Using our own online petitioning site, Twitition.com, we utilised a sample of its 7.6m signatures to gather data on the value of tweets on SERPs positioning, and found that the more tweets a URL receives, the higher up the rankings it sits.
If you’ve ever used Twitition.com, you’ll know that when you sign a Twitition, you send a tweet out containing the Twitition’s URL, so we can assume that a Twitition signature equals a tweet.
Our study found that URLs received a significant boost in Google rankings up to 50 tweets, when the effect seems to level out.
The subsequent benefit of gaining tweets is fairly minimal until around 5,000 tweets, when the average ranking of a URL is 31. URLs with over 7,500 tweets enjoy an average Google ranking of 5, whilst URLs over 10,000 tweets are almost guaranteed first page rankings.
Of course, there could be many factors at play here and we only used Google for this study, but what the results have conclusively shown us is that there is a correlation between number of tweets and Google rankings.
Take a look at the post on Branded3’s B3Labs for more information, and get in touch if you’d like to know more about this and how it could affect your SEO strategy.
Have you got a message like the one below from Google? If so then it means that Google has discovered some links that it doesn’t like in your link profile and you need to act fast to fix things.
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.yoursite.com
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.yoursite.com/,
We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
We’ve had a few people contacting us asking what to do about this message recently (Google has sent 700,000 messages in the past 2 months). The answer is pretty straightforward – you need to remove all the bad links ASAP and then submit a reconsideration request. We don’t recommend that you ignore this message.
Actually doing this can be very hard if you don’t have the contact details for all the links you have built. Lots of spam sites have no way of getting in touch with them to remove the links.
If you would like help identifying and removing the bad links or consultancy on how best to manage this situation please get in touch. We’ve had experience dealing with this issue and can help make sure you remove the right links and don’t lose rankings.
Earlier today I said that the fact that 10% of search traffic was now coming up under the “not provided” keyword wasn’t a problem because 90% was easily big enough to get a good sample size.
This seems to have been a bit hasty because Firefox has just announced they are testing https with a view to rolling it out as the default. This would mean that another 25% of users would be “not provided”.
“We are currently testing the change to use SSL for built-in Google searches in our Firefox nightly channel,” a Mozilla spokesperson said via email. “If no issues are uncovered, it will move through our Aurora and Beta release channels before eventually shipping to all our Firefox users. This will include migrating the changes to our non-English version of Firefox, as well.”
Google has so far not said that they will roll out https for Chrome but you can bet that if Microsoft follows Firefox then Google won’t be far behind. They would hate to be the only browser that didn’t do https by default.
There’s only two weeks left to get your early-bird tickets for one of the newest Search Marketing conferences in the country – ionSearch.
Taking place on Wednesday 18th April, ionSearch is a chance to get up to speed with the latest search updates and developments, and to network with some of the most influential and leading professionals (and myself) in the search and social media industry.
The Carriageworks in Leeds is hosting the event, with three suites dedicated to one-to-one sessions and workshops, as well as a large theatre for the main talks.
I’ll be talking in the main auditorium at 11am on ‘Link-building in competitive industries’, where I’ll be covering a wide range of strategies, including social media techniques and manual link-building.
You can also catch me a bit earlier on at 9:55am in the Expert Panels Suite, where I’ll be joining Daniel Bianchini, the Senior SEO Consultant of SEOptimise; Stu Owens, Bloom Agency’s Head of SEO; and Jonathan Alderson, the SEO and Data Insight Manager at Twentysix; to talk about SEO for E-commerce.
With in-depth presentations, master-classes, and a chance to speak to top SEO professionals; ionSearch should be perfect for anyone wanting to learn more about the industry, or perfect their search strategies.
I’ll be around all day in-between talks to chat to you about your SEO needs or answer any questions you may have. Register for your place now to book the early-bird tickets and get £20 off the price.
Google is rolling out the Venice update this week and has buried the information in a long list of 40 algorithm changes. In reality Venice is a really major change to how they show results and one that probably took a huge amount of work.
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
Basically if you search for “plumbers” the organic results will now show you organic results related to your location rather than just general results for that keyword. This has never been the case before on Google (outside of the Google Local & Places results).
This means that every site offering a geographical service needs to have a geographical SEO strategy. If you don’t then sites with a more relevant geographical page will rank higher than you for generic keywords.
The screenshot below was taken from a search for “plumbers” in Google Chrome incognito. Normally only a search for “plumbers in leeds” would bring up results like this.
Don’t miss Branded3 tomorrow at the TFM&A event in London, where CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Head of Search Tim Grice and Search Expert Matthew Jackson will be available to offer insights and tips for your campaigns.
Tim will be taking to the stage twice during the event at Earls Court 2 tomorrow, to deliver some expert talks. Firstly, if you get to the event early enough you can catch Tim talking in the Social Media Theatre on ‘How to use social media to improve your SEO’.
This talk is essential for any search enthusiasts wondering how social media affects SEO, and the following topics will be covered:
Maximising link potential through social media
How Social Media & SEO are joined
What is Social Link Building?
Using Twitter to build links and followers
Social media tools and services
And last but not least, our very own award-winning social media phenomenon, Twitition
Head to the Search Marketing Theatre later on tomorrow afternoon at 4pm, to hear Tim’s talk on ‘Advanced SEO Strategies for 2012’.
Tim will cover the following in this talk:
Developing natural link signals
Developing ROI from your SEO campaigns
International SEO
Plus much more…
Come and talk to Branded3 in the VIP area tomorrow, or if you can’t make it – get in touch with us for any SEO or social media advice, or if you’d like to receive the presentation slides.
Google has released an algorithm update today designed to penalise websites that have too many ads above the fold (in the visible area of the page). This is a great move by Google because nobody wants to see pages full of ads.
The problem is that Google is being very hypocritical here because over the years the amount of ads on the search results pages have been getting bigger and bigger. When you take into account YouTube and Google Places the space for organic search results (the only real content that Google offers) is getting much smaller.
As suggested in Googles blog post I went to their Browser Size tool to see how much of the Google search results were above the fold but surprise surprise the tool doesn’t work with Googles own websites so I had to load the pages via a proxy.
The screenshot below (click for larger version) shows the search results for “credit cards” in the UK and you can see how only 30% of users will ever see the top organic result without scrolling and only 20% see the top two organic results without scrolling.
Contrast this to the fact that 98% of people see the ad for Googles own credit card comparison engine and around 70% of users can see a total of 8 Google PPC ads.
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005. For an average searcher they probably wouldn’t think this was amazing but I think it’s pretty mind blowing. To have Google searching the web and images stored in my Picasa albums is just amazing to see working.
I think the way Google has launched this is really clever. In the past both Twitter & Facebook have tried to stop Google indexing all their content and wouldn’t give them full access to crawl sites. Twitter used to give Google a feed of all tweets but turned that feature off and killed the real time search that Google used to show for breaking news events. Now that Google has launched with a massive favouritism for Google+ data we here Twitter making statements saying that this isn’t fair.
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
So Twitter stopped the agreement to give Google a feed of tweets and is now saying that this new system isn’t fair and wants to be included. All Google has to do is agree to include Twitter and ask for full access to data and Twitter will probably agree.
At the moment unless you use Picasa and Google+ or have friends that do then the new system isn’t a major change to the organic results. But once Google gets Facebook and Twitter on board as well as perhaps LinkedIn then this will be amazing.
SEO at present is about getting people to link to sites and the search results are based on a voting system that takes into account how trusted each linking site is. This has no relation to whether the person linking for the site is actually trusted by the searcher or not. I can see in a few years that Google will be focussing more on surfacing sites and search results that a users friends like as well as relying on links from sites that the searcher might have never heard of.
The new changes have a major impact on PPC. A search for “cars” brings up the Google+ results shown below for Ferrari & BMW above the PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. For BMW & Ferrari where PPC is mainly a brand play I’m sure they would much prefer to have their logo and a long snippet of text rather than a PPC ad, especially when it’s totally free.
Getting users to share your content on Google+, Twitter & Facebook has to be a part of your SEO strategy for 2012. Certainly brands need to be working on building up followings on these social networks every single month.
For those people who think this is the end of SEO I can assure you it isn’t. As long as people still search for things then there will still be sites needing to use SEO to get to the top of the list of search results. Whether SEO is about on-site optimisation, links or encouraging sharing via social media sites or some other method is irrelevant.
