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Online Reputation Management Trends

Online reputation is still a very serious topic in the online community. As the Web continues to be a place that is under a constant state of change, it’s also important for individuals, businesses and SEO experts to keep online reputations in the forefront of their minds. There is no better time than now to reassess an online reputation and update reputation management strategies. In today’s volatile online community, it is imperative to understand the significance that having a positive online reputation can mean for a company or individual. Using the same reputation management strategy that you’ve been using for years is not going to offer the same amount of protection as it has in the past due to the rapid changes which occur in the online community almost daily. Here are just a few trends that are presently occurring in online reputation management today.

How Does Defensive SEO Work?

Defend Against Negative SEO
Defend Against Negative SEO

Over the last two or three years the entire SEO world has gone through what most would call a major transformation. This has caused digital marketing experts and SEO specialists to have to rethink and change a variety of strategies. It is true that it is now more difficult to rank high in the SERPs than what it used to be. Many think that many of the negative SEO campaigns that have begun emerging are a result of black hat SEO tactics that no longer work. Negative SEO campaigns attack competitor’s sites and cause damage to their site ranking and in many cases can cause a site to fall off the first few pages of the SERPs altogether. The good news is that there are some strategies that can help you prevent the negative effects of such an attack, and there are ways to protect your site from coming under attack in the first place.

Web Design Trends for Fall 2014

If you’re a business owner, you probably have a website. If you don’t have one, get one. Because, as a business owner, chances are you won’t go a day this year without a customer or potential customer asking, “What’s your web address?” If you do have a website, then you know how important it is that you remain relevant and contemporary in your web style and content, and that means keeping up with all the latest web design trends. Nothing will sink your website’s page ranking quicker than irrelevant information and tired design. Too often what was popular last year is passé this year. SEO experts are pointing more and more to good web design as a digital marketing strategy in order to enhance content. If you haven’t already done so, now’s a great time to bring your website into 2014. So, are you ready to optimize your website by seeing what’s in store for fall’s upcoming design trends?

How Does Google Deal with Spam?

Spam … does it ever go away? Every internet user has had those days when they think the internet gods must hate them, as the spam just keeps coming relentlessly. It shows up all over the place in so many searches and emails, and you just can’t seem to get rid of it. The truth is, though, that the people at Google are hard at work 24/7 dealing, often quite successfully, with this seemingly omnipresent web nudge. In fact, if Google’s knowledgeable staff wasn’t equally unrelenting at ridding the internet of spammers and their unsolicited rubble, your internet searches would become never-ending pursuits of relevant data. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is what internet searches are all about. Users must be able to search on … and find … whatever they’re looking for, and if a website contains spam or content irrelevant to users’ searches, that makes users unhappy. And unhappy users make Google sad.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO
Negative SEO

One of the latest difficulties that SEO experts and webmasters have to face is negative SEO. A negative SEO campaign is when another person performs actions which are intended to hurt a competitor’s ranking in the SERPs. There are several different ways that competitors attack a site and try to inflict malicious damage, some report sites to Google for using “black hat” tactics, others review bomb which means that they send a lot of 5-star reviews very close together so it looks like they were paid reviews. In most instances, negative SEO tactics are totally out of the control of the site owner and competitors try to obtain higher rankings in the SERPs by negatively impacting a competitor’s site.

Types of Spam

Spam … the word has never been associated with anything all that tasteful. In the past, people knew spam as a precooked, canned meat made from pork and ham and some other stuff that garnered it a rather dubious reputation. Poor spam … how it was besieged with ‘mystery meat’ jokes about it showing up in kitchens and school cafeterias all over the country. Today, of course, spam is more associated with unwanted electronic messaging that internet users get bombarded with by the dozens or hundreds daily. Spam is what we now know as those ads that just don’t go away. So, what exactly is spam? How did it get its name? And what are the different types?

How to Predict Results from SEO

Successful SEO
Successful SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) employs a wide variety of strategies that are designed to improve a site’s ranking in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Over the years,  there has been a lot of manipulation of search results and the search engines have responded by upgrading their algorithms. These updates are designed to penalize those who abuse the system and use black hat or spammy methods to obtain a higher ranking in the SERPs. Some strategies like buying links, cloaking and keyword stuffing were commonplace and in many cases did help improve a site’s ranking. But these types of practices are considered black hat now and can get a site penalized so badly that they fall off the result pages altogether. By using SEO best practices and ethical strategies a site can obtain a ranking near the top of the SERPs. But since it’s not an exact science, is there any way to predict the results?

How Does Search Work?

The internet … could it be more wonderful? You may or may not be old enough to remember, but it wasn’t that long ago that, if you needed to perform research, you had to schlep to a library, look through something called a card catalogue, pick out a bunch of books that might contain some of the information you’re looking for, and subsequently hunt through the library to find those books’ reference numbers. Then, if you were lucky, the books you needed weren’t checked out, or sitting on the librarian’s desk waiting to be returned to their rightful places, and you could start reading … and reading … and reading. Thank goodness we don’t have to go through all that today! Billions of users worldwide search the internet for information every day. Most people go to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, type in a topic or a few key words, and hit enter. Then, when the pages of data appear, they click on the ones that interest them. But how many users actually know how searching the internet works?

The Eraser Button Law in California

Privacy laws are getting pretty stringent and far-reaching in the European Union. In the United States, however, the debate is fueled by the fact that privacy laws often conflict with U.S. Constitutional protections of free speech. In 1995, the European Union signed into law the ‘European Data Protection Directive. It has since been revised to include a concept that was not adopted originally that has come to be known as the ‘right to be forgotten.’ This concept was conceived from the notion that individuals have a right to determine the development of their lives in an ‘autonomous way,’ without being perpetually stigmatized by things they did in the past. In the law, the EU gives individuals power to have erased from the internet information previously published on the web. In a response to this law, Governor Jerry Brown of California signed into law Senate Bill 568, which requires websites to provide to minors an online ‘erase button,’ giving them the ability to remove their own web posts.