Welcome to our new weekly series. For quite some time we have been thinking about collecting interesting topics each week and sharing them here on our blog. We get a lot of questions from our customers about what we think is important out there at the moment and the customer is always right of course. So here we are.
We’ll look at fresh topics, as well as the ones we think that you need to keep and eye on and the ones you better not ignore.
Let’s get started, shall we?
No conferences for me this week, after SMX New York and then the OMCap in Berlin, I need to get some work done. Next ones I’ll be at are SEOKomm in Salzburg.
So lets see what was happening this week:
- Disavow Links – we need to talk about this one: The new “Disavow Links” from Google has already been making the rounds, nothing need to add but to check this example from Graham Charlton and spend some time with this tool. This can be a pretty helpful, but it can also strongly impact your business. We had a customer a few month ago who suffered a lot from pretty dirty links that somebody (seemingly) bought to lower his rankings. And even after a lot of calls, emails and letters, he still wasn’t able to remove all of the dirty links, so he will really love this new tool from Google.
- Google is still building his own stuff; One of the latest offers Google put into our results; A website for car insurance. After buying Beatthatquote.com, they now need to get back to business and get a return on the investment. What’s next? Who knows, they tried to get into the jobs business a few years ago with Google Base, but failed due to the resistance of the job boards. Now they are stepping into the more affiliate focused markets, and there a still some other spaces that they could step into next. Lets see what Google comes up with.
- Google is getting more and more local. If you need local rankings for you business models, you will need to keep an eye on what this one. Stay up to date about what you can do to promote your stuff locally.
- Using infographics for your SEO, then you might need to be careful. I read this at Search Engine Land and can recommend it for your reading list. And because this still is a social topic, read these tips from Cyrus Shepard at SEOmoz, how to use G+. While we’re talking Google+, we have some upcoming news about our new ranking factor study that we are working on, because we can nearly prove it to be a ranking factor 😉
- Watch the snippets in the SERPs. There was a pretty good Bastian Grimm at SMX Stockholm, including a lot of tricks and tips. Give it a try, the slides make it a fast read.
- A calming article from Chris Drum at Webpronews about a Heavy-Ad-Penalty: He shows that you can recover pretty fast from penalties from using too many ads. In his case it was solved after the next crawl, lets hope that it always works this fast.
- Tart thinking Google news: First of all, because our friends at Search Engine Land collected some information about Enterprise News SEO. Also interesting, is what is happening at the moment in Brazil. 154 News websites decided to step out of Google News, “because it did not bring us more relevant users“. Next could be the French or the Germans, all having problems with Google news earning revenue but not splitting it back to the news portals. We’re working on a study to show how this impacts the SERPs and who wins or loses from here. For myself the answer is pretty easy, I would rather have the traffic from Google news, than not.
Here are our next conferences:
- 1.11. UK Search Awards (Searchmetrics is nominated)
- 6.11. NOAH Conference London (Marcus as Speaker)
- 8.11. Race Conference Moskau (Marcus and Matthias as Speaker)
- 23.11. SEOKomm Salzburg (Marcus and Kathrin as Speaker)
I hope you like our new series and i would love to get some feedback from you. And of course we would also like to get you input, what is important for you to read here, what did i miss and what to i need to put on next weeks agenda. Just contact me via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or in real life (yes, that really exists) and tell me what you think is important these days.