Google’s Panda update has sent shockwaves through the online industry and it seems that few are safe from its rampage – not even Microsoft.
Ciao, the price comparison and reviews site run by Microsoft, has been pushed down the search rankings as a result of the new algorithm. It lost a massive 94% of its SEO visibility after the Panda update, which seeks to improve the quality of content that’s displayed in the search listings, went live last week.

Ciao is one of many comparison, review and voucher code websites to suffer at the hands of the Panda.

Industry insiders are suggesting that Google’s attack on Ciao will only serve to fuel the fierce rivalry between Google and Microsoft.
Other sites to suffer a setback in the search rankings include Qype, which lost nearly 96% of its SEO visibility, and other notable sites such as Play.com, ehow.co.uk, hotfrog.co.uk and shoppingvouchers.co.uk.

Google as also reduced the visibility of sites that feature a large amount of advertising. There were some success stories in this week’s search rankings, however, with several sites celebrating a big rise in visibility. EBay.co.uk’s visibility increased by 42.1% whilst national-lottery.co.uk enjoyed a 39.5% rise. Other winners included econsultancy.com, this is money.co.uk and metro.co.uk.

Google designed its now infamous Panda update in order to push what it calls high-quality sites further up the search rankings whilst penalising those sites with unoriginal or repetitive content.

Google has revealed how it treats URL shorteners in terms of SEO in a new video released this week.

In the latest video in his YouTube series, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, took time to answer the following question, which was sent in by one of the many web professionals confused about Google’s new algorithm and how it impacts on URL shorteners: “Since Google is now using Twitter and Facebook links as ranking symbols, will custom URL shorteners be looked at as providing anchor texts for links?”

Cutts explained that custom URLs work in same way that most redirects do. This means that using custom URL shorteners or keyword-rich custom URL shorteners shouldn’t have a negative effect on SEO.

He said: “Custom URL shorteners are essentially just like any other redirects. ”If we try to crawl a page, and we see a 301 or permanent redirect, which pretty much all well-behaved URL shorteners (like bit.ly or goo.gl) will do, if we see that 301, then that will pass PageRank to the final destination.

“So, in general, there really shouldn’t be any harm to using custom URL shorteners in your SEO. The PageRank will flow through. The anchor text will flow through, and so I wouldn’t necessarily worry about that at all.”

The explanation will be of use to anyone who uses the likes of bit.ly and tiny url to direct surfers to their website on bookmarking and social networking sites.

As if Google hadn’t done enough recently to revamp the way SEO works with its search engines, it seems that more changes are on the way.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has released a YouTube video in which he suggests that the search engine giant may now turn its focus towards keywords in domain names.

The video, entitled ‘How important is it to have keywords in a domain name?’ sees Cutts explore the practice of using keywords in domain names and how a new algorithm might stamp it out for good.

Cutts says in the video: “We have looked at the rankings and the weights that we give to keyword domains, and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains.”

“We have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given two different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it.”

So if your SEO strategy relies too heavily on keywords on your domain names, you need to start thinking of your plan B – and fast …

Watch the video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI&feature=player_embedded

If you’re considering an investment in good quality web design, there’s one factor you can’t afford to overlook: search engine optimisation (SEO)!

SEO is often an after-thought to web design, and many business owners tend to think in terms of building the site first, and then thinking about how to optimise it. This is not a successful strategy and could lead to you being ranked lower down the all-important Google search rankings than you otherwise could be.

SEO and web design should go hand in hand. Effective SEO can drive traffic to your site. What’s the point of having a smashing website with no visitors to experience it?

With your joint SEO and web design hats on, you can consider a range of structural and usability issues that can make all the difference between a successful website and a flop – both from an end user and an employee/organisational point of view.

One of these issues is a really basic one: which content management system (CMS) to use. Your choice of CMS is paramount and can make the difference between smooth processes and happy employees and customers – or not! We’ve seen a range of CMS’s in use during our time and the ones that factor in SEO are usually the best. Get advice from an SEO specialist before you choose your CMS.

SEO can also help you to arrange how to link pages together in the best way, making navigation work effectively for both Google and your end users. Site structure is one of the most important things to get right and one of the most difficult things to change once it as been put in place, so it’s fundamental to get this right from the start.

Google has recently implemented a major overhaul to its search algorithm. The search engine behemoth has said it wants to promote sites with high-quality content, and to bury those with low-quality content.

In a post on the Google Blog, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Principal Engineer Matt Cutts defined low-quality sites as those which ”are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful”, while high-quality sites typically contain ”original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Google is thought to tweak its algorithm frequently, but the changed search results are often not significant enough to be picked up on. However, this latest move means that 11.8% of queries will get meaningfully different results from the search engine than before.

The overhaul by Google comes after releasing its Personal Blocklist extension for Chrome users on 14 February, which allows users to manually block low-quality websites. The search giant is still monitoring the feedback from Blocklist, but the Google blog post reported that 84% of ”the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension” are now addressed by the new change.

Google’s adapted results are currently only applicable to search results in the US, but plans to roll out the changes in the UK are underway.

Google has cracked down on major online retailer Overstock.com after perceived underhand search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While Google’s policy dictates that it does not comment on individual cases, the problem is rumoured to lie with Overstock offering a discount to students and educational institutions in exchange for embedding keyword links on their sites. According to experts, the .edu domain names of these academic institutions websites have enjoy greater prominence in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), since they are deemed more likely to display ‘authoritative’ content.

In addition, sites fare well in Google’s rankings if a significant number of other sites contain links to them – a manifestation of the crucial principle behind PageRank, Google’s original ‘scoring system’ for websites.

After recent criticism about the falling standard of Google’s search and its slow response in dealing with content farms, is this move as much a statement of intent as a decision to penalise a company that contravened Google’s guidelines?

Also, given the extensive publicity of the case, is the consequent media attention numbing the effects of Google’s penalties? Overstock has been relegated in Google’s SERPs, but the media attention may be driving more traffic than their search results ever did. Then again, it’s probably not the kind of publicity most companies want …

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns should be incorporated into an efficient whole to maximise a company’s online profile. According to the Online Marketing Summit held last week in San Diego, there has been a shift in balance between paid and unpaid listings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)and this has changed the playing field.

Given the now greater prominence of PPC adverts on SERPs, paid search ads are competing with organic listings more than ever and may deflect attention from natural results and relegate them further down the page.

This recent development in how PPC ads are displayed more or less amounts to a new set of market rivals, and businesses – especially those that compete in dense keyword fields – should bear this in mind when looking at their SEO analysis.

Businesses with smaller budgets may concentrate on one or the other through necessity, and both marketing forms have advantages in their own right – PPC is a great option for boosting a company’s online profile in a competitive keyword field, for example. But having a paid ad on a SERP increases the conversion-rate from the traffic brought about by an SEO listing – the perfect way in which SEO and PPC work together.

The two methods are also closely linked by choosing accurately targeted keywords – this approach fundamentally underpins both SEO and PPC – and, given the new-found prominence of PPC adverts, the significance in being among the top of the organic listings has intensified.

Yahoo! is struggling to cope with surging competition from Google and Facebook, with the web portal and search engine facing the prospect of making 1% of its 14,100 workforce redundant – just shortly after announcing 4% cuts in which whole departments were laid off.

Yahoo! was the subject of a failed take-over bid by Microsoft in the third quarter of 2008, and gross revenues have failed to grow from that point. After Yahoo! announced its redundancy plans, the company’s shares fell 4.4% in after-hours trading.

eMarketer, the business information service which analyses US online advertising spending, understood that Yahoo!’s display advertising share decreased last year to 16.2% from 16.5% in 2009 while – in the same period – Facebook accounted for 13.6% of display revenues, an increase from 7.3% in 2009. Yahoo! chief-executive Carol Bartz admitted that the company was not getting the click revenue it had hoped for.

Yahoo!’s current cuts contrast to Google’s fortunes, as the corporation implements an assertive recruitment plan to hire 1,000 new employees in Europe. In the same quarter that Yahoo!’s revenue had decreased by 4%, Google’s revenue had grown 26% to $8.4bn and its profits by 29% to $2.5bn.

Referring to Google’s further fourth-quarter profits of $2.54bn, outgoing chief-executive Eric Schmidt said: “We had a very, very good year and a very strong quarter”.

The rise of the smartphone has brought mobile web design into the spotlight. A couple of years ago, just about everybody checked out websites on a full-sized PC, but more and more people these days browse the web on their phones. That means your business needs a website that is fully optimised for mobile search and browsing.

Ask your web designer to test your existing website on all the popular mobile browsers. You need consider how to optimise it both for search and usability, just as you would for a traditional website.

Submit your site

Both Google and Yahoo! have created mobile versions of their site map applications. Submitting your mobile website means the mobile versions of the search engines are aware of its existence and you are more likely to appear in users’ mobile search results.

Watch those URLs

If you’re transferring content from your regular website make sure that all of the relevant URLs are adapted for the mobile market if you wish to be included in mobile search. Most search engines will only index relevant URLs, i.e. those that are configured for mobile browsing.

Configuration is key

When the mobile web bots start crawling your site, they will penalise any site that is configured incorrectly.  Some mobile websites can be difficult to index, therefore most major search engines have separate mobile crawlers. To optimise your mobile website for search make sure that all user-agents, including mobile ones, are allowed to access your site.

The general principles of SEO apply to mobile websites just as to traditional websites: design them in a way that is SEO-friendly, and adhere to the established best practices of the major search engines.

From March 2011 the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the self-regulatory body responsible for advertising standards in the UK, will extend its remit to SEO marketing campaigns.

The ASA will not have any say over organic search results or user-generated content, but will be able to monitor anything else that comes within the brief of an SEO-marketing campaign, such as paid-for links and undisclosed links within blog articles.

The Office of Fair Trading is already monitoring the use of paid for links, which must make it clear that they have been paid for, rather than achieve pole position organically and the ASA has confirmed that their main focus will be on analysing paid-for links to ensure there is total disclosure regarding the relationship between the advertiser and blogger.

There doesn’t appear to be a clear differentiation between what will come under the OFT remit and what the ASA will handle, which suggests that at this stage there is a large overlap between the two, although this may resolve itself before the ASA becomes involved in March.

It’s going to make things more difficult for those wishing to run successful SEO campaigns though, as they will have to contend with three entirely separate sets of rules – OFT, ASA and Google – governing their advertising, and what is fine under one set may well be in breach of another.

Industry watchers believe that ASA will mainly focus on big businesses who flout the rules of SEO advertising, but as an SME, it is worth being aware of the changes and checking out the ASA’s remit to ensure that your SEO campaigns remain relevant, and legal.