Search Engine Optimisation Services

In July, Google released a statement saying that it was updating the requirements needed for Product Feeds in its Merchant Centre.

All feeds had to comply with these new specifications for the 22nd September or face having your account suspended.

Google will give you 7 days warning period to get your feed up to date. If you do not heed this warning, your account will be suspended for 7 days. If, after the 7 day suspension, you still refuse to comply with the new requirements, your account will be suspended for at least 28 days.

Although Google are claiming they will be tough on people who do not comply with the new requirements, they have been trying to help people update their feed information. A tool that allows you to upload your product feed to the Merchant Centre in a sort of dummy run, allowing you to check and fix any errors that occur. You can also use this tool as many times as needed. If you need any more help, you can check out the official Google Merchant blog or check out the tutorial videos on YouTube.

As we patiently await Social Media Week Glasgow we thought it would be worth taking a quick look at Google's new social network and the impact it might have on SEO. It's still very fresh, so the work is still ongoing to see what the impact could potentially be however some early signals have already emerged.

The +1 button has a substantial impact if you are signed into your Google account when searching. Items you have +1'd previously will show up in prominent positions if you search for related terms, while content which those in your circles have +1'd will receive a similar boost.

Social feedback seems to be Google's latest idea to determine the most appropriate result for specific searches, and the +1 button will give them vital feedback to help find quality content. The challenge for those offering search engine optimisation services is encouraging  people to share the content they are trying to promote, a task that will be far easier in some areas than others.

It is widely expected that Google will be applying more modifications to it’s search algorithm in the near future. This will see Google roll out it’s Panda 2.2 update.

Google’s Matt Cutts revealed at the SMX Advance conference in Seattle that the next update has been approved and will be released some time soon.

The latest Panda update is reported to trace websites that republish content to get higher page ranks and superior positioning in search rankings and punish them. It is hoped that the update will also fix the false positives (sites that were wrongly penalised by the 1st Panda update).

Cutts did confirm that the updated algorithm will be on the look out for pages that may use “hidden text”. If any of these pages are spotted, they could be penalised on search rankings.

It will be a nervy few weeks for website owners and SEOers at our SEO Scotland office as the Panda update rolls out, waiting to see what effect the new algorithm update on their sites.

Following the much publicised recent changes in the Google search algorithm (known as the 'Panda' update) there has been a lot of discussion as to just what the biggest influences on the SERPs currently are. Recent research by SEOMOZ suggests that social signals, such as Facebook shares and likes, retweets on Twitter etc have a much bigger impact on ranking results than they did previously.

A similar study in June 2010 showed that .com domains with exact match addresses and the number of linking domains had the biggest impact on the results. Now, as of late March 2011, the Facebook 'share' appears to have the biggest impact on the rankings, outranking even Twitter in the impact it has on the results. The study has the following takeaways:

1 - Social Signals Appear To Correlate Well With Strong Rankings
Pages which earn a large number of tweets and shares correlate well with earning links, and send direct traffic on their own.

2 - The Testing Of Facebook Shares Is an Urgent Matter
The impact of a viral Tweet has been well established, it is imperative to test this with Facebook link shares.

3 - New Strategies Are Required To Achieve Facebook Shares
Shares are not easy to come by, and some brainstorming is required to find new ways of getting people to share your link

4 - Shares Appear More Valuable Than Likes
A like on a link will appear on a user’s wall, whereas a share is much more likely to be in the 'Top News' landing page of a user’s friends and family. This should, in theory, allow more people to view and then share your link.

5 - Twitter Might Not Be As Powerful As Previously Thought
The data showed that the presence of tweets in the rankings was, compared to Facebook, a lot less than anticipated. This requires further analysis and testing.

The full report can be found here, this article was by EQTR SEO, Glasgow.

All the talk over the past few weeks in our SEO Glasgow HQ has been about the recent 'Panda' algorithm update which intended to remove low value or spam sites from the higher end of the organic search results. However one thing which has become apparent is that Google is now incorporating user feedback and social signals much more prominently in its algorithm, and this brings with it another area for SEO teams to consider. This won't come as a shock to those who have been monitoring the recent statements from the company, and the impending introduction of the '+1' button and the option for users to remove sites from their results will help give Google feedback on what sites users are finding value in.

The exact amount of influence these factors will have remains to be seen, though I have no doubt there are countless SEO'ers running their own tests at the moment to see which of these changes is most prominent and we will have a clearer picture in the not too distant future. It will also remain to be seen just how quickly the less ethical side of the SEO world find a way to manipulate these features for their on gain. It's already an interesting time, and the next few months should prove fascinating as we start to see the outcome of the research being done.