A new way to access quality content online

Whether we’re getting the latest election news, making sense of the day’s stock market activity or looking for an update on our favorite celebrities, we rely on publishers to inform and entertain us. Online publishers often fund the creation of this content through ads; sometimes they ask you to pay for content directly, by buying a subscription or purchasing a particular article.

Now, you may see a new option: the ability to access some of this content by responding to microsurveys, without having to pull out your wallet or sign in. When a site has implemented this option, you’ll see a prompt that offers you a choice between answering a market research question or completing another action specified by the publisher (such as signing up for an account or purchasing access). All responses are completely anonymous -- they aren’t tied to your identity or later used to target ads. The prompts look like this:

First Report Of Google Penguin Recovery

The Google Penguin update first touched down on April 24th and many webmasters that were hit by this update were frantically making changes to their web site in anticipation for a Penguin refresh. That refresh happened late Friday evening and we have one report that appears to be a legit Penguin recovery.

SEOmoz story named How WPMU.org Recovered From The Penguin Update has a pretty good case of a likely Penguin recovery. How can we know it is a pretty good case of a recovery? The Google Analytics graphs show a huge dip in traffic on April 24th and then a huge spike on May 26th, returning the site to pre-Penguin traffic levels.

We have reached out to Google to see if this site did indeed recover from the Penguin update but from the looks of it, it has.

This site claimed the reason it recovered was because it was able to remove over a half a million links from sites using their WordPress themes. These sites used a WordPress theme supplied by WPMU.org, all with a link and anchor text “WordPress MU” pointing back to the site. They were easily able to get that link removed and over 500,000 links disappeared over night. They did not go after additional potential link profile issues prior to the Penguin refresh because they did not have time.

Other changes they made but don’t believe made a difference were:

- Pinged blogs that were originally highlighted by Matt Cutts in a conversation with the Syndey Harold – only one removed links, but they did come from a significant volume of splogs on the Blogdetik.com domain

- Submitted WPMU to the Penguin review form, twice, specifically referencing this article that was being beaten out by the links that referenced it

- Used SEOmoz campaign data to implement some canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and also kill some unnecessary links across the site

- Did a bit of “SEO cleanup” that revealed WPMU.org sitemaps did not exist and/or were broken. Implemented sitemaps and submitted the feeds to Webmaster Tools, which was not happening previously

- Cleaned up numerous duplicate title tag issues as reported by Webmaster tools

- Continued to build natural links to the site and promote other positive signals such as referring traffic and social shares

- Very notably and importantly, got this specific use case in front of Google and also the greater SEO community that highlighted it

Source: Barry Schwartz/ searchengineland

Local SEOs Analyze Current Google Ranking Factors

Although the local search landscape has changed pretty significantly, the fundamental elements of ranking well in Google’s local search results haven’t strayed dramatically from past years. That’s one of the main takeaways from the 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors report that’s just out today.

Organized (as always) by David Mihm, this year’s survey includes contributions from more than 40 local search marketers around the world. It looks at general Google signals such as Place Page vs. Website vs. Reviews (and more), as well the weight that specific factors may have on local rankings. The top five specific factors in this year’s survey are:

+ Physical Address in City of Search (i.e., it’s hard to rank for “seattle real estate” if you’re based in Bellevue)

+ Proper Category Associations

+ Proximity of Address to Centroid (“centroid” is the geographic center of a city/town)

+ Domain Authority of Website

+ Quantity of Structured Citations

The survey goes on to separate positive ranking factors and negative ranking factors (i.e., having mismatched phone numbers can hurt local ranking visibility).

Not included is Google’s recent switch from Place Pages to Google+ Local Pages, which was announced right at the end of the survey period and — so far — doesn’t appear to have had much impact, if any, on local ranking factors.

Source: Matt McGee/ Searchengineland