A New Direction for SEO in 2014: The Secure Search Manifesto

SEO marketing finally matured in 2013. With more than 500 algorithm changes a year, keeping pace with innovation was a source of confusion and frustration for some people, yet provided great clarity for others.

The rapid pace of change in our market, fueled by the convergence of earned, owned, and paid media has meant that the traditional SEO mindset moved from keyword-centric methodologies toward new content-centric, and key revenue based strategies.

Google's move to make 100 percent of search keyword data "(not provided)" in September finally forced SEO marketers to rethink their strategies. Some people failed to identify trends, and struggled to adapt, while others took a giant innovative leap into the world of secure search.

In 2014 we'll see a new content and page-centric SEO workflow form the backbone of, what I like to call, a new "Secure Search Manifesto." This new manifesto allows you to actually match your SEO and content marketing strategies to measurable business outcomes.

2013: The Year SEO Changed Forever

SEO changed forever in 2013. The evolution of SEO and the focus on content started a long time ago. Google's Hummingbird update "rubber stamped" the essential need to focus on quality content marketing and, in conjunction, secure search did the same with regard to "adapt or die" pure keyword rank checking philosophies.

Google began giving SEO marketers signals about how their model and algorithms would change in 2011. Panda and Penguin gave clear signals on the shift to content and relevancy and the removal of "black hat" strategies. The gradual rise in the number of keywords "(not provided)" signaled an impending paradigm shift in the keyword model market to a content-centric model.

In September 2013 marketers witnessed the single biggest change to happen in this industry since the introduction of off-page factors and backlinks. Secure search ensured that adapting to change was no longer an option but a necessity.

The Dangerous Perception: Old school strategies can still work

Any fundamental shift in a market brings with it opportunity but also resistance and fear. Many marketers still maintain the misconceived perception that SEO is dead – a very mute and irrelevant topic.

A far more dangerous perception is that although SEO has changed, the way you work doesn't have to change. Let me be clear:

• In a pre-"(not provided)" world, marketers had the luxury of having access to traffic, conversion, and revenue data by keywords.
• In the new "(not provided)" world, marketers no longer have access to this data.
• Continuing to look at just keyword data won't work for your business.
• Marketers that still focus on an outdated dependence on rank checking tools will see their SEO performance decline rapidly.
• Moving from old school to new school tactics across page, content, search, and social sets you up for success in 2014.

The Reality: Content, Page and Analytics Integration now are King and Key Strategy

A renewed importance and focus on quality content was reflected in the Hummingbird change that ran in parallel to the move to secure search. For the forward thinking marketer this was a clear signal that SEO is in fact more alive than ever.

Forward thinking marketers have been evolving and developing content and on-page strategies in line with Google innovation. They changed the way that they work and now look to innovative ways to integrate analytics data to restore visibility no longer available with secure search.

Organizations that can mirror and adapt to a new SEO workflow stand to benefit at the expense of their competitors.

2014: The New Secure Search Manifesto

Adapting to the epic change and shift in our market requires adapting to, and focusing on, a new direction in SEO. Here are four key truths about secure search that you can use as a guide to formulate your strategies in 2014.

1. Analytics is the Source of Truth

Secure search changed the way that we think about SEO forever. In 2014, new SEO reporting requires a shift to measuring real (not estimated) business metrics at a page level. This includes making sure that you measure traffic, conversions, and revenue.

In 2013 many marketers viewed secure search shift resulting in a technology or integration problem. The best marketers saw this as a logical outcome of a shift to page-centric SEO. Your web pages, are what will attract visitors, drive conversions and help you measure organic revenue in the New Year.

2014 Tips and Tactics:

• The most effective way to manage your SEO programs going forward is to make pages the center of your SEO world.
• Pull actual data from your web analytics at the page level in order to do this.
• Understand what is happening with your traffic, conversions, and revenue as a result of secure search and prioritize you work accordingly.

2. Rank Still Matters

In 2013 the meaning and focus on "what rank is" changed rapidly. The convergence of earned, owned, and paid media was reflected in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The integration of search, social, mobile, global, and local, and the growth and adoption of mobile, changed the way content appeared in the SERPs.

SEO success is now the gateway to measuring the ultimate business impact of your content – driving a greater keyword rank for your page's is essential and tracking your keyword performance still matters. Rank still matters in 2014. It always will.

2014 Tips and Tactics:

• Focus on accurate rank in 2014 – this means having a robust methodology in place that takes account of spikes and drops in traffic and not focusing on generic rank reports that do not take into account these shifts.
• Make sure that you measure rank and performance by device type – research shows that rank and conversions on tablets, phone, and desktop vary dramatically.

• Ensure that you are measuring and tracking universal/blended rank. This includes looking at Carousel results. Remember, there aren't always 10 results per page.

In 2014, rank means ensuring that you have complete visibility into how content appears in the SERPs by device type (mobile, tablet, desktop) in universal listings, and by location (city and country).

3. Page and Content are the Center of the Universe

It's essential that your approach to content in 2014 is done the "Hummingbird way." Content on your pages are what attract visitors, drive conversions and bring in revenue. The most effective way to manage SEO programs in 2014 is to make pages the center of your SEO world.

2014 Tips and Tactics:

• Think like a content marketer, analyze like an SEO.
• Analyze your content and data at a page level in 2014.
• Integrate and work closely with GWMT to correlate page and keyword data.
• Use this data to understand your SEO and content performance across revenue, conversions, and traffic at a page level.
• Set up and report on individual and group pages total performance.

"The industry has become overly dependent on keyword referral as a data point," said Chris Keating, VP, SEO, CO and Data Feeds, Performics. "We will continue to leverage other search engine-provided data, but our main source of advanced metrics will cover page-level performance, share of voice, and other enterprise measurements."

4. All Data is Relevant and Connected

In 2014, you'll need to utilize a rich set of data sources to ensure that you have a complete, 20/20 vision, on how your content and SEO is performing. Secure search brought about challenge for some but opportunities for many.

All structured data has a meaning and is connected across search, social, and digital marketing. The opportunity manifests itself in analytical integration and how you connect the search, social, and content dots on your web page.

2014 Tips and Tactics:

• Utilize all your data from multiple data sources (such as Majestic SEO and Google Analytics)
• Ensure that you utilize Google Webmaster Tools data to restore partial keyword visibility.
• Integrate this data to form new format keyword reports.
• Build comprehensive dashboards that collate all rank, keyword, social, and content data in one place – do this at a local and global level.

Conclusion

Old habits die hard in SEO. However, adapting to change is the new imperative that marketers in our industry have to follow in 2014. SEO has always been the most predominant channel in online marketing and it always will be.

So, what has changed? People's perception of what SEO is has changed.

• SEO is content
• SEO is social
• SEO is analytics
• SEO is marketing

Google's shift toward 100 percent secure search meant that the metrics and methodology SEO practitioners had been using needed to change.

The role of SEO as the driver of earned media has become even more important as part of the content marketing revolution. The key to unlocking this potential lies in gaining a 360-degree view of how your content is performing across all your web pages and attributing this to revenue.

It's time to build a new dashboard – a content performance dashboard.

Google's Matt Cutts: Our Algorithms Try To Break Black Hat SEOs Spirits

A couple weeks ago, Google's Matt Cutts was on This Week in Google (TWiG) and on episode 227 Matt had some interesting things to say. He said that Google specifically tries to break the spirits of black hat SEOs.

At about an hour and 25 minutes into the video, Matt said:

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.

Here is the video, scroll to just before 1:25 on this video:

So in short, Google actually doesn't just look to prevent money to go to spammers, they look to break their spirits.

Google's Matt Cutts: A Little Duplicate Content Won't Hurt Your Rankings

Duplicate content is always a concern for webmasters. Whether it's a website stealing content from another site, or perhaps a website that hasn't taken an active role in ensuring they get great unique quality content on their site, being duplicated out of the Google index is a problem.

In the latest webmaster help video from Google's Matt Cutts, he addresses how Google handles duplicate content, and when it can negatively impact your search rankings.

Cutts started by explaining what duplicate content is and why duplicate content isn't always a problem, especially when it comes to quoting parts of other web pages.

It's important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web's content is duplicate content. … People will quote a paragraph of a blog and then link to the blog, that sort of thing. So it's not the case that every single time there's duplicate content it's spam, and if we made that assumption the changes that happened as a result would end up probably hurting our search quality rather than helping our search quality.

For several years, Google's stance has been that they try to find the originating source and give that result the top billing, so to speak. After all, Google doesn't want to serve up masses of identical pages to a searcher because it doesn't provide a very good user experience if they click on one page, didn't find what they're looking for, and then go back and click the next result only to discover the identical page, just merely on a different site.

Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as of it's just one piece of content. So most of the time, suppose we're starting to return a set of search results and we've got two pages that are actually kind of identical. Typically we would say, "OK, rather than show both of those pages since they're duplicates, let's just show one of those pages and we'll crowd the other result out," and then if you get to the bottom of the search results and you really want to do an exhaustive search, you can change the filtering so that you can say, "OK, I want to see every single page" and then you'd see that other page. But for the most part, duplicate content isn't really treated as spam. It's just treated as something we need to cluster appropriately and we need to make sure that it ranks correctly, but duplicate content does happen.

Next, Cutts tackles the issue of where duplicate content is spam, such as websites that have scraped content off the original websites or website owner suggests republish a lot of “free articles” that are republished on masses of other websites. These types of sites have the biggest problem with duplicate content because they merely copy content created on other websites.

It's certainly the case that if you do nothing but duplicate content, and you are doing in an abusive, deceptive, malicious, or a manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action on spam. So someone on Twitter was asking a question about "how can I do an RSS auto blog to a blog site and not have that be viewed as spam," and the problem is that if you are automatically generating stuff that is coming from nothing but an RSS feed, you're not adding a lot of value, so that duplicate content might be a little bit more likely to be viewed as spam.

There are also cases where businesses might legitimately end up with duplicate content that won't necessarily viewed as spam. In some cases, websites end up with duplicate content for usability reasons, rather than SEO. For the most part those websites shouldn't worry either

But if you're just making a regular website and you're worried about whether you'd have something on the .com and the .co.uk, or you might have two versions of your terms and conditions, an older version and a newer version, that sort of duplicate content happens all the time on the web and I really wouldn't get stressed out about the notion that you might have a little bit of duplicate content.

Cutts does caution against local directory types of websites that list masses of cities but serve up empty listings with no true content about what the user might be looking for, as well as sites that create individual pages for every neighborhood they service, even though the content is the same as what's on main city web page.

As long as you're not trying to massively copy for every city in every state in the entire United States, show the same boilerplate text which is, "no dentists found in this city either," for the most part you should be in very good shape not have anything to worry about.

Bottom line: as long as your duplicate content is there for legitimate reasons (e.g., you're quoting another website or you have things like two versions of terms and conditions), you really shouldn't be concerned about duplicate content. However, Google certainly can and will take action against sites utilizing duplicate content in a spammy fashion, because they aren't adding value to the search results.

Google Squashes Backlinks.com, Another Link Network Outed By Google’s Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, announced on Twitter that Google has gone after another link network, this one is named Backlinks.com.

Like with Anglo Rank, the link network Google outed the week prior, Matt Cutts took a line from their marketing material and then said “Au contraire!” This is the way Matt Cutts tells the SEO industry that Google is actively going after link networks and to stop participating in them.

Here is Matt’s tweet about Backlinks.com:

"Our installation code/software used to publish the sold links is not detectable by the search engine bots." Au contraire!

Here is the tweet the week before on Anglo Rank:

"There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together" Oh, Anglo Rank.

Will there be a tweet late on Friday this week about another link network?

Anglo Rank Rebuilding?

It is reported at Search Engine Roundtable that the owner of Anglo Rank, the link network Google penalized the week before, has decided to rebuild the network and start again. It is said that this is how black hats operate, they build sites that they expect will get penalized and then do it all over again after the penalty. Is it recommended? No, you can’t build a long term business around this cat and mouse game. But some like to live life on the edge.

Over the past year or so, Google has been going after link networks at greater speeds. Here are some of the reports we have on those stories over a year or so

Nelson Mandela Ranks #1 On Google’s Top Trending Searches For 2013

Google has published its top ten global trending searches of  2013, with the recently deceased South African leader Nelson Mandela ranking No. 1 for this year’s top global searches:

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the #1 trending search of 2013 was an international symbol of strength and peace: Nelson Mandela. Global search interest in the former President of South Africa was already high this year, and after his passing, people from around the world turned to Google to learn more about Madiba and his legacy.

Unlike Yahoo’s celebrity-focused list of top searches or Bing’s collection of top searchesthat surprisingly lacked any mention of Nelson Mandela, Google’s top global searches included a variety topics, from celebrities to tech gadgets and world affairs.

Google’s Top 10 Trending Global Searches of 2013:

1. Nelson Mandela
2. Paul Walker
3. iPhone 5s
4. Cory Monteith
5. Harlem Shake
6. Boston Marathon
7. Royal Baby
8. Samsung Galaxy s4
9. PlayStation 4
10. North Korea

Along with its top global trending searches, Google also published its annual “Year-End Zeitgeist” page, listing more than 1,000 top ten search lists. Google claims this year represented the most “global Zeitgeist” to date with top searches from 72 countries.

Top searches of 2013 included:

• Most searched celebrity pregnancies – Kim Kardashian
• Most searched deaths – Paul Walker
• Most searched Fortune 500 – Google
• Most searched movies – Man of Steel
• Most searched MLB Player – Alex Rodriguez
• Most searched NBA Player – LeBron James
• Most searched TV Show – Breaking Bad

According to Google, the most often searched “What is..?” question asked by users was, “What is twerking?” which aligned perfect with the site’s most searched person of the year, Miley Cyrus.

Google wrapped up its year with a video spotlighting the most popular people, places and events of 2013:

7 Breaking SEO News Updates That Will Take Your Business To New Heights

Nothing ever remains the same way for long in the world of SEO. The experts at Moz report that Google typically updates their algorithm between 500-600 times each year! While most of these tweaks go unnoticed, we’ve recently weathered an abundance of rewrites and changes that could affect how your company approaches your content marketing strategy. To help you stay informed about the ever-changing inbound marketing landscape, here are 7 pieces of critically-important SEO news:

1. Google is Tough on Repeat Offenders

One of the most fascinating and little-known areas of SEO news is Google penalties. When websites break Google’s webmaster guidelines with outdated tactics like buying links, they’re typically caught. The search engine responds with an official spam warning, and may eventually ban some websites from appearing in search results. Recovering from these issues can take months of hard work.

Google’s head spam fighter, Matt Cutts, recently revealed in a Q & A session that it’s much harder to come back and rank well after a second or third penalty. In fact, his recommendation for websites who are trying to improve their SEO after past use of purchase links to use the disavow tool to wipe their backlinks completely. If you’re unaffected, take this as evidence that it’s crucial to be pay attention to SEO news and avoid breaking any rules.

2. Rich Snippets Could Be Rolled Out Soon

The author photos which appear next to search results once you’ve earned Google authorship are a form of rich snippet. However, it appears the world’s biggest search engine is considering leveling the playing field. SEO News reporter Matt Southern shared that Google is currently testing the idea of including embedded images in search results, which are visible with certain searches:

If you haven’t started enhancing each of your website pages with images, this SEO news indicates it’s probably wise to make that your next project.

3. In-Depth Results aren’t Going Anywhere

Back when Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm re-write was launched, the search engine announced they’d be sharing in-depth search results for around 10% of queries that may require more complex answers. Recent SEO news have indicated that the in-depth articles initiative continues, and that every web master has an opportunity to have their content featured among these top results:

While many of the websites featured in in-depth results have extraordinarily high site authority, the Google webmaster blog announced the SEO news that you can improve your chances of being featured here with the following tactics:

• Use schema.org “article” markup,
• Apply for Google authorship and include the markup,
• Use rel=next and rel=prev for paginated articles (also watch out for common rel=canonical mistakes),
• Provide information about your organization’s logo,
• Create compelling in-depth content.

4. Google to Index App Content

If you haven’t yet built an app for your business, there may be even more incentive to get started now. Some of Google’s latest SEO news is that content from Android apps would soon be indexed like regular web pages. This concept is illustrated below using real estate website Trulia:

It isn’t easy to set this up – it requires advanced SEO capabilities to edit your Sitemap file, and a working knowledge of Google Webmaster tools. However, once it’s up and running, you’ll be able to provide a seamless mobile web experience to your customers. This is undoubtedly mobile marketing at it’s best!

5. Google PageRank is Now Up-to-Date

In perhaps the most shocking piece of SEO news in months, Google PageRank was quietly updated on December 6, 2013. Prior to 2012, the tool bar was updated on a quarterly basis, allowing SEOs and content marketers almost real-time access to their site’s authority in the eyes of Google. However, this year it wasn’t updated once and Cutts stated it probably wouldn’t be – causing many to speculate that PageRank would become secret data like keywords.

The updates are now live, and you can scope out how your site’s authority has increased in the past year. Regardless of when the next update occurs, you can rest assured that your site’s authority is updated in the eyes of Google on an hourly basis – even if you can’t see it.

6. Semantic Search is on the Rise

Anyone who’s been using web technologies for more than a decade remembers Boolean search operators. Early search engines weren’t smart enough to pick up on things like plural words, and you had to join your queries together with specific terms like “and”, “or”, and “else.” However, the deployment of Google Hummingbird, Bing’s Satori and Facebook’s knowledge graph in 2014 is clear evidence that search engines are getting much smarter at picking up on the variation behind phrasing choices, a concept known as semantic search.

SEO news expert Colin Jeavons writes that search engine’s increasing ability to use natural language processing has already transformed SEO from a highly rigid practice to a science that’s a mixture of quality, social signals, and optimization efforts. If your primary SEO tactic isn’t quality content above keywords, it’s time to make the switch.

7. Google Penalizes Excessive Linking

Cutts recently addressed the long-standing belief that you should never exceed 100 links per page on your website. Turns out, it’s still a wise best practice. In the early days of search, major engines had trouble indexing content with more than 100 links. While the capability is now there, excessive linking can be a pretty serious red flag that someone’s being spammy. Cutts recommends that content marketers stick to a “reasonable number” of links. If you hit 102 or 110 links on a particularly long and research-heavy piece of content, you’re probably in the clear. If your links begin to interfere with the readability of your content, it may be time to take a step back.

Google Busts Yet Another Link Network: Anglo Rank

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, just confirmed on Twitter that Google has targeted another “private link network” – this one is named Anglo Rank.

Matt’s tweet was pretty direct, he wrote:

“There are absolutely NO footprints linking the websites together” Oh, Anglo Rank.

That is a quote directly from Anglo Rank’s marketing material, and a dig from Cutts suggesting that indeed, Google was able to spot sites in the network.

In response, Search Engine Land’s editor-in-chief Matt McGee suggested on Twitter that those in the network were likely to find that it was “torched.” Cutts responded by saying “messages can take a few days to show up in [Google Webmaster Tools], so timing of when to post can be tricky to predict.”

In other words — yes, Cutts confirmed that Anglo Rank was penalized, and that those involved with it were getting penalty notifications, and since those were finally starting to appear in Google Webmaster Tools, Cutts felt it was OK to finally go more public with a tweet.

Over the past year or so, Google has been going after link networks at greater speeds. Here are some of the reports we have on those stories over a year or so:

• Google May Have Penalized Another Major Link Network: Ghost Rank 2.0
• Did Google Just Penalize Another Link Network? SAPE Links
• Google Eliminates Another Link Network, BuildMyRank.com – Just One Of Several?
• Google Zaps Another Link Network, ‘Several Thousand’ Link Sellers Hit
• “Text Link Ads” Was Latest Hit By Google’s Actions Against Link Sellers

Cutts did say that Anglo Rank is not the only link network targeted in this effort. Heresponded to me that Google has “been rolling up a few” link networks in this specific target.

So if you get a message in Google Webmaster Tools about paid links in the next day or so, it may be related to this update.