A recent study, cited in a Fox News clip,was conducted to evaluate the role of SEO in how people come to make political decisions. So, if someone were to search for something online about a political topic or candidate, whatever ranked the highest was more likely to influence that person, whether in their outlook or in how they voted. In fact, the study showed that search results and rankings affected how people voted by up to 15%!

This is definitely a large enough percentage to affect the outcomes of elections.

Basically, this indicates that SEO may be more important than anyone has ever thought before. Political organizations and candidates invest in search engine optimization just like regular companies do in an effort to get their websites to rank highly in the search engines.

Yes, it is possible to purchase ads that appear at the top of the page or at the right of the search results, and these will get you plenty of clicks. However, it is the organic ranking that is the real prized treasure here in terms of influencing politics in any meaningful sort of way.

Now, all of that being said, this doesn’t mean that Google goes in and manipulates the search results to fit with the owner’s ideologies or anything like that. However, it does raise a serious question: could they if they wanted to?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Google and the other search engines, could directly influence elections by manipulating search results. They could alter the algorithm or filter out sites that represent causes the company disagrees with in an effort to promote their core ideologies or beliefs. The worst part is the public would have no way of knowing whether or not Google was doing this until it was too late. They’d just see a list of search results and that’s that.

The results of this study are definitely troubling but for the moment, don’t let it concern you too greatly. All indictors show at this point that if your site is optimized well, it will rank well. Until there is evidence that this is not the case, keep on improving your site and optimization efforts.

His short answer is, yes. Yes, Google will be looking at how rel=author is used and will likely implement modifications as deemed necessary. He points out that it’s actually a great move forward in the fight against webspam. As content will have a defined author, it’ll be much harder to perform blackhat SEO or other shady, spammy techniques. Anonymity in this regard won’t carry as much clout, making spammy tactics obsolete. By establishing authorship, it’ll be much easier for people to keep track of what notable voices have to say across the web.

The second question we’re going to talk about this week has to do with what the SEO industry just doesn’t understand and what areas they focus on too much. Cutts answers this by explaining that many people don’t understand the difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh.

He also notes that some people seem to think that Google Panda was only launched to make it so Google made more money, when in fact, it results in a short-term revenue decrease. He says that they focus on keeping users for the long-term, even if that results in a loss of money in the short-term.

They want to establish long-term users. They want people to come back time and time again to their search engine and other products. This is why, Cutts says, they don’t focus on short-term gains. They want to keep people satisfied for many years to come, which means investing in search that simplifies the user’s experience. They are not out to make people buy more ads.

He thinks that one area people focus on too much is link building. Cutts says that SEO teams should focus on building good content and marketing that content well, rather than just trying to appease the search engines all the time. At the end of the day, you should be creating content for real people. That is his biggest suggestion.

Advertorials are basically like native advertising but look much more like natural content or editorials. The problem here is that many times when people come across a piece of advertorial content, they think it’s editorial and that the writer isn’t getting paid for that content. A lot of the time advertorials pass PageRank, which is problematic when they aren’t disclosed as such. If it’s found out you’re doing this, you could see some SEO penalties heading your way.

In order to avoid penalties, you need to disclose the content’s advertorial nature to Google. You can do this through optimization tactics like the rel=”nofollow” tag, which tells Google not to pass PageRank for it.

The second question Cutts answered had to do with how Google thinks of search quality when relying on subjective signals. He explains that the assumption here is faulty: that Google can’t determine the context of the search query when it comes to SERPs. They can often determine the context of a query. The human quality testers can infer context by looking at the domain and the query. Even if they aren’t familiar with the subject matter, it is easy to see how the two are related.

He does caution that search engines can’t be completely objective because they are made by humans and they all have their own philosophy and algorithms. Some might show more diverse results while others might favor particular sites over others. It’s just how it works and total objectivity isn’t possible in this regard. Every search engine will have different ideas of what the best search results are and there is no exact science determining what “best” even means in terms of what sites should rank higher than others.

At the end of today, as SEO and website optimization have some inherent subjective qualities. But that shouldn’t be viewed as a negative thing. If anything, it allows good content and good websites to naturally rise to the top. So the next time you’re feeling like the SERPs are getting you down, remember that a human touch graces all algorithms.

That’s all for now. Be sure to stay tuned for the next installment of Q and A’s with Matt Cutts.

The first question we’re going to cover has to do with the most common mistakes people make regarding optimization and what web masters can be doing better. He first points out that not having a crawlable website is offense number one. Another common mistake is failing to use the right wording or keywords. He suggests thinking about what the user will type into Google and use those phrases in your site optimization tactics. Make business information as accessible as possible like business hours and things like that.

The next question has to do with the HTTP Vary: User-Agent header and whether or not Google still recommends using it. Normally, when you visit a website, it is cached so you don’t have to put a load on the server every time you visit it. However, if you’re visiting from different devices (like a desktop and a smartphone), it’s important that the server sends you the appropriate version of the site. Inserting an HTTP Vary: User-Agent header in your site’s header will tell the server which version of the site to load depending on what device you access it from. Google still suggests using this even though Akamai no longer supports it.

The third and final SEO question we’re going to talk about today has to do with negative SEO. Cutts explains that whenever they release a new algorithm, they try to thoroughly think about how people could possibly take advantage of the system and potentially frame another site. One of the biggest ways people can do this is to link to a competitor’s site in a malicious way in an attempt to drop their rankings.

Cutts suggests using the disavow links tool to combat this. To use it, all you have to do is upload a text file to your site listing out all the backlinks you want Google to ignore. Easy! You can pick and choose which links you want ignored or even state that you want Google to ignore all links from a particular domain.

That does it for this week. Good luck with your SEO efforts and be sure to come back again soon for more answers to your most pressing optimization questions.

The key thing he suggests for people to do is build a great website. Have good content and share it with the people you know. However, in terms of what Google is doing, he cautions that plans could change, but at the moment, they’ve just finished up the next generation of Penguin. It’s called Penguin 2.0 and goes a bit more in depth with catching poor quality content. According to Cutts, the update will affect 2.3% of regular U.S. search queries on Google. He notes that it’s the second update to the algorithm they’ve launched and he encourages anyone who spots a spam site under this new algorithm to report it to Google. They are always looking to improve!

Another thing they’re doing is looking at advertorials and other things that violate their quality guidelines. Basically, if you pay for reviews on a site, it shouldn’t flow PageRank. They’re also looking at a new way to conduct link analysis. It’s in the earliest stages of development right now, but Cutts feels it’s looking promising.

They’re also looking for new ways to communicate with webmasters about hacked sites and sites that serve up malware. This way, webmasters will have a place they can go to find out information they need to fix their sites if they’ve been hacked. Obviously, repairing damage caused to your site due to hacking is vital for restoring all of your hard SEO related work.

Another thing Google is working on identifying are authority sites. So even if it’s not optimized in the best possible way, they can identify if the site is a leading authority in its field. The algorithms are being adjusted to reflect this.

Another change the Google team is working on is making it so once you come across a cluster of results from the same domain in the search results, the less likely it would be for you to come across any more results from that domain. This can help to broaden what pages rank in Google for certain keywords. This may be something you need to pay attention to call when optimizing for SEO.

One final thing they’re thinking about doing is giving webmasters more information so they can diagnose their own sites. This includes more example URLs. Google seems like they’re going to be up to quite a lot in the next few months, so webmasters and search engine optimizers should pay attention. And with Penguin 2.0 finishing its roll out on May 22, everyone will need to keep their eyes open to see what exactly this new webspam algorithm update will hold in store for SEO professionals and website owners.

Affordable SEO Now Offers Negative SEO Remediation Services

May 20, 2013 — Clearwater, FL — Optimizing websites is big business; so big that some people are using unscrupulous tactics to rig the system. They’re implementing negative SEO to push down competitor’s sites in the rankings, subsequently boosting their own. Thanks to Affordable SEO, however, website owners now have a way to fight back against this injustice. It’s called negative SEO remediation.

These services both identify and repair damage caused by negative SEO tactics. Business owners in the Clearwater, Florida area no longer need to fear what their competitors may be doing behind their backs.

Negative SEO remediation service offerings include confirming whether or not people are trying to negatively impact search engine rankings of a site and implementing fixes that target site scraping, poor backlinking schemes, slow site load times, bad reviews, and more. There’s no reason to sit idly by while others attempt to tear down companies using these unethical means.

Affordable SEO gives business owners a way to fight back.

About Affordable SEO

Based in Clearwater, FL, Affordable SEO offers a wide range of SEO services to bolster the reputations of online businesses. Both onsite and offsite optimization services are available, the newest of which is negative SEO remediation.

It’s obvious now that the negative SEO has arrived and is not going anywhere for a while. So you as a website owner have a couple of choices, (a) get used to it and wait till Google comes up with the fix (b) do something about it.

I don’t think the solution (a) is acceptable for anybody as the effect of negative SEO is to downgrade the reputation of your website which subsequently leads to the downgrade of the ranking. Even if your website seems to be doing fine in terms of the ranking eventually you will start seeing results of the negative SEO as traffic slow down and ranking degradation. Then it will take much more effort to address the effect of it. My recommendation is don’t put it on hold and instead proactively remediate the negative SEO.

Here is what you can do to proactively monitor the negative SEO with Google’s rudimentary tools. Well … we have not had these tools a year ago and despite my extensive unhappiness with Google’s effort on improving the remediation tools, I am glad there is a set of tools which may help you to keep the negative SEO at bay.

First we need to find what links have been created to our website. This can be done within Google Webmaster Tools utilizing the Download latest links feature (see picture below).

After downloading the file in the CSV or Google docs format you should be able to review links Google discovered for your side. My recommendation is to place it into the Google docs format and then work with the Google spreadsheet file to verify all links. Yes, you heard me correctly, you will need to be prepared to review all links Google discovered for your site going back perhaps many years.

I don’t think I will need to explain much on the topic of how to recognize the negative SEO link.   However a few distinguished elements might be present on the negative SEO page which obviously links to your website pages:

- usually the negative SEO links are coming off the non US domains
- the negative SEO links page usually exist in forums, free blog sites or compromised websites
- the negative SEO page most of the time has snippets of the content with multiple outbound links not related  to your website theme
- usually the domains used to host negative SEO links have no PageRank.

Well, you have enough information to review your website for negative SEO links. Good luck in researching it. Please keep on coming back for more information on the Negative SEO Remediation process. Next time I am planning to discuss what to do next after you discovered the negative SEO links.

There are a couple of different types of mobile sites you can build that employ mobile SEO. First up is responsive web design. These sites use the same HTML on all versions of the site but different CSS is loaded depending on what device you view the site on. If you decide to build a site this way, you’ll need to use an @media only screen that has a max-width value of 640px. This will ensure the optimum presentation of your content on a smartphone-sized device.

Now, you could also offer different HTML from the same URL. This is called dynamic serving and is a server side specification that offers up different HTML and CSS depending what device you use to request information from a URL. Same URL, different content, pretty much.

Another thing you can do for mobile SEO is to use the Vary HTTP header. This tells the server to consider the device being used before serving up a page from the cache. It can also tell Googlebot about the mobile version of your site.

Your last option is to use different URLs for your regular site content and your mobile content. So, if someone visits your site from a desktop, they’ll get the regular version of your site but if someone visits from a mobile device, they’ll get the mobile URL, which is usually something along the lines of m.yoursite.com.

All of these methods are suitable for developing a good mobile SEO strategy, however, the first two are preferable because they are the easiest for Googlebot to crawl and it’s more likely for your mobile site to be cached faster these ways.

Truly, developing a site for mobile devices isn’t all that different from developing one for your standard desktop, however, there are some things to keep in mind in order to make your mobile site easy to find by the search engines. As you know, SEO is vital for improving site visibility. So it stands to reason that taking your mobile site into account will further boost your rankings.

Okey let’s start. First thing first. What is the Negative SEO?

The term “Negative SEO” is pretty much self explanatory. However I will try to explain it in layman terms.

Negative SEO is a black hat SEO technique that leads to downgrading a website ranking (SERP) for lead keywords and may also lead to the website ban or to even placing a website into the “sand box“.

If your website is affected by Negative SEO (and we will talk later about how to recognize that) then most likely it’s done by your competition.

It does not take too much time nor knowledge in white hat SEO to apply Negative SEO to a website you don’t appreciate. There is a number of companies with roots most likely outside of the US which offer Negative SEO services.

To be continued …

First up is a question about using the same anchor text for several internal links on a site. The user was concerned that by doing this, he’d cause his site to be penalized. Cutts explains that for the vast majority of websites, internal links with the same anchor text won’t cause harm to your rank. While there are exceptions to this rule, it’s generally not something you’re going to have to worry about.

The second SEO question has to do with launching a site with hundreds of thousands of pages at once. The user wanted to know if doing this would penalize the site or make it difficult for Google to crawl. Cutts explained that while there’s nothing wrong about doing this, it may require the webspam team to take a look at it before it can rank. Likewise, Cutts recommends rolling out the content over time to make it a bit easier on everyone. A few thousand pages at a time, perhaps.

The third and final SEO question we’re going to talk about this time is what users can include in a proper reconsideration request. Cutts answered by stating that users will first need to provide evidence that they’ve actually stopped the behavior that resulted in a lower rank. Paid links will need to be taken down. Spammy content will need to be cleaned up. You get the picture. Users also need to give the Google team the impression that they won’t immediately return to this sort of behavior once the site is restored.

Things you can include in your reconsideration request to convince Google that you’ve changed your ways include a list of the sites you’ve contacted to have paid links taken down and talk about who made these bad decisions (in-house or contractor) and discuss how you’re preventing this from ever happening again. Basically, do everything you can to make your request be as convincing as possible.

That about covers it for this instalment of questions and answers from Google engineer, Matt Cutts. We hope it was helpful to you and be sure to check back soon for even more questions and answers about every SEO topic under the sun.