Two days, three tracks, over 50 speakers. IonSearch 2013 certainly didn’t lack in ambition, nor in potential for some insightful search marketing conversation and thought.
And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.
Recently, I read an interesting blog post by Barry Adams titled “The Adversarial Relationship between Google and SEO“. He argues that Google’s not an SEO’s friend but rather an adversary and cited quite an interesting patent filing by Google titled ‘Ranking Documents’. If you’re an SEO I’d strongly suggest you take the time to read this document in full. Also, Bill Slawski provides an excellent analysis of how this new approach will affect a page’s rankings.
In layman’s terms, this patent document specifies how Google intends on making rank changes to its search engine results pages (SERPs). Instead of allowing the algorithm to use its ranking factors to decide how documents (or pages) are ranked, Google will randomly initiate a “transition” period between when a rank change happens.
It’s no secret that in today’s modern age, we’ve embraced a “search” based culture. Whether it’s a new artist you’ve heard of, a recipe you’ve read about, or even a news report you’ve just seen on TV; we’ve become more inclined to search about those subjects to find out more information to such a degree that our collective thoughts can actually correspond with what people actively search. As highlighted in the graph below, people tend to aggressively search for the keyword phrase “english premier league” during the month of August corresponding with the cut off date for player transfers:
In fact, you could even make educated guesses about who’s going to win a presidential election based on searches; the graph below are for the keyword phrases “Barack Obama” (blue line) and “John McCain” (red line).
Lately, you might have noticed Google’s aggressive and frequent product announcements. With so much going on at Google during the past few weeks such as Google’s Penguin algorithm update, the Google Plus iPhone and Android app redesign, Google’s Knowledge Graph, Google acquiring Motorola Mobility, Google Maps being replaced by Google Plus Local and Google Shopping; it’s become so very hard to keep pace with the changes (or future changes) that are bound to affect SEO and SEM strategies in the near or distant future. Therefore, I thought I’d take a step back and use the Queen’s Jubilee weekend to gauge how all of this will shape your future SEM strategy. Google has always maintained that search is at the heart of everything they do. So it’s safe to assume that all of their major updates, will in some way have an impact on search.
Schema & Authorship: 1 Year Layer
The second day of SMX started with a panelist discussion on social shares, and top tips on how marketers are truly going to be influential.
Here are the top takeaways from the first morning session with more to follow later on today!
Social Shares | New Link Building from @LisaDMyers
Making Waves Not Ripples: Effective Syndicatoin to Drive Social Sharing from @mrjamescarson
Many speculated for weeks over the launch of Google’s next algorithm update targeting websites that Matt Cutts described as “over optimised”. The new algorithm update is meant to launch in the next few days and according to the Official Google Search Blog, this particular update will affect sites that employ the following “black-hat” tactics:
According to Matt Cutts, the change will go live for all languages at the same time. The update is meant to affect 3.1% of queries in English where “regular users” will notice. This number is relatively small when compared to the effect the original Panda update had on search queries (12% of search queries for regular users).
Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.
Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.
Creative Link Building, Link Prospecting or even Link Scouting – call it what you will, the premise is the same: you are looking for opportunities to build links.
Over the years there have been many different ways that people have been doing this; one of my personal favourites is using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. However useful this is, I still find it time consuming and painful, until thankfully along came Linkdex which came and helped ease the pain.
However helpful these tools have been in aiding my link building efforts, it is important as part of any SEO link strategy to think outside the box and establish links where your competitors are not present.
Like many others I am sure, I find quality link prospecting to be a slow process, and knowing where to begin is the hardest and most frustrating. Hopefully, though, after reading this you’ll be able to analyse quicker and build better quality links.
Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:
Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.
According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.
And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:
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