Pinterest To Launch Promoted Pins

I received an email from Pinterest yesterday, it seems that most users did, announcing in a very nice and flowery way that they are going to be launching promoted pins. I imagine that these will be similar to promoted posts on Facebook or Twitter.

Pinterest promise that promoted pins will be tasteful and transparent so you as a Pinterest user will know straightaway if a pin is promoted. It is just an experiment for now and no businesses are paying anything at the moment and we don’t know yet what businesses are going to be involved.

Pinterest has been around for a few years now and this seems to be the first move in generating an actual revenue stream, I assume they have waited until they reached a significant level of active users before making this move, currently they have 46 million unique monthly active users.

Anyway here is the content of the email with all the details of the launch:

Hi, Chris!

Just over a year ago, my wife and I welcomed our son into the world. Since his first day, I’ve been pinning fun things we can do together, right now while he’s still little and later when he gets older. I know many of you do the same. Pinterest is where you keep your wishlists, vacation plans, dream home ideas, and other things you want to do soon and in the future.That’s why for us, it’s so important that Pinterest is a service that will be here to stay. To help make sure it does, we’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses. I know some of you may be thinking, “Oh great…here come the banner ads.” But we’re determined to not let that happen. While we haven’t figured out all the details, I can say that promoted pins will be: Tasteful—No flashy banners or pop-up ads. Transparent—We’ll always let you know if someone paid for what you see, or where you see it. Relevant—These pins should be about stuff you’re actually interested in, like a delicious recipe, or a jacket that’s your style. Improved based on your feedback—Keep letting us know what you think, and we’ll keep working to make things better. For our first test, we’ll promote a few pins in search results and category feeds. For example, a pin for a Darth Vader outfit from a costume shop might be promoted in a search for “halloween.” Nobody’s paying for anything yet—we want to see how things go and, more than anything, hear what you think. Thanks so much for all your support these first few years, and we hope you’ll keep pinning with us for many years to come! All the best, Ben

So what do you think, is this a good move for Pinterest? If you start seeing lots of promoted pins will it put you off using the platform? Let me know in the comments box below.

By Chris Jones

Ranking Factors For Local Search In 2013

What do you need to do to rank well in local search in 2013? There are many factors that contribute to achieving good rankings locally and it can all seem a little confusing to many small businesses targeting a local audience, especially if they have little or now experience or knowledge about SEO and of course many small businesses, especially start ups, don’t have the budget to employ a SEO Consultant or agency.

There are many factors to consider and determining which is the most important is difficult for the average local businessman. Is the most important factor having a complete Google Places profile? Or is it the proximity of your business to the location being searched for? Maybe it’s the number and quality of reviews about your service.

Recently Moz updated their annual survey of local search ranking factors and to make all the information easy to digest the guys at Doublespark have collated all the information into an infographic and here it is.

Of course if you are a small local business and you need some help or advice with local SEO feel free to get in touch.
By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

Will Having Your Website ON Both IPv4 & The New IPv6 IP Addresses Cause Duplicate Content Issues?

It has been widely published over the last few years that we are about to run out of IP addresses, the current system in use is IPv4, so a new alternative had to be found so we now also have IPv6, this currently only accounts for 1% of IP addresses.

In a video from Matt Cutts published today on Google’s Webmaster Help Channel Matt discusses whether or not there are any potential duplicate content issues by having your website in both types of IP address, this was in response to the following question “As we are now closer than ever to switching to IPv6, could you please share some info on how Google will evaluate websites. One website being in IPv4, exactly the same one in IPv6 – isn’t it considered duplicate content?”

In his answer Matt compares this to having your website on multiple country code domain names which is fine to do and as Matt states even spammers are unlikely to use the method of multiple duplicate site on ccTLD’s, so in other words its fine and having your site on both IPv4 and IPv6 will not cause you any duplicate content issues as far as Google is concerned.

Anyway here is Matts answer in full:

By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

Google Plus Adds Automatic Authorship on WordPress

In a recent announcement from Google their social media platform Google+ has added automatic authorship markup for users of WordPress.com and Typepad, so if you haven’t yet included authorship markup in your blog it has now got a whole lot easier.

This is another move from Google in their aim to get the majority of the webs content attributed to its authors and of course if you are a trusted author with a history of good content it can possibly effect the Google rankings of your content.

All you need to do from now on is sign in to WordPress.com with your Google+ logins and authorship info will automatically be integrated, so make sure you are happy with your Google+ profile picture as it could soon be appearing in Google’s SERP’s.

To see an example search on Google.co.uk for “SEO Consultant Lancaster” and you’ll see my ugly mug on the first result.

So if you using WordPress.com or are planning to make sure you have a Google+ profile set up and log into Worpress with the same log in details and you may soon start to see your face all over Google.

By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

What To Do If Your Website Has Been Hit By A Panda, Matt Cutts Advice

This is my third post in a row about Webmaster Help Videos from Google’s Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts. He seems to go quite for a few weeks and then has a week or two of a new help video every couple of days.

Anyway in this recent video Matt answers the following question “Recently Google has integrated the Panda update in to its normal indexing process. Now, how will webmaster come to know whether his/her site is hit by Panda? And, if his/her site is already hit, how he/she will know that he/she has recovered from Panda?

Now as you would expect Matt’s answer starts with the mantra about creating high quality content, he then goes on to explain that Panda initially rolled out in February 2011 but has more recently become integrated in to the indexing process so the Panda algorithm is now pretty much a part of the normal collection of the various ranking algorithms.

Matt doesn’t really answer the question in this video but if you have noticed a drop in rankings and traffic then he said you should work on improving the content quality on your site.

Anyway here is the video answer in full:

By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

Google Will Take Action On Auto Generated Content

In a recent video on Google’s Webmaster Help Channel Matt Cutts discusses Google’s view on auto generated content. The video is in response to this question from a webmaster in the Netherlands “What does Google do against sites that have a script that automatically picks up the search query and makes a page about it? Ex: you Google [risks of drinking caffeine], end up at a page: “we have no articles for DRINKING CAFFEINE” with lots of ads.”

These types of sites with auto generated content used to be very popular and were known by many as “made for Adsense” and were created in the hope that someone landing on the page would not find what they wanted and click on one of the Adsense ads.

Googles view on these types of sites is that if a user lands on the site and doesn’t find anything that they were looking for it means that its a bad user experience and will take action against that site as it offers no value to the site visitor.

In the video Matt Cutts states “We are absolutely willing to take action against those sites. So we have rules in our guidelines about auto-generated pages that have very little value and I have put out in the past specific calls for sites where you search for product a VCR or laptop or whatever and you think you really get a review and the new land there and the very first thing you see is ‘0 Reviews Found for [blah blah blah]’.”

So if you are creating this kind of web site with auto generated content be aware that as soon as it is discovered Google will take manual action against it.

Anyway to see Matt’s answer in full here is the video:

By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

No Follow Links, Can They Hurt My Site’s Rankings?

In a video published yesterday on Google’s Webmaster Help YouTube Channel Matt Cutts answers the following question “I’m building links, not for SEO but to try and generate direct traffic, if these links are no-follow am I safe from getting any Google penalties? Asked another way, can no-follow links hurt my site?”

Matt Cutts goes onto sat thay no follow links will not usually hurt your website or your rankings on Google however if you are doing this on a mass spammy scale Google may still take manual action and apply a penalty to discourage you from this activity even if the links do have the no follow attribute.

Anyway here is Matts answer in full:

By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google

How Not To Build Links According To Duane Forrester

A few days ago Duane Forrester, the Senior Product Manager and public face of Bing, published an article on the Bing Webmaster Blog discussing spam link building.

He gives four specific examples of how to not build inbound links.

Blind Email Requests

Now every webmaster in the world probably gets at least a couple of these every week, you know the type of email, it will mention how much they love your website and that they will give you a link in return from another website. In the email they don’t usually include real trustworthy contact details, they don’t usually include their name and it will have come from a Gmail or Hotmail address or similar.

Its usually fairly obvious that they have never even looked at your site, in fact Matt Cutts and Duane Forrester have both given examples in the past of these link request being sent to Google and Bing, duh.

If you do insist on emailing webmasters to request a link be genuine and offer something of actual value, like a well written piece of valuable content, but the success rate will be so low you are probably better off spending your time doing something more productive.

Blog & Forum Commenting

No matter how many times both Bing and Google say that links in blog and forum comments carry no weight at all with regard to SEO there are still many so called SEO companies out there that include these activities in their descriptions of what they do for link building. So if you are contemplating using a SEO agency that includes this sort of spammy link building within their services I would suggest you forget about them and move on.

All you are going to achieve from this kind of activity is to annoy the blog owners and get yourself banned from participating on the forums and as a blog owner that gets around 50 spam comments a week I can definitely confirm it is very annoying.

Link Injection

This is a technique that has been popular with the spammers for a long time and the target is usually WordPress blogs or similar. It is usually an automated process that hacks into a WordPress blog and insets links into the site without your knowledge, you’ll never see the link as its hidden in the code but search engine crawlers can see them. Its fairly easy to fix though, just make sure you always have the latest version of WordPress installed as it will have patches to block the back doors that the spammers use.

Guest Blogging

This activity sits on both sides of the spam line. There are many legitimate blogs and guest bloggers it all comes down to intent really. If the blog itself is full of guest posts and seems to exist purely for that and the posts themselves cover a wide range of topics then its probably going to be viewed as spam, if you’re creating guest posts and publishing them on these sorts of blogs with the sole intent of getting a link then that’s most likely going to be viewed as spam. However if you write a genuinely useful post that offers value to the blog its being published on and you’re doing it for traffic and brand exposure then that’s good. Also any links you do get from it will be viewed in a much better light, so by all means guest blog but don’t do it for SEO.
By Chris Jones

Chris Jones On Google