Category: Search Engine Optimization

SEO Plateau – How to Break it

Back in 2002, I was just a new immigrant in Canada.  It was tough moving to a new country, getting to know the culture, finding new friends who can fill in the empty space of family members and friends I left behind back home, learning how the job mark works, etc.  To say the least, it was a stressful time.  As a way to manage stress, I started jogging in the beautiful city of Toronto. It made a huge impact on how I felt about myself and my new home.

As the weather started to get colder – yes believe you me, Toronto gets cold 😉 – I joined a local GYM in Toronto.  I started working out on my own for a few years.  Even though I was feeling good, I was not seeing great results.

Then one day I had knee injury while we were in Niagara Falls with a couple of friends. As a result I stopped working out for a while.  After resting to heal for a couple of months, I rejoined the GYM; however, this time around, I hired a professional personal trainer to ensure I am doing the exercises right. It was only then when I realized I was doing a lot of moves wrong – spending so much energy and not getting the most return possible.

It made me thinking this is very much like the business world.  Throughout the years I have worked with great marketers who had decided to take on search by themselves.  The issue with Google AdWords or SEO is that they are deceivingly simple.
You can read a few articles and play around with the tools and you might feel that you know how to manage your campaigns and website.  However, there are so many small details that you only learn by years of experience working on a wide range of websites and industries.

As part of my training program, my personal trainer keeps changing my routine so that I do not hit a plateau.  You need to do the same with your link building process.  If you keep doing the same, you will not get the maximum impact.  You need to be creative and diversify your link building and link baiting exercises.

Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that getting the basics right is still crucial.  The same way you need to use the right form and breathe properly when you workout, you need to make sure your site is crawlable, has valuable content and linked properly.

As Six Sigma suggests, always Define the problem, Measure the process, Analyze the data, Optimize the process, and Control process to ensure desirable results.

Removing Content from Google Index

Whether it is for reputation management, eliminating duplicate content for SEO purposes or removing sensitive information indexed by search engines, you might want to remove content from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

As with your health, prevention is better than cure. As a webmaster, you may try preventing the search engines from finding your pages by not linking to them, using nofollow attribute or hide them behind JavaScript.  However, there is no guarantee that these steps work.  If you have sensitive content on the site that you would like to keep it hidden from the prying eyes of search engines, your best bet is to hide it behind authentication.  You may also consider using robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling and/or indexing those pages.

If Google has already crawled and indexed the pages you did not want to be public, you can file a request to remove the page from Google index through URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools.  Once the request is submitted, it usually takes up to 48 hours for Google to either accept or deny your request.

Requesting Removal of Content from Google Index

For Google to remove a page from its index, you need to ensure that the page is no longer live on your site and returns a 404 or 410 HTTP status code, or block the content through robots.txt file or meta noindex tag.

You can also remove pages from Google cache by either adding a meta noarchive tag to the page or change the content of the page all together. One word of caution: make sure you know what you are doing and what pages you are removing.  Because the content removed from Google index using this tool will be excluded from the Google index for at least 90 days.  You can only request for a re-inclusion after the 90-day cooling period.

Online Reputation Management

Depending on the size and brand sensitivity of organizations, they have traditionally had Public Relations departments, spokesperson or spin doctors to deal with crisis management, customer relations, employee relations, government affair and media relations.

Even though Public Relations (PR) has been a center of attention for years as the process of maintaining public image for high-profile people, organizations, corporations, programs and governments, in the recent years, its importance has grown more than ever. With the ever growing creation of user generated content (UGC) through blogging and video sharing platforms and other forms of social media, more people have access to the media and can potentially negatively impact the image of a person or an organization.

Negative blog postings, undesirable feedback in blog comments, damaging testimonials in popular forums, unrealistic allegations, and product reviews from false users just under or above your company name can destroy profits without the proper corporate reputation management.  Reputation Management is the practice of responding to the reputation damaging information.

Robert Greene says: “so much depends on reputation – guard it with your life. Make your reputation unassailable.  Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen.”  To do so, you need to monitor your brand or name on an ongoing basis to see what is being said about it.  You can do so using various brand monitoring tools such as Google Alert.  Once you find possible negative online comments or blog posts, you have various options to deal with the situation.

Reputation Management will assure that potential customers will have a positive and realistic impression of your company.  As in most cases removing the damaging information from the result pages of search engines is not possible, online reputation management explores other solutions such as improving the first page of search engines results pages more favourable to the corporate site.

The first goal of online reputation management is to get negative results off of the first page. This is done by adapting various SEO strategies to outrank those negative results and send them far down the search results.  Some of these strategies are:

•    Developing micro sites
•    Utilizing social media sites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn)
•    Developing and optimizing videos and other digital assets
•    Writing and distributing press releases
•    Blogging to create fresh content
•    Building wiki-sites

Search engine optimization agencies were among the first companies who started offering search reputation management services.  PR companies seem to be a little behind the online world.  They either need to start developing the skills or team up with search marketing firms to help their corporate clients in the Web 2.0 world.