Did Google Update its Search Algorithm?

Posted by airabongco in Featured Articles, Google, News, SEO Knowledge, Search Engines on 03 5th, 2009 | 18 responses


A post on Archer SEM SEO Blog entitled “New Google Algorithm Change – Commie Update?” have made a claim that Google have changed its search algorithm. This is in accordance with the change in rankings on longtail terms that some people have observed. Although we have not witnessed this ourselves, it is important news to us SEOs to hear that Google is now changing its ranking rules.

Perhaps the most important debate that have emerged here is the ranking of big companies. A lot of websites have found themselves sliding down the rankings as the large companies emerge at the top. This is an ethical issue because having the search results controlled by the “authoritative” sources will only result into less variety and unfair competition.

Google may have a reason for doing this. A lot of of the big guys lack the ability for proper SEO that’s why they are giving them this little boost. However, this may be bad news for the little guys. This only means they have to work double if they want to occupy the rank that is now given by Google to the big guys.

Although this may create a lot of noise in the search engine world, it is still not yet confirmed. It is just a theory made by some people who have observed the lowering of their rankings overnight. Here are some images from the ArcherSEM.com



But should we all worry because of this?

Of course not! What we must remember is that we should change our approach to branding. So long as you create your brand and establish your authority in a certain niche, then you can expect yourself to soar in the rankings.Branding has always been used in social media but today, it is also valuable for search engines. Even more valuable than little keyword alterations.

Google may have a reason for doing this. According to SnoopBloggyBlog, Google may be doing this in connection with their new service – TV and Online Radio Ad Platform. This can only be utilized by people hoping to establish their brands online. So I guess it goes without saying that what Google want is for us to use this advertising platform if we want to ace their ranking algorthms.

So what can you say about this recent shift? It will provide a whole new background on how people do SEO. It may even threaten some methods that are not compatible with it. My only concern here isthe difficulty of building a name for a particular brand. If you’re a nobody then don’t expect to see yourself on Google. With their new algorithms, they will simply ignore you.

Ads That Target Your Market Are In

Posted by airabongco in Featured Articles, Google, News, Search Engines on 03 11th, 2009 | 11 responses



Through the years, we have seen different kinds of advertisements. There’s contextual advertising that exists in Adsense and Kontera. There’s also other forms such as video as well as social media advertising. With all these, it is obvious that advertisers are now valuing their market. They want to make sure that the ads reach the right audience to maximize conversion.

Now here is where interest-based advertising comes in. We have received announcement from the Inside Adsense blog that they are implementing this new kind of advertising.

Over the next few months we’ll start offering interest-based advertising to a limited number of advertisers as part of a beta, and expand the offering later in 2009. Whether the advertiser’s goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to their ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of their campaigns and should increase your earnings as advertiser participation increases. 

Remember those times when Google have been trying to guess what’s on your mind? Now they seemed to have found one of the solutions. Now as you surf websites and click on certain ads, Google will now record your interest with a cookie. With this, you will see ads based on your interest on other websites.

I think this is good news for both parties. The owner of the website will have higher conversions because he is serving the interest of his surfer while the surfer gets the ads that feeds his interest. You get the idea. It’s not about contextual advertising anymore. It’s about serving the interest of the user.

Of course, it may seem all positive at first. But the problem I see here is that people have varied, changing interests. Some people may be interested on one thing at a certain time then become uninterested in it the next. I wonder how Google is going to address this problem.

But publishers do not need to worry. They have the choice to implement interest based advertising or not. It is entirely up to their discretion. Also, like adsense, they can filter out certain websites with a competitive filter. Just some features Google added that should ease the publishers’ minds.

But still, interest-based advertising is an interesting change. Some may be afraid of it while others may try it. Since it’s new, we still don’t know its conversion possibilities. I guess we should stand by those publishers who will try this new kind of advertising.

But before you jump and start implementing these ads, be sure to change some parts of your Privacy Policy. Google have added some stuff that they would like you to include. Just go here.

For questions and concerns about this topic, you may visit Google Adsense Help.
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Delicious Uses The Silent Ban Hammer

Posted by airabongco in Delicious, Featured Articles, Link Building, News, Reddit, SEO Knowledge, SEO Tips, Socal Media Optimisation, Social News on 03 12th, 2009 | one response



With the use of social bookmarking sites as a means of promotion, Delicious have been facing a lot of spam problem lately. Their goal of a community sharing the best websites on the internet turned to spamville overnight. People have been submitting links expecting the popular link juice.

With this, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, announced last 2007 in the SMX Conference that they are going to implement in the nofollow tag. This is to prevent people from submitting irrelevant links just for link juice. This may have stopped some from submitting spam links but it did not stopped all.

So now Delicious have resorted to another way of solving the problem and that is through silent bans. For those people who do not know what ’silent bans’ mean, it is a way of banning by not notifying the person and rendering that person’s activity irrelevant to the system. This is what Brent Csutoras experienced which he shared on his blog on a post entitled “When Did Delicious Starts Silent Bans?“. According to his post, he saw his past bookmarks disappearing from the system as his new bookmarks are rejected. Here is how he relays his story.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ’silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

Brent Csutoras claimed that this is a rather familiar situation. It was not so long ago when Reddit did the same thing. A person who is silent banned submit a particular story to the websites but then the website does not react. It will not submit the story rendering the account of the person useless.

But one question comes to mind with all these things happening. Why do social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Delicious have to resort to these informal ways of banning? Why do they keep the account but leave the user useless to the community?

Also, as Brent Csutoras wondered, what triggers the penalty? How can he, who rarely use his Delicious account get banned by Delicious?

I guess these are some questions that Delicious must answer in the next conference they are going to attend.

On Search and Branding

Posted by airabongco in Featured Articles, Google, News, SEO Knowledge, SEO Tips, Search Engines on 03 13th, 2009 | 2 responses



We have been continuously tackling branding here at SEO tops. And we did for good reason. Even if we tried to deny it, branding is now evolving and may become the next ‘big thing’ in the upcoming years. We have seen Twitter expand and how brands have utilized social media for marketing. We have seen Google update its algorithm with the new focus on branding. We have also heard news from major networks that online television and radio advertising will take its toll in the next months. But what is branding anyway?

Branding is not the name nor is it the logo. It is the very essence of the company’s products and services. It stirs emotions, perceptions and impressions. It creates a perspective and triggers the imagination of its target audience. It is way more than having the right domain name or the right image. It is the shared meanings and associations people create with the brand.

As Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Buyology:The Truth and Lies about Why We Buy” said.

Effective branding leverages emotion, interaction, experience, desire, ritual, faith, and our senses (the more the better). The brain scan results from study after study showed that subjects’ brains reacted to strong brands the same way they react to emotional or even spiritual experiences.

So branding is so much more. It is not enough that you get your name out there. You must tell the people what your company stands for and how your products and services will affect their lives. Of course, since you are not perfect, you will not be able to please all. But if you instilled in their minds that you can please them, they will be convinced by that and believe it.

But what does branding have to do with search? As Lance Loveday said in his post in Search Engine Land entitled “Search:Too Boring for Branding“, search is just way too different from branding. He illustrated this through a commercial of Starburst which he saw on television.

It was easy to imagine being the funny-looking guy, chewing the candy yourself (touch), savoring the flavor (taste) and inhaling the aroma (smell) with your llama-esque nose.

But on search, everything is different. All one gets is this advertisement written in plain text. No emotions, no images. Although search have been proven by some people to contribute to the power of branding, it merely strengthens and does not establish the brand. The brand is only established after the click. As Lance Loveday puts it,

Twitter Ranking Possible?

Posted by airabongco in Ask.com, Featured Articles, Google, Internet Marketing, Live, News, SEM Knowledge, Search Engines, Socal Media Optimisation, Social News, Twitter, Yahoo on 03 17th, 2009 | 17 responses


When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful. 

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.



I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings. 


With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

Suggested Questions on Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers has been a very powerful marketing tool. What one needs to do to establish his expertise in a particular field is to simply find related questions and answer the questions while linking them to valuable areas of your website or blog. With this, one can expect that the person clicking through the link has an interest on the topic. He will not have asked the question or searched for it if he does not have an interest in it in the first place. This makes Yahoo answers not only effective but targeted as well. 

Also, Yahoo Answers posts have a high tendency of showing up in the Google rankings. If one types a question in Google search, the results are almost always from Yahoo Answers. With Google, your link is not only getting a visit from the one who asked the question. You are also getting visits from dozens of people searching the same question in Google. 

However, as one uses Yahoo Answers, he will find out that one of the hardest things to do is to find the questions to answer. You may have a lot of expertise in a particular field but you always have to sift through the results to find open questions which you can benefit from. 

There are some old ways of getting some questions. One can browse through the categories in Yahoo Answers to find some related questions. Another way is to set up an RSS feed and sift the results. However, both can be a but painstaking. It also takes time which takes the fun away from using Yahoo Answers for easy marketing.

This is the reason why Yahoo Answers now implements the Suggested Questions feature. This means one does not need to go through the painstaking way of searching for related questions. He can now see related questions as they are suggested for him. 

However, Yahoo noted that these questions will only pop up for people who have a decent amount of activity around a particular topic. It takes some time for the system to understand your interest so one has to tell it that “Hey! I’m an expert on this field so please give me some suggested questions.”

The key to using this feature is targeted answering. So Yahoo Answers services need to at least set up different accounts for different niches or only answer on a particular topic. 

For those who don’t like the feature. Yahoo Answers allow you to turn it off. But what for when it helps you find the questions you need to establish your expertise?

Google Caffeine Update, An SEO Insight

Posted by Musa Aykac in Google, SEO Knowledge on 08 13th, 2009 | 8 responses


I don’t usually post news stories as I try to make the blog different and unique, I mean why post something that everyone else is posting, with exactly the same stance. But I feel that the Caffeine update that Google have recently announced is well worth a blog post.

Here is a caption from the official announcement

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Read the full post by Google Here

The Google caffeine update clarifies exactly what I have been saying and thinking for the last few weeks, you can refer to the recent blog post http://www.seotops.com/google-are-now-bringing-in-more-real-time-results_1096/
I like to post about things that I see and notice happening in the search industry from experience and testing. So let’s get down to discussing the Caffeine update. So what does this mean to search positions? The future of search? And so many more unanswered questions?

Well from what I have seen although Google say that they are testing the new infrastructure on www2.sandbox.google.com and some people stating it will not affect the results. I have been seeing this is the current SERPs for some weeks now. Basically what I am seeing is results constantly changing, updated content is getting a fresh boost for major terms a lot more now query deserves freshness, part of the faster indexing and crawling capabilities. I.E. new blog posts go straight into the Top 10 for competitive terms and gradually drop out. Results are no longer stable and personally from a searchers point of view it’s a good thing. The reason I say this is because the internet has expanded so much, whereas we used to have a strict Top 10 with all the best sites, there are now so many more sites online and simply not enough room to show ever decent authority site in the Top 10.

We all know that users do not navigate to page 2-3-4 etc, so what Google can now do is constantly refresh the Top 10 with the authority and power sites, so users get to see much more great sites as well as newly created content for what they are searching for. This is basically a response to Twitter and a right back at you to Bing.

But from what I am seeing, although Google seem to be bringing in real time results and constantly refreshing the SERPs, the Top 4 positions seem to be still be stable. Again the reason for Google doing this is because they have to please all searchers, although moving into real time is all very well and good, a lot of people still want consistency and a huge amount of users click on the Top 4 results, so they have to stick. I mean if you go and search for something find a great site at the top, you want that site to appear there next time.
So where does this leave SEO? Personally I think it’s good for the SEO sector. I mean even the most competitive terms do not get that much traffic from positions 8-9 and 10. So the constant refresh will allow Google to deliver a constant flow of great results and allow all sites to get coverage numerous times a day, stable positions for competitive terms will be a thing of the past, unless of course you are a good SEO or employ a good SEO to push you into the Top 4.