Australian Ecommerce Web Design & Website Development News » Google

Google Magazine: Think Quarterly

BlackMax — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 04:01:34 +0000

Who would have thought we’d be adding one of Google’s sites to the Hottest 100 Web Design Lists?

Google have created a lovely magazine layout of their quarterly publication aimed at their partners and advertisers. It is aimed at the UK audience, not sure if there is one for the US. It certainly looks English. The layout and style has a relaxed feel to it, large custom fonts, excellent use of white space and colourful illustrations. Outstanding web design by the big G!

Go and visit Think Quarterly

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Google’s Caffeine: Will It Make You Twitchy or Tweety?

BlackMax — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:23:12 +0000

The much talked about Caffeine algo update is released today and most SEO’s are on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what this will mean to their websites.

It is expected to reduce the phrase “It will take 6 months to index your new site”. In theory new sites should be in the listings as soon as they are indexed. Twitter posts will be just about live. Actually, you should be able to watch them. If you Google “caffeine google” right now and probably for the next week or so you will be able to see the Twitter results scrolling along. Which makes it pretty hard to game in terms of getting a static ranking for a tweet.

Does this mean the end of the “Google Sandbox”?

It’s hard to tell. Really I think Caffeine is just going to pull in more news and social media results, that is results that are following a trend, rather than make much of an impact for business to business websites where the content only changes monthly at best.

Of course we will be experimenting with some of our sites to see how we can benefit from this new change.

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SEO tactics and link building efforts

BlackMax — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:33:51 +0000

I’ve just read an article by Axandra, the people who make IBP the do-it-yourself SEO software. This article is a concise and easy way to explain to customers the different approaches needed in SEO depending on the level of competition. It also outlines the importance of links when trying to achieve a top ranking on a competitive term.

It reiterates the importance Google places on incoming links, so let me repeat again, if you want to go after a competitive keyword term then you better have a lot of high quality links. For help on link building visit our link building packages.

Enough talk, go and read the article.

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Future of the Web

BlackMax — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:11:03 +0000

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, discusses how he sees the future of the web. The clip below is a 6 minute excerpt TechCrunch cut as the meat in the sandwich.

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Low Quality Backlinks to your Website

BlackMax — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:44:41 +0000

Google has released a statement about having low quality backlinks to your website. In typical Google fashion it’s not very specific, however I’m reading that having a heap of low quality links to a site that doesn’t hold a lot of weight can effect rankings. Read the article here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/dealing-with-low-quality-backlinks.html

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SEO for Bing

BlackMax — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:28:27 +0000

I’ve been ignoring Bing as a search engine, mostly because it’s made by the evil Microsoft. However, it’s now overtaken Yahoo for most of our clients sites as the second largest search engine referrer. That is no threat to Google as the Big G still takes about 90% of the search engine credit, but I’m surprised it’s overtaken Yahoo so rapidly. It could still be the novelty factor, but it could also indicate real competition.

So, not to be left out in the cold, the key factors for number one websites in Bing seem to be:

having an old domain name
having quality inbound links, specifically from pages that have the same keywords in the title
then the usual good amount of quality content (I’ve read Bing likes more than 300 words on a page), clean code and a sitemap

If you’ve done a good job of optimising your site for Google then your rankings shouldn’t be too different for Bing. If you’ve got loads of spammy links holding your website up in Google then these won’t help you in Bing. Bing seems to like better qualified links than Google – it’s about time!

Beware of Netregistry Traffic Accelerator SEO or other Mass Links Pages

BlackMax — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:08:39 +0000

This morning we had a client lose all of the hard work we’ve applied for the last four months. This client was making their way up the rankings for a number of competitive keywords and were sitting at page two in Google, about to make it into the first page. Then disaster. Not on page two, three, four or five, but relegated to page six, and for some terms, past page ten!

It smelt like a Google penalty, in particular a -50 penalty. But I didn’t understand, we hadn’t purchased any links, all of the links we obtained were on topic, relevant, using a range of anchor text. So I went to the source to see the outcome. Googling the clients URL I discovered they had over 600 links, amazing since we’ve only created about 60 for them, six months ago they had about 70, so something odd was going on. Close inspection of the sites linking to them revealed a heap, I’d be guessing at least 500 sites, were other Australian businesses with links pages.

And then it twigged. I’d remembered the client was involved in the Traffic Accelerator Program last year. They hadn’t created a links page themself, but every month they were emailed a list of websites to link to, including the anchor text and description. So presumably, all the other companies involved in the program had also been emailed my clients details and asked to add them to their links pages.

That means about 500 sites are linking to my client with exactly the same anchor text and description. Clearly Google doesn’t like that, so they’ve updated the algorithm.

These pages are spammy, but more importantly they are just not useful – they add no value for anyone! The title on the pages is either links, resources, useful links, useful websites, or some other red flag that says to Google “I am spam” or something to that effect. They link to other websites that are completely unrelated to each other and provide no value to the user whatsoever. If you Google the URL of any of the sites in the Netregistry Traffic Accelerator video you will see the what I mean. Obviously for the companies that appear in the video their sites are strong enough to take take the penalty, which indicates they have a number of links that outweigh the spammy links, but for most in the program, these links would be all they had.

I’ve always maintained links pages and reciprocal linking are a waste of time. Now it seems they are detrimental.

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Link Building Services

BlackMax — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:45:23 +0000

We are pleased to launch stand alone link building services. With Google finally admitting link building a significant factor in getting a high ranking, we thought it was time to offer these services to the general public, instead of just our SEO clients.

From Google:

“In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

We do recommend you carry out SEO on your website before engaging in link building as the end result will be much better. Prices start at $AU450 per month. Click here to order now.

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Google's Search Engine Rankings: Brand Bias

BlackMax — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:14:30 +0000

Aaron Wall has written an interesting post about the latest Google update and how the search engine giant is currently favoring big brands in the rankings.

It sounds not particularly automated and more of a manual manipulation of search engine results. It’s not a good sign for small businesses or new businesses without heavy branding.

Read the article here.

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