How Google Webmaster Central Can Help Your Small Business Grow…Part 1
How can small businesses maximize their organic visibility in Google? Google offers many tools to help your business, from well know paid ad tools, Adwords and Adplanner, to Google Analytics to help your site analytics.
What about tools to help your organic business though? Let’s look at one such tool, Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to review how using this can seriously improve your SEO score and increase targeted traffic to your website.
Webmaster Tools Optimization
GWT tools allows you to set a multitude of options and gain insights how Google views your website. Some of the insights are invaluable and especially with more and more visits to your website not giving up their keyword origins due to privacy concerns with Google Analytics. There are four main sections with GWT:
- Configuration
- Health
- Traffic
- Optimization
Webmaster Configuration Options
- Settings
- Geographic Target
- Let Google know what you’re preferred primary target country is. This is a very useful option and although it may be obvious from your domain name or hosting country, it’s best to leave no doubt in Google’s mind as to your preferred target country.
- Preferred domain
- Choosing either option, www.mywebsite.com, or http://mywebsite.com will help remove potential impacts your site receives from canonicalization issues.
- Crawl Rate
- Leave the default option here checked, i.e. let Google determine how often it crawls your website.
- Geographic Target
- Sitelinks
- If you see that a search on your brand or website name is showing organic sitelinks, but you don’t like them, well then this is the place to change that. You can let Google know that you don’t want to show specific sitelinks.Google will remove any sitelinks you tell it too, but you can’t nominate new suggested urls to show as sitelinks. Google will identify new pages it deems relevant and show them instead and if you don’t like them, well you start again by demoted the latest urls you don’t want.
- URL Parameters
- You should only use this option if you are very comfortable with the technical aspects of your website and how your site handles multiple urls with the same content. If you or your site guys feel confident using this functionality, then it’s a great way to let Google know your preferred urls if you have multiple duplicates.
- Change of address
- Not to be confused with a physical change of address, this is to help you if you’re moving website address. If you want Google to know your’re changing website address and your don’t want to lose any hard built PageRank and links to your pages, then using this functionality allows you to move address without losing any Google history.Google will assign authority from the old site to the new site and you won’t be penalized. Matt Cutts describes this process of 301′s redirects below.
- Users
- If you want multiple users to be able to access your GWT account, to either share the admin tasks or just to view the data, you can add additional users here.
Health Options in Google Webmaster Central
The health section of GWT is where Google will let you know if your sites has any serious technical issues.
- Crawl Errors
- Google will let you know if there any issues with three key areas:
- DNS
- This let’s you know if your Domain Name Server is accessible. The DNS lets Google know where to access your server. If you DNS is not accessible, then Google can’t crawl your site.
- Server Connectivity
- If Googlebot can’t access your server, then your site won’t be crawled. If you see a red X here then you’re site is probably down and urgent attention is required.
- Robots.txt Fetch
- Not as serious as the previous two connection issues, but if you have a robots.txt file, but Google can’t access it, i.e. a 200 or 404 error code is not sent, then Google will postpone crawling your site until it can access the robots.txt.
The robots.txt file is a file that Google looks up before it crawls your site to see what folders you allow it to access.
- Not as serious as the previous two connection issues, but if you have a robots.txt file, but Google can’t access it, i.e. a 200 or 404 error code is not sent, then Google will postpone crawling your site until it can access the robots.txt.
- URL Errors
- This is potentially very serious. Here you’ll see a list of those URL’s that can’t be accessed by the Googlebot. It’s critical that you review the URL’s that appear here and understand why Google can’t access them. Perhaps it’s a wordpress theme change that’s caused the issues, or a badly formed links.
- DNS
- Google will let you know if there any issues with three key areas:
- Crawl Stats
- Pages Crawled Per Day
- This shows you how oftern the Googlebot is crawling your website. The rule here is simple. The more content you add to your site, the more frequent your site will be crawled. If you’re adding increasing amount of content to your site but are seeing the crawl rate trending downwards, the you could be experiencing accessibility problems and should be looking at the crawl errors section as per above.
- Kilobytes downloaded per day
- Linked to above, if you’re adding more content to your website, you should see Googlebot crawling and downloading more data. If these trends are going in opposite directions you could have issues with Google going deeper into your site.
- Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)
- Again, more content, more data, more time downloading so you should see this trending up in line with your crawls per day and kilobytes downloaded.
- Pages Crawled Per Day
- Blocked URLs
- This section allows you to check that Google can access your robots.txt file and hence is aware of any URLs that you don’t want Google to crawl and index.
- Fetch as Google
- If you want to view your pages as the Googlebot sees then simply paste in your url and Google will return your page as per below.
- If you want to view your pages as the Googlebot sees then simply paste in your url and Google will return your page as per below.
- Index Status
- Very useful chart showing how many of your sites urls are in the Google index. If you are adding content on a regular basis to your site you should see this graph trending upwards.
- Malware
- Google will let you know if they’ve detected any malware threats on your site If they do detected anything suspicious they will effectively block any visitors accessing your website. They show a big red warning that your site is infected should any visitors click on a link to your site from the search engine results pages.
That’s the first two sections in Google Webmaster Central, Configuration and Health.
What you had any difficulties with these sections on GWT? Any hints or tips on getting the most from this free resource.
In part two of this series, we’ll look at the remaining three (and possibly more interesting) sections of Webmaster Tools,
- Traffic
- Optimization
- Labs
The Top Google SEO Tools for Small Businesses…?
There are loads of SEO related tools available from Google, some are critical, some are nice to have. As a small business owner, what are the critical Google SEO tools that you need to be using on a regular basis?
Top Google SEO Tools
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Key to letting Google know what’s on your site, what new pages you have, your target country and key for Google letting you know of any issues with your site, e.g. broken links, malware and traffic metrics like impressions (how many time your site appeared in an organic listing for a keyword search) and clicks to your site.
- Key to letting Google know what’s on your site, what new pages you have, your target country and key for Google letting you know of any issues with your site, e.g. broken links, malware and traffic metrics like impressions (how many time your site appeared in an organic listing for a keyword search) and clicks to your site.
- Google Analytics
- Find out how visitors are using your website, where are the entering and leaving your site, where are they bouncing off your site without even staying to look around, or how many of your visitors are new , i.e. first time to the site – important metric if you’re striving for increased net new reach.
- Find out how visitors are using your website, where are the entering and leaving your site, where are they bouncing off your site without even staying to look around, or how many of your visitors are new , i.e. first time to the site – important metric if you’re striving for increased net new reach.
- Google Trends (aka Google Insights )
- Find out what are the latest trends on keywords. How are your top target keywords performing against the rest of the index? Great for brand tracking.
- Find out what are the latest trends on keywords. How are your top target keywords performing against the rest of the index? Great for brand tracking.
- Google Keyword Tool
- Fing out what people are actually searching for - take out the guess work of and optimize your site for keywords that you know people are searching on
- Google Alerts
- Keep in touch with your brand and top keywords – get notified when someone uses them
- Google Plus
- Social, share, engage, inform, connect
- Google Ad Planner
- Find out where you need to have your ads displayed, and from an SEO viewpoint where the major traffic sourses and what the demographics are on these sites (target content to the right people)
- YouTube
- Secdon largest Search engine after Google Search – are your using YouTube Channels?
- Google Merchant Center
- If you have products, you need a feed, especially with the arrival of Product Listing Ads.
Over the next few posts I’ll be focusing on each of these Google Tools, deep diving into exactly how small businesses should be leveraging these tools for maximum benefit.
Let me know if you have any specific questions you wish covered or any challenges you’ve had using these tools.
Penguin 2.0 Continues to Drive Uncertainty after Google Update…
Judging by some of the keyword phrases driving traffic to CleverSEO, there are a lot of people out there wondering how to understand and recover from the latest algorithm update from Google.
Some of the searches are below:
- how many sites hit by penguin 2.0?
- penguin 2.0 porn
- revise seo strategy for online game site after penguin 2.0 update
- theme change penguin 2.0
- what is the major recent update in penguin 2.0 ??
Recap of what Penguin 2.0 update is…
Penguin 2.0 is the latest algorithm update from Google. It is the latest update of what was christened the Penguin update in early 2012. The original Penguin release was targeted at those sites that were specifically violating Google’s quality guidelines, i.e avoid the following practices (taken directly from Google blog):
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or links
- Doorway pages
- Scraped content
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
- Abusing rich snippets markup
- Sending automated queries to Google
I’m not going review each practice in detail, I think most of the are self explanatory and if you need others explained you can check out the Google Webmaster blog.
What I would saw is that you’d find it very hard to engage in any of the above practices accidentally. So if you’re engaging in them you know you are. Or ,you’ve employed a 3rd party who are engaging in these blackhat techniques , and you’ve not asked the right questions when it came to understanding exactly what SEO techniques are being used on your site.
How to avoid Penguin 2.0 penalties
The bottom line when it comes to avoiding penalties is to have a content marketing strategy that is delivering high quality, relevant and useful content, consistently.
The question really is, why would you not want to attract traffic to your site because of the great content you have to offer? Giving new and existing site visitors the opportunity to engage and share with your business is the main of the game and great content will achieve these goals. Getting visitors to your site (using black hat techniques) only to see them let down by a poor site experience is a waste of time and money.
Again to reiterate, Matt Cutts (head of Google Web Spam) posted a recent video on what Google look for when it comes to a great website, he mentions:
- Make a great site that users love
- A site that visitors want to tell their friends about
- A site that Users bookmark
- And sees a high percentage of returning visitors
Stick to these guidelines and you’ll have no issues with Penguin or Panda or any other Google animals…
What has your experience of Penguin been? Do you feel you’ve been harshly treated by Google? Feel that you’re not engaging in any blackhat practices, but still got penalized? Let us know your experience!
Porn and Gaming Sites Hit Most by Recent Google Penguin 2.0 Update…
Google just rolled out it’s latest search algorithm update on 22nd May. Penguin 2.0 is aimed at further impacting those sites that use blackhat SEO (i.e. break Google’s terms) . This update is an algorithm update, which according to Matt Cutts :
Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.
So just how many websites are impacted by this latest update? According to Google, 2.3% of English-US queries are affected. If you’re one of those 2.3%, expect to start seeing your traffic fall away. But what exactly are the penalizing? What are the new algorithm changes looking for when they crawl your site?
Google Penguin 2.0 Algorithm Impacts
In my last post I covered what Google was focused on during 2013 and the impacts for SEO. One of focus areas was the release of the update to Penguin. As of the 22nd May, Google have released that update to Penguin, so what does this actually mean?
Before I run though what Google are not looking for, it might be idea for your to refresh yourself on what Google’s webmaster guidelines are when it comes to SEO.
Searchmetrics released an analysis of the impact on the 23rd May, so a day after the go live.
In terms of what sites are seeing the biggest impact, the breakdown is below:
The above data is looking at the top 25 impacted sites and breaking down the impact at the category level. Although Games sites would not have seen the largest impact in terms of actual reduced visibility, in percentage terms, they are taking the largest impact.
Looking at the impact in terms of volume, below the biggest losers are the porn sites, i.e.
SEO Visibility as defined by Searchmetrics is :
how ‘visible’ a website is according to Google. This means, the frequency and manner in which this domain appears in search results. Searchmetrics determines SEO Visibility by sorting through millions of keywords from Google’s index. The most important factor is the number of search terms for which a particular site appears in search results, taken and weighed against the number of search queries for these keywords and their placings.
Porn and Gaming Industries Impacted – But Why?
The focus here is on links and how they are gained. Links from other websites to yours – aka back links.
Google is looking at how your website’s link profile changes over time. What websites are linking to your site and how fast you adding new links.
It’s not only the number of back links you are adding but how. Google preferred option on back links is that your site naturally attract links. These ‘editorial links’ are given to your site because your content deserves it. People find your site, read your content and deem it worth sharing.
When you start gathering links that are not editorial based, and your link building strategy has more to do with budget (buying links) rather than value (attracting links), then you’re likely seeing more of a negative impact from this update.
Porn and Gaming sites would traditionally be more associated with webspam and Google is clearly going after them in an effort to clean up the category.
Other categories are also impacted though, the Business and Blog/Community sites being two that are seeing substantial impact. Obviously not all sites in these categories are impacted. The sites impacted most in these categories are listed below:
What about your site? Have you seen an impact from the Penguin 2.0 update? Were you surprised to be impacted? Were you not aware of any spammy techniques you and your SEO agency were using? Let us know your experience.
SEO 2013 Trends – Latest Google Update and Impacts for Your Business
What’s on the horizon for website and business owners concerned that search engine optimization 2013 is going to be another turbulent year? What are the SEO 2013 trends in terms of updates to Google’s organic algorithm? What better place to look for answers that from Matt Cutts, head of Web Spam at Google.
Matt just released a video (May 2013) with an overview of what’s about to happen to the Google search algorithm this year. Before going into the changes, he reiterated what Google are looking for from site owners:
- Make a great site that users love
- A site that visitors want to tell their friends about
- A site that Users bookmark
- And sees a high percentage of returning visitors
The focus on visitors is clear and as long as this is your goal, then you are aligned with Google and should not be penalized in any of the upcoming algorithm changes.
So, back to the SEO 2013 changes and the main focus areas Matt covered are:
- Next generation of Penguin – Penguin 2.0, this update is focused on detecting blackhat web spam. Interesting to note that Matt believes that this update will be more comprehensive than the previous version. A quick summary of what Penguin 1.0 loves and hates again:
- Hates – low quality links, over optimized anchor text and keyword stuffing
- Loves – natural links based on relevant and unique content
- Advertorials – native advertising that violates Google’s quality guidelines. If a company is paying for an ad or coverage on a web page, then that ad or page should not be flowing Pagerank. Google makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with advertorials per se, but they should not flow PageRank and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ad is being paid for.
- Probably one of the best examples of what not to do it here was Interflora in the UK. Google called out Interflora for paying for advertorials and essential removed them from their organic index for a week – big revenue impact!
- User Focused Changes – Matt mentions they get a lot of user feedback on the quality of search results (I bet they do!), and he mentioned ‘Pay Day Loans’ as one example. He mentioned that this area and some others, historically more spammy areas (like porno) will be tackled with a couple of updates.
- This update will only impact on those areas that are a little more contested by spammy techniques.
- Upstream Spammers Link Value – This update will be focused on denying the value of spammers that generate volume spam links
- Mentioned also that they are working on more sophisticated link analysis – as long as your’re gathering your links in a natural way you should have no worries here. If you paid someone a couple of hundred dollars to get as many links as possible, well, you’re likely on Google’s radar!
- Hacked Sites – Google is trying to improve it’s detection of hacked sites and also improve communication to webmasters. There has been some confusion between hacked sites and sites that server up malware.
- This looks like an update to Google Webmaster Tools, so if you’re site has been hacked and you’re struggling to clean the mess p, some new updates here will make this process easier for you.
- Author Rank – better analysis and understanding of when someone is an authority in a particular niche area.
- Ok, so Matt did not say directly that this was an update to Author Rank, but it’s fairly clear that is you’re an authority on some subject that your content will get some type of boost in relevance.
- Panda Updates – They are looking at additional signals within Panda to refine their analysis of those sites that fall into a grey area in terms of compliance. Remember that when it comes to Panda, it
- Hates – Thin Content, Content Farms and High Bounce Rates
- Loves – Insightful, Relevant and Useful content, High Engagement
- Clustering of Search Results – this change is focused on showing only one cluster of results from the same site. So if you see a cluster of results from one site on page one, you’ll be less likely to see another cluster on page two or three.
- Essentially these are updates to their host clustering and host crowding parts of the algorithm
- Google Webmaster Tools Updates, along with the hacked sites update, they are also looking to give webmasters more diagnostic information on their sites
The video of Matt talking about SEO updates in 2013 is below:
Now you have it from the horses mouth as it were, how Google’s organic algorithm is changing and what best SEO practices 2013 you need to be focused on.
Are you making any changes in your SEO strategy ahead of these changes? Worried that your site and business is going to be impacted? Please share your concerns!