On February 27th, Google posted an update to their official search blog announcing that they had made 40 search quality changes to the Google search engine that month, including an update to Panda, last year’s game changer.

40 updates in one month is actually a new record for Google, and there’s been some buzz about it, but don’t panic just yet. Google making changes, even numerous changes, isn’t anything new. Google is constantly tweaking, changing, improving and updating all of the products that they offer, and those changes don’t always make a huge impact.

With this latest round there’s plenty to sift through, but what likely matters most to businesses can be easily summed up in two parts.

Link Quality

Google indicated that it would be making a change to the way it evaluates links. Specifically, how they evaluate a link as a means of determining the topic of the page being linked to. Unfortunately, Google was characteristically cryptic in exactly what that change is.

Google did say that they are “turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years.” Since we don’t know which method that is, we can only speculate for now how that will impact rankings.

So let’s speculate!

Back in January I gave a little presentation on Google and some of the big changes of the previous year, and in it I caution business owners to be on the lookout out for updates to Panda. Specifically, I stated that Google is likely to refine how it evaluates backlinks. My advice was to ensure you have plenty of backlinks from quality sites, and to taper off dependency on a high volume of low quality, low relevance links.

That strategy used to work shamefully well, and in many cases it still can, especially if your competition isn’t doing anything. But if Google is “turning off” an old method and trying to improve how it delivers results, then associating your site with low quality sites via backlinks is probably not a sustainable strategy.

Local Search

Typically, if users want local results, they might add their city in along with their search phrase, and this would likely produce relevant local search results. Recently though, Google has been working hard on improving local search functionality to produce local results for all search phrases, including those without a city or location added.

Google is able to accomplish this by using your location information and matching that with webpages that feature compatible location information and are also relevant to the search phrase used. To be clear, local search results may come in the form of a webpage with a geographically relevant address, a homepage of a local business that mentions its city, a Google Places listing, or a combination of those. Essentially, Google is working towards providing relevant local results to a user without requiring the user to explicitly state their desired location in the search phrase.

What does this mean for businesses that want to ensure they show up in local search results?

Well, as always, creating, claiming, and optimizing a Google Places listing is crucial. Beyond that, there’s plenty of optimization that should take place on-site. Add the business address, use the city name in content, or even create a location specific landing page. The latter is basically required if your business has more than one location.

Ultimately though, the specifics of how best to optimize for local results aren’t clearly defined, and they probably won’t ever be (Google wouldn’t want that). What’s important to keep in mind as a business owner, is that it’s crucial to do more things correctly than the competition.

Google wants to deliver the best results for search phrases, and will always be working towards that goal, constantly improving on how it delivers what it thinks are the most relevant results to the user. In order to rank highly and beat out the competition, your business needs to actually be the best result.

Is it?

post a comment | Filed under: Articles & News, Search Engine Marketing

Magsoft Corporation had an outdated website that was difficult to make updates to internally. They wanted a site that is dynamic and that is able to be expanded to include items such as a mobile website and QR codes.

Burst Marketing developed a new site for Magsoft Corporation that is completely in WordPress to allow for ease of expandability, function, and updates, as well to be able to tie easily into 3rd party social media tools. Because Magsoft mostly got its business through ‘word of mouth’ until now, the new site will increase business through a better website that people are already being driven to see.

Magsoft Corporation was founded in February 1986, and is a top 5 world leader in marketing Computer Aided Engineering [CAE] simulation tools for computing physical phenomena.

post a comment | Filed under: Articles & News, Design, General News, Web Design