Google Takes on Content Farms: What Does it Mean for SEO?
There has been a lot of buzz this past week about Google’s “Farmer Update,” which was designed to take on content farms; spammy, low-quality content sites that have been crowding their search results. Google had this to say about their updated algorithm in a post on the official Google Blog on February 24th. “Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible…This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Crawling and Indexing Tips
Once a website owner starts to get to a slightly more advanced stage of search engine optimization they are going to want to view some highly detailed and technical information regarding how their website is crawled. Crawl rate and the ability for search spiders to access certain aspects of a website can play a significant role in search engine optimization and marketing over time. Robot.txt files play a significant role in how website pages often times index, and if positioned improperly can really be disastrous to a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google’s Advice on Multiple Websites
At some point in time businesses attempt to run multiple websites in the search space, which is either good or bad depending on how you look at things. If you don’t watch yourself on the technical aspects of executing this you could quickly see a penalty lingering on your website, so you must be careful on how you approach it. Google recently wrote a very interesting blog post on the Google Webmaster Blog about how they feel about multiple websites from the same organization. “While you’re free to run as many sites as you want, keep in mind that users prefer to see unique and compelling content. It is a good idea to give each site its own content, personality and function. This is CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Get Your Blog Into Google News
Anyone who owns a blog and continues to maintain and write in it on a daily basis is always seeking new ways to deliver consistent amounts of new unique traffic in order to build up their name in an area of business online. Being included in Google News could bring heaping amounts of new steady traffic but there are some steps that need to be taken prior to even trying to be included. Here are some tips that could help you when submitting your blog to Google News: Unique Content Your content on your blog should always be unique and never duplicated. If you are writing about other news related sources online that is fine but you need to be able to include some of your own stories CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
A Breakdown of the Google Webmaster Guidelines
Have you ever actually stopped and taken a moment to really look through what Google has to say is good and bad when it comes to how you conduct yourself online from a communication and business standpoint? You should always follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines when marketing your business online to ensure the utmost safety of your website. The purpose of this post is to summarize a breakdown of some of the important areas within the Google webmaster guidelines and as they pertain to search engine optimization. “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
New Bing Webmaster Tools Are Here
With Bing’s recent step up to compete against everything Google they have also ramped up their webmaster tools to allow serious website owners looking to really make an impact in Bing to carry out their plan. The new Bing’s Webmaster Tools have been long anticipated because they never really competed with the Google webmaster tool set before. Now things have changed. The Bing Webmaster Blog had this to say: “The redesigned Bing Webmaster Tools provide you a simplified, more intuitive experience focused on three key areas: crawl, index and traffic. New features, such as Index Explorer and Submit URLs, provide a more comprehensive view as well as better control over how Bing crawls and indexes your sites. Index Explorer gives you unprecedented access to browse through CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Bing Search Engine Positioning Ideas
Websites do not typically just rank for the sake of ranking, especially if they are a new website in the search space. The Bing Webmaster blog gives some sound pieces of advice to keep your website running like a well oiled machine and keep you rankings climbing. “Check to see if your site employs a robots.txt file. If so, confirm that the directives block only what you want blocked. If one or more sets of custom directives exist for specific bots, be sure they include all necessary directives from the generic set of directives. Then be sure the file has been validated. Also, check for and review the validity of any REP commands in webpage tags and in HTTP Headers.” Sometimes a website might CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Created US, So Don’t Complain!
Google is not dumb by any means, but they really can’t complain about the SEO industry because they single handedly have shaped the entire search industry. Unethical practices are going to spring up anywhere there is a chance to make some money and you have to take the good with the bad. Google has made lots of money for themselves but in the process they have spawned and industry with no regulation and no benchmarks leaving things wide open for you know…the bad people. Google Pagerank: If you ask me Google pagerank was one of the biggest culprits to the overall madness of online spam. Many website owners got so wrapped up over the notion of increasing that little number that they lost track of the CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Caffeine is Alive, Now What?
For the last 8 months (since November of 2009), Google has been spoke about the new search engine algorithm known as "Google Caffeine". For months everyone in the search engine optimization industry and world has had theories of what will change (although Google has given hints in the past) but we all still were holding our breaths to an extent. Well, on June 8, 2010 Google finally announced that the Google Caffeine update is 100% active! After reading the vague post on the official Google blog with this announcement, it seems that none of us will really know the long term impact of the new Google update and what exactly has changed. I suspect, that really it will take many months, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Mayday Update Confirmed
It is confirmed by Matt Cutts at Google that around the end of April and beginning of May Google rolled out an change to the search engine algorithm that primarily affected long tail searches. Apparently this is all about improving quality of long tail search and does not have anything to do with the much awaited Google caffeine update. Anyway, please check out the video from Matt Cutts below that discuss the Google Mayday update: On my end I have not seen any major client Google visitor long tail change as a result of the Google Mayday algorithm update, so it may have affected certain sites with not as good quality or lower Google trust factor. Either way, it is nice to hear about a CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Bing’s 45 Point SEO Check List
Bing recently came out with their version of an SEO check list that all internet marketers should be trying to follow in some sort of way. Some of the bullet points are very important to talk about and fit into the overall search engine optimization equation very well. Let’s pull out a few that I think are the most important below: “13.Create a custom 404 page so that even if someone encounters an error on your site, they are re-directed somewhere nice.” Huge! If a visitor lands a 404 page and all they see is a blank page than you are missing out on an opportunity to change that visitor into a lead or even a sale. Customize your 404 page so that your visitors have CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Is Bing Solving the Media Indexing Issue?
Still to this day media rich website applications have a difficult time being properly indexed due to the search engines inability to read those types of marketing efforts. Search engines are simply readers which rely on reading text in order to display the correct relevant information. Microsoft has created a new type of technology recently which many large brands have embraced in order to help them index their media rich content. It is called Microsoft Silverlight and it is supposed to offer much more powerful indexing capabilities for media rich content. Rick DeJarnette had this to say on the official Bing webmaster blog: “Right off the bat, there are several things you can do to help the search engine bot learn more about your Silverlight-infused CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Google Spam Report Public Calling
Recently Matt Cutts has announced on his blog that Google will now be letting companies report other websites that might be taking spammy approaches and clearly violating the Google webmaster guidelines! Is Google running out of abilities to track all black hat techniques? If someone comes across another website performing any spammy or black hat SEO techniques such as cloaking, hidden text, misleading words or deceptive redirects you can now submit the websites information to the following link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport Am I the only one that sees a variety of problems from this? Trying to create silent police officers in the search engine optimization industry is an appetite for disaster while the potential for rather large quarrels is amazing. This leads me to believe CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Where Is The Future Of Search Going?
All the search engines have been scrambling around quite a bit over the last year to position themselves as the number one source, everything from Microsoft’s very expensive push with Bing to Google just scrambling around clawing to make the next big thing. But where is all this scrambling really heading? What I do know is that websites like Google need to make some changes because the amount of content entering the live space does not seem to always make it into the search results. I recently did a Google search for the phrase: The Future of Search What I got was actually quite astonishing. One up to date recent article on view points of where the search industry is heading. The third link down was an CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
Yahoo and Bing Holding Hands, Now What?
Yahoo and Bing have been hoping and praying that everything with their recent partnership would go through as smoothly as possible with no hang ups. Recently everything was approved for these two giants to be allowed to put their heads together and change things for the future of both businesses. With Bing really increasing in market share and Yahoo decreasing, it was an obvious marriage that had to happen. Don’t forget that Yahoo is still a very powerful website and one of the most trafficked websites in the world. How is this going to change things for SEO professionals who have been focusing on just Google for so many years? The united pay per click advertising platforms of Bing and Yahoo will surely be a new CLICK HERE TO READ MORE...
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