Google announced Search Removal Request Form

Following the European Union "Right to be Forgotten" court ruling, Google has now launched a new form to allow people to submit removal requests to the search engine.

The form launched Friday and supposedly spurred 12,000 requests. Users in all 28 European Union countries, as well as four extra non-EU countries, can now request removals from search results.

The form requires that those who submit the form submit a valid form of photo ID to complete the request. It does, however, allow users to request removals for others, provided they are acting for that person, such as a spouse or lawyer.

To submit a request, you need to contain the full name for the person you are requesting search results to be removed, your own name (if different) as well as the relationship to the person you are submitting the form for and a contact email address. Google also said you must:

(a) Provide the URL for each link appearing in a Google search for your name that you request to be removed. (The URL can be taken from your browser bar after clicking on the search result in question).

(b) clarify, if not clear, why the linked page is about you (or, if you are submitting this form on behalf of someone else, the person named above).

(c) Explain how this URL in search results is immaterial, outdated, or otherwise wrong.
The form defaults to only submit a single URL for removal but you can add added as needed, but Google requests an explanation for each one.

Google also seems to recognize the option that there could be fake removals from people attempting to damage competitors. They hope that the requested information will avoid people from impersonating others, or from those trying to attempt to stifle legal information.

It is attractive though that the identification does not need to be a government issued ID or passport. Users can also vague the identifying numbers from the identification and Google will wipe out their copy within a month of the removal requests being closed.

Why there are four non-EU countries is a mystery, other than they are physically close to the UE. The four countries include Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

There is no announced timeline for how long Google will take to take action on the submitted "Right to be Forgotten" requests.

"Almost a third of the requests were in relation to accusations of fraud, 20 per cent were in relation to violent/serious crimes, and around 12 per cent regarded child pornography arrests,"

 The Telegraph reported. "More than 1,500 of these requests are believed to have come from people in the UK. An ex-politician seeking re-election, a paedophile and a GP were among the British applicants."

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Importance of H1 Tag in SEO

 As search engine algorithms continue to evolve a range of elements, both on and off page, experience shifts in their import as a ranking factor. Elements that were once significant ranking factors have lost some of their power on search engine performance in the modern day landscape. Moreover, as more and more new ranking factors are introduced, the impact of any one factor is reduced.

The H1 tag has long been an example of an important ranking factor and important signal to search engines as to what a page of content is about. The proportion of the H1’s authority on rankings compared to the overall picture has diminished over time, but is still an important ranking factor to many of the top minds in the SEO industry. This is illustrated by Moz’s bi-yearly survey on search engine ranking factors. 

Based on the opinions of 120 leading search marketers, the latest survey (conducted in 2013) ranked page authority as the most important ranking factor with a relative score of 0.39. Keyword usage in the H1 tag received a score of 0.12. This places the H1 tag in the bottom half of ranking factors, but nonetheless still a factor.

H1 Effect on Other Ranking Factors

While keyword fame is still an important ranking factor, whether it is within the H1 or simply highlighted at the top of the page, there is another level to the consequence of the H1 tag on organic search performance. A page’s skill to effectively engage users is another way Google organizes its search results. The bounce rate is arguably the most significant engagement metric as calculated by Google’s algorithm. Technology reporter Steven Levy was granted access to Google’s headquarters for his book In the Plex.

 According to the book, Google’s engineers recognized bounce rates of search results as a signal of quality or lack thereof. If a search engine user does not return to a search results page after clicking on an individual result, this is the strongest signal to Google that the user was happy with the result. instead, if a user quickly returned to a search engine results page after clicking a result, the page will be identified to be a poor result and can therefore be demoted in rankings.

The Hummingbird viewpoint

The Google Hummingbird algorithm update, which aims to offer a positive user experience, opens up a great opportunity for optimizing an H1 tag. A key feature of the Hummingbird algorithm is Google’s drive and ability to look past the keywords in a search query and pull out the user’s intent. By understanding the search intent behind a target keyword query, an H1 can be crafted to speak directly to that intent. If Google agrees with your interpretation of the user’s intent and it is effectively communicated in the H1 tag, this can certainly lead to a ranking promotion.

In order to position a content piece as an answer to a user’s query, it is good practice to format the H1 tag as a question, and answer that question in the body of the page. Since the launch of Hummingbird, I have taken note of an influx of top search results containing a question in the H1 tag. Although this is not a scientific observation, it is reinforced by Google’s knowledge graph returning a question based on a short-tail search query, such as “allergy symptoms”.

 In order to have some great, Hummingbird-optimized H1 tags, try to understand what a user may be asking when they are searching for a keyword the page is targeting and format that question on the page with H1 tags.

All in all, when focusing on on-page optimization in 2014, it is absolutely still valuable to spend some time and thought on the H1 tag. With an H1 optimized for the 2014 SEO landscape, you will be providing a positive experience to your users and still receiving the added advantage of improved positioning in search engine results.

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SEO changes 2014

SEO (still) isn't dead and won't be until the day that search engines can no longer drive important traffic to websites .

Search engine optimization residue an important part of the digital marketing landscape, and the path to long term achievement is relatively the same as it has always been.

Common SEO Campaign Activities

The basic essentials of SEO are still important and if done correctly, will still yield favorable results. Here are some SEO basics that have remained relatively unchanged (note this list isn't intended to be comprehensive):

Keyword Research

Not much here has changed apart from the tactics of how you go about understanding which words are being used by your audience to search for your products, services, or content.

Keyword research is still the same exercise in human behavior modeling and thoughtful how people are using language to search. Only the data sources have slightly changed and people are more aware of the significance of long-tail keywords.

Internal Link arrangement

People often say that PageRank is dead. However I invite you to attempt to rank a page for any significant keyword with zero internal links pointing at it and see how far you get.

I don't advocate obsessing over toolbar PageRank, but accepting how PageRank works and how that affects your site's internal link structure will help you rank in any search engine, not just Google.

Ongoing Performance Analysis

Certainly the case can be made that recent changes with keyword "(not provided)" has impacted our capability to measure SEO performance. No one can argue that.

All of these actions are still as important today as they have ever been, albeit more difficult because of the lack of keyword referral data.

Link Building & Content Marketing

I hear people say that Penguin completely changed SEO forever. I disagree. What it did do was make it so that everyonehas to do link building that adheres to most excellent practices.

Links are supposed to be a vote of relevancy based on the power of the content that they link to. Many people have been doing SEO for years the right way and never had to change anything as a result of these updates. What Penguin did was abolish the value of low-quality links that never should have counted anyway.

In terms of acquiring links, people talk about content marketing like it is some new thing. Content marketing was here before the Internet and has been doing well ever since.

What Has Changed?

All search engines want to rank the most related 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 outstanding content with high rankings.

If you want to be the most applicable resource for a scrupulous keyword, you have to provide the content, and finally the supporting business model, that justifies your company's website having that ranking.

Conclusion

The next time someone tries to tell you that SEO is dead or that SEO is totally changed, take it with a grain of salt.

My advice is to disregard all of that chatter, get back to SEO basics, produce great content that is related to your audience about the keywords that you're targeting, build links by marketing that content to the right audience, analyze your show, and adjust thus.

SEO is going to be here for the foreseeable future. It still produces an outstanding ROI and improves user experience, if done correctly.

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Link building techniques in 2014

 Most importantly, and contrary to what you may have heard, link building is far from dead. Many of the "link building is dead" theories are ingrained in wishful thinking and/or fear. The fear is real and understandable as the Penguin update at last delivered on Google's long running promise to severely penalize websites engaged in manipulative link schemes.

The Google Reaper

Some have fulfilled that the best and safest response to Penguin is to stop link building altogether. That's a bad idea.

Here's a reality check: the best way to recover visibility in the SERPs, in 2014, is still link building. Links are still believed to be the most significant part of the algorithm, according to the most recent Moz search engine ranking factors survey.

The main takeaway is this: Link building is still the key to more visibility in organic search. If your purpose is to improve visibility in organic search, then invest in resources accordingly. Social media and authorship may  impact the SERPs at some point in the future, but not today and maybe not significantly in 2014.

Relevance is the New PageRank

The growth of the original 1 link = 1 vote algorithm took a quantum leap forward in May 2012 with the introduction of the Knowledge Graph, which is used by Google to deliver search results with semantic-search information. This information is gathered from a wide variety of sources, using more than 500 million objects and 3.5 billion details. In Googlespeak, the Knowledge Graph is about "things, not strings."

It's quite credible that Knowledge Graph is baked into Hummingbird, the latest Google algorithm. Assuming that's the case, then a connection between "context, not anchor text" and "things not strings" is applicable. Relevance is the new PageRank when searching for linking opportunities.

A real life example could look something like this: Pre-Hummingbird, a search for car covers might yield results crack among auto accessories to protect your car, tribute bands that cover the classic rock group "The Cars" and songs enclosed by Ric Ocasek and the cars. The "old" algo couldn't distinguish one car cover from another. Hummingbird, on the other hand knows the difference. Now, all of those auto parts links coming from high PR band sites, are now showing for what they really are: unnatural. At best the link is devalued. At worst it triggers a physical review.

Link Schemes vs. Link Building

Understanding the variation between link scheming and link building is critically significant in 2014. For webmasters who were doing SEO before Panda, this can be particularly difficult to navigate.

Many have been directly impacted by the Google paradox. Unlike the Einstein theory of insanity, in the Google Paradox, SERPs really do yield different results after doing the same thing (spammy link building) over and over again.
A link scheme that scored number one rankings in 2010 can and will draw a manual or algorithmic punishment, today. That paradox has driven many a webmaster nuts!
According to Google, the following actions are link scheming – not link building:
 

•    Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
 

•    Using automatic programs or services to create links to your site
 

•    Linking to a site for the sole purpose of getting a link back
 

•    Building a link networking for the point of linking
 

•    Large-scale article marketing or guest posting using keyword-rich anchor text
 

•    Buying advertorials or articles that include links that pass PageRank
 

•    Creating & Distributing Press releases with optimized anchor text
lately removed from the guidelines, but still likely to trigger a penalty:
 

•    Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
 

•    Links that are inserted into articles with little coherence
 

 Secure Ways to Build Links in 2014

 
 •    Focus external link building efforts on the gaining of editorially given links. These are links requiring human interference and approval.
 

•    Build links that are relevant – on pages where the readers would have a genuine attention in your website.
 

•    Quality trumps quantity. A few links from high trust/authority websites will have more crash than hundreds of links from "Made for Guest Posting" blogs.

There are no more short cuts to link building. The process is hard and time intense. In 2014, it's time to spend the time and the money to do it right so you can stop fearing the Google reaper.

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Most important Google Changes expose the expectations of SEO

 Google is doing a brilliant job of pushing people away from planned SEO behavior and toward a more planned approach.

Here's a look at the major developments, some of Google's initiatives driving this change, and the overall impact these changes will have on SEO.

1. '(Not Provided)'

Google made the move to make all organic searches secure early September 23. This means we've lost the capability to get keyword data for users arriving to our websites from Google search.

Losing Google keyword data is sad for a number of reasons. These impacts publishers in many ways, including losing a valuable tool for understanding what the intent of customers that come to their site, for change optimization, and much more.
For planned SEO efforts, it just means that keywords data is harder to come by. There are ways to work around this, for now, but it just won't be quite as simple as it used to be.
 

2. No Page Rank Update Since February

Google has updated the PageRank numbers shown in the Google Toolbar every 3 months ago or so, but those numbers haven't been updated while February. This means 8 months have gone by, or two updates have been skipped.
In addition, Google's famous Engineer Matt Cutts has said Toolbar PageRank won't be updated again this year, most important many to speculate that PageRank is going away. I won't miss it because I don't look at PageRank often and I normally don't have a Google toolbar in my browser.

3. Hummingbird

There are a small number of elements to Google's Hummingbird algorithm, announced in time for Google's official birthday, but like Caffeine before it, this is really a major platform transform. Google has built a capability to understand conversational search queries much better than before.

For example, submit a query to Google such as "show me pictures of Fenway Park", and it does:

Then you can chase that query with this one: "who plays there", and you get this result:

Both of these show conversational search at work .Hummingbird really changes the keyword game rather a bit. Over time, exact keyword matches will no longer be such a big deal.
 

4. Google+

While it seemed to get off to a slow start at first, many argue that it has developed a lot of momentum, and is growing quickly. The data on Google+'s market share is pretty hard to parse, but there are some clear impacts on search, such as the display of modified results:

In addition, you can also see posts from people on Google+ show up in the results too. This is true even if you do your search in "incognito" mode:

And, while I firmly consider that a link in a Google+ share isn't treated like a regular web link, it seems likely to me that it does have some SEO value when joint with other factors.

How Google+ fits into this picture is that it was built from the ground up to be a content sharing network that helps with establishing "identities" and "semantic relevance". It does this quite well, and in spite of what you might read in some places, there is a ton of action in all kinds of different verticals on Google+.

5. Authorship

OK, authorship also isn't new but it is a part of a bigger picture. Google can use this to connect new pieces of content with the person who wrote it.
Over time, this data can be potentially used to measure which authors write substance that draw a very strong response (links, social shares, +1s, comments) and give them a higher "Author Rank".

We won't look into into the specifics of how Author Rank might work now, but you can read "Want to Rank in Google? Build Your Author Rank Now" for my thoughts on ways they could look at that.

That said, in the future you can imagine that Google could use this as a ranking signal for queries where more complete articles are likely to be a good response. Bottom line: your personal authority matters.

I also should mention Publisher Rank, the concept of building a site's authority, which is perhaps more important. Getting this payoff depends on a holistic approach to building your authority.

6. In-Depth Articles

The Google announcement included a statement that "up to 10% of users' daily information needs engage learning about a broad topic." That is a pretty big number, and I think over time that this characteristic will become a pretty big deal. Effectively, this is an entirely new type of way to rank in the SERPs.

This increases the payoff from Author Rank and Publisher Rank – there is a lot to be gained by developing both of these, assuming that Google actually does make it a ranking factor at some point. Note that I wrote some thoughts on how the role of in-depth articles could evolve.

The focus now is on accepting your target users, producing great content, establishing your authority and visibility, and given that a great experience for the users of your site. Properly architecting your site so that the search engines can understand it, including using schema and related markup, addressing local search , and work of this type still matters, too.

But, the obsession with tactical items like PageRank and keywords is going to weaken away. As Google tweaks the way their service operates, and look for ways to capture new signals, they do things that of course push you in that direction. It isn't going to stop. Expect more of the same going forward.

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Stimulate Your Inventiveness In SEO

Increasingly, the only type of links worth going after are top quality links. However, these are hard to get; your content and pitch must be top notch. To produce top notch work, you need to get inventive, but there is a world of difference between using a inspired technique and being really creative.

How do you get inspired? Say you were writing an article on the subject ‘Creativity in SEO’ and you want to help people be more creative in their work. As a single writer, you might expect to jot down ten ideas on the subject in as many minutes.

Pull in a colleague to brainstorm and you’d likely reach twenty pretty easily, while with a team, you’d get to 50-100 with little attempt. It would then not be a big deal to write an article on ‘57 ways to stimulate creativity in SEO’.

So you’d have an article and a big list, but would you have been creative?

Probably not.

The psychology of such list articles is interesting:

•    They’re easy to scan and read.

•    A number in the title makes it hard to ignore - especially a big one like 57.

•    People who don’t know the topic will be open to learning something.

•    People who do know the subject will be tempted to open just to see if writer knows as much as they do, or if there is authentically new and interesting information within.

•    Some readers might add them to their own ‘to-do-soon’ lists.

We’ve all done such articles several times, but the article format itself is not particularly creative and is unlikely to motivate real creativity. A list of ‘ways to be creative’ is unlikely to have the necessary crash to motivate others to be really creative.

So has the writing exercise then been a waste of time? Again, probably not. If we’ve done a practical job of writing, we may well attract a lot of readers, tweets and shares, and maybe even a bunch of decent quality links.

However, we’re unlikely to reach our objective of helping readers really get creative.

A more inspired approach might be to hone in one particular idea, like ‘think first, link later’. In this approach, you put the bulk of the attempt into creating the idea or the content.

There are a lot of great things about this encouragement and it demonstrates that a lot of thinking went into it before Amazon launched. Here are five great lessons:

 1.    The attempt went into the creation of the idea and accompanying video. The end result was so good that media coverage, social shares and links will almost look after themselves.

2.    Released on Cyber Monday, the story is powerfully seasonal but it doesn’t mention Cyber Monday by name - it gives a story that is relevant to it.

3.    The story did indeed attract major media treatment as is broke together with many social shares - many blog posts will surely follow. From a link building point of view it was a work of brilliance.

4.    The story highlights what will become a core service from the Amazon brand - Prime Air delivery - and even though it hasn't launched yet, the promotion was timed to agree with a holiday shopping need on everyone's mind: shipping.

5.    Finally - and possibly one of the most significant lessons - the video itself did not appear to be a big-budget production. It is of a good standard - but one that most of us could reach with a little practice.

It clearly demonstrates the value of ‘think first, link later’. Also, you can better understand the story’s impact by doing a link analysis over the next few weeks and months.

You can learn a lot about creativity by dissecting ideas like this. They won’t give you 57 ways to do anything. But by carefully dissecting the story and watching how it spreads, you’ll be able to get deep creative insights and motivation.

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SEO For 2014

Search in 2013

This year has brought upon a lot for us to appreciate as marketers. As we close out 2013 algorithmic intelligence is varying faster than ever.
The buzz of 2013 and even more so the last few months has been upon the advancements of the Knowledge Graph, Local Carousel, Google Now, Hummingbird and the big change.
That's not even to point out Penguin and Panda, but those changes are more about what you may have done wrong in the past. We're here to talk about the upcoming.

The Future of SEO

While the "(not provided)" announcement was a slap in the face to SEO professionals, hopefully it has helped you to understand that our intentions shouldn't be so focused so solely or intently on ranking a keyword in search results.

After watching what Google has been doing over the last year or so, where do keywords tie into the above-mentioned rollout features? They each in some way or another tie into local, mobile, or social.

•    Will keywords help you with the Local Carousel? No, closeness and review generation will.
•    How will Google Now push your keyword strategy? It won't, but social efforts will.
•    Do you think that Google will give you a Knowledge Graph box for a keyword and link to your site? If so, you're dreaming.

Add in the Hummingbird update, and all of these changes tell us that Google is moving faster to bringing everything together through the tie-ins of localization and semantic improvements for conversational search, which is accepted on mobile.

SEO Isn't Dead, It's Converging

SEO at its core will never be dead. All of the on-site needs of long ago will remain important in 2014. All of the newer processes of creating informational, enticing, and perceptive content for link building and social digestion are still the hot topic now and will be heading into the future.

My point is that we need to watch the converging of our old silos into the new SERP display. SEO has taken on a converging role with other mediums which impact SERP display.

2014 Will still be Big for SEO?

Sites must be crawled professionally, content must be targeted, and yes we still want to rank where preferred. The focus as we move down the road is more so on what vehicles we use off-site to help drive traffic to our sites.

How we use the earlier discussed pillars alongside their continual convergence by Google will decide how successful your Search Marketing strategy will become.

Fast takeaways:

•    Don't build a local listing. Allow your viewers to help you build a local presence.
•    Don't build a brand. Build a community, a socialized brand, one that can keep your audience in tune with you in coincident.
•    Don't just optimize a site. Optimize an experience for those that are mobile and content hungry.