Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.yourwebsite.com

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.yourwebsite.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

If you have received a similar email then we suggest you act very quickly but don’t panic.  Some sites received this warning without penalties, and some sites were penalized immediately. In either case, the links need to be taken down to retain or regain rankings.

The email is the result of a regular Google search update known as Panda [webspam] and has already been sent to many websites so you are not alone.  This latest update penalizes websites based on the link strategy they are using and has already caused major problems for the impacted websites with large drop in rankings, thus visitors sent from Google and ultimately revenue.

The reason not to panic is that Google finds it very hard to know if your links are actually bad links, some are obvious because Google knows the website is bad but by you panic removing a whole lot of links just tells Google their guess was correct.

Your first step after not panicking is to examine all of the links that point to your website and evaluate if they are ‘bad links’ or not. You are looking for links that come from link farms, blog networks or bad sites, these are often identified by 100′s of links per page and no real content, often provided by cheap SEO services from outside of the UK.  Also Google becomes suspicious if all the Anchor Text [the text the person clicks on] is the same on all your links, this just indicates the links are not natural.

Any bad links need to be removed or Google will penalize your site, sending it down the rankings and significantly impacting your website visitors numbers.

Once you have removed all offending links you can ask Google to reconsider your website but when you send your request you need to be honest and provide details of the links you removed, you have to show that you’ve made an effort to sort your website out.

If all of this is giving you a headache then give Praeparo a call and we will explain, in plain English, just how you can avoid the penalties of Google.

It is now more than ever all about building a balanced and natural Internet Marketing Strategy.

This release was really about website owners or there SEO companies Over Optimising!

So what is over optimising?

Over Optimising, also known as webspam, is where a website owner tries too hard to get a website page to the top of Google results to the cost of the visitor. Sometimes when you look at a website page it looks confusing and seems to repeat, this basically indicates the page has been written to keyword stuff to help rankings but at the cost of visitor experience. This also includes techniques used external to the website to help rankings, for example the purchasing of links on other websites to point at your own website.

At Praeparo we are strong believers that if you research your keywords well and then create unique content aimed at the website visitor and not the search engines then your website will get to the top of Google, you don’t need these techniques.

If your website has a problem or think you have been impacted then please contact us for a chat.

With the big upsurge in the use of mobile devices to browse and make purchases it is essential for any business to offer a good user experience to these devices. It is NOT sufficient to just show a website that has been designed for a large desktop or laptop screen on these devices. All too often these are just not usable as the text is scaled so small it is not readable and when you try and click a button you often click something else as they are too small.

Saying the above is easy for a web design company but becomes a big burden for small businesses that need to get on with the business rather than administering a website.

If you have a bespoke website designed and created for you then the year on year costs are going to be high as you will need to engage with the design company to make adjustments. By far the best way is to go with one of the many frameworks  available as these are maintained and updated for you as technologies move on, leaving you to focus on the content and not the technology.

By far the biggest framework is WordPress. WordPress has 1000′s of plugins and themes available of which some are free and some are commercial but in most cases are significantly cheaper than engaging a developer to create something. One of the big WordPress plugin and theme companies is WPMU Dev that offer well supported plugins and themes.

If you need any advice on your website and in particular WordPress please get in touch.

Our WordPress specialist hosting package includes:

• UK Linux hosting
• .com domain name
• WordPress installed
• 1,00MB of Storage
• 10,000MB of bandwidth
• 100 eMail accounts

GREAT value at just £8.50/month or £85/year

Praeparo are WordPress design, development, hosting and support specialists and can provide supported plugins to:

• create a membership website
• add Classifieds to your blog
• powerful ecommerce / shopping cart
• manage events
• accommodation booking form
• fundraising
• create your own blog network

Need some advice just give us a call 020 8123 8159.

There is a lot of confusion around the directive with many organisations sitting on the fence and waiting to see what competitors are doing. regardless of if you agree with the directive or not you need to understand it, plan how it impacts your own website(s) and plan a strategy to implement the directive.

What we at Praeparo recommend you do is:

At Praeparo we believe we can save you money in the long term. All too often small businesses are either not marketing at all or putting effort into the wrong areas first. For many small businesses getting your own website into order will be sufficient and it is not worth doing anything else until you have done this.

We guess you have asked the question “What do people search for when they are looking for my products or services?”

But, who did you ask? Often you as the business owner are not the best person to answer this as you understand the product, services and the problems trying to be solved. It is all to often seen that a business owner makes assumptions that are just not valid for the person looking on the Search Engines.

For example, are you using keyword phrases that are very technical, in which case would a member of the public outside of the industry use such a phrase.

In any digital marketing campaign your success criteria is to increase business by a % greater than the marketing spend, i.e. go for the highest possible Return On Investment (ROI).

The simplest way to achieve this is to get as many of your website pages, facebook page or twitter tweets in front of the people looking. This is not just about how well your home page performs on the Search Engines.

First of all don’t think about keywords but ask the question “What problems am I solving with my product or service?”

We often see that website pages are written targeting the answer but you rarely get a search engine query looking for the answer but instead they state the problem and hence are looking for the answer. i.e. the searcher has no idea on the solution.

Once you have a list of problem statements you then need a page on your website dedicated to solving each problem. You should not duplicate but keep a single page focused on solving a single specific problem or need. For each question and thus each page you need to turn the questions into keywords. We would suggest selecting no more than 3 keyword sets, one primary 3 word objective and two secondary phrase sets (3-4 words each) per page. It is the primary one we will first target.

The aim is to have as many of your website pages on the first page of a search engine’s results (SERPS) that solve the searchers question. If you have the solution then it stands a good chance you have a new customer.

This is just party of your overall keyword and website content strategy that also needs to consider other elements, like brand and customer up-sell and retention.

Your ultimate aim is not to get 10,000′s of visitors a day to your website but to get very targeted visitors that make a purchase.  It is a lot better to have fewer visitors that purchase than more that just browse. Think like a high street shop, it costs money to open the shop and gets depressing if you get lots of people arriving every day but the till is empty. In fact if you don’t make a profit they typically shut up shop and relocate to another area.

At Praeparo we believe we can help you adjust your existing website so that it organically arrives at the top of the search engine results for phrases that bring purchasers. No need to spend large sums of money on adverts. You need to think of this as an iterative process just like that high street shop where you constantly manage your inventory (in your case website pages) and adjust those that don’t sell and promote more those that bring in a high ROI.

They clearly show that the England receives a massive spend in the travel and tourism sector:

• £8.3bn is the amount spent on domestic holidays in England between Jan and Sept 2011.
• £225 is the average amount spent per overnight holiday trip in England between Jan and Sept 2011.

A number of surveys predict that as money gets tight more domestic holidays will be taken, add this to the focus of the Olympics and Diamond Jubilee celebrations, 2012 is a year of opportunities to UK travel and tourism businesses.

How can you as a small business help yourself get full occupancy, more visitors to your attraction, full teaching groups, or a greater number of visitors in through the door?

Well you can compete against the large corporations. In today’s online world a simple well thought out website can get you in front of the many potential clients searching around the World Wide Web. Unlike a few years ago people will book with small websites as long as the website obeys a few simple rules:

• Has a postal address and landline phone number.
• Has an email address the same as the domain name (www.praeparo.com, sales@praeparo.com)
• Has a privacy policy.
• Has clear, relevant terms and conditions.
• Has clear descriptions and pictures.

As well as the above you must be able to take online bookings and a deposit. If you force someone to pick up a phone or write then you may well loose out on the point-in-time purchase.

This all does not have to cost you a fortune but as more people start using mobile devices like smart phones and iPads then you need a website that works well on these devices. If you have not touched your website for a few years then you will more than likely look very outdated, why not compare it with some of your competitors to see how far you have fallen behind.

2012 is the year to get your website working as people expect it to work or risk loosing valuable business.

The website has been designed to be responsive to the device (PC, laptop, tablet, smart phone) being used.

Other key elements are a map that knows where you are, improved navigation system, improved performance, new business listing management area.

To coincide with the launch Coast Radar has launched a Social Media campaign making use of re-vamped facebook, twitter (@coastradar) and blog pages.

Coast Radar was faced with a problem that many other websites are also struggling with. The whole idea that visitors are using different sized devices and expect a tailored experience. At first we worked on a main website, mobile website and iphone application but this just became too expensive and complicated to keep in sync.

After listening to what the users were saying we decided on a completely new version of the website.

The beta is a mechanism where we can share our new vision and still have time to take on-board people’s comments.

At a high level the changes of the new website are:

• Clearer navigation outside of maps.
      We have provided a new text link navigation system where you start at a continent, then look at countries, then states, then actual listings.
• People who enter at a beach listing from the search engine said it is long winded to see other elements close by.
      We have added a breadcrumb at the top of a page labelled “You are at :: ” where the green parts are links to allow you to easily move backwards and forwards. This means you can easily move up from an entry to the region, from a region to the country, etc.
• People only want to be told about the area they are looking at rather than maps of the world with 1000′s of markers.
      We have changed the whole site to show information based on the context. For example, if you are looking at The United Kingdom you will see the regions/states, where as if you are looking at a state you will see the listings within it.
• People want a mechanism whereas they can ask businesses and other people for advice on a coastal area.
      We have expanded the community to provide a full social environment where people can freely ask questions and share experiences.
• People wanted a mechanism to plan plan and record a trip.
  We have allowed FREE travel Blogs within the community to plan, record and share a trip.
• People want a single website to map to the device they are using, a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and don’t want to have to swap between mobile, desktop and mobile application versions.
      This was a complete re-design to provide a responsive website that adapts to the screen size being used. We will discontinue our iphone and mobile website versions.
• Businesses wanted a mechanism to communicate with other businesses and people interested in the coast.
  The new community website allows people to discuss topics within what we calls groups. Groups can be PUBLIC – open to everyone, PRIVATE – people have to request membership of the group Admin or HIDDEN where people have top be invited. Anyone can start a group.
  
• People wanted a faster site.
  Although the beta does not use it, when the new website goes live it will use an international Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide faster access to content.

Why not go and have a play at beta.coastradar.com

Technology wise, the main website is a custom HTML 5 fluid design and the community makes use of WordPress and Buddypress.

Any questions then just drop us an email or give us a call at +44 (0)20 8123 8159

This is especially the case within Travel and Tourism sectors as more and more people look to make up there own holiday packages by booking flights independently to accommodation. This means if you are an accommodation provider you need an engaging website, with detailed text and pictures. The visitor needs to totally understand what they will get, if they think something is missing they won’t ring or email you but just go back to the search engine results and try the next one on the list.  You also need to be ready for when they make a decision as you need them to book and pay a deposit whilst you have them interested. A lot of people that leave the site to fill in a form and post a cheque will have second thoughts and re-consider.

This all means travel and tourism operators need to:

• Have an informing and visually stimulating website. Photo and Videos help travel websites more so than other markets.
• Manage online reputations and be open by integrating them into your website. A piece of negative feedback does not have to be bad if handled appropriately.
• Make use of third party distributor sites such as Coast Radar, Last Minute, as they have bigger marketing budgets and rank well under highly competitive keywords.
• Give information on the surrounding area to give the visitor ideas on what they can do when they visit.

A lot of small travel and tourism websites don’t put the amount of effort they should into marketing. All too often a website is created and left to market itself, which of course it can’t do. This means those websites are missing out on all those people ready to buy.

Remember your website is operational 24 hours a day and will receive more visitors than you received phone calls, make sure it reflects your business, provides all the answers to visitors questions and allows them to book.