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If you’ve always wondered how Google’s magical search engine works and how it decides which results to show first for a certain search query, then you’re in luck. Google has recently released a fantastic resource to help answer all your questions and show you what’s happening behind the scenes.

The new section of the site is called “How Search Works” and it’s basically an in-depth interactive infographic that takes you through Google’s search process, from Crawling & Indexing to Algorithms and Fighting Spam to only show the most relevant results.

While the topic of how search works has been discussed and over-analysed for years by SEO consultants all over the world, Google’s main purpose for publishing this new section is to help site owners figure out what Google values in terms of content, why Google has penalised certain sites and what publishers need to do to make it all better.

So let’s start at the beginning…

Part 1: Crawling & Indexing

This first part focuses on how Google crawls or finds pages on the Internet and then indexes them so they can be searchable and show up in search results. Take your time exploring this section as there’s a lot of interesting information. Just hover your mouse over the areas you’re interested in and click to find out more.

Part 2: Algorithms

This second part explains how Google returns specific results when a user enters a search query and also how it decides which pages are more relevant and of more quality that they need to be ranked at the top of the results. Google’s algorithms – a headache for most of us I know – consider about 200 ranking signals before actually deciding which web pages are more relevant to the search query.

Part 3: Fighting Spam

The third and last part of this interactive infographic focuses on how Google is trying to make the web a better place by fighting spam and removing all those irrelevant and useless sites we all hate.

There are a couple of great things you might also want to check out in the Fighting Spam section, such as:

First: The “Live Spam” area where Google shows the spam removed from its search engines in the past 15-30 minutes due to violation of quality guidelines.

Second: A chart of Google’s “Manual Actions” from August 2004 to present! A “manual action” refers to when a quality rater (not a robot) manually reviews a site and penalises it for being “pure spam” (spammy content), for being hacked or for having unnatural links which are all in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. (There’s also a useful list with the types of spam that you should check out).

Third: Another chart with the ”Reconsideration Requests” that Google receives in a week from publishers whose sites have been penalised,  asking Google to manually review and reconsider their site.

This is a fantastic resource for any site or blog owners, no matter if you’re a beginner and don’t know how to get started or if you’re an expert and want to make sure you’ve got it all right. So, whatever you have planned for today, clear your schedule for an hour or two to have a closer look at this infographic.

Google also released its Search Quality Rating Guidelines

As part of the “How Search Works” area, Google also decided to publish their Search Quality Rating Guidelines publicly for the first time. This document is being used internally by Google’s quality team to rank websites manually.

Sure, previous versions of this guideline have already seen the light of day back in 2001, 2008 and 2012 so making it public now is no longer breaking news. However, it is an important document and if you want to rank well you should download  the PDF document and give it a read.

What’s surprising is the length of the document. This public version has been stripped down to just 43 pages from 161 pages. The removed sections showed specific examples of how “search quality raters” should review and rank websites on Google.  Even with these sections removed, it’s still a very useful resource and a must-read for any publisher that’s struggling to understand what Google is looking for in a quality website.

What are the Search Quality Rating Guidelines all about?

This is the URL’s rater’s handbook. Basically, this document highlights how Google’s team of search quality raters perform search queries and rank the links that show up in Google’s search engine results page. This helps them ensure the results are relevant to the search queries.

Are search quality raters human?

Yes, they are and they’re here to “represent the user”, as Google states in the guidelines. Their mission is to grade the URLs but their scores don’t influence website rankings. Instead, they help Google determine if they need to make changes to their algorithms to improve the quality of their search engine results.

With the new “How Search Works” interactive infographic and the search quality rating quidelines published, you have plenty to read today.

Have you read Google’s search quality rating guidelines?

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Facebook has struck again. Yesterday it has launched a new search functionality called Graph Search and some say it’ll be better than Google’s search engine. That would be correct if Google’s results were personalised to a user and his connections. You can sign-up here to get on the waiting list and in a couple of days you should get your chance to take it for a spin.

How does it work?

Unlike Google, Graph Search is actually a social search engine that shows results based on the users’ “Likes” and their connections, thus personalising the search results to what it believes to be the most relevant for each user. So, it performs a search based on the vast user information that Facebook has in its database.

Running a search on Facebook is a completely new experience. Not only is the old-style search box ancient history, but you’ll also be able to search for specific things like “games my friends play”, “restaurants in London my friends like”, “people who went to the University of Toronto in 1985”, “books read by people who read Truman Capote” and so on.

How cool is that? This new feature takes the search functionality to a whole new level and, to be honest, we all knew it was coming, didn’t we? Come to think of it, it’s a bit of Google, LinkedIn, Yelp, iTunes rolled into one.

When Zuckerberg was asked about users’ desire to use a social search engine, he said the product was actually created as a result of users’ requests to find out more about their friends and places nearby.

“I don’t know that anyone was asking for us to combine this all into one thing,” he said, “but I think that it is very useful because people only have to learn one interface.”

How to use Graph Search for your business

The new search functionality is great for making new connections, but it’s also an invaluable tool for businesses to get found on Facebook.

Facebook’s new search allows users to run specific searches such as “restaurants in London that my friends have been to” or “doctors that my friends recommended” or local searches like “spa near London Bridge”.

So, if you want to take advantage of the new search functionality, Facebook published some great tips for business owners focused on optimising a Page for the new Graph Search:

• Make sure the About section of your page is up to date as the name, category, vanity URL and other information you’ve included can help people find your business.
• If you have a local place Page, make sure the address is accurate as this will show up in search results when someone is looking for a specific location.
• Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.

Bing has also written a post about how the search engine’s results will be used when Facebook needs to show additional information so be sure to give it a read if you want to find out more about it.

What do you think about Facebook’s new search functionality? Have you joined the waiting list?

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You’ve spent time writing catchy meta descriptions for your web pages, but you notice Google isn’t displaying them on the results page. Why is that? More importantly, what snippets of text is Google displaying instead and is it helping your site rank higher?

These are all valid questions we have asked ourselves when we discovered that major search engine Google is being a Meta Description puppet master, so we’ll try answering them in this post.

But first: what is the Meta Description tag? It’s a summary of a page’s content that helps users understand what information they’ll find on that page. For site owners, this is the snippet of text displayed by search engines on the results page. Meta descriptions are basically short “advertisements” that are meant to determine web users to click on your pages in the search results, rather than your competitors’ pages. This means it needs to sell.

The Google Meta Description puppet master

Some believe that once they have added meta descriptions for their web pages, search engines will pull those default meta tags and display them in the search results page. However, that’s not always the case as things have become more complex.

Google evaluates your default meta description but if it finds more keyword relevance in one of your page’s content, then it won’t use your custom meta description.

Our little experiment

For example, in the Google results for “domain names”, Google is displaying the following result for 123-reg.co.uk, which is our default meta description.

Now let’s do a little experiment and see what happens if we take a phrase from the domains landing page, one that’s not included in the meta description, and search on Google for that?

So, we ran a search on Google using this phrase:

… and this is what Google returned for our 123-reg domain names page:

Hm, that’s weird. As you can see, our default meta description is nowhere to be found and it’s now been replaced by the phrase we searched for along with some other on-page text.

This is not a singular case. It happens with any other site so here’s another example for you. We’ve done the same thing with the SEOMoz site.

This is the meta description displayed by Google when searching for “seo moz”:

Now run a search on Google using an onsite non-meta description term…

… and watch the default meta description disappear!

This can also happen with page titles, no matter how well-formulated or clear they are. According to Google, titles can change in search results to show their relevance to the user’s search query. The title tag you set for a web page is static, which means that it remains the same regardless of the users’ search queries.

However, Google can change the titles depending on the search query in order to show users results that are highly relevant to what they are looking for. So, the alternative title not only helps users find what they are searching for but also site owners by providing a title that is tailored to the users’ query which can increase the chances of click through.

So, what does this all mean?

For us, this has resulted in an increase in organic traffic and in time spent on site as well as a lower bounce rate. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense – when the descriptions on search engine results are personalised to a user’s search query, these are more relevant. If they’re more relevant you’d expect all of these improvements.

This change is in line with Google’s efforts to prioritise high quality and unique content over more traditional search engine optimisation techniques. Bottom line, Google is actually trying to help by providing accurate descriptions for websites that are good but run by people who don’t have the know-how to fiddle with meta data.

It seems doubtful Google will want to kill off meta data completely. A well-written, targeted description should really have the edge over a description picked out by an algorithm. On the other hand, what you need to understand is that every piece of content on your website needs to be well-written and unique because, from now on, it might just be your opening sales pitch.

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For many small businesses, Google AdWords is the biggest single source of website visitors. Although it’s a simple platform, Google relentless improves the features, making it quite a challenge to keep up to date!

In case you missed them, here are the main highlights for 2012

January was fairly quite one compared to what came later. Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) rolled out, a lazy AdWords option if ever I saw one! Enable DSA and Google will crawl your website adding dynamic headlines to your ads based on the products it finds, matching those ads with search queries. Perfect for those sites with a large number of products.

March saw a big improvement to the targeting options on the Google Display Network. From this point advertisers could bid up or down on individual keywords, bringing the control of search to display

In April, AdWords for Video launched, bringing YouTube advertising to the small business owner. All of a sudden a video campaign that reached millions was within the grasp of all. And thanks to Google’s TrueView format, advertisers only get charged if users actually watch the video. The better your ad, the more people want to watch it, and the better it all works.

Here’s one of our TrueView ads:

Got a mobile app? Want more people to download it? From March, advertisers could promote their app in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) thanks to Mobile App extensions. These are a simple one-line extension beneath your ad which link to your app in the Appstore. A bit like this:

Do you run display campaigns using AdWords? These usually take lots of effort, and require you to trawl through thousands of URLs, including or excluding them from your campaigns, based on performance. Thanks to the launch of the Display Campaign Optimizer (DCO) in April, these tasks disappeared, since the DCO takes over the job of monitoring your campaign and focusing it on those placements that are actually working.

May saw a major shakeup of keyword matching options. For years ‘exact match’ meant just that – your ad would only show if users searched using your EXACT keywords. But with ‘close variant’ matching Google interprets the matching options more flexibly, meaning advertisers with exact and phrase match keywords are eligible to appear against thousands of new queries with slight variations. A great opportunity for advertisers? Or a great opportunity for Google increase its bottom line? I will leave it up to you to decide…

The other exciting update was the addition of the ‘Auction Insights’ report. This lets you know about the other advertisers appearing on the same keyword as you, and how you performed against those advertisers. This is perfect for helping to find out if people have been using your brand name as a keyword in their campaign. Here’s how to find the Auction Insights:

June was a busy! For the first time it became possible to use AdWords to advertise within mobile apps, bringing a whole new medium for those businesses looking to promote their own mobile app or site.

Google also improved the options for local businesses trying to reach people near to them, with the launch of search ads in Google maps for mobile.

For the advanced and technical user Google launched campaign programming with AdWords scripts. These allow you to make changes to an AdWords account by writing simple JavaScript programs. One of the benefits is for those advertisers who have lots of product inventory and some lines that go out of stock. With AdWords scripts it’s possible to use an external inventory counter to pause your keywords – so you’re not promoting a product that you don’t have in stock.

We all know that it often takes a TV advert, a conversation with a friend, a bit of online research and perhaps an email before we buy something big. ‘Attribution’ gives marketers insight about all those pre-sales experiences. Thanks to the launch of ‘Search Funnels’ in June, Advertisers can see all the ads and keywords that preceded a sale, even if the customer only saw the ad and didn’t even click on it. Find these in your account under the ‘conversions’ menu:

I guess Google spent the summer on the beach, because the next exciting update came in September with the global roll out of enhanced sitelinks. These turn the one-line sitelinks that run beneath your ad into a whole ad on their own – a real boost for CTR and quality score. Here are ours!

Do you ever return to your AdWords account after a few days elsewhere to find that one of your campaigns is ‘limited by budget’ whilst others use just a small fraction? This means that you’re not appearing 100% of the time, missing out on potential customers. Thanks to the launch of ‘shared campaign budgets’ this problem goes away, as budget is moved flexibly between campaigns ensuring they’re kept online all the time.

If you use Google Analytics (GA) to find out how people use your site, from October it became possible to import GA engagement data right into your AdWords account. This is most useful when measuring display campaigns, which less frequently lead to conversions than their search counterparts. Previously you had to constantly flick between the two platforms, seeing which display placements were bouncing and which were leading to a long onsite time. With all this data sitting right in your AdWords account it’s very easy to pause all of those URLs which are sending you poor traffic.

October also saw Google taking its first steps to becoming a bank, with the launch of the AdWords credit. With the continuing difficulty of getting even a small loan from the bank, and cash flow crippling many a small business, this extra flexibility was welcomed by thousands. Advertising has always been about speculating before you accumulate: with AdWords credit you can at least get the cash register ringing before the bailiff is knocking at the door!

Having trouble getting your ad to appear? Can’t work out why a keyword performs so poorly? In November Google improved their campaign diagnostics tool making it easy to troubleshoot performance issues on Google.

So what does Google have in store for the next 12 months? Well luckily enough here at 123-reg we get to test out new Betas on behalf of Google. Having had a play with some of next year’s AdWords toys I can assure you that 2013 is going to be as action packed as 2012 was.

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Google is constantly trying to improve its search engine results and help users find exactly what they’re looking for and fast. Now it has released a Data Highlighter tool that allows site owners to create structured data, currently only for events and only in English. Soon enough it will extend the functions for this tool to other data types and languages.

By using the Data Highlighter on your site, Google will be able to show rich snippets in its search results for your future events, concerts, exhibitions, etc. In other words, if you have a site where you list events such as upcoming concert dates, sports events or exhibitions you can use this great tool to have your events and general info about them listed on Google’s search results page.

The great thing about this new tool is that it’s so easy to use that you don’t have to be tech-savvy to use it on your site. You don’t even need to edit any code. You only have to click, drag and highlight the data fields and name them (for eg. Date, Address, Location, etc).

Getting started with Data Highlighter

To get started, go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and start tagging. Watch this short video that explains exactly what steps you need to follow to get started with Google’s Data Highlighter tool:

Another great thing about this tool is that if you use a specific format to list all your events, Google will crawl your site regularly for new event listing and will automatically add them to its search results. Google says that “5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.”

However, it also mentions that using the Data Highlighter to add events data does not guarantee that your events will always show up in Google’s search results.

“Each product applies its own rules when deciding whether and how to display the data. For example, Google search results will display as rich snippets only for events that are in the future and that appear to be legitimate events,” Google mentions.

All things considered, this should not stop you from using it as it can only benefit your business.

What do you think about Google’s new Data Highlighter tool? Will you be using it for your business?

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SEO is such an unpredictable domain, constantly changing and putting the website owners’ patience to the test. The optimisation techniques that worked perfectly until yesterday can be considered history today after yet another algorithm update from Google. Even obscure codes like 7NVUUV33MHET come to have relevance and meaning in what we do.

This year, the Google Zoo has grown after the endless series of 2012 Google Panda updates and the algorithm change called Penguin. With so many changes, one question remains unanswered: white hat, black hat… or zebra hat link building?

To help answer this question, we’re going to go through all the major 2012 Google updates. This 2012 SEO overview will hopefully bring some light into what has changed in the way that Google evaluates a website for ranking.

We will also describe all the important 2012 Google updates, from the Panda updates bundle that were rolled out this year to the Penguin updates that were created to stop spam on the Internet and many others.

Image courtesy of Thanamat – www.freedigitalphotos.net

Ready? Let’s begin…

Panda updates bundle

Google rolled out several Panda updates in March and April but most of them were fairly routine updates with minimum impact. However, the Panda 3.4 update that was rolled out at the end of March 2012 coincided with a number of notifications sent to webmasters worldwide warning them about unnatural linking to their sites.

So, even though some site owners might have thought that they had the best kind of links, one of the Google Panda updates had a surprise in store for them. They received an important notice informing them that Google Webmaster Tools detected unnatural links to their site. Obviously, most site owners panicked until Google’s Matt Cutts explained they had nothing to worry about:

“If you received a message yesterday about unnatural links to your site, don’t panic. […] While it’s possible for this to indicate potential spammy activity by the site, it can also have innocent reasons. For example, we may take this kind of targeted action to distrust hacked links pointing to an innocent site. The innocent site will get the message as we move towards more transparency, but it’s not necessarily something that you automatically need to worry about.”

Parked domain bug

Another one of the 2012 Google updates focused on classifying the sites that were actually parked domains, meaning domains that had only ads and no other content. The purpose was to target parked domains or ‘placeholder’ sites so these wouldn’t rank on Google. However, Google mistakenly classified some sites as being parked domains even though they weren’t. As a result, some sites no longer ranked in Google. The issue was later solved as it wasn’t an intentional algorithm change but rather a data error.

Penguin updates

The Penguin updates are a group of the 2012 Google updates whose purpose is to stop webspam. Here is Google’s official explanation of Penguin: “a decrease in rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google existing quality guidelines”.

This year’s Penguin updates focused on site owners who abused Google’s quality guidelines by either stuffing their content with keywords or exchanging too many links. In other words, the Penguin updates penalised people who went beyond what is natural, such as:

• Hiding text

Using white text on white background or hiding text behind an image with the sole purpose of getting a few more keywords in are violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Penguin has improved its detection of content for search engine optimisation that has been hidden using CSS.

• Keyword stuffing

This is probably one of the most significant changes that has come with the Penguin update. Google has improved its algorithm for detecting websites that are stuffing their content with keywords in order to rank higher.

• Unnatural external links

One of the major Penguin updates focused on penalising websites with unnatural external links as a result of excessive link building. Another important Penguin update was over-optimisation. This refers to having too many sitewide links from other sites, which could indicate a much too aggressive link building that includes but is not limited to excessive link acquisition, links exchange or over-optimised anchor texts.

As a result of these Penguin updates, in July 2012, many webmasters have received notifications from Google through Google’s Webmaster Tool warning them about having unnatural links linking to their websites.

The Pirate update

Not long after the Penguin updates, Google hit with yet another update. The ‘Pirate update’ was rolled out back in August with the purpose of penalising sites that have been repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. So, if Google receives a large number of ‘takedown’ requests against your site and after analysing it comes to the conclusion that your site violates copyright, then your site gets penalised. How? Google will cause your site to rank lower in search results.

Domain diversity update

A few months later, in September, Google rolled out yet another update, this time to improve domain diversity. The purpose of this update was to show search results from different domains and not just from one or two. This way, users can get a more diverse set of results.

Exact match domain crackdown

Domain names with exact keywords have been a commodity since the internet became a commercial marketplace. However, many have argued that Google gives too much weight to keywords included domain names. You have probably seen plenty of three, four or five keywords included in a single domain name and these are clear cases of abuse of keywords. So, at the end of September, Google rolled out another update disputing the relevance of certain EMDs.

So, which are the EMD most likely to be considered spam? The most important ones are multiple dash domains and domains with too many words.

Link Disavow tool

In October 2012, Google announced a new tool to disavow links. This can be useful if you’ve been notified by Google about having too many spammy, unnatural or low-quality links pointing to your site and if you believe that these may cause issues for your site. Find out more about this tool and how to use it for your site.

Too many ads above the fold

Also in October, Google released a new Page Layout Algorithm also known as the ‘above the fold’ update. This was designed to target pages with ads above the fold instead of content.

Here’s how Google’s Matt Cutts explains the update: “We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

Changing rel=author tags in the search results

Last month, Google changed the way rel=author tags work in search results. The rel=author tag helps you show a by line and a photo next to your blog listings in the SERPs. The latest update refers to what happens when one clicks on the author name or by line. In the past, this would have taken you to the author’s Google+ profile. Now clicking on the author name or picture runs a new search for that author, displaying the author’s bio and even listings of recent blog post or status updates from the author’s page. If you’d like to find out how to implement rel=”follow”, make sure to read our dedicated post on the subject.

This 2012 SEO overview includes only the most important Google updates that have affected many site owners worldwide. Some have managed to recover while others are still trying. So, here comes our question for you: have any of the updates presented in this 2012 SEO overview affected your site? And if so, what have you done to recover?

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If content is King, then we can say that SEO is Queen (most of the times, a drama Queen). Everyone knows that article optimisation as well as creating fresh and engaging content can help you not only build a loyal following but also attract links.

This article is a short ‘Wordpress SEO for articles’ guide that you can use for article optimisation. So, make sure to bookmark it so you can easily access it whenever you need to write a search-engine- friendly post for your blog. It will explain how to optimise articles in order to achieve a better search engine visibility and get more organic traffic to your site. How do I know this? Because WordPress SEO works for us.

Let’s begin…

SEO for WordPress blogs

To make it easier for you to understand how WordPress SEO works, I’ve chosen a random post from our 123-reg blog so I can describe the exact steps to simple article optimisation.

Add a title for your post

The first step to optimise articles is by setting a correct title. Usually, the title of your post will be used to create the URL so here are three main things you need to consider:

• Use your main keyword in the title
• Try to place the main keyword at the beginning of the title.
• Keep it as short as possible.

Double check the URL

If you’re using special characters in your title (like apostrophes, quotes or pound signs) check out the URL to ensure these characters don’t appear inside the URL. If they do, then use the EDIT button and remove anything extra aside from words, numbers and hyphens used for separating words.  A shorter title means a shorter URL which can only help because long URLs are never fully displayed in search engines’ result pages.

Optimise articles for specific keywords

When it comes to WordPress SEO for articles, you want to make sure your post turns up in search engines’ result pages for certain terms. Thus, I recommend you employ your main keyword a minimum of three times throughout the copy as it will help that word(s) to be perceived as a keyword.

• Don’t use it in consecutive sentences;
• Don’t use it too often as it will fall into keyword stuffing. While correct SEO for articles is important, making your posts informative, useful and attractive should be your main focus. You want your readers to read and enjoy the articles you write so that they become loyal readers.
• SEO for articles also means using synonyms and variations of your keyword across the post and not the same keyword over and over again.

Adding URLs

You also need to pay attention to the website addresses that you include in your post as these are also contribute to the correct SEO for articles on your site. When adding an URL into your post, check it to ensure it’s functional, is not redirected and doesn’t open a 404 page and…

• ALWAYS start URLs with HTTP://
• Use descriptive anchor texts, even if these are long.
• Avoid “click here” anchors in favour of “Visit our Website Builder page”, for example.

Adding images

The descriptions you give to the images included in your post are also important part to WordPress SEO. When adding images to your post, make sure you add an ALT tag. Just go to HTML editing and in the <img> tag you will see alt=””.  Wordpress adds it automatically without assigning it a value. Add a short description between the quotation marks that best describes the image you used to help with SEO for articles.

SEO for articles 101

When it comes to SEO for WordPress blogs, there are a few things you must keep in mind when adding the meta title and meta description for your post:

 1. Meta TITLE

• The maximum length for SEO for articles should be 68 characters, including spaces.
• WordPress can automatically add your brand name at the end of every title if you want it to. So, if you choose this feature, then keep in mind that the name will add up to the total number of characters in the meta title.
• Make sure your title isn’t too long. I recommend a maximum of 68 characters including your brand’s name and character spaces.
• Use your main keyword at the beginning.

2. Meta DESCRIPTION

• Maximum length should be 154 characters, including spaces.
• You can use the first paragraph if it contains the main keyword and doesn’t go over 154 characters.
• You can write your own in which case you should use the main keyword to ensure correct SEO for articles.

3. Meta Keywords

Find out which search engines sends your most traffic to decide if meta keywords are really necessary. If most visitors come from Google, then you can leave the Meta Keywords box blank as Google ignores the meta keyword tag included in the article optimisation. Other search engines like Yahoo and Bing still give the tag some value.

As you can see, SEO for WordPress blogs can be a child’s play if you can spare five minutes for every post you publish. And you definitely should because WordPress SEO can help you get more traffic to your site and also increase your site’s rankings.

Are you using WordPress SEO to optimise your blog posts? In your experience, has SEO for articles helped you get more traffic to your blog/ site?

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You’ve probably seen those rich snippets in Google’s search results that show you not only the name of the author of a blog post but also his picture. This is a really cool feature because when you write a blog post your readers can also put a face to your name.

Since recently, Google has transformed simple snippets that only included a name into rich snippets that also allow you to add a picture to your name. We had our SEO specialist, Roxana, do this for our blog so if you’re also interested in doing this for your site or blog, read on…

First, let’s start with the basics…

What is AuthorRank?

AuthorRank measures how much your reputation as an author influences the ranking of your articles in search results.

In a post-Panda and Penguin world, it’s quite refreshing to see that our content’s ranking factors are not as dependent on backlinks as before. Today, good content leads to a good AuthorRank which results in good ranks.

How can you improve your AuthorRank?

Google is basing their ranking algorithm on hundreds of signals for organic search and we can only assume they will also use a similar algorithm to determine AuthorRanks.

A few of the more likely ranking signals are:

On-site

• Page Rank – You might remember this one. It allows you to see what your average PR is for all your published content.
• Engagement – How engaging is your content? Encourage your readers to comment on your posts and don’t forget to reply back. If you’re able to start a conversation, this will signal Google that your content is worth talking about.

Off-site – G+

• +1s – You can say that these are popularity votes so try to have as many as you can.
• Google+ shares – Having people sharing your content on G+ means they found it so interesting that they want people in their own circles to read it as well. This is a great way to reach larger audiences.
• Circles – The more circles you’re in, the more people you can reach.
• G+ engagement – Make sure that the correct URL to your site or blog appears on your G+ profile so people know where they can read you.

 Other websites

• High AuthorRank authors – Get recommended by other authors who already have a high AuthorRank. Their success will surely rub off on you as well.
• Get your content shared on websites with a high authority. If such websites consider your content worthy of being shared, Google will consider you worthy of a higher AuthorRank.

Social networks

• Wikipedia – If you have something interesting to share, then share it on the largest informational platform on the Internet.
• YouTube – If you prefer videos over content, you can still get a good AuthorRank. Although this is on the works, get a jump start by creating engaging videos and getting users to subscribe to your channel.
• Trustworthy social networks – Find out which social networks Google trusts and make sure your content is visible on them as well. For instance, you may want to try Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and SlideShare.
• Publishing – Are you a published author? Then ensure that your work can be found on Google Books or Google Scholar.

How do you get Google to know you’re an Author?

To start with, you will need to set up Google Authorship. This will show Google the link between your online presence and your content.

How to set up Google Authorship

There are several ways to set up Google Authorship depending on the site or blog you’re writing and publishing content on. We’ve chosen to share only two of them – the easiest and the most difficult (for those of you who want to feel you’ve earned it).

The easy method

You will need:

• A public Google+ profile
• Access to the website/blog you’re writing for.

Edit your G+ profile by going to the “Contributor to” section and then add the URLs to the websites or blogs you write on.

In your blog posts, just add your G+ profile URL  (remove anything after the profile’s ID like /posts or /about) and use the exact name as on your G+ profile as the URL’s anchor text. Add “?rel=author” at the end of your G+ profile URL.

Your code should look like this:

<a href=”Google+ Profile URL”>Exact G+ Profile Name</a>

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/111024654176066667781/?rel=author”>Alexandra Gavril</a>

The difficult method

We’ve learned on our own that sometimes taking the hardest road can return the greatest rewards. We’ve tried the simple way but haven’t seen any results so we gave the difficult method a go.

You will need:

• A public G+ profile
• An email address using the same domain as the website you write on
• Access so you can customise your blog posts.

Go to your G+ profile and edit it. Update the email address with one using the same domain as the website you write on.

Save your changes and then click on the “Verify” option next to your email address.

If you’ve done this correctly, you should see a tick mark next to your email address in the “About” section.

When you publish your posts, make sure you say “by First-name Last-name”. Write your name the same way it appears on your G+ profile. With a verified email address on the same domain as your post, Google will connect the dots and recognise you as the Author.

How we did it

We made sure our authors had G+ profiles with up to date head shots in order to get relevant pictures in SERPs.

We asked our authors to verify their work emails on G+. Then we installed the Google authorship for multiple authors plug-in so that every author on our blog would get recognition for their own content.

You can see my plug-in at work at the end of this post:

When you think you’ve successfully implemented the rel=”author” markup, you can check to see if Google can see the relationship between your content and your author profile by using Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool, now called The Structured Data Testing Tool.

If Google can see it then all you have to do now is wait for it to appear in search results. There’s no guarantee Google will show your author picture in search results but if it does, it’s quite rewarding!

Have you tried other methods? Share them in a comment below.

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Do you pay attention to the links in the search results? Years back, when spam wasn’t such a big issue, I hardly ever looked at the URL and the name of the website before clicking on it. Now I am more careful on what I click, I look at the domain name and if I get the feeling it’s spammy, I avoid clicking on it. Most of the times I prefer clicking on sites I know are trustworthy because I assume the content is better than anywhere else, don’t you?

According to a study conducted by Stanford and Microsoft researchers called “Domain Bias in Web Search”, domain names are an important factor in consumer click behaviour.  The researchers did a blind domain test similar to the Pepsi/ Coca-Cola test and the results showed that a domain name can change the Internet users’ preferences of which page is more relevant about 25% of the time.

Does domain bias exist?

“Domain bias” is a new phenomenon in click activity and it refers to a user’s high probability to click on a search result because it’s from a reputable or popular domain.  It also refers to a user’s low possibility to click on a search result coming from an unknown, spammy or distrustful domain. This study however is not linked to the site’s relevance or its position in search results.

The blind test

The blind test consisted of asking users to choose between two snippets and two domains, webmd.com and genetichealth.com. When the domain was absent and users could only read the snippet, they preferred genetichealth.com. However, when the domains were revealed, users chose webmd.com because they considered it an authority site. This shows that Internet users blindly trust content from authority domains, even if there may be search results that are more relevant to their query. We are loyal to some domains and believe that that content is better simply because those are reputable domains.

What does this mean for you?

As you can see, domain names are becoming an important factor in a users’ click behaviour, now more than ever.  Even though the researchers did not link this study to search results, search engine optimisation is still necessary to get a site in the top results of search engines so users can find it. If the site is nowhere to be found, it doesn’t matter how attractive your snippet is.

If you’re just starting out, it won’t be easy to find the right domain name and build a reputable brand with such a fierce competition. To start, buy a domain name that you can build as a brand. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a .com or .co.uk. There are so many other domain extensions where good domain names are still available, such as .info, .so, .net, and more. We also have a fantastic offer this summer where you can buy .info domain with only £ 1.99 for the first year, so hurry and get yours before anyone else.

Once you get your site up and running, come up with marketing and SEO strategies that can help you build a brand that users would come to recognise and prefer.

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Last week Kate Dailey posed a question on BBC News Magazine Online: “Is it possible to quit Google?“.  Featuring the thoughts of three computer professionals trying to part ways with Google, the article raised concerns over the Google group’s privacy agreements that even EU officials have suggested are too invasive, but is Google really that bad?

In a word: No. Without the data-mining, data-crunching and processing that Google has spent years building its reputation on, the internet wouldn’t be as advanced as it now is and equally neither would our daily lives. What Google does may lead the way – certainly in terms of numbers – but it isn’t alone in wanting to collect information about us, process it and then use it to improve our user experience. It’s rife, not just on the web but also offline too. Your bank will use fraud monitoring systems to track what, when and where you spend, process that and then flag up an alert if your ‘pattern’ changes. Your store loyalty card does the same. Tracking what you buy, processing it and sending you vouchers for similar things, trying to tempt you back in, to link more data and more processing about you, into their systems. Same intrusion? Same tracking? Same complaints? As Google themselves are always at pains to point out, they don’t sell users’ personal information, they merely use it in-house. That’s not something others online or offline could realistically claim.

A lot of the anti-Google speak is based on their sheer dominance of the market, number one and two in search land (Google Search and YouTube) is massive in the digital world but they have achieved that from nothing by just being good at what they do, very good. Much criticism is also based on the founding values of the internet: Freedom and everybody as equals. Nice values to respect and uphold but the internet is a much different beast nowadays, driving economies across the globe and still continuing to connect those on the periphery at a tremendous rate.

We all owe a great deal to Google, especially those of us who find themselves using the internet daily whether we consciously use Google products or not.

Part of Google’s success as a search engine is its own success. How many of us have simply typed a website into the Google search box instead of typing the full URL in the address bar? Google is now the lazy man’s bookmarks. Google knows that too, and based on their processing of our data, is trying to help us to find ‘exactly’ what we are looking for, via innovations such as social search, etc.

Whatever their knowledge, use or understanding of the internet, 99.9% of people who have surfed have probably used Google. They know it. Even people who haven’t used the internet know of it. That’s not a bad thing. That’s good branding but that is also being good at what they do too and providing solutions to problems sometimes we didn’t even know existed. As a business Google should and will serve you on so many levels, via so many channels. For the former customer looking to get back in touch “after that great work you did a couple of years ago” for them, Google offers the way of finding you if your office has moved or your number changed.

Google not only re-unites but it also helps find new customers. It is no fluke that SEO and PPC are now abbreviations known to almost every business person and wannabe in the developed world. Google helped drive that, and like it or not, Google lead the way in each of them. That’s technology. It’s what they do and it’s what they do best. Yet, it’s helping hand for businesses needn’t even be that techie. Potential customers who see your print advertisements, see your office sign, or perhaps just get recommended via word of mouth, will more often than not simply “Google it”. It’s a phrase that is almost a caricature of itself now, simply because it works. Google can even help connect you to would-be customers who have never heard of you, just searching for a solution to a problem that you have been clever enough to cover in your content that has then been trawled, crawled and listed in Google’s massive data system.

So while privacy online should be a concern and you should always be encouraged to read the small print, we shouldn’t see Google as the ultimate dark force to be evaded. Interestingly, in the article referred to at the start, the attempts by the interviewees to de-Google themselves seemed to fail. One of the three interviewees even admits to now being “a total Google geek”. Perhaps only when you truly look at the impact of what it does and how it goes about it, do you really appreciate the fact that without Google we would be lost. So if you and I (with a fairly high level of internet knowledge) would be lost, where would that leave our customers and furthermore where would that leave our businesses?

What do you think? Do you agree? Let us know.

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