Webmaster Pro Guide

Archive for the ‘Search engines’ Category

The latest article by Matt Cutts “Traffic Power CEO in jail” is just the best example of Google guy arrogant attitude toward those SEOs who try to beat Google at their own game. The Traffic Power was a SEO company that allegedly employed some unethical practices in the search engine optimization. In the SEO world this kind of practice is called “black hat SEO”. When you hear the phrase ‘unethical practices‘, you are immediately turned off and inclined to believe that there were some evil doings involved in their business, which were completely against your moral values or ethics in general. The very term sounds pretty awful, but the fact of the matter is that in the current context it spells ‘unethical’ as opposed to what Google considers ethical. A multi-billion dollar corporation is hardly ever thought of in terms of ethics or high moral standards, but Google’s Don’t be evil motto says it all. From a high moral stand Mr. Cutts can talk with a “smidge of glee” that those who “embrace blackhat SEO on their sites are willing to cut corners in other areas of business as well”. I think this is too far-fetched a conclusion.

In real life people try to find ways to maximize their profits and minimize their costs. This goes for mammoth like Google as well. In the virtual world the costs are minimal (no need for stores, warehouses, decorators, leases, etc), but you need visitors to your site in order to make it profitable. Those usually come from search engines. Search engines have become a very important medium in driving traffic to your website, without which your site may remain in an Internet dungeon that nobody ever realized existed. Each search engine has its own rules how it evaluates sites or what you should do to improve your site’s rankings. Frankly, I’ve never heard of MSN’s or Yahoo’s rules, but Google made their webmaster guidelines widely known all over the Internet. Not following the guidelines is tantamount to all kinds of penalties that Google can impose on your site. Breaking Google guidelines is unethical, because Google says so. All these evil webmasters who try to promote their own sites or their clients’ sites using some questionable tactics will be punished together with their guilty-by-association clients. (more…)

Another under-the-radar-of-the-real-world blog firestorm erupted yesterday over high profile page rank drops. Google dropped visible PR of many blogs and mainstream news sites presumably as a penalty for selling links.

Should Google penalize sites that sell links?

No one except Google really knows for sure why PR dropped for these sites but it certainly looks like an extension of September’s paid directory massacre. This time Google targeted some well-known sites in the search marketing world and mainstream news too.

Sites include niche blogs like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Roundtable, ProBlogger and nationally prominent sites such as WashingtonPost.com and Forbes.com.

The reactions around the web fall into four categories. Again… these are not my opinions, just a synopsis of what I have read from hundreds of comments in blogs, articles and forums.
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vBSEO 3.1.0 is now officially a GOLD release, available to all vBSEO customers.

3.1.0 includes several important new additions including vBulletin Blog Compatibility, caching system compatibility, performance improvements and several other new features, updates, and bug fixes (60+ in total).

This version will include the following features:

• Branding Removal Option
• Installation Service
• No More Encryption - Visible Source Code
• vBSEO Performance Boost
• vBSEO Roadmap

The pre-release team is also testing a new version of the sitemap generator as well which includes support for blogs and a few bug fixes.

You can purshass Vbseo f

The search engines play a crucial role in sending traffic to your website. In fact most of the websites depend on the search engines for their staple dose of traffic although these days it is advised that you should target other websites, blogs, social networking websites, three article directories, online directories, and online forums too.

You need to make your website search engine friendly and properly communicate to their algorithms what key phrases and keywords are important to your website, in order to derive maximum traffic from various search engines. Let us quickly go through a few steps that can help you make search engines fall in love with your website.

Write for the people and not just for the search engines: Some people have this misconception that you need to manipulate text in order to rank well on the search engines; partially this is true but most often it is not. The best way to fair well in the search engines is to write and organise your content in such a manner that it is best suited to human reading. The more human-friendly content you have the more search engine friendly content you have. The search engines will favour relevant, well-organised content so that they can present quality results to their search engine users. (more…)

These basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for all bloggers can help to increase your blog rankings on major search engines. Follow them routinely, and you will achieve consistently higher volumes of traffic to your blog.

Profitable bloggers know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an important element of optimizing their blog and how effectively they implement it determines whether they succeed in making money online or not…….
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1. Multiple Website Domains for Multiple Products- More and more, people are being told to create multiple domains for the different areas of their business to create more recognition amongst search engines. WRONG! This is a bad practice for multiple reasons. First of all, it can be expensive, very time-consuming to maintain, and totally unnecessary. Second, search engines can pick up on the attempt to trick them and decrease your rankings on all pages. Also, all incoming links to all these sites are spread very thin. The best option would be to put all the time, money, effort, and link-building into one site and reap the benefits of having a stream-lined, collaborative site.

2. Loading Meta Tags With Keywords- These are special HTML tags that provide information about a Web page. Unlike, normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect formatting but provide hidden information like keywords and author information. Ten years ago, when the Web was gaining popularity, meta tags were used frequently by developers to let search engines know what subjects were on their sites. In the last few years, due to abusive practices, this form of SEO is now ignored completely by most major search engines.

3. Submitting URLs to Multiple Search Engines- Most Web sites are found whether they want to be or not. Even if you do not have one incoming link to your site, chances are that there is a search spider that will find your site. Although they might find the site, it doesn’t mean that it will help rank your site even if your URL is submitted to the search engine. The only type of search engine that you must submit your URL to is a subject directory. Subject directories are search engines that manually place Web sites by category.

4. Using Keywords Abundantly- Keywords are important in the rank of your Web site, but not the sole factor. The use of keywords is recommended to be 3-6% of your page’s content. However, it has to be used in combination with other SEO efforts.

5. Having Reciprocating Links on Your Site- Links to and from related and unrelated sites are factored into page ranking. The more quality or pertinent incoming links to your site are very good ways to boost page ranking. However, a plethora of reciprocating links from unrelated sites will have the opposite effect.

6. You Don’t Need to Update Content- Strictly updating content on a regular basis may not have an effect on page ranking. However, routine maintenance to check for outdated content and broken links is mandatory. Not only will search crawlers be encouraged to roam your site more often, site visitors will want to return to your site more often for fresh information. Not only that, but it is a great way to tweak and measure your SEO efforts.

7. Flash Components are Not Recognized by Search Spiders- A Flash component on a Web site generally pertains to a graphic animation or video. It has been rumored that search engines cannot index Flash components on a site. This is simply untrue because search engines can index Flash text in the HTML. Therefore, any information included in the HTML about the movie can be indexed, therefore ranked.

8. Pay to be Listed- This is an expensive scam that some SEO newbies fall for. Although it was a more sought-after practice years ago, today it is unnecessary. There are only a handful of search engines that are used frequently and you can submit yourself if you really want to. However, as noted in Myth # 2, URL submission is really not that helpful anyway. Save your money!

9. You Must Resubmit Your URL- Not true. Submitting links is time-consuming and not all that helpful anymore. Having to resubmit your link on a regular basis is just an extra step that isn’t needed. The time you could save by not worrying about resubmission could be used to research how else to help your ranking.

10. Money Spent on SEO is A Waste- Are you serious? Many corporations and small businesses alike have a hard time appropriating funds for search engine optimization strategy. It is justified in the minds of business owners and senior marketing professionals that money spent on traditional media like direct mail, print ads, and television commercials drive in mostly untargeted, general traffic to your site. Search engines drive people that are already looking for your products. How can that be an unimportant practice?

Author: Heather Jewel

Yahoo Search is updating with some changes to its algorithm and index, which at first seems like one of their monthly weather reports. However, there may be some significant changes going on behind the curtains at Yahoo.

Yahoo seems to be making more of an effort to clean up their search results, especially after the launch of SearchAssist, expansion of Yahoo Shortcuts and the inclusion of Flickr images and videos in Yahoo results. As Yahoo Search grows, it is in their best interest to confront the relevancy of their organic results. Is this the case today?

Search Engine Roundtable notes that some site owners in Digital Point Forums are reporting increases in rank while others are noticing their sites being dropped down into the Yahoo index.

Barry Schwartz notes he “noticed a decline in traffic from Yahoo on some sites and an increase in traffic from Yahoo on other sites.”

Have you seen any changes in your Yahoo rankings?