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Georgijevic Developer Team

Georgijevic Developer Team

Paying for Penalties: Lies That Shady SEO Companies Tell

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Ever since Panda and Penguin (Google’s major changes to how they rank websites in order to fight web spam) have hit, a lot of companies have lost a large percentage of their website visitors. Bewildered by their sudden misfortune, many of these business owners have turned to me to review their websites and their SEO practices to determine where they went wrong and what they need to do to get back into Google’s good graces.

While many of them had been doing their own SEO based on what they’ve picked up through the years, a few have had SEO companies (and I use this term loosely) “helping” them. Sadly, what some of these companies do worked okay in a pre-Panda-Penguin world, even though it was garbage that doesn’t come close to following SEO best practices. The fact that it worked is what has kept SEO web spammers in business for so long. And it’s possible that to a certain extent, what they’re doing may still work for a short time — at least until Google reprocesses their ranking formula. That’s when the panda poop hits the fan!

If it were just a matter of the links no longer counting, it wouldn’t be so bad. But these days not only does the site lose any additional Google traffic they may have gained from the bad SEO, they start receiving even less traffic than they were getting before the bad links.

Here’s an example of this:

And here’s another example:

You’ll notice in both of these examples that the start of the major loss of Google traffic started toward the end of April, right around when ‘the Penguin first came to town. In the first instance, the client was (and is) very web UNsavvy. She knows very little about her own website and online marketing in general, let alone much about SEO. I’m not sure if she contacted the SEO company directly to “help” her, or if it was unsolicited. Either way, the web spammers quickly found they were dealing with their favorite type of customer — trusting and naïve. Not to mention desperate. The website had been losing traffic and sales since the early Panda days in 2010. (Due to not much content and simply not keeping up with what other companies in the space were doing.)

Signs That Your SEO Sucks

When I reviewed the site and looked at the links pointing to it, I saw a lot of terribly written spammy blog (splog) posts having been submitted to irrelevant, crappy splog networks, article submission sites, and fake directories. They all had a few different keyword phrases that pointed back to the home page of the client’s site. The dates of the posts were all from around the time that the site had its initial boost in Google traffic.

These links were obviously fake, purchased and extremely low in quality. For instance, one was in a directory on a domain that had a section pertaining to link building services as well as a splog full of wonderful articles which nobody in their right mind would be interested in reading — ever. In fact, the client’s site was linked from a number of directories that all looked the same, but were on different domain names and using a different name and background color. High class and high quality they were not! My favorites were the links right next to ones for “buying text links!” (They’re a nice change from the ones next to credit card and payday loan links!)

Shoddy SEO That You Pay For

In addition to creating barely readable content and submitting it to their icky splog networks, this SEO company also wrote useless, grammatically incorrect articles and put them into a blog on the client’s own site. Of course, these all had anchor text pointing back to the home page. I was surprised that they didn’t even go to the trouble of pointing the anchor text to the most appropriate pages within the site instead of the home page, but that may have taken some actual work to figure out where they should go! (Web spammers don’t believe in actually working.)

To top it off, they even stuck a link to their own SEO site with the anchor text of “SEO” on every page of the client’s site! (It wasn’t clear to me whether she gave them permission to do this or not.)

When I pointed out all of the above in my SEO site audit report to the client, I told her to have the company remove all of the links and explained why they were bad. And here’s where it got weird. The company emailed her back trying to convince her that they were not a spammy SEO company at all and that everything they were doing for her was on the up-and-up. When she asked them for a list of the links they had built for her, they had the gall to say that only black hat link building companies would be able to provide a list of their links. (Huh?)

Whom Do You Trust?

But the really scary part is that their answers sounded credible and believable to one who wouldn’t know better. This poor client was stuck between a rock and a hard place. She had me on the one hand telling her that what this company did was likely a big reason why she was no longer making any sales, and them telling her, “But you’re ranking for the keywords we chose together.” (This was true to some extent because the site was still ranking for some of the non-competitive phrases that nobody searches for.) And then they tried to scare the client by telling her that if they removed the links, her rankings would plummet and she’d lose even more traffic. They also tried to weasel out by saying that perhaps her shopping cart was not working properly (which, even if true, wouldn’t account for the nearly complete loss of Google traffic).

Finally, in answer to their half-truths, I told her that any reputable SEO company knows that the types of things this company does are considered to be web spam — certainly after Google Penguin, if not before. And the very fact that they were continuing to claim that what they were doing was all well and good showed just how horrible and unethical they were. In fact, I was so enraged by this that I told her to tell them that if they didn’t want to remove the spammy junk and wouldn’t give her money back, I’d be happy to write about them to my 25K newsletter subscribers.

At this point I haven’t heard back from her. I decided to write this article anyway (without naming names) so that others can learn from it. I hope that the more this kind of SEO gets talked about, and pointed out as the web spam that it is, the more others will stop spending money to get themselves penalized by Google.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/15/paying-for-penalties-lies-that-shady-seo-companies-tell/

Authority Sites Versus Niche: Where Do You Stand?

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Does it seem like niche site building will soon become an ancient Internet relic?

I’m starting to think the answer may be yes. This week, I noticed a little trend emerging in the Internet marketing blogosphere: debate over whether authority sites are a better business model than niche sites. There are ardent advocates on each side, and both have valid arguments.

Authority Sites: The Pros

On the AdSense Flippers website, the guys moderated an entire 4000+ word debate pitting authority sites against niche sites. Super affiliate and authority site owner Steve Scott argued for authority sites, and a niche site-builder named Mike Thomas argued in favor of niche websites.

To be clear, let’s look at the great definition of the two terms that Scott offered up during his portion of the debate:

Niche and Authority Site Defined

Scott continued by pointing out the merits of an authority site. He explained that authority sites should be considered long-term investments. The idea is to build up a readership; a loyal following that will trust your recommendations, identify with your brand, and buy from you repeatedly for the long haul.

The biggest plus that Scott noted, however, was something we’ve been talking about here at Site-Reference for months now:

It’s better to build your online business in a way that you control completely. Diversifying your traffic sources and creating a brand will future-proof your website and protect it from Google’s changes.

When you create an authority site – a true authority site – it’s here to stay, with or without Google. New and returning visitors alike will continue typing your site’s address directly into their browsers, visiting your site through links, and finding it through shares on social networks. The long-term value of an authority site? Well, it’s incalculable.

The Cons of Authority Sites

It’s funny: it seems that ever since the last Google algo update, the talk has been non-stop authority sites. It’s become the buzzword in the Internet marketing world right now. But what webmasters are forgetting is that they can’t simply pay people to “make” an authority site. They can hire writers, SEO experts, etc., but they can’t buy the trust that comes from a solid foundation of long-term, repeated visitors. That kind of reputation takes years and heaps of value-add to achieve.

An authority site simply can’t be manufactured.

You can buy an authority site – sure – at a ridiculous premium. But the high price is justified due to the sheer longevity and power of such a site in a particular niche.

That’s the primary downside of an authority site. It could take months, and in most cases, years, to see any kind of real return on investment. That’s exactly what caused Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits to throw in the towel after only a few short months. In his blog post this week – aptly titled I Can Only Handle 1 Authority Site, Back to Niche Sites – Haws lamented about the difficultly that comes with authority site building:

Haws on Authority Site-Building

It’s a lot of work. Indeed. And it’s a time commitment. As in a working-on-it-for-the-next-decade time commitment.

Seriously.

That’s what it takes to become a true authority: loving your topic to tears and writing about it tirelessly, networking with others in the same arena, and committing to grow the site… forever. Or until you sell it. Haws himself summed up the biggest drawback of managing an authority site – the time suck.

Pros of Niche Websites

In his announcement post about the change in course, Haws enthusiastically discussed his reasoning for returning to niche website building – even after Google banned him from AdSense and closed his account.

“Niche sites have always been the core of my business, but the early part of this year really shook me up. I’ve looked at the damage and still see a pretty sweet business. I still earn a great passive income from my niche sites (yes it’s much less), even after Penguin and AdSense closure. I’m ready to emerge stronger after the storm,” says Haws.

“Who’s with me?” Haws asks, “I know the risks, and I’ve always bounced back after penalties, deindexing, and more.”

Interesting point-of-view. I’m against spamming the Internet, and I’m all for authority sites. But the perspective is interesting. His is similar to Thomas’ viewpoint supporting niche sites in the AdSense Flippers debate.

I’m thinking that a niche website does have its purpose. I read quite a few articles that outlined a strategy of creating niche websites in order to find out which areas would be profitable without wasting time building an authority site – only to find out there’s no money in the niche. I agree with that wholeheartedly, but there must be a better way to find this out.

(By the way: I’d love to hear your thoughts on that in the comments below!)

During the AdSense Flippers debate, Thomas noted, “It all depends on how you build your niche sites. I’ve seen supposed “authority” websites that have a ton of content but were spammy as heck with spun or poorly-written content, no images, and placed on a free commonly-used theme.

I’ve also seen niche sites that had only one page of content, but the content was well-written, included relevant images, and was placed on a theme with a unique header. If you were a Google reviewer which website would you penalize first?”

Niche Sites: The Cons

I almost agreed with the argument made by Thomas. Then I checked out the page where he sold his niche websites. Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles in which he discusses his backlinking methods of choice for the niche sites he creates:

“Unique Article Wizard- I use the spun article I get from EZArticleLink also here. In that way I can get even more links out of the spun article.

Article Marketing Robot- I use this to give my sites a blast of link juice. You need to run this in Windows as it’s not available for Mac.

Social Adr- This service lets you put your social bookmarking on autopilot. There’s a free account where you get credits in return for bookmarking other people’s links, or you can skip that and pay for the service. I have a paid subscription.”

Okay, but wait. His niche sites are not spammy?

See, that’s the biggest drawback of niche websites right there.

They’re created to rank quickly and by any means possible. Most of the time, they’re sites about such exciting topics as “push reel lawn mowers” or my personal fave, “red gym socks”. People won’t be excited to link to sites like these. You can’t really build an engaged community around socks. Therefore, spamming the web is pretty much the only way to get links to sites like these. It is what it is.

It is inherently risky to build your business upon something you have no control over. If you depend on Google AdSense for your sole source of income and you build hundreds of niche sites, your time is ultimately limited with the program.

So, should you build niche sites while creating an authority site? Build a portfolio of niche sites alone? Work on your beloved authority site for years and *hope* that it will be an earner?

The choice is up to you, but whatever route you choose is a roll of the dice.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/authority-sites-versus-niche-where-do-you-stand/

Facebook’s Still Debating Whether or Not to Let in Your 12-Year-Old; Are You Still Concerned?

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Facebook’s Still Debating Whether or Not to Let in Your 12-Year-Old; Are You Still Concerned?

I’m 27 years old.

Actually, I’m not 27 years old. I’m 26 years old. I just lied on the internet! And trust me, it really is so easy that a preteen can do it.

And they do – all the time. Although Facebook’s current policy plainly prohibits anyone under the age of 13 from operating an account on the site, most reports put the number of preteen Facebook users in the millions. In fact, if a kid is on Facebook (under 18), there’s about a 2 in 5 chance that they are actually under the age of 13. Other reports, acknowledged by Facebook themselves, show that over half of parents with a 12-year-old child say that he/she has a Facebook account.

Do you think that Facebook is safe for kids under 13? If not, do you think it can be made safe with certain limitations and parental controls? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook says that they do all they can to identify and remove underage accounts – but it’s obviously one of the largest games of whack-a-mole ever. Close one down, five 11-year-olds log on in their place. Facebook removes somewhere around 20,000 underage accounts a day, and there’s still over 7.5 million under-13 accounts active on the site.

It doesn’t take the world’s most adept mathematician to see that this is a fight that’s going to be really hard to “win” with a simple ban. It’s clear that simply requiring age verification will never keep young kids off of Facebook. The site’s simply too popular. Everyone, including 10, 11, and 12-year-olds now require the social connectivity that it can provide.

Facing the evergreen problem that is trying to police all of these underage accounts, it shouldn’t shock anyone that Facebook is considering a new approach. Just over a month ago, we heard that the company was mulling over the idea of opening up the site to kids under the age of 13. We heard that Facebook’s “if you can’t beat them..” strategy would have preteen accounts closely monitored by parental controls – which would work in correlation with the safeguards that Facebook already has in place regarding minors’ privacy.

If they’re going to do it anyway, we may as well have them do it under proper supervision, right?

Early concerns

If we believe the stats, the majority of parents with 12-year-olds know that their kids are on Facebook. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are cool with it. Once the news of Facebook’s possible shift in age restrictions, people seemed to come out of every conceivable corner of the outrage circuit to voice their opinions.

And who can blame concerned parents? Facebook (and social communication in general) can be a minefield for older teens and even adults – and most people’s natural inclination is to protect young children at all costs. All a parent has to hear is one nightmarish story about child predation and subtle manipulation on Facebook, and the negatives of social networking immediately outweigh any positives. And although Facebook horror stories aren’t so commonplace as to become routine, there are still enough floating around to engender some concern.

To some parents, no amount of control or guidance would make them feel truly comfortable with opening up their preteens to the risks – either external or internal.

In one of the first major addresses of Facebook’s possible plans, nearly a dozen consumer groups sent a joint letter to Mark Zuckerberg. That letter contained some “demands” for any scenario where Facebook opens up the service to kids under 13.

Although the groups mentioned parental controls, and increased privacy for preteen members, their main point involved ads on the site – in that there shouldn’t be any when it comes to kids:

[T]he company’s business model relies, at its very core, on data collection, ad targeting, and viral marketing, and many of its practices have generated public and government privacy concerns. If Facebook opens itself up to a younger audiences, we want assurances that any space created for children under the age of 13 on the site is safe, parent-guided and controlled, and, most importantly, free of ads (including the range of practices that are routinely employed through social media marketing).

Congressional pressures and the evolution of Facebook responses

When the rumors began to fly concerning Facebook’s possible age-shift, the company was unsurprisingly unspecific about their actual thought process. Upon the initial reports, Facebook told me that they were “in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policymakers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.”

After the letter from the privacy groups, Facebook started to say that they were open to suggestions:

Enforcing age restrictions on the Internet is a difficult issue, especially when many reports have shown parents want their children to access online content and services. We welcome today’s recommendations by consumer, privacy, health and child groups as we continue our dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policymakers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.

Now, thanks to a newly-released letter from Facebook to two Congressmen, we know that Facebook is still thinking about it, but are a ways away from a final determination.

“At this point, we have made no final decision whether to change our current approach of prohibiting children under 13 from joining Facebook,” said the company.

That’s just a blip in a much-longer letter that the company sent Republican representative Joe Barton and Democratic representative Ed Markey. The two House members sent Facebook a letter back in early June outlining their concerns regarding the protection of kids on the site.

Facebook’s response mirrors many responses the company has had to questions raised by concerned parties. For one, they reiterate that any decision they make will be mindful of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a law that Facebook has formally addressed in a highly detailed fashion. The bulk of the response involves Facebook talking about their current features that promote safety for minors, in lieu of having yet made any actual decisions on the sub-13 crowd.

Facebook actually does do a lot, already

In addition to the everyday privacy controls that all Facebook users have access to, the company already has an admittedly impressive set of features in place that are designed to protect the network’s younger crowd.

  • For instance, Facebook users aged 13-17 have different sharing settings, by default, than those users who are 18+. A minor’s sharing capabilities are limited to friends and friends of friends – no more. Also, if you’re not a friend of a friend of a minor, it’s physically impossible for you to send them a direct message.
  • In a more controversial move, we recently learned that Facebook is actively monitoring the millions and million of chats and messages between their 900+ million users. Why monitor chats, you may ask? Because Facebook is always on the lookout for suspicious behaviors. And their software scans communications all across the network, looking for possibly criminal activity. That, of course, includes inappropriate conversations between minors and possible predators. Facebook’s monitoring software works in two distinct ways. First, it puts more weight into focusing on conversations between members who aren’t especially connected in any significant way – few mutual friends, new friendships, etc. Second, the message scan can identify certain words and phrases that could signal illicit communications. As a Facebook user, you can raise concerns about privacy and the legality of this sort of monitoring – and your concerns would be legitimate. But from a protecting kids standpoint, it’s hard to argue that this sort of technology is of great benefit.
  • Facebook also bans sex offenders from participating in the network – outright. So do many states as well, although these laws are currently begin challenged by free speech activists as we speak.
  • As a company that’s put a lot of effort into anti-bullying campaigns (having even been recognized for their work), Facebook says it’s a priority to keep users, especially minors, safe from harassment. Just recently, Facebook made a few tweaks to their reporting mechanisms to help in that effort. Now, when minors feel threatened by a particular post, the “report” procedure has been softened and made a bit more conversational and inviting. For instance “report” will be replaced with “This post is a problem.” After clicking, teens will be walked through the process with scenario-specific questions.

But is it enough?

“Children are not commodities, and their personal information should not be harvested to yield ad revenue for Facebook and its hungry shareholders,” said Rep. Markey, co-author of the letter to Facebook. “The privacy of personal information for pre-teens should not become a post-script in Facebook’s drive for profits.”

Even if Facebook opened up the network to preteens and did so by giving parents granular control over all aspects of their experience, would it be enough to assuage the concerns of many? Even after knowing that Facebook is actively trying to protect young kids from seedy situations online, does it do anything to make you feel comfortable with the thought of your 10-year-old browsing their News Feed?

The advertising issue may be just as potent of an issue as privacy and safety. Both the consumer groups and the Congressmen made ads their front and center complaint.

You could argue that children are inundated with ads all the time – television, movies, etc. Hell, walk into a toy store and you’ve basically just put your kid in the middle of a giant advertisement for various products. How can parents think that targeted ads on Facebook are any more dangerous than a targeted ad on the Sunday morning cartoons?

Or on a site like YouTube?

But it’s clear that something about Facebook ads clearly rub people the wrong way – especially when it comes to children.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebooks-still-debating-whether-or-not-to-let-in-your-12-year-old-are-you-still-concerned-2012-07

7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tips

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Good SEO is invaluable to achieving online success. Before you invest in a search engine optimization tutorial here are some tips for getting the most beneficial effects from your optimization efforts.

1. Text is the favorite format of search engine spiders. You can rely on spiders to crawl and read a website that
has sufficient text content. If your website is heavy on graphics or dynamic content, find some way to work some basic body text into your site because spiders don’t really see Flash, JavaScript or image text.

2. When creating content, stick to one topic for each page. Several topics on a single page confuses readers and
leads to poorer relevancy.

3. Use your strongest keywords early on in your copy, preferably in the first sentence. Craft your sentence in
such a way as to help spiders establish a relationship between keywords. Insert keywords and key phrases in subsequent sentences, but avoid overusing them as this might lead search engines to consider it as spam. How do you determine if you’ve overused a word or phrase? Read your copy out loud. If it sounds natural, then it’s probably all right. If, however, there is a noticeable and awkward recurrence of the keywords, then you need to modify your copy.

4. Provide clear trails for spiders so that they can move from point A to point B and so on until they’ve covered the extent of your website that you want them to cover. A simple way to achieve this is by supplying a text-based sitemap with a link to every page on your site that you want the spiders to crawl. This is especially beneficial if your site is relatively new and has few inbound links or if your site is comprised largely of images or other format that is not easily discoverable by spiders.

Sitemaps are of benefit as well to websites that have a large volume of content pages that are not linked to each other. Although they serve more as a directional tool for spiders than for your human visitors, do consider your website’s visitors when creating your sitemap.

5. In some cases, you may not want spiders to access certain pages on your site. This may be due to privacy reasons or, because the pages are irrelevant to the site as a whole or something else. Learn to use “robots.txt” files to instruct spiders to stay away from such content.

6. Make your URL search-engine-friendly. Use two to three relevant keywords in your URL. Use lower case letters instead of uppercase, and hyphens instead of underscores. In general, simple, easy to remember URLs without too much punctuation are the way to go.

7. After the URL, spiders look at the page title. Titles are a very important on-page factor when it comes to ranking because a good title conveys to spiders what your webpage is about, therefore making it easier to index. When composing titles, use two or three strong keywords that tell the topic of the page and that you want to rank for. Keep in mind that the first words of the title are given the most importance, so you want to get those keywords in at the beginning. Your title is also what is shown to searchers in search engine results pages. Google shows up to 70 characters of a page title in their results page. Be sure to make each page title unique, even if topics may be similar. This avoids confusion.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/7-key-search-engine-optimization-tips/

Advanced SEO Techniques for Website Optimization

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Alt attributes are a way to describe images to search spiders simply because search spiders cannot see them. It is not only an opportunity to add more content (with keywords) to your site, but it also helps your images to be searchable on Google. For best results, all images should also have distinct filenames.

Alt tags were originally designed to be displayed as an alternative text to an image in cases when an image cannot be displayed in a browser. Also, alt tags are displayed when users rest their mouse on the image.

2. Title Tags

A title tag describes an online document and has the most SEO power for establishing keyword relevance on the page. The Title tag appears at the very top of a browser or tab window, in search result pages, and external websites.

At 70 characters or less (including spaces), the title tag should include a few relevant keywords and a company or brand name. Important keywords should be placed at the beginning of the title tag. It is recommended to avoid using stop words such as “the,” “is,” “can,” “and,” “but,” “while,” “that,” “we,” etc. that have no keyword value.

3. Meta Descriptions

Meta tags give search spiders a summary of what the page is about. Meta descriptions play an important role in search results and gaining users click-through. Google sometimes uses this summary to display in search result pages (SERPs) and highlights keywords relevant to the search query.

The optimal length of meta description is between 150-160 characters and should include keywords that are relevant to the title tag and content. Consider this an opportunity to advertise the content of your page to searchers.

Ideally, each page should be optimized around one main key phrase that should be included in your title tag, meta description, and content.

4. Sitemap.xml

Google uses Sitemaps to learn about a website’s structure, which allows a better crawling of your site. Creating a Sitemap ensures that search spiders know all the pages of your site that may not be discoverable through the normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are also used to provide metadata about specific types of content on your site such as video, images, mobile, and news. Sitemap.xml files reside in the website main directory and have to be submitted to Google using Google Webmaster Tools.

5. Robots.txt

In addition to Sitemaps, a robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about access to your site. Before accessing pages of a site, search spiders check the robots.txt file to see if it restricts them from accessing certain pages. You only need a robots.txt file if the directory of your site includes content that you don’t want search engines to index. The robots.txt file resides in the main directory of your site.

6. Rich Snippets and Microdata

High ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs) is no longer the only problem to solve with website optimization. When searchers glimpse through result pages they look for additional relevant information to their query before they click-through. Rich snippets provide searchers with that information and help them quickly decide if the content that exists on a web page is relevant.

To implement rich snippets web developers have to add additional HTML markup to a website. One of the most used markups is microdata. Using simple HTML tag microdata allows you to indicate specific type of information: reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and video content.

7. Code Restructuring

Though search algorithms have changed dramatically since their original inception, search spiders still don’t search deep into a site and don’t spend much time on any given page. With this in mind, code restructuring of some pages is still a valid addition to any advanced SEO techniques. Web developers restructure a page (without affecting a page layout) in a way that places content higher in the code. This helps spiders quickly find relevant information.

The above advanced SEO techniques will significantly improve your website’s online visibility, but that’s not the limit of SEO optimization that can be done to a website. A website can be further optimized for better usability with accesskeys (use of keyboard shortcuts), tabindex (use of tab key to navigate through a page), and web accessibility for people with disabilities. It might sound like unnecessary optimization, but everything that makes a website more human friendly is highly valued by search engines.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/advanced-seo-techniques-for-website-optimization/

Behind the Scenes: An Exclusive Interview With Google’s Matt Cutts

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Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, reveals information most of us have never heard before in an interview with Eric Enge, founder of Stone Temple Consulting. Cutts discusses why content does not rank, linking, why infographics may become Google’s next target, and how Google may treat content curation.

Read all the way through—you may just learn something new.

Here are some of the highlights of the interview:

Duplicate Content that is not Duplicate Content

Traditionally, duplicate content refers to pages or copy on websites that are exact duplicates of each other. But in the interview, Eric brings up an even more important issue of which most people are not aware. He asks Matt about content that essentially says the same thing yet it is not an exact duplicate.

He uses this example:

When performing a search on “frogs”, users may see content like this:

Users may not like what they see so they move on to the next website that reveals this content:

At this point users may get frustrated because this is not the information they seek and it is just a copy of the rest. Eric points out that even though the content is not an exact duplicate, it still consists of the same information. And simply being “non-duplicate” is not enough to rank well in the search engines.

Matt agreed with Eric and stated that the second site was not bringing any additional value. He stated that the people who are regurgitating the same old content are not doing anything wrong; however, they won’t rank well.

According to Matt, “Google would seek to detect that there is no real differentiation between these results and show only one of them so we could offer users different types of sites in the other search results.”

When asked a question about e-commerce and aggregator sites, Matt Cutts explains that sites that aggregate content must discover their “value add” and what makes them special.

No Special Privileges for Big Brands

Most of us at one time or another thought Google was playing favorites with big brands—I know I did. Eric asked Matt about his opinion on people who feel Google is favoring advertisers with big budgets.

Matt Cutts’ response:

“First off, I just want to emphasize that whether someone is an advertiser doesn’t help in our web search rankings at all.

Google does try to mirror the real world. We try to reflect the real-world importance of things as we see that reflected in the web. Brands sometimes are an indicator that people see value, but it isn’t the only way that people see value. There are many other possible indicators that something is important and worth surfacing in the search results.

A brand could be potentially useful, but it’s certainly not the only lens to interpret the world. There are lots of signals we use to try to find the results that bring the most value to users. And whether or not someone is an advertiser does not matter at all.

One of the great things about the web is that it still offers up-and-coming businesses opportunities to build their own reputation online. This can enable them to succeed even though other companies may have large advertising budgets.”

Linking

Eric told Matt that he feels linking has misled people to think they must reach a far off place to acquire links, “places where no one ever goes.” In these places, marketers do not care about what they do there. This has become a linking mindset.

Matt agreed with Eric’s example and added that people think of linking as the end goal instead of prioritizing producing excellent content. Once you create content, he says to focus on promoting it.

Eric talks about building a reputation which forces website owners and business to engage in the right types of activities. When you get links from article directories, link wheels, blog networks, and sites that are not concerned with editorial quality, you are not building your brand.

Matt Cutts responds:

“By doing things that help build your own reputation, you are focusing on the right types of activity. Those are the signals we want to find and value the most anyway. Just promoting your site on a spammy blog network that no one would ever choose to visit is not a good strategy.

It’s wild to see some blog networks just repackage the same spammy sites and services and have the nerve claim that their content is ‘Panda and Penguin compliant’ when the quality of the network is clearly not at the level that even a regular person would choose to read it.”

Infographics and Link Bait

We discussed link bait in previous Site-Reference articles and the topic has become prevalent on the web. Link bait is a piece of content that goes viral and causes others to link to the original publisher. SEO greats such as Bruce Clay and others touted link bait as an effective method to acquiring high-quality links, but Matt Cutts had a little more to say about it.

Matt agrees that businesses can use this type of content as a promotional tool, but infographics can blur the lines of spam which we all know Google will not tolerate. Matt doesn’t mind infographics, but he does not like when they are used as strictly promotional and include incorrect facts and unrelated links. When people repost the infographics on their sites, they are unaware of the link’s destination which could be totally unrelated to the infographic. According to Matt, “This is not what a link is meant to be.”

Will Google make some algorithm changes to infographics? It may be on the way…

Matt says:

This is similar to what people do with widgets as you and I have talked about in the past. I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.

Any infographics you create will do better if they’re closely related to your business, and it needs to be fully disclosed what you are doing. The big key is that the person publishing the infographic has to know, and agree with, including an endorsement to your site as attribution with the infographic. Even then, there is reason to believe that the link is more about the barter to get the infographic than a real endorsement of your site.

Content Curation

I discussed content curation briefly in my last article, and Google seems to be following the path I proposed it would.

Eric mentioned that businesses are using content curation to increase their content.

Matt didn’t seem too keen on the idea. He questioned whether content cutators are really focusing on a value add, and also whether visitors will want to read others’ opinions on these topics.

In Matt’s own words:

“If the information stream is coming from a third party service and you aren’t involved in anyway, except for providing a place to publish it, this may be something that you might want to decide not to do.

We might not view this as spam, but it’s sort of shallow and we would tend to not want to rank this type of content as highly.”

That last sentence pretty much sums it up. Content curation will most definitely fall under Google’s radar. I suppose that when mixed with fantastic content as part of an overall marketing strategy, it will not hurt a site. But Google will see right through the webmaster using content curation specifically to manipulate rankings.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/behind-the-scenes-an-exclusive-interview-with-googles-matt-cutts/

Google+ – Believe the Hype

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Google just celebrated the one year anniversary of its latest social networking endeavor, Google+. While proselytizers and critics armed with competing statistics argue both its success and failure, it is clear that Google+ is the centerpiece to an evolving social strategy that is guiding the development of many Google products. Skeptics site usage numbers compared with Facebook and Twitter to suggest Google+ is nothing but a mirage. Google claims 250 million accounts have been created and 150 million accounts are used monthly with 50 percent signing in daily. In contrast, Facebook boasts more than 900 million active users per month. One study cited in a recentWall St. Journal article claims users spent six to seven hours per month on Facebook, versus three minutes per month on Google+. While comparisons with the dominant social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, seem obvious, they overlook the real strategy behind Google+ and fail a simple apples-to-apples test.

It makes an easy and compelling narrative to suggest that Google launched Google+ as a competing social networking site to an ominous and growing threat from Facebook, Twitter, and other emerging social platforms and is desperately trying to catch up with the popularity of these properties. This fails to capture Google’s social strategy and the unique power inherent in the Google+ framework. As stated by Google social and mobile global marketing director Rikard Steiber, “Google+ is not another social destination, but it’s more sort of bringing a social layer to everything people are doing on Google already today.” They are striving to add social relevance to what billions of people are already using Google for: search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, as well as future internal and third party development. This is a critical distinction – Google+ is not a destination on the web that relies on monetizing users while they are on the site therefore dependent on maintaining and increasing engagement.

Google is a company that has monetized its core service – search – by creating an ad platform that dominates the web; Google controls over 44 percent of global online ad revenues – Facebook controls 3.1%. They have recognized that in order to maintain and expand this advantage, they must harness people’s social, local and real time interactions into search results. Google+ is not a place to hangout, it is a structure and developing set of tools that enables Google to bring all the advantages of social into their existing, extremely profitable, framework. The threat they face is not external, from a social networking behemoth like Facebook, it is internal – failing to evolve their cash cow to incorporate the new social demands of their users.

This competition in the social space has important implications for all of the businesses currently, and soon to be, in awkward pursuit of getting me to “like” their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter, or say nice things about them on Yelp. As I detailed in a previous article, Google is strong-arming businesses both small and large into taking their social framework seriously, and already there are over one million brands with a presence on Google+. Research shows that social cues, recommendations, criticisms, and suggestions from peers have a far greater impact on our consumption patterns than advertising alone. It is estimated that over 70% of branded content online is user-generated. This is why all of the companies in the social space are hyper-focused on incorporating the likes, dislikes, suggestions and recommendations from our social networks into the content, advertising, and search results they are feeding us. There is a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for any company that creates a user experience that fuses this seamlessly, elegantly and inoffensively.

From this perspective, it is hard to argue against Google having an immense advantage over its rivals. Rather than trying to develop ways to monetize the social behavior of their users, Google is faced with compelling its massive user base to use its Google+ framework to build a vibrant social foundation for their existing products and services. If Google is able to stay current with their users’ desires for social influence on the products and services they already rely on Google for, their potential to remain an overwhelmingly dominant and profitable force on the web for many years to come will be very difficult to challenge. Their search network alone answers over 3.2 billion queries a day – even a fraction of a percent of that traffic clicking on an ad, for pennies a click, yields significant revenue to build on.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/google-believe-the-hype/

10 WordPress Plugins That Save Bloggers Time

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Featured Article Picture

1. WordPress.com Stats

Personally, I feel it is essential for bloggers to track the activity on their blogs. You can make use of a web analytics tool, but it takes sometime to navigate through all the reports. That is where a plugin will be handy. The WordPress.com Stats plugin is a big help in this regard. Instead of using another application, you can keep track of your blog’s stats directly from your WordPress dashboard.

2. WP-Polls

It is a well-known fact that people like to participate in polls. There are options available to you on the internet, but the WP-Polls plugin will allow you to create custom polls on your WordPress dashboard. You do not have to leave your account to log into another site to manage it. This is only if you want to make use of polls.

3. Sociable

This plugin automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.

4. Akismet

It is very important to activate your Akismet plugin on your blog. It is a fact that blogs unfortunately get comments that are spam. This plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “comments” admin screen. Your readers do not like to see spam comments. This can easily result in a decrease of your traffic. I cannot stress this enough, please make sure you are using a plugin like Akismet. This WordPress plugin will save you time.

5. Math Comment Spam

In the fast growing era of technology, it is unfortunately a fact that comment spam blocking plugins like Akismet will not always be enough to eliminate all spam comments. By using the Math Comment Spam plugin in conjunction with the Akismet plugin, you will be able to decrease spam comments. The Math Comment Spam plugin will ask readers a simple math problem such as 2 x 3 before they can comment. This is to make sure that it is a human comment.

6. Theme Tester

Editor’s Note: The Theme Tester plugin may not work with newer versions of WordPress. A good alternate plugin is Theme Test Drive which can be found at:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-test-drive/

It sometimes happens that bloggers want to change the WordPress theme. You do not want your audience to see the changes until all is finished and ready. This is where the Theme Tester plugin is of great help. Your readers will see your existing design until all is set up and ready for publishing.

7. WP-Database Backup

I want you to read the following with attention! If your blog is important to you, do yourself a big favor and install the WP-Database Backup plugin. It is most crucial to have this plugin installed and set to back up your WordPress database. This plugin will save the data on your hard drive or it will be sent to you via email. The next important point I want to stress is the following: Please keep in mind that this plugin makes a backup of your database files only. Make sure to make a manual backup of your WordPress content folder from your hosting account.

8. Easytube

This plugin will help you to get a YouTube or Google video published on your blog. It easily makes embedding YouTube and Google videos into your post a snap. Easytube also includes a preview image of your YouTube videos in the RSS feed with a link to the video. If you want to make use of visual media, it is essential to install this plugin.

9. Auto Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

To reduce spam on older posts, you can make use of this plugin. Older posts are targets for automated comment spam bots. After installing the plugin, set the timeframe to a date when you want to close comments on your posts.

10. Google Maps Plugin

Editor’s Note: The Google Maps plugin may not work with newer versions of WordPress. A good alternate plugin is the Comprehensive Google Map plugin which can be found at:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comprehensive-google-map-plugin/

This plugin speaks for itself. If you want to make use of maps from Google to be part of your blog post, this plugin will assist you in the process of creating, inserting and customizing it. This WordPress plugin will definitely save you time.

I really hope these 10 WordPress plugins will save you time and make blogging a treat. Make use of them and enjoy your blogging!

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/12/10-wordpress-plugins-that-save-bloggers-time/

Google Over-Optimized Penalty Overview

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Everybody who is involved in internet marketing and search engine optimization has definitely heard about Google Panda algorithm and penalties associated with it. It has been talked about for so long, so people got used to it and in one way or another we are all trying to cope with it, hoping that bad times are behind us. But you know what? It is not over yet.

Now there is a big buzz going around the web that they are about to introduce new penalties for over optimized websites. It means that if you did what was said in SEO books even one year ago, you can end up in being penalized for it. We personally think that Google is becoming too obsessed as they have enough analytics already to recognize dodgy sites. It seems they behave like the one who could not get enough and want more and more until they end up with nothing. World is really need an alternative to this monopolized market, but until it is not there we have to play their game.

So, what they mean by over optimized websites? We will try to analyse it below.
First think you need to check is your title and description. Those are your face for all search engines. Take a careful look at them and make sure that you do not just list keywords there, especially if all of them contain the same short keyword in each of them. The idea is that your title and description should be targeting your readers, but not search engines. The main idea here is that users are more likely to click on meaningful titles rather than on keywords. And if you have already read our Google Panda Overview post, then you should know how important click through rate is.

Second thing you need to think about is your internal backlinks structure. We all know that this is a very important part of SEO and we all use it on our sites. But be careful and do not overdo it. There are a lot of websites there, which stuff their posts with a lot of links to internal pages; they want to rank higher in search engines. Now this is considered as not a very good practice. Try to limit this and add only one or two text links there or even skip them if you have other backlinks in your posts. Especially avoid adding the same link multiple times on the same webpage.
Another tip, related to it is to avoid multiple links in your footer. I believe everyone has seen websites with a lot of links to internal or external pages, hidden in the footer. Stop doing it and find another place for those links on your website. Also, you should not make those links of the similar colour as your background. We all know that the same colour is a huge NO-NO practice, so a lot of webmasters started to use similar colours as a workaround. So, from now on, consider it as NO-NO too, as if you are caught you can lose more then you have gained from it.

Third point is to avoid backlinks from private networks. We think that it is not really dangerous to get backlinks from those if they are placed correctly. You should avoid networks, which contain interlinked members of them, as they can be easily detected. Another type of networks to stay away from those, which claim that, they will place your article to multiple websites. No matter how good your spun article is, it is really impossible to spin the same text even ten times so it cannot be recognized as the same article by smart search engine crawlers. So, if you really want to use blog networks, then you should use those, which allow you to publish one or two posts for the same article. We are planning to open our own network, which we are using for promoting our websites. So, if you are interested, keep an eye on our blog for announcements.
The same tip is relevant for article marketing. Do not publish the same article to multiple article directories. This means you should avoid automated tools like article marketing robot or use them very carefully.

Last thing we want to talk about is a content of your website. One thing you need to stay away from is from adding text to your content, which is specifically dedicated to search engines. Quite often webmasters publish very useful content, which might be difficult to optimize for specific keywords and then they add a paragraph to that article, which is stuffed with keywords and not really beneficial from readers’ point of view. This is going another target for Google in the nearest future.
Another important tip for the content of your website is avoiding multiple webpages optimized for the same keywords. It is fine to have several of them as it can be difficult to avoid this completely if your website is targeting a small niche, but you must avoid having lots of pages optimized for slightly modified keyword terms.

To summarize this, we tried to give you a very brief overview of additional things you need to look at when creating and developing your websites, so you stay under the radar of search engines. You should use these techniques together with all the others; we talked about earlier, in our previous posts. If you follow our advice, you will definitely rank higher than your competition and more importantly, you will be on a safe side from being penalized by Google.

Source: http://www.backlinks4u.com/blog/google-over-optimized-penalty-overview/