Google Penalises Rap Genius – Offsite SEO Gone Wrong
14SHARESFacebookTwitter On Christmas day, Google penalised a large US-based lyrics website and removed its presence from the SERPs. John Marbach, the guy that exposed Rap Genius wrote an article on his blog entitled “RapGenius Growth Hack Exposed” detailing how Rap Genius had improved its search rankings by enticing bloggers to add linkbacks to Rap Genius’ website that contained heavily targeted anchor text — in exchange for a Tweet to said page. (A link for a Tweet) This is what the search results look like when you search for “Rap Genius” at the moment: As you can see RapGenius.com can’t be seen other than on other websites mentioning the now penalised website. This is the sort of link building that RapGenius.com has been doing: That’s just asking for trouble. That’s 16 links to the same site with targeted keyword anchor text to specific pages on the RapGenius.com website. The reason they got caught? They weren’t careful enough. This sort of link building activity likely sent alarm bells ringing, and the fact that they were publicly exposed and publicly reaching out to bloggers like this on Facebook was just another nail in the coffin or even the final nail in the coffin. What’s the course of action? Rap Genius can definitely bounce back from this, as we’ve seen this sort of penalty with brands like Interflora and BMW. They need to contact all of the sites that they’ve reached out to delete the linkbacks to RapGenius.com or either disavow them. Now Rap Genius’ entire backlink profile will be under scrutiny. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether they recover from this. I don’t see why they shouldn’t recover from this if they act quickly. Another point is the fact they’ve likely gained a lot of attraction, as major sites like TechCrunch are now linking to RapGenius.com, which should count for them when they get back on their feet. It’s really quite interesting how a negative can also be a positive. Obviously the negativity of this is at a much higher percentage, but sometimes you just have to look at the positives — even if minimal. Matt Cutt’s “When penguins attack” post on Twitter When penguins attack! Merry Christmas! pic.twitter.com/iEs9yKBVXC — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 25, 2013 What’s your take on...
Google gives preference to Google+ (Duh!)
10SHARESFacebookTwitter It appears that I’ve managed to get my authorship working, but just not on this site. I presume this is because Google are essentially trying to push their product, Google Plus. Unfortunately this is not what I was expecting, but nonetheless I’ll still take it. I posted yesterday on Twitter that I’d be looking into implementing authorship on two of my sites. Just setup Google Authorship on two of my sites — should have done that a while ago. Will be fun to see my face in the SERPs. #GooglePlus — Jonathan Jones (@Jonny_J_) December 20, 2013 I’ve done this by verifying my websites using emails that are connected to the domains I own to verify my authorship status. I’ve also added a much more suitable picture as I’ve read that Google are quite stringent on the types of pictures you can use. You obviously can’t use pictures of cats, dogs or anything else other than a human face; otherwise, that would give you the benefit of higher click-through rates (CTR). This is obviously something Google are against, and you should only really be having rich snippets on listings that you’ve actually written yourself. It’s quite unfortunate as I did already have Google Plus authorship setup (also known as “rich snippets”) — I believe in that occurrence, however, I didn’t have an image uploaded that Google would be willing to accept. It was a side shot of my head. From Google’s own words: “Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot” Otherwise, you’ll find that your mug might not ever appear in the results. You’ll likely get the following issue where your only your Google Plus account will be linked to with no image in sight. See “by Jonathan Jones“. (Only text; boo!) Where Google+ was given preference over my own site And, this is the part where Google+ was given preference over my own website. I actually don’t really think this to be the case, and would moreover conclude that this is due to Google+ being crawled then indexed quicker than my site. I’ve heard it could take a minimum of a week to start seeing my lovely face in the search results — after implementing the rel=”author”, adding your site to G+ and verifying your website using the same domain as your content (not necessary). Why does Google’s Authorship for Google Plus matter? According to a case study by Catalyst Search Marketing, click-through rates (CTR) increased by 150% when the authorship image showed up on their listings. It’s also quite obvious that if you have an image next to a bunch of...
Title & Meta Optimisation using Screaming Frog
12SHARESFacebookTwitter It’s important to optimise your meta descriptions and titles so that they stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and if you’ve got a particularly large website then the process can be quite daunting. However, with the help of programs like Screaming Frog, you should be able to speed this process up a little. And, I really do mean a little, as you’ll still be spending most of your time writing page titles & meta descriptions. Here, I’ll show you how I’m going to optimise my titles and meta descriptions for Vlexo.Net. I’ve been meaning to do this for a couple months now, but I’ve just not had the time to do this. I guess I don’t have that excuse anymore, as I’m on annual leave. 🙂 What is Screaming Frog? Screaming Frog is a crawler and it’s something you should be aware of if you have ever delved in the world of SEO. It’s an awesome tool, in my opinion, which helps you to identify areas of your website/blog that need improvement. For example, you can see where on your site you’re missing H1 & H2 tags or if there are duplicate H1 & H2 tags – with a number to go alongside it. It’s essentially a tool that analyses your website from an SEO perspective. I won’t go into too much description on this, as you can find out what the tool does on the Screaming Frog website. Play around with it and get used to it. In fact, don’t even read about what it does, just run the program and see what you can find out after you enter your site in the URL field. How do you go about optimising your site’s titles and meta descriptions? It’s simple. Using Screaming Frog I simply typed in my domain in the URL field and hit “Start”. What this does is crawl your entire site — pages, images, css, javascript and probably more — then you can use this information accordingly by exporting this data into an Excel spreadsheet and adding into a table to filter it. This is what it should look like in Screaming Frog: The time consuming task is actually coming up with high quality meta descriptions and titles. It’s probably worth doing keyword research behind the pages you’re trying to optimise. For now, you can optimise each page for keywords that you think people will be searching for to find your lovely website, which is essentially what I’m going to be doing with this site. Hit the export button and download the file. Open it up in Microsoft Excel: It’s a little disjointed,...
What new features does WordPress 3.8 give us?
13SHARESFacebookTwitter Crowned as the “most beautiful WordPress yet”, what exactly does this new version give us aside from a new fancy user interface? From first glance, and from not even reading the full list of feature updates, I can already see that they’ve made this version of WordPress very tablet friendly. You only to have to login to WordPress via tablet or minimise your browser to see that it will respond (responsive design) to whatever resolution you’re working in. See this as an example: As you can see, the text is replaced by those larger icons – so that it fits quite comfortably when you’re browsing the WordPress 3.8 admin control centre. You’ll also notice that from a design perspective, things have become much darker on the menu side of things. The default colours have changed from white to black. I personally love this change, as it gives the WordPress 3.8 admin area that sleek feel and the white text behind a black ground makes it easy on the eyes. On that note, you can change the colour schemes in the admin control centre with a colour picker that WordPress have incorporated into the latest build: You’ll notice that most of this review has been focused on the design aspects of WordPress 3.8. This is because the 3.8 is all about updating the user interface to give it that sleek and sexy look. To addon to this sentiment, WordPress have also released a new theme called “Twenty Fourteen”. It’s a magazine based theme and it looks quite sleek, although I’ve found that it would require a lot of tweaking to make it look like the image WordPress has given us: There’s not too much that I can delve into when it comes to features, as this 3.8 update seems to have been all about design. As always, the WordPress team have delivered a fantastic result and I feel they’ve added enough features, that another feature update would be somewhat...
6 Tips for Effective Tech Blogging
20SHARESFacebookTwitter This is a guest post by Selena Mitchell who works as a smartphone developer. In this article she gives her views on what tech blogs can do to improve their online content and reach. Working for an app development company, tech blogging was a first time experience for me. Surrounded by tech snots, developers and designers I felt like a pre-schooler seated in an IT lecture. Many a times, I’d find them talking like the star cast of Matrix, speaking a language where I’d often reply back with “Take me to your leader”- and after a few blank looks, they’d point me towards our boss’s door. So yeah, the field was new and looked encrypted but thanks to a few helpful pointers from a colleague here’s what can make your tech blogging effective and make it blog stand out in no time. 1. Google up techno babble Yes, all these buzzwords and techno speaking may sound intimidating but Google really does help simplify your job instantly. Even when you feel unable to catch up with the techno jargon, the only best thing you can do is to make best friends with Google and ask the engine at least 6 queries before lunch. 2. Read… a lot When you kick start your career as a tech blogger, the only best advice which can miraculously improve your writing is by reading. Just when you think you have read enough for the day, read some more. What’s most important is to stay focused and make your techno cramming on the regular. Stay updated with trends, new gadgets, latest operating versions and with that entire daily dose of tech- knowledge you`d be itching to show off. Here are some of the publications you should be reading daily: TechCruch, Mashables, the Next Web, the Guardian Technology etc. 3. Look up other tech bloggers and reference them: When you read up on other bloggers, not only do you understand what they’re doing right but you can always link them up as well and their related topics in your own posts. When you reference back to them, chances could be they may just link you back and your blog can surface with ease by simply building your virtual connections online, that being essential for any successful blogger. 4. Have a Voice Since blog writing is slightly informal, you can throw in your insight, opinions and garnish it with your wit and charm. Don’t be afraid to let your personality show through your blogs. Your quirky style or dark humor can only entertain your reader so don’t make your blogs a drag, lifeless or robotic. Slight...
On Page Search Engine Optimisation
9SHARESFacebookTwitter On Page Search Engine Optimisation Having done a bit of on page optimisation for websites – it’s always great to have a visual way in how you should be optimising a page with explanations as to why. Here’s a great infographic by BackLinko that explains which areas of the site you should be looking at for optimisation purposes. I’ll be honest and quite frank about Vlexo.net, as I haven’t really done optimisation on this site; however, I do plan to do a full days work of optimisation on this site to get it ranking better in the search results. Source: Infographic by...
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