Don’t expect anything less than ambiguity from Google’s announcements. Matt Cutts, the head of web spam at Google will never confirm precise happenings. You’ve as much chance of coaxing Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorean embassy with a long rope and a US work visa.

Look out for resultant changes from Monday onwards. Waking up the morning after a Google update can put the fear into webmasters, like no other. Finding out that your website has been swept aside with a demolition job on it’s keyword placements can cause a knotted stomach, but if you’ve a clear conscience and have read all the warning signs over the past 12 months, then you’ve got less to fear.

I thought Pandas were supposed to be Cute!

To add to this, there will also be an important Penguin update this year,  currently being compiled by Google engineers which will further combat link network targets.  This is being labelled as a substantial and cogent change to further unearth the underhand manipulation of the Google rankings.  Google also announced that this will be the last time a Panda or Penguin  update will be broadcasted, as in future they will be incorporated into the indexing algorithm, and rolled out silently and incrementally.

Hopefully, this won’t stop the likes of SearchEngineLand assigning release numbers to future Google updates.  A numbered index of our own is useful in tracking changes in site behaviour, against the asynchronous, unpredictable nature of future amendments from the Google..

If you’re experiencing loss of traffic due to Google Panda update, or you’re concerned with future changes, contact Rankability for a free analysis and Panda proof SEO advice.

Whilst carrying out back link analysis for one of our new clients having sought our advice following a subtle ranking demotion, I was taken back by the findings.  After following the usual steps of checking webmaster tools (there was no message from Google on a manual penalty), next I checked the back links  and found a high volume of keyword rich anchor text usage, source linking from 95% directories.  A closer look and it was soon evident that some of the directories were emanating from the same linked hosting accounts and IP addresses.  Another 15 minutes of sighing and it was clear there were at least three network groups with dominant link patterns, using repeated anchor text.  Overall, quite a straight forward SEO analysis completed. Verdict: automated penalty. Job done!  Not quite…

Next, I narrowed down the sites and decided to remove the worst offending back links.   Then I uncovered something quite  cheeky to say the least, albeit saving us time in the process.  As if it’s not enough to have to stomach the demolition of your websites rankings,  and the resultant loss in  eCommerce sales, online leads and possibly your livelyhood, the website owners of the offending directories are also cashing in on the removal process of these bad links.

So having paid for directory link submissions in the first place…you now have to pay again to get them deleted.

I suppose it’s not that surprising really.  In the cut and thrust of an ever changing digital world,  opportunities like these are often being exploited by companies looking to make a quick buck.

Remove Unwanted Backlinks: the system

Once clicking on the link you will be redirected via an affiliate link to deletebacklinks.com site.  This is an affiliate scheme that has been spawned form the high demand for link removal inquiries, and the associated volume of email requests that have become unmanageable for directory owners. A gap has appeared in the market for an automated solution.  OK, so this  can save you a lot of time, but if you’re a small business with a low budget for marketing in the first place, it can be a kick in the wallet to have to stump up additional fees, for 100′s of these nuisance links.

According to Ahref’s, the number of back links pointing to deletebacklinks.com is 157 at the time of writing. So one can presume that most of these domains are the referring ‘contact us’ page from their client’s directories.   In the end we reluctantly paid £38 to  get  a total of 59 links removed.

Assuming that each directory site receives 10 requests for link removal, that’s a healthy income of 10 x 157 x £38 = £59,660 for deletebacklinks.com. Minus the affiliates commission of 14% for link removal, that’s a nice tidy profit for both parties.

Whatever your opinion, there is often a need for removing back links to help recover your site and get your online business back on track. Life would be a lot less painful if these linked networks/directories  were wiped off the face of the inter-web.

On the upside, since the Google updates, these poor quality directories have largely been relegated to obscurity, and most digital marketers now know  to take a wide berth of them.

Call me cynical but isn’t this the start of a simple index and filtered controlled content. Is Facebook slowly morphing  into a search engine? Of course not!  Mark Zuckerberg and Co. when presenting these changes last week at a recent media event, drew similarities with the well known  Flipboard application, in that it will partition content based on an improved structured layout based on topics and content source. So how do you get your new look facebook home page? You can make your application here and wait in the queue.  How long? No one knows.  (Wait here whilst I get you that tartan can of paint)

Currently, the Facebook news feeds are a melting pot of images, videos, posts from friends and comments,  which all blends into itself in one vertical stream.  After a perfunctory glance, I find it’s easy to lose interest when trawling through uncorrelated information.  Compare to a typical iPad newspaper app like TheTimes –  they deploy feature rich images and videos and everything is organised by topic and easy to find;  front page headlines, politics, sport, fashion, celebs etc.  And there lays one of the primary reason for this change, to give Facebook a consistent look and feel across the web, tablets and mobile devices.

Overall the interface changes aren’t drastic, more subtle. The interface has an upgraded navigation panel with larger icons and text. There’s also a dedicated music feed, photo/image feed and the message feed. It’s a lot easier to pick things out that you like. We will be covering the new Facebook  interface in detail in next weeks follow up article.

So what’s this all about?

Lets face it, it’s also about improving the monetisation of the Facebook platform from advertising, and Facebook isn’t doing too badly in the mobile marketing sector at the moment.  With the average user spending approximately twenty something minutes on Facebook every day, one of the primary goals of the new look is to lure people into spending more time interacting with content.

They’re also making it more digestible, as well as giving the power to the user on how they organise their content. The more decisions and input made by the user on customizing their feed, the more they’re giving away about what they like or don’t like.  See what they’ve done? Created a more targeted platform for advertisers. This can only mean one thing for businesses, more opportunity and more appealing ads.  Facebook ads will be more prominent with more bolder images which from an advertising point of view, will work better in associating adverts with cleaner content, making a stronger connection with the viewer. This will make it more likely to be clicked on and improve click through rates.

 Just like a new girlfriend, you have to keep it fresh and keep them guessing sometimes to keep their attention –  unpredictability has become the new predictable. Is this Facebook redesign a change for the better? I think so.  All 3 parties will benefit, ‘the user’,’ the advertiser’ and of course ‘Facebook’s share value.  Lets face it, it needs a shot in the arm to live up to the hype of it’s perceived worth.

 Mobile Search Best Practices 

1.   Responsive Design or Not? There is still some confusion on how to setup your website for mobile search, and what works best.  Opt for a responsive web design and control the same html content to different devices through CSS media queries for rendering. Google does support web and mobile content on different URL’s, for example  www.acme.com  and m.acme.com (for mobile content), but I would opt for this only if there are severe technical difficulties in changing to  a responsive design. There has been a degree of conflicting statements from Google’s Matt Cutts and other Google departments over the past 2 years, but the general consensus in the mobile SEO industry is to deploy a responsive design as first choice solution.

Yes, it’s still ok to have a separate mobile site (mobi.acme.com), and utilise to address your mobile users goals, and then link your users to the main responsive site and appropriate section.  Just to be clear, you do not need a separate mobi site to help mobile search rankings.

2. Use of Robots.txt. NOT! Do not block your mobile URL’s with robots.txt. Use the canonical tag for duplicate URL’s and redirect Smartphone URL’s.  Ensure your mobile home page is unique in content, and make it obvious – put mobile in the title tag and include the phrase ‘mobile’ within the text/copy.

3. How Important Is HTML Code Compliance: Mobile search and the Google mobile search engine is not more sensitive to invalid html code than 100% valid html code, so there is no need get your developer to spend hours and unnecessary time achieving 100% compliant XHTML code.

4. Usability NOT Rankability:  Ease of navigation is paramount to ensure that the user experience is slick, fast and obvious, but this will not help your mobile site rank better.

5. Presence and Relevance of Content: the inclusion of content/keywords that matches the mobile searches query is important in placing your site well in mobile search results.  So, unless you’re an automobile site selling cars, and haven’t optimised for caravans, then there’s nothing to worry about here.

6. Link Authority:  Yes, link building and page authority  this will always be a ranking factor for any type of website, be it mobile, eCommerce or a mobile app.

7. Focus On The User, NOT the device: is a mantra worth repeating. The best mobile apps consider ergonomics, usability and often solve a problem, worth being solved.

 Mobile Search Ranking Factors 

A. Most Important 

1. Your website listing is correctly redirected to Googlebot mobile or smartphone Googlebot.

2. Proximity of business location to searchers device location.

3. Relevance of content that is related to searchers query.

B.  Important 

4. Mobile sitemap exists

5. Presence of Mobile Site (Reposnsive or dedicated)

B. Of Limited Importance

6.  Use of mobile in the page Title Tags

7. Presence of mobile app in Google Play

Anyway, back to the analogy and important point; when it comes to marketing your online business it’s paramount to give your consumers the right constitution and quality of content that they are accustomed to, keeps them engaged and is helpful to them.  From email subject headers to blog articles and press releases, if you churn out horse meat, it will put people off your brand and possibly your products and services.

What you need is a 100% pure Beefy content..!

Would you get a horse to write your content for you? Neigh to that one!! 

 Here are a few reasons and tips on the why and how to ensure your content is 100% Pure Juicy Beef…

1.  Duplicate and unoriginal stitched together content or copy writing will be classed as low on the worthiness rating as far as search engines like Google are concerned  and may get your website penalised, leaving you pondering exactly what caused it.

2.  When engaging and posting comments on Twitter, don’t be  repetitive with your conversational tweets.  It’s easier to lose followers than gain them. Work smart and vary   your tweets if you’re running a competition or launching a new campaign. Get inventive with your posting.

3. Maintain some consistency with your content and don’t give all your gems away in one sitting; keep your audience hungry wanting more more.  Split your content into two articles (Part 1 and Part II) if posting on your blog. Bait them and tell them to tune in for part deux, tweet it and remind them 2 days before releasing the final part.

4.  Try and choose a small niche topic where there is not much content already. It’ll be easier to stand out this way.

5. Use bulleted or numbered lists to help  your readers scan for information that is important to them.

6. Hire a seasoned writer or a professional copywriter to ensure your websites pages are well received by new customers landing on your site.  Verify and ask for examples of work before hiring.

7. Get someone else, a 3rd party to read and review your writing/ideas, before publishing. A alternative audience can be a meaningful reality check.

8. Take the plunge and use images and videos heavily if your budget allows.  Well designed facebook company pages or infographics can work well in telling a story graphically.

1. Ahrefs has the largest database of live links and us updated frequently.  Very important if you want to keep up with your competitors SEO effort.

2.   It provides in depth analysis of back links and referring domains.

3.  It gives a true view and report of your anchor text usage, displaying referring domain count and allowing you to order by percentage of referring domains with anchor.

To explain, this means that instead of basing the anchor text usage on just volume (if you have a site wide link with 1500 pages, it will skew the result massively). What you want is the percentage of referring domains using a specific anchor text from all referring domains.

4.  The reports are comprehensive and are presented in graphical format, giving a snapshot that can be viewed at a glance.

5.   Also gives a report on sites issues like timeouts, missing and duplicate title tags. OK, not as thorough as webmaster tools but a nice touch.

6.  Offers a ‘New and Lost’ link report, with a list dates as well as URL’s.  Handy to help find out your link building drop off rate and more importantly an aid to help you research the reasons why.

7.  Ahref’s also gives you the ability to create reports going back 30 days giving details on H1,H2 headers, canonical issues and much more.

There are a number of other SEO tools on the market but this is one of the best when it comes to raw analysis of backlinks; very useful if you are looking at an indepth analysis of your sites links after it’s been relegated to obscurity from the SERPS from the latest Penguin/Pandas update. Ahhhhhh!

1. Reactive, Real Time Marketing & Optimisation

In 2012, there were signs of the adoption of real time branding and optimisation within digital campaigns including reactive ‘on the fly’ campaigns. Looking at dynamic data and behaviour will be more the norm in 2013, giving tight controls over campaign management.  If a campaign message isn’t going down as well as it should be, finding out early and tweaking it in order to maximise full potential and return on client investment, (if you’re an agency).

To obtain anywhere near digital utopia will require tight and close collaboration and convergence between major players and buy into the ‘big data’ picture and insights.

-  Greater use of attitudinal and behavioral data from real time analytics and insights. (What could this mean for Google analytics?) will be required to make informed decisions for campaigns (social media & creative campaigns) and to optimise maximum value from clicks.

-  Responsive agencies and internal marketing departments that can rework creatives based on insight and data, real-time events and triggers that are based on inbound marketing activity and not push-marketing, or outbound campaigns.

-  Smarter media publishing platforms that are self learning and automated for optimisation based on real time data and information.  For example; a banner creative with multiple iterations and in campaign insights feeding back into the banner campaign for redesign/rework.

-  Technology and in house developers will need to integrate and provide a unified single source of data and information that can be used for automating decisions and feedback into the campaign loop.

2. Targeted Behavioural e-Mail Marketing: data driven

e-mail marketing is not over yet, but no one wants the standard boilerplate email marketing message do they. They want to feel like you care about their needs.  Sending  an email to thousands of potential customers is yesterday.  Sending thousands of different emails to thousands of potential customers that is tailored to their interests, buying habits, etc is the future.

Watch out for smarter email marketing applications where you can build in more reactive responses and tailor the message for a particular customer, from real time data.  Again it’s all about the data and smart targeting.

3. Omni-Channel Marketing: knitting together the big picture

Omnichannel marketing. What’s that? It’s about tapping into your customers behavioral patterns, and using touch points and data from online, offline and mobile to provide a better experience , interaction to the consumer.  It’s less effective to swamp people with random noise, as oppose to reconnecting with them based on previous experience and interactions, thus giving relevance to the message.  Social media behavior and data collection will play a large part in shaping the bigger picture, and omni-channel solutions will  provide active insights and multi-threaded campaigns with more purpose than previous passive campaigns. Over the next year, it will become essential for companies to invest in technology that can collate customer data in a way that is more easily measurable and actionable.  Marketers will be syncing data from all avenues; including Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, and importing into their contact databases, so providing in depth profiling on customers.

A retailer might integrate loyalty and special offers from local stores to your mobile device, when you’re passing nearby in the car – smarter and more intelligent marketing is the order of the day for 2013 and beyond.

4. Mobile Marketing & Apps for the Future

It’s as plain as a pike staff, that mobiles have become the centre of attention in most peoples lives.  By that I mean more people are rarely without their mobile and rely on them more now than in 2012, and the year before that. It’s been said that 75% of iPhone users take them to bed with them. Marketers will need to have a mobile marketing strategy that is integral to the overall company strategy that blends with online and off line marketing campaigns.

Mobile coupons will go large with with the advent of geotargeting and Near-Field Communications (NFC). Marketers will be able to push out special offers and discount coupons as you drive past the store within distance.  Digital coupons will be utilised more and more n 2013.  Large retails stores are already providing GPS based information on how to find departments and products, so as to maximise the shopping experience whilst in store.

HTML 5 will become mainstream in mobile app development because it is universal, more cost effective than developing apps for native IOS and android that requires different expertise and resources.

 5. Smart Content: just got smarter

Up selling items at online checkout, relevant product recommendations, music tastes can all be catered for through dynamic and smart content. You’ve only got to use iTunes and see how their ‘genius’ feature recommends the music you may like to buy.  Providing dynamic content to the consumer enables marketers to serve highly personalized messages to the right audience at the right time in the buying cycle.  This could be smart banners,  items/products on e-Commerce sites or tailored articles/news to a specific readership interest.

This week Facebook informed all developers that they will be erasing the attribution labels from page posts, that are stamped by third party apps.

At the moment, they appear on timelines for page posts and user posts, with a ‘via [app name]‘ link. (See example below).  Facebook are planning to remove the brand name for page posts only.

There has been a fevered debate from developers and marketeers for some time now, on if this has an effect on reachability – news feed distribution and engagement for your facebook posts.  Results have been mixed but a more in depth study was carried out and can be viewed here:@http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32124/Facebook-Content-Published-Via-Third-Party-Tools-Suffers-67-Fewer-Likes-New-Data.aspx

This seems like a minor snub by Facebook to the likes of Hootsuite and company, but means there brand gets less exposure, and less sales from Facebook leads from the attribution label.

Jack Reacher To The Rescue?

The reach-ability of your facebook posts are in jeopardy   Maybe it’s time for all the 3rd party companies to  hire ‘Jack Reacher’ to pay a short visit to Mark Zuckerberg and face slap him into submission.

So What’s This All About?

You may have noticed that your article,s when shared using a 3rd party tool like Hootsuite, are not getting as much reach as articles that are manually posted on Facebook.  You may have 500 likes but  the “people who saw this” value for your posts are rather on the low side.

Here’s a recent example:

This post has been shared using the Hootsuite platform, and has a value of 8.

This subsequent post was added manually and has a higher reach with 33 people indicated that saw this post.

Facebook determines the popularity of a post using 2 main indicators;

1. Organic – The number of people who saw your post on your newsfeed, in their ticker, or on the wall of your Facebook Page.

2. Viral – The number of people who saw your Page’s story from a friend. This can be from a “like”, comment, or share.

So How Should You Be Posting On Facebook?

Simply, I would consider carrying out posting manually and rely less on utilising social media tools.  Although this is going to be more time intensive, I would atleast manually post the very important ones, like Events or Free Offers.

Without reach-ability – you have NO RANK-ABILITY!

Well, there are 3 ways of advertising on Facebook now. These ads that can be configured around your needs and objectives according to Facebook’s presentational opening screen. You can get more page likes to grow your audience, promote your page posts to improve engagement and get your content seen more readily or there’s an advanced option for more flexible bidding.

With the ‘Get More Page Likes’  option, you have what Facebook call a ‘Landing View’ – basically you get to choose which part of Facebook you want to lead your customers once the ad is clicked. You can opt to take people to your timeline, events or any specific app you have created. This is useful and can allow you to do some split testing on different facebook app landing pages.

There’s also an option to display your advert on sponsored stories within news feeds (which is turned on by default, but can be removed).  These adverts don’t appear on the right hand side, but are marked Sponsored within the news feed, although in small writing, so as to be not that obvious to the glancing visitor in a watered down light grey colour. But where will it appear? What is the added benefit? Simply, your post will appear higher up the news feed giving more exposure compared to normal posts that historically get pushed down the page. The ability to now promote Page Posts is a new feature and gives you the opportunity to enhance even further posts that have not received enough exposure or give that extra push to other neglected posts, like competitions or industry posts.

There are some useful advertising options for targeting more precisely for custom interests and sub-categories. You can also target certain types of people based on how they are connected to you.  This is handy to exclude advertising and targeting people who are already aware of your brand or facebook page , if you are targeting for likes that is.   You can also narrow down the targeting further to target peoples who’s  friends are connected to one of your apps, pages or events.  This would be useful if you are wanting to make most of the 1 to many relationship and penetrate your message to fit a specific audience interest.

And, there’s more! There is an advanced targeting option allowing you to opt for “Target people who are connected to” or  ”Target people who are not connected to”

There are many small businesses that need that kick start or extra velocity to make some ground on Facebook.  But remember facebook social is not a search platform where people search for products or services, (that may come in the future),   it’s a social place to hang out and it doesn’t lend itself for gaining huge amounts of leads or conducive to an aggressive sales strategy, but can help you make local connections with other businesses and build your brand effectively.

The combination of Facebook’s visibility, brand strength and newly simplified tools may turn into a big success story for them in local in 2013.