Thursday, June 20, 2013

Google Webmaster Tools “Links To Your Site” Reporting Bug

Last week, we began seeing complaints of the Google Webmaster Tools “Links To Your Site” report showing 80% or less of the number of links that should be displayed. Yesterday, I noticed the issue myself, and today, Google confirmed this is a reporting bug.

In short, tons of webmasters who analyze their links using Google Webmaster Tools have noticed a huge drop in the number of reported links to their sites. For example, my site, Search Engine Roundtable, had 3.8 million links reported last week, then yesterday dropped to 2.1 million links and now it is reporting 1.3 million links.

 
 
Scary, but for those who are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools — they know there are frequent reporting glitches. In fact, a similar issue sprung up back in February.

Here is Google’s statement from today:

Some Webmaster Tools users have reported missing data in the “Links to your site” section. We are aware of this issue and are looking into it; you do not need to take any action. We hope to have the normal data shown again in the near future. The data shown there is informational and does not affect your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking.



Monday, June 10, 2013

Penguin 2.0 rolled out today

We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally. For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.

Added: If there are spam sites that you’d like to report after Penguin, we made a special spam report form at http://bit.ly/penguinspamreport . Tell us about spam sites you see and we’ll check it out.

Tags : Search Engine Optimization,Nilesh Patel SEO,Nilesh SEO, SEO Services in Ahmedabad

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Thursday, May 30, 2013

10 SEO expectations for 2013, as told by Matt Cutts

Google’s Search Engineer Matt Cutts is in the game of informing webmasters, SEOs and marketers of future search signals that could impact companies’ bottom lines. Fortunately, he’s taken to video once again to cover 10 points every internet marketing professional should expect from Google in the coming months. This week’s primary question Cutts sought to answer: “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?”

Brafton outlined the 10 points he touched on and put a content marketing spin on each.

1. Penguin 2.0 : Cutts recently noted that Penguin 2.0 is still weeks away, and he reiterated in the latest video that the refresh will have an even greater impact than the first version. SEOs must take a moment to evaluate their current backlink profiles to see where improvements can be made before Penguin 2.0 comes out.

2. No more ads, please : Google will also look to take a firmer stance against advertorials disguised as custom content. This threatens the black hat side of native advertising, but also encourages content writers and other marketers to dig deeper into their creative kits in order to generate compelling campaigns.

3. Say goodbye to spammy queries : Cutts also hinted that Google will eliminate spammy queries in general, like searches for “pay day loans” and other mature themes.

4. Next target: link networks : Google has already targeted websites with low-grad link portfolios, and it will continue its fight against bad links by going after wider networks. The search company engaged in this practice in the past, but it’s ongoing efforts remind SEOs to remain honest in their efforts to increase visibility in search.

5. Sophisticated link analysis : Google’s head of search noted that Google’s ability to identify weak links has advanced rapidly. Portent’s recent study also highlighted this trend, showing how Penguin has evolved over time to target sites with backlink woes.

6. Protection for hacked sites : Google is also working new features to detect when websites have been hacked. This should help business owners maintain their customers’ privacy, and perhaps limit events like Twitter’s recent White House debacle.

7. Brand authority : While Google won’t introduce Publishership for brands to help rank authority, it will look to push credible resources toward the top of search results. Content marketing remains the sure way to earn higher rankings in search.

8. Panda forgiveness : Cutts also suggested that the search engine company will soften Panda’s impact on websites that are on the cusp of ​avoiding potential search penalties.​​.  Businesses that suffered from initial updates may see their organic traffic rates rebound in the near future.

9. SERP clusters : Google will even the search playing field by removing site clusters from SERPs. Instead of seeing several links leading to one domain for a given keyword term, Google will bring unique web content to the front page of search.

10. Webmaster communication :  Cutts also emphasized Google’s ongoing push toward becoming more responsive to webmasters’ needs. The search engine company will improve their communication with these professionals.

Google has its sights set on a brighter search world in 2013, and Cutts shows the company’s goals clearly have end users in mind. Content marketing and SEO professionals must keep their practices honest in order to benefit from any new update by the engine, as one small slip could push online content further down in search engine results pages.


Tags : Search Engine Optimization,Nilesh Patel SEO,Nilesh SEO, SEO Services in Ahmedabad

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SEO Experts in the USA

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On the Internet we can find wonderful networking and marketing tools but the vast majority of them get you results only for your business name. In other words, you would only be found on Internet search engines if someone were to type in your business name in the search field. If somebody already knows your business name, they can go directly to your website! OMB100.com places your business in evidence on search engines, focusing on key words and key phrases, in other words, your OMB (optimized microblog) is found by the keywords for what your business does. 
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Friday, May 17, 2013

What to expect in SEO in the coming months

We just recently taped a new round of webmaster videos, and I thought this video deserved a full-fledged blog post. This is my rough estimate (as of early May 2013) of what search engine optimizers (SEOs) and webmasters should expect in the next few months:


Bear in mind that this is a very rough estimate, because priorities, projects, and timing can change based on a lot of different factors. But I hope this gives folks a ballpark idea of what to expect in the coming months as far as what my team is working on.



Google Continues To Experiment & Expand Authorship

If one theme was abundantly clear at SMX West in March, it was the question over the importance of authorship and how it might impact future rankings in Google.

During the “What’s Needed For SEO Success In 2013 & Beyond?” panel, I asked Matt Cutts if Google planned to expand authorship credit (and potentially the rich snippet) beyond just written content (like blog posts) and begin incorporating other content types.

In reality, content creators could truly author various types of content, including photos for photographers or video for videographers. Just because a piece of content isn’t part of the written medium doesn’t mean that content has no author.

Matt indicated that while the majority of content that Google sees on the Web is written, there are clearly other types of content Google indexes and wants to be able to understand authorship for.

Google is certainly doing its part to infer authorship of content, even when authorship markup has not been applied to a particular page. Over the past six months, there have been several examples of Google erroneously crediting the wrong authors with content, such as when a New York Times article credited Truman Capote with a new article, even though Capote has been deceased for nearly 30 years.

Google has even inferred authorship over other types of semantic markup on the page. On my own site, our archived webinar pages, which are coded with video schema and previously were displaying a video rich snippet, suddenly reverted to authorship instead, even though the page was not coded with author data:



Thursday, May 09, 2013

The Most Effective Way to Become an SEO Master

A couple of months ago a friend of mine asked my help with one of his websites. It is an online store that sells sports equipment, and he hired a local web agency to revamp the design and the site structure. 

Long story short the agency completely destroyed the optimization he had on his site, changing all permalinks, putting the same title tag on all pages of the site and so on. As a result the good rankings he had disappeared over night, and he was pretty pissed.

He set up a meeting with the agency to discuss the issue, and he asked me to go along with him to back him up and to give my take on the issue.  

After talking for 5 minutes with the guys who owned this web agency I realized they didn’t have a clue of what they were talking about. I pressed them a bit with some technical questions and one of them said:

“Hey man, I know this stuff, I am even doing the Google course!”.

To which I replied:

“What Google course? Google doesn’t offer any SEO course officially.”

The guy started mumbling and couldn’t explain what course he was talking about. Then I asked them:

“Okay forget about courses and books, just give me the URL of a couple of sites you managed to increase the search rankings and the traffic. And please show me the Google Analytics so I can see the organic traffic numbers.”

Silence…

In the end the guys admitted that they didn’t know much about SEO, and I gave them a to-do list of things they should do to fix my friend’s website.  

But my point is: there’s only one way to effectively learn and become good at SEO, and that is by getting your hands dirty and doing it. 

Sure, books and courses can help, and there are some good ones out there, but all the books and courses together represent only 10% of your learning curse. The rest will come from hands-on experience. From building 10 websites from scratch and failing with 9 of them, while making one to the top of the search rankings and seeing your organic traffic explode.  

Only when you try to do the stuff yourself you’ll understand and learn what works and what doesn’t, which methods are effective and which are not.

I was inspired to write this post after reading a similar post on Shoemoney’s blog: If You Are Such a Hotshot SEO, Why Are You Trolling For Clients?.

If you are starting to learn about SEO stay tuned for tomorrow’s post as well, when I’ll review a set of SEO tools that can get you going a lot faster.




Friday, April 26, 2013

RSS Search Engine Optimization

Tips for Helping Your RSS Feed Perform! : In some ways RSS is very similar to HTML, the language commonly used to create websites. Just as with HTML, webmasters using traditional search engine optimization tactics when creating an RSS feed will find that their RSS feed receives additional exposure and interest.

Simple steps to optimize an RSS feed for search engines

1.) The title should contain important search terms : To state the obvious, the title should be relevant and not misleading, while still emphasizing keywords. Ultimately, the title should entice the reader to read on, not mislead them.

2.) Display RSS feeds : Most webmasters display their feeds as content on their website. When displaying a feed be sure to use PHP, ASP or HTML so that search engines will spider the contents of the feed displayed. If using a template to display feeds, use header tags to define the appearance of the Channel Title and Item Titles. Many search engines weight header tags with more importance. See Displaying RSS Feeds for additional information - http://www.small-business-software.net/display-rss.htm

3.) Internal & external Links : Within a feed you should always use the full path of any links, keeping in mind that other sites may syndicate the contents of the RSS feed. Links that are not local to the site should launch a new browser. While this is not specific to search engines it will help keep visitors on your site.

4.) Link text should emphasize keywords :It is no longer a deep, dark secret that the text used for incoming links will help a site contextually define the keywords that the site appears for in the search engines. Keeping that in mind, be sure to use keywords in any link text that points back to your website.

5.) My.Yahoo and My.MSN : This is surprisingly simple to do but often overlooked by publishers and webmasters. The fastest way to have an RSS feed spidered by Yahoo or MSN is to include the feed on a personal my.yahoo or my.msn home page. Simply create an account on the respective search engines and customize the home page to include your RSS feed. This is done by adding content and listing the URL to the RSS feed. Typically, within 24-48 hours the feed's contents will be spidered and indexed by Yahoo and MSN.

6.) Theme feeds : Feeds should be themed. This will help with themed links back to a publisher's website from anyone syndicating the feed's content.

7. ) Link popularity : Increase link popularity by submitting the RSS feed, blog or podcast to the appropriate directories. The following directories allow submissions of specific kinds of RSS feeds. Be sure to follow the guidelines of each site and choose categories wisely.


8.) RSS feed descriptions : RSS feed descriptions are generally summaries or introductions to other content. Often, feed creators will provide additional information on an HTML site, enticing the reader to click through for the full information if it is a topic that is of interest to them. Provide enough teaser copy that the reader can easily discern if the contents are something that is important to them.

9.) Subscribe to feeds : This might seem obvious, but a surprisingly large number of publishers do not subscribe to their own feed. This is a great way to visualize what your customers see, and experiment with formatting and integrating HTML into feeds.

10.) Image ads : Add your corporate logo to your RSS feed. Create a brand and enforce that brand by including the image in the RSS feed. The image will enhance your corporate identity and dress up the look of your feed by adding your corporate logo.

11.) Alphabetical rank : Many feed readers list feeds alphabetically in the reader. Feed channels that begin with A will naturally appear in the top of the feed list in most feed readers. If you wish to appear in the top of list of feeds that a reader has subscribed to, keep this tip in mind.

12.) Meaningful Links : Each item in your feed should contain a unique URL associated with it. This will direct users to associated information. Many find using target URLs with the "#" symbol in the link to identify specific content useful.

Most marketers have a love-hate relationship with search engines. Search engines have the abilitiy to make even the most confident webmaster feel powerless . Let’s face it - all of us have felt the wrath of the search engine powers-that-be at one time or another, and while it may be difficult to know what line was crossed or how we fell out of favor, following some basic guidelines will be helpful in optomizing feeds for search engines. 
 
 
For More Info about RSS Search Engine Optimization
 

Monday, March 25, 2013

On-Page Optimization Methods Still Valid in 2013

SEO can be divided broadly into on-page and off-page optimization techniques. Simply put, on-page optimization is concerned with everything that can be done to boost your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) on the webpage itself.

Off-page optimization deals with aspects that take place elsewhere such as the quality and relevance (though not these days the sheer numeric volume) of your back-links. An effective SEO campaign will usually take both into account, but the importance of complete on-page optimization cannot be overstated. 

Keywords
 

‘The keyword is king’ used to be the mantra of most SEO campaigns. Choosing the correct keywords is still crucial. They are, after all, the phrases that people use when searching for a site, but nowadays less can be more.

The recent Penguin update to Google’s search algorithm dealt with keyword stuffing amongst other issues. Keyword repetition, if done within reasonable parameters, is not considered a black hat technique, but its efficacy is certainly debatable.

After years of debate concerning the optimum keyword density (if you were paying attention you might have noticed people throwing extremely precise figures such as 3.5 percent or 4.2 percent), Google’s Head of Webspam Matt Cutts claimed that it didn’t matter half as much as many people think.
“The first time you mention a word, you know, ‘Hey, that’s pretty interesting. It’s about that word.’ The next time you mention that word, ‘Oh, okay. It’s still about that word.’ And once you start to mention it a whole lot, it really doesn’t help that much more. There’s diminishing returns,” Cutts explained earlier this year.
More recently he revealed that:
“We have an entire team at Google called the Synonyms Team, and their job is to sort of realize that car and automobile are the same thing.”
The key with keywords in content, it seems, is to choose them wisely and use them as naturally as possible. There are, however, a few places where you should make sure your most important keywords appear. Keywords should generally be placed near the top of the page and at the beginning of paragraphs. 

Titles
 

When search engines analyze your site, they pay particular attention to what lies between the HTML heading tags, especially <H1>, <H2>, and <H3>. In other words, titles and subtitles are important positions for keywords.

Don’t just use the heading tags on your first or main page. For every page on your website you should have a <h1> or <h2>or <h3> that has that page’s main keyword within it.

You can also double up on your subtitle SEO efforts by also including them in a contents list of clickable links. Don’t, however, make your titles too long or convoluted. Keep them simple and to the point. 

URLs
 

The URL of the webpage can be one of the most important factors of on-page optimization. Changing URLs retrospectively can be problematic so it’s important to get this right from the start. Including important, relevant keywords in the URL can give you a small, but perhaps, crucial rankings boost, and both Google and Yahoo will display the portions of your URL that match the search term entered in bold in the SERPs. This can serve to catch a human eye even if you are not at the top of the SERPs for that particular search term.

Avoid overly dynamic URLs as these can be off-putting in the search results. All of your URLs should be set up in a logical way that gives an idea to what the user can expect from the content of the page.
If, for example, you saw www.domain.com/index.php?12345/ then it would be almost impossible for you to guess what that page was about. On the other hand, www.domain.com/dog-leads/ is almost certainly going to be about dog leads. 

Meta Tags
 

Meta tags are used to instruct search engines on how a particular webpage should be indexed. Optimizing your title tag and the description meta tag can be useful in providing additional information to the search engines but using the keyword meta tag can do more harm than good. 

The exception to this is the news_keywords meta tag that Google announced in September. This is only for Google News-accredited clients however and pertains only to news stories. If this isn’t you, steer clear of the keyword meta tag.

The nature of SEO has changed over time, but its purpose is still the same. Increasing your chances of a high SERPS ranking and the additional traffic this can generate can only be a good thing. On-page optimization is one of the most important tools in achieving this and can be well worth the time and effort.


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