Gael Breton from <a>Higher Click</a> presents the latest Google changes and how you can take advantage of them

1. SEO IN 2012
GAEL BRETON
CO-FOUNDER HIGHERCLICK.COM
@GAELBRETON

2. GOOGLE’S STRATEGY
It seems that now google’s down working on their logo, they decided to start focusing on
improving search again since 2011

3. STEP 1 – PANDA ATTACK
Name: Panda
Type: Onpage
Penalty: yes site wide
Target: thin, low quality, ads filed
sites
Metrics: user engagement
Refresh: monthly
% of results changed: over 12%
The panda update was rolled out on feb 23 2011 aiming to weed out low quality sites
from the top search results by applying a sitewide penalty to them.

4. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF PANDA
• Big keyword’s top results have been
wiped out, opening opportunities for
high quality sites.
• Clean up your website or noindex the
thin content
• Redesign your user experience to
improve bounce rate/time on page…
• Work on user generated content
• Use social as a benchmark (if it works
on social the UX is great)
Rethink your site content and UX,is it something people truly want? How can you make
it better?

5. PANDA TOOLS AND TIPS
• Replicate the panda questionaire and
use Mturk to crowdsource answers :
seomoz blog post
• Crawl your site for duplicate content
and make it unique : copyscape and
screaming frog
Rethink your site content and UX,is it something people truly want? How can you make
it better?

6. RICH SNIPETS: SCHEMA.ORG
More info presented on serps
• Ratings
• Authorship
• Flight times
• Item prices
• Video preview
• Cooking ingredients
• …
Google’s result pages went from a list of 10 blue links to media rich pages where you get
a much better idea of the content you’re going to find once you click through.

7. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF SCHEMA
For the full list, go on schema.org and see what uses of micro data you can make to
drive more traffic to your site right now.

8. SCHEMA TIPS AND TOOLS
• Google rich snippets tool
• Google guidelines on rich snippets
• Rich snippets examples blog post
For the full list, go on schema.org and see what uses of micro data you can make to
drive more traffic to your site right now.

9. GOOGLE +1 AND GOOGLE PLUS
It may look like a ghost town now but it’s the fastest growing social network ever

10. GOOGLE +1 AND GOOGLE PLUS
And Google is biased to change my results heavily based on it.

11. G+ WHAT GOOGLE WANTS OFF IT
Increased user demographic and psychographic knowledge to serve more relevant
content and ads in search and therefore make more $$$.

12. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF G+
1. Create your business page and make it look good
2. Embed the +1 button and circle box on your site
3. Share exclusive content on your page
4. Organize hangouts with customers giving them tips, rebates, and
encouraging them to interact with your google plus page
5. Promote your google plus page from facebook and twitter if you have
powerful accounts
6. Use findpeopleonplus.com to connect with people that may be part of your
community
1- create your g+ page and make it cool

13. G+ TIPS AND TOOLS
• Create your google+ page
• Add the +1 button to your pages
• Embedable badge for visitors to circle your company
• Tactics for early G+ adopters
• Higher Click’s Google+ Page
Increased user demographic and psychographic knowledge to serve more relevant
content and ads in search and therefore make more $$$.

14. THE REAL OF (NOT PROVIDED)
• Dismisses content
optimization attempts
• Prevents CRO to work
together with SEO
• Prevents traffic analysis
• Hated by SEOs
Google to “protect” its users installing https by default on every domain and encrypting
the data of logged in users (but only for organic..)

15. (NOT PROVIDED) LANDING PAGE
ANALYSIS
Breaking down your not provided traffic per page will give you a decent idea of the
keywords the traffic is coming from and conversion likelihood.

16. (NOT PROVIDED) TIPS
AND TOOLS
• Understanding your (not provided) traffic
• Notprovided.com tips
• Advanced segments to slice your data more efficiently

17. FRESHNESS UPDATE
• Aims to give more time
relevant information for
generic queries
• Impacted 35% of search
results
• Big boost for sites with an
ongoing content strategy
Users don’t just want information, they want time relevant information. Businesses that
do that get rewarded by Google.

18. FRESHNESS UPDATE
New sites overtake huge authorities due to content freshness. You can now outrank
massive newspaper if their info are not up to date.

19. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF
FRESHNESS
1. Identify keywords with aging content ranking on top in your industry
2. Create a great up to date piece of content for your website
3. Find people linking to the older pieces of content with ahrefs or
opensiteexplorer
4. Outreach to them telling them you’re going to release something more
accurate and have them commit to redirect their link to your new piece and
share it on social
5. Enjoy the rankings and traffic ;)
New sites overtake huge authorities due to content freshness. You can now outrank
massive newspaper if their info are not up to date.

20. TIPS AND TOOLS FOR FRESHNESS
• Opensiteexplorer and ahrefs for backlink analysis
• Inboundwriter for LSI optimisation
• Your brain and creativity for awesome content ;)
New sites overtake huge authorities due to content freshness. You can now outrank
massive newspaper if their info are not up to date.

21. PAGE LAYOUT ALGORITHM
• Penalizing websites with too
many ads above the fold
• Can mistarget websites with
large headers
• Has no notification in
webmasters tools.
• Is very suggestive
Google decided they’d be the only ones allowed to fill your screen with ads when you
open a page ;).

22. VENICE UPDATE
• Aims to localize results for
broad keywords
• Is different from google places
• Allows local businesses to gain
more visibility and traffic
• Allows more people to rank for
high traffic keyword
• Maintains national/international
authorities to the top
The Venice update aims to show local results for broad keywords based on your ip and
location. Local businesses are the winners of this update.

23. VENICE UPDATE
The top results remain the same nationally while the lower end of page 1 shows very
local results for a broad keyword such as “SEO”

24. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF VENICE
You can now start to aim for broader 1 word keyword in your area and show up for them
despite the competition

25. TAKING ADVANTAGE OF VENICE
Making your link profile local is also a great way to indicate google you should rank in
your area.

26. VENICE TOOLS AND TRICKS
Hcard creator
Geo sitemap generator

27. OVEROPTIMISATION & LINK
NETWORKS ENDED
• Link networks have been
massively deindexed
• Overoptimized pages receive a
-10 to -50 penalty
• Not enough anchor variation or
links from bad neighbourhoods
are likely to get your site flagged
• It is strongly advised to remove
any kind of “dodgy” links you
may have to your site before
that happens.
Google decided to crack down on “Grey” SEO in the past few weeks

28. THAT’S ALL FOLKS
GAEL BRETON
CO-FOUNDER HIGHERCLICK.COM
@GAELBRETON