SEO predictions and trends for 2014

Google will always change its search engine algorithm frequently many number of times in every year. In 2014 Google made many updates to its search engine algorithm, those are:

1. SEO will always be with us:

This is said by Brian provost, presently he works as the vice president of digital strategy for Define Media Group. SEO is a group of compliance problems and procedures to optimize businesses around them, it is like tax law. By this reason SEO is considered as a restraint for content marketing.

2. SEO has always been about content marketing:

Brain Wood, he is the senior marketing manager for SEO stated that the Content marketing trend is overblown, because Google more concentrates on quality of content. For better traffic people who were using spammy or copied content in their site, Google has made more difficult.

3. SEO and Content marketing, both are becoming same:

SEO and Content marketing both are different industries, but they perform similarly. Because SEO may not create your content and content writer may not optimize your site, but every piece of quality content boosts your search engine ranking.

4. SEO basics will never go away:

Adam Barker, senior inbound marketing manager admits that content is a king; quality content is the new way to get more traffic to particular site. But you have to still prepare your site based on main keywords and on-page factors.

5. Search engine will become smarter:

Search engines are speedily increasing the intelligence to differentiate between websites that provide value from sites that create the illusion of value. People think of SEO as a series of HTML, Link building etc., that enable better rank to the site in search engine, but now a days search engines concentrating more on detailed and significant content to provide better ranking.

6. Social presence will be more important than search:

This trend will more noticeable in this year as compared to last year. Having social presence is becoming more reliable to get more traffic and building brand awareness, because people can easily share content across social networks like face book, twitter, Google+ etc.

7. Determining what ranks, and why, will be more difficult:

It is impossible to know when readers see your content unless they click through to open your site in a browser.

8. The Rule of SEO experts will evolve:

There will be an unlimited regeneration of SEO agencies as content marketing or inbound marketing departments. Finally, Pollitt (director of marketing for Digital relevance) says, imagine marketing communications and PR departments to swallow up SEO departments.

9. Stay honest and be an authority:

Focus on creating high quality content and avoid old building links that will serve your users.
           So, Making out these simple changes can benefit us and yield high results. As when there is a content which serves purpose then obviously audience will be attracted towards it. So, by keeping these points about content we can get sales from people who are interested in purchasing or taking our services. From the search updates and algorithm changes content has undergone huge number of changes in 2012 and 2013. Even SEO has taken its form that is now SEO serves in a realistic way to the users without any spam or black hat. So it is the duty of webmasters to build a site with certain design, content marketing strategy need to be developed, engaging in social advertising is very crucial, technically a site should perform well and also you can have high number of long tail keywords.

Widget Link Scheme Definition

Widget Link Scheme Definition

Google updates their algorithms on regular basis. Recently google reveal the definition of widget link scheme. It is a pretty broad. In this definition, google clearly comprehensible what types of links in widget link scheme violation.

Previously Google Guideline:

Links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.

Today Google Guideline:

Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites.

Comparison

Compare previous guideline and today guideline of google changed definition a bit. Google recently updated definition to its widget link scheme or representation. It was simply done to exclude from consideration for confusion.
Google old widget link scheme definition, define that every link in a widget is a scheme. But as per new widget link scheme, doesn't reveal exact statement on this. It gives some factors or issues that will bring out google to view a widget link scheme as spam.

Matt Cutt's Stated About Widget Link Scheme

Google spam head Matt Cutt's stated as, warned against widget links as a winning link building process or strategy. And he also suggests to SEO as use rel-"nofollow" attribute properly to widget links.
Matt cutts said like "I would not trust on widgets as your essential origin to gather links, and I would advice to putting a nofollow attribute, especially with widgets links".

Ultimate Guide to Recover from a Google Manual Penalty

  Google, the major search engine continuously fine-tune their algorithm updates to extract accurate search results. Every year, Google rolls out many minor and major algorithms to catch websites that violate Google webmaster guidelines and participate in unnatural link building strategies. Google penalty updates are fearsome thing for most of the webmasters.

What do you mean by penalty?

Google penalty is a term that refers to a manual spam action given to a website with the algorithm update. If you search for a website that has been hit by a Google penalty, you can able to see a message in Google search results stating that it has been hacked or penalized.

Most common penalty

Most of the webmasters receive a common penalty like "unnatural link penalty" when they participate in unnatural link building strategies (link schemes). Google considers "links that are used to manipulate page rank or website ranking in search results and violate Google webmaster guidelines" as a part of link scheme. Henceforth, site owners should not participate in link scheme strategies to increase their website ranking.

Filters Vs Penalties

Google uses both filters and penalties to improve and organize search results in an accurate way for better user experience. There is a lot difference between a filter and penalty. If you have well knowledge on purpose of update and target, you can easily recover your website from an update when it is hit by a filter.

Where as a penalty is occurred when website owners break Google webmaster policies. Filter may lead to manual action, penalties are caused due to panda and penguin updates. Moreover, steps to recover from a filter drastically vary from steps to recover from a penalty.

You will receive a message in Google webmaster tools, when your website got penalized by a Google update. Message in the Google webmaster tools helps you to identify the cause of penalty but it will not provide specific examples.

Not appearing in search results

Find out whether your website is showing up in search results by entering your website URL or brand name. If you're site is not displayed in search results, it could be due to two reasons. First reason is that, your website has not been indexed. Second case is, your website got penalized by Google update.

Identifying Bad Links

If you have been hit by a Google penalty, then you should identify your website bad links with the help of tools and the process depends upon the Google policies you have broken. If you've been actively indulged in link building practices, focus more on it, to filter those links. You can make an use of many tools to identify such kind of bad links. You have to give foremost priority to Google webmaster tools which is the best source to find unnatural links.

Link Removal and Clean Up

After identifying bad links, next step is to send an e-mail to website owners about your link removal request to clean up your website to make it free from spam and the message should be in a pleased way. Put an effort to clean up all those links. At last, sort out the remaining links which are not removed and place them in a sheet for further process.

Disavow

You need to send link removal request for website owners at least twice or thrice. If you didn't receive any reply from them, then you need to use disavow tool to clean up the remaining links. You need to show a proof for Google about your link removal request before submitting remaining links via disavow tool.

Reconsideration Request

Next step is to write a reconsideration request to Google, when writing, be honest and mention about your efforts which you made for removing bad links. It takes at least two to three weeks of time to remove those links.

What's Next

After few weeks, Google will send you a message in GWT stating that, your penalty has been removed and it will take some time to re-index your website. If the penalty has been removed and still the message exists in GWT, redirect your domain, this can speed up the process.