Here at Web Gnomes, we stay on top of the ever-changing world of Internet Marketing so you don’t have to. We enjoy learning new tricks of the trade and putting them to practice in the work that we do for our esteemed clients. Here is some of the most helpful Internet marketing info we came across this week:
Google Allows Spam in Rich Snippets with Schema.org
The past few weeks/months, one of the topics circulating around the SEO web is the question about rich snippets & spam.
What does this mean?
Rich snippets are code segments that you can add to your site to help the search engines understand even better what your content is about. For example, you can add rich snippets about products including a product image and customer reviews. You can even add a rich snippet for a recipe!
Now it appears as with everything else on the web, some webmasters are taking advantage of the rich snippets in a spammy way and that is making the rest of us “white hat” types upset.
Read this thorough article by David Weichel of CPC Strategy for more details.
How Google’s Penguin Update Got Its Name
On Tuesday, Google went live with a new update called “Penguin.” This is an update to further fight web spam. Web spam is things like keyword stuffing and shady link schemes devised to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. These tactics create a bad user experience, which is why Google doesn’t like it.
This is big, serious news, but the article we’re featuring here is a little less serious. It is Andrew Shotland’s (funny) explanation for how Google’s Penguin update got its name. You will enjoy it if you are a Batman fan.
Should I Check Email Process Flow
I can’t even remember how I found this amazing process flow, but I just had to share it with you. I love writing about productivity and this one just hits the nail on the head. Enjoy!
Great post Tabita. Actually had a good chuckle to myself here over a well earned Friday evening drink reading that. I love that email process flow chart!
Have a good weekend
Thanks! I’m glad you enjoyed it. 🙂
I think I see how the “spam” problem will be solved. Like Reddit, which doesn’t use any kind of flagging for spam, quality sites and pages will simply rise to the top of the SERPs. Note that in the two examples you pointed to, they *were* quality pages, and so Google was doing the “right” thing. (In your test, your site was otherwise non-spammy. If, however you truly used this strategy to show fake content, you wouldn’t have the SERP you do. And in the broccoli example, it appeared third in the results, and apparently *did* refer to a high quality resource.)
I bet this is what Google’s banking on: sure, people can game this info. But the other ranking signals will cause the spammy content to get buried.
Thanks for the comment Eugenijus!
Unfortunately, the spam problem will never be “solved.” Google will continue to create algorithms (manually and with the aid of machine learning) that attempt to identify patterns and devalue (or penalize) spammy behavior. However, as with other forms of spam (e.g., email, social, etc.), the spammer/Google dynamic will always be characterized as an arms race.
And as long as there’s a monetary incentive associated with gaming Google’s algorithms, we’ll continue to see spam.