Category Archives: Google+

  • 20th March 2013
  • 0

Do You Need a Google+ Profile?

Category : Google+

Google+ has been around for awhile now and I have written about it on a number occasions. It was thought to be a challenger to Facebook at one time and this may be the case in the future, but for the moment it seems to be going down a more commercial route, most notably by allowing people to G+ (i.e. recommend) website search listings and adverts on Google.

Google is now taking this a step further to ‘encourage’ people to go down the Google+ route by automatically creating a Google+ profile for anyone with a Google account – Adwords, Analytics, Blogger, etc. This reason alone should have you signing up to Google+ to create your own profile rather than have one created for you, but the G+ element looks like going further.

Google is working towards online content having an author, rather than being anonymously created. This isn’t a bad thing as it should improve the quality of website blogs and websites. How would this be authored? Through your Google+ profile of course!

So your Google+ profile should eventually tie into your web site(s) and any other online content using authorship tags.

Indications are that this will also become a ranking factor on Google searches. So if you run a business, this means that you, and your key staff need to create Google+ profiles so that when blogs and other content are published they have authorship. The implication being that anonymous authorship will be downgraded in the future.

Obviously this won’t happen overnight, but it is going to come, so best to be prepared by claiming you Google + profile now.

  • 5th October 2012
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Exact Match Domains and Google Search

Category : Google+ , seach engine rankings

At the end of September Google’s head honcho, Matt Cutts, revealed that Google was rolling out a new algorithm update targeted to reduce low-quality, exact match domains in search results.

In case you’re wondering, an exact match domain is where the words in the domain match the main subject of the website, so accountants.com, yachtercharters.com, playpoker.com, etc, are possible candidates. So if your site has suddenly dropped down the page on keyword searches on Google, this may be the cause.

However the saving phrase in the Tweet is ‘low-quality’. If your site has a good quality ranking and links it will hopefully be unaffected. It might even improve it’s position.

If we can get into the Google brain we might find that one of the purposes of this update is to weed out micro-sites attached to a main website, just to target a particular keyword.

For example if you had the site organicfoods.com but were not getting ranked for ‘organic vegetables’ searches you may have been tempted to create the micro-site – organic-vegetables.com – pointing information to the main site. This may be the type of ‘low quality’ link Google are trying to mark down. But this is, of course, just me guessing.

If you are effected by this your site has fallen down the search rankings it’s a case of back to the basics through better quality incoming links, improving content quality and quantity, improving social media visibility, etc, etc . . .

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  • 2nd April 2012
  • 0

Google+

Category : Google+

If you’ve been watching the TV over the past week you may have noticed an advert for Google+ the new(ish) social site from Google. This could be in response to a recent report by comScore, which estimated that the average PC user spends just 3 minutes a month using Google+ .

Compare this to the minutes per month for some of the popular networking sites:

  • Facebook: 405 minutes
  • Twitter: 21 minutes
  • LinkedIn: 17 minutes
  • Google+: 3 minutes

For Google to be at the bottom of any list is something of a new experience for the company and has led to the Wall Street Journal to call Google+ a “virtual ghost town”.

Google has responded by saying that it’s difficult to accurately estimate this type of data and that their own internal results are far more optimistic. But there is no doubt they are pushing hard with Google+ on the advertising front with a long, detailed and probably very expensive advert.

Will it work? The industry seems undecided and it’s going to take a lot to move people away from Facebook, although Google+ does offer a different way of organising your social network that has some appeal.

My advice is, if you don’t have a Google+ account you should claim one and be ready – just in case . . .

  • 4th August 2011
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Google+ After the Launch Buzz

Category : Google+ , social media

In June, amid much publicity and fanfare, Google launched Google+ as the new networking/social media tool. So how is it doing so far?

Although opinions are mixed it seems that most agree that there was a very strong initial takeup but traffic has now leveled off a little.

So in this brief posting I thought I’d include this chart created by VentureBeat which logs traffic to the various social sites and puts the current situation into perspective.


Although Google+ is the quickest website to reach 20 million users worlwide, and early take-up was very strong, at the moment Google+ is still a small player in the social media world, especially when compared to Facebook.

As the launch buzz dies down and initial traffic slows Google is entering the next phase which will probably decide how successful Google+ will be.

  • 7th March 2011
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Google’s Panda Update

Category : ethical seo , Google+ , seach engine rankings , SEO

Google has made another change to it’s algorithm and the way it ranks wesites on Google searches.

Officially known as the Google Panda update (who thinks up these names?*) it has seen nurmerous established sites disappearing from Google’s rankings.

Asssessing who has been effected is never straightforward but Google seems to be targeting sites using duplicate content, non-ethical SEO practices, excessive advertising or what Google terms ‘low trust sites’. There is also evidence that Google is using outside human raters, at least in part, as a form of quality assurance on the Panda update. As the official blog states:

“Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem.”

So hopefully, this means that well designed sites with original content won’t be effected and will continue to rise to the top of the search rankings.

So far the Panda update has been launched in the USA but will be rolled out worldwide over the coming weeks/months.

If you think your site has been effected by the ‘Panda’ update you can contact me at; barney@catnet.co.uk.

See the Official Google Blog posting on the Panda update here – googleblog.blogspot.com

* Apparently it’s named after a Google engineer . . .

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