SEO Belfast

Below are two screenshots showing a comparison of last year compared to this year. This year for Shopping Ads it’s almost all eBay. In this market eBay is aggressively bidding on all the shopping ads and those businesses that are just running Google Adwords without an eBay strategy are getting significantly less traffic than last year.

2014

2013

What is noticeable having looked at the products on eBay, and the ones that are showing up in the Ads, is that they are much cheaper to buy (particularly as a single item, though if you buy multiple labels they may not be), and certainly of poorer quality.

With eBay swamping some Shopping Ads if you’re not selling through eBay, then it might be time to reconsider.

This is quite annoying, every Google Analytics account I look in has referral spam from Kambasoft.com, Semalt.com, youtube-downloader.savetubevideo.com and one or two others.

Log into your Google Analytics account, if you’re running the universal ‘analytics.js‘ version of Google’s tracking code click on ‘Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List’

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Not everything you read about SEO is gospel truth, far from it. There’s so much information on blogs and forums that clearly isn’t true or is written with an agenda. Below are my SEO Myths based on working on personal and client projects.

1. Rankings Don’t Matter

I’ve seen this quite a lot over the last number of years, it tends to go along the lines of ‘rankings don’t matter, it’s conversions that are all important‘.

Surely higher rankings with a better conversion rate is the target?
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Linking Google Webmaster Tools with your website is an absolute must. Aside from the software being free, other perks include the ability for webmasters and site owners to ensure that they’re running a healthy and well optimised website.

If you’re a small business on a budget, Webmaster Tools offers the same value and more as other commercial SEO tools – but you just need to know what to do with the data in your interface to make the most of it.

In this article, I’m going to highlight the most important characteristics of Webmaster Tools that will benefit the small business.
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The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has been in a state of flux in recent years. The main catalysts were a number of Google’s algorithmic updates, including Penguin and Panda. Both of these updates penalised websites for attempting to manipulate Google’s search results through spammy techniques.

Penguin, which was first rolled out in 2012, penalised sites for over-optimisation and attacked a number of web-spam tactics such as keyword stuffing and overuse of keyword rich text backlinks. The first Penguin roll-out was estimated to have affected 3.1% of English queries and had a considerable effect on many business websites, transforming many page 1’s overnight, and no doubt crippling many businesses that had relied too heavily on Google’s traffic.

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Just a quick blog post, unfortunately with another cautionary tale.

Always make sure that your site isn’t stopping Google from indexing it’s pages. This tends to happen when a site has been redeveloped and the restricing code is left in when the development site is moved over to the live site. It’s not uncommon, but usually spotted very quickly, or atleast in most cases it should be.

Last week I was with a company that were unaware that their site had a robots.txt file with the code disallowing Google from indexing ALL the content on their pages. Oops!
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Ok, takeaways from a failed reconsideration request.

1. All the sample links highlighted in the message are links that Google mentions in the Google Webmaster Tools ‘Download Latest’ spreadsheet. This seems to confirm what John Mueller has stated that going through
   the listed link profile in Google Webmaster Tools before submitting a reconsideration request would be enough in most cases.
2. Took around 4 weeks for a reply from the reconsideration reply, and that’s over the busy holiday period.
3. 2 are article marketing directories, with keyword rich anchor texts. These links were overlooked and should have been in the original submission.
4. Google has little tolerance. The vast majority of these website links had been removed or disavowed at considerable time and expense, and removing links didn’t just rely on the limited links in GWT though as stated above this may be enough. Other software such as Majestic SEO was used to identify the link profile.
5. Google’s Feedback certainly helps.

Here’s a quick review of some (obviously not all) important events over the last couple of years, and the odd link with advice. If there’s anything you think I should have covered then please add them in the comments section.

2011 & 2012 – Google Strikes Back

Following on from 2011 and the release of Panda, 2012 was certainly a turbulent year in search. The Penguin & Top Heavy updates caused mayhem and caused huge traffic drops to those affected sites.

April 2012 saw Google release Penguin that targeted over optimised websites with a heavy reliance on the similar keyword anchor text links, an over optimised structure and poor quality links.

The Top Heavy Alorigthm update of Jan 2012 affected sites with too many banner ads above the fold and little content. Monetizing websites with banner ads just got riskier.

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As part of the Google Partners program, I now have 30 or so Google Adwords Vouchers. Spend £150 in the first month and get £150 worth of credit free on a new Adwords account. Just get in contact if you would like to use one. Vouchers last until the end of February.

Google were also kind enough to send a set of earphones, that was nice of them & they’ll come in handy.

Over the last few years I haven’t really had much time to put any effort into any of my own personal sites including this one, so I’m hoping that can change over the next few months with some more content here, and some new development & design work on my other sites.

At the end of May the penguin update was rolled out and hit one of my newish clients that had a pretty poor backlink profile. When I took over the site there was a dilemma as to whether to spend time cleaning the site’s link profile as well as improving the on site over optimisation or just forging ahead with building a better site, with better content, less over optimisation and better quality links. Getting hit by Penguin 2 obviously made the decision easier.

I decided to run LinkRisk, to see if it matched what I thought were the poor links and to see how they scored the site according to their chart below.

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