Google Panda: Forcing Businesses to Create Better Content

If  you haven’t paid any attention to the news around Google Panda but use content to market your business, here’s what you need to know. Google recently changed the way it ranks websites with content in search engine results. So all the dozens of article directories (also known as content farms) are no longer ranking at the top of search results. If you’ve been using article directories to increase your ranking, you’re now wasting your time.
Essentially, Google now looks at the quality of every site that links to yours and determines its value. Of course, Google’s secret formula will never be known, but what we can glean is that it doesn’t like:

• Sites with a lot of unrelated content
• Sites with lots of ads
• Sites that don’t appear to be moderated
• Sites that are overstuffed with keywords
• Sites that link to many others without reason

You know those sites when you visit them. And while many companies bemoaned these new rules, they’re actually really good rules, if you know how to play the game.

Rule 1: Deliver Good Content
This should be the only rule, honestly. If you’ve been mindlessly churning out articles with little value and lots of keywords, you need to change your strategy. Instead, focus on what your customers want to know. This could be how-tos on your products, frequently asked questions, industry commentary, company news or op-ed pieces. Find out what pains your customers have, then ease them by providing useful content.
For example, you came to Small Business Trends because you were looking for information related to small businesses. You (we hope) find the content useful, and might even come back to see what other good stuff we’ve got going on. You can do the same thing we do on this blog on your own website. Be the expert in your industry and drive traffic to your site through content.
Rule 2: Keep It Fresh
Google loves new content, so don’t write one article and think you’re done. Create a strategy for putting out several articles a week and determine what you’ll write about. You might ask different people in your company to write on their areas of specialty to keep it diverse, but still relevant.
Rule 3: Invest in a Good Writer
Most CEOs don’t have the time or ability to write awesome content week after week. So don’t skimp. Hire a freelance writer or agency specializing in blogs and articles to help if you don’t have someone on your staff who can do it. Look for someone with experience in writing blog posts. You want a pro to drive traffic to your site.
Rule 4: Share Your Content
Your content’s only as good as the people who read it, and if that includes just your mother, it’s not doing its job. Set up an RSS feed from your blog; publish links to your posts on social media; share links in your company emails. Eventually people will find your content on their own, but you need to help them get there.
Look at Google Panda as a positive change that will help you rise above competitors who were doing a bad job of content marketing. If you follow the new rules, you’ll be able to effectively use content to get new customers.

Editor: Alex Rojas writes articles related with technology, social media and marketing. Sponsored by Costa Rica Hotels, Motor de reservas en linea and Travel to Costa Rica

The Most Powerful Secret In Facebook Ads

Yesterday we discussed the trick to growing a Facebook fan base — to place the like button everywhere, get folks to like everything, as treat your fan base like an email list. Now that you have the initial set of fans, here’s where the fun begins.

Facebook has 3 types of connection targeting: users who are fans, users who aren’t fans, and friends of fans. It’s this last option that is amazing– so awesome that I’m afraid public mention of it may cause Facebook to remove it. And that’s why we keep testing, plus don’t reveal all our tips, but I digress.
Let’s consider a poker site– the National League of Poker. When we target only fans of the page, Facebook gives us an audience of 2,060 people:

The actual fan count is 2,894, but that’s because Facebook’s estimate are delayed and we’re automatically filtering by US 18+. By using the first connection targeting option, we can continue to nurture those folks who have become fans. As a marketer, you know that you want to say something different to folks who already know you versus those who don’t, right? So why is it that Facebook advertisers treat everyone the same? When you use the first connection option, you’re trying to move people from the interest stage to either desire or action. You should not be trying to generate awareness with these folks who are already fans. Note that how our messaging is quite different than “Learn how to play poker!”
If you already are a fan of the page, the like button won’t show up, by the way. It will just say “You like this ad/page”– and if you have other friends who like it, they’ll show up, too. Sometimes the unlike button shows- not sure what governs when it shows. There are so few advertisers that are sending traffic to Facebook pages and also using connection targeting that it’s hard to tell.
Finally, this is what you’ve been waiting for. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. So the 2,060 fans allow us to reach 304,800 people.

This particular example works out to 148 friends per fan. The larger the base, the smaller the number of friends per user. It’s partly that your initial users are more likely to be early adopters and have more fans in general. But it’s also that the more fans you have, the greater the chance of overlap between them, such that the unduplicated audience decreases. When you have over 500,000 fans, then your factor of reach vs fans may be only low double digits. While decreased reach may appear bad, this is actually VERY good, since it means that each time you show the ad, it’s showing MULTIPLE people below providing endorsements. Awesomeness on Facebook = maximizing PEER PRESSURE!
Consider an ad for a pizza restaurant that says they have the best pizza in town. Yawn. That’s what 99% of advertising is about– in fact, pretty much all advertising outside of Facebook is like this– we just tune it out. Now imagine the same ad, but below it, your friend says they like it. Might you trust the claim a bit more– perhaps even be more likely to drop in and order pizza the next time you drive by the place?
How do you think this may affect the CTR as well as the conversion rates?
What if we could say this to 304,800 people– showing each of them an ad that had their particular friend’s endorsement below it?
What if you got clever with your ad copy to make outrageous claims?

By the way, these are fake examples– you’ll have to see what you can get by Facebook’s ad review team. The winning psychology: if you’re doing retargeting (remarketing) on Google, then you can use similar ads in your direct fan and friends of fans (FOF) targeting. For example, if someone has abandoned their shopping cart, you can say “Hey, why didn’t you buy? Here’s 10% off now to make it worth your while!” And you can put a retargeting pixel on your Facebook page, but that’s something to discuss in a post by itself.
Now consider the reach you have when you multiply your fan base by 150 and hit each of those folks with ads that have endorsements attached. The Las Vegas metro has 606,460 people on Facebook.

UNLV has 14,151 fans of our page of their 3 Las Vegas stadiums. We can cover over 50% of Las Vegas Facebook users with an endorsed ad. Consider if you’re a dentist in a suburb of 100,000 people. You need only a fan base of 500 people to effectively dominate your town with endorsed (FOF) ads– to have more than 50% coverage of a geo-graphic area.
Now before you go crazy with FOF targeting, consider when it works and when it doesn’t:

• B2B: Nearly a complete FAIL. Why? When you do FOF targeting for an electronics manufacturer targeting design engineers, you end up targeting that design engineer’s family and friends who are decidedly NOT interested in the latest data sheets on your 16 bit transformer assemblies. For B2B, use workplace and interest targeting to hit their place of employment and title.
• Consumer products and entertainment: ABSOLUTELY! Targeting the friends of of your fans is highly likely to result in something interesting to them. Ask yourself what percentage of a user’s fans will be interested in their endorsement of a new movie, their favorite brand of soap, or whatever.
• Local: This is the goldmine of Facebook ads. People’s Facebook friends tend to be people they see and interact with in real-life. There is a high likelihood that you can leverage that fan’s recommendation broadly across their friend base. You can make it even better by adding a geographic and age filter, so you’re not showing ads to old college alumni or children, depending on what your business does. BlitzLocal has asserted that Facebook is the sleeping giant of local, because of the wealth of trusted information available and effectiveness of targeting. We don’t believe this will replace Google, but rather, augment it.

By the way, users who are being hit with this targeting aren’t aware that the advertiser is doing so– unless you are as blatant as the example I’ve provided. The ad itself doesn’t show what targeting criteria was used to match them to the ad. Note to Facebook: this would be a cool feature– and it would assuage many of the privacy concerns, where users are afraid that anything they have on their profile or interactions on Facebook is fair game for ad targeting.
There is a third targeting option, which is to exclude folks who are fans. Negation targeting matters only when your fan base is large enough that you risk showing awareness ads to folks who are fans.
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER
Few people realize that Facebook plays at all points in the conversion funnel– they simplistically believe that Facebook is just display advertising with social elements, and that Google is for conversion. It’s true that Google is primarily demand harvesting and that Facebook is more towards demand generation.

(image courtesy of Facebook)

More accurately, because you can target whether people are totally new to you, are connected to someone who does know you, or knows you– that lets you separate out your messaging and conversion paths. Most marketers are familiar with the AIDA funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action). And you can see how clearly Facebook’s ad system allows you to hit people at each of these points.

Advertisers inherently understand that word of mouth has been the most powerful marketing vehicle– previously unmeasurable. These ad options on Facebook, which we’ve only superficially covered here, allow not only for the measurement of word of mouth, but the aggressive amplification of it. Social media is inherently about leveraging trust to promote your business.
Was it Mark Twain who said something like “The key to success is to be genuine…. Fake that and you have it made!” Seriously, when you have a solid brand, you get an amazing boost from advertising on Facebook– the investment you’ve made in your brand means that users are already aware of who you are, are more likely to like your page, and are more willing to endorse you– whether they know it or not.
In our next article, we’ll discuss the next phase of your Facebook campaigns– how to manage your pages effectively such that you build upon the principles we’ve discussed so far. What if your company has multiple brands and multiple products in multiple countries. Do you create one page for each combination of country, product, artist, and language? Maybe have one page per country and then separate tabs for each product, so local fans can interact? Or maybe one page per product with tabs by country? The answer is none of the above and we’ll explain why.

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a firm specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought after speaker and 
author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

Editor: Alex Rojas writes articles related with technology, social media and marketing. Sponsored by Costa Rica Hotels, Motor de reservas en linea and Travel to Costa Rica

Otro cambio en el algoritmo, se anuncia Google Panda 2.2

Cuando todavía no hemos acabado de leer el artículo sobre Qué es Google Panda y como afecta el SEO actual, Matt Cutts (de Google) ya ha anunciado en una conferencia en Seattle que están por llegar varios cambios en el algoritmo actual con el lanzamiento del llamado Google Panda 2.2más pronto que tarde.

Debido a las quejas de varios bloggers y webmasters sobre la pérdida de posicionamiento de su contenido original en relación con quién se lo había copiado, que incluso, en muchos casos, se encontraba por delante del propio autor del mismo, han decidido hacer alguna que otra modificación. Estos cambios pretenden diferenciar, y penalizar más fuertemente a las webs que “raspan” el contenido original.

Otro punto tratado ha sido el de eliminar las “trampas” utilizadas por algunos para posicionarse mejor, como, por ejemplo, textos ocultos con palabras clave. Siempre se ha dicho que Google atacaba estos métodos, pero, por lo anunciado por los mismos, ahora se pretende acabar definitivamente con los malos usos y técnicas de sospechosa moralidad.

Se ha anunciado además, que, con Panda 2.2, también se volverán a posicionar correctamente gran parte de las webs y blogs de autores originales que se habían visto negativamente afectados con las versiones previas del algoritmo.

Por supuesto, para llegar a la versión 2.2 de Panda, el algoritmo de Google ha tenido que ir pasando por la 1.0, la 2, la 2.1… pero no ha anunciado a partir de cuando se ejecutará la versión 2.2 final (por ahora..). Para no perdernos con la historia de las actualizaciones recapitularemos un poco:

• 24 de febrero de 2011: Google lanza el nuevo algoritmo llamado Panda (versión 1.0). Este algoritmo penaliza las granjas de enlaces, cosa que afectó al posicionamiento de, aproximadamente entre un 10 y un 12% de las webs de Estados Unidos únicamente. Digamos que se encontraba en su versión más light.

• 11 de abril de 2011: Google Panda se lanza a las búsquedas a nivel mundial, se trata de la versión de Panda 2.0. A parte de la penalización a las granjas de enlaces, se empiezan a bloquear algunos datos en las búsquedas. Un buen número de páginas a nivel mundial se ven afectadas por este cambio. Digamos que ahí Google dió el gran paso, o al menos, el que más hemos notado nosotros.

• Entre el 11 de abril y el día de hoy, se dice que han habido pequeños arreglos de la versión 2.0, lo que sería la 2.1, aunque son mínimos y han afectado a sitios muy concretos, por lo que los demás, ni los hemos notado.

Los expertos dicen que lo más gordo ya ha pasado con los cambios de febrero y abril, y que las siguientes modificaciones que se prevén (al menos para este año) serán mucho menos significativas. Aún así, estaremos pendientes de nuestro posicionamiento (y del de otras páginas) para comprobar los cambios que vayan sucediendo con la versión inminente 2.2, o con la 3.0, que podemos estar convencidos de que también llegará.

Después de que nos entrara el miedo en el cuerpo con todos los cambios que están llegando y los que están por llegar, hay que recordar que el algoritmo que utiliza Google siempre ha estado cambiando, aunque no llevara nombres tan comerciales ni creara tanto revuelo.

Editor: Cristian Segura writes articles related with technology, social media and marketing. Sponsored by Costa Rica Hotels, Motor de reservas en linea and Travel to Costa Rica

Naciones Unidas declara el aceso a Internet como un derecho humano

La Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas ha declarado el acceso a Internet como un derecho humano por ser una herramienta que favorece el crecimiento y el progreso de la sociedad en su conjunto.

El uso de Internet se está convirtiendo en una herramienta imprescindible para la libertad de expresión. Más que una posibilidad de comunicación, se está convirtiendo en una necesidad debido al periodo de globalización que hoy se vive.

Por ello, la ONU considera también que debería ser un derecho universal de fácil acceso para cualquier individuo y exhorta a los gobiernos a facilitar su acceso.

"La única y cambiante naturaleza de Internet no sólo permite a los individuos ejercer su derecho de opinión y expresión, sino que también forma parte de sus derechos humanos y promueve el progreso de la sociedad en su conjunto", indicó el Relator Especial de la ONU, Frank La Rue, en un comunicado de prensa recogido por la CNN.

Según La Rue, los gobiernos "deben esforzarse" para hacer Internet "ampliamente disponible, accesible y costeable para todos". Asegurar el acceso universal Internet "debe ser una prioridad de todos los estados".

Por otro lado, la organización se ha mostrado contrariada por las medidas opresoras de algunos gobiernos que violan el acceso a Internet. Desde gobiernos occidentales como Francia con su ley Hadopi hasta países con dictaduras como modelo de poder, aplican hoy en día medidas restrictivas al acceso a Internet.

El gobierno chino ha bloqueado el acceso a páginas como Facebook, Twitter, Youtube y LinkedIn e incluso ha creado su propio buscador que filtra y censura la búsqueda de palabras como: revolución jazmín, democracia, entre muchas otras.

Son muchos los gobiernos que han bloqueado el acceso a Internet. Egipto lo hizo durante las revueltas sociales que terminaron con la dictadura de Hosni Mubarak. Irán bloqueó algunas páginas de activistas que llamaban a una manifestación y muchos otros países han seguido este ejemplo.

La ONU afirma que el acceso a la web debe mantenerse y es especialmente valioso "en momentos políticos clave como elecciones, tiempos de intranquilidad social o aniversarios históricos y políticos", según recoge la CNN.

Por último, la ONU señala que Internet, como un medio para ejercer el derecho a la libertad de expresión, sólo puede servir a estos propósitos si los estados asumen su compromiso por desarrollar políticas efectivas para lograr el acceso universal".

Fuente: http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/06/09/navegante/1307619252.html


Editor: Cristian Segura writes articles related with technology, social media and marketing. Sponsored by Costa Rica Hotels, Motor de reservas en linea and Travel to Costa Rica

Is Your Web Site SEO and Social Media Friendly?

Numerous companies are losing vast amounts of revenue due to their web sites doing poorly in the search engines. Web sites that are not easy to find via search miss out on attracting new customers as well as repeat customers that use Google to navigate sites they already know about. Is the same true for web sites that are not social media friendly?

People discover new sites through search, but also through recommendations made via email, word of mouth and through social media content. Making a web site social media friendly will facilitate the saving and sharing of content with others, extending reach and facilitating engagement.

Consumers find new content via social networking sites ranging from links on Twitter to Facebook to their favorite blogs. Content creation and links that occur as an outcome of social media participation can provide positive signals to search engines and affect search visibility. Making a site more social media friendly will expand the opportunity for content to be discovered directly and indirectly.

Search is the most efficient and effective way for consumers to discover content. Companies that want to take advantage now of where trends in information publishing, discovery and marketing would do well to ensure their content strategy factors in the value of search as well as social media.

Core concepts to understand search engine friendly web sites includes:

* Crawlable content
* Site organization
* Internal links
* Keyword usage – content optimization
* Code/HTML optimization
* Inbound links from external web sites

The notion of “search engine friendly” basically means making a web site easy for search engines to find, make a copy of, understand and rank in search results. Search engines are by no means perfect, not even Google. Making web sites more search engine friendly means making up for shortcomings in the search engines’ ability to crawl, index and sort web content.

This is why SEO is an important asset to the performance of natural seasrch results. All major search engines invest in continued improvements in order to achieve a better search experience for users. Some of the things that SEOs have traditionally done for web site publishers are now handled automatically by search engines such as many of the features included in Google’s Webmaster tools.

Improving a web site’s availability to search engines as well as keyword usage and links (internal/external) helps the search engine provide better search results to consumers. It’ also helps companies marketing their products and services to attract more qualified buyers. Not only can web site traffic increase, but the right kind of visitors will self segment themselves by the keywords they use to search.

Many companies have the search issue handled or at least they’re on their way. A recent study by eMarketer shows B2B companies rate Search Marketing as one of their top marketing investments for 2009. A poll run on Online Marketing Blog with well over 500 responses also ranked SEO as a top digital marketing tactic for 2009.

Standard search is evolving but it’s not enough to remain competitive to focus on standard Search Engine Optimization tactics. The social web is the web of the near future and real time search results through services like search.twitter.com or even the new sort by recency option within Google are giving consumers more control over the freshness of the information available to them.

The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results demands that web site owners and content publishers make their web sites both search and social media friendly.

Here are a few ways web sites can make themselves more “Social Media Friendly”:

* Fresh content – To play the search and social media game, a web site must be in the content publishing business. Search engines and participants of the social web respond favorably to the signals created from frequent updates. Participation in off site social channels can be brought into the corporate web site through RSS or widgets providing web site visitors access to additional forms of information and interaction with the company.

* Social content – Not all of a company’s social web participation needs to happen offsite with third party tools. The addition of a blog, reviews, forum or even a social network to the company web site can provide intersted consumers opportunities to interact with other brand fans as well as the company.

* Easy to share – Besides the ability to contribute to conversations happening on a corporate web site, there’s a tremendous opportunity and benefit to making it easy for site visitors to share that content with others. Many sites offer “share this” options that make it easy for readers to submit the page being viewed to popular social bookmarking and social news web sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and email are also popular.Making it easy for web site visitors to share interesting content (web pages, video, images) facilitates the word of mouth recommendations people make in real life, except when done online, they become searchable assets.

The advantages of incorporating social features include improved online word of mouth, stimulating conversations with prospective customers and advocates and expanded market reach. The question is, are web marketing teams incorporating a social media strategy with their overall search marketing and vice versa?

Are you making your web site search engine friendly for the social web?

You can find 5 ways to make your web site search engine and social media friendly in this companion blog post at Mashable.
Fuente: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/06/is-your-web-site-seo-and-social-media-friendly/

Future Trends for Marketers in Search & Social Media

The intersection of SEO and social media marketing continues to gain traction amongst online marketers everywhere you look in the industry. As an example, the enthusiastic interest in our recent compendium of blog posts, Essentials of Integrating SEO & Social Media. I think most experienced marketers “get” that SEO and Social Media functions are less effective as distinct channels within a marketing program and work better as a coordinated effort.

Integration of Social and SEO makes sense for a variety of reasons when considering evolving consumer information discovery behaviors. Even so, I think a lot of companies are looking for direction and what’s next. This week Brandon Prebynski and I chatted on his Webtrends.TV show about the mix of search and social media and one area we discussed that I think is worth sharing here is about future direction.

There are two areas of focus (out of many) I think are worth considering with future of search and social media for marketers. First, is the technology that powers the search and social media experience for consumers. The second is the logistics of implementing integrated search and social media campaigns within a company.

On the technology side, you have search becoming increasingly influenced by social signals. For example, Google and Bing are getting feed data from Twitter and Facebook. If you’re logged in to Google, your search results can be annotated by things your friends have shared on Quora or Flickr. Erik Sherma recently covered the award to Facebook of a patent for curated search that combines any type of search engine results with the popularity of each result among members of a user’s social network which shows another direction social sites are taking to make search more social.

True social search is something the engines have been trying at for a long time, but now the momentum Facebook has with 600 million users gives them a lot of data and an audience with which to experiment. From a technology standpoint I think we’ll see an increasing level of influence and integration of social based signals on traditional search activity. The race for true social search is between search engines like Google adding social signals and features vs. social giants like Facebook adding more significant search functionality to their platforms. Who will win is up to consumers.

Logistically within companies we’ll see less silos between search marketing and social media functions. While it’s been up for debate a while, many companies’ social media is managed by Public Relations and SEO is managed by Marketing.

There’s an growing convergence of responsibilities between PR and Marketing. The value of relationships and influence are increasingly appreciated by online marketers. Alternatively, PR and communications professionals are beginning to value search based discovery as they look for ways to communicate more value for their efforts.

PR departments are already creating content, why not make it easy for their target audience (journalists, analysts, bloggers and direct consumers) to find via search? Google sites alone handle 88 billion queries per month – that’s an overwhelming quantity of behavior and too significant to ignore.

As part of the effort to improve the connection between searchers and content, people in the social media content creation business would do well to consider things like a keyword glossary when creating their content marketing strategy and editorial plans.

Search marketers have traditionally used social media as distribution channels for promoting content to drive a flood of traffic. Many of those SEOs are beginning to appreciate the equity in relationships (community) that they can build through social channels so they don’t have to work so hard creating new connections every time they have a new link bait campaign.

Mastering the convergence of SEO and Social Media with Content Marketing starts with an appreciation of how consumers prefer to discover, consume and share information online.

Google’s Panda update is yet another reminder to focus on content that engages. Marketers that make great content easy to find via social channels and links will be rewarded with even more relevant traffic through search engines like Google and Bing.

What can companies do to become more effective search and social media marketers? The simple answer is to develop an approach to online marketing that focuses on customer centric content that’s keyword and social media optimized. Follow how content is consumed and shared – make it easy to do those things while monitoring and engaging to develop networks and relationships. Continue to keep business outcomes in mind and be thoughtful about how success will be measured short and long term.

As many companies deal with figuring out how search and social media will work together, I am curious what your experiences have been?

* How important is the integration of search and social in your company’s current marketing mix?
* Are you incorporating SEO and social media efforts more or less since last year?
* What positive outcomes have you seen as a result of incorporating SEO & Social Media Marketing?
Fuente: http://www.toprankblog.com/2011/03/future-trends-search-social-media-marketing/

Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update

In January, Google promised that it would take action against content farms that were gaining top listings with “shallow” or “low-quality” content. Now the company is delivering, announcing a change to its ranking algorithm designed take out such material.
New Change Impacts 12% Of US Results

The new algorithm — Google’s “recipe” for how to rank web pages — starting going live yesterday, the company told me in an interview today.

Google changes its algorithm on a regular basis, but most changes are so subtle that few notice. This is different. Google says the change impacts 12% (11.8% is the unrounded figure) of its search results in the US , a far higher impact on results than most of its algorithm changes. The change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future.

While Google has come under intense pressure in the past month to act against content farms, the company told me that this change has been in the works since last January.
Officially, Not Aimed At Content Farms

Officially, Google isn’t saying the algorithm change is targeting content farms. The company specifically declined to confirm that, when I asked. However, Matt Cutts — who heads Google’s spam fighting team — told me, “I think people will get the idea of the types of sites we’re talking about.”

Well, there are two types of sites “people” have been talking about in a way that Google has noticed: “scraper” sites and “content farms.” It mentioned both of them in a January 21 blog post:

We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content.

I’ve bolded the key sections, which I’ll explore more next.
The “Scraper Update”

About a week after Google’s post, Cutts confirmed that an algorithm change targeting “scraper” sites had gone live:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

“Scraper” sites are those widely defined as not having original content but instead pulling content in from other sources. Some do this through legitimate means, such as using RSS files with permission. Others may aggregate small amounts of content under fair use guidelines. Some simply “scrape” or copy content from other sites using automated means — hence the “scraper” nickname.

In short, Google said it was going after sites that had low-levels of original content in January and delivered a week later.

By the way, sometimes Google names big algorithm changes, such as in the case of the Vince update. Often, they get named by WebmasterWorld, where a community of marketers watches such changes closely, as happened with last year’s Mayday Update.

In the case of the scraper update, no one gave it any type of name that stuck. So, I’m naming it myself the “Scraper Update,” to help distinguish it against the “Farmer Update” that Google announced today.
But “Farmer Update” Really Does Target Content Farms

“Farmer Update?” Again, that’s a name I’m giving this change, so there’s a shorthand way to talk about it. Google declined to give it a public name, nor do I see one given in a WebmasterWorld thread that started noticing the algorithm change as it rolled out yesterday, before Google’s official announcement.

Postscript: Internally, Google told me this was called the “Panda” update, but they didn’t want that on-the-record when I wrote this original story. About a week later, they revealed the internal name in a Wired interview.

How can I say the Farmer Update targets content farms when Google specifically declined to confirm that? I’m reading between the lines. Google previously had said it was going after them.

Since Google originally named content farms as something it would target, you’ve had some of the companies that get labeled with that term push back that they are no such thing. Most notable has been Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who previously told AllThingsD about Google’s planned algorithm changes to target content farms:

It’s not directed at us in any way.

I understand how that could confuse some people, because of that stupid “content farm” label, which we got tagged with. I don’t know who ever invented it, and who tagged us with it, but that’s not us…We keep getting tagged with “content farm”. It’s just insulting to our writers. We don’t want our writers to feel like they’re part of a “content farm.”

I guess it all comes down to what your definition of a “content farm” is. From Google’s earlier blog post, content farms are places with “shallow or low quality content.”

In that regard, Rosenblatt is right that Demand Media properties like eHow are not necessarily content farms, because they do have some deep and high quality content. However, they clearly also have some shallow and low quality content.

That content is what the algorithm change is going after. Google wouldn’t confirm it was targeting content farms, but Cutts did say again it was going after shallow and low quality content. And since content farms do produce plenty of that — along with good quality content — they’re being targeted here. If they have lots of good content, and that good content is responsible for the majority of their traffic and revenues, they’ll be fine. In not, they should be worried.
More About Who’s Impacted

As I wrote earlier, Google says it has been working on these changes since last January. I can personally confirm that several of Google’s search engineers were worrying about what to do about content farms back then, because I was asked about this issue and thoughts on how to tackle it, when I spoke to the company’s search quality team in January 2010. And no, I’m not suggesting I had any great advice to offer — only that people at Google were concerned about it over a year ago.

Since then, external pressure has accelerated. For instance, start-up search engine Blekko blocked sites that were most reported by its users to be spam, which included many sites that fall under the content farm heading. It gained a lot of attention for the move, even if the change didn’t necessarily improve Blekko’s results.

In my view, that helped prompt Google to finally push out a way for Google users to easily block sites they dislike from showing in Google’s results, via Chrome browser extension to report spam.

Cutts, in my interview with him today, made a point to say that none of the data from that tool was used to make changes that are part of the Farmer Update. However, he went on to say that of the top 50 sites that were most reported as spam by users of the tool, 84% of them were impacted by the new ranking changes. He would not confirm or deny if Demand’s eHow site was part of that list.

“These are sites that people want to go down, and they match our intuition,” Cutts said.

In other words, Google crafted a ranking algorithm to tackle the “content farm problem” independently of the new tool, it says — and it feels like tool is confirming that it’s getting the changes right.
The Content Farm Problem

By the way, my own definition of a content farm that I’ve been working on is like this:

* Looks to see what are popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics)
* Generates content specifically tailored to those searches
* Usually spends very little time and or money, even perhaps as little as possible, to generate that content

The problem I think content farms are currently facing is with that last part — not putting in the effort to generate outstanding content.

For example, last night I did a talk at the University Of Utah about search trends and touched on content farm issues. A page from eHow ranked in Google’s top results for a search on “how to get pregnant fast,” a popular search topic. The advice:

The class laughed at the “Enjoyable Sex Is Key” advice as the first tip for getting pregnant fast. Actually, the advice that you shouldn’t get stressed makes sense. But this page is hardly great content on the topic. Instead, it seems to fit the “shallow” category that Google’s algorithm change is targeting. And the page, there last night when I was talking to the class, is now gone.

Perhaps the new “curation layer” that Demand talked about in it earnings call this week will help in cases like these. Demand also defended again in that call that it has quality content.

Will the changes really improve Google’s results? As I mentioned, Blekko now automatically blocks many content farms, a move that I’ve seen hailed by some. What I haven’t seen is any in-depth look at whether what remains is that much better. When I do spot checks, it’s easy to find plenty of other low quality or completely irrelevant content showing up.

Cutts tells me Google feels the change it is making does improve results according to its own internal testing methods. We’ll see if it plays out that way in the real world.

Hotel web design Trends

Tip de Posicionamiento SEO #6 - Dirección física

Para dar confianza a los compradores y buscadores como Google y Yahoo,
recuerde incluir su información o dirección física. La información debe ser
incluida en la página HTML, para que los robots como google bot la
localicen. Se debe incluir el código de área, zip code, ciudad, provincia
o estado, o cualquier otra dirección que ayude a encontrar su comercio.

Tip de Posicionamiento #5 - Keyword Phrase

Se debe buscar la frase clave más importante. Una forma de encontrar la
frase clave, es estudiando el Top 10 de resultados de busqueda.
Ver cómo están escritos los títulos?, qué provoca hacer click?

Si tiene problemas en su ratio de conversión, una forma de optimizar es
revisando sus frases claves y las frases que provocan el click.
Un consejo es hacer una lista de unas 10 frases claves. Puede ir probando
en su sitio web, y medir cuales surgen mejor efecto que otras; hasta llegar
a las que mejor rendimiento le brinden.

SEO, usabilidad y accesibilidad para el éxito en un sitio web (W3C)

Cuando se diseña un sitio web, dependiendo los gustos del jefe del proyecto, se inclina la balanza entre lo estéticamente atractivo (diseño gráfico) , muy tecnológico (blogs, widgets, flash, share it), fácil mantenimiento (cms, php) y dejamos en última prioridad las necesidades del posible usuario del sitio; que al final es lo más importante. Los 2 usuarios más importantes del sitio web son:

• Los robots de búsqueda (Ejemplo googlebot). Es un usuario con discapacidad visual, por lo tanto no aprecia el diseño gráfico.
• El usuario final del sitio (Qué busca un usuario en mi sitio web).

Por dichas razones, los SEO hacen mucho énfasis, en que el éxito de un sitio está en: contenido original y propio (buena calidad), generar interés en lo que dice el sitio, ser proactivo o interrogar al usuario, ser cortos y puntuales, y ofrecer una forma simple y fácil de encontrar lo que buscamos. Usualmente se recomienda crear Paths de Búsqueda; para darnos cuenta que tan fácil o difícil es la ruta para encontrar cierta información en mi sitio web.

El perfil del buen consultor SEO - Turismo 2.0

El perfil del buen consultor SEO - Turismo 2.0: "A partir de una discusión iniciada días atrás en este mismo grupo, he creído que sería interesante plantearnos cómo debe ser el perfil profesional del buen asesor SEO, sobre todo viendo como está el patio últimamente.

Por supuesto, la red está llena de artículos y entradas en blogs al respecto. La diferencia es que aquí la definición de nuestro perfil ideal la podemos hacer entre nosotros, e incluso afinarla a la realidad de nuestro mercado.

Hilvanando esto con lo que deberíamos considerar de forma común como el perfil idea, creo que el consultor SEO debe reunir las siguientes cualidades:

1. Debe tener conocimientos de marketing y ser un excelente COPY: Al fin y al cabo, la mejor indexación (por ética y duradera) es aquella que se basa en disponer los mejores contenidos, en tanto sean acertados y relevantes, en la sede web. He visto muchos productos y sitios que no tenían apenas competencia pero que no eran siquiera indexados por la sencilla razón de que no mencionaban con suficiente claridad y vehemencia los términos clave que los definían de cara a su mercado objetivo. Por ello, detectar las motivaciones principales que deberían atraer público a la página, así como identificar motivaciones-nicho o secundarias que generen también tráfico relevante, y lograr redactarlas de forma que se manifiesten claramente es fundamental.

2. Debe conocer el mercado que le ocupa. Esto en cierto modo viene de lo anterior, y es que los comportamientos de búsqueda difieren de un mercado a otro. Y con ello no me refiero a las palabras clave, sino a las motivaciones y expectativas que persiguen los usuarios al buscar información de un determinado producto. No interrogamos igual al buscador ni interpretamos sus resultados de igual manera cuando buscamos información de viajes que de coches, libros, etc. Es más, me atrevería a decir que cierta especialización es incluso recomendable.

3. Debe tener conocimiento práctico y teórico en profundidad de programación-cliente web. Esto me parece fundamental: No basta con poder generar contenidos interesantes. Estos deben ser además accesibles, muy accesibles, y sustentados en una estructura de código semántica. Muchas de las páginas que vemos no son convenientemente indexadas porque están mal programadas y codificadas, con profusión de etiquetas no semánticas, contenido embebido en javascript intrusivo, texto inaccesible, etc. El buen consultor SEO debe poder identificar esto y dar directrices claras para subsanarlo, si no lo hace él mismo. Para ello debe tener un fuerte compromiso con los estándares y los principios de separación de contenido y presentación. En definitiva, un experto en (x)HTML, CSS y (en menor medida) Javascript. Desconfío de todos aquellos que no muestran estos requerimientos.

4. Debe tener también conocimientos teóricos del entorno servidor. No es preciso que sea un experto en Java, .NET, PHP o RubyOnRails, ni domine la configuración de Apache o IIS, pero si debe tener unas ciertas nociones a nivel teórico de qué caracter´siticas tienen los diferentes entornos de servidor y cómo sacar partido de las mismas: Redirecciones 301, módulos HTTP y .htaccess para la creación de URIs amigables, etc.

5. Debe ser un lector e investigador voraz. Cada día surgen nuevas herramientas y directrices en el posicionamiento en buscadores. Sólo Google es un filón de novedades, así que imaginaros el conjunto de buscadores más importantes. El buen agente SEO debe tener una sed terrible de conocimientos y una curiosidad imparable, así como la audacia de ponerlos en práctica (aún a riesgo de causar un estropicio en algún cliente): Últimamente tenemos que lidiar con las nuevas metas de exclusión, las landing pages, la ascensión imparable de los microformatos como etiqueta semántica, etc... El buen SEO debe ser implacable.

Y esto es en mi opinión el perfil ideal, o por lo menos una semblanza de mínimos. ¿qué opináis vosotros?

Pablo Deeleman
www.koalab.com
Fuente Turismo 2.0

Tip #3 de Posicionamiento web: Meta Tag de los keywords

Recuerde que los keywords siempre deben ir con el Meta tag. No incluya keywords repetidos en mayúscula o minúscula. Ese tipo de prácticas podría ser interpretado por los buscadores como "contenido forzado".
Además, las palabras repetidas en diferentes frases, trate de utilizarlas a lo sumo 2 veces.
Ejemplo:

meta name="keywords" content="beach hotel, spa, family hotel"

Tip #2 de Posicionamiento web: Contenido único

Los principales buscadores penalizan si su sitio web tiene contenido duplicado o muy similar a otro sitio web. El contenido de su sitio web puede ser similar a otros sitios, pero si el nivel de similitud es muy alto, puede ser castigado con un pagerank bajo. El siguiente link es una herramienta en línea que le puede ayudar a ver la similitud de 2 páginas en línea.
http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

Tip #1 de Posicionamiento web: Herramienta para medir Popularidad del site

Vamos a iniciar una serie de publicaciones con tips y consejos prácticos para mejorar el posicionamiento de su página en Internet. Para hoy, le recomendación es una herramienta que nos permite verificar en línea si nuestro sitio web está dentro de las 3 primeras páginas de los mejores buscadores de Internet; con los keyword que le indiquemos.

El servicio es gratuito, pruébelo en www.marketleap.com/verify