Weekly HubFeed: 5/2/2014
Your source for the biggest news in internet marketing this week.
We cover a recent survey by Searchmetrics that reveals the importance of schema and how it could help your pages rank higher, our latest survey and eBook on Native advertising, and more in just a couple of minutes!
Also available on YouTube.
Examples of Link Schemes
- Eric Kuan, a member of Google’s spam team, answered a post in Google’s Webmaster Help forum regarding bad links. The webmaster said that he was being spammed by his competitors and asked for examples of harmful links that could result in an unnatural link warning.
- The harmful links that were given as examples were keyword rich anchor links that were marked as DoFollow stuffed in the footer of the page and in multiple forum threads.
- These methods of acquiring backlinks is seen as spam in the eyes of Google and should be avoided.
See the discussion posted here, and read Google’s Webmaster support documentation on link schemes.
Internet-Users Favor Native Advertising
- In a survey we just released, Native Advertising was found to be preferred by internet-users, and over 70% say it has more or equal value to non-sponsored content.
- Native advertising is a form of advertising that takes the form of the content that exists on a certain website. This includes promoted posts on social networks, pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engine results pages, and sponsored articles.
- A great reassurance in our findings was that native advertising does not hinder user experience on a website, while more and more sites are losing their audience and search ranking with intrusive advertising.
Get a copy of our survey results by downloading a copy of our eBook.
Rank Higher With Schema
- A study by Searchmetrics revealed that sites that include Schema.org markup on their pages rank an average of 4 positions higher than pages without.
- Another interesting finding was that only 0.3 percent of web pages include Schema integration.
- While this can’t be assumed to be a causal relationship, it is one in the long list of characteristics well-structured web pages should take advantage of to be competitive in the search rankings.
Read more about the Searchmetrics study here
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