Entries Tagged 'Google' ↓

Your website index signifies the issues your website is experiencing. For instance, if there’s an abrupt drop in your Google index pages, it’s a danger signal to notify you that something is going wrong. Before proceeding forward into the details, it may be worthwhile to know that the more pages you’ve indexed on Google, the more keywords you can target, and ultimately the higher traffic you may obtain.

Locating the Bugs

How do you identify issues with your website index? Being an SEO company specialist, you must conduct a weekly checkup of your site by examining its indexed pages, back links and content. If you feel anything distorted in these sections, you need to further explore the causes and rectify them immediately.

Instant drop in Google while rise in Yahoo is a clear symptom that your website is in trouble, and normally duplicate content is the main cause. To rectify content duplication and 404 errors, you can verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools.

Removing the Bugs

Here are some important tips to resolve your site index issues:

• Organizing META Tags

The default Meta tag for every page is “index, follow” which is represented in the following manner:

<Meta content=”INDEX, FOLLOW”>

You can re-organize your Meta tags to buildup web pages in different styles. In the above tag, INDEX means that you’re allowing the search spiders to index that page, while changing it to NOINDEX would restrict spiders from crawling up your web page.

FOLLOW command makes links on that web page to be tracked, while NOFOLLOW obstructs link following.

• Remove Your Link From Google’s Index

In order to remove an entire URL, you can use ‘Remove URL’ option in Google Webmaster tools. You can find this option on the “Crawler access” page. In order to apply for the removal request, you need to make sure that any one of the below listed things are true:

• Your content is not live on the web, and the page you want to remove must generate back a 404 (not found) error code
• You’ve blocked the content through Meta No Index tag
• You’ve blocked the content through a robots.txt file

You can also delete the directory or page or the file from your server in order to remove a link. After doing this select the ‘New Removal Request’ option. You’ll be given different options to choose from, but you have to hit the “Remove page from search results and cache” and submit your request. It’ll take about 24 hours to finally execute your request.

Conclusion: Clearing out your Google index will re-establish your site’s rankings and traffic.

Ranking at search engine depends on many factors. What Google officially declared is the web page load timing. The time a website takes to open its page is a factor that attracts or detracts the visitor. People find it time wasting and get stressed when pages are not opened as quickly as possible. It’s for the first time that Google has announced the ranking algorithms in a more open way. How SEOs and the owners of websites will see it. Here are few points toward understanding this news.

• Is it big news for better web development? Yes of course. It will tell the web owners that what people like and what they demand, what they hate and what irritates them. It might have made the web masters to ponder over the timing their website takes to open. 8.9 seconds is not satisfying the visitors. They have to shorten the time. The changes required to alter the lay out and make the page opening user friendly should be the priority of web owners.
• Google expecting a minimum load on their servers. A good advice for SEOs as they need to eliminate the doubling of content present at the site. It will reduce the budget too and earning will also be maximized. Lowering the code at your website increase the efficiency of the search engine to open your page as soon as possible.
• The best links and good content makes your website not affected by poor server problems. Time saving is important but the quality of the content and standard of the website also matters in ranking high at search engines.
• Google declaration of including quick loading in the ranking criterion of website, may lead the people to switch to Chrome that is a faster browser than Google. Google want to now what people are expecting from its services and what changes Google can bring to improve browsing.
• Site speed also improves revenues so it’s not a matter to be concerned by the search engines but of your own interest. A web owner knows the important of keeping the visitors stayed at his site and the loss involved in losing a single visitor.

It is expected now that SEO services will contribute efficiently toward improving the ranking at major search engines while making it better in every aspect including the less time to page loading of the website.

Google reader has been currently modified with a new feature and now it has the capability of creating and tracking RSS feeds for certain pages that don’t offer them. Every website can benefit from this new feed creation tool by Google reader, but here we’ll analyze its role from the SEO perspective.

1) Helps You Monitor Your Website’s Internal Links Removal and Replacing

Successful link building entails tracking and keeping record of all the internal links you’ve attained, particularly if you have spent money buying those links. You’ll be wasting a lot of valuable time if you start examining each of these internal links manually, but Google reader saves your time by telling you what changes a certain web page and endured and which links have been removed or replaced.

2) Helps you Track the source pages you want backlinks from

For link building purposes you mainly look for hubs and pages that are popular. Since these pages are so renowned that many of your competitors may also be linking back to them. Therefore, you can also get links from the same sources as your competitors and track these pages using feed creation tool to identify who your rivals are and what are their activities of link building.

3) Helps you track your link approval

You normally require manual checkup to find which websites have approved on adding your links. This is another time consuming task which can be shorten down by the use of Google Reader feed creation tool which automatically spots when your links has been approved.

4) Helps you examine your client’s website for content changes

Being an SEO services provider, Google reader’s new tool may help you examine your client’s website to check if any updates or content changes have taken place recently. This is a good way to identify mistakes early and prevent them from occurring.

5) Helps you keep a close eye on your competitors

Google reader tool helps you tremendously by letting you track every little movement made by your competitors. If you know who your competitors are, this tool lets you Keep tabs on your competitors hub pages and watch every SEO action they make. Whether your competitor updates content or links to some new page – you’ll instantly know!

Use this new Google reader’s feed creation tool and enhance your SEO efforts manifold.

A website can be fined or even banned by the search engines in extreme cases. The search engines can now detect duplicate items.

How to identify duplicate content:

Take a fragment of the content and enter it in quotations marks in a search engine. Search engine will detect the content to where it is copied.

Tools for detection of duplications:

Following are the tools for the detection of duplication of content by other websites:

CopyScape:

This copies web pages across the web. It gives an in detail duplicate content research. It offers comprehensive search for plagiarism detection.

Plagiarism checker:

This tool will allow you to enter a keyword, phrase or sentence to search if the same words is entered or used by someone else. This also helps in setting up alerts so it notifies if content is being copied.

Plagiarisms detect:

This tool will detect after analyzing if upload text and word doc files if it is copied. Two documents can be compared side by side in this.

Plagium:

Plagium will show the date of when it was discovered. You may also translate the text for the checking if duplication.

Virante:

It checks internal duplicate content issues.

Webconfs:

This checks the similarities of urls. The lower the percentage the less similar the two pages are.

Know About Other  Duplicate Content Checker Tools ? Let Us Know By Commenting!

In order to attract loads of traffic to your website or blog, link wheel building may help. What is a link wheel? A link wheel basically builds backlinks to your website or blog’s main page, allowing you to achieve a higher search engine ranking. This may be termed as a kind of link building.

You can build link wheels by following the 6 simple procedures given below:

Step#1: Write a squidoo lens and link it back to your website or blog. Sqidoo lens basically refers to one person’s view expressed in the form of a single web page. The basic advantage of squidoo lens is that if someone is looking for recommendations regarding your topic area, your lens may lead them up to your website.

Step#2: Write meaningful and information loaded article about your topic area, linking back to your squidoo lens, and submit the article to various article directories. Remember to submit your article in only and only your niche, otherwise it’ll just be a waste of time.

Step#3: Next, create a hubpage of your topic and link it to the article you wrote and submitted to various directories. At Hubpages you can create a “hub”, which is basically one page of information of any topic. The biggest benefit of creating hubpages is that Google loves them and you are likely to rank higher if you’ve optimized your website keyword on the pages.

Step#4: Now build a Google Knol about your topic and include a link back to your Hubpage. Google Knol is designed to allow anyone to create a page on any topic which others can comment on, rate, and contribute to. It’s just like Wikipedia.

Step#5: The fifth step is to create a blogger blog and link it back to your Google Knol. In order to place links of different link wheels, the same blogger blog can be utilized.

Step#6: Lastly, you can end your link wheel either by leaving it “as it is” or by linking your website back to your blogger blog.

After following these simple steps, you’ll witness a considerable increase of your website’s ranking in the search engines.

A Few weeks ago Google has announced about their Algorithm update code name as “Caffeine Update” in Google Webmaster Blog with the post entitled: “Help Test Some Next Generation Infrastructure”. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. Instead, they’re providing a developer preview and are asking webmasters and power searchers to try it out and give them feedback. Unlike Google’s now-defunct SearchMash, which was intended for search experiments that wouldn’t necessarily be incorporated into Google’s main web search, the caffeine index seems to be an entirely new search infrastructure that will repace what exists now.

By reading this blog post, it seems that his new search engine index includes the efficient ways of web crawling, determining reputation and authority and returning more relevant results more quickly.

According to Matt Cutts, “the Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback”.

The underlying infrastructure changes do seem to have impacted user interface as it relates to universal search (likely because universal results are influenced by ranking and relevance signals). For the sample searches I did, the first ten results were fairly similar, but the existence and location of images, video, news, and blog posts was notably different.

You can check the search difference between the Older Version of Google and the New Google at following two sites:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ Google Beta Testing Version

http://www.comparecaffeine.com/ To Compare the Search Difference

By conducting some tests we observed following:

•    New Google is FAST: It often doubled the speed of Google classic.

•    New Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The   algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results.

•    Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google and Bing. With both Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (facebook) launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.

•    It’s partially a response to Bing:  At least, that’s how we feel. This new search has a focus on increasing speed, relevancy, accuracy, and the index volume, things that Microsoft really hit on when it released Bing. It feels as if Google “Caffeine” is meant to shore up any deficiencies it may have when compared to Microsoft’s offering, though it’s been in the works long before Bing launched.

Still Google Caffeine Update is in process. We have no confirmation from Google that whether new search engine infrastructure is been applied or not. Keep a closer look on the search engine and keep noticing the changes in SERPS for different keywords and other changes.

After Caffeine Updates, SEO specialists will to have to go on a whole new platform for getting their clients to the top. And who knows how this new Google search works?  SEO Experts will have to start digging down the new rules to Page rank. But they do not need to worry about it as If you are a webmaster or an owner a website and if you do your job good, huge differences or updates for search engines don’t affect your site much. Just, prepare your websites or your articles for people, not for the Search Engines. (If people love your website, so search engines love.)

Let’s Hope that this update is to offer the best. Let’s see what Google’s new “Caffeine” update will bring to searchers. :)

Google algorithms are like a pinball game – tricky, confusing, and constantly changing without us getting a grasp of what’s going on. Ask yourself, is this good for SEO and for SEO Exprets? Many of you would be rolling your eyes at such a question, some of you might say “yeah right, as if!” while the rest of you would think of me as insane. At first instance all you webmasters must be whining, because for all of us the answer is an obvious “NO”. We break the secret code to one algorithm and Google comes up with an update, and when we’re finished on that, another is on its way! But looking at it closely, it’s not as worse as you may think of it.

Although nobody likes the idea of such changes at first instance, but let’s see it this way: Innovations and discoveries are dependent on changes and change is a sign of progress and growth. Besides, playing a game is fun when challenges are there otherwise it may turn out to be quite boring. These constant algorithm changes must be taken as a way to groom you as professionals instead of crying over it.

SEO is a profitable business, and many SEOs go beyond what’s called “ethical” in order to promote their clients business. An aggressive approach is good in a profession, but Google makes you pay for overdoing it. Here are some tips for webmasters to follow in order to keep their site and its ranking unharmed each time Google modifies its algorithms:

•    Just do enough SEO that gives you a respectable ranking in the search engines and for which you don’t get penalized whenever Google wishes to revise its policies. Google hates over-smartness so keep everything to its moderate for your best benefit. This applies to all the techniques of SEO including link building, keyword density, tags etc. Also engage social media marketing for generating traffic to website.

•    Stick to white hat SEO practices. Google is also disgusted by spammers who manipulate the search results causing the searchers a very negative browsing experience and many times forcing them to leave the search engine. Oh, Google will be so pissed to find THAT out!

•    Do you want to know the one thing that Google bots simply love and can never ignore? That key ingredient is the “content”. Original and unique content on a website automatically lets you gain higher search rankings, despite the fact you optimize it for search engines or not.

Don’t let the updates upset you, for these changes are meant to facilitate the process of search for its users. Just avoid the dark side of SEO practices and focus on the positive promotion of your website, this will not only benefit you but will keep you in the good books of Google :)

Another great swing in the pendulum! Google has made yet another shift in its algorithms, and this time it’s about Page Rank sculpting using nofollow tag. What is Page Rank sculpting? Page Rank sculpting is an enhanced SEO technique, by which the SEO’s can control how Page Rank flows within the side using nofollow or any other methods. In simple words, you could extend more links to more important pages, without injuring a certain page’s rank—but gone are the days!

The leader of Google’s Web spam team says “no more Page Rank sculpting using nofollow”. This may be a big blow for SEO community out there, not only because a change has been made but because this change was made a year back and is being disclosed now.

Although a rough explanation by Matt Cutts was intended to clear it all when he said, “At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise.” This explanation sure is not a surprise as Cutts terms it, but an utter shock!

Let’s see how this new change can affect the Page Rank of your website. Consider you have a page with ten outgoing links and five of those links are nofollowed. For each link you get one point which means you have 10 Page Rank points in total. With Page Rank sculpting, you were able to put nofollow on 5 out of 10 links by which the nofollowed links were not counted by Google and the remaining 5 links got 2 points each, making them rank higher.

Things have however changed now, a certain 10 links page may still have 10 points with 5 nofollow links…but now, the nofollow links will not be ignored by Google and the Page Rank will be segregated equally. Means, instead of 2 points, the regular links will get 1 point each and the nofollow links will get no points at all, though the nofollow links will consume their points but will not send them forward.

Page Rank Flow Mentioned By Matt Cutts on His Blog

The question that arises at present is whether Page Rank sculpting using nofollow a bad plan or not? Well, Cutts sure has answered this by saying,

“I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your Page Rank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “Page Rank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawl able for humans and search engines alike.”

At this point I would suggest not to panic if you have utilized the nofollow tags on your website, and don’t go all removing them particularly if it’s applied on the paid links. After all, this changed occurred a year back, and if none of the SEO’s figured it out during this long period, then it certainly proves little harm. Although Google and all its policy makers should be condemned for hiding this aspect from its users and optimizers, because no matter how slight and insignificant the change is, it may still have affected many!

Google has constantly evolved and with this its rules have also undergone a change. Going back a couple of years from now, article submission was easy and equally effective. You wrote a couple of articles, submitted them to a number of article directories, ezines and BAM!! Your articles showed up everywhere in the SERP’s. But this was way too simple to get a good rank on Google and maybe too hard for Google to take it in, and so the things were revised and Google defended by introducing duplicate content filter.

Article submissions are effective as each submitted article carries a link to your site, but with duplicate content filter things have changed a bit and it is not as simple as it was before. So, what exactly is this filter? It actually searches for all the available copies of your article on the web and then accredits you for only one. In short, you don’t get acknowledgment of having several links pointing towards you, but instead you only get one point in your direction. And this being the very reason why so many article sites have witnessed intense reduction in the article submissions!

Recently I came across an interesting discussion held between Matt Cutts and a blogger—many concepts related to article submission and Google’s duplicate content filter were cleared in my mind and I would like to share this information with the readers who are as confused as I was sometime back. Here it goes:

Many of you would question how the submitted articles can be considered as duplicate if they are dispatched for other websites. This point is cleared by the first answer provided by Cutts which indicates how important it is to produce and maintain original and quality content. According to him, your site’s value will be lost if the same content is floating all over the web! It makes it difficult for the search bots to determine the originality of the content on your site.

You all must now be curious that submitting articles is not such a good idea after all. Upon this, Cutts gave two options: First was to avoid over-syndicating the articles, and second was to place a link of the original content in the syndicated content, which will help the original content get a higher Page Rank.

Here however, Matt didn’t go into further details of how to escape over-syndicating the articles. On a personal note, I would like to explain what you can do to dodge this content duplication. These would be my suggestions:

1 – Don’t use the automated software to submit your articles in hundreds of directories. Alternatively, use a service that selects only a hand-full of quality websites and then submit your articles manually. Remember, no matter how many articles you submit using mechanized tools; effective results will only be produced with manual article submission.

2 – Dispatch your writings to only those websites and directories that allow HTML in the “author info” section. Articles are usually submitted to build link popularity, and you get a much higher credit if you use keyword based anchor text links instead of the conventional http links.

3 – Before posting your article to web directories and ezines, make sure to post it on your website first and let the search bots index it before proceeding further.

Follow these simple tips and don’t fret about where your articles rank in the search engines, because in the end it’s all about bringing business to your website and if submitting articles can do that…I suggest you go for it!

Seems like a constant backfiring is going on between Google and SEO’s, with both ends unhappy with each other. Where Google has streamlined its “rules”, the SEO marketers are just not willing to swallow them in. The matter remains intense and raises an important question, does Google hates SEO’s? As far as my opinion is concerned, I would like to go with a well-thought “NO”, Google does not hate SEO’s, but it surely does hate over smart SEO’s on the block!

There is no use of going over and over the debate by cursing Google or Matt Cutts like the others do, as for me, I’d like to rely more on my common sense. And using that common sense, here are a few things that pop into my mind:

•    Google likes competition, and it keeps testing the SEO’s by constantly tweaking the search algorithms and causing more and more difficulties for them. We don’t know how in such a short time SEO got sentenced and penalized with the terms like keyword stuffing, hidden text—in short, “black hat SEO practices”…maybe this is just another way to test the extent to which the SEO’s will thrive for getting websites appear in the top search rankings. So for all the Internet marketers out there—don’t panic and keep your fists tight, you have got some pretty hard challenges coming your way.

•    Another thing that’s quite obvious is that every firm, company, and organization has a set of rules and principles that it follows and does not let anyone operate outside that defined policy. In a similar manner, Google has its rules—you don’t follow and you’re out of the game! Anyone who exploits or misuses the SEO platform by deceiving and manipulating the search engines gets his piece of fine by being considered as spam or being banned for life.

•    Google hates deception, true! But SEO’s love deceiving—that’s for sure! So unless and until one of these doesn’t bend, things aren’t going to settle down. Now here, I must side with Google and admit it’s the SEO’s doing wrong. Google in fact, has gone above board in not only supporting but practically devising tools for a smooth SEO process including guidelines, webmaster tools, API access and blogs etc. If Google hated SEO’s, would it be foolish enough to go to such an extent and help them out? Don’t know about you, but I don’t think so!

•    Commonly we have always witnessed one side of the story. We have always seen internet marketers killing themselves to get their identity flash on Google pages. Yes we all know SEO’s need Google as the hype prevalent among the SEO community is “get higher search engine ranking”. This phrase has made Google the king, while SEO’s the poor public running after the king and obeying every order that trickles down from it. What we fail to see is the other side of grass which is much greener than the one we typically see. Google is a search engine and it can’t operate itself unless some efforts are made to optimize it. In order to serve people and operate well, it has to be used, and the only way it can be used is through Search Engine Optimization.

•    The most logical and realistic explanation validating my answer of how Google “not” hates SEO’s comes now. Can you hate someone earning money for you? Ok, most of you can even answer a “yes” to this one so here’s another; would you stop someone from earning money for you and create trouble for them while they work? Obviously no! So how can you expect Google to demolish the SEO practices when SEO actually makes a bulk of money for it? These bucks are made through organic campaigns and paid search campaigns (PPC) that make use of programs like AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, adCenter and much more.

In conclusion I would say: a cold war is in progress between the two entities. This is the war between two rivals whose goals are the same (giving users a good search experience) but the approach is totally different. There is a need for them to acknowledge issues simultaneously and lay down principles that both can happily follow without blaming the other, because whether Google or SEO’s admit it or not, they both are interdependent on one another.