SEO BLOG

Keeping Top ranking for competitive phrase:

2009-06-19T02:28:00.000-07:00

You get top ranking for competitive phrase. How to you sustain its rankings? We have used the knowledge gained over the years to keep competitive rankings consistently for more than 3 years but following some simple yet strong SEO tactics.
1. Make sure your links are consistent most of the time ranking drops happen when the existing links lose its value. Keeping looking for quality natural resources to get backlinks. There are many organizations out there willing to link out to quality websites without any monetary benefit. You can approach them and they will eventually link to you.
2. If you have achieved top ranking it doesn't justify you achieved everything. We need to make sure we keep adding quality contents, blogs and whatever you were doing before to come up on top.
3. Also if one phrase is ranking make sure you rank for more relative phrases , synonyms, plurals etc. This will help the search engines understand better your rankings are deserved and they will keep your ranking on top.
4. If a page ranks in search engine for top competitive phrase make sure you don't too much play with it. You can play around it not play with it. We never know what factors contribute to the ranking for a phrase and it's important not to mess it up.
5. Avoid using anything negative that might result in over optimization or penalty. When people get top rankings they get existed and tend to go more aggressive. Aggression not only hurts but your site can disappear from rankings for a long time.

What determines a website size?

2009-06-17T05:02:00.000-07:00

Particularly in SEO industry we are used to calling small, medium sized, large and extra large websites. So what determines the size. Well size is a relative word in our industry. It's important we know the size before quoting for SEO work or starting work on the site.

Small sized sites: Most of the small Business sites that come to us a small. People think just putting one website online is enough to be on top of search engines. Fact its not enough we need to have a quality site to be on top. We say a site is small when it is built completely in flash, or html sites with only 10 to 20 pages ( without any database / products ) , just pages with contact and few other pages, sites that have products but very few like 10 or 20 etc. If sites like these come to us we tell our clients to add blogs, articles, news and all other possible information that helps SEO and helps expand the size of the site.

Medium sized website: Medium sized website sites that has decent amount of pages with articles, good well written information pages, at-least 50 products etc. Medium sized websites are ideal for targeting regional and low competitive keywords. So we prefer to take medium sized sites for SEO for low competitive keywords. To be eligible to be medium sized you can say the site should have at least search engine crawl able pages. We don't consider flash sites as medium sized even if it has 500 pages embedded into flash. It's because flash are still not efficiently crawled and it's difficult for us to optimize a flash website.

Large websites: Large websites are mostly product based websites. We get lots of websites that are product driven for optimization. Some sites have up to 10,000 products. It can range from costumes, cosmetics, tools etc. In rare cases we get large websites that are not product based but still have 1000s of pages. These websites have good contents already and it's easier to optimize. A large website is mostly database driven and it's eligible to be called large only if it has 1000s of search engine index-able pages.

Very large websites: These websites are rare but lots of them exist we rarely take these sites for SEO because it contains more than 100,000 products and it's not easy to optimize these sites. We had a client in medicine industry that had more than 150,000 pages. Optimization was never easy because it's difficult to funnel PageRank and backlink power to all those pages.
So as you can see from my explanation size is a more relative word. Online marketing industry is the most concerned when it comes to size. We take size seriously.

Is Google penetrating our secret lives?

2009-06-16T04:04:00.000-07:00

Many of us are not aware how much we get addicted to Google and its products. I personally use Google search, Gmail, Google reader for reading my favorite blogs, Google images, Product search, Google Maps and much more Google products. Virtually you can say most of my internet experience in around Google search engine. It's not just because I am Google addict. It's also because SEO is my lively hood. I spend most of my time in internet and Google.
But doing all these most of us forget, Google is tracking every activity of us using cookies and other technologies. So more we use Google and its products more our privacy is invaded. I suspect a big YES. We all know Google needs to collect information from its visitors to keep its search engine going efficiently, if any of our sites use Google analytics it's important they track down every detail possible for their Analytics users. Similarly every product has a catch for itself. Google has a reason always to spy on us for each of its products. So is this something to worry about? If someone is spying on you will be happy to let it go? Don't you think you will get disturbed it's true that more you use Google products more they spy at you? But it's their duty you cannot blame them but you need to be aware that Google knows what you are doing.
The most penetrating and efficient Google spy tool is the Google Pagerank display on the Google toolbar. If you enable PageRank display on Google toolbar for each and every web page or website you visit the toolbar needs to query the Google datacenter to get its PageRank. So Google knows each and every page you are visiting. Most of us who are aware of this either turn of the PageRank display or turn off the Toolbar itself when we are surfing for personal or sensitive information. Its not just me who is concerned on Google's penetration there are lots of discussion on blogs and forums about this issue. Most of the people conclude by saying if you are worried about privacy don't use products that invade your privacy. That is the reason many corporate don't allow emails like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc. Only corporate emails are allowed to be used. Some companies even ban search engine usage to protect privacy. I recently came across an interesting theory in a forum on Google's privacy invasion. A user posts
"Google's Algorithm has changed to the point where it now tracks every user by IP address, so for example if you are searching for a specific search term or browsing a website running AdSense ads, then it will log the sites you visit or terms you search for and display matching ads to you regardless of what website you visit. I think this is one of the reasons why people often see irrelevant ads on their websites. Google is refining their technique and logging all of our activity individually. I also believe Google has a way of rating the relevance of each users visit, for example Google might pay AdSense account holders for clicks based on criteria around the kinds of sites a person visits prior to arriving at their site.

I will provide a better example; A person that visits Gamespot.com and then clicks on a link to Netflix from Gamespot might result in a publisher earning .10-.20 cents for that click, however a person that has visited moviereviews.com and then went to Gamespot and then clicked the Netflix link might result in a publisher earning .20-.30 cents for the click since the chance of an actual sale is increased. "
Even he agrees it's just a theory but it looks dangerous and little bit possible. Also you should look at the most interesting Google flu trends search.
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Here Google will show the spread of flu in certain parts of the world monitoring the searches arising from those places for flu related keywords. This is one example what Google can do with the data it collects I am sure we can see something similar to this a lot in future.
What I am telling Google users is that be aware that you are being monitored for everything you do in Google. Even if you don’t have cookie enabled still there are lots of ways Google will collect your data. What is important is the awareness that's required when using internet and Google.
Good Luck.

MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

2009-06-15T05:55:00.000-07:00

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.
Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.

Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo’s market share is Google’s market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it’s not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It’s just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.
Wall street Journal reports
"The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world's largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday."

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
“Microsoft’s share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing’s first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

Can rel="canonical" index my hostname and not my IP address?

2009-06-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

a small question from sweden, anders ask-

will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?

i had the double check that there is the certain things you would like to be able to do it , you would like to take your IP address and put that in to the hostname. neither i m thinking allowed, we make the IP address different from the host name so we have the confirment but we dont think it would hurt to go ahead and have that.and i think that there is certain things wen you dont want your IP address to show up, you want your host or domain name to show up instead.so i think that would be a nice thing to do, i m not sure whether we supported

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

2009-06-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

question from tripstar, ontario canada -

underscores vs hyphens in URLS, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?

it doe make a difference, i would go with dashes or hyphens if you can, if you have underscores an things are working fine for you.---- using an underscore is a seperate and reason y we typically never talk about the stuff in future is that it gives us the freedom to change your mind infact the people who work in there project worked on a something slightly different for scoring in the URL that ghas high impact in the much higher event. we might still get reminder for thanks for paying as it focus on the quality trh team hey can we take a fresh look at this. but for time being dashes and hyphens are treated as seperate from underscores. that might change in the future but that the way it is now.

Yahoo June 2009 search engine ranking update:

2009-06-05T01:50:00.000-07:00

Yahoo updated its search engine index on 2nd of June. I can see a lot of shuffling happening most of our rankings got boosted. This is the 1st update in June 2009 I am happy to see yahoo keeping upto expectations.

Bing replaces Microsoft Live search:

2009-06-03T21:53:00.000-07:00

At last Microsoft has come up with a search engine which I feel can be a serious competitor for Google. Results are just amazing from the past 6 years I am with search engines this is the first time MSN has come up with somewhat clean results. It just looks amazing I really appreciate Microsoft for bringing this product.
I just some searches for our websites as well as our client websites and almost all of them are doing well and the results are very similar to Google. There are some areas that needs to be cleaned especially the geo-targeting is too uneasy. I can see a lot of .au domains poping up when I search from India. This is natural when geo targeting exists and I see it visibly. Overall results are far better than MSN live results and I am sure there is some future for Bing search engine. I can see there might be some bugs in search results but its perfectly acceptable since the search engine is very new. Google was terrible when it came out especially with all the spammers ready to exploit Google was bad when it came out but it improved and proved to be a really worthy search engine today. I am sure Bing will one day remove the monopoly of Google in search engine industry. I personally like Google but their decision making is becoming too aggressive and I see lots of innocent sites getting affected due to this aggression. I hope Bing stops this aggression of Google.

Does Google's crawler active on one day compared to another day?

2009-05-30T01:35:00.000-07:00

There are few people who report Google is indexing pages more on weekdays than weekends, also it seems Google's traffic in much more in first 3 weekdays than towards weekends or Fridays.
I do agree with the traffic point its obvious that weekdays are much more popular than weekends. People tend to use computers more on weekdays especially from work places. We monitor a lot of websites and the pattern remains the same.

But for pages indexed I don't buy the argument. If you see more pages indexed on some weekdays it could just be a coincidence. What I have seen when Google indexes pages it keeps them in its index for a long time. So when a page is indexed on say Monday it will still remain on Saturday. So the numbers should virtually remain same as of Monday. But from what I have seen, sometimes lot of crawling happens on weekends and sometimes it happens on weekdays. I don't see much difference; I think it has to be mostly with the person who operates the crawlers.

Google's influence on Yahoo

2009-05-26T00:11:00.001-07:00

Those of us who were in search engine optimization for many years know once yahoo results were completely powered by Google. Google used to have almost 90% market share excluding only MSN and its powered search engines. Where are we now today do we still see any relationships with Google. We recently had a major controversy where Yahoo had a deal with Google to display adwords ads in its search results. But Microsoft was not happy with it.
First we had yahoo make a deal with Google
"Yahoo said it had agreed to let Google put search ads on its site in what it called an $800 million annual revenue opportunity that would boost cash flow by $250 million to $450 million in the first 12 months.
Yahoo's ads and Google's would be pitted against each other in an auction style process that could make a deal easier to pass regulatory approval.
"Yahoo is being a reseller of Google whenever it makes sense and that is likely to be a lot of the time given how much more effective Google Web search ads have proven to be," Global Crown Capital analyst Martin Pyykkonen said."

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSN1247863820080612?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Then Google decided to dump yahoo and the rift began:
“The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had told Google it planned to file a lawsuit to block the deal, under which Google would have placed its more lucrative ads on Yahoo searches.
"Had the companies implemented their arrangement, Yahoo's competition likely would have been blunted immediately with respect to the search pages that Yahoo chose to fill with ads sold by Google rather than its own ads," the government said.
Yahoo regretted Google's decision, saying it was "disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court."

Age of search engine crawlers:

2009-05-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

From age old days where the search engine crawlers used to take up to a month to crawl a page and can take another 15 to 30 days to re-crawl the page things have changed a lot. Now search engine crawlers are the best compared to previous years. Lot has changed with search engine crawlers. Due to ever evolving algorithms and new features added to crawlers they tend to crawl a website much easier and faster than ever before.

Way back in 2001 search engine crawlers were not so sophisticated. Most of the crawlers including Googlebot take a lot of time to crawl a page and more time to refresh the data. It slowly evolved over the years and today we have Googlebot picking up pages of millions of websites in minutes sometimes in seconds. Features like RSS, XML feeds atom feeds help Google track blogs and other relevant sites and they crawl the pages as soon as the new pages are live on the blogs. It’s not just blogs Google at times have capabilities to detect changes to a website and if a webpage is added search engines are good enough to detect the new page and crawl it.
I call this the age of Crawlers because they just amaze me with their speed and effectiveness. Imagine millions of WebPages are updated every day but Googlebot is able to detect and spider them immediately. I wonder what the future will be for search engines I don’t see any more improvement to be made lets wait and see.

Google suggest one of the find of Google i would say is ever evolving

2009-05-22T02:04:00.000-07:00

When first Google introduced it as a beta version everyone liked it and later Google moved suggest option to Google.com regular search. One thing was lagging but. Google was not showing suggestions after we do a search on Google.com homepage. Once you navigate from the page and into results page the suggestion stops. I personally wanted suggest to work both in homepage as well as results page. Now Google has made the changes and it works in both versions now.

Similarly now Google has introduced personalized search which gets saved into web history as preferred suggestions. All the searches you previously made when logged into Google will show up first before the regular suggestions. They also now provide the ability to remove the personalized search keywords which is cool I would say.

Also direct links now appear if you are looking for a specific site. Google's intelligent algorithm understands your motive to find a website based on your partial keyword input and will show you the correct URL of the site you might want to reach.

Google never missed out commercializing Google suggest. They also have suggestions for sponsored links after all they need to impress their share holders right?

Google webmaster tools new features:

2009-05-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

Highlights

One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and clickthrough! In addition, we've substantially improved data quality in this area.
Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we've streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We're always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.

Webmaster tools has now many new features, when you sign into webmaster tools you will see a new home for your site with a message center, and all the sites that you have. To reach a verified site there a one stop dashboard this gives you all the highlights from the data. You can now get your favorite features easily, more navigation and trouble shoot problems can be seen, additionally you can now see more search queries for your site that appears in better than never before. You have robots.txt and URLs in access for some time. But now all tools are together at last under one tab. We already sent messages to your site to webmaster tools Inbox now you can forward those messages to people you know. We all really enjoyed redesigning webmaster tools. This is just a beginning stay tuned for more updates.

Some interesting stuffs in Co-op network:

2009-05-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

You know anyone can create a custom search engine with Google. I just came across this interesting page where a guy gives out a search engine that can actually find do follow blogs.
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010363265520675485990:xjmxcyokkls. . . SO what is the use of do-follow blogs these blogs allow people to comment on their blogs without a no follow . Without a no follow means you can Spam the hell out of that Blog. But most do-follow blogs have effective Spam prevention systems they have pre-moderation enabled in most cases. SO I don’t think there is any special benefit finding do-follow blogs. But being in an era of no follow its good to find some do-follow blogs.
When you create a custom search engine you can
# include one website, multiple websites, or specific web pages.
# Host the search box and results on your own website.
# Customize the colors and branding to match your existing web pages.

This custom search engine as it claims doesn’t show all do-follow blogs. Some of the blogs coming up are actually no-follow. If you want to find do-follow blogs I recommend doing a search by your own and checking source code rather than counting on these search engines.

Google introduces new features in searcology coference:

2009-05-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

As people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it.

Our first announcement today is a new set of features that we call Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?

Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week. Just last week, at our Shareholders' Meeting, I had a woman ask me why she couldn't organize her results by time, with the most recent information appearing first. "Come back Tuesday," I wanted to say!

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways. We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future.

Another challenging problem we have worked on is better understanding the information you get back from a search. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Or, how can we help you make the best decision about where to click?

We call the set of information we return with each result a "snippet," and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing.

Google competitor Wolfram alpha launching this month May 2009:

2009-05-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

The long-expected Wolfram Alpha search engine is due to be launched this month. We are waiting for it anxiously as unfortunately we didn't get the opportunity to test it, however, others did and it looks amazing. I will start with the fact that many said that this is the Google Killer, but in fact Wolfram Alpha is not a conventional search engine, it is more a computational knowledge engine which is based on ideas from Stephen Wolfram. Recently, Google launched its public data search, and not even that can be compared to Wolfram Alpha.

Don think of Wolfram Alpha as a Google Killer, though, because frankly Google doesn't really have anything like it—except for maybe Google's new public data search, which, while impressive, doesn't look nearly as robust as Wolfram Alpha. (Then again, we'll have to wait and see how well Wolfram Alpha works when it gets in the hands of the public.) Either way, Google will still corner the market on most normal search. (We're not always looking for the kind of answers Wolfram Alpha provides when we hit up Google.) As for how this editor uses Google and Wikipedia, I'd actually imagine that Wolfram Alpha could be more of a Wikipedia competitor than a Google competitor.
The system, Wolfram Alpha, was developed by Stephen Wolfram (49), a British physicist, and showcased at Harvard University in the U.S. last week. "Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade," the daily claimed. Although the system is still new, it has already attracted massive hype among technology pundits, it added.

"Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as 'how high is Mount Everest?' but it will also produce a neat page of related information - all properly sourced - such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts," it said. "Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer."

http://www.wolframalpha.com/index.html

Google Patent to rank personalized pages based on bookmarking:

2009-05-10T22:45:00.000-07:00

I am thinking about crawling social media profiles and links shared on those profiles, to which you link on your Google profiles, maybe even Gmail and gchat; and of course sites you join on Google friend connect; and what you share through Google and Google reader. And once they identify your twitter hyperlinked idiosyncrasies, they could then discover those of your followers and rank documents based on what everyone loves... or loves to spam ;)

And ultimately distinguishing what one and one's followers and friends truly love and love to spam, is the feature measuring you’re 'linger time:'

1. A computer-implemented method, the method comprising: receiving a search query from a user; receiving a request from the user to personalize a search result; responsive to the search query and the request to personalize the search result, generating a personalized search result by searching a personalized search object; responsive to the search query, generating a general search result by searching a general search object; providing the personalized search result and the general search result for display; selecting an advertisement based at least in part upon the personalized search object; and providing the advertisement for display.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises an article associated with a bookmark.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein an index associated with the bookmark is stored on a server remote from a client with which the bookmark is associated.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein an index associated with the bookmark is stored on a client with which the bookmark is associated wherein searching of the personalized search object is performed by a client-side agent.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the general search object comprises an index of articles.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the index comprises an index of articles associated with a global computer network.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the general search object comprises a plurality of global indices.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises a plurality of bookmarks.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises an annotation.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises a rating.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising identifying a user cluster based at least in part on the personalized search object and providing to the user a suggestion of another user with which to network based on the user cluster.

12. The method of claim 1, further comprising identifying the personalized search object based at least in part on an implicit measure of the user's interest.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the implicit measure of the user's interest comprises a history of user accesses.

14. The method of claim 12, wherein the history of user accesses comprises at least one of: a period of linger time, a quantity of repeat visits, and a quantity of click-throughs.

15. A computer storage medium encoded with a computer program, the computer program comprising instructions that when executed cause a computer to perform operations comprising: receiving a search query from a user; receiving a request from the user to personalize the search result; responsive to the search query and the request to personalize the search result, generating a personalized result by searching a personalized search object; responsive to the search query, generating a general result by searching a general search object; providing the personalized search result and the general search result for display; and providing an advertisement for display on a browser based at least in part on one of the personalized search result and the general search result.

16. The computer storage medium of claim 15, wherein the instructions when executed cause the computer to perform operations further comprising identifying a cluster of users based at least in part on the personalized search object.

17. The computer storage medium of claim 15, wherein the instructions when executed cause the computer to perform operations further comprising identifying the personalized search object based at least in part on an implicit measure of the user's interest.

Google moving to Ajax based result pages:

2009-05-04T00:43:00.000-07:00

It seems Google is now moving into Ajax based result pages. As per the Google analytics blog "Starting this week, you may start seeing a new referring URL format for visitors coming from Google search result pages. Up to now, the usual referrer for clicks on search results for the term "flowers","

The key difference between these two urls is that instead of "/search?" the URL contains a "/url?". If you run your own analyses, be sure that you do not depend on the "/search?" portion of the URL to determine if a visit started with an organic search click.

New parameters as per Google blog:
------- old
http://www.google.com/search
hl=en
q=flowers
btnG=Google+Search

------- new
http://www.google.com/url
sa=t
source=web
ct=res
cd=7
url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm
ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN
rct=j
q=flowers
usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w
sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

According to Mattcutts a senior Google employee this change is to make sure search results are retrieved faster than it usually does. Matt says "The team there only thinks about speed. They want to get the results back to users as quick as humanly possible. JavaScript makes the search results a lot faster. Suppose you do a search for flowers, as you’re typing flowers, they can do a query from the back end and fold search results right into the page. You’re still in Google.com and they can pull in the results automatically."

Can hot-linking benefit your website?

2009-04-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

What is hot linking?

Directly embedding or linking to a resource on another server, such as an image or video, so that it appears to be part of the linking website. Hot linking provides the ability within an online manual to jump from place to place by clicking on table of contents and index entries, cross-references, or icons.

So can hot linking benefit you. Yes I would say hot linking benefits you because you can get some quality traffic to your images from other websites that embed your image. We get loads of traffic from hot linking most of them are valid visitors. People who follow hotlink images also tend to look around your website for other images or videos. So yes there is solid benefit. But there are some draw backs imagine your image is added to an adult site and Google image crawler picks it up it might damage the reputation of your website and your image might start featuring only when safe search filter off. Most people don’t switch off safe search filter so its recommended to keep note of who is hot linking if you see a bad source feel free to request them to remove your image.

2 sites on same server using same database:

2009-04-22T22:18:00.000-07:00

I saw this question asked in one of the forums where I am a frequent reader. So what happens when a product sites use same database. We had a similar problem with one of our client. He has his own dedicated server where he hosts his websites. He is in clothing industry and its difficult to move his whole database that too he is on a dedicated server paying around 200$ a month. So if he decides to move to a different server for one site he needs to shed out huge amount of money. So he dedicated to use same database for 2 sites and we are suppose to optimize both sites and rank them.

One site started doing well and continued to stay on top position for a long time but the other website never came up. We tried all the tactics in SEO but still can't get the other website to rank. One year passed and 2 years passed still we are unable to rank that website. This is a clear indication Google doesn't like 2 sites using same database and hosted on same IP. We even modified 1000s of product descriptions but still we cannot make the site look unique for Google.
So I recommend in case you want to use same database for 2 sites don't host them together. Better move the database to a different hosting write unique product descriptions I am sure you can make the site rank and can gain traffic.

Alexa and sub domain rankings;

2009-04-22T06:02:00.000-07:00

Alexa has improved a lot than what it was before in ranking sites. Before Alexa used to rank websites just based on alexa toolbar users. Now the criteria for ranking has changed they have tie up with other ranking companies and they use their own toolbar data with other company data to decide the final rankings. Still I feel alexa rankings are skewed and influenced more by toolbar related factors.

Well here the question whether Alexa sees sub domain as a separate entity to rank it? In most cases no alexa rarely sees separate sub domains as a different entity. I have seen BlogSpot domains having Alexa rank of 500. The 500 is not for BlogSpot sub domain but the usage of blogspot.com itself.

A word from the official Alexa blog:

Alexa's traffic rankings are for top level domains only (e.g. domain.com). We do not provide separate rankings for subpages within a domain (e.g. domain.com/subpage.html) or sub domains (e.g. subdomain.domain.com) unless we are able to automatically identify them as personal home pages or blogs, like those hosted on Geocities and Tripod. If a site is identified as a personal home page or blog, its traffic ranking will have an asterisk (*) next to it: Personal Page Avg. Traffic Rank: 3,456*. Personal pages are ranked on the same scale as a regular domain, so a personal page ranked 3,456* is the 3,456th most popular page among Alexa users.

So they don’t separate if the don't identify them automatically. They have such a dumb automated algorithm and it never detects proper sub domains. I feel Alexa need to improve their algorithm on working with sub domains because sub domains are actually different websites.

Website not getting crawled due to potential history of penalty:

2009-04-19T23:16:00.000-07:00

We have this question asked by few of our website visitors, does a site stop getting crawled if Googlebot detects any previous penalty or ban on that website. I would say yes we have seen this being reported by some of our potential clients or by people in forums. I assume Google has a list of all sites that was previously blacklisted in Google rankings. When Googlebot detects a link to a website that was previously blacklisted then it will first take that link and will store in a database. Later Google's algorithm will decide whether that link is crawl worthy and then Google crawler will be sent to crawl and index that website.

Best way to see if your site has any historical spam flag is to check in archive.org. Archive way back machine will have your old pages indexed if it ever existed. If you are sure what is the problem with your website then explain that carefully in a re-inclusion request and I am sure Google will accept your website.

Penalties apply to Google too:
2 months back Google.co.jp , Google's japan domain was penalized for buying pay per post promotional links from leading Pay per post agency cyberbuzz.com . A visible example of Google Japan's penalty can been seen if you have Pagerank enabled in Google toolbar. Google Japan has a pagerank of 5 now compared to pagerank 9 it previously had.

An extract from their promotional campaign:

"The Google Hot Keywords blog widget [link to Google's page] can show you what is in fashion now, and what other people are interested in.
It's appealing that you can view buzzwords from the previous day or the previous week. I am sometimes surprised to see that such words are so popular! Personally, I like the "fortune-teller" feature from the previous week's ranking. When I click on a keyword, I am quickly taken to Google's result page and so I enjoy the feature.

I might not have noticed them by myself, but now I understand that these things are what people care about.

I am participating in CyberBuzz’s campaign.
"
After realizing their problem and other bloggers reporting the problem with them, here is the apology from their official blog:
""Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google's search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident."

Stealth links and Googlebot :

2009-04-17T04:57:00.000-07:00

Webmaster world owner and senior webmaster Brett Tabke posted an interesting thread what he calls stealth links in Google. Links that are not the same HREF links but still seem to count in Google. He calls them stealth links according to him following are some prominent stealth links:

another site links to your graphics (img src)
a site links to your javascript files
a site links to your css files?
rss feeds and other xml feeds that people can link to without notice or referrals necc being generated.
links in email that some se's can read (yahoo mail, hotmail, Gmail)
links marked with noindex
links marked with nofollow
urls within javascript or js comments
raw urls within css or css comments
urls within meta data of graphics and video files
urls within html comments
urls within the head section or meta data of a html page
links or pages that maybe surfed while visitor has page rank engaged on the toolbar
the target of a constructed, obfuscated, or encrypted js url (hidden until executed)
links behind pay walls that Google can spider via webmaster tools
Domains that have been 301'd with links.
Links in Flash movies (games, quizzes, etc).
non href'ed url's. (raw url on page http://www.webmasterworld.com)
Links in any documents other than web pages e.g. .doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.
blocking a page in robots.txt should make it blocked from bots, but they still spider it.

According to me most of links from the above sources are not counted by Google atleast for ranking purposes. Brett came up with the above list because of the discussion that was started in another thread about pages getting pagerank without any external links. I feel most of the people who are complaining about pages getting pagerank without external links either don’t know to check backlinks or just rely on yahoo and Google backlink data which is totally unreliable.

CNN a PR 10 now:

2009-04-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

After a long stay in Pagerank 9, CNN has finally got a full Pagerank 10 from Google. We have the most updated list of Pagerank 10 sites available in internet now http://www.searchenginegenie.com/pagerank-10-sites.htm . CNN was PR 10 before a year now they retained their PR 10. Though pagerank is just a number it's a ultimate symbol of quality in Google's point of view. There is just a handful list of sites with Pagerank 10 and CNN is one among them. Also Adobe flash player page and acrobat page got pagerank 10 which is again good news.

Pagerank obsession had been in existence for more than 8 years. From the day Google came into existence pagerank fever grabbed many search engine lovers and followers.

Does Protected Whois affect Google rankings?

2009-04-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

Many of us prefer to protect our whois data to avoid spammers and scammers getting our email addresses for potential abuse. We protect our privacy on some of our sites though we don’t do it on our company website. Many of us know Google uses whois data in for search engine rankings. They primarily use this to avoid spammers capturing expired domains and using the backlink power of those domains and use it for their own website.

This Google patent already describes Google's usage of whois for ranking purposes.

(http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=

HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=

1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741 )

Some extra from that Google patent:
1. A geographic information system (GIS) comprising information about a plurality of geospatial entities and configured to prioritize the geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data about a meta attribute of a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity's priority.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: quality of information available about the geospatial entity, an attribute of a description of the geospatial entity, and an attribute of a definition of the geospatial entity.

4. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises an indicator of the geospatial entity's popularity.

5. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises one of: an age attribute, a stature attribute, and an importance attribute.

6. The system of claim 2, wherein the meta attribute comprises a relationship of a geospatial entity to its place in a hierarchy of geospatial entities.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a collection of geospatial objects and wherein the priority of the entity is determined responsive to a characteristic of the collection of geospatial objects.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein an entity of the plurality of entities comprises a geospatial entity defined in an on-line forum and wherein the ranking mechanism uses data generated in the on-line forum to determine the rank of the geospatial entity.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism uses data harvested from a website on the internet about a geospatial entity to determine the geospatial entity's priority.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the ranking mechanism determines a geospatial entity's priority from a combination of weighted data from a plurality of meta attributes of the geospatial entity.

11. A computer-implemented method for ranking geospatial entities, the method comprising: receiving geospatial entity data; evaluating attributes of geospatial entities included in the received geospatial entity data; ranking the geospatial entities based on the evaluation; and storing the ranked geospatial entity data.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data generated in a community forum.

13. The method of claim 11, wherein the geospatial entity data comprises data associated with a specific user and further comprising using the ranked geospatial entity data to generate a map for the specific user.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities for a geographical display based on the rankings of the geospatial entities.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to a map system configured to generate a map that includes ranked geospatial entities and unranked geospatial entities.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting geospatial entities to include in navigation instructions based on rankings of the geospatial entities.

17. The method of claim 11, further comprising selecting a geospatial entity to associate with an advertising term based on the geospatial entity's ranking.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising providing the ranked geospatial entity data to an application for generating a search result based on the ranked geospatial entity data.

19. The method of claim 11, wherein evaluating is performed responsive to user instructions for providing personalized geospatial entity rankings.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the user instructions comprise a weighting to be applied to an attribute of a geospatial entity identified in the geospatial entity data.

21. A system for ranking geospatial entities, the system comprising: an interface for receiving ranking data about a plurality of geospatial entities; an entity ranking module for generating place ranks for geospatial entities according to a ranking mechanism based on the ranking data; and a database for storing ranked entity data generated by the entity ranking module.

22. The system of claim 21, wherein the interface is configured to provide the ranked entity data to a requesting application.

23. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to evaluate a plurality of diverse attributes to determine a total score for a geospatial entity.

24. The system of claim 21, wherein the entity ranking module is configured to organize ranked entity data into placemark layers.

25. The system of claim 24, wherein each placemark layer corresponds to at least one of: a level of detail, a density, an altitude, and an entity category.

26. The system of claim 21, wherein the requesting application is a map server system configured to use the ranked entity data to generate a map including entities selected on the basis of place ranks.

27. The system of claim 26, wherein the entity ranking module is hosted on the map server system.

28. An entity ranking module hosted on a client device, the module for generating rankings for a plurality of geospatial entities and the module comprising: an interface for receiving entity data that defines a plurality of geospatial entities and ranking data that describes the plurality of geospatial entities; and a ranking engine for generating rankings for the geospatial entities, wherein the rankings are used to select which of the geospatial items to include in a map to be displayed on the client device.

29. The module of claim 28, further comprising a memory for storing data about a user of the client device and wherein the ranking engine is configured to apply a ranking mechanism responsive to the user data.

30. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises user preferences about the relative weightings of attributes evaluated by the ranking engine.

31. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises a user defined geospatial entity.

32. The module of claim 29, wherein the user data comprises an indication of a user's interest in a geospatial entity and wherein the ranking mechanism assigns a rankings premium to the geospatial entity based on the user's interest.
What I am trying to say is you need to be careful when changing whois info or trying to suddenly protect your privacy by hiding your whois data. If there is sudden change you can expect some sort of problem but if done correctly I am sure you wont have any problem with whois privacy protection.

Links for 2008-05-14 [del.icio.us]

2008-05-15T00:00:00-07:00

Sanford wallace AKA Spamford wallace awarded 234$ million fine for spamming

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2008-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

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2008-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

Merciless visa consulate officers CEO banned from entering US

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2008-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

Mysterious Places - The Nazca Lines
very interesting - I love to research about this a lot
Ramya - Buddy in College
I think this is the same ramya who used to date with all friends
Labels categories for FTP blogger/blogspot blogs
Very simple way of adding lable to FTP blogger blogs very nice find

Links for 2008-04-10 [del.icio.us]

2008-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

No short cut to Dmoz Heaven, Patience and determination Pays.
Cool posting on getting listed in the big giant of all directories. very good insights a site owner needs to look at.

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2008-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

Does all links count in Search Engines - A SEO checklist
Good article links that counts and not counts in search engines