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News for the Hospitality Executive |
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by Brandon Dennis
May 2013 Hotel websites are still recovering from last year’s Penguin update, but a new update loosely called ‘Penguin 2.0’ by the industry is looming on the horizon. Now is the time hotel marketers must make changes to their website SEO to prevent any penalties that might be levied by Penguin 2.0. While no one really knows what will be in Google’s upcoming update, here are a few likely scenarios you can prepare for. First, Some Context Last year, Google released an update to
their algorithm
called Penguin, which severely penalized websites that practice bad
SEO.
Tragically, hotel websites were some of the worst hit by these
penalties, as
hoteliers have a history of paying unscrupulous SEO agencies to ‘do’
SEO for
them. Hoteliers are therefore vulnerable to be penalized by upcoming
penalties,
unless hoteliers change their SEO strategies and move away from vendors
whose
techniques are outdated.
Google gave this warning to a hotel
marketer through Webmaster
Tools who approached me recently with questions about SEO. It took
a while,
but Google finally penalized their hotel website for practicing bad
SEO—specifically, for purchasing backlinks from article directories and
blog
comments. The following images will be using data from this hotel
website’s
SEO. Soon, Google will update Penguin, and
eventually incorporate
it into their broader algorithm. Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts
spilled
the beans about the looming update when he commented
on a popular SEO blog: “…expect that
the
next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional
signals, and
as a result will have more noticeable
impact.” (Emphasis mine) In other recent interviews, Cutts said the
updates will be “jarring
and jolting”, and to those looking forward to the next Penguin update,
“You
don’t want the next penguin update”. Note:
I am
indebted to many thought leaders in the SEO industry, including Search
Engine Watch,
QuickSprout,
and State
of Search for performing excellent SEO research and giving me much
to think
about when composing this guide. Also note: No one
truly knows what Google plans to do. This guide is a prediction of what
Google
will likely focus on with Penguin 2.0, based on intuition, industry
discussions, and public statements from Google. 1.) Manipulated Links
As Google’s technology advances, they become
increasingly
sophisticated at discovering manipulated backlinks. Google valued
backlinks in
the first place only because backlinks
are harder to ‘game’ compared to other outdated SEO techniques, like
meta tags.
But, like Google’s use of meta tags, Google will rely on backlinks less
and
less with each algorithm update. It’s quite possible that someday,
Google won’t
place any value on backlinks at all. For Penguin 2.0, the
only links Google will value are links placed with editorial
intent—that is,
placed with purpose because they
give benefit to the reader.
 In short, if Google can detect a link was
not consciously
placed by the author as an editorial comment, reference or source,
Google will
disavow the link. Action Item:
Don’t pay for backlinks. If you have paid for backlinks in the past,
verify
that none of the links you received were from these low-quality
websites. If
you have links from these kinds of websites, you may want to have them
removed. 2.) Domain Trust
If a website repeatedly practices suspicious
linking, then
Google will decrease the domain authority they give to that website
over time.
Websites like this are easy to detect, as they have characteristics
similar
with each other. If Google sees that the majority of your website’s
backlinks
come from low quality sites like these, then they may conclude you’re
buying
backlinks. Google will likely publish strict penalties
with Panda 2.0,
to penalize websites they have caught receiving links from ‘bad
neighborhoods’,
or sending links to them.
In the above example,
we see that the majority of backlinks this website has come from
websites with
low authority. The dots on the outer edge of the spiral are websites
with
higher authority. The closer towards the middle the dots get, the lower
the website
authority. Hovering over one of the dots, we see the kind of poor
quality,
unrelated website this hotel has backlinks from: it’s a public forum
for free
video games. Action Item: If
you actively build backlinks for your hotel website, make sure you only
solicit
high quality websites that are thought leaders in your niche. If your
agency
has solicited low quality links, try to have them removed. 3.) Social Signals
Google has been using social signals to
supplement backlinks
as a way to judge a website’s quality. But even social signals like
Facebook
likes can be ‘gamed’, or purchased, and Google is increasingly better
at
detecting them.
In the example above, we see a cluster of
one website’s
Facebook likes, broken into different clusters. Each gray dot
represents one
person who liked the website, and the links represent connections to
other
people who have liked the content. The left side of the cluster looks normal.
The page has
likes from various people, who are connected to each other through long
chains
of interlinking friends. A healthy social graph will depict an
interlinking web
of likes from friends connected to other people through various degrees
of
removal, whom the website author has
never met. On the right, we see some suspicious
activity. We find four
big lumps of likes from people only connected to friends within small
groups.
This is highly suspicious, as it is unlikely for there to be a
community of
friends connected to each other but have no connection with other
people
outside their click. That is, the people who liked the page are all
friends
with each other only, and have no
friends outside those circles. This makes sense. Because it is unlikely
for a
real person on Facebook to send a friend request to a fake Facebook
account
created by a robot to give likes to a website. Google could use data like this to help
detect spam, and
penalize websites. Since Google does not have access to all the
data 3rd-prty
social websites like Facebook and Twitter have, Google created their
own social
network, Google+. It is likely that Google will put greater trust on
social
signals from Google+ over all other social networks, as they continue
to
aggressively encourage users to adopt the new social network. They will
do this
because they have access to all the social networking data of users of
their
network, which gives them an easy way to detect suspicious activity
from fake
Google accounts. This will give Google the ability to reliably place
trust and
value on +1s (the Google equivalent of a Facebook ‘like’) and Google+
social
shares while weeding out the chaff. Action item:
Optimize your hotel website to accept Google +1s (see my guide
to +1s for more info). Use the social network to build up a community
of Google+ users with whom to share hotel information. 4.) Authorship
Google has clearly said they will give
greater weight to
content tied to verified online identities compared to anonymous
content. Google
can verify authorship though Google+ and verified Twitter profiles, but
Google
probably will rely more and more on Google+ authorship in the future as
that
network becomes more mature. Hotel websites will receive a boost in the
rankings if they are tied to a verified online identity. Read our
guide to Google+ for hotels and our article on setting up Google+
authorship and publisher markup for more information. Action Item: Make
sure Google+ authorship is installed correctly. 5.) Relevancy
For a long time now, Google has warned us
that getting a
slew of links from a random assortment of websites might not be the
best idea,
as they give greater weight to links from websites in your niche. With
Panda
2.0, they probably will become stricter with the authority they give to
backlinks from non-relevant websites.
In the above example
we see this hotel website gets the vast majority of their backlinks
from
article directories (pink), blog comments (green), and web directories
(red),
some of the lowest quality websites possible. Instead, a healthy
backlink
profile would have the majority of these coming from travel related
websites For hotels, this means that the backlinks
worth the most are
backlinks from travel websites, like travel blogs, TripAdvisor, local
travel
businesses, and so on. Action Item:
Discover the kinds of websites your backlinks come from. If the
majority come
from article directories, blog comments, or other un-related websites,
consider
having them removed. 6.) Rich Anchor Text
Links with rich or ‘exact-match’ anchor text
are links on a
website made from words that exactly match the search engine query the
recipient hopes to rank. The idea goes that a hotel website will get
100
backlinks with anchor text that says ‘great Seattle hotels’. Google
will index
these links, see that website owners think the hotel is relevant to
‘great Seattle
hotels’, and then rank the hotel website well for that keyphrase. This type of manipulation was all but killed
with Penguin
last year, and it was a lesson learned hard. This, more than anything,
was the
cause for so many hotel websites being severely penalized or even
completely
removed from Google’s index. While having some rich anchor text is
still good
for a website, the majority of backlinks should have the hotel
brand name, or generic phrases like ‘click here’ to be deemed
safe and ‘natural’. Recent reports indicate Google is reducing
the percentage of
rich anchor text backlinks that are acceptable. With Panda 2.0, we
could see
even more websites fall out of the index or get penalized for having
rich
anchor text. Action Item: If
your website has paid backlinks, or links from friends, family, or
colleagues
that include rich anchor text, ask them to replace the anchor text with
something safer, like your hotel brand name. 7.) Traffic Metrics
Metrics that demonstrate how popular and
interesting your
website is have always been a part of the Google algorithm, but they
were emphasized
with Google Panda. Now, the way your viewers act on your website can
determine
how well it ranks. Google will look at how quickly your website
loads, how long
guests stay on your website, their ‘bounce rate’, how much of your
content is
read, how many broken links your website has, and so on. Now more than
ever, it
is essential to perfect the technical side of your website’s SEO. Action Item: If
your website is outdated or hasn’t been touched for years, it’s
important to
check on it—it may need to be rebuilt. Partnering with a digital
marketing
system is a smart move, as they will make sure your website is always
up-to-date and innovative. 8.) Co-Citations / Co-Occurrence
Co-citations is a theory that websites can
obtain authority
from other websites even when they aren’t linked to by those websites,
based on
mentions, and links from other websites in the network. This can be a
tad
complicated, but I’ll try to explain with diagrams
Above, hotel A is linking to both B & C
(blue arrow). Hotel
B is linking to hotel A. But even though hotel B is not
linking to hotel C, B is giving C a co-citation (black arrow)
because of its relationship to A. That is, Google connects C’s
relationship to
B through A and B’s mutual relationship.
Above, hotel A and hotel C are only linking
to each other.
However, both websites are talking about hotel C, by mentioning hotel C
in a
blog article where they link to each other, for example. Hotel C gets a
co-citation from each website, even though there are no actual links.
Here, no one is actually linking to anyone.
However, each
website mentions one of the others. By citing each other, Google can
figure out
there is a connection between them all, and pass along co-citations
where
necessary. It’s possible that Google is resorting to
alternative trust
indicators like co-citations to convey website and article authority,
and rank
content. Action Item:
Continue to develop thought leadership in your niche using
advertisements,
creating deals, guest blogging, and developing relationships with
leaders in
your niche, in order to get people talking about you. Even if they
don’t give
you backlinks, your website may still receive a ranking benefit simply
by being
cited by other websites in your niche. I realize that this information is pretty
thick and can be
overwhelming. My goal is to demonstrate how far away we are from the
old days
of SEO where stuffing keywords in meta tags and stuffing backlinks in
website
footers was considered clever SEO. We now have to work in a world where
Google’s algorithm is increasingly difficult to game, and any SEO
designed to
manipulate the algorithm that actually works, if it even exists, is far
beyond
the talents of most SEO agencies. Google Penguin has always been designed to take-out sites that use manipulative techniques to improve search ranking. As long as your efforts improve content quality to benefit guests with better information, there is little to worry about. If, however, you have used SEO agencies in the past that proved unreliable, or to have used black-hat tactics, then you may have some work cut out for you to prepare for Penguin 2.0. Original article may be found by clicking here:http://www.buuteeq.com/blog/penguin-two-point-o/ ________________________  About the Author Brandon Dennis is the Technical Marketing Manager at buuteeq, the digital marketing system for hotels. He manages buuteeq’s SEO, paid media channels, social outreach, and the company blog. You can connect with him on Twitter @buuteeq.
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| Contact: Brandon Dennis Twitter @buuteeq Google+ profile for author connection: https://plus.google.com/100588133120378013221/posts |
