SEO Expert

Digital Marketing - latest update

2021-01-05T10:34:00.003+05:30

1. Google Search to display short video results from Instagram and TikTok. Read More

2. Bing Image Search Tests Related Content Feature & Icon. Read More

3. Google People Also Ask Tests Question Mark Icons. Read More

4. Google Search Results Show Practice Problems For Studying. Read More

5. Google tests displaying services in the local pack. Read More

6. Facebook Expands Engagement Alerts for Groups, Adds New Alert Options. Read More

7. Snapchat Looks to Establish Connection to Emerging Indian Market Through Investment in ShareChat. Read More

8. Twitter Acquires Podcast Listening App Breaker to Expand its Audio Focus. Read More

Digital Marketing Update - Latest update

2020-12-30T09:38:00.001+05:30

YouTube Adds New 'Shorts' Shortcut Button to User Home Screens in India. Read More
Google Search Console brings back the request indexing tool. Read More
Google confirms passage indexing is not yet live. Read More
Bing Webmaster Tools adds Microsoft Clarity integration. Read More
Google Testing New People Also Search For Location. Read More
Google Search Streamed 3D Content Including Cars. Read More
Google Tests Square & Multicolored Search Result Category Buttons. Read More

Digital Marketing Update - New Things in the Digital Industry you need to know!

2020-12-16T10:59:00.002+05:30

Recently we have experienced that Google Services went off for 45 min worldwide, But you know it's Google fixed the issues in no time. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc always coming up with new functionality to engage the end-users & bring new opportunities to the digital marketer to reach out to the relevant audience. Here comes the first update for you!

Google Search New Look For Question & Answers Carousel, Combines Multiple Sites. Read Here
Google Web Stories ads now available via Display Network. Read Here
Twitter to let users share tweets as stickers on Snapchat stories. Read Here
Facebook's Testing an Instagram Content Calendar in its Creator Studio Tool. Read Here
Instagram Tests Adding Timers to Stories to Boost Engagement. Read Here
WhatsApp Brings New ‘Add to Cart’ Button to Enhance Shopping Experience. Read Here
Shopping is coming to Instagram Reels globally, turning the whole app into a catalog. Read Here
Facebook's Looking to Take on Cameo with a New Celebrity Streaming Option. Read Here
LinkedIn Adds New 'Products' Tab on Company Pages to Highlight Specific Products. Read Here
Facebook Adds New Monetization Tools for Gaming Streamers. Read Here
YouTube Shares New Insights into Emerging Video Trends. Read Here

Do write your experience with the blog on gsm2610@gmail.com.

Get all latest updates about the Digital Marketing Platforms.

2020-12-16T10:44:00.003+05:30

I have created this blog with all basic & technical information that helps new digital marketers, Now the tons of information available in Google, but new digital marketer has to browse a number of websites to get relevant & authentic information.

Now In this series, I have come up with the advanced level information that one should know. Hoping this digital marketing information with keep you update & help in enhancing the knowledge. My aim to spread important information & make digital marketers aware of the platform they are using for digital marketing activities.

We all know the platform Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin &, etc, work on these platforms on daily basis to improve your SEO & Social Media efforts. But sometimes the process becomes monotonous & the outcomes too. To break the dead loop we should keep upgrade ourselves with platform expertise, market knowledge & new ideas to market our products/ services,

This is the one simple & small initiative for entry-level & 2 - 3 years of experienced digital marketers, Experts are always welcome to discuss the things. Stay tuned to this blog, I am coming with the exciting & latest information about digital marketing platforms.

Admin

What is hCard and how it works?

2013-06-07T19:51:00.002+05:30

hCard is a microformat for publishing the contact details (which might be no more than the name) of people, companies, organizations, and places, in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, or arbitrary XML.[1] The hCard microformat does this using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC 2426) properties and values, identified using HTML classes and rel attributes.

Here is hCard Creator.

Example [edit]

Consider the HTML:
<ul>
<li>Joe Doe</li>
<li>Jo</li>
<li>The Example Company</li>
<li>604-555-1234</li>
<li><a href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a></li>
</ul>
With microformat markup, that becomes:
<link rel="profile" href="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard">
...
</head>
...
<ul class="vcard">
<li class="fn">Joe Doe</li>
<li class="nickname">Jo</li>
<li class="org">The Example Company</li>
<li class="tel">604-555-1234</li>
<li><a class="url" href="http://example.com/">http://example.com/</a></li>
</ul>
Here the properties fn,[5] org (organization), tel (telephone number) and url (web address) have been identified using specific class names; and the whole thing is wrapped in class="vcard" which indicate that the other classes form an hcard, and are not just coincidentally named. If the hCard is for an organization or venue, the fn and org classes are used on the same element, as in <span class="fn org">Wikipedia</span> or <span class="fn org">Wembley Stadium</span>. Other, optional, hCard classes also exist.
It is now possible for software, for example browser plug-ins, to extract the information, and transfer it to other applications, such as an address book.
Geo and adr [edit]

The Geo microformat is a part of the hCard specification, and is often used to include the coordinates of a location within an hCard.
The adr part of hCard can also be used as a stand-alone microformat.
Live example [edit]

Here are the Wikimedia Foundation's contact details as of 2010-10-28, as a live hCard:
Wikimedia Foundation Inc.
149 New Montgomery Street, 3rd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
USA
Phone: +1-415-839-6885
Email: info@wikimedia.org
Fax: +1-415-882-0495
The mark-up (wrapped for clarity) used is:
<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn org">Wikimedia Foundation Inc.</div>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">149 New Montgomery Street, 3rd Floor</div>
<div> <span class="locality">San Francisco</span>, <abbr class="region" title="California">CA</abbr> <span class="postal-code">94105</span></div>
<div class="country-name">USA</div>
</div>
<div>Phone: <span class="tel">+1-415-839-6885</span></div>
<div>Email: <span class="email">info@wikimedia.org</span></div>
<div>
<span class="tel"><span class="type">Fax</span>:
<span class="value">+1-415-882-0495</span></span>
</div>
</div>
Note that, in this example, the fn and org properties are combined on one element, indicating that this is the hCard for an organization, not a person.
Other attributes [edit]

Other commonly used hCard attributes include
bday - a person's birth date
email
honorific-prefix
honorific-suffix
label - for non-granular addresses
logo
nickname
note - free text
photo
post-office-box

Source
- wikipedia

Learn about the Canonical Link Element

2013-06-07T19:41:00.001+05:30

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:

That tells search engines that the preferred location of this url (the “canonical” location, in search engine speak) is http://example.com/page.html instead of http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 .

I also did a three-minute video with WebProNews after the announcement to describe the tag, and you can watch the canonical link element video for another way to learn about it. Watching the video is the easiest way to learn about this new element quickly.

The search engines have also posted about this new open standard. You can read a blog post or help center documentation from Google, Yahoo’s blog post, or Microsoft’s blog post.

Also exciting is that Joost de Valk has already produced several plug-ins. Joost made a canonical plug-in for WordPress, a plugin for e-commerce software package Magento, and also a plug-in for Drupal. I’d expect people to make plug-ins for other software packages pretty soon, or modify the software to use this link element in the core software.

Thanks to the folks at Yahoo (e.g. Priyank Garg and others) and Microsoft (e.g. Nathan Buggia and others) who built consensus to support this open standard. On the Google side, Joachim Kupke did all the implementation and indexing work to make this happen; thanks for the heavy lifting on this, Joachim. I want to send a special shout-out to Greg Grothaus as well. Although people had discussed similar ideas in the past, Greg was a catalyst at Google and his proposal really got the ball rolling on this idea; read more about it on his blog.

By: Google Blogs

What’s “webspam,” as Google calls it, or search spam? Pages that try to gain better rankings through things like:

2012-07-31T12:56:00.002+05:30

Keyword stuffing
Link schemes
Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages
Purposeful duplicate content

Keyword stuffing

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

Link schemes

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:
Links intended to manipulate PageRank
Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the

question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page's visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest.

Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

Cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages

Cloaking

What is cloaking?

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user-agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:
Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.

Serving different content to search engines than to users.
If your site contains elements that aren't crawlable by search engines (such as rich media files other than Flash, JavaScript, or images), you shouldn't provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:
Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.

Provide the textual contents of JavaScript in a noscript tag.
Ensure that you provide the same content in both elements (for instance, provide the same text in the JavaScript as in the noscript tag). Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site.

Sneaky JavaScript redirects

When Googlebot indexes a page containing JavaScript, it will index that page but it may not follow or index any links hidden in the JavaScript itself. Use of JavaScript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of JavaScript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in JavaScript than in a noscript tag violates our Webmaster Guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the JavaScript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the Webmaster Guidelines to embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in JavaScript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.

Note that placement of links within JavaScript is alone not deceptive. When examining JavaScript on your site to ensure your site adheres to our guidelines, consider the intent.
Keep in mind that since search engines generally can't access the contents of JavaScript, legitimate links within JavaScript will likely be inaccessible to them (as well as to visitors without Javascript-enabled browsers). You might instead keep links outside of JavaScript or replicate them in a noscript tag.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

Google's aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practice, including removing these sites from the Google index.

If your site has been removed from our search results, review our Webmaster Guidelines for more information. Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices

Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
Printer-only versions of web pages

If your site contains multiple pages with largely identical content, there are a number of ways you can indicate your preferred URL to Google. (This is called "canonicalization".) More information about canonicalization.

However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.

There are some steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues, and ensure that visitors see the content you want them to.
Use 301s: If you've restructured your site, use 301

redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)

Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent.

For example, don't link to http://www.example.com

/page/ and http://www.example.com/page andhttp://www.example.com/page/index.htm.

Use top-level domains:

To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know thathttp://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance,

than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.

Syndicate carefully:

If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.

Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don't publish pages for which you don't yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.

Understand your content management system: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.

Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Google does not recommend blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can't crawl pages with duplicate content, they can't automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can alsoadjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.

However, if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results, review your site carefully. If your site has been removed from our search results, review our Webmaster Guidelines for more information. Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

In rare situations, our algorithm may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission. If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

What is a Blogroll?

2012-05-03T10:52:00.004+05:30

How Bloggers Use Blogrolls to Boost Traffic to Their Blogs

A blogroll is a list of links to blogs that the blogger likes. A blogroll is usually included in the blog's sidebar. Some bloggers divide their blogrolls into categories. For example, a blogger who writes about cars could divide his blogroll up into categories for links to other blogs he writes, other blogs about cars and other blogs he likes about unrelated topics. The blogroll can be set up based on each blogger's personal preferences, and it can be updated at any time.

Blogroll Etiquette

It's an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that if a blogger puts a link to your blog in his or her blogroll, you should reciprocate and add that blog's link in your own blogroll. Of course, each blogger approaches this with their own blogging goals in mind. Sometimes you may not like a blog that links to you through its blogroll. There are many reasons why you may decide not to reciprocate a blogroll link, but it's good blogging etiquette to at least review each blog that links to you through its blogroll to determine if you'd like to add that blog to your own blogroll or not.

Blogrolls as Blog Traffic Boosters

Blogrolls are great traffic driving tools. With each blogroll that your blog is listed on comes the possibility that readers of that blog will click on your link and visit your blog. Blogrolls equate to publicity and exposure across the blogosphere. Additionally, blogs with many incoming links (particularly those from high quality blogs as rated byGoogle page rank or Technorati authority), are usually ranked higher by search engines, which can bring additional traffic to your blog.

By:

Susan Gunelius,

About.com Guide

Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm

2012-04-27T12:52:00.002+05:30

Do you shove lots of ads at the top of your web pages? Think again. Tired of doing a Google search and landing on these types of pages? Rejoice. Google has announced that it will penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads.

Top Heavy With Ads? Look Out!

The change — called the “page layout algorithm” — takes direct aim at any site with pages where content is buried under tons of ads.
From Google’s post on its Inside Search blog today:

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.
So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.
Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Google also posted the same information to its Google Webmaster Central blog.
Sites using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads are not impacted by this. It only applies to static ads in fixed positions on pages themselves, Google told me.

How Much Is Too Much?

How can you tell if you’ve got too many ads above-the-fold? When I talked with the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, he said that Google wasn’t going to provide any type of official tools similar to how it provides tools to tell if your site is too slow (site speed is another ranking signal).
Instead, Cutts told me that Google is encouraging people to make use of its Google Browser Size tool or similar tools to understand how much of a page’s content (as opposed to ads) is visible at first glance to visitors under various screen resolutions.
But how far down the page is too far? That’s left to the publisher to decide for themselves. However, the blog post stresses the change should only hit pages with an abnormally large number of ads above-the-fold, compared to the web as a whole:

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content.
This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.
This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

Impacts Less Than 1% Of Searches

Clearly, you’re in trouble if you have little-to-no content showing above the fold for commonly-used screen resolutions. You’ll know you’re in trouble shortly, because the change is now going into effect. If you suddenly see a drop in traffic today, and you’re heavy on the ads, chances are you’ve been hit by the new algorithm.
For those ready to panic, Cutts told me the change will impact less than 1% of Google’s searches globally, which today’s post also stresses.

Fixed Your Ads? Penalty Doesn’t Immediately Lift

What happens if you’re hit? Make changes, then wait a few weeks.
Similar to how last year’s Panda Update works, Google is examining sites it finds and effectively tagging them as being too ad-heavy or not. If you’re tagged that way, you get a ranking decrease attached to your entire site (not just particular pages) as part of today’s launch.
If you reduce ads above-the-fold, the penalty doesn’t instantly disappear. Instead, Google will make note of it when it next visits your site. But it can take several weeks until Google’s “push” or “update” until the new changes it has found are integrated into its overall ranking system, effectively removing penalties from sites that have changed and adding them to new ones that have been caught.
Google’s post explains this more:

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes.
How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content.
On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Our Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update article explains the situation with Panda, and how it took time between when publishers made changes to remove “thin” content to when they were restored to Google’s good graces. That process is just as applicable to today’s change, even though Panda itself now has much less flux.

Meanwhile, Google AdSense Pushes Ads

Ironically, on the same day that Google’s web search team announced this change, I received this message from Google’s AdSense team encouraging me to put more ads on my site:

This was in relation to my personal blog, Daggle. The image in the email suggests that Google thinks content pretty much should be surrounded by ads.

Of course, if you watch the video that Google refers me (and others) to in the email, it promotes careful placement, that user experience be considered and, at one point, shows a page top-heavy with ads as something that shouldn’t be done.

Still, it’s not hard to easily find sites using Google’s own AdSense ads that are definitely pushing content down as far down on their pages as they can or trying to hide it. Those pages, AdSense or not, are subject to the new rules, Cutts said.

Pages Ad-Heavy, But Not Top-Heavy With Ads, May Escape

As a searcher, I’m happy with the change. But it might not be perfect. For example, here’s something I tweeted about last year:

Yes, that’s my finger being used as an arrow. I was annoyed that to find the actual download link I was after was surrounded by AdSense-powered ads telling me to download other stuff.

This particular site was heavily used by kids who might easily click on an ad by mistake. That’s potentially bad ROI for those advertisers. Heck, as net-savvy adult, I found it a challenge.

But the problem here wasn’t that the content was pushed “below the fold” by ads. It was that the ratio of ads was so high in relation to the content (a single link), plus the misleading nature of the ads around the content.

Are Google’s Own Search Results Top Heavy?

Another issue is that ads on Google’s own search results pages push the “content” — the unpaid editorial listings — down toward the bottom of the page. For example, here’s exactly what’s visible on my MacBook Pro’s 1680×1050 screen:

(Side note, that yellow color around the ads in the screenshot? It’s much darker in the screenshot than what I see with my eyes. In reality, the color is so washed-out that it might as well be invisible. That’s something some have felt has been deliberately engineered by Google to make ads less noticeable as ads).

The blue box surrounds the content, the search listings that lead you to actual merchants selling trash cans, in this example. Some may argue that the Google shopping results box is further pushing down the “real content” of listings that lead out of Google. But the shopping results themselves do lead you to external merchants, so I consider them to be content.

The example above is pretty extreme, showing the maximum of three ads that Google will ever show above its search results (with a key exception, below). Even then, there’s content visible, with it making up around half the page or more, if you include the Related Searches area as content.

My laptop’s screen resolution is pretty high, of course. Others would see less (Google’s Browser Size tool doesn’t work to measure its own search results pages). But you can expect Google will take “do as I say, not as I do” criticism on this issue.

Indeed, I shared this story initially with the main details, then started working on this section. After that was done, I could see this type of criticism already happening, both in the comments or over on my Google+ post and Facebook post about the change.

Here’s a screenshot that Daniel Weadley shared in my Google+ post about what he sees on his netbook:

In this example, Google’s doing a rare display of four ads. That’s because it’s showing the maximum of three regular ads it will show with a special Comparison Ads unit on top of those. And that will just add fuel to criticisms that if Google is taking aim at pages top-heavy with ads, it might need to also look closer to home.

NOTE: About three hours after I wrote this, Google clearly saw the criticisms about ads on its own search results pages and sent this statement:

This is a site-based algorithm that looks at all the pages across an entire site in aggregate. Although it’s possible to find a few searches on Google that trigger many ads, it’s vastly more common to have no ads or few ads on a page.
Again, this algorithm change is designed to demote sites that make it difficult for a user to get to the content and offer a bad user experience.
Having an ad above-the-fold doesn’t imply that you’re affected by this change. It’s that excessive behavior that we’re working to avoid for our users.

Algorithms? Signals?

Does all this talk about ranking signals and algorithms have you confused? Our video below explains briefly how a search engine’s algorithm works to rank web pages:

Also see our Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, which explains some of the other ranking signals that Google uses in its algorithm:

Name The Update & More Info

Today’s change is a new, significant ranking factor for our table, one we’ll add in a future update, probably as Va, for “Violation, Ad-Heavy site.”

Often when Google rolls out new algorithms, it gives them names. Last year’s Panda Update was a classic example of this. But Google’s not given one to this update (I did ask). It’s just being called the “page layout algorithm.”

Boring. Unhelpful for easy reference. If you’d like to brainstorm a name, visit our posts on Google+ and on Facebook, where we’re asking for ideas.

Now for the self-interested closing. You can bet this will be a big topic of discussion at our upcoming SMX West search marketing conference at the end of next month, especially on the Ask The Search Engines panel. So check out our full agenda and consider attending.

Postscript: Some have been asking in the comments about how Google knows what an ad is. I asked, and here’s what Google said:

We have a variety of signals that algorithmically determine what type of ad or content appears above the fold, but no further details to share. It is completely algorithmic in its detection–we don’t use any sort of hard-coded list of ad providers.

The Penguin Update: Google’s Webspam Algorithm Gets Official Name

2012-04-27T12:22:00.000+05:30

Move over Panda, there’s a new Google update in town: Penguin. That’s the official name Google has given to the webspam algorithm that it released on Tuesday.

What’s An Update?

For those unfamiliar with Google updates, I’d recommend reading my Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update post from last year. It explains how Google has a variety of algorithms used to rank pages.
Google periodically changes these algorithms. When this happens, that’s known as an “update,” which in turn has an impact on the search results we get. Sometimes the updates have a big impact; sometimes they’re hardly noticed.

Who Names Updates?

Google also periodically creates new algorithms. When this happens, sometimes they’re given names by Google itself, as with the Vince update in 2009. If Google doesn’t give a name, sometimes others such as Webmaster World may name them, as with the Mayday update in 2010.
With Penguin, history is repeating itself, where Google is belatedly granting a name to an update after-the-fact. The same thing happened with Panda last year.
When the Panda Update was first launched in February 2011, Google didn’t initially release the name it was using internally. I knew it, but I wasn’t allowed say what it was. Without an official name, I gave it an unofficial one of “Farmer,” since one of the reasons behind the update was to combat low-quality content that was often seen associated with content farms.
In the end, I suspect Google didn’t want the update to sound like it was especially aimed at content farms, so it eventually let the “Panda” name go public, in a Steven Levy interview for Wired about the update about a week after it launched. Panda took its name from one of the key engineers involved.

Say Hello To Penguin

Since Panda, Google’s been avoiding names. The new algorithm in January designed to penalize pages with too many ads above the fold was called the “page layout algorithm.” When Penguin rolled out earlier this week, it was called the “webspam algorithm update.”
Without a name for the new webspam algorithm, Search Engine Land was asking people for their own ideas at Google+ and Facebook, with the final vote making “Titanic” the leading candidate. A last check with Google got it to release its own official name of “Penguin.”

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February

2012-03-02T15:42:00.001+05:30

This month we have many improvements to celebrate. With 40 changes reported, that marks a new record for our monthly series on search quality. Most of the updates rolled out earlier this month, and a handful are actually rolling out today and tomorrow. We continue to improve many of our systems, including related searches, sitelinks, autocomplete, UI elements, indexing, synonyms, SafeSearch and more. Each individual change is subtle and important, and over time they add up to a radically improved search engine.

Here’s the list for February:

More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.
Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.
Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.
More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.
More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].
More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.
Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.
Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.
“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.
Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.
Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.
Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.
Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.
Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.
Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.
Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.
Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.
International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).
Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an "IME", or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you've visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.
Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.
Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.
Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.
Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.
Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.
Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.
Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.
Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

And here are a few more changes we’ve already blogged about separately:

Posted by Amit Singhal, Senior VP and Google Fellow

Google Algorithm Updates Announced: Panda Gets More Sensitive

2012-03-02T15:05:00.003+05:30

Will Panda now be even pickier about your content?

I wasn’t expecting this to come until early March, since the month isn’t even over yet, but Google has gone ahead and released its monthly list of updates: 40 changes for February.

While we’ll take a deeper look into the list soon, it’s worth noting right off the bat that there is a Panda update listed. Late last week, in light of Panda’s one-year anniverary, I asked Google if the Panda adjustment from January’s list had been the most recent adjustment to Panda. The response I received from a spokesperson was:

“We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines. We also released a minor update to refresh the data for Panda.”

This was basically what the company said in January. Now, in today’s list for February, Google says:

“This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.”

So between January’s and February’s Panda news, it sounds like Panda is more ingrained into how Google indexes the web than ever before, and may even be pickier about quality.

Here’s the full list in Google’s words:

More coverage for related searches. [launch codename “Fuzhou”] This launch brings in a new data source to help generate the “Searches related to” section, increasing coverage significantly so the feature will appear for more queries. This section contains search queries that can help you refine what you’re searching for.

Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “Snippy”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] This improvement adjusts a signal we use to try and identify duplicate snippets. We were applying a categorizer that wasn’t performing well for our expanded sitelinks, so we’ve stopped applying the categorizer in those cases. The result is more relevant sitelinks.

Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets forexpanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.
Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.

“Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

Improved detection for SafeSearch in Image Search. [launch codename "Michandro", project codename “SafeSearch”] This change improves our signals for detecting adult content in Image Search, aligning the signals more closely with the signals we use for our other search results.

Interval based history tracking for indexing. [project codename “Intervals”] This improvement changes the signals we use in document tracking algorithms.
Improvements to foreign language synonyms. [launch codename “floating context synonyms”, project codename “Synonyms”] This change applies an improvement we previously launched for English to all other languages. The net impact is that you’ll more often find relevant pages that include synonyms for your query terms.

Disabling two old fresh query classifiers. [launch codename “Mango”, project codename “Freshness”] As search evolves and new signals and classifiers are applied to rank search results, sometimes old algorithms get outdated. This improvement disables two old classifiers related to query freshness.
More organized search results for Google Korea. [launch codename “smoothieking”, project codename “Sokoban4”] This significant improvement to search in Korea better organizes the search results into sections for news, blogs and homepages.

Fresher images. [launch codename “tumeric”] We’ve adjusted our signals for surfacing fresh images. Now we can more often surface fresh images when they appear on the web.

Update to the Google bar. [project codename “Kennedy”] We continue to iterate in our efforts to deliver a beautifully simple experience across Google products, and as part of that this month we made further adjustments to the Google bar. The biggest change is that we’ve replaced the drop-down Google menu in the November redesign with a consistent and expanded set of links running across the top of the page.

Adding three new languages to classifier related to error pages. [launch codename "PNI", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser but the text only contain error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

Improvements to travel-related searches. [launch codename “nesehorn”] We’ve made improvements to triggering for a variety of flight-related search queries. These changes improve the user experience for our Flight Search feature with users getting more accurate flight results.

Data refresh for related searches signal. [launch codename “Chicago”, project codename “Related Search”] One of the many signals we look at to generate the “Searches related to” section is the queries users type in succession. If users very often search for [apple] right after [banana], that’s a sign the two might be related. This update refreshes the model we use to generate these refinements, leading to more relevant queries to try.

International launch of shopping rich snippets. [project codename “rich snippets”]Shopping rich snippets help you more quickly identify which sites are likely to have the most relevant product for your needs, highlighting product prices, availability, ratings and review counts. This month we expanded shopping rich snippets globally (they were previously only available in the US, Japan and Germany).

Improvements to Korean spelling. This launch improves spelling corrections when the user performs a Korean query in the wrong keyboard mode (also known as an “IME”, or input method editor). Specifically, this change helps users who mistakenly enter Hangul queries in Latin mode or vice-versa.
Improvements to freshness. [launch codename “iotfreshweb”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.

Web History in 20 new countries. With Web History, you can browse and search over your search history and webpages you’ve visited. You will also get personalized search results that are more relevant to you, based on what you’ve searched for and which sites you’ve visited in the past. In order to deliver more relevant and personalized search results, we’ve launched Web History in Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Morocco, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Estonia, Kuwait, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Nigeria, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegowina, Azerbaijan, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Moldova, and Ghana. Web History is turned on only for people who have a Google Account and previously enabled Web History.

Improved snippets for video channels. Some search results are links to channels with many different videos, whether on mtv.com, Hulu or YouTube. We’ve had a feature for a while now that displays snippets for these results including direct links to the videos in the channel, and this improvement increases quality and expands coverage of these rich “decorated” snippets. We’ve also made some improvements to our backends used to generate the snippets.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

Improvements to English spell correction. [launch codename “Kamehameha”] This change improves spelling correction quality in English, especially for rare queries, by making one of our scoring functions more accurate.

Improvements to coverage of News Universal. [launch codename “final destination”] We’ve fixed a bug that caused News Universal results not to appear in cases when our testing indicates they’d be very useful.

Consolidation of signals for spiking topics. [launch codename “news deserving score”, project codename “Freshness”] We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
Better triggering for Turkish weather search feature. [launch codename “hava”] We’ve tuned the signals we use to decide when to present Turkish users with the weather search feature. The result is that we’re able to provide our users with the weather forecast right on the results page with more frequency and accuracy.

Visual refresh to account settings page. We completed a visual refresh of the account settings page, making the page more consistent with the rest of our constantly evolving design.

Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.

Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

SafeSearch update. We have updated how we deal with adult content, making it more accurate and robust. Now, irrelevant adult content is less likely to show up for many queries.

Spam update. In the process of investigating some potential spam, we found and fixed some weaknesses in our spam protections.
Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.

More analysis to come.

By:
By Chris Crum

Facebook readying new premium ads?

2012-02-27T11:18:00.001+05:30

Leaked document shows ad upgrade presentation apparently targeting the friends of advertisers' fans.

A snapshot of the leaked advertiser materials.

(Credit: GigaOm)

Facebook is expected to launch an upgrade next week to its premium ads program that will target the friends of advertisers' fans.

The new ads, which will launch February 29, will be created from content posted organically to pages, according to a purportedly leaked document (see below) obtained by GigaOm.

"Anything you can post to on your page, you can turn into an ad," the document says. "Upgraded ads can be targeted to anyone you want."

When the users seeing the ad are friends with fans of the page, Facebook will automatically expand the ad and provide social context about the friends. The ads will also feature an expanded interface allowing fans to comment on the post directly from the ad.

The social network promises advertisers that the new ads will be in a larger format, boosting engagement by 40 percent and increasing retention by 80 percent. Fan rates are also expected to increase 16 percent, as well as purchase intent, according to the documents, which appear to be a presentation prepared for Facebook advertisers.

The new premium ad types can feature a photo, video, question, status, event, or link. They will replace "classic" ad options such as Premium Like (Photo and Video), Pemium Event, Video Comment, and Premium Poll (Photo and Video), which will be phased out on February 29. Marketplace ads on the right column will not be affected.

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook Premium Ads Overview

Facebook Premium Ads Overview
by Steven Musil February 21, 2012 10:20 PM PST

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57382395-93/facebook-readying-new-premium-ads/#ixzz1nYgZv6IQ

Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacts 35% Of Searches - 2012

2012-01-04T12:05:00.002+05:30

Today, Google announced a change to its search algorithm that the company says will impact 35% of Web searches. The change builds on top of its previous “Caffeine” update in order to deliver more up-to-date and relevant search results, specifically those in areas where freshness matters. This includes things like recent events, hot topics, current reviews and breaking news items.

Google says that the new algorithm knows that different types of searches have different freshness needs, and weighs them accordingly. For example, a search for a favorite recipe posted a few years ago may still be popular enough to rank highly, but searches for an unfolding news story or the latest review of the iPhone 4S should bring the newer, fresher content first, followed by older results.

For searches about recent events and news, Google may now show search results towards the top of the page that are only minutes old, the company says. For regularly occurring events, like the Presidential election, the Oscars, a football game, company earnings, etc., Google knows that you’re likely interested in the most recent event, even if you don’t specify keywords indicating that.

That means a search for “Apple earnings” won’t (in theory) require you to also type in “Q4 2011″ in order to see the latest information. It will be implied that you meant this latest quarter, without the need for the extra text. Of course, Google was already ranking news items and stock symbols at the top of the page when users performed financial-related searches or searches for current information, but this algorithm change has an impact on the organic search results, too, not those from the verticals (search, finance, images, etc.) which have been integrated into Google’s Universal search.

For items that see regular updates, like consumer electronics reviews, reviews of a particular kind of car and more, Google will also feature the most current and up-to-date information above the rest.

This “freshness update,” is an extension of what Google begin last year with Caffeine, an under-the-hood improvement that, among other things, helped Google index content quicker, so results were more realtime. This year, Google also brought out its Panda update, which was meant to decrease the rankings of so-called “content farms” – SEO-optimized entities that critics said filled Google with low-quality results.

Now, it’s clear that Google understands that the most relevant search result is more often the one that’s relevant now – the one that’s bringing you new information. The update’s impact on Google Search is fairly substantial, with Google claiming that roughly 35% of search results will be affected by the changes.

Google used to have a search vertical specifically for the most recent updates at www.google.com/realtime, where it was indexing Twitter updates. However, when the contract with Twitter expired, Google shuttered the site (it now redirects to the Google homepage). Google said at the time that it planned to re-open the site with Google+ search results alongside other realtime sources of information. But with the new Google search update, a specific vertical for realtime information feels less necessary.
By,

Sarah Perez

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Google Adwords New Algorithm!

2011-11-06T00:10:00.002+05:30

Google recently rolled out changes to its AdWords algorithms after successfully tested them on its users in Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

To be successful in online marketing, you have to look beyond this immediate response and understand what Google is trying to achieve here. Google has always ranked ads according to two criteria: the “Quality Score” of what you’re offering and the price you’re prepared to pay. The Quality Score is, itself, made up of three factors – the historical performance of the ad (primarily, what percentage of searchers clicked it); the relevance of the ad text to the search term; and, finally, the quality of the landing page.

The changes Google is introducing have the effect of increasing the importance of the landing page in the Quality Score. Google’s explanation is that too many searchers are being sent to pages that aren’t entirely relevant to their search. They get frustrated and leave the site, which is bad news for both the advertiser and Google.

Your Google Adwords Control Panel will tell you what your Quality Score is and specifically how your landing page rates.

The peak shopping period is upon us and, for most online shops, the effectiveness of their Google AdWords campaigns can make the difference between a fruitful festive season and a bleak new year.

If you’re finding that your ad is appearing lower than it previously was, now is the time to check whether your Quality Score has dropped and, if it does, go through Google’s landing page guidelines.

www.adwordsbuzz.com

List of Indian B-2-B Portals!!!

2011-10-20T11:07:00.000+05:30

As all of you know always i have shared a very important and rare information with you. Today i am sharing List of Indian B-2-B Portals, That may help you to grow your business in Indian market & you will reach to the exact targeted audience. Keep reading this blog i will come up with more interesting things in next comming days...!

List of Indian B-2-B Portals

Sr. URL

1 www.globalsources.com
2 www.hktdc.com
3 www.tradekey.com
4 www.made-from-india.com/
5 www.ec21.com
6 www.gofrugal.com
7 api.e-point.co.in
8 www.importersdirectory.co.in/Directory
9 www.thaitrade.com/signup
10 india-b2b-portal.int.ask.com
11 www.itrademarket.com
12 www.promarket.in
13 www.indiamarkets.com
14 www.indiamart.com/
15 www.infobanc.com/
16 www.seekandsource.com/
17 www.tradingbiz.com/
18 www.tradeindia.com/
19 www.nsicindia.com/
20 www.eworldtradefair.com/
21 www.b2bchannels.com/
22 www.eindiabusiness.com/
23 www.clickb2bindia.com/
24 www.bizxchange.in/
25 www.sme.in/
26 www.thegreatindianbazaar.com/
27 www.b2bbyte.com/
28 find4sites.com/
29 www.trademart.in/
30 www.mfgtrade.com
31 www.worldmart.in
32 www.webdir.biz
33 www.citiconnect.in
34 www.iq197.com
35 www.tradeguruindia.com
36 www.indiandefenceindustry.com
37 www.thegreatindianbazaar.com
38 www.motalala.com/
39 www.globalsources.com
40 www.inworldoftrade.com
41 www.olx.in
42 www.kompass.in/
43 www.business-india.in/
44 www.tradekeyindia.com/
45 tradejumbo.com
46 www.b2bindiamart.com/
47 www.tradetong.cn/B2B-Directory/Asian_B2B.html
48 www.fibre2fashion.com/
49 www.indiantrademarket.com/
50 betavine.mobi/bvportal/forums/index.html?threadId...
51 ww.slideshare.net
52 www.indiaexport-import.com/
53 www.indiacon.com/
54 www.impexonweb.com/
55 www.exploreglobalbusiness.com/
56 www.goldenline.pl
57 www.internetworldstats.com
58 hi.baidu.com
59 advij.com
60 www.tradeb2b.net
61 www.latrades.com/
62 find.informe.com/marketplace_b2b_portal/
63 www.indianb2bmarket.com
64 www.businessportalindia.com/directory/
65 www.adoos.in
66 www.webportalsindia.com
67 who.stsoftware.biz
68 www.workinfo.info/
69 www.websitevalue.us/www/tradeindia.com
70 www.dialnsearch.com/
71 stuffgate.com/tradingbiz.com
72 www.indianebiz.com
73 www.needb2b.com
74 www.investmentnetwork.in/
75 www.indianmanufacturersclub.com
76 indiaetrade.com/
77 www.b2btradeindia.com/
78 www.ezsearch.co.za
79 www.webmarketingwar.com/
80 indiancommercials.com
81 www.webcitymarketing.com/
82 www.thehindubusinessline.in/
83 www.abc-directory.com
84 dir.exportersindia.net/
85 www.ipfonline.com/
86 www.cityit.in
87 www.panomtech.com/panomtechb2bmarketplace.aspx
88 www.pharmasuppliers.net
89 website.informer.com/
90 www.vcsdata.com/
91 www.clickindia.com
92 www.pinnaclepixel.com/b2b-b2c-portal-development.html
93 www.dreamznetsolutions.com
94 mumbai.quikr.com
95 www.b2bwebdevelopmentindia.com/
96 www.atcomaart.com/
97 www.toboc.com/
98 www.tradeportindia.com/
99 www.virtualsplat.com
100 www.intrawebsolns.com
101 www.technowizpvtltd.com/E-Commerce.aspx
102 www.creativewebsolutions.in/
103 www.companiesinmumbai.com/
104 www.antya.com/topic/b2b-portal/mumbai
105 www.provab.com/
106 www.asklaila.com
107 www.bangalorebusinesses.com/
108 www.sahipasand.com
109 b2b-dir.com/
110 www.radical.co.in/
111 www.ads2india.com/
112 www.bangalorebased.com
113 www.mason-summers.in
114 www.nsic.co.in/
115 www.hotfrog.in
116 indialist.com
117 locanto.in/
118 www.clickmavis.com
119 www.computex.biz
120 www.all-firms.com
121 ncrads.com/footer/b2b.php
122 www.bizplenty.com/Hydraulics_Information
123 www.smeworld.org
124 www.pragyanet.com
125 www.webdhoom.com

How to Set Up a LinkedIn Company Profile for Successful Solopreneurs

2011-10-19T14:52:00.002+05:30

Before we dig in, you must meet one very important requirement: you need to have an email address with your company domain. And, this email address must also be listed on your profile. Addresses tied to free email services like yahoo, gmail and hotmail don't count.

To add your company, click on “Companies' in the navigation bar near the top of the home page. At the Companies page, click the “Add a Company' link in the upper right. If you've never been LinkedIn's Companies site before, here's a quick introduction to how this site works.

Did you know LinkedIn allows people to follow company updates? When you to go the Companies page, updates for all of the companies you follow will be here. This is also a good place to search for new clients and connections. A link to follow each company appears when you mouse over the space in the upper right corner of each search result.

How to Complete Your LinkedIn CompanyListing

As a successful solopreneur, you already have everything it takes to set up your company profile in 30 minutes or less. Read through this checklist to save time and make sure you're ready to complete all the information when you log in. In addition to the company overview page, you'll see tabs for career, products and services, and analytics. Here's the information you'll need to complete your company overview page.

Company Name
Make sure the company name listing matches the name you use in your profile. For example if you use LLC or Inc. on your personal profile, your company site must be the same.

Admins
LinkedIn wants to know who will administer your company profile. You have two choices: either all employees with a valid email address registered to your domain or designated users only.

Logos
Logos can be uploaded as a standard logo as well as a square logo that will be used for network updates.

Company Description
In the company description section, you have the opportunity to describe who you are and what you do. Think big[ger] picture. You may be a successful soloist now, but if you're planning on growing your business or going after big companies, present your company as an entity.

Specialties

Include keywords that describe what you do in this section. You have 256 total characters to describe specialties. Two or three word descriptions are okay.

Twitter and Company Blog RSS Feed
Bringing in your twitter updates and blog feed keeps your company page active, relevant and current.

News Module
Adding in the news module displays search results that share news about your company. But, be prepared to see stories that don't relate to your company, except in search terms. If your company is not making news, it's best to select “don't show news about my company.'

Company Type, Size, URL
Under company type and company size, you'll select from the options that describe your status. Your company website URL link can go to your home page or to a services or gallery page.

Industry, Operating Status, Year Founded
Main company industry allows you to choose from any within the LinkedIn categories. Then, you will select company operating status and the year founded, which is an optional entry.

Locations

The last step is locations. You can add up to five different location addresses, then click publish and your LinkedIn company profile is active.

Careers
If you ever want to add employees, you can post a job on your company's careers page.

Promoting Your Products and Services on LinkedIn

The next tab, products and services, gives you the opportunity to promote who you are and what you do in the course of 11 steps. Only the product/service option, category, name and description are required.

First, you'll choose between a product or service. Next, you'll select a category. Then, you'll name your product or service, add a logo, write a description, list key features, post a disclaimer, add a URL, list a company contact, add a promotional link and link to a YouTube video.

While you don't have to complete every step, you can see how much opportunity LinkedIn gives you to promote your business from within a company page. The best part is you don't have to pay someone to design it or write it, unless you want to.

Monitoring Traffic and Audience Analytics on LinkedIn

The last tab, analytics, is a rich resource and adds insights and value. Here, you can track page views and unique visitors for your overview, careers and products and services pages. You can even compare how your company is doing with similar companies.

Inviting Connections to Follow Your Companyon LinkedIn

Now that your page is all set up, you're ready to invite followers. You can add a follow button to your website or blog. LinkedIn makes it easy with a line of code. If that seems too complicated, you can always add a “follow our company on LinkedIn' call to action with the company page URL to your email address and in other promotional materials. Congratulations! You and your business are on your way to being found and followed in a network with over 100 million members. How's that for being a Successful Soloist?

Author of the LinkedIn chapter in “Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars,' Barbara Rozgonyi is a recognized 3D thought leader who enjoys showing organizations and people how to attract attention, build business and connect with communities by integrating social media, content marketing and digital PR strategies with the WIRED system. Founder of CoryWest Media, LLC and publisher ofwiredPRworks.com, Barbara invites you to learn more at http://savvysocialmedia.com

How to Redirect a Web Page

2011-10-10T12:39:00.000+05:30

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". You can Test your redirection with Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection:

IIS Redirect

In internet services manager, right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect Select the radio titled "a redirection to a URL". Enter the redirection page Check "The exact url entered above" and the "A permanent redirection for this resource" Click on 'Apply'

ColdFusion Redirect

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently"> <.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/" %>

ASP .NET Redirect JSP (Java) Redirect

<% response.setStatus(301); response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" ); response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" ); %>

CGI PERL Redirect

$q = new CGI; print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect

def old_action headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently" redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/" end

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain. The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed) Options

+FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Please REPLACE www.newdomain.com in the above code with your actual domain name. In addition to the redirect I would suggest that you contact every backlinking site to modify their backlink to point to your new website. Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

Redirect to www (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all requests coming in to domain.com will get redirected to www.domain.com The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed) Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc] rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc] Please REPLACE domain.com and www.newdomain.com with your actual domain name. Note* This .htaccess method of redirection works ONLY on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite moduled enabled.

How to Redirect HTML

Please refer to section titled 'How to Redirect with htaccess', if your site is hosted on a Linux Server and 'IIS Redirect', if your site is hosted on a Windows Server.

Google Insights For Search !!!

2011-10-08T12:27:00.000+05:30

See what the world is searching for

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search. Categories Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports. Examples: Entertainment category in Australia (last 90 days) | The top vehicle brands in France (last 30 days) Seasonality Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly. Examples: cricket in 2008 vs. 2007 | christmas presents, 2004 - present Geographic distribution Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities. Examples: news in different Australian states/territories | champions league in the UK, Brazil, Australia and Switzerland Properties See search patterns in other Google properties. Examples: puppies vs. kittens, Australia (image search) | Rising image searches (last 30 days) More examples

Micro-Site/Blog Strategy for Link Building and Brand Awareness

2011-09-28T11:57:00.002+05:30

Microsites

A microsite is an Internet web design term referring to an individual web page or a small cluster (around 1 to 7) pages which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The microsite's main landing page most likely has its own domain name or subdomain.

They are typically used to add a specialized group of information either editorial or commercial. Such sites may be linked in to a main site or not or taken completely off a site's server when the site is used for a temporary purpose. The main distinction of a microsite versus its parent site is its purpose and specific cohesiveness as compared to the microsite's broader overall parent website.

Microsites used for editorial purposes may be a page or group of pages that, for example, might contain information about a holiday, an event or similar item which gives more detailed information than a site's general content area may provide. A community organization may have its main site with all of the organization's basic information, but creates a separate, temporary microsite to inform about a particular activity, event or similar.
Often, microsites will be used for editorial purposes by a commercial business to add editorial value. For example, a retailer of party goods may create a microsite with editorial content about the history of Halloween or some other holiday or event. The commercial purpose of such editorial microsites, (beyond driving product sales), may include adding value to the site's visitors for branding purposes as well as providing editorial content and keywords allowing for greater chances of search engine inclusion. Normally, microsites do not contain web applications.

Microsites may be used for purely commercial purposes to create in-depth information about a particular product, service or as editorial support towards a specific product, such as describing a new technology. A car manufacturer, for example, may present a new hybrid vehicle and support the sales presentation with a microsite specific to explaining hybrid technology.

With the prevalence of keyword contextual advertising, (more commonly referred to as Pay per click or PPC), microsites may be created specifically to carry such contextual advertising. Or along a similar tactic, they're created in order to specifically carry topic-specific, keyword-rich content with the goal of having search engines rank them highly when search engine users seek such content topics.

An additional benefit of a microsite is that it can lower your PPC cost because the microsite can focus on specific keywords improving your Quality Score therefore lowering your cost per click.

Creating a network of micro-sites for the sake of link power manipulation is a controversial technique; hence it has become risky to interlink your own websites even for very “white hat” purposes (e.g. to let your readers know about your other relevant sites). Nonetheless, link building with micro-sites can be a highly effective technique if done correctly.

My main idea is that creating micro-sites around your main web resource is not necessarily done for the sake of interlinking and spreading the link power. When done wisely, the strategy can aim at multiple great purposes:
build link power of several resources simultaneously ( = if the microsite is closely associated with the main site, many webmasters will link to the both resources when talking about either of them). Michael Martinez in
his recent post on one-way link building put it greatly:
satellite site networks succeed because each site brings enough unique content and concepts to the user experience that it makes sense for people to link to them all be on the safe side: aggressive (or any other) link baits can be both fail or win, that’s always hard to predict; if you host your link bait on a separate site, you will always keep your main site protected from the campaign (probably dangerous) circumstances;
create multiple / additional positive / sticky brand associations (citing Michael, “split a brand value across multiple sub-brands“);
reach broader audience or attract some particular audience – that might be hard for a well known site that is strongly associated with one age group, for example, to rebrand so that it could appeal to much younger / older audience. Creating a microsite and optimizing it for a new audience group you want to target can be a better idea than relaunch your established site.

broaden your link building scope (e.g. promoting a corporate site in social media could be tough as it is not “social media friendly” enough for the campaign to be successful).

get people promote your site: by encouraging customers’ active participation, you will enroll most Internet-savvy audience; almost all representatives of this audience run websites and blogs of their own where they will be glad to promote your site.

See how others use micro-site strategy to both build links and brand awareness (examples from Mashable and WOMMA):
host relevant but different content: Coca-Cola Conversations blog focuses on Coke collectibles.
encourage viral marketing: a social network of photo enthusiasts around Fujifilm newest camera.
host link bait: to promote its new T.V. series “Back to You,” Fox Broadcasting created a micro-site where users can upload photos of themselves to create an image that shows them seated at the anchor desk between the show’s stars, Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer.host different type of content (e.g. user-generated content): Southwest Airlines employees and customers share the “Nuts About Southwest” on a separate blog.

Sales Funnel in Google Analytics

2011-07-15T10:47:00.004+05:30

If you are a hard core Google Analytics user (like me), you are probably already familiar with Goals.

What is a Goal?

In simple terms, A goal is something that a site/business wants to achieve. So for instance, If its a E-commerce website, one possible goal can be the orders or sales that take place online. For a consultation firm, the goal can be to get the contact information of the client and so on.

In a typical buying process, a buyer actually goes through a series of steps to complete your goal. These steps, in traditional marketing are often referred to as AIDA model. AIDA stands for Attention > Interest > Desire & Action.

So basically in order to complete a Goal, a prospect will often go through these 4 steps or in other words will go through a sales funnel. At the top of the funnel, you will often find a lot of prospective customers who are probably paying attention to your market & also probably interested in your product, however as they go deeper into the buying process, many of them feel disconnected and lose their desire which results in them taking no action (no purchase/order/sales).

How can Google Analytics help with Funnel Visualization?

Google Analytics has everything that you need to keep track of your Website goals as well as to track whatever that is happening inside your Sales Funnel.

So for instance, a company like Dell comes up with an online offer almost every other day. One of their primary goal is to get as many order as they can for each of the respective models/units. With hundreds and thousands of visitors coming to Dell’s website everyday for various reasons, not everyone is actually becoming their customer (placing an order). Some visitors are probably just browsing, some goes deep into the order page and then leaves probably because they didn’t find the right configuration that they were looking for and some are probably just confused in the order process etc.

Unlike a physical store, where the sales person has the ability to communicate with the buyer and also read his body language to better understand the needs and wants, a website just doesn’t have that luxury!

It’s bascially up to you (the webmaster/owner), to look at what happens during each step of the sales closing process (i.e. conversion / sales funnel) and find a way to make each page in the process as helpful and painless as possible.

So how can Dell identify the visitors that goes inside the sales funnel but doesn’t complete the whole process? How can Dell find out why some of their visitors are leaving their site in the middle of an order process?

Google Analytics Funnel Visualization is the answer!

How to Set Up Google Analytics Funnel

There are plenty of tutorials (including the official help pages from google) that shows you the steps for setting up a funnel in Google Analytics [I included some of them at the end of this article].

So instead, I’ll share a video with you that sort of demonstrate the Google Analytics Funnel Visualization report in just 60 seconds! [Source: Google Analytics Blog]

Posted by Saad

SEO Interview Questions.......

2011-03-25T16:51:00.005+05:30

Interview Questions listed below are most frequently asked questions when you attend for seo job Interview, it is important to concentrate on how an answer is given rather than the actual answer.
They often scare interviewees, practice well by reading seo articles, to get a good opportunity in seo field and shine in this industry.

1. Did you work on PPC?
2. Is sitemap usefull for Seo?
3. Do you know HTML Coading?
4. Explain your seo Experience?
5. Can you write HTML code by hand?
6. What Seo tools do you regularly use?
7. Explain importance of meta tags in seo?
8. Why are you leaving your current seo job?
9. Have you attended any seo conferences?
10. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
11. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
12. What role do social media play in an SEO strategy?
13. Explain what META tags matter in today's SEO world?
14. What kind of SEO strategies do you normally implement for back links?
15. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
16. To what extent do you think seo is effective?
17. As a seo consultant Do you consider yourself as creative?
18. Have you ever prepared proposal for seo clients? if yes can you give me one proposal now? 19. What are the problems you face in seo industy?
20. How do you evaluate whether an seo campaign is working?
21. In what area of seo are you strong ? And what area of seo you are weak?
22. What seo blogs and Forums do you read ?
23. Do you have experience in social media optimization?
24. How far do you think social media optimization help a website to achive top position in search engines?
25. As a seo consultant what do you prefer google / yahoo/ bing ?
26. Do you have Knowledge of Static as well as Dynamic Website Optimization ?
27. Do you have experience in copy Writing and can you provide some writing Sample?
28. What is the role of social bookmarking sites in Seo?
29. What do you mean by social networking Traffic? How do they help for website seo?
30. Have you done any Videp Submissions and Video Promotions.?
31. Explain what is page rank and explain page rank algoritham?
32. Explain me the steps you follow for optimizing a website?
33. For what clients you have done seo? Are you successful in doing seo for them?
34. What is link building ? Link buying?
35. What kind of activities do you normally implement for genrating back links for a website?
36. Why do we use nofollow on an internal link?
37. What do you mean by competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
38. How many target keywords should a website have? Or how many target keywords do you suggest for a website?
39. How do you help your client to decide budget allocation for seo and pay-per-click?
40. Do you have your own blogs? Do you do any seo freelance works ?
41. How do you handle your client if he do not want to implement your seo recommendations?
42. Could you briefly explain the Page Rank algorithm? And what do you think of Page Rank?
43. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
44. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
45. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
46. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Or Stumbled?
47. Why might you want to use no follow on an internal link?
48. What do you think about link buying?
49. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a Web Site?
50. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
51. What is the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?

How to Use Latent Semantic Indexing...?

2011-03-03T12:50:00.006+05:30

People get worried when they hear about terms such as SEO and LSI, and when they try to find out how to use latent semantic indexing, they get even more worried when they get conflicting messages. On the one hand some say that LSI doesnâ€™t exist and therefore canâ€™t be used, while others, on the other hand, state that it is critical to your websiteâ€™s success with the search engines.

We all know what computer people are like, the way they try to make acronyms of everything. LSI is one of these, although not quite what you would call an acronym. LSI does exist, but not in the form that Google would have us believe, and not in any form that you can use to make your website â€™LSI compliantâ€™. Anybody claiming that they can do that are simply playing Googleâ€™s trick and using big names for what is a very simple thing to do.

LSI or LSA?

Without going into any detail as to the mathematical background of LSA, it can be used, and is used, to determine the relevance of a passage of text to any given topic based upon a keyword or multiple word search term. LSA was, incidentally, patented by a group of people in 1988, although the basics were known prior to this. LSI is nothing more than the use of LSA in the indexing and retrieval of information. It is therefore a concept, and you cannot make a â€˜concept compliantâ€™ web page.

However, it is all semantics (ha-ha!) and the meat of this article is not to knock holes in the way the terms LSA and LSI are being wrongly used by SEO experts, but inform as to how you can make your web page more likely to be considered relevant to the main keyword for which you want your page indexed. This is very simple and does not warrant all the books now being offered on the subject.

The Development of Adsense

Latent semantic analysis is used by Google primarily to detect spam, in respect of excessive repetition of keywords in order to fool the search engines into providing a high listing for that keyword. There was a time when smart people could indeed achieve this simply by writing a meaningless template with rotating synonyms into which any keyword could be multiply inserted by means of software. Thousands of pages could be generated in minutes, each targeting a different keyword. Some were making $thousands daily from Adsense using this method.

In fact the principles of LSA to determine the content of web pages were used by a small company called Oingo that changed its name to Applied Semantics who developed a search system to determine the relevance of page content for specific advert placement. They called this Adsense. This company was in turn bought by Google in April, 2003, and Adsense used to replace their own system which was still under development. Adsense, then, was not developed by Google, but purchased by them.

BigDaddy and Character String Analysis

The principles were also applied to determine the relevance of on-page text to specific search terms and used in the web indexing algorithm called BigBaddy, used by the Googlebot to index your web pages. BigDaddy appears to view links and relevance as the two major factors among many others that determine your listing position in the index for any specific search term as used by a Google customer.

Back to spam. Your web page content is now analyzed by the statistical mathematical analysis tool known as LSA/LSI and indexed according to the meaning of the words in your text. It goes further than just checking for the excessive use of specific words, and no longer searches only for indices of your stated keywords. LSA informs Google of the true meaning of your text, and you cannot hide this by repetitions of a single key phrase. Letâ€™s call it LSI because thatâ€™s what Google calls it. LSI analyzes the character strings in your text and compares them to a large database of words, the meanings of which have been defined.

Same Words â€“ Different Meanings

LSI is used to determine the true meaning of homonyms, heteronyms and polysemes. Homonyms are spelled and pronounced the same, but have different meanings, such as lock, with three meanings. A heteronym is a word spelled the same as another, but with a different pronunciation and meaning, such as lead: a metal or to be in front. Polysemes are words spelled the same, and from the same root, but used differently such as a mole â€“ a burrowing animal, or a mole â€“ a spy deliberately placed in an organization. Both moles have the same root, but the words are used in different contexts. LSI or LSA can be used to determine the difference by means of analysis of the other words in the text.

If your page has been written around the keyword lock (my usual example of a homonym), without any decent content the reader would find it difficult to tell what type of locks you were writing about. The LSA algorithm would be looking for words such as canals, keys or hair to tell the difference and know where to list it.

All you need do is to look up thesaurus.com, and then use plenty of alternative vocabulary in your content that explains its meaning precisely. You can also use the tilde (~) in a Google search for your keyword. While Google does not highlight exactly correct synonyms, it will give you an indication of what vocabulary it regards as being equivalent. If you do that with â€˜locksâ€™ all you get are â€˜lockâ€™ and â€˜locksâ€™, and all are security locks. Interestingly, when you do it with â€˜canal locksâ€™, Google also highlight â€˜narrowâ€™. This indicates that if your topic is on canal locks, using the word â€˜narrowâ€™ will be to your advantage.

Semantics and Vocabulary

If you keep in mind that the main purpose of the LSI component of BigDaddy is to detect keyword spamming, and to determine for what search term the page should be indexed, then it should be obvious to you that the sue of contextually related vocabulary will reveal the semantics of your page. Semantics is nothing more than the meaning of the words you are using, and where your keywords could have more than one meaning, you have to make the meaning clear through the use of related text. Nothing more than that.

If you write naturally, as you would if you were talking to somebody, and trying to explain your subject, then you will not have any problems with the LSI algorithm. There is no need to use an SEO expert, since they are not necessarily qualified in their knowledge and use of language. A thesaurus will do the job fine.

Keyword Density is not What it Was

Do not overuse your keywords, and the old adage that you should have between 1% and 3% keyword density on your page no longer applies. Use it often enough to stress its importance, which means as the page title, as the heading in H1 tags, and in the first 100 characters and in the last paragraph. Google will check all four of these, and will regard any words it finds there, other than fillers and stop words, as being important. Use it again every 300 words or so and that is enough.

SEO and LSI are not really related since the term LSI is used in the wrong context here. However, in the way that it is used, if you use good vocabulary, contextually relevant to your keywords, then you will also be using good SEO. How to use latent semantic indexing properly is irrelevant in pure terminology, since you canâ€™t use it on your web page. Google can use it in their algorithm, and you should make your vocabulary as understandable as possible by means of simple words that express the meaning of your text.

Pete has his own theories of the way that SEO and LSA can be used to improve your web page listing positions, and more information is available on his website SEOcious and his blog SEOscopy where you will find how to use these concepts to their maximum effect.

Posted by Peter Nisbet

AOL uses the Open Directory Project as its backbone..!

2011-01-17T13:54:00.004+05:30

AOL uses the Open Directory Project as its backbone. The Open Directory Project has approximately 2 million web sites, collected and organized by more than 20,000 expert editors worldwide, with more than 3,000 new sites added daily. These editors and America Online are dedicated to an open-source volunteer effort to make the best human-edited Directory on the Web.

Inktomi offers, next to the directory listings of dmoz, crawler based results to AOL. Google will deliver "Sponsored Link" results to AOL (as from May 2002).This year AOL celebrates its 25th anniversary as a leading global Web services company. Twenty-five years ago, the company was known as Quantum Computer Services offering an online service named Q-Link. Quantum launched its first instant messenger service in 1989 and welcomed users with that familiar saying 'You've got mail!'.

It wasn't until 1991 that Quantum was renamed America Online through an employee contest. The following year, America Online, commonly called AOL, went public on NASDAQ. Starting in 1993, our disk mailings connected thousands of households to the Internet, and two years later we reached our one million member mark. In 1995, AOL extended its service internationally and launched AOL Germany.

As more and more users connected to the Internet, AOL began expanding its products and services. In 1995, AOL debuted the AOL.com homepage. The next year AOL reached five million members and introduced a flat-rate pricing program. That same year, AOL launched the Buddy List for chatting and welcomed the Running Man as a new AOLer. Two years later, the Buddy List was inducted into the Smithsonian collection.

While our user base grew, so did our company. In 1998, AOL acquired CompuServe and ICQ. The following year, Moviefone and Netscape joined our suite of products. MapQuest became AOL's trusted mapping source in 2000. Then, in 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner to create AOL Time Warner. In 2004, AOL connected advertisers to users using the newly-acquired Advertising.com.

America Online made history in 2005 by becoming the first Internet company to win an Emmy. The very next year, we officially changed our name to AOL and began offering our content and services free of charge. Over the next three years, AOL launched new content sites totaling more than 80 sites by 2009. In 2009, the Running Man was inducted into the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame and was also recognized in the Advertising Icon Museum. Later that year, AOL Inc. became an independent, publicly-traded company. In 2010, we look forward to many more historical moments.

Google Slap.......!

2010-12-22T11:27:00.002+05:30

Basically, the Google Slap accomplishes several things at once. First, it drives up the price of your pay per click amount, sometimes asking as much as $10USD per click, which most small vendors cannot afford to pay. Second, they may reduce your page ranking (PR), which will automatically mean you have to pay more to have your ads featured through AdWords.

Google obviously has a right to determine which pages represent the greatest quality and most match to keywords, but in 2008, a round of Google Slap actions on small vendors took considerable toll, driving many companies out of business quickly. Many argued that their pages conformed to Google’s AdWords recommendations for pages, and yet they still receive very low PR rankings. This meant the enormously high pay per click fees were prohibitive, and comparable to banning certain vendors from using AdWords, though searches for information on these pages might still be revealed in a regular Google search, just not in ads.

When some companies receive a Google Slap, just about the only thing they can do is completely change their domain because it is very difficult to challenge Google on their ratings or assessment of pages. There are Internet horror stories on known pages, with excellent authoritative and original information being slapped, and being unable to recover. If you decide Google AdWords is for you, you should definitely read all information about what Google looks for to avoid receiving a Google Slap.

A few things that Google consistently appears to look for include original and significant content on landing pages (the page a person goes to when they click on your ad), transparent business dealings and upfront information about how you conduct business, and easy methods for searching your website from the landing page. To avoid a Google Slap you’ll want to not create a landing page that is just a table of contents and plenty of ads for other vendors, and you have to make sure your page conforms to any of Google’s Editorial Guidelines, too.