One of the website my team worked on got a Google Penalty. The possible reason for the penalty might have been external site-wide links. The first thing I did was to look for the rankings of the website in other major search engines Yahoo and Bing. The keywords were still on top on both the other search engines. The next thing was to avoid the panic situation which webmasters and SEO experts face when they see one of the websites their team work upon gets a penalty for some wrong action/wrong SEO practices. The penalty for our website might have been due to some sort of spam link building tactics done on the website. I tried to handle the situation as calm as possible. Below are the steps I took to remove the effect of the penalty.
Day 1: First thing I did on the page is to change all the file names to show new page URL thus removing the spam link effect of all previous off-page submissions done. I blocked all the old pages using robots.txt. I changed all the content in newly created pages.
Day 2: Created new Title and Meta Tags for the newly created page and uploaded the same. I also removed the old RSS feed. I then re-submitted the Sitemap.
Day 3: Send a reconsideration request to Google through webmaster tools account.
Day 5: The website has got all the SERP back and some keywords got higher SERP.
The first and the formost thing is to check whether your website is having a penalty or not. There are many ways to check the same. You can read about 10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty .
Share your thoughts and experiences of avoiding Google penalty. You can a share the things you have done to avoid a Google penalty. You can get in touch with me personally through my Twitter Handle @cijoaj2003
Today I came across the new Google layout which they rolled out to all the Internet users. I hate the way the new menu feature appeared in Google new search engine layout. The factor that I hate is that the search bar is on left side. I would suggest them to put the same on the right side after Sponsored links. If they put in the right side then it is going to help Google is maintaing the clean look atleast at the top.
I am impressed by some of the new features that I saw in their menu. The features like page previews, sites with images etc as Internet surfers can easily get a feel on which website to enter and which not to enter. Is this feature going to improve search results ?. I think it will improve the search results as traffic to websites will now be based more on website layout rather than just the search engine result page rankings. The big question now is that Google is not having the preview of all the websites in the search engine result pages. So how will Google overcome this ? How often will Google update page previews.
It is now time the designers need to spend much time to the websites to improve the overall look and feel of the whole websites they work for. Now is the time for the SEO's to come up with their innovative ideas about website layout. My suggestion to all would be to focus on a clean layout which looks pretty good.
Is Google's new search engine layout similar to Bing? What is your suggestion about Google new search engine layout ?Do you really feel that Google has made a wrong move ?
Will Google change the layout back to the previous clean layout ?
Please post your comments about Google's new layout.
If you are looking ways to use the old Google layout you can use the below URL
Bing might already be aiming to take Search to the next level. They are already on the right track as they announced the Spatial Search . Bing have been discussing about Spatial search from last December. The idea is simple. Bing wants users to make most out of their search results. They have introduced the idea based on human psychology. Humans makes decision based on senses like sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.
Bing is making the new search considering the two main sense sight and touch. Bing Maps will start giving an immersive experience of a particular place. Bing have already started their advanced map feature with Twitter real time physical location map and Bing Local Lens .
Is spatial search important ?
Yes. Spatial Search is extremely important when it comes to local search queries like "Hostels in Los Angeles" . I can get a better result with Spatial Search. I am looking foward towards great changes in the search industry with search going to real world datas.
Daniel Lew's post search engine result display made me think about the vertical search engines. Vertical search engines are entirely different from the general search engine's like Google,Yahoo and Bing. Vertical search engines know their visitor and they are made based upon the visitor's interest. You can easly find a lot of travel based vertical search engines like Kayak. There are search engine which go beyond the general search engine feature to provide results based upon word relation in context to search query. Truevert is one such search engine which provides true vertical results beyond general search engine niche intention based result. Another interesting search engine I came across was Bossy which provides single answer to visitor queries.
An example is
Question:: When did germany invade poland ? Answer:: Month: Sept Year: 1939
The latest computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha was intended to provide visitors with systematic knowledge on their queries.
Where is the search heading towards?. The search engine future might go beyond general search engines as new signals of relavance becomes important. Certain factors like user behaviour, speed of providing search results etc will play a much more dominant role in the coming years and this will make general search engines to start taking measures to understand about the user query signals to stay on top of the search industry.
Why do you think about Bing? How can we say that Bing will dominate the internet? Do you think they're doing this because they give you outstanding tools, results and updates? Or their services are not amusing at all? Bing! Bing! Bing! Here comes the Bing! They totally want to dominate the internet, but there's a problem anyway.
Google is on the top and they're way too far than Yahoo and Bing. Bing is trying to make a plan in order to dominate Google and Yahoo in the internet. But they will do it in an idiot way. On these past few months, there are some controversies that Bing will crush Google.
WHAT? Are you kidding me? We'll their words are completely harsh for Google, which they are making alternative plans for it. They are making a deal with the big time webmasters who uses Google for SEO, to de-index themselves in exchange of big cash.
Oh really? Big cash, huh? How much is it? Huge money just to get out of Google? Are you kidding me for being such a Bing out there? I can say you're a total piece of crap! Don't you know that search engines are very useful no matter where you are independently like Altavista, Dogpile, Baidu, etc.? De-index with Google is a huge mistake for you.
Don't try to be tempted with Bing. Google is already big and most webmasters need it for their own business and earning revenue through their tools like Adsense, Adwords, Analytics, etc. Bing also has their MSN adCenter but I think getting backlinks to Bing is very difficult than Google and Yahoo.
So I will tell this straight to you Bing, you will never win against Google! If you do this in a blackhat or evil way, you're already filling up the heat. Just do your own business there and not jeopardizing others to de-index with Google.
Search Engines are trying to dominate Internet by learning and understanding how people use and navigate through websites. Lately all major search engine's Google, Yahoo, and Bing have started their attempts to track your website history. One of the reason that search engines show about tracking website history is that they are trying to improve the search results. The major question that comes to visitor is that are search engines going to far by creating customer based search results based on once internet activities? . The privacy of people who search on this search engines is getting affected. The one way to stop search engines from doing this is to switch off web history or to use a search engine that safeguards your privacy.
The third annual crunchie award winners have been announced by Techcrunch. Here is the list of nominees and winners:
Best Technology Achievement: Backblaze Bing (Microsoft) Chrome OS (Google) (Winner) Google Wave PuSH Silverlight (Microsoft)
Best Internet Application: Animoto Dropbox (Winner) Groupon MOG All Access Posterous Yelp
Best Social App: Aardvark Brizzly DailyBooth Farmville(Winner) SocialVibe StockTwits
Best Bootstrapped StartUp: atebits (Tweetie) Shoes of Prey Tinychat (Winner) Wildfire Interactive wizehive Wufoo
Best Mobile Application: foursquare (Winner) Google Voice Gowalla Kindle for iPhone Skies of Glory Tonchidot
Best International: Amiando Jolicloud Playfish Spotify (Winner) TweetDeck vente-privee.com
Best Time Sink Application: Canabalt Civilization Revolution (iPhone) DailyBooth (Winner) I Am T-Pain Pandora Zoosk
Best Design: Animoto (Winner) Brizzly Chrome (Google) Clicker Facebook Mobile Threadsy
Best Enterprise: Amazon Web Services Atlassian Azure (Microsoft) Chatter (Salesforce) Google Docs/Office (Winner) Yext
Best CleanTech: CalStar Products Locust Storage Picarro Sappphire Energy Sun Run (Winner) Tendril
Best New Gadget: Apple Magic Mouse Barnes & Noble nook (Winner) litl webbookMotorola Droid Sonos S5 Zune HD
Best Tech PR: Brew Media Relations LaunchSquad OutCast Communications PerkettPR Spark (Winner) SutherlandGold Group
Best Angel: Betaworks Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital) Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC) Ron Conway (SV Angel) (Winner) Y-Combinator Yossi Vardi
Best VC Firm: Accel Partners (Winner) Charles River Ventures Benchmark Capital Greylock Partners Sequoia Capital True Ventures Union Square Ventures
Founder Of The Year: Aaron Patzer (Mint) (Winner) Elon Musk (Tesla) Jack Dorsey (Square) Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons (Yelp) John Borthwick (Betaworks) Omar Hamoui (AdMob)
CEO Of The Year: Josh Silverman (Skype) Marc Benioff (Salesforce) Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Winner) Neil Young (ngmoco) Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media) Tony Hsieh (Zappos)
Best New Startup Or Product Of 2009: Aardvark Bing (Microsoft) (Winner) Foursquare Hunch Milo Spotify
Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009: Android (Google) Facebook (Winner) LinkedIn ngmoco Twitter Zynga
I may wonder on the issue of Microsoft today, when they want to give compensation to the big time web owners to de-index themselves to Google. However, their plan was crushed and was not really worth for it. We know that webmasters and bloggers, especially the new ones, have Google as their first thing in mind to do search engine optimizing (SEO).
Microsoft's search engine, known as Bing, has been an attractable search engine like no other. They have no sufficient SEO tools compared to Google, but their design is unique. Everytime you refresh the main page of Bing, the design gradually changes over and over again. Most designs are related to "Mother Nature".
It is the possibility of Bing, which they can overtake Google in the next few years. It is possible guys, even Yahoo can still win the race of being the top used search engine in the world. When you take a look at Google's home page, it's practically simple as in "white", and nothing changed a little bit.
But why are they still at the top of the mountain right now? Their secret is through the word SEO, which most webmasters and bloggers are checking their page ranks, Alexa rank, backlinks, inbound links, do-follow and no-follow links through the use of Google. Many software and tools like Seoquake, are much more compatible to Google rather than Yahoo and Bing.
Google has the best ad revenue sharing program like Adsense and Adwords, and it's most popular to be discussed in any webmaster forums, blogs and Web 2.0 sites than Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.
What's for Bing anyway? We know that they're one of the best search engines used in the internet right now, and they are making huge profits from their customers. If we think that they can surpass Google and Yahoo by themselves, they must look at the features which they don't have and what they don't have. That's what Bing can do for now in order to surpass them.
