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ahrefs-interview

Ahrefs “With Penguin, Google threw a bomb”

Google’s recent updates reshaped the way SEO (search engine optimization) is perceived and executed in many ways, from keyword placement to link acquisition. This is already well known.

Today’s article is about how online tool providers are dealing with updates such as the Penguin and how they are  concentrating in identifying URLs with too many inbound links with exact match anchor texts pointing to them. This is now considered an unnatural profile and gets Google’s “special treatment”.

I invited Ahrefs (a well known back link tracking tool) to discuss how messy these Google updates can be and how such changes impact the SEO tool business.

We kick off about how clients are seeing those updates and how the company addresses such questions.

“Google update increases interest to the backlink deep analysis. Maybe that makes a contribution to the positive growth trend of serious package sales”, says Ahrefs’ Iana whose surname I`m yet to know.

So, according to Iana, the back link business is actually profiting with the unnatural link hunt. “That’s why the actuality of backlinks analysis services do not fall depending on what links are in search engines’ priority”.

Makes sense. If you think your ranking may be hurt by excessive low quality links, you want to check which links are those and an online tool can be very helpful at this time.

link analysis toolThis Google Update takes no prisoners

Lying on the link-high battlefield many innocent corpses turn the link hunt into a blood bath. “With Penguin, Google threw a bomb”, says Iana.

The scenario seems more complicated then it was during the first days of Panda Update back in 2011 when some innocent victims were made including the New York Times. The Manhattan-based news monster suffered some drops in the ranking because of a byline displayed in many pages triggering the duplicate content filter. Tough such a terrifying collateral effect can be eliminated rapidly, the same cannot be told concerning  link penalties.

“I believe innocent URLs may be hurt, as millions sites over the world are pecked by released raging Penguin”, says Iana over email. Many backlinks are created intentionally, it is obvious. That’s why it’s hard to sort them into strictly natural or not. Irrelevant links are visible, but paid links are relevant to the topic and often look natural and all of them take a lot of work”.
In my latest interview about Google’s link hunt, Alliance Link’s CEO Debra Mastaler says that maybe Google is taking manual action to discover spammy links.

To Iana this may be more than an option. It may be absolutely necessary to prevent more and more URLs leaving the SERP in a bag. “If the task cannot be always perfectly solved even manually it’s hard to believe it will be done perfectly by an algorithm”, writes Hrefs’ professional Iana.

Good faith?

“Google tries to determine link types, to detect “unnatural”, but wouldn’t consider SEO’s interests in this work. Is there a mistake or is it intentional work of Google specialists?” asks Ahrefs Iana.

To Iana, it is important to keep an open mind when it comes to determine whether Google’s actions towards a certain link is honest and not for a particular link.
 Further on, Iana defines the link examination as an “egg-dance”.

“People say, for example, they never did any unethical work or black hat seo but their rankings decreased”, so it kind of takes a honest person to look at what may have caused a SERP drop.
Partly just, partly wrong – it will always characterize Penguin according to it’s mission.

About Ahrefs:

A company providing tools for backlink and SERP analysis. Starting these days ‘Ahrefs index 3.0′ showing the most fresh data on backlinks, regardless of Google’s tendency of changing it’s link preferences.

Link Builders From Around the World: Speak up!

Much has been published about how to escape Google’s infamous recent updates. The duo Panda 3.x + Panda 1.x stirred things up in an almost unseen way for SEOs and their linkbuilding companions. Now, if you’re looking for a way to escape a penalty you relate to one of these updates, I’m sorry to inform that this page will not solve such quest. The following article gathers opinions from linkbuilding agencies and other professionals from Brazil, UK and the US, and is not supposed to help anyone getting rid of that 20 position lost. Rather it offers an insight about how the linkbuilding market has been changed by those Google Updates.

All interviews were made via email, except Gareth Hoyle’s. Gareth and I chatted over Skype on May 29th for as long as an hour.

Portuguese version

Is business suffering?

UK-based linkbuilder Gareth Hoyle is quite upset and runs Manual Linkbuilding. He says that business and procedures are being damaged hard by those updates and new algorithms. “We’re really changing everything in the way we do our business”. Before these updates, our effort was concentrated in getting links for specific keywords and whereas now we’re changing the way we saw junk anchor text links”. By junk anchor text Hoyle means “click here” and other link texts, which were, before the updates arrived badly perceived by the general linkbuilding community, used to keyword anchor text, where a link is displayed using a niche keyword explored by the target domain. “It is now much more an effort of balancing our link anchors and trying to dilute as much as possible earlier acquired links with the exact keyword. Klaus, it is crazy! What we used to cheer for is becoming, in the absence of a better word, ‘toxic assets’”.

US-Based linkbuilder Debra Mastaler

Out of beautiful  Virginia, Alliance-Link President Debra Mastaler takes an easier approach on changes in her business making routine. She engaged in additional strategies a couple of years ago also to provide her customers with quality links.  ” I have not changed the way I sell services, what I offer, how I charge or how I implement tactics, everything is the same. We started incorporating social media tactics about two years ago so that’s the newest addition to services”. She says it is best to keep your content at your own site. It opposes to an old tactic of guest post copy writing to acquire inbound links. “  I am not a fan of sending content away from a site, I think you should build your site to be the premier location for whatever you sell or promote”.

Content and link quality. This goes along with South-Brazilian Enlink CEO Manuela Sanches‘  thought on the subject. ”I see an important manner of the way customers are understanding this updates”, says . “They tend to look at the quality of inbound links instead of that ancient formula of link volume. A positive change is that our clients are being aware that their own content needs to be improved, which opens opportunity for content professionals without diminishing the importance of our work”.

 

US-SEO Steve Gerencser

For years Steve Gerencser runs Steam Driven Media and makes his remarks on how the market has changed for linkbuilders. “For us it has had almost no impact at all”. Looks like not all linkbuilders (or simple link providers) became conscious about how these updates work. “ What we have seen an impact in though is the huge increase in people wanting to sell us link building using old tactics like ‘get 10,000 directory links for $100′ or ‘get 500 social bookmarks for $5″. To  Gerencser it seems that the last part of a race is going on while these service providers ”are flooding the market as quickly as they can before the entire auto-linking industry is destroyed for good. That, or they simply don’t care and will continue to sell to anyone that doesn’t understand that the landscape has changed”.

 

Google’s Communication policy

It wouldn’t be that bad if, along with the tons of updates recently added to the link quality algorithm Google did not engage in a massive communication strategy targeting webmasters and consumers about its action issuing warnings concerning the danger of spammy link acquisitions. Let’s hear what the pros have to say.

Aline Aguayo, an Enlink account manager takes care of this question. “It’s usual to be confronted by customers after each new algorithm change. They usually ask how we’ll approach this and if we’re making any changes in our strategies to keep the train rolling.”

“I am not hearing from past clients about their link work, I am a content and media link builder so most of my links are embedded in content or being run through credible media sources”, says Debra Mastaler. ”Customers tend to always have the same questions no matter when they approach us for work”, says Debra. “How many links will I get as a result of your link building campaign and how long will it take.  People seem to be less concerned with cost and more concerned with where the links will come from and that they come from quality pages”.

“They contract us for a certain campaign and then let us run with it”. According to Mastaler most clients do interact in the link building process, but not a great deal.

Learn what major differences Gerencser sees in the link acquisition industry:

“Where we have seen the largest changes is in new clients. We have one that was hit lightly a few days after we were hired. We were immediately contacted and accused of tanking their site.” After such an accusation, what Gerencser did was replying to this client assuring him to take the proper measures. On the other hand it looks like not all customers are reading these Google emails. The same old questions are coming up by customers. Gerencser is skeptic to the real impact of those emails and Google’s crusade against spam. “..they (clients) aren’t very informed after all.  They want to know how many links and how much they will cost. That hasn’t changed at all”.

Out of Manchester, Hoyle says that it  differs on a client-by-client basis. “As an outsource provider many of our clients are SEO companies. And this puts us in a quite privileged position because we can see what other people are doing. And this information helps us a lot when defining a linkbuilding campaign strategy. But to Hoyle this communication policy issue touches a sensitive point of Google’s revenue machine. “When Goggle sends out a million emails announcing further penalization of unnatural links and leading people to believe that the money invested in links and SEO will bring more revenue if transferred to PPC campaigns, how much do you thing Google will make?”. Further on he cites an example of a client of his. “They were hit I`m not sure whether it was penguin or not, they went from monthly 10,000 GBP to 50,000 in PPC campaigns. So it`s quite clear why Google is making these changes. ”

This may very well be the nude truth. A quick reading at Google’s quarterly issued financial report clears that. Google itself states that bad quality results can jeopardize it’s business heavily based on ads display.

How competent is Google in its link hunt  effort?

EnLink CEO Manuela Sanchez“Very competent” says Manuela Sanches. Some aspects of how Google evaluates link quality got tweaked. Link farms and exact match anchor texts are both very sensitive signs now. The Enlink CEO says that in some cases there were drops as big as 30 positions in organic search results.

Mastaler suggests there’s more between the SERP and algorithm than believed. To Debra, Google is taking manual action to further penalize spammy link acquisitions. “I think Google is very capable of finding and deciding if links are paid especially if they are not placed in content areas.  Not only do they have the computing power to find the links, they have a large staff of human reviewers to check out what they find”.

“Based on things we are seeing across multiple websites in Webmaster Tools, Google is far better at sniffing out “bad links” than most people want to admit. They were able to point out links to client sites that we had never seen before in such a way that impressed us with just how deeply they track link building”, answers Steve Gerencser.

UK linkbuilder Gareth Hoyle

“Competence is not the issue here”, says Gareth Hoyle. The real problem with this is that Google lacks of constancy in its actions. If they had any, we would be able to reverse engineer some of the results we’ve seen. But some sites with identical link strategies are going up, others are down. People are not being hit the same way. There seems to be no standard in the way penalties are being applied”. The Manchester-based linkbuilder is scared about one thing “Negative SEO”. Unfortunately I did not ask the other interviewees about that. So, let’s save his statement about that for another story.

A shelter in Bing?

Bing recently crawled out of its eternal Beta state in the US and in the UK. This kind of poses the question if Microsoft’s search engine has become an attractive realm to get traffic and how they’re fighting spammy links. As many of us know, there’s been rumor about Facebook building up its own search engine, which is these days powered by Bing. Even if it does enter the search engine market, convincing people to perform queries in its social media environment is a major challenge.

Hoyle is using Bing as his main search engine on his  iPhone. “And you know what, Klaus, I`m getting all information I need out of it. I think that, if Google continues to serve people the wrong results, they will eventually migrate to Bing, and, in a short-medium term, when Facebook search finally gets released, this will be a major threat to Google.

“Unless I’ve missed an update, I don’t know of any changes they’ve made recently that would impact a webmasters marketing plan.  Bing continues to hold a strong second in the search space,  they have a new social platform they are promoting and I suspect we’ll see more integration of it in their search, email and other products in the future”, answers Debra Mastaler.

Gerencser has “No idea if Bing gained from this or not”. However he did the same as his UK colleague Hoyle. ” I switched to Bing as my default search engine months ago. The results for the areas I tend to be interested in tend to be better than the spammy stuff in Google. ”

Now what?

Which tactics have been put aside in their former way of getting precious and sometimes juicy inbound links? Is quality content the answer to the challenge of becoming relevant again and rejoice sweet organic traffic?

This looks like a yes to both Manuela Sanches and Debra Mastaler.

To Mastaler it is paramount that customers distribute their content to credible sources, while keeping the most of their “quality content” within the realm of their own domains. Sanches approaches to this stating that both mid- and longtail content strategies are more than welcome in this era. They help to maintain a site’s relevance for both guestposting and linkbait actions.

Developing high quality content for links is a bad taste joke to Hoyle.  ”All the quality content jabbering which Google loves to promote is nothing but a fairy tale. People are more likely to tweet or to share, recommend, post on LinkedIn or anything else than linking. Linking is a non natural behavior. Do you really think people will take the time to open their blogs and write something about how amazing this and that article is and after this, link to the article? See, Klaus, to tweet is a subconscious action.

Quotes

“Unfortunately the industry has been so entrenched in creating links by using self made links that this is what our clients have been trained to expect. We spend most of our time ‘untraining’ them.” 
Steve Gerencser

“The whole Panda & Penguin could all be a massive PR stunt for Google, tailored in order to scare users and force them into PPC.”
Gareth Hoyle

“Developing content on your site and bringing people to your site makes sense to me “
Debra Mastaler

“It’s us against Google”
Gareth Hoyle

4 Myths of SEO – Shaken Not Stirred

This is the first guest post I`m hosting at this blog. As a special treat I bring you an article by SFC-based SEOCopywriting professional Gabriella Sannino. Ladies and gents, without further ado:

4 Myths of SEO – Shaken Not Stirred

You read about this myth and that myth, but what, exactly, is a myth? Especially when you consider the term here, in the context of an “SEO myth”. I’m quite baffled at how there can be so many…

A myth, according to the dictionary, is “a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature.”

Phew. Not only is that a run-on sentence, but it also doesn’t quite fit the mold, although people do often treat SEO as something without a natural explanation. Why is it so difficult to understand that optimization is a discipline like any other? Marketing, branding, blogging, copywriting, and optimization: there is a right way and a wrong way.

Now, granted, some use a lot of hot air to describe something that can be told in one sentence or less. This often brings another definition into the fray: an unproved or false collective belief.

That fits much closer to how SEO myths can come into being. A truth is twisted or an outright falsehood is pushed, and it grows. It becomes a collective belief in the online world. It becomes an SEO Myth, like the ones below:

#1: Outing Companies is Okay

I’m just going to come out with this one. There’ve been a slew of companies being “outed” for shoddy optimization practices. I’m not sure why this has been happening with such fervor, but it most definitely has. However, there is no other industry that we’re aware of where it’s an accepted practice, so why is it okay in SEO?

The argument is, “Well, we want to take the high road.” Very good. So, then, take the high road, do your job, and do it well. If you see shoddy practices and want to speak up, why aren’t you speaking out about the optimization company performing the practices, instead of the clients?

Now, if someone asks you, that’s one thing. You can say, “In our professional opinion, this isn’t a practice we should be encouraging, and isn’t one we offer. You’ll have to go somewhere else for this and, no, we don’t have a referral.” If someone asks you about an optimization company and you have firsthand experience, you can say, “In my experience, this company…”

The only time we’ve ever spoken out against a company was when they hurt one of our clients before they came to us. One instance that comes to mind is a design company changing the “author” meta tags to their brand name. Not exactly a positive thing in my book, and, at that point, we had an obligation to the client to let them know what we saw.

#2: Buying Links is Okay

This takes us to link building with paid links (which is what a lot of companies were outed for). The practice of buying links isn’t necessarily bad, but it does depend on several factors, which is where the myth comes in. From the horse’s mouth (Google): “Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.”
The problem isn’t buying links; the problem is how, and what you’re buying the links for. Here’s the real deal on buying links and link building:

When you hire someone to develop thousands of links for your site, you have to be careful how they plan to build those links. Links developed for ranking should be:
• Relevant to the page the link is on (i.e. if the page the link is on is about red widgets, it needs to link to a page on your site about widgets).
• Relevant to the page being linked to (i.e. if the link is about widgets, the page needs to be relevant to widgets).
• On a quality site/good source (i.e. a link on a porn site to your widgets, unless you’re running porn-based widgets, isn’t advisable).
• Not an obvious advertisement (i.e. not in the sidebar or footer, but in the actual content, such as a blog post).

If you’re developing links for advertising purposes, you can buy them straight out. However, it’s best to make sure they’re no followed, in order to decrease the risk of penalization.

#3: SEOs Are All Snake Oil

We have several clients that will whole-heartedly disagree with this. However, we have several potential clients that believe this myth. Why? Because they’ve been burned, so experience has taught them that SEO is a scam.

It’s not, anymore than insurance is a scam. Yet, insurance is an industry with a bad reputation, due to how easy it is to manipulate. SEO is much the same.
How do you make sure your chosen optimization company or professional SEO expert isn’t skewed? Well, there are a few warning signs, and a few steps you can take (longer blog later):

Step: Go to the industry experts, even if you can’t afford them. Let them know you’re considering such and such a company, and ask if they’ve heard anything negative about them. Many are willing to share what information they have with you, because we all want the industry to shine.

Step: Find non-big brand companies ranking high and ask them who they would recommend for optimization. This is a hit/miss type of checking, but worth the extra time. SEO is expensive; finding a legitimate company is well worth the time spent.

Warning sign: The optimizer tries to push high traffic, non-relevant words on you. You know how you want to represent your business. An optimizer is part marketer; they should be always be keeping your brand in mind, and know it’s not about traffic, but quality traffic.
Warning sign: Read the fine print. If it talks about adding a link back to their site, ditch them. This is free advertising for them, and “SEO Services by….” is a warning sign to the search engines that your site has been manipulated. A good SEO company doesn’t need to advertise on client sites.

#4: SEO is Dead

Yes, this rumor is still alive and kicking. You’d think the myth itself would have long died out, but it hasn’t. SEO isn’t dead; it isn’t even on its last legs. It does, however, have a shady reputation with a lot of people, thanks to the overwhelming idea that optimization and spam are the same thing.
They aren’t. Optimization is nothing more than an extension of Internet Marketing as a whole. Done correctly, it helps your site perform better for people first, and then search engines. It helps increase your click-through-rate (CTR) from the SERPs via marketable descriptions/title. It helps increase your conversion rate on the page and connect all the dots you have lying around with steel cables.

Yes, indeed. While it’s true that the practice of SEO is evolving, it is far from dead.

Let’s lay these myths to rest, once and for all. If you’re an optimizer, don’t act as if SEO is a voodoo ritual. If you’re a business owner who has hired a legitimate optimization company, share. The only way the myths will stop building is through transparency and ethical use of the skills we have.

This post`s author - Gabriella Sannino

Level343 CEO - Gabriella Sannino

Gabriella Sannino is an Italian firecracker. She grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. As a child, she spent time in Italy, Lebanon, Crete and Greece (among other places), pinning more and more languages to her profile wall. Among those Arabic, French and yes, the kraut language a.k.a. German, too. By the time she reached college age, she’d learned to speak five languages fluently, and understand a few more. I once saw her chatting to an Orangutang about Nietzsche, so communicating skills as well as will to convey any message in a friendly way are paramount to my dear friend.

The Company:
Since its debut (2005) Level343 has shown to be a bustling, growing business. It was a monday morning when it opened its doors decided to conquer a market which was literally aching for professional hand holding when it comes to search engine friendly and yet informational content. Gabriella uses her real world experiences to help clients gain a foothold and keep it in the competitive online marketplace. She runs Level343 with an iron fist, quick wit and a notepad. Lists are her friend.

Barry Adams - SEO e consultor em marketing de busca para sites de notícias

Search and Online-News: Barry Adams Speaks his Mind

São Paulo, March 13th 2012 – via Skype - 

Notícias online e search: Barry Adams abre o jogo (Brazilian Portuguese Version)

Computerklaus: I`m sure you read the recent happening between the German News-Industry and Google News, whats your comment about that?

Barry Adams: I understand both sides of the story. As someone who’s worked on the publisher’s side of things, I can see how a perception of content ‘theft’ can arise, when publishers see how Google uses its content to feed into its own search results. But at the same time, publishers are not entirely up to date on the sensitivities of the internet and how content distribution works. I think publishers should instead welcome the ‘free’ traffic Google News and similar sources sends to their site, and try to monetize other channels such as specialized news & background stories.

Computerklaus: But what’s the downside of getting Google News generated traffic? According to German publishers, folks enter GN, look at the headlines and get out without clicking? do you think there’s such a user, who enters GN without the intention to click?

Barry Adams: I think the actual Google News portal isn’t used all that much, comparatively, and publishers who focus on that aspect of Google’s traffic are missing the big picture. The inclusion of news stories as universal search elements on regular organic search results, that’s where the real power of Google News lies, and smart online publishers such as the Daily Mail have been very good at capitalizing on that.

Barry Adams: Also, I think publishers should embrace Google News, both in its vertical flavour and as a universal search element, as a potential huge source of basically free traffic. Publishers can profit from Google News more than Google profits from including it.

Computerklaus: And the traffic generated at GN. since it’s little used, doesn’t that mean that`s high quality visitors? I mean the so called “influencers”.

Barry Adams: I would agree that traffic from Google News enjoys a high bounce rate – higher than, say, people who type in a news site’s URL to get their daily news fix – but again dismissing this traffic as useless is missing the point. That traffic basically represents free impressions for your advertisers, and with smart design and targeting you can keep them on your site for much longer than that single page visit. The problem is that most news sites are unwilling to explore those avenues, and seem to only want internet visitors if it is done on their terms.
Also, the potential of retargeting off the back of that single news visit is enormous, and advertisers are willing to pay for that.

Computerklaus: About syndication. You say publishers should explore others sources as well and keep GN open (unblocking the bot) So, basically what publishers do when they block the GN-bot is admitting “we are incompetent and do not have any resources to widen our audience”?

Barry Adams: Pretty much, yes. I’ve seen regional news publishers throw up a country-level paywall – visitors from the local country have full free access, but visitors from abroad need to pay – and I think that is again an example of spectacularly missing the point. If you as a publisher are incapable of monetizing a certain type of traffic, that is not that traffic’s fault – that is your own failing as a publisher.

Computerklaus: About both syndication and original-source Meta-Tags, have you seen them being adopted in the news industry? are those Meta-Tags suitable to REALLY make a difference?

Barry Adams: Original source Meta-Tags, I have seen them adopted by a few news sites, but the jury is still out on whether it’s effective at all. Google has gotten better at ranking original publishers anyway – before the original source tags – so I don’t think these new meta tags have had such a big impact. I think more than anything they’ve served as warnings and discouragement to content scrapers.

Computerklaus: FYI Brazil`s News Paper Association has adopted this GN-Bot blocking policy since November 2010.

Barry Adams: I’d love to see their web analytics from that period onwards. I can imagine their traffic graph looks like the cliffs of Dover.

Computerklaus: Oh! awesome. You should attend one of their meetings. It goes like (according to a trusted source), “we have grown 10%” – when they really dropped 30%.

Barry Adams: We saw it with the Times here in the UK. Their online market-share fell down a hole, and i think that as a news publisher you should want to get your message – your side of the story combined with your advertisers – out there to as many people as possible. A paywall does the exact opposite, and basically ensures you end up with a self-selected, insular audience that already bought in to your message.

Especially here in the UK where newspapers are openly partisan and promote their preferred political ideologies.

Computerklaus: A few years ago, publishers and advertisers killed the CTR for ads as for an acceptable or relevant metric, now do you thing the might be moving towards the murder of impressions? what’s the metric they should look at?

Barry Adams: I think impressions should still be the king of ad metrics, at least on publisher websites. There’s a lot of research suggesting that the presence of advertising for a specific brand – even if no one clicks on it – results in a positive brand image for people who have been exposed to that advertising. The subconscious impact of advertising is rather huge, and represents a value that most advertisers – and publishers – have not yet tapped in to.

Computerklaus: They look mesmerized by Facebook likes – you thing this metric is of any relevance to news?

Barry Adams: Also, I think a lot of advertisers have been lazy, doing the same old type of advertising over and over. More advertisers need to be clever and embrace interactive advertising, which – especially when combined with social media – can make your brand stand out much more.

Likes can be bought, so I wouldn’t focus too much on them. Facebook does provide other metrics such as reach and interaction, and I think those are much more useful, as well as a more accurate representation of your presence on Facebook.

SEO in the news room

Computerklaus: Have you trained news room pros in search engine friendly copy writing?

Barry Adams: I haven’t unfortunately, though I know other news organizations have done so. To be honest I’m a bit ambiguous of this approach. I’m more in favour of the set up we had at the Belfast Telegraph where the journalists write in their usual fashion, and a small team of online editors then adapted the print content for online publishing, complete with SEO’d headlines and internal linking.

Part of my remit was to keep these online editors up to date on all the latest Google algo changes and other technologies that could impact the online visibility of the site.

Computerklaus: I`m careful with this approach too, but remember it is not about teaching those folks how to write – if one had to do so, they would be at the wrong job, it is more about showing them how readers search.

Barry Adams: Agreed, we need to approach journalists carefully and make sure they know we appreciate and admire their craft. It’s more about making sure they understand the potential of search, and what they can do to help their publisher on that front.

Computerklaus: And it is, in my point of view, not for reporters but for editors.

Barry Adams: Exactly.

Computerklaus: Nothing worse than sitting down to write w a bunch of kw to look at. It messes up the whole text.

Barry Adams: Although the Daily Mail has a team of ‘journalists’ (I use the term loosely there) who do exactly that, and I suppose it works for them.

Computerklaus: Do you still read printed media?

Barry Adams: Yes, though much less than before. I have a few magazine subscriptions, but I’d say 95% of my written media consumption happens online.

Whenever I read a good magazine article in print, I often find myself wishing I could leave a public comment on it. Printed media doesn’t allow for this…. yet. :)

Computerklaus: How do you see cross-media efforts happening? Trying to drive audience from a printed to the online. It’s though to measure those efforts’ success, not?

Barry Adams: I think many media organizations are desperately trying to push people back to print, which is a bit like people laying roads only wanting horse & carts to make use of it. I think a much better strategy would be to embrace online and see what aspects of it you can make profitable. To be honest I see hints of a new model for publishing that combines the best of print & online, in the form of tablets & smart e-paper. Instantly updated and interactive news. I’d pay for that. (In fact, I already pay for it: Wired’s iPad app is a great example).

Computerklaus: Now for a technical issue. Google News is not, as far as I know, SSL encrypted, does it m ean that, when a news slot is exhibited at the universal SERP that click will have its KW recorded? it would kinda put a BIG CHERRY on the top of Google News as far as a traffic source, not?

Barry Adams: If a regular search results includes a News element, and that regular search is encrypted, than when the user clicks on the news result the publisher will see a (not provided).
So alas, Google news is not a method of avoiding SSL search. Only clicks from Google News’s vertical portal are, as of yet, immune to SSL search. Not sure that will last, however. And when Google rolls out SSL for Google News vertical, there will be a huge controversy. Which is probably why they haven’t done it yet.

Computerklaus: How reliable you think that the googlenewsraningfactors.com information is? looks pretty much like a hype a GO GOOGLE effort, not?

Barry Adams: I think it’s about as reliable as any piece of SEO information out there. Which means it’s just another set of best guesses, speculation, derivative information, and maybe’s.

I wrote an article about Google News ranking factors back in 2010, and now half of that stuff is already outdated.

Computerklaus: Barry, concerning the above fold ads. How you think news sites will be impacted by it, if not already?

Barry Adams: I haven’t yet seen any big impacts of that algo change, but I do think news sites need to take heed. Many news sites are plastering ads all over the place in their efforts to make money off of their content (again they’re missing the point), and it really hurts the usability of their website. More ads is not the answer, and I think that’s the point Google is trying to make.

I’ve even see the return of the much-hated in-text ads: automatically generated links on keywords in the text that pop up the moment you hover over it with a mouse. Disastrously bad.

Computerklaus: Have you seen iniciatives such as “my advertiser goes where my piece goes” taking sponsores along with syndicated content. Is this idea any good?

Barry Adams: Yup, seen it on a few occasions. In principle I don’t have a problem with sponsored content or sponsored sections, as long as news publishers are careful not to have their editorial agendas set by their advertisers. Also, cheap (low quality) content doesn’t do anyone any favours. As a publisher it cheapens your brand and reputation, and it doesn’t provide much financial benefit either.
I would recommend publishers note sponsored content as such – a little disclaimer at the top of an article suffices – and readers will be grateful.
We all understand news sites need to make money somehow, but deceiving your readers is not the right way of doing that.

Computerklaus: Google News is about to complete its 10th year since entering beta, can you point out two changes it made and you saw with good or really bad eyes?

Barry Adams: Well…

Computerklaus: …and two you`d love to see happening.

Barry Adams: Resuming, GN’s recent advanced personalization has, for me as a user, been very beneficial – I can now tell GN to keep the crappy tabloids out of my news feeds, which has done wonders for my general mood. :)

Also the moment GN started feeding in to the regular search as a universal element, that was HUGE for publishers. I think they don’t appreciate that Google didn’t HAVE to do that, but it did, and in doing so did publishers an enormous favour.

I’d like to see GN’s feeding in to regular search be a little more intelligent – right now it’s more or less a simplistic keyword matching algo – and thus take the wind out of the sails of some of the low quality tabloid that capitalize on trending topics without adding any news value. I’d also like GN to purposefully include opposite vierwpoints compared to the one I favour – I’m a left-wing kind of guy, but I’m a little wary of the Filter Bubble as described by Eli Pariser, and I’d like to see Google help burst that bubble.
A final thought: Google News as a bit of a bastard child right up until Google decided to include it in universal search, and that made it a Really Big Deal. Publishers should thank Google for the chance to get their content in front of the wider audience, and should be smart about finding ways to monetize it.

Journalists and bloggers

Computerklaus: In the US, bloggers have recently been given the same status as journalists any comment?

Barry Adams: I think it’s great, to be honest. I don’t think one needs a journalism degree to be able to report on news and investigate issues, so I think expanding the protection of journalists to all online publishers – regardless of affiliations with news organizations – is a good thing. It opens up the inline discourse even more, and while I don’t think it puts bloggers on an equal footing with journalists in all aspects, it does help with the credibility of online-only media.

The line between blogger and journalist is often a blurry one anyway, nowadays.

Computerklaus: And you think they will be held responsible for what they write down, I see this change of status being pretty much for that matter. In Brazil you could easily sue a journo or a paper… but not a blogger.

Barry Adams: I think bloggers get called out for writing disinformation just as often – if not more often – than regular journalists. A blog usually has a comment functionality, and if a blogger publishes untruths, very often the comment section will fill up with criticism quite easily.

I don’t think either should be sued at all, except in extreme cases. Freedom of speech is pretty important in my book, and libel & slander laws should not be used to silence criticism.

Instead the criticized should fight back with reasoned arguments and engage in public discourse.

Barry Adams - SEO e consultor em marketing de busca para sites de notíciasBarry Adams is the Senior Digital Marketer for Search at Pierce Communications in Belfast, where he provides online marketing services for a wide range of clients across Ireland and the UK. Barry specialises in search engine optimisation (SEO) and is well-known in the wider UK SEO community through the blogs he contributes to (State of Search and Search News Central), his activities on the UK SEO conference circuit, and his prolific twittering.
Prior to moving to Northern Ireland from the Netherlands, Barry worked as a web consultant for SMEs and corporate webmaster for large multinationals Honeywell and Philips. Before joining Pierce Communications, Barry provided SEO and digital marketing consultancy services to the Northern Irish properties of the Independent News & Media group: the Belfast Telegraph, nijobfinder.co.uk, nicarfinder.co.uk, and Propertynews.com

Former googlers set up world wide search-alliance

São Paulo, Brazil -  A search marketing professionals network, build by ten former Ireland-based googlers makes its  debut on the web today. SEO and Google Advertising focused offices located in Spain, Germany, Brazil, France and Austria launch the  SearchQualityAlliance.com-Team. They will share Seo best practices and information among associated offices spread those countries, all managed by former search quality googlers.

Computerklaus interviews Michael Martinez

This article is also available in Brazilian Portuguese: Entrevista com Michael Martinez sobre SEO e Jornalismo

CK:  How is a traditional training program for news rooms build? Which has been your greatest satisfaction training journalists (if you ever did such a job) and your biggest disappointment after being in this industry for years?

M.M.: I have only trained one journalist in search engine marketing. I hired him to be the editor for a news Website. I needed the site to publish occasional legitimate news articles for clients. The only guidance I gave him was to set an editorial policy, to adhere strictly to that policy, and to develop the site’s content as he saw fit. When clients pressed me to have their content included on the site I insisted that he make a decision as an editor, not as my employee. After he rejected a few stories people began to understand he was only interested in publishing news, not propaganda. After that, clients only submitted real news to him. (I should note that the majority of the site’s content, more than 95% of all articles, had nothing to do with clients.)

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