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Google Penguin Update – Is your website Affected?

admin — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:21:15 +0000

As we all know, search engines are continually changing their algorithms to account for spam by search engine optimisers who follow black hat techniques and to improve the quality of search results.The latest update to come out of Google is called the Penguin update (Google seems to have a thing for exotic animal names, the most controversial one before this was called the Panda update!)

So what is it that you need to ensure that your site does not get affected and demoted in search results because of the Penguin update? Actually, nothing new. If your seo company uses white hat techniques, you have nothing to worry.

Here is a list of some do’s and don’ts right from the horse’s mouth:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don’t send automated queries to Google.
Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Some of them are more black and white than others. For example, avoiding hidden text or hidden links seems like a pretty obvious thing. Just don’t do it. The duplicate content one is a little different. What does Google consider “substantially duplicate content”? How much is too much?

Beyond the specific guidelines, Google also lists 4 “basic principles”. These are:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
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 help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

In general, make sure that your designers, developers and seo follow the Google Quality Specifications and you should be fine as long as your website exists.

SEO strategy for top Bing rankings

admin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:54:11 +0000

Post the Microsoft-Yahoo deal which finally happened in July end, it is well known that Microsoft’s Bing will now power Yahoo search and Yahoo will be the exclusive worldwide salesforce for both Yahoo and Microsoft’s premium search advertisers.

In simple terms, its goodbye to optimising your website for yahoo and the focus now is on Google and Bing. While Google still has the majority share (70%) of the search traffic, Bing’s share of the market is likely to increase with Yahoo’s search volumes.

As a webmaster or an seo, therefore, you need to have an seo strategy for Bing in place. A step in that direction is using Bing’s toolbox. The toolbox, in ways similar to Google’s webmaster tools, offers sitemap submission, url submission, malware detection, an seo toolkit and guidelines for webmasters. Using Bing’s toolbox, webmasters can get valuable insight into how Bing sees their sites and improvise as per its guidelines for webmasters.

Using Bing’s API, one can create dynamic 404 not found error pages. Which means that one can serve customised 404 pages, based on what the visitor was trying to access. And not just serve the standard, generic error page. From a user’s perspective, this makes a whole lot of sense. When customised cleverly, you can use it to give your user clear instructions on what to do when the page they are looking for is not found. Not leave them in the lurch groping around!

Bing’s toolbox also offers an “ads and campaigns tool” to create and manage ad campaigns.

Our seo strategy for our clients’ websites now also has a significant focus on Bing though admittedly, earlier it was heavily loaded in favor of Google. True the traffic that Bing can bring in pales in comparison to that a site can get through Google, it is nonetheless prudent to not ignore Bing.

The toolbox, in ways similar to Google’s webmaster tools, offers sitemap submission, url submission, malware detection, an seo toolkit and guidelines for webmasters. Using Bing’s toolbox, webmasters can get valuable insight into how Bing sees their sites and improvise as per its guidelines for webmasters.

Bing’s toolbox also offers an “ads and campaigns tool” to create and manage ad campaigns.

Google’s Caffeine an answer to Microsoft’s Bing?

admin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:01:24 +0000

Google unveiled its secret project Caffeine recently. Caffeine is, as Google puts it, the first step in an effort that will raise the bar on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other search dimensions. In other words, it is a marked improvement in terms of the infrastructure behind Google’s search engine. For the user though, there isn’t what one would call a discernible difference. Most of us who tried it have found that the apparent difference in most searches was to do with where the maps, videos and news appeared on the SERPs. In the case of Microsoft’s Bing, on the other hand, the major visible difference was to do with the user-interface.

One which could be called a big difference, though not one that is user-friendlier, was that Local business results were not returned by sandbox for one of the searches I did. Also, the search suggestions that appear at the bottom of the results were fewer and different in case of the page returned by Caffeine. See screen shots of the result pages below.

Google has a web developer preview of Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com where one can try out the new search engine and provide feedback. One can also perform a local language search and provide feedback in a language other than English by changing the following two values:

hl=language

gl=country

SERP returned by current engine

SERP using Caffeine