Google Targets Spammy Queries, Bad Mobile Sites With New Ranking Updates

Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has announced that a new ranking update, one that targets spammy queries is now live. Separately, Google is warning that if you have a bad mobile website, your search rankings will soon be hurting.

New Ranking Update for Some Spammy Queries

The ranking update for spammy queries, which will impact 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent of queries in English, shouldn’t come as a surprise to most. This was one of the changes we were told by Cutts to expect from Google this summer. . Cutts specifically mentioned that the change would affect queries such as “payday loans” on Google.co.uk and pornographic queries.

The ranking update is a work in progress, Cutts noted on Twitter, adding that it’s a “a multifaceted rollout that will be happening over the next 1-2 months.”

Smartphone Rankings Changes

Bad mobile SEO will cost you. In a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google warns that “we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.”

Google called out two specific areas in their blog post – faulty redirects (“when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to an irrelevant page on the smartphone-optimized website”) and smartphone only errors (when “sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show an error page to smartphone users”).

Google’s advice on properly configuring your mobile site: “Try to test your site on as many different mobile devices and operating systems, or their emulators, as possible.”

In addition, just as site speed has played a part in Google’s web search ranking algorithm since 2010, you can expect site speed to have an impact on the rankings of mobile sites, Cuttsannounced at the SMX Advanced conference.

Original Source: Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search.
Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:


If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What's your experience in my industry?
• What's your experience in my country/city?
• What's your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.
If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue. Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
  

  "Dear google.com,
  I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

  Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
  
• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
  
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do. Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.
  
• You should never have to link to an SEO. Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
  
• Choose wisely. While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
  
• Be sure to understand where the money goes. While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
  
• What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
• What are some other things to look out for? There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
  
  • owns shadow domains
  • puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
  • offers to sell keywords in the address bar
  • doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
  • guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
  • operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
  • gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
  • has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
  
  Source:
  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
  

How to Detect (and Fix) Duplicate Content on Your Site

I estimate that about 80% of the websites I do an SEO audit for have some sort of duplicate content issue. And there’s nothing that hurts a website more than duplicate content. In fact, if you never want to rank well on Google, all you have to do is add duplicate content to your site.

The good news is that detecting duplicate content is very easy, and fixing it is sometimes even easier. In this post I’ll show you how to do it.

Step 1: Check for Duplicate Meta TagsEvery URL of your website should have a unique title and a unique meta description. Your page titles shouldn’t be over 60 characters and your meta descriptions shouldn’t be over 140 characters.

There’s a really cool tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider that will help you detect duplicate page titles and duplicate meta descriptions. It’s free for websites up to 500 pages URLs and if your website has more than 500 pages you can get the paid version. Run the tool on your site and then go to Page Titles and select Duplicate from the drop-down menu.

Once you know what pages have duplicate titles, all you have to do is fix them. Once you’re done with the page titles, do the same for the meta descriptions.

Step 2: Check for URL Canonicalization IssuesGoogle sees YourSite.com and www.YourSite.com as two different URLs. If you can access your website through both instead of having one redirect to the other, Google will see two URLs with the exact same content. The best practice is to have YourSite.com (without the “www”) redirect to www.YourSite.com (with the “www). If you want to see an example, type TheOutsourcingCompany.com into your browser and you’ll see how you get redirected to www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com.

You can set up this redirect from your .htaccess file. Warning: if you don’t know what you’re doing and mess up your .htaccess, your whole website could go down. Have an expert take care of this for you if you don’t feel confident you can do it yourself. If you want to give it a shot, there’s a great tutorial here.

Step 3: Check for Internal Duplicate ContentThere are various reasons websites have internal duplicate content. Some websites have print-friendly versions of their pages, or the same type of content in both HTML and PDF formats. A lot of ecommerce sites have really bad architectures and you can find the exact same content through searches, category pages, tags and the product pages themselves. Most ecommerce platforms are very bad for SEO off-the-shelf, but can be made SEO-friendly with some minor customization.

To detect internal duplicate content on your site go to one of your pages and copy some of its content. Here’s an example:

Now you’ll need to do a Google search using advanced search operators. It’ll look like this: site:yoursite.com “text you copied”. Make sure to put the text you took from your website between quotes. I did this for the example above and look at what I found:

There are several pages on this website that have the exact same content. There are three ways to fix this issue:

• If you have two versions of the same piece of content (such as web and PDF versions), just tell Google not to index the PDF version. Put all your PDFs in one folder and use the robots.txt file to tell Google not to index that folder. This is a good tutorial on how to create a robots.txt file.
• If there’s absolutely no reason to have two or more URLs with the same content, redirect all the duplicate URLs to the main one using 301 redirects. Here’s a tutorial on 301 redirects.
• If you have a legitimate reason to have multiple URLs with the same (or very similar) content, define a canonical URL. This is a way of telling Google “I know I have multiple URLs with the same content. I have a reason for it. This is the URL I want you to count.” This is perfect for when pages A, B and C are similar but you want to keep all three. Just tell Google that page A is your preferred choice and even though B and C won’t redirect to A, Google won’t think they’re duplicates. Here’s a tutorial from Google on setting up rel canonicals.

Step 4: Check for External Duplicate ContentTake that same search query you did in step 3 and add a dash at the beginning. It’ll look like this: -site:yoursite.com “text you copied”. This will show you all the duplicate content that is not on your site. This is what I found:

We can see that the wines this company is selling are also being sold by other companies using the exact same description. How do you fix that? Ideally, you want every page of your site to have unique content, but if you have an ecommerce site with tens of thousands of products, this might not be possible. In cases like this you need to have one goal: to make your website the best place where people can buy the products you sell. There are a lot of ways to do this, but think about it: if 10 companies sell the exact same product, what reason can you give people to buy it from you? Here are some ideas:

• You can be the cheapest option
• You can have a lot of great content, such as videos and infographics
• You can have a better-looking website that’s easy to use and provides a better overall shopping experience
• You can have more product reviews than your competitors, increasing the value of your site
• You can use social media to position your company as the go-to resource in your space. Establishing thought leadership and a strong brand goes a really long way.

OK, that’s it. Not too hard, right? Now it’s time to get to work and fix that duplicate content on your site. If you cannot do it by yourself then you can hire any SEO Company they will do it for you. If you have questions, post them in the comments section below and I’ll answer them for you.

Source: http://www.theoutsourcingcompany.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/how-to-detect-and-fix-duplicate-content-on-your-site

Update To Google Webmaster Tools – Download BackLinks By Date

Actually – QUITE a useful update to Google Webmaster tools went live a short moment ago



You can now DOWNLOAD your BACKLINKS BY DATE in your GWT panel – which makes identifying who’s linking to you a bit easier. It might also be useful if you are cleaning up your backlink profile, too.

It looks useful on first play about with – the latest Hobo links are below – and considering I’m not building links of any kind at the moment and havent done so for years (or even blogging much if you are paying attention) I’m apparently still picking up lots and lots of organic, sh*t links – as well as my negative seo attack links.

You can easily spot negative seo posts though, and who’s scraping and spamming Google with your url:
My last 55+ links I’ve earned have been organic spam links, apparently….. no wonder Google gives little weight to most of the links pointing at your site…



Chances are Google will pollute this long term to take the real benefit of this away as per usual – ie – by rediscovering backlinks already in your profile.

But – it is an interesting addition to Google Webmaster tools.

It would be nice to know if the page your link was on was nofollowed, or the link was nofollowed – that would make it even more useful.

But then we wouldn’t have to build our own tools, would we.

A better addition to the DISAVOW links over at Bing for the moment, at any rate.

Study: Stopping SEO Leads To 30% Drop In Top Rankings

A Cre8asite Forum thread has someone who conducted a small study where he claimed that those who stop maintaining their SEO campaigns saw a 30% drop in top rankings, while those who continue the campaign saw a 18% increase in top rankings.

The study was done with two groups of 10 clients. One group that continued to maintain their SEO and another group that stopped maintaining their SEO. So it was a really small sample and it was conducted by an SEO company - got that?

Here are the results:

SEO Rankings: June 2011-2012	Group A*	Group B**
Increase in #1 SEO rankings on Google	18%	-30%
Increase in Top 10 SEO rankings on Google	0%	-22%
Increase in Top 30 SEO rankings on Google	8.3%	-14%
Increase in Top 30 SEO rankings on Yahoo	15%	-2%
Increase in Top 30 SEO rankings on Bing	18%	5%

* Group A: Companies that continued SEO marketing on their websites after initial optimization

** Group B: Companies that discontinued SEO marketing on their websites after initial optimization

Would you agree that this is the case? You stop maintaining your SEO, you drop? What is maintaining your SEO really mean anyway?

SEO Proof Your Internal Links

There are a number of criteria by which websites are judged by search engines, One of these criteria is popularity. If search engines believe your site to be a popular and valuable source of information with regards to a particular search topic, they will feature you highly within their results list.

Take a look at the links to your homepage throughout your website. Does each of these links include the appendage index.html, such as http://domain.com/index.html ? 

If so, you are splitting your links. This is bad for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and that is bad for you.

When the homepage links on your website are appended with index.html it means that you’re splitting these links, and subsequent traffic from them, apart from the external links to your site. External links without the suffix index.html will go directly to your domain name, http://domain.com. Splitting your links means that you’re not doing your SEO practices any justice.

As already stated, one of the ways to earn a higher ranking within search engines is to cultivate popular links. The more popular and trusted a link, the higher it is likely to appear in relevant user searches. The problem with splitting links is that you’re dividing that popularity between two separate destinations, thus unlikely to reap the rewards that your SEO practices deserve.

Remove index.html, default.php or any other appendages from all of the links to homepage across you website, and instead link to your domain. That way all external and internal links will be alike and working toward the same endgame, which is propelling you up the search listings.

Top Bookmark Submission Sites April 2012

Hello Guy's, I found too many social bookmarking websites are not exist only. So I  review all site and posted in this blog. I Hope it will help you...Latest Social bookmarking site list - April 2012

http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://delicious.com/
http://digg.com/
http://www.bibsonomy.org/
http://www.folkd.com/
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://buddymarks.com
https://www.mywebdesktop.net
http://www.ezyspot.com
http://casthit.com/
blurpalicious.com/
bookmark-manager.com/
bookmax.net/
designfloat.com/
easybm.com/
favoor.com/
linkagogo.com/
mypip.com/
saveyourlinks.com/
saysaid.com/
google.com
http://www.social-bookmarking-site.com/
http://www.happybookmarks.org/
http://www.bizsugar.com/
http://socialbuzzs.info/
http://socialwebplus.info/
http://www.index4.in/
http://kannikar.com/
http://www.boomarking.com/
http://thoribuzz.info/
http://socialnetplus.info/
http://www.bookmark4you.com/
http://www.socialbookmarkssite.com/
http://www.video-bookmark.com/
http://yapod.com/
http://www.indofeed.com/
http://www.biotematur.com/
http://emusar.org/
http://raptower.com
http://www.shwack.info
http://www.confesen.com
http://www.sporta.biz
http://www.bookmarkingmediatrends.info/
http://www.bookmarkingnewsarticles.info/
http://www.bookmarkingnetworkingsite.info/
http://www.bookmakermirrorsite.info/
http://www.bookmarkingposter.info/
http://www.listsocialbookmarks.com/
http://www.bookmarkingmediafiles.info
http://www.easybookmarkingservice.info/
http://www.bookmarkingwebsiteslist.info/
http://www.socialbookmarkingsitelistsz.com/
http://www.socialbookmarkingsiteslists.com/
http://www.socialbookmarklist.com/
http://www.listofsocialbookmarks.com/
http://www.socialbookmarkinglists.com/
http://www.socialnetworkingservicez.com/
http://www.listsocialbookmarks.com/
http://www.zabox.net
http://www.diigz.com/
http://www.fark.com/
http://www.connotea.org
http://www.blinklist.com/
http://www.dropjack.com/
http://www.farkinda.com/
http://www.givealink.org/main/show
http://www.jumptags.com/
http://www.newsmeback.com/
http://www.oneview.com/
http://www.pusha.se/
http://bookmarkbay.com/
http://www.social-bookmarking.net/
http://chime.in
http://designbump.com/
http://fwisp.com/
http://www.hotbmark.com/
http://www.scoopit.co.nz/
http://svejo.net
http://tagza.com/
http://www.tipd.com/
http://youmob.com/default.aspx
http://www.bloggingcanadians.ca/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://www.wists.com/
https://friendfeed.com
http://buzzbookmarks.info/
http://www.ziki.com.au/
http://www.bestofindya.com
http://www.bukmark.net/


Have a Nice Day!