scroll through potential results (if Google doesn’t instantly provide me with the term I’m looking for).

For example, if I were to do a search for: “best weight loss diets”… the first thing Google does, when I’ve typed in the first two words, is suggest the term “loss”… well that’s exactly what I want, but I don’t want to search for “best weight loss” I want “best weight loss diets”… as a result, I can either type the next two words, or I can scroll down the suggestions, one of which is “best weight loss diets”. Now, as my fingers are on the keyboard, it’s just as easy to type the final two words as it is to either use my mouse to select “best weight loss diets” or the arrow keys to select the same term. And, ultimately, I’m still getting the exact same search result whether I type in those final two words or not.

However, I guess there are situations where I may not know exactly what I want to search for, and thus typing in a couple of words could provide me with good suggestions. Maybe. Or maybe not? Simply because when I perform a Google search, my typical behavior is to type in the search terms and hit the enter key. However, if I type in a search term now, even if the word appears that I want, if I hit the enter key it doesn’t work. I actually have to select the term with the mouse or the arrow keys, which is something I’m unlikely to do because it isn’t my habit to search that way.

Of course, I can’t speak for every single user of Google here. We all perform searches slightly differently, and where one may appreciate not having to type in an extra word or two, others will continue to perform their searches as they always did.

If you are a website owner though, and you are concerned that Google Instant may affect your site’s popularity, then make it work for you instead of against you. Type your own site’s most used keywords into Google and see what suggestions Google comes up with. Are you using those search terms on your site? If not, then do so! If your site is optimized to Google Instant’s suggestions, then you’ve got an even better chance of scoring a hit, particularly if the user in question does happen to like the suggestions offered.

Well, the first thing you need to do is figure out why your site’s ranking has decreased so considerably. The first reason is that, for whatever reason, your site has been penalized. A good way to find out whether you’ve been penalized or not is to go to the Google search box and type in site:yourdomainname.com. If you get no results, then it’s definitely a sign that your site has fallen into disfavor.

Well, let’s say the worst case has occurred and your site is gone…kaput… What can you do about it? Well for starters, realize that Google generally only penalizes sites that use spammy or black hat SEO methods. This means that if you’ve done ANYTHING at all that the search engines don’t like, you need to fix the problem. Start with things like, hidden or near-hidden text on your pages. Have you tried to hide keywords on your pages by making the text the same color as the background? If so, get rid of it.

Look at page titles, headings, overall text (including keyword density), meta tags, and anywhere else where you may have tried to put in too many keywords. If you’ve got 50 meta keywords for example, or your keyword repeated every line or two on your page, then there’s definitely evidence of keyword stuffing. Fix it.

Do you have any even slightly suspicious redirects, or links to suspicious sites, or anything else the search engines may frown upon? If so,  get rid of them all.

AND, most importantly, if some so-called SEO expert did all this for you, then fire them. Now.

What about off page issues? Have you, perhaps, participated in auto link exchanges, or auto surf program, or something else that search engines frown upon? If so, you’ll need to remove any auto link systems from your site, and halt all participation in any similar program, even if it seems as if it should be fairly harmless.

Now there is some debate over whether or not backlinks from “bad neighborhoods” can affect your site or not. Overall, the answer is probably “not” because if it were possible to get sites banned by linking to them from spammy sites, then businesses all over the world could get their competitors’ sites banned. This means it’s highly unlikely that any regular ordinary backlinks to your site could be the reason for your penalty.

Now you’ve cleaned your site as well as you possibly can, it’s time to make a reinclusion request. Make your request as respectfully as possible, keep it short and to the point, and explain what you’ve done to fix your site. And now… wait!

Those are the steps you need to take if your site has actually been removed from the search engine index, but what if your site has just plummetted a few pages down the SERPs? It hasn’t been banned, but it’s not ranking at all anymore, and nor is it getting traffic. What’s happened?

Well, this is not uncommon, and happens to many sites. Generally it’s because the search engines have undergone a change to their ranking algorithm, and your site no longer rates as highly in their eyes.

There are some reasons why this can occur. One is that you’ve redesigned your site, or your site’s still relatively new and hasn’t had time to really settle into position yet. Generally, if you’ve undergone some major design changes, it’s usually just a matter of time before your site will start to climb again. It’s naturally important to ensure you’re still optimizing for the right keywords, and that your code is clean and that the search engines can navigate your site easily.

Sometimes it also occurs because while you initially put a lot of effort into your site, adding new content, getting backlinks and so on and so forth, activity on your site has slowed down. The simplest thing to do to regain your ranking is to start putting more work into your site’s content, and building a few new backlinks.

The moral of the story is that a drop in ranking isn’t the end of the world. It sometimes just takes a bit of analysis to work out why you’ve dropped, and a bit of hard work to get your site ranking again. Of course, if you haven’t the time to spend working on your site, and you don’t have the confidence to do your own SEO, then it’s a great idea to hire an ethical SEO company who can help your site climb back to its rightful position.