Google's most recent update to its search algorithm called the Penguin Update is Google’s way to even the playing field between website’s that deserve to be ranked highly and websites that in the past have ranked well strictly due to search engine optimization.  Many sites recently have fallen out of page one ranking with the Penguin update and the site owners are now asking themselves why. Google has long time stated that they aren’t against search engine optimization (although some search engine optimizers would argue with that).  They want you to follow certain rules that will allow them to figure out what your site is about so that the most relevant websites will come up in search.  However, Google has also stated for a long time that they don’t want sites to be overly optimized (i.e. buying backlinks). Pixo has looked at a lot of data since the Penguin Update and what we have found is a consistent pattern to sites that were hit and not hit with the Penguin Update.  Only 3% of the sites that Pixo does search engine optimization for were inversely affected by the Penguin update but we wanted to know why.  What we found was interesting. Every single site we looked at that dropped in ranking after the Penguin Update had keyword heavy link text in over 60% of its incoming links. On the other hand, the sites that were not hit by the update tended to have more random usage of text used in its links. Having over 60% of your link text being heavily keywords did not guarantee that your site would be hit by the penalty (many of the sites not affected had numbers just as bad), but if under 50% of your anchor text for incoming links were “keywords” it’s almost guarantees that your site’s ranking will be  affected by this update. Another pattern that we have seen with sites that were affected by the Penguin Update is sites that do not use natural language in the site content where there is blatantly too many keywords in the text.  Google has gotten very smart over the last 3 years when it comes to spammy site content and Google is now penalizing sites that don’t follow the rules. We see many of these changes as good for search engine optimization.  It does make search engine optimization more challenging in some ways but we’ve always found that good optimization has always followed the rules of good content and quality backlinks.  Our clients enjoy very good ranking because of it. To find out more about search engine optimization for your website contact Pixo.

We've built countless websites for customers with ecommerce ability.  It always suprises us how much some companies pay to have ecommerce added onto their website.  In our opinion ecommerce doesn't have to be expensive, clunky or hard to maintain.  With our Concrete5 ecommerce solutions you can have a very robust ecommerce solution at a very afordable price.  With Concrete5 ecommerce you can add products, give products specific attributes (i.e. small, medium, large), categorize products in a thousand different ways, have a user friendly shopping cart and accept payment using numerous payment solutions (PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) for less than $1,800 in most cases. Have a lot of products to add to your website?  We have numerous solutions to import and populate products on your website.  We've created website with thousands of products using Concrete5. To learn more about Concrete5 and Pixo's ecommerce solutions drop us a note or give us a call at 720-334-PIXO for a free consultation.

Congradulations to Concrete5 on winning the WebHostingSearch.com award for best web tool.  This award is not something that many companies or sites can brag about. To receive this award you have to provide extra value to your users. This award is handed out only if WebHostingSearch has been convinced that it's a useful and qualitative tool and resource before they are even consider for an award.

A new minor relase of Concrete5 is out available.  Version 5.5.2 comes with a number of new features including: Replaced Picnik with built-in crop, rotate and zoom functionality. Crop+Zoom provided by jQuery Cropzoom by Gaston Robledo (http://www.cropzoom.com.ar/) Added ability to specify a file set on a form block for files uploaded through form. (Thanks danklassen!) Prettier edit/add experience for image block. Image block can now automatically resize thumbnails (previous default) or accept a fixed size, which can be passed to the image editor directly as a fixed width/height Ability to receive an email when new users register (Thanks Mnkras.) These behavioral improvements are also great enhancements to Concrete5: Made better use of space on dashboard home and system & settings Newsflow arrows are more prominent Moved sessions into filers/tmp/ on each site for better security. Download File script now redirects to files instead of forcing all files to download (to allow PDFs, images to display in browser) Fixed: http://www.concrete5.org/developers/bugs/5-5-1/cant-open-sitemap-visit-links-in-new-tab-5.5/ Improved installation will remove user-created configuration files if something goes wrong in installation, removing an infinite installation loop unless the files were removed by hand. More robust UI handling when concrete5 is used with themes with greedy center styles. Adding wmode=transparent to youtube videos for better display File blocks now are searchable through the site-wide search block. To upgrade your current version of Concrete5 to the latest relase or to have Concrete5 added to your existing or new website give us a call at 720.334.PIXO.

Now available for Concrete5 websites with ecommerce is a new add-on package that allows you to export your products into Google Products (aka Google Shopping).  What the add-on does is create an export of the C5 ecommerce products to Google Products and it creates the export on a set schedule.  In Google Products you can set the data to be imported on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  It takes a few days after a product is imported for it to show up in Google Products search. Right now Pixo is offering this add-on with installation for only $50 to a select few beta testers and that includes the setup on Google.  Google doesn’t charge anything for products to be added to Google Products or for any of the traffic driven to the website so you get a lot of exposure for your products and services at very little cost with this add-on.  To setup the Google Products add-on all Pixo needs is your Google login, tax and shipping information.  You will need to go into your products and categorize each product after the add-on is installed.  When the add-on is installed, in the ecommerce Dashboard area, there will be a new product attribute tool available that displays the different Google categories that they can choose from.  Each product has to have a Google category applied in order for it to be accepted by Google. To learn more about this great Concrete5 add-on contact Pixo.

The stable release of Concrete5 5.5.1 is now available.  This release is probably the biggest release concrete5 has done to date.  With it many important enhancements have been made and the entire Dashboard interface has been overhauled into a clean, fast and easy to use menu system.  From the Concrete5 website the following are just some of the enhancements available in this release:

Amber Johnson, Vice President at Pixo, pointed out to me this weekend that Picnik is closing in April.  Picnik is a great online editing tool that is integrated with Concrete5's File Manager.  That integration was very handy for users that didn't want to use an image editing tool like Photoshop or for quick image resizing and cropping.  The message on Picnik's website says:

We look forward to the coming release of Internet Explorer 10.  If for no other reason it will mean the death of IE6 & IE7.  Rumors indicate that a beta release of IE10 will be out this month and that IE10 will be out with the Windows 8 release.  Unconfirmed reports indicate that Windows 8 will be out around June of this year.

One of the great things about Concrete5 is that it is easy to enhance the functionality of the website.  There are many add-ons that we install for our customers to suite their website needs and adding custom code to Concrete5 is easier than any other content management system that we have used.  For our social media clients we like to add a number of different tools to their Concrete5 site in order to get the most out of their social media campaign.