26Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

Do you feel secure?

News and updates from the web, SEO, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, Sunday funday! But, before we delve into euphoria: is our traffic safe? Hacking in general is a huge concern, in a market that will be worth $2 Trillion by 2019. One way to encrypt your traffic was to implement SSL certificates on websites, but not all certificates were created equal. As business owners, we must protect the identity of our customers, ergo we need to implement intricate means of security such as protected servers, protected clouds, SSL certified channels and compartmentalize as well as classify different types of users. Ok, but many users ignore the “not secure channel” warning True, but Google and others always assume that “The Lord preserveth the simple” (Psalms 116:6), ergo they must make sure that traffic is protected, and strongarm website owners to…
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23Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

Yoast SEO 4.4 and 4.5 are out – Learn what has changed

SEO, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, Time to start easing into the weekend, while we use beautiful tools to optimize both our own websites as well as our clients’. If you create websites in Wordpress, you are probably familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin. In essence, the Yoast plugin is here to optimize your endeavors when it comes to SEO, from a snippet editor to a real time page analysis - anything and everything there is to make sure your site is displayed well on SERPs. The Yoast SEO premium version always went hand-in-hand with Google Search Console, so this is nothing new to report; now it always displays crawl errors, which lets you fix these issues as quickly as possible. Another nifty feature is the ability to append redirects. Back in the day,…
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14Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

Vimeo goes 360°

News and updates from the web, SEO, Social, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, We started a whole new week! Last week we had quite a few subjects to talk about, from the merging of Google Site Search with the Custom Search Engine, to OpenGraph metatags on social and their effect on overall SEO in the long run and finished with the new Google update, now called “The Fred Update”, after Gary Illyes’s fish, Fred. Two weeks ago we also talked about Youtube coming to the TV, a way to combat cable television and a direct competitor - DirecTV. Today we are going to discuss Vimeo’s declaration of war on both Facebook as well as Youtube - by offering 360° videos on the platform. This doesn’t come to us as a surprise, as 360° is the future of video as well as…
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10Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

Beware the Update of March

News and updates from the web, SEO, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, TGIF! We are approaching the middle of the month, and since it is March, The Ides are at hand. Apparently there was a change to the Google algorithm, although Google has decided to not disclose which changes were made and did not confirm (nor deny) there was any to begin with. Gary Illyes just said that Google is constantly updating the algorithm, ergo we cannot be really sure as to what had happened. The update is now called the Fred Update, named after Gary’s fish Fred. If we use heuristics for this, we can surmise that the update was a link quality one over a content quality one. Which means the black hat community of SEO is the one to shiver in its boots, as WebmasterWorld as well…
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08Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

OpenGraph meta tags and SEO

SEO, Social, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, We have reached the middle of the week, with St. Patrick’s just around the corner, so if you deal with the alcohol industry or brand bars for a living - now’s the time to put some more effort into it. A question arose the other day about OpenGraph for social media and how it affects SEO. Most webmasters were skeptical, saying that it doesn’t affect SEO per se but the sudden boost in traffic could definitely benefit the site in the long run. What many marketers fail to understand is that you can tweak your site endlessly for conversion, but you can also do that with the power of social. Social media is shown in search results all the time; Qwant for example shows these in search criteria.…
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06Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

So long, Google Site Search

SEO, Social, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, A new week, and new energies :-) Over the course of the weekend, we spoke about Youtube’s latest transition to TV, and how it may affect televised advertising. Now, Google has decided to discontinue a product in their arsenal: Google Site Search (GSS). For those of you who weren’t familiar with the product, GSS was a way to apply the Google search engine to one’s own site, thus providing a way for web publishers to allow their clients to explore the site more efficiently by grouping a few websites in the search, give it the Google branding feel, specify and prioritize certain pages and more. As of April 1, Google will be transitioning to its new Custom Search Engine, or CSE. The new engine will differ from GSS:…
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03Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

Youtube has gone syndicate

ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, TGIF! Ever since Facebook has introduced the Facebook live feature, Google has been trying to overcome this situation. A couple of months ago, Facebook started adding mid-roll ads to their videos. Now Google has gone Netflix - Google is now featuring Youtube TV, syndicated service for $35/month in selected countries (naturally in the US first). (Courtesy of Bloomberg) This doesn’t come as a surprise, as the first Amazon produced movie has actually won two Academy Awards (Oscars) - which means that online companies are now taking over offline markets completely. Youtube TV isn’t a new notion, per se - Apple has already produced a streamer back in the day just for that but that is not the reason why Google has decided to put Youtube on TV -…
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01Mar 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

What DMOZ’s closure means for all of us

News and updates from the web, SEO
Hey peeps, We have started a whole new month! Springtime is approaching, and flowers again will be in bloom. Springtime is also time for renaissance, rejuvenation and meditating about the future. This time we will talk about something ancient, some of you who were born later than 1990 or so could remember - a time where humans, not machines, curated the internet. DMOZ was an open directory project run by volunteers that was made to list all relevant websites on the internet. It was so relevant back in the day, that Google used it as a ranking factor. DMOZ’s history starts in 1998, the day of its inception. It was a volunteer’s answer to Yahoo listing directory, that grew too powerful and intricate for websites to actually be listed on.…
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27Feb 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

What’s going on with Google’s Featured Answers?

News and updates from the web, SEO
Hey guys, We started a whole new month! Last month we had a couple of interesting things: We had Valentine’s Day We had Google replacing its solid green ad label to a green outlined one We found out that Google’s Featured Answers shouldn’t be featured in the first place What does that mean? Apparently, if you had searched “US Presidents that were in the KKK” you would receive presidents that had inconclusive evidence against that were in the KKK. These are just rumors with no factual basis, and still they were featured: Yes, naturally people shouldn’t believe everything they read, but that is exactly why fake news were so popular up until a couple of months back - because people do believe in what they read online. If only this…
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24Feb 2017 by Avishay Segal No Comments

The return of the Emoji

News and updates from the web, SEM & PPC, SEO, Social, ZEFO's Posts
Hey guys, Back in 2015, Emojis had dropped out of fashion and kicked off Google search results in terms of desktop SEO. But Google has recently decided to put them back on. The reason? Some say it’s a bug. We wouldn’t be surprised, as last Wednesday we talked about Google releasing outdated warnings about Wordpress and Joomla sites, which made developers shake in their pants. Google did raise a couple of red flags there, with old Google Index caches surfacing all of a sudden, which sent hundreds of developers to check that their sites haven’t been affected with mass defacements. But, what if it’s not a bug? What if Google is trying something out? Could it be because of social media? Social media do possess more and more of a…
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