example.com/parent-category/child-category/sub-child-category/

Because this page would be a destination page that would be shared and even memorized by some, I needed to get the permalink for the Sub Child Category to look like this:

example.com/sub-child-category/

After trolling through lots of close-but-no-cigar code snippets and broken plugins, I finally came across the Custom Permalinks plugin. This plugin lets you set custom permalinks on a per post, per tag, or per category basis.

And in the process, as in my case above, it doesn’t break your bread crumbs either (i.e. my bread crumbs still show the parent category, child category, and sub child category links).

Creating Custom Permalinks

You create your custom permalinks in several places, depending on what  you’re working with (categories, tags, or posts).

For both categories and tags, you can customize the permalink on the edit pages for categories and tags (either when creating or editing on those pages: Posts > Categories and Posts > Tags respectively).

For posts, you can edit the permalink when editing the post.

SEO Benefits

In my case above, I was cleaning up my URLs solely for the benefit of visitors; however, it has been said that shorter, cleaner URLs will also help you with SEO. To what degree that’s true is debatable (as is much in SEO), but it’s clear that Google prefers short, nice-looking URLs. They have even said as much: “A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. … Whenever possible, shorten URLs by trimming unnecessary parameters.”

So there you are — if you have long, messy URLs, this plugin can help you clean them up.

Photo: www internet web address concept from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

That’s no good! Attachment Pages Redirect is a new plugin that does one simple thing. It 301 redirects attachment pages to the post parent, if it has one. If not, it redirects using a 302 temporary redirect to the home page. You may have an SEO plugin that already does this, so make sure to check before you install it.

Indexing pages with no content dilutes your site’s power to rank in searches. Attachment Pages Redirect will help you to get all of those dead ends redirected. Download it for free from the WordPress repository.

Sarah Gooding on Google+

Essentially on the 24th April, the Goog rolled out an update named Penguin, with the intended function being to penalize sites that:

• Engage in ‘keyword stuffing’
• Participate in ‘link schemes’
• And are generally of low quality

And while usually this would result in much rejoicing as purveyors of fine content, such as ourselves, watch the spammy copycat / autoposted to / RSS sucking uselessness disappear out of the results (as it did, to a degree, as a result of last years Panda update)… this time round it wasn’t quite the same.

For, ahem, example, take a look at what happened to the google referrals to this very site:

The word is "ouch"

Yep, that’s right - Monday 23rd April saw 8,580 visits from Google. Monday 30th saw 1,527.

Holy. Crap.

But, since we are not involved in any keyword stuffing (well, Tom does sometimes use a few tags, but really, come on ;), link schemes (although I get multiple emails about them every single day), or poor quality content… why did this happen?

Well, fortunately we were able to ask Matt Cutts!

Oh, ok, not directly, but we reached out to the largest news site down under (the SMH), who interviewed him and asked him what the problem was specifically with wpmu.org. We may or may not appear in an article shortly… I’m hoping may.

He gave them three links, copy and paste the below:

• http://baydownloads.info/11580-Wordpress-Membership-Plugin-Wordpress-PayPal-R-Plugin-show-5starserve.htm – a site pirating our software, presumably linking to us for credibility
• http://computerofficechair.blogdetik.com/category/tak-berkategori/ – a splog, using an old version of the Farms theme pack (which did have a link to wpmu.org in the footer)
• http://computerchairs.blogdetik.com/ (the same splog)

And said that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these.

My thoughts on that are, in a nutshell… arse!

We’re a massively established news source that’s been running since March 2008, picking up over 10,400+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers and – to cap it all 2,537 +1s and 4,276 FeedBurner subscribers – as measured by Google!

How could a bunch of incredibly low quality, spammy, rubbish (I mean a .info site… please!) footer links have made that much of a difference to a site of our size, content and reputation, unless Google has been absolutely, utterly inept for the last 4 years (and I doubt that that’s the case).

And then there’s the fact to consider that have…

• NO keyword stuffing
• NO links schemes
• NO quality issues

So, how did this happen?

It’s clearly down to being punished for distributing WordPress Themes!

Here’s how it works:

1. You create and release a really great WordPress theme, for free
2. Some spammer decides to use it on their sploggy / nasty / low quality / keyword stuffed pages
3. YOU get penalized because of that

Given that we were the folks who outed the dangers of searching for free WP themes in terms of the danger they could pose to your site, especially even in Google’s eyes, the irony is not lost on me.

And I’d be willing to bet an extremely large amount of money that a great number of WordPress Theme developers, even if they haven’t been rolling out themes in the last 3 or 4 years, have been hit just the same (or a heap worse!).

So, what can you do if you’ve been affected? And what are we gonna do?

Well, first up give up 11 minutes of your life to watch the always excellent Rand Fishkin explain how Penguin has worked, and what folk might be able to do.

Then, consider doing the following (it’s pretty much what we’re going to have to do :/):

1. Find the spammiest and nastiest sites using your themes and beg / offer to pay them to remove the attribution
2. Remove or rel=nofollow every attribution link you ever put in anything you release, do that now
3. Look around your own sites and remove any links that aren’t 100% branded (and by that I mean a link to WPMU.org should read ‘WPMU.org’ or ‘WPMU’)
4. And then, and this bit makes me feel kinda sick as we’ve never done it, go out and engage in what your non-penalized competition is doing… namely ‘legitimate’ link building (want a guest post from me, look forward to the email, ugh ;)
5. And last, but not least, add in non-branded, keyword-rich, links to all your competitors sites and include them in your free releases… should serve you a treat!

Well, OK, obviously we’re not going to do the last one, but clearly any malicious SOAB could do that, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s happening right now :/

And who knows if you’re gonna be the victim, or what you could possibly do about it.

Image credit for the arse UmNET, for the angry Penguin Real Science

James Farmer on Google+

OK, let’s start here: There’s a lot of craziness happening in Google’s search results lately. Some of it seems to possibly be related to some algorithm changes that were made recently, but some of it seems more deeply rooted than recent changes.

It’s hard to say why certain things are happening, and it may sound preposterous, but I would guess that even Google itself doesn’t know why some of it is happening.

How can I say that? Well, read on and look at some of the examples in this post. You may come to the same conclusion. There’s no way Google would allow some of this stuff to happen if it could prevent it.

“Make Quality Content”

We’ve all heard it a million times: making quality content is the answer.

If you had done a search recently for the very lucrative keyword phrase “make money online” in Google, however, you would have seen something odd pop up in the #10 position on the first page.

And this is what the site looks like on the inside.

When this was noticed, people in the SEO community started talking about it (and linking to it). It then shot up to the #1 position on the first page.

As of this writing, however, it is now gone from the first page and rests around position #44. Google often hand-edits embarrassing results, and that could be the case here. But it also might be the SERPS (search engine result pages) just shaking themselves out. Still, it doesn’t deserve a spot at #44 either, obviously.

If I were to really put on my conspiracy cap, I might say that it was hand-edited down to #44 to make it look as if it were slowly slipping out of the rankings, and then in a day or two (perhaps by the time you read this post), it will have been hand-edited completely out of the SERPS altogether.

How Did It Get There in the First Place?

Conspiracy aside, the question still remains: How did it get there in the first place?

Some have shed a little light on the domain. Supposedly it was once an active site that actually held the top spot for the term “make money online.” Google then deemed the site to be a spam site, and they shut the owner out of it years ago.  As it was a BlogSpot blog, and Google owns BlogSpot, they could do this. (Some say it was NOT a spam site, but never having seen the original site, I can’t say.)

While all of that makes for interesting backstory, it doesn’t change the fact that the current site looks like this:

Fluke!

Of course there can be flukes, even in very competitive spaces such as the “make money online” space.

But that’s not the only “fluke” on Google these days. Take a look at this one.

And here’s the totality of the site that comes in at the #1 spot.

And while this one isn’t exactly a money-maker, it goes to show that this is a problem that spreads across the board.

So What’s REALLY Going On?

Well, it’s hard to say what’s really going on. Obviously if Google knew what was going on, they wouldn’t have results like those above showing up where they do.

There is a chance that all this above may be related to a very recent change in Google’s algorithm. And while that technological change is, well, technological, there are some other very human-related consequences that are starting to arise from it (and things like it).

In Google’s quest to root out spammers, it would seem it may have “broke the internet.” But how could that be? Well, it may be that Google doesn’t just want to discount spammers; it seems they may want more than that. It seems they may want to punish them — and badly.

Is it this desire for revenge that’s leading Google into whacked out ranking formulas? Is this thirst for blood also turning their enemies more vicious?

Maybe.

This gets a little complicated, but let’s see if we can tie it all together.

Google’s Recent Update and Their Motivations

Google recently announced that they have come out with an updated version of their algorithm. We reported that this was coming last month. At that time, Matt Cutts (Google’s lead engineer from their Webspam team) referred to it as a way to combat “over optimization.”

Seeing that the term “over optimization” sent many in the web community into fits of derisive, mocking laughter, Google has moved away from that term and now simply calls it combating “webspam.”

Make no mistake about it, however, this update is meant to combat over-optimization. In other words, it’s meant to devalue sites that seem to have followed Google’s rules too well – for example, sites that put too many instances of a keyword on a page, or sites that get “too many” links with perfectly crafted anchor text.

The Problem in Google’s Eyes

It would appear that the problem, in Google’s eyes, is that people were beginning to more or less figure out their algorithm. Google being Google (arrogant, obnoxious, secretive, bullying, impersonal) didn’t simply want to discount these sites when they found them, they wanted to PUNISH them. They wanted to teach them a lesson. They wanted to show them who was boss. Perhaps, of course, they thought this would dissuade them from ever doing something similar in the future.

That’s all fine and dandy … unless you’ve ever seen a Kung Fu Panda movie. Even a semblance of kung fu in an animated movie can teach you some lessons about redirecting another’s energy away from you.

And that’s exactly what some have started to do. As Google charges at them full force, they have learned that they can redirect that massive Google power and determination away from them. Specifically, they have learned that they can use it to hurt others – i.e. their competition. This is known as Negative SEO.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO has actually been around for a while. Some have claimed to use it for years. As long as Google was doling out penalties, anyone who wanted to could simply turn those penalties onto their competition by doing exactly what Google didn’t want them to do, only for their competitors’ sites, of course.

Comment spam? Sure, give me a 50,000.

Paid links from blog networks? Yeah, I’ll take 10,000.

Forum profile spam? Yes, please. How about 30,000? … No, wait, make it 40,000.

Foul, but No Harm

It used to be that Google said there was practically no way you could harm someone else’s rankings.

But as long as Google’s punishments were meted out blindingly and impersonally by its algorithms, of course that made no sense. If you could hurt your own site with “off-site SEO” (getting spammy inbound links, etc.), then you could obviously hurt someone else’s.

No matter what came out of the mouth of Google, there was simply no getting around that logic.

However, even though it was possible to perform Negative SEO, not many did it. Either they believed Google when they said it wasn’t possible, or they simply chose not to go down such a dark path.

The Tides are Turning

Now, however, it seems the tides are turning in the SEO world. As Google tightens every possible noose it can find in the hopes of strangling those it deems spammers, it has unwittingly done two very important things:

1. It has put the spammers in a corner with their backs against the wall, and …
2. In its wild-eyed zeal, it has created a lot of collateral damage, wiping many non-spammers off the map

The Rise of Negative SEO

Group 2 above, the non-spamming collateral damage group, unfortunately, don’t matter much. They have their businesses wiped away in an instant, and they’re gone. They don’t know what happened, and there’s no one who can tell them how to fix it. They are essentially powerless in this SEO struggle.

If they’re smart, and they can muster the energy again, they come to the conclusion that they need to get away from their Google addiction. In order to do this, most turn to social media. If they can get some traction in social media, ironically enough, Google may start to love them again.

Happy ending, right?

Well, maybe not.

And the answer is “maybe not” because there is still a very pissed off Group 1 from above – those that Google has cornered.

This group doesn’t just want to “go social.” No. They want to get even.

And how will they do that? … Well, they’ll just kung fu Google’s ass.

Enter Negative SEO.

A Real Life Example

Dan Thies is pretty famous in the SEO world. He’s known as being “white hat” (as opposed to a “black hat” spammer). He’s also famous enough in the SEO world to be able to chit-chat with Matt Cutts (Head of Google’s Webspam team).

Being chums as they are, and hating spam as they do, Dan and Matt had a nice little exchange via Twitter about some actions Google recently took to devalue paid links from blog networks. (These networks are set up for the sole purpose of buying links. Typically, you buy a subscription from a network, and then submit content to them with links pointing wherever you want them to go.)

Some didn’t like that, it seems, especially a few posters from the forum TrafficPlanet.com. They called Thies “a suck-up-brown-noser.” But that wasn’t all; they decided to target Thies’ site (seofaststart.com) for a Negative SEO case study to see if they could actually negatively affect his rankings.

Results of the Case Study

The reason why many believed Google when they said you couldn’t negatively affect someone else’s rankings was fairly logical.

1. If you were spamming and gaming the system, you might at first move up in the rankings.
2. When Google caught on, they would simply discount your spammy links.
3. You would subsequently fall in the SERPS because your rankings were built on spam that had been removed, NOT because you were “penalized” per se.
4. Therefore, throwing spammy links at a legitimate site would not affect it. Google didn’t punish for spammy links; they simply discounted spammy links.

All that makes sense. And so to go after an authority site like Thies’ seofaststart.com would be a real test. Thies already had high rankings for competitive terms like “SEO” (#11 in the SERPS according to the testers). These rankings (if we are to believe Thies, and there’s no reason not to) were built from years of strictly white hat SEO.  Therefore, if throwing spam links at Thies’ site affected it negatively, it would be proof of Google “punishing” sites, not simply discounting links they deemed unworthy.

So What Happened?

Well, one thing that happened was that Dan Thies (as we learn from a post he made on a Google Webmaster Central Forum) got a smart letter from his buddies at Google telling him he had spammy links pointing to his site.

These letters (that a lot of webmasters get, it seems) read in part like this:

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.

So, we know that you can definitely get blamed for spammy links to your site even though you weren’t responsible for them. But the question remains – do they matter? Will Google still punish you?

Thies’ Rankings Drop

In the forum entry linked to above, Thies says that his rankings weren’t affected. But then a little later on he says that his rankings had gone down; however, he attributed this drop to a change in his WordPress theme.

(This brings up a whole new question about how changing your theme can tank your rankings, but we don’t really have time for that now.)

In the comments on a blog post at SEOBook.com, Thies weighed in some more on his situation, saying that the Negative SEO campaign wasn’t responsible for the drop in his rankings. In fact, he said, he had seen some uptick. A poster claiming to be the original case study author (Jammy from TrafficPlanet) weighed right back in with the following:

I’m not sure who you are trying to fool here? … Ranking for SEO, you started at number 11, now you can’t be found! “Can’t be found” isn’t higher than you were before.

And as of this writing, that’s still true. Searching Google for “seo,” Thies’ site is … um … nowhere in sight.

Here are some results on the keywords targeted by the Negative SEO campaign as reported in the original case study:

• dan thies – number 1 (still number 1)
• seo – not in top 1000 (down from number 11)
• seo service – not in top 1000 (down from number 34)
• seo book – number 34 (down from number 3)

The Larger Questions

While it appears that Thies is adamant that his rankings plummeted for reasons other than Negative SEO, that confidence belies the questions he seems intent on getting answers to in the aforementioned Google Webmaster Forum post.

Namely, he mentions four:

1. What should a webmaster do when something like this happens?
2. Will Google still state that what others do on the web should not be able to affect the rankings of one’s web site?
3. If #2 is not true, does Google realize that they are actually creating a larger market for the spam they want to prevent?
4. Why, if you find unnatural links, don’t you simply delete the links from your index and carry on?

He then goes on to say,

The only reason I am bothering to post anything here now, is to try to get some answers for everyone on whether Google has decided to open up the market for “negative SEO.”

So Is Negative SEO Possible?

The authors of the Negative SEO case study above seem to think it’s possible. They even left a little message to Matt Cutts saying as much: “Negative SEO is possible. Sort it out!”

(By the way, they also negatively affected another site in the case study at the same time as Thies’ site – negativeseo.me. This site, presumably, did not have a theme change at around the same time. Of course it didn’t have the authority of Thies’ site either.)

And to Thies, they had the following warning, “Next time you want to smugly throw your holier than thou 2 cents into the ring, think before you speak.”

Who’s to Blame for Negative SEO?

Case study or no case study, as mentioned before, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if Google will penalize you for spammy links, they will also penalize your competitor for spammy links (regardless of who created them). And there are countless stories on the web of self-inflicted spammy link wounds.

It would appear, therefore, that Google is penalizing for spammy links.

None of this is meant to excuse those who would use Negative SEO. But reality is reality. If it’s possible, some will use it. And the more some use it, the more others will use it.

Google is upset that people try to game their algorithm. I get that. But it appears that they have taken the whole thing a little too personally. It seems they’ve gotten a little too upset and a little too bent on revenge. Why not just discount spam? Is it really their job to “teach spammers a lesson”?

At the moment, it would almost appear as if Google’s lust for blood is greater than its desire for good SERPS. And in this time of cut-throat competition, as they battle everyone from Facebook to Apple to Twitter to Microsoft, search is the absolute ONE thing Google can’t afford to lose on. And for that matter, neither can most of the rest of us.

Photo Yin Yang SEO SMO  panda  Voodoo doll  Seo from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

If you want your WordPress site to rank well in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you need to build up a portfolio of high quality links, both to your home page and your individual posts, from a variety of different sources on the web.

Google judges the ‘authority’ of a given web page, in part, by the number of other web pages that link to it. More links means greater perceived authority, which translates to higher rankings.

Common strategies for creating backlinks to your WordPress blog

The best kind of backlinks will always be those that come naturally, because people like your content and want to share it on their own site. But it doesn’t hurt to give yourself a bit of a ‘leg up’, and actively seek out places on the web where you can create some publicity and SEO juice for your blog. These are some common techniques for creating backlinks to your WordPress site:

• Guest posting on other high profile blogs in your niche – usually gives you the opportunity to link back to your own site in your author bio.
• Commenting on blog posts and leaving a link, either in the content or your bio.
• Commenting on forums that are related to the topic of your blog, and leaving a link back to your own site.
• Submitting your best blog articles to social bookmarking sites.

Beware the evil wrath of the ‘nofollow’ attribute

By default, many blogs and forums use the ‘nofollow’ attribute in their comment section, which effectively kills the SEO value of any outbound links. If you comment on another blog and leave a link back to your own site, Google won’t count this link toward your overall ranking value if the ‘nofollow’ attribute has been included.

So building up a whole lot of backlinks from sites that use ‘nofollow’ isn’t going to do much for your SEO. Before you invest the time in a guest post, blog comment or article submission, check to see whether the website in question is using the ‘nofollow’ attribute.

You can check this manually be looking at the source code of the web page. You’re looking for links that include the text rel=”nofollow”. Alternatively, there are plenty of SEO extensions for Chrome and Firefox that will automatically alert you to websites that use these links.

How to find relevant websites for your backlinking campaign

According to most SEO theorists, Google gives more ranking weight to backlinks from relevant websites, ie. sites that cover the same topic as your own. So if you write a blog about Formula One motor racing, getting a whole lot of backlinks from blogs about bansai gardening isn’t your ideal strategy. Your backlinks will be worth more if they come from other motorsport-related sites.

Search Ninja is a handy little tool that lets you narrow down a Google search specifically to blogs, forums and directories. Instead of just searching Google for ‘Formula One Motor Racing’ and sifting through the enormous number of results, Search Ninja makes it easier to locate the relevant web communities which offer backlinking potential.

Are you using any kind of backlinking strategy on your own WordPress site? Leave a comment and tell us what works for you.

_{Photos courtesy of Kristin McKee and Ramberg Media.}

However, Jeff made the point in his post that it seemed the WordPress community does not consider AIO to be the best solution. There is a certain plugin known as WordPress SEO by Yoast that is rather well-respected amongst many WordPress users. This is despite the fact that it has just 10% the number of downloads of AIO.

What does an analysis of the available data tell us? Let’s take a look:

Requirements and compatibility are similar. Both have been updated within the last three months or so. But as you can see from the downloads history, AIO is getting over twice as many downloads.

What is quite telling however is the ratings. Despite SEO by Yoast only having been downloaded 10% as many times as AIO, it has more ratings. Not only that, the average rating is much higher. And if nothing else, an average rating of 4.5 is a pretty stunning achievement, given the number of ratings.

Over To You

So what do you think, noble WPMU reader? Are you an AIO guy, or a Yoast girl? Or do you use a completely different plugin – or no plugin at all? (Gasp!) Let us know in the comments section!

Tom Ewer on Google+

A questioner asked if Google was doing anything about the situation where a Mom & Pop website is being outranked by less relevant but more extensively SEO’ed sites.

Here is Matt’s response:

Matt Cutts from Google

What’s interesting about your question is you went a little bit deeper, and you said, “What about all the people who are sort of optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO?”  And normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it. And the idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit.

So all those people who have sort have been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization,” or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

And so that’s the sort of thing where we try make the GoogleBot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so if people don’t do SEO, we handle that. And we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on a page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. And so that is something where we continue to pay attention, and we continue to work on it. And it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now.

(You can hear the complete audio here. The section about this issue starts approximately one-third of the way in.)

What is Over Optimization?

All of this leads us to the question, “What is over optimization?”

This is a tricky one when you actually start to think about. And so to help us get to the answer, we’ll set up an imaginary dialogue between two people. Let’s call these two people Joe and Matt. Matt knows what “over optimization” is all about. Joe doesn’t.

Joe: I’m not sure I understand how you can “over” optimize something. If it’s “optimal,” that means it’s perfect. If you’ve “over optimized,” that means you’ve made it … um … too perfect?

Matt: Yes, exactly. You’ve made it too perfect. You’ve followed the rules too well.

Joe: And why is that bad?

Matt: It’s bad because the rules are supposed to be secret, and so you aren’t supposed to know what they are.

Joe: And so if I’m not supposed to know the rules, does it matter if I break them?

Matt: Yes, of course. Don’t be stupid.

Joe: But how am I supposed to follow the rules if I’m not supposed to know what they are?

Matt: You just are. Don’t be stupid.

Joe: And if I follow the rules too well, that’s bad too?

Matt: Yes, of course. We just went over this. <under breath> Idiot. </under breath>

Joe: And what if I follow some of the rules but not all the rules, is that good?

Matt: It depends. If you follow the right rules and you ignore the right rules, then yes, that’s good.

Joe: So there are rules about which rules to follow?

Matt: Of course.

Joe: I think maybe I’m catching on here. What you’re saying is that I should … umm … I should pretend I don’t know some things even though I know them. I should make believe that I’m one way when really I’m another.  … In a way, it’s like I should kind of play hard to get. … Would you say that?

Matt: Me? No, I wouldn’t say that. That sounds stupid.

Joe: I know it sounds stupid, but would you say it’s true?

Matt: What is “true”?

Joe: Ummm … Not false?

Matt: That was a rhetorical question.

Joe: Was it? … Oh, sorry. Umm … well, I guess I just have one more question.

Matt: Go ahead.

Joe: So these rules about which rules to follow – are they secret too?

Matt: Of course.

Joe: But …  but … none of this makes any sense!

Matt: (heavy sigh)

Joking Aside

One big clue about how to move forward may have been provided by the other member on the panel at the session — Duane Forrester, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bing.

In his response to the question, he took the opportunity to stress the importance of social media on search engine optimization.

“You’re a Mom & Pop and you have a great product. Does the rest of the world think you have a great product? Because if they do, and they amplify this, we will pick up on those signals. … Essentially what I’m telling you is, ‘If you’re not engaged socially, you’re missing the boat because the conversation is happening socially – about you and about your content. So, you need to be engaged with that. Those are really important signals for us. Whether you’re involved or not is your choice, but those signals still exist whether you’re in that conversation or not. So those types of things can really help those Mom & Pops get ahead.”

Those with over-optimized websites, he went on to say, probably aren’t engaged as much – they’re banking on their SEO to take them to the top.

It’s important to remember that links became the holy grail in SEO because they were a way to measure social engagement with your content. But as the social element of web has become more sophisticated, we can only assume that the tools to measure them have as well. But the basic idea is still the same. Get real people recommending/discussing your content.

Where Should You Go from Here?

While the actual situation is, in fact, somewhat farcical, as with all things Google, they get the last word whether it’s fair or not, whether it’s consistent or not, whether it makes sense or not.

Should you worry if your site is overly optimized? Possibly – especially if that’s all you’ve got going for it.

Should you worry about your super-powered SEO plugins? Again, possibly. Keep your ear to the ground in the next few weeks/months and see what’s being said. Also, of course, it probably depends on how your content does in the world of social media vs. how expertly you have it optimized.

Is that fair? … Well, “fair” isn’t always a factor on the web. Sometimes it simply gets shaved out of the equation.

A Simple Solution

It seems a simple solution may be to basically just create good content, make it easy to find on your site, and then try to get people talking about it via social media.

Hey, wait a minute! That’s what Google has been saying all along! … How in the world did I come to that conclusion?

Matt Cutts!!! What have you done to my brain???

(Original source for this article: Search Engine Land – Google Over Optimization Penalty)

Photos: Dart and SEO target. Computer generated 3D photo rendering & Seo & vector warning sign from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Not only does this help bring traffic to your site when people are searching specifically for images related to yours, but it also helps out the general SEO of your page; it allows you to legitimately add some extra very important signals to your page that help the search engines decipher it and classify it correctly.

Take a look at a short video by Senior Google Engineer Matt Cutts talking about the importance of describing your images with text.

Text for Images in WordPress

There are four different types of important text that can be directly associated with an image when you upload it via the WordPress media uploader.

• Title
• Alt Text (Alternative Text)
• Caption
• File Name

* The alt text (or alternative text) is meant to describe the image so machines can get an idea about it.

In WordPress, you will see boxes for these types of text when you have your image open for editing.

Default Text for Images in WordPress

By default, WordPress takes the name of your image file and uses it as your title for the image. This can help, but if your image file is named something like PICT0881, this tells the search engines nothing.

Or even if you’ve given your image file a descriptive name (which you should try to do), you might be able to squeeze a little extra SEO juice out of the image if you had a term or two more added to the text.

And then, of course, it would help to give the images alt text.

But all this takes w*rk.

SEO Friendly Images Plugin (DOWNLOAD HERE)

Luckily, the SEO Friendly Images plugin will automatically fill in your title and alt text boxes for you based on tags associated with different elements from your site. It will also do this for any images that you’ve already published.

This plugin lets you set your alt and title text by automatically substituting in the title of the post, the name of the file, the category, tags associated with the post, or even general words that you type in yourself.

Take a look at the settings page.

The Result

As you can see from the setting page above, I’ve set my title to take the name of my post plus the word “photo.” So as you can see, you can even enter your own text. (But keep in mind that if you insert a word of your own, that same word will appear in the title of every image.)

In the alt text section, you can see that I’ve made it the name of my file plus the name of the category I’ve put the post in. (Keep in mind that if your images have generic names like PICT0881, and you don’t plan on renaming them, then you’ll want to use a different tag there.)

The full code for the image would look like this.

<a href="http://mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/peanuts.jpg">
<img title="Nutrition in Peanuts photo"
src="http://mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/peanuts.jpg"
alt="peanuts healthy eating" width="300" height="165" /></a>

You see my title says, “Nutrition in Peanuts photo.” (The title of the post + “photo”)

The alt text says, “peanuts healthy eating.” (My image file name + my category name “healthy eating”)

Optimize  Every Single Image Automatically

If you’re meticulous about SEO optimizing your images, then obviously this plugin isn’t for you. But if you’re like most, and you want an easy way to automatically optimize your images, then this plugin is the ticket.

If you set it up in an intelligent way, then you will get some pretty decent optimization applied to EVERY SINGLE IMAGE on your site. And that, of course, is miles and miles better than nothing.

Photo: Film from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Google recently announced a change in their “page layout algorithm” that is designed to penalize pages that are stuffed with ads and light on content, especially in the area above the fold (i.e. the screen area that you see before you scroll down the page).

Google says in their post, “This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.”

Matt Cutts, Google’s most public software engineer, also spelled this out to some degree in a Q&A last September.

Browser Size Tool

In order to help you determine if you have too many ads above the fold, Google has also provided a rather sloppy looking Browser Size tool to help you see your website under different screen resolutions.

Do As I Say

While this move is obviously meant to improve user experience, and will no doubt be a good thing overall, many in the SEO community could not help but giggle/roll their eyes/shake their head/pop a vein at the announcement. Google, you see, makes the rules. But that doesn’t mean they always follow the rules.

A popular little trick to illustrate this point is to go to Google and search for “credit cards.”

How much content do you find above your fold?

Another irony that a lot are pointing out, and that I too experienced, was an email from the Google Adsense team on the very same day of this announcement encouraging me to put MORE Adsense ads on my pages.

The diagram below is from Google itself, recommending possible places to put your Adsense ads.

Funny or Not

Whether you find all this ironic, funny, or infuriating, the fact still remains that the Page Layout Algorithm is a reality, and if you depend on traffic from Google, you will need to pay attention to it.

Google has told us for years that it looks at site structure. It wants to see logic and ease of use for the visitor. So now it turns out that this means more than simply naming your categories well; it also means you need to make sure to lay your site out to highlight the content, not the ads. Presumably, this also applies in-house ads (for your own products or services).

Photo: Internet Search from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+

Linking to other posts on your site with keyword-rich links is one of the best things you can do for your on-site SEO efforts.

How to Do It

When you have some content in your visual editor, simply highlight whichever word or words you would like to link, and click the link icon.

When you click the link icon, a link dialogue box appears. Simply type your keyword into the search box, and then related content from your site appears below. Click on whichever post you’d like to link to, and everything is filled in automatically. Then simply hit the “Add Link” button.

Photo: Chain Link Close Up from BigStock

Joseph Foley on Google+