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Let’s All Bing It While We Search Online and Get Rewarded
BING It Today
Last week many bloggers, SEO specialists and small online businesses were really upset with Google – myself included. Why don’t we all just Bing it and forget it! Maybe Bing would account for more searches and help us all get more out of Bing vs. Google. Plus look how pretty their homepage is. And isn’t this one ironic with these Panda’s? Love it!
Searching Online
How often do you use search in a day? 21% of our time online is spent searching. That is #2 behind time on social networks at 22% of the time. 3rd is reading content online at 20% of our time online. Google alone acounts for over 1 billion searches per day. Bing and Yahoo are right behind Google and Facebook for daily visits. (*Stats from Comscore, Nielson, TNS Digital Life and Pew)
The Bing Advantage
- You can see what your friends like on Facebook when you log in. You can see their referrals. Just log in via Facebook on Bing.
- You can also sign in via Microsoft.
- You can earn REWARDS via their Bing Awards.
Bing Rewards
Bing Awards are easy to do. Everytime you search you get reward points. You earn 1 credit per 2 Bing searches and up to 15 credits a day. That is 30 searchers per day that you can earn rewards from. When you have enough rewards you visit their redemption center to claim your rewards. You can earn Starbucks cards, Amazon cards and more. How nice is that! Is Google rewarding you for searching? They also offer sweepstakes that you can enter to win prizes when you sign up.
What others were saying about Google’s recent changes:
Nancy Cawley Jean – a Communications and Media Relations Pro blogged about the Google Reader changes a few days ago.
Google, you have gone too far. You’ve become a cyberbully! Yes, that’s exactly it. You’ve become a big, bloated, egotistical bully…… You can read more on Nancy’s blog.
Ana Hoffman from the Traffic Generation Cafe did a slideshare on the death of the Google Reader (You can click on image below to read more from her SlideShare)
“Google is on a killing spree 70+ dead products and counting….”
Closing Google Reader Sucks, But Is Dangerous For Google blindfiveyearold.com/closing-google… via @ajkohn
— Danny Goodwin (@DannyNMIGoodwin) March 14, 2013
#Google Reader Shutting Down Leaving Huge Curation Gap For Marketers – ow.ly/iZVmR
— Robert Caruso (@fondalo) March 16, 2013
It scares me as a consumer into thinking what #Google will cut next out of the free products I use every day. bit.ly/152sNna — Bryan Kramer (@bryankramer) March 14, 2013
Google, Who Are you? pammarketingnut.com/2013/03/google… #seo <-Incl my exp w/#Orlando recent #Google search results.
— Pam Moore (@PamMktgNut) March 14, 2013
SEO Updates via Google
Hubspot did an eye opening post the other day on the SEO Panda updates and it wasn’t pretty. It confirmed my suspicions on an Google update as one of my sites was tanking just on Google for the past 5 days. (I believe messy coding was the cause, more to come.) Some of the comments on Hubspot’s blog on the topic included:
It is a shame when a regular site created for anyone that is interested in that content gets hit. A regular site being the everyday business person not knowing much about algorithm’s and such builds a site to help his business along creating no foul play or black hat tactics…..
My website has 2,200+ pages of original content written by experts, minimal ads (in a narrow right column), NO duplicate pages, NO purchased links, NO empty pages. But, still, Panda took my traffic from 22,000 visitors on a good day to 8,000 on a good day. Killing my revenue and losing me my expert contributors….. Read more on their blog on this SEO topic.
Matt Cutts: Google Adding Panda to Real-Time Algorithm sewat.ch/ZNaMaX via @sewatch #SEO
— Danny Goodwin (@DannyNMIGoodwin) March 15, 2013
Will you be switching to Bing for your searches and earn their rewards?
Have you noticed a change in your traffic from Google in the past week or two?
Check out my guest post today too over at Adrienne’s Place.
What Is This SEO All About?
SEO – What is This SEO All About Today?
Everyone is talking about SEO. Just exactly, what is this SEO all about? And how does it affect your website or blog? I came across a great quote this week and I had to share it. It really rang true for me.
SEO Now and Future
When applying SEO to your website or blog it’s not so much about what is happening now on Google but about what will be happening on Google. It is constantly changing. I am always reading about the latest Google updates and checking rankings of keywords, products or pages. I must admit not as much as I used to as traffic was going up and so were sales on our retail website. Until a week or so ago. And then I found the missing sitemap and broken links that were taking time to re-direct.
The good thing is that Google crawls websites faster than it did just 2 years ago with their caffeine update. One thing I have not totally figured out is how a new page can rank near the top in the beginning and then begin a descend sometimes. Other times it can remain high in the rankings. Google always leaves some things a mystery to me. But not for long. I continually do research. It’s a good thing I do not need much sleep to learn SEO all about what it can do for us.
Years ago SEO included using many of your keywords throughout the copy and meta descriptions. Now you can have to be careful not to overdue it with Google’s latest Penquin update. Yes Penquin – not Panda this time! I learned yesterday it should be around 2.5-3.5% keyword density.
What is the penquin up to?
So what else has that penquin been up to over on Google? Here are some of the highlights:
- Multiple Sites – Do not make multiple sites with the same content. That just saved a lot of people a lot of work!
- Multiple Pages – The same goes for pages – Why would you have 2 pages alike to begin with?
- Images – Label all images appropriately and make sure they are related to the content.
- Image Sitemap – Upload image sitemap – They help Google to crawl your images.
- Link Schemes – Glad to see this one going bye-bye. Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging. This was big when I first build our retail website and was very time consuming. I’ve dropped old links like those and kept only relevant ones.
- Paid Links - Gone! Buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results. Glad to see this one gone too – money can’t buy you organic page rank through links anymore.
- Doing No SEO? Did I read that right? Here it is from Google’s Webmaster Blog: “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all).”
What Will The Google Changes Mean To You?
I have been studying the latest news and blogs about the Google changes coming. It looks like the Google Panda is hard at work once again. What else do you have to do to your websites or blogs to keep up with this fast moving Panda?
Last week Google announced these changes via an infamous Tweet of their algorithm changes on Google search:
Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6% of queries noticeably affected. Background on Panda: goo.gl/mTKCH
— A Googler (@google) March 23, 2012
I had been reading about this since March 15 when the Wall St. Journal did an article on the upcoming changes coming to Google and what it might mean for search for both the readers and website owners. Of course I started to check on some of our websites rankings and positions. Nothing had changed yet except we were getting more traffic. I cannot be sure yet if it’s related to the Panda over at Google.
What do these new algorithm changes mean?
- Semantic Search – The process of understanding the actual meaning of words. The search engine is looking to better match search queries with a database containing millions of entities. Google claims this process may take a full year. Google will blend new semantic-search technology with its current system to better recognize the value of info on websites and figure out which ones to show in search results. They want to provide answers without always giving blue links to other websites thus keeping visitors on Google for a longer time period.
- Elimination of Link Networks – I see this a very positive thing. Most of them were using “Black Hat” SEO tactics to come up higher in search results. You can read more on SearchEngineLand on this info.
- Keep It Simple – Keep it simple with your website or blog – Use real SEO tactics – no latest craze that tries to offer short cuts. See the Google’s Webmaster Blog for their 5 Common SEO Mistakes.
- Continue to Keep it Fresh – Keeping your content fresh is a plus! Not only for your readers but for SEO and Google. Continue to update your blog or website – not just to update but with relevant content.
- Be Careful of Over-Optimization – Do not stuff your content with too many keywords – I have been reading at different places that 3-5% the correct amount of keywords on a page. Susan at Cirquedumont did a post on over-optimization today – check it out!
The Panda Is At It Again At Google!
The panda is back to work on improving Google. Another Panda update has been confirmed by Google the other day on their blog.
What does these 40* updates all mean for you? I’ll pick the most important ones for you to know.
- Links – Link evaluations that were used for years are no longer going to be used. They do not give away too much info on this one but it makes me believe the old link exchanges used in SEO may no longer be as necessary.
- Local Search Rankings – Google is using a new system to find better results from a user in a more reliable way. If you are a local business take advantage of this and be sure your Google’s Places Pages is claimed.
- More Coverage for Searches - A new data source is being used to refine what you are searching for and giving you more results and choices. This good lead to more traffic for your site if your keywords are on target.
- More Accurate Detection of Official Pages – Pages that were misleading will no longer be seen in search (that’s a great thing!)
- Fresher Images – Google adjusted their signals for fresher images – so your newer images will show in search. Another great reason to use images besides pinning.
- Freshness Update – Google has added new signals to to update fresh content in the searches more quickly than before. Now more than ever it’s important to update your sites and blogs with quality freshness.
- Safe Search Update – Irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many searches. Good to know! Remember the days when white house turned up those porn sites? Those days are gone by the Panda wayside.
*You may read more here on the 40 changes.
Have You Checked Your Google Pagerank lately?
Google Pagerank
Someone asked me yesterday what is Google Pagerank? Google ranks websites on the web by many factors from 0-10. The pagerank was invented by Larry Page when he was at Stanford University.
This image above of the page rank algorithm is courtesy of Wikipedia. What are some of the contributors to the ranking of a Google Pagerank for your website or blog?
- How many links are going into your website for support? The more inbound links the better if they are relevant.
- Like a cnn.com or .gov or .edu – These are high ranking links and can be out of your control for the most part. Or you could write something and link to them that they would see and may link back.
- Probability of people clicking on links to get to your website – through the use of Search Engine Optimization on your website or blog.
- Internal Links in Your Own Website- If you have properly linked your own pages and people go from page to page and not leave your website this will help your Google pagerank too.
How can you check your Google pagerank and other websites page rank? They are several ways and my favorite one is installing any of the follow toolbars on your brower:
Is Google Pagerank important anymore? There is a dispute among webmasters and most say it’s not that important. But it will establish the crawl priority and crawl depth of a website. It is also a tool some webmasters still use to decide whether or not to link to your website. When we first started our storefront no one responded to our email requests for links on our resources page. Today we get emails daily asking us to link.
It used to be that Google changed Pagerank on a monthly or quarterly basis, it is now done randomly. I noticed this website got a 2 ranking last week and our storefront went from a 3 to a 4. There are few websites that have a ranking of ten, like Google itself and Facebook. See more 10 ranked websites here.
Have you checked your Google Pagerank lately?
