We’re halfway through the month so you know what means, the ComScore data for the previous month is finally available! What search engines finished out 2013 strong and who continued their inevitable but tragic clown car skip into obscurity? Let’s take a look and find out.

The major winner was, of course of course, Google. The search engine juggernaut finished out the 2013 year with near record numbers. Google’s all time search engine share high is 67.5 percent and they managed to hit 66.7 in November and closed out with 67.3 in December, nearly tying their own record.

Bing also grew last month, but they definitely aren’t seeing the growth rate that they’ve been hoping for. They moved from 18.1 percent of the search share to 18.2. However, the same time last year they were only at 16.3 so overall, it was a decent year to Bing it On (trademark symbol).

Yahoo is continuing their tragic fall. Really, it’s like they stepped on a banana peel in 2011 and we’ve just been watching the result in slow motion ever since. They are at an all time low of 10.8 percent of the search share, and they continue to fall.

Now, the dregs. It may not surprise you to hear that Ask and AOL are doing as poorly as ever. In fact, they had a small victory this month by not failing quite so hard as they’ve been failing. They both only lost a single percent of the search engine share. Ask fell from 2.6 to 2.5 percent and AOL dropped from 1.4 to 1.3 percent.

So those are the scores for 2013. Nothing too shocking, but it’s interesting to see that Bing is still moving upwards. With all of the changes that Google has been throwing around willy nilly, I think people are ready for a serious competitor to force  the search giant to play a little bit nicer.

Original post on Wikimotive by Daniel Hinds.

Original Article by Timothy Martell on Wikimotive's blog.

I'm writing today because a serious fraud is being perpetrated on virtually all car dealers, the scope of which seems to be far greater than any I've encountered before. What seemed at first to be merely a bad SEO practice, now seems to amount to copyright infringement, a willful attempt to harm dealers while profiting from them, and perhaps even collusion by OEMs and vendors to control market performance between franchise owners. I'm not going to name names at this point. I have included screen shots and examples which would certainly allow someone to search and figure out for themselves who the culprits are and what, exactly, they are doing. This all began when two new clients sought our services due to severe drops in search performance. They are both clients of website vendor A. The larger dealer group had received a web spam penalty from Google while the smaller group experienced the following performance over the past year:

What could cause two thirds of this dealer's client base to disappear in 7 months? Google's latest algorithm update? Negative SEO? A new dealer that caught SEO fire? What we found is much, much worse. Duplicate content, like we've never seen before. Now, I know what you're thinking. Wow, big deal. SEO crap. But this is much different.

What we've found is that many, many website vendors have engaged in a form of deception and fraud. What's worse, I believe some have simultaneously left their dealer clients in violation of copyright infringement. Here is the proof:

Website Vendor B

Pictured above is a page on Dunning Subaru's website about brake repair. This site is built by website vendor B. Below are the search results generated by searching for examples of this text. This search generated 1,540 results, and this was one of the smallest infractions we found. Upon closer inspection, we found that most of the websites listed here were built by website vendor A, but Jansen Chevrolet and Chevrolet of Puyallup were built by website vendor C. Now, if you visit sites by each of these vendors you will notice something at the bottom of each page: Dunning Subaru, Jansen Chevrolet, and Toyota of Santa Barbara.

Notice that the Toyota dealer has a copyright mark. Now, not all vendors publish the mark for all of their clients. So some of these dealers are theoretically in copyright violation of the dealers that have marks. Of course, this begs the question, "How do you determine who first used the copyrighted content?"

I suspect the answer is a lot of billable hours to a good law firm.

In this next example, you'll notice 865,000 results for the same page. You might wonder how this is possible with less than 25,000 dealers in the US. We found that not only was this page duplicated across 4 website vendors on this one SERP page, but there were even instances of the text appearing on other sites as well. Try this: using the quotations, enter this text into Google search, "has an experienced and reliable Service and Parts departments that are open extra hours to help fit our customers' hectic schedules, and as always,". 

When I ran the search last week I found 1.9 million results.

Why is this so outrageous?

When the dealer enters into an agreement with a website vendor, there is an expectation of expertise. It's the vendor's job to be aware of practices or procedures that could harm their client and they should be dedicated to never harming their client.

In 2005, Google publicly announced that web masters who used duplicate content would see their websites penalized. While many SEOs would agree that this didn't take place early on, there isn't a (competent) web master on the planet that is unaware of the Panda update released by Google in February 2011.

"Google says it only takes a few pages of poor quality or duplicative content to hold down traffic on an otherwise solid site, and recommends such pages be removed, blocked from being indexed by the search engine, or rewritten.^[11] However, Matt Cutts, head of webspam at Google, warns that rewriting duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda -- the rewrites must be of sufficiently high quality, as such content brings "additional value" to the web. Content that is general, non-specific, and not substantially different from what is already out there should not be expected to rank well: "Those other sites are not bringing additional value. While they’re not duplicates they bring nothing new to the table."

"Only a few pages of poor quality of duplicative content." As we continue to research this issue, we're finding that virtually every page (we're talking hundreds and even thousands of pages in some cases) on most dealer websites is duplicate content. To make matters worse, in most cases, the primary offenders of this content plagiarism are also selling "SEO services" in conjunction with their websites. In almost every case, we've found that not only do these website providers NOT provide any form of SEO service, most of the time they are actually charging the dealer for creating more duplicate content and copying it to all of their other clients' websites! That means that they are actually doing more damage, faster, and charging a premium for it!

How can you tell if you are being plagued by duplicate content? 

The easiest way to determine this is your "about" page. If you didn't write your own content for your dealership about page, start there. Try selecting a large portion of text that doesn't include your dealership name or geo information. Copy and paste what you copied into the google search bar and then put the text in quotation marks. Do you get a list of lots of other car dealers? Chances are yes, you do. If you're not sure about how to do this, you can e-mail us at questions@wikimotive.com and we'll be happy to walk you through it. And before you suspect that we have ulterior motives, we are not an automotive website vendor. We DO NOT have a dog in this fight other than looking out for dealers.

My content is all over the web! What can I do?

Remember, what Matt Cutts said, "Rewriting duplicate content so that it is original may not be enough to recover from Panda -- the rewrites must be of sufficiently high quality, as such content brings 'additional value' to the web." 

In most cases, this means a real need to start from scratch.

BIG IMPORTANT POINT TO TAKE AWAY

If you are a client of one of the website vendors in the results here, there is no immediate fix short of finding a new provider, and unless you have the knowledge and expertise to understand what differentiates one provider from the next, there is a real likelihood that you will trade one bad vendor for another. So far, we've only found a single website vendor that is not building sites this way and does not use duplicate content on their websites. If any other vendors are out there listening and are digging what I'm saying and wondering why no one has ever called this out before, please give me a call. We'd love to find more great solutions for our car dealers.

My website rep/seo guy/gal etc says that the content is unique because my name is in there and there are different geo modifiers in the content and that makes it unique. What is he/she talking about?

They are L I A R S or they were trained to say that by LIARS. Google SPECIFICALLY looks for content that is the same with minor changes like proper nouns and geo modifiers. It's the worst kind of duplicate content because it tries to be deceptively manipulative.

Well they said that Google allows for duplicate content for businesses because product information like inventory is all the same and can't be unique. Is that true?

Not exactly. This allowance is for e-commerce platforms and is suspected to be applied to the inventory on dealer websites. BUT there's a catch. The webmaster must include code on those duplicate pages that signals this to Google. Its called the rel=cannonical tag, and most of the website providers DON'T USE IT FOR INVENTORY! That means your inventory is duplicate content too!

I tried to include the regular spin you'll likely hear if you research this, but understand, one of the website providers listed here recently sold for nearly $1 billion. These are massive companies who's primary client is the OEM not you the dealer.

Why would my OEM want my website provider to hurt me?

Maybe it wasn't originally intended, or by design, but I have to believe that the most digitally savvy people working for OEMs realize that by devaluing the authority of the dealer website it makes it easy for the OEM to rank in the dealer's backyard which then gives the consumer choice. Remember, if you're a Honda dealer the best place to increase your sales efficiency is by taking deals from the nearest Honda dealer you compete with. The OEM doesn't want this because they still sell the same customer the same Honda. They want you to take deals from the Toyota dealer and the Nissan dealer. How can they ensure this happens? By controlling the level of competition in search.

We are still researching this issue and will continue to update the community on our findings. Our goal is to see these website vendors face the reality of the continually evolving digital landscape. You've known this was coming and if you haven't prepared for it, shame on you.

Its time to do whats right and serve the dealer.

2014 is here, and I wanted to join in with the leagues of digital marketing writers offering their predictions for the new year. To give things a little perspective, I’m ranking my bold predictions using the Doritos Locos Tacos Boldness Index (Doritos Locos Tacos being known for their bold flavor).

Bold Prediction 1: Google Analytics Data will move to 99% (not provided) 

Google is trying to respect privacy (at least until the NSA comes knocking) and in the past 6 months alone we’ve seen keyword (not provided) creep up to over 90% of our data. I think that the natural end result is a complete keyword blackout, where the keyword is not provided in almost every case.

Boldness Rating: Just a little bold here. Two Doritos Locos Tacos out of Five. 

Bold Prediction 2: Digital Marketers will need to be well versed in everything from SEO to PPC, code, writing and beyond to get jobs.

I’m seeing this more every day. People are looking for jobs and the only skill they have on their resume is SEO or PPC. Unfortunately for these poor souls, that’s just not enough anymore. Plenty of people out there understand SEO, write well, and can build websites proficiently. If you want to continue working in the digital marketing industry, you’ll need to diversify your skill-set so you can manage big projects with a small team.

Boldness Rating: I have to hand it to myself, this is pretty bold. Three Doritos Locos Tacos out of five. 

Bold Prediction 3: Authorship will become one of the most important factors for Google search results.

Authorship is spreading, and trusted sources across the web are building their author rank steadily. By the end of 2014, I think it will be nearly impossible to rank for a normal search query without authorship implemented and author rank established.

Boldness Rating: Not going to lie, this isn’t especially bold. Gotta give myself my lowest rating: a single Doritos Locos Taco out of five. 

Bold Prediction 4: Guest Posting will start incurring penalties on a massive scale.

Guest posting has been the go-to strategy for the entirety of 2013. On its face, it seems like a decent enough practice. You’re creating content for an interested audience, you get a single link back in your bio, it’s win win…or is it? Google is too canny for this sort of thing to continue unchecked. Matt Cutts has already said that Google is going to start looking into some guest posting practices and I’ll be shocked if guest posting doesn’t become a toxic technique this year. After all, at this point a lot of guest posts are on blogs that only post guest posts, or worse, they are paying for the privilege of posting on quality blogs. Guest posting in 2014, do it at your own risk.

Boldness Rating: Now we’re getting bold, baby! Four Doritos Locos Tacos out of Five. 

Bold Prediction 5: Google will release a mysterious new algorithm update known only as “Cattle Car”. All searches now return one result and one result only: the Google+ signup page.

It’s a simple plan but that’s what makes it so diabolical! Looking for restaurants in Boston? How ’bout a little Google+ to fill your belly. Searching for relationship advice? Google+ has the time to listen to your problems. Sick and need the number to your local hospital? Hoo-boy buddy, you better pray they have a Google+ page, ’cause Google is sick and tired of you not taking their social network seriously.

Boldness Rating: Pack it in, folks! It just doesn’t get any bolder. This prediction gets an astounding five Doritos Locos Tacos out of five. 

So there you have it, my bold predictions for 2014. How will they fare? Check back at the end of the year. If there’s a post here gloating, you’ll know I nailed it. If I’m strangely quiet, I was either very wrong, or “Cattle Car” is in full effect and I’ve been silenced.

Either way, see you on the other side!

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Daniel Hinds.

Pinterest has been growing in popularity month over month, but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding their product. Much like Facebook, the pin-board social network keeps making changes large and small as it grows, trying to deliver the best product possible to both its users and advertisers. Today, they have made a large step forward by acquiring the search-focused company VisualGraph. What does this mean for Pinterest marketing moving forward? Let’s take a look.

Essentially, VisualGraph’s technology will make Pinterest users better able to search through the ever increasing mass of pins on the site. VisualGraph is a small company, with owners Kevin Jing and David Liu being the only employees, but their tech is powerful. Pinterest says the acquisition “will help us build technology to better understand what people are Pinning. By doing so, we hope to make it easier for people to find the things they love.”

The reason Pinterest wanted VisualGraph specifically is that their technology is able to recognize an astounding number of objects in pictures. With this tech implemented, Pinterest users will be able to type a term like “blue sweater” and find nearly every blue sweater available on Pinterest, even if their is no associated meta info detailing the image as such. The graph can also filter pornography, which is important to Pinterest as it grows as a family friendly brand.

Here is how the boys at VisualGraph describe their new jobs at Pinterest:

On Pinterest, millions of people are curating and sharing billions of Pins everyday. And these Pins are more than just images — they link to contents that can inspire and enrich people’s lives. We are excited for the opportunity to combine machine vision with human vision and curation, and to build a visual discovery experience that is both aesthetically appealing and immensely useful for people everywhere.

 

Original post about Pinterest search can be found on Wikimotive's blog by Zach Billings.

Have you ever thought about the way people might view your website? I’m not talking about how they’ll feel about it, but how they will physically view it, like how their eyes will move from place to place as it loads. It’s an area of real interest for a lot of the digital marketing world, and it should be something you aware of as you design your own site, blog, and landing pages. If your design doesn’t flow, people may click away. Ideally, it needs to not just flow, but guide the eye directly to the area that is most important for conversions. Let’s take an infographic that illustrates what that many look like.

The infographic comes courtesy of Crazy Egg and SingleGrain, and it’s their first of the new year. It gives you the basic 101 course on eye tracking and illustrates the average way that eyes move across a page and how you can best capitalize on this. It may seem simple, but it’s one of my favorite parts of digital marketing. The fact that every little decision influences the bottom line is simply fascinating.

Take a look and then send it a long to your web designer and web developer so they can look at your site and see how you stack up.

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Andrew Martin.

If you’ve been paying attention to the world of search engine optimization this past year, you know that Google brought the hammer down on exact match domains. No longer can someone trying to rank for dog toys simply buy “dogtoys.com” and enjoy front page results…or at least that’s what people are saying. I hear it from people all the time actually, they’re afraid to get a domain that has their targeted keyword in it because they think Google penalizes exact match keywords now. That’s just not true, so I’m going to take a minute here and dispel some of the rumors.

To start, Google DID NOT penalize exact match domains, they jut stopped rewarding them. Sure, losing a reward can FEEL like a penalty when an existing site starts doing worse in the rankings, but it’s not the same thing. If you were to start a website today that used an exact match domain, you would have just as good a shot at ranking as any other domain, so if you want to include your keyword in your site name, then go for it. In fact, not only will it rank as well as any other domain, I think it will still have an edge.

Above, I used the example dogtoys.com. Can you guess why? The top result on Google for “dog toys” is, in fact, dogtoys.com. In the interest of fairness, I wanted to look at a single category of products and test the effectiveness of exact match domains in an admittedly casual and anecdotal fashion. I chose to look at general household goods, and to keep it random, I had my girlfriend yell out some household products for me to check at random. Here’s the first handful we did, in order:

Refrigerators: No exact match domain on the first page, all tried and established brands.

Coffee Table: Coffeetables.com is the first result.

Wall Clocks: No exact match domain on the first page, lots of respected home-goods stores.

Pillowcase: Pillowcases.net halfway down the first page.

Toaster Oven: Thetoasteroven.com halfway down the first page. This is an especially strong example in favor of the exact match domain as this result is a restaurant across the country from where I live, so it wasn’t influenced by geography.

Frying Pan: Fryingpan.com is the first result on the first page. It’s a ship you can tour in North Carolina. Again, not anywhere near me and it’s definitely not a local result.

Food Processor: No EMD on the first page, lots of web retailers.

Griddles: Thegriddle.com and thegriddlecafe.com both on the first page.

Charcoal Grill: Charcoalgrill.com is the second result. Again, a restaurant located across the country from me.

Coffee Pot: A few exact match domains for restaurants around the country. Another strong, strong point in favor of exact match domains lending considerable weight.

As you can see, exact match domains still come into play. If you want to argue with me and say that they don’t give you a better chance to rank, I believe that it’s up for debate, but to say that hurt your chances of ranking is just plain wrong.

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Daniel Hinds.

I've written before about the benefits of using a plugin to boost your SEO on Wordpress. It's simply a game changer as far as SEO is concerned. It can take a decent blogger with a modicum of SEO knowledge and bring them to the next level. It is one of the first things we here at Wikimotive install when we're starting a new blog (either personal or professional) and it simply covers all of the SEO basics you could think of.

Before you accuse me of being some kind of shill for Wordpress SEO by Yoast, you should consider the best part: it's absolutely free.

Getting Yoast only takes a few minutes, just follow these simple steps:

1. Login to your Wordpress dashboard.
2. Locate the Plugins nav menu option on the left-hand side of your screen. It should be between the Appearance menu and the Users menu, though this may be different depending on the theme you have installed.
3. Click "Add New" to bring up the Plugin search box.
4. Search for "Yoast."
5. Find the option "Wordpress SEO by Yoast" and click "Install Now" below.
6. Once the Plugin installs, click the "Activate Plugin" button below the success message.

Once it's installed and activated, you should notice the posts screen change right away.  If you don't, you should hide the "SEO Details and Traditional Style" in the screen options menu and turn on the "Wordpress SEO by Yoast" screen option. This will bring up a slightly different screen than you may be used to, but it's essentially the same idea. The big difference is that now you can input a Focus keyword above your SEO title. This focus keyword will be how you hone the entire SEO strategy of the page. Of course, the focus keyword isn't the end all be all of Yoast's strategy, but it represents the changes Yoast brings to the table. Click the new SEO menu on the left hand side of your dashboard to check out the rest of what Yoast has to offer.

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Andrew Martin.

There's an interesting development brewing in the world of SEO. Of course by this point you've heard about Authorship (that's with a capital A thank you very much) and exactly what it means to Google, but it turns out it is going to go deeper than just slapping your name onto posts. Authorship is going to tie in with PageRank and overall site authority to create a very deliberate and exacting picture of who knows what on the web. Let's take a look at how this is going to be implemented and what it means for your digital marketing strategy moving forwards.

According to the illustrious Matt Cutts, Google is currently working on the way that authoritative Authors can talk to other Authoritative authors and pass maximum PageRank to other sites. Basically, if someone that Google has decided is an expert on a topic (like Rand Fishkin on SEO) links to another Author's work within the same realm (SEO or digital marketing) that link will be worth a lot more than other links from pages with similar PageRank but from different spheres of industry.

Here's how Matt Cutts described it:

We have been working on a lot of different stuff. We are actually now doing work on how to promote good guys. So if you are an authority in a space, if you search for podcasts, you want to return something like Twit.tv. So we are trying to figure out who are the authorities in the individual little topic areas and then how do we make sure those sites show up, for medical, or shopping or travel or any one of thousands of other topics. That is to be done algorithmically not by humans … So page rank is sort of this global importance. The New York times is important so if they link to you then you must also be important. But you can start to drill down in individual topic areas and say okay if Jeff Jarvis (Prof of journalism) links to me he is an expert in journalism and so therefore I might be a little bit more relevant in the journalistic field. We’re trying to measure those kinds of topics. Because you know you really want to listen to the experts in each area if you can.

Originally on Wikimotive's blog by Tim Martell.

All of us in the SEO industry have always had the feeling that Matt Cutts took offense to spam on a personal level. Sure, he always comes across as a cool and level headed sort of guy, but you just know that deep down in his heart of hearts, there burns a not-so-secret hatred for all of the SEO spam artists in the world. He managed to keep this hatred a secret for a long time, but like any dark secret, it eventually came bubbling to the surface. Let's take a look at what Mr. Cuts had to say about spammers when he stopped being polite and started being real.

On the newest episode of the popular series This Week in google on the TWiT network, Matt Cutts was answering questions from the hosts Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte when the topic of spam came about. In an unusually candid reply, Matt Cutts said that he aims to not just defeat them at every turn, but to break their very spirits.

I know it sounds extreme, but it's the God's honest truth.

The folks at SEO Roundtable transcribed his exact words. Read them and enjoy a calculated killer instinct from the heart of Google's operations:

If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.

 

Original post on Wikimotive's blog by Tim Martell.

You hear search engine optimization being described as an iceberg sometimes, with the on page elements as the tip and then the rest of the business underneath the surface. Honestly, it's a good way  to illustrate the trade, because there is so much more to it than you see on the surface, but it's also easy too get too caught up in the metaphor. People focus so much on learning the hidden depths of the industry that they neglect that surface layer. Sure, it's a small part of a successful strategy as a percentage of the whole, but it's a vitally important part, and one that you can't afford to ignore.

To help you remember all of the things that frost your SEO cake, we have an infographic that covers all of the basics of on page SEO. It breaks it down into ten easy steps, and we recommend you try to to hit all ten especially why you're learning. As you grow you may be able to take a few more liberties with the basics of on page SEO, such as length and keyword placement, but  we encourage all of you who are new to the SEO world to print this infographic out and hang it next to your desk and consult it every time you build a page. Once you have all this memorized, you'll be well on your way to SEO success. 

Post on Wikimotive's blog by Tim Martell.