Trademark Productions SEO Web Talk Radio Show

If the Trademark Productions crew learned anything at PubCon Vegas 2012, it’s that Google Authorship is one of the biggest factors in SEO today. That, along with the new Disavow Links tool, is what TM Social Media Manager Michael L. Hoffman and I are discussing in this week’s TM podcast. For those unfamiliar, Google Authorship is the search company’s way of linking an author to the content he or she has published online. Essentially, it creates a link between an author’s Google+ page and the content he or she has produced. It doesn’t just associate an author with his or her content, though, it also lends more legitimacy in the eyes of Google to both the author and the page. There are some people in the SEO realm who fully believe that pages with Google Authorship properly set up will rank higher in search results than those who don’t. There are three primary ways to go through the Authorship process: the three-link method, the two-link method and the email verification method. But before you begin to add the rel=author tag into all your blog posts, you need to set up what Search Engine Land calls a “circuit of verified trust” between an author’s Google+ page and the appropriate content. The first step in establishing this trust is to properly fill out the “Contributor to” section of your Google+ profile. Google+ ‘Contributor to’ section. This is easiest part of setting up Google Authorship. All you have to do is add links in the “Contributor to” under Profile -> About to the different sites or blogs that you write for. It’s that easy. One thing to keep an eye out for, that we encountered here at TM is if your blog is not built on the same platform as the rest of your website, link directly to the blog, not the root domain. If you link to the root domain, Authorship won’t work, even if you have everything else set-up correctly. In this podcast, we’re going to cover how to properly utilize the three-link method of verifying your Google Authorship. This method is used for websites with content pages linking back to an author biography on the same site. In this scenario, you add a rel=me tag to your author biography page that links to your Google+ and add the rel=author tag linking back to your biography page on your content pages. What this does is create a circle of links intertwined in each other. After you have added all of the appropriate links to your site (and Google+ profile), you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to see if your Authorship is working correctly. This tool will also tell you if your Authorship is fully verified. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should see something similar to this: How Google Authorship looks in SERPs. If your Rich Snippet doesn’t look like the one above, it may be because you didn’t include a link somewhere along the process. Also, while you will see your picture next to your post after the test, it could take anywhere from one week to a month or two for SERPs to start looking like this. We have attached our podcast both at the top and bottom of this post so that you can learn more about Google Authorship. If you have questions, ask us in the comments! We’d love to help you out!

During the lunch keynote in Las Vegas at Pubcon 2012 Matt Cutts, Chief SPAM Engineer at Google announced the Disavow Links tool to Webmaster Tools. I managed to grab half of the presentation in an audio format, which can be listened to at the bottom of this post. The tool is now live in Webmaster Tools and can be found (once logged in) here at the Disavow Links tool. Matt also added that if you are doing a link reconsideration request due to a Bad Link email recently (since spring 2012), then you should do the reconsideration request first, then start your link disavow in Webmaster Tools. Much like the release of Penguin, the new Disavow Links tool is just another step Google is taking to put a heavier weight on the quality of backlinks versus the quantity of links. Happy link sculpting!

This summer’s been great, but as with every year, fall is back, and so is our weekly podcast! This week Dwight and I discuss Google’s latest Panda update, President Obama and Google+. The dust is just now starting to settle after Google’s Aug. 19 refresh to the Panda algorithm, and we’re starting to see that update’s effects. There has some positive movement in search rankings with not only our own website, but also our clients’ sites, and it just goes to show that for long-term results, the white-hat techniques are truly the way to go. President Obama recently hosted an AMA, or “Ask Me Anything” session on the social news site Reddit. While not the first time a politician who has done something like this before, it is the first time that the President of the United States has. Although Pres. Obama has been using social media as part of his campaign strategy since he was first campaigning for the presidency in 2008, his AMA session is being seen as a “coming out party” of sorts for Reddit. We also discuss how Google+ is a must have for your SEO strategy. Despite the fact that it is still not as popular as Facebook, Google+ has two things that Facebook and Twitter don’t have. First, Google+ posts have much higher SEO value than those of Facebook (little-to-no value) or Twitter (zero value). Secondly, the active users of Google+ are very active, so it’s important to engage that audience to increase your company’s or brand’s online relevance. Please take a few minutes to listen to our latest podcast. And don’t forget, if you have questions, just leave us a comment below!

When it comes to knowing the latest happenings in the world of search engine optimization, few people are as knowledgeable as Todd Malicoat. Todd was kind enough to make the journey all the way from Florida to Royal Oak, Mich. to join me for our latest SEO Web Talk Radio Show. As it seems with every week, there are a lot of things changing with SEO and search. Todd reinforced that in order to stay ahead of the game, or at least even, you have to keep up with all the latest news and updates. Especially from Google. But even then, “you’ll never know all the moving parts,” he said. He added that if you pay close enough attention, you should be able to see changes coming ahead of time. In Google’s ideal world, there would be no SEOs SEO Consultant Todd Malicoat This would be Google’s dream come true. But luckily for us, that will never be the case. Todd aptly points out that Google’s over-optimization penalty has always existed, but they let the world know about it under the facade of “transparency.” If Google was really concerned with being transparent it would tell us exactly what factors come into play with site rankings. That will never happen and that’s why it’s crucial to document everything you do with respect to your site’s optimization. Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive recently showed us just how important documentation really is. In the matter of 12 hours, Reynolds’ site went from being No. 1 in the rankings for its name (SEER Interactive), as well as other search terms, to not ranking at all. SEER’s link profile is extensive (and legitimate), which is why Reynolds was so dumbfounded at its plummet. In his blog post, he said that friends found ”a LOT of architectural issues, lazy crap I never thought would impact us (and still don’t) but it is sloppy.” This goes to show that no matter who you are, where your links are from and how big your social signals are, your site is still susceptible to Google’s algorithm changes. Link equity goes social With all of Google’s changes in the past few months (not to mention the past year or two), the backbone of having a good site ranking is still links. But it’s not the same as it once was. The effectiveness of link exchanges was destroyed years ago and now just baiting for links isn’t going to do the trick. It’s not good enough to just have other sites, blogs, etc. linking back to your site. And we know we beat this horse to death every week, but you have to be social and you have to produce quality content. Quality content will ideally get you “social validation” for your blog posts and other site pages. It’s these social signals, especially within Google+, that will help keep your site atop the rankings. If you’re not being social on a regular basis, get on that. Yesterday. If you’d like to hear more about what Todd and I discuss in this week’s podcast, listen below!

Reports state that Facebook is working on a search engine to rival Google, would you use it? In this week's TM Podcast we discuss that as well as bad links warnings.

Aside from everything else it does well, Google is very good at keeping SEO professionals on their toes. Last week at SMX, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that the search company is working on an algorithm update that will penalize over-optimized sites. And while we don’t know all the details of this new penalty, Cutts did say Google hopes “to release it in the next months or few weeks.” This new penalty is one of several topics I discuss with TM Social Media Manager Michael L. Hoffman in this week’s SEO Web Talk Radio Show. This is just one more link in the chain of updates Google has released in the past year. Ever since Panda’s inception in February 2011, Google has been making an active effort to fight against lower-quality sites and gear the search engine’s focus toward content and away from keywords. But that’s not to say keywords aren’t important–they are, just not in the same ways they were a few years ago. What Google has done is draw a line in the proverbial sand and created a divide between websites with content-driven strategies and sites with keyword-driven strategies. And at TM, we’re positive the former will be victorious. What Google wants is for websites to create content that readers want to read and that they want to share. So while optimizing your site is still crucial, don’t overdo it since you could hurt yourself in the long run. Duane Forrester of Bing also talked about the importance of content, but in relation to social. He said that if you’re not creating content readers want to share, you’re not doing a good enough job. We agree. And yes, we know this is like beating a dead horse sometimes, but if you have a business of any kind (local, corporation, etc.), you need to be active in social media. Especially Google+. If we wanted, we could do a podcast just about Google+ every week which is probably why it finds its way into our discussions on a regular basis. But as Michael points out, being active on Google+ is not only a good idea, it’s necessary. Google has brought two things to the forefront in 2012: localization and social sharing. And Google+ is your one-stop shop to embrace both of those. Our suggestion is that you not only get on Google+ if you’re not already, but ramp up your presence. You don’t have to post every hour on the hour, just produce regular content for your followers and fans. Speaking of your fans, have you updated your Facebook Business Page to the new Timeline layout yet? No? As of March 30, all Business Pages will be forced to adopt the new Timeline setup and it’s important that your profile is ready. No, the world won’t end if you don’t update your Facebook Page immediately, but your page will look like a skeleton. Listen to our podcast below to learn what you should do to prepare your Page for the new Timeline. Don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of Google’s over-optimization penalty or Facebook Timeline in the comments!

In February, Google published a list of 40 changes it was making to its search algorithm, but a few of those changes flew way below the radar. One in particular, Google Venice, is going to dramatically change the search results users see in Google. In this week’s podcast, TM Social Media Manager Michael L. Hoffman and I discuss what Google Venice means and how it applies to you. We also delve a bit into why your latest pin on Pinterest could be illegal. We’ve already discussed in-depth how much Google has changed things up in the last year, but Venice is another addition to the search giant’s algorithm that you should pay close attention to. According to Google’s blog, Inside Search, Venice is defined as follows: Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal. What this means is that Google is now taking universal search results, say “used cars,” and applying them locally to your searches. So if I was looking for a used car and searched for that specific phrase, my SERPs would be populated with some local results based on my location in Metro Detroit. And while this may seem helpful for the average user, it makes our jobs as SEOs a little more challenging. This is just one reason why at TM we’re referring to 2012 as the “Year of Localization.” The emphasis on localization has forced many people into changing how they do their SEO. Now, not only do SEOs have to focus keywords, meta descriptions and title tags more locally, but content as well. If you sell used cars in the Metro Detroit area, your site should be populated with local keyword phrases. If not, because of Venice, you could be missing out on potential customers. SEO is a constantly evolving industry and Google never seems to let us get our footing back. It’s a game of cat and mouse where top rankings are the mouse and SEOs are the cat. But by localizing your site’s content, you are more likely to be able to secure those higher rankings. And because Google has also changed how it evaluates links, it’s important that you are working toward getting not just authoritative links, but also local links, too. And speaking of links, one of the most popular sites for driving links back to your website is Pinterest. Unfortunately, the photo-sharing site has come under fire in recent weeks due to its awkwardly written terms of service. The TOS states that users are the owner of every image they pin to their boards, which means the only way to pin something legally is to pin your own photos and pictures. It will be interesting to see how Pinterest moves past this controversy. To learn more about Google Venice and search localization or Pinterest’s terms of service, listen to the podcast below!

Google's latest Panda update, Panda 3.3, isn't has intense as past updates, but it still affects SEO. The search giant also changed how it evaluates links.

The TM Team discusses PubCon Paradise, Andy Beal's reputation management tactics, the "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in a Networked World" in this week's TM Podcast.

SEO Consultant Kate Morris discusses social search, Pinterest, SEO consulting with Trademark Productions SEO Dwight Zahringer live from PubCon Paradise in Hawaii.

High Rankings CEO Jill Whalen discusses the development of Search, plus Your World and social media in search with Trademark Productions CEO Dwight Zahringer.

Reputation management is essential in today's internet. Protecting yourself against "black hat" reputation management is one of the best ways to preserve your online identity.

Facebook has filed a $5 billion IPO, but is it ready for that? In this week's podcast we will tell you why it's not ready, as well as some great SEO tips for 2012.

Who stole Dave Bing's Twitter account? That's the question the TM Team answers in this week's podcast. we also discuss Google's new privacy policy and Twitter's censorship.

In this week's podcast, we discuss the effectiveness of Reddit's, Wikipedia's and other sites' protest of SOPA and PIPA as well as what Google's new search algorithm means for SEO. Take a listen!