Google +1 – The Good the Bad & the Ugly

Posted on the March 31st, 2011 under General SEO,News,Technology by Scott McLay

Google has recently announced that they will be adding a Facebook style voting system called +1 that will affect the rankings of search results while signed into your Google account. The system will work by people voting on their favourite pages online, these will then be viewable within your contacts search results – see example below.

In a perfect world a search engine that does this would be great – result sets that you can trust because it’s made up of websites / services that your friends trust and use.

The contact list for +1 will be made up from everyone on you’re:

• Gmail / Google Talk Contact List
• The ‘My Contacts’ group in Google Contacts
• People your following on Google Buzz and Google Reader

Looking at the list above its clear to say that there will be quite a few people that will be in these lists that you don’t want personalising results, especially if you’re an SEO – could make it easy to spot who is working with what client(s), here is what Google says:

“You can’t control who sees your +1’s because +1’ing is a public action. Anyone on the Web could potentially see the things you’ve +1’d”

Can The System Be Gamed?

At the moment there is only talk of this being implemented to users that are signed into Google and should not affect regular searches, but if we think back to the Google Toolbar ‘block result’ where they actually implemented it using the top blocked results its clear to say that the most +1’ed results may also be given more authority over time.

I was going to include Google’s view on how it will affect search results but it seems that the exact page I’m looking for has been removed (Matt Cutts tweeted the page yesterday)  – basically it was talking about how potentially +1’s could be factored into the current ranking factors (without any mention of being signed in).

Personally I feel this could be another avenue that Google will go down and quickly backtrack on – here is what what Yousef from ElevateLocal thinks about the +1 feature:

“Google must find an innovative and seamless way to have people influence rankings, unfortunately +1 is neither innovative nor seamless. If it ever takes off and given the public nature of +1, it will be abused by spammers. Very soon we will notice a sudden surge of +1 tasks on Mechanical Turks. As far as PPC is concerned, I think +1 has the capacity to improve CTR significantly. “

If anyone else has thoughts on this please drop a comment

Link Building in 2011

Posted on the March 21st, 2011 under General SEO,Link Building,SEO Tips by Scott McLay

Quite a bit has changed since I my Link Building 101 was published on SEOmoz – most of which still applies to this year but I thought I would take the time to list what I feel will be the important / unimportant link types for 2011.

Social Media Links

Google has admitted that it values links from social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook even though they are no-follow (unless you put one on your personal Facebook page) but what about other links coming from what we would call social media profiles?

Personally I feel that any link coming from pages containing social media components will be valued higher by Google and possibly other search engines – why wouldn’t they?

Verdict: Important

Site-Wide Links

Since around November / December site-wide links seem to have taken a massive hit, this may be because it is one of the easiest link types for Google to crack down on when looking into link spam – Lists of links containing “money” keywords rolled up one after the other must be easy to spot.

Verdict: Stay Away (or use branded keywords)

Guest Blog Posts

Guest posting is a great way to get links and always has been – provide a great post and that post will get links from Twitter profiles and other blogs to help power your link.

Verdict: Important

Contextual Ad’s

Contextual Ad’s seemed to pop up quite a bit last year (some disguised as Banner Ad’s) and seem to work well for now but I think these types of adverts will be the next link type to be discounted by Google (if they can).

Verdict: Potentially Dangerous

Blog / Forum Commenting

This link type is usually associated with spam, if you do this properly and post a great comment it is more likely to stick  and prompt replies from the community. These links are in no way powerful and will not help you rank on their own but they provide you with a good mix of natural anchors and nofollow links which can help build a solid base for other link types and create background noise around your website.

Verdict: Important

Directories

Directories have always been the bread and butter of link building – I’ve seen many posts over the last few months saying there is no point in these BUT people seem to forget about the hundreds of high quality directories out there – when submitting just keep an eye out for spam.

Verdict: Important

At the end of the day these are just my opinions on how important these link types will be to the search engines this year so it would be great if you could leave your thoughts too.