Jennifer Grappone, Author at Gravity Search Marketing

Guest Blogging Pointers in the Age of Link Building…

July 16, 2013
by Jennifer Grappone

If you’re working on link building for your website, chances are you’ve thought about guest blogging. Moz reports that guest blogging has seen a “meteoric” increase in 2012 and 2013, and is expected to continue on as a heavy-use tactic over the next year.

But some wonder whether guest blogging is an effective tactic, and if it is now, how long it will remain one. The same Moz survey I just mentioned found that there is a lot of uncertainty in the SEO community about which link building tactics are helpful, and which are harmful. As anyone who’s spent even five minutes following Matt Cutts probably knows, Google’s typical stance for any SEO tactic is that website owners should create high-quality content, provide an excellent user experience, and avoid trying to manipulate links for ranks. Guest blogging often falls outside of those parameters, and in fact Search Engine Land points out that Google’s advice to guest bloggers is to nofollow links when the goal of guest blogging is to build links.

We think guest blogging can benefit your site in terms of driving targeted traffic, improving search visibility for your brand, and if you’re careful to stay out of questionable territory, may even benefit your site’s ranks.

Here are some pointers for your guest blogging efforts:

Write guest posts for high-quality sites that are relevant to your industry and website content. It’s better to write guest posts for a variety of sites rather than writing multiple guest posts on the same site.
Google looks for quality signals, so the article should not be terribly short, keyword stuffed, or very similar in content to another post you’ve published elsewhere.
If possible, get a link back to your site. Whether you work in a link to your home page or deeper pages depends on the content of the blog post – go by what is most useful for your reader. It is not necessary to focus too much on keywords in your links, and it is not advisable to link to your site using the same keyword in the anchor text multiple times – this can be perceived as spammy.
You should not accept payment for guest blog posts, or submit a post to a site that is known for paying for guest posts. (Or, if you do, make sure the payment is disclosed and the link is tagged with “nofollow.”) Google does not want to reward the practice of paying for guest blog posts, so any paid guest blog post that links back to your site probably won’t help your ranks and – without appropriate disclosure and tagging – could even have negative ramifications.
If you can, set up Google+ authorship for every guest blog post (this will cause the author’s photo to be seen in the search results, and can provide other SEO benefits). Here’s an excerpt from The Ultimate Guest Blogger’s Guide for 2013: “More blogs are beginning to support authorship markup, so in many cases, you just need to provide your Google+ profile link to them, or link to it from your byline and list their root domain in the ‘Contributor to’ section of your [Google+] profile.”

Feel free to add your favorite guest blogging tips in the comments!

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Google Semantic Sidebar [“Knowledge Graph”] Spied in Australian Results

April 12, 2012
by Jennifer Grappone

We recently noticed that Google Australia is showing much more information-rich search results for certain searches than we’ve ever seen. We’re not seeing this type of result in US searches. Could this be a peek at future, more widespread Google results?

Update: 5/16/12 Google has given the sidebar a name — Knowledge Graph — and has officially announced it in this YouTube video. Universal roll-out is likely imminent at this time.

We don’t know how long this feature has been in testing mode, and not everyone on our staff was able to trigger these results. Here are some examples:

A search for “the walking dead” results in a detail-rich sidebar, with cast, episodes, and more.

A search for “apple fruit” results in a sidebar containing scientific details.

(Admittedly, we’re giving the search engine a lot of context here. A search for just “apple” results in both Apple stores as well as some details about the fruit.)

A search for “Iron and Wine,” the name of a singer/songwriter, results in a list of songs.

Why Is This Important?

We think it’s worth watching as a possible indicator of future semantic/information-rich results on Google.com and worldwide. It’s been reported in The Wall Street Journal that, over the next several months, Google will be adding more facts to prominent positions in search results in addition to standard links. Mashable discussed this evolution, too, describing a the development of a resource called Google’s “knowledge graph.”

This Isn’t New, Just Bigger

Google behaving as an “answer engine” is not new. Currently, for example, if you search Google.com for “what is mitosis” you will see a definition, provided by Google, above the regular search results.

Similarly, if you search for “men in black 3 release date” you will see Google’s best guess for the movie release date, based on several sources.

But there’s a big difference between these definitions and the big semantic sidebar we’re seeing in Australian results. This is the first we’ve seen something so extensive.

What’s Driving These Semantic Sidebars?

The results are coming from a mix of sites, and the links within the sidebars go to various websites as well as Google search results. For example, if you click on a movie poster, you may go to a site such as freemovieposters.net, but if you click on the cast image, you may be taken to a Google search result for the actor name.

What Google does to gather this information is crawl websites and look for data that it can understand. This doesn’t always involve semantic tagging (such as schema.org microformatting) but semantic tagging would certainly make it easier for Google.

We tried to find a clear connection among the sites chosen for inclusion in the sidebar, but so far we haven’t identified one. The image results in the sidebar are not the top ranking Google image results, and we see no evidence that the featured sites are collectively using semantic markup such as Schema microformatting.

What Does This Mean for Site Owners?

If what we’re seeing on Google.com.au is a harbinger of a more widespread Google search result, site owners may feel a pinch in their click-through-rates. We believe Google’s goal in adding more semantic answers in its results is primarily to keep searchers on Google; you might say that Google is eliminating the need for searchers to click away from Google.

Some site owners have expressed concern about this as a growing trend for Google to steer visitors to its own properties, and we share this concern. There’s not much we can do but roll with these changes. But now we may have a new featured spot to vie for: how to get sites featured in these semantic sidebars is likely to be a topic of much research and speculation.

UPDATE: Matt McGee of Small Business Search Marketing pointed out that Google was previously testing this change in 11/2011. You can read the story on Search Engine Land. Thanks, Matt!