Google’s major search engine function is to offer a customer the best possible results for a search, based upon the search term (keywords) that the customer has used in the Google search box. While the story is breaking Matt says it’s understandable that you’ll have multiple instances of that story spread across the web. When things settle down, having a “rel=canonical” tag in place indicates the preferred location on the web where you would like that information to sit.

Cutts also did say that 25% of the web is duplicative, so you really don’t have to worry about it.

For more information to the question in his own words, see the video below:

Matt Cutts answered to the question

“How did Interflora turn their ban in 11 days? Can you explain what kind of penalty they had, how they fixed it, as some of us have spent months trying to clean things up after an unclear GWT notification?”

Interflora is a major UK flower site that was hit by a Google penalty early this year, but Google didn’t call out this company publicly, after the reports of penalty came out, the company wrote a blog post warning people not to engage in the “buying and selling of links.”

Matt Cutts proceeds to try and answer the question in more general terms “Google tends to looking at buying and selling links that pass page rank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times then the action that we take more and more severe. We’re more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeat violation.”

Cutts says “It’s not something that I would typically recommend for everybody to disavow every link that you’ve gotten for a period of years-but certainly when people start over with completely new websites they have bought-we have seen a few cases where people will disavow every single link because they truly want to get a fresh start.”

In other words, if you’re willing to go to such great lengths and eliminate such a big number of links, Google is going to notice.

If you’ve got links from some very spammy forum or something like that, rather than trying to identify the individual pages, that might be the opportunity to da a ‘domain:’ . So if you’ve got a lot of links that you think are bad from a particular site, just go ahead and do ‘domain:’ and the name of that domain.  Don’t try to pick the individual links because you might be missing a lot

Now you can connect a full range social media pages as long as those pages have a link back to your verified website, you need not provide Bing with any special permissions for your social media accounts, so your privacy is still fully intact.

Here is the list of social media pages that Bing’s connected pages currently support:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. Google+
5. Windows Store
6. Google Play
7. Apple Store
8. Pinterest
9. Windows Phone Store
10. YouTube
11. Instagram
12. MySpace

All you have to do is log into Bing Webmaster Tools and select connected pages and complete the URL path for the various media networks associated with your page on that network and click verify. This may take a few moments, especially if you fill out multiple networks at the same time.

The feature is available to users immediately, though it will take up to 72 hours for Bing Webmaster Tools to start populating the data related to connected pages.

What is Hummingbird and how do you know if it’s affecting your site’s ranking?

Hummingbird is the nickname that’s been assigned to update, 90 % of searches are affected. By comparison, that’s much higher than most of the Google algorithm updates we see from Google.

Google announced the algorithm update at a press event on Thursday along with some other interface and knowledge Graph tweaks. Hummingbird was described as the biggest algorithm change since the caffeine and that it is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis.

In particular, Google said that “Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query-the whole sentence or conversation or meaning-is taken into account rather than pages matching just a few words”.

A lot of people are worried about its impact and of course Panda and Penguin which we’ve been talking about all summer and even last year, are those dead? The answer to that seems to be, no, not entirely. They are using elements that they learned through Panda and Penguin in this new Hummingbird update.

This is really just an extension of Google’s ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which does have implications for SEO, and while webmasters may not have to worry about a major drop-off in rankings like with updates Panda or Penguin this could be more of an ongoing struggle for those competing to get on search results pages.

For now, according to Google (per Sullivan’s report), you don’t need to worry about anything, and Google’s normal SEO guidance remains the same.

In essence various sites are reporting that the “NOT PROVIDED” percentage of organic keyword referrals has jumped from 50-60% up to 95%, 99% or 100% , so sites are not able to pull full international statistics yet, but all signs point of SEOs and webmasters not being able to pull data on Google driven keyword traffic anymore.

Google’s latest move is interesting in the context of its own actions against the NSA as well as recent leaks regarding the agency’s activities. The leaked prism slides from early June revealed that the NSA can collect “notifications of target activity” and “special requests” both of which may involve searches, from the tech companies that are allegedly involved. If Google supplies encrypted searches to everyone, it may be able to slow down the pace at which the NSA can obtain search information from it.

The motivation here is not to drive the ads site-it’s for search users. It’s not still clear why Google seems to have ramped up things.

Earlier, the download sample links report downloaded a sampling of links in alphabetical order and stopped after a maximum of 100,001 links, it wasn’t that useful to users when they could get so many results from a single domain and there was no way to sort them.

Now the sampling of links is not done in alphabetical order, instead it is ordered in alphabetical order but rather it is now “sampled uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks” said Google.

Shortly, when you download your data, you’ll notice a much broader, more diverse cross-section of links. Site owners looking for insights into who recommends their content will now have a better overview of those links and will find easier to see where to spend their time and effort.

This is a great change and has already gone live, so now you can download a better cross-section of your backlinks in Google webmaster tools.

If you use any popular keyword research tool you will get excellent information about which keywords were most heavily utilized along with nicely formatted rankings.

What if the search volume for your keywords is falling? Or rising?

What if search volume for your keywords has shifted in the past three years?

So, what tool will? Google Trends.

Google Trends is a keyword research tool that can help you see at glance how many people are searching on Google for the keywords you’re considering. Since Google is far and away the search engine of choice, focusing on Google keywords information provided can prove to be quite helpful.

Google Trends in Action

Let’s do one exercise together. Go to Google trends (google.com/trends) in your browser. Enter the following search terms, separated by comma:

• Internet Marketing
• Online Marketing
• Website Designing
• Social Media Marketing
• Website Development

Several things become apparent from this initial search. Now let’s drill down the data, click the drop down that says “All Years” and select “Last 12 months”, select country and relevant category, you can see the moving trends in more details.

 If you used Google Trends to see that one keyword was gaining searches over time while the other was losing its’ steam, you’d want to emphasize the keyword with the rising trend in your copy. If you have to make a choice between keywords, Google Trends becomes even more important in making that decision.

Google Keyword tool Vs. Google Trends

Both tools rely on and present historical data I reaction to the criteria you set. But there is marked difference.

Take the term ‘Olympics’ as an example. Google’s Keyword Tool estimates that there are a massive 30,400,000 monthly searches per month for that term, based on the activity over the last 12 months. Of course we know that last year’s event will skew the results and that until the next event interest will fade. But imagine that we didn’t have that knowledge. We might pursue this keyword traffic based on an estimate that is inaccurate and potentially a waste of resource.

Google Trends is a fantastic stand-alone tool that can help to understand market demand and search trends; and its use is not limited to SEO alone. The information it provides is highly valuable and a business can use it to make decisions about market strategy.

Competitor Identification:

Before analyzing what individual sites are doing , you need to identify who your true competitors really are. There is sometimes a difference between the top ten Google results for a site’s primary key phrase, and the true lay of a market’s land. Analyzing a market involves data, rank checking and battles with the Google Adwords API for search volumes, but it’s absolutely possible to do this in-house.

Whether you are an SEO Company or simply a marketer or blogger, you may want to identify and determine the quality of the links pointing at your website. There are many tools available to help you do this.

What are the web tools?

I’m going to provide some information on three tools which are the best and easiest to use for backlink analysis.

As an Internet Marketing Company, we use number of web tools that helps us to identify and analyze the volume and quality of links coming into our clients/ prospected clients websites which is a fundamental task to perform for SEO purposes and driving traffic to your site.

OPEN SITE EXPLORER

Moz’s open site explorer is an awesome tool to discover a number of website factors. The good thing about OSE is that you can break down the entire backlink analysis to find out what you are looking for.  Whether you are looking for an individual link, the anchor text distribution, the source of a link or whether a link you built has been indexed or not, OSE is one tool that should provide the answer you are looking for.

You can filter through the data in order of preference, by simply clicking on the category in the menu, to help make your analysis or search as easy as possible. You can also conduct a link metrics comparison in conjunction with your competitors to see, how strong their website is and how many links they have coming into their sites.

MAJESTIC SEO

Majestic SEO is another great tool to use. It provides much of the same information and specifies that OSE, its main difference is the trust flow of the link profile and the visual chart of anchor text distribution analysis. Dependent on your current back link profile determine what type of SEO strategy will be created to benefit your individual website.

What is trust flow?

Trust flow is consistently passing through individual sites throughout the entire web. Each individual link that passes from one website to another, passes through authority to the referring domain. Trust flow can run through several pages, continuing to pass authority (link juice), however will eventually cease as the pages increase.

Google have always been aware of this finally and finally cracked down on over-optimization with the introduction of the panda update last year, which most digital marketers and webmasters are now well aware of.

Working in an online marketing company, it’s important for us to analyze a prospected clients backlink profile to identify what keywords they are targeting with anchor text terms and the volume of inbound links using the anchor text.

AHREFS

The site provides one of the largest index of live backlinks on websites. It runs an updated backlink check every 15 minutes to find large index of links on websites. It is a favorite backlink analysis tool for many website owners and SEO gurus, yet simple and convenient enough for novices because it comes with a user friendly interface. One can easily find the data of new and internal links, anchors, best pages and linking domains of a website. It is also capable of checking ranking and competition on keywords that you use on your site.

A complete website backlink analysis will help clarify and direct your SEO efforts, and in some cases certain parts of your general business strategy. Just don’t forget some important points

• Stay on top of how search engines are treating backlink behavior.
• Remove the bad backlinks in your own profile and look into potential link prospects.
• Create content that will be useful to the readers in your niche. 

Cutts says that “High quality content naturally generates a lot of likes, shares and +1’s, but we shouldn’t take that as an indication of having the ability to influence rankings”. However, there are some valuable findings from the Moz study that still hold true. Google plus does page rank and allow anchor text, two things we know for sure are factors in Google algorithm.

As a webmaster, business owner or SEO Company, you should be using Google plus for SEO to enhance your keyword terms. In short, if you make a compelling content, people will link to it. Like it, share it on Facebook, +1 it etc. But it doesn’t mean that Google I using these signals in our ranking.

The Google +1 button in its current state is mainly a social feature as opposed to an algorithmic feature. So it’s supposed to benefit you by attracting networks of friends and associates to your content. Since friends are linked socially and share similar lifestyles, demographics, education levels, values etc then content endorsed by an associate should be more relevant and trustworthy.

A lot of Internet Marketing Company  are working for long term SEO success, where creating quality content that is more likely to be shared is the best kind of strategy when it comes to content.

• Dive into your analytics deeper:

Have Google analytics installed on your site and have goal tracking set up. Dive into your analytics deeper and check to see what particular keywords ads, referring sites etc, have high conversion rates and support those efforts with attention and budget.

Find this illustration by clicking Traffic sources>Search>Organic and then selecting a Goal set in Google Analytics. 

• Finding corresponding URL’s:

Determine which pages on your site are driving these keyword conversions

Click on Secondary Dimension and select Traffic sources>landing pages from the drop down menu.

• Find where these keywords Rank:

Get these keywords to work even harder for you, which means getting corresponding url’s to rank higher improve their visibility. So you need to determine current SERP position.

• Keyword conversion report:

Once you have keyword rankings, you can pop that into your spreadsheet along with list of keywords, corresponding URL’s and conversion rates and determine whether to focus on the highest ranking terms, highest converting terms, highest traffic terms.

• Focus on those keywords to improve rankings:

Review title tag structures: keyword placement in headlines, subheads and body copy, image tagging and see for any further improvements. Add anchor text links on those pages back to the pages you’re trying to rank higher and freshen up more relevant content. Social shares may not be a direct ranking signal, but good content gets shared likely can help reinforce popularity and interests.

• Iterate over your website:

Now you are aware where they rank and you’re working to improve those rankings to grow conversions. Next step is to leverage that intelligence you acquired during this processes and apply to keywords which are underperforming on your site.

Nothing prevents you from trying to increase your conversion rate. If you do things, your conversion rate will normalize over time. However while conversion is an important factor to the profitability of your marketing, you shouldn’t lose sight on big picture-that’s building your brand equity.