Oxiem recently hosted a Facebook training event for seniors. Oxiem has a relationship with the Dublin Convention and Visitors Bureau, and we partnered together to put on this free event. Six of us from Oxiem went out to the Dublin VCB to teach seniors how to create an account, upload images, “like” pictures and statuses and to answer any Facebook-related questions the seniors had.
Check out this video from the event or visit our own Facebook to see pictures.
We had a blast, and we look forward to similar events in the future!
We are excited to announce that Jeff Jacobs has joined the Oxiem team!
Jeff (pictured right) is an Account Manager, responsible for working with clients on all aspects of their interactive and traditional marketing activities. Jeff has specialties in digital integration and omnichannel strategy with experience in the retail, restaurant, and wholesale industries.
Jeff, who lives in the Columbus area, will be working primarily out of Oxiem’s Dublin office.
Fun Facts About Jeff:
Has two kids and understands working long days on little sleep!
Loves technology and gadgets
At one time was a city planner, has AICP and LEED AP certifications and maintains an interest in real estate and development
Loves to travel (Recently returned from vacation in Florida at Disneyworld with his family)
We are excited for the skills and experience that Jeff brings to the table, and look forward to having him on our team!
Google has just released a report “detailing” 50 changes to the Google Algorithm that were made in March 2012.
As usual, this report briefly mentions each one and does not go out of its way to explain what the changes actually mean. You can read the full report here.
What We Think
Here are the changes with the potential to have the most impact on search results.
Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"] “This month we turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust.”
Better interpretation and use of anchor text. “We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.”
Over the past few weeks, we’ve definitely already noticed this. Backlink anchor text, especially on 3rd party sites with little-to-no content relevance, seems to have lost some of its automatic magic. This has the potential to impact black-hat SEO companies who buy myriads of backlinks on blog networks in 3rd world countries, but probably will have little impact on natural backlinks on sites with relevant or related content. Google’s spider is getting better at reading and understanding on-site content and knowing when a backlink is spam. While you may see some minor shifting in the SERPs, as long as you continue to post helpful, informative, relevant content and gather natural, context-related backlinks, your site will be fine. But if you are relying solely on spammy SEO activity (such as we are intentionally doing in our SEO experiment), your site may be in for some hurting!
Improvements to processing for detection of site quality. [launch codename "Curlup"] “We’ve made some improvements to a longstanding system we have to detect site quality. This improvement allows us to get greater confidence in our classifications.”
Similar to above, Google truly is getting better at understanding content. From the beginning, Google’s mission has been to show the user what they are searching for, thus their emphasis on rewarding sites that have relevant, authoritative content with high placement in search results. If you are churning out “spiderfood” content stuffed with keywords for the sole purpose of ranking higher in the SEPRs, this Google update should have you nervous! But if you focus on writing high-quality, relevant content and being an authority in your space, this update should have you excited.
There are lots of other interesting and ambiguous updates in the update article, have fun!
The Main Takeaway
If you’ll notice, I’ve used the words “relevant” and “authoritative” about 50 times. That is the main takeaway: if you want to do well in organic search, don’t approach content creation from an SEO-only perspective but instead, write for the user. Create content that is actually helpful, and Google will reward you for it! The Oxiem Search Team encourages good content and can help you create quality blog posts and articles, find interesting images and create helpful, funny or interesting videos to ensure a positive user experience for your site visitors. If you have any questions about the updates to the Google algorithm or about how we can help to make your site relevant and authoritative, give us a call or contact us here!
Fast note. Did some checking today, seeing some slippage on a top keyword for our test site. I’m not sure if it’s the recent algo changes or our awesome links. Will dig deeper later today and report back
This isn’t the penny kind of wishing well at Oxiem — that’s too old school for us. We are, however, wishing someone here well as they move on to a new role.
Everyone at Oxiem wishes our friend, and first Dublin employee, Billy Fischer all the best as he steps into the next stage of his career. While we’re sad to see him go, our team will always be rooting for his success.
Billy helped launch Oxiem Dublin in early 2009, which grew from two employees to more than 12 now and more on the horizon. His love for everything digital and early embrace of social media helped us expand our growth and build a strong Columbus market presence over those two+ years.
While Billy was a great speaker and always represented Oxiem well, he also held a number of unofficial titles, including:
Office Walk-off Champion of All-Time
Best Golfer (for real, he smokes the rest of us)
Coolest Dad of a Toddler
Most Excited About Everything
Social Media Guru (he hates that one)
Top Carlton Dancer
Most Likely to Say “If you Don’t get Paid, I Don’t Get Paid,” in his best smarmy salesguy voice
Alter Ego: Phil Dunphy from Modern Family
App Snob
“While we are sad to see Billy go — he was instrumental in our early growth in Columbus — we have no plans to slow down the pace of our growth and hope to replace his role in the near future,” said John Fimiani, co-founder and Brand Strategy Director.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Old Hoists or “PETOH” is a concept we came up with as a fun, interesting way to talk about Konecranes’ crane and hoist repair services. We created a simple web page for PETOH, as well as this 60 second video:
Fun right?
We sure thought so. Much better than a boring infomercial-esque presentation. Hope you enjoy!
We have exciting news! Our little domain, complete with brand new CMS and updated content, has been cached by Google! The Search Team at Oxiem is very excited, but at the same time we feel bad about our little domain: it never did anything to us and now we’re gonna destroy it. But boy are we having fun.
We decided to target four main keywords with our backlink campaign:
Emergency Plumber
Emergency Plumbers
Plumber Services
Plumbing Services
Currently, our domain does not rank for any of these keywords, which is no surprise because the plumbing industry is extremely competitive: some plumbing-related PPC ads are upwards of $50/click! Over the course of our experiment, we will buy a myriad of spammy backlinks with our keywords as the anchor text and see if we can get our site to rank for these keywords.
And Our Backlinks are Live!
We Googled “Black Hat Link Builder” and purchased our links, which ended up costing about 0.5 cents/link: not a bad deal!! (Of course this is a terrible idea. NEVER DO THIS: you’ll kill your site! We’re trained professionals, never do this at home.) After a few days of nail-biting uncertainty, in exchange for 1 easy payment of exactly $45, we received 10,013 backlinks! And these links are baad. We’re talking Russian directories, completely unrelated content, you get the idea.
So.
Our site is cached, and our 10,013 links are live. Now we watch the SERPs to see what happens. Stay tuned!
(We can’t post the name of our site, because we don’t want Google making the connection between our SEO efforts and our domain name. If you want to check out the site, comment below, and we’ll message the link to you.)
Written by bsterzenbach | February 28, 2012 3:09 pm
Update. We’re seeing lots of news that Google is actually discounting certain link types. This is actually great news for real SEO.
What do WE See
We’re seeing traditional non-relevant links performing much more poorly as a result of this recent update. SEO folks from around the world are reporting the same results. The interesting thing is, forums, blogs,etc are still working GREAT where there is actual contextual relevance.
Early Lesson?
Work your social signals. Get on REAL message boards, get real clicks from real users.
Ah sweet deja-vu. I seems like it was only 8 years ago when Google announced how they would change the way links are handled. Wait – it WAS 8 years ago…
Alright, I might be exaggerating a bit, how about Hilltop refreshed?
Today Google announced MAJOR CHANGES to how they will be handling links moving forward. My professional opinion – I’ll believe it when I see it. This recent announcement looks like Hilltop redux with an emphasis on ignoring anchor text.
The changes that have the SEO community concerned are their ambiguous references to retooling how they handle links.
What does this mean for you?
Nothing. If you built your entire SEO campaign with anchor text optimized backlinks, at some point you might see a shift, but if you did “the other stuff” you will probably notice that the other guys who did more and possibly spammier link-building will be less of a threat.
Is Google Moving in the Right Direction?
I don’t know. If you look at their PPC philosophy (basic economics will police search results) then link-building follows that model to the letter and should be fine for their results. Think about it like this, in PPC, quality of results are controlled by the bidding system – ostensibly people won’t place high bids for keywords unless they bring high-quality visits, meaning they will not spam the results as it’s economically silly to do so. The same philosophy should apply to link-builders. Why would a site spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on links only to bring non-targeted visitors? The real question we should be asking is “what’s wrong with basing SERPs on inbound links?”.
What should you do?
I’d say sit tight. If you’re building spammy links, you should have stopped doing that about 12 years ago anyway. If you’re building questionable links, let’s wait and see if Google really starts to disregard them. You’ll see it in your traffic soon enough.
Written by jordanlink | February 23, 2012 12:38 pm
“I got an email promising that my website could get high organic rankings in a short time for $39.99. Does this work??”
At Oxiem, we have this conversation almost daily. Here’s our answer: the only way that these (spammy) SEO companies could guarantee ranking success is by pointing a multitude (we’re talking thousands) of spammy backlinks from dirty, low-quality websites at your domain.
We of course advise you to never, ever enlist these (spammy) SEO companies to “help” your site.
The Consequences of Bad SEO
Google places a high value on backlinks, viewing them as “votes” that proclaim the relevance and authority of your site: more backlinks=higher authority of your site=higher rankings (not that simple, but you get the idea.)
It is very dangerous to try to “game” Google’s Algorithm with spammy backlinks, because if the GoogleBot can make the connection that you are trying to circumvent the system, Google will penalize you immediately.
“Sandboxing” or “Negative Fifty”
This is the first consequence of bad SEO: “sandboxing” involves dropping your site immediately to anywhere from Page 4 – Page 6, no matter how well you used to rank for your keywords. This is to punish you for perceived bad SEO practices and prevents you from being rewarded with high ranking while Google evaluates the authenticity of your SEO efforts. Nothing you do will help you get unburied, and your site will stay in the “sandbox” anywhere from 3 – 6 months.
De-Indexing
If Google figures out that you are trying to “game” the system, they might just de-index your site, which is essentially SEO death. (De-indexing: taking your site out of the Google index, which means your site can no longer be found using the Google search engine.)
If your website is de-indexed, there is a grinding, lengthy re-inclusion process, which can be costly to your company since you are getting zero organic traffic from Google in the meantime.
The Procedure
Yes it’s risky, yes it’s dangerous, but can bad SEO actually work?? We’re going to find out.
Oxiem purchased a domain that has great age (8 years) and no flags against it. (To avoid any connection with Oxiem, we can’t list the domain here, but comment below and we’ll send you a link. Over the course of this experiment, you should be able to figure out which domain we’re targeting, based on the keywords we’ll be trying to rank for.) We’re going to use all the terrible SEO practices that we’ve been advising against for years, and we can’t wait to see what happens.
We’re looking forward to learning from this experiment, and ultimately trying to kill our little domain. Stay tuned!
Google has just released a report “detailing” 50 changes to the Google Algorithm that were made in March 2012.
Everyone at Oxiem wishes our friend, and first Dublin employee, Billy Fischer all the best as he steps into the next stage of his career. While we’re sad to see him go, our team will always be rooting for his success.
