What '(Not Provided)' & Google Hummingbird Mean for Small Business SEO

Many small businesses measure the performance of their SEO agency based on keyword-level data. They believe the value proposition stems from better rankings on specific keywords that they select. Small businesses generally approach SEO firms with the assumption that better rankings will equate to more business.

Small Business SEO Monthly Reports

As time goes by, the small business will receive a monthly report that will explicitly show that great progress has been made moving the rankings of the selected keywords in Google and Bing/Yahoo. More sophisticated agencies transform raw keyword analytics into several buckets.
It has been popular to bundle keywords that are branded (i.e., use some form of the company's name or brand in the search phrase) against those that are non-branded. An increase in non-branded traffic has been attributed to SEO, while increases in branded traffic were attributed to other marketing efforts.

'(Not Provided)' Kills Specific Analytics Reporting

Regardless of the politics of the decision, Google’s recent move to 100 percent secure search has decimated the branded/non-branded keyword analysis used by many small businesses to evaluate their SEO firms. But this is OK.

SEO is Changing (Again)

Google has made several large algorithmic changes in 2013. The net result of these changes is that many old tactics for link acquisition are no longer helpful.
Additionally, both small business owners and SEO firms need a new orientation to remain successful.

Brand is Important to Rankings

The death of branded versus non-branded keyword traffic may be a blessing, as many now believe that branded mentions are a key signal in the Google algorithm.
While no one will deny that backlinks remain the primary driver of rankings, the anti-spam filters have also become much more sophisticated.
Mentions of a small business company name, even when not accompanied by a backlink, are believed by many to be a signal of legitimacy.

Breadth of a Website Matters to Hummingbird

Whereas small businesses used to obsess over the rankings of their top money keywords, Google's new Hummingbird algorithm implies their focus needs to be elsewhere.
It is now critically important that the website answers questions for end users.
Yes, content is still king. In fact, content that answers specific questions may be critical for Hummingbird success.

Replace Non-Branded Keyword Traffic with Entrance Pages

A healthy website is constantly expanding in breadth. In other words, SEO post-Hummingbird requires that a site gain new keyword rankings every month to demonstrate that it is a helpful resource.
The easiest metric to review is the number of unique entrance pages used by users to get to the website.
A website with more entrance pages:

• Is a stronger resource for answering questions.
• Offers expertise on more topics.
• Ranks on more long-tail keywords.
• Has more breadth in a specific space.

How to Grow Website Entrances Pages

Websites can't grow their entrance pages without introducing new content regularly. While hard to believe, there are many webmasters who don't update their websites, have no blog, and refuse any assistance.
While introducing new pages of helpful, high-quality content is a great start, the issue of syndication and recognition remains a barrier – particularly in highly competitive keyword spaces.
Webmasters and small business owners need to be very creative to be noticed:

• Newsjack hot stories in their areas of expertise.
• Create infographics.
• Make videos to post on YouTube.
• Utilize staff to promote in social media.
• Use a small budget to promote the best content via PPC.

Measuring Keyword Traffic Was Wrong Anyway

While new alternatives to keyword-level analytics, branded and non-branded traffic are rapidly emerging, the punchline is that measuring keyword rankings and traffic was the wrong criteria. The real return on investment from SEO comes from an increase in new customers.
Lead tracking remains the single best measure of how a small business website is performing. Many websites lack the appropriate web-to-lead and phone tracking (up to 50 percent of leads come through phone calls even when the website was found via a search engine) integration to have a complete picture.

Conclusions

This year has proven to be very dramatic for SEO with major changes from Google in the form of Hummingbird and "(not provided)". Small business owners who once obsessed over their top keyword rankings and traffic from a few "money terms" now need to adjust their thinking.
Google's secure search has removed the popular branded keyword traffic data, but offers an opportunity to instead focus on the breadth of a website via entrance pages. And Google Hummingbird clears the path for small business owners to generate high-quality content that really answers questions.

Big Brands, Google, Penalties & You

For years there has been controversy about big brands and their special place in Google's heart. For the most part, Google's supposed brand bias is really an SEO myth told late night over beers in darkened corners at conferences and in forum postings.
Most sites that are big brands rank well because they meet so many points on Google algorithm – everything from authority, to quality score, to links, to social signals.
If you see Wikipedia everywhere, as annoying as it may be, it positions so well because it has tons of content and more links pointed at it than stars in a desert sky. This doesn't mean Google prefers brands; it means the site is algorithmically awesome.
OK, so "algorithmically awesome" isn't really an SEO term, but it might as well be. If you naturally meet more points on the algorithm than any of your competitors, then your gift from Google will be to occupy a higher position in the search results. It just kind of works that way.

Wait, What About Google's Vince Update?

Yes, there was an algorithmic update called Vince in 2009 that threw big brands some special algo points.
That same year, there was "brand affinity." This quote from Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO at the time, probably said it best:
"Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."
So big brands were wired into the algorithm with Vince, then even more so with Panda. Yet, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said big brands "can't do whatever they want" and are subject to the algorithm just like regular sites. What is an SEO to believe? Which is it?
Well, it's really all of the above. You don't automatically get to the top by just being a big brand. If you have a poor website and are in general not doing well on the algorithm, you might do well for a few terms sure, but overall, no.

Big Brands and Search

Being a big brand naturally helps you with some algorithmic factors, including perceived site authority and quality. You also have the one thing most mom and pops don't: brand affinity.
One sentence of the Search Quality Rating Guidelines is telling: "Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?" Brands are more well known to users by simply being a brand, so the user intent is more likely to be Target the store then say target the bullseye.
Wikipedia ranks well everywherebecause, frankly it should. That said, you don't always position well just because you are a brand.
I once sat in a site clinic in which one of the largest ecommerce sites on the web didn't understand why it couldn't position for selling television sets. The problem? There were no signals from the site that it deserved to position to sell television sets. While the site did position well for things related to its core brand, it just didn't for things that weren't.
So where is the benefit for big brands outside of having a bit more ability to extract authority, quality, and large value points on links and social and rank for being a known brand?
Well mostly it seems limited to penalties.

Penalties and Big Brands

Many big brands have a direct connection at Google, which means someone at Google that will tell them when they crossed a line or at least one to Cutts to answer a question or two. And if you're really big, Cutts will warn you himself (see Mozilla)
Big brands also more likely to survive a Google penalty than a small- or medium-sized business (SMB) site, partially because they are stronger sites, partially because their penalties do seem to have much more limited damage.
Seriously, when was the last time you heard of a big brand being removed entirely from Google's index? Sure they get hit with penalties all the time, I know Cutts isn't misleading us about that. But the damage is much more focused and much more limited.
Remember JCPenney and Overstock? They lost keyword traffic, not their entire website.
Go to Google forums see how many SMBs can say the same.
Now some theorize that it is because Google gives these sites leniency – in the hey – they were at #1 they could not rank any higher, so those link buys didn't actually help them. Others believe it is just a strict brand preference.
Personally, my SEO brain has settled on it is a set of algorithmic factors, I like to term "the expectancy factor" or the "should be there factor" (this is just an easy way to say algorithmic factors combined with the fact that the sites are just stronger and the brands are given leniency and limited penalties).

'Should Be There' Status

Some sites should be in Google's index – not just because Google thinks it should be there, but because searches by end users have indicated to Google that they expect it to be there.
If one of these "should be there" sites didn't show up in Google's results, then the searcher might think Google has a pretty lousy product.
So Google protects its product by making sure to limit the effect of penalties on big brands by warning them directly and by helping certain ones recover quickly if a penalty is more damaging. Whichever it is, big brands are like a naval carrier in the middle of a penalty storm; your SMB is a Tiki raft.

Google Penalties – Big Brand Leniency

So how does it work in the real world when you have "should be there" status?
While a standard SMB site might receive one penalty and find itself without a homepage in the Google index (and many have), a big brand might look like this:

This is the manual action viewer of a big brand site.
Under each of these penalties, except for one, in the manual action viewer were approximately 1,000 pages (the maximum the viewer can handle). These penalties were on the subdomain, but the main domain was also penalized.
Both the main domain and the subdomain lost key terms in the search engine and key placements, but it did continue to position for new, highly trafficked terms though less relevant and longer tail, didn't cause enough damage that its core business functions were threatened.
Now what happens if you're a company that doesn't have "should be there" algorithmic triggers? And you receive even one of these manual actions on your site over a multitude of pages or even just a percentage of them?
You would have probably woken up to this:

But this big brand site never saw this graph. This site hardly noticed the blip. Partially because it creates new pages all the time, which were positioning (well enough), which helped cover up the loss, but mostly because the penalties were isolated and not cross sectional.

Penalty Removal: Big Brand vs. SMB

These penalties were there for quite some time. So, if your site was not expected to be in the index, if you did not have site authority, site strength and your site was not a big brand, you would probably expect the road back would be pretty tough (noting that you would at most be dealing with one or two of these penalties as no small site would survive more than that without getting their homepage kicked out of the index along with the rest of their site).
Here's what the site looked like after one reconsideration request and one penalty removal.
Within a few days they regained 100 percent of their impressions, or 2 million (on average). This change shows that their site was repositioned into key terms and their new content was likely being shown highly in the search results.
We did a hand-check and yes, they regained key category terms and they were now positioning for relevant, highly competitive terms, even highly competitive phrases with short life expectancy (terms that would live only a few days).
If you aren't a big brand, you site isn't likely to work the same way. At the same time as this big brand site was recovering, we helped an SMB recover.
Instead of days, the SMB site took three months, three requests (one rewrite for depth and breadth), and a complete site rebuild. Only then did the homepage just start to show for their own name on the fifth page of Google.
This is more likely the outcome for an SMB. If you recover at all.

So Why do You Care About What Big Brands do?

Maybe that big brand corporation site is getting away with some black hat tactic, and your (clueless) boss, marketing team, board of advisors, or some other stakeholder knows about it.
"If they can do it, well we can, too!" they say.
No. You can't.
Unless you have algorithmic awesomeness, authority, and expectancy (and that expectancy is the key) you will much more likely end up losing your position, your pages or your homepage if you buy links or engage in other practices that violate Google's guidelines.

What Else Can You Learn From Big Brands?

Acting like a big brand is your best method for achieving success. Big brands send out strong signals to Google that tell Google there is a company and people behind them. These signals tell Google that the site is taken care of, that the company is awake at the helm, and that the site is going to be a good product.
Now not all big brands put out great websites, in fact a lot of them put out horrible websites, which is where expectancy (brand) can save them and where you can beat them.
Google has provided some guidance on building high-quality sites, in the form of these 23 questions. Follow these concepts, check your site. Does it meet the criteria of what Google (not you) considers a high-quality site? You don't have to hit every point, but the more signals you send Google the better.

Be a Big Brand in the Making

Get your site to send out big brand signals. If you mimic all the good things a brand does well, Google will give you some of those authority and quality points:

• Create content.
• Build a natural link profile.
• Use social.
• Create more content (and more content).
• Have a blog.
• Make sure your site is technically sound, fast, visually appealing, and easy for users (and search engines to navigate).
• Utilize experts in the industry to audit your site and tell you what you're not doing well, so you can do it better.

You aren't likely to get those valuable expectancy signals unless you have offline indicators as well, but that's OK. If you build a better site, with authority and meet more brand points on the algorithm, you don't need that to compete.
Brands do have leeway, but that is a much stronger case when it comes to penalties. Being a brand just means they need to be there and found, not found in the top position except for their name and a few core key terms.
Expectancy, being a brand, having authority doesn't get you automatic position; it just gets you some advantages in the game.

Securing the Future of SEO: Global Brands & 5 '(Not Provided)' Solutions

SEO has changed forever.
The great philosopher Heraclitus once said "change is the only constant". But wait? Einstein said a similar thing about the universe. Even the very subject on the correlation of change and constant in life is open to debate.
This sums up the situation that search marketers face themselves in today. SEO has a new meaning, a new direction. How we deal with it is driven by marketers' perception and the word "secure" now has more than one connotation in our market.
When Google made it apparent that 100 percent of its keyword data will be "(not provided)" (to the SEO community), many reacted with anger, angst, and frustration. Others sat back to absorb the news and some, content-based marketers, embraced the news as part of the natural evolution of SEO. They saw it coming and planned ahead. Read more

Will Google Punish a Guest Posting Strategy Due to Unnatural Link Patterns?

"The Missing Link" is a Search Engine Watch exclusive reader-driven Q&A column with veteran content publicist Eric Ward. You can ask questions about all aspects of links and link building and Eric will provide his expert answers. Submit your questions here, and you may be featured in a future installment!

Until Google's recent algorithm changes we consistently ranked on top of the search results for our primary keyword phrase. Now we are on page two for that phrase so I am looking into pursuing guest posts on other sites. To my understanding Google will detect and penalize unnatural link patterns. As a result I am wondering if I obtain guest posts from a blog network would or could this be easily detected and penalized as a pattern?

– Blue on Page 2

I'll give you a short answer and a long answer.
Short answer: Writing posts for other sites (which is a form of guest posting) is still an effective way to build credible links.
The devil is always in the details though. Here's a longer answer.
First, a video from Google's Matt Cutts addressed this exact subject. I strongly suggest you watch it:
Of everything Cutts said, the thing that struck me most was when he said, "It's a long and time honored tradition" for writers with expertise in certain topics to share content with each other. In other words, it's absolutely acceptable.
In fact, this column you're reading likely falls into that category. I've written this post for Search Engine Watch and nobody else.
Technically, this is a guest post. But this is much different than a guest posting approach where you aren't selective about where you seek out posting opportunities or, on the receiving end, you aren't selective about who you accept guest post content from.
Here are few guidelines/criteria that may help you as you seek out guest posting opportunities:

1. Look for signals/signs of credibility and longevity:
   • How long has the target site been on the web? Longer may mean more credibility.
   • Who owns/operates the site? Have you ever heard of them?
   • Is there an editorial team with clearly stated guidelines? There should be.
   • Is the target site's content made up of mostly guest posts? If so, be very cautious. Search to see if the posts have appeared on other sites.
   • Look at the other guest posts on the site. Search on author names to see who they are and what kind of web presence they have.
2. If you want to take your credibility analysis really far, do a backlink analysis of the target site, as well as the target sites of the guest posters, to see just how credible their existing link profiles are. I personally stay away from any site that has any evidence of a spammy backlink profile, because I don't want my site to have any negative signal association with those sites.

One final point: at the start of your question, you specifically mentioned your Google rankings. Consider that even under the best guest posting circumstances, you can only take guest posting so far as a ranking-specific strategy.
You can't permanently guest post your way to the top of the search rankings. Nor should that be the only goal.
In fact, I look at guest posting opportunities for their potential to help my direct traffic and exposure to an audience I'm interested in reaching. I don't guest post for search rank. Seeking search rank via guest posting can lead you to make poor decisions and leave a linking footprint that Google can detect as manipulative.

3 SEO Success Factors for 2014

I recently came upon one of my old articles, "SEO Factors for 2011". I chuckled to myself, not only about how some of the details were actually still relevant but also how many seemed so elementary compared to today's search environment.
Yes, we still need to worry about the possession of "natural-looking" link profiles and how we feed our data to the engines. Those items will always be of consideration.
However, the nostalgic review of my piece had me thinking about what factors we need to consider for successful SEO as online marketers in 2014.

Social, Local & Mobile

We've spent the last handful of years practicing and preaching the importance of being in social, mobile, and local. This mindset was proactive. It allowed us to not solely focus on keywords and search results, but how these elements were going to change the search results our users saw as well as our user's experience.
While we walked down this road, at first it felt as if we were making strides to build silos of these efforts. Soon we saw the convergence of local and social sites molding into Google local results (e.g., Yelp reviews in Google local listings). We've also seen the fast paced growth of mobile and how localization of results has brought a more relevant delivery of results in this arena.

Search in 2013

This year has brought upon a lot for us to understand as marketers. As we close out 2013 algorithmic intelligence is changing faster than ever, at least in my opinion.
The buzz of 2013 and even more so the last few months has been upon the advancements of the Knowledge Graph, Local Carousel, Google Now, Hummingbird, and the great secure search/"(not provided)" change.
That's not even to mention Penguin and Panda, but those changes are more about what you may have done wrong in the past. We're here to talk about the future.

The Future of SEO

While the "(not provided)" announcement was a smack in the face to SEO professionals, hopefully it has helped you to realize that our intentions shouldn't be so focused so solely or intently on ranking a keyword in search results.
After watching what Google has been doing over the last year or so, where do keywords tie into the above-mentioned rollout features? They each in some way or another tie into local, mobile, or social.

• Will keywords help you with the Local Carousel? No, proximity and review generation will.
• How will Google Now propel your keyword strategy? It won't, but social efforts will.
• Do you think that Google will give you a Knowledge Graph box for a keyword and link to your site? If so, you're dreaming.

Add in the Hummingbird update, and all of these changes tell us that Google is moving closer to bringing everything together through the tie-ins of localization and semantic improvements for conversational search, which is popular on mobile.

SEO Isn't Dead, It's Converging

SEO at its core will never be dead. All of the on-site needs of yesteryear will remain important in 2014. All of the newer processes of creating informational, enticing, and insightful content for link building and social digestion are still the hot topic now and will be heading into the future.
My point is that we need to watch the converging of our old silos into the new SERP display. SEO has taken on a converging role with other mediums which impact SERP display.

For example, you've created optimized local listings for your local business, but know that the display weighs even more heavily on reviews, have you done your job at local-social integration.

Do you want to display your social activity in SERPs?

2014 Will Still be Big for SEO

Sites must be crawled efficiently, content must be targeted, and yes we still want to rank where desired. The focus as we move down the road is more so on what vehicles we use off-site to help drive traffic to our sites.
How we use the previous discussed pillars alongside their continual convergence by Google will determine how successful your online marketing strategy will become.
Quick takeaways:

• Don't build a local listing. Allow your audience to help you build a local presence.
• Don't build a brand. Build a community, a socialized brand, one that can keep your audience in tune with you in real-time.
• Don't just optimize a site. Optimize an experience for those that are mobile and content hungry.