Posts Tagged ‘Google’

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1808.11

Will your site get attacked by a Panda?

Posted by Dan Cave in E-Commerce, Online Marketing, SEO

We have written a little bit of a comedy headline for what can be a VERY serious issue for some business owners and any managers responsible for profit and loss.

Google’s search ranking algorithm update code named ‘Panda‘, dubbed the ‘Farmer update‘ by the search industry, was released earlier this year. This is one animal you do not want to mess with!

Aggressively removing low quality web pages from search

Google’s Panda is designed to aggressively remove low quality web pages from search results by applying a site wide penalty to websites with high ratios of:

  • Low quality content
  • Thin and shallow content
  • Duplicate or copied content
  • High advert to copy ratio

The update takes into account a lot of quality factors from bounce rates to the number of returning visitors and adjusts your rankings accordingly. Many people have said this is less of an algorithm tweak and more of a new way to measure and punish low quality sites.

Anger Google’s Panda and you can lose high percentages of traffic and, by extension, profit.

How to avoid being bitten by Google’s Panda

A large variety of sites can be affected, but if you follow some simple rules you can avoid being bitten by this not so cute, furry animal:

  1. Always write your own content for ALL pages (yes that means you too e-commerce sites, even product pages)
  2. Write your content in a manner that is deep and meaningful, making it as interesting as possible
  3. Try to keep your banner advertising minimal (especially if its irrelevant adverts to the content)
  4. Put your strongest content up-front on a page

You really shouldn’t be using duplicate content or cramming ads into your website. This is a no-brainer to Optix, you should have a description which contains a clear reason to buy, a call to action and a hook to grab your reader’s attention.

Put yourself in your client’s shoes, why should they buy from you rather than another re-seller with the same description and pictures? Can you add value? Can you convince them to buy?

Your page is your sales person, some sales people are good, some people are bad, make yours a good sales person solving the user’s problems by selling them a product.

Good luck, and as always, feel free to comment, contact us or share this page, you never know you might save someone’s business.

Tags: ,
Posted in E-Commerce, Online Marketing, SEO | No Comments »

2707.11

Google Shopping Changes Help

Posted by Dan Cave in E-Commerce, Online Marketing

merchant_center_logo

This month the Big G (Google) recently announced changes to their merchant product feed rules. You have until the 22nd of September to update your product feed or face the consequences.

keeping a close eye on things

At Optix we like to keep a close eye on these things for our clients sake, but for those who run their own product feed the following information could be vital to staying afloat in the world of Google Shopping (formerly ‘Google base’):

Summary of Changes

…Below are several examples of how the feed spec is changing; please note that different countries have slightly different requirements:

  • Availability: We’d like a user to be able to find your products even when they are out of stock. For this reason, the [availability] status of all your items will be required.
  • Google Product Category: We have added a new required high-level attribute called [Google product category] that contains the category of the item in Google’s taxonomy (currently only required for a select number of categories). This is in addition to the current [product type] attribute.
  • Images: We’re making [image link] required and we encourage you to submit up to 10 additional product images through [additional image link]. This way, you can improve the visual representation of your products.
  • Apparel: In order to create a better experience for product variants such as dresses or shoes that are available in multiple colors or sizes, we ask you to include information like [size] and [color] in your product feed. In addition, we require you to provide [gender] and [age group].
  • Data Freshness: We will continue to regularly check feeds for accuracy of pricing, availability, and general product information, and take action against accounts that violate our standards.

http://googlemerchantblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/important-changes-to-google-product.html

Need a little Help?

Some links you will need if you are going to attempt to survive in the Google shopping channel:

Alternatively we could take care of this for you, or help you sell more online via any one of our many web design and online marketing services. We would love to hear from you in the comments below or on the phone.

What are you opinions on the google shopping feeds? Have you used them to any positive or negative effect? have you even heard of them before?

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Posted in E-Commerce, Online Marketing | No Comments »

1703.11

Remove Google Personalisation – Objective Results in Google

Posted by Dan Cave in Development, SEO

Google’s Search Engine is incredibly complex, exceptionally intelligent and frighteningly accurate at guessing what you want.

There are times though when, to be quite honest, I would prefer it to mind its own business and stop personalising my results, so to that end Optix Solutions have a solution should you feel the same.

Removing Google Personalisation isn’t easy; using traditional methods would result in you losing your ability to remember your login details, keep you logged into sites and all kinds of other behind the scenes things your browser can do. Google’s Personalisation is mixed in with these things and you have to be a bit savvy to work around it. One way to remove the personalisation is to turn off cookies and search history in your browser and search settings. Although this isn’t the best!

The Best Way to get Objective Google Results – In our opinion

Step 1

To view the results the rest of the world would see you need to add a little known piece of code to the end of the URL, (web address,) of your search which sets personalisation to zero. And here it is:

&pws=0

Putting that on the end of every search you do is a bit inconvenient so we also suggest step 2

Step 2

now, turn off google instant search in your Firefox Web Browser, becuase it prevents this from working.

In Firefox, install the Grease Monkey plugin and use it to automatically add the piece of code to the end of the web addresses for you.

To do that:

  1. Install Grease monkey – Get Grease Monkey
  2. Make a new script that includes:
    // @include http://www.google.co.uk/*q=*&*
  3. Put this code in the operational bit:
    if (location.href.substring(location.href.length-6,location.href.length)!='&pws=0'){location.href=location.href+'&pws=0';}
  4. Enable the script
  5. Enjoy personalisation free results

If you prefer the whole Grease Monkey script to remove Google Personalisation i’ve included it below:

// ==UserScript==
// @name personalisation remover
// @namespace pws
// @description adds &pws=0 to the end og google addresses
// @include http://www.google.co.uk/*q=*&*
// ==/UserScript==
// Author Optix solutions

if (location.href.substring(location.href.length-6,location.href.length)!=’&pws=0′)
{
location.href=location.href+’&pws=0′;
}

Credits go to our Developer Rich Moore for this one, with inspiration coming from Dan Cave and encouragement from James Dawkins and Nick. You can see them all on our team page.

Rich MooreDan Cave

Rich and Dan

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Posted in Development, SEO | 2 Comments »

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