Google Algo Changes - #seopodcast 149

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name's Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. Yes, I am. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. How are you guys doing today? You are here listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. I actually asked him a question. In my mind, I was like, okay, this is going to be interesting. How do you answer that? The most popular SEO podcast on iTunes, that is because of you, you, you, and all of you. Thank you guys so much for listening. Yeah, all of you from all 64 countries around the world. That's phenomenal. Yeah. I had to reflect on that. 64 countries downloaded this podcast you're listening to last week. Yep, right? Last week. Yeah. 7,000 times. That is awesome. Punch in the face. We are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. Yeah, it's not a good look. As you're listening to the near electric to interact socially and geekily, we would ask you to be geeky right now. Geekish. Geekish. You can tag podcast. Tag us at eSweetish plus it. We'll find fun. We have from the last podcast, our tip is actually we covered algorithm changes, so our tip is to listen to our new segment called Algorithm Cataclysm. Algorithm Cataclysm. Yeah. Yeah, we had some debate over the name. One or both of us may not be convinced. The Algorithm Cataclysm is where we're going to cover recent algorithm changes. That's going to happen really early in our podcast. Frankly, for SEO reasons. And the Algorithm Cataclysm section for today is listen to the rest of this podcast because we're actually going to cover Google Algo changes, which is the latest rap by this cat next to me, also known as the SEO rapper. So we're actually going to go over the lyrics that he put together for that particular rap, give you ways to make contact with that rap. A little bit of news. We've got Facebook

IPO. That's everywhere in the news. I think it was actually pretty interesting that Severin, one of the original founders, renounced his U.S. citizenship like two weeks ago or a week ago to avoid $67 million in taxes. Wow. And U.S. senators, there are a couple of them that are giving him a hard time. And they're like, you know what? You know, you put the, that's how the laws are. And frankly, it's not like he was born and raised here in the U.S. and then decided. He was actually born in Brazil. He's living in Singapore now. Well, you know, it's kind of foolish that he had U.S. citizenship at the time. Maybe when he was here and at the time when he made Facebook, okay, that made sense. And now it doesn't make sense anymore. So it seems cool to me. This I thought was pretty cool. Well, this is ultra geeky. You know, Facebook in a, to celebrate the IPO had a hackathon. Yeah. Their 31st hackathon. I was trying to find out a little bit of details about what they did in that particular hackathon. Yeah, that's not the first one they've had. And so my question has always been, what are you finding out? What are you trying to do? Or what's the logic behind it? Yep. Other than my vision of a whole bunch of people on computers typing real fast. And, you know, it takes you back to the scene from the social network, right? Yep, absolutely. And so, There's a shot. Yeah. You know, what did you win besides drunk, you know? Well, apparently some of their key products or features have come out of hackathons, so that's kind of cool. Okay. It would be interesting to know, like, which ones and out of which, you know, what they were working on. I think they're assigned some tasks. You know what? I'm just making it up. Well, frankly, since going public, this stuff will probably come to the light now because, Yeah, there will be more

information. Yeah, all the stuff that was behind that closed door with the key and the lock on it has now been opened. The lock and key have been given to lots of people now. I thought this was interesting. Windows Phone is edging out the iPhone in China. Okay. I, yeah, I don't know. I always liked the, I think it was, do you remember Benny Hill? Is it Benny Hill? Comedian. Yeah, comedian. The anatomical British guy. And he always used to say, once upon a time there were two Chinamen. Now look how many there are. We got a Facebook from, Facebook question actually from, it's from Shaza Salim. She says, hey guys, I love your SEO podcast. It's very useful. I was wondering if you can help me with the following. I'm a webmaster. Usually starts websites from scratch. But she just got a project and the owners asked her for a full analysis of existing and have, and then email them a report. I know part of it will be SEO analysis, but what other things should I consider? And I thought that was a great question. I don't know if you've had a chance to see our Ether podcast. It's actually a video podcast. It's the Unknown Secrets of Sevo Analysis. So Sevo is one of the things that we would do. Basically in that podcast, people submit their website. We'll do an analysis of that website from, really from two perspectives. One is from SEO and then the other is from Sevo, Search Engine Visitor Optimization. That's where once the traffic gets to you, what are you doing with them? Are you guiding them in the right way so that they're interacting with you the way you need them to? We've said this before, and we're probably the only company that does web design that will say this. We work incredibly hard and with as much skill and talent as we have, we pour all of that into a website. And we desperately want people to

spend as little time as possible on that website. If we can get them to pick up the phone in the first two seconds, one second, don't even click magically, just pick up the phone, that's what we would prefer. Because typically customers, typically our customers want people to pick up the phone and call them. Yeah. I mean our service, our niche for the businesses we tend to target and who our, probably large percentage of our clientele is small businesses who provide a service. And that service is either positioned by a phone call or an email or some sort of action like that. And so, yeah, we spend a lot of time and effort designing a great website that does Sevo. Another phrase for Sevo would be conversion optimization. Right. And so what we want people to do is search, find a site on the homepage, make that click, and then take action. Fill out an email, submit, bounce. Make a phone call, bounce. A lot of our sites have a high bounce rate because of that. And we don't have a problem because we're doing call tracking and we know that they're getting calls. Exactly. So, yeah, I would really, to really sum up your question, yes, you want to look at it from an SEO perspective. You probably want to look at it from an aesthetics, just an overall aesthetics, which is really part of Sevo. You want to make sure, let me give you one example. In one of our website analysis, we told, it was the parks. Remember the New York parks? He had an image. Oh, centralpark.com. Something. Central Park schedules or something. Yeah. And so he basically had all the things that were going on in New York Central Park and on the upper left of his website, there was actually a video that could play. But it didn't have a big play button in the middle of the image. And we said, why don't you add a big play button? He wrote us back

later. He said it increased video watches 70%. So, it's those kinds of things. Make sure, look at it from the perspective of a user. So, not your kind of web design perspective, not your client's perspective who's kind of creating this content for the user, but look at it from the perspective of the user and does everything really make sense? And if you want to guide them somewhere, is it easy for them to get there? Yeah, exactly. Kind of consider the actions you want them to take. If you want them to email you or you want them to call you, put yourself in their shoes. How would they do that when they landed on the site? How easy for it is it for them to do that? You know, is the phone number prominent? Is the contact information readily available? Is what their prime target, what they're looking for, is that easily accessible? You know, keep those things in mind when you analyze the website. And if you haven't, you know, submitted that site for our webinar, we had a few come in. I haven't looked at those yet. Go ahead and submit that. And we'll be glad to take a look at it. And just go to our website to do that. Speaking of which, there are a number of ways you can interact with us. A couple of them are go to facebook.com slash ewebstyle. Twitter.com slash ewebstyle. YouTube.com slash ewebstyle. And email us at podcast at e-webstyle.com. Dot com. All right. So, I think we... Tinner, huh? I was alto. You was thinner. I was like... It was natural. You look like an alto. Do I? All right. So, that is... We have reached our Geno time limit. Again, you know what? She did give us a compliment. And we'll call it a review. She said she loved the podcast, so I didn't have to put a tear. And I have to be honest, there were no new reviews on iTunes this week. So, how do you get, you know, 7,000 downloads

in a week and no new reviews? Yeah. We don't have... Almost disappointed. Almost. He had a great week this week. Yeah, this is... Yeah. I'm not letting that spoil my great week, but come on, y'all. Yeah. Just go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review, and if you choose to, let us know that you wrote a review, and we can give you a punch in the face, a little link love. So, let's make that happen. Also, another thing that you can do, go to e-webstyle.com slash SEO podcast. We're about to jump into the SEO wrapper, so I'm a little excited about that. Slash SEO podcast, and just under the video section, you can find our Google Places page. Go there and write a review about our podcast. We really appreciate that. That'll help us out a lot. All right. Geno time limit exceeded. We are now going to get into the latest rap by the SEO wrapper. Yeah, so, a lot of y'all know Google, this has been a consistent topic throughout the past few podcasts we've done, is about the algorithm changes Google has been making. And so, a while ago, probably earlier this year, actually, I shared with Chris, I said, man, I think I'm going to start composing my new rap covering all these algorithm changes. And then he was like, I am now composing it. Yeah. I'm about to wrap up. I am now wrapping up. The bad part about it was I finished it in, like, probably March. And I recorded the video and everything, and I was really, I had a cool concept in my mind on how the video should go, but, you know, I was editing myself and in my spare time, and I couldn't execute it the way I wanted. Problem with that was, spending the time to execute it, Google released two new algorithm changes. And so, it was like, okay, now this sucks, because now my new rap is already old. Right. And it hasn't even been released yet. Right. So, I

decided to just edit the best way I could, post a video up, it's called Google Algo Changes. It's, go to theseorapper.com, it's the first post there, you'll find it, comment on it, hit me up, check it out, tell them what you think about it. And I covered, really, and we'll go through it now, I talked about, I started from, like, 2010 is when some of the major algorithm changes started really having an effect, and I covered those from 2010, 2011, and up to earlier this year. And so, the lyrics, we'll go through the lyrics, I guess I'll start from the top. The SEO rapper back with another one, pay attention this time, you might learn something. Shout out to business makers, made me think of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did an interview with thebusinessmakers.com this week. Yesterday, yeah. Was that yesterday? Yeah, it was yesterday. And that'll be on their website probably in the next two to four weeks. Coming soon, according to them. Dedicated to my online marketers, spending all day looking at monitors, that's me. First page aim, I get it in, man, we had Google tame till the algorithm change. So, that was kind of the intro into the song. So, then I'll talk about the 2010. Let me take you back to 2010. Local listings, Google places. So, local listings, remember, that one was the one that came in where all of a sudden Google places started showing up in the results to begin with. Yes, exactly. And it was all kind of scattered. Yeah. They had... Over here, they were here. They had maps over here above the sponsor side. Then they moved the map to the middle. Then it was, like, some natural listings, then some places listings, then some more natural listings. And we were kind of freaked out a little bit because they were changing it every day. And so, that was back in 2010. That was in April. I had to put the date in here. Man, you got to see. Everybody wants to be

A through G. That's what happened. After they finally figured it out, they came up with the seven pack A through G, or the listings, for a local listing search. Right. In June came Google Caffeine. It increased Google's website crawl speed. And so, Google Caffeine was, you know, the algorithm update that allowed Google to really index more sites. And massive content. Massive, huge amounts of content. That was when Matt Cutts, didn't he say, they could take a screenshot of the entire web. Yeah. Yeah. In three seconds or something. They actually have the pipe, the bandwidth, and the computer systems to literally take a screenshot of the web like that. That's crazy. They don't do it because it would take down the web. Google Instant came in September. Everybody was panicking. Remember? Yes, I remember that. Google Instant is when you begin typing your search query in the search box, and it drops down and gives you some instant related search terms. And so, from an SEO perspective, we were like, that sucks because it also, because the page changes. Yeah. As the word, more letters you type, the more words come up, the results automatically change. Yeah. The old content is impressions, this or that. We learned that they implemented the 30-second rule. Right. And that's how I actually found a rap group called Tech N9ne. I was looking up Tech News, and by the time I had typed the N in news, Tech N9ne had come up, and so now I'm a fan of Tech N9ne. Awesome. Yeah. Like, Google should get paid for that. Yeah. But they probably did sometime. No, no, no. They should pay me. Up here. Let's see. Then they switched gears, focused on landing pages. In November, Instant Previews initiated. So, Instant Previews, if you're looking at a search page, you can hover to the right of the search engine result, and you'll get a pop-up with a screenshot of the website you're about to click on. Instant Previews. I use it occasionally, especially when I see the text that

doesn't match necessarily. Yeah, it seems like this result shouldn't be here, you know, and I'll look at this site. So, pretty cool. Saves you a click. Social Signal was added in December. You rank influenced by Facebook and Twitter. So, yeah, that's when they kind of made a change to see if, how much social was affecting your site. You know, how much social activity you had, links, tweets, Facebook posts, comments, things like that. It's a distraction. So, in 2011, there were more changes. You know them, I remember about six or seven. So, in January 2011, they reached one called Attribution Updater. January Tried to Stop Content Scrapers. So, the Attribution Update was really targeted towards people who copy in content and placing, you know, content in other places, spinning articles and things like that. That's what that algorithm update was for, to try to prevent that. And that hit us. Yeah, that hit us. That hit our, actually, our SEO podcast page. We were, you know, bouncing between, I don't know, page one and page two at the time. And then we ended up, you know, back in the supplemental. And it was because we were just taking snippets of our podcast from our RS feed. And that actually ended up, they cut us out because it was scraped content. So, then they released Panda in February. Messed up a whole bunch of people. Very scary. And so, Panda was huge. A lot of people were affected by the Panda Update. The Panda Update kind of really affected things across the board. Yeah. Not just links, not just content. It affected, you know, a lot. You know, how the over-optimization was kind of sprinkled in there. And that's, even, it was funny about Panda. It's so huge of an update that they're releasing out different versions. Sub-versions. Yeah, like Panda 3.5, Panda 3.7, and things like that. And so, my thing, to this day, most of the algorithm updates have some sort of Panda in them, if you will. Right. Because you have good content and

quality. They released Farmer in that same month. Hurting people using content forums, huh? Yeah, so the Farmer was for people who were, you know, just really getting content from all these different places. Really trying to take advantage of caffeine and writing tons of content, and then they're like, oh, okay, that's too much content, and it's kind of crappy content. Yeah, just a whole bunch of content. It makes no sense, but it's keyword-rich and extremely targeted. And so, you have all this content coming to your site from all these different places, and they're like, okay, this is the content forum. They're not going to value that. And so, if your site was ranking because of that sort of technique or tactic, then you were affected by the Farmer update. We actually did, in some of our podcasts, we talked about people who were massively impacted by that Farmer update. Yeah, it was a lot of people who did. It was some pretty big brand names who were actually affected by that. In March, they tried to get social right, plus one button similar to a Facebook like. So, in March 2011, that's when we started to see the plus one buttons on the search and the results page, which is pretty cool, which kind of leads into the next couple of algorithm updates. But the plus one is just like a like. Well, I ain't going to say just like a like. It functions like a like. Plus one counts as a vote, pretty much. The cool thing about it is it shows their image. You know, they like this, or somebody who you, they plused it. Right. They plus one is. And so, it's pretty cool because you can see people who are in your Google Plus circles, if they plus something that you're debating or clicking on or not. And that can actually affect the results. Like, so when you do a search, if somebody in your circles actually plus something. Yeah, then your results are so different. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Now, mentally, I

wonder how it works with, let's say I got people in my circle who I don't favor them. Yeah. Now, he looked at this page, you know. Yeah. I'm not clicking this one. Site links came in August. It was 12. Then they cut it down to six. So, that is when you see a natural listing and you have the six pack of links that go to different pages on that site below the listing. Right. Those are called site links. Oh, man. October came a huge change, man. Encrypted search query. Hurt the analytic game. Oh, man. Yeah. Oh, it was only supposed to affect 3% or something. It's affecting. 30% of a client that we have. Yeah. Probably more than 30% because, you know, 33% at the last one we looked at and every time I'm in analytics and I'm looking at keywords, not provided is always the top phrase. As a matter of fact, I've never seen anything under 30%. Yeah. And so, yeah, I understand the logic behind it was protecting the privacy of people who are logged into Google so you don't pass through their search data. But you'll do it for PPC? You'll do it for people who are paying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a little, come on, Google. That's a little funny. Let's see. Yeah. In November, release Freshness. We call it Ziploc. So the Freshness update was a pretty cool one. I think it was really targeted towards industries that provide or that need to provide a level of new content. Right. You know, news or entertainment, sports or health even, where information changes rapidly and so they don't want to display old information. They display the newest information. Right. And so the Freshness update, we call it Ziploc here. Just a better name for it. Google should just take our lead. Here in 2012, they still added too many ads above the fold. Call it Top Heavy. Top Heavy was the algorithm update that really focused on sites that had too many ads, frankly. So most of these blog sites

got affected by that. You know, they have a banner ad at the top and then you're still above the fold and you have some more kind of square ads over here. And then you got a pop-up ad coming over here. And all this is happening above the fold before the user can get to the content. I'm getting penalized for that. It's just, you know, go remove your ads. Put them below the fold. And this really goes back to what we say regularly. As long as you're providing a good experience to the Google user, then Google's going to like you. And if you're providing a bad experience, eventually Google's going to incorporate into their algorithm something to stop that, to stop you from showing up well in the search engines if you are. Yeah. And so the last one I covered in the song was Plusher World Search. It includes Google Plus social data. That was the last one they did. It was very major. And so the Plusher World Search, that's when they began to really, it tied back to the Plus One button update. The Plusher World Search really began to change everyone's results based on the search word due to, you know, how social they've been in regards to Google Plus. So if you've Plus One this site, this site, and that site, and they're related or linked to some other sites, then depending on what you search, that will have some sort of effect on what results you see. And it even goes a step further. People who are in my circles or who I'm in their circles, if they've Plus One stuff, similar things that Google deems may be interesting to me, then my search engine results may change again, which is good and bad. I think in regards to that, it makes doing SEO a little bit more, I won't say difficult, but a little bit more time consuming. Right. Because there's more work you've got to do now, more steps you have to do. You know, I can't depend

on the same results showing for a particular search phrase regardless of who searches it. Yep. You know, now, if they're logged into Google, they'll see something different. If they're active on Google Plus, they'll see something different. If they're logged in, active on Google Plus, and have a lot of people in their circles, you know, then those results will change again. And so you have to, you know, it really forces you to add Google Plus to part of your search engine optimization strategy. You have to be doing G Plus now. Right. Add that to your social media campaign. Yep, absolutely. And since they've actually integrated the local places listings and the kind of traditional organic listings, you know, you've got to do a better job on your Google local places page as well. So that's true. So at the end of your wrap, and by the way, it's really cool what he did with it because he's got a section where he's teaching and he's got him as an SEO or wannabe kind of guy. And so check out the video. It's awesome. At the end of the video, he mentions some of the algorithm changes that he didn't mention in the wrap. Yeah, so like Penguin came out afterwards. They just did another one. The Penguin one kind of affected ad text. I mean, not ad text, anchor text. They released several things since then, like within the past three months. And so I did cover those briefly. May start on a part two, perhaps. Because we'll wait until the end of the year, and that way I'll have enough content for it. But, yeah, so check it out. VSEOrapper.com. Maybe we'll tweet it out to those who happen to be watching right now. Very cool. All right. That's it. You have been listening to any blank stare? No, not really. You know, I'm just curious to see what's going to happen after the IPO today. Yeah. You know, that'll be blank stare regardless of how it happens. Yeah. You know, it'll be something probably

historic, you know. I heard yesterday that the projections of the valuation of Facebook, if you use the multiplier based on earnings and the actual valuation of Facebook, if you use that same multiplier on Apple, Apple's like a $2.3 trillion company if you use that multiple. So, it kind of gives you a sense, because I think Apple's a couple billion, I don't know what they're at. They're not in the trillions. And so, it gives you an idea of how the valuation of Facebook has been so weird. And there's been a lot of talk lately of, is Facebook going to be gone in 10 years? Is Facebook going to be MySpace, you know, in 10 years? Who knows? Only time will tell. Well, there have been other really large social networks that have gone the way of the dodo. You have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast. This has been podcast number 149. Next one's going to be 150. I think we will have a hat on and a balloon. A cone hat. A cone hat. You know, one of the things, the birthday celebration. Woo! Yeah, maybe. The thing, you know what I'm talking about. That's a good idea. Yeah. So, make sure you check that one out. And make sure you go check out the rap, theseorapper.com. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for making us the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris.