Wednesday, October 31, 2007

How To Survive the Google Pagerank Breakup

Google just broke up with you- after a yearlong pagerank 7 relationship. It's just temporary of course. You'll have her chasing you back with some of these search engine flirtation tips.

Go bold. Just as women love bold suitors, so do search engines. Start highlighting keywords on each page with the tag to increase search relevance. Search engines are attracted to words contained in the H1 and B tags. Just don't go wild- two bold words per page is enough.

Go Deeper. Having other sites drill deep into your web at various locations tells google that 'hey, this guy has varied useful content'. It's poor SEO strategy to acquire links just to link to the homepage. The search engines may ultimately discount those links

Go foreign. Why focus on North America? You can take your business to India, Pakistan, UK and Hongkong! Start creating pages for lucrative markets and submit to their local directories. This ensures multiple streams of revenue

Fire Up Newsletters. Provide articles to publishers like ezinearticles. The links breathe for many years in their archives and funnel backlinks to your site.

Go Bi. Image links are good, but text links are more appreciated. If your site is full of image links, have your webmaster place the text links first because that's what google looks for. Subsequent links are often discounted.

Multiple Partners. Create different domains on varying IPs that talk about similar subjects. The reason is that Google only lists one domain page per search result. Imagine if you owned ten domains that came up for the same search result? You'll be seducing more curious searchers. Another tip: search engine consulting firms recommend varying the keywords used on these domains just to minimize looking spammy

Article Exchanges. You've heard of reciprocal link exchanges. Text link purchases. One way backlink purchases. Try them, and it's like getting herpes on the net. Google blacklists you and your worth is downgraded. But article exchages are different. Whip up an article, upload to Ezinearcticles and before you know it- wham! Dozens of sites publish your article and bring fawning admirers to your door.

Shun Unvaried Anchor Text. If 1000 sites links to you with the appellation "Gimme Money", Google starts to squint and dig deeper, "Smells like automated filthy spam, methinks." Avoid the search engine ban by varying the anchor text. Dance under different names and you'll flirt more grandly with search engines.

Expose Your Glory With a Site map. Your visitors reach the honeypot more rapidly when you have a structured sitemap that links to every major page. Keep the map on a location easily accessible so you keep the action flowing. Google bots flirt with sitemaps too and often births detailed search results. So keep it search engine friendly.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

SEO or PPC - Choose the right option for your business web site marketing

When businesses start web site marketing or promotion, two main options help to achieve the goal, SEO (also referred as "organic optimization") and PPC (also referred as "inorganic optimization"). Selecting the best option of these two is the first mile stone of any Internet Marketing Campaign.

PPC (Pay Per Click):

Pay Per Click involves online advertising on web sites, search engines and their related advertising networks, by bidding highly searched and product relevant keywords and appropriate creating ads. These ads are called "sponsored links" or "sponsored ads", which generally appear to the right or on top of organic (natural) results of search engines. Advertiser needs to pay whenever user clicks on the ad in accordance with his bidding amount.PPC is the ideal option for highly funded adversting campaigns aiming to achieve visitors and targeted traffic within short duration, however involves more cost and risk involvement.

Edge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) over PPC :

* Guaranteed Clicks: Many Researches revealed that visitors in general prefer natural organic search links in comparison to PPC sponsored links.

* Long Term Traffic and ROI Benefit: Web site once ranked top in search engine's organic results brings steady, long term traffic and in return ROI in contrast to short term traffic and ROI based ppc campaign.

* Less Risk and Cost Involvement: "Click Fraud" is the most concerned, risky and costlier affair for any PPC Campaign. SEO, in comparison involves zero or less risk and cost involvement.

* More Keyword Targeting: PPC facilitates bidding and ranking for limited set of keywords. SEO offers no such limitations on keyword targeting and ranking

* More Exposure and Wider Space Promotion: PPC Campaign is confined to pay-per-click search engines and its advertising networks. SEO promotion gives more exposure and wider space with RSS, Blogs, Social Search, News Articles, in addition to Search Engine placements.

In general ,SEO has major gains in comparison to PPC. However PPC can be considered for short duration in combination with long term and result -oriented seo promotion strategy.

Source : seoarticles4u.com

Sunday, October 28, 2007

What do 16,000 people 'do' at Google?

I'm beginning to think that besides search advertising, hiring is the thing Google does best.

On Thursday, the company reported gains of 50 percent or so in quarterly profit and revenue from a year ago, beating analyst expectations. It wasn't a stellar quarter, but it was pretty darn good.

The notable thing was the hiring. The company added 2,130 workers to its roster, bringing the head count to 15,916. What do nearly 16,000 people do at a company that doesn't make widgets (at least in the hardware manufacturing sense of the word)?

That's an average of about 35 people showing up for their first day of work each business day during the past three months. Granted, that is in offices around the world, but still, that's impressive. By comparison, Yahoo has 13,600 employees, after hiring 1,200 during the past quarter. (Actually, when you think about it, that's even more crazy given the need for Yahoo to retrench right now.)

Those numbers may seem surprising given the fact that Google attributed last quarter's 3-cent earnings miss to overspending on hiring, and promised to curb that impulse. However, during the conference call with analysts Thursday afternoon, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said many of the people hired during the quarter had been given offers before the previous quarter had closed.

The fast pace of hiring at the search giant is the one concern Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, mentioned in an interview with CNET News.com after the Google earnings call.

"Half the company has been hired in the last 12 months. That's chaotic," he says. "The new employees find it difficult to figure out how to get things done. It's not a normal company."

I can only guess that the new hires are working on the much-anticipated "Google phone," which is probably going to be a Google operating system for mobile devices, and on the new copyright content filtering technology deployed at YouTube this week. They're also probably tasked with taking over the advertising world with the company's lucrative online automated ad platform.

"They have possibly the best core business in the history of the Internet," Rohan says. "That is supporting them as they attempt to find an Act II. I don't know if it will be media, display, mobile or what."

Source: news.com

'Google bowling' and negative SEO: All fair in love and war?

The term "Google bowling" has been floating around the Internet for a while now. The practice is one of many that can be put under the heading of negative SEO, and while I'm not a proponent of these methods, they are worth noting:

Google bowling: As Google attempted to curb link-popularity exploitation by penalizing Web sites that purchase link ads across the entire site, it also created the environment in which Google bowling came to be. As a form of negative SEO (search engine optimization), certain unscrupulous entities began buying sitewide links for competitor sites, thus causing them to incur the Google penalty. Simple, evil and a very real practice.

Spam in another's name: This form of negative SEO is even more simple. If spam gets Web sites in trouble with search engines, then creating spam on behalf of a competitor might lower their search engine results. In addition, a Web site's URL can be used for spamming in online forums, social-network sites and blog comments. It's hard to prove that the victim is innocent, and social-network sites might ban that Web site regardless. This can have a negative effect on the link neighborhood of a site.

Tattletaling: Did you buy links on other Web sites to improve your search engine rankings? Google doesn't like that at all. If your competitor finds out that you use paid links, he might tell Google and your rankings might drop! Of course, you can tell on your competitor, too.

Faux copyright complaint: If a search engine is notified that a copyright infringement exists (or might exist) on a Web site, then the search engine must remove the reported page from its index for 10 days. Snarky, but effective if someone wants a page out of the search engine results page (SERP) system for a spell.

Faux duplicate content: If someone creates duplicates of a competitor's Web pages, these duplicate pages will split rankings with those of the original site. Again, this isn't theory. This is something that is done in practice regularly.

To be clear, I am NOT promoting these tactics, and some of them will put you in legal hot water. But it is good to be aware of them so you can protect yourself against such practices, or at least identify these attacks when they are occurring. And, if someone is pulling one of these stunts on you--well, all's fair in love and war.

Source : news.com

Empty Google News


Imagine a day without any news headline. Well, that’s what’s happening to Google News today... it’s showing empty fields for all the topics, across various country versions (including the US one at news.google.com). Some test searches I tried didn’t yield any results either. People had been reporting problems since some days already, but this scope seems to be new.

Source: blogoscoped.com

Official Google Blog: Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Official Google Blog: Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Get your iGoogle in 42 languages

Earlier this week, iGoogle launched in 13 new languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 42 and the total number of country domains supported to over 70. For those of you who don't know, iGoogle is a personalized version of the Google homepage that lets you select the content that matters to you most from across the web and arrange it in a way that you find useful and fun. People rely on iGoogle to save time by putting all the information and services they need in one place. They also use it to discover new content through the iGoogle gadget directory.

With this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language, which is really exciting for us. We're particularly curious to see what iGoogle ends up looking like in these new languages. For example, who would have guessed that 'Tu Nombre en Japonés' (Your name in Japanese) would be among the top 20 gadgets in Chile and Spain? (Mine is Jえすしか, by the way.) Because users and developers ultimately decide what iGoogle will look like in each of these new domains, we can't be sure what will be popular, which is part of the fun.

If you're a developer who speaks one of the languages below, now is a great opportunity to get your cool gadget idea out to a fresh audience. For more information, visit our Gadget APIs page. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next 'Tu Nombre en Japonés.'

Here's a list of the new languages available:

* Arabic
* Bulgarian
* Catalan
* Croatian
* Icelandic
* Indonesian
* Latvian
* Lithuanian
* Malay
* Serbian
* Slovak
* Slovenian
* Tagalog

Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

China accused of rerouting search traffic to Baidu

Reports have surfaced that China is redirecting traffic from foreign search engines operated by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to homegrown Baidu.com.

According to various reports online, some online users in China attempting to access Google.com, Microsoft's Live.com and Yahoo.com search sites have been redirected to China-based Baidu.com.

Blog site TechCrunch reported that Chinese traffic to Google's blog search engine was being rerouted to Baidu. TechCrunch later published another article saying a similar situation was observed with the other two search giants.

Vivian Wong, a manager at CB Richard Ellis in Shanghai, said visits to the three search engines showed Baidu's home page instead.

Beijing-based David Feng wrote in his blog on Thursday that he was able to gain access to both Google and Yahoo, but not Microsoft's Live.com or Yahoo-owned search engine AltaVista.

However, Ori Elraviv, chief executive of Dragon Ports in Beijing, said he had no problems getting through to the sites. "I find such an occurrence really hard to believe. Blocking a service is one thing; diverting it to a competitor is a completely different story." Dragon Ports is a developer of mobile applications.

Google has, however, confirmed the traffic-rerouting episodes. In response to queries, Google sent similar statements to The Register and search engine blogger Danny Sullivan, noting: "While this is clearly unfortunate, we've seen this happen before and are confident that service will be restored to our users in the very near future."

China has been involved in previous allegations of Internet censorship, though the government has denied such claims.

Incidentally, Google sold its minority stake in Baidu last year, explaining that it was doing so to focus on building the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn.

Source: news.com

Google's PageRank Update Goes After Paid Links?

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Can't say that we were not warned about this. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over two weeks ago, and now it appears many sites are getting hit with a drop in PageRank.

Here is a list of some sites, including major publishers, who seem to have taken a hit overnight:

* http://www.washingtonpost.com ==> / PR7 to PR5
* http://www.forbes.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.suntimes.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.sfgate.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.statcounter.com/ ==> PR10 to PR6
* http://www.masternewmedia.org/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.autoblog.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.engadget.com/ ==> PR7 to PR5
* http://www.problogger.net/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.copyblogger.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.joystiq.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.tuaw.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.searchengineguide.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.johnchow.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ ==> PR6 to PR3
* http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4
* http://andybeard.eu/ ==> PR5 to PR3
* http://www.seroundtable.com/ ==> PR7 to PR4
* http://www.blogherald.com/ ==> PR6 to PR4

For more information please visit: searchengineland.com

Google October 2007 Page Rank Update

Looks like the toolbar PR updated today, with many sites losing lots of greenbars I have received message from friends in international and alerted me to it, since i have notice that some website PR went decrese to a 4, However, I’ve still got great rankings and traffic for things I track, so there’s no direct reflection there.

The toolbar data is months out of date, so the changes in SERP (if there were any) likely already happened weeks or months ago.

Seems like there is a PageRank update taking place now that seems to be impacting sites that sell links. Danny Sullivan wrote Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google over …

Let see, wait and watch for upcoming happenings.

Source: Topseo.org