Posted by Danny Whatmough on Jan 02, 2013
Google guru Matt Cutts clearly found it hard to enter fully into the festive mood this Christmas as he was busy posting away in one of Google’s product forums about the value of links in press releases. ON CHRISTMAS DAY!
All work and no play? Well, maybe. But, whatever his motivations, now we are back at work recovering from Xmas excess, his post needs careful attention:
Note: I wouldn’t expect links from press release web sites to benefit your rankings, however.
Now, before everyone wades in, it is worth adding a few caveats (and/or read the whole forum thread in its entirety). Matt isn’t saying that press releases don’t help. He is saying that links in press releases, that are then posted onto newswire or press release distribution sites, won’t have any impact on search engine ranking positions.
The end of links?
Google’s Head of Webspam is confirming what many digital experts have long suspected, that Google has significantly diminished the ranking effect of links from press releases (or indeed other content) on less valuable sites.…
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Posted by Danny Whatmough on Oct 01, 2012
Last Tuesday, I chaired an event for the PRCA looking at the relationship between PR and SEO. If there is one key theme that came out of the conference, it was that Google’s recent updates (think Panda and Penguin) bring SEO very much into the domain of what you might term ‘traditional PR’ activities.
For the last week or so, the digital marketing community has been buzzing about a new ranking factor, called AuthorRank. Google is expected to roll AuthorRank out very soon and, for me, it once again shows how the boundaries between traditional PR, digital PR and SEO are blurring.
Last year, Google launched its authorship programme. You’ll have come across this in the Google searches you do on a daily basis – where pictures of the author of a particular article appear next to the listing. Ever since this launch, there has been speculation in the digital marketing community that soon, Google would start to use authorship as a determining factor for rankings.…
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Posted by Danny Whatmough on Sep 24, 2012
There has been a debate raging for years (and this has even intensified in recent weeks) about the role that SEO and PR can/should play together.
As chair of the PRCA’s Digital Group it’s something I’m acutely aware of and I’m therefore delighted that the PRCA is addressing this at its latest Gateway conference tomorrow in London.
I’ll be chairing the half day session and there’s a host of A-list speakers from Edelman, Unibet, Text 100, PH Creative and Inkling.
It promises to be a fascinating morning and there are still a few tickets left so I’d encourage you to grab them if you are able to make it and/or follow the hashtag #prcagateway…
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Posted by Danny Whatmough on Sep 05, 2012
Google is such a dominant force in the world, surely there isn’t anything that keeps the behemoth up at night?
Well, what about this… You know all that content that sits out there on the web? What happens when the same person writes for more than one site? How do you (as Google) track all that information and attribute it to the same author?
Introducing authorship markup
It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that Google has been working on for some time. The nifty solution it has created is called authorship markup.
You’ve probably already seen the results of Google authorship markup. Anytime you do a search and you see an author’s avatar come up next to a search listing, that’s a result of authorship markup. And it is becoming increasingly common.
It’s all about SEO
The reason that more publishers and authors are flocking to this new way of sorting content is partly the kudos of seeing your picture in Google searches (and, in all seriousness, it makes your listing stand out even if it isn’t the highest result) but, more likely, because of the SEO benefits.…
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Posted by Alex Perryman on Apr 03, 2012
I recently attended an interesting seminar looking at future trends in SEO, organised by General Assembly and Hyperclick.
Here at EML Wildfire, we believe that SEO is a crucial part of the PR and marketing mix and so we are constantly integrating SEO techniques into the work we are doing for our technology PR clients.
Because of this approach, it is important to stay up to speed with developing trends. So I thought I’d share some of the insights – new and old – that I picked up over a series of blog posts.
Some fundamentals things to consider before embarking on SEO…
The first thing to bear in mind when considering SEO is that it’s not a quick-fix panacea for everything.
However you manage your SEO strategy, it would be wrong to think that a quick blast of activity will get you to the top of the SEO rankings overnight.…
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