has been in the eCommerce and internet marketing industry for 12+ years. Her organizational skills and detail oriented nature keep our processes streamlined. Julie’s great at keeping all the moving parts prioritized and organized. Her brain is analytical and practical, she can fine tune and implement John’s creative off the wall ideas. She has a natural talent for on site optimization, and loves to help clients connect the dots between blogging and social and SEO and usability, often found in different departments of a company. Her previous experience in web design provides a balance between user friendly sites and SEO friendly site architecture. Researching and editing are like breathing, and she spends time with clients on social media marketing, branding, and content marketing. She is religious about following internet marketing forums, events, and the latest in SEO and social media marketing shifts; this consistently updated knowledge is your key to staying ahead of the curve. Her experience includes running her own ecommerce business, and volunteered as executive secretary to an international online trade organization. Julie travels extensively, loves wine, is a mom and the Game Queen.
UPDATE 10/19: Google has confirmed the rollout of Penguin 3.0
I’ve only got one anecdote to support my suspicion, but a client who was a victim of Negative SEO lost all of their top 10 rankings, and as of today they are all back 100%!
Photo Credit: omoscowonder.com
Backstory: This client hired us in December 2013 to figure out why their rankings and organic traffic had dropped overnight on Oct 5, 2013 (date of the last Penguin update). We analyzed their back links using a variety of tools and didn’t take us long to discover they had been a victim of negative SEO. We found over a period of 3 months there were random spammy links added to their site to the tune of about 20,000 links a month! They had never done their own link building nor hired an SEO. Other than these links they had a very small link profile, with just natural links and only a few.
Because the rankings and traffic did drop right in line with the Penguin update, and there were no warnings in Webmaster Tools of a manual penalty, we knew this was an algorithmic penalty associated with these links.
It took us about 3 months to discover and disavow these links, and the reason why is interesting. The links were not showing up on the page every time – they would only occasionally show up upon a refresh. Each refresh of these spam pages was filled with about 100 random links, and each refresh showed a new 100 links. So any link checker would find the links some times, but not other times. We had no choice but to continue to run a link checker, 3 different link checkers as a matter of fact, about 1x a week. Each time we would discover new links that we hadn’t disavowed yet. It was a brilliant sneaky black hat SEO attack.
By around February, we were confident we had disavowed about 90% of the spam links. But no recovery.
As we have all learned since then, a site must wait on Google to update the Penguin algorithm before any changes in rankings or recovery can take place. Unfair? Absolutely. Especially in the case of Negative SEO, which is real and does work. And in this case it took Google over a year to update Penguin. Imagine us reassuring this client that as soon as Google runs their update, their rankings will be back. “When will that be?” “Uh, Google won’t tell anyone, should be within 3 more months”.
In the meantime, we worked hard on content marketing, blogging for the client, getting high quality content published on their site and blog, building out Google Local pages, hoping that when the update hit, their site would be stronger than ever.
SUCCESS! ALL of their previous important keywords are back to the top 10, as of today October 18, 2014. Some of them even higher!
We are torn between being thrilled and being sickened that Google can allow something like this to happen.
SEO has evolved so much during the past 5 years that we even renamed our company to Web Moves. I absolutely love some of the brilliance I read from experts in our industry— and this guy could have been speaking words straight from my mouth.
Forbes – If You’re Good at These 3 Games, You’re Probably Good at SEO
Photo Credit: riograndegames.com
Another Facebook advertising glitch yesterday, December 7, 2012. A poorly built system now completely not able to launch an ad. Not sure who else has experienced the new approval method on Facebook for ad copy, but it will blow your mind how moronic it is. Surprise surprise, Facebook advertising not working again.
Yesterday when I updated a routine ad campaign, to advertise a recent post for a client, I performed the usual: chose a recent post, and unpaused the campaign. Typically the ad stays in Pending Review and is automatically approved within a few hours, and we receive an email confirming when it launches. Not this time. With no explanation, while I happened to be on my personal Facebook page, a frame “Your Ad is Almost Ready!” and invites me to Finish My Ad. That’s odd since I finished it hours ago.
Round two, the following day, ad campaign still pending review, nothing launched, I see the same Frame “Your Ad is Almost Ready” and this time the ad is correct. Success you think? Afraid not, clicking Approve Ad also takes you back to the same page, nothing will approve and the ad will not launch. It’s broke.
Facebook just implemented a system where an ad you already approved has to be approved by you a second time? And you only know this if you happen to log on to your Facebook page later that day? No email notice for this? No warning you will be expected to approve it? And then it does not even work? That has to be great for conversions! The most popular website on the planet in dire need for advertising revenue, and their systems are not tested before launch.
This is the equivalent of checking out at Amazon, and randomly visiting their site later in the day to be asked “Are you sure you really really want to buy these things?” and they are not the right things. Or you do click Yes I Really Really Want to Buy These Things, and are ignored. No sale, no shipping, no conversion.
I wish I could share a solution for anyone experiencing this right now. Yeah yeah, try a different browser, clear your cache, delete the entire campaign and start over, RIIIIIIGHT, I’ll get right on that. I think I’ll turn up our AdWords campaign instead.
Rant over.
Just heading to bed and noticed that out of the blue, many exact match domains have slipped in search. I noticed a number of exact match domains names have slipped somewhere from 5-40 positions in search. It was really long over due that Google fixed this issue. Exact match had gotten so far out of hand that domain names like www.health-insurance-quotes.us were ranking well.
Glad to see Google has discovered a way to tweak this, although I am not a fan of some of the recent changes Google has made, they really did need to make some serious changes.
Google has been releasing changes to it’s algorithm rapid fire, I think they updated it about 3-4 times in the past 60 days. I think they may take a breather soon, and possibly even turn back some of their changes. I think they have moved with a VERY heavy hand on some of their link updates, and have really scared everyone online.
Everyone now is worried about “over optimization” I have had nearly every client of ours contacting us about this, so needless to say it is on everyone’s mind (including mine).
Good morning Google Plus one users, we have decided that it was best for us to change the colors on your website. We know everyone likes washed out red, so this is the new color we added to your website:
The good news is it still functions the same, although I personally do not like washed out red on my website. Well you have no choice as Google does not allow you to alter their button in anyway.
I would imagine that Google is trying to be more like Facebook, and pattern their button along the lines of that of Facebook.
I’m at an interesting 1 day conference today, ITS2011. The focus is on the future of internet technology. This is not the type of conference we typically attend, we are usually at the marketing focused events. Of course, you can’t have an internet technology event without talking about marketing, so of course I’m picking up some good social media and marketing tips.
What does our future look like?
The CEO of Cisco offered up a motivating entertaining keynote, with a focus on embracing change. We live for change here, you cannot survive in internet marketing without embracing and learning new methods every month, so you’d think his chat would be a snore. Still his presentation got me thinking about the assumptions we make, and how to reach beyond what we know is happening today and anticipate what is going to happen tomorrow. He shared a fantastic interview from 1964 by the author of 2001, Arthur C. Clark, with his predictions for the future. He said maybe the world would not exist (meaning we would live virtually. That we would be able to work from anywhere, even Tahiti or Bali. Imagine that! 🙂 So what is our future going to look like in 20 years? Visualize it and fit your business into it . Is video going to be huge? Yes. Is mobile taking over? Yes. Be ready for that.
Social Media takeaway from ITS 2011
The social media panel gave a basic overview, but some productive takeaways are about using Linked In more, especially for a B2B business. People tend to discuss social media as Twitter and Facebook, but Linked In is a tremendous resource for reaching businesses and often overlooked. It’s not as important for all business models, but spend a few minutes evaluating if this is a missed opportunity for you.
We’re heading down under! Our Asia Pacific Director and long time colleague, Phil Leahy, hosts a dynamic Australian internet conference for small to midsize online sellers every year, now in its 5th year. We’re finally going to make it out there this year, and thrilled to be participating. John will be presenting an internet marketing session, Get More Traffic! Link Building and Expert SEO Tactics.
This is an excellent affordable conference to attend for online sellers. PeSA is a networking group that has evolved from eBay sellers back in the day to multi channel sellers in powerful growth mode. John and I actually met through PeSA years ago during our ecommerce online retailing days, and we’ll be reconnecting with many of our colleagues from the past (waving hi to John Lawson)
The topics covered in the conference reach far beyond internet marketing, including retail and ecommerce issues such as multi channel selling, fulfillment and delivery issues, and direct networking and problem solving with Ebay Australia execs.
We are most excited to visit our many Australian clients in person during this trip as well. We will be spending time in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne. Contact us if you’d like to set up a meeting or get more information on the event.
Google announced the launch of Google Shopping in four new countries this week: Australia, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Google Shopping is a comparison shopping engine delivering product results already in US and many other countries. Google includes products delivered to them via data feed.
Product results in US are shown directly on page one of standard search, with images, pricing, and customer ratings. This high visibility can be a large traffic force for any ecommerce business. But thus far the shopping results in the new countries are not displaying in the main results. The user must click the Shopping tab on the left to use the retail search engine, but we expect in due time Google will integrate products into page one as they have elsewhere.
This is basically free traffic and advertising, so any business shipping to these countries needs to take some action. If you already provide your data feed to Google, you just need to create a new feed and choose that country from the drop down. If you are not set up with Google Shopping yet in any country, visit the Merchant Center to open an account and set up your product feed.
With our strong presence in the Australian market, we are most excited to see this launch! We have been prepping our clients for this and ready to get them included immediately.
Also note that this makes it more important to use the hreview microformat for your customer reviews as we discussed last week.
