Google Freshness and Ziplock update - #seopdocast 127

Although we never talk about them. We probably won't ever, except for like right now. I can tell you I will never have another one, because I had one. You had one? Oh yeah, it was. The only thing that saved it is I was actually able to put a wrapper on it, so it totally enveloped the operating system so I didn't have to deal with it. Gotcha. Bad. And Linux doesn't have anything. They don't have anything that is actually an operating system for a mobile device. At least not that I know of. Actually, I'm sure there's one out there. And it's certainly not, it was never really a major competitor to Microsoft and Apple, so I think it's even less a competitor in mobile. So it's interesting as we go mobile, as more and more searches happen mobile, as more and more really computer time goes mobile. Yeah, FaceTime. Yeah. Then, you know, the operating systems you're using are going to become very relevant, more important, and will probably exclude Linux. And it's funny, when I think Linux, I think servers. Yeah. I don't think OS. Right. I think servers. I think GoDaddy hosting option, Windows or Linux. Yep. And then, that's what makes me kind of contradict what you said, because most of these CMSs that we tend to install, WordPress, you know, ModX, Joomla, all these WordPress, all of these CMSs work on Linux. They tend to work better on Linux than the Windows. They're designed to work on Linux, and then, yeah, they happen to work on a Windows box, which we can attest to, because our sites are on Windows boxes, and they run fine. Yeah. Yeah, there's one little tweak with WordPress on the login process. We know the workaround. Another thing, hey, I don't know if you've heard this, there was an algorithm change after Charles. Google algo update. Charles sent it in my direction to keep me up. We are going to call this the Ziploc update. Yes. Because it doesn't really have any sort of name associated with

it. You know, usually there's like caffeine or panda. Reformer or whatever it is. Something, right? This one had nothing. It's Google Ziploc. Google Ziploc. It's all about freshness. Really what it is, is they're saying that this new update is going to impact 35% of searches, and that the update is really about freshness, to give more credibility to freshness. And I love some of the examples, and you probably have some off the top of your head, of where this impact is important and useful. Well, I like the example that they gave on their blog site, on the Google blog site. The example they gave was, you know, if you were to search Olympics, right, then you would technically want to see stuff about the upcoming 2012 Olympics and not necessarily something about, you know, Dominique Dawes from some Olympics ago. Right. You know, and so the whole concept of the algo update was to bring you the freshest, most up-to-date content relevant to your search query. Makes sense. Some of the other examples they gave were like NFL, Exxon earnings. You really don't want Exxon earnings from, you know, 1970. Yeah. So, and, you know, projections. Yeah, NFL was a good one. Yeah, if I'm looking for the 49ers score, I'd like to see, you know, what their score was right now. Last night or right now during game time. During the game, you know, rather than what last week's score was, because that doesn't help me. Another example, SLR, you know, kind of modern example, SLR cameras, right, because they're coming out all the time. So you really do want to know, you know, everything that's been out probably in the last six months, not everything that's been out three years ago. And, you know, I actually, I do a lot of searching for reviews, and that's something that I bump into. When you're looking for reviews on software, software changes so fast that you really want a current review. I don't want a review because the software two years ago is not the same.

It's got the features, sets is different. Potentially, it doesn't work where it used to, or it works and it didn't used to, all of those things. So... It's part of my blanks there. Software doesn't work. The Twitter fire hose remains off. So what that means is that Google isn't indexing Twitter, and so Twitter feeds are not part, not instantaneous Twitter feeds are not part. And I think what that really means is that they're not going to automatically include them on that search engine results page. Yeah, because they did that for a while. Yeah, you can go in and check the latest news option on the search page, and then you'll see Twitter results. And just for some clarification, so you guys may have been aware of the caffeine update. Yeah. And the caffeine update didn't have a big impact on searches because really caffeine was about infrastructure. And we saw the video of Matt Cutts where he said, we actually could take a snapshot of everything available on the internet... At once, yeah. All at once, repeatedly, and know the exact status of the internet, and actually indicate that in a search of what is it now. Because since pages are always changing, and they're not indexing every page the second it changes, it's actually wrong. You know, technically, each search you do is a little bit outdated, and they could actually implement their infrastructures big enough, their bandwidth is big enough, their CPUs are big enough that they could be taking... Yeah, they're not going to process the power to do that, but it would bring the internet to a halt. Yeah. So, tip of the hat, actually, to Google for punching the face for not doing that. So, caffeine was really about infrastructure and how you can index pages, and really about amping up the ability to index lots and lots of information. And then Panda was an update pretty recently where they say that Panda impacted 12% of searches, and again, they're saying this Ziploc update is going to affect 35% of

searches. And they did have a freshness portion of the algorithm before, and they said that freshness portion influenced about 17%. So, they've doubled the amount of what they're going to do. So, what does that mean to you? That means to our SEO out there who's building a site, who's optimizing a site, update your content, especially if your site is about current events or pop culture or things that tend to, you know, have frequent updates, make sure you're on top of it. And for the rest of those whose sites may not be part of some sort of industry that requires frequent updates, update your content anyway. Rewrite that services page. You know, update your About Us page. It's probably outdated anyway. You know, change the text on your homepage, and you would probably want to implement some sort of practice to do this monthly, you know, or at least quarterly to, you know, keep your information fresh. Well, and it's interesting because it begs the question, what is Google going to consider fresh? If I tweak one line on a page, is that fresh? Does that make that page fresh? I think the answer to that is clearly no. So, if I change, you know, 70% of the content, you know, at what point is it fresh content? And, you know, what do I need to be doing to make sure that I have fresh content? So, I think the answer is going to tie into typical SEO practices. If those headers are changed, if the title is changed, you know, then they may consider that fresh content. Yep. We'll see. Yeah. And it brings up, you know, one of the points, actually, in a Search Engine Land article was, you know, there's the potential for freshness spam. Freshness spam. Yeah. So, just, you know, it's going to go back to, like, content farm. Yeah. And I think that idea was, well, you could write code to flip the content every time Google visits, right, indexes the Google monsters. Arr. And if you did that, then,

you know, you'd be spamming with freshness. So, I was a Google pirate. Arr. I thought this was interesting. Search Engine Land thought it was important to make the distinction that a 35% change does not mean a 35% improvement. Okay. And they go on to say, you know, because a lot of people who, frankly, got screwed in the Panda update would not call that, I think it was a 13% improvement. Yeah. They didn't call that an improvement at all. And I thought this was interesting, right? We kind of know Google's the best. We think of Google as the best. And there is no commonly accepted way of rating a Search Engine result. You know, commonly accepted way of rating a Search Engine result. So, you could do a search on Google and you do the same search on Bing. There's no way to say which one's best. Like, we don't have, like, oh, this one's 80%. This one's, you know, this half is good. This is, you know, this, I mean, we do have this kind of general sense that one sucks. This one's, I mean, and usually, let's be honest, Bing is at least okay, probably good, and Google's gooder. If they used it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's not a fair assessment for me, personally, because the only time I use Bing is when I'm researching or doing AdCenter. You know, other than that, matter of fact, I even import my AdWords campaign to AdCenter, so I'm rarely there. Right. You know, so, I don't know. Yeah, you just work it from one piece of software. Yeah. I'm working on two browsers, though. Chrome on one monitor, Firefox on the other monitor. I think I'm going to put Bing on one of those. And then, you know, that way I can come back after a month of doing that and have a better answer to my question. Did you bring the list? Yeah, I had a list. Okay, cool. I just want to make sure that I wasn't going to go get it. So,

that's really kind of our news for today. Remember, if you're watching, tweet, hashtag SEOpodcast127. And let's get started with our information. This is going to be another, I don't know, 10 or something points. We might just run through all of these. There's only like four more on the second page, and we'll put this horse to bed. Stick a fork in it. Hey, but check this out. And this is old, right? This is kind of an old article. Yeah, this was, to recap, we've been going through this article that we found by Richard Burkhardt, posted in 08 in April on SEJ, Search Engine Journal. And he posted a listing of the things you must do in regards to SEO. And so, the reason we started going through this list was to see what was relevant then, if it's still relevant now, and what has changed. And so, right now, it's 55 of them. We're on number 36. So, we'll see if we can get through this next 19 pretty quick. So, 36 is, get the owner or CEO blogging. That would be you. It's priceless. CEO influence on the blog is incredible, as this is the voice of the company. Response from the owner to read his comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket. Yep. I co-signed it. 37, optimize the text in your RSS feed, just like you should with your posts on web pages. Use descriptive keyword-rich text in your titles and description. Check. Yeah. He's talking about the RSS feed, so people who are blogging, and you know how you can have a different description and text in the feed that people subscribe to. Right. Optimize that text. And that's just in general. Anytime you're posting something, you know, a lot of what we'll do is go into like a PR company and train them on how to do the fundamentals of SEO so that their blog posts, their, even their press releases- The articles and all that, yeah. Are more impactful from an SEO perspective. 38, use captions with your images. As

with newspaper photos, place keyword-rich captions in your images. Yeah. Somewhat. I think, you know, right now with images, all the sites I've been optimizing, I've been given an alt tag and an image title. Right. And so that's been pretty sufficient for me. The caption, I think, is more of a design deal. Right. You know, if you want the little caption below it, then great. It could also help because it is an additional keyword. I just don't know if it's entirely necessary. Or more or less valuable than an alt tag, yeah. Exactly. 39, pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on the text that's around them on the page. Pay attention to keyword, text, headings, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, I would say common sense would say put this image in a place where the content that you're reading next to it is relative to the image. Yep. Right. And they make sure that the image file name has keyword-rich content in it. 40, you're better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML sitemap. Well, yeah, that goes back to usability, right? Yeah. I mean, yes, have a sitemap. And, you know, your website needs to be, you know, something that we learned the other day. Maybe, and I use other day for things that happened a year ago, so, and it probably was about a year ago, is that, you know, the more buried your blog posts are, the harder it is for Google or the less Google is going to rank them. So, make sure that there's some links early on, maybe on your home page or maybe on a secondary page that go to, you know, blog posts inside there somewhere. 41. There are two ways to not see Google's personalized results. One, log out of Google. Two, append the password equals zero to the end of your search URL in the search bar. Okay. Yeah, and that's,

you know, the clients who call us and say, hey, I'm already on the first page for my term. Log out. Yeah, I'm not seeing that. I'm not even seeing you on the third page. Yeah, that's integrity. Are you logged in? I could spend that. Really? Well, I'm awesome. Well, I did brag to one of our clients the other day. Hey, this is how good we are at social. I just doubled your Facebook followers. That's because he had one and I became, I liked it. Yeah. But, yeah, we have clients do that regularly and they just need to log out. Yeah. 42, links, especially deep links from a high PR site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the backlinks will carry more weight. Yeah, quality over quantity. And deep links in that situation really can apply to really both situations, like the situation where you've got a deep link on MSN, so maybe not the home page, although that would be more valuable, but also linking into a deep page of yours, so not your home page, and we were just talking about this today, some of our link building efforts are focused on a target page in the website, not just sending traffic to the home page of the website. Exactly. Let's see here. And use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems, like links to and from HTTPS pages, but if someone scraped your content, you'll get backlink juice out of it. It's an old tactic. I have been doing that for a while. I think it doesn't really work that much now, because anybody who scrapes content, Google has already input procedures to prevent them from ranking higher than you, but more importantly, nowadays, you don't need the full URL. It's usually everything after the slash, anyway, so they're removing it. 44. See if your hosting company offers sticky forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the

address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL. All right. I have a little problem with that. Okay. If you're leaving the old URL in the title bar, it doesn't make sense. Like, there's a switch. It's, you know, one day it's one, the next day it's next. I don't think you get people used to that. I just think you redirect. You just redirect, and you use 301 redirects to make sure that your link juice travels. That's one thing that probably was not in place at the time of this article, was the importance of the 301 redirect. Yeah, probably right. 45. Understand social marketing. It is part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like DigYup, Delicious, Facebook, et cetera, the better you will be able to compete in search. Yeah. Market social. I mean, that's a no-brainer. It's funny, he was talking about that in 08. Yeah. As big as it is now. 46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account. I was actually going to talk about the video sitemap earlier when we were talking about the XML sitemap. Right. I think you should do as many sitemaps as you can. Yeah. Video sitemap, XML sitemap, HTML sitemap, the regular sitemap page on your site. Right, yeah. All of that, you know, it definitely helps your site get indexed. There's more. Let's see here. 47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don't just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, LL, MSN, and Yahoo, to name a few. Make sense. Vimo. Yeah, Vimeo. Vimeo. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Surround your video content with pages. So volume your video content on your pages with keyword text, similar to the images. Yep. And we would even submit that the transcript or the actual script for the video should have keyword-rich content with the keywords early and often in the actual body

of the script because Google does transcribe those videos. Let's see here. Use the words image or picture in your photo, alt descriptions, and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words. I concur. Somewhat. I mean, because these days, more Google users are getting savvier now. If they want images, they'll just click the Images tab, and they don't necessarily tag it, you know, a picture of Chuck. It's just, you know, they'll just search Chuck. Chuck, and then hit Images. And hit Images, yeah. Exactly. Enable enhanced image search in your Google Webmaster Central account. Well, Google Webmaster Tools was huge back then. Right, right. A lot of people don't use it that much now, but images are a big part of new blended search results. 51. Add viral components to your website or blog. Reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, et cetera. Definitely. I mean, that's pretty much, you know, share and follow, right? Yeah. Yeah, that we tagging most of our sites with the WordPress plugin to make them social. So these articles and posts can be shared. Well, and that's also kind of link baiting, right? Exactly. Have content that people are interested in reviews. In fact, we'll probably, we're thinking about doing some reviewing of, you know, we use SEO Quake as one of our tools. We're probably going to do some reviews of those kinds of things. And those, we believe, will be powerful things that people will link to. Yeah, definitely. 52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcast news, social content, and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I'd love, there's one example, one description. And it said that Facebook, imagine a conference with, I don't know, a billion attendees. Mm-hmm. And Facebook is offering a free booth. You should take advantage of that free booth. Yeah, exactly. So, I think that's just a really, really descriptive, you know, if there was a conference and there were a billion people going and you

could get a free booth, you would probably be there. Well, it exists. It's called Facebook. Exactly. And make a Facebook page, so. Great. I like the concept. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cash date of the page where your link will be located in Google, where it's suitable URL for the actual page. The newer the cash date, the better. If the page isn't there or the cash date is more than a month old, the page isn't worth much. Interesting concept. Because I get these emails all the time from people from Never Never Land who email me about link exchanges. Right. And I always send them the spam and ask them to remove me from that list. And then I happen to look at the sites that they were offering links from. Yeah, and these sites aren't in the end. I mean, like, his email says it's a PR5 site. And then when I search the site, it's your quick system different. Disagrees with the PR5 assessment. Yeah, because if you want to link to a PR5, yeah, that actually sounds pretty good. If it actually were PR5. Exactly. Let's see. If you have pages on your site that are very similar and you are concerned about duped content issues and you want to be sure to correct what is included in search engines, place the URL of the preferred page in your sitemap. Makes sense, but I think it's kind of redundant. Site maps have all of the URLs. Right. They should, you know. And so that URL would already be there. Well, Google now has a mechanism, I think, in terms of a meta tag where you can actually define which one is supposed to be the primary. Yeah. Yeah. And then you can use canonical to also reinforce that. So, it's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that was brought up because that has become big in the last two years. I'm surprised that it was mentioned in this article in 08. Last one, number 55. Check your server headers. Search

for a checked server header to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URL is reported 200 OK status or 301 moved permanently for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site. General error checking. Yeah. Good idea. Great idea. You should do that along with browser checking and everything else. That should be included there. Absolutely. So, that's it for that list. That was a great list. Like I said, it was by Richard Bolkart posted on Search Engine Journal three years ago. And so, basically, out of all 55 things he listed, I would say 75% of this is probably still relevant. Yeah. And I would say he was maybe even a little ahead of the game. Ahead of the game. Yeah. I would concur to that. Pretty good. I got blank stare. All right. Come on, nigga. We've got a photographer in here and we're blank staring and blank staring and blank. I haven't heard the click yet. Yeah, I know. All right. Blank stare, blank stare is at Google. So, Google, they released the Gmail app for iPhone. Okay. Yeah. And it didn't work. Oh, no. No. They released it in the App Store, got a whole bunch of downloads, and then they yanked it after complaints from everybody that it wasn't working. Everybody that it wasn't working. Yeah, everybody. Wow. Wow. So, they yanked it, said they're improving it, and then they'll put it back when they fix it. And by improving it, they mean making it work? Yeah. So, when I first read that, I read that on Tick Crunch, I was like, whose job was that? Yeah. You know, who checked off and said it works? It works. Well, they tested it on the Android. It worked. You know, it also brings another kind of phone-related, especially iPhone. The iPhone 4S is having all sorts of battery problems, apparently. Yeah. The heart is there's people's phones dying on them. Yeah. So, iPhone, Apple's

come out and said that there's a new, it's actually operating system based. And so, it's probably requesting updates too frequently or something like that. And so, they're going to have that fixed out pretty soon, but. Yeah, so, what's up, Apple, you know. And Google. Gmail. Gmail not working. Reminds me of the conversation we had yesterday where somebody was saying that Gmail's not secure enough. Yeah. And they're on Yahoo. Yahoo. They're using Yahoo Mail. And we're like, well, we're going to switch it to Gmail, even if it's not secure. It's better than Yahoo. It actually works. Yeah. So, maybe not on an iPhone app, and it actually works. So, great. That's the end of our podcast, podcast number 127. You've been listening to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. We, today, will actually be doing a few website analysis. We have the Unknown Secret of Website SEVO Analysis, or SEVO Website Analysis, I think is how it goes. SEVO stands for Search Engine Visitor Optimization. Yes. And, basically, what you can do is go to our website, e-webstyle.com. You'll see a form on the right. Submit your website. And if you're one of the lucky names chosen out of the hat, we'll do a video, 10-minute video analysis from a Search Engine Visitor Optimization perspective of your website. Our feedback from that has just been phenomenal, thanks to those people who have given us feedback. They really appreciate it. We're not out to, you know, slam a website. We're not bashing your site. If it's wrong, we'll tell you that. But, you know, we try to be nice. I have no clue what that is. I don't know what that is. What is that noise? And it's very productive, and it has some value there. So, if you have questions about your site, you're not sure about it, which direction to go, why it's not working, submit one. And I'll do it personally. Yeah. Excellent. You've been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Because of you. Punch in the face to

all of you. Oh, I didn't tell you. Go on to iTunes. Create an account. Yes. Make a review. Yes. Let us know you did it. Let us know you did it. Three steps, three minutes. It's awesome. Thank you guys very much. Until the next podcast, bye-bye for now.