Google Launches Panda 4.0

It's official. Panda 4.0 has officially hit the Google search results.

The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible

Panda 4.0, which Google and Matt Cutts confirmed began rolling out yesterday, has definitely caused some waves in the search results. However, the fact that Panda 4.0 is also hitting at the same time as a refresh of an algorithm targeting spammy queries like payday loans makes it a little bit more difficult for webmasters to sort through the damage.

With the payday loans refresh impacting extremely spammy queries and Panda targeting low-quality content, some webmasters could potentially get hit with both of these or by just one or the other.

While usually people complain about losing rankings, Alan Bleiweiss from AlanBleiweiss.com showed via Twitter that Panda can also bring about some serious improvement to a site's traffic as well.

Prior to Cutts confirming via Twitter that Panda 4.0 hit, there had been plenty of speculation about a change with either Panda or Penguin, although many found it hard to pin down exactly what the change was.

"It was interesting to see the chatter amongst SEOs over the last few days," says Marie Haynes of HIS Web Marketing. "We all knew that something was going on, but there was significant disagreement on exactly what Google was doing. Most of the black hats were saying that it was related to Penguin because they were noticing huge drops in their sites with the spammiest link profiles."

This would have been the changes to the payday loans update, where the goal is to target the spammiest search queries Google sees. There was also plenty of debate on forums and Twitter about whether the shake-up we saw was Panda-related or Penguin-related. And with the payday loans update thrown in there for good measure, it was definitely confusing.

"I was really hoping that this wasn't a Penguin refresh because the majority of the sites that I had done link cleanup on were not seeing any improvement and if Penguin refreshed and none of my clients were seeing ranking increases, then that would not be good," Haynes says. "I was also puzzled because one site that I monitor that has been adversely affected by several Panda updates saw a vast improvement today. It does not have a bad link profile and would not have been affected by a Penguin update. "

"When I heard the announcements that Google had released two algorithms over the last couple of days – payday loans and also a big Panda update, everything made sense. And still, so many of us are waiting for that big Penguin refresh. It wouldn't surprise me if that happens in the next couple of days," she says.

Google has said previously that they try not to throw multiple updates at once or within a very short period of time, so it is interesting that they pushed out two completely unrelated updates – although updates that could both impact some the same sites – within a couple of days.

Releasing two back-to-back updates makes it a lot harder for webmasters to analyze the changes and what specifically was targeted in these updates, and could affect Google's ability to evaluate how well (or not) the two updates worked. It also means webmasters might have a challenge knowing what changes need to be made in order to recover search rankings.

However, Haynes speculated that some of the Panda change might have been to reverse some of the damage done to sites that had great content yet were impacted for other on-page reasons.

"I think it's too early to say what this new iteration of Panda is affecting, but I can tell you that in the case of the site that I saw big improvements on, no cleanup work had been done at all," Haynes says. "It was always in 'Panda flux.'"

She says some Panda refreshes would hit it hard and then occasionally the site would show a slight increase with a refresh.

"This is by far the biggest increase, though," Haynes says. "It really is a good-quality site and I believe that what caused it to be affected by Panda in the first place was a site layout that caused crawlers to get confused. Underneath that confusing layout is a site full of really good content. It may be that Google found ways to see past structural issues and recognize the good content as the structural problems would not affect users, just crawlers. But really, that's a guess."

Panda first blazed onto the scene in February 2011, and was believed to be Google's response to criticism of how well content farms were ranking. Google later announced that they internally called it the big Panda update, after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who created it.

While there have been many smaller Panda updates and a couple larger ones, each rolled out monthly over a period of 10 days, Google had announced several months ago that Panda would be integrated into the algorithm updates and that the "softer" Panda would be less noticeable. However, that clearly isn't the case with Panda 4.0, which has had a widespread impact, both positively and negatively.

Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also studied the changes they saw from the latest Panda update, and noticed that eBay got hit particularly hard.

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the "Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10).

In fact, Meyers notes that eBay's drop was so significant that it dropped from 1 percent of their queries to 0.28 percent. It won't be surprising to hear of more sites who have seen a drop due to Panda 4.0 – especially sites that have been notorious for having low quality content.

We will definitely see more come out in the next few days as webmasters and SEO professionals have a chance to evaluate the changes and what might have caused sites (either their own or competitors) to either rise or fall in Google's search results. And since we're still awaiting a Google Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 launched a year ago this week), I wouldn't be surprised if we see one of those updates coming soon, especially in light of Google releasing both the payday loans and Panda 4.0 so close together.

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Google Provides More Clarity Around Sneaky Redirects Against Their Guidelines

Google announced on their Webmaster blog that they have updated two of their guideline documents to improve the clarity around what sneaky redirects are against Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Google has expanded their guidelines to ensure webmasters are aware that using sneaky redirects through mobile site detection and redirection, is not allowed if the content is not the same. An excerpt from Google’s revised guidelines indicate a situation where “desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain,” as not in accordance with Google’s guidelines.

Here are the two new examples Google placed in their sneaky redirects guideline page:

• Search engines shown one type of content while users are redirected to something significantly different
• Desktop users receive a normal page, while mobile users are redirected to a completely different spam domain

Google also updated the hacked sites page with an content about redirects that reads:

 “Hackers might inject malicious code to your website that redirects some users to harmful or spammy pages. The kind of redirect sometimes depends on referrer, user-agent, or device. For example, clicking a URL in Google search results could redirect you to a suspicious page, but there is no redirect when you visit the same URL directly from a browser.”

Google added a warning at the end of their blog post saying that “with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take manual action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of the search results.”

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What’s new in social media and what is broken

At least quarterly, it’s a good idea to find out what’s no longer working in different parts of digital marketing, particularly in fast-moving areas like social. This week, we’ll talk about what’s no longer working in social media, then we’ll move on to what’s new. And in our next series, we’ll also talk about search.

Before we proceed though, it is worth mentioning that participating in social media without a plan is asking for trouble. Really think about why you’re using social and what you hope to achieve. More visibility? An increase in website visitors? What are they supposed to do when they get to your website? Is your blog connected to your lead capture system?

Read also: 7 steps to elevate your social media presence

Also think about the role of social in your overall online strategy, whether it’s part of branding, marketing or customer service.

1. Blogging

It’s often forgotten that blogs were among the first social media tools – the best we’d had available since the online bulletin board or forum. The ramp-up to slow-down theory of blogging is no longer working. You can’t blog daily for six weeks, then slow down and blog when you “have time” and expect the same results. 

Studies are now showing that ramping up to posting even every other day increases sales. So wake up that dead blog.You can start by asking people who have subscribed via email what they’d like to learn about.

Try doing more shorter, pithier posts, then one in-depth post a week.

2. Twitter

There was a time you could get away with broadcasting links into the general noise of Twitter, and be noticed due to the curiosity factor of Twitter’s firehose, and the fact that Google would pick up your tweets in real time, and even show them in real time on trending searches.

Now, not only has the Twitter firehose been hidden for years now, but Google’s relationship with Twitter has changed – no more real time tweets on hot searches.  

Besides, Twitter was never meant to be a broadcast medium and most people ignore much of what is on their incoming streams, or whittle them down to a manageable level, full of only the people they most want to interact with frequently. Instead of trying to manage my full incoming Twitter stream, 

I look at my Twitter lists, hashtags, and people who I’ve set to mobile notifications first. Most people on Twitter now have a system similar to this or a custom timeline – being followed is no longer enough to get noticed. You must provide value, and shouting “LOOK AT ME AND MY STUFF” isn’t doing it anymore.

Pick some non-competing colleagues (or even the competition if you’re confident) and share their most helpful content 6 to 8 times for every time you talk about yourself. I personally find that I get a lot more attention when I’m ready to talk about myself if I share my community with others.

Screen some Twitter chats related to your topic if you have trouble finding out who these people are.

3. Facebook

Oh #facepalm. Where do I begin with what doesn’t work on Facebook? 

I’m tempted to say “everything”. For Pages, reach is down, because apparently Facebook differs from Twitter in that it either doesn’t see the value, or doesn’t have the capability, to show you everything you or your connections are subscribed to in the the public stream.  

You’ve got to pay to play and even that can give you dismal results. 

Ever since Facebook began to take away some of pages killer features, I haven’t been the fan I once was. It used to be easy to get prospects to opt-in to be contacted outside Facebook, to create posts natively using the Notes app, and many other things personal profiles have been able to do, or still can.  

If you’re using your personal profile for personal interaction, it’s best to keep it that way. But if you’ve been using your profile’s ability to make certain information visible or hidden to certain groups via the refreshed Lists feature, that may be your best bet for visibility of informational posts that aren’t commercially heavy.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn used to have a kick-ass section called LinkedIn Answers. You could get a crazy amount of visibility by logging in once a quarter and answering questions until you were one of the top three in a sub-niche. I used to get very high quality client leads this way.  

Now LinkedIn is letting more people into its Influencers program. Many don’t see the appeal to writing to an audience they already have. However, if you promote your LinkedIn posts as you would any other content marketing item or guest post, you will find that your audience expands outside the contacts you already have.

Test this out by applying to their program – if you’re accepted, test with a reworked blog post if you don’t have any new content on hand.

5. YouTube

Trying to grow your YouTube audience without interaction is much harder than it used to be. In years past, you could get away with just optimizing for search and exposing your videos to your own subscribers or your blog audience. 

Now, the action on your page is part of the criteria for getting ranked, according to my favorite source on video SEO, ReelSEO (get it? Why can’t I think of things like that?) A dead channel is an ignored channel. Get out there and find the active users in your space. Delight them and lure them to your channel.

6. Google+

So here’s a weird one for you – the main thing not working for Google+ is ignoring it. 

If you’ve hated Google+ for years, you had good reason. With lots of abandoned profiles and few of the features that now exist, 2011 was way too early to speculate about its potential.

However adoption among more regular people, business owners, bloggers, and even Android users is making Google+ the place to be, not to mention the ability to leverage additional spots in Google’s universal search rankings, or the personalized rankings of people you’re connected to via the site.

If for no other reason than to get your OWN blog more personalized rankings by being connected to more people than your nearest competition, Google+ is a must if Google search is part of your marketing strategy.

You may hate it, but even though we may hate accounting, we still make sure it gets done. Build out your profile and invest just 5 minutes a day making new connections on Google+ – if you do it right, it’ll be worth your while. 

The takeaway

Sometimes it feels like our social media efforts are failing. And sometimes, this is actually true. The key question to ask isn’t IF there is failing but WHAT is failing. Before you give up, make sure the point of failure isn’t your strategy or technique.

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Google Working On A Softer & Gentler Panda Algorithm To Help Small Businesses

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced at Search Marketing Expo that his search team is working the “next generation” Panda update that would appear to many as being softer.

Cutts explained that this new Panda update should have a direct impact on helping small businesses do better.

One Googler on his team is specifically working on ways to help small web sites and businesses do better in the Google search results. This next generation update to Panda is one specific algorithmic change that should have a positive impact on the smaller businesses.

Matt Cutts didn’t mention when the new update is coming out but rather they are currently working on this update. My feeling is that it is far off from being launched, like maybe in two to three months at best, but that is my gut.

This would not be the first time Google released a softer Panda update. They did a softer update to the Panda algorithm possibly in July of last year.

Now Panda is more of a monthly rolling update and Google is unlikely to confirm future Panda updates.

Learn more about Google Panda updates.

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How Search Marketers Succeed

"How Do I Get Some Success Rolling In Search Engine"

The complicated algorithms of search engines may appear at first glance to be impenetrable. The engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results or garner more traffic. What information on optimization and best practices that the engines themselves do provide is listed below:

SEO INFORMATION FROM GOOGLE WEBMASTER GUIDELINE

Googlers recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as cloaking.

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Use keywords to create descriptive, human friendly URLs. Provide one version of a URL to reach a document, using 301 redirects or the rel="canonical" element to address duplicate content.

SEO INFORMATION FROM BING WEBMASTER GUIDELINE

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

Ensure a clean, keyword rich URL structure is in place Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide links from crawlers.

Create keyword-rich content based on research to match what users are searching for. Produce fresh content regularly.

Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For example, if you want your company name or address to be indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.

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Google’s Matt Cutts Gives SEO Advice For Times When Your Products Go Out Of Stock

Google’s Matt Cutts answered in a video what webmasters and site owners should do about their out of stock products on their e-commerce sites.

Matt Cutts basically said it depends on the size of the e-commerce site. He broke it down into three sizes: small sites with tens of pages, medium sites with thousands of pages and massive sites with hundreds of thousands of pages or more.

Small E-Commerce Sites

Small sites that sell items, such as handmade furniture, that showcase a product that is out of stock should likely link to related products. This way the customer can see that this owner can make or design something as displayed but at the same time, show other products that are currently available in stock that the customer can purchase today.

Of course, it may make sense to add a manufacturing time next to the items that are out of stock.

Medium E-Commerce Sites

The normal, medium sized, e-commerce site, that sells thousands of products, and where some of those products are out of stock. In that case, the site owner should 404 – page not found – the products that are out of stock.

That is unless you know the date that the products will come back in inventory. If you know when the products will come back in inventory, inform the customer on the site and let them choose if they want to order it for later delivery or not.

Otherwise, 404 the page because it can be frustrated for a customer to land on a product page that they cannot buy.

Large E-Commerce Sites

For really large e-commerce sites, with hundreds of thousands of pages, such as Craigslist, you should set the date the page will expire using the meta tag, unavailable_after tag. This way, when the product is added, you can immediately set when that product page will expire based on an auction date or a go-stale date.

This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. Google currently only supports unavailable_after for Google web search results

Here is the video:



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The Resources You Need to Stay Current With SEO In Under 100 Words

understatement: SEO has changed.

To understand what’s in store for the future (which you can learn about here), you have to know where SEO has been (which you can learn about here).
With that context, let’s lay out some resources to make you a modern SEO.
First, learn how to optimize your blog content — a cornerstone of top-notch SEO. Then, figure out how to integrate search and social.
Finally, stay on top of those constantly changing trends. Resources like this SEO coffee tips series, and this mythbusting guide will keep you in the know.

For More Info about The Resources You Need to Stay Current With SEO

The Latest SEO Challenge? Maintaining Rankings

Unfortunately for hopeful small businesses with polished websites and great new content, staying high-up in the rankings of major search engines is an ongoing challenge. Because search engines constantly index content and search for new pages, it requires proactivity and perseverance to keep a website at the top of the rankings.

Several factors cause a website to slip in ranking. Namely, competitors optimize their own sites, which can cause theirs to rise in ranking and others to drop. There are also constant changes in search engine algorithms, which improve search engines, but often leave some websites behind which used older SEO methods. Not to mention changes in search engine market share, or the simple habits of online buyers.

Telx Web, a Miami website design business, announced today that they now provide new and improved rankings maintenance for clients. This means Telx Computers monitors clients’ rankings weekly for targeted keywords, they write articles and distribute them with links to clients’ websites, as well as back-linking from other sites and social media postings.

This Miami SEO company has a reliable and reputable staff that is dedicated to updating and maintaining clients’ website rankings. A few years ago, technology like “Meta Tags” was essential to maintaining traffic. As search engines have changed and grown, link building is considered much more important, and the largest search engines have changed their algorithms along these lines. Telx Web is one of the few search engine optimization companies that will actually continue to write and distribute articles with links to client websites, provide back links and social media postings, and monitor the search status of clients’ sites.

Being able to not only understand the current trends and search engine technologies, but being able to adapt and overcome changes in these trends is what Telx Web is set on accomplishing for customers. Through SEO consulting, Telx can teach clients how to successfully optimize their businesses for search engines of all types, and to reach the customers they intend to impact.

About Telx Web - A hallmark of the best SEO companies are full-ranging SEO features. Telx Web provides these, and more; On-Page optimization - which involves the use of correct keywords and metadata and Off-Page optimization - which is all about back-linking to a site via other sites. Not to mention Social Media Marketing through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social networking sites, as well as manually submitting and monitoring the ranking of clients’ sites and pay-per-click campaigns. Telx also provides clients with scalable services, so that they can serve every budget and every business, small to large.

For More Info about The Latest SEO Challenge

SEO in 2014: How to Prepare for Google's 2014 Algorithm Updates

It has been an incredibly eventful year in terms of updates from Google. Major 2013 changes included further releases of Penguin and Panda, Hummingbird taking flight, and the shift away from providing keyword data thanks to encrypted search.

Many have gone so far as to ask whether SEO as a profession is dead: for one interesting perspective, see my recent Forbes interview with Sam Roberts of VUDU Marketing. My own take is less alarmist: Google has taken major spam-fighting steps that have shifted the playing field for SEO professionals and anyone trying to get their site on the map in the year ahead.

At the same time, the need for an online presence has never been stronger, while the landscape has never been more competitive. The potential to make a real ROI impact with your company's online marketing initiative is greater than ever. But defaulting to so-called "gray hat" tactics no longer works. Instead, SEO professionals need to step up and embrace a more robust vision of our area of expertise.

You might call it a move from tactician to strategist: the best and most successful players in our space will work to anticipate Google's next moves and respond to them with laser focus. In a sense, the infinite digital game of chess that is SEO will continue, but the rules of the game have become more complex.

Through a mix of what I'm observing and reading and what I'm seeing working out in the field today for my clients, here are some suggestions for companies and SEO professionals that are thinking ahead to 2014 for their digital strategies.

Everything You Learned in 2013 is Still Relevant, Just Amplified

When you look closely at the targets of the 2013 updates (ie, websites that cheat their way to the top of the rankings or provide no value to visitors), I anticipate seeing these carried forward throughout 2014. We can continue to expect micro adjustments to Panda and Penguin that continue to target both link quality and content quality.

When you look closely at the targets of the 2013 updates (ie, websites that cheat their way to the top of the rankings or provide no value to visitors), I anticipate seeing these carried forward throughout 2014. We can continue to expect micro adjustments to Panda and Penguin that continue to target both link quality and content quality.

Smart marketers will benefit from keeping a close eye on their link profiles, and performing periodic audits to identify and remove inbound links built unnaturally. High quality content investments will remain critical.

A solid SEO performance in 2014 is going to be built on a foundation of really understanding what happened in 2013, and what these changes mean both strategically and tactically for SEO. SEO really has changed in critical ways.

Content Marketing is Bigger than Ever

Content marketing will move from buzzword to mature marketing movement in 2014. From an SEO perspective, Google will be looking at companies that have robust content marketing efforts as a sign that they're the kind of business Google wants to support.

Think of all the advantages of a good content strategy:

• Regular, helpful content targeted at your audience.
• Social signals from regular sharing and engagement.
• Freshness or signs that your site is alive and growing.
• Increasing authority connected to your body of work.

Sound familiar? It's the very approach to SEO that all of Google's recent updates have been designed to shape.

What changes you need to make in 2014 depends largely on where your company stands now in relation to an active content marketing strategy. Companies with existing content strategies will need to assess the role of mobile, specifically.

If you've just begun to move in the direction of content marketing, it's time to really commit and diversify. If you haven't started yet, it's time to take the plunge.

Social Media Plays an Increasingly Visible Role

Social media has been a major player in the digital marketing landscape for the last few years. First we saw the rise of mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the last couple of years, visual content from networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and various micro-video services haa swept through.

Social media has been a major player in the digital marketing landscape for the last few years. First we saw the rise of mega platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In the last couple of years, visual content from networks like Pinterest, Instagram, and various micro-video services haa swept through.

Today, diversification is a major trend: depending on who you're targeting, it's no longer enough to be active on a single network. In fact, The Content Marketing Institute recently released a study that the most successful B2B marketers are active on an average of seven networks. Companies and SEO professionals will need to be asking the following questions in the year ahead:

• Are we taking our social media seriously? Are we employing the pillars of strong profiles, good content, reciprocity, and engagement?
• Is easy social sharing enabled for all of our content?
• Does our content strategy include a dissemination phase that includes maximizing its potential for distribution through social networks?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter in our industry?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to our customers?
• Are we active on the social networks that matter to the search engines? (See below for more thoughts on making that strategic investment).
• Does our social media marketing strategy stimulate the level of social signals required to achieve our goals?

Google's updates are likely to increasingly rely on social signals as active human curation of good content.

Invest in Google+

In addition to strengthening your overall social media marketing position, it's going to be absolutely critical that you are investing in your Google+ presence.

Moz's most recent study of ranking factors confirms that Google+ is playing an increasingly significant role in a solid SEO ranking. The immediate areas to focus on include:

• Establishing Google Authorship of your content, and tying it to your Google+ account. Authorship, which brings your body of content together, will play an important role in the SERPs as well as strengthening your Author Rank.
• Those +1's add up. It isn't clear exactly how much Google +1's directly contribute, but it's fair to say that it's a major factor in the "social signals" component of Google's algorithm. I expect this to increase in the year ahead.

Hummingbird Was Just the Tip of the Mobile Iceberg

2014 will be the year of mobile SEO. Hummingbird was just the very small visible tip of a very large iceberg as Google struggles to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape where half of all Americans own smartphones and at least one-third own tablets. Those statistics will probably shift upward, maybe dramatically, after the 2013 holiday season.

As a result, your site's mobile performance matters to your SEO rankings. Properties that you're trying to rank need to be designed first for mobile and then scaled up for the big screen. If you don't have a mobile-optimized website, this needs to be your top priority in terms of SEO and design investments for 2014.

Some underlying changes that happened with Hummingbird, including the increasing importance of both semantic search and Knowledge Graph, will continue to grow in influence. Practically speaking, this is to help prepare the search engine for the rise of voice search associated with mobile. But it also has direct implications (which we're still learning about) for broader SEO. This is one area that you should pay close attention to, from how you structure your content to what content you choose to put out.

The Long Versus Short Debate

Which is better, long content or short content? The answer depends on who is creating the content, who is reading it, what it's about, in what context it's being consumed, and how you define "better."

For the purposes of this argument, which form of content will help you best prepare to rank well in 2014? Frustratingly for some, the answer is more "both/and" than "or."

Vocus recently cited a study that showed that the top 10 results for a specific keyword search tended to be more than 2,000 words in length. The validity of that study has been debated, but it's probably fair to say that length is a proxy for depth of expertise and value delivered to the reader.

Google values both expertise and value. As a result, we've seen a trend where the "minimum desirable length" for text-based content has shifted from something in the range of 550 words to articles in the range of 1000-plus words.

Yet we're also confronted with the reality of the mobile device: if I'm reading about something I'm only moderately interested in, there's a high probability that I won't want to scroll through 2,000 words on my iPhone. That leaves content marketers faced with the challenge of producing mobile-friendly content, which tends to be (in a sweeping generality) much, much shorter.

Proposed solutions have run the gamut from content mixes to site architectures that allow you to point readers to specific versions of content based on their devices. This is great for the user experience, but where it all comes out on the SEO algorithm front remains to be seen. For now, I'll just acknowledge that it's an area of concern that will continue to evolve and that it's something you should keep your eye on.

Advertising and PPC has a Shifted Relationship with SEO

Since Google made the decision to encrypt the vast majority of its searches, our ability to access keyword data for research purposes has been restricted. However, there's a loophole. Keyword data is still available for advertisers using PPC on Google's platform.

More SEO budgets may be driven toward PPC simply because access to the data may otherwise be restricted. It's also possible that we'll see the release of a premium Google product to give us access to that data through another channel from Google in the year ahead.

Guest Blogging Remains One of the Most Effective Tactics, With a Caveat

Guest blogging has exploded in the past year, and it's going to remain one of the most effective means of building quality inbound links, traffic, and branding exposure in 2014. However, it's absolutely critical that you're creating high quality content, and using extremely stringent criteria when selecting your target sites.

In other words, you need to apply the same high ethos approach to guest blogging that you do to the rest of your SEO efforts. If you dip a toe into spammy waters where guest blogging is essentially scattershot article marketing with a 2014 update, you're likely to be penalized in a future Penguin update.

Conclusion

This has been a year of significant change in the SEO industry. Even contemplating strategies for 2014 can feel staggering.

The good news is that looking back, it's easy to see which direction the trends are heading in terms of the years ahead. Staying the course on solid white hat tactics and paying attention to a few priority areas that are shifting rapidly should give you the insights needed to improve your organic search visibility in 2014 and beyond.

What trends do you anticipate seeing from Google in the year ahead? How are you preparing?

For More Info about How to Prepare for Google's 2014 Algorithm Updates

Tags : googl's algorithm 2014, nilesh patel, seo services provider, nilesh patel seo

SearchCap: The Day In Search, November 27, 2013

Below is what happened in search today, as reported onSearch Engine Land and from other places across the Web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Google Keyword Planner Now Shows Trademarked Terms
  At some point recently, Google started to indicate terms that are trademarked in the Keyword Planner with the TM mark. Dan Shure of Evolving SEO tweeted about the new feature, noting that McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” tagline is not marked as trademarked while Staples’ “The Easy Button” is marked as such. (Burger King’s “Have It […]

• The Brave New World of SEO: Beyond Websites
  We hear it regularly – the death knell tolling for SEO. In the past several years, we’ve been bombarded by a barrage of change in organic search, from Penguin to Panda to Hummingbird, from inbound link penalties to [not provided]. Let’s face it: the only constant in search is change. But I propose that SEO isn’t […]

• 3 Ways AdWords Scripts Will Make Your Holidays Merrier
  The holidays are officially upon us, and if you’re reading this, I must give thanks to you for your time. When I still worked at Google, this was the time of year when new product launches came to a crawl since most advertisers were too busy to deal with change, and only the most persistent […]

• How To Run A Successful B2B Social Media Marketing Campaign
  Many marketers think of social media in the context of B2C companies: after all, 4 in 10 consumers buy products that they’ve favorited, liked, tweeted or pinned on various social networks. Yet, according to a recent study from MarketingProfs, 87% of B2B marketers use social media platforms in their content marketing efforts. In fact, of […]

• Google Adds Big Change To Display Bidding: Pay By Viewable Impression In AdWords
  In a significant move, Google rolled out CPM bidding by viewable impression in AdWords this week. Advertisers will only be charged for ad impressions that can actually be viewed in-screen by users, rather than on the traditional served impression basis. New reporting metrics are also available, all powered by Google’s viewability measurement solution, Active View, […]

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