New SEO Course - Advanced SEO Training for Managers?. Get hands-on with Structured Data Markup & Semantic Search.

Have you ever wondered where Google gets the information for search results like these?

This is an example of Rich Snippets generated by Structured Data.

Structured data markup helps search engines understand the context of a webpage through the use of HTML tags.

You identify an item (ie. recipe) and its properties (ingredients, preptime, nutrition etc.).

See which items and properties BBC Good Food has used with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool.

You can also check the page source to see how they have actually marked up the page:

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What Is Negative SEO?

In simple terms, negative SEO is any act performed to harm a competitor. In this case I'm going to look at links as that's the biggest talking point and easiest to spot, but if you want to scare yourself then I recommend reading Kristine Schachinger's hair raising post on Extreme Negative SEO.

The act of building bulk backlinks to your site with exact match anchor text used to be a great idea. It resulted in higher ranking and was relatively easy to do. However, since the search engines have started cracking down on this hard, it's become a very bad thing for your site - just the sort of thing that can get your site penalised or even delisted by Google.

This is a move that promotes quality - that's great! But what if you're not the one building links to your site? What if a rival decides to turn their mass link building schemes on your site instead of theirs?

UPDATE JULY 2014: Google has now withdrawn authorship photos from SERPs. We still recommend implementing authorship as results will still have a byline and your content will rank better for your Google+ connections.

Possible name for Author Rank update in 2013: Shakespeare Panda

Two years ago, after attending a much smaller BrightonSEO, we wrote a post about the death of journalism. Now in 2012, at a much bigger BrightonSEO, James Carson believes it is rising from the grave to take back the internet from anonymous personas.

The importance of authorship on the internet was a hot topic on Friday. As well as James Carson’s excellent 20x20 presentation 'I Believe that Authors are The Future', it also came up in a number of the other talks and prompted some follow up discussion on Twitter and on blogs. Coincidently a blog post on authorship appeared on SEOmoz two days later.

Make sure you've read our other write ups of BrightonSEO including the 'Ask the Engines' panel, morning session, afternoon session and 20x20 talks.

The meat of James’ talk was that authorship will be important for SEO in the future as search engines look to find a suitable replacement for link ranking factors that have become skewed thanks to paid link building, link spam and the ongoing pursuit of SEOs to gain more and higher authority links to boost their rankings. Even social ranking factors aren’t that reliable due to paid followers and shares.

Link building is the process of trying to manipulate the inbound links that are directly aiming towards a site. It is an essential part of an SEO campaign but a lot of SEO people do not use or have the essential tools to do the job properly and thoroughly. Even so, the people with the right tools still don’t use them to their full potential and are making life difficult for themselves.

If you want to learn more about building your own spreadsheet then take our Excel Training course ( we also offer advanced excel training), also if you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimisation, then try our SEO Training course in Brighton, Sussex.

I have created an Excel document and a Word document to help you with your link building campaign. The Excel document includes different worksheets with different lists in to enter your data as you go along. For data entry, Excel will always be a useful tool to use as it allows you to switch from cell to cell while entering data with ease.

Normally, link building is an on-going practice and from time to time it can get boring and repetitive, but if you keep it all organised then you will find it a lot easier. Also, if you need to get someone else to do the link building for you, with these resources, you can easily pass on what you have done and they can just pick up where you left off.

You can download the resources at the bottom of this page, but here’s a breakdown of what is in them and what you should be considering when starting your link building campaign -

New SEO Course - Advanced SEO Training for Managers. The best SEO course you'll attend in 2014.

Could your business survive a manual or algorithmic Google penalty? That's the most important question for SEOs in 2014.

Over the past two years we have seen the number and frequency of algorithm updates and manual penalties increase as Google's Webmaster Spam team gets better at identifying tactics. This only looks set to continue over the next two years.

So how can you adjust your tactics to get results without risking everything?*

In this post I'm going to run through an SEO strategy that meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines, takes advantage of new and developing technologies and diversifies your traffic sources so that you're not so heavily reliant on Google search traffic.

If you're completely stuck with SEO or unsure you're going about it the right way then you can learn everything in this post on our hands-on, workshop-style SEO training courses.

I've included tips for content, link building, technical, offline, local, social and mobile considerations to create an overall picture of what search engines see as a 'good' site and help you give your SEO strategy a makeover for 2014.

Update 09/07: Search Engine Land have reported that Google's John Mueller has twice stated that if you are guest blogging for links, then those links should be nofollowed. This is stronger proof than ever that Google considers guest post links a violation of their Webmaster Guidelines and it's a matter of time until we see some sort of 'guest post link penalty'. I think this should be taken with a pinch of salt so you shouldn't rush out and nofollow all your posts, but you should definitely think about the kinds of sites you are writing for and the quality of your content.

Nearly two years since we wrote about guest blogging as the next big thing for SEO and link building, it's time to look at how guest posting has changed, the impact of scaling and whether it's still a valuable SEO technique.

It's important to remember that content marketing is not just guest blogging. Find out exactly what it is on our Content Marketing Course or read our Content Marketing Guide.

One of the most common reasons that small businesses attend our SEO Courses is that they've had a Google link penalty - manual or algorithm - which have become part and parcel of SEO since the Panda update first reared its head.

With the increase in penalties has come an increase in link removals, but it's not always easy to know when to remove links, or even which links to remove. After all if you remove all your links then you're not going to rank for anything at all!

We decided to clear up the confusion surrounding link removal by creating a downloadable guide to removing links. Simply work your way through the guide to decide if and when to remove bad links, and how to go about doing it.

Click the image below to download the full PDF:

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It's important to remember that links are no longer the be all and end all of SEO anymore. Personalised results based on location, preferences and search history now mean that no searcher has the same results. This is even more true for mobile searches, which is why we've just launched our one-of-a-kind Mobile SEO course that focused specifically on the mobile side of search.

Have You Had a Manual Link Notification?

Check your Webmaster Tools account for unnatural link penalty notifications, which mean that Google have taken manual action against your site.

If you haven't set up Webmaster Tools then it's essential you do; use our guide to using Webmaster Tools and make sure you set up email alerts so you don't miss important messages.

BrightonSEO usually ends with a 'Lightning Talks' session but this year Kelvin switched up the format and introduced a 'Greatest Tips Session'.

The idea: every speaker from the day shares their top actionable SEO tip that attendees can start using when back in the office on Monday morning. We particularly liked the idea because it meant a chance to catch tips from speakers which we'd missed on the day.

We came away with 21 fantastic tips which we couldn't help but share with those who couldn't make it on Friday.

You can watch the full video, skim through the quick tips, or read the full transcript with our thoughts below.