Search lately issue 128

ISSUE 128 – 20th MARCH 2014

Bing Ads Relaxing Normalization

Editor

Constraints

around

Keyword

This week, Bing Ads announced that based on advertiser feedback, they are taking a phased approach to relaxing constraints around normalization when adding keywords to your Bing Ads campaigns. There will be no change to how keyword normalization will work when matching keywords to user queries. The new process is available on both Bing Ads Editor and the Bing Ads Bulk Upload API. However, the new process is not yet available through the Bing Ads web user interface (UI). This limitation is only for the addition of keywords to ad groups. You will, however, be able to modify the bid and match types of these keywords from the web UI once the keywords are in the account. In addition, Bing Ads plans to relax normalization constraints in our Bing Ads Web UI in the very near future.

Shared By James Lin Follow the link for more details: http://bit.ly/1kID3ep

Google penalises large 'guest post blog network' Google has taken action against "a large guest blog network", a couple of months after the web giant's head of search Matt Cutts warned against continuing to deploy the strategy for link building in 2014.

Although Cutts didn't reveal the name of the 'offending' site in his tweet announcing the penalty, MyGuestBlog's Ann Smarty subsequently confirmed it was her network being penalized in a post on her own Twitter page.

Cutts' original blog post, published in January, warned that although the practice was once "respectable", it's now been overdone and should not be relied upon as part of an SEO link building strategy.

However, he also muddied the waters a little by proclaiming that guest posting is still acceptable for "exposure, branding, increased reach [and] community".

With supporters of MyGuestBlog rallying around the network with Twitter hashtags such as #isupportmyblogguest and #GoodGuestBlog, the industry consensus is that MyGuestBlog has been penalized to set an "example" – and serve as a warning to any SEO practitioner still relying on guest blogging to skew rankings.

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http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2335246/Google-Penalizes-MyBlogGuest-aGuest-Blog-Network Shared by: Rick Martin Read more information: http://bit.ly/Kzh8sp

SEO: Dead or Alive?

The question keeps coming back almost every year with statements like ‘SEO is dead or at least is now completely different thing than was before’ appear quite frequently in various articles trying to describe current and future trends in digital marketing.

The truth is that SEO, standing for Search Engine Optimisation is not dead and will not die until the day that search engines can no longer drive significant traffic to websites, which won’t be for a long, long time – if ever.

Regarding the alleged changes in SEO essence and nature, the only thing that has changed about SEO is that search engines (especially Google) are getting better at enforcing their own rules. From the point of view of all those ‘grey and/or black hats’ optimisers focused just on ‘how to cheat Google’ - yes – SEO is dead.

But for genuine marketers search engine optimisation still remains an important part of the digital marketing landscape, and the path to long term success is relatively the same as it always been.

The fundamentals of SEO are still important and when executed properly, will still yield expected results. Below is a list of few of them, which remained basically unchanged: Keyword Research Keyword research is still the same exercise in human behaviour modelling and understanding how people are using language to search. Only the data sources have slightly changed and people are more aware of the importance of long-tail keywords.

Technical Issues In order to improve our site performance in search engine results we still have to address issues like duplicate content, cryptic and messy URL structure, excessive use of Flash, AJAX and Java Scripts or submit properly structured XML sitemap to Google.

None of these things has changed that significantly enough over the last few years that they would make one say SEO is a completely new exercise compared to what it used to be.

Ongoing Performance Analysis

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Certainly the case can be made that recent changes with keyword "(not provided)" has impacted ability to measure SEO performance. No one can argue that. But ultimately the exercise of SEO performance analysis still has the same goals: -

Identify the state of your site's performance.

Compare that with historical performance to understand whether you're improving.

Identify and improve low performing pages.

Eliminate any technical issues that may be impeding performance.

Use data to identify new ranking opportunities.

Link Building There are claims around saying that Penguin completely changed SEO forever, but the truth is that what it actually did do was make it so that everyone has to do link building that adheres to best practices. Links are supposed to be a vote of relevancy based on the strength of the content that they link to. Those who were doing link building the right way for years had to change anything as a result of Penguin updates. What Penguin did was eliminate the value of low-quality links that never should have counted anyway.

What has changed?

If we look at all of the activities listed above, it starts to become clear that while the tactics have evolved a little, the core strategic activities and the goals of those activities remain largely unchanged. All search engines want to rank the most relevant resource for any given keyword at the top of their results page. Doing so keeps users coming back, which makes search engines money. Thus search engines reward excellent content with high rankings.

A big part of that ranking comes from consistently producing relevant content that is of superior value to users and differentiates you from everyone else who wants that same number one ranking and nothing about that has changed since the days of AltaVista, Hotbot, and Lycos.

What has changed over time is that search engines have gotten better at eliminating false signals of relevancy and quality. SEO is going to be here for the foreseeable future. It still produces an excellent ROI and improves user experience - if done correctly.

Shared by: Artur Kozdrowski Read more: http://bit.ly/1oA8rgK

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