The Original Post is Located Here: TEST

It’s for that reason that I was not at all surprised to learn of one their most recent algorithm tweaks that penalizes excessive “above-the-fold” advertising on websites. And by penalize, we mean rank lower than more compliant sites in search results. Taking it straight from Google’s very own Matt Cutts at Google’s own blog:

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result…. 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.

Looking at it from Google’s perspective, it’s an update that should deliver higher quality results to the end user. No one like to see a site that’s jam packed with adverts. There’s enough advertising in every day life, without having to stomach it online too. So, what does it mean for webmasters looking to comply and not see their webpages tank in search results? Well, the good news is that this algo-tweak will affect “less than 1%” of searches”, and that websites who use above-the-fold ads “to a normal degree” should not be affected. The only question is what constitutes “normal degree”? First, let’s see what the fold actually is, as defined in this image.

Simple enough, until you consider that different monitors have different screen resolutions, so the fold is not always in the same position for every viewer. How to gauge whether you’re being as compliant as you can? Google has this nifty little tool to help you out!

Enter your URL and Browser Size tool super imposes a selection of browser sizes over your site to help establish what percentage of searchers can see your content without the need to scroll down. Using this tool it’s relatively simple to see whether your on-site adverts would be considered excessive and result in penalization. This is what it looks like when super imposed over IanAinslie.com:

The image shows how many people can typically view areas of your web page. The diagram is calculated from browser height and width information collated at Google.com. For example, the top 600 x 300 pixels can be immediately seen by 99% of users. My sweet-spot is around the 950 x 500 range, where the belly of content is visible to a high percentage of viewers without the need to scroll past adverts to get to the good stuff. How do you think that this site fares? Pretty massive ad slap bang in the centre of the page.

As always, the best strategy is to deliver the best and most relevant quality content. Monetization should always come second to providing a good user experience. This is how you should have been running your site before this algo change and it’s obviously even more important now that Google’s made it official. Adapt or die.

The Original Post is Located Here: Keeping It Above The Fold To Keep Google Happy

As with most things, it’s not quite as simple as that. It’s widely recognized that a site needs backlinks from as many different sites on as many C Class IPs as possible. The big question is how to get those backlinks to your site in sufficient amounts to drive SERP increases. The answer is Private Blog Networks. They tick all the right SEO boxes, allowing network participants to get high quality contextual backlinks from a wide footprint over hundreds of sites. That is until Google got wise and took action earlier this month by de-indexing one of the biggest Private Blog Networks at BuildMyRank.com (BMR) and sending a very strong message to other networks that gaming the algo like this won’t continue to carry as much weight as it once did.

I cottoned on to BMR rather late in the day and started using it in Jan 2012 for a few sites as a test. It didn’t take long to see results in the web-pages that targeted, with sometimes quite dramatic SERP increases that came as a very pleasant surprise. The question now is whether BMR’s very public de-indexing has had an effect on the sites I targeted. The answer is a definite yes. The keywords I targeted with specific anchor text backlinks have dropped. Never good news, to be sure, but the SERP drops are not as bad as some of the stories strewn over the net. I have typically experienced drops of 3-5 positions. This is not the result of my sites being directly slapped, but more the result of the backlinks that propelled the sites upwards having been removed from Google’s index and therefore loosing potency.

Lesson Learned

The essential lesson to take away here is that it is also very important to source links from a wide variety of types as well as IP addresses. Stick to just one method (as I did in the above example and many others did for longer periods of time) and you will pay the price. Mix your backlink types up and when one method becomes less effective you can still maintain your ranking and traffic flow thanks to a solid backlink foundation from article directories, blog comments, forum posting, web 2.0 sites as well as other traffic generation strategies (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest…). Thankfully, this is how I built the backlinks for most of my other sites, so I’m not feeling the crack of Google’s whip. The sites that I did run through BMR will recover as I continue to diversify their respective backlink profiles.

Bottom Line: Always use as many types of backlink as possible.

The Original Post is Located Here: Google Slaps Private Blog Networks

Before totally giving up the ghost and retiring my midi controllers, monitors and misguided belief that I could actually write music, I worked with a very talented guy called Kevin Ingham who goes by the name of Pupilar. We collaborated on a project called Cymophane. This is my favorite track from the CD that we put out on Bandcamp.

Enjoy!

The Original Post is Located Here: SDZH Music