October 27th, 2011
Google Tweaks AdWords Keyword Tool
Google’s Keyword Ranking tool is a big help to page owners and SEO strategists. It’s one of the fundamentals when it comes to writing SEO articles to fuel content syndication in the entire SEO campaign. While there are alternative sites that offer keyword ranking analysis, Google’s Keyword Ranking tool is the old reliable. For quite some time, users have been seeing the usual traditional bars that are filled depending on its level of competitiveness. The more the bar is filled the more it’s competitive. But Google is now replacing those bars with text descriptions to gauge the level of competitiveness a keyword has. SEO site, Search Engine Land, notes the list below as competitive labels:
- Low – Competitiveness number under .33
- Medium – Competitiveness number between .33 and .66
- High – Competitiveness number over .67
A keyword’s competitive score is connected to AdWords rather than organic search. This area in the Keyword Ranking tool is defined as: “This column shows the number of advertisers worldwide bidding on each keyword relative to all keywords across Google. The shaded bar represents a general low-to-high quantitative guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword.”
Google says that the recent change will not affect the granularity as-to how this ranking was assigned. Users can still download a report to acquire figures similar to when the green bar was still in use. Further information about a keyword can be downloaded as a spreadsheet as well. Aside from this latest development, Google’s Matt Cutts has a new video that talks about Google not considering SEO as spam. Check out the vid below.
May 13th, 2010
Reciprocal Linking
Most savvy SEO professionals understand that Google frowns upon blatant reciprocal linking. This is viewed as an attempt to manipulate their rankings. Before 2007, this was a popular practice, and many websites had a page called “Link Partners”, or something similar.
For example, a real estate brokerage would like their site to other real estate brokers, who would then link back. The idea was to gather as many of these type “relationships” as possible in an attempt to boost Google rankings. It worked, until Google grew weary of people manipulating the system. Google makes a change to their formula AT LEAST once a day according to information released from Matt Cutts, Google Chief of AntiSpam.
Obviously businesses in the same field will do business with each other, and some amount of valid reciprocal linking is OK. While no one knows the cut-off number that triggers penalties from Google, suffice to say, it is best to only do reciprocal linking with true partners on a selective basis. Peachtree SEO has never recommended reciprocal linking to our clients, and strongly caution against employing this method.
A much more powerful and “safe” approach to linking is to build a blog and write regular posts on a variety of thematically related topics to your website. Our team at Peachtree SEO can provide consulting to guide you in the right direction and help empower you to search engine success.
