Tag Archives: Google

Shifts In Google SEO in 2012

The Present year has been a major shifts in Google especially in Search Engine Optimization for 2012 we can Call the Farmer Updates to the new implementation called Disavow Links and more..

The Major one was Panda Update which helped to fight against WebSpam. Other implementations like Penguin had a major role along with Exact Matched Domains.

Google had taken a major step against Pirate Websites on DMCA requests. i liked most is  Google’s new abilities was the announcement that its search spiders can now execute AJAX and JavaScript.

Taking the necessary against the Domain Farming/Parking has provided a lots of relief to the people in the domains industry. The recent update was about the Google News Tag which help a lots of fresh content to showcase themselves

Along with these there are other updates which happend along the past 12 months (November to November 2012) which was a greater aspect of learning for me in the Digital Marketing Industry.

Google had made major snatch for the Original Content Information to getting to the users instead of the scrapped Content sites

TIP: If you don’t measure what you’re doing in search and social media, how do you know if what you’re doing is working?

If I have missed anything for the present year updates do share them in the below mentioned comments

Image Optimization for Search Engines

Image Optimization for Search Engines – Image SEO

Image Optimization Tools for your images is one of the many on-page SEO steps that you need to undertake. Optimizing your images is an important SEO step, it is in fact connected to other SEO factors such as bounce rate, site speed and others.

Image Optimization for Search Engines

  • SEO Friendly Images WP Plugin by no less than Vladimir Prelovac.
  • Udinra All Image Sitemap WP Plugin creates sitemap.xml file for your images.
  • DynamicDrive a web image optimizer that compresses and converts your images to render it for suitable for online use. This is one of my favorite tools, perfect when optimizing single or few images.
  • ImageOptimizer is another web image optimizer that treats your images per upload. There is also a desktop version.
  • Shrink O Matic is one of my most favorite tools. It runs on Adobe Air and can help you optimize images in bulk by a simple gesture of drag and drop. I personally used it to optimize thousands of images for a recent project.
  • FeedtheBot tool checks Alt Texts, Titles and Dimensions for you automatically.

Google’s Over-Optimization How to Avoid It

Recently Google’s Matt Cutts announced the impending rollout of an SEO “over-optimization” penalty at South by Southwest (SXSW)

Cutts went on to address the increasing adaptability of the Google Bot, and mentioning that there is a place in relevant search results for those who don’t do SEO, and that there should similarly be a way to address those who abuse SEO. Although he didn’t use the word “penalty,” it’s clear that was what he was talking about.

Here is a Video Link of Rand Fishkin Who explains about 6 Changes Every SEO Should Make BEFORE the Over-Optimization Penalty Hits

This announcement ruffled the feathers of the SEO community, most of whom not only remember, but held sacrosanct, a 2009 YouTube video by Cutts win which he outright said there was no such thing as an over optimization penalty. It seems that in the last few years, either the need for such a penalty has grown, or Cutts and the Google team have changed their minds.
Neither is surprising, nor is the “why” of this rollout the point. Instead, we will address 4 “whats” today.

  • What are the penalties for over-optimization?
  • What qualifies as over-optimization or over-SEO?
  • What can I do if I’ve been penalized?
  • What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Let’s begin.

What Are the Penalties for Over-Optimization?

As we all know, Google rarely does anything at half-measure. Traditionally, sites that violated filter algorithms like Panda took a hit in rankings, but the penalty for over-optimization is de-indexing.

That’s right – if you’re penalized, you are removed from the Google index and the bots stop crawling your site, which means that you are invisible to the search engine.

What Qualifies as Over-Optimization?

Over-optimized websites, contrary to a mildly popular belief, are rarely the result of a professional SEO consultant or firm’s doing. Typically, webmasters who understand only a shadow of the basic principles of SEO are responsible for the black-hat tactics that provoke the ire of searchers, honest sites – and now, Google.

There are over 200 signals that comprise the database of potential abuses, and the Google Bot assesses confluences of these factors to identify sites that are over-optimizing. Be on the safe side: don’t do any of them. Here are some of the strongest signals:

  • Excessive keyword density – typically, anything more than 2-3% is too much. If your site crunches 3 to 4 keywords into its title, heading, meta description, and body content with 7% density, don’t be surprised when Google slaps you with a penalty.
  • Inorganic or paid inbound links – you know you shouldn’t be doing this anyway.
  • Strictly keyword-rich internal links – are you only linking to your internal sites with keywords? That’s another no-no.
  • Listing keywords on the site – it makes me physically ill when I see a list of conspicuous keywords, usually all tagged with internal links, at the bottom of a page. This is sometimes done when a site is attempting to appeal to a broad base and stuffs internally-linked keywords anywhere in the body of the site to artificially boost rankings.
  • Ugly site design – sites that rely on SEO manipulation rarely put in the effort or resources to create an aesthetically appealing, user-friendly site design.
  • Weak content – if your site is re-hashing material from other websites and offers uninspiring content with a low value, you’re exposing yourself to a penalty.
  • Few or zero value propositions – a value proposition is something that provides value to the searcher. Not only are these important to conversion, but the lack of one will make your site suspect. What are you offering your reader? An e-book? A white paper? A free consultation? Make it count. You brought them to your site for a reason, didn’t you?
  • Domain name is keyword – did you buy kidsafegardensupplies.com for its SEO benefit? You might have wasted your cash. While this won’t trigger an automatic penalty, it is on the over-optimization checklist.
  • All “home” link anchors in the site navigation use the keyword – this was long thought to be clever, but now it’s written off as a cheap trick.
  • Excessive back-linking – if all of your back-links have the same anchor text and all point to your main URL, you’re in the danger zone. Please note, however, that organic back-links with unique anchor texts that lead to specific landing pages, articles, or blog posts are very healthy for your ranking.
  • Back-linking to untrustworthy sites – if you’re linking to a low quality site, you may be exposing yourself to a penalty.
  • Duplicate content – content duplication is when you use the same text over and over again on your website, changing only the keywords and links.
  • Automatic page re-directs – anything other than a permanent 301 redirect won’t be supported by Google, and could signal that you’re trying to dupe searchers.
  • Doorway pages – doorway pages are those that offer no navigation options to the browser, and instead only display affiliate links or advertisements so that the browser either “bounces” (exits) or clicks on an ad to leave the page.
  • Excessive H1 tags – all together now: H1 is for the top heading; H2 and H3 for the rest. You should only have one H1 heading per article or page.

To find out if your site has been penalized by Google, you should compare the number of previously indexed URL’s from your site with the most current figures.

To do so, use the command site:yourdomain.com in Google’s search bar. If you don’t see any results, try link:yourdoman.com. If you still get nothing, then there’s a high probability that Google has targeted your site for over-optimization and has assessed a penalty.

What Can I Do if I’ve Been Penalized?

If your site has been penalized by Google for over-optimization, go through the above checklist and make the required changes to your site. Once finished, you can request that Google reconsider your site for inclusion in its index, and by then, you’ll hopefully have learned your lesson: write naturally, using SEO as an augmentation or as a guide, rather than dogmatically keyword stuffing. This isn’t 1999. The rules have changed.

Without addressing all of the strikes against you and making a formal request, there’s nothing you can do – other than hope that all of your intended customers use either Bing or Blekko.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Search Marketing?

As previously mentioned, the vast majority of these no-no’s are perpetrated by black hat SEO’s or amateurs, so above all else, do not panic.

SEO isn’t going anywhere, nor is its close cousin, content marketing. At this point, based on the infrastructure of how information is catalogued and shared on the internet, that would be impossible. Until Google switches entirely to natural language search interfacing, which it has all but sworn to never do, or until search engines learn to read people’s minds, we are dealing with a keyword-based information hierarchy.

What this does mean, however, is that it’s now more important than ever to hire an SEO and content marketing firm that not only understands the intricacies of SEO content and how it interacts with the rest of a marketing campaign, but can also fix potential violations you or others have made on your site in the past.

While SEO used to exist as an island in the sea of internet marketing, the tides have changed and we now find that SEO, like so many other aspects of digital advertising, is a peninsula of a Pangaea-like continent.

Or, to use a different metaphor, SEO is only one of many different working parts that keep the machine working. To do it properly is to reap the rewards – of two sites with comparable quality and content, the one that has been properly and legitimately optimized will receive a significantly better ranking.

This article originally published at Searchcore

Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator easily adds Google Analytics tracking support to a WordPress-powered blog. Google Analyticator also comes with an easily customizable widget that can be used to display specific information that is gathered by Google Analytics using the Google Analytics API. It supports all of the tracking mechanisms that Google Analytics supports such as external link tracking, download tracking, tracking without counting administrative users, and any other advanced tracking the user wishes to add. Google Analyticator works with a majority of themes as long as these themes provide the proper plugin hooks.

Google Analyticator was the first Google Analytics tracking plugin for WordPress. It is also now one of the most popular tracking plugins that can be used with WordPress. It is also now the first WordPress plugin using Google Analytics stats to display visitor information on the front-end in the form of a visitor counter.

Features

Google Analyticator supports the following features:

  • Standard Google Analytics tracking support
  • Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
  • External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
  • Download link tracking
  • Support for hiding Administrator visits without effecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
  • Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
  • Easily installable only requiring the user knows their UID
  • Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
  • Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Share your Google Latitude location

Google Latitude, a new feature for mobile and iGoogle that lets you share your location with your friends. Since the launch, a lot of you have asked “What if I want to share my location with people who are not my Latitude friends?” Today, we’re happy to release two applications that make that possible.

Google Talk location status (beta) automatically updates your Google Talk or Gmail chat status message with your Latitude location. With this application enabled, all of your chat buddies can see your most recent city-level location. The Google Public Location Badge lets you publish your Latitude location on your blog or website. You can choose to show just the city that you are in or you can have your device’s location detected automatically, using GPS, Wi-Fi, or cell tower ID, which provides a more specific location. To read more about these new features, visit the Google Mobile Blog.

If you’re already a Latitude user, give the new apps a try. If you don’t have a Google Latitude account, sign up and start sharing your location now. We take your privacy very seriously and you can read the privacy notice on the application pages for more information.

In the near future, we hope to offer a way to share your location in even more applications. If you have any suggestions or comments, please visit our Product Ideas page.