There has been an increase in discussion regarding the Google authorship markup as of late, partly due to a belated welcome email by Google to the authorship program but also because of some of the extra benefits they are starting to bring to authors. There’s no denying that authorship and author rank are going to be the next big thing in SEO.
A few days ago, having returned from a very nice holiday in Greece I noticed that all my authorship thumbnails had been removed from Google – not exactly the welcome home I had anticipated, so I checked Google Webmaster Tools and could clearly see that my impression count and clicks had dropped off the face of the earth:
I thought it strange so I checked the rich snippets testing tool on all my blogs just in case Google was either testing something, all worked fine:
Worth noting here is that all my blogs, not just one or two, that previously had authorship tags triggering the thumbnails suddenly stopped:
I looked online to see if anyone else had experienced anything like this but couldn’t find any information – but what I found interesting after a day or two was that I could see that for most of my blogs the impression count and number of clicks had actually peaked at the highest number in many months – without authorship thumbnails.
Also in Google Webmaster Tools the impressions and clicks of the site increased to the highest point in 2 months
Another strange point to mention is that for all my blogs the “about us” pages still did trigger the image so this is again evidence that technically everything is working correctly.
So 4 days later, the authorship images have begun to return to my blogs but rather oddly one by one and not for all blog posts. It’s almost like the tags are being reviewed section by section and then set live – very odd, will give everyone an update when I learn more.
Ok, I just want to start by saying I do not promote the use of paid links at all but there’s a technique which I’m seeing being used more and more that does help increase rankings and has very little if not any risk from Google.
Right, so link building has been happening more a less since the day Meta data spamming optimisation died a gruesome death many years ago. For a long time paid links have worked well and as a result of that a lot of content has been muddying up the waters in Google’s search results and making it very difficult for genuine search marketers to follow their increasing guidelines.
There are methods out there, such as the one I’m going to talk about which do still work – yes it may be an old method but that’s irrelevant, I’ve seen exception results for a long time. It’s the process whereby you build links to an already existing or trustworthy link therefore indirectly passing page rank and link value to the page and those links on it. There are many names for this method, pyramid link building, link wheels, indirect link building but they all work on the same principle. This can be a genuine link building method for white hat if done correctly but paid links are creating a problem for Google and those websites who worry about negative SEO.
So below you can see how traditionally building links to a page works, a website passes a percentage of its value (or PR) to the destination link, as a result your website gets more link value.
So indirect link building (as I like to call it) looks quite different:
So when you build links to an existing link on say the BBC which will pass good value and trigger trust signals left, right and center – you are in a sense boosting whatever you already have. Now the value is going to be a lot less than if you build directly but integrated into a long term SEO strategy this can work wonders for keyword performance.
Although Google has talked about how bad paid links have been for a long time now it’s only really been in 2012 that I’ve seen any real progress from them, with updates such as Penguin and its slightly comical unnatural links warning in July – but results have been improving.
So Google’s got paid links cracked right?
Unfortunately not, as I’m seeing more and more paid links using this method – as you might expect they are not reinforcing already good links on places like the BBC but promoting content through places like PR web which are generally low quality to start with.
A very real problem with this is that people are starting to build paid links to websites that are using ethical means of link building putting them at risk. Some might call this negative SEO but in some cases they are in fact buying links indirectly without any Google risk and getting the SEO benefit.
What I believe Google might be doing about this is something mentioned in their update about the unnatural links warning:
We don’t want to put any trust in links that are artificial or unnatural. We recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize that some links are outside of your control. As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole. If you are able to remove any of the links, please submit a reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
So the fact Google is taking action against the links themselves could mean that they may only penalise specific pages rather than whole websites – but still any way you look at it Google still has a problem here.
So Google+ has been around a while now and there have been many arguments and discussions based on if the social platform is working or not. The numbers certainly speak for themselves, in April 2012 Avinash quoted that there is over 170 million users on Google+, which is likely to look more towards 200 million now – a number that brands certainly cannot ignore.
That being said there has always been the argument that Google is forcing users and brands onto the platform with such releases as search plus your world and people and pages in search - even Google recently said they would stop pushing the information so heavily. Along with that people are still not convinced Google+ is a genuine social network where conversations and interactions take place in the same manor as perhaps Facebook or Twitter - i’m sure a lot of people have heard the line “Isn’t Google+ just for Marketers?”. Well, that got me thinking – what is the current state of some of the top brands on Google+ today? So I did some analysis around 10 of the top brands on Google+ to see what learning’s, if any could be discovered.
1. Number of Google+ Followers - I looked at how many people have these brands in their circles and follow them, to get this data I visited each of their pages:
Cadbury UK was a clear winner with about 2.25 million circle followers – but lets put this into perspective these are large worldwide brands, for most companies out there anything over 1,000 followers is pretty good going. So the question here is how did these 10 businesses setup so many followers in relatively little time?
2. Average Daily Increase in Followers – I used the website SocialStatistics.com to pull together how many new followers each brand had received over the last 2 months and then averaged that number.
Interesting to see here that there is a vast difference between half of the brands on this list, almost x10, x15 more users adding these brands than others. Looking historically on socialstatistics.com it seems that for the half that are currently driving much less than the others received a very high increase of followers at the launch of Google+ and have since tailed out, again Cadbury UK is delivering on average just over 10,000 new followers each day
3. Post Frequency and Post Quality- here I looked at how often each brand posted over the period of the last 30 days and scored a number out of 10 (being best). For post quality I again marked each brand out of 10 based on the type of posts, media, tone, platform specific – obviously the more types of content they have the better.
It actually surprised me that so many of the brands were posting such good quality content, I was expecting a much more “taken from our website” approach, when in reality there are definitive Google+ content strategies being applied out there – of course as you can see in the graph there are a few which a less successful.
4. Average Comments Per Post – perhaps the most important when discussing if the platform is actually being used properly by people. I calculated an average post count on the last 30 days for each brand.
5. Visibility of Google on Each Website – An important part of the integration for publishers is making sure you have the right buttons coded on the websites. I looked at each brand website that was linked in the “About” section of the Google+ brand pages.
Very clear that some brands have embraced Google+ and integrated the necessary but also, quite alarmingly there are brands that have no mention of the site – so how do they generate their followers? Brands could be using email, newsletters, brand visibility, organic search results and simply people searching for brands once on Google+.
6. Does quality and quantity of posting have any relation to conversation? I added the frequency average to the posting quality score to give an overall number.
So there’s some interesting takeaways from this graph;
- For the first third of the brands there is some correlation to the quality of what brands post and how often they post it
- There are some brands, most noticeably Pepsi that have a high number of conversations happening with relatively few posts (or bad quality posts)
- Topman, Samsung and Glamour Magazine have quite a high number of posts of good quality but relatively few interactions
So I had a look in a little more details into the quality of the conversations being had, I chose Cadbury UK, Pepsi and ASOS (I wanted a good mix of brands). Firstly I looked at if I thought the conversations were fake or genuine – I defined this through 3 random posts for each brand and categorized comments based on the post theme and relevancy.
- Cadbury UK – as you would expect their content is excellent and this is reflected in the types of comments. The content is engaging for users and the brand is prompting replies.
- Pepsi – The comments are relatively good and on topic but the content being used has no real direction, it’s a bit scatty in my book.
- ASOS – these guys are not a million miles away from Cadbury in terms of the type of content they are posting but the comments are very unrelated to the posts themes, clearly not at the same level of engagement.
This led on to the final part of my analysis, what is the quality of the followers like? It’s no secret that you can buy followers on Google+, you can do this for every social media platform – that’s nothing new. However have these big brands gone down the same route? Now I’m not saying users are fake or not but I did grade the type of follower – if they have added content about them besides the “standard” format and have posting anything else, I would consider that active (not very scientific I know), if the followers have literally posted nothing besides their name and location I did not consider that active – I looked at 50 random profiles for each brand:
What’s interesting is that there seems to be quite a mix of active versus non active followers (or real vs fake if you like). I have to admit, I did notice the same suspect profiles appearing a all of the brands above which would point to suspect behavior but what’s interesting is that Pepsi, who have the highest percentage of followers that appear active also have the closest ratio of comment to quality/frequency of posting - does this mean brands that post good content less frequently attract the right type of ”active” user? Perhaps, but there are many other variables which need to be taken into account.
Whichever way you look at this you have to say that there is good content being promoted on Google+ by brands and in some cases that content is being engaged with by real people – that in my book makes Google+ a worthwhile investment.