Category: Search Engine Optimization Penalities

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Hummingbird Ups The Search Ante

SEO Tips For The Hummingbird Algorithm Update

Analytics Graph Affected By The Hummingbird Update

So, Thursday September 26th, Google has revealed the fact that a new algorithm has been running for a month. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24292897

For people not in the industry, you may wonder why there had not been more guessing or supposition from the SEO community. As one of the search engine optimization professionals at My Favorite Web Designs who deals with the constant whims and vicissitudes of the Google engine updates, I can attest that it does not matter too much what it is called, just what it portends.

According to the BBC article, this update utilized almost an AI – a computer algorithm that understands the interconnectedness of concepts and ideas, and thereby simulates something very akin to human understanding in its ability to associate concepts.

Now, I am the first person I know using the word AI for hummingbird, but I have been assuming this would be the wave of the future. Now, is it a true AI, or a sentient self aware artificial intelligence? No, far from it, it is simply replicating functions of learning associated with humans to teach itself.

Now, of course, Google cannot release specifics, since they have patents to protect and intellectual property to safeguard from the other search engines and search engine optimizations pros like those at My Favorite Web Designs. But, I have always done well for my company by speculating, and trying to be logical with the clues that we are given about the search engine updates. So let’s examine the implications, the real practical nitty gritty implications, of an update like Hummingbird.

Conquering And Recovering From Hummingbird

Related Concepts Help SEO

First, Hummingbird seems to be pulling from a pool of knowledge called “latent semantic indexing” which associated words with other words. This means, if you are on a page for plumbing, then Latent Semantic Indexing” theorizes that we should see words such as “plumbing” and “pipes” and “leaks”. The shortcoming of this, and many blackhat SEO’s have known this, is that it is tough for that type of algorithm to catch spun articles, or randomly inserting keywords, as long as they are at a proper density and related to the article.

Hummingbird seems to imply that it will look beyond the keyword to the context of the keyword, both in relation to it sentence, paragraph, heading section, page, etc… (again, I am assuming a lot, but this is how I would set it up, given an unlimited amount of computing power, which Google must be approaching quickly, for its intents and purposes, given the advances in quantum computing and shared processing techniques)

So, this tells me that I can use things like asides, subheadings, and other areas to convey related concepts. So if I am doing a page on phoenix gardening, I can include a section on the pests found in phoenix, and gardening FAQ, etc… Again, I would theorize that the content which best presents these resources in one spot in a well optimized way should be the page that gets the boost from Hummingbird.

Long Tail Becomes More Valuable

Long tail search becomes much more valuable with the arrival of the Hummingbird Search Engine Update. This can be very useful once it is understood. Hummingbird partially addresses a change in the way that end users search. More search occurs on mobile devices, and a fast growing percentage of these are voice searches.

Voice searching is different that typing. Early indication are that people will use much longer tail keywords when voice searching. For example, instead of search phoenix gardening, you might now search “cheap gardener near downtown phoenix” or “gardener who cuts grass and can care for trees”.

How do you take advantage of this? More content! More writing, and, more video, since video utilizes voice recognition and can give more content to a page without making it obnoxious. You can also work with embedded PDF’s, embedded audio files, etc… So when we say more content, it certainly does not need to mean words on page.

Hummingbird Conclusions

Nothing has really changes for web design pros at My Favorite Web Designs, it simply more enforcement of rules from prior years, so if you have been playing it straight you will be fine.

Predictions For The Next Big Updates

Expect Hummingbird, due to the advanced nature of this update, top go through a solid year of iteration. The next update from Google should include social graph data. I do not estimate they are currently calculating entire social graphs for companies and their social reach, due to the processing power required, but this is a very logical extension of the current update, and the processing power seems to be ramping up very, very quickly, so look for social signal to affect search more solidly by this time next year, roughly.

 

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The EMD Penalty And What My SEO Company Learned

The Exact Match Domain Penalty – The EMD Penalty

On Septemper 28th, 2012, Google rolled out a new penalty. The stated target of the penalty was exact match domains, particularly lower quality websites created for the purpose of targeting specific keywords. Google’s contention is that these sites represent unnatural search results, and that they are not truly “organic” results.

According to Google, the update only affected 0.6% of rankings. However, by empirical evidence rocketing through the forums and the SEO community at large, it is affecting a far greater sampling. This is a great example of the partial truthfulness of Google. While the exact match domain portion of the algorithmic update may have only affected .6, the update seems to have targeted low quality sites on non-EMD domains as well.

What Does This Mean For the Future Of SEO?


Search engine optimization through My Favorite Web Designs has evolved over the years. Many of the tactics which worked only a year ago are now an invitation to being penalized or deindexed. This makes many in the field wonder “what does the future of SEO look like now?” and “Is SEO Dead?”.

The answer is that the future actually looks very bright for the SEO community who has proper strategies in place. In fact, this will ultimately result in more American SEO dollars being spent on the creation of useful content instead of the running of spam machines of yesteryear.

Who Will Be The Winners Post EMD, Penguin And Panda?

To start, the greatest winners will be the american copywriter. Virtually gone are the days of article spinning, where instead of paying for the writing of additional content SEO companies used a synonym process to produce duplicate versions of their articles and landing pages. The grammar rules in the algorithm also prevent outsourcing writing to anyone with less than perfect grammar.

Another of the winners is the My Favorite Web Designs search engine optimization consumer. The new methods of SEO promote investment into social media properties, which is a much more enduring form of SEO, and valuable in its own right.

The last winner we’ll look at is the operators of start up web ventures. In the past, SEO companies would have spent big bucks automating spam for each web 2.0 or social media enterprise, reducing the sites effectiveness by diluting it with useless comments and posts linking back to their site. These updates heavily favor sites that promote better content.

How Do I Recover From The Google EMD Update?

In examining my own clients, and looking through countless posts on the internet, I have formed my own conclusions on the causes of the EMD Penalty, and the best routes forward now that the SEO penalty has been incurred.

The Penalty Factors, In My Opinion

  • Lack Of Social Media Connections
  • Overuse of exact match anchor text
  • Under use of the brand name in anchor text
  • Link Velocity Relative To Social Media Connections
  • Links to your site from low quality EMD domains
  • Low quality pics, or keyword stuffing pics
  • Too Many Landing Pages, or duplicate landing pages

The Google Penalties Recovery Methods

1. Build social media. Make sure you have a NAP(Name, Address, Phone Number) exact match on your social media. Use OGP, Twitter Cards And Microdata to hook your site to your social properties. Link to your social properties from your site. Get connections from users in your local area (No purchasing on fiverr, foreign and irrelevant IPs do not help).
2. Build your author rank. Author rank is part of trust rank for sites, and if it is not it will be very soon. It is also another piece of property that is penalty proof. Engage in personal social media, such as Linkedin, personal Facebook, Google plus, and other sites such as Quora.
3. Vary your anchor text – this applies to links on and offsite.
4. If you have any links from really low quality domains, disavow them with Google Webmaster Tools.
5. Use Google Analytics to cull your content. This is easier than you think, do not be intimidated. Go to the content section in analytics, and look for the average time on page, and the bounce rate. For pages that can be improved, improve them. For pages that cannot, redirect them. For pages that have duplicate by useful content, work on combining them, or set up an experiment using analytics to determine the best content for conversions. For pages that get no visits, rework your keywords or redirect them if there is a page they can be part of.
6. Part of improving pages is looking at page length, how stale the content is, adding rich media, embedded media, and other interesting items, such as links to useful resources and infographics.

The last word I will leave you with is the doomed domain effect. This is a scenario where you have worked diligently to increase the quality, and yet your penalty seems to barely go off. Perhaps you manage to achieve some small amount of traffic, but not what you wanted. This may be time to jump ship on your domain. Another instance where this is useful is when it is a brand new site and you are not yet heavily invested in the domain.

If you are asking yourself whether you should change the domain, consider the following: to prevent penalties, we are establishing brand. Brand is the reason people give you trust, and a big part of the reason search engines give you trust. To build brand, your domain should likely match your company name pretty closely, without being long or too many words. So if your domain is just random keywords, then perhaps switching to a branded domain would be a good move, and you can always 301 the old site.

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My Favorite Web Designs –
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Mesa, Arizona 85207
Office: 480-335-1330
Email: Josh@store.myfavoritewebdesigns.com