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Bedford Hills Realtor | URL Be Sorry! Google Cuts Back on Top-ranking Exact-match Domains

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Regular Google users will know that one of the easiest ways to get a good ranking in its search results is for your web address to exactly match the search query.

Get it spot-on and, until recently, you’ve been almost assured of a position close to the top, and often in the number-one slot on page one of the SERPs.

But Google’s continuing mission to put right what once went wrong in their algorithms is now targeting what Matt Cutts calls “low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains”.

This adds to the work done by the Panda update, which filtered out poor-quality web pages, and Penguin, which tackled spammy pages.

According to a Cutts’ tweet on September 28th, 0.6% of English-US queries will be noticeably affected.

This might not sound like many searches in the grand scheme of things. However, the latest comScore figures show that Google sites were responsible for 11.3 billion individual search queries in the US alone in August 2012, meaning that 0.6% of queries amounts to almost 68 million searches per month.

What they said

Cutts’ full announcement of this update on Twitter read as follows:

“Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality ‘exact-match’ domains in search results…

New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.”

The immediate response was positive, with one Twitter user simply replying with “Yippeeee!,” and another joking “I suspect that won’t be a ‘minor’ weather report to the vast majority of affiliate marketers.”

Moving on from EMDs

So just what does this mean for online marketing and SEO? Well, it goes considerably further than simply meaning that EMDs won’t be so prevalent in the search results, because it opens up that top spot to other websites that are able to compete using the remaining “acceptable” methods of SEO not yet targeted for penalisation by Google.

There are as many webmasters out there who are frustrated by always ranking second to an EMD as there are site owners who will be negatively affected by this change. So it’s the perfect opportunity for us to re-optimize any of our pages that could use a bit of attention.

Poor quality content is already a no-no, as are paid links or those created by spamming blog comments and discussion forums. Now EMDs are out too. So renew your focus on legitimate PPC platforms and the remaining on-page SEO opportunities.

Where to focus for better position

Good-quality content will always be favoured by Google, and they’ve never stopped saying that well-placed on-page keywords are a good thing, as long as they don’t damage the overall quality and grammar of the page they’re placed on.

Look to your best-performing pages for inspiration, and you can’t go wrong: you’re likely to find a strong structure with keywords and phrases repeated a couple of times in appropriate places on the page, possibly helped further by your choice of anchor text for hyperlinks on the page, text used in image captions, and so on.

With these Google-approved locations for keywords, you can make sure your pages are viewed in the best possible light by the search robots, even if they’re hosted on an EMD. Hopefully, you’ll be able to snag yourself that top spot in the search results once the dust settles.

This blog was written by Rob Henry, marketing specialist at K2L. K2L Marketing is a full service marketing agency offering a unique approach to your marketing needs.

via problogger.net

Home Sellers Awake | Bedford Hills Real Estate

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A year of record low inventories of homes for sale and improving prices may finally be catching the attention of millions of prospective home sellers.  Is a seller’s market in the offing?

According to a November consumer survey released today, 22 percent of homeowners said they are likely or somewhat likely to sell in 2013.  Should the sales materialize, the number of homes on the market next year would increase five-fold over 2012.  Annualized sales were 4.71 million (as of October), or about 6.2 percent of the nation’s 75 million owner-occupied homes.

The survey found that homeowners who bought their homes between 2010 and 2012 and have owned then less than two years are more likely to sell than those who have lived in their homes longer.  One out of three homeowners (33 percent) who bought their homes in the past two years said there are likely to sell next year compared to 20 percent who bought before 2002.

Most of the new owners seeking to sell are probably move-up buyers who won’t be adding to the overall inventory but will be vacating entry-level homes, which are in high demand in most markets.  For years, low home values have frozen move-up buyers in place, many of them underwater.  Today 22 percent of owners with a mortgage still owe more than their homes are worth.

“2013 could be the year that inventory turns around, just as 2012 was the year that prices started recovering,” said Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist. “Homebuyers need inventory to choose from, and with fewer foreclosures on the market, new inventory will come from new construction or homeowners wanting to sell. Rising prices will bring out more sellers, especially if price increases lift them back above water. ”

The Trulia survey also looked at attitudes towards homeownership.  Millennials (18-34 year olds) said they haven’t completely written off homeownership. In fact, 72 percent of these young adults said homeownership is part of their personal American Dream, which is the same as the adult population overall. Among renters in this age group, 93 percent plan to purchase a home someday. Meanwhile 43 percent of young adults are homeowners already.

Yet despite these long-term aspirations, Millennials have much more negative expectations for the housing market in 2013 than older generations. Younger adults have a harder time imagining price increases and higher mortgage rates than older adults who have lived through more years of rising prices and high rates.  Just 37 percent of Millennials expect prices to rise in the next year, and 22 percent expect prices to fall:

“Millennials have been shaken, not scarred by the housing bust,” said Kolko. “Nearly all of them want to own a home someday, if they’re not homeowners already. But many of them think today’s low prices and low mortgage rates will last. They may be in for sticker shock if the cost of homeownership has returned to normal levels by the time they’re ready to buy.”

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Housing Market Unlikely To Boost Economic Recovery In 2013 | Bedford Hills Realtor

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Although the economy grew in the third quarter, data continues to show a “sluggish recovery overall” according to Fannie Mae’s Economic & Strategic Research Group.  Total growth in U.S. gross domestic product since the lows of 2009 has been 7.2% compared with average growth of 16% for previous economic recoveries since the 1960′s.

Despite the absence of wage growth, consumer spending was the biggest driver of GDP growth in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 70% of GDP.  Inexplicably, consumer confidence has increased even as most business anticipate slowing economic growth.  Fannie Mae economists expect the disconnect between consumer and business confidence to converge as  confidence about future economic growth wanes due to the inability of Washington to deal with the so called “fiscal cliff” and ballooning federal deficit.

Fannie Mae Chief Economist Doug Duncan notes that “The tone of the economic data we’ve seen during the past month has been modestly favorable, but our expectations for growth this year remain subdued.  While the pick-up of activity in the third quarter is encouraging, it is compared to the weak pace seen in the second quarter and doesn’t portend a robust recovery in the near term. More encouraging, perhaps, is that the slight increase in consumer spending appears to have fed into the overall housing market data, particularly home sales and starts.”

The housing market has seen a modest recovery with gains in both existing and new home sales.  Sales prices have increased by 5% year-over-year which is the largest increase since 2006.  Fannie Mae expects the recovery in housing to contribute to GDP in 2013, but notes that housing “accounts currently for only 2.5% of GDP” and “such growth isn’t likely to provide a substantial boost to the economic recovery.”

Although much of the mainstream press has been gushing over the recovery in housing prices, the recent blip up in home values is almost imperceptible on a long term chart of house prices.

Courtesy calculatedriskblog.com

Housing prices declined at a dramatic pace during 2007-2008 and have slowly stabilized since then as excess inventories and foreclosures worked their way through the system.  A return to the days of steadily appreciating home values now depends on consistently strong GDP and wage growth, something that still eludes us five years after the housing and banking crisis first began.

via problembanklist.com