Google, Bing, SEO/SEM News

Google and Bing have been making updates lately, as they always do, that warrant some mention. Here's a quick recap of recent developments. For more detail, please read the lengthier Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM.

Content Farms and Site Scrapers

If you've spent any time searching through Google you may notice that sometimes you get multiple results on your search phrase that look the same in the results, but when visiting the site you find they are just ad-laden monstrosities with no value. Sometimes one of these spam sites would appear higher in the Google search results than the site from which the content was stolen.

Google has now taken steps to not only push those sites back down to the bowels where they belong, but also to penalize those sites. These changes started in late January and went through some more revisions at the end of last month.

As a user of QuantumCMS you have access to both an RSS import and export feature. Unless you are taking content in whole from other sites using the RSS import, then this probably will not affect you. It does mean sites stealing your content and parading it as their own to increase their ad revenues will now be penalized. A site stealing your content is probably not using your RSS feed, but instead may be taking the entire site or high traffic pages regardless of whether you offer RSS or not.

Page TItles

Perhaps you have spent a great deal of time carefully crafting your page titles (specifically the text that appears in the title, which displays in your browser title bar and which is populated partly from the page Title field.). Perhaps you have noticed that in Google the title you entered is not what appears on the search results page. This isn't a bug, doesn't mean your site was indexed improperly, and doesn't necessarily mean your page title had some other affect on your page rank. This is done intentionally by Google.

This does imply, however, that your titles are unwieldy. Google does this when titles are too short, when they used repeatedly throughout a site, or when they are stuffed with keywords. If you find that your title is being cut off (implying it's too long) then you may want to limit your title to 66 characters, or at least put the most important information in those first 66 characters.

Because QuantumCMS allows you to enter not just long page titles (using the Title field), but also a pretty lengthy Title Prefix and Title Suffix that are applied throughout the site, you may want to pare down the longer prefixes and suffixes to help avoid this clipping. Letting your pages take up most of the title space instead of the site-wide title text means more meaningful search results for Google users. Alternatively, you can put all your keywords in the Title Suffix to at least keep your page-specific Title from being cut off.

Social Media

It wasn't that long ago that Google and Bing said that links in social media (think Facebook and Twitter) will affect a site's position in search results (PageRank for Google). Some people may even be tempted to run out and post links to every social media outlet they can find, hoping that the more inbound links, the better for their site. Thankfully it's not that simple.

Both Google and Bing look at the social standing of a user when calculating the value of an inbound link. This can include number of followers (fans/friends on Facebook), number followed, what other content is posted, how much a user gets retweeted or mentioned and a few other factors. In short, those Twitter accounts that come and go in a matter of hours that tweet a thousand links into the ether aren't doing any good. A good social media strategy that is garnering success, however, should also give a boost to the sites it links.

If your organization is using Twitter and you want to publish/promote your Twitter feed to your site, you don't need to use one of the pre-packaged widgets that barely fits into your layout. Instead you can use the built-in RSS import feature to display your Twitter feed on your site, allowing it to match the design of your site. The same goes for other social media outlets, with the notable exception being Facebook. However, Facebook makes a widget that does integrate without trying to look like the rest of your site — the advantage being that many users recognize this and know just how to use it as a result.

References

To remind you, you can read about these items in more detail at Recent(ish) News on Google, Bing, SEO/SEM. If you have any questions in the meantime, please don't be shy about calling us.