Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
Link building is a tactic often employed by SEO specialists in order to boost a site’s domain authority and therefore keyword rankings. The idea is that the more (relevant, quality, authoritative) sites that link to yours, the more legit your site will be in the eyes of Google. Consequently, there are numerous ways to go about garnering backlinks to your site – some dodgier than others.
In an effort to discount the less legit backlinks, Google ignores links contained in user generated profiles (e.g. on forums or comment threads) and auto-generated content sites. This means that there’s no value in creating numerous user profiles and spamming various forums across the web in order to spread your links around – because Google isn’t using these to rank websites. Instead, focus on creating quality content that people naturally want to link to!
You may have noticed that has recently gotten a makeover (and if you don’t know what we’re talking about, then you should definitely read this article we wrote on how to set up Google Search Console).
In addition to looking completely different (and much slicker, we must admit), the new Search Console comes with a few useful new features:
This article brings to light how far Google is yet to come with its machine learning. Despite getting rid of 70% of all fake Google My Business listings in 2017, these spam listings continue to populate the web – and in growing numbers.
Without much in the way of validation or spam filtering, what’s happening is people are creating listings with keyword-stuffed business names, fake reviews, and listings that are altogether fake – all in an effort to show up when people search for certain keyword phrases. It’s super frustrating for business owners who do the right thing and hire a Melbourne digital marketing agency to handle things like building out a robust Google My Business listing.
Having these phony listings fall through the cracks and not be removed is obviously detrimental to the tool’s legitimacy and something Google is endeavoring to get on top of. In the meantime, you can fill out this form to report any fake listings you come across.