Penguin and Google Image Search - #seopodcast 148

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Yeah, sound about right. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-WebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. As you can see by looking at your clock, we are starting exactly on time. Yeah, which means, yeah, we're on this time. When it starts. Yeah, sorry about that. CCTV, I know you're trying to go to bed, you stayed up to watch it, appreciate you tuning in. Punching, kicking the shins, punching the face to everyone who's actually watching our podcast right now. As usual, from our previous podcast, this is podcast number 148. We're thinking about doing something different for 150. Maybe we'll start on time. The tip from the last podcast is, don't get penguinized. Penguinized. It will leave you in the cold. I just thought the last part was mine. I added that. Don't get penguinized. Remember last week we talked about the Google's penguin update, new algorithm update that really attacked spam and things like that. So, if you had a lot of spam links coming in or you're doing a lot of spammy stuff on your website, you can get penguinized. And it's not a good look for you or your rankings. You may be left in the cold. Left in the cold. In the cold, there was some joke on our Facebook page that I thought was hilarious. What's the best place to hide a dead body? Second page. Yeah, Bill just posted that on Twitter. Second page of Google. Because no one will find it. Since I'm actually looking at our Facebook feed, I thought I'd kind of bring up a couple things here in the podcast. Robert Mansour, he asked what the song on our podcast is. Of course, that song isn't on the video version of our podcast. After we cut out the audio and put it on iTunes, there's a little snippet, an intro, an extra of a song. The song is actually by a friend of mine, now defunct band called Circle the Cat. The song is

called Cold Mine. And, Robert, you won't find it anywhere. Anywhere. I can send a note to my friend and see if he's got any copies laying around. I'll do that. Next, Bill Hamburg actually gave a link that was also highly recommended by Charles, which is a whiteboard session with Rand Fishkin. Negative SEO myths and precautions. So, go to our Facebook page. There's a link there. Go check that out. Yeah, I watched it about probably 7.45. It was like 18 minutes long. But Rand really dives in into negative SEO and some of the tactics people are using. He talks about the Dead Thieves experiment that I brought up a couple podcasts ago. And so, it was pretty informative. Cool. Well, I'll definitely have to check that out. And also, Salvador Bernal, he says, just wanted to let you know that the information is great and the books are always fun. I have a question. A client wants to build a small 10 e-commerce site. I'm planning on using WordPress. Is there an e-commerce plug-in that you would recommend? I actually recommended two there on Facebook. Shar, Shop, and Cart66. And I did mention the horrible experience that we had with WP Commerce. Yeah, I recommend Shop. Cart66 is cool. They're both pretty good. We've been using Shop for our last couple of e-commerce projects. And it's been working phenomenal. Do not forget, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers with a mantra of, don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. Yeah, it's not a good look. No, it's not good. In fact, I was out on identa.ca. So, it's identi.ca. And, you know, I actually have been banned from that site a couple of times. All I'm doing is saying, look, our podcast is available. It's free. It's useful information. And I get banned. And then I have to, like, send a note saying, look, I'm not a douche. Yeah, I'm not. This is free, good, like, internationally recognized. In fact, the downloads for last week, 7,467 downloads in 59 countries where internationally

recognized free SEO information, I'm not being a douche. Stop banning me. So, then I start, then I go, okay, maybe they want me to interact a little bit more. It is a social platform, so I should be social. So, I search SEO, and the result comes up, 6,000 results and limit of 2,200. So, I can't even search. So, I have to, like, search SEO for many results. SEO Houston podcast? There's no. Yeah, it's bizarre. Anyway, I don't know how I got on that tangent. But, on Identica, I do post our podcast now, and hopefully I won't get banned again. Do remember and do please, if you're somewhere right now where you can, tweet or Facebook or G+, and what you should tweet is? Hashtag SEO podcast 148. Tag us at an at eWebStyle, that way we can punch you in the face, let you know we've got it, and we can share it. That's what I'm doing right now. This is the time when I say this portion of the program is brought to you by Google Nexus, Samsung Nexus. Not yet sponsored. Not yet sponsored. Not yet a sponsor. Yeah. But, yeah, so I just did mine, so y'all feel free to retweet. I'm trying to make it easy. Yeah, just retweet. We just tweeted. Go ahead and retweet. Yeah, retweet mine, yeah. And if you can't find it, just search for at eWebStyle, and then you'll find those tweets and boom. Well, they can go a couple other places, can't they? Oh, yeah. They could. One thing they could do is they could go to Facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Or Twitter.com slash eWebStyle. YouTube.com slash eWebStyle. And you can send us an email at podcast at e-WebStyle.com. I was going low. I thought you could hit another octave. No, that was it. That would require some physical adjustments. Yeah. Hey, you notice. Not capable of making. Or at least not interested in making. Probably not interested in hearing. The eunuch octave increase. Here we go. You notice I don't have it here. No test

today. I'm getting all cleaned up here. The review is awesome SEO podcast. Love them. This is by clearly an automotive guy. I mean clearly an SEO. Automotive links down. These guys do a great job at what they do. It's great to find people that are obsessed with this as much as I am. Please keep doing what you do because I listen to you guys every day and I keep listening over and over. Even the same episodes over and over. Loving it. That's a... Wow. Wow, yeah. We'll go like rapid punch. You can actually... I wasn't even going to try that. I don't think I could say so quickly. Here we go. A little bit of news. There's Apple Foxconn has actually... Those are the guys who make the iPad. Yeah. Have actually in China. Have actually let slip that they're working on an Apple TV. So the rumors continue. We have heard slips before that have turned out not to be true. So who knows. Apple's working on a Google Maps alternative. So that's kind of cool. I think anytime there's competition, things can only get better. Because I have had some challenges with... Remember the time we were going to the client and we're like, Chris, I don't care what your phone is saying. We need to go right. Go this way. I've been over here before. The U.S. Postal Service is banning overseas tablet shipments because of lithium-ion batteries. Apparently, FedEx and UPS are cool with it. But the United States Postal Service is not cool with it. Wow. Yeah. And it's worth repeating, over 7,000 downloads. Actually, almost 7,500 downloads a week. In a week. That's like seven days. Yeah. Yeah. That's over 1,000 a day. 59 countries. So, thanks to you guys. Thank you guys for downloading our podcast. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for commenting. And again, if you're somewhere where you can comment right now, do that, please. That really does help us out. Keeps us excited. And now we can move past our Gino time

limit. Okay. So, last week we talked about the Penguin update, which is a Google algorithm update. And so, I thought it would be a good topic this week to continue on with that series of algorithm updates. Be honest. Be honest. Be honest. Leading up. Be honest. You found some more information that was worth presenting. Well, I found that and I'm building up to releasing that algorithm update. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah. So, anyway. Are we going to do this? So, when you do your next song release, are we going to go over the lyrics that episode? I think. Okay. Cool. We'll go over the lyrics and it's called Google. This is like top secret. Oh, yeah. You know. Come on. Come on. Get the dish. Just whisper it. Yeah. This is a Google algorithm. Matter of fact, I'm calling it Algo Updates. Cool. And so, yeah. It's a new SEO rapper song coming soon. Editing the video right now. So, y'all stay tuned for that. Looking forward to that. We'll release it here live. We will stop. But today, I'm going to pull an article from Search Engine Land written by a guy, Matt McGee. And he was discussing the algorithm updates that Google updated with in the month of March. And so, I knew most of these. Half of these are included in my song. And so, but I thought it was worth sharing here and kind of discussing them and see what you guys think about it. One of the key ones, and I'm glad he put it first, was anchor text tweaks. Right? And so, the code name that Google was using was called PC. And pulled directly from Google's blog, they wrote, this month, we turned off a classifier related to anchor text. Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success. So, turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust. The second caveat to that was a better interpretation and use of anchor text. We improved systems we use to interpret and use

anchor text and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Anchor text? Anchor text. What is that? Anchor text is the text inside of an anchor is a link. That's why they start with an A, H-Riff. That A stands for anchor. And so, the anchor text is the text that's inside of, let's say, a sentence that contains the link. The actual link. Okay. The actual link. So, you know, we do SEO in Houston at eWebStyle. And SEO in Houston could be a link to our SEO page. SEO in Houston would be our anchor text. And so, what Google is saying here, which is according to this, we would need to almost change that. Right. Because they've turned off the classifier related to anchor text. And I think this kind of partial to the Penguin update. Right. They are targeting sites that have two, there's been a lot of talk in the SEO stratosphere about over-optimization. Right. And so, if you have tons of anchor text on your page or links on your page and they're using the same exact match keyword terms, you know, throughout your content, then this update here is going to make those irrelevant. Right. And so, what I actually read yesterday was we should spend more time doing anchor text links with other phrases that are related. Maybe some of your long tail phrases. Maybe some different variations of the word and not your primary target exact match phrase because Google is reducing the amount of value and rank that that has. And remember, you should also actually have some outbound links on any given page because, again, as we say over and over again, your job as an SEO-er is to provide a good experience to the Google user. And if I'm doing kind of classic research, I don't want to come to a dead-end page. I don't even want to come to a dead-end website, if you will, where all the links stay on that

website. If I want more information, I want, you know, I'm looking at the SEO podcast and I want to find, you know, this article, then, you know, have an outbound link. Google finds value in that. Yeah. And so, yeah, definitely show, I mean, that's really just for giving credit. Anytime you're doing research, you want to give a link. That's link love. Give a link to your research, to your resource. We found it. By the way, I did not know A was for anchor. I just got to be honest. Now I know. We're going to keep it moving. So, remember the first time we kind of broke down your design coding rap, I disagreed with the whole bold and strong. Strong, dude. Yeah. Yeah, I converted. And also the CSS and the tables, you know, it may be a little slow. I get there, though. Yeah. Well, you know, that's why I'm here. Yeah. That's why I'm the owner and you're the internet marketing specialist. Okay. So, next we're going to keep it moving. Image search changes. And I really like this one because I do a lot of image searches on Google. And this one's codename was Lice. Interesting name for that. Sounds like something we'd come up with. Lice. And so, basically, more relevant image search changes. This change tunes signals we use related to landing page quality for images. Makes it more likely that you will find highly relevant images, even if those images are on pages that are lower quality. Then they went on to say that improvements to image search relevance. We've updated signals to better promote reasonably sized images on high quality landing pages. I think this is a fabulous, magnificent, wonderful update. Right. Because I do a lot of searches on Google for various images, especially like when you're blogging and, you know, you want to include an image. So, you're trying to find a decent image or you're trying to, I've been experimenting with pinning certain stuff on Pinterest to see what sort of search traffic that'll bring

back. And so, I need the image so I can pin it. Right. And so, I'm doing image searches. And so, the problem I would usually run into is that the first results, usually the image quality sucks. Right. It's a low file size. The dimensions suck. Right. So, I can't use it. Right. And so, this is saying that it's going to focus on bringing a higher quality image even if the site that that image is hosted on sucks. Right. So, that's pretty great. And what should happen on behind the scenes is that eventually that site should probably start to rank well if that image gets a lot of traffic. Right. So, kudos to Google for this particular update. It's been needed and thank you. And then, the second part to it was reasonably sized images on high quality landing pages. So, if you have a great landing page and you did your images right and you have nice images, then you'll just get ranked higher. That's in a nutshell what that means. The next one, indexing symbols. I thought that was pretty cool as well. So, they call this one Deep Maroon. I wonder who at Google makes up the name for the update. I understand the reason for naming them. Yeah. You know, because you have to name it. Which update are you talking about? Yeah. 3.196.4. 0-0-0-1, right? You know? Oh, that was so much better than 0-0-0-2 because that one just left us in the cold. Yeah. And so, this one, Deep Maroon, was about indexing symbols, like keyboard symbols. And so, they went on to say that we generally ignore punctuation symbols in queries. Based on analysis of our query stream, we now started to index the following heavily used symbols. The percent sign, dollar sign, slashes, quotations, the at symbol, hashtag or pound sign, the pluses. And we'll continue to index more symbols as uses orange. That's cool. This is huge for guys doing social media marketing. And it's tying in to your SEO. So, if you are hashtag SEO podcast

148, now Google is indexing that hashtag. Right. And so, anybody who tweets that, let's say, if you're watching right now, let's run a test. Bill, I know you're watching. Go ahead and tweak that with the link to the podcast. And according to this update, we should be able to search. And find it. Hashtag. Yeah. And not just this one, but we should find his tweet, the one I did, and whoever else did. Well, and I think because that phrase is so unique, you wouldn't have a problem finding that anyway. Yeah. So, maybe. Just SEO Houston. SEO Houston. Maybe include some spaces. Differentiate some. And I'm curious to know what shows up when we search for it. Because if you search for SEO Houston altogether versus hashtag SEO Houston, Google is saying that will now give you different results. And so, that's pretty cool. And so, I mean, I think it's cool. A lot of, especially for branding. There's a lot of companies or people who are branding their Twitter profiles now. So, you know, I mean, we joked about this last year sometime that, yeah, start calling me at Chuck. At Chuck. You know, my new name is at Chuck. And so, I think for companies who maybe have some sort of symbol in their logo, maybe a dollar sign or at symbol or something like that in their company name, then their branding online will be improved. So, I thought that was pretty cool as well. Other changes they had worth reading were more accurate short answers. They have Freebase. I didn't really use Freebase before because I thought it sucked. And so, maybe this has improved it. This code name was Porky Peak. And, yeah, that's what it says. E-B-D-E-B-D-E-B-D-E-B-D-E-B-D-E-B-D. That's all, folks. Yeah. We've updated the sources behind it. You're like, what's that? I watched Looney Tunes in a while. I had to kiss me. Behind our short answers feature to rely on data from Freebase. This improves accuracy and makes it easier to fix bugs. And so, you know, they're giving

some better information out there so people who want to use it, whether it's, I've just lost my whole train of thought, database-driven information. That's what Freebase is. And then I like the last one here, improvements to freshness. We call it Ziploc. Yeah. And so, you know, I Googled Ziploc. There are other people using that, too. I don't know if it's, I'm assuming it's from our podcast. Probably so. 7,000 downloads a week, 59 countries. Probably. I'm claiming that. Yeah. And so, the improvement they called was, we launched an improvement to the freshness that was very helpful. But it cost significant machine resources. At the time, we decided to roll out the change only to news-related traffic. This month, we wrote it out for all queries. And so, basically, the freshness update was an algorithm update geared towards displaying the latest results or the newest information about whatever topic you searched. First. First. So, you know, and the example we used at the time was, if the Olympics are coming around and you're searching for anything Olympic news, it wouldn't make sense for the Olympics four years ago. Just show up at the top. First and show, yeah, you need to see the newest. Or even playoffs are going on right now. If we're looking for who won the game last night between Lakers and Denver, then, you know, I wouldn't like to see last night's scores and stats rather than game one scores and stats. Yeah. And so, you know, the freshness update makes sure that the late information is always there. And it makes sense that they applied it to news first, right? Because that's where you're going to be looking for your freshest content anyway. So, they rolled it out to everything else. So, those were algorithm updates for the month of March. I already have a list for some that came out in April. And so, we'll cover those next week. Cool. That it? Oh, we got some blanks there. Oh, blank. Hold on. That was good. Blank with the mouth makes a

change. Yeah. And so, blanks there goes at Google. Since we're talking about Google. Yeah. Google Plus. So, they released the Google Place newer updated version. Google Plus updated version. Yeah. For your phone on iOS. So, it's... On iOS? Yeah. For Apple. So, it's not... They didn't do it... On Android. For Android. They did it for Apple. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I would have thought that, you know... You would be playing with it on your own platform and then migrate it over to Apple. I would think that, you know, since you have to have a Google account to use it, it would only make sense to do it on Android at least first. Yeah. But, yeah. So, blanks there to you guys. The report said they'll have it ready in the next few weeks. Kicking the shins. Yeah. Kicking the shins. I can't even do it. All right. Is that it? That's it. It's been a kind of brief podcast. Thank you guys for tuning in. This has been one episode, one great episode of the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Also, the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you. We really appreciate you. We'll get to some more Facebook stuff. We'll get to some more... Hopefully, there'll be some more reviews. If you want to write a review. If you get any value out of this podcast, please go to iTunes, create an account, write a review. And if you choose to, send us an email. And you can do that at podcast at... Edithwebstyle.com. And send us. Let us know that you just submitted a review. We'll be looking out for that. If you're in another country, let us know what country you're in. Because the reviews are actually divided by country. Yeah. And I must say that the people in Spain are brutal. And apparently, we are rednecks. In Spain. Wow. Yeah. So, you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. Thank you very much. Until the next podcast.