How Plugins Improve SEO

As a part of hire WordPress developer India, the best method is to retain the easiest way to use SEO tools at all times. Most of the SEO processes get automated and provide you to remain on top every time when Google changes alter the ranking of pages. In fact, according to the best WordPress developers, WordPress is considered as the most used system covering all the content management techniques. If you are one of the members of hire WordPress expert today, then you must take a look at the following top WordPress plugins to improve SEO in 2018. These plugins will help you to work on SEO tasks with great ease. Consequently, it helps you to improve search engine rankings greatly. A few WordPress plugins to improve SEO and its benefits are:

404page Plugin

This is an important WordPress plugin as a part of hire  WordPress  developer India process, you can easily create a customized 404 error page. Besides, you can send an error signal to search engines. Hence, de-indexing of this page can be done. Through the best WordPress developers, this plugin is compatible with the most of the Themes of the WordPress.

You Can Find All In One SEO Pack

It is possible to find an all in one SEO pack as a part of hire WordPress expert. The advantages are that such plugins will be able to sort out many of the issues faced by the website owners. However, these plugins will help you to optimize the WordPress sites without any hassles. The other benefits you can derive out of this plugin are that it is possible for you to easily submit your sitemap to Bing and Google. You can see accelerated mobile pages at all times. The plugins will support Google analytics and can create advanced Canonical URLs to improve the value of SEO. Further, whenever your site is updated by the hire  WordPress  developer India initiative, this SEP pack plugin will automatically send the desired notifications. Accordingly, the notifications will indicate search engines about the changes that may occur in your site. The all in one SEO pack plugin is considered to be secure and generates meta tags in an automatic manner. This plug is mostly compatible with most of the other WordPress plugins available, today.

Yoast SEO Plugin

This plugin is perhaps considered as one of the most popular plugins in 2018. It is used to maximize the entire WordPress website. Similar to an All in One SEO Pack plugin, this plugin is intuitive and starts its working immediately. But, the interface of the plugin is more departmentalized.

Similarly, there are other WordPress plugins in 2018 are AMP for WordPress, Premium SEO Pack, WOT Cache, Redirection plugin, and SEO Internal Links Plugin. Each of them offers its own advantages to the WordPress site owners of today. However, the best WordPress developers can choose the ones that will work best for a particular website.

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Benefits of Hiring SEO Consultant India
Owning a website by your client is not adequate for a successful online business. Your client’s website will be a successful one only when a number of visitors are going through it. As a seo company in India, your responsibility is to get your client’s business website to occupy a good position in major search engines. Hence, the role played by seo services India is to optimize your client’s website so that it gets a good ranking. So, seo consultant India hired by your client, will always render top class services to boost the online business.

Brain Technosys as Reputed SEO Company in India
Brain Technosys is one such seo company in India that has earned reputation by giving its professionally managed seo services to its various clients. Being an seo consultant India, the company makes use of the latest and advanced seo tools and techniques to make its client’s website to become more search engine friendly. The seo services India uses appropriate keyword and innovative techniques enabling the clients to find out the technology determined method of alteration to the business. Besides, seo consultant India will make all out efforts to render cost effective consulting services to the clients by considering its websites from the point of a search engine perspective. Brain Technosys working as seo company in India, offers all the technical capabilities to the clients enabling them to effectively figure out their website needs.

Professional SEO Services India
As part of seo services India, the seo consultant India enables its clients to know how they can make use of the right type of keywords. With this strategy, the company’s clients will be able to attract the right type of audiences to visit the website through search engines. The benefit of hiring seo services India, will give solid ideas and tips to its clients so that they can attain high ranking of their website in major search engines. Affordable prices are charged by the seo company in India to their clients. Major advantages of hiring seo consultant India is that there is a huge saving in time by its client’s business operations. Paying high amount for the seo services is avoided. The seo company in India will bring about one hundred percent guaranteed results for the clients. Here, the objective of any seo services India is to optimize the client’s website for search engines effectively and properly.

Conclusion
From the above, it is possible for you to understand as to why the seo consultant India brings benefits to its clients. Without wasting your time, go ahead and hire the services of your favorite seo consultant Brain Technosys, immediately.

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Comprehensive Service:

Under this category, SEO professional should be able to provide various services. Various services includes:-

• Link Building
• Content Writing
• Keyword Search
• Search Engine Submission
• Directory Submission

Like these, you will find more chance to add services:-

• Insights From Old Customers: It is very important to collect review from other people about this Company. In order to achieve this, you can go for customer reviews.

• Unique and Customize Services: Affordable service will give you various options regarding services to ensure that whether are fulfilling the needs of clients. They will allow clients to choose the service packages or features so that they will suit the exact needs. It allows business to find the features which they needs under package. A small business can reduce the price of cost of service based on their demands.

• More Experience:  Affordable SEO Companies will be usually experienced. They are capable of providing sudden turn over. They will apply experience to increase the investment which is put on business.

• Scaled Service: An Affordable seo company India will provide you various kinds of options and allows you to scale features based on budget.

SEO Company is compulsory for an online business to keep it running for long period of time. It helps in creating the website to linking them to the customers. They will constantly work with your website. They are having more responsibilities like website creation, link building, etc.

Keyword Researching:

Keyword researching is one of their important responsibilities. They will find the keywords which will match with your site so that it can be visited by the customers. An existence of search engine optimization company for an online business is compulsory. It is not dependent on the size of business. SEO will help you to boost the customers for your site. Their few responsibilities are explained as later.

• Link Building: As keyword is more important for a site, link building is also more important.
• Directory Submission: More number of directories will help the site with its more amount of usage.

Though SEO service is important for an online business, cost of providing service is also important. Therefore, you should find out the service at which the affordable cost can be enjoyed. Before beginning to enjoy the affordable service, you should find out whether they are really affordable.

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A Google spokesperson has told us that they will now be updating the Penguin algorithm continuously, by optimizing it as they go. A Google spokesperson sent us the following statement around our recent questions about the holiday Penguin updates.

That last big update is still rolling out — though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.

That definitely explains all the reports of Penguin changes we’ve been recently been seeing. Which also means that we will likely be covering these updates, even if they are not confirmed by Google, when we feel the change is significant enough to warrant so. If we feel one of these “continuous updates” has resulted in enough of a significant spike in the search results, we will label it as a Penguin update within the 3.x category.

Penguin algorithm updates have historically been processed offline and pushed at a specific point in time. Google would process all the Penguin data offline and then pushed the data live, which would produced change in the search results. Now, Google seems to be saying they will change the algorithm within their live ranking processes.

Live changes to the Penguin algorithm seems to imply no more large data pushes for Penguin.

We will continue to document what we feel are changes to the live Penguin algorithm.

But what this means for sites who were impacted by any of these live changes is unclear. Do their link removal or disavow efforts get processed between each live algorithm change or would that not happen until Penguin 4.0? Again, we are working on getting clearer information from Google around these changes.

Also, why Google feels okay with changing these things now, during the holiday season, is still a bit worrisome for many. On the other hand, we wanted Google to update the Penguin algorithm faster, and it seems like Google is now.

Just to keep you all up to date, we have not seen any changes in Penguin since this Saturday, December 6, 2014:

• Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
• Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
• Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting around 1% of queries)
• Penguin 3.1 on November 27, 2014 (confirmed by Google, no impact given, Google considers part of Penguin 3.0)
• Penguin 3.2 on December 2, 2014 (not confirmed by Google but based on publisher reports)
• Penguin 3.3 on December 5, 2014 (not confirmed by Google but based on publisher reports)
• Penguin 3.4 on December 6, 2014 (not confirmed by Google but based on publisher reports)

Note:  This article originally posted on Search Engine Land.

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Likewise, you will probably see a few results showing sites where you can buy the DVD, in which case the snippets might provide prices. If the film is showing in theatres, then some results might show movie times. You might also notice that some articles have dates next to them.

These are all examples of rich snippets in action, but for a bit more information and explanation on how to use them, see this advice from Google.

Why Rich Snippets Are Crucial For SEO

The first major of advantage of rich snippets is the simple fact that they draw users’ attention. With Google Authorship done and dusted, rich snippets are now one of the only ways to make your results stand out against the competition on the SERPs (unless you can get featured as an in-depth article or as news). In short, someone is more likely to click on a film review with the star rating showing beneath it than the one without. In fact, many companies report seeing a 20-30% rise in CTR after implementing rich snippets. That is the kind of boost and optimization any company, including new startups, should understand and implement right from inception of their website.

At the same time, if nothing else, the presence of stars also confirms the link is indeed a film review/store selling a product, which again increases click-through rates and also reduces bounce rates – because users know what to expect before they land on the site.

With Google’s data highlighter (see below), it’s now possible to add a lot more structured data to a site, including information about articles such as the title, author, and publish date. This could help to increase the perceived reliability and again boost CTR – we all feel more comfortable trusting information that was written recently.

Crucially, information regarding your business can also help Google to understand the location of your business, which is very useful for local cinemas displaying film times, for instance. Local businesses are one group who should strongly consider looking at rich snippets (see more information here from Google).

Perhaps what’s more important though, is that by using rich snippets you are helping Google to understand the content on your website – which can only be a good thing. Google says using rich snippets won’t directly affect search rankings, but the same may not be true of all search engines and the role of rich snippets is only likely to increase going forward.

Rich Snippets: The Past and Future

Support for microdata that makes structured snippets possible is something that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all pledged for in a rare moment of collaboration. The three companies united in order to support rich snippets because they see it as an important step for the future of search and the web generally. Don’t you think they would have been unlikely to go to such lengths unless they had big plans for them? This should tell you that snippets will likely be an important factor going forward.

The most probable reason for this is that future products from these companies will rely on rich snippets more and more. Google is already making it a habit to display more information directly on their SERPs (thus giving users less reason to navigate quickly away), and it is very easy to see how AI tools such as Google Now, Siri, or Cortana would make use of the readily available information.

Does this actually benefit the webmasters as future users could have the information dictated to them with no need to navigate to the actual website? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly better to be the site referenced than to be one of countless sites left behind who also won’t get visited.

And if future systems cite their sources, then such features could at least provide a boost for your brand’s visibility and your site’s authority in the eyes of visitors. Likewise, if you want the AI of the future to recommend your local business, then you should have organization information in your snippets.

In short, rich snippets are a critical tool in the construction of the semantic web, and if you want to be a part of this evolution then you need to embrace them.

There are other potential uses for rich snippets going forward too. A smart watch, for instance, could potentially display an abridged version of a website in order to accommodate a small display, while the ambitious and somewhat amazing VR Browser Janus could also make use of the feature (Janus converts web pages in ‘rooms’ to be explored in virtual reality). Rich snippet are essential for future-proofing your website.

A Word of Caution

While Rich Snippets are important for the clicks you get from Google and your future compatibility with the web though, it’s important to also exercise restraint.

Rich snippets give you the opportunity to spam. For instance, there’s nothing to stop you giving your own website or article a five-star review in theory. Likewise, you could fill your rich snippets with sales copy and tell Google it’s a “recipe.” But it’s vital that you don’t use these underhanded methods because Google are onto this trick and have been issuing manual penalties for this kind of spam for a while now.

Rich snippets are not for everyone. If you run a blog dealing in fitness articles, then there may not be as much need for rich snippets as yet (though basic information about your articles could still be useful). On the other hand though, sports scores, recipes, song lyrics, prices, dates and star ratings all can be very useful in increasing CTR. Events can also benefit from structured snippets, while local businesses should also be sure to include information regarding their business.

Getting Started

Likewise, irrelevant information or faulty markups could also hurt your site more than help it. Google has a rich snippets testing tool you can use to make sure your rich snippets are working effectively. Or, there are several WordPress plugin that can do the job for you.

Alternatively, you may be able to use Google’s data highlighter to outline information more easily. Google’s highlighter tool allows webmasters to add more versatile information to their site listings with no need for them to get down and dirty with code. This data highlighter is available through Webmaster Tools and lets users use a point-and-click solution to highlight the information they want outline for Google. This is pretty much a fool-proof tool for adding structured data to your site, but will only work with certain types of data.

Structured snippets aren’t going to change your company’s fortunes overnight, so you certainly shouldn’t rely on them. Nevertheless, they are still a very important piece of the huge jigsaw puzzle that is SEO, and they deserve your attention.

Note: The  post original posted on Search Engine Journal.

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Google updated their Penguin algorithm with version Penguin 3.0 late Friday night. The Penguin algorithm primarily looks at a site’s backlink profile and may demote a site that appears to have a poor backlink profile.

The Penguin 3.0 release was communicated very poorly by Google. With Google only confirming the update 24-hours after the update was release and not giving us the details they would typically give when we ask them. But this morning at 3:50am EDT, Google’s Pierre Far shared more details on Google+.

Here is the summary:

(1) This is a worldwide update, impacting all versions of Google
(2) The rollout is not complete yet, it will continue for the “next few weeks.”
(3) It impacts less than 1% of English queries but may impact other languages more or less
(4) Google confirmed the roll out began on Friday
(5) Pierre Far specifically called this a “refresh”
(6) It should demote sites with bad link profiles and help sites that were previously hit that cleaned up their link profiles

Worldwide Penguin Rollout

Unlike some of Google’s other algorithm updates, such as the Panda algorithm, the Penguin update typically launches globally. So sites in any language, any region, are all open to the potential impact of this algorithm.

Why? Since Penguin is mostly about link profiles, language doesn’t really need to be looked at by the algorithm. Panda looks more at content and language, thus those algorithms roll out different by region or language. Penguin doesn’t need to worry about language, for the most part.

Penguin Still Rolling Out

There was some confusion if the Penguin refresh was done rolling out or not. SEOs were wondering why not all sites were impacted yet, they felt the roll out was halted or not complete. But yesterday Google’s John Mueller felt it was complete but then retracted that a few hours later. Pierre Far this morning said the roll out is not complete and will likely last for a “few weeks.”

So when analyzing if a site was impacted, it may be hard to nail down the issue to Penguin or another algorithm, since this is a multi-week roll out.

Penguin 3.0 Impacts Less Than 1% Of English Search Queries

When gauging how large an update was and how much of the webmaster community felt it, Google sometimes tells us how significant it was by measuring the percentage of queries impacted.

Penguin 1.0 impacted ~3.1% of queries, 1.1 was 0.1% and 1.2 was 0.3% of queries. Then 2.0 was 2.3% of queries and 2.1 was about 1%. Penguin 3.0, which some may argue is 2.2 and not 3.0, impacted less than 1% of queries.

Now, it may be higher in other languages, but Google’s measurement was English queries.

Penguin 3.0 Launched Friday

Google confirmed that Penguin 3.0 launched Friday, October 17, 2014. Keep in mind, the rollout will continue for a few weeks as we said above.

Penguin 3.0 – A Refresh

Google’s Pierre Far called this update a “refresh,” he didn’t mention that any new signals were added or the algorithm was changed in any way. A refresh in Google’s terminology around algorithms means they just re-ran the algorithm to release sites that fixed their issues and demote sites that had issues they didn’t pick up on. They did not add any new signals to the algorithm to find Penguin related sites, it was just a refresh.

Just a refresh even after waiting over a year? Indeed and this is pretty shocking to most of those in the SEO industry. Many expected a refresh could have happened way earlier and that Google was laying the ground work for a new Penguin algorithm.

Again, this is why some want to rename this update to Penguin 2.2 versus 3.0.

Helps Some Sites & Hurts Other Sites

Like any algorithm refresh, some sites that were previously hit would see a ranking increase because they are no longer negatively impacted by the algorithm. While other sites may see a ranking drop in the search results because they were just picked up as sites that should be impacted by the Penguin algorithm.

Note: This post is originally posted on Search Engine Land.

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The ultimate objective of SEO is to produce positive results in terms of visibility and traffic. Now, with an increasing number of people using various mobile devices that are ‘smart’ enough to access net, it is imperative that each and every business has a strong online presence to better their ‘online visibility’ and have a substantial edge over the competitors. Let us discuss some of the ways to better the local SEO.

Building the local listing pages

This is the most elementary and probably the easiest step that involves claiming the local listings on various search engine pages along with the business listing directories. Once the profile is complete, then you will have to verify whether you are considered an owner of the particular business listing and whether each of the business listings has come up with unique verification mechanism. While some of them will provide a pin code over email that will have to be used for completing the verification, some others will ask you to complete the verification by just verifying your email address.

Blogging

Regular blogging is a fantastic way of enjoying SEO benefits. The articles you come up with at regular intervals will help you to increase the local visibility by a considerable extent. This can be done by creating content with strategic use of local keywords along with search items pertaining to the business in question. Experts are of the opinion that blogging provides immense SEO benefits besides providing the visitors loads of information whenever they open the site.

Optimizing the website to the maximum

This is the trickiest as well as the most important part when it comes to improving local SEO. A solid and comprehensive on-page optimization always provides businesses the topmost ranks on the search engines. Hence, it is imperative that proper research is done when optimizing the on-page factors and subsequent time is taken to make sure that the optimization is done in a proper way. Further tips in this regard can be seen on the page having link http://www.paradoxseo.com.

Ensuring that the website is tablet as well mobile-friendly

With the introduction of smart phones and mobile devices like tablets and iPads that can be used for accessing net, it is imperative that your site is mobile responsive. Or in other words, the site can be watched on PCs as well as mobile devices irrespective of the screen size, without losing any of the information or functionality. Hence, an investment needs to be done to make your site mobile responsive, if you are to improve your local SEO ranking.

Ensuring that the website is tablet as well mobile-friendly

With the introduction of smart phones and mobile devices like tablets and iPads that can be used for accessing net, it is imperative that your site is mobile responsive. Or in other words, the site can be watched on PCs as well as mobile devices irrespective of the screen size, without losing any of the information or functionality. Hence, an investment needs to be done to make your site mobile responsive, if you are to improve your local SEO ranking.

Encouraging viewers and customers to upload reviews

This is another highly effective step that helps in improving local SEO. If you regularly get positive reviews from the customers, quite understandably it will lure more people to use your product or service, and that will increase your site visibility to a great extent. Do not bribe your customers as that does not have any long term benefit. Provide them a comprehensive list of sites where they can leave their reviews and this will help them leave their feedback, which will help your site to get top ranking on SERP.

Author Bio: The author is an experienced SEO executive and has his own SEO firm that caters to the needs of a number of businesses. Look at http://www.paradoxseo.com and this will give you a lot of information on the subject written by the author.

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After three years the great Google Authorship experiment has come to an end … at least for now.

Today John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post that Google will stop showing authorship results in Google Search, and will no longer be tracking data from content using rel=author markup.

This in-depth article, which I’ve jointly co-written with Mark Traphagen, will cover the announcement of the end of Authorship, the history of Authorship, a study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting that confirms one of the stated reasons for cessation of the program, and some thoughts about the future of author authority in search.

Authorship’s Gradual Slide Toward Extinction

The cessation of the Authorship program comes after two major reductions of Authorship rich snippets over the past eight months. In December 2013 Google reduced the amount of author photo snippets shown per query, as Google’s webspam head Matt Cutts had promised would happen in his keynote at Pubcon that October. Starting in December, only some Authorship results were accompanied by an author photo, while all others had just a byline.

Then at the end of June 2014 Google removed all author photos from global search, leaving just bylines for any qualified authorship results.

At that time, John Mueller in a Google+ post stated that the photos were removed because Google was moving toward unifying the user experience between desktop and mobile search, and author photos did not work well with the limited screen space and bandwidth of mobile. He also remarked that Google was seeing no significant difference in “click behavior” between search pages with or without author photos.

A Brief History of Google Authorship

The roots of the Authorship project go back to Google’s Agent Rank patent of 2007. As explained by Bill Slawski, an expert on Google’s patents, the Agent Rank patent described a system for connecting multiple pieces of content with a digital signature representing one or more “agents” (authors).

Such identification could then be used to score the agent based on various trust and authority signals pointing at the agent’s content, and that score could be used to influence search rankings.

Agent Rank remained a theoretical idea without a practical means of application, until the adoption by Google of the schema.org standards for structured markup. In a blog post in June 2011, Google announced that it would begin to support authorship markup. The company encouraged webmasters to begin marking up content on their sites with the rel=”author” and rel=”me” tags, connecting each piece of content to an author profile.

The final puzzle piece for Authorship to be truly useful to Google fell into place with the unveiling of Google+ at the end of June 2011. Google+ profiles could now serve as Google’s universal identity platform for connecting authors with their content.

In a YouTube video published in August of that year, Matt Cutts and then head of the Authorship project Othar Hansson gave explicit instructions on how authors should connect their content with their Google+ profiles, noted that doing so could cause one’s profile photo to show in search results, and for the first time mentioned that — at some future time — data from Authorship could be used as a ranking factor.

Over the next three years, Authorship in search went through many changes that we won’t detail here (although Ann Smarty has compiled a complete history of those changes). On repeated occasions, though, Matt Cutts and other Google spokespeople reiterated a long-term commitment by Google to the concept of author authority.

Why Has Google Ended the Authorship Program?

Over its entire history Google has repeatedly demonstrated that nothing it creates is sacred or immortal. The list of Google products and services that were introduced only to be unceremoniously discontinued later would fill a small phone book.

The primary reason behind this shuffle of products is Google’s unswerving commitment to testing. Every product, and every change or innovation within each product, is constantly tested and evaluated. Anything that the data show as not meeting Google’s goals, not having sufficient user adoption, or not providing significant user value, will get the axe.

John Mueller told my co-author Mark that test data collected from three years of Google Authorship convinced Google that showing Authorship results in search was not returning enough value compared to the resources it took to process the data.

Mueller gave two specific areas in which the Authorship experiment fell short of expectations:

1. Low adoption rates by authors and webmasters. As our study data later in this article will confirm, participation in authorship markup was spotty at best, and almost non-existent in many verticals. Even when sites attempted to participate, they often did it incorrectly. In addition, most non-tech-savvy site owners or authors felt the markup and linking were too complex, and so were unlikely to try to implement it.

Because of these problems, beginning in early 2012, Google started attempting to auto-attribute authorship in some cases where there was no or improper markup, or no link from an author profile. In a November 2012 study of a Forbes list of 50 Most Influential Social Media Marketers, Mark found that only 30% used authorship markup on their own blogs, but of those without any markup, 34% were still getting an Authorship rich snippet in search. This is similar to data found in a study performed by Eric which is further detailed below.

However, Google’s attempts at auto-attribution of authors led to many well-publicized cases of mis-attribution, such as Truman Capote being shown as the author of a New York Times article 28 years after his death. Clearly, Google’s hopes of being able to identify the web’s authors, connect them with their content, and then evaluate their trust and authority levels as possible ranking factors was in trouble if it was going to depend on the cooperation of non-Google people.

2. Low value to searchers. In his announcement of the elimination of author photos from global search in late June of this year, John Mueller stated that Google was seeing little difference in “click behavior” on search result pages with Authorship snippets compared to those without. This came as a shock (accompanied in many cases with outright disbelief) to those who had always believed that author snippets brought higher click-through rates.

Mueller repeated in his conversation with Mark about today’s change that Google’s data showed users were not getting sufficient value from Authorship snippets. While he did not elaborate on what he meant by “value” we might speculate that this could mean that overall, in aggregate, user behavior on a search page did not seem to be affected by the presence of author snippets. Perhaps over time users had become used to seeing them and they lost their novelty.

It is interesting to note that (as of the time of this posting) author photos continue to appear for Google+ content from people a searcher has in his or her Google network (Google+ circles or Gmail contacts) when the searcher is logged in to her or his Google+ account (personalized search).

When asked, Mueller said he had no knowledge of any plans to stop showing those types of results. However, some users have reported to Mark that they are no longer seeing them. We will watch this development and update here if it looks like Google is indeed removing author photos from personalized results as well.

If Google does continue to show author photos in some personalized results, it would seem to indicate that Google data is showing that when content is from someone with whom the searcher has some personal association, a rich snippet actually does provide value to that searcher. More about this in our final section below.

Study of Rel=Author Implementations
As luck would have it, Stone Temple Consulting was in the process of wrapping up a study on rel=author markup usage. A look at the data illustrates part of the problem that Google faces with an initiative like this one. The bottom line of what we found? Adoption was weak, and accurate implementation among those that attempted to set up rel=author was also bad. If that was not enough, the adoption by authors was also bad. So let’s look at the numbers!

Authorship Adoption

We sampled 500 authors across 150 different major media web sites. Here is a summary of what we saw for their implementation of authorship tagging in their Google+ profiles:

A whopping 70% of authors made no attempt to connect their authorship with the content they were publishing on major web sites. Of course, this has much to do with how Google attempts to promote these types of initiatives. In short, they don’t. They rely on the organic spread of information throughout the Interweb ecosystem, which is uneven at best.

Publisher Adoption

50 of the 150 sites did not have any author pages at all, and more than 3/4 of these provided no more than the author’s name for attribution. For the remaining batch, some of them would allow authors to include links with their attribution at the bottom of the article, but the great majority of these authors did not take advantage of the opportunity.

For today’s post, we also took 20 of the sites that had author pages, and analyzed in detail their success in implementing authorship:

13 of the 20 sites attempted to implement authorship markup (65%)
10 of these 13 attempts had errors (77%)
12 of the 13 attempts received rich snippets in the Google SERPs (92%)
The implementation style for authorship was all over the map. We found malformed tags, authorship implemented on site, but no link the the author’s G+ profile, conflicting tags reporting multiple people as the author for a given article, and one situation where an article had 2 named authors, but only the 2nd named author linked to their G+ profile, and Google gave the 2nd author credit for that article.

Seven of the 20 sites did not attempt to implement authorship markup (35%)
Two of these seven received rich snippets in the Google SERPs (28%)
In the two cases where Google provided the rich snippets even though there was no markup, the authors did link to the site from the Contributor To section of their G+ profile.

Summarizing the Study

In short, proper adoption of rel=author markup was extremely low. Google clearly went to extreme efforts to try and make the connection between author and publisher, even in the face of many challenges. From a broader perspective, this tells us quite a bit about the difficulties of obtaining data from publishers. It’s hard, and the quality of the information you will get is quite low.

Summary

Google has stated many times over the past three years its interest in understanding author authority. It’s hard to forget executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s powerful statements on the topic:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.
Eric Schmidt in The New Digital Age

However, this has proved to be a very tough problem to solve. The desire to get at this data is there, but the current approach simply did not work. As we noted above, this is one of the two big reasons why this initiative is being abandoned.

The other problem identified by John Mueller is equally important. The approach of including some form of rich snippet, be it a photo, or a simple byline, was not providing value to end users in the SERPs. Google is always relentlessly testing search quality, and there are no sacred cows. If Google is not seeing end users valuing something they try, out, it will go.

We also can’t ignore the impact of the processing power used for this effort. We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. It doesn’t. If it did have such power, it would use optical character recognition to read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech to text technology to transcribe every video it encounters online, and it would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth. But it doesn’t.

What this tells us is that Google has to make conscious decisions on how it spends its processing power — it must be budgeted wisely. As of this moment, the Authorship initiative as we have known it has not been deemed worthy of the budget it was consuming.

The rise of mobile may have played a role in this outcome as well. When John Mueller says staffers don’t see a significant difference in click behavior in the SERPs as a result of Authorship rich snippets, remember that about half of Google’s traffic comes from mobile devices now. Chewing up valuable screen real estate for this type of markup on a mobile device may simply be a bad idea.

So is authorship gone forever? Our guess is that probably is not. The concept is a good one. We buy into the notion that some people are smarter about certain topics than others. It’s the current attempts at figuring this out that have failed, not the concept.

As Google moves forward in its commitment to semantic search it has to develop ways to identify entities such as authors with a high degree of confidence apart from human actions such as markup. Recent announcements about Google’s Knowledge Vault project would seem to reinforce that Google is moving steadily in that direction. So this may be how it approaches detection.

If, and when, it makes use of such data, what will it look like? Don’t be surprised if the impact is too subtle to be easily noticed. We will probably not see author photos in the results ever again. Could we see some form of AuthorRank? Possibly, but it may come in a highly personalized form or get blended in with many other factors that make it detection virtually impossible.

So goodbye for now, Authorship. You were a grand and glorious experiment, and we will miss you, but we look forward to something even better for Authorship in the future.

Note– This article originally posted on Search Engine Land.

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The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible.

Panda 4.0, which Google and Matt Cutts confirmed began rolling out yesterday, has definitely caused some waves in the search results. However, the fact that Panda 4.0 is also hitting at the same time as a refresh of an algorithm targeting spammy queries like payday loans makes it a little bit more difficult for webmasters to sort through the damage.

With the payday loans refresh impacting extremely spammy queries and Panda targeting low-quality content, some webmasters could potentially get hit with both of these or by just one or the other.

While usually people complain about losing rankings, Alan Bleiweiss from AlanBleiweiss.com showed via Twitter that Panda can also bring about some serious improvement to a site’s traffic as well.

Prior to Cutts confirming via Twitter that Panda 4.0 hit, there had been plenty of speculation about a change with either Panda or Penguin, although many found it hard to pin down exactly what the change was.

“It was interesting to see the chatter amongst SEOs over the last few days,” says Marie Haynes of HIS Web Marketing. “We all knew that something was going on, but there was significant disagreement on exactly what Google was doing. Most of the black hats were saying that it was related to Penguin because they were noticing huge drops in their sites with the spammiest link profiles.”

This would have been the changes to the payday loans update, where the goal is to target the spammiest search queries Google sees. There was also plenty of debate on forums and Twitter about whether the shake-up we saw was Panda-related or Penguin-related. And with the payday loans update thrown in there for good measure, it was definitely confusing.

“I was really hoping that this wasn’t a Penguin refresh because the majority of the sites that I had done link cleanup on were not seeing any improvement and if Penguin refreshed and none of my clients were seeing ranking increases, then that would not be good,” Haynes says. “I was also puzzled because one site that I monitor that has been adversely affected by several Panda updates saw a vast improvement today. It does not have a bad link profile and would not have been affected by a Penguin update. “

“When I heard the announcements that Google had released two algorithms over the last couple of days – payday loans and also a big Panda update, everything made sense. And still, so many of us are waiting for that big Penguin refresh. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happens in the next couple of days,” she says.

Google has said previously that they try not to throw multiple updates at once or within a very short period of time, so it is interesting that they pushed out two completely unrelated updates – although updates that could both impact some the same sites – within a couple of days.

Releasing two back-to-back updates makes it a lot harder for webmasters to analyze the changes and what specifically was targeted in these updates, and could affect Google’s ability to evaluate how well (or not) the two updates worked. It also means webmasters might have a challenge knowing what changes need to be made in order to recover search rankings.

However, Haynes speculated that some of the Panda change might have been to reverse some of the damage done to sites that had great content yet were impacted for other on-page reasons.

“I think it’s too early to say what this new iteration of Panda is affecting, but I can tell you that in the case of the site that I saw big improvements on, no cleanup work had been done at all,” Haynes says. “It was always in ‘Panda flux.'”

She says some Panda refreshes would hit it hard and then occasionally the site would show a slight increase with a refresh.

“This is by far the biggest increase, though,” Haynes says. “It really is a good-quality site and I believe that what caused it to be affected by Panda in the first place was a site layout that caused crawlers to get confused. Underneath that confusing layout is a site full of really good content. It may be that Google found ways to see past structural issues and recognize the good content as the structural problems would not affect users, just crawlers. But really, that’s a guess.”

Panda first blazed onto the scene in February 2011, and was believed to be Google’s response to criticism of how well content farms were ranking. Google later announced that they internally called it the big Panda update, after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who created it.

While there have been many smaller Panda updates and a couple larger ones, each rolled out monthly over a period of 10 days, Google had announced several months ago that Panda would be integrated into the algorithm updates and that the “softer” Panda would be less noticeable. However, that clearly isn’t the case with Panda 4.0, which has had a widespread impact, both positively and negatively.

Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also studied the changes they saw from the latest Panda update, and noticed that eBay got hit particularly hard.

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the “Big 10” (our metric of the ten domains with the most “real estate” in the top 10).

In fact, Meyers notes that eBay’s drop was so significant that it dropped from 1 percent of their queries to 0.28 percent. It won’t be surprising to hear of more sites who have seen a drop due to Panda 4.0 – especially sites that have been notorious for having low quality content.

We will definitely see more come out in the next few days as webmasters and SEO professionals have a chance to evaluate the changes and what might have caused sites (either their own or competitors) to either rise or fall in Google’s search results. And since we’re still awaiting a Google Penguin update (Penguin 2.0 launched a year ago this week), I wouldn’t be surprised if we see one of those updates coming soon, especially in light of Google releasing both the payday loans and Panda 4.0 so close together.

Note – This post originally posted on Search Engine Watch.

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Obviously there are other fundamental concerns (e.g., indexation, crawlability, duplicate content, site architecture), but link acquisition needs to be an active consideration.

Links are still the strongest signal we can give to Google about the importance of our content and site. So, if you’re working to increase search visibility, links need to be a primary consideration.

The water is muddy right now though with Google’s war on spam links, and from what I’ve observed attending recent conferences I think a few messages need to be addressed within SEO:

• Links are still the core of Google’s search algorithm.
• Link building and content marketing are fundamentally different.
• Content marketing is difficult to do well. SEO pros often don’t have the required skill set for high-level content creation.
• Link building can supercharge your content marketing efforts.
• You can still build links even if you don’t have great content.

1. Links are Still the Core of Google’s Search Algorithm

Links are still immensely powerful.

This is confirmed by:

1. Moz’s 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors.

2. Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search.

But we’re all aware of Google’s recent crackdown on link building activities. We’re aware that MyBlogGuest didn’t really deserve the penalty, and that more realistically it was a PR move.

But because we represent real, legitimate companies who are looking to grow their online visibility long term, we need to make sure our strategies are safe, effective, and just as long term. This has led SEO professionals to search for new ways to ensure safe and powerful links are created.

Because links are still the core of Google’s search algorithm, and we all know it.

This has led many people who were previously doing SEO toward content marketing, with their primary concern being links.

2. Link Building and Content Marketing are Fundamentally Different

Let’s be honest: there are many right now who think that content marketing is the new link building, and have labeled it “link acquisition” or “link earning.”

But content marketing is not link building. Nor is it even SEO – there’s no guarantee that your content will be visible in search, nor is creating more content guaranteed to make your site more visible in search. And you’re certainly not going to get the links if you don’t do the work.

Content marketing is wholly different than link building or SEO. SEO is about increasing search visibility. Content marketing is about creating valuable content worth sharing.

You shouldn’t be approaching content marketing from a link building/SEO perspective – it’ll lead to terrible content, I guarantee it.

How often do we complain about yet another garbage blog post, infographic, roundup, whatever the current content flavor is? Content fatigue (and content shock) is a very real problem. We certainly see it more than most.

Your primary concern when building content should be providing value, furthering your brand message/values, and engaging with your target audience.

Sounds easy, but it’s really, really difficult.

3. Content Marketing is Difficult to do Well

SEO pros often don’t have the required skillset for high-level content creation.

Content creation potentially requires:

• Industry experts
• Writers
• Editors
• Designers
• Technical (coders, web dev, app dev, etc.)

Content marketing requires the support of a host of people with diverse skills, including creative, technical, industry experts, graphic, etc. Without significant investment to ensure the content remains unique, valuable, and engaging, you’re simply wasting your time, money, and resources.

Thinking a single person can do all this work is daft. Thinking that those skilled at SEO naturally have all these skills is just as bad. Will some be able to make the transition? Sure. Will all? Definitely not, nor should they.

SEO pros don’t have to become content marketers.

4. Link Building Can Supercharge Your Content Marketing Efforts

Every content marketing campaign should involve SEO.

Creating amazing content isn’t enough – you still need to market it. SEO can help increase the visibility of content, especially if your team has a strong link building background.

SEO pros have the skill set to:

• Find similar content and:

• Find people and websites who have shared, mentioned, or linked previously.

• Find people and websites who would be interested in sharing, mentioning, or linking.

• Outreach persuasively to generate links, shares, and mentions.

• Help determine future content ideas that have a high chance of success.

• Ensure best practices for search are used on-page and on-site, within the content.

• Leverage previous relationships and industry understanding (assuming they’ve worked in the niche before).

• Advise paid options as well – most SEO folks are capable when it comes to both social media and PPC.

If you’re going to invest in content, you need to invest in visibility. Having an if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude it today’s content era is ridiculous, considering the amount of content produced and the very real content fatigue happening online.

Without intelligent marketing you’re leaving valuable opportunities on the table. A good SEO can supercharge great content, promote decent content, and even salvage mediocre content.

5. You Can Still Build Links Even if You Don’t Have Great Content

Content marketing and link building are definitely compatible, and can create a marketing flywheel.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to be involved in content marketing to build links.

For many sites content marketing simply doesn’t make sense – either due to their size, target audience, culture, resources, or products. There is no one-size-fits-all online marketing solution. But there’s other ways to build good links that make sense.

Without content, you can build links using:

• Fresh Mentions
• Local links
• HARO
• Broken link building
• Relevant niche or local directories
• Contests
• Reviews
• Community engagement

Focus on the human value – build links that you would want even if Google didn’t exist. Build links that are for the betterment of mankind, and the web. Build links that you wouldn’t hesitate to show a friend, colleague, or even competitor.

Real link building has always been a creative endeavor, requiring added value. And content certainly isn’t the only way to add value to the web.

Note: This article original posted on Search Engine Watch.

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