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How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

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

June 18, 2009 Evidence of Page Level Google Penalties? Richard at SEO Gadget showed how Google seemed to have penalized specific pages of his site from ranking in the Google index. The penalty seemed to be fair, in that there were nasty comments that slipped through his comment spam filter. The drop in traffic can be seen by the keyword phrases that page ranked well for. He noticed a ~70% drop in traffic for that phrase, which in his case resulted in a 15% drop in his Google traffic and a 5% drop in overall traffic. What I find extra fun is that a Google Search Quality Analyst, @filiber, tweeted: Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop http://bit.ly/JNAly (via @AndyBeard) <- interesting read! Of course that is not admission to this as a fact, but it wouldn't be too hard to believe that bad comments caused such a decline. Now, I don't think this would be considered a keyword-specific penalty, which most SEOs believe in, but rather a specific page being penalized. Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Up first is Rand Fishkin. Rand says he asked to be kicked off this panel because he doesn’t endorse buying links and he doesn’t do it anymore [Hear that, Google. SEOmoz doesn't buy links. SO KEEP MOVING.]. He offered to go last…but everyone else bullied the moderator into making him go first. Poor Rand. Always the innocent bunny in a pack of wolves. Unfortunately, the projector is broken so we have no screen. Something about a plug that doesn’t work.  So…we’re doing question and answer first while they send someone to try and fix it. I’ll throw the questions at the bottom.  Back to Mr. Fishkin. He tries to be very clear about his shift in position about paid links. He doesn’t think not buying links is right for everyone, it’s just what’s right for his clients and for SEOmoz.   Rand says he falls into the “Operator of Interest’ category. Meaning, he’s profiled for being an SEO. The problem with paid links: Algorithmic detection is getting better than ever before. Penalties are hard to diagnose. Manual link penalties are also a threat Google’s’ Webspam team invests (A LOT of) time and resources in shutting down effective paid links. [Agreed. And almost an unhealthy amount.] Competitors have significant incentive to report link spam. (Don’t be a rat.)

If we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting for a second, maybe we can openly talk about the bigger story of last week’s SMX Advanced. The one that has to do with Matt Cutts taking the stage during the You&A and openly stating that Google profiles SEOs like common criminals. I was naïve in my youth. I’d read blog posts that accused Google of “having it out” for SEOs and laugh. There’d be rants about how Google was stricter on sites that were clearly touched by an SEO and how SEOs were dumb for “self-identifying” with attributes like nofollow. At the time, I thought these people were insane. Now I know they were right. Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.

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.

If you have your site set to detect a visitor's location and show content based on that, I would recommend the following: Serve a unique URL for distinct content. For instance, don't show English content to US visitors on mysite.com and French content to French visitors on mysite.com. Instead, redirect English visitors to mysite.com/en and French visitors to mysite.com/fr. T hat way search engines can index the French content using the mysite.com/fr URL and can index English content using the mysite.com/en URL. Provide links to enable visitors (and search engines) to access other language/country content. For instance, if I'm in Zurich, you might redirect me to the Swiss page, but provide a link to the US version of the page. Or, simply present visitors with a home page that enables them to choose the country. You can always store the selection in a cookie so visitors are redirected automatically after the first time.

Google's policies aren't as inflexible as you're trying to portray. The same Google page you quote also says that intent ought to be a major consideration (just as when evaluating pages with hidden content). Also, why would Google's guidelines prevent you from using geotargeting without an immediate redirect? Just because you don't immediately redirect search users to a different page doesn't mean you have to ask for their zip code instead of using IP-based geotargeting.    Lastly, I don't think using such redirects from SERPs improves user experience at all. If I click on a search result, then it's because that's the content I'm interested in. It's very annoying to click on a search result and get a page completely different from the SERP snippet. And what about someone who is on business in a different country? Search engines already provide different language localizations as well as language search options to favor localized pages for a particular region. So if someone goes to the French Google, they will see the French version of localized sites/pages. If they're seeing the U.S. version in their SERP, then it's because you didn't SEO or localize your pages properly, or they deliberately used the U.S. version of Google. Don't second guess your users. Instead, focus on making sure that users know about your localized pages and can access them easily (by choice, not through force).5 days ago, 17:00:11 – Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate Bill Hunt Frank your spot on as usual. We still keep chasing this issue and as I wrote on SEW last year in my article on language detection issues http://searchenginewatch.com/3634625 it is often more of the implementation that is the problem than the actual redirect.    Yes, it is exactly cloaking (maybe gray hat) when you have a single gateway such as "example.com" and if the person comes from Germany they see the site in German language or English if their IP was in New York. Engines typically crawl from a central location like Mountain View or Zurich so they would only see the English version since they would not provide signals for any other location. Where you really get into a tricky area is if you set it so that any user agent from a search engine can access any version they are asking for and let them in yet a human is restricted - sort of reverse cloaking. If Mr GoogleBot wants the French home page let him have it rather than sending him to the US homepage.    With the growth of CDN's (content data networks) I am seeing more and more of these issues crop up to handle load balancing as well as other forms of geographical targeting. I have a long list of global, multinational and enterprise related challenges that are complicated by many of Google's outdated ways of handling kindergarten level spam tactics. Sounds like a SES New York session...

Importance of Ratings and Reviews From 2008 to 2009, usage of consumer ratings and reviews increased to 25 percent (+3) among IYP searchers and to 27 percent (+5) among general searchers. Additionally, people who use social networking sites for local business information are more likely to use consumer reviews (53 percent). It's interesting that, while overall usage of ratings and reviews is only 24 percent, its importance during the business selection process is 57 percent! Because users of ratings and reviews heavily rely on them to select a company to do business with, they should be a serious component of any marketer's online strategy.

Google extracted the word “misdemeanor” and defined it within the snippet. It’s also interesting to note that Google pulled in the British spelling of the word “misdemeanor” even though it is spelled the American style in the snippet."

Digital agencies are incredibly hard to sell; to do so, you need to have streamlined your process as much as possible

12-month net profit average and then times that by a multiple. Typically, a multiple will range between 20–50x of the 12-month average net profit for healthy, profitable online businesses. As you get closer to 50x you have to be able to show your business is growing in a BIG way month over month and that your business is truly defensible

EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.

The traffic valuation method can be useful for devising a value for a non-monetized site

a proper valuation of a website or internet business requires hard data, some financial analysis and most importantly, human judgement. This is unfortunately where automated website valuation tools cannot compete.

Earnings multiples are by and large the most popular valuation approach in small internet business M&A. There are two elements to the method that buyers should become experts in: defining profitability and identifying the factors that should influence the multiple