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
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.
I found this post a bit awkward to write as a blogger and the person who is responsible for all our blogger outreach. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t hoping for a few follow links when we embark on a Blogger Outreach Campaign. However, we would never try to deceive a blogger to get one.
As a blogger, I receive approximately 10-12 requests a day from SEOs and PR companies to review products or to host sponsored posts. My standard response is:
‘thank you for getting in touch, I currently do not accept paid for sponsored posts as they are against Google’s Terms and Conditions unless it is a no-follow link. If this is of interest please do get in touch’
‘You are more than welcome to send a product for review, however, to comply with the ASA and google, the post will contain a full disclosure and the links will need to be no-follow’
Unscrupulous Marketers
Nine times out of ten I never hear back from them. However, a few of the Black Hat’s will try it on. On one occasion the PR/SEO came back and said ‘we work with bloggers all the time and it’s okay not to include a disclosure we do it all the time or sorry my client won’t go for that.’ It seems they will stop at nothing to get a link.
Non-disclosure is breaking the law
It clearly states in ISBA Guidelines on the Payment for Editorial Content to Promote Brands within Social Media, July 2012 that this is not the case. If you haven’t already do make yourself aware of this document.
‘The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs) specifically prohibits “using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer (advertorial).”
And it also goes on to say:
Google’s webmaster guidelines explicitly state that paid-for links should have the ‘nofollow’ attribute, and brands found breaking these guidelines are routinely de-indexed by Google.
So what do we do?
To keep on the right side of Google and the law encourage your bloggers to fully disclose in the body of the blog post when payment has been received and to make any links no follow.
In terms of SEO this isn’t brilliant but just remember that every time you get a link, even if it’s no-follow, you’re putting the business/brand in front of people and the no-follow helps you build the trust factor.
It’s only a matter of time before Google notices unnatural link building and implements a manual penalty. Are you prepared to take the risk?
Today Pinterest has launched Analytics for business accounts.
The Analytics breaks down in the following areas:
Here is an example of one of my accounts [click image to enlarge if needed]:
Pinterest adds Analytics
The big thing is to note is the Analytics is only for the Account and NOT for the domain
You can see here the same time period for the same site in Google Analytics:
My pins on my account only drove around 10% of the total referrals from Pinterest. So it’s key to remember your need to multi up the reach by this factor. Hence in theory the reach on pinterest during that time period would be 10×123,000 = 1.2million.. Which is much more in-line with other social networks like Facebook and twitter.
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’s St David’s Day Logo
Happy St David’s Day!
Today google’s logo celebrates the patron saint of Wales St David.
I do love the fact google has included the dragon leak and of course good old traditional daffodils (did you spot them).
What’s the logo and the day all about?
Saint David’s Day (Welsh: Dydd Gwyl Dewi) is the feast day of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, and falls on the 1st of March each year. The first day of March was chosen in remembrance of the death of Saint David. Tradition holds that he died on that day in 589.The date was declared a national day of celebration within Wales in the 18th century.
See more information about St David here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_David%27s_Day
Of course if I’m logged into my google account I don’t see the St David’s Day logo but the following:
Yes.. I’m a year older 🙁 hence the google birthday logo for me today…
Have a great day all!
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.
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