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Jennifer Williams

Tag Categories - 24 views

Hey Dale, I added that for you. If anyone else really thinks a new "tag" (category) is needed, post here to the forum. Don't forget to use these tags and make sure that they are spelled the same...

tags

Rob Laporte

Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings - 0 views

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    Oct 14, 2008 at 1:08pm Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings What do the Google searches; Orlando Hotels, Miami Discount Car Rental & Dallas Discount Car Rental have in common? The obvious answer is that they are all local searches on popular phrases in major metro areas. A less obvious answer is that like the infamous Denver Florist search last December, they all return seemingly authoritative OneBox results on popular geo phrase searches in a major market, as in the example below: Orlando Hotels or the Marriott The searches demonstrate clear problems with Google's Universal Local OneBox algorithm. Certainly, "major city + service/product" searches should return a broad range of consumer choices and not an authoritative OneBox that limits the view to one highlighted provider of the service. Google returns the OneBox result because the ostensible business name in the result supposedly mirrors the search phrase and in Google's opinion provides strong relevance in relation to the user query. The problem with the above result is that the business shown on the map is the Marriott Orlando Downtown, not "travel.ian.com." The Marriott's business listing has apparently been hijacked. In fact, all of the listings returned on these searches have apparently been "hijacked" via Google's community edit feature and the business name of the listing has been modified from the original, Marriott Orlando Downtown, to match the search phrase. The URL's of the listings have also been modified to direct users to an affiliate link on an appropriate site. How? Through the use of Google's community edit feature for local business listings. Google's community edit feature has become the playground of black hat affiliate marketers and is sorely in need of more security. Of interest in this regards is that many of these listings are for multinational corporations. These are not small independent business that are t
jack_fox

The January 2020 Core Update: Affiliate Sites, Pet Health, Trust Issues and Spam likely... - 0 views

  • Affiliate sites that did not properly disclose their affiliate links may have been affected.Truly excellent content appears to have been rewarded.Several elements of trust, as outlined in the Quality Raters’ Guidelines (QRG) were possibly reassessed.
  • A lot of ultra-spammy content may have been deindexed.
  • we believe that if something is outlined in the QRG, it means that Google is either measuring this algorithmically, or they want to be able to measure it algorithmically.
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  • some examples of things that we noticed on affiliate sites that saw improvements in overall keyword rankings with this update:Plain text to make it clear that the user is clicking on a link to take them to a sales page. Example: When I make this recipe, I love to use this blender which you can buy on Amazon.
  • Using an official widget from your affiliate partners.
Rob Laporte

SEM News, The Ultimate Guide To Search Marketing Optimization, & Broad Match Or Not? - 0 views

  • In depth: the ultimate search marketing optimization guide, part 1: the basics In last week's article, I mentioned a post called the AdCenter Optimization Quick Reference Guide on the adCenter Community Site by Shefali Singla. It has some basic tips and tricks (albeit Microsoft specific) for optimizing accounts. I remember having something similar when I worked at a search agency some years ago, so I thought I'd expand upon that listing, make it more platform generic, and hopefully create a good checklist of things to think about when doing your daily optimizing.
  • "As part of Google's recent acquisition of DoubleClick, the Performics affiliate network is now a part of Google. To consolidate our offerings, we will be phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta, and the product will be retired on during the last week of August. Pay-per-action campaigns and all related data will be removed from all AdWords accounts the last week of October." So, if you have any CPA business in AdWords right now, it would seem that you should make sure to back up all of your data immediately... A follow-up announcement on the AdWords blog unveils the next step: "The Google Affiliate Network, previously known as DoubleClick Performics Affiliate, has been in operation since 1998. Through the network, advertisers can open their ads to all publishers in the network, or select specific publishers that match their criteria. You can set a CPA for your entire campaign or establish custom payment schedules for specific publishers -- such as a higher CPA for a particularly optimal placement. The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense. As with AdSense, publishers must apply and be accepted into the network." You can check out the home page for the new Google Affiliate Network here. I think this will be a very smart media channel and I've already signed up to learn more and get started.
Rob Laporte

Small Business Alert: Claim Your Google Local Business Listing Before Someone Else Does! - 0 views

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    Oct 7, 2008 at 11:59am Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Small Business Alert: Claim Your Google Local Business Listing Before Someone Else Does! Imagine going to the Post Office to check your post office box to discover that all of your mail and receipts for the past few weeks had been forwarded to an unknown party. The Post Office informed you that there was no chance of getting your receipts back and if you wanted to start receiving your mail at your PO box once again, you needed to go over to their new business center and fill out some forms to claim your box. Just notifying the Post Office that it was your box was not enough to protect it in the future. Due to normal delays in processing it would be 2 weeks before you started receiving your mail and money again. If you're a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware: the same scenario described above could happen to your local search result info if you're not careful. The apparent hijacking of a large number of independent florists in Google Maps several weeks back is just such a story. Google, in the role of Post Office, allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature. For those of you unfamiliar with the incident here is a brief recap. The technique, apparently in widespread use in the locksmith, pay day loan and other industries, exploited weaknesses in Google's Community Edit capability. In this newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate mapspamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing businessâ ranking and reviews. The spammers, using these community edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, a new URL and ultimately the change name of the business. Apparently the smal
Rob Laporte

Page 3 - Textlinkbrokers.com & text-link-ads.com - SEO Chat - 0 views

  • Jarrod u seem pretty convincing here. I sent a mail to Brigette (ur account manager) last month and asked some few simple questions regarding the services. Not a single answer was convincing enough to buy your services and that's when i decided not to purchase links through u. Here are the excerpts: Quote: 1. What if we decide to discontinue your service in the future? Do we lose all the purchased back links in that case? TLB: If you rent links, they would come down. However, if you purchase products that are permanently placed, we do not take them down. But you don't place text links permanently. Even your permanent package gives only 6 months guarantee. Quote: 2. How we can secure the ownership of our purchased links? What if the webmaster removed the link we have purchased after some time or what if he moved the link to some other location or some other web page or changed the anchor text of the link or added large number of other external links (may be from our competitors) and thus reducing our link weight or what if he made our link no follow or what if he deleted the web page or shut down the website? Can we claim any compensation or refund in that case? TLB: Each of our products has different minimums and guarantees. Our permanent links that are included in the “Booster Package” have a 3 month guarantee. During this time we have a script that ensures your link stays live. If, for some reason, it were to come down we would replace it free of charge. Beyond that, you would have no recourse. However, if you purchase a permanent link package, they have a 6 month guarantee that works the same way. Do you call this a convincing reply? Quote: 3. How you can ensure us that you will not get our website penalized or banned by Google through your back links? What if our website gets penalized or banned by Google because of the link you have purchased for us? What is your policy in that case? TLB: We take every step possible to ensure that does not happen. We do things very differently than most link building companies. We do not use software, feeds or auto generated code of any kind. Each of our links are manually placed on 100% SEO friendly sites. Everyone who is accepted into our inventory goes through an extensive approval process. We deny applications daily for not meeting the large number of criteria our Quality Assurance team looks at. Once they are accepted into inventory, their information is not posted on the web site. They are not allowed to post anything on their site that says they are affiliated with us in any way. They are not asked to and not allowed to backlink to us under any circumstances. We take the protection of our Inventory Partners and our clients very seriously. If a potential client goes to our website to view inventory, they will only see general information such as a description, page rank, site age, number of outbound links, etc. The only way to view the actual url is to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That is only done after speaking with a Customer Service Representative or Account Manager who would create the list for you. So, as you can see, for years we have done everything we can do to protect our inventory partners as well as our clients. Our goals is to make you successful so that we can continue with a long term business relationship. If we do not protect our partners and they get penalized, your links will not pass SEO value. Therefore, we take that very seriously. Your so called forbidden inventory is just one report away from Google web spam team. Once identified, everyone associated with it will bust like a bubble. IMO that's the risk rand was talking about.
  • Himanshu160, I only wish that I could replicate myself, wouldn't that be great. I would be happy to discuss other options with you outside of the forums or get you to one of our senior account reps. I do not handle very many sales and this isn't the place for it. As for our perm links, most of those are placed on sites that we do not control thus it becomes too costly to guarantee them forever. We have found that if they have stayed up for 6 months the churn rate is fairly low after that.. The 3 month guarantee is being offered at a cheaper rate and usually only used in our bundles. Again if it has stayed live for 3 months the churn rate isn't going to be very high after that. There are advantages to being on our controlled inventory but also some disadvantages. With our controlled inventory we can make sure every link we place stays up, those tend to be the links we charge monthly, although we have done some custom perm links on controlled inventory. The disadvantage is that if someone reports one of our controlled sites to Google it can loose value, of course some sites are at more risk than others because they sell a lot of links or they sell homepage links in the sidebar etc.. We do have inventory that is cleaner than others and we can even do exclusive deals so that you are the only one on the site. It all depends on your budget. For most low competition keywords one of our cheap link bundles is all that is needed. Sure some of the links will go down over time, and yes Google may devalue some. However there are always new links being built to replace the few that go down so the results are a nice increase in rankings over time.
Rob Laporte

How to optimise your Amazon product listings - Vertical Leap - 0 views

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Rob Laporte

Google's December 2020 Core Update Themes - 0 views

  • The data and overall consensus point to Google’s December 2020 Core Update is it's one of the more impactful algorithm adjustments to hit the SERP over the past year or so.
  • I prefer to look at core updates almost from a pure content and UX perspective. For me, it’s about the specific pages Google swaps out more than it is a per domain analysis.
  • I am performing a qualitative analysis
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  • I am not making any sort of definitive statements
  • What moves me, however, is when I look at 100 keywords I start seeing the same content-oriented theme arise again and again.
  • What I’m trying to say, and as you’ll see in the examples I will get into later, is that the content that was more focused on the specific topic mentioned in the query did better. So while the "ultimate guide” here did get to the topic the query deals with, it was not exclusively about that topic.
  • This might call the entire strategy of creating these ultimate guides into question. Perhaps you can’t cast a wide net in that way anymore? Perhaps, the "ultimate guide” is only really suitable for people who actually want to get a more broad understanding of a topic? (Crazy to think, I know!)
  • The pages from Rocket Mortgage, on the other hand, is only about how much you need for a down payment:
  • So too is the page from Quicken Loans:
  • The Moral of the Story: If I want to understand how much money on average I need to put down when buying a house or what the various options generally are and what they mean long term, the CFPG page, .gov or not, doesn’t really help me. Its content is not specifically honed in on that particular topic. Again, we have another page that takes a sweeping look at a topic that lost rankings when the query reflected a more specific sort of intent!
  • What’s interesting here is that unlike the previous examples, where too much content resulted in the page’s topical relevance being diluted, the lack of such content here is what I think caused the ranking loss. Look, it’s not bad content. However, it’s pretty much the "general” kind of content you see here, there, and everywhere for all sorts of topics. Just compare it to what the page from the Credit Card Insider offers:
  • This just oozes depth. The third topic on the page alone (6 Ways to Pay Off…) rivals the depth shown on the CreditCards.com page! What differentiates this page from the "guides” shown in the other examples is that this is a guide that drills deep into one topic as opposed to trying to span multiple subtopics. Also, have a look at the formatting, it reminds me of what we saw on the Motley Fool’s page:
  • It’s deep content that is easy to digest. It’s not hard to see why Google swapped these two pages.
  • The Moral of the Story: Exact content relevancy is not only about what topic you talk about. You can be topically aligned but it has to offer real information to the user. It’s even better when that information is digestible. In other words, if you want to rank for a keyword with topic specificity it might be better to create an "ultimate guide” that drills deep into the topic itself versus trying to cover every subtopic under the sun in order to try to rank for more topics with one piece of content.
  • The by-line really sums it up. It tells you this article is about the fact that you most likely won't get addicted to painkillers, but it’s definitely possible so here’s the scoop. To me, it’s far more in line with the average user’s intent of learning about the risks of addiction versus understanding the fine difference between addiction and dependence. It’s the same story with the WebMD page:
  • The Moral of the Story: Again, the issue here is not how authoritative or how substantial the content is. There is no doubt that content from the NIH is both substantial and authoritative. The issue here again seems to relate to Google being better able to show content that is specifically relevant to the nature of the query.
  • First things first, the page doesn’t speak to the query directly. While in the process of learning the difference between sadness and depression one could understand the signs of depression that route is certainly indirect. You could argue that the query how to tell if you have depression could be taken as ‘how do I know if I am just sad or depressed?’ but that really doesn’t seem to be the essential intent here. That topical line (i.e., sadness vs. depression) would most likely produce its own unique query (i.e., am I sad or depressed). From the content shown on the WebMD page, it appears that Google thinks of the intent as understanding the symptoms of depression:
  • The WebMD, in contradistinction to the MHA page, speaks to the "plain meaning” of the query’s intent… how can you tell if you’re suffering from depression? Aside from that, the WebMD page offers a bit more in terms of substance. While it doesn’t go into great detail per se, the WebMD page does offer a pretty comprehensive list of items. Compare that to the MHA page which, if you read it, is a bit thin and lacks tremendously in offering much of any details (even a basic list as seen on the WebMD page). The Moral of the Story: Relevancy is a two-pronged equation (at minimum). It requires the content to be topically focused on the one hand as well as substantial on the other
  • I’ve saved the best for last. This is my favorite example that I came across when diving into the December 2020 Core Update. I mean, for crying out loud, we’re talking about the CDC losing rankings in favor of a .org domain I never heard of. How could this be? Let’s understand the intent of the query. If I were searching for this it would be because I found something on my body that I thought might be skin cancer. If I could be so bold, I would imagine that this is why most of us would search for this term. I wouldn’t, and again I imagine most people in most instances wouldn’t search for this in order to understand if regular screening is officially recommended or not. Yet, that is what the CDC page is about:
  • I hate to make assumptions, but I would also think that someone running this query is most likely not interested in the common tests and methods doctors use to determine if skin cancer is present. Yet, this is what the page from Cancer.net focuses on:
  • Again, I would search for this term if I saw something weird on my body that made me think "Holy crap, do I have skin cancer?”. The page from the AOCD is entirely made for people on the verge of freaking out at the possibility of having skin cancer:
  • To me, when you see this page relative to the pages from Cancer.net and the CDC is painfully obvious why this page got the ranking boost. The Moral of the Story: Again, I think what has transpired here is painfully obvious. Google has looked past the immediate authority of some of the pages here and has more heavily considered how relevant the content is to the query. As with the cases I have shown earlier, Google is rewarding content that speaks in a highly-focused way to the intent and nature of the query. What Was the December 2020 Core Update About? Are you expecting a one-liner that definitively characterizes the December 2020 update? You’re not going to get one from me.  This update, like any other, certainly included a whole plethora of different "algorithmic considerations” and themes. That said, from where I sit, while other core updates did things to help put the most authoritative content at the top of the SERP, this update seemed to me as being more about pure relevancy. Updates of the past have done things to weed out sites using a marketing tone within YMYL informational content or have rewarded sites that put the right content ahead of their affiliate pursuits. All of that, while part of relevancy, speaks more to a need for something authoritative at the top of the SERP. Seeing so many .gov pages drop in favor of pages from sites like Healthline or WebMD seems to point to the update rewarding relevancy to the nth degree. Perhaps Google felt as if it had "authority” at the top of the SERP in order, paving the way for a focus on relevance? Who knows. All I can say is that I personally have not seen such a strong focus on pure relevance on page one of the SERP. Content Creation Takeaways Practically speaking, I think the era of broadly reaching pages is quickly coming to an end. I think that has been the case for a while. However, seeing Google pull pages off page one of the SERP because they deal with multiple subtopics is a new level, at least for me. It shows that you have to create content that talks about one topic and one topic only (unless the keyword reflects a specific desire for a broader survey of a topic). I wonder if the idea of having one ultimate guide so as to win numerous keywords should be replaced with multiple posts where each post deals with one specific topic or subtopic. (If you do that, please don’t create thin content, that is not what I am advocating for.) It’s a rather logical concept. As Google gets better at understanding content it is going to prefer highly-focused content around a specific topic to that which is of a more broad nature unless the query specifically shows intent for a general survey of a topic.
Rob Laporte

Google's March 2022 Product Reviews Update (PRU) - Findings and observations from the a... - 0 views

  • sites should consider providing links to more than one retailer to purchase products
  • against Amazon’s TOS
  • my recommendation is to link to more than one seller, if possible (to future-proof your site), but it’s not a requirement as of now
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  • provide evidence such as visuals, audio, or other links of your own experience with the product, to support your expertise and reinforce the authenticity of your review
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