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:

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:

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?

Last 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).

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