Martin Hayman is Head of Technical SEO at SiteVisibility and writes on various SEO related topics. His hobby is Mixed Martial Arts but he doesn't practice this in the office... Yet!!! Read more of Martin's posts here
Martin Hayman+ Martin Hayman on Twitter Back in March, the head of the web spam team at Google, Matt Cutts announced that there would be a big Penguin update later this year. Well we didn’t have to wait long. On Friday whilst responding to @mrjamiedodd on Twitter, Matt confirmed that they will be rolling out Penguin 2.0 in the next few weeks.
The SERPs are continuously evolving and there are now more and more ways to make your results stand out from the crowd. One of these methods is the rel=”author” tag.
What is Rel=”Author”?
Rel=”author” and rel=”me” are types of Google authorship markup that can be used to enhance your results in the search results by adding your face and name to your posts.
Not only does this help with building the online reputation of your site and writers, it also makes your results appear more clickable and has been proven in many cases to improve click through rates by large amounts.
With companies now servicing customers in different countries and different languages, a website can’t just be created in English and forgotten about. Making your website accessible to your entire customer base is critical to grow your business, and helping the search engines index your site is a very important job. We’ve written this about the importance of distinct multilingual and multinational campaigns.
Does your site target different countries and/or languages? Are you using subdomains or directories to do this? Or are you using different top level domains (TLDs)? Is your content directly translated? Or perhaps you have duplicate English pages targeting different countries? If any of these apply to you then you may have large amounts of what Google would class as duplicate content. Read on
Yesterday Google launched a new algorithm update aimed at targeting webspam. Google has stated that this update will target around 3% of queries.
Only 2 weeks ago at Brighton SEO, Stefan Hull predicted that with content farms being hit in 2011, this year would be the turn of webspam/linkspam to feel the force. And it’s happened already. Google’s change will “decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines“. Although Google have always made an attempt to target webspam, this algorithm is a further improvement in their efforts to reduce it and promote higher quality content.
