Category Archives: Search

How to Remove Your Name from Google

Do you know what people are saying about you or your business online?

September 2015 is looking to be the biggest month ever for people looking for “How to Remove My Name from Google” and the like.

The graph above shows the spike in searches for this phrase.

One of the biggest reason is the aftermath of Ashley Madison, a Canadian based dating service and social media site that encourages married people to have affairs.  On the 15th of July 2015 hackers stole all of their customers personal details and threatened to publish online.

How are you managing your Online Reputation?

‘What people say about your company online has become the single most important reflection of your company’s quality, reliability, and skill.’

A post on Seroundtable here show how SEOs are being asked to remove the names off the Top 10 listings. This service is call Online Reputation Management, we have worked with clients in the past to solve issues were Google will rank negative content about a person/product/company etc. You have spent years building up your business online and all of this hard work can quickly be undone if someone publishes a negative review about your company.  Methods to fix the issue include getting the content removed and out ranking the content (pushing it down the results).

Regarding Ashley Madison many “big names” have already been outed which makes its a massive job.

If you need any help looking into getting content removed OR pushed down the results then let us know.

Eu goes all “Some results may have been removed”

Currently you can type in any name in the UK and about 50% of the time google will now show a warning!

Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe

remove

After the EU ruling here google have started to display the above message on many name searches.

Try it on your own name and see if you get the message.. My name is very rare, My full name is only showing about 30 results and all are mine but I get the message that content “could” of been removed which is hasn’t.

 

Bad Google Merchants Could See A Drop In Organic Ranking

This story goes back to 2010 when a feature in the New York Times wrote about bad customer service from a glasses / sun glasses online store.  The key to the story was the organic rankings came from people writing, blogging  and basically linking to the site because of the poor customer experience.

This then opened the debate regarding can google tell good from bad? A link is a link?

In short Google in 2010 ended up downgraded the site manually. You can read all about it in the following blog post:

Back to 2013

Matt Cutts of google brought the topic back up at SXSW conference last week suggesting google are going to look at the issue again and downgrade organic ranking of merchants with poor customer experiences:

“because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results”

Credit for the quote and conference coverage to searchengineroundtable

This of course all ties in with google’s “trusted stores”

When will google trusted stores come to the uk?

Currently you still have to be based in the US and price in USD to be a trusted store. Google haven’t mention anything about other countries as yet. If you or your client is in the US then check out how to become a Trusted store merchant here.

I’ve worked with google Merchant Center (froogle, google base) from the start. I’ve even had chance to help Clay, the product manager at google, out back in 2006 with all the problems it had with the crazy data feeds and delays back in the day.

Google Organic UK Shopping Results Being Removed

As most of you know google is slowly switching over it’s shopping results from a free model to a Pay Per Click Model. Here in the UK Google has said the following:

Google Shopping will be transitioning to a new experience in the UK beginning 13 February 2013.

Over the past weeks google shopping results have been showing less and less in the organic results and more and more shopping ads are showing.

This graph below shows the real results for a site with referrals from just the organic shopping channel, which you can clearly see the drop in visits hence drop in exposure of the organic shopping listing on the search results pages:

ukgoogleshopping

 

With organic search flat lining site owners really need to consider the use of the Pay Per Click model now being used.

Here is the impressions chart (the number of times an ad is shown) for the Pay Per Click shopping  ads in the UK over the same time period:

ppcukgoogleshopping

It’s pretty clear to see if you are not running the PPC Uk Google Shopping you’ll be messing out on what you once had. Feel free to contact us regarding google shopping and advertising on google.

 

 

Why is Interflora still sending out vouchers to bloggers?

Interflora PenaltyLast week we saw Interflora UK wiped of the face of the earth, well off of Google anyhow for allegedly breaking their terms and conditions.  Here’s what Matt Cutts had to say about buying links and paying for advertorials.

Please be wary if someone approaches you and wants to pay you for links or “advertorial” pages on your site that pass PageRank. Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations. The consequences for a linkselling site start with losing trust in Google’s search results, as well as reduction of the site’s visible PageRank in the Google Toolbar. The consequences can also include lower rankings for that site in Google’s search results.

 

You can see loads of the coverage from last week here http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalty-advertorials-16412.html  AND http://searchengineland.com/will-google-penalize-chromebooks-advertorials-149452

This wasn’t a bolt out of the blue and Interflora UK must have been aware as they started a militant clean up last Aug 2012, contacting bloggers to remove the links that they initially purchased and threatening them with DMCA takedown notice or reporting the links to Google.

So, why are they still sending out vouchers in return for advertorials?  This voucher was received last week (19th Feb 2013).

Interflora UK Penalty

Are they playing with fire or just someone being rather naive?

 

 

Image credit Lee Forrest

Do 301 redirect pass all the link juice?

Matt Cutts of google explains in the video below about the myth of loss of link value (juice) passed via a 301 redirect.

Firstly what is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is a signal sent by your web server via the header of a page to say “this page have moved permanently”

Why would you use a 301 redirect?
Page A has no use to users due to it being duplicated somewhere else or the product has been updated with the latest version but the old page still gets traffic and internal/external links/bookmarks. By adding the redirect you are directing users to a current and valid page.

The video is short but worth a watch. 

The myth mainly came about when people 301’d a page and saw the rankings wouldn’t completely pass BUT the main reason for this myth is it would take a while for google to recalculate and pass the value. The theory was that the full value was never passed however Matt goes on record to explain that the value is the same a 1 link on that page.

It’s worth considering the page you are 301’ing is very likely to be more than 1 link so you “should” see a loss in value to the pages that are linked but not 301’d as you can only 301 to a single page.

Here at ripplegen we have worked on millions of 301’s in areas of redesign, re-structure and removal of duplicate content. Contact us for more information

Less reach, more clicks with facebook ads

We have all seen the massive change to our facebook timelines especially on mobile.. ads ads and more ads.. The ads are now everywhere..

This has offended many users including many of my friends.

 

 

facebookads

 

The graph is the reach of a facebook campaign I’ve run for many years. This campaign runs on the PPC (pay per click) model. You can clearly see the massive drop in reach from the 2nd week of January 2013.

Nothing in this campaign has changed, no targeting changes and no budget changes..

facebookadsCTRlastyear
This next table show last years CTR (click through rate) at 0.094%

This is the current CTR:

facebookadsCTRthisyear

 

So with CTR more than double will result in a reduction of the same in reach. It maybe time to start testing the impressions model.

If you require more information on facebook advertising why not contact us.