Google has been catching a lot of heat at the moment with many people saying the recent algorithm updates have made search quality worse. I thought I would chime in on this debate by showing a truly bizarre set of results:
Is it a restaurant, a plumber, a locksmith, or a supermarket? Awful search quality from Google
How can I find guest post opportunities?
Guest posting is a great way to build up some high quality, relevant, backlinks. Providing you can produce content regularly there is no reason you won’t be able to build up a large number of links consistently over time. There are plenty of great posts around looking at outreach strategy, including this fantastic study showing a huge statistical breakdown of outreach methodology. What I am going to talk about today though is how we actually find the blogs to contact.
When I first started in SEO I found it a bit disheartening hearing about how great guest posting was, but never actually finding many opportunities myself. After a bit of experience and picking up a load of pointers from all the other fantastic articles I’ve read/talks I’ve been to etc this process has become a lot easier, and more rewarding. I will show you a few of my favourite tools to find guest posts below:
I’m on a Gondola! – What’s happened to local rankings?
Google announced a series of updates on February 29th including the Venice update which affected local search results. They described it as:
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.
They also mentioned a new system to improve local results saying:
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
The effects were immediately noticeable with local results appearing more prominently in the SERP’s for big search terms and changing depending on location. Kevin from SEOptimise did a write up on this here. The thing that was personally interesting, was when I went into Linkdex and looked at the rank tracking for one of our clients: (more…)
New Google commandment: Thou shall never over optimise
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam and all round master of the Google SERPs made a rather interesting statement whilst chairing a panel at SXSW recently that has caused a bit of speculation, and possibly a lot of SEO’s to quake in their boots. He said: (more…)
SES Conference Day 1 Takeaways
Hi All,
Today was the first official day of SES and I thought I would present my takeaways from the talks I saw throughout the day. I was furiously scribbling notes throughout the sessions and I have transcribed them as best I can below: (more…)
Red or Blue has moved!
Although none of us have fixie bikes, and only one of us wears jeans that threaten our ability to father children, we have moved to the heart of trendy East London – Shoreditch! Saying goodbye to the old faces at Paddington (Leeroy in particular), was an emotional experience but we packed up the van and got over to Rivington Street (at 1400mph according to the GPS), to our lovely new building!
SEO in 2022: What have TV and Films Taught Us?
Writing about what SEO will look like in 10 years is a difficult proposition. Had I been in this situation 10 years previously I’m not sure I would’ve predicted the search world being influenced by my Dad sharing photos of the dog he looks after, or me being at the mercy of someone who spends their spare time writing about the ridiculously confusing world of facial products just because I need a link. As difficult as it would have been to predict then, I think it is possibly even more difficult now unless you have some Q like powers (Star Trek reference no.1). Not one to be discouraged though, I will endeavor to give a well informed, logical, and structured view on what the world will look like.
5 things I learned in 5 weeks of SEO
I initially started at Red or Blue as an intern working for 5 weeks. My only exposure to SEO had been the SEOmoz beginners guide and some very, very basic work in my previous job. These first five weeks taught me a lot, and when I was asked to write my first blog I thought it was only appropriate that I reflect on this period, and as we all know everyone loves a list, I thought picking 5 of the most important things I learnt would be a cool thing for me to do (and hopefully you to read).