Month: March 2014

Facebook rolled out the much-hyped Graph Search to its users a few months ago. With every major Facebook change, some users worry about negative effects: In December 2012, Facebook changed its privacy settings (again), which reset default settings for users who had painstakingly customised their privacy settings.

Facebook Graph search makes your information easier to find. While this may cause fear among some users, who prefer to keep personal information private, graph search is not inherently scary. Unpacking how it works can help alleviate the fear of the new.

How graph search works

Facebook’s present search tool is fairly limited: Type in a name and Facebook returns users, businesses or pages with that name. If no one with that name is on Facebook, the search returns web results. Graph search is poised to revolutionize this by allowing more advanced queries. Now, users can search for a subset of other users who like a certain thing, work for a certain company or live in a certain place. If you’re traveling to Berlin and want to crash on an acquaintance’s sofa, you can search for “friends of friends in Berlin,” for example. You can also perform general queries like “Social Media Gibraltar employees.”

While Graph Search can be helpful, it also opens up the possibility that friends, acquaintances or potential employers could stumble across unflattering photos or status updates you’ve posted. From a technical standpoint, Graph Search isn’t making new information public, but it is making your personal information more discoverable.

Protecting privacy under Social Media Gibraltar

Facebook does offer ways for you to hide information you don’t want to appear in Graph Search when it comes to Social Media Gibraltar or social media in general. The “limit old posts” setting allows you to limit old posts to friends. The “untag photos” feature removes tags of you from embarrassing photos. Personal information and Likes can be shared with friends or friends of friends only, for greater privacy controls. Each time you post content to Facebook, you can select the audience, limiting everything to friends only or choosing to make content public.

While Graph Search does represent something new and different, it isn’t inherently scary. Learning how to control your privacy can help put fears to rest and allow you to focus on how Graph Search can promote connectedness in new and unusual ways.

On May 22, Google officially released its latest algorithm change. Nicknamed Penguin 2.0 because of its similarity to the sweeping changes of the first Penguin update, this latest update is actually going to reward local businesses that have been doing what they can to provide quality content for their sites. Yet some companies have been hit by the latest change. If yours has, the culprit may be your links.

Penguin 2.0: A New Look at Links

Search Engine Watch indicates that the newest Penguin update is digging deeper into sites and analysing inbound link profiles specifically. The first Penguin update only analyzed the link profiles of homepages. Now, internal pages are also being analyzed. As a result, SEO Gibraltar experts are encouraging website owners to focus on links to all pages of their websites, not just the home page.

So what does this mean? If you’re building a strategy for search engine optimisation Gibraltar, you need to focus on inbound links from high-quality sites, not just to your home page, but also to your internal pages.

Improving Your Link Profile

To have quality inbound links, you must be able to identify sites that are worth posting on. A site with a page rank of 4.0 or higher is a site worth considering. Anything lower won’t help, and may even hurt, your search engine optimisation in Gibraltar.

Google is also looking at the time of the links. If you gain hundreds of links in a few days’ time, they won’t help your ranking. Google wants to see organic links developed on quality sites over time. This requires a long-term strategy for SEO in Gibraltar.

Next, create a strategy that links to more than one page of your site, as these appear more natural. Diversity will help improve your site’s rank.

Finally, analyze the anchor text used for your links. Google wants to see a variety of related terms linking back to your site. For instance, if you are operating a Gibraltar Web Design Company, you will want to see terms like Gibraltar web design, web design Gibraltar, Best web design company in Gibraltar pointing back to your site.

If you’ve never taken the time to analyze your link profile, our SEO Gibraltar experts can help. Contact us to develop a search engine optimisation Gibraltar strategy that will maximise your local results and help improve your rank, even with the changes that Penguin brought.