How to Become Invisible to Google

Believe it or not, when I first began writing this post, I was surprised to learn that there are actually website owners who want to learn how to become invisible to Google. Why they would want to do that… well, their reasons are their own.

Most of us do want to improve web visibility in the Google index. But, just in case you don’t want to be visible (and we are really, really advising that you do want to be!), then here are the steps to become invisible:
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Organic SEO tips: how to create a landing page

Let’s say that you sell 20 products online, with each one falling into one of two categories: Product Type A and Product Type B. You’ve created a unique page for each of your products, which is terrific, but what’s the next step?

The next step is to create a landing page for Product Type A, with links to each of the ten products in this category, and a landing page for Product Type B, with links to each of the ten products in that category.

This internal linking strategy will accomplish two goals:

• make it easier for human site visitors to find the products they need
• make it easier for the search engine spiders to index the content and return these URLs in response to relevant search queries

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Want to start climbing up the Google SERPs ladder faster? Make an online video!

That’s right, a video. According to a study conducted earlier this year by The Forrester Blog, posting an online video can increase your site’s chances of reaching that golden first page of search engine results by 50 percent for keywords that produce video search results. In other words, a YouTube video is 50 times more likely to rank for a certain keyphrase than a page containing that keyphrase on your site.

That’s a pretty amazing statistic. But now that Google’s Universal Search is in full swing, the SERPs are chock full of blended search engine results – a mixture of pages, videos, news, books and more from Google’s standard and specialized, or “vertical,” search results. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know what a search marketing scam looks like?

The email read:

Thanks for your time. Once again this is guaranteed first page placement in the sponsored links on GOOGLE 24/7 in The US at flat rate pricing.
There is a onetime set up fee of $79.95. There are NO Contracts. Keep in mind once this placement is sold I cannot sell them to anyone else. I can get you online the same day.

A client had forwarded me this email he had received. He wanted to know if it could be this easy. Could there really be some search engine ranking cheats that would allow his site to appear at #1 for any word for the low, low price of $79.95? Certainly sounded a lot easier then all this content work and this link building drudgery.

I explained that this was a classic search marketing scam. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you paying attention to online brand protection?

When was the last time you did a search for your company’s brand on Google? You are fairly certain that you come up number one, but who is sitting in positions two through ten? Complaints against stores online are on the rise. Does an online brand lose a customer when the search result below its listing is a complaint?

You are right. It’s not fair. You are a great company.

It may not seem fair that great companies have to invest in online brand protection. You might think that brand monitoring and protection is something only bad companies have to do. But the fact is that no matter how great a company you are, you can’t make everybody happy. Rightly or wrongly, people post complaints against stores online all the time. These complaints will come up when someone searches for your company’s name.
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