There has been a thread on the forum Webmaster World that suggested around 50% of all free directories are now being de-indexed, I was a bit sceptical about this to start off with however Barry Shwartz from Search Engine Land and Terry Van Horne have done some tests and have both concluded that there are in fact now less free directories listed in the Google index, with Terry Horne concluding that around 16% of free web directories have been de-indexed.

End of the Free Directories and the Rise of the Paid for Directories

Chris Crum on Web News Pro argues that there will be a growth paid directories whilst the free directories continue to decline. If this is the case it could certainly see a bit of a shake up in the rankings whilst link flows readjust.

Directory Deindexing & Over-Optimisation

Coming so soon after the Penguin update it would be hard not to lump it all into the same basket which would suggest this is just another element of Google targeting old, or spammy SEO tactics. I’ve always believed in link deprecation and I would have thought that the majority of bigger sites out there that have some directory posts will not be affected by the directory deindexing because they probably didn’t have any benefit from those links in the first place.

If there are sites out there that have got a load of Fiverr type links for Directory Listings and they have been working, well, they probably won’t be anymore and it’s time to change strategy.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• google
• googl
• google de indexing directories
• de-index directory
• deindexed directories
• google de indexing free directories

Here is Google’s marketing ad for their augmented reality glasses:

As you’ll see from the video above this all seems very exciting and very cool, bringing the vastness of the internet and overlaying it on the everyday world could make life just thatg bit easier and maybe more interesting.

In the video it seems like the augmented reality will displayed directly in the wearers line of sight, covering their whole field of vision. Unfortunately, this appears to have been over-zealous marketing. In fact the augmented reality will in fact be positioned just above your line of sight in one eye and only. In Google’s own words it displays information: “about where the edge of an umbrella might be” – great, not quite the augmented reality everyone expected then! Note to self: don’t wear glasses when using umbrella to avoid confusion.

Google have admitted that it’s too early to know how the user interface will look (again check out the video, from that they seemed to have scoped out what they want to do with it and given it its own look and feel – marketing have over-stepped the mark havent’ they?).

Is the Design a Bit Too Star Trek?

The CEO of Oakley, Colin Baden has stated in the past that Oakley have been trying to develop augmented reality glasses since 1997 arguing that this is the most important consideration in the technology taking off or not. I’d tend to agre with him and take a look at the patented designs Google are putting out there at the moment, they look a bit Star Trek The Next Generation, what I mean by that is they look as though they were designed in the late 80s to look as though they are futuristic.

 How will Google Glasses Develop?

At this moment I’d be slightly cautious about saying how will Google Glasses develop because I think it’s far more likely that another company such as Apply will enter the market late and make something that’s outstanding and class defining in this sector in the way that the iPhone did to the smart phone market. I don’t think people will fully get on board until the point where there is an all signing all dancing augmented reality glasses type product on the market and Google has indeed fallen short of delivering that in this phase of the development. They may in the future but who know.

I’d love to have a play with some Google Glasses though!!

Campbells’ carried out marketing, mainly for multinational businesses selling vans and trucks as well as accessories for those kind of vehicles. They marketed in a very traditional manner, mainly direct marketing, data marketing, market research through a call centre. Not long after I arrived they decided to launch a monthly trade magazine and before you knew it I was a full time marketer and a part time trade journalist. Getting a van every week full of fuel and being sent to vehicle press launches was pretty amazing.

So what’s a magazine about vans got to do with SEO? During this period I was developing my marketing skillset as much as I could, I started to notice that the press releases and articles I wrote started to rank in the search engines, what’s more I started to see that the links I created in these articles helped the other websites ranks. That was how it all began, as with many thing in life I fell from one area into the next but seeing it had legs I went for it. All these years later I am still working my socks off to promote people online from a marketing point of view.

The interesting thing about this is that I feel as though SEO is coming in a full circle for me. I’m beginning to think that in the future the SEOs that will really be able to make a diffierence for their clients are the ones that have really good journalistic authority, the ones that create articles that people want to read, yes they may promote the odd client in them, however a lot of the articles they write won’t be written solely to promote a client – they will actually contribute something to the topic they are writing about.

Just as journalists are doing now, SEOs will turn more and more to social media sources for the up to the minute topics in which they can talk about.

Will SEO Agencies Become Publishing Houses?

Google is trying to get us all to move away from the poor content sites the seo community has been using for far too long, getting away from the poor quality linking practices that unfortunately still go on in our industry, but how can an seo agency promote the great content they are going to create now they can’t use things like blog networks, press release websites, article syndicators. I think the example is simple, as well as regressive. I believe we are going to see the growth of publishing houses from the seo industry, each seo agency will develop their own magazine/newspaper sites to write a about very specific topics, they will have a group of in house content writers to develop content on behalf of their clients that is unique and on topic of the site it’s being posted on, journalistically/editorially significant enough to warrant being included in the Google index and which in turn will be shared on social networks and which will actually pass weight back to the client websites.

Not every agency out there will have the stomach to do it. This model will require a lot of development from an agency to progress from agency to publisher, they will have to create lots of different sites on lots of different topics, they will need content writing on them by an editor – you’d probably require a couple of hundred magazine/newspaper type sites in order to do it effectively. I roughly worked out that one person could probably look after around 5 – 7 clients which in itself would mean there would have to be an increase in the cost of SEO in general to compensate for being able to handle fewer clients.

How important is the Journalist Persona?

All the posts that I write on GrowTraffic feature my rel=”author” tag – this lets Google know who I am and what I’m about. It is also an indication that this article is being written by someone who (vaguely maybe) knows what he’s talking about and it’s not just written by an anonymous person in Outer Mongolia who has no reputation to be damanged if he puts out junk content.

My persona gives Google an idea that this can be ranked. It also raises an interesting problem for those seo types who want to carry out some of the darker side of things. Namely it would be pretty obvious to Google that a person is creating a ton of content out there and just creating it to get links back to clients – they could then quite easily just discount the links out from any article with that author’s author tag. So do the more duplicitous of us out there start to develop multiple personas? This means creating several signals about a made up person or group of people – pen names almost. I’ve already heard of people offering this service, so I know people think it is going to be an important part of SEO in the future.

How SEO and Journalism are Related

SEO and journalism are all about words, I believe you’ve got to love words to be able to be an effective SEO and you’ve got to really love playing with words to be a journalist. Technical SEOs have had their day on the whole because all the new sites being built out there are built with the highest standards of SEO in mind, there are still some clever things you can do however if the basics are in place anyone with a basic understanding of how SEO works can go into the code or content management system of most sites and do their worst.

Certainly from my position and based on the way my career has meandered as marketing methodology has changed through the last decade, it feels as though we are coming full circle, that SEO and journalism are once again back in parallel to each other and the more changes Google makes, whether that be the de-indexing of the blog networks, the roll out of the Panda updates or the Penguin update I can only see them becoming ever more closely linked in the future.

So I’m scratching my head, the client is essentially accusing me of building the links and I can’t think that this can possible be true, then I look at the date on the link and realise that I was on a holiday break for the best part of a week when the links were built – so feeling a little bit more confident that I hadn’t been involved in the dodgy link building I went back to my client and said so. Rightly, the client then asked me: “well who has been building these links?” obviously still not believing me, but when I thought about it and thought about all the changes that have gone on in Google over the last couple of months lead me to think the much-fated negative seo techniques are finally getting used. Those black hat seos that we once referred to are truly turning to the real dark side!

What can be done about Negative SEO?

This got me thinking about what can be done to get this sorted, it’s not an easy question really because if you’re concentrating on building a select number of really good links, then you’re not going to constantly checking your own link profile, however it would seem that this is going to be something that we need to do in the future.

If we see a surge in links that are of poor quality then I’d suggest the first thing to do would be to let Google know that you think something strange is going on as soon as possible, this can be done through a reconsideration request, detailing everything you can see.

Dealing with Negative SEO in the future

So that’s if you see a surge in links – what happens if there are just a few dripping through, this is after all what we really want to happen with a site, we want people to find, it’s likely that these are going to slip under the radar, I think you don’t need to worry if you have a decent link portfolio in place, the few links that come through would be mitigated by the good quality links. The problems may come about when the links come in to a site that doesn’t have a big link portfolio not only because the ratio of these links will be much higher but also because the owner won’t be as on top of what’s happening in their link portfolio.

I’m fairly sure that I’ll be able to sort out what’s happening with my clients site, although I am a bit concerned that a competitor out there is adding negative seo links back to the site – it’s quite a negative process to have to keep building links to try to contain the potential affects of a competitor.

I really hope SEO isn’t going the way I think it might be doing, I’m all for growing businesses however I’ve always believed in a collaborative approach to business, not shameless destructive competitiveness that stops you focusing on what a business does well, rather makes the focus simply how to damage a businesses competitors.

What does the Penguin Update Do?

The Penguin Update was set live on the 24th April 2012 and it’s objective is to penalise websites that have been trying to spam Google and it seems to have been focusing on overuse of anchor text and keyword stuffing. Basically, it’s about things that violate Google’s guidelines. Check out a couple of examples here:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• SEL’s SEO Guide: iolations & Search Engine Spam Penalties

If you’re worried that you might be about to get hit by Penguin, don’t, you would already have been hit by the update – the damage would be done. Google has confirmed that this update is now live and active and it’s not rolling out from data centre to data centre as sometimes can happen.

This isn’t like when Google de-indexed the blog networks and sent out a load of emails telling people they had to remove unnatural links – in this situation the best way to tell if you’ve been hit by the Penguin update is to see if your organic traffic has gone down on or after 24th April – if it has you’ve been hit, if it’s gone up you’ve benefited from other people being hit (which suggests you’re doing some good stuff) and if you seen no difference you’re probably not ranking massively well or you aren’t in such a competitive search marketplace.

Google Panda 3.5

If you’re website starting to get less traffic on or around 19th April, it’s likely you’ve been hit by Google Panda 3.5. Google Panda 3.5 was specifically targeting websites (or web pages) that are less than great quality, so if this is when you saw the drop in rankings you can do something about it by putting some emphasis onto the content in those sections.

Should I submit a reconsideration request to Google for Penguin Update?

Unfortunately, Google Penguin update is an algorithmic change, which means if you have changed everything that could be construed as spammy that you can think of and you’re still not getting your rankings back, you won’t get your rankings back by submitting a reconsideration request so don’t bother, instead concentrate on creating some great user signals and brand signals that will convince Google you are one of the good guys, doing good things.

Google Over Optimisation Penalty

A while back I talked about the over optimisation penalty Matt Cutts has been talking about (or hinting about) for the last few months. The Penguin Update is the over optimisation penalty in question.

How has Penguin affected the search results?

Let’s face it, if you’ve had a search around you’ve probably started to see websites that you’ve never come across before. There is a lot of talk in the seo community that the Penguin update has ruined the rankings, but I expect in the cold light of day, the people saying this are the people that have had their rankings dropped. Generally, I’m seeing an improvement in the rankings for my sites, what’s more I’m seeing some fresh websites that I’ve not seen before in the rankings that I’m of the opinion that that’s got to be a good thing as long as they are relevant to the search query which so far they have been.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• google penguine update
• steven evans seo smm
• when is google penguin update in uk
• google penguin update in co UK
• google penguin update uk
• penguin update google
• penguine update
• what is google penguin
• what is penguin update ?

Another Step to Reward High Quality Sites

In their recent update Another step to reward high-quality sites, Google specifies essentially two elements they are targetting with this new update.

• Keyword Stuffing
• Links from poor quality / unreadable posts

How are Google targeting Keyword Stuffing?

They are looking at websites that have loads of content in a block that has loads of keywords that doesn’t really contribute anything – or more than likely when taking the next point into account (and the future of semantic search) they are looking for a content block that in which the content doesn’t read in context with the rest of the content block.

I’ve noticed a design agency in our local area that has 3 blocks in their footer that contains about 90 keywords or phrases. I should probaby let them know to change this – although I might just watch to see if their rankings are damanged in this update.

How are Google going to be targeting links from poor quality posts?

Google have given us one example, although from that example I’m going to assume them are looking at two elements, the anchor text of the link in relation to the content of the piece – if it’s not relevant to the topic it’s not going to rank and secondly (as above) does the text read as though it was written by a person for a person, if it doesn’t it’s not going to rank.

Thoughts on Google Latest Webspam Update

Overall, there are things that we’re talking about here that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone and we should always remember that Google deals in half truths – so read what you can from between the lines. If you’ve been in the game for some time now you’ll probably be scrathching you head thinking – I’ve not been doling this sort of stuff in years because Google are boud to do something about it – well now they have.

3% of all search queries are going to be affected by this update, there are some pretty straight forward things webmasters can do to makes sure they don’t get hit by that 3%.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• anchor text webspam update
• anchor text penalty
• another step to award high quality sites
• google handles anchor spam
• google latest web spam update
• google spam update
• how google is dealing with web spam

We’re in a Post-Panda world and it will never be the same again. In this brave new world we’ve got to think about how the SEO community has abused things and work back from there, looking specifically at the things Google has already shut down and the things they are telling us they are going to roll out and then try to imagine how.

Although I’m going to be looking at anchor text use, if you’re wondering about the recent changes in search that you really need to be thinking about these are the elements that you need to think about more carefully:

• Duplicate content
• Blog Networks
• Scraped content
• Spun content
• Link Anchor Text
• Semantic Search

How should you use Anchor Text?

For this post I’m going to look at anchor text – this is a follow-up in many ways to the last post I wrote about Google shutting down anchor text as a ranking factor.

Anchor text is the text that is used for a link, traditionally, this was Google’s best method for working out what the link was about and what strength should be passed through to the destination URL from the referring URL. They improved this system by working out how much the anchor text of the link was related to the context of the surrounding page it was on, thus article marketing, press releases, blogs all became the most effective method of marketing a product. The thing is, this created a lot of rubbish content on the internet, the type of content really didn’t want to have to crawl through because they knew it added very little, if anything to the end user, if we’re being totally honest they probably had to do something about it because it was costing them so much more money in server costs to have to keep processing all the additional content their algorithm has been making marketers create.

Should you use exact match anchor text?

Exact match anchor text is when you select the exact word or phrase you want someone who’s carrying out a search to use to find your website, it passes the strength back to that website for that term. Historically this was the best way to go about getting a ranking and the more of those you had the more likely your site was to rank for that phrase, I think it’s still fair to say exact match anchor text will play a part, there are times when using exact match anchor text in a blog post or on your site is exactly the right way to go about things, I think if you’ve got a lot of legacy links that are all exact match anchor text you also won’t have to worry too much. However, if you are still creating lots and lots of exact match anchor text links back to your website you should probably review your link building procedure.

Should you use partial match anchor text?

Partial match anchor text is when you get have the exact match keyword or phrase within the link, with additional words that may or may not be keywords. This is a better way of going about things, they look more natural and can be seen accross the blogosphere, where the writers use descriptive anchor text that are often a short sentence long rather than 2 or 3 words. I’d also argue that these give Google less chance to decide you’re trying to game the system and in fact what keywords you are looking to use to game the system.

Should you use call to actions in anchor text?

Back in the golden olden days of the internet every website you went to used anchor text that range from visit the website to click here, from read more to view here. It’s a fact that Adobe is probably the best ranking website out there for phrases such as Click Here. When Google came along and make link the central feature of their ranking algorithm SEOs starting saying (and Google’s Webmaster Guidelines still say) links should be descriptive, the thing is SEOs knew that if you stopped using click here in your link you would be able to get the website to rank for the keywords you used in its place.

Over recent years Google has started to work out the relevance of the link to the the page it’s on and the destination page. This was a great leap forward because it meant they wouldn’t count as highly any link that came in from a page that wasn’t about the subject of the link or the destination page, so what did SEOs and online marketers do? theyh created loads of content that was relevant to the link on the page. Simple. Google scratched its head for a while.

The thing is – the signals that tell Google that the referrer is relevant to the link, and the link to the destination page has a stage that can be cut out, namely is the referring page relevant to the destination page, Google works this out using contextual semantics. Easy. So if they can do that why do they have to consider anchor text at all? Probably because that’s how half the web works and they have to give us time to change it, hence their announcement that they will be moving towards semantic search.

So if you think about those factors then it is more probable that using a word or phrase such as click here or view more etc is actually more akin to the way we use language offline. I am now advocating that more often than not we should be mixing click here and view more and learn more as part of the anchor text structure as long as it comes in from a page that is contextually relevant to the destination page.

Should you use brand terms in your anchor text?

Further to the use of call to actions it’s definitely a good idea to start thinking more and more about using brand keywords as anchor text in your link building campaigns. Since 2009 Google has been looking more and more about what makes a website a brand in its own rights, and it’s pretty obvious that people will link out to you using your website or businesses brand. If you’re not doing it already (and lots of SEOs won’t be) it’s time you start addingn this into your strategy.

Conclusion

Google has said that they are going to change the way the are reviewing anchor text. I really don’t think that they are going to stop using anchor text in every occassion however I’d suggest it’s important to start thinking about the anchor text you use, both on site and offsite. I’d suggest it’s more appropriate to have exact anchor text onsite than it is offsite – although there will be occassions where exact match anchor text is appropriate offsite as well.

I’d suggest coming up with a formula of what percentage you are going to do for each different type of anchor text and personally I’d argue that most of your anchor text should be either brand focussed or call to action focussed with a lesser extent partial anchor text and then a relatively small percentage being exact match anchor text.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• what should you use as anchor text?

What is anchor text?

Anchor text is the text selected for a link back to another website, if you’re pointing back to a website about printer ink for example you might choose the words Printer Toner Cartridges as your anchor text, this in theory would help the website rank for the term printer toner cartridge and along with some other factors such as how relevant the referral page and destination page is to that anchor text this is one of the fundemental principles of seo over the last ten years.

The thing about anchor text is it’s really easy to spam – it’s just a case of sticking the word in there and you’re off. I’ve been saying for a while now that Google are going to do something about this because it seems like a bit of an antiquated way to rank websites – especially when you think the new ranking signals are all plus one and like buttons.

How are Google handling Anchor Text

Google specify two changes to the way they are handling anchor text as follows (view the original article):

1. Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.
2. Better interpretation and use of anchor text. We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.

So I take this to mean anchor text may have some relevance in some circumstances but won’t be valuable in all circumstances.

If you’ve not been using partial anchor text in your link building processes for the last year or so I think it’s about time you do.

What does this mean for SEO?

The classic method of building a rank has been lost, no longer can you just add a link to a page using a certain type of anchor text and expect it to benefit the destination of that link, like the printer toner cartridges link about will have only a limited effect on the seo of the website it’s linked to because GrowTraffic is about SEO and that’s about printer ink! I suppose that’s the way it should be really. It is certainly in line with everything that Google is talking about in terms of getting great content out there and getting real, relevant and qualifying links back to your websites.

I don’t think there will be a massive shift in the rankings, Google will protect the sites out there due to its historical bias – I think they got their fingers burnt a bit with the big Panda update in early 2011 and they’re not going to go back to doing something so huge again. This will be about new links and will be slowly retrofitted to the way Google views old links.

Fun times in SEO – yet again!

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• Tweaks to handling of anchor text
• google anchor text
• how does google handle anchor text?
• anchor text google growtraffic
• on page anchors seo
• how does google handle anchors
• google update anchor text
• google better interpretation of anchor text
• gogle changes to anchor text
• changes in the way google handles searches

Without boring you with the methodology I basically had a search around for the key websites that provide SEO services that have the most visibility. I discounted websites that had exact match domains on the thought that this was too easy, I also favoured those websites that ranked using an internal page rather than the homepage and have based this list on a number of different areas of SEO, namely: SEO consultancies, Freelance SEOs, SEO Copywriters and SEO Programmers.

This isn’t a list of the best seo agencies, seo consultant, or seo copywriter – this is about the visibility of websites in the SEO sector – but if a seo company, freelance seo consultant or seo programmer can’t get themselves to rank for their chosen area of SEO expertise you’re probably not going to want to speak to them anyway!

30 Leading SEOs in the UK

The 30 leading SEOs I’ve chosen here – displayed in alphabetical order:

• http://alex-moss.co.uk/
• http://www.ben-norman.co.uk/
• http://www.bensykes.co.uk/
• http://www.bigmouthmedia.com
• http://www.clickconsult.com/
• http://www.danhorton.co.uk/
• http://www.dotsearch.co.uk/
• http://enterprisingseo.com/
• http://www.espan.co.uk/
• http://www.firstfound.co.uk/
• http://www.growtraffic.co.uk
• http://www.helpinthecity.co.uk/
• http://www.i-fluid.co.uk/
• http://www.ioptimal.co.uk/
• http://www.jasonjsmith.com/
• http://www.justsearchseo.co.uk/
• http://www.kendallcopywriting.co.uk/
• http://www.mansoorsiddique.com/
• http://www.mylesbradley.co.uk/
• http://www.promodo.co.uk/
• http://www.seo.co.uk/
• http://www.seoconsult.com/
• http://seocv.co.uk/
• http://sharkseo.com/
• http://www.seo-creare.co.uk/
• http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/
• http://www.seo-vantage.co.uk/
• http://www.seonext.co.uk/
• http://www.smart-traffic.co.uk/
• http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/

I hope this is a bit of fun as much as anything else! I’d love to know if there are names here you think shouldn’t be – or names/websites that you think should be here and what you think the methodology for building such a list should be. I’ve been considering developing a site that would look at this a little more scientifically/automatically and would be grateful for your thoughts on how to do this.

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• copywriter steve evans
• seo-vantage co uk
• how to choose the domain of microsite steven evans
• leading seos
• -inurl:justsearchseo co uk justsearchseo co uk
• www growtraffic co uk
• who are the leading seos in the uk
• promodo co uk
• leading seos in the uk
• justsearchseo co uk/

The thing about this content is, by and large it is created at dirt cheap rates, with little or no thought, it’s then spun which means the words are changed algorithmically by a piece of software and the content is then syndicated across a networks of sites that are owned by the same person or organisation, each one of these new blogs then has a link pointing back to a page on a client site using specific anchor text which then helps that links destination to rank. The thing is Google is getting smarter about how it deals with this.

There is quite a bit of talk in the SEO community about unnatural link warnings coming through to people’s webmaster tools account, I’ve written on it myself – it’s recently featured on SEOMoz.

How to tell if you’re looking at a blog network site?

When searching in Google it’s likely you’re never going to find a blog network site, these sites aren’t designed to be found by ordinary internet users, they are really just designed to generate links back to websites to help those money sites rank. If you do happen to find yourself on a site you think might be part of a blog network here are a few things you should look out for:

1. Basic template – in all likelihood no effort will have gone into making these sites appear good, they are all very basic, usually just a date archive, limited navigation
2. Pages and pages of seemingly unrelated content
3. The content is probably badly written
4. The content doesn’t really add anything to the subject it’s about
5. There are normally 1 – 3 links in the content back to the same page on a client’s website
6. They  won’t link out to any other websites
7. They won’t have Google Analytics, Google Webmaster or Google Adsense added to them

What is Google Doing About Blog Networks?

Basically, as from March 2012 it looks as though the game is up – they seem to have figured out the general consistencies between different blog sites and what blog network sites look like.

This means they are Google are getting rid of a load of rubbish from its index and just about every website out there that has ever dabbled in SEO will probably feel this pain in some way or another, some will have directly used blog networks in their strategy, others will have used sites that also use blog networks in their strategy. I think it’s fair to say it’s a big change asnd it’s going to have a massive impact not only on those sites that have been delisted – it’s certainly likely to put some people out of business.

What will happen to my site if I’ve got links from blog networks?

No idea is the honest answer, however I can speculate. I’d guess that there would be a combination of two factors going on. I think Google will implement time based penalties for certain keywords – this would be like a time based penalty that would see a site drop down for a specific keyword for a certain amount of time. I don’t think Google will do too much damage to the strong players in the search market if they have some links from these sites, ultimately if all your links come from these sites your site will probably fall off a cliff – but I’d guess only in the fact that it’s had all its links removed by the deindexing of the blog network.

Google’s advice is to take them off the network and resubmit a reconsideration request. I’m not really sure how feasible this is, by and large I’d guess that most people that have links on these networks will never be able to get in touch with the person or organisation that own them directly in order that they are taken down.

Why blog networks went wrong

Essentially,  the blog networks got greedy, they didn’t product good quality websites – there’s talk about them not producing good quality content but I don’t think it’s really about good quality content, rather it’s about a type of blog, that has no topic and no brand to signal to Google that this is good quality, otherwise Google’s algorithms would trip out thinking just about every newspaper out there, for example, is a blog to be deranked.

Can blogs still work for SEO?

At the end of the day Google has been encouraging us to blog for years. Their new semantic search is going to be much more blog orientated in my opinion because it relays on the context of the content. If it didn’t our move towards inbound marketing would be left in tatters too. Therefore, I believe that blogs still have a significant role to play in SEO in fact I believe after the decline of the blog networks, blogs will probably have more influence in SEO, although I’m not advocating it, if there are people out there that are looking to build networks of blogs to benefit clients I would suggest they may be best creating content in specific topic areas and only taking on clients that match those topic areas, or at very least writing the content in such a way that it relates the client content through to the overarching content topic of the website.

Easier said than done no doubt!!

Keywords used by people to find this content include:

• google delisting blogs
• content mills uk
• is google delisting blog networks
• how to overcome google unnatural linking penalty
• how to overcome a google penalty for links
• google unnatural links warning penalty
• google dislikes
• google detected unnatural links panda updates
• google delisting loads of links
• google delist blog network