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
I today checked one of my client website in Google Webmaster Tools and saw that there is a huge increase in the backlinks . Is this a fault in Google Webmaster Tool tracking ? . Many of my friends too experienced the same. I think the reason might be that Google has started counting all links which are not previously considered to be a priority. I have checked the same with SEO Round Table and came to the following post http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022454.html
I think this might not be a techincal error as I have already heard that Google will start to give no follow links also linkjuice but the priority to this links would be very less considered to do follow links. We would all have to wait until we hear what the Google Webmaster Team has to speak.
This will inturn be a big change and this might be just shift in link importance and authority. Google might want the webmasters to be aware of all the pages which link to their website. This seems to have lot of positive impact like we can analyze which linkfarms/content spams are linked to our website and we might also get an additional feature to report spam websites which link to our website.
I am not doing a strong research now but I will wait till I hear something from other SEO Experts.
Have you recently noticed this type of a link count difference in your webmaster tools accounts ? What do you feel about the change ? Do you think that Google is now going to change the way they give priority to backlinks ? I would like to see you comments about this topic.
You can also discuss the same with me through my Twitter Account
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
What I found on the internet was, alot of SEO consultants base their pricing according to how many sites are competing with the same search term. This is wrong! The reason why it's wrong is it doesnt mean anything. I will tell you why.
If you research the backlinks of the top 10 sites that appear on the first pages, lets say your site has 0 backlinks and the sites that appear on home page of Google for example all have around 10,000-20,000 backlinks of quality PR, this essentially means regardless of the search competition, you also have to obtain around the same amount of backlinks with the same pr and value before you will even have a chance to show up before them.
Generally speaking the search term could be melbourne singles and the results are just 1 - 10 of about 463,000 for melbourne singles. (0.28 seconds) so one would think that anything below 1 million is no problem and would base their pricing accordingly.
The mistake again is they base their pricing to clients based on the search volume and yet this means nothing particularly if the first page contains sites that are highly competitive or are appearing on 1st page becuase they all have 100,000 high pr backlinks.
Another thing is lets say an seo company is bidding for the keyphrase SEO Melbourne you would be surprised that even though using the Google Ads Tool it shows that there is 4000 global searches per month on this term, and one would expect a reasonable volume of enquiries, I am positioned on the first page for this term but I can tell you this is not the case.
A good majority of the search volume you will find competitors searching for this term. A client that is looking to use SEO services in Melbourne would generally instead type in something like "how to get on the 1st page of Google". You must sometimes think with a simple frame of mind and try to put yourself in the customers shoes. So with this in mind even with low search volume targeting niche words are more valuable.
In general you should allow for atleast 30% of the overall search volume to be included when you calculate the overall amount that Google Ads data displays, so the 30% would generally be competitors.
So if you are a client and you have already a good idea about what the search volume means and what to expect then just be cautious if you get quoted purely based on the search volume as it usually is a very misleading way to calculate pricing this way.
I have recently been searching around like I normally do and seemed to find some faults and what appears to me to be some glitch with the local business listings.
Here is an example of what I recently did, I simply typed in "Melbourne Forum" and up came a whole heap of local map listings but all showed google url's as their business website. Strange? Now I know Googles local business listings are not very well maintained and it's something that they are working on, but cmon this is a bit over the top. It just goes to show you that you could almost list any website url you want when your local listing is approved. There are still many loop holes, and glitches in their system.
Another interesting find was that when I was searching in Google for "Melbourne Events" , "Bangkok Events" etc. Up came indents from internal link pages from the one website eventful.com which displayed the link and then the date and venue etc. This is something I have never seen before? Does this mean extra promotion for sites that hold events now? If so, I think we will see an increase of sites with events as part of their content.
Then the most bizarre result of them all was when I typed in "Facebook advertising" as this is obviously hot property at the moment. And guess who showed up in the search results? Google!
Imagine that you have your desired dream location on the first page of Google with your optimized content page. The search result contains here a blue link in the header.
When the link is clicked, the user lands on your blog or website. The page on which the user lands is called the landing page. The title of the search result is therefore the link that must capture the user's attention in Google, you can edit and customize this header via the landing page's page title.
Depending on your browser's version, the title is often visible in the top of your browser's URL field and tab. A web page's page title is placed in the page's HTML code in header section.
The title is placed between the HEAD tags.
And is inscribed as follows:
What is a page title ?
The title is one of the most important factors that will help rank your page on Google. It’s the perfect real estate to place your keywords and drive readers to your blog. The title is also used to drive users to click on the Google search results. The title tells Google exactly what the page is all about.
All pages on a site must have their own unique titles. Every page must have a unique title that tells Google exactly what the page is all about in other words a title should not be the same and should be descriptive and must contain the keywords you are targeting in the post.
Do you currently similar titles on all your pages, you have a huge potential to achieve much greater visibility in Google, simply by making unique titles in all content pages on your blog.
Good Practices for Optimizing Titles
Each page of your website must have a unique title. Avoid having the same title on multiple pages, as this damages your visibility in Google.
An optimal title should be between contains 65 – 125 characters included spaces. This will ensure that the entire title is always visible in the link in Google search results.
The keywords you plan to target should be included in the title - starting with the primary keyword
Google gives high value to keywords appearing first in the title. Ensure that your product or service appears in the beginning of the title. If you want your company name to appear then that should be at the end
Write call to action-word into the title, so that your readers audience are lured into clicking on the search results. These words may be, for example words like buy, book, download, receive offers and book online
Wherever possible, avoid stop words in the title. These advancements include the words "a, an, to, in, and". These words fill only and are not assigned any value by the importance of Google's algorithm.
If you have any other tips to use titles effectively please share with us.
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.
I have recently been playing with thoughts and thinking of ways that perhaps in the future could be possible. Let's think about this for a moment in the way of Google how it displays it's results.
First of all it shows the top 10 results before you click next and then next again to the 2nd ten. Now what if it was possible that they could give you the option to view 100 results per page, without having to click next and next every time. Would this be better in your opinion for SEO companies? Would we then be able to tell our clients we can get them on the 1st page. Perhaps we would need to propose to them a slightly different scenario. But if the results were displayed differently like this could this effect the services we are offering?
Quite simply it would not necessarily effect anything, we would just have to approach our angle differently when offering placements to companies. Anyway like I said this has not happened, and perhaps it will never happen. I mean if it didn't happen before why would it happen now?
Well Google has always tried to make things complicated for us SEO companies and will always do what they can to change the way they display data to move with the times. It's just part of nature and the internet game, don't get frightened as this has not yet happened but you never know what the future lies ahead. I always like to think one step forward.
Another thought that came to mind and something that you never know could happen is what if it was possible to display results all on one page without having to click next and next. Perhaps one day there might be such a thing. You never know, so again would this effect us? Perhaps it would, but again we would have to adjust our market and what we offer.
No matter the case the way results will be displayed their will always be someone on top of someone else, so for us SEO companies it is not a case of what page you are on, it is more a case of who is ahead or on top of you, as everyone looks from top to bottom anyway, it's just natural. I don't know anyone that searches and looks from bottom to top? Do you?
In my real opinion, what has worked well already will continue to work well, now that Google have introduced other data displays such as Twitter results products and videos in the results, you never know what could happen one day good or bad. We just have to be prepared and always be one step ahead!
A lot of rumours are being displayed in real time search results due to the real time search integration to search engine results. The false information are being promoted virally through twitter and other real time social media. How search engines would prevent this type of false information being displayed on their real time search results is not yet clear.
Search Engine's should come up with a new technology like Page Rank which I do like to call as Social Rank. The tweets that come online at real time in search engines should be based on the Social Rank. The social rank of each profile must be based on the credibility of the users social presence and interaction.
I hope that this way we can really get the correct news at the right time. Real time search should provide the correct news not just the real time data which might be false information.
In the morning on feburary 3rd, 2010 TV channels created a flutter airing incorrect information about the death of popular movie star in malaylam and it was tweeted virally. The real time search started showing the false information. At 1pm the channels said they regretted airing the false news but within this time the news had virally reached to thousands of people around the world.
The TCS hack was in the real time search results today. The website was hacked by a french hacker according to relevant sources and the domain was put to sale.
Real time search have its own merits as well as demerits like any other technology. Search Engines needs to ensure that they start measuring the Social Rank of each profile rather than the Page Rank which seems to be an irrelevant source to measure credibility.
Do you think Search Engines should measure Social Rank? Tell us what you think
For the knowledge of all RDFa is nothing but Resource Description Framework attribute. RDFa is a W3C recommendation which adds attribute level extensions to XHTML. Google uses RDFa for reviews. It displays the date of the review, the star rating, the author and the price range of the reviewed product. Some of the review sites which used RDFa seemed to have improved ranking and increased traffic for their review pages.
So here is the biggest question Are You Working The RDFa Framework Into Your SEO Campaigns?. It is time that SEO's should start working on RDFa and microformats. Using RDFa in contact page can be really helpful for the search engine to verify certain information like contact information. RDFa helps us to show author information as well as manufacture information. Owner of particular images can use RDFa to provide license information about the images they own. I will like you all to come up with your opnions about RDFa. RDFa in SEO is surely going to be the hottest topic that will be discussed in 2010. I would suggest the readers to start using important RDFa tags as it would really help in improving your website credibility.
