HTTPS Now a Google Ranking Factor

When Matt Cutts, Google webspam fighter extraordinaire, says something, SEOs best listen. Most of the time he’s offering hints at a policy the search engine will soon adopt, and so it is with Google’s latest change in ranking factor.Only a few months before, during March’s SMX West, Cutts had hinted the company was considering a move in that direction, but he declined to speculate when the change would take place or even whether it was a viable option for Google.
Looks like the company heeded Cutts’ advice. It claims it was motivated by a desire to make the web a safer place, which is a nice idea, though a cynic might say it’s just another case of Google enforcing its will on us. Goodness knows that once the search giant makes a decision, the rest of the internet has no choice but to fall in line. Google has said that the switch to a secure domain will give sites only a small boost, and it could rise later if more sites are doing it.
So what does this new change mean for SEOs? Let’s take a look at what HTTPS is, why it’s important, and how it could impact you.

What is HTTPS?
In the simplest terms, HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP. Your site can switch to an HTTPS domain after you install an SSL certificate. When you connect to an HTTPS site, your session will be encrypted by a digital certificate.

It’s basically a way to ensure that your private stuff stays private. Online retail sites have been using HTTPS for years to keep sensitive information such as credit card numbers and addresses private. Since Internet fraud has become a huge concern, and with hackers trying to get their hands on any information that’s left unprotected on the web, using SSL connections has become understandably popular.
Google itself switched over to HTTPS for all of its searches last year. The move was unpopular among SEOs, as it meant keyword data was no longer passed along to site owners, eliminating one way to track users.

Why the HTTPS Switch is Important
Google is calling the switch a “lightweight signal” in terms of search page ranking. It says in its announcement that it could tweak its formula to put more weight on having HTTPS, but it wants to give sites more time to get their SSL certificates installed.
Smaller sites have argued this change should not apply to them. Why does a content site like a blog need to be secure? Google says there are two main reasons: data integrity and authentication. If your server is not secure, there’s always a possibility someone could change the way your content is reaching your readers. And you want to be able to prove that you are the one actually writing the content on your page, not someone posing as you.

How HTTPS Could Impact Search Rankings
Google itself has been coy when it comes to how the switch to HTTPS could impact search rankings. It claims that it will be only a “lightweight signal” and not very significant when you look at all the other factors that go into search rankings. High-quality content, for example, will continue to be much more important than security of a site.
But the company also hinted that HTTPS could become a much more important search factor down the road. Google wants to give sites time to adopt SSL certificates. So while the company says right now it will impact about 1 percent of all searches, in coming years you can expect that to change.
So what should smart sites be doing to ensure they are properly optimized? Here are some tips 

• Determine which type of certificate your site needs. You can choose from single, multi-domain or wildcard.
• Make sure you pick a 2048-bit key certificate.
• Do not block your HTTPS site from using robots.txt to crawl.
• Let your pages be indexed by search engines when you can.
• Use your analytics software to track the move from HTTP to HTTPS.

For now, HTTPS will not be a huge factor in search rankings, so you may think you can put off transitioning. But remember, this is Google. The company rarely makes any moves that don’t have a bigger aim down the line, and it punishes those who don’t fall in line with its vision of Internet orderliness. While you probably don’t have to jump to HTTPS the moment you read this, you’d be wise to do it in short order, if only to avoid the headache of having to do it quickly once Google inevitably decides security is a big search ranking factor.

Google Knowledge Graph Proves To Be (Brief) PR Nightmare For Major UK Brand Greggs Bakery

Company's official logo replaced with fake logo that included an extremely offensive slogan.

 

The UK’s Greggs Bakery took a hit recently when its logo was hi-jacked via Google’s knowledge graph, causing a short-lived PR nightmare for the brand.Anyone searching “Greggs” on Google UK would have seen a knowledge graph box that included what appeared to be the brand’s logo, but with the accompanying fake slogan “Providing sh*t to scum for 70 years.”

The fake logo was sourced from the satirical website uncyclopedia.com, a questionable resource for Google knowledge graph data.

Here’s a screen shot of Google UK’s knowledge graph displaying the fake Greggs logo:


Fortunately, the brand was on top of the issue and brought it to Google UK’s attention in an amusing exchange on Twitter.

After Google fixed the issue, Greggs responded with a request for a Greggs Google doodle as compensation for the mix up:
 

The same thing happened to PC World earlier this year when its logo was replaced with a look-a-like image that read, “PC WORLD: Like hell, but with worse customer service.”
While Google UK quickly remedied the Greggs logo error, the underlying issue here is the PR dilemma resulting from Google’s knowledge graph pulling incorrect information for a business or brand.
Showing up on Google’s front page stops being a good thing when the information displayed reflects poorly on a brand. Being a socially savvy brand, Greggs avoided any long-term damage, but what happens when a company doesn’t have the SEO resources or knowledge to address such issues?

 

What Is Black Hat Social Media & Does It Affect SEO?

Black hat social media is emerging quickly and spawning a new era of web spam. This affects the social media sites themselves, the users, and the businesses utilizing the site for marketing.While many people are starting to recognize this trend, there is a dearth of information on how black hat social media influences search engine optimization (SEO).

What Is Black Hat Social Media?

First off, “black hat” is a phrase originally coined to refer to a type of hacker — one who “violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain.” In the search marketing world, “black hat SEO” refers to techniques and tactics that increase search engine rankings in ways that fall outside of the search engines’ guidelines or terms of service. (Conversely, “white hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques and tactics that are ethical — i.e., fall within the search engines’ guidelines.)
You won’t find many definitions for “black hat social media,” so allow me to define it here. Black hat social media is an attempt to utilize a social media site for some kind of gain, using methods that are outside the social media website’s guidelines.

Examples Of Black Hat Social Media

So what are some examples of black hat social media, you ask? Well, allow me to list a few.

• Buying fake Likes, YouTube Subscribers, +1s, etc. from click farms
• Sharing hyperlinks that pose a security risk
• Using a program to automatically follow and unfollow new accounts
• Creating fake social media profiles to like, share, comment or gather information
• Writing fake negative reviews on competitors’ pages or positive reviews on your own
• Securing social profiles with competitors’ names, ranking them in Google, and posting negative comments

These are just a few examples of black hat social media. But really, there are so many ways you can use social media to positively or negatively impact a business that are outside of the social site’s intended purpose.

Ways It Can Influence Google Search

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Can black hat social media impact SEO? Let’s take a look at several hypothetical examples, and then we can leave it up to the community to decide.

• Buying Fake Followers, Likes And Shares. According to Search Engine Land, “Social signals are emerging as ranking factors as search engines determine how to leverage our social interaction and behavior.” Most SEO professionals will agree that social signals have some impact on SEO, even if they’re not a direct ranking factor.

For example, if one were to buy likes, tweets, +1s and shares to fake an interaction with content, this could falsely inflate the content’s level of authority, especially if the profile listing this social interaction is public and crawlable by Google.

• Optimizing Fake Accounts. When people create fake accounts, they have the ability to operate under an alias. For example, if I create a fake account with a competitor’s name and optimize it, this fake account may rank for the competitor’s name. Users will then see that profile in Google search.

If the fake account outranks any of the competitor’s real web properties, that can hurt them by impinging on their click share. Or, if what is displayed in the search listings deters the user, that could hurt the overall brand image/reputation.

• Fake Reviews. Unfortunately, I have seen this black hat social media strategy pretty often, mostly due to my years working in online reputation management. Someone will leave a fake negative review about a business on a social media site, and it will stick! This can really hurt the business if the negative review ranks well, and a potential customer finds the review upon performing a web search.

Furthermore, reviews that contain the appropriate structured data markup can display as a rich snippet in search results — and users seeing a low star count for a business may decide to take their business elsewhere. There has also been a great deal of discussion about whether negative reviews impact SEO (and if so, how), but there is no clear answer on this.

• Poor Quality Social Sites. We all know that in the SEO world today, if you get a link from the wrong website it can become a major issue. This begs the question: “Could a share from the wrong social media website hurt your SEO?”

As we see in link evaluation tools like Majestic SEO, links are generally gauged based on the domain/page authority, topical relevance, etc. So if you have thousands of shares from spammy, off-topic social media profiles, could that hurt your rankings?

Will Black Hat Social Media For SEO Be An Issue In The Future?

There is no way to know for sure, but with the rise in social media as a marketing method, there is good reason to think that this will be a growing field. Many people speculate that social media shares, likes and interactions will become more important to SEO in the future, so it seems clear that people will try to game the system.

Twitter Buys Image Search Company Madbits

Twitter hasn't traditionally been known for their image capabilities. However, that may be about to change as image search company Madbits earlier this week announced via their website that they were joining Twitter.
Within the posting, Madbits co-founders Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari shared the following insight:

"Over this past year, we've built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organizes and extracts relevant information from raw media. Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal.
We prototyped and tested about ten different applications, and as we've prepared to launch publicly, we've decided to bring the technology to Twitter, a company that shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology."

Madbits had taken to their LinkedIn page to share that they are "primarily interested in the task of image search, and the creation of intelligent, dynamic image sets, to automatically organize large databases of images," according to TechCrunch.

It appears that Twitter has been slowly adding image features to their arsenal. These capabilities include:

• People-tagging
• Multiple photos per tweet
• Animated GIFs

Competitive Intelligence For SEO – SimilarWeb PRO Review

Search traffic is the main pipeline for online marketers to draw traffic, whether it’s from paid or organic sources. Competition over keywords and SERP real-estate is fierce and constant and you have to adjust yourself to the ongoing changes of algorithms and policies by Google.

In order to be able to stay on top, online marketers are forced to use multiple tools, track competitors and optimize their paid and organic campaigns accordingly. This takes time and money and can be, at times, a bit frustrating.

A few words about SimilarWeb PRO:

SimilarWeb PRO is a platform that shows you the analytics of any website. This includes all traffic sources, including the number of visits per source, the referring websites, referring keywords and even engagement metrics such as time on site and bounce rate. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus just on the Search.

Step 1 – Define Your Competitors:

Most good marketers can list their top 5-10 competitors, but online and especially for Search definitions become more complicated.Your first step will be to understand which competitors you should be researching. In order to do that you can start running multiple related search queries in Google and try to identify competitors that are ranked for most of them. You will need to do this for both the paid and organic results.

Step 2 – Estimate Your Competitor’s Organic and Search Spends

In order to figure out which keywords your competitors are targeting you need to run search queries in Google and estimate the amount of traffic according to their rank and the search volume given by Google keyword planner. You can also use tools that tell you the ranked words of a website, such as SEMRush and again, estimate the potential traffic from each keyword. Alternatively, you can go to SimilarWeb PRO and see exactly how much traffic your competitor is getting from each referring word.

Step 3 – Find Out Which Keywords Refer Traffic to Your Competitor

In the same section, ‘Search’, scroll down to the table of keywords. A good best practice is to check the ‘Exclude branded keywords’ box, which will filter out the branded terms and bring up the good stuff. In the top of the list we can already see some interesting keywords such as ‘used books’, ‘cheap textbooks’ and ‘international edition textbooks’. We can see how much traffic each keyword brought by multiplying its traffic share percentage with the total search traffic AbeBooks.com got. We can also see which keywords were recently pushed by examining the ‘Change’ column, which shows you the change percentage in traffic share compared to last month:

Step 4 – Find out Which Ads Your Competitor is Using Per Keyword Group

There are tools out there, including Google keyword planner, that can tell you which keywords have the biggest potential to bring you paid search traffic by showing you their search volume, estimated bids and competition level. However, none of these tools will show you the exact keywords used per ad. SimilarWeb PRO gives you this information and more – it shows which ads match to different search terms.

Conclusion: Competitor Intelligence Pays Off

Search marketing is a never ending battle to claim supremacy over keywords and SERP rankings.  Because of the highly competitive nature of the industry loads of data and proven strategies are out there just waiting to be used. Competitor intelligence will show you both the strategies and tactics that have proven to work.
The 4 key takeaways from this article will give you a good head start when launching new campaigns or looking to enhance existing ones.

1. Define your competition, both business and keyword based.
2. Find the organic and paid strategies that exist among you competitors to take advantage of underutilized channels.
3. Learn from the keyword level tactics before you make investments to save on costs.
4. Find out which creative are being utilized to develop a strategy that will beat your competitors.

Google Making Maps App More Competitive With Yelp

Google Maps has updated its app for iPhone and iPad. The new version adds features and content and even makes the app more visually appealing.

The new version includes the following improvements:

·         Search results appear with descriptions on the map

·         Easy switching between map and list view of results

·         Reservations via Gmail indicated on map (and list view)

·         Improved Explore browsing experience (based on nearby locations)

This is not mentioned among the official upgrades (maybe I missed it previously) but I just noticed the capacity to filter search results in various categories such as hotels, restaurants and rental cars. I found this also extended to some service business categories such as “landscaper.”

All of these changes aim to make Google Maps a more useful local search and nearby discovery tool, not simply a way to get directions and navigation from A to B. In so doing Google is taking increasingly direct aim at apps such as Yelp and even Hotels.com or TripAdvisor (e.g., hotel prices are posted in results).

While Google Maps isn’t yet a complete replacement such apps, Google’s ability to integrate your search history, Google Now/notifications, location and Gmail content gives it a potential competitive advantage over time.

According to the most recent comScore data, Google Maps is the 6th most popular/widely used app in the U.S.

 

Google Hits Poland Again With Link Network Penalties

Four months after Google’s first link network penalty in Poland, Google has targeted an additional two Polish link networks this morning.

Google’s Karolina Kruszynska, a spam fighter, posted on Twitter that the most recent wide spread manual action targeted two link networks in Poland:

Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed this as well on Twitter after Bartosz Góralewicz showedevidence on of massive manual actions being sent out in Poland. Bartosz posted a screen shot of manual actions received by webmasters over this link network slap: Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, responded that Google indeed took action in Poland. Adding he didn’t “tweet about it because people have been asking us to be more positive.”

As I covered at the Search Engine Roundtable, Bartosz feels that this actually hit more than two link networks. He told me it hit at least four including Statlink.pl, Gotlink.pl, e-weblink.com and seopilot.pl. I asked Google to confirm which networks were hit but they have yet to reply to my request by the time I have posted this story. Bartosz added that Google doesn’t really know how many networks they hit because it “wasn’t too severe and spread across all the major networks.”

Google also posted details on the Google Poland blog about how to submit reconsideration requests after you’ve been hit by a manual action.