Lead Generation Websites: SEO News

Google’s Animals:

Three birds and a bear!

For more information email: info@leadgenerationwebsites.co.uk

Google’s Search Engine Updates

1. Hummingbird

2. Pigeon

3. Panda

4. Penguin

For more information email: info@leadgenerationwebsites.co.uk

1. Hummingbird

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What is Google’s Hummingbird?

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“Hummingbird” is the name of the new search engine algorithm that Google introduced in August 2013

What is Google’s Hummingbird?

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Hummingbird designed to focus on the meaning behind a search query rather than just look at each word discretely.

The idea is that the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.

The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

What are the implications for business websites?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Hummingbird is the Google search engine entirely rebuilt.

There was little noticeable effect on the search engine results.

Ultimately nothing has changed – it’s still about useful, relevant content and good user experience – the engine has just got better at identifying meaning in queries and the best pages which answer it.

2. Google Pigeon

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What is Google Pigeon?

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Google released its Pigeon algorithm update to make local search results more useful and relevant by tying local search results more closely to traditional web search signals.

As far as we know this update has only been released in Google US and not hit the UK yet.

What is the effect of Pigeon?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Pigeon appears to have favoured larger websites in the US.

This means that smaller businesses need a strong branded domain to compete with larger well-known brands.

Location is ever more important. Whilst you cannot do much to change the location of your business you can make sure that Google knows your location through use of Google My Business and schema address mark-up on your website.

3. Google Panda

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What is Google Panda?

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Google Panda is a quality content filter which looks at;

1. Quality, length and relevance of on-page content

2. Usefulness and originality of that content

3. User-experience in terms of interactive content & ads

4. Original, experience-enhancing images

What should you do?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Research suggests that the filter favours pages with 1500+ words, original images and embedded video

Content should not be copied – original and useful

Put best content ‘above the fold’ with no ads

Use interactive content – maps and videos

4. Google Penguin

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What is Google Penguin?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Penguin demotes sites with bad link profiles and promotes sites that were affected by previous Penguin updates that cleaned up their link profiles.

Implications for business owners?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

What is a bad link profile?

A bad link profile is when a website has incoming links from low-quality or irrelevant websites.

Low-quality is defined as a website with ‘thin’ content –it has few pages, offers no value to readers and has low Trust Flow probably due to a spammy link profile.

An irrelevant website is defined as one from an unrelated niche – getting a link from a carpet cleaning website for your shoe repair business website is an example.

How does Google Penguin affect websites?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Bad link profile – anchor-text ratio

Another major aspect of Penguin is the anchor-text ratio.

If you have 1000 links to your shoe repair site and 500 of them link with the text ‘shoe repair London’ then you have an anchor-text ratio of 50% for that single phrase.

This is a sign of manipulation – it is unlikely that any site would naturally get 50% of all links with the EXACT same text...

What should you do?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

If you lost rankings and traffic suddenly in the middle of October you need to check your link profile for anchor-text ratio over-optimisation and for spammy links by comparing your Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics.

You should also check your on-page titles and copy for ‘keyword stuffing’ as over-optimisation of pages for keyword phrases will also trip the Penguin filter.

What should you do?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

Change page titles to more readable, natural sentences.

Use related phrases and synonyms in your web page copy if you have too many instances of a particular keyword phrase.

Stop building links from low-quality sites.

Stop using keywords as anchor-text.

What should you do?

For more information call: 01708 208 889

If you have been affected it will be some time before you can get out of the penalty – you have to wait until Google runs the Penguin algorithm again.

Build links from related and relevant sites that have trust and authority using your brand name and URL.

If you have many bad links you may need to submit a disavow file to Google.

In certain cases the domain may need to be scrapped and the website resurrected on a new domain!

For more information;

call: 01708 208 889

Email: info@leadgenerationwebsites.co.uk