Are embedded links in widgets ethical?

Google and other search engines have always stressed for people to get only natural links. The whole link based algorithm depends a lot on natural links. Scientists wrote link based algorithm because links are natural and more reliable. Talking about widget embedded links this has been in debate for a long time. Search engines always have mixed opinion on this.

Embedding links in widgets has been in existing from the day widgets were introduced. Statcounter.com a world famous tracking company which provides free tracking were PR 10 because of the links embedded in their counter. Seeing this people started this natural usage of links in a commercial way. People started approaching commercial counter companies to embed their links when free counters are distributed in exchange for a payment. Lots of companies got temporary benefit from it but the search engines immediately woke up to the occasion. An SEO company which did this as part of their link building strategy was completed banned from Google’s search engine. Also Google started implementing link based penalties like the -60 penalty for sites that use widgets to embed links. Even we were affected a bit but later recovered. So is this ethical? . In my opinion I feel the user should know that the link is embedded into the widget code as long as they know it its fine. But if the links are embedded without the user’s knowledge then it’s wrong. I feel search engines too have similar view. People should have the ability to embed the link or remove it or make it no-follow. If they can do it I am confident the search engines will accept it whole heartedly.

TAGS: Link Building, SEO

SEO Blog Back Again

I have to personally take the blame for not updating my blog regularly. I am learning to get rid of this laziness in me. Ill make sure from now on ill keep you entertained with my posts. Also blogger ftp being discontinued affected our blogs but that was not till end if May. I don’t have an explanation for not posting before may. My last posting was in Feb, that is 4 months before blogger discontinued allowing FTP publishing. Now I am back to some serious blogging I will be giving you latest updates in SEO industry and also will continue to share my experiences that I have gained over the years.

TAGS: SEO Blog Back Again

Google’s blind eye towards paid links:

Recently we are seeing more and more websites buying links casually to get their rankings boosted. Google who is opposing paid links openly are nowadays showing a blind eye towards mass link buying. We are a SEO company but we always stay away from buying links or recommend clients not to buy links. Its because we know that buying links are the biggest plague to hurt the search engines but the search engines seem to not realize it.

Yahoo is the only search engine which is serious about link buyers. Google seem to be never interested. They keep saying they want to fight it algorithmically and in this process they ban some innocent sites. Almost a year back our ranking got devalued because Google thought our widget links are paid links and devalued our rankings (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/widget/seo_statistics_widget.php ) .

More and more people resort to link buying these days. Almost all clients who come to us for SEO and have done SEO before have paid links to their site placed by previous SEO companies. So is automated detection working? I see it a big failure people just find innovative ways to hide links from Google’s algorithmic detection and the result it hurts Google.

I expect Google to take more action on buying links since it hurts people like us who don’t buy links. Our clients push us hard to buy links but still we stay away to stay within Google guidelines. If Google continues to show blind eye towards paid links companies like us too with resort to buying links since we don’t have an ethical option to tackle aggressive competition.

Is Caffeine search results live?

Google caffeine update datacenter was under test mode for months. Now Google has taken down the datacenter and many people feel caffeine results are now live in Google.com. I have to disagree on this I don’t see any significant movement in our sites or our client sites. We did see lot of changes in caffeine datacenter and none of them are visible in Google.com results.

We are expecting Caffeine results to be live because we had some cool ranking boost in that test datacenter

SEOs in twitter prosper

Twitter has become an excellent tool for SEOs. SEO had a wrong name with many social sites. Places like myspace, Orkut and even social bookmarking sites like digg hates SEOs. But nowadays there are many SEOs who use twitter the right way.

They have learned methods to use sites like twitter with lot of respect. I have seen some very good discussions in twitter between people in search engine industry. Some SEOs have 1000s of followers which itself is a very good sign for SEOs.
People are listing to the SEO guys and I have seen people like matt cutts, Adam lasnik follow some SEO guys. Matt cutts makes some interesting comments in his twitter account which is worth the read when you are in search engine industry.
He already has a whooping http://twitter.com/MattCutts number of followers ( 45,000 ) .

Its incredible since there are so many people who are active in this search and SEO industry. Today the awareness of people about search engines is huge. Only good SEO companies and SEO guys survive in this ever increasing competitive industry.
Other people to look out for in twitter are Danny Sullivan, Jeremy Zawodny and lot more. I don’t recommend you block anyone who wants to follow you unless you feel they are really spammy. I have seen people having 100s of followers before seeing anyone spamming them.
Most SEOs feel twitter is a great neighbourhood. Even Pageoneresults ( Edward ) has named it twitterhood. Great to see SEOs use a great platform in a constructive way.

Do you really have a penalty

For long time there have been wrong assumptions on what constitutes a penalty in Google. Few years back Google has very less penalties but now we have lots of different type of penalties that Google can impose on a site to stop it from ranking. We have few of the penalties listed here
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-problems.htm
So what really constitutes a penalty and do you really have one?
Here is a simple checklist to see whether you have a penalty or not.
Your site has been ranking for a long time but suddenly almost all the major keywords disappeared and only you rank for obscure keywords – YES you have one
Your URL is removed from search results and you cannot find your site on top even searching for your unique domain name itself – Yes you have a penalty.
If there is a notification in webmaster tools that your site is violating guidelines and has been removed – Yes you have one.
One particular keyword has been ranking for a long time but suddenly it moves beyond rank 100. Yes you have link penalty.
Sitelinks to your disappear when it used to be there before and a search for yourdomain.com without www doesn’t bring up your site. But your site comes up when www is added to yourdomain.com. Yes you have a potential link buying / selling penalty.
If one keyword suddenly moves below 3 pages and never comes back even after 3 months. Yes it’s what we call -30 penalty check the SEO problems page in the above link.
Penalties are not something we need to be worried. Even the worst penalties can be removed by explaining to Google. If you have trouble with your site don’t hesitate to contact me and our team we will be ready to help you.

Caffeine update datacenter goes offline:

Mattcutts in his recent post said caffeine is ready to go live. Most people are happy with the results in caffeine datacenter and it seems Google is making it live. They have already took down the test datacenter at www2.sandbox.google.com
When i visit that URL i get this message:”Thank you! We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox. Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Most of our sites and our client sites are doing exceptionally well in this particular datacenter and i am happy to see it go live. One particular client whom we have been doing work for about 2 years now is doing exceptionally well. I am sure he will be the happiest person to see his site do so well. I feel this update brings a lot of happiness among users.

Matt cutts says in his comments the delay for a full role out is because of the worry it will create on webmaster’s mind. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/ I was just stunned to see a response like that from a senior Googler. Because Google gave a damn for anyone’s website. I can remember back in 2003 when we had the great infamous Florida update it make lots of webmaster cry and even lot who depended on Google went out of Business. People were yelling but Google never cared. Good to see Google care for webmasters a lot these days.

Pagerank update after a long wait:

It seems Google has started to move away from PageRank or at least they are trying their best to make people move on from their PageRank obsession. PageRank from the day it came into existence has been the talk of the search engine world. Almost all webmaster knows about PageRank and its importance. Even lot of webmasters go one step ahead and learn how PageRank works and find short cut ways to get high PageRank.

Google is well aware of this PageRank obsession and they are doing their best to stop it. Recently Google removed PageRank from webmaster tools. They used to say which page is the most popular on your site every month in webmaster tools now they removed it from there. Just do a Google search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=pagerank+removed&rlz=1R2GGLL_en&aq=f&oq=&aqi= and you will see how many blogs are talking about this news. Just a simple thing and people talk about it to the core. It just illustrates the importance of PageRank and its obsession on people’s mind.

Now after a long time Google has updated its toolbar PageRank. You can see from this list ( http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-toolbar-PageRank-update-list.html ) last PageRank update was end of June and this once has come after almost 4 months. That’s virtually just 3 updates a year.
Before we used to have updates every 20 days. People just wait to see their green bar increase on Google toolbar. Now that has gone down since every site has to wait at least 4 months to get PageRank or see any update / upgrade / downgrade to their PageRank. I feel Google is doing the right thing by moving people away from PageRank obsession. I hope Google maintains the current trend.

New Sitelink-type links with meta descriptions on some searches

Google has recently made a lot of changes to their site links. When site links ( links that appear below the site when the domain name or other major name that the domain represents appears ) came into existence people thought its a weird thing. But now Yahoo, Bing both uses them copied from Google. Its an interesting way for people to find pages to a site they get a chance of multiple pages to be clicked from the search results itself. I have personally used site-links for a long time. Every one out of 2 times i have clicked a site link than the primary result. So yes as an active internet user i use sitelinks which i feel is a big achievement from Google. A trial has worked for them and we usually see tracking URLs in Sitelinks so even Google is monitoring the clicks on sitelinks.

Today Google has improvised a lot when it comes site links. They came up with a site link similar to simple single line text links we see it visible these days. Take a look at the following example.

Now furthur improvization they are able to show actual links in descriptions it was not the case before. It shows how much effort Google is putting into their organic search too. They know Organic search is their primary area and they need to keep focusing on improving it. I am sure we can see a lot of improvization in future.

Great going Google keep it up.

Influential women in Search industry – 7thpixel

In response to our post on the most influential people in search industry v7pixel blogged about the most influential women in search industry. I have to agree with v7pixel guys or i should say girls .

Here is the list according to them, check their Most influential women post here

Alex Bennert
In-house SEO, Wall Street Journal

Allison Fabella
SEO Manager, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Amanda Watlington
Ph.D., Searching for Profit

Anne Kennedy
Managing Partner, Beyond Ink

Christine Churchill
President, KeyRelevance

Dana Todd
Founding Partner, SiteLab International, Inc.

Elisabeth Osmeloski
Managing Editor, Search Engine Land

Gillian Muessig
President, SEOmoz, Inc.

Heather Lloyd-Martin
President and CEO, SuccessWorks

Janet Driscoll Miller
President & CEO, Search Mojo

Jennifer Laycock
Director of Social Media/Editor, SiteLogic/Search Engine Guide

Jessica L Bowman
Founder & President, SEOinhouse.com

Jessie Stricchiola
Founder & CEO, Alchemist Media, Inc.

Jill Whalen
CEO, High Rankings

Kim Krause Berg
Web Site Usability and SEO Consultant, Cre8pc

Rae Hoffman
Chief Executive Officer, Outspoken Media

Rebecca Kelly
Director of Social Media, 10e20

Rhea Drysdale
Co-founder and COO, Outspoken Media

Shari Thurow
SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive

Tamar Weinberg
Techipedia.com

Vanessa Fox
Founder, Nine By Blue