Earlier this month Google announced officially that site speed was now part of their search ranking criteria. Given that is has been a few weeks since Google made this announcement, I want to share what I think are more far reaching ramifications of this change.

Google claims less than 1% of sites will be affected by this change to their ranking algorithm, but I think the further reaching affect of this change is that sites that have difficulty with up time will suffer even more.

In my experience sites that have to deal with a lot of real time data such as travel sites and ticket sites often suffer unexpected down time or have pages become unavailable unexpectedly and take a long time for custom 404s to return. The new speed component could potentially really affect these types of sites. While real time data is in demand, I think real time data also just became that much more risky to use from an SEO perspective.

These types of changes by Google are going to force many sites dealing with real time data to become better at caching and to potentially build in short delays in the data to protect themselves from having a significant number of incidents.

Google provides a nice list of tools that you can use to gauge site speed and some of them also provide useful types on areas for improvement so that webmasters can actually identify and fix problems.

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Last Friday, the Silverback web development team successfully completed and launched a new website for Rutledge Law Center LTD.  The goal of the project was to update the look and feel of the site with a clean, professional, modernized design.  Based on the feedback we got from the client and from those who have seen the new design, I’m pretty sure we nailed it.  Great job guys!

And hey, if you ever need a business attorney in Nevada, I highly recommend John Rutlegde and Rutledge Law Center LTD.  They don’t take on a lot of clients (which I like), so they are incredibly responsive, thorough, and consistent in providing sound legal advice.  And I’m not saying that because we redesigned their web site, I’m saying it because they’re one of Silverback’s most valued business partners.

Over time many bloggers have become accustomed to same day indexing of their new articles. Recently Google has taken seven days to index new content on some new as well as long running blogs. The reasons vary but the experts believe that the following factors may be reasons why this is occurring:

According to Free SEO News
“It looks as if the 7 day delay might be related to two different website types: websites that use server scripts that return different pages to different user agents and websites that contain little or no unique content.

The 7 day delay for blogs that display the content both on the blog index page and the blog posting page is not a penalty but a Google feature that prevents duplicate results.”

My own thinking is that not only are many blogs just repurposing content that has already been reported, but that also these same blogs are failing to add their own unique analysis to the content making them less relevant right now (Google has placed great value on information that is immediately relevant). As the blog posts are eventually getting indexed by Google, clearly the content is not being classified as spam, but it still appears to be less than uniquely valuable.

And apparently it isn’t just me thinking this way.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book has similar thoughts about the quality of the content and the reasons that so many people may be turning to blogs to generate links. To paraphrase Aaron’s thinking, Google is aware that because relevancy is still key to the value of a link many companies have taken to purchasing links from content farms or creating their own content farms. The content farms that are being created tend to fail to deliver any truly unique content but rather repurpose parts of articles that have already been published and fail to bring any value to a potential audience.

In short much of the unique content being produced on blogs today has value, especially when link building is factored into the equation and I think many folks who for years had republished content are losing the immediate impact of not only the traffic they may have been receiving but also the value of the links on those slow to be indexed pages.

Post written by Roderick Ioerger

Ever wonder why the search engines seem to contradict themselves when you consider Internet directories?  I have and the arguments both for and against are compelling.  Matt Cutts (Supreme Allied Commander of Spam at Google) recently released a video over at Youtube explaining Google’s position.

Matt Cutts on Internet Directories

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Aaron Wall turned me on to a cool CSS Directory Submission Service.  Not a bad deal at all… $20 gets your site submitted to 102 CSS Galleries within 24 hours.  We’re gonna check this out and will get back to you.  But heck… for $20 why wouldn’t you do it?

About a year ago, we were approached by a young lady inquiring about the steps she should take in preparing to launch an ecommerce web site designed to sell scented candles to consumers. It was truly a unique situation in that she had not made any progress toward developing the site. In fact, she hadn’t even secured a domain yet. This was an incredibly clean slate and an opportunity that I’ve rarely encountered in my years as an online marketing consultant.
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At Google I/O 2009, Google has demonstrated an amazing new tool for anyone that wants to collaborate with people on the web. This tool is poised to replace many offline and online tools that currently exist. In order to truly understand the power of Google Wave, you need to watch this video and see the current uses of their technology. When you begin to understand exactly how Google Wave can be utilized you will also need to consider that this is only the beginning of what it is capable of. When developers get their hands on this technology and start developing extensions to this framework as well as the applications that can be created that will integrate this technology, the possibilities will only begin to be understood.
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There was an article on Marketing Pilgrim today that discussed the results of a survey conducted to determine the effect of sales on Social Media Marketing. The survey results are heavily leaning towards an underwhelming conversion rate from this form of marketing. Nevertheless, this isn’t a perfect case study on Social Marketing and you need to read between the lines when taking these results into consideration.
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Is the search engine marketing industry ready for the real-time web? Sadly, not many search engine marketers are ready to embark on the challenge that faces them. They certainly should have taken notice of the changes Google made to promote the real-time web at Searchology. Google unveiled functionality that makes it easier to show the most recent results of your respective search. Although this feature won’t be utilized by most, strategies need to be addressed to take full advantage of this real estate. Twitter has also announced a new algorithm based search that will follow the links posted by users on the popular micro-blogging platform.

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I recently ran into Backtype when doing some social marketing research. Their service allows you to keep track of the conversations that you find interesting or relevant to your business. You can follow individuals and their comments on Blogs, keywords that can identify discussions that you would like to get involved with and branded keywords such as your name and your company name for obvious reasons. Another useful feature it provides is the ability to claim your comments and provide a profile where someone can view all of your conversations and potentially follow you.

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