Google seems to be at a defining moment in time with it's penalising sites with paid links, and almost constant shifts to the algorithm that make the SERPs a guessing game to normal SEO folk just about everyday.

So what are you doing now to make sure your site survives should it be hit by a Google penalty? You might be ranked very well today and making great money from the traffic that Google sends to your site naturally - so what if they flag your site for some deserved or un-merited form of spam?

With so many people gaming the system, no wonder Google lashes out at the SEO community on occasion. We're the ones pushing them to provide more relevant results while at the same time doing things that some would question on a moral level.

We did a quick count up and, between us, here at Google Geeks, we have looked at and worked on over 12000 sites. We aren't saying that they are all top five of Google but we have had the opportunity to split test pages on some sites with over 250,000 pages.

Quite simply, if we (for example) put the search term in the meta-description twice, instead of once, and that one page went up in the rankings, then we would apply that tactic to all pages on the site. same goes for page titles, header tags, a dash in an alt-tag and the page went down, an h2 tag halfway down the page. We know you know.

What drives more traffic to your site? Facebook, Twitter or Google?
It's a question that has only one correct answer, despite what the newly founded 'Social Media Marketing' Agencies have to say.
Of course, we wouldn't do anything without proof. We are, after all, scientists and thrive on data.
We have a client who, in 2011, was coerced into starting a very expensive social media marketing campaign, and we monitored their web traffic.
Six months down the line and, of the 2,500 visitors that come to the site every day, Facebook and Twitter between them couldn't manage an average of 1 a day.
Going back to the client, we happened to mention in passing that the cost per acquisition through social media marketing was currently over £600.
The cost per acquisition through natural search engine rankings, less than 90p.
Facebook is great if you want to show your friends pictures of your cat while Twitter, well we have yet to find a use for that at all (except their system is great for configuring all sort of feeds for web owners to pull back into a dynamic website.

On May 4th 2013 we made a change to this home page - something that, we believe, nobody has ever tried as a way to intentionally improve rankings before.

If this 'thing' works, we will roll it out across the 200 odd sites that we are currently looking after.

Spotted it? Send us an email and we'll do your SEO for nowt.