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?

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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The season finale of Chuck is on NBC tonight and apparently this may be it’s last episode or will it? In a recent episode of Chuck, there was a funny and paid product placement for Subway. The placement referenced the successful “$5 footlong” campaign. Fans of the show enjoyed the product placement so much that Subway sales increased greatly after the broadcast of the episode and now they are including Subway as part of a campaign to save the show from being cancelled on NBC. The star of Chuck, Zachary Levi, has also joined the campaign and brought fans to Subway from a convention.
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I’m currently doing some research into the use of Blog Directories as a means to marketing your blog.  Perhaps the best resource I have found online so far is Joost de Valk’s blog on Wordpress SEO.  Very well written and an incredibly content-rich resource.  I’ll post more later when I have a chance to organize my research.

Those “in the know” about search engines are far too familiar with the phrase “Content is King”.  Search Engines tend favor large, dynamic sites to smaller, static ones. This is primarily because larger, dynamic sites are more likely to contain fresh information of value to the search engine’s audience.

Over the years, we have worked with some of the world’s largest online media companies such as Forbes.com and CNET Networks who are widely considered leading sources of information within their respective subject matters. Both entities have achieved “authority” status with the search engines and thus are typically “crawled” deeper and more often than smaller sites with similar information.  Not surprisingly, they also find it much easier than the average Joe to rank for more competitive search terms.

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense for Google to want to be there when Forbes breaks a story on say, a trading scandal… or when CNET breaks a story on the first review of the latest, soon to be released tech gadget.

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Well there you have it… yet another blog from yet another online marketing firm. Truthfully, we are hoping to bring something new and fresh to the masses with insight into SEO , Paid Search, Social Media and other related online marketing disciplines. So hopefully, you’ll learn something and ultimately participate in the conversations around the topics we cover.

The blog will feature authors with tons of experience. Our core focus is SEO, so we’ll use this forum to share our thoughts, insights and tricks of the trade as they relate to search engine optimization. We’re also pretty well versed in other online marketing areas, so we’ll share our thoughts as new and interesting topics emerge in the marketplace.