5 SEO Tips You Should Know to Survive in 2013

It’s time for the ‘old’ SEO dogs to learn new tricks.  I’ve been doing creative marketing for 10+ years and a lot has changed in the past year. If you haven’t stayed abreast of the new changes in the SEO community, then you’ve missed out tremendously. The new changes to Google’s algorithm woke up sleeping giants, crushed people’s income, and changed the game dramatically. Here are 5 things you should know in order to survive this year.

1. What’s the Penguin everyone keeps talking about?

In April of 2012, Google released an algorithm update known as the Penguin update. Not every webmaster suffered in this update, but those who participated in any of the following did:

• Link Schemes (unrelated links, link exchanges, buying links, etc)
• Cloaking (hiding keywords)
• Keyword Stuffing (just like it sounds – excessive keyword density)
• Duplicate content (content that is appearing on more than one site, almost word for word)

Website owners that participated in these things lost roughly 40-90% of their traffic overnight. I personally know some entrepreneurs who were living the dream because of their rankings and now they’re deeply in debt because Google killed their ‘golden goose’.
Moral of the story? Focus on building quality links

2. The trend towards social backlinks

Some have worried that backlinks are either obsolete or on their way quickly. At the moment, backlinks are still necessary. With the new updates, we’ve seen a change in the top 10 ranking factors. Out of the top 10, five or them are social. The trend is towards social backlinks.
In case you’re wondering what the top 10 ranking factors are, they are:

• facebook shares
• number of backlinks
• facebook total
• facebook comments
• facebook links
• tweets
• % of backlinks that are no follow
• keyword in domain name
• % of backlinks with keyword
• % of backlinks with stopwords

Moral of the story? Focus on your social media presence and create content that users engage with.

3. Evolution of PPC search

With new devices coming out, Google adjusts their PPC module for advertisers. It used to be that you could set your ads to target desktops and mobile devices separately. It’s not the case anymore. Google has now thrown all of them together because they say that more search is being done from mobile devices anyways.
This is especially important as a service provider running ads. You can adjust your bid to be higher when someone is searching and they’re closer to your location.

4. Facebook and Google are at war with another

Google has sat and watched Facebook’s rise to fame.. and they’re envious. Google always thought their search engine would be the primary place people would go to for information. It turns out Facebook is actually the number 1 place people are going for information; with Google trailing right behind.
Both companies are rushing to mobile to capitalize on the most current gold rush. Facebook just recently released Graph Search, which allows its users to find information based on what their friends like. This tells SEO’s that they need embrace social media more than ever.
Just think about it, if your business doesn’t have likes, then the chances of it popping up are little to nothing. On the flip side, if I am searching for ‘chinese that my friends like’ and a restaurant is liked by several of my friends, I’ll probably end up eating there. It gets rid of the ‘guinea pig’ mentality.

5. Google Authorship

Google is now allowing webmasters to ‘claim’ their content by adding a rel=author tag to our posts. You’ll need a Google + page to begin the process. Personally, I’ve seen increased conversions up to 3x in the SERPs since using authorship.
When someone searches and finds one of your posts in the SERP’s, they’ll see your picture next to your post. It’s great because it adds a personal touch to your posts.Article Source:- performinsider

Maintained By :- Live AutoWorld

Matt Cutts Tells SEOs to Stop Worrying About Google Search Patents

f you're an avid SEO professional, you likely pay close attention to any new Google patents that are attached to the Search or Search Quality teams. It often gives insight about where the future of search could be headed, along with plenty of speculation about just how the patent could be applied and how it would affect webmasters.
Well, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts brings up the topic of the many Google patents in his latest Google Webmaster Help video, which was an answer to the question about the latest SEO misconception he would like to put to rest.
“Just because a patent issues that has somebody’s name on it or someone who works at search quality or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean we are using that patent at that moment,” Cutts said in the video. “So sometimes you will see speculation Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that a domain was registered. That doesn’t mean that we are necessarily doing that, it just means that mechanism is patented.”
Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea said Google may not presently be doing what is described in many patents, but that doesn't mean that they might not have been in the past, or may not in the future.
"It's not a great practice to take anything within a patent as gospel that Google is doing what's described within the patent, but it's also not a great practice to automatically tune patents out," Slawski said. "They are a chance to learn about the assumptions that search engines make about search, searchers, search engines, and the web."
In the video, Cutts continues to describe another patent where Google looked at websites that were being updated after they did an update, which of course concerned webmasters that this could flag them, as they reacted to each update.
“Patents are a lot of interesting ideas, so you can see a lot of stuff mentioned in them, but don’t take it as an automatic golden truth that we are doing any particular thing mentioned in a patent,” he said.
Slawski noted that sometimes it can be almost impossible to tell if a process described in a patent filing was or is implemented, especially if the process described in the patent is one that might impact rankings or results but doesn't leave much of a visible footprint that it was involved in those results.
“Matt is right – don't take the existence of a patent as present day proof that Google is actively doing what is described within the patent," Slawski said. "But don't ignore what you can learn from the patent, especially if it raises a lot of questions that you can explore and experiment with, and use to help understand the search engine better." Article Source:- searchenginewatch.

Maintained By :- Live Auto World

Google’s Matt Cutts: Next Generation Of The Penguin Update “Few Weeks” Away

In March, Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts promised that the Penguin Update designed to fight spam would get a big refresh later this year. Today, Cutts gave an update — keep waiting. It’s still a few weeks off. Along the way, there’s some confusion about whether the next Penguin Update will be Penguin 2 or Penguin 4. It’ll be Penguin 4, in how we reckon things. Let’s dive in.

This Week Wasn’t Penguin

Publishers have already been wondering if a change in rankings that many have noticed this week was some type of Google update. Google won’t say what, if anything happened.
However, Cutts has ruled out that it was the significant Penguin Update he warned in March would be coming. He tweeted:
He went on to say that the next Penguin Update is a few weeks out:

Counting The Pandas & Penguins

Note that Cutts refers “Penguin 2.0″ as the coming rollout. How can that be, when we’ve had three confirmed Penguin updates already, with Penguin 3 happening in October?
This all goes back to a different update, the Panda Update, which first launched in February 2011. That was Panda Update 1. Of course, we didn’t call it Panda 1 then, because as the first Panda Update, it was just called “The Panda Update.”
Two months later, Google made a huge change to Panda, so the next version was called Panda 2. But when the third release happened, and people started calling that Panda 3, Google said that because the changes to the filter weren’t so dramatic, it would better be called Panda 2.1.
That left it to Google to call the shots on whether a Panda Update was big enough to go through a full point change or not. And that became ridiculous when we got to something like Panda 3.92, last September. As we explained then, when the updates started going to two decimal places, we felt maybe just a straight Panda 1, 2, 3 and so on number order made sense, no decimals involved.

Renumbering The Pandas

When what would have been Panda Update 3.93 came around, we decided enough was enough. We renumbered all the Panda Updates that had happened, regardless of how big they were, believing that was a clearer way forward.
The number no longer reflects whether there’s been a major “generational” change or not. The number is just a common reference point for everyone to use, not some type of magnitude.
For the record, here’s where we are with Panda. The impact each update had on queries is shown, when provided by Google, after the number:

1. Panda Update 1, Feb. 24, 2011 (11.8% of queries; announced; English in US only)
2. Panda Update 2, April 11, 2011 (2% of queries; announced; rolled out in English internationally)
3. Panda Update 3, May 10, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
4. Panda Update 4, June 16, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
5. Panda Update 5, July 23, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
6. Panda Update 6, Aug. 12, 2011 (6-9% of queries in many non-English languages; announced)
7. Panda Update 7, Sept. 28, 2011 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
8. Panda Update 8, Oct. 19, 2011 (about 2% of queries; belatedly confirmed)
9. Panda Update 9, Nov. 18, 2011: (less than 1% of queries; announced)
10. Panda Update 10, Jan. 18, 2012 (no change given; confirmed, not announced)
11. Panda Update 11, Feb. 27, 2012 (no change given; announced)
12. Panda Update 12, March 23, 2012 (about 1.6% of queries impacted; announced)
13. Panda Update 13, April 19, 2012 (no change given; belatedly revealed)
14. Panda Update 14, April 27, 2012: (no change given; confirmed; first update within days of another)
15. Panda Update 15, June 9, 2012: (1% of queries; belatedly announced)
16. Panda Update 16, June 25, 2012: (about 1% of queries; announced)
17. Panda Update 17, July 24, 2012:(about 1% of queries; announced)
18. Panda Update 18, Aug. 20, 2012: (about 1% of queries; belatedly announced)
19. Panda Update 19, Sept. 18, 2012: (less than 0.7% of queries; announced)
20. Panda Update 20 , Sept. 27, 2012 (2.4% English queries, impacted, belatedly announced
21. Panda Update 21, Nov. 5, 2012 (1.1% of English-language queries in US; 0.4% worldwide; confirmed, not announced)
22. Panda Update 22, Nov. 21, 2012 (0.8% of English queries were affected; confirmed, not announced)
23. Panda Update 23, Dec. 21, 2012 (1.3% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
24. Panda Update 24, Jan. 22, 2013 (1.2% of English queries were affected; confirmed, announced)
25. Panda Update 25, March 15, 2013 (confirmed as coming; not confirmed as having happened)

Panda 25 was the first time Google itself didn’t confirm whether a Panda Update had happened, part of its policy that it wasn’t likely to confirm these going forward, since they rollout over the course of days now. Instead, it was left to third-parties to decide if one had hit.

Did Panda 26 Just Happen?

This also means that the update that’s caused chatter this week might be Panda 26. It might be something else. We don’t feel confident enough to declare it Panda 26 ourselves, which is why our list stops at Panda 25. But with Penguin ruled out, it does suggest that maybe Panda 26 had happened this week.
Or maybe not. Isn’t reading Google tea leaves fun?

Penguin 2.0 Or Penguin 4?

That leads to Penguin. This is how those have gone, so far:

• Penguin 1: April 24, 2012 (3.1% queries affected)
• Penguin 2: May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 3: Oct. 5, 2012 (0.3%)

In our numbering system, regardless of how “big” the next Penguin Update is, we’ll still call it Penguin 4.
It will be big. We know that already from what Cutts has said in the past. In fact, it’s so big that internally, Matt said today that Google refers to it as Penguin 2.0.
From what Cutts tweeted to me:
Oh dear, but if this next one is the “true” Penguin 2, are we going to make a mistake calling it Penguin 4? I’ll argue not as big a mistake as if we called it Penguin 2.

Why We’ll Call It Penguin 4

See, let’s go back to Panda. In October 2011, we wrote that Panda 2.5 was live. Google hadn’t said it was a massive new change, so that seemed the right number. But the following month, Google said that Panda 2.5 would have been better described as Panda 3.0. We corrected that after the fact — but it would have been easier if Google had called it that way from the start.
We can’t depend on Google to consistently tell us how massive a particular update is, or even if an update happens at all. Because of this, linking magnitude to some decimal-based numbering system seems a mistake.
We have to use something that isn’t going to change months later on. The new numbering system has worked well with Panda, and we’ll stick with it for Penguin.
Ideally, I’d love to see Google itself simply list any significant change with the date it happens and some common reference name. I think that’s useful for publishers — not spammers, but any publisher — trying to understand if they’ve been impacted by something that they should correct. You can’t fix what’s wrong if you don’t have a good sense of what it was. Article Source By:- Search Engine Land

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French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free

Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free.

                                                        

According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.

The French court ruling requires Google to pay $660,000 (500,000 Euros) in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means Google’s total cost from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”

As you can see from the related stories listed below, this is far from the first time that the French have raised legal issues with Google.

About The Author: Matt McGee is Search Engine Land's Executive News Editor, responsible for overseeing our daily news coverage. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. See more articles by Matt McGee.

Article Source : searchengineland