Were you pecked by the Penguin?

I actually wrote this piece for Yahoo! about a month ago, so although they have only now published it, it still remains relevant.

For those of you that know your Google stuff, you'll probably already know about the Penguin updates and you'll know about them because it's either improved or worsened your page ranking result.

Bottom line is, Google is trying to make it extremely difficult for all those naughty black hat SEO's out there, using naughty tactics in order to boost either their, or their clients page ranking.  In the long run, this isn't going to work out well for either.  You may be able to fool Google once and possibly even for quite some time, but when you get caught, and yes when you get caught, you'll get fined and penalised etc. and all of your hard work will be for nothing.

I have to say that although these updates have kicked up quite a bit of fuss from businesses who have seen their google page rank decrease for what they say to be no apparent reason, and I do feel for these people, as years of hard and honest work has quite literately gone down the pan, I also understand that this update is a move in the right direction for users in general.

Change is good and we should embrace it.

Here's the article;

USA article for those who would like to +1 ;)

UK Article

Has your websites page ranking changed since the updates?  And now that you've had some time to re-coup, have you clawed it back?  I welcome your comments :)

Where has Google Places Gone?

I wrote a blog post for wiselittleninja yesterday about the transition of Google Places over to Google+ Local.  Basically, Google places is no more and all of the information stored in Places has been transferred over to Google+ local, which you can find as a new tab to the left hand side of the home page in your google account, if you have one.

As a social media advocate, I really welcome the changeover from a static, stagnant and quite ordinary business page, to an evolving and collective advertisement which encourages both customers and business to become more social and listen to wants and needs of the community.

I appreciate that it seems to be yet another hoop that the local business has to jump through in order to to stay ahead of the game, but look at it in a positive way;  you have another platform to interact with your clients and customers, another platform to listen to them and another platform to receive feedback in order to improve your product or service.  It's a winner.


New Key features

• Uses new zagat scoring system
• Encourages businesses to interact with cusomers
• Allows business to become more social

Overall, offering a better customer experience in the long run and hopefully making local businesses a part of the community again. 

Read the post here