Group items tagged

Paid links are always controversial. I found it interesting that "direct link purchases from individual sites/webmasters" was considered by your panel to be the fifth most effective link building tactic yet "link acquisition from known link brokers/sellers" was the second highest negative ranking factor. Any thoughts on this? Does this reflect the fact that even though paid links in general have a bad reputation, they're still widely employed? I think that's correct. Link buying and selling is still a very popular activity in the SEO sphere, and while the engines continue to fight against it, they're unlikely to ever weed out 100% of the sites and pages the employ this methodology. Link acquisition via this methodology is incredibly attractive to businesses and something the engines have also instilled as a behavior - with PPC ads, you spend more money and get more traffic. It's not unnatural that companies would feel they can apply the same principles to SEO. While I think the engines still have a long way to go on this front, I also believe that, at least at SEOmoz, where our risk tolerance is so low, the smartest way to go is to play by the engines' rules. Why spend a few hundred or few thousand dollars renting links when you could invest that in your site's content, user interface, public relations, social media marketing, etc. and have a long-term return that the engines are far less likely to ever discount.

1 Week Ago AccuraCast vbmenu_register("postmenu_141249", true); This is just a forum. Opinions expressed here are not official!   Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: London, UK Posts: 115 Google Shares Mobile Search Volumes After more than 2 years filled with numerous requests for more stats on mobile search volumes and click estimates, Google has finally shared this data via a rather inconspicuous feature on their new Keywords Tool. Google shares mobile search volumes - accuracast.com/search-daily-news/accuracast-7471/google-shares-mobile-search-volumes-for-the-first-time/ This is really BIG for all mobile advertisers! Finally we can put a number and a value to mobile search advertising, and make a stronger business case to prospective clients.

For publishers, this could of course mean a drop in organic traffic from Google if it is no longer showing your in-depth or evergreen content as often or as prominently as it once did for certain queries.For others, such as big brands like Amazon that attract press coverage, it could mean more traffic to their own properties and their social networks.And, depending on the coverage that ranked, it could help some in the brand reputation department.

What Google said. “When relevant, we do and will continue to surface high-quality evergreen content as part of the overall search results,

According to many small businesses, they are being extorted; either they use Yelp’s advertising services, or face reputational ruin that will force their businesses to close.

We’re not saying businesses aren’t being extorted, but there isn’t currently a law that says someone has a right NOT to be extorted.” That’s hardly a vindication of Yelp’s business practices.

Yelp has lately been on a spree to buy back its outstanding stock. The buyback not only boosts the stock price, it makes Yelp’s board less vulnerable to the kind of activist investors that recently ousted infamous CEO Travis Kalanick from Uber’s board. So the prospects of forced changed happening at Yelp anytime soon are dim.

Don’t set up a review kiosk in your place of business to ask for reviews. A single IP address being shared amongst multiple reviews on a given platform can lead to those reviews being flagged and removed.

Don’t narrow your focus to a single platform. Diversity in where your business has reviews posted is insurance against reputation loss should something happen to your reviews on any one of the platforms.

When a customer is willing to share an email, follow up within a few days to ask them to write a review about their experience. Give them a choice of platforms so that they can pick their favorite.

The changing distribution of middle star reviews means that it’s more critical than ever for businesses to create a review program to solicit a larger volume of reviews from people who may not have thought to leave one before.

BrightLocal’s 2020 edition of their annual survey to over 1,000 users in the US, 79% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. However, if we look at the overall trend, we can see that 10% fewer respondents trust online reviews compared to 2014.

Users are more web-savvy than ever, and they can tell when there are suspicious patterns in reviews–like when a business has all 5-star reviews that were submitted all within the same time period. However, it also means that consumers can sort through potentially negative or fake reviews as one-offs when one or two individuals were perhaps having a bad day and took it out on your business. 

To tell Google not to follow or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked, set the value of the rel attribute of a link to nofollow or ugc. Nofollowing a link means adding rel="nofollow" or a more specific attribute such as ugc inside the link's anchor tag, as shown here:

Use the HTML <img> or <picture> elements